Album Reviews - Pitchfork

Various Artists: Who's That Man: A Tribute to Conny Plank

Andy Beta — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:04 -0500

Whether you read On Some Faraway Beach, author David Sheppard’s biography of Brian Eno, or writer Geeta Dayal’s in-depth investigation of Eno’s 1975 watermark Another Green World, at one point, you’ll come upon Eno’s comment about an early King Tubby record: On King Tubby Meets the Upsetter, the artwork features "a picture of the consoles instead of 'the stars'"; the producer championed as artist in their own right. That sort of realization would turn the one-time glam rocker into a studio sage over the course of the 1970s, but just as crucial was his understanding that one producer had already taken the lessons of Jamaica to heart in Germany, utilizing the mixing board to re-structure the music he was producing. The man born Konrad Plank, and the music he captured to tape in the 70s and 80s, wholly altered both the trajectories of German kosmische music and the Neue Deutsche Welle; British punk, new wave and New Romanticism; electro and industrial music; and-- years after his passing from cancer-- alternative rock. There may be no more daunting task than to encapsulate the man in a box set tribute.

Who’s That Man makes that attempt across four CDs, courtesy of the Grönland label, who were also responsible for ending decades of Neu! bootlegs by properly reissuing the German band’s massively influential three studio albums. The reason Neu! was so influential on the likes of Radiohead, Sonic Youth, and the Sex Pistols is due in no small part to Plank, who captured the magma-like intensity of the band on tape. Described by Sheppard as “ursine and lank-haired, dressed like a Viking and [a] ‘mad scientist,’” by the time Plank began to make his name as a producer, he had already studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen and recorded Marlene Dietrich. To trace his production credits from 1969 onward is to follow the lineage of krautrock itself. Plank was behind the earliest Kraftwerk, Cluster, Ash Ra Tempel, and Guru Guru albums along with innumerable others. (Can, Amon Düül, and Faust were among the few genre proponents not bearing his fingerprints.)

Eno himself encountered Plank when he ventured to the German countryside to collaborate with Moebius and Roedelius of Cluster, and his is the first voice you hear on the box set, on the woozy pop Eno & Cluster collaboration “Broken Head”. Plank’s studio was in a converted farmhouse in Neunkirchen, 30km east of Cologne. “His mixing desk had been modified so that with one finger he could simultaneously deploy echo and panning effects,” Sheppard wrote. “For Plank, mixing was a matter of quixotic performance as it was technical application.” While his cues might have been taken from the likes of Lee “Scratch” Perry and King Tubby, Plank’s productions eschewed easy earmarks. And while his influence on the likes of Martin Hannett is evident, the box shows that there was no singular “Plank sound.”

For one disc at least, Man captures some of Plank’s essence. Spiky no-wave electro noise from Japan rendered with half of Can that anticipates Silent Shout? Check Phew’s “Signal.” Joy Division-style punk? That would be D.A.F.’s rumbling “Alles Ist Gut”. A dark, cavernous b-side on a debut single from an act that would become one of the 80s most revered pop acts? See Eurythmics’ “La Sinistre”. Beatific oceanic ambience? Cue up closer “Leb Wohl!” In a three-song span, the set shows how Plank moved from the producer’s chair onto a more active, collaborative presence in the studio: from the jittery and jangly noise courtesy of Plank’s collaboration with Moebius to a proto-industrial spoken word piece with Red Krayola’s Mayo Thompson, and onto an alien yet ebullient proto-techno track from Moebius-Plank-Neumeier (of Guru Guru). Yes, the producer could be more than just a finger pressing record, a participant in the very sound he was rendering to tape.

But by the second disc, the man, his sense of capturing space, and his great oeuvre fall woefully out of focus. His groundbreaking work harnessing the unfettered electronics of early Kluster and Kraftwerk is wholly missing (with the latter’s disavowal of their first four albums leading up to Autobahn acutely felt). Same goes with his New Romanticism work alongside Ultravox and John Foxx. His stranger 80s work, producing the likes of A Flock of Seagulls, Les Rita Mitsouko, and Whodini, is also noticeably absent. Instead, one has to suffer through a stodgy and useless cover of “Eleanor Rigby” and the man’s own drunken bellowing of “Silent Night” at the disc’s end. And why Bluepoint Underground’s namechecking of the man in the late 90s warrants inclusion here is beyond me. The last disc comprises a live set, featuring Plank fully transitioned to performer down in Mexico in 1986, unleashing squalls of industrial noise alongside Dieter Moebius and Arno Steffen, less than a year before he succumbed to cancer in 1987.

Worse still is the entire disc of underwhelming remixes. Automat’s “Broken Head” remix is serviceable, but Justus Köhncke’s flatulent remix of Michael Rother’s “Feuerland” only detracts from the original’s eloquence. Günther Lause reducing Phew to the sound of jingling jewelry while music plays two rooms over need not take up 10 minutes. Same goes for a sleep-inducing remix from Crato that’s also past the double-digit mark. Eye from Boredoms does a cartoonish, whiplash remix that goes to the other extreme, giving the impression that none of the remixers involved really understand Plank.

After four discs, one comes no nearer to understanding who that man was. Refined and impish, noisy and tranquil, grotesque and resplendent, Plank’s handiwork feels at once ineffable and instantaneous. When the jackhammering of Neu!’s “Hallogallo” ruptures the proceedings midway through disc two, the effect remains startling. One remains hard-pressed to identify specifically what Plank contributed and what sprang from Rother-Dinger, but the close partnership is evident. And it sounds nuts four decades later. "Craziness is something holy," Plank said in an interview with Electronic Musician magazine shortly before his death, and yet the set conveys only the merest glimpse of the man’s insanity.

October Falls: The Plague of a Coming Age

Kim Kelly — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:03 -0500

October Falls like to keep you guessing. The band was originally conceived and executed as the solo project of one M. Lehto, who gradually expanded the lineup to include a handful of musicians from other Finnish bands. The first few releases focused on acoustic, largely instrumental neo-folk, woven around themes of nature worship and bereft of the harsh black metal elements that surfaced later on. As the years passed and seasons changed, so did the songs Lehto wrote. He eventually altered his approach with 2007’s The Streams of the End EP, which abandoned the acoustic sound for a more metal-oriented approach. The music became more nuanced and refined, as gentle intros and interludes dovetailed nicely with the more inexorable dark metal passages (to employ the “dark metal” catchall in lieu of banging on about “melodic folk-influenced black/death/doom metal” forever). The album embraced his earliest influences, namechecking Katatonia and Opeth while borrowing bits of Agalloch, Empyrium, and early Ulver.

It’s unwise to slap a band as mercurial as October Falls with overarching generalizations, so, as far as this particular album goes, there is a solid base of Finnish melodic death/doom a la Swallow the Sun underpinning the more recognizable black metal rasps and wistful folk-- unsurprising, given the addition of Ensiferum bassist Sami Hinkka (formerly of Finnish death/doom greats Rapture) and drummer Marko Tarvonen of Moonsorrow/Barren Earth. Though October Falls has always been Lehto’s sole domain, it sounds as though his companions had a bit more of a say in the writing on this record. There is still plenty of black metal to be found here, but Lehto’s songwriting has matured and moved into solidly melodic territory. “Bloodlines” is a perfect example; the swinging main riff could have popped up on any Rapture album, and “Boiling Heart of the North” is a sad, dreamy waltz. The overall effect is of stateliness and melancholia, especially when Lehto chooses to indulge in atmospheric touches and acoustic instrumentation like the subdued piano lines and sounds of wind and rainfall scattered throughout.

Not all of Lehto’s forays into melody work well, though he manages to avoid falling totally flat. The title track hauls out some seriously 1990s goth metal vocals, and while his voice is pleasant enough, falling into a sonorous midrange , the whole exercise feels strained and overdone. The ragged howls that follow are much more effective, and are far more suited to the light-fingered dirge and apocalyptic lament of the song and the album itself. October Falls’ strength lies in the juxtaposition of those ferocious vocals with its pastoral, wintery requiems, and when that balance is overturned, the results lack charm.

The positives of The Plague of a Coming Age outweigh this relatively minor quibble, though, and make for a satisfying listen. October Falls should be much more popular than they are; they should be sharing stages across the States with Paganfest bands, or at the very least, headlining small festivals in Germany and thrilling European crowds. Their music is finely tuned, beautifully composed, and an excellent example of how well this style of melodic, dark metal can be done. This is an album to return to on cold and lonesome evenings.

Helado Negro: Invisible Life

Brian Howe — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:02 -0500

It's tempting to claim that the Helado Negro of 2009's Awe Owe is unrecognizable in the Helado Negro of Invisible Life. The former was a softly warped, pastoral record with Spanish lyrics and prominent Latin guitar; the latter is a more urbane electronic pop record with lyrics in English and Spanish. But in every style Roberto Carlos Lange develops, a sultry, dreamy temperament remains apparent, from the shimmying cadences and simmered arrangements to his just-woken-up voice. Invisible Life is the clearest and most dynamic Helado Negro record to date.

His transition from acoustic to electronic took place on 2011's Canta Lechuza, which was lively but sometimes drifted through embryonic learning passages. Helado Negro generally deals in smart sounds rather than memorable songs (outside of maybe "El Oeste") but that changes with Invisible Life. Lange has committed to his MPC game and tightened it up, knotting his signature atmospheres into immersive, highly musical beats scrawled with unstable sub-rhythms. The glass-brick chords and deeply pumping bass of "Dance Ghost" are solidly constructed but hairline-cracked by jittery, stereo-panned clicks, and Lange's shivery falsetto halfway through lifts the whole arrangement up a level, breaking it free from its foundations. There are many patient, considered payoffs, as when, late in "Arboles", a staccato synth begins skipping atop the leisurely Latin rhythm.

A nostalgic feel lightly creeps in to Invisible Life, from the cartoonish snake rattles and bird whistles shot through the bass arpeggios of "Lentamente" to the gear-shifting 8-bit theme of "Catastrophe". Other songs are rooted in Caribbean music or techno. But Lange's most compelling moments come when he circumvents cultural references, exhuming mysterious but vibrant sound-worlds from the ocean floor of his imagination. He's never before ventured anything as formally distinctive and effectively delightful as "U Heard", which feels densely compacted even as its varied timbres peel off in every direction-- rubbery plucks bouncing around a low octave, bubble-like blips rising and sinking, and percussion threshing straight ahead.

A couple tracks don't measure up to this standard of invention. The rather thin "Relatives", for instance, plops Helado's pal Jon Philpot (Bear in Heaven) atop a rocksteady template of knobby bass and skating backbeats and then calls it a day. There are other guests lurking around, including Devendra Banhart supposedly playing guitar on "Arboles", which isn't prominent. Helado Negro actually seems to have begun as a more collaborative project. Lange has previously worked with Julianna Barwick and Guillermo Scott Herren. But there's always been something solitary about it, and the most subtly bewitching tracks on Invisible Life feel like the internal weather of a mind billowing and clearing. His once noticeable traces of tentativeness around electronic tools have disappeared. At the time, Canta Lechuza seemed like Lange dabbling in electronic music, but in the retroactive light of Invisible Life, it sounds more like him finding his voice.

Black Pus: All My Relations

Aaron Leitko — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:01 -0500

Black Pus is Lightning Bolt drummer Brian Chippendale’s pop-inspired side project. Don’t get the wrong idea, though. The drummer’s solo-musings are only “pop” in comparison to his main gig, whose expansive, abstract thrashing sounds sort of like a flaming 8-bit meteor plunging into the Burning Man festival.

Those same drum-and-bass-meets-Jackson Pollock rhythms provide the foundations for Black Pus, but here, Chippendale sometimes reigns in the pounding to make way for singsongy melodies. Over the number of small-run CD-R and CD releases that he’s done under the name since 2005, there’s been a marked progression from free-form havok to music that is, in its own claustrophobic and LSD-singed way, kind of tuneful. And this latest release, even more so.

All My Relations is the first Black Pus record to have been recorded in a professional studio, rather than at home on Chippendale’s cassette four-track. As a result, it’s noticeably less blown-out than those previous efforts. Producers Keith Souza and Seth Manchester-- who have engineered records by Battles and Skull Defekts-- help to inch the fidelity forward, strengthening the low end and bringing definition to the stew of psychedelic gook that drifts around the drums.

Not that All My Relations is any kind of step toward the mainstream. The added clarity actually makes the music sounds even more aggressively gonzo. On album opener “Marauder”, Chippendale wails and hollers over splatters of rhythm, accompanied only by a kick drum-triggered oscillator. That sound-- which mutates over the course of the album from dentist drill grind to rubber band flop-- acts as a stand in for his Lightning Bolt co-conspirator, bassist Brian Gibson, providing a consistent pulse for the drummer to rail against.

On subsequent songs, Chippendale chills out a little. On “1000 Years”, the drummer temporarily shelves his flashier moves, playing a fairly straightforward beat. The vocals are pulled high enough in the mix that they are often intelligible, even though they’re smeared with delay. It’s only in the track’s final minute, when the high-pitched and gnarled samples fade in, that things get appropriately weird.

Sensory overload is Chippendale’s forte, and as a member of Lightning Bolt, he’s helped make some of the most authentically psychedelic music in recent memory. All My Relations makes a few nods to conventional songwriting, but, really, it’s just as dense and repetitive as anything the drummer has ever put out. Using the multi-track setup, he colors in the nooks and crannies between snare cracks with the kind of stoner-shrapnel that would make Boredoms jealous.

The record's most experimental move, by Chippendale's standards, might be the printing of a lyrics sheet on the inside jacket. Some of them are surprisingly laid back. "I'm just trying to keep my head straight, keep my mouth above the waves, trying to create something great," goes the closing line of "1000 Years". "But I just take it day by day."

Various Artists: Spring Breakers OST

Corban Goble — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers was a media phenomenon before anybody had seen so much as a promotional still. For starters, Korine, the mind behind cult classics like Gummo (his directorial debut) and Kids (he wrote the screenplay for Larry Clarke's film), cast Hollywood wildcard James Franco as the uncannily RiFF RAFF-like rapper/dealer Alien while Gucci Mane makes his screen debut as his drug kingpin rival. Meanwhile, Korine tapped Disney Channel star Selena Gomez as the conflicted Spring Breaker, Faith, and former High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens as the reckless, dangerous Candy. An early teaser features the leads belting out Britney Spears' "…Baby One More Time" and that's not the only (nor the most memorable) Spears homage in the movie. And then, to top it all off, Korine hands the soundtrack to EDM figurehead Skrillex, a former Warped Tour band member turned posterboy for dubstep's more malignant cliches.

It's clear from the opening credits of Spring Breakers-- the most cartoonishly turn't-up Spring Break scene you could possibly imagine, accompanied by the drop-heavy debauchery of Skrillex's calling card "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites"-- that Sonny Moore was the man for the job. His music, old and new, serves as the spine of Spring Breakers, a compilation that also features carefully selected rap tracks and his remix of Birdy Nam Nam's "Goin In'" along with contributions from electronic musician and soundtrack veteran Cliff Martinez. The latter, who also steered 2011's well-received and similarly tense Drive OST, is a critical presence. Both musicians contribute their own ambient-leaning, instrumental originals to the soundtrack-- Martinez handles the curious, searching electronic interludes "Pretend It's a Video Game", "Your Friends Ain't Gonna Leave With You", and "Never Gonna Get This Pussy", while Skrillex handles the relatively more aggressive textures of "Ride Home" and "Park Smoke"-- but the fiber of Spring Breakers is the sonic influence that they have on one other.

Skrillex, in particular, benefits from Martinez' presence. Though Moore has recently attempted more laid-back approaches to composition, songs like "The Reason" didn't sound as idiosyncratically him, and don't prove as captivating or recognizable as his contributions here. The new music, stitched between previously released tracks (like Skrillex's "With You, Friends (Long Drive)" and Gucci Mane's Ferrari Boyz cut "Young Niggaz"), achieves an important headspace for both the dramatic arc of the film as well as the soundtrack as a piece of music. Between the blurry revelry and the careening rush of consequence borne of violent impulse, Spring Breakers is all about the state between that original drug-fueled adrenaline burst and the depressing comedown crush. By cleverly interspersing the soundtrack with their original arrangements, Skrillex and Martinez successfully find that headspace throughout.

Most importantly, Spring Breakers teases out the connections between songs that would be difficult to hear otherwise, offering new entry points. Take Waka Flocka's "Fuck This Industry"; on Flockaveli, the track comes across as repentant and desperate, a song that finds a self-doubting Flocka siphoning out his signature bellow in favor of a restrained, contemplative whisper. Here, it serves as a momentary sense-collecting pause before the chaos. By leading into Martinez pieces, Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" gains a pensive new tone, a fresh context that's only underlined by the orchestral back end redux of that track, as well as the Martinez/Skrillex sequel "Son of Scary Monsters". On Ferrari Boyz, "Young Niggaz" is known as one of the only tracks where Gucci and Waka didn't sound totally asleep, but here, it's a flag-bearer for shaking away the dark thoughts and getting back to the party; after all, it's spring break.

There's a turning point of the film, where some characters decide they're overwhelmed and scared by this neon fantasy world and others find it all the more captivating. The question arises: Do we leave the party, or stay? Given its relatively seamless mesh of spiky, aggro party music and the more contemplative electronic moments created by Martinez and Moore, Spring Breakers is the rare soundtrack that covers both extremes and makes it work as a whole.

Carmen Villain: Sleeper

Jayson Greene — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:04 -0500

Carmen Villain's first single, "Lifeissin", was a placid ballad with something dark and evasive at its core: Over a faint glimmer of guitar, Villain murmured sour nothings about closing the blinds, going to hell, living in fear. Even the song's run-together spelling suggested something slurred from the corner of the mouth. Like R.E.M.'s "Perfect Circle", the song danced in the middle distance, defying you to twist the lens and sharpen its edges.

Carmen Villain, aka Carmen Hillestad, is a similarly blurry prospect: The fact that she was once a model, appearing on the cover of magazines like Vogue and Marie Claire, seemed to be the only available scrap of biographical information. One of few exceptions, an interview she posted to her own Facebook page, was conducted entirely in Swedish. Google Translate helped to extract a few intriguing morsels: She chose the stage name Villain to help distance herself from her modeling career. Her debut album Sleeper is the first music she's ever shared with the world, after writing in private for years. And much of the album, she said, "is about indifference, being in a kind of emptiness."

This foggy unease and blankness communicates itself everywhere on Sleeper, a frustratingly imperfect record that nonetheless holds onto the essential mystery that sparked my curiosity. It is gloomier than "Lifeissin", which surfaces through the murk here as a lone moment of clarity. Hillestad surrounds her bored, flat-as-earth vocals with a smeared wall of half-tuned guitars, evoking the seedy prowl of Royal Trux and early Sonic Youth. There are strong hints of bad drugs, and the unpleasant sensations that accompany them.

The songs with strong, legible vocal melodies carry themselves the best, transforming all of this disaffection and spiritual emptiness into something worth making your own. Hillestad has a knack for curdled, nursery-rhyme melodies, like the late-album highlight "Dreamo", which walks up and down the same four half-steps like someone humming to themselves. "They caught me staring out the window," she sings, a lifelong dysphoric on guard against another well-meaning intervention from the outside world. She hits this note repeatedly in her lyrics, which seem to regard regard human interactions through a thick pane of bulletproof glass. "People keep telling me, real life can be real nice," she sings on "Two Towns".

This noncommittal shrug occasionally prevents Sleeper from hitting harder. Without pushing further into her exploration of despair or sharpening her songwriting, Hillestad sometimes lets her music just sit there. Stretches of the album simply drift past, like the cut-and-paste interlude "Slowaway" or the six-minute drone piece "Obedience", during which there isn't much left to focus on save for the album's rich, reverb-heavy production. "What is love, but a second hand emotion?" Hillestad sings on the haunting "Dreamo", quoting a beloved Tina Turner line. In my attempts to gather some surrounding context, I ended up corresponding briefly with Hillestad, who told me the quote was a tribute to the lifting power of a memorable song. "That Turner lyric is a sort of reference to the type of cultural noise, for example heard through the radio, that could momentarily drag me out of the detachment I could quite often find myself in," she wrote. It's a neat object lesson in where she should go next: Music expressing detachment is easy, but music that addresses it requires some heavier lifting.

Rachel Zeffira: The Deserters

Larry Fitzmaurice — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:03 -0500

Horrors frontman Faris Badwan was the famous face behind Cat's Eyes' 2011 debut, but Rachel Zeffira's story has since proved more intriguing. A half-Irish, half-Italian classically trained opera singer with roots in rural Canada, Zeffira is perhaps the only living person who's both worked with visual vanguard Chris Cunningham and performed for Pope John Paul II. Shortly after Cat's Eyes was released, Zeffira went off on her own and put together a pair of solo tunes, including a cover of My Bloody Valentine's "To Here Knows When", that led to the eventual creation of her solo debut, The Deserters.

Zeffira handles writing, singing, and production duties here, and also assembled and conducted the orchestra, whose parts were recorded at Abbey Road, narrowly avoiding bankruptcy in the process. She plays nine different instruments. Of course, one only needed a listen to Cat's Eyes to glean Zeffira's considerable talents-- the broken-radio orchestral pop on which she took the lead easily make up the album's high points. However, much of The Deserters consists of mournful melodies. When the tempo occasionally picks up and percussion enters the equation the effect is akin to throwing your iTunes on shuffle and transitioning from Air to, say, Pantera.

There's an unmistakable presence that looms over The Deserters, same as it did with Cat's Eyes, and it's that of late Broadcast singer Trish Keenan. At this point, it's impossible to talk about Zeffira's voice-- a fragile, even-tempered thing that's worlds away from what you'd expect with operatic experience-- without mentioning Keenan in the same breath. Broadcast's sound has proved more influential in modern indie with every passing year, but while a few Keenan-alikes have popped up here and there Zeffira's timbre is exceptionally similar. It hovers over almost everything else, an anti-gravitational presence amidst an already weightless environment.

Her voice suits the album's main theme: the act of leaving. Sometimes, Zeffira's the one taking a hike, as she does atop the piping synths of "Letters From Tokyo (Sayonara)"; elsewhere, she's left standing at the "Front Door" waiting for someone who may never return, or detailing someone like the vanishing girl at the nucleus of "Break the Spell". Her lilting, detached voice stays in the same mood throughout, emphasizing the uncertainty contained within these 10 songs.

Ultimately, though, Zeffira's voice isn't notable so much for who it sounds like as it is for how she uses it-- which brings us to that My Bloody Valentine cover. Obviously, it's a good time to unleash a take on any tune from Loveless; regardless of when this was recorded, the opportunity wasn't wasted. The original's swirling guitars and ambient confusion are swapped out for, at first, just Zeffira's voice and her piano-- then, a distant buzzing, picked strings, and swelling woodwinds and brass that build in their intensity to the point where the prettiness is suffocating come the end. Play it loud enough, and it almost works just like its source material.

It's a bold, smart take on a song that's oft been pilfered. Unfortunately, the cover also highlights The Deserters' biggest flaw. This is a record that operates in two modes: light, floaty-yet-expansive orchestral pop, tempered with a few doses of samey motorik noir. Blame the learning curve-- after all, this is someone who's only been making pop music for two or three years thus far. A little more stylistic and structural variety could lead to something special.

ST 2 Lettaz: The G... The Growth & Development

Mike Madden — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:02 -0500

As recent breakups go, G-Side’s didn’t register with the same magnitude as that of the Mars Volta or Das Racist, but the tributes their split did garner were well earned. Though the Huntsville, Ala., rap duo's musical boldness pulled together various corners of the internet-- The ONE... COHESIVE’s “How Far” sampled Beach House’s “10 Mile Stereo”, while iSLAND’s “Gettin It” sliced up Tame Impala’s winding “Why Won’t You Make Up Your Mind?”-- ST 2 Lettaz and Yung Clova always had their feet cemented in the spongy, candy-coated stylings of early 8Ball & MJG and other Southern luminaries. It was an aesthetic that, if not exclusively theirs, no one else did better, and it provided the foundation of five satisfying (if commercially ineffectual) albums in barely four years, from 2007’s Sumthin 2 Hate to 2011’s iSLAND.

While Clova, as the head of Athens, Ala.-based collective Lambo Music, has continued to release new material since he and ST officially parted ways, the latter has worked faster. Less than a week after the breakup came his debut EP, R.E.B.E.L., which proved to be the most sonically daring release ST’d been involved in yet. Sampling the Beastie Boys, Bone Thugs, Empire of the Sun, and Skrillex, much of it was as kinetic as any of the party-rap by his Huntsville pal Jackie Chain (albeit in a much different way). Not only did it suggest ST would be just fine without his former partner, its best moments justified G-Side’s dissolution in that it exposed a singular vision that might never have been achieved by the pair as, well, a pair.

Originally planned to be G-Side’s sixth LP, The G... The Growth & Development wound up as ST’s full-length solo debut. It marks the first release of the 27-year-old’s career that doesn’t have much in the way of continuity. Three tracks approximate pure East Coast classicism-- “Trillmatic”’s first half, for example, could hardly be more reminiscent of that Nas album’s “Memory Lane (Sittin’ in Da Park)”-- and two more aim for the club nearly as overtly as G-Side’s “College Chicks” did in 2009. Of course, those make for two very distant poles, but given that ST has written both with unabashed hubris and of everyday struggles whose details wouldn’t sound out of place on some meditative Rhymesayers single, we know the guy has range. And everything on The G falls within that range.

Besides those from the well-intentioned but occasionally goofy “Not a Luv Song”, these verses don’t show any sides of ST we haven’t seen before. Fortunately, he has no problems finding inventive ways to tread his usual topics. Here’s a note on his dope-dealing history from “Green Light District”: “Hit that bitch with P’s and O’s/ She flip them letters like Vanna White.” On “Flashlight”, ST steps back for a survey of the Big Picture, growing as pensive as ever in the process: “What good is having a voice if you only talk about yourself?/ What good is having a choice if you only choose to hurt somebody else?” Later on that same track, he looks at his surroundings and concludes, “This ain’t livin’, that’s why I’m livid.” Nothing worldview-shaking or stunningly pithy, maybe, but as per always, ST consistently gets the job done here.

A few obstacles prevent The G from reaching a serious peak or sustaining any real hot streak: some elements that were surely appended to give the album a more expansive feel-- GMane’s interstitial musings, the longish in- and outros, the instrumental “Lighthouse”-- account for too much of the album’s 42-minute duration. (Those GMane interludes don’t serve the same narrative purpose as, say, Kendrick’s mom’s do on good kid, m.A.A.d city.) It’s also frustrating that ST insists on working with relative unknowns instead of collaborating with a heavyweight who might help draw him somewhere near the limelight of rap in a grand sense; Grilly and Bentley might sound a little like Big K.R.I.T. and a more restrained Gunplay, respectively, but they lack the intangibles those guys would bring if they were actually here. Barring the EP/pre-album teaser Prelude... To The G, The Growth & Development might be the feeblest release of ST’s career so far. It’s never bad, but it could have been more streamlined, and we should be hearing a little more ambition from a guy who, as he tells us on “Flashlight”, is hoping to be a star at some point.

The Delfonics: Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics

Miles Raymer — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:01 -0500

It's almost 20 years since Rick Rubin successfully repositioned Johnny Cash from a fading star in a terminally uncool genre into the walking embodiment of cool with American Recordings. In the interim, the late-career Rubin-style makeover has become just as much of a cliche as the album of standards from the American songbook. A release about a new collaboration between the Delfonics' William Hart, and Adrian Younge, a producer several decades his junior, said that the resulting album was going to be "what the kids call 'hip-hop'"-- which sounds a lot like an unappealing welcome to the rap game Rubin-Cash formula.

Fortunately, it turns out that Younge's approach towards working with an older artist is less like Rubin's and more like Quentin Tarantino's: Instead of aiming for gravitas and youth culture appeal, he's placed Hart in his own stylized and slightly warped vision of the past that's both a tribute to the Delfonics' heyday, a radical deconstruction of it, and something altogether original.

Younge and Hart's album doesn't actuallly sound much like a Delfonics record. In the group's late 1960s and early 70s prime, they were at the vanguard of the Philly sound that replaced the hard-edged funk that girded the popular black music of the time with a slick breeziness that could occasionally border on easy listening. Delfonics records were gorgeously produced, with Hart and his rotating cast of support singers floating layers of vocal harmonies over lush beds of strings and horns.

Younge-- who produced the album, co-wrote all of its 13 songs with Hart, and played a couple of dozen instruments on it-- exchanges all that for a sonic aesthetic that has more in common with the more eccentric strain of soul and R&B records that are so beloved by hardcore crate diggers and producers like J Dilla and Madlib. Instead of the luxe orchestration that was a trademark of peak-period Delfonics, Younge has given Hart idiosyncratic arrangements full of harpsichord, glockenspiel, and the electric sitar, which impart an element of campy psychedelia, but thankfully avoid crossing fully over into kitsch. With a mix that leans heavily on analog grit and high midrange tones, it sounds like the test pressing of a long-lost psych soul record rescued from a storage unit, and achieves a similar kind of retro accuracy that Younge gave to his soundtrack for the 2009 faux-vintage blaxploitation flick Black Dynamite.

For much of the album Hart sings solo, another departure from the Delfonics sound that we're used to. Purists might be consider the move tantamount to sacrilege, but it suits the material. Hart treats Younge's arrangements like an obstacle course, slipping nimbly through them with an agility that belies his age. His falsetto is still as crystal clear as it ever was, even if he has to bend the occasional high note in order to find the right pitch.

There are a number of potential issues with calling this record Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics: Crediting what's essentially a William Hart solo album to the group could be considered questionable, and Younge taking top billing on the record's title and artist credit is either audacious or presumptuous. And anyone expecting a revival of the Delfonics sound we all know and love very well may walk away disappointed.

Taken on its own terms, though, the record works. And if Adrian Younge's approach to the project becomes the new formula for older artists, then all the better. A musician demanding the respect they're due is understandable, but one taking their reputation and using it to crack open new artistic territory is much more interesting.

Dave Grohl: Sound City: Real to Reel OST

Stuart Berman — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

About halfway during the time that elapsed between Kurt Cobain’s suicide and the release of the first Foo Fighters album, Dave Grohl made his first public, post-Nirvana showing in the most unlikely of places: On "Saturday Night Live", manning Tom Petty’s drum kit for a couple of weed-scented folk-rock jams from Petty's Wild Flowers release. But if the surprise cameo provided little indication of Grohl’s imminent future as the guitar-slinging, camera-ready leader of one of the last arena-rock bands left standing, it was the harbinger of another role he would grow to relish over the next two decades: that of a dutiful gatekeeper of classic-rock tradition. Grohl’s essentially the middle-man who helps the geezers look cool to the kids: He’s got an open-door policy for Rock and Roll Hall of Famers to join him onstage anytime; he’s got enough charm and charisma to coax the most reclusive living member of Led Zeppelin out of semi-retirement; and he’s always on hand to help Grammy Awards producers mitigate the encroaching influence of EDM. This sort of cross-generational appeal has made Grohl not just the nicest man in rock, but its Employee of the Month for nearly 20 years running.

And no doubt, he’s probably the only person who could have made Sound City happen. Grohl’s directorial debut pays tribute to the legendary-- and recently shuttered-- L.A. studio that produced Fleetwood Mac’s 1975 self-titled effort, Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes and what seems like every other album in perpetual classic-rock radio rotation, not to mention alt-rock touchstones like Rage Against the Machine’s debut, Weezer’s Pinkerton, and, of course, Nirvana’s Nevermind. But if the impetus for the film is a certain they-don’t-make-’em-like-they-used-to nostalgia, its accompanying soundtrack release-- also documented onscreen-- is a noble attempt to put the lie to that sentiment. Having purchased the facility’s hallowed Neve 8028 board and installed it at his own 606 Studios, the Foo Fighters frontman used his documentary as an occasion to gather various famed Sound City alumni together to create new music using an old-school tool.

However, “being friends with Dave Grohl” is not the most coherent unifying principle for a stand-alone album, given that his friends here include everyone from Stevie Nicks to Corey Taylor of Slipknot. And a mutual admiration for a bygone recording studio doesn’t provide much of a conceptual conceit to build a record around. Grohl, naturally, sounds the most invested in the cause: His epic showdown with Trent Reznor and Josh Homme on “Mantra” climaxes with a rallying cry (“And all of this will never be the same”) that essentially reads as an indictment against the technological and economic shifts that drove the studio out of business. But other artists, like the Black Rebel Motorcycle dudes on “Heaven and All”, simply show up as if they were cutting their own album. With its hit-and-miss deviations in tone and quality, Real to Reel feels less like a tribute to a studio that created some of the greatest albums of all time, and more like an approximation of a typical Active Rock Radio playlist.

The album works best when embracing the sheer absurdity of its ad-hoc supergroup combinations. Back in 1981, Rick Springfield and Lee Ving (of L.A. hardcore heretics Fear) represented the polar opposites of the rock-frontman ideal. Here, we find them on back-to-back tracks leading various Foo Fighters with equal amounts of bravado and self-deprecation. Springfield’s “The Man That Never Was” makes for a cheeky comment on his own faded celebrity, while Ving’s berserker turn on “Your Wife Is Calling” feeds on the neuroses of the domesticated aging punk. But the 62-year-old Ving is neither the oldest nor most impetuous guest on hand here: After making its surprise debut at last December’s Hurricane Sandy tribute concert, Paul McCartney’s “Cut Me Some Slack”-- which sees the former Beatle backed by the surviving members of Nirvana-- still excites with its “Helter Skelter”-scaled bombast, hoarse-throat howls, and fierce double-timed outro. It’s the best representation of Grohl’s intent for his Sound City mission, to recapture some of the raw spontaneity that’s been lost in an era where so many recordings are clicked and cut with clinical precision.

It’s too bad that many of the other collaborations here feel as generic and laborious as a ProTools tutorial. Grohl, Masters of Reality’s Chris Goss, and half of Rage Against the Machine team up for “Time Slowing Down”, which comes off like a rejected Stone Temple Pilots audition for The Crow soundtrack; “From Can to Can’t”, meanwhile, squanders the power-pop chops of Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielsen and desert-burrowing bottom end of Kyuss bassist Scott Reeder on a plodding post-grunge power ballad belted with clenched-neck earnestness by Corey Taylor. But it’s the date with Stevie Nicks that feels like Real to Reel’s biggest missed opportunity: “You Can’t Fix This” is a forced attempt to update the witchy-woman archetype of “Rhiannon”, but its heavy-handed lyrics about dancing with devils forsake mysticism for melodrama. And yet, even Real to Reel’s failures are a testament to the greatness of Sound City Studios-- in that they prove it takes more than the right equipment, the right people, and good intentions to recreate the magic of what once was.

Batillus: Concrete Sustain

Grayson Currin — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:00:04 -0500

The bulk of “Rust”, the fifth song on the new album from New York heavy metal hoarders Batillus, is pure pit invocation. The quartet falls in behind Willi Stabenau’s initial bass rupture and powers through an up-tempo crunch, with singer Fade Kainer growling in time above the punch. Most of the song follows this format, but tucked strangely between these parts are brief lugubrious impasses that steal the momentum. On first listen, these short drones play out like such shocking forks in the tune that they seem swiped from another song entirely, vestiges of one track accidentally spliced into this one’s militant clip. Upon repeated inspection, though, these lulls are musical foreshadowing for the number’s midsection, which, however bracing it remains, downshifts toward a viscid lurch. Batillus, then, attempt to add a little compositional sophistication to their musical burl.

The ploy almost works, but however intelligent and elegant the mechanism might be, the choice to add those faded clips ultimately stalls the motion of “Rust,” a song that, otherwise, is simply a blast. Concrete Sustain thrives and dies by this premise— that is, add unexpected elements to metal that’s alternately no-, low- and mid-tempo, and attempt to shake loose the formulas of doom and stoner metal. When the plan works, Concrete Sustain is a captivating record created and energized by new possibilities. For instance, brilliant opener “Concrete” backs a reaper of a guitar riff with Geoff Summers’ stuttering funk drumming, offsetting the gloom with unexpected pep. The elements here are familiar, though their arrangement is not. The result is exhilarating.

Batillus formed as an instrumental trio in 2007, and Kainer took the microphone two years later. He serves double duty, acting not only as the lead singer but also as the textural locomotive, using an array of synthesizers and samplers to back the band with electronics and to sample and layer his voice in these songs. During “Beset”, the album’s eight-minute centerpiece, he uses this toolkit to profound effect. He growls between the doomy crests of guitar, but he replicates his lines beneath the lead, forming a crisscrossed web of howling phantoms and demons. It’s a tad frightening but, mostly, it’s sonically interesting, suggesting Sunn O)))’s Black One collaborations with experimental aesthetes such as John Wiese, Oren Ambarchi, and Malefic. When Greg Peterson creeps through a guitar solo toward song’s end, Kainer again supports it with a wash of soft, gray noise, mirroring the earlier effect of musical valances. Summers adds ricocheting dub drums to the start of “Cast”, Peterson triumphant post-rock radiance to the front of “Thorns”-- dual intriguing elements that confirm Batillus’ intention to break beyond their form’s barriers, as well as their own.

Though Batillus have some remarkable ideas for the progression of their sound and, really, of metal itself, they don’t always have the necessary perspective to make them work. Moments of Concrete Sustain are entirely invigorating, but some of them arrive within songs that lack focus or steady development, frustratingly embedding gems within a morass of gravel. “Cast”, for instance, sports not only those great snare pops but also a roiling bass line from Stabenau that, again, borders on funk. The song itself, however, is a lopsided mess, with a structure that collapses beneath the shifting weight of its unstable parts. “Mirrors” bullies through the same psychedelic sludge as Kylesa but allows Kainer to go on a bit of a noise rampage, with his electronics overpowering the rest of the band in moments of intoxicating power. Rather than end the song with that thrilling peak, though, Batillus trudges through to the other side, epitomizing the act of anticlimax with a slow fade to silence.

Risk doesn’t always deliver reward, of course, and that’s the fate Concrete Sustain suffers. Still, it’s good to hear Batillus clearly trying to outfox themselves and their peers. They even succeed in fits, starts and, with only their second half, at least a third of their songs. For a band so obviously on the offensive, that approach affords a prime position for the future.

Bandshell: Caustic View EP

Larry Fitzmaurice — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:00:03 -0500

Bandshell's part of the ever-growing generation of young artists who, thanks to the digital age, could potentially pass through the gates of dance culture without setting foot inside a single club. In an interview with The Quietus last year, the 21-year-old Northern UK-based producer claimed the closest he'd come to a club experience was seeing Daft Punk during their epochal 2007 tour, and that his music had only received notice after e-mailing Hessle Audio co-boss Ben UFO some of his music after hearing his regular Rinse FM show back in 2011. (When it comes to putting his stuff out there, though, he admits "I don't have much of a web presence, musically"; his Soundcloud, in accordance, contains nothing but silence.)

The internet can be a desolate place, and Bandshell more or less lives on the internet, so his music follows suit. His debut EP, last year's Hessle-released Dust March, less resembled proper techno than it did a skeletal, perverted take on the genre. The beats were sparse and unstable, with few intrusions-- static washes, distant shouts, a few evenly spaced synth droplets-- thrown in as window-dressing to accentuate the bare rawness of it all. Fellow hot-ticket e-countryman and reformed enigma Evian Christ "introduced" Bandshell last month on Dummy, and considering the producers' shared fondness for dry, brittle textures, the association makes sense. Whereas Evian Christ's coruscating hip-hop mutations are presented in relative high-definition, though, Bandshell's music frequently sounds as if it's being played back through an old Tascam that's been thrown down a few flights of stairs.

"Broken" is a word that's popped up a few times in attempts to describe Bandshell's sound; appropriately, "Winton", the lead track off of his Caustic View EP for Mute offshoot Liberation Technologies, sounds like busted parts held together with masking tape. (Caustic View is the third release from Lib Tech, following strong output from Laurel Halo and Surgeon/Regis pair-up BMB, and it further suggests that the imprint is one to watch for off-center beat fare in the future.) The tune's thick bass introduces something more floor-ready than anything on Dust March, but as the tune's structure continually reassembles and regurgitates itself, its spastic movements resemble how you'd imagine someone attempting to dance to the thing.

"Winton" is aggressive and splayed, and it's the only track on the EP that operates as such-- Caustic View's four pieces travel on their own paths. "Nice Mullet" is all hissing steam and dirty tones, with piping machinery as a rhythmic backbone; "Landfill" switches out the fog for a healthy dose of paranoia, as noise blasts puncture the atmospheric humidity before a sludgy synth melody turns the whole thing into a bombed-out anti-anthem. Most intriguingly is "Winton"'s A-side sharer, "Perc", the EP's longest and most meditative cut. The composition is relatively simple-- a few interlocking synths that sound as if played from six rooms away, a sneakily melodic low end, the warm thud of the backbeat, and the faintest whiff of tape hiss-- but the results are affecting and contemplative, reminiscent of the prettier moments on dance deconstructionist Actress' beguiling 2012 album R.I.P.

Bandshell has stated that he used to "write a lot of music" but is more judiciously creative as of late. So despite the possible assumption that Caustic View suggests artistic growth from his material out there thus far, the fact that two of these tunes have appeared on previous mixes potentially disproves a sense of chronology-- "Landfill" especially, as it appeared on Bandshell's own Sonic Router mix around the time of Dust March's release. (In a full-circle of sorts, "Perc" showed up on Ben UFO's recent, relatively rough'n'tumble Fabriclive mix.) Instead of piecing together Bandshell's past and future, then, it's more fun to wonder where the promising talent will go with his sound next.

Boldy James: Grand Quarters

Renato Pagnani — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:00:02 -0500

Last year's Consignment: Favor for a Favor, the Redi-Rock Mixtape from Detroit rapper Boldy James managed to keep you invested for its entire 26-track, hour-plus runtime. Sometimes the beats didn't line up with the quality of his rapping. Sometimes he tried to wear a lothario's robes instead of playing to his hard-nosed blue-collar strengths. But Boldy's presence was reason enough not to skip ahead. He spends most of his time detailing the intricacies of selling cocaine and raps with a numbed monotone, and he's the kind of rapper who boasts of his product's popularity while looking over his shoulder, afraid of being usurped by a younger version of himself. But he manages to be someone you root for.

Boldy's new EP, Grand Quarters, gathers songs from the last few years and adds new material. Half the tracks are produced by Chuck Inglish of the Cool Kids, whose minimalist knock meshes well with Boldy's gritty, no-frills style. Inglish's work is more black-marker outlines than finished watercolors, and his beats are some of his hardest yet, stripped down and hollowed out to their most elemental parts-- usually, just granite blocks of bass, cavern-sized drums, and simple synth lines to provide some color.

"Gettin' Flicked" finds a second home here after first appearing on the 2010 Cool Kids mixtape Tacklebox, and surrounded by other tracks similar in aesthetic, it's even more effective. Woozy synths approximate police car sirens, and Boldy crafts a tight narrative in which, after being released from jail, he goes straight back to the only life he knows. It's packed with details that give it a lived-in feel, like the fact his Air Jordan XII sneakers don't have any laces or that it was his aunts Lynnette and Marsha who accepted his collect call when he was arrested. The broken-subwoofer thump of "For the Birds"-- the only one of the three Inglish-produced tracks not to have been released in some form before-- frees Boldy to dig into the corners of the track as he expands on slang for a brick of cocaine into a track's worth of fowl-inspired drug talk. Because they leave so much room for him to maneuver, these tracks serve as an excellent introduction for those unfamiliar with Boldy. The wide-open spaces highlight how flexible of a rapper he is, how much energy he can inject into a tightly-coiled style. His raps aren't quite melodic, but they possess a musicality that keeps them engaging.

The new tracks further highlight that flexibility. "Come Here" is bombastic and celebratory, radio-friendly without sacrificing Boldy's idiosyncrasies-- the song even finds him trying on Auto-Tune for size, and thankfully it's more Future than Rebirth-era Lil Wayne. "I Can Pull It Off" is probably the most melodic production Boldy has ever rapped over, a shimmering tapestry of adrenaline-soaked synths with a sticky hook to match.

Because it repurposes older material, Grand Quarters feels like a stopgap release more than anything else, a lead-in to Boldy's forthcoming Alchemist-produced album, scheduled for later this year. The outlines of two diverging courses for Boldy's career are plotted here. But given Alchemist's noir-ish take on classic New York boom-bap and "Power Glove", their collaboration from last year's Russian Roulette, it's likely that the album will hew closer to spacious, harder-hitting sound of the first half. But Boldy's surprising range here suggests that he'll be ready for whatever comes.

Son Volt: Honky Tonk

Stephen M. Deusner — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:00:01 -0500

Jay Farrar has always stood up for the Little Guy in America. Most of his songs are about regular folks facing down some challenge, whether it’s a powerful corporation, a corrupt politician, or simply hard times. With Uncle Tupelo in the early 1990s, he wrote paeans to anonymous laborers and pitiable drunks, although the ensuring alt-country movement borrowed the romanticism and ignored the radicalized politics of March 16-20, 1992. In the 2000s, he discovered Woody Guthrie and recorded a few albums of languid agit-folk-rock that were heavy on vague outrage and light on sense. Okemah and the Melody of Riot, named after Guthrie’s birthplace, had all the passion of a thesis paper, as though Farrar admired his idol’s righteous anger but had no idea how to duplicate it. Even on One Fast Move or I’m Gone, his 2009 book report on Kerouac, Farrar lost himself in unquestioning idol worship of the Beat Poet.

If those albums depict the American everyman laboring and traveling, Son Volt’s latest, Honky Tonk, shows the Little Guy at leisure. As the title suggests, the milieu is the roadhouse full of people nursing beers and broken hearts while wearing ruts in the dance floor. Instead of Okies or Beats, Farrar’s inspiration is Bakersfield, the California crossroads that figured so prominently in the country of music of the late 1960s. Acts like Buck Owens and Merle Haggard emphasized electric guitar and drums, steely riffs and solid rhythms, and that harder sound distinguished them from the more traditional strains of country emanating from Nashville. For Son Volt, that means a constant two-step rhythm, a fiddle that swirls in and out of focus, pedal steel that sheds a tear in everybody’s beer, and an electric guitar that bounces around some of the faster tunes like “Bakersfield”.

It may be the best Son Volt has sounded in a decade and the most engaged Farrar has sounded in longer, but that’s not really saying much. As a singer, his voice drifts into a muddied, low monotone that favors an unhurried midtempo and tends to flatten the melody; as a songwriter, he tends to favor obtuse wordplay that obscures rather than illuminates his subject matter. On Honky Tonk, he makes the most of those limitations, more or less. His voice sounds positively animated on “Seawall” and “Barricades", and he lovingly draws out the long vowels of “blues” on “Angel of the Blues”, as though reluctant to actually part with the word.

To adapt to the roadhouse setting, Farrar’s songwriting has grown more straightforward as well, even if he favors the same theme on almost every tune: “Don’t let the barricades of life keep the wild spirit still.” But some of his attempts to evoke actually do evoke; some of these songs sound like they have thousands of highway miles between them and are coated with dust. “Down the Highway” may be his best roadtrip anthem since “Windfall” on Son Volt’s ’95 debut, Trace. “There’s a world of wisdom inside a fiddle tune,” he sings. “Throw this love down the highway/ See where it takes you.” The scale is less ambitious, but writing about the travails of the heart is just as righteous as building a machine to kill fascists.

The problem with Honky Tonk is that it’s more suited to the road than the roadhouse. The pacing is so languid, the dynamics so muted that I doubt this iteration of Son Volt would last very long in a real honkytonk. They’d clear the dancefloor and possibly get drowned out by chatter. While the Bakersfield sound is not strictly dance music, it is by its very nature social music, meant to be experienced and enjoyed communally. Yet, Farrar’s songs sound introverted instead of extroverted, suited more to his own idiosyncrasies as singer and bandleader than to the needs of his perceived audience. In other words, you can’t scoot a boot to this album. Farrar continues to sing about regular folk, but still hasn’t found a way to sing to them.

Devendra Banhart: Mala

Ian Cohen — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Insofar as anything about Devendra Banhart was ever considered "underrated," the man rarely got enough credit for his sense of humor. He was often called "playful" or "mischievous," or some other lightly stepping compliment that aligned more comfortably with the image of him as the kind and gentle Cosmically Transcendent Avatar of Freak-Folk. But check his track record: "This Beard Is For Siobhan", "Chinese Children", "The Beatles", Megapuss, and, oy vey, "Shabop Shalom"-- dude's got jokes. If you still don't get the picture, witness the title of his latest album Mala. It's a term of endearment that loosely translates to "sweetie pie" in the native tongue of his fiancée, Serbian artist Ana Kraš. But as a guy who frequently sings in Spanish, Banhart must be very aware of how most people will initially read it-- especially in light of the artistic freefall he's been in for the past six or so years. If he's baiting us with a pun, it's a great relief to find out he's earned the right to fuck around, as Mala is Banhart's best record in nearly a decade-- largely because it's his loosest and funniest.

While not exactly a trend within itself, it's interesting to see how Banhart's latest follows a similar route to recent solo albums from Christopher Owens and Jim James, longhairs who had similarly been burdened with messianic praise and rock savior archetypes. Like those men, Banhart has eased back on multiple levels after increasingly ambitious records, digging up pre-Beatles concepts of pop and rock while writing from non-punk states such as loving with levity and aging with grace. Mala's no less diverse than Cripple Crow or Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, but it's exponentially less heavy-handed in its genre-hopping. As the lovely instrumental "The Ballad of Keenan Milton" attests, he hasn't completely foresworn solo acoustic performance, but otherwise, these songs are short and spare, little more than reverbed electric guitar accompanied by light drumming and rudimentary synth tones. It retroactively posits him as something of a missing link between Ariel Pink and Owens, which is an accomplishment within itself.

Most importantly, these are by far Banhart's most plainspoken and legible songs. Considering they're in the form of soft-shoe jazz or playful R&B, there isn't urgency per se, so much as immediacy resulting from how Mala often feels like snippets taken from Banhart's daily life. "Daniel" namechecks bars and street names as well as "waiting in line to see Suede play," while the record's cloaking, murky production gives the impression that he stills lives on a more mysterious plane than most of us. It also gives Banhart the freedom to get a little goofy even when Mala sounds dead sober. The muffled disco strut of "Für Hildegard Von Bingen" reimagines the 12^th-century mystic as "a VJ on location" and leaves it as just a passing fancy Banhart felt worthy of capture rather than some high-minded metaphor. Likewise, "A Gain" is more of an interlude than a song, about a minute of free-form violin and Banhart muttering lines about being a disappointment to his mother, hair gel, and the W Hotel. As he rushes to jam in every last word in the line "love is gonna be a long lost biological father," he's laughing at his own emo capacity as well as the nakedly "confessional" format.

For the most part, Mala makes good on its titular inspiration by way of including plenty of silly songs about love. Which is different than "silly love songs" in a crucial way-- Banhart's light touch with the more embarrassing aspects of relationships cuts against the occasional whimsy, and his self-deprecation feels earned, humanizing him as someone who can be a jerk in mundane ways: a guy who dated starlets but probably got yelled at for leaving the toilet seat up. Banhart takes on a deeper register that's equally suave and fatuous on "Never Seen Such Good Things", a song that borders on rhinestone cowboy pop. He laments a lost love with momentary nobility before the gawky phonetics and crude sentiment of "if we ever make sweet love again/ I'm sure it would be quite disgusting" make it a multilayered joke at the expense of our faulty memories regarding exes. This is even more pronounced on "Your Fine Petting Duck", a duet where Banhart and Kras play ex-lovers on opposite ends of a proposed reconciliation; Kras wants him back, Banhart is quick to remind her of the numerous ways in which he was a total ass: "If he ever is untrue/ Just remember I was too... and so much more so." For whatever reason, it switches midway to a lo-fi electro-pop thump while Banhart and Kras sing in German, because... why not? Even if it's fiction and decidedly anti-romantic in content, the feel is that of an inside joke between two people who really like each other; in practice, it's an ironic Valentine that's a powerfully effective demonstration of the conspiratorial giddiness of new love.

So it's best to think of Mala as a new beginning for Banhart than a triumphant return to form-- for one thing, this is not the sort of record that will bring back the diehards who felt he fell off the moment he traded in his four-track, to say nothing of cleaning up his image and reneging on the promise of "Long Haired Child". And he still isn't the most fastidious editor of his own work; on the whole, it's for the best that his mojo and humor are given equal billing on Mala, though he should've kept the Zappa pastiche "Hatchet Wound" to himself. But one overly bawdy locker room joke is a small price to pay as Banhart sounds refreshed and relieved here, someone happily on the outside looking in rather than trying to situate himself as a countercultural star, and finally taking the opportunity to show that he doesn't take himself as seriously as a lot of people take him.

Toy Love: Toy Love

Marc Masters — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:05 -0500

Though they existed for less than two years, Toy Love are immeasurably important to the history of New Zealand music. They helped inspire the creation of Flying Nun-- perhaps the most important independent label in the country’s history-- and last year their influence was recognized via induction into the New Zealand Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s odd, then, that for decades after their 1980 demise, their music was represented primarily by a record they didn’t even like. That’s because the production on their sole, self-titled album (issued on major label WEA) buffed the edges off their melodic but raucous post-punk.

Flying Nun rectified that a bit in 2005 by reissuing a newly-mixed version of Toy Love, adding singles and demos in a 2xCD package called Cuts. But for anyone curious about the band’s reputation as a vital, high-wire garage act, now is truly the time to dive in. A few months ago, Goner issued Live at the Gluepot, a ripping double LP of recordings from the band’s final shows. And now Captured Tracks, as part of its new reissue program with Flying Nun, has compiled two discs’ worth of singles and demos under the name Toy Love (a slightly confusing move, since the original self-titled album is not included).

Of the two, Live at the Gluepot is more immediately impressive, just in terms of sheer speed and momentum. Amazingly, Toy Love played nearly 500 shows in their brief existence, and here that experience is loudly obvious. Each of the record’s 25 short, sharp songs flies by so quickly you might find have trouble remembering any single one. But that’s likely the point--- Toy Love doesn’t sound interested in finding perfectly-crafted melodies, but in cranking out tightly-wound tunes with as much snarling energy and coursing blood as possible. That head-down approach is reflected in the between-song banter of singer Chris Knox. His wry intros-- “this next one we found on a back of a chewing gum wrapper in 1939”-- suggest the music should be taken just seriously enough to enjoy the hell out of it.

Toy Love did bury some memorable gems inside their quick-shot post-punk, and that’s clearer on Captured Tracks’ compilation. Punchy tunes like the winding “Squeeze”, the rising stomp “Sheep”, and the swaying “Swimming Pool” (in which Knox oddly parodies Bob Dylan’s nasal croon) all rival the best of contemporaries like the Buzzcocks and the Undertones. I’m most partial to “Amputee Song”, an anthem for the limbless that predicts both the organ-driven garage of the Clean and the weird monster tales of Tall Dwarfs, the equally-vital act that Knox and guitarist Alec Bathgate went on to form. It also highlights Toy Love’s unique combination of bold enthusiasm and dark humor-- it’s hard to imagine anyone besides Knox making a nihilistic chorus like “We don’t exist!” sound so exultant.

Enthused humor has been a Knox/Bathgate trademark since the days of their first group the Enemy, from which Toy Love was spawned. And Knox has valiantly maintained that attitude since suffering a stroke in 2009. Many artists rallied around him after that tragic event, creating a tribute compilation and rekindling interest in his great body of work. Hopefully this pair of Toy Love releases will do the same, but you don’t have to know who Chris Knox is to appreciate Toy Love and Live at the Gluepot. All you really need is a pair of working ears.

Ellen Allien: LISm

Nick Neyland — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:04 -0500

Berliner Ellen Allien clearly doesn't view boundaries in quite the same way as many of her techno peers. Using terms like "fearless" to describe musicians who cycle through contrasting styles in their career often comes across as lazy shorthand for competency-- the music rarely eclipses its obvious influences. Allien has occasionally veered close to that space, although mostly there's a strong feeling of immersion in the genres she splintered off into in works like Sool and Dust. LIsm, a single track that clocks in at 45-minutes, is her most fractured work to date, a piece that veers from abstraction into song-oriented forms and through the clubby territory that made her name. It's adapted from a work she produced for a dance performance at Paris' Pompidou Centre in 2011, with Allien subsequently retooling the music she composed to give LIsm a peculiar life and feel of its own.

This is more likely to be a one-off project than a firm detachment from the scene that spawned Allien, but it's certainly something far closer to avant rock circles than it is to anything approaching dance music. As an overall work it bears few peers, although there are passages that produce a sense of familiarity. The opening guitar strum is reminiscent of the slow creep lead-in from "Nice One" by improvisational Portland troupe Jackie-O Motherfucker, while the clear-eyed pop that closes out the track is just a production budget short of Dr. Luke's domain. In between those bookends come impulses that need a road map to make sense of, although the beauty of LIsm comes from dipping in and getting lost. The sequencing is skillfully cut together, as you'd expect from someone with Allien's DJ pedigree, although it never ends up as a mere technical feat to marvel at. She's clearly more interested in digging out an emotional core to this work.

It's a wayward journey, which appears to be the intention of the piece, although at times it produces the kind of mixed results you get from opening a novel at a random page and trying to make sense of it. Sometimes that can produce a whole other world, a place where the reader is forced to color in the background in interesting ways; at other times it's impossible to get your bearings. LIsm is both those things, a place where the minimal techno of Sool brushes up against primal screams reminiscent of the stringy howl of Liars' Angus Andrew, only to take a thrilling left turn into gamelan-influenced percussion. At those points, LIsm forges ahead with purpose, resembling a DJ set that's part education, part historical melting pot. When it doesn't work it feels a little clunky. Sparse jazz moves collide with glacial Vangelis synths, 0PN drones segue awkwardly into classical piano, drum machines pointlessly sputter into life then fade away.

That sense of just trying stuff on to see whether it works has some merit, but it does cause LIsm to lose purpose at crucial junctures. There's a sag in the center of the piece, a feeling of Allien not keeping her eye on the bigger picture as a soupy array of styles slosh about aimlessly. It's no surprise that her exit door out of there is via the kind of thoughtful techno that harks back to her Berlinette days. But in this context it doesn't feel like a retread, instead coming across as a crucial part in the LIsm narrative, a way of figuring out how darker fare can form part of a slow build toward celestial clubland. The barbed metallic drones that guide Allien to that place are the highlight of the track, a beautiful mesh of criss-crossing figures, all set at purposefully difficult angles to one another. That's LIsm's place, looking for commonality where none exists, succeeding because it shapes conversations through the klutzy way its parts are assembled.

Young Dreams: Between Places

Lindsay Zoladz — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:03 -0500

A few months ago, when Young Dreams covered a song by former tourmates Tame Impala, they renamed it “Feels Like We Only Go Bachwards”. The pun spoke volumes. Young Dreams are baroque, a little anachronistic and, occasionally, wincingly earnest-- but at least their self-presentation shows that they’re fully aware of all these things. Everything about them has an air of almost orchestral grandeur. A Norwegian pop collective whose membership sometimes is as high as 12, their press material describes them not as a band but a “sovereign nation.” Their recent single, the floating, psych-pop anthem “Fog of War”, was a standard tale of alienation and teenage dreams, except for the fact that instead of pining for the girl next door, the narrator was “waiting for my own Athena.” Dream big or go home.

Young Dreams are from Bergen-- a city where, by their own admission “it rains 400 days a year”-- but sonically, Between Places imagines a place where the sun shines bright. Their densely flourished yet weightless pocket symphonies owe an obvious debt to the Beach Boys, but certain elements of their sound also nod to more contemporary artists: the buoyant vocal harmonies on “Footprints” recall Grizzly Bear circa Veckatimest, while “First Days of Something” centers around a breezy riff that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Vampire Weekend song. Still, Between Places has a thematic unity that makes it something more pointed than a collection of influences. Whether about escaping the oppression of adolescence or your dreary local weather patterns, Young Dreams’ music exalts the transformative power of imagination. “I think it's a reaction to the weather we have: freezing cold, no light,” the de facto frontman Matias Tellez said of their sun-dappled sound. “I think it's just that, when things are miserable, you start dreaming of things that aren't as miserable."

Between Places is certainly an impressive sounding album. Its best songs, like “Footprints” and the eponymous “Young Dreams” achieve a difficult balance of feeling grand and baroque but never overcrowded; woodwinds, synthesizers and choral background singers add a fullness to the atmosphere but duck out of frame right at the moment when they’d be too much. The hooks are unabashedly epic, and the atmosphere is immersive but light. The album’s high point, “Fog of War”, sounds like a Killers song coming apart in the outer reaches of the stratosphere.

But Young Dreams have to work some things out down on earth before they can effectively soar that high. Tellez’ lyrics often either too bland (“We’re restless, that’s why we keep on moving…We’ll live forever”) or, when he zooms in and attempts a bit more specifics, clumsy (“I couldn’t stop talking/ I now need a charger for my mobile phone”). This wouldn’t be such a problem if the songs weren’t structured and mixed as though the lead vocals were the most important things going on-- they haven’t yet mastered the trick that a band like Grizzly Bear do so well: presenting lead vocals as though they’re just another instrument in the song, and using lyrics more for texture than explicit meaning. The band’s songwriting chops are evident on Between Places, and it’s refreshing for a debut to err on the side of being too ambitious, when so many new indie bands nowadays suffer from the opposite problem. But the content of these songs doesn’t quite earn their epic execution. “Not empty, because of our young dreams,” Tellez professes on the closing track, but it’s the dreams themselves that feel hollow and faceless, the kind whose specifics you strain to remember the next day.

Apparat: Krieg und Frieden (Music for Theatre)

Ruth Saxelby — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:01 -0500

There is a level of expectation with a piece of work like Krieg und Frieden (Music for Theatre) that threatens to color the experience of listening to it. It's a reminder that what we bring to a piece of music shapes how we listen. In the crudest of terms, it's an album adapted from a score for a piece of theatre based on novel responding to a historical event. More specifically, it is the work of Berlin-based producer Apparat, commissioned by German theatre director Sebastian Hartmann for his 2012 production of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. While these cold facts could perhaps appear impenetrable on paper, Krieg und Frieden (Music for Theatre) is a delightful challenge to both fixity and expectations.

There are many layers of response at work here and, similarly, as many reflections and echoes between the various responses. It was the result of intense collaboration between Hartmann and his cast, Apparat’s Sascha Ring and the musicians he involved, and with the ever-shifting nature of the production itself during the making and staging of it with the score performed live by an orchestra each night. That inherent sense of flux permeates every note on the album; it surprises at every turn. The delicate music box chimes of “K&F Thema” seem to come from nowhere, like sparks of vibrant light shooting up from the stark, watery landscape of the preceding “Blank Page”. Swelling strings proceed to engulf the chimes until they themselves are cut short, succumbing to distant drums sending out a warning. “K&F Thema (Pizzicato)” is, as the title indicates, a plucked variation on the main theme, conveying a level of affected yet affecting sophistication. The desire to join the dots in the bigger narrative is strong: is this the aristocracy’s last dance before the war fractures their insular way of life?

Swimming beneath Ring’s orchestral arrangements is a primordial soup of sonics: the falling of rain outside a window, the awkward tumble of unknown objects, a shrill whirl of drills. The hustle and bustle of these sounds ground the grandiose orchestration in the real world, give it an abstract sense of the mud and blood-splattered physicality of war. Ring’s skill here recalls the work of cult techno producer Torsten Pröfrock, a man he has previously paid tribute to for instilling in him “the idea of sounds having a patina [...] That sounds really needs something like that-- a little dirt is always important in your music.” There are also lines to be drawn with the work of cellist Julia Kent who incorporates found sound into her recordings. On an even wider level, it speaks to the many conversations going on in contemporary composition today: briefly, about whether to embrace electronic means, as Anna Meredith has done, or uphold tradition in composing solely for orchestra.

Ring has, of course, come to the orchestra from the other side of the fence. It was his last album The Devil’s Walk that first found him breaking with his techno production past to more fully incorporate instrumentation and his own singing voice. While there's a touch of mid-90s, prog-rock musical theatre to the two vocal tracks on Krieg und Frieden (Music for Theatre)-- “Light On” and “A Violent Sky”-- it's not unwelcome. Ring’s orchestral and electronic score communicates the narrative’s swing from complacent luxury to riveting despair, showing what happens when worlds collide.

David Bowie: The Next Day

Ryan Dombal — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Before there was Ziggy, Aladdin, Halloween Jack, the Man Who Fell to Earth, the Thin White Duke, Major Tom, the Goblin King, The Dame, the Mid-Life Crisis Soul Patch, and all the rest, there was the Mask. In 1969, when David Bowie was just another struggling London songwriter desperate for a break, he shot a promotional film to showcase his particularly dramatic brand of performance. Along with a handful of songs-- including an early version of "Space Oddity" in which a tinfoil-helmeted Bowie is seduced by a couple of space sirens-- the reel included an original mime piece called "The Mask". It shows Bowie, looking like the least intimidating pirate of all-time in tight white tights, a frilly top, and a pageboy wig, stealing an invisible mask and proceeding to charm his family, co-workers, and eventually entire concert halls by simply placing it on his face. "Autographs, films, television-- the lot!" he says, in voiceover, describing the opportunities afforded by his mysterious new facade. "Had a very strange effect on me, though." The mime ends with the white-faced "star" giving his biggest performance yet-- and then he can't get the mask off. It strangles him. "The papers made a big thing out of it," he continues, "funny though, they didn't mention anything about a mask." Even before David Bowie gained a smidge of notoriety, he was well aware of its pitfalls-- and his own susceptibility to the lure of disguise.

To put it mildly, this self-aware attraction to reinvention has served him well. In the 1970s, he rifled through looks, genres, and band members without hesitation, from space-age glam, to cocaine funk, to harrowing ambience, to name a few. In more modern terms, consider Radiohead's whiplash transformation between OK Computer and Kid A... and then consider how Bowie pulled off equally radical shifts at least five times between 1970 and 1980 alone. This malleability astounds because it runs so counter to the way most of us think and behave. It's non-conformist, uncomfortable, and irrational, without any of the detrimental consequences that are supposed to come along with such rule-breaking. Granted, a stupendous coke habit nearly killed him and he wasn't able to be a present father to his young son during that time, but even those disappointments led to the despondency that fueled his oblique Berlin trilogy. While many artists claim to despise the status quo, only a few have discarded previous successes with the abandon of Bowie, especially during that flawless decade-long stretch. "Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming," read the tagline in an ad for 1977's "Heroes". It was anything but hyperbole. Back then, Bowie may have had many masks, but he knew exactly how long to wear each one.

The following couple of decades weren't quite as fulfilling, with Bowie reaching stadium success, over-diluting his art, and then doubling-back and over-corroding it. Whereas the 70s run was marked by unpredictability, the 80s and 90s were more transparently reactionary, with Bowie eventually following trends rather than leading (or ignoring) them. But this is what happens to rock stars, right? They age, they wither, and they eventually play 30-year-old songs to 50-year-old people who are doing their best to avoid nostalgia's bittersweet aftertaste while nursing an $11 Bud in the back of a basketball arena. Bowie could've gone that route. He didn't.

Following the death of his mother, the birth of his daughter, the decision to lay down roots in New York City, and a reunion with Tony Visconti, the producer who helped him hit career highs like Young Americans, Low, and Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), came 2002's Heathen. The album found Bowie in a contemplative mood, finally finding peace by twisting up his own past in a way that did service to his accomplishments without overtly repeating them. The following year's Reality pulled off a similar trick, and it seemed like David Bowie was settling into a respectable late-career renaissance. And then, on June 25, 2004, he collapsed backstage after a show in Germany, and had to undergo emergency heart surgery. "I tell you what, though, I won't be writing a song about this one," he joked, following the angioplasty. "I can't wait to be fully recovered and get back to work again."

Nearly a decade of silence followed. Rumors of retirement or serious illness came up once in a while, but that's about it. In Paul Trynka's 2011 biography Starman, a friend of Bowie's was quoted as saying, "If you were in hospital after a heart scare, would you be wishing you'd spent more time flogging yourself on tour? Or would you be wishing you could spend more time with your five-year-old?" The explanation seems reasonable; Bowie was going to avoid rock'n'roll fogey-dom by avoiding rock'n'roll altogether while making up for his early fatherly failures. But then he figured out another way to move ahead.

On several levels, David Bowie's 24th studio album is a cunning act of sleight of hand. On The Next Day, he hasn't only come to terms with his past-- he's making his old material work for his new material. For Bowie, the always-savvy son of a public relations man, it's good for business and good for art. The "Heroes"-erasing cover is an admission, a boast, and a provocation ("how dare he!") all at once. And by keeping the album's recording sessions a tight-lipped secret, the back-from-the-dead exclamation of its announcement was that much more pronounced. Also, by abstaining from any new interviews and only releasing a few drab black-and-white promo photos, he's all but forcing the press to go back through his archives to fill the inevitable cover stories from all across the globe. So, there's long-haired Hunky Dory Bowie on the cover of France's Telerama, a lightning-eyed Aladdin Sane fronting the UK's Q, a "Heroes" outtake peering out from Japan's Rockin'On. He turned the "David Bowie is dying!" worry into a thousand fawning would-be obituaries that instead build excitement for his new album-- all while he's likely sitting at his computer, sipping tea and enjoying the coup.

The music found within is also something of a bait-and switch; on the surface, many tracks are uptempo rockers that recall various moments of Bowie's near-50-year career-- hopeful fodder for a tour that looks unlikely to take off-- but delve into the lyric sheet and you'll find death, war, graves, murder, and ghosts at almost every turn. Admittedly, this is not new subject matter for the singer-- his 1967 debut album ended with the theatrical "Please Mr. Gravedigger", an essentially a cappella tale of a child killer and a man re-digging holes for bodies after a bomb tore up their original resting places. And there's the glam apocalypse story of 1974's Diamond Dogs. But while those yarns could be fanciful and campy-- the musings of a young man glamorizing or sensationalizing the ultimate end-- The Next Day's deathly bent is more blunt.

Inspired by English medieval history books, the title track tells of a man being dragged and maimed by an angry mob. "Here I am, not quite dying/ My body left to rot in a hollow tree," sings Bowie, in a husky voice. The simmering "Love Is Lost" observes a troubled, perhaps suicidal 22-year-old girl whose "fear is as old as the world." It builds to a clenched-fist climax with Bowie ruefully pleading "oh, what have you done?" "Valentine's Day", meanwhile, is a Ziggy-style romp... about a tiny-faced school shooter; "How Does the Grass Grow?" offers a quasi-sentimental graveyard tale in which Bowie quips, "Remember the dead/ They were so great/ Some of them"; "You Feel So Lonely You Could Die" wishes comeuppance upon a heartless Cold War assassin. You get the point. It may very well be his bleakest set of lyrics to date, words that don't glorify death as much as they detail its cruel inevitability throughout history. So while "The Next Day" could be seen as an optimistic phrase on paper, on the title track its describing nothing less than eternal brutal violence: "And the next day, and the next, and another day."

Musically, The Next Day isn't as radical or dreary, as it bounces around from style to style, casually suggesting past greatness while rarely matching it. The production is clean and crisp, almost to a fault, leaving little room for the off-kilter spontaneity that highlights Bowie's best work; it's no coincidence that two of the album's best moments, on the skulking "Dirty Boys" and the taut "Boss of Me", feature glorious sax solos from longtime collaborator Steve Elson. Too often, though, the instrumentation sounds museum-ready. This is a shame, especially considering Visconti's pedigree-- this is the same guy who revolutionized the way rock drums sound on Low by pitching them down using a device that, he boasted to Bowie at the time, "fucks with the fabric of time." The same effect teasingly shows up ever-so-briefly on The Next Day, at the start of "Love Is Lost", and the Scott Walker-style closer "Heat" nails a disconcerting ambience, but otherwise, the album's sonics could've certainly been fucked with a bit more.

In 1974, Rolling Stone sat a 27-year-old Bowie down with a 60-year-old William Burroughs to discuss accelerating technologies, the uselessness of love, and the quality of porn films from country to country: "The best ones were the German ones," Bowie concludes. (In one of the few Next Day press photos, the 66-year-old Bowie sits beneath a photo of himself and the famed author from that '74 interview.) They also touch on the trappings of public perception. "They want to see their picture of you," says Burroughs, "and if they don't see their picture of you they're very upset." David Bowie has made a career of walking that line between the picture people want to see and the one he wants to give them. In this way, The Next Day finds him as astute as ever, casting a ghoulish shadow over sounds and images we know and love. In fact, there was at least one exclusive magazine cover photo to go along with the new record; according to an editor's letter, the image that appeared on the front of last week's NME arrived in his inbox with the message, "This is just for you. No-one else has seen this. David would like to be on the cover." The photo, shot just last month, shows two eyes-- one pupil bigger than the other-- behind a stark white mask.

Golden Grrrls: Golden Grrrls

Steven Hyden — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:04 -0600

Remember how the internet was supposed to make albums extinct? Around the turn of the century, serious-minded pop scholars were telling us that listeners would stop caring about compendiums of songs with pre-designed tracklists and conceptual underpinnings. The online world was supposed to free us from the tyranny of 50-minute bulks of music. We would now only be concerned with gloriously succinct, stand-alone tunes. But that hasn't happened. There's still an expectation that makers of songs need to group them together into LPs and EPs at some point, even if those songs wind up suffering in the process.

One band that doesn't benefit from the album format is Glaswegian indie pop trio Golden Grrrls. The band's full-length debut comes after a series of 7-inch and cassette-only releases that presented Golden Grrrls' modest, pared-down charms in appropriately modest, pared-down packages. As guitarist Ruari MacLean acknowledged in a 2012 interview, Golden Grrrls derive their sound from "classic American indie stuff" and "also a lot of Flying Nun/Kiwi pop stuff." That much is obvious from a cursory listen to Golden Grrrls, which is built on MacLean's buzzed-up riffs and flat, deadpan monotone playing off the surprisingly intricate (but always novice-level simple) instrumentation and backing vocals supplied by guitarist Rachel Aggs and drummer Eilidh Rodgers.

When heard in two or three-song bunches, Golden Grrrls sounds great; opening track "New Pop" is 110 seconds of chest-bursting guitars and charming boy-girl vocals giggling and making eyes at each other. The next song "Past Tense" offers more of the same: a chirpy melody, slipshod rhythms, low-key (and off-key) harmonies. By the third track "Paul Simon" (the legendary singer-songwriter is surely referenced for his jangly, pre-Bridge Over Troubled Water Simon & Garfunkel hits, not his more adult-oriented solo material) the formula has already been strongly reiterated and not at all elaborated upon.

If Golden Grrrls had ended there, it would've been another pleasurably slight and bite-sized entry in the band's discography. But even though the next eight songs only last about 20 minutes, the rest of Golden Grrrls feels much longer. There are some good songs here: "Think of the Ways" is a delicate beauty, and "We've Got…" brings the record to a reliably breezy conclusion. But Golden Grrrls was born to make 7-inches; this band needs to say its peace and leave, not linger while the buzz wears off. The bursts of bright energy and amateurish enthusiasm on Golden Grrrls shine on wondrously for several minutes, but after a while the limitations of stunted musicianship and repetitive songwriting take over. What Golden Grrrls screams out for is a haunting ballad or an experimental, noisy detour or two-- anything to add variety to what is otherwise a stiflingly samey album. In lieu of that, an unsparing editor would've sufficed.

Deathfix: Deathfix

Paul Thompson — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:03 -0600

Brendan Canty played drums in Fugazi; Rich Morel's a singer-songwriter with a side-hustle remixing Nelly Furtado songs for the club. The two met when they both joined Bob Mould's touring band (Morel and the ex-Hüsker host a monthly DJ night in D.C.). The stylistic gap between a post-punk legend like Canty and a song-and-dance man like Morel might seem a bridge too far, but Canty and Morel's pedigrees, impressive as they are, don't really loom all that large on Deathfix, their new band's self-titled debut. Canty and Morel bonded over a love of shaggy 1970s rock, and there's plenty of Big Star and Deep Purple's influence to be found on Deathfix, cut with swampy grunge, post-rock, and a touch of funk. So many new bands from established artists hinge on the tension between the two styles, but there's not much tension of any kind to be found on the surprisingly loose-limbed Deathfix. Unmoored from expectation, uninterested in rehashing past glories, Canty and Morel make for the basement, looking to make a racket all their own.

Opener "Better Than Bad" practically swings an arm out the window and asks if you need a lift. The glam-spangled, sweet-as-Raspberries power-popper seems to be at least 90% hook, its ribbony lead guitars driving the song's melody off into the night. "Low Lying Dreams" introduces the first of several unseemly characters, as Morel's Mark Lanegan-worthy leer gives way to a sweeping eastern-tinged crescendo. Faraquet's Devin Ocampo and Medications' Mark Cisneros joined Canty and Morel in the studio, fleshing out their demos with bits of their own, and the results are remarkably fluid, never showboaty, perpetually locked-in.

Most of Deathfix's lyrics concern themselves with the down-and-out. Characters sidestep sobriety, idolize wantonly, die in depressing fashions. Take "Hospital", which flits between the mania of a fever-dream ("the patients are turning red") to a young girl, a do-not-resuscitate order, and a patient's bed with a regrettably high turnover. Morel and Canty won't paint you a portrait, exactly, but there's enough detail in these thumbnail sketches to suggest a very real (and very troubled) cast of characters hanging in the shadows of these songs. Until "Dali's House", that is.

"Dali's House" is a goof; that's the only explanation. Riding a stock funk groove with a distinct jam band lean to it, "Dali's" finds our speak-singing narrator wishing he himself could house a loose gathering of cool kids from the annals of history: Jane Birkin, Muhammed Ali, Mr. Dali himself. If some guy wryly intoning a who's who over a locked groove sounds a little familiar, that's because it's supposed to: "I wish I was James Murphy's house," Morel notes, "because you can steal ideas, and Daft Punk's always playing there." It's kind of a rimshot in search of a punchline, but there's just a hint of acid in the delivery that makes it awfully hard to conclusively figure for a burn or a tongue-in-cheek tribute. Considering how quickly the song devolves into silliness-- "I wish I was the guy from House's house"-- we'll go with the latter. But while the first DJ to fake-out an LCD-expectant crowd with "Dali's House" is a hero in waiting, essentially it's just one of those jokes that gets less funny every time you hear it.

Deathfix quickly recovers with "Playboy", which charts a surprisingly nimble path between tricky jazz rock chords and starry-eyed, lighter-flicking balladry. But the snarl of its guitars can't keep the slow-burning "Mind Control" from getting a bit bogged down in its own murk. There's no shortage of dynamism in Deathfix's arrangements, a lot of little parts sliding past the periphery. But the strange paths some of these songs travel to get to their eventual crescendos occasionally gets them stuck in one place, or one mood, for too long. Penultimate track "Mind Control" gradually builds to a window-shaking post-rock climax, but it takes eight minutes and a false ending to get there. Deathfix gets its expansive, laid-back feel from the relaxed conditions under which it came together, but that's also the source of its occasional directionlessness and the fuck-around vibe of "Dali". The approach gives Deathfix a certain slightness that may rankle fans of either of its principals' more serious work. It's hard to imagine that bothering Morel and Canty much, though; they're clearly having way too much fun.

Pete Swanson: Punk Authority EP

Nick Neyland — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:02 -0600

The general trajectory of Pete Swanson's solo recordings is one of increased corrosion, where each new record he puts out bears a sound that atrophies a little more than the last. If you take in a few plot points-- say, 2011's Man with Potential, followed by 2012's Pro Style, and then this new EP for Mexican Summer/Software-- it feels like you're simultaneously witnessing a refinement of his vision and the gradual destruction of his core aesthetic. In a 2011 interview for the Out Door, Swanson discussed how he was often bugged about krautrock and electronic influences on his former band, Yellow Swans, and how the duo's early experiments were born out of "not being satisfied with what generally existed" in those styles. That sense of dissatisfaction has continued on the beat-heavy output under his own name, taking a scorched earth policy toward EDM that gleefully pulls out all the ugly innards of the genre.

Punk Authority, the latest in a string of wittily titled releases from Swanson, pulls everything into a bigger, fuller, more expansive framework. The title conveys confidence, even if it is some private, unexplained joke, and it's a feeling matched in the music. Here, everything is pushed up into the red. Even less cluttered moments, such as the clock-ticking beats that form an intro to the title track, are in the throes of deterioration, lost in an attempt to bend everything toward breaking point. At times there's only a tiny semblance of order peaking through the debris, but it's always there, just about keeping everything together. Still, it's hard not to think of this as some kind of end game that Swanson has been careering toward, especially when that title track is shunted into a pure whiteout phase that makes it hard to focus on anything other than the unholy shitstorm spewing out of your speakers.

Fortunately, Punk Authority is only concerned with the present, not the future or the past. This is Swanson finding a new type of delirium and wallowing in it, letting it expand and contract over four tracks that begin in unadulterated mania and never look back. It's obtrusive, even obnoxious at times. The first lick of noise from "C.O.P." feels like a bratty kid spitting in your eye and lifting your wallet from your pocket while you're still comprehending what happened. The bleepy motif strung throughout that track is the closest anything here gets to having a solid link to dance music, ultimately coming off like a version of LFO's "Freak" stretched out on a torture rack. There's something cleansing about returning for repeat plays, a sense of Swanson purging some unidentified horrors from his life. The silence that settles in at the end of the EP resembles the pause in time needed when comprehending a piece of really bad news.

The track that precedes that silence, the 13-minute "Life Ends at 30", is Swanson's wildest statement yet, a berserk piece of man vs. machine noise that's as bruising as it is euphoric. It's a dense work, plagued by a million tangential thoughts all piled up on top of one another, creating a sense of claustrophobia that never lets up. The term "nosebleed techno" has already been coined to define a sub-genre of hardcore, which is too bad; it would be the perfect ugly descriptor to hang around the neck of most of the material here. "Life Ends at 30" is a great example of Swanson’s ability to gain a form of lunatic momentum that positions him right on the brink of chaos. He doesn’t appear interested in total formlessness, instead reaching a place that gets as close as he can to all-out loss of control then just about pulling back. Getting there is a thrilling white-knuckle ride, like peering over the ledge for 30 minutes but never jumping off.

Planningtorock: Misogyny Drop Dead EP

Katherine St. Asaph — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:01 -0600

Having already released a track called "Patriarchy Over and Out", which matched its manifesto to a cracking beat arguably even more striking than the lyric, the only way Janine Rostron could go for an International Women's Day single was up. And up Planningtorock went, at least in title; yet "Misogyny Drop Dead" is a far subtler affair than its 2012 counterpart. It matches that song's brittle percussion, Knife-y synths, and androgynous vocal, but adds a blunt lyric ("Misogyny, drop dead and dump the script… 2013, our time is ahead") and some funk on the verses. Rostron's vocal skirts and thrusts around the beat to almost playful effect, somewhat like Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs in her more reggae-influenced mode. The production makes it seem as though misogyny hasn't got a chance.

"Misogyny Drop Dead" marks a thematic change from 2011's W: Back then, Rostron said she was "never interested in writing literal lyrics" about feminist theory. There's not enough material here to tell whether it's a one-off (well, two one-offs) or the start of more overtly political work, but what's here is compelling enough to make it seem a viable direction. The song leads a 12'' single, with a remix by Pursuit Grooves that makes the original even twitchier, the instrumental interlude "Agender", and "Public Love", an eight-minute call to arms beat that constantly threatens to crumple in on itself, a sample that sounds like a baritone sax played through a loudspeaker, and the rallying cry, "public love is back!" "P-U-B-L-I-C!", she cries halfway through.

Everything's kind of spelled out like that, making literal what was previously assumed in Planningtorock's work. As a result there's little here as suddenly striking as, say, the lyrical knives-in-the-back throughout W's "I am Your Man"-- but perhaps that's the point. It can be liberating to be this unsubtle. In the video for "Misogyny Drop Dead", Rostron's face is hidden-- standard for Planningtorock-- behind quick cuts and dark lighting. But look closely at the grotesque mouth and you'll see a grin, and study Rostron's movements and you'll realize they seem a lot like dancing. "You've got the power to prove," Rostron sings at the end of the track. Celebration's as powerful proof as any.

The Men: New Moon

Stuart Berman — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0600

It's the first law of indie-rock: Every grungy, guitar-powered act-- from Dinosaur Jr. to Titus Andronicus-- eventually goes a little Crazy Horse, gradually easing their squalling sludgefeasts into a classic-rock comfort zone. I just didn't expect it to happen so soon for the Men. Over the course of two quick-succession albums, 2011's Leave Home and last year's Open Your Heart, the Brooklyn bruisers' primordial post-hardcore roar had exploded into a constellation of possibilities, exploring everything from krautrock to country to shoegazed psychedelia. But the Men that hit the road in early 2012 to promote Open Your Heart were already a different band than the one documented on that record. Their once-unwieldy noise was being harnessed into a more economical drive and harmonicas were being blown. A band that less than two years ago sounded like descendents of Big Black had already found their way to Big Pink.

This is the Men that greet us on New Moon-- recorded, natch, in a cabin in the Catskills. And what gracious hosts they've become, welcoming us in with the gentle, piano-tapped lullaby "Open the Door". Even when you take the band's rapid-fire maturation into account, the song still startles with its angelic harmonies, peaceful images of "trees swaying," and general air of bonhomie. But if the opener seemingly announces a break from the band's formative inspirations, New Moon as a whole reinforces their spiritual connection to them. In hindsight, 1980s indie rock wasn't so much an antidote to the preceding generation's dinosaur rock as a tough-love corrective measure to revitalize it, from the Minutmen’s CCR/BOC boosterism to Hüsker Dü's sand-blasted take on the Byrds. What the Men ultimately share with their SST forbears isn't a sound but a work ethic, with a record-release output that can barely keep pace with their artistic progression, fuelled by a blatant disregard for the punks they're bound to piss off along the way.

But as New Moon proves, there's a big difference between respecting tradition and being boring, between quieting down and going soft, between being earnest and being sappy. The album's more rustic first side may exhibit their newly professed fondness for Tom Petty, but the spirit is still a lot closer to Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers. Acoustic guitars are front and center, but they slash and scrape rather than soothe; the early double shot of "Half Angel Half Light" and "Without a Face" suggests Full Moon Fever had Jeff Lynne been ousted from the producer's chair and replaced by Spot. What initially impresses about the record is not just that the Men have reconciled their growing affinity for delicate, confessional songcraft with their usual raw frayed-nerve energy, but how easy they make it look.

That's not to say there weren’t some growing pains along the way: Shortly after the release of Open Your Heart, the band excommunicated bassist Chris Hansell, the guy responsible for the most unforgivably caustic, phlegm-splatterd songs in the repertoire. A recent Village Voice cover story claims Hansell was shown the door because he couldn’t afford to keep up with the band's growing tour commitments, however, his scuzz-punk regressions were increasingly at odds with the Men's ever-evolving aesthetic. And playing a big hand in that development was the band's go-to producer Ben Greenberg, who was not just promoted to replace Hansell, but immediately placed on equal singing and songwriting footing with founding members Mark Perro and Nick Chiericozzi. To say he fits right in would be an understatement; his two standout turns-- "The Brass" and the urgent "Repulsion" redux "I See No One"-- respectively push the paint-peeling power-pop of Open Your Heart further into the red and into the rough. (The band's ranks have also expanded to include new fifth member Kevin Faulker, to satisfy their surging demand for lap-steel.)

In contrast to Open Your Heart's exploratory eclecticism, New Moon unabashedly plays to the extremities of the Men's sound. But the album counts as the band's most cohesive statement yet, thanks to savvy sequencing that gradually amps up the volume and ramps up the velocity. You can even hear the precise moment the band snaps in the middle of "I Saw Her Face", when the song suddenly up-shifts from a sad-eyed, "Cortez"-killing dirge into a ferocious, full-torque rave-up, blazing the trail for the album's decidedly more raucous second act.

But where Open Your Heart's stylstic diversity sometimes felt like genre tourism for the sake of it (the country song was actually called "Country Song", after all), New Moon's sonic dichotomies are emblematic of a deeper emotional distress. No matter which of the band's three frontmen are singing them, the Men's songs are pretty simple: someone's usually missing someone who's far away, or dreaming of a better place, and there's often alcohol involved. But over the whole of New Moon, you get the sense the Men are coming to grips with the men they want to be (loving, upstanding, domesticated) and the kind of men they have to be-- i.e., the sort of hardened souls that must spend most of their year in vans and dives in order to survive. As the album flames out in the psych-punk apocalypse of "Supermoon", the moment as is as poignant as it potent: Like the retired hitman in countless gangster movies who gets pulled in for one last hit, New Moon bristles with all the internal tension of a dormant beast that, try as it may, can't ever be fully tamed. Open Your Heart was the sound of the Men issuing themselves a challenge-- "I wanna see you write a love song!" Perro exclaimed on the opening track. New Moon follows through on that promise but inevitably discovers that, when you do open your heart, blood gets spilled.