mincetapes

the mix ends before the world

2012-02-03T09:05:00.004-05:00

Happy February! So I guess I still owe us an albums list for 2011? I've sort of got one (check the sidebar) but I'm not particularly attached to it –I've switched things around a bit since completing my pazz'n'jop ballot and I'd probably rejigger it more (and possibly sneak in a couple of late-breaking discoveries straddling the 2011/2012 divide) if I were to post about it in earnest. We'll see.. Basically, 2011 felt like a pretty unexciting year for albums – in fact, I've already heard a couple of 2012 releases that I like way more than anything that came out last year (more on those soon...) And it kind of felt like an off year for music in general (though I've now come around to the feeling that it was an excellent year for singles, many of which I didn't fully catch on to until the final round of list-scanning and binge-downloading.)

In fact, I wasn't even sure if I was gonna make a year-encompassing mash-up dance mix this time 'round. But, of course, I did.

And here it is:

[download here]

I'll be back with a tracklist and more to say soon. For now, enjoy!

2011, all mixed up

2012-01-06T19:15:00.006-05:00

In the past, I've had a policy of "saving" my emerging favorite favorite songs from an unfolding year – i.e. refraining from including them on mixes (or at least mass-distro mixes) and holding them back instead for a big bang-up year-end mix of songs. That delayed-gratification approach has resulted in some satisfying summing-ups which have stood up to time – notably, 2003's Such Great Heights [aka the duct tape mix]; Fun and Interesting: 2008 in Pop; and last year's H'010nanny! Other years I haven't made a year-end songs mix at all, or else I've made one that I didn't like much at that time and have forgotten about since (like the 2009 two-fer at the bottom of this post.)

This year, breaking my own rules willy-nilly, I made several mixes over the course of the year which did include most of my current-listening favorites – and what's worse I rejiggered the tracklists of these mixes and cherry-picked songs from them for use on later mixes – without necessarily ever settling on a finished stand-alone mix that I was completely happy with. (a similar process has happened with my year-end top ten lists this year – it's been that kind of year.) So in effect, I guess, my B3ST 0F 2oII M1XT@P3 has been a work-in-progress all year long.

Here are some tracklists – they may or may not exactly reflect the versions of mixes I may or may not have given you over the course of the year, but in the end why fuss; it's all good musik!

We Need a Mix*
1. Cults - Go Outside
2. Dom - Living in America
3. James Curd presents Ziggy Franklin - Shelter
4. Cornershop with Bubbley Kaur - Double Decker Eyelashes
5. Xylos - Not Enough
6. Britney Spears - How I Roll
7. Abigail Washburn - City of Refuge
8. David Wax Museum - Yes, Maria, Yes
9. The Kills - Nail In My Coffin
10. The Strokes - Taken For A Fool
11. Peter Bjorn and John - Dig A Little Deeper
12. Yelle - Comme Un Enfant
13. Zoey Van Goey - You Told The Drunks I Knew Karate
14. The Mountain Goats - Estate Sale Sign
15. About Group - There's A Way To End This Run Of Doubt
16. The Decemberists - Calamity Song
17. Deerhoof - Super Duper Rescue Heads!
18. Young Galaxy - B.S.E.
19. Revolver - Monk (Mini Mansions Cover)
20. Panda Bear - Slow Motion
21. Cut Copy - Need You Now (Architecture in Helsinki Version)

*titled in homage to the epic Okkervil River song which I liked [and whose title I especially liked, and took as sort of the thesis statement of their fascinating-but-not-quite-lovable album in my annoyingly non-linkable cowbell magazine article...come to think of it that album got weirdly and also unfairly shunted out of pretty much all year-end coverage i've come across, mine included...] but which I didn't manage to actually include on this or any mix...but equally as an appropriately descriptive/meaning-empty response to a slightly alarming feeling of having to do something with the already-overwhelming glut of sure-fine-yeah musical detritus that was accumulating in my 2011 headspace circa april, which must have been about when i made this.

i like the hipster/anti-hipster move of opening with two of the biggest blog hits of 2010, for the very sane reason that i was only just hearing/really getting into them. i also like lots of these songs, but ultimately the ones i really like the most are the ones that got pillaged for later editions...see below...

Summerville*
1. Foster the People - Pumped Up Kicks
2. Beyoncé - Countdown
3. Mayer Hawthorne - Work To Do
4. The Cool Kids ft. Mayer Hawthorne - Swimsuit
5. Dennis Coffey ft. Mayer Hawthorne - All Your Goodies Are Gone
6. Sebastian ft. Mayer Hawthorne - Love In Motion
7. Pictureplane - Real Is A Feeling
8. tUnE-yArDs - Bizness
9. When Saints Go Machine - Kelly
10. Architecture in Helsinki - Contact High
11. Ford & Lopatin - World of Regret
12. Wild Beasts - Lion's Share
13. Rye Rye ft. Robyn Never Will Be Mine
14. Teddybears ft. Robyn - Cardiac Arrest
15. Nicola Roberts - Beat Of My Drum
16. Kissy Sell Out ft. MC Zulu - Turn It On
17. Austra - Lose It
18. Ada -Keep Me In Mind
19. Benoit & Sergio - What I've Lost
20. Allo Darlin' - Tallulah
21. YACHT - Shangri-La

*because what we really need most is a summer mix, and can't get much simpler cuz i didn't think i could really pull off the Mangumian po'etry of "Cum Trees in the Summerville Breeze" q.v. the ginkgos outside my Inman Sq. [but over the line] Somer sublet., which was the phrase in my head every time i biked up prospect street past the field (The Field!) etc.... anyhow this is more like it. Mayer Hawthorne and Robyn get to be MVPs even tho they hadn't (yet) even put out anything much new of their own in 2011... some versions of this also included Junior Boys' "Banana Ripple," which (like the rest of their album) i kinda like but mostly just don't know what to do with. the closing sequence is really the clincher; I played it to end our midsummer backyard pool Shlock Party, and I kept it for what is essentially a cannibalistic combination of the two above mixes:

Glow in the Dark, Arrow in the Heart*
1. Cults: Go Outside (Menahan Street Band Remix)
2. Beyoncé: Countdown
3. Mayer Hawthorne: Work To Do
4. Xylos: Not Enough
5. Young Galaxy: B.S.E.
6. Pictureplane: Real Is A Feeling
7. ANR: It's Around You
8. tUnE-yArDs: Bizness
9. Cornershop & Bubbley Kaur: Double Decker Eyelashes
10. When Saints Go Machine: Kelly
11. Architecture in Helsinki: Contact High
12. Wild Beasts: Lion's Share
13. Abigail Washburn: City of Refuge
14. Mark McGuire: Chances Are
15. Active Child: Hanging On
16. Hercules & Love Affair: Boy Blue
17. Ada: Keep Me In Mind
18. Benoit & Sergio: What I've Lost
19. Allo Darlin': Tallulah
20. Y∆CHT: Shangri-La
[packaged in a pink sleeve]

*maybe not my favorite lyric from "Kelly" (the whole thing really is brilliant, even perversely so), but it's certainly a potent summation of what the song feels like, and likewise the love of any good song or season or, sure, boy. when i made this it was just early fall and i was touring through the southland, so the working/burning title of this was dixieville. i could've jiggered it more (maybe swapping in a MayHawt album original for the Isleys cover from the EP, but it just didn't feel right) but decided to let it stand as-is as one-half of my "official" "best of 2011" mix-package, along with:

A Swastika In Your Cappucino*
1. Lana Del Rey: Video Games
2. Jens Lekman: Waiting for Kisten
3. Frank Turner: Peggy Sang The Blues
4. Wilco: Dawned On Me
5. Lykke Li: I Follow Rivers
6. Low: Try To Sleep
7. When Saints Go Machine: Add Ends
8. The Dø: Too Insistent (Trentemøller Remix)
9. Paul Simon: Love Is Eternal Sacred Light
10. Kathryn Calder: Who Are You?
11. Peter Bjorn and John: Dig A Little Deeper (Mayer Hawthorne Remix)
12. Cults: Walk At Night
13. Baby Dee: The Pie Song
14. They Might Be Giants: Cloissoné
15. Devon Sproule: The Warning Bell
16. Darren Hayman: I Taught You How To Dance
17. James Blake: Lindisfarne II
18. Gillian Welch: Hard Times
19. St. Vincent: Champagne Year
20. The Throne: Made In America (Ft. Frank Ocean)
21. Joan As Police Woman: Human Condition
22. Cut Copy: Need You Now (Architecture in Helsinki Version)
[packaged in a baby boy blue sleeve, though come to think of it maybe they shoulda been switched]

*probably is my favorite lyric from "Kirsten," which is equally the most brilliant, heart-wrenching and hilarious lyric of the year, even if the string parts do cannibalize his past work. not sure it's a great mix title, but it's a great image, mental or actual (i drew it on some copies.) i agonized over this for a long time in isolation, and i guess i'm pretty happy with it by now. might have actually been easier to slim down to a single disc of for-sure favorites, but i like having space to include things like "Add Ends" (a more representative and possibly of-greater-wide-interest WSGM selection) and "Cloissoné" (definitely the standout of the semi-let-downish Join Us) and "The Pie Song" (hard to satisfactorily integrate, but equally hard to safely ignore) and especially "Human Condition," which I'd mostly forgotten about but does include some truly poignant lines which have made me almost cry multiple times (the opening verse, basically.)

....and then... all the end of year lists and whatsits started coming out, and i went on my usual year-end catch-up downloading rampage, and started totally jamming out to all these awesome techno/hip-hop/weirdpop/rnb songs i'd mostly not even heard previously, plus a few poppier jams that hadn't quite fit in with other iterations. and, mostly, i just wanted to dance, and jam out. so i burned this one up quick, and gave it to some of you. it's a mix of my favorite songs in the history of the world ever, circa the last week of december 2011. and i would like it to be called:

Teeth Ring, Ears Click
1. Jai Paul: BTSTU
2. Purity Ring: Ungirthed
3. Miguel: Sure Thing
4. The Weeknd: The Morning
5. Kelly Rowland ft. Lil Wayne: Motivation
6. Jacques Greene: Another Girl
7. Jamie xx: Far Nearer
8. Adele: Rolling In The Deep (Jamie xx Shuffle)
9. Soulja Boy: Zan With That Lean
10. Big K.R.I.T feat. Ludacris & Bun B: Country Shit (Remix)
11. Azaelea Banks: 212
12. Ill Blu: Meltdown
13. Blawan: Getting Me Down
14. Don Omar ft. Lucenzo: Danza Kuduro
15. Modeselektor ft. Busdriver: Pretentious Friends
16. Lana Del Rey: Blue Jeans (Penguin Prison Remix)
17. Franz Ferdinand: No You Girls (Trentemøller Remix)

okay, i give up... maybe next year i'll just make some mix tapes for the sake of making some mix tapes, and leave it at that. or maybe i'll just make spotify playlists, once i figure out what that's supposed to be, exactly? i just joined, i'm intrigued...we'll see? well anyway, hope you like the music.

review round-up XV: 2011 second half, vol. 3 [soul/r&b, hiphop, world, ambient/xprmntl, etc.]

2012-01-04T18:52:00.008-05:00

Mayer Hawthorne: Impressions EP and How Do You Do? reviews

Detroit retro-soul MVP Mayer Hawthorne has been a busy man lately, popping up on tracks by Chi-town rappers Cool Kids, Parisian techno bro SebastiAn and funk legend Dennis Coffey. He's also found time to cut a digital covers EP, Impressions (free at stonesthrow.com) offering his impeccable takes on some predictably awesome soul obscurities plus tunes from such less likely sources as Chromeo, John Brion and Electric Light Orchestra. Still, with album number two on the horizon, Hawthorne better not start resting yet. As he sings here in his best swoon-worthy Isley Brothers croon: he's got work to do.

When your out-of-nowhere debut was a stone-cold modern classic that managed to be both an uncannily convincing recreation of prime 1960s soul and Motown and also perhaps the most distinctive, freshest-sounding soul platter to emerge in ages, what do you do for an encore? No need to reintroduce himself: Mayer Hawthorne's wholly worthy sophomore set keeps things grooving with plenty more of the same – typically tasty, apparently effortless fun (if occasionally under-written) fare like "Hooked," strutting single "The Walk," the irresistibly buoyant "You Called Me" and the Tempts-ish "Stick Around" – while also dipping a big toe into the sultry, string-laden '70s (and plying his best Barry White come-ons) with the plush Philly slow-burn "Get To Know You" and the gaudy, bawdy Snoop duet "Can't Stop." If covering Jon Brion and ELO on this summer's Impressions EP tipped his pure-pop-loving hand, similarly blue-eyed influences come to the fore here with trace levels of the Doobies and Steely Dan (particularly on the Rhodes-aided "Finally Falling" and "A Long Time," a dynamite, heartfelt tribute to his Detroit roots) and an emphasis on tight, bright, crisply poppy arrangements throughout.

Beyoncé: 4 review

A new Beyoncé record is, by definition, an event, but after her last album's sprawling, unwieldy embarrassment of riches (and vaguely contrived stylistic segregation), 4 feels almost casual: a plain dozen unfussy tunes with (mostly) refreshingly minimal, understated productions, custom-devised for Ms. Knowles to sing the bejeezus out of them, which she graciously, gracefully does. That's a tremendous treat in itself – as always, though she's rarely been quite this artlessly affecting; authoritative yet unforced (breezily pyrotechnic, even.) And, shrugging off negligible missteps like "Party"'s pointless Kanye West intrusion, there are comparable musical pleasures all across the tracklist, from "I Miss You"'s warmly brooding slow-mo electro and "Love On Top"'s grin-inducing throwback R&B gush to the euphorically scattershot, Boyz II Men-sampling "Countdown." Even the album's unorthodox bluesiness-in-front, party-in-back sequencing (flip the track order – nipping the overblown "I Was Here" – and you've got a much more conventional, arguably more effective LP, not unlike B'Day with an inverted ballads:bangers ratio) helps it feel an appealingly low-key, off-the-cuff lark. As though B could really just sneak up on us like that.

The Throne: Watch The Throne review [expanded edition]

Nobody's coming to Watch the Throne cold. Whatever opinions you may have about Jay-Z and Kanye West, this album will likely affirm if not reinforce them – unless, say, you somehow believe either to be humbly self-effacing or blandly conventional. Throne is many things: an idiosyncratic showcase for two uniquely complex personas, a gleeful celebration of ostentatious excess (Hov's words: "Black excellence, opulence, decadence..." – also: "new watch alert!"), an overstuffed hodge-podge of bold and occasionally dodgy experiments, and, not least, a literally gilded monument consecrated to Ego. Some things it's not: predictable, pedestrian, a mindless victory lap or a rote cash-grab – nor, for that matter, is it a consummately crafted album for the ages. But it's certainly never boring. Notwithstanding their long and storied history together (which itself provides some fertile lyrical grist), Jay and 'Ye seem like a potential mismatch for a full-length collab; they have equally recognizable but markedly dissimilar flows and, increasingly, musical wheelhouses, and each is utterly confirmed in his own particular strain of solipsism. But – along with their obvious, infectious camaraderie – they turn out to be pretty good influences on one another: Jay sounds generally reinvigorated: good-humored, full of nimble, intricate wit, and uncharacteristically emotionally revealing, and if Kanye's rhymes often remain as clumsy and crass as his personal life choices ("sophisticated ignorance/write my curses in cursive" sums it up well – and in Pig Latin, too, we learn), he drops far fewer boners than usual. The discrepancy is marked on "That's My Bitch" – a clumsy, ersatz "old school joint" whose Amen breaks and P.E. scratches jut against ponderous synths and blue-eyed throwaway hooks (crooned, randomly, by fake Frenchies La Roux et Bon Iver) – wherein Ye patronizingly mocks his latest hook-up for mispronouncing "Basquiat" while Jay ponders white-washed beauty standards (and, amusingly, proposes that Picasso could have painted Beyoncé.) (Oh yes, both parties go to considerable lengths here to demonstrate their familiarity with art as well as haute couture.) On the touching "New Day" (whose dappled synth burbles and woozy, auto-tuned Nina sample are considerably more artful and, arguably, "respectful" than the album's blunt Otis and James flips), both rappers rectify their life's mistakes vicariously through their purported sons; Kanye envisions himself as neurotically overprotective ("I might even make him be Republican/so everybody know he love white people," he ironically/moronically quips), while a particularly big-hearted Jay, apart from indulging his weirdly persistent Judaism fetish, just sounds like the coolest dad ever. Credit both for executing an effective late-album swerve into social consciousness, via the incisive socio-political-cum-musical diptych "Murder to Excellence" and raptly exultant coming-up anthem "Made In America," which shouts out the patriarchs and matriarchs of the civil rights movement, along with the holy family – another notch for rookie of the year Frank Ocean (as is the stark, anti-clerical/pro-polyamory blues "No Church in the Wild." As full of complications and contradictions as My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – its nearest and easiest reference point – Throne is at least as musically adventurous and wide-ranging, if not always as successful – the convincingly potent, tough-as-nails dubstep curveball "Who Gon Stop Me," for instance (a pretty wholesale Flux Pavilion recasting), is pretty much the polar opposite of "Liftoff"'s stale day-glo puff paint triumphalism. Between the misfires and the winners, through all the smoke and spectacle, our heroes come off perhaps only intermittently regal, but always resoundingly, royally human.

Mariachi El Bronx: [II] review

If there was any doubt that the gringo Angeleno hardcore punks in the Bronx were dead serious about their Mexican folk alter ego -- and for anyone who's spent time with Mariachi El Bronx's 2009 self-titled debut (or caught the twin bands' rollicking, identity-shifting live shows) there certainly was not -- the outfit's second album offers ironclad reassurance that this is no novelty act. Not messing with a good thing, the group takes essentially the same approach this time around -- even the album title's the same -- but the results exhibit a subtle yet significant improvement in almost every respect: both the production and the performances are notably crisper and punchier; the arrangements are richer and more complex, full of swirling, soaring strings; the stylistic range is successfully broadened (to encompass cumbia, norteño, and bolero), and the passion and fire on display are simply undeniable. And the songs, in particular, are uniformly strong and memorable, with highlights including the raucous, tempo-shifting instrumental "Mariachi El Bronx," the fun, flirtatious "Norteño Lights," and especially the tremendous, white-hot single "48 Roses," a philanderer's furiously impassioned plea for dubiously deserved forgiveness ("With four different lovers and 48 roses/I need a confessional that never closes"). The effect of Matt Caughthran's heartfelt but distinctly non-Hispanophone vocals (toned down though still discernibly punk-informed) atop resolutely traditionally styled instrumentation (give or take the not strictly conventional presence of a drum set) recalls the slightly uncanny effectiveness of David Byrne singing with Brazilian musicians on Rei Momo or Paul Simon with South Africans on Graceland (the Pogues' use of traditional Irish music is another, perhaps more apposite comparison) -- a major difference, however, is that Caughthran's lyrical and emotional approach cleaves far closer to the conventions of the genre in question, focusing mainly on affairs of the heart (though he doesn't shy away from more somber philosophical musings on death, poverty, and religion). Purists may, of course, have their qualms, but it would be hard to deny the combination of reverence, proficiency, and sheer exuberance in evidence here -- indeed, it's difficult to imagine any serious limits of this band's appeal. ¡Viva El Bronx!

Buraka Som Sistema: Komba review

Komba, as a voice-over early in Buraka Som Sistema's so-titled sophomore album helpfully explains, is an Angolan religious tradition that's roughly the equivalent of an Irish wake: a massive party held a week after a death, celebrating the life of the deceased. The accordingly spooky and festive title track, which is primarily sung in English (and, in part, as though from beyond the grave), together with several references to Bantu tribal rituals in the opening "Eskeleto" (Skeleton), sets up the notion that the album will be something of a cultural guided tour. But save, perhaps, for the ominous, drum-driven instrumental "Macumba" (whose title refers to Afro-Brazilian folk religion), there's no other indication here (at least to Anglophones) that Portugal's Kuduro champions have any such edificatory intentions in mind: for all practical purposes, Komba is "conceptual" only in that -- as could only be expected -- it's just one hell of a party. Not tampering too much with the formula that made 2008's Black Diamond such an undeniable, explosive experience, Komba essentially delivers more of the same: fierce, hard-hitting, yet decidedly playful, fully polyglot electronic gutter-funk. The average intensity of these new tracks may have come down a notch (though they're still plenty fiery), and there's an uptick in what might seem like crossover pop concessions (not that there's anything wrong with that) -- incorporating elements from R&B ("Voodoo Love") and blandly populist dance-pop (first single "[We Stay] Up All Night" is something like the African tech-funk version of Kesha), as well as the self-explanatory reggaeton hybrid "Burakaton" -- basically, it's just the group indulging its omnivorous and well-established pan-global pop wanderlust. (See also the nutty "LOL & POP," which combines childlike taunts, Clipse-referencing raps, and shout-outs to past BSS tracks with a frenetic, vaguely surf-punky riff.) There aren't quite as many standout tracks this time around, but there are no real low points to speak of (although the dopey ghetto-tech vocal sampling of the incessantly blip-happy "Hypnotized" comes close), and there's plenty to enjoy, especially from a beat programming standpoint -- or, even more especially, from the center of a crowded, sweat-soaked dancefloor. Not at all a bad way to go.

A Winged Victory for the Sullen: A Winged Victory For The Sullen review

By comparison with your typical Stars of the Lid output – like 2007's epochal And Their Refinement of the Decline, whose languorously protracted tones and drones might still not have finished reverberating four years after its release – this new collaboration pairing Adam Wiltzie (half of that Texan duo) with "post-classical" composer/pianist Dustin O'Halloran offers something a little more lively. By any other measure, though, A Winged Victory For The Sullen could hardly be more utterly, ineffably tranquil. Building from Refinement's graceful, majestic swells of sound, and expanding on that album's orchestral inclinations with an even broader symphonic palette – encompassing strings, organ, harp, and O'Halloran's sturdy, meditative piano – articulating a carefully selected compass of harmonic and melodic information, these seven pieces feel at once structurally minimal – almost formless, albeit deliberately controlled – and sonically maximal. Where much ambient drone, and Stars' in particular, seems to take form from residue and a near-spectral suggestion of absence, Wiltzie and O'Halloran's richly sonorous clusters rise toward an emotive power that can only stem from engaged, emphatic presence.

Oneohtrix Point Never: Replica review

Replica, retro-synth drone maven Daniel Lopatin's return as Oneohtrix Point Never following his critically adored, profile-rocketing 2010 album Returnal (and his equally estimable work with Ford & Lopatin), offers repeat customers both familiarity and surprise in roughly equal measure. In the former column, Lopatin still grounds his creations in conspicuously beautiful, buzzing, humming, and twinkling Kosmiche synthscapes; once again, everything feels draped in a syrupy, soft-focus analog glaze. But only one track, the aptly titled "Submersible," sustains itself on warmly drifting, rhythmically unfettered synthetic sound washes alone. Elsewhere, gentle waves of gauziness give way, more or less gradually, to more dynamic elements: on "Remember," an intertwined pair of looped vocal snippets (one speaking the track's title, the other a muffled, mutilated moan) slowly emerges from the amniotic haze; dappled pace-setter "Andro"'s undercurrent of murmuring, garbled sound scraps flips in the final 30 seconds into a stuttered, ritualistic outburst of hand percussion and jungle screeches. By and large, though, rhythm is not merely appended to but fully foregrounded in these compositions, in a way that's essentially new for Oneohtrix -- rarely in the conventional guise of drum tracks and "beats" (though there is a stark, rudimentary one anchoring the first two minutes of "Up," which might be approximately danceable if it weren't in 7/8), but often in the form of sampled loops, creating a definite rhythmic structure without (in most cases) the use of "percussion" per se, a much calmer variation of the micro-sampling methods of Akufen and Matthew Herbert. "Power of Persuasion" introduces this approach with a shifting series of classical-sounding (acoustic) piano figures stuck on short-circuit repeat, to placid, gently numbing effect, while the rather less somnolent "Sleep Dealer" lassoes in a wider array of thuds, groans, and whirrs along with a perky keyboard fillip, indecipherable spoken bits, and a satisfied-sounding exhalation to form a pleasantly cheery little jaunt, and the gently erratic "Nassau" adds some rustling, shuffling footsteps that sound a bit like soft-shoe tap dancing. Even the lovely, lulling title track, which combines static buzzes and fluid, meandering melodic tones with no regular rhythmic matrix to speak of, creates a sense of gentle groove and motion in its soft, patient new age piano chords. Apart from his usual battery of analog keyboards (and a considerable amount of actual acoustic piano), Lopatin apparently culled much of the sound for this album from a DVD compilation of TV commercials dating from 1985 to 1993. Though it makes for an intriguing compositional back-story -- and it clearly provided him a rich sound palette from which to draw -- it's rare that that source material is specifically evident while listening; at best it functions on a more energetic, subconscious level, making the typically nebulous sonic nostalgia of the chillwave/hypnagogic pop movement -- with which these productions bear some strong commonalities -- more literally (if still somewhat imperceptibly) manifest.

Das Racist: Relax review

Having turned heads internet-wide (and beyond) in 2009 with "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell," their unlikely but undeniable, out of nowhere breakthrough hit/joke/meme, and having established their no-joke chops -- validating that seeming one-off as no fluke even while revealing its unmitigated goofiness as something of a red herring -- with a pair of improbably solid, seriously skilled (but still impishly playful) 2010 free-download mixtapes, the smarty-pants Brooklyn rap squad Das Racist arrive at their first legit, purchasable album with goodwill (and talent, and charisma) to burn, and little to prove except their ability to keep a very good, emphatically original thing going. Relax -- the title's a logical extension of the mixtapes' enjoinders to "Sit Down and Shut Up," though an odd handle for such a manically wired, hyper-functioning affair -- makes that much readily clear, delivering in spades the blend of dense, reference-strewn, culture-jamming jokey (not jokey) rhymes, absurdist non-sequiturs ("I'm DJ Khaled/I'm a daikon radish"), cannily irreverent racial critique, eggheaded egg-tossing ("Rapgenius.com is white devil sophistry"), fake patois, and gleeful gibberish that made their name. If there's a discernible new development here, it may be an increased sense of toughness, both musically and lyrically. At least intermittently, Relax seems geared toward beefing up Das Racist's hip-hop bona fides; i.e., basically, their sincerity; no mean feat for such unrepentant trickster-hipster satirists. So we get rampant (largely unconvincing) drug hustling references; the basically self-explanatory (evidently unironic) "club banger" "Booty in the Air," and, on the pace-setting title track, a rare moment of personal introspection -- Heems rapping about his immigrant parents in 1980s Queens ("from holding me to bagging groceries at the Pathmark") -- juxtaposed with the uncharacteristically straight-faced boast "these days I mostly focus on my bank account/I ain't backing out til I own a bank to brag about." Indie rap-wise, it doesn't get much tougher or more soberly serious than El-P, who both produces and guests on "Shut Up, Man" with characteristic chilly digi-funk steeliness, Das Racist following suit impeccably (but with poop jokes.) On the other hand, there's the bubbly synth pop of "Girl," a clear, tongue in cheek, pop-rap piss-take; the lite electro-bhangra fusion "Punjabi Song," and the frothy, fun-loving "The Trick" (produced by Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij, with a heavy nod to Tom Tom Club). Their range is impressive, for sure, but nobody's gonna mistake these guys for remotely conventional rappers -- nor, presumably, would they want that. One quibble: while "Combination Pizza Hut" is referenced twice (once in "Rainbow in the Dark," the well-selected lone mixtape holdover; once -- in ludicrously crude fashion -- in Danny Brown's delightfully loopy "Power" guest verse), there's nothing here approaching the catchiness of that song's indelible hook. Granted, they're not fishing for another viral earworm here, but you'd think they could come up with something better -- for the lead single, no less -- than "Michael Jackson"'s feeble placeholder of a refrain.

DRC Music: Kinshasa One Two review

At the dawn of the 2000s, Damon Albarn traveled to Mali and made some recordings with a handful of local musicians, later shaped into Mali Music, a curious, casual, satisfyingly undefined collaborative foray that marked the starting point of his continued public fascination with the music of Africa. Ten years later -- following a decade that found the incessantly networking Albarn joining forces with many more African musicians through his myriad musical guises (Gorillaz, Blur, the Good, the Bad & the Queen), not to mention releasing the work of several others via his Honest Jon's label -- he returned to the continent for a similar project with a considerably grander scope, descending on metropolis of Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with a veritable army of British and American producers (ten of them, including Actress, Dan the Automator, Jneiro Jarel, and XL Recordings head Richard Russell) to interface with a much larger number of Congolese players and vocalists. What's more, the whole recording process lasted a mere five days. The resulting album (which, like Mali Music, was released as a benefit for Oxfam charities) is as sprawling, messy, and multifarious as you would imagine, a bustling, urban contrast to the sleepy, subdued village feel that prevailed on Mali Music. The difference can be ascribed to the energy of both the Kinshasan musicians and the cutting-edge electronic and hip-hop-oriented Western producers involved, as well as the frenzied, on-the-fly, street-level spirit of the recording experience itself. Strands of funk, house, hip-hop, dub, and techno intertwine freely and loosely with dense, polyrhythmic percussion grooves played on all manner of hand drums, bells, whistles, and scavenged scrap metal instruments (often performed by Bokatola System, who turn up four times) as well as sparser textures featuring thrumming likembes and twangy guitars, and a dizzying array of vocalists who sing, speak, rap, toast, and chant atop it all. (Arguably the most striking track here, a minute-long singsong entitled "Love" and performed by a lightning-tongued rapper/singer of the same name, is entirely a cappella.) Although little if anything here fits neatly into any specific Western genre (the Gorillaz-ish, gently poppy trip-hop of opener "Hallo" -- the only track to feature Albarn's vocals, and coincidentally the dullest thing here -- comes closest), this is definitely much more of a thorough cultural fusion than any sort of reverent "field recording" project -- both Western and African elements are readily audible on every cut, with a somewhat varying but generally quite equal balance of prominence. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's any less respectful of the local musicians and their contributions, nor any less of a resonant depiction of a globalized but nevertheless specific cultural environment. In the increasingly prevalent spirit of similar trans-cultural musical interminglings in recent years, what we get never feels carefully curated, explicated, or tamed but rather refreshingly, bewilderingly alive -- an explosive flurry of rhythms, sounds, and voices.

Fool's Gold: Leave No Trace review

By the time of their second album, L.A.'s Fool's Gold solidified their lineup from an expansive and somewhat amorphous eight-to-twelve-person collective into a condensed five-member band. Correspondingly, perhaps, Leave No Trace largely reins in the freely flowing pan-global jams of the group's debut in favor of a more tightly structured set of songs, a change that turns out to somewhat diminish their music's singularity, if not its fundamental charm. It's not that the defining African and Middle Eastern strains which predominated throughout Fool's Gold -- the layered polyrhythms and, in particular, the gleaming, liquid Afro-pop guitar lines -- are wholly absent here; indeed, they're all right there in opening cut "The Dive," which also gestures toward Brazilian samba in its percussion (and whose central guitar riff is a kissing cousin to first album stand-out "Surprise Hotel.") But the international influences are noticeably toned down and made to share space with more familiar, pedestrian Western rock and pop elements, bringing the group's sound closer to the more generically "tropical-inflected" indie rock of artists like Foreign Born (two of whose members overlap with Fool's Gold) and Vampire Weekend. The band also experiment with adding some squelchy synthesizers and electronic textures, most prominently on "Street Clothes," which veers unexpectedly into full-on '80s art-funk territory, complete with sproingy drum triggers, clavinet, and a chaotically skronking sax. Further diluting the group's multi-cultural spirit, singer Luke Top largely forgoes his native Hebrew this time out to sing in English (save on the bilingual "Tel Aviv.") All of this is fine as far as it goes: the global stew may be watered down, but it hasn't entirely lost its flavor. Leave No Trace still sounds great; the playing is marvelously light and breezy, and these tunes are still enjoyably summery, simmering, and infectiously danceable (if not, on the whole, terribly memorable.) Still, it's hard not to wish Fool's Gold had figured out how to develop and expand their approach without compromising so much of what made their debut so delightfully unique.

Kitty Daisy & Lewis: Smoking In Heaven review

There's a lot to love about Kitty, Daisy & Lewis Durham, a trio of British youngsters (aged 18, 22, and 20, respectively, at the time of this recording) whose enthusiasm for the American roots music of the 1950s is undeniably sincere, impressively zealous, and absolutely infectious. It's easy to imagine a project like theirs smacking unbearably of gimmicky novelty, especially given the ambitious measures the Durham siblings undertake in the interest of authenticity -- including amassing enough vintage recording gear to build a complete home setup modeled after the Sun Records studio -- but these kids make it all feel breezily natural, and for them it really is: after all, they were raised on this stuff by their hipster music industry parents (mastering engineer Graeme Durham and Raincoats drummer Ingrid Weiss, who also sit in with the band on occasion.) While Smoking in Heaven, the group's second proper full-length, doesn't tamper with the charmingly loose, deliberately homespun energy of their 2009 debut, it does find them branching out in several ways: exploring bluebeat ska ("Tomorrow," "So Sorry") and coarse, strutting funk ("Don't Make a Fool out of Me") in addition to plenty of their usual jump-blues, R&B, and swingin' rockabilly (no Hawaiian jaunts this time, though); trying out some more ambitious (if not always wholly convincing) musicianship -- check the rough but still rollicking boogie-woogie piano solo that kicks off the instrumental "Paan Man Boogie" -- and, notably, penning all their own material for the first time. The writing is nothing earth-shattering; in fact, it's rudimentary and formulaic almost without exception, although they still come up with a couple of winners ("I'm Coming Home"), and lots of tunes that would easily pass for understandably forgotten oldies (not among them is "Messing with My Life," whose trebly, cod-funk guitar and atypically contemporary-sounding vocal stylings make it sound incongruously like an especially amateurish cover of a faceless, 2010s Top 40 R&B hit.) But as with their playing and singing (Lewis sometimes calls to mind a young, inelegant Eric Burdon -- an apt reminder of how much these guys have in common with Ameriphile '60s beat groups like the Animals and the Yardbirds), the sisters have a tendency to sound a bit congested, but their charm and passion take them a long way. That charm can run pretty thin, though, when it comes to extended "jams" like the seven-and-a-half-minute "What Quid," and harmonica-riddled, nine-minute title-track, neither of which offer nearly enough variation or interest to justify their length.

Goldmund: All Will Prosper review

None of the music Keith Kenniff makes under any of his guises -- as Helios, or as half of the duo Mint Julep -- is really the least bit difficult or demanding, but the solo piano-oriented Goldmund is probably the most anodyne of all of his projects, and this fifth release under that name may well be his most pleasantly unchallenging yet -- unless you're the sort of person who's easily riled up by hearing the melody of "Dixie." All Will Prosper is a collection of 14 Civil War-era folk songs (plus one more recently composed dead ringer, "Ashoken Farewell") rendered in sparse, minimalist arrangements featuring only delicate, close-miked acoustic guitar and reverberant upper-register piano. There's the occasional hint of simple, organic ambient techniques (such as one of these instruments being used in an atmospheric, drone-like or gently percussive fashion) but the focus is squarely, unabashedly on presenting these almost innately familiar melodies as simply and as beautifully as possible. And if anything can be said to be truly remarkable about this recording, it is precisely that sense of focus, with every detail of the sound carefully deployed and calibrated to maintain a sense of pure, unruffled calm. Kenniff is a past master of prettiness, and he certainly hasn't lost his touch here. At the same time, there's a thin line between tranquil aesthetic purity and emotionally empty sterility, and while this music makes a fine blank canvas for whatever you want to project onto it, it's ultimately pretty faceless stuff. For all the emotional potential of this source material, Kenniff does little to make it resonate more than literally; he certainly doesn't present the era in any sort of new, freshly relevant way (like, for instance Titus Andronicus on their similarly artworked The Monitor), but neither is there much palpable sense of nostalgia, except perhaps on the mournfully slow, somber closing rendition of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." Something about these simple old-fashioned melodies and the gently chiming quality of the sound makes this feel vaguely like a generic collection of instrumental Christmas carols (or perhaps it's that "All Quiet on the Potomac" bears a passing melodic similarity to "Greensleeves"). More to the point, it sounds like a souvenir CD you might pick up at the gift shop of a historic battlefield site. Actually, Kenniff should look into that -- it might be a great marketing opportunity.

Philadelphia City Paper reviews:
Active Child: You Are All I See review

The word "ethereal" gets thrown around a lot in reference to voices that are merely high, but Active Child's Pat Grossi, on his spiritually ecstatic debut LP You Are All I See (Vagrant), unleashes a falsetto that's veritably angelic (an attribute enhanced by the album's copious, gossamer harp cascades) and also lavishly, deliriously dense enough to spread like velvety putty across these synthetic cathedrals of gleaming, electrified new age crunk.

Escort: Escort review

There's been no shortage of disco revivalists recently, but few latter-day practitioners have managed to recognize and replicate the joyous, sexy, soulful spirit – and the magnificently playful excesses – of the music's 1970s origins quite like Escort. The seventeen-piece New York orchestra took their sweet time perfecting their eponymous debut LP – they started dropping singles (all included here, most in tight new re-recordings) way back in 2006 – but there's no denying that the fifty solid-gold groove-strutting, synth-twinkling, string-swirling minutes making up Escort (Escort) were worth every second of the wait.

The Caretaker: An Empty Bliss Beyond This World review

Fascinating, elegantly evocative and rather delightfully eerie, An Empty Bliss Beyond This World by The Caretaker (British sound-collage artist James Kirby) is a sort of allegorical aural portrait, an attempt to emulate the experience of Alzheimer's disease via deconstructions of crackly old prewar shellacs: syrupy ballroom jazz, languid piano waltzes, weepy orchestral serenades, cloaked in reverb and static and manipulated into gently drifting loops and fragments to create a pleasantly bewildering, hypnotic jumble of disorientation and free-floating nostalgia.

Mark McGuire: Get Lost review

Even more than the spacey, synthy drones of his well-loved band, Emeralds, the music that Ohioan guitarist/tone-sculptor Mark McGuire makes on his lonesome is ideally suited to soundtrack any variety of bliss, be it heady or wistful, wide-eyed or pleasantly drowsy. Get Lost (Editions Mego), his latest in a continuous stream of releases, offers five fairly brief, breezily fluid, warmly melodic and layered acoustic/electric pop-ambient excursions, plus the perfectly-titled "Firefly Constellations" – twenty minutes of flittering, saturated sound-shards and patient, placid strums.

Glenn Jones: The Wanting review

Boston's Glenn Jones – a collaborator and pal of our own dearly departed Jack Rose, who plays in a similarly dense, deft, folk-derived finger-picking style (so-called "American primitive," though it's really anything but) – is an immensely skilled guitarist, something that's evident from any given few seconds of The Wanting, his Thrill Jockey debut. But it's his spirit, grace, and subtle, sure compositional style, not mere technical wizardry, that makes these eleven songs without words such an uncommonly warm, welcoming and immersive listening experience.

Drake: Take Care review

Eighty minutes of anybody ego tripping out (maybe emo tripping would be a more apt description) is a lot to take, but Drake, ever the mopey charmer, makes it a typically nuanced and pleasurable ride on Take Care (Universal Republic), not that it'll convince the haters. Subtler and smoother but also more monochromatic than his debut, it's an icier listen but a bolder aesthetic statement; all free-floating nocturnal, money-drunk, earnestly world-weary malaise.

Van Dyke Parks: Arrangements, Vol. 1 review

Van Dyke Parks' Arrangements, Vol. 1 (Bananastan), a hand-picked collection of little-heard '60s and '70s chestnuts, is a fittingly spectacular showcase for a legend who's worked with everyone from Brian Wilson to U2 to Joanna Newsom to, apparently, Skrillex – but it's also just a totally cracking mixtape: consistently entertaining, delightfully eclectic – a truly pan-American patchwork of styles – and full of surprises (psychedelic country-gospel from Arlo Guthrie, off-color calypso from Bonnie Raitt, stone-cold funk from Little Feat), all with Parks' playful, colorful, jauntily baroque orchestrations.

Gem Club: Breakers review

Emanating wintry calm and sober, classically restrained elegance; using a palette that feels even more spare and restricted than it actually is – glacially patient, cavernously reverberant piano; spartan, poignant cello; judiciously sparing percussion, and achingly delicate, boyishly whispered vocals, often harmonized and layered to exquisite effect – Somerville, MA's Gem Club have birthed a starkly simple but deeply affecting debut LP in Breakers (Hardly Art), one which bears an almost uncanny likeness to Sufjan Stevens at his softest and most heartbreakingly sincere.

Little Dragon: Ritual Union review

"Ritual Union," the sparky title tune of Little Dragon's third full-length (Peacefrog), is a meditation on matrimony, but the phrase could also describe the seamless, deep-vibing pocket the Swedish foursome inhabit so magnetically whenever they take the stage. Recordings still aren't a patch on that uncanny live allure, but this may be their most satisfying yet, progressing beyond effortlessly moody grooves toward brighter, snappier territory without losing their jazzy machine-soul elasticity or Yukimi Nagano's endlessly enrapturing, enigmatic coo.

El Rego: El Rego review

When not occupied with latter-day simulacra (Sharon Jones, The Budos Band), the soul and Afrobeat specialists at Daptone records work an occasional sideline in unearthed vintage goodies such as El Rego, an impressively wide-ranging collection of 60s and 70s sides from the eponymous Beninese funkateer. Besides the usual rampant James Brown-isms and limber, percolating grooves, we get smoky sub-Saharan blues, vague Arabic inflections, plenty of melody, and some intriguingly soulful accordion work.

Yelawolf: Radioactive review

It's no surprise that celeb cameos, splashy Euro-crunk productions, and blandly inspirational rent-a-diva choruses don't suit scrappy skate-rat rapper Yelawolf's Southern trailer-park gutter talk and neck-snapping double-time flow nearly as well as the sparse, steely, deliciously sinister beats peppering his galvanizing mixtape work. The intermittent moments of the sprawling, overstuffed Radioactive (Shady/Interscope) which allow the Alabaman's "ugly boy swag" to shine through tantalizingly confirm that he remains one of hip-hop's most charismatic and technically compelling new voices; if only this was the proper showcase that voice deserves.

review round-up XV: 2011 second half, vol. 2 [singer-songwriters and indie rock bands]

2011-12-25T16:18:00.000-05:00

Devon Sproule: I Love You, Go Easy review

Devon Sproule's sixth album opens in typically bucolic fashion, with the limber-voiced songwriter musing mellifluously on the mossy, terrapin-filled pond of her childhood commune (perhaps the very same "goose-poop pond" referenced at the start of her previous album), but the record on the whole finds Sproule -- an Ontario-born lifelong Virginian, freshly transplanted to Berlin, who's probably best beloved in the U.K. -- traveling musically and thematically further afield from her rustic roots. I Love You, Go Easy, which feels every bit as warm, thoughtful, and generously gentle as the twofold sentiment contained in its title, was recorded in her native Canada with a fresh batch of collaborators -- free-thinking Toronto producer Sandro Perri (Polmo Polpo) and experimental folk-pop trio the Silt -- who work some small wonders with the album's breezily expansive textural palette, making tasteful use of flutes, clarinets, saxophones, brass, and a few unobtrusively burbling synthesizers alongside Sproule's trusty Gibson. The result is considerably removed from the country-informed folk that dominated (but never completely encapsulated) her earlier work; it's both her subtlest and jazziest effort to date, certainly sonically but also in its songwriting, which tends more than ever toward long, fluid melodic lines and loose, open-ended structures. And the songs, if not necessarily her most immediately captivating or endearingly winsome, are as artful, personable, elegant, and finely crafted as ever, revealing abundant charms and quirks with familiarity. They're also frankly, unapologetically personal, vehicles for Sproule to explore the nuances of her relationships and emotions but also to sort through her life and career goals (though the two tend to intersect, particularly when it comes -- as it often does -- to her husband, fellow singer/songwriter Paul Curreri).

Twin Sister: In Heaven review

Twin Sister's most singular asset – and, apart from a general sonic softness which could be described as "twee," In Heaven's only really consistent attribute – is Andrea Estella's singing voice: a supple, adorable coo that's got a soupçon of Lætitia Sadier, a playful pinch of Judy Garland – by way of Nellie McKay, and, particularly when layered and harmonized, a warm, velvety mellifluence akin to underrated California popsters Simone Rubi and Terri Loewenthal (Rubies/Call and Response.) True, the band's carved out a distinctive, likable, retro-indebted yet minty-fresh baseline sound: dappled, spacey lounge-pop which calls to mind Baudelaire's "luxe, calme et volupté" (also, incidentally, the mantra of romanticist Canadian lushes Stars), and is perhaps best exemplified by opening ditty "Daniel," with its glowing, drifting Tortoise-shell veneer of vibraphone and organ and its gently zippy beatbox bossa. (Call it The Sea and Cupcake – with Estella as the gooey frosting – or, alternatively: Coctail Twins.) But In Heaven, if anything, only ramps up the genre-hopping of Twin Sister's early EPs, rendering it a rather diffuse, perplexing miscellany. Viz., infectious funk-slice "Bad Street" struts into kewpie disco territory (somewhere in the suburbs of "Funkytown"); aptly-named "Space Babe" ushers in the synth-washed and ponderous dream-pop of "Kimmi in a Ricefield" and "Luna," whose gauzy solemnity is then undercut by a spate of campy weirdness: "Spain" (torchy spy-theme pastiche), "Gene Ciampi" (Spaghetti Western clip-clop) and "Saturday Sunday" (easy-listening bubblegum? Petula Clark takes on Rebecca Black?), which largely dial back the synths in favor of screwball guitar. So: Heaven? or Las Vegas? or, more probably, (c. late 90s) Chicago? Hard to predict quite where Twin Sister will end up, but it's a lovely, leisurely, labile journey all the same.

Kathryn Calder: Bright & Vivid review

For an album titled Bright and Vivid, Kathryn Calder's sophomore solo effort sure starts out pretty murky. With its thick, squalling guitars, thudding drumbeat, and smeared, muffled vocals, "One Two Three" initially suggests that Calder is taking a page from the voguish, lo-fi girl group playbook (Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls, et al), but that soon turns out to be a bit of a miscue. There's a sense of polish and deliberateness in spite of all the hazy, swirling sonics; what emerges here, and throughout the album, is indeed quite vivid and bright -- but on the order of a lush, richly saturated Impressionist painting (or, perhaps, the album's autumnal-hued cover), an aesthetic far removed from the crisp, neatly delineated formalism of her work with the New Pornographers and Immaculate Machine. While Calder's relatively intimate, understated solo debut demonstrated a keen awareness of texture and a solid understanding of arrangement, those impulses come to the fore here in a considerably fuller and more conspicuous way, becoming as much of a focus as the songs themselves, if not more; take for instance the epically evolving, almost suite-like "All the Things," which is instrumental for more than half of its six-minute run time, and features Calder's voice, when it does come in, positively drowned in reverb. That voice -- warm, confident, girlishly pure, more richly developed than ever --still serves as the sublime vehicle for melody it has long been, rising brilliantly above the gentle haze on "Right Book," or tenderly harmonizing on "City of Sounds," but it's also sometimes treated as just one more, albeit integral, element in the album's lavish, layered tapestry of texture. For all the considerable volume of sound on the album -- which Calder recorded in her living room with her producer-engineer husband Colin Stewart (head of Vancouver's Hive Creative Labs), working at a leisurely pace and enlisting a generous cast of collaborators -- it never feels overstuffed. And while the songs, in general, tend not to announce themselves loudly, but rather blossom gradually, taking time to reveal their ample hooks and charms, they show just as much care and craft as the album's expansive soundscape. Even at their most immediately, infectiously accessible -- the glorious, electro-poppy earworm "Who Are You?," which has all the makings of an indie-night dance anthem, or the catchy, rocking "Walking in My Sleep" (the closest the album comes to New Pornos-style power pop) -- these are thoughtful, complex pieces of songwriting. A firm step forward on all fronts, Bright and Vivid is a thoroughly engaging listen and establishes Calder as a creative force and pop craftsperson every bit as worthy as her big-deal bandmates.

Darren Hayman: Essex Arms review

For the second installment in his planned "Essex Trilogy," Darren Hayman shifts his focus from the suburban, middle-class "new town" Harlow – the subject and setting of 2009's Pram Town – to a broader view of the East Anglian county's rural, working-class communities. Like its predecessor, Essex Arms is full of highly specific geographic and cultural references which effectively function as a backdrop to Hayman's usual assortment of love songs, character sketches and wistful ruminations. This time there's no attempt to cement the album's concept through a grand connecting narrative (or even a modest one), but the songs still hang together nicely to evoke a clear sense of place, with linchpins including "Dagenham Ford" – a touchingly bittersweet eulogy to a shuttered auto plant (and perennial football underdogs West Ham United) – and the languorous "Two Tree Island" (an ode to a former sewage works and landfill, now partially a nature reserve), with its vision of the countryside commingled with litter and waste. Sweetness and decadence run hand and hand throughout these songs, with references to semi-public sex and reckless (and sometimes fatal) joyriding intermingling with heartfelt declarations of love (none more pure and guileless than "Super Kings"' earnest refrain.) Perhaps the most winning moment (which is reprised en passant throughout the album, for good measure) comes with "Winter Makes You Want Me More," whose central sentiment is as poetic as it is self-evident; a cold-weather love song that's as universal as pawprints in the snow, shivering smokers and candy-striped flannelette sheets. Throughout, Hayman and a particularly strong incarnation of the Secondary Modern (including contributions from Fanfarlo, The Wave Pictures and – on the scene-setting "Calling Out Your Name Again," a duet with Emmy the Great) infuse the proceedings with a loose but decidedly folksy, countrified air, flush with pedal steel, harmonica, fiddle, mandolin and more. That musical modus may or may not be strictly relevant to the countryside in question, but it works marvelously well with Hayman's increasingly soulful songwriting, both on the hushed, melancholic tunes which make up the majority of this collection (starting right off the bat with the sad-sack "Be Lonely") and the handful of upbeat offerings, including the atypically rocky scrabble-playing closer "Nothing You Can Do About It." While it's not quite the uniquely charming statement Pram Town was, Essex Arms is yet another excellent addition to Hayman's ever-expanding discography.

Jeffrey Lewis: A Turn In The Dream-Songs review

Following the splendid career highlight Em Are I, and after a couple of collaborative detours – the uneven-at-best The Bundles with Kimya Dawson, and the delightfully loopy Come On Board with weirdo-folk icon Peter Stampfel – lovably quirky New York songwriter/cartoonist Jeffrey Lewis returns with a highly likable sixth album full of his characteristic wit, whimsy, sardonic self-deprecation and transcendental musings. Lewis' regular backing band the Junkyard are absent here (under that billing, at least), as are the occasional bursts of electrified rowdiness they've provided in the past. In their place are a clutch of mostly British indie-folk players (including the Wave Pictures' Franic Rozycki, who provides some fine mandolin work throughout), and a bevy of guests – members of The Vaselines, Dr. Dog, Au Revoir Simone, Misty’s Big Adventure and Schwervon – who help flesh out the album's pleasantly loose, vaguely psych-folky vibe, particularly on the tone-setting "To Go And Return," whose spacey, surreal lyric (a somewhat Seussian nonsense rhyme about the cosmic metaphysics of wish-making) is the source of the album's peculiar title. Despite all the friends he's amassed here, Lewis remains an archetypal loner, a condition which informs many of the album's sharpest numbers, from the lovelorn lambast "How Can It Be?" (featuring peppy, '60s-style backing vocals by the Dr. Dog boys) and the goofy "Cult Boyfriend" (which likens Lewis' romantic boom-and-bust cycles to a rapid-fire list of pop-culture obscurities) to "I Got Lost"'s gentle, plain-spoken disquisition on disconnection and "When You're By Yourself"'s wryly tender dissection of the practical logistics of loneliness – not to mention the hyperbolic shaggy-dog suicide saga "So What If I Couldn't Take It Anymore." (As usual – though still impressively – these songs rarely if ever come across as bitter or overly self-pitying; Lewis hasn't lost his knack for balancing depressed and depressing subject matter with insightfulness, sincerity, levity and charm.) All that time alone must give Lewis plenty of opportunity for deep thinking, which might explain the homespun, slightly stoned philosophizing of songs like the de facto centerpiece "Krongu Green Slime" – which uses the odd conceit of a pre-historic novelty manufacturing corporation to reimagine the entirety of evolution, over six protracted minutes of spare acoustic picking – and, perhaps more cogently, the touching "Time Trades," which moves beyond theorizing to offer some practical advice about long-term life planning. Songs like this – imaginative, contemplative, densely wordy, slightly silly but unflinchingly earnest – are arguably Lewis' strongest suit, especially in his recent work, and if the instances on A Turn In The Dream-Songs aren't quite as striking as those on its predecessor, the album still ranks right up there among his best.

Wu Lyf: Go Tell Fire To The Mountain review

British foursome World Unite Lucifer Youth Foundation – amusingly tempting to confuse with their rather distant Stateside counterparts World/Inferno Friendship Society (both bands are, at least, similarly fervent, unruly and rabble-rousing) – craft music that's every bit as elemental, emphatic and willfully enigmatic as their album's title. On its own terms, stripped of the hyped-to-hell/anti-hype vortex of its appealingly mythic but all-too-familiar backstory, Go Tell Fire offers both considerable beauty – lots of chiming, churchy organ, lots of gorgeously liquid, lucid guitar – and considerable ugliness (including some brutish, pounding grooves, but especially Ellery Roberts' instantly divisive choked, guttural caterwaul, which is potent in chunks – especially in exhortative chant mode – but dreadfully wearisome at unremitting album-length full-throttle), neither of which feel like ends in themselves (nor a purpose-driven juxtaposition) so much as value-neutral vehicles striving, straining, yearning toward pure, pummeling visceral emotion. And, to the (inconsistent) extent that they keep things abstract (read: post-rock-ish), and avoid sounding like any other bunch of dull, drudgy indie-rock also-rans (most of the bits invoking their self-conception as "heavy pop," a rather sour, chore-like description), it mostly works.

Zee Avi: Ghostbird review

A pint-sized, ukulele-strumming, vintage dress-wearing Malaysian-born songbird who rose to prominence via YouTube videos, Zee Avi fairly screams cute, quirky whimsy. If that description raises any warning flags or cynical twitches, ghostbird might just not be your glass of agave-sweetened hibiscus tea. (Should it be held against her that both she and her music are the stuff of marketing directors' dreams? It's an open question...) But you'd have to be at least a little cold-hearted not to be pleasantly lulled by the warm, gentle breeziness of Avi's music; its evident charm, predictably familiar though it might be, is modest enough never to feel cloying. If nothing else, the album consistently sounds wonderful: helmed by longtime Beastie Boys associate Mario Caldato Jr. (Bebel Gilberto, Jack Johnson) with a genially eclectic textural expansiveness – drawing freely from folk, swing jazz and soundtrack-friendly pop, with a twist of South Pacific tropicalia – it boasts a particularly vivid variety of percussion elements (shakers, fingersnaps, crisply mic'd congas, brushed snare drums, bullfrogs, rhythmic vocal chanting and discreet turntable scratches.) As for Avi herself, her personality often takes a comfortable backseat to the sound – and her lyrics, save for the occasional pithy sun-dappled observation ("every good fisherman has a pelican watching over him") tend to stand out for vague syntactic awkwardness ("even my lover's no longer enamored by me") or blatant factual inaccuracy ("thirty-one days in June" – from a song whose refrain also asserts "my love will pay the rent") if at all – but her voice, a gorgeously honeyed, legitimately jazzy warble (recalling The Bird and the Bee's Inara George) that belies her 25 years, is simply beyond reproach.

philadelphia city paper reviews:

Jens Lekman: Having An Argument With Myself EP review

Oh so silent oh so long (four years!), Mr. Jens Lekman reminds us just what we've been missing with the delectably dense An Argument With Myself EP (Secretly Canadian.) Over some of the sparkliest, most lovingly detailed grooves of his career – effervescent Afro-pop, plasticine twee-funk, soupy yacht-reggae – the gallant Göthenburger peruses and ponders the debatably ethical society of his hometown (and this world over: Melbourne; Santiago) via personal anecdotes, romantic professions, driving directions, absent-minded small talk, socio-political critique and – of course – plenty of jokes.

Gillian Welch The Harrow and the Harvest review

It's been a long, dry spell since last we heard from Gillian Welch – eight years; though the ten sterling originals comprising The Harrow and the Harvest feel, characteristically, far far older than that. If anything, Welch and her indispensable partner (in songwriting, harmonizing, and stunningly meticulous picking) David Rawlings sound more artlessly natural than ever inhabiting these deeply bluesy (and sometimes gothically gloomy) Appalachian folk strains, any of which could slot right in at your next backwoods campfire.

Tom Waits: Bad As Me review

Saying someone sounds like Tom Waits has become a lazy rock critic cliché trotted out for any singer who's a bit growly or guttural. Bad As Me (Anti-), the man's seventeenth album, besides being an all-around marvelous return after the longest recording gap of his career, is a spectacular reminder that, in actuality, nobody sings like Ol' Tom, whose larynx unleashes everything from weary, warbled moans to feral, splenetically spluttering yowls to an eerily husky falsetto croon across a tight set of his inimitable juke-joint rumbles, junkyard blues and bleary, beery ballads.

Steve Malkmus + The Jicks: Mirror Traffic review

Sorta a shame he didn't stick with the wry working title Madonna in Love, but otherwise it's hard to fathom a legit complaint against Mirror Traffic (Matador), Stephen Malkmus's fifth album with the Jicks, first since last year's world-conquering victory lap with that other band of his, and most instantly, consistently approachable in ages. Spanning gorgeously warm countryfied lopes, smirking spazz-outs, and bulls-eye riff-fests, these fifteen cuts are spry, tuneful, funny and touching: nothing but gold, gold sounds.

Laura Marling: A Creature I Once Knew review

Third time out and the spryest, most striking work yet from the fiercely prodigious Laura Marling, A Creature I Don't Know (Virgin) finds the steely-eyed, still-implausibly-youthful songstress toughening up her nimble, classically refined folk with hard-boiled jazz, blues and (surprisingly bruising) rock inflections; following her increasingly inimitable voice (both literary and literal) into ever more dramatic, elementally mythic themes and haunting, heart-wrenching idiosyncrasies; and also — just showing off — penning her most immediate, ear-catching batch of tunes yet.

Kate Bush: 50 Words for Snow review

Kate Bush – art-pop's high priestess; iconoclast icon who's the inspiration for at least one generation of would-be "eccentrics" – returns to show 'em all how it's done. Except, it's never been done quite like this: 50 Words for Snow (Fish People), her second album this year (but only third this century!) tackles its titular promise with zestful aplomb (and a little assist from Stephen Fry) – "phlegm de neige"..."whippoccino"...psychohail" – but also achieves subtler, equally prodigious feats of imagination and expressiveness throughout its seven mesmerizing, glistening-gentle, white-flurried powder-puffs of song.

The Dø: Both Ways Open Jaws review

There's much that's curious about Franco-Finnish twosome The Dø: the baffling bandname (pronounced "dough," incidentally); the ineffable charisma of Olivia Merilahti's potent, versatile soprano; the way their simple-seeming but naggingly elusive folky/poppy/bluesy tinker-toy tunes flit from gypsy jazz to junkyard electronica and somehow feel at once sparse and texturally teeming. Both Ways Open Jaws (Six Degrees), their modest, ambitious second effort, dances its bohemian dances with a Feist-y, casually effortless sophistication that seems primed to court mainstream attention, but without sacrificing a quark of their subtle, innate quirk.

Brite Futures: Dark Past review

Maybe Seattle electro-popsters Brite Futures' named Dark Past (Turnout), their debut-as-such, in reference to their somewhat notorious, decidedly dubious original moniker, about which the less said the better. It certainly couldn't be about the music, which is as day-glo bright as all get-out: glamtastic party-rocking power-pop with mirrorball glimmers of everybody from Queen and The Cars to Weezer, Phoenix and Daft Punk. It's blatantly mindless fun that, for once, is genuinely fun. Not bad for a buncha goofs who used to call themselves Natalie Portman's Shaved Head. Oh, wait, whoops.

Beirut: The Rip Tide review

Zach Condon's toponym fixation is alive and well in the tracklist of The Rip Tide (Pompeii), Beirut's quietly assured third full-length, but his old-world musical wanderlust is far less dominant than it once was: the defining Balkan, French chanson and Mexican folk currents of past efforts are synthesized here into a broader, more refined aesthetic; the characteristic barrage of trumpets, accordions, string bands and martial snares is more than ever in the service of these nine compact, comfortable songs.

Björk: Biophilia review

She may never recapture the synthesis of uncompromising artiness and pop accessibility which blessed her peerless '90s peak, but the music on Biophilia (One Little Indian), Björk's often arresting, occasionally impenetrable sixth (proper) full-length – in non-trivial danger of being overshadowed by the album's truly ambitious accessorizing (app-based interactivity, exhaustive conceptual exegesis, multi-media overload) – reveals that, when she wants to, she's still able to engage as well as merely dazzle, through concise melodicism, sheer sonic prettiness, and the occasional bad-ass drill'n'bass freakout.

Sam Phillips: Solid State review

Of the increasingly many industry-dispossesed critics-darling songsmiths to go the self-released, fan-financed route (see also: Jill Sobule, Juliana Hatfield), smart-pop lifer Sam Phillips must be among the more ambitious – Solid State: Songs from the Long Play is merely a compact, physical distillation of a long-running subscription-based online project which yielded, in full, forty-three new tunes. The ones compiled here should amply satisfy more casual fans that her rich, Beatles-indebted songcraft and wryly bittersweet vocals (often distinctively close-harmonized) remain as singular and effective as ever.

Feist: Metals review

Metals (Interscope) is Leslie Feist's calmest, plainest record yet; despite the occasional string-laden swelling of sound, group-chanted refrain, or Colin Stetson saxophone murmuration, it basically never deviates from her mossy-soft luxe pop métier, and it will serve comfortably as more-than-adequate background music for just about any demographic. Listen closer, though, and it's rarely if ever dull: Feist may have grown complacent but she's still a smart, thoughtful songcrafter whose subtle way with mood and melody are as meticulous as they come.

The Bees: Every Step's A Yes review

As though still stuck in a starry-eyed, pastoral post-Brit-Pop groove the rest of us have rudely tumbled out of, A Band of Bees (just The Bees to their fellow Britons) have been churning out sunny, amorphously Sixties-referencing psych-pop (and the odd samba detour) for nearly a decade now. The lovely, leisurely Every Step's A Yes (Fiction/ATO), which reaches our shores a year late, is their gentlest, folkiest excursion yet, recalling forgotten soft-pop sophisticates like the Mamas and the Papas (covered quite faithfully here) and The Association.

Baby Dee: Goes Down To Amsterdam review

For anyone who caught up with her classy, largely instrumental suite Regifted Light earlier this year, or the far-too-many who haven't had the pleasure, Baby Dee Goes Down To Amsterdam (Tin Angel) offers a quick and dirty tromp through the highlights of the big-hearted, crazy-voiced harpist/pianist's songwriting oeuvre, sampling both the unabashed tenderness and the chillingly dark, twisted recesses of her catalog, with lots of gleeful cackling along the way. Make a date with one of the most utterly singular talents of our times...and go Dutch.

Bon Iver: Bon Iver review

Superficially, the eponymous second Bon Iver album (Jagjaguwar) is a radically different beast from Justin Vernon's rapturously admired debut – texturally expansive and opulent where its predecessor was solitary and sparse; trading wispy folk for gooey, Oldenburgian Soft Pop. But the music's fundamental allure remains conspicuously unchanged: in a word, vibe. Befitting his work's preoccupation with environments (here, a litany of real and surreal place-names), and extrapolating from an ineffable voice which conveys (or evokes) reams more in sound than it ever does in actual sense, Vernon is, essentially, indiedom's preeminent purveyor of ambience.

review round-up XV: 2011 second half, vol. 1 [electronic]

2011-12-24T14:23:00.011-05:00

about time? i've been, apparently, much too busy writing about music this year (as you'll see) to post any writing about music up here. now, in one massive lump that probably completely undermines the whole point of the concept of blogging, i present to you just about all the record reviews i wrote from july through december 2011, for All Music Guide, Cowbell Magazine (R.I.P.), Magnet Magazine, and (a regular outlet for record reviews for the first time since i started writing for them) Philadelphia City Paper.

in three installments, sorted by "genre," broadly speaking. within each installment, i've set the shorter, blurby CP reviews apart from the longer AMG and magazine reviews, and each grouping is in rough order of how much i liked em...

Ada: Meine Zarten Pfoten review

Like Isolée's Pampa Records bow in January, Meine Zarten Pfoten (which translates, brilliantly, to "My Tender Paws") marks the fervently-awaited follow-up to one of mid-decade "minimal" electronica's most appealing and personable documents, in this case 2004's phenomenal Blondie. Pfoten, true to its title, veers far from that album's Teutonic bleep-and-thump backbone in search of gentler, plusher, sensual pastures: bossa-tinged, witchily cooed opener "Faith" (a Luscious Jackson cover, of all things); the Cornelius-like chime and sway of "On the Mend"; "Happy Birthday"'s cheery throb and playfully warped vocals. It's only after the delectably burbling synthesizer "Intro" (which arrives, quirkily enough, at the album's midpoint) that we get something properly house-derived and dancefloor-plausible with "At The Gate"'s moody dark-disco whirr, and then it's perhaps the least distinguished thing here. But "going soft" doesn't mean Michaela Dippel's lost her edge. Don't equate organic delicacy and vocal abundance with a lapse into feeble easy-listening: there's as much spunk, production clarity, and inventiveness here as ever. And, as demonstrated by a sparkling, unlisted transformation of Little Joy's "Keep Me In Mind," she hasn't lost her knack for surprising indie-rock covers either.

Hercules & Love Affair: Blue Songs review

It's second-album time for Andy Butler's shape-shifting, fervently classicist dance-music troupe, and the big stories seem to be that there've been some change-ups in the vocal department (farewell Antony; welcome newcomers Shaun Wright and Aerea Negrot) and that the retro-revivalist reference points have been updated from '70s golden-era disco to jacking turn-of-the-'90s house (which is really only half-true; peep the stately, string-laden strut of "Painted Eyes" for proof.) Oh, and that there's no single to match the epoch-making rapture that was "Blind." So be it: Butler's production prowess remains as magnificent (and, despite his manifest reverence for past masters from Patrick Cowley to Marshall Jefferson to Arthur Russell, as distinctive) as ever, and the slightly wider net he casts here (lest we forget, the debut was plenty varied too) simply makes for more facets to his mirrorball – including, perhaps dubiously positioned at the album's center, a pair of flat-out gorgeous ballads. True blue is more like it.

Dixon: Live At Robert Johnson review

The last installment in the Live at Robert Johnson mix series -- only the eighth in a brief but fruitful two-year run for the eponymous Frankfurt nightclub -- was announced as not only the end of the line for the still-young series, but also, more regrettably, the final mix offering from the masterful DJ Dixon, whose past efforts have included the excellent Body Language 4 and (in collaboration with Âme and Henrik Schwarz) The Grandfather Paradox. In any event, Live at Robert Johnson, Vol. 8 finds both the series and Dixon's mix career going out on a high note, with a very satisfying, beautifully paced, highly personal, and idiosyncratic selection. Probably the mix's most notable idiosyncrasy -- aside from its penchant for sometimes-effective, sometimes-distracting, earnestly intoned spoken vocals -- is its extreme patience: although a nominal pulse gradually emerges after the first few tracks, it's not until over 20 minutes in -- partway through Agoria's genially shuffling "For One Hour" -- that we get anything which could be properly called a beat, and (strangely for a so-called "live" set) a full 45 before the overarching moody languor fully gives way to dancefloor release. Don't think of it as merely an extended build-up though, but as a necessary and integral part of the journey: Ursula Bogner's embryonic dabblings, Barnt's kosmische clusters, Dominique's languid, drifting lounge noodles, and Hauschka's elegant, prepared-piano fantasia calmly giving way to Scalde's soulful-operatic wailing, Hatikvah's dubbed-out rumination, and the slow-moving, gently epic majesty of star-studded Kraut-techno supergroup Cologne Tape's "Render 2." All that brooding and spaciousness make the final emergence of a full-on house groove, in a bespoke edit of Mark E's warmly uplifting "Call Me" (featuring yet another spoken vocal, an interpolation of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough") all the more magical, priming us for the thumping disco jack and percolating synths of Roman Flugel's "Dishes and Wishes" and (after one last dip into moody, melancholic murk with Bruno Gauthier's darkly dubby "Existing Reality") the peerless, purely pleasure-inducing finale of Osunlade's fiercely funky deep-soul cut "Envision" (in a Dixon edit of Âme's remix), and Todd Terje's joyous, synth-dappled anthem "Snooze 4 Love." It's a shame the party has to end so soon, but such is life; with Live, Dixon leaves us fully living it and beckoning us to do the same.

Four Tet: FabricLive 59 review

In contrast to Kieran Hebden's previous DJ mix efforts as Four Tet, such as his kaleidoscopically genre-jumping DJ-Kicks installment, his entry in the Fabriclive series plays things surprisingly straight, largely limiting his selections to a narrow stripe of electronic dance music, and for the most part linking them together in a reasonably smooth, utilitarian fashion. The set's relative focus and club-mindedness is perhaps less of a surprise coming in the wake of 2010's There Is Love in You, Hebden's most floor-friendly record to date, although here he swaps that album's gentle house explorations for a headfirst plunge into U.K. garage and 2-step, with a bucketload of hopelessly obscure, decade-old tracks unearthed and cleverly slotted alongside strikingly simpatico cuts of more recent and wide-ranging vintage: Floating Points' slinky, samba-fied "Sais"; Burial's poignantly percolating "Street Halo." (Hebden even manages to sneak in a tiny bite of his pal Dan Snaith's early twee IDM, sandwiched between Apple's propulsive U.K. funk and Big Bird's sinewy old-school garage.) Most of the tracks here are texturally minimal and strictly beat-focused, and nearly all of them feature at least a handful of distinct percussive lines set up in opposition to create complex, hypnotic, ineffably funky polyrhythms, keying into Hebden's signature love of repetition and organically off-kilter rhythmic overlap. Not content to completely just let things ride out, Hebden paces the proceedings (and pays homage to Fabric the club, a key inspiration for this London-centric affair) with crowd-chatter field recordings sourced from the club itself, bookending the mix and separating it into halves that are each additionally prefaced (somewhat incongruously) by a small palate-cleansing dose of 1980s Euro-synth ambience. The flow is further broken up by occasional (and somewhat distracting) dropouts and near fades, but the set still manages to build up a decent head of steam, particularly in the final stretch anchored by Active Minds' phenomenal "Hobson's Choice," a monstrously groovy slice of 2-step soul. But two of the strongest (and longest) moments here come courtesy of Four Tet himself: dappled, bonus-like closer "Locked," which would have fit right in on his last album; and "Pyramid," which lashes an intoxicating matrix of vocal samples (actually a vastly pitched-down, sped-up Jennifer Lopez) to a foundation of deep, fluid, Villalobosian microhouse.

The Field: Looping State of Mind review

Axel Willner brought this all on himself. The Swedish loopster's early singles and 2007 debut were so ineffably – not to put too fine a point on it – Sublime: where does he Go from there? Commendably enough, his answer hasn't been toward simple recursion (much as he adores it) but expansion: album two tinkeringly broadened his original approach, and the inanely literalistic Looping State of Mind magnifies that trend, offering seven mutations (transformations, perversions, degradations) of his trademark sound, in (for instance) a newly expansive array of tempos – though, interestingly, nothing quite as quick as his consistently zippy early work. So: "Is This Power" feels like a Sublime track pitched down and smeared, to somewhat nauseous effect; the misnamed "Arpeggiated Love" glides along harmlessly, while "Sweet Slow Baby" is utterly numbing. Yeah, there's more going on: more live instrumentation (the limber, funky "It's Up There"; the warmly hypnotic, fully immersive title track), more vocals drifting in and out of the mix (druggy and dripping on the placid, torpid "Then It's White"; distorted and blank – à la Matthew Dear's recent seediness – on the murky "Burned Out.") It's all so much gum in the works; mussing Willner's pearly ultra-glide smoothness for the sake of some vague, psychedelic interest-added – and yet, mostly, the feeling remains.

Class Actress: Rapprocher review

The "actress" in question would be ex-folkie (and "former drama major") Elizabeth Harper, who indeed seems to have some class; her voice projects both hi-gloss glamour and a personable, almost-casual geniality, a slightly paradoxic conjunction mirrored by the balance of sheeny synthetic elegance and homespun imperfection in Mark Richardson's electro-purist productions. That vaguely amateurish analog wobbliness – the result of a dogmatically anti-MIDI M.O. and/or steadfast fealty to the standard slate of '80s synthpop forebears (it's chickens and eggs, really) – gives full-length bow Rapprocher an impressive period authenticity, sometimes at the risk of dulling its melodic hooks (already of variable sharpness) and muddying its dancefloor potential. Especially in today's digital context, the album feels torn between big-P Pop à la La Roux, or happy-mode Goldfrapp (or at least Annie c. 2004) and the darkier, broodier likes of Ladyton; between the euphoric, frontloaded Vince Clarke-isms of "Weekend" and "Keep You" and the draggy, druggy back end. (Tellingly, they've shared stages with both Little Boots and Washed Out.) It feels like a while since indiedom's given us such a pure, resolutely classicist synth-pop act. Even if, vision-wise, Actress don't hold a classy candle to class-of-'11 counterparts Austra, it's still good to hear electromusic as made by fallible humans.

K-S.H.E.: Routes Not Roots review

Routes Not Roots is the debut album from Kami-Sakunobe House Explosion aka K-S.H.E., one in a lengthy string of monikers adopted by Midwest-bred, Tokyo-based transgendered thinker/scholar/DJ/producer Terre Thaemlitz. Initially released in Japan in 2006 on Thaemlitz's private Comatonse label, and made more widely available through a 2011 reissue, it serves as something of a companion piece to Midtown 120 Blues, Thaemlitz's acclaimed 2008 album as DJ Sprinkles, offering a similar mixture of trenchant (if sometimes oblique) social critique and sterling, smooth deep house grooves. (Both albums also share a recurring train motif.) As Midtown 120 Blues made explicit, Thaemlitz is interested in exposing and investigating the frequently obscured and erased history of house music's development -- specifically, its roots in queer, black, urban subcultures -- through the medium of house music itself, but as this album's title points up, he's less concerned with origin stories per se than with contexts and journeys, and the intermingling cultural, social, political, and economic factors that resonate within those stories. And it's quite some intermingling he's got here. The album's adventures in identity politics range from an interview with Japanese "hermaphrodite" Saki-Chan, set amid absurdly lush harp runs and recorder beeps, to "Stand Up"'s harrowing spoken account of tranny-on-tranny violence (involving a gang of "flaming" Puerto Rican queens), delivered against a pointedly callous, canned laugh track. But these interstitial curiosities (which also include, for no readily apparent reason, a solemn synthesized rendition of folk standard "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair") merely form the backdrop for the real meat of the album: five extended house workouts, ranging from seven to fourteen minutes, which operate on multiple musical and textual levels. Expansively bleak opener "Down Home Kami-Sakunobe" gets the multi-cultural stew simmering, dressing up its deep, mournful post-disco grooves with incongruous (but emotionally kindred) country-style fiddling and intermittent, discordant piano clusters. The similarly constructed locomotive shuffle, "Hobo-Train," eventually reveals the source of its seemingly club-minded driving utterance ("work, sisters!") to be a rabble-rousing sermon about unemployment (sampled, oddly enough, from an episode of "Good Times"), while the taut, propulsive "B2B" lets the insinuations of its numbingly incessant refrain ("brother to brother, brother to brother") speak for themselves, or, perhaps, in conversation with the openly gay African-American voices heard on the Stevie Wonder-sampling "Crosstown." Perhaps most effective, both as commentary and dance music, is the uncharacteristically cheerful, buoyant "Infected," which takes on HIV drug trials by way of frothy filter-disco and corny sampled dialogue. Clearly there's a lot to take in here, but Roots' wide-flung, omnivorous approach is seemingly a crucial part of its socio-political purpose. Alternately, with a few sore thumbs excised, it works equally well as a collection of mellow, moody, late-night groovers.

Motor City Drum Ensemble: DJ-Kicks review

For the 36th edition of their venerable DJ Kicks series, K7 Records tapped producer/DJ Danilo Plessow, alias Motor City Drum Ensemble, an individual who hails not from Detroit but from the German automotive center of Stuttgart (home to Mercedes and Porsche). Though his fondness for the manifold classic grooves of America's Motown is amply evident in his own productions and remixes -- including, notably, the jazzy, funky Moodymann-indebted house workouts of his Raw Cuts series -- that's hardly the extent of his inspirations, as this mix makes clear. Indeed, Plessow's brought together a dizzying array of tracks in nearly as many different styles: after an opening invocation from Sun Ra, he leads us on a freewheeling trip through soul (New Zealand's Electric Wire Hustle, via an irresistibly slinky Scratch 22 remix), dub (Rhythm & Sound), Afro-beat (Tony Allen, Geraldo Pino), classic Chicago acid trax (Mr. Fingers), and Detroit techno (Robert Hood), deep house (Fred P.), funky disco (a Walter Gibbons mix of Arts & Crafts' "I've Been Searching"), jazz (Timo Lassy), film music (Philippe Sarde's chugging "Le Cortège et Course"), and even an unexpectedly funky, early Aphex Twin "ambient" work. Of course, genre names are just so many words, and these cuts all basically have more in common than they do differentiating them: shared roots in African-American musical vernacular, of course, for one thing, but above all, in a word: groove. As you might imagine, Plessow simply finds that shared groove (at least, he makes it sound simple) and runs with it, keeping his transitions fluid, clean, and remarkably smooth. Actually, if there's a complaint to be lodged here it's that the mix is a little too seamless: too few tracks really manage to stick out above the generally high-quality, head-nodding flow, especially after about 20 minutes when things really start to simmer. In fact, perhaps the most startling, ear-catching moment here -- the acid-squelch synth that unexpectedly burbles up in Isolée's monstrously funky mix of Recloose's "Cardiology" -- turns out to belong to the original track. In keeping with DJ Kicks tradition, MCDE also contribute a bespoke new production, "L.O.V.E.," a no-nonsense funky strutter that effectively distills the essence of the entire affair, minimal and a bit murky, but still grittily satisfying. Perhaps most readily comparable to Henrik Schwarz's 2006 installment in the series (though it doesn't quite reach that mix's level of soulful spirituality, focusing more exclusively on groove and moody ambience), Plessow clinches yet another feather in K7's towering cap: one that's smartly assembled, artfully sequenced, impeccably tasteful, and indelibly tasty.

DJ Diamond: Flight Muzik review

The first widely released album from 24-year-old Chicago footwork veteran DJ Diamond -- he's been producing since the age of 13 -- is the fourth full-length installment in Planet Mu's seemingly almost single-handed campaign to bring the music of the Windy City's quick-stepping juke and footwork scenes to a wider audience following 2010 albums by DJ Nate and DJ Roc, and the first Bangs & Works compilation. While Flight Muzik essentially adheres to the hallmarks of genre's instantly recognizable formula -- hyperactive, minutely sliced samples repeated incessantly, almost numbingly, against manically jittery rhythms, to dizzying and disorienting entrancing effect. Diamond's productions stand somewhat apart from those of his peers as sonically richer and fuller, less aggressive (if still decidedly tough, at least in rhythmic terms) and generally more varied. He's at least as likely to employ thick, nauseous synths as thuggish hip-hop-style vocal clips (à la the brief "Down Bitch") -- plenty of these tracks feature both -- and regularly works in snippets of jazz and soul ("Snare Fanfare"; the majestic Willie Hutch-flipping closer "I Choose You"), bursts of discordant brass or orchestral bombast ("Burn Dat Boy"; the Santogold-sampling "Go Hard"), and plenty of stranger, less identifiable sounds. Even the percussion here (often more nuanced and abstract than in much footwork) leans heavily toward the treble end of the spectrum. The result, especially in the texturally lusher tracks toward the beginning of the album, is to heighten the hypnotic, perversely lulling effect of the repetition in a way that feels slightly warmer and woozier than the genre's typically ferocious non-stop bluster. Which isn't to suggest that Diamond is a big softie. Just take the menacingly sparse, gutterball fuzz-bass of "Torture Rack," with its unpredictable and unnerving array of percussive sounds, or the cinematically epic, constantly shape-shifting album highlight "Decoded," which combines snaky, insistent, Eastern-tinged video game synths, over-the-top metallic guitar, and probably the album's fiercest low-end beat drubbing. If Flight Muzik is perhaps less direct and immediate than DJ Roc's awesomely hard-hitting The Crack Capone -- and possibly, at least in spots, less overtly dancefloor-minded -- it's probably a good deal more appealing to actually listen to, and more broadly accessible, emphasizing footwork's commonalities with the likes of dubstep, glitch, techno, and grime. Fans of those genres, or anyone interested in truly radical, cutting-edge dance music, will find this well worth checking out.

Bullion: You Drive Me To Plastic review

Bullion is West London sample-slinger Nathan Jenkins, who first turned heads with 2007's Beach Boys/J Dilla-blending Pet Sounds: In the Key of Dee, a rare instance of an album-length mash-up project that more than rewarded its blatantly gimmicky premise. Since then, he's issued a couple of tantalizing singles and one EP; You Drive Me to Plastic is his debut for Young Turks (SBTRKT, El Guincho, Holy Fuck) and at least on some level, his first "proper" release. It's essentially presented as an album, although at nine quick cuts in a maddeningly brief 20 minutes, it hovers in a grey zone between LP and EP. That's appropriate enough, since the Plastic also resists classification on just about every level: there may be aspects of disco, funk, hip-hop, acid jazz, old-school electro, chillout, and cosmic psychedelia (and more: bluegrass fiddles? flamenco guitar? tribal chanting? whinnying horses?) all present and accounted for, but it still feels erroneous to describe this music in terms of genre at all, beyond the broad umbrella category of "sample-based music." Despite his omnivorous, unabashedly maximalist approach -- and although he sometimes resembles a more soulful, less spastic Jason Forrest -- Bullion's musical aesthetic has less to do with the past decade or so of ADD-addled, digital mash-up mischief than with pioneers like Coldcut, Steinski, and, in particular, the Avalanches. Similar to their still-unparalleled Since I Left You, probably Plastic's closest point of reference, this is effectively one single piece of music; a fluid, constantly fluctuating kaleidoscopic suite that meanders from sound to sound and groove to groove with enviable smoothness. Each cut remains distinct -- "Magic Was Ruler" and "Pressure to Dance," for instance, stand out as the obvious dancefloor-primed pleasers -- but the whole is much more than than the sum of its countless, unpredictable, intricately interwoven parts. Impeccably seamless, surprisingly listener-friendly (as dense and volatile as it is, it never feels truly overwhelming), You Drive Me to Plastic is above all playful, inventive and fun.

Modeselektor: Monkeytown review

About a decade and a half into their career, and four busy years since the maximalist pleasure-seeking of 2007's Happy Birthday!, the Berlin-based knob-twiddlers of Modeselektor return, ditching Bpitch Control for their own Monkeytown label to release their third proper full-length, which shares the appropriately simian name of said imprint. As that title suggests, Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary have not abandoned their characteristic, merrily deviant ways: monkeying with the staid conventions of German techno, muddling the lines of genre and good taste, and enlisting a motley assortment of co-conspirators to assist them in these deeds. As with earlier efforts, Monkeytown filches fitfully from glitch, techno, IDM, hip-hop, rave, bass music, and (more prominently here) dreamy, textural electro-pop, often seemingly sequenced for maximum disorientation. Take the four-song run that opens the album: the genial, gently twitchy ambient-crunk of "Blue Clouds"; the all-out bloop-rap cartoonery of "Pretentious Friends" (which gives the always entertaining Busdriver -- filling a role frequently assumed by TTC -- a chance to poke hilariously absurdist fun at snooty high-society trend-chasers, while Modeselektor warp and tweak his vocals just as mercilessly); the fluttery, floating Thom Yorke feature "Shipwreck" (offering enough warmly woozy, stuttered somnolence to pass for a King of Limbs castoff); and the nutty, glitched-out darkwave bass throb of "Evil Twin," bolstered by Otto Von Schirach's leering house-style pronouncements. While the diversity of this sequence might suggest that these cuts derive most of their meat and personality from their respective guest vocalists, the truth is that Modeselektor's colorful, chameleonic, and detail-oriented productions are just as crucial to their improbably wide-ranging effectiveness. That said, Monkeytown is definitely at its least distinctive when Bronsert and Szary are left to their own devices: "German Clap"'s popcorn lurch and "Grillwalker"'s crispy squelch-hop, while flavorful enough, amount to little more than rote palate-cleansers. Meanwhile, fans of past albums' manic, party-ready energy may be dismayed to find that, even counting the nodding, plushly soulful tech-funk of "Berlin" at the midpoint, there's nothing overtly danceable in the album's back half, even though it does feature some of the finest moments here: a second, more fully formed (and fragment-flecked) Yorke collaboration, "This," and the even lovelier "Green Light Go," which blends whirring, wordless vocals and tastefully busy live drumming with an earnest, melodic pop core (courtesy of post-rockers PVT). The very notion of "maturity" might seem like anathema to Modeselektor, but these two tunes, in particular, suggest that the M-word might not be such a dire prospect after all (not that they're quite there yet). And while nobody expects cohesiveness from these guys, Monkeytown is at least commendably concise -- their leanest and tightest offering yet.

Pictureplane: Thee Physical review

Thee Physical, the second widely-distributed album from Denver-based producer Pictureplane, is a dirty, murky, delirious mess. There's a lot going on here, and it all tends to happen at the same time. Take the first few seconds of album opener "Body Mod": brightly chintzy house piano stabs in a faltering rhythmic loop; a crudely cut-and-pasted, instantly recognizable hip-hop vocal snippet (the same sample that powered Fatboy Slim's block-rockin' 1998 remix of Wildchild's "Renegade Master"); some churning, fuzz-toned synth throbs; a pinging Nintendo bassline; a distant, warped, diva-esque wail. All this hangs in vague, uneasy suspension for half a minute; then come the manic rushing snares, jump-starting a syncopated, jacking breakbeat that suddenly harnesses everything into a tight lockgroove, making the next three-plus minutes feel as propulsive and inevitable as they are disorienting. It's a striking, effective collage and – better – a bluntly obvious dancefloor killer. It's also, by some distance, the most immediate thing here, though not necessarily a misleading introduction.
Like just about everybody making electronic music at this point, Pictureplane's Travis Egedy is an unabashed nostalgiast: every element of "Body Mod," like the rest of Thee Physical, hearkens more or less explicitly to the popular dance music of the 1990s – diva house, Hi-NRG, hip-house, rave, big beat, drum'n'bass, two-step garage – not coincidentally the last time, until recently, that electronica had anything to do with this country's cultural mainstream. But he's not, by any means, a revivalist, at least in any straightforward sense. Besides slap-chopping all of these styles together in an ecstatically sloppy, anti-formalist jumble, just about every sound that passes through Egedy's decks comes out grimy, roughed up and sonically distressed, hearkening to the same impulses fueling the amorphous chillwave movement. Adding to the general sense of woozy bewilderment and stylistic abstraction, most of these grooves are surprisingly slow – closer to dubstep than disco, tempo-wise – rendering them less oddly danceable than they feel like they should be, though allowing for some thrilling double-time freakout moments. Throw in occasional bouts of wobbly, manifestly non-mechanical imprecision – like the just-slightly-off bass breakdown midway through "Black Nails" – and a certain political/critical subtext starts to emerge. If all electronic music functions, on some level, as a mediation of the endlessly mutable relationship between human and machine, the thrust here seems to be "retain the throbbing, emotive heart of '90s club music, while utterly fraying and distorting its vapid, faceless façade."
For all the mileage Egedy gets from this premise, though, Physical's best moment is also its most conformist, at least structurally. "Real is a Feeling," named for Egedy's ongoing Denver DJ night, reins in the chaos for a blissful outpouring of grubbily shimmering synth-pop; the album's sole, shining club anthem. Elsewhere, for better and worse, this album often can't quite decide if it wants to be music for the mind or the body. On the other hand, if "we are all post physical" – as Egedy intones, breathily, amidst typically dark, sweaty electronic churn – then perhaps it shouldn't matter anyway.

Memory Tapes: Play er Piano review

For the product of a self-described socially awkward homebody, Memory Tapes' 2009 debut album, Seek Magic, sounded remarkably expansive and exploratory, bubbling its way through seemingly limitless sonic tangents and stylistic intersections to forge something at once fresh-feeling and immensely nostalgic. Like its predecessor, Player Piano was created in Dayve Hawk's New Jersey home studio, and it plows a similar if somewhat narrower musical swath: dreamy, texture-heavy electronic indie pop, dripping with reverb and lousy with synthesizers, commingled with elements of dance, rock, and new age that are in this case considerably toned down, if still discernible. This time, though, the visceral effect of the music more closely matches the insularity of its origins; these tracks feel simpler, smaller in scope, less adventurous, and more inward-focused. Having nailed a sprawling but undeniably evocative sound the first time out, Hawk's evident focus here is on the songs themselves: save for a few relatively brief instrumentals, his vocals are notably more prominent than ever before. "Sunhits" is the most blatant of the album's big pop stabs, with its clean, sheeny new wave guitar hook, midtempo New Order synth beat, and warmly harmonized refrain full of caustically double-edged positivity ("life is a dream if we never wake up..."). "Worries" and "Today Is Our Life" are equally vibrant in spots, though both tend to lose focus and momentum beyond their choruses (the latter in particular can't seem to stay in one genre for more than a minute, squeezing in a razor-sharp, out-of-nowhere guitar solo and a church organ/sitar breakdown along the way). While these aural color bursts are at least decently interesting (unlike, say, the drab, plodding "Yes I Know" or the rote-feeling "Offers"), few of them make for particularly great pop songs, whether that's due to overly distracting arrangements, Hawk's thin, lackluster singing (which is often distorted through layering and textural manipulation, but in any case typically the least compelling sound here), or the nagging similarity of many of his melodies. (The sparsely folky "Fell Thru Ice" is appealing but slight, leaving the genial, sweetly patient "Wait in the Dark" as perhaps the best of the lot.) Player Piano offers enough of Hawk's characteristically inventive sonic tinkering -- including, the title notwithstanding, an intriguing emphasis on organ sounds -- to merit repeated listens, even if these productions do sound worrisomely flat at times. But juxtaposed with the singular alchemy he achieved on Memory Tapes' debut, it's hard not to hope Hawk focuses his energies a little differently next time out.

Philadelphia City Paper reviews:

Chrissy Murderbot: Women's Studies review

Genre-trawling stunt-blogging DJ (check the awesome yearofmixtapes.blogspot.com) turned puckishly polyglot dance producer, Chicagoan Chrissy Murderbot flips maybe the year's most breathlessly giddy party record with his Planet Mu debut. Fitfully grounded in the manic stutters and off-the-chart BPMs of his adopted hometown's footwork and juke scenes, but borrowing just as liberally from dancehall, ragga jungle and rave, Women's Studies pairs cartoonishly crude humor – "Heavy Butt" comes complete with "we're here to explore Uranus" sample – and populist hands-in-the-air anthemism with dizzyingly refined beat-fusing prowess, to thoroughly deliriously effect.

Pallers: Sea of Memories review

He's given us one minor masterpiece already this year (Acid House Kings' strummy, sunny Music Sounds Better With You) but that's hardly stopped insatiable Swedish popsmith Johan Angergård (Club 8, The Legends) from gearing his shy, whispery croon right back up and teaming with longtime pal Henrik Mårtensson for The Sea of Memories (Labrador), their full-length bow as Pallers and a swirling, sterling set of atmospheric, autumnal electro-pop brimming with elegance and muted melancholy but also boasting, in the female-sung "Wicked," at least one club-ready dark-disco anthem-to-be.

Rustie: Glass Swords review

In an improbably overcrowded UK "bass music" field, Glaswegian producer Rustie manages to stake out a defiantly singular identity on Glass Swords, his exuberantly over-the-top Warp debut, marrying the label's archetypal "intelligence" and chin-stroker-friendly compositional density with poptastic hypercolor euphoria and a zany, go-for-baroque aesthetic embracing all things bright and booty-full: fruity robo-funk, digital headsnap hip-hop, pixelated videogame sunbursts, cartoon slap bass, chipmunk vocal splices, proggish polyrhythms, glowstick trance. Oh yeah, there's even some dubstep in there.

M+A: things.yes review

M + A is Michele Ducci and Alessondro Degli Angioli, two Italian twenty-year-olds whose things.yes (Monotreme), feels less like a debut album than a magical mechanical music-box, stuffed with surprises, curiosities, sunny clutter and uncloying cuteness. It's a funny, beguiling little record that's tough to place in a contemporary context (distant cousins to Bibio, or perhaps a quieter, gentler take on Rustie's giddy every-genre maximalism?) but would've made perfect sense a decade ago, sandwiched somewhere between the tunefully glitchy IDM of Plaid and Plone and the so-called lap-pop of the long-lost Notwist and Lali Puna.

Mungolian Jet Set: Schlungs review

There are your humdrum, workaday cosmic disco epics, and then there are your mega mutant bongos'n'lazers boogiethons about being abducted by actual space alien disco freakazoids, which is pretty much how it feels to listen to Mungolian Jet Set, a couple Norwegian knuckleheads with some seriously screwy musical superpowers. Schlungs (Smalltown Supersound), their third debut album in a row (see?), boasts their tightest, most comprehensible compositions yet, but it's best when their penchant for deliriously proggy absurdist kitsch excess is left fully unfettered.

Basement Jaxx: Vs. Metropole Orkest review

Basement Jaxx Vs. Metropole Orkest (Atlantic Jaxx) – wherein a seventy-strong Dutch symphony takes on the UK maximalist-house duo's catalog (plus bespoke offerings like "Mozart's Tea Party," which sounds precisely how you'd imagine) – is basically ludicrous in both concept and ultra-bombastic execution. In other words: roughly par for the Jaxxian course, but surprisingly fun even by that token, especially when spotlighting the group's forays into Samba, Balkan, swing jazz and Middle Eastern music. Who knew "Where's Your Head At?" could benefit from a good harpsichord solo?

Sepalcure: Sepalcure review

Much like last year's quietly enchanting debut by their Hotflush labelmates Mount Kimbie (and, to a lesser extent, that of Gold Panda), the eponymous bow from Brooklyn post-dubstep duo Sepalcure – polymathic beat luminaries Praveen Sharma (aka Braille) and Travis Stewart (aka Machinedrum) – filters the diffuse diaspora of UK-bass micro-genres into a focused, delicately detailed set of gently fluid, pointillistic grooves, frayed vocal fragments, and warmly woozy atmospheres, whose slightly faceless air of politeness and familiarity hardly diminishes its ample, unassuming charms.

Elite Gymnastics: Ruin review

Minnesota-by-way-of-Tumblr duo Elite Gymnastics – rare Stateside inhabitants of that fertile breeding-ground of Balearic dance beats and indie-pop sweetness (plus a healthy dollop of new age kitsch) pioneered by St. Etienne and lately colonized by Swedes like Air France (both bands are seemingly referenced in the title of their "Minneapolis Belongs to You") – get viscerally physical on Ruin (Acephale), which consolidates a pair of web-issued mirror-image EPs; one side's glitzy, jungle-tinged breakbeats sanded down and repurposed for side two's lumberous, mood-enhancing slow jams.

SBTRKT: SBTRKT review

The South London-based SBTRKT isn't quite as reductionistic in his approach to production as he is about spelling, but his eponymous first LP (Young Turks) is frankly straightforward, even workmanlike, in its pursuit of palatable yet fully contemporary electronic pop. Enlisting a bevy of future-soul vocalists, and drawing more on two-step and smooth R&B than dubstep's jaggeder edge, this set is friendlier (and livelier) than James Blake but just as gently majestic, even if its coloring stays mainly within the lines.

Zomby: Dedication review

Zomby's somber, suitelike 4AD debut finds the inscrutable dubstepper squeezing sixteen fleeting tracks into thirty-five minutes riddled with frustratingly premature fades and abrupt breaks. He makes the seconds count though: Dedication (named in tribute to his deceased father) offers enough evocation and invention; pathos and dread – bleary 8-bit bleeps, burnt-out riddims, spectral alien ambience – that it could have been just as satisfying and intriguing at twice this length.

Washed Out: Within and Without review

Arriving, in suitably leisurely fashion, two years after the much-buzzed "summer of chillwave" he was instrumental in touching off, Ernest Greene's luxuriantly lush full-length debut as Washed Out comes across as resolutely classicist (or, said otherwise, impeccably generic); delivering all the requisite fluttery warmth and thrumming daydream grooves, slightly shellacked of their wobbly analog charm. It's not that Within and Without (Sub Pop) is boring – at least, not in a bad way – but there's such a thing as being too well washed.

pickin' n' scratchin'

2011-11-14T16:56:00.010-05:00

While we're on the subject of old, silly themed party mixes... how about this very special, very silly mix I cooked up this past May for the awesomely successful, never-to-be-repeated Spring Chicken Dance Party at the Roost (in West Philly.)

Penny vs. Penny

It's pretty self-explanatory. You may have realized, but then again you may not, just how funky chicken music can get. One thing I certainly didn't realize until I started putting this thing together, is that there is apparently an entire genre of Polish chicken techno music that exists on YouTube. (of course there is.) Tell me what it tastes like?

download it here

Chicken - Mississippi John Hurt
Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens - Louis Jordan
Bird Flu - M.I.A.
Super Chicken - Cee-Lo
I Move Chickens - Gucci Mane
Fry Dat Chicken - Ms Peachez
Crow Black Chicken - Ry Cooder
Truncated Life of a Modern Industrialized Chicken - Herbert
Chicken Grease - D'Angelo
Little Red Rooster - Sam Cooke
Ham 'n' Eggs - A Tribe Called Quest
Fried Chicken - Busta Rhymes
Chicken Noodle Soup - DJ Webstar ft. Young B
Chicken Dance - The Emeralds
Thunder Chicken - The Mighty Imperials
Chicken Strut - The Meters
Barnyard Boogie - Louis Jordan
Chicken Shack Boogie - Amos Milburn
Know Your Chicken - Cibo Matto
The Rooster - Big Boi
Do The Funky Chicken - Rufus Thompson
Chicken Half - Sugarman 3
Thousand Year Egg - Simian Mobile Disco
Chicken and Meat - Das Racist
Chicken Lady - Vitalic
?some techno thing?
Chicken Walk - Hasil Adkins
Chicken Dream Inside Egg - Pink Skull
random youtube chicken techno track #1 (Oli Chang?)
Chicken With Its Head Cut Off - The Magnetic Fields
random Polish youtube chicken techno track #2
Chicken Dance - Jack Fetterman and the In Hi-Fi Music Direction
Chicken Payback - The Bees
Chicken Soup With Rice - Carole King

oh, and I'm kinda bumming about not having included the thoroughly righteous Sly Stone song, "Chicken" – so you should listen to it here (and ignore the visual weirdness):

[h/t to Tom 'n' Jojo for hepping me to that one along with The Bees' "Chicken Payback"]

bonjour. bonjour. bonjour. bonjour. bonjour. bonjour. comment-allez-vous?

2011-11-05T12:08:00.011-04:00

allo allo! about a year ago (sheesh!) j'ai DJed une trés swanky function pour le Gershman Y dans Philadelphia, part of le Jewish Film Festival, aprés d'une screening of le film Gainsbourg. which, by the way, i thought was pretty fun but also super weird and too long. hm, maybe i should give it another viewing. anyway. basically i played a whole heap of french musique, vintage et moderne, for theoretical (and to some extent actual) dancing purposes.

alors! le traque-listé c'est below. and you can download the whole dang (fairly silly, and, unsurprisingly, rather serge-heavy, but still super fun) set [1 hr 37 m] right here, parfait for your next froo-froo frenchy soirée [try right-clicking if it gives you trouble].

also, this joke/img is still pretty great:
Serge Gainsbourg, «Pauvre Lola»
Dimitri from Paris, «Sacre Francais»
Jane Birkin, «Orang Outan»
Serge Gainsbourg, «Requiem Pour Un Con»
Serge Gainsbourg, «Initials B.B.»
Clothilde, «Saperlipopette»
France Gall, «Jazz a GoGo»
Air, «Love»
Serge Gainsbourg, «Bonnie & Clyde» [Herbert's Fred and Ginger Mix]
Saint Germain, «Rose Rouge»
Phoenix, «If I Ever Feel Better»
Komeda, «It's Alright Baby»
Serge Gainsbourg, «Eurotico-tico» [Instrumental]
Charlotte Leslie, «Les filles c'est fait pour faire l'amour»
Stereolab, «Emperor Tomato Ketchup»
Cosette, «Idealisation»
France Gall, «Poupee de Cire, Poupee de Son»
Holden, «Je Te Reconnais»
Serge Gainsbourg, «Cannabis»
Serge Gainsbourg, «Aux Armes Et Caetera»
Serge Gainsbourg, «Shu Ba Du Ba Loo Ba»
Francoise Hardy, «Tout Ce Qu' On Dit»
Serge Gainsbourg, «Mambo Miam Miam»
Stone, «Fille ou Garcon»
Johnny Hallyday, «Itsy Bitsy P'tit Bikini»
Johnny Hallyday, «Noir C'est Noir»
Frank Alamo, «Heureux Tous Les Deux»
Serge Gainsbourg, «New York USA»
The End, «Les Sambassadeurs»
Dimitri from Paris, «Le Rythme et La Cadence»
Daft Punk, «Crescendolls»
Vitor Hublot, «Aller Simple»
Cerrone, «Supernature»
Yelle, «A Cause de Garçons»
Les Rythmes Digitales, «Jacques Your Body» [Cassius Remix]
Johnny Hallyday, «T'Aimer Follement»
Daft Punk, «Around The World»
Francoise Hardy, «Je Veux Qu'il Revienne»
Justice, «DVNO»
Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin, «Je T'aime...Moi Non Plus»
Air, «Playground Love»
Francoise Hardy, «Tous Les Garcons Et Les Filles»

AMG + Cowbell review mega-round-up, volume XXIV: 2011 first half, vol. II [symfisyzers]

2011-06-24T14:26:00.008-04:00

okay, here are twenty-four reviews i wrote in the last six months, all on more-or-less electronic-type-music. though who knows if julianna barwick really counts. roughly inorder of how much i think i like them, best first.

Clive Tanaka Y Su Orquesta: Jet Set Siempre Nº 1 review

Available only on cassette when it was initially released in 2010, with vinyl and digital editions following in early 2011 -- both tape and vinyl in an eye-catching blue-green -- the debut offering from the shadowy Clive Tanaka y Su Orquesta arrived carrying the distinct whiff of novelty. Add in the generically beachy, soft-focus artwork and the archly hokey moniker and album title -- recalling the leisure-lounge vibe of swinging-'90s shibuya-kei acts like Pizzicato Five and Fantastic Plastic Machine, not to mention Atom Heart's shticky electro-Latin "outfit" Señor Coconut y Su Conjunto -- and the strawberry daiquiri-scented stench of kitsch is downright impossible to miss. Meanwhile, the deliberate mysteriousness of the whole business -- available details on Tanaka are scant and sketchy -- makes it all that much more exotic and/or gimmicky. Setting all that aside, though, there is some truly terrific, phenomenally enjoyable music to be found here. Certainly, Jet Set Siempre Nº 1 is a highly playful affair, with loads of fun, familiar retro-futuristic touches: cheesy-sounding, heavily filtered synths, "robotic" talkbox and vocoderized vocals, occasional snatches of wah-wah guitar and Latin beatbox percussion, plus some baldly corny lyrics. But none of this feels nearly as cutesy or affected as it might. Maybe, a decade on from Daft Punk's Discovery, the sugary, semi-gloss sounds of early, analog Euro-disco have largely been drained of their camp factor, or perhaps it's simply the strength of Tanaka's considerable melodic and compositional gifts, which absolutely merit inclusion in the same sentence as the aforementioned landmark. Besides enhancing the album's very zeitgeisty artifactual and textural appeal (while hardly lo-fi, the music does have a certain handmade graininess to it), the restriction to tape and vinyl formats makes more sense in light of the clear, utilitarian division between the album's two sides: one "for dance," the other "for romance." Both halves fulfill their functions exceedingly well. The former blasts off with a delirious disco workout, cools down with a midtempo groover and closes strong with a moodier, more modern-sounding electro shape shifter, although the absolute stunner is the impossibly catchy, inscrutably titled "Neu Chicago," a marvelously warm, sunny, disco-ey pop tune. The largely vocal-less flipside is a prime example of what was once termed "chill-out" and would more recently have been tagged as "balearic"; a set of gently expansive, easy flowing organic/electronic tracks recalling dubbed-out Swedish duo Studio and the exotica-sampling Quiet Village. The album comes full circle (and the vocoders reemerge) on the slightly more active final track, a completely transformed, washed-out recapitulation of the opening "All Night, All Right."

When Saints Go Machine: Konkylie review

"Konkylie" is Danish for "conch shell," but it sounds like the fantastical portmanteau of an obscure 1980s NYC art-funk group and a world-famous electro-pop princess. Which is probably as good a reference point as any (The Knife? Wild Beasts? Kate Bush?) for the breathtaking, unclassifiable second album by this awkwardly yet uncannily well-named Copenhagen outfit, which drifts from gauzy, ethereal choral fantasias to roiling slow-mo falsetto tech-soul to intricate, world-flecked new age pop. And then there's "Kelly," a breezy, intoxicating synth-disco paean to young love which could make your entire summer.

[this review written for city paper, and too short to work in this format, so here's some extra text to make it look better on the page. this really is a phenomenal album that i feel like i'm still just getting a handle on, but mostly just enjoying how ineffably pretty it sounds, without worrying too much about trying to explain it. "kelly" is at 23 last.fm plays and counting, very possibly my favorite song of the year so far...]

Art Department: The Drawing Board review

Canadian house duo Art Department -- longtime Toronto club scene veterans Jonny White and Kenny Glasgow -- made a massive splash in the dance music world with their 2010 debut single, "Without You." A mind-numbing slice of stark, minimal tech-house sporting a crushingly bleak, bleary-eyed vocal from Glasgow, sounding like he was on the brink of utter depravity, the track met with tremendous acclaim and, it's safe to say, ratcheted up considerable anticipation for the duo's debut album. And rightly so: The Drawing Board is a near-flawless work of deep, dark, moody modern house; an expansive, atmospheric odyssey equally primed for wee-hours dancefloors and late-night headphone sessions. (You could try listening to it during daylight hours too, but somehow that just seems perverse; this is, indisputably, nocturnal music.) In general, most of these tracks follow the basic template of "Without You," settling into a propulsive but deceptively low-key groove -- nothing too flashy, but complex enough to sustain interest and dynamism for anywhere from six to ten minutes -- and carefully layering on a few judicious melodic elements, allowing ample breathing space for each. There's a hypnotically squirmy synth riff on "Much Too Much"; ping-pong bass blips and gospel-touched organ stabs on "We Call Love," and "Without You"'s irresistibly sproingy robo-toms. From there it's all up to the vocals, frequently in Glasgow's deadpan croon, though it's not all anguish and devastation: "We Call Love" drafts in soulful, deep house vet Osunlade to deliver a soul-searing plea for romantic guidance, while quasi-celeb DJ Seth Troxler turns up on "Living the Life" to drop a motivational self-help sermon in classic Chicago house style, and then returns on "Vampire Nightclub" to litter cornball utterances ("straight gangsta...") in and among Glasgow's woozy, creepily sinister dancefloor incantations ("I like to watch your body get down.") Art Department switch things up toward the end, trying out a brief R&B-flavored tune over a slow, shuffling breakbeat ("In the Mood"), a downtempo synth-reggae track ("Roberts Cry"), instrumental save for few wordless, hair-raising diva wails, and a jazzed-up sequel to stand-out "Tell Me Why" boasting some tasty keyboard noodles. There's nothing wrong with these diversions, which don't disrupt the mood but rather augment it in fairly unexpected ways. But when Art Department stick with their signature sound, even though it might not be exactly unique -- it's easy enough to trace a lineage through seminal Chicago jack tracks, early-'90s disco house and the sleeker end of electro-clash to contemporary peers like Soul Clap and Benoit & Sergio -- the results are nothing short of mesmerizing.

Wolfram: Wolfram review

Majestically maned Austrian producer/gadabout Wolfram Eckert has been a key player in the zealous resurgence of Euro-disco since at least 2005, when he launched his Diskokaine imprint, first issuing his own productions and collaborations (under the sneakily reversible marfloW moniker) and soon introducing the world to the immaculate Italo disco simulacra of Sweden's Sally Shapiro. But anyone still dubious of his Euro-dance bona fides need only glance at the guest list for his fantastic first artist full-length, which plays less like a debut album than a star-studded coming-out party. The parade of vocalists and co-writers includes not only a veritable who's who of contemporary disco torchbearers -- Hercules and Love Affair, Holy Ghost!, Legowelt, and Shapiro (plus her producer, Johan Agebjörn) -- but also a couple of Hi-NRG OGs: Paul Parker, who scored a number one dance hit in 1982 (the year before Eckert was born) with the Patrick Cowley-penned "Right on Target," and early-'90s sensation Haddaway, who posed the immortal musical question, "What Is Love?" With friends like that, you know Eckert's gotta be doing something right, but then it takes more than a loaded Rolodex to make a memorable album. Credit all of the aforementioned for bringing their A games in their vocal performances; credit Wolfram for crafting a seamless but restlessly diverse and wildly entertaining batch of tracks, suiting each one to the particular style and sensibility of each guest, and honoring the fun-loving spirit of 1970s and '80s electronic disco, neither coming off as overly reverent or self-serious nor crossing the boundary into excessive campiness or pastiche. Highlights include Parker's adrenalized turn on "Out of Control," whose undeniable Van Halen vibes are tied with the epically emo electro-rock of "Norway" (sung by Heartbreak's equally throaty Sebastian Muravchik) for the album's glammiest moment; the soulfully subdued "Thing Called Love," which pits Haddaway's smooth-as-ever croon against a brilliantly cheap-sounding casio riff; and the taut, tidy synth pop of "Hold My Breath," which appears three times -- bookending the album as the loosest, most playful Holy Ghost! cut yet and as a suitably sparkly Shapiro feature, then again in an extended two-part bonus instrumental -- but never wears out its welcome. The ten-minute "Teamgeist," a funky midtempo acid house workout with countryman Patrick Pulsinger, demonstrates that Wolfram can be just as colorful and charismatic working wordless (and long-form), and the stately, soaring, mildly melancholy instrumental "Roshi" shows that he can also do it all on his own. Then again, why opt for solitude when you can throw a party like this?

Nôze: Dring review

The incorrigibly flamboyant, unpredictably freewheeling jazz-techno-cabaret twosome Nôze would probably come off as smirking, wryly irreverent misfits in just about any context, but the Paris-based Circus Company (which is co-run by the duo's Nicolas Sfintescu, and which released their first two long-players) at least seemed like an appropriate match. Since they jumped ship to join the big boys at Berlin's more classically house-oriented Get Physical, the group's musical output has grown ever more gleefully Frenchy and circus-like, while its relationship to conventional electronic dance forms has grown increasingly tenuous. Hence, Dring, their second effort for the label (and fourth overall) seems in some ways utterly out of place – probably just the way they like it – even though it's also by some measure the smoothest, straightest and most broadly appealing full-length statement they've made yet. It could also be guardedly described as their most "mature" – keeping in mind that it's not without its share of characteristically nutty, salty bathroom humor (q.v. the warped, low-key masturbation blues of closer "Willi Willi," which comes complete with toilet flushing sounds), often delivered in Sfintescu's earthy, Beefheartian growl. But while hardly lacking in personality or playfulness, Dring largely tones down the overt goofiness (vocal and otherwise) in favor of a rich, polyglot musicality that draws fluidly and fluently from klezmer, Dixieland, Balkan brass music, cocktail piano balladry, chanson and musette, Broadway showtunes, reggae, samba, cinematic scores, West coast cool jazz and even, on occasion, house music (the slinky, Latin-tinged "Nubian Beauty," which includes perhaps Sfintescu's most unhinged, lecherous, Serge Gainsbourg-by-way-of-Tom Waits yammering on the record, also works in a submerged synth bassline that seems to wink at label buddies Booka Shade and M.A.N.D.Y. via their 2005 smash "Body Language.") It's a broad, far-reaching but well-integrated palette that could lend itself equally well to a hearty multi-cultural dance party or a sophisticated (but never stodgy) coffeeshop soundtrack, and Dring would work admirably in either setting. Anyone seeking more of the quirky disco-house of earlier singles like "Remember Love" and "Love Affair" is liable to be disappointed here – indeed, Dring works so well as a big, lavish whole that few of its tracks are quite as effective when taken out of context (though bouncy, brassy opener "C'era Una Volta," with its infectious, curiously loping 3/4 groove, serves as an ideal tone-setter and calling card, notwithstanding its liberal "borrowing" of saxophone figures from Moondog's "Bird's Lament") – but it's hard to imagine anybody not getting swept up in the album's bacchanalian outpouring of buoyant brass, sinuously smokey reeds, exuberantly nonsensical scatting and wordless choral chants; sometimes more moody than body-moving, but always tethered to a generous groove.

Julianna Barwick: The Magic Place and Florine reviews

On her third, highest-profile release to date -- her first truly "full-length" outing after an album and an EP which both clocked in under 25 minutes -- sound sculptor Julianna Barwick continues to explore and subtly refine the techniques that made her earlier work so utterly singular and transcendent. Barwick's methods are simple and seemingly straightforward: her music consists of her vocals -- looped and layered, layered and looped, to a sometimes dizzying degree, and swaddled in cavernous, mist-making reverb -- and generally little else. So it can be difficult to account for the immensely captivating, evocative potency of the results. Perhaps it relates to her ability to craft something fundamentally new and unique out of the oldest, most elemental musical sound imaginable; transforming the human voice into something abstracted, even alien, without erasing its humanity. The Magic Place enhances that effect by giving her music its clearest, most sonically vibrant presentation yet, these recordings are still necessarily hazy, but they make Barwick's voice(s) sound purer and clearer than ever before, especially in the moments when she allows one particular vocal line to shine through the heavenly thicket. The album also finds her augmenting her one-woman choir with an unprecedented amount of instrumentation, an expanded color palette to accompany the expanding size of her musical canvas. Especially in its first half -- as if to emphasize upfront that the vocals are still far and away the focal point -- the instruments often don't emerge until several minutes of a cappella development, and when they do, they're relatively minimal: there's a warm synth drone on the aptly named "Envelop," and a marvelously integrated, barely perceptible church organ submerged beneath the vocal swells of rapturous highlight "White Flag." The instrumentation, always treated with the same suffusive, softening reverb as the vocals, grows more pronounced as the album progresses -- persistently plinky piano and a hint of accordion underscore the lilting "Vow"; "Prizewinning" emerges from a spare bass pulse and builds toward a clattering, martial percussion cadence; "Bob in Your Gait" opens instrumentally and offers a rare departure from the looped/layered approach with its more straightforward (if still lavishly echo-laden) singing, and the gentle, vaguely folky "Flown" closes the album with a bit of ringing, Harold Budd-like piano. Impressively, these myriad accretions manage to complement the fragile glory of Barwick's inimitable choral effects while never overshadowing or diminishing them. Her music may have vaguely discernible precedents in minimalism, new age, and Eno's ambient works, and a few tangential contemporary peers including Grouper and How to Dress Well, but her sound has a comfortingly homespun, unfussy quality, and a patient, uplifting serenity, that remain uniquely her own.

Ford & Lopatin: Channel Pressure review

Childhood friends Daniel Lopatin (the esoterically inclined synth/noise producer Oneohtrix Point Never) and Joel Ford (of the electro-pop band Tigercity) introduced their musical partnership in 2010, issuing several releases under the moniker Games. For their full-length bow the following June, the duo switched their handle to a more businesslike pairing of surnames, but that doesn't mean they've quit playing games with their art. To the contrary: Channel Pressure's impishly playful, retro-futuristic sci-fi sensibility is evident right off the bat, with smirking song titles like "Too Much MIDI (Please Forgive Me)" and particularly the perfectly pitched cover image of a boy sleeping in the neon green glow of a giant glossy screen, in a bedroom crammed full of outmoded hi-tech gizmos, his outstretched arm reaching for a joystick. That visual key to the album's overarching conceptual framework based on a loose narrative set in the year 2082 about a teenager named Joey Rogers who succumbs to sinister subliminal voices transmitted through his TV while he's asleep. But the image also works more generally as an analog (pun fully intended) to the scintillating, synth-tastic sounds within these grooves. The Donnie Darko-ish details of the story line may remain fuzzy and elliptical (even with the lyric-sheet transcription of Ford's woozily robotified vocals), but the vibe is crystal clear and dead on: this is a precise aural equivalent of '80s future shock as filtered through the experience of a geeky, fantasy-prone teenager; presumably not unlike the boys Messrs. Ford and Lopatin once were. Musically, Channel Pressure evokes a wide range of the era's most plasticine sounds, blurring the boundaries between brittle digi-funk, gooey, soft-focus R & B, wonky fusion jazz, noodly electro-prog, and chintzy new age, but its primary mode is plush, pillowy, synth pop occasionally suitable for dancefloors (as on the dynamite single contenders "World of Regret," "Emergency Room," and "Joey Rogers"), but often more dreamy and cinematic (the swoony, mesmerizing "The Voices.") Obviously, revisiting the sounds of the '80s is hardly a new idea circa 2011 -- the approach here variously calls to mind contemporaries like M83, Dâm-Funk, and Com Truise, as well as any number of 8-bit, chillwave, and kosmiche-disco artists -- but Ford and Lopatin manage to make them feel surprisingly fresh, thanks to their obvious affection for the material and their equally devoted attention to songs (all the aforementioned numbers are, above all, massively catchy pop tunes) and sounds (Lopatin's amply demonstrated facility with evocative, granular, analog synth textures is definitely put to good use here, and a mixing assist from Prefuse 73's Guillermo Scott Herren probably doesn't hurt either.) Like another recent '80s-obsessed conceptually driven collaboration -- Neon Neon's woefully overlooked Stainless Style album -- Channel Pressure is equally enjoyable as a painstaking period re-creation drenched in neon nostalgia and nylon nausea, and as a piece of sterling (if decidedly warped) electronic pop music in its own right.

YACHT: Shangri-La review

Following the artistic breakthrough of 2009's See Mystery Lights, Yacht's second album as a duo (and second outing for DFA Records) continues to mine a fruitful blend of new wave, dance-punk, and playful electro-pop, this time with a slightly tighter, poppier focus. Effectively a stylistic extension of its predecessor -- which is certainly nothing to complain about -- Shangri-La benefits from a marginally more song-oriented, vocal-centered approach, informed by the loose lyrical theme suggested by the title. As laid out in songs like the opening diptych of "Utopia" and "Dystopia" (also issued as two sides of a 7" single prior to the album's release), the basic position here is that all the potential for paradise (or hell) exists right here on Earth, and lies within us: "there's nothing in the future, it's up to us to build utopia." It's a stance that falls right in line with Yacht's familiar brand of ambiguously earnest/ironic sermonizing and sloganeering, toeing the line between rosily sincere, communitarian self-empowerment and pseudo-mystical mumbo-jumbo, and Claire Evans mounts that pulpit with gusto throughout, breathlessly declaiming that "the future exists first in our imagination, then in our will, then in reality." Sneakily, pointedly, the same song ("Paradise Engineering") also features lyrics paraphrased from infamous cult-leader Jim Jones ("If you want me to be your god, I will be your god"), echoing Evans' impersonation of a sleazy self-styled prophet on the anti-clerical "Holy Roller" (with its worrisome reference to "drown[ing] fears in napalm"), as well as the tantalizing flirtation with transgression explored on "One Step." So, as with the band's black-and-white color scheme (and the triangular happy/sad faces they've recently added to their iconography), there's room for both darkness and light in Yacht's vision of paradise ("and even in Arcadia, ego ego ego!" Evans wittily/nerdily interjects at one point.) Musically however, Shangri-La keeps things fairly light and upbeat, with plenty of memorable, chanted vocal hooks and a satisfying mixture of live and sequenced instrumentation. Standouts include the zippy disco-punk of "Utopia," with its hyper-kinetic rubbery bassline, and "I Walked Alone," which evolves from bouncy, midtempo funk (featuring ample cowbell and some goofy, octave-shifted vocals) to breezily infectious piano house. Things get a bit bogged down with the plodding, murky "Love in the Dark," while the lengthy "Tripped and Fell in Love" sadly fails to redeem the promise of See Mystery Lights' excellent epic "It's Boring," opting instead for an overly polite seven minutes of static Motorik disco. But on the whole, Shangri-La is far more heavenly than it is hellish, and Yacht save the best for last with the lilting, largely electronics-free title-track, a dreamy, gently anthemic evocation of earthly paradise complete with strings, cooed choral vocals, and wispy, tastefully deployed strings.

SebastiAn: Total review

Seemingly influenced just as much by Daft Punk's work ethic as their musical M.O., the hard-partying gallic hordes at Ed Banger records may be capable of some massively adrenalized, barnstorming electro-house, but they're sure in no hurry about it. In 2011, four years after Justice's watershed debut album, a follow-up from that label flagship was only beginning to appear on the horizon (see also Germany's like-minded Digitalism); meanwhile, the shadowy SebastiAn, who'd been issuing singles (and at least one compilation's worth of remixes) on Ed Banger since 2005, was just getting around to his first full-length. At least he took the "full" part seriously enough: Total boasts a staggering 22 tracks. True, a third of them are brief, spurt-like interludes under a minute long, and SebastiAn could theoretically have crammed almost another half-hour of music on here, but anybody not ready to cry for mercy after 50 minutes is made of steely stuff indeed. The experience is a bit like somebody scanning slowly across a radio dial, catching snatches of classic rock, soul, disco, funk, punk, metal, and even classical music (check the harpsichord trills on the delectable, too-short "Tetra," produced with Justice's Gaspard Auge), all with the equalizer settings permanently stuck on hyper-compressed bombast, and occasionally lingering on the static between stations just for the sheer agony and ecstasy of it all. Especially with the interludes ensuring a total dearth of silence between tracks, Total can feel pretty monolithic, and certainly, nothing here strays too far from the sort of scuzzy, overdriven, body-slamming rock-techno that's pretty much synonymous with Ed Banger, but there are some intriguing diversions along the way. Lead single "Embody" is a smooth, strutting, electro-R&B confection boasting woozily crooned talk-box vocals, and several other stand-outs feature a similarly soulful vibe, including the atypically breezy lounge-pop cut-up "Arabest" and the swaggering paisley chug of "Love in Motion" (featuring retro-soulster Mayer Hawthorne in a vocal performance so processed and mixed-down it might as well be a sample.) Elsewhere, Total cleaves to SebastiAn's more familiar, trashy, glitch-funk maximalism, including a few retooled old singles (the name-making 2006 spazzfest "Ross Ross Ross," the petulant whine and grind of "Motor") and a few similarly styled new productions. The most brutal barrages, though, come with "Doggg"'s screamo-disco and the fairly tepid electro-punk M.I.A. collabo "C.T.F.O." ("chill the fuck out," ironically enough.) Whether you'll want to cherry-pick favorites or wade through the whole unwieldy mess may depend on context (and your personal level of tolerance), but there's no denying that, a half-decade late or not, SebastiAn has delivered.

Junior Boys: It's All True review

If only because the first two Junior Boys LPs set an impossibly high bar – especially the peerless, debonair So This Is Goodbye – the still-excellent Begone Dull Care couldn't help feeling like a slight comedown; the songcraft stumbling even as the productions grew increasingly nuanced and streamlined. Album number four is at once a corrective and a reorientation: excepting the tender, lovelorn "Playdate" – daringly (or perhaps teasingly) slotted second – it's their catchiest, most outgoing outing yet. (I'm almost tempted to say "sunniest," though these are relative terms: Jeremy Greenspan's hushed, wistful croon remains indelibly nocturnal.) Though it finds the duo successfully branching out without disrupting their core sonic identity (and it's neat to hear Care's numbed, tech-y lockgrooves – revisited here on the terse "Kick the Can" – blossom into something more chromatic and engaging), It's All True also veers ticklishly toward an outright evocation of plastic '80s pop-soul (q.v. Grovesnor, if not quite Chromeo), troublingly for a band that's always felt effortlessly modern. Infectiously epic closer "Banana Ripple" even busts out the synthetic disco-samba horn stabs, practically the antithesis of the JBs' trademark restraint. Then again, it's easily the best thing here.

[unfortunately, this album is doomed to disappoint because none of it is nearly as good as the tracey thorn song of the same title.]

WhoMadeWho: Knee Deep review

True musical omnivores, Copenhagen's WhoMadeWho have always been far too slippery a beast to be encapsulated by the standard-issue genre tags -- dance-punk; disco-rock -- they're often saddled with. To wit, even before completely overhauling their self-titled 2005 debut into a set of beatless, acoustic psych-folk (Green Versions), they'd already sprinkled a surprising number of gentler, guitar-led tunes among its party-starting electro jams. And 2009's The Plot was a wily, wayward amalgam of strutting glam rock, slo-mo space pop, blistering techno-boogie, and goofy instrumental funk. So if the markedly moody, downcast turn the trio take on their third proper album (and Kompakt debut), Knee Deep, comes as a slight surprise, attentive followers should at least realize they're no strangers to the unexpected. Actually, this is easily the band's most cohesive, streamlined outing yet, not just due to its relatively sleek length (it's technically billed as a mini-album, though it's a generous one at 38 minutes, not counting a bonus instrumental which plays like the intersection of Daft Punk and Explosions in the Sky) but because it sustains a consistent, though hardly monochromatic, air of melancholy and doubt, tapping into the darker aspects of their moniker's wry, pithy existentialism. "There's an Answer" sets the tone, with sinuous bass clarinet, ominous strings, and choral accompaniment bolstering Jeppe Kjellberg's restrained, world-weary vocal -- "now the man is not so sure of what he feels," he muses blankly -- and only an intermittent, submerged 4/4 thump gesturing toward the kinetic dynamism of the band's earlier work. That sense of alienated uncertainty grows even more marked on the brooding, throbbing darkwave of "Every Minute Alone," which can't even muster up a refrain more confident than a weak, bewildered "should I call you up," question mark left ambiguously unexpressed. WhoMadeWho haven't entirely lost their interest in moving bodies, though: the pulsing syncopated blips of "All That I Am" (think Booka Shade circa Movements) offer plenty of dancefloor potential -- especially if it's goth night -- to say nothing of the viciously strobing synths and thunderous disco-funk groove of the powerhouse "Two Feet Off Ground." Despite the bleakness and gloom that permeate the album, it never feels timid or insular; both musically and emotionally, Knee Deep is far weightier than its title implies. WhoMadeWho have been accomplished, even inspired, in the past, but here they emerge on a whole new level, displaying a subtle command of tension and release and an assured, seamless blending of rock and electronics, suffused with unfeigned emotionalism, which calls to mind the confidence and mastery of marquee acts like LCD Soundsystem and Radiohead. It turns out depth is a good look for these guys.

Hatchback: Zeus & Apollo review

From this vantage point, the scintillating, Kraut-induced cosmic disco of Sam Grawe's debut feels like a hedged bet. On his second opus as Hatchback, the San Franciscan synth-aesthete (and Dwell magazine editor) stretches luxuriously beyond commonly perceived boundaries of taste, proudly proclaiming the emergence of "the new age of New Age." That canny, if charged, catchphrase, hip-to-be-square provocations aside, seems intended to grant him – and us – greater freedom to indulge in this sumptuous music (which could also be comfortably, less contentiously labelled ambient electronica) on the level of pure, experiential beauty. And Zeus & Apollo is an exceptionally, unabashedly beautiful work, if – per its Classically-informed title, and Grawe's design inclinations – more focused on forms than feelings. But its formalism is far from minimalist or reductive: these six tracks – averaging over twelve minutes apiece – are serenely slow-moving, but they're constantly evolving; never static. Indeed, it's a marvel how much color and character Grawe can introduce without disrupting his music's fundamental clarity and calm.

Malachai: Return To The Ugly Side review

By giving their second album a title that explicitly positions it as a sequel to their exceptional, eye-popping debut, Ugly Side of Love, the pigeonhole-defying Bristol duo Malachai set up a curious set of expectations. Besides suggesting a general similarity between the two efforts, the implication seems to be that this is, if not necessarily a lesser work, one that shouldn't or can't quite stand on its own merits. Return to the Ugly Side might indeed be most charitably considered as a companion piece -- and more of a supplement than a necessary complement -- but it's not exactly a retread. The overall feel of the album is comparable, with the same phantasmagoric, slightly seedy vibe, and a similar off-beat evocation of dusty, decades-old records. But this a much more subdued, streamlined affair than the gaudy, kaleidoscopic pastiche of its predecessor: if not a maturation, certainly a mellowing. Generally speaking, Return hearkens mostly to the debut's slower, murkier side -- cuts like "Fading World" and the drowsy, Geoff Barrow-assisted "Only for You" -- resulting in a set that hews much closer to the '90s trip-hop typically associated with Malachai's hometown. The genre's cinematic obsession is immediately foregrounded by the steamrolling soundtrack strings of the opening "Monsters" (an overture which turns out to be essentially an instrumental version of searing, Portishead-y album highlight "Monster"), while the gently eerie "Rainbows" invites singer Katy Wainwright for the obligatory haunted chanteuse turn. There are still moments vividly redolent of turn-of-the-'70s British rock, pop, and soul -- the crunchy hard rock guitars on "Mid Antarctica (Wearin' Sandals)"; the jaggedly funky drum beats on "Anne," and the kinetic "(My) Ambulance," although these elements feel somehow more oppressive, less sprightly, in this context. But there's a conspicuous lack of the outright rockers which lent some seriously spiky punch to the first album's paisley patchwork. An emphasis on sustained mood and texture over individuated songs isn't a terrible sound for these guys -- and they haven't entirely lost their knack for simple, effective songwriting, as demonstrated by the wry "No More Rain No Maureen" and standout "Let 'Em Fall," a deliciously spooky, menacing showcase for Gee Ealey's potently throaty R&B crooning -- although a disappointing proportion of this brief set (including its two longest cuts) winds up feeling sparse, dreary, and weirdly rudderless. That said, Malachai remain a fascinating, worthwhile, and essentially unique proposition, and there's still plenty to enjoy, for fans and newcomers alike, even in this somewhat diminished Return.

Siriusmo: Mosaik review

Most mosaics are designed with some amount of general visual coherence in spite of their inherently cobbled-together nature. Siriusmo's Mosaik -- the full-length album debut of a German producer (birth name Moritz Friedrich) who's been steadily releasing EPs, singles, and remixes for over a decade -- hardly deigns to bother with such matters, stringing together an unpredictable jumble of sounds and styles and generally wreaking playful, pranksterish havoc across the board with no regard for overarching sense or structure. Hardly any strain of vaguely beat-based electronic music is safe, from the tuneful, Röyksopp-ish synth-disco of "High Together" and the aggressive hardcore dubstep of "Bad Idea," to the cartoonish glitch-funk of "Lass Den Vogel Frei!," the mechanical tech-house of "Feromonikon," and the jittery Atari bleeps of "123." Of course, Siriusmo's tracks -- which rarely exceed the four-minute mark -- don't necessarily stay in any one subgenre for long: witness "Goldene Kugel"'s gradual transformation from restrained, Ellen Allien-ish Berlin minimal into a burbling, xylophone-happy, Latin-tinged groover, or "Sirimande"'s slickly executed out-of-nowhere about-face from snakily stark, menacing body music to bongos 'n' lounge piano chill-out exotica, or the twinkling prog-jazz breakdown in the midst of "Feed My Meatmachine"'s squelchy, computer-voiced robo-funk. The latter two highlights, along with the relatively straight-ahead, smooth-cruising synth pop of "Nights Off," appear only on the CD and download versions of Mosaik: the album's LP edition features not only four alternative exclusive cuts, but also a completely reshuffled track listing, which speaks either to Siriusmo's carefully considered curation of his material to suit each format or, more probably, his general disregard for considerations of sequencing and format altogether. Either way, each of his tracks is so distinct and singular that they'd probably be just as enjoyable in any arbitrary order, although as it happens, the CD version does settle into a somewhat refreshingly less manic, more melodic groove (or perhaps a relative lull, depending on your perspective) in its midsection, before the metallic yowls of the brief, Beefheart-ian absurdity "Peeved" send things spiraling off again. If there's a unifying thread here, apart from Siriusmo's obvious playful irreverence and kaleidoscopic eclecticism -- which call to mind his label bosses and longtime pals Modeselektor as well as freewheeling artists as disparate as Norway's Bjørn Torske and Japan's Com.a. -- it's that with all of his shenanigans, he never loses sight of musicality and groove. If Siriusmo wasn't so darn good at putting these things together, with a solid melodic sense backing up his infectiously cheerful inventiveness, Mosaik might have been a hopeless, unlistenable mess. Instead, it's an utterly exhilarating, albeit exhausting, mess.

Yelle: Safari Disco Club review

Not quite the wild, equatorial jungle party its title suggests, Safari Disco Club doesn't trek terribly far afield from the sweet 'n spunky synth-pop of Yelle's 2007 debut. Which is just fine, considering that Pop-Up remains one of the most gleeful, infectious party-starting records in recent memory. If anything, Safari is actually less animalistic than its predecessor, lacking the harder edge of that album's gritty, electro-laced hip-hop cuts – the trio's eponymous vocalist generally sticks to singing rather than rapping, though she's still as sprightly as ever. The newly polished, more melodically-focused approach makes a decently effective trade-off, yielding pleasantly fluffy roller-disco gems like the sparkle-eyed "J'ai Bu" (strangely reminiscent of Sally Shapiro), even if the best cuts here – the enjoyably loopy title song; the pumping fidget-house of "Comme Un Enfant" – are often the leanest and meanest. Still, despite an occasional over-saturation of generically glossy, faceless synths, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more propulsive, exuberant set of icily retro electro-pop this side of La Roux. And those poseurs aren't even French!

Diskjokke: Sagara review

This third album from quietly prolific Norwegian producer Joachim Dyrdahl was inspired, in a somewhat roundabout way, by a trip he took to Indonesia to fulfill a 2009 commission for a new work; not, as originally envisioned, by the time he spent with a Javanese gamelan group, whose music he'd planned to intermingle with his own electronic dance stylings, but rather by a final week in Bali which, he reported, "changed his perspective on music forever." Certainly, Sagara seems to stem from a decidedly different set of impulses than the pair of party-friendly, groove-oriented Diskjokke albums that preceded it. Although it shares the same undeniable warmth and good feeling that have marked his work all along, it ventures into entirely new stylistic territory: languid, almost entirely beatless ambient music, or, you might say, new age. Not that the underlying musical sensibilities of this approach are all that far removed from the late 2000s/early-2010s brand of spacy, Scandinavian cosmic disco (Dyrdahl typical mode); the two have long co-existed happily on the Smalltown Supersound's roster, and indeed Sagara fits right in alongside the label's prior release, Pechenga's Helt Borte, as well as more recent fare from acts like Arp and Meanderthals, with its full, rich, slowly shifting billows of pure synthesized softness and haze. Amid a few more distinctive keyboard textures (such as "Golotrok"'s dreamy, organ-like fanfare and coda, which bookend many lovely minutes of subtle, lilting bass pulse and synth drift), Dyrdahl also makes magnificently sparing use of a few gentle melodic elements -- muted bell-like tones (most notably on the vaguely ominous "Mandena"), a tiny sprinkling of xylophones -- presumably the fruit of his sessions with the gamelan. The album's transcendent moment, though, comes with the final piece, "Panutup," which gradually meanders its way from amniotic haze into celestially chiming, Vangelis-esque synthesizer pop and then, unexpectedly, into a few blissful minutes of full-on 4/4 electronic disco that feels, on arrival, like the aural equivalent of a tropical sunrise, as though the whole album had been a build-up to that moment. Which is not to suggest, incidentally, that the rest of the album feels like it's missing anything, or is in any way inferior to Diskjokke's dance-oriented output. On the contrary, Sagara shows the Norwegian to be an equally effective mood painter without his trusty beats, and in some respects, his accomplishment here is his most adept and impressive yet.

Pechenga: Helt Borte review

Making as good on the label's name as conceivably possible, in 2011, Smalltown Supersound reissued this obscure 2007 album by a duo from Vardø, a tiny fishing village at the northern tip of Norway. Regardless of the cosmic significance -- or not -- of this seemingly improbable event (it might have something to do with the fact that one of the duo is noted electro/disco producer Rune Lindbaek, who happens to have released a similarly minded album as one-half of Meanderthals, also on Smalltown Supersound), it's certainly a boon for fans of slow, spacy, ambient synth music (Biosphere, Stars of the Lid, Tangerine Dream). In tritely predictable but nevertheless redolent fashion, Helt Borte sounds about as wintry, primordial, elemental, glacially paced, and remote as you would expect of sounds emanating from such a distant, arctic locale. Titling one track "Snowflakes" and filling it with placidly twinkling synthetic bell-tones may be pushing things a bit far -- or maybe not -- but suffice to say this music will stand up to any sort of slumbering snowdrift/Aurora Borealis imagery you want to throw at it. So yes: Pechenga's music may not be boundary-pushing, cerebrally stirring, or in any way original. At the same time it is, absolutely, haunting, entrancing, and lush, and not in a cheap or facile way, either. The basic musical methodology, throughout, rests on sinuous, slow-moving melodies and deep, thick synthesizer drones, often eerily dark and brooding ("Ununoktium," "Pechenga," "My Frozen Spirit"), sometimes ethereal and serene ("Ultima Thule"; "Hamningberg," which is named for another, even tinier town in northern Norway). Sometimes other elements flit their way through, as with the languid, almost bluesy guitar figure which makes "Gitaro" ("guitar" in Esperanto) probably the most distinctive and memorable thing here, or the shards of harp splintering the title track, or even the occasional pan flute. The California-based producer Hatchback recently proclaimed the dawning of a "New Age of New Age." You could argue about whether it ever really went away in the first place, but in any case, Helt Borte suggests that new age had in fact already returned, at least a few years earlier than he might have realized.

Pictureplane: Thee Physical review [forthcoming in July issue of Cowbell]

Thee Physical, the second widely-distributed album from Denver-based producer Pictureplane, is a dirty, murky, delirious mess. There's a lot going on here, and it all tends to happen at the same time. Take the first few seconds of album opener "Body Mod": brightly chintzy house piano stabs in a faltering rhythmic loop; a crudely cut-and-pasted, instantly recognizable hip-hop vocal snippet (the same sample that powered Fatboy Slim's block-rockin' 1998 remix of Wildchild's "Renegade Master"); some churning, fuzz-toned synth throbs; a pinging Nintendo bassline; a distant, warped, diva-esque wail. All this hangs in vague, uneasy suspension for half a minute; then come the manic rushing snares, jump-starting a syncopated, jacking breakbeat that suddenly harnesses everything into a tight lockgroove, making the next three-plus minutes feel as propulsive and inevitable as they are disorienting. It's a striking, effective collage and – better – a bluntly obvious dancefloor killer. It's also, by some distance, the most immediate thing here, though not necessarily a misleading introduction.

Like just about everybody making electronic music at this point, Pictureplane's Travis Egedy is an unabashed nostalgiast: every element of "Body Mod," like the rest of Thee Physical, hearkens more or less explicitly to the popular dance music of the 1990s – diva house, Hi-NRG, hip-house, rave, big beat, drum'n'bass, two-step garage – not coincidentally the last time, until recently, that electronica had anything to do with this country's cultural mainstream. But he's not, by any means, a revivalist, at least in any straightforward sense. Besides slap-chopping all of these styles together in an ecstatically sloppy, anti-formalist jumble, just about every sound that passes through Egedy's decks comes out grimy, roughed up and sonically distressed, hearkening to the same impulses fueling the amorphous chillwave movement. Adding to the general sense of woozy bewilderment and stylistic abstraction, most of these grooves are surprisingly slow – closer to dubstep than disco, tempo-wise – rendering them less oddly danceable than they feel like they should be, though allowing for some thrilling double-time freakout moments. Throw in occasional bouts of wobbly, manifestly non-mechanical imprecision – like the just-slightly-off bass breakdown midway through "Black Nails" – and a certain political/critical subtext starts to emerge. If all electronic music functions, on some level, as a mediation of the endlessly mutable relationship between human and machine, the thrust here seems to be "retain the throbbing, emotive heart of '90s club music, while utterly fraying and distorting its vapid, faceless façade."

For all the mileage Egedy gets from this premise, though, Physical's best moment is also its most conformist, at least structurally. "Real is a Feeling," named for Egedy's ongoing Denver DJ night, reins in the chaos for a blissful outpouring of grubbily shimmering synth-pop; the album's sole, shining club anthem. Elsewhere, for better and worse, this album often can't quite decide if it wants to be music for the mind or the body. On the other hand, if "we are all post physical" – as Egedy intones, breathily, amidst typically dark, sweaty electronic churn – then perhaps it shouldn't matter anyway.

Pantha du Prince: XI Versions of Black Noise review

A year on from the release of Black Noise, one of 2010's most masterful and celebrated electronic releases, Hamburg techno maven Hendrik Weber issued this straightforwardly titled revisitation, boasting an enviable roster of A-list remixers that reflects his unique position straddling both the mainstream of European minimal electronica (Basic Channel pioneer Moritz von Oswald; Weber's erstwhile Dial labelmates Efdemin, Lawrence, and Carsten Jost) and the wider well of broadly indie-friendly acts (Four Tet, Animal Collective). Fully eight of these "versions" are based on a mere two of Black Noise's 11 cuts, with "Stick to My Side" alone accounting for five. Still, even though these are largely respectful reworkings, altering musical content but rarely the underlying emotional tone -- nobody effects a transformation nearly as striking, for instance, as the shift from the picturesque painted landscape on the original album cover to the stark, elegant, abstraction adorning XI Versions -- the resulting collection manages to be just as pleasantly varied and cohesively listenable as Black Noise, while distinct enough to be worth investigating on its own right. The three renderings of "Welt Am Draht" -- not necessarily a highlight of the original album, but nevertheless a lovely specimen of Pantha's fluidly floating yet rigorously rhythmic style -- are an illustrative example. Von Oswald turns in a typically entrancing, atmospheric dub, stripping the track down and refitting it with an airier, gently syncopated pulse and reams of open space. Animal Collective preserve Pantha's ever-twinkling bells and chimes but sub in more basic "tribal" drumming for the rhythm and add a wash of their familiarly fractured, woozy vocals. And Hamburg-based duo Die Vögel, in the most remarkable mutation here, offer up a pulsating, densely layered live-brass-and-flutes opus recalling the oompah-flavored experiments of Nôze or Ricardo Villalobos, which shares only its basic rhythmic undercarriage with Weber's original (and only after a full two minutes of stuttered, harmonically rich brass chorale). None of these three tracks sounds anything alike, but they work remarkably well together since each in its own way picks up on Pantha's predominant aesthetic cues, by and large remaining elegantly smooth and subdued, yet subtly, sinuously propulsive. The same goes for the five "Stick" remixes, although they tend to be less adventurous and, save for the endlessly spiraling synths and cheerful thump of Four Tet's version and Walls' beatless, lushly reverberant take, can feel somewhat formalist and occasionally overly static. Hieroglyphic Being's unrecognizable, incongruously mechanical mix of "Satellite Sniper" is the only real misstep (albeit a minor one), and all told this is one of the most rewarding remix albums in recent memory.

Black Devil Disco Club: Circus review

When Bernard Fevre, the soi-disant Black Devil, released 2008's Eight Oh Eight, it was allegedly the capstone to an increasingly redundant trilogy of electro-disco albums he'd begun 30 years earlier. Some might have assumed he'd slink back into his accustomed obscurity, his diabolical mission accomplished. But little about the Frenchman's career trajectory to date has been straightforward, so it's not all that surprising that now, following 2009's cobbled-together The Strange New World of Bernard Fevre, we're presented with a fourth Black Devil Disco Club album. This time, though, he's learned a few new tricks: instead of six five-minute dance tracks, Circus consists of ten three-minute pop songs, each featuring a different vocalist. For an artist who's never before enlisted collaborators, Fevre's amassed an impressive roster of guests here, among them Nancy Sinatra, Afrika Bambaataa, Jon Spencer, the Horrors' Faris Badwan, and Claire Evans of YACHT. There's a lot of personality on that list -- something that's been fairly lacking in most of Fevre's output -- but it's also noteworthy how well-matched each of these contributors is to the playfully sinister Black Devil aesthetic. And while none of the big-name guests (or the lesser-knowns for that matter) make an especially outsized impression, they all fit remarkably well into Fevre's familiarly dark, squelchy, mechanical, Moroder-esque grooves. Spencer kicks things off with some ominously intoned mumbo-jumbo on the pleasantly jumpy "Fuzzy Dream"; Poni Hoax's Nicolas Kerr sneers with unhinged, glammy decadence on the creepy "My Screen," and English up-and-comer CocknBullKid brings an intriguing hint of chart-soul polish to her turn on "In Doubt." Sinatra is somewhat overpowered by the aptly titled, overly cluttered "Too Ardent," but her airy, witchy croon is a treat nonetheless. And Bambaataa, an old pro at this stuff, works up a credible bit of spooked sermonizing on "Magnetic Devil," although he's rather rudely forced to share space with an uncredited "ft. MacTalk." Surprisingly, YACHT's Evans -- who knows a thing or two about cockamamie occultism, and who sings perhaps Circus' only legitimately blasphemous lyric -- might actually be the album's biggest vocal presence, if only because she's mixed the highest. Throughout, there's a well-maintained balance between the vocalists -- who bring just enough individuality and presence to keep things engaging, never to fully dominate -- and Fevre's energetically synthetic productions. Which may, admittedly, be somewhat rote, and monomaniacally thumping, and extravagantly bongo-laden (are bongos meant to be spooky?), and generally much more goofy than actually menacing, but nevertheless offer more variety and interest than they often have in the past. Maybe he should have been a ringmaster all along.

Teddybears: Devil's Music review

It took Stockholm-based party mongers Teddybears a while to follow up their 2006 U.S. debut, Soft Machine -- itself a hodge-podge of reworked tracks from the group's earlier, punkier efforts -- with the similarly styled Devil's Music, which was issued in Europe in 2010 and appeared stateside a year later in remixed and slightly reshuffled form. But they hadn't entirely been silent during the intervening years: Joakim Åhlund was active with his '60s-inspired garage rock/power-pop outfit Caesars, while his brother, Klas, maintained a busy schedule of songwriting and production work for major-league pop artists like Kesha, Sugababes, and, most frequently and notably, Robyn. Both brothers' extracurricular ventures are relevant reference points for the Teddybears' sound, an unabashedly sugary mixture of rock & roll and fizzy electronic dance-pop centered around big, crunchy guitars, equally big, crunchy synthesizers, bluntly energetic beats, and a healthy smattering of hip-hop, reggae, punk, and techno. Both ridiculously stylistically diverse and surprisingly distinctive and cohesive in all its gleeful dumbness, Teddybears' music frequently recalls the hard-partying eclecticism and shameless hookiness of late-'90s, big beat electronica. Very much like its predecessor, Devil's Music derives most of its noteworthiness and novelty (and arguably, for better or worse, much of its musical interest) from an impressive, sometimes head-scratching roster of guest vocalists drawn from pop, rock, rap, and reggae. Most acquit themselves perfectly well: the long-largely-dormant Eve kicks things off (after a vocoded bit of Charles Bukowski nonsense) on an appropriately goofy and swaggering tip with the ironically titled "Rocket Science," declaring "I am the robot Elvis rockin' my bionic pelvis," while the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne contributes a characteristically appealing turn on the gently trippy "Crystal Meth Christians." But a few of the most promising collaborations fall a bit flat. Robyn's appearance on chugging electro-pop nugget "Cardiac Arrest" is fun enough but fairly rote (blame it on the material, which isn't long on melody or personality), and "Cho Cha," featuring both Cee-Lo and the B-52's (!!) feels like a truly wasted opportunity; an odd, rather forced '50s/'80s-pastiche with unfunny zero-entendre lyrics about a cat (hmmm), and, inexplicably, Fred Schneider only gets to sing about half a stanza. Still, the inevitable self-recycling aside (see "Get Fresh with You," which re-does "Louie Louie" via Caesars' wonder hit "Jerk It Out"; it's shocking that there's not a more blatant "Cobrastyle" re-tread here) the Åhlunds have proven themselves time and again as ham-fisted masters of ear-wormy, marketing-friendly pure pop confections (the delightfully dippy B.o.B. feature "Get Mama a House" has already been used to sell Swedish real estate), and it's hard to complain too much about another cheap and dirty dozen of their trademark trashy trifles.

Jason Forrest: The Everything review

It only took Jason Forrest a year to follow the hyper-maximalist, sample-mad sugar surge of his 2004 debut, The Unrelenting Songs of the 1979 Post Disco Crash, with the equally dazzling and demented Shamelessly Exciting -- both albums which can be summed up remarkably well by the cheekily unabashed descriptors in their titles. But excepting 2010's brief Utopia EP -- which can't -- it was a quiet six years until he resurfaced with this third proper full-length. Once again, The Everything tries mightily to live up to its title, cramming what might seem like every sound imaginable -- elegantly atmospheric symphonics, heavy metal guitar shredding, electro-acoustic drones, chintzy soft pop keyboards, brass bands, ghostly choirs, hand claps, harpsichords, bongos, squeaky hinges, crackly field recordings -- into its dense, micromanaged collages. Of course, that doesn't really mean the album has Everything. Never mind that one could easily list whole strata of the musical universe Forrest skipped over (most varieties of international/ethnic music, for one thing, not to mention almost any vocals beyond a couple of spoken snippets.) There's also the quibble that encyclopedic content (sound) is not the same thing as encyclopedic form (structure): most of these tracks -- which tend to fall, at any given moment, anywhere along Forrest's typical rhythmic continuum from stiff, chopped-up electro-funk to spastic breakcore -- are arranged in a similar cobbled-together way that feels both highly deliberate and almost entirely arbitrary. And, predictably, there's little evidence of fashionable musical attributes like harmonic coherence, emotional expressiveness, and restraint (well, there is the closing "Isolation, Too," whose sparse, muted piano clusters and relatively minimal percussive interference seem to exist mostly for completeness' sake, viz the disclaimer-like title.) Truth in advertising aside, there's the major caveat to Forrest fans that this album contains few, if any, recognizable samples, so despite many stylistic similarities to his earlier work it's a considerably different sort of listening experience; less like a candy-coated culture-jamming spree (except, perhaps, conceptually) and more like an iconoclastic updating of the Ninja Tune stable's millennial cut'n'paste adventures. Which isn't necessarily to suggest this is a difficult album to enjoy. Two tracks in particular -- the nimble, Meters-like funk of "New Religion" and the swampy lurch of "Raunchy" (built around a bluesy, Link Wray-style guitar lick, and reminiscent of Unrelenting's CCR-sampling "Satan Cries Again") -- stand out as both the catchiest and, not coincidentally, most precise in their genre-glossing gestures. But there are other pleasures too -- "Crime of the Century"'s slinky, half-time stutter-step; "Keys to the Door"'s ersatz Steely Dan wankery; plenty of interspersed cartoonish, Carl Stalling-esque giddiness. Even if Forrest doesn't manage to be quite as deliriously exciting this time out, it's good to know that he remains shamelessly unrelenting.

French Horn Rebellion: The Infinite Music of French Horn Rebellion review

The Infinite Music of French Horn Rebellion is not infinite (though it is admittedly overlong), it's not particularly rebellious, and it features disappointingly few french horns. Apparently the Williamsburg-via-Wisconsin Perlick-Molinari brothers actually wish to rebel against the french horn (on which score this is, again, only a partial success), and more specifically against Robert P-M's classical music career, but it's not entirely clear what they'd like instead. The foundation here is workaday but well-executed electro-dance – a little bit sparkly neo-disco, a little bit glitchy blogfodder tech-pop – infused with a cheery, Fountains of Wayne/OKGO-style power-pop sensibility, with the occasional spacey chamber-psych diversion (where the horns come in, usually) tacked on, presumably, misguidedly, to bolster a sense of artful, album-like weight. You could cite the usual run of "nostalgic" '80s forebears, but really it feels like these guys are just imitating their contemporaries (Passion Pit, MGMT), and though their ambitiousness is appealing and the classical chops serve them well, true greatness in this vein (q.v. Cut Copy's In Ghost Colors) requires heart as well as craft.

Isolée: Well Spent Youth review

The last Isolée album, Wearemonster, was a watershed for minimal techno, and a richly deserving crossover success, injecting unprecedented warmth, melody and personality into the genre's steely sphere and presaging the so-called "maximalist" likes of Gui Boratto. Six years on, Rajko Müller's third full-length reverts to the comparatively mild, mannered microhouse of his first (2000's Rest), but it's markedly chillier and far less engaging. Despite the intriguingly woozy claustrophobia and jagged, intermittent funk bass incursions of opener "Paloma Triste" – a twisted Prince allusion in both title and sound – there's maddeningly little to hold on to here. Müller hasn't lost his attentiveness to fine detail – his sonic fingerprinting is still readily recognizable – but, at least in this context, these tracks mostly seem to meander aimlessly, with too little of his trademark tunefulness – the Monster-lite of "Taktell" and the wanly pretty "Celeste" are paltry exceptions – to save Youth from being a competent but ultimately drab, generic drag.

AMG + Cowbell review mega-round-up, volume XXIV: 2011 first half, vol. I [guitars]

2011-06-18T13:10:00.013-04:00

splitting my review output from the last six months – not just for allmusic but also my newest outlet, the funky-fresh new cowbell magazine – into two portions. this batch covers mostly rock, folk, pop, songwritery stuff, etc. – "music with guitars," for want of a better catch-all shorthand (even though it's not even always true.) music with (more) synthesizers up next. these are more or less in (descending) order of how much i like them:

Lykke Li: Wounded Rhymes review

Returning to the album game three years after the charmingly curious Youth Novels, Lykke Li Zachrisson has grown up and moved away a little bit from the rather timid, waifish, precocious young woman of her debut. She hasn't entirely let go of her girlish sweetness, and she certainly hasn't lost her way with a melodic hook, but she's largely outgrown the more cloyingly precious, occasionally clumsy tendencies that sometimes plagued her debut, and her singing voice, while still appealingly personable and distinctive, has gotten considerably more forceful. Indeed, despite its vulnerable title, Wounded Rhymes practically oozes confidence, barreling out of the gate with the swaggering, rabble-rousing "Youth Knows No Pain," all in-the-red handclaps, hip-shaking drums and tambourines, and downright nasty, psych-damaged organ, as Li sneeringly exhorts us to "C'mon honey, blow yourself to pieces." Even with a roughly even ratio of ballads to rockers, and a fair complement of woebegone lyrics, there's a similar sense of toughness throughout. But it's a fleshy, lived-in toughness, equally unabashed about declarations of love (the deeply romantic "I Follow Rivers," the powerfully passionate "Love out of Lust," and the borderline obsessive "Jerome"), and provocations like the fierce, sexually aggressive "Get Some." Musically, Li and returning producer/co-writer Bjorn Yttling (of Peter Bjorn and John) use the bare-bones, rhythmically oriented textures of Youth Novels (and of his band's 2009 album Living Thing) as a springboard, keeping starkly intimate vocals, clattering drums, and all manner of oddball percussion sounds at the forefront (check "Rivers"' fetchingly wonky, detuned xylophone riff), but they flesh things out somewhat with guitars and organs, frequently multiplying Li's voice to create an ad hoc backup choir, resulting in a considerably fuller-sounding effort that still feels grittily immediate and raw. Rhymes also reveals, and revels in, Li's fondness for '50s and '60s rock and pop, hearkening equally to classic girl group sounds and harder-edged garage rock. In fact, she and Yttling pull out just about every time-worn trick in the throwback pop playbook: doo wop arpeggios and "shoo-wop shoo-wop" backups on the gentle "Unrequited Love," a thunderous Bo Diddley beat and tremulous spy/surf guitar on "Get Some," seedy "96 Tears"-derived organ on "Rich Kid Blues," and "Be My Baby" drums, and Spector-ian orchestra bells on the big ballad centerpiece "Sadness Is a Blessing." But despite that plethora of knowing musical allusions, this is by no means a stale, cut-and-dried retro affair. On the contrary: it's an inspired, rugged, smart, emotive, coolly modern piece of indie pop, and an improvement on Lykke Li's debut in just about every respect.

East River Pipe: We Live In Rented Rooms review

Fred Cornog's seventh album of slow, sad home-recorded pop songs does not, when you get down to it, sound all that different from the first six. There are subtle changes: whether because of upgrades to his home studio gear over the years -- he recently traded in his trusty old Tascam 388 for a Korg D1600 mini-studio -- or his increased mastery of it, his music has evolved to the point that it can hardly be described as lo-fi any longer. We Live in Rented Rooms feels positively lush; despite the familiar, humble drum machines and no-frills strumming, it's brimming with warm, comforting keyboards and quietly meticulous arrangements, projecting a calm, unassuming stateliness. If anything, these songs are even slower than ever -- nothing exceeds a modest, amiable lope, and several numbers are so leisurely they barely seem to move at all. They also just might be the slightest bit less sad, or at least less self-loathing, although nothing remotely approaches cheerful (unless a line like "When you were doing cocaine/You never slept alone" qualifies). Certainly, in the five years since the last East River Pipe opus, the hard-luck stories and workaday misery that have always typified Cornog's songs have grown sadly all the more commonplace, which by design or circumstance makes Rented Rooms that much more poignant and topical. It's not hard, for example, to see the political resonance of a song like "Backroom Deals," which sketches, in a few simple lines, a sharp portrait of lifelong drudgery, hard-earned cynicism, and bitter complacency. The hymnlike, heartbreakingly beautiful "Three Ships," meanwhile, essentially allegorizes all of American history through the eyes of a Native who watches three European ships appear, only to depart leaving nothing but "highways and silicon deserts." Elsewhere, Cornog shows us individuals for whom creativity is hopelessly fraught (in "Tommy Made a Movie," whose titular figure is too psychologically self-crippling -- and too distracted by online porn -- to actualize his cinematic daydreams) and romance is inevitably compromised if not doomed to failure (the wistful "Summer Boy"; the wry standout "Payback Time"). With a few exceptions, it's usually ambiguous how directly personal these songs are for Cornog -- when he's drawing specifically from his own notoriously troubled life experiences and when he's looking further outside himself -- but it's ultimately insignificant. What matters is that this is some of the most economical and effective songwriting of his career, bolstered as always by his appealingly understated delivery and gorgeously crafted musical settings. In short: another astounding, resounding East River Pipe triumph.

Baby Dee: Regifted Light review

Baby Dee is one of the most enchanting and idiosyncratic figures in modern music, and even if her (quite inimitable) literal voice appears relatively little on this largely instrumental set, her distinctive personality – a blend of sentimentality, humor, quirky theatricality and a profound, big-hearted sense of wonder – shines marvelously throughout. Staking out largely new territory from the frequently dark, confessional cabaret of her past work, Regifted Light presents a series of brief, thematically-linked chamber pieces, oddly reminiscent of Aaron Copland at his most populist, variously incorporating strings, horn, glockenspiel, bassoon, temple blocks and more, but always featuring Dee's deliciously crisp piano playing (on Andrew WK's old Steinway, no less.) The four interspersed vocal numbers – particularly the magnificently silly "Pie Song" – are among the highlights, but the album plays as a cohesive suite, and despite (or maybe because of) its brevity and resounding lightheartedness, it's as powerful and affecting, in its way, as anything she's done, and probably all the more readily enjoyable.

Joan As Police Woman: The Deep Field review

"Deep" is a good adjective for the third album by the inimitable, unfathomable Joan Wasser. So are: thick, loose, rich, raw, murky, dangerous and, without a doubt, sexy. Also, patient. It's not nearly as immediate as her immaculate, crystalline debut, Real Life – tellingly, with just as many songs, it's twenty minutes longer. Gone are the achingly spare piano ballads; in their place is another sort of ache, the kind that sprawls out over gritty, slow-boiling funk and organ-drenched soul or, in the case of "Flash," eight minutes of pensive, amniotic floating. Nothing's under four minutes; the shortest cut, first single "Magic," is taut and buoyant enough to scan as pop, but much of Field veers far from conventional singer/songwriter fare. This is a songwriter's record – indeed, it's a powerfully frank treatise on love, lust and positivity – but it's also an astonishing vocal showcase, a rapturous mood piece and a killer blowing session. Wasser's versatility and fearlessness call to mind another Joan – the likewise underheralded Armatrading – but what she's concocted here is something entirely her own.

Kurt Wagner + Cortney Tidwell present KORT: Invariable Heartache review

The aptly named Kort is a collaboration between Kurt Wagner and Cortney Tidwell, two Nashville musicians whose credentials lie well outside the Music City mainstream: Wagner fronts the long-running Lambchop; Tidwell has released a couple of electronic art-pop records. Invariable Heartache is their heartfelt, albeit idiosyncratic, tribute to their hometown's venerable tradition of commercially oriented country music. More specifically, it finds the duo, along with a crack ensemble of local players (most of them members of Lambchop and/or Tidwell's band) laying down a set of obscure cover tunes primarily drawn from the '60s and '70s catalog of Chart records, the label run by Tidwell's grandfather, A&R'd by her dad, and for which her late mother recorded. The material spans slick, tuneful country-pop, plenty of soulful ballads, a bit of '50s-ish R&B ("Yours Forever"), playful semi-novelty songs (the good-naturedly bawdy "Wild Mountain Berries"), and one truly bizarre oddity ("Penetration," which sounds like the group having some sort of post-modern laugh but was apparently the most scrupulously reverent arrangement here; one wonders if that includes Tony Crow's haunted, abstract, minute-long piano intro.) Though there's a definite tendency toward endearingly formulaic schmaltz, many of the selections offer some sort of ear-catching quirk or lyrical distinction, be it hokey wordplay -- as with "I Can't Sleep With You" [...On My Mind]" -- or an especially heart-rending sentiment, like the self-explanatory "Incredibly Lonely," which provides the album's more-accurate-than-not title. Crucially, the band brings just the right touch to these performances, their obvious fondness and reverence for the material never getting in the way of a loose, expressive feel, with some very fine bits of soloing and lots of enjoyably breezy ensemble playing. That's doubly true of the vocals, which in some ways could have been this project's most hit-or-miss element. As it turns out, Wagner's characteristically laconic, crotchety-sounding, hyper-articulated delivery pairs beautifully with Tidwell's versatile but generally sweet-as-pie pipes. Certainly, they generate enough of a rapport to make one wish that more than half of the tunes were proper duets; while Tidwell can manage an effortless, spine-tingling Patsy Cline evocation, her five vocal features (Wagner only gets one, sounding pitifully dour on the legitimately poetic "April's Fool") tend to be the record's weaker links. The exception there is the closer, and sole non-chart inclusion (her mother sang it for ABC/Dunhill), "Who's Gonna Love Me Now," which is about as immaculately devastating as you could wish.

About Group: Start and Complete review

Start and Complete was recorded in a single day and mixed in three, with compositions that the players – a Brit alt/out panoply whose credits include This Heat, Spiritualized and Derek Bailey – had minimal time to learn. So listeners may be surprised to find that, far from a free improv excursion – a lá the group's first, eponymous outing for the Treader label – this is an album of heartfelt, blue-eyed bedsit soul. The extemporaneous working method absolutely translates into a wonderfully congenial looseness and immediacy, but notwithstanding the undeniably masterful ensemble-based musicianship on display, what it's really about this time is the inimitable singing and songwriting of Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor. Continuing in the tender, comforting vein of his band's triumphant One Life Stand, Taylor sets his croon on swoon and unleashes a dozen new heart-melters and bad-love ballads (plus one roiling, eleven-minute funk-workout cover) doused in warm Wurlitzers and swirling organs, til resistance is just about hopeless.

Zoey Van Goey: Propellor Vs. Wings review

Zoey Van Goey are a Glasgow indie pop group with connections to local legends like Belle & Sebastian and the Delgados. And while that's worth mentioning to provide a rough frame of reference for their sound, it should be stressed that they've gleaned at least as much from those two bands' adventurousness and idiosyncratic vision as they have any particular elements of musical style. They may belong to a proud tradition of scruffy Glaswegian pop bands, but they can hardly be pegged and dismissed as reverent genre traditionalists. Indeed, part of what makes their eminently likable second album, Propeller Versus Wings, initially tricky to pin down is that it refuses to stay in one place for long, skipping blithely from the dulcet, autumnal tones of "Mountain on Fire" and "Little Islands" to brisk, spiky pop bursts like the quirky, catchy "The Cake and Eating It," and flirting along the way with warbling cabaret-jazz ("My Aviator"), herky-jerky kiddie punk ("Robot Tyrannosaur"), and a smidge of country ("Extremities"). But the band has a strong enough voice that these peregrinations never feel like faceless genre exercises, or eclecticism for the sake of eclecticism. At least after a few listens to let it all sink in, the album's myriad modes hang together to present a coherent sensibility, the varied but complementary sides of the same sparkling personality: goofy at times, definitely a little geeky, but also sweet, sensitive, thoughtful, and often boldly romantic. Lyrically, Propeller touches on aspects of love, dreams, flying, and such painfully twee situations as buying 8-tracks in second-hand shops -- as well as helicopter crashes, fire-breathing monsters, and robotic dinosaurs -- but also more sobering topics like heartache, depression, and suicide. Apart from their commendable versatility, ZVG's chief calling card is their highly personable singing, especially Kim Moore's girlishly sweet soprano (recalling Kathryn Calder of the New Pornographers and Immaculate Machine -- incidentally, two other salient musical reference points) and Matt Brennan's warm, rich baritone. They're even better when they join vocal forces, especially on the album's spunkier, rockier moments. Chief among these is "You Told the Drunks I Knew Karate," an adorably dorky romp through Glasgow and a triumphant testament to young love and recklessness (with the excellent refrain: "I do the dumbest things for you") reminiscent of Los Campesinos!, with a touch of the Mountain Goats at their scrappiest. While it would be easy enough to continue lobbing apt but imprecise comparisons at them (the Magnetic Fields and Regina Spektor also come up frequently), Propeller Versus Wings shows Zoey Van Goey are capable of flying quite well on the strength of their own personality.

The Decemberists: The King Is Dead review

The King is Dead is, unquestionably, The Decemberists' most ordinary record. Markedly less ambitious – outwardly, anyway – than the byzantine story-songs and old-fangled, concept-driven folderol that reached an apogee on the thorny, toilsome Hazards of Love, these ten relatively straightforward songs, surveying a range of resolutely rootsy American rock and folk styles, present some artistic hazards of their own. There's an easily bungled subtlety, after all, to what troubadour-in-chief Colin Meloy calls "the complexity of simple songs." But while Meloy's distinctive dictionary-thumbing diction sticks out occasionally (and you kinda want to hug him for it), he and his band, with a few well-chosen confederates, pull off the gambit admirably. "Don't Carry It All" trades Picaresque's scene-setting shofar for a gloriously shrill harmonica, kicking off a rousing, full-throttle Americana anthem (complete with Gillian Welch, the indie generation's Emmylou Harris), while the superb, driving "Calamity Song" manages to both luxuriate in and transcend its blatant (and roundly, rightly reckoned) R.E.M.-iniscent qualities – Peter Buck's presence aside, it also emphasizes Meloy's Stipe-ian timbre and capacity for lyrical obfuscation (in this case, dreaming up the end of the world as we know it.) The album's other pleasures are often subtler: the gentle, moving "Rise to Me" (partially addressed to Meloy's young son); the pair of sweetly breezy seasonal "Hymns," recalling the calm clarity of the band's earliest days. There's no denying the familiarity of certain sounds here, but it's always resoundingly, recognizably the Decemberists, which, given their tendency toward stilted theatricality, feels surprisingly natural and comfortable. And if it occasionally gets a little bit dull – well, such are the perils of normalcy.

The Mountain Goats: All Eternals Deck review

Meticulously detailed yet poetically cryptic songs crammed full of emphatic imperatives, lists of objects, place names, photographic and cinematic imagery, ambiguously metaphorical melodrama, and elliptically sketched characters doomed to lives of regret, despair, terror or worse... yep, it's another Mountain Goats album. The fourteenth, depending how you count, though the first on Merge Records, an indie stalwart which has lately been building up an impressive roster of indie artists. John Darnielle is such a distinctive and prolific songwriter that it's easy to feel like he's repeating himself, and, sure, listeners who are comfortable with the amount of Mountain Goats already on their shelves probably needn't bother making space for what is essentially more of the same. But the man's also tremendously consistent; he's never offered up a less-than-intriguing set of tunes, and the 13 cuts on All Eternals Deck can stand alongside his finest: another baker's dozen of richly realized vignettes, some more narratively lucid than others, but none without at least a handful of wry, expressive, elegant, or otherwise worthy lines. There's no readily discernible theme or concept this time out, apart from a general (and hardly new) tendency toward darkness and dread, with occasional reference to the occult: songs mentioning vampires and ghosts; a title alluding to an apocryphal, and possibly invented, tarot deck. The album this most resembles is 2008's Heretic Pride, which was a similar grab bag lyrically, as well as, to some extent, musically. Sticking with the increasingly poised and polished full-band sound of the last several Mountain Goats releases -- plenty of piano, several lovely string arrangements, and fine work throughout from Darnielle's bandmates Peter Hughes (bass) and Jon Wurster (drums) -- much of All Eternals Deck sounds warm and relaxed, even lush. Outliers (and standouts) include the guardedly optimistic "Never Quite Free," with its breezy pedal steel, the spectral "High Hawk Season," which enlists a trio of male choristers who come across perhaps more like affably drowsy barbershop ghosts than the "spirit throngs" of the lyrics, and a couple of bona fide rockers: "Prowl Great Cain" (an account of unconscionable remorse which may or may not be about its biblical namesake), and especially the ripping "Estate Sale Sign," which surveys the detritus of a disastrously failed relationship (with distinct shades of Darnielle's old "Alpha Couple") in the nearest we get to an anthem on the level of "This Year" or "No Children." Nothing here's likely to attract new converts quite the way those tunes did, but this is still a very easy Mountain Goats album to like and to recommend, whether it's your first or fourteenth.

The Strokes: Angles review

Five years after an archetypically difficult third album that yielded middling reviews and a surprising degree of indifference (even though, from this distance, its purported "experiments" sound like nothing more or less than energetic, inventively crafted rock songs), the five men once hailed as rock'n'roll's sainted saviors have both a lot to live up to and, somehow, strangely little to lose. Angles, outwardly, reverts to the tightly streamlined form of the first two Strokes LPs – 10 tracks, 34 minutes; minimal margin for excess. But the way they pack that dense half-hour betrays hardly any hint of backpedaling. Full of stylistic curveballs, compositional left turns, screwy sonics, skewed '80s pop pastiche and fantastically scrawly soloing, this is easily the wildest and weirdest they've ever sounded; if not exactly sloppy then certainly gleefully uncalculated. True, slap-happy loss leader "Under Cover of Darkness" overtly evokes their era-defining early singles (albeit with the menace replaced by vaguely Footloose-ish forced mirth), but nothing else sounds remotely like the output of a formula. Hence, while the sneaky syncopations and power-pop goodies of "Machu Picchu" and "Taken for a Fool" feel very nearly irresistible, it's likely most listeners' mileage will vary track by track, particularly in the slippery second half. The trademark tenseness (and tinniness) of the band's younger days are still around, especially on the jagged, tightly-wound "You're So Right" and "Metabolism," but Angles also manifests a newfound looseness, most palpably on "Gratisfaction," a breezy, Stones-y good-times shuffle. That freewheeling spirit, alongside all the kitchen-sink tinkering and a brightly trashy, plastic-pop aural aesthetic, occasionally comes at the expense of the band's habitual melodic elegance (both vocal and instrumental), but more than not it translates into a whole lot of inspired, bristly rock'n'roll fun.

Lenka: Two review

Anybody who was hoping the second Lenka album would be a dark, moody, sober, edgy, or in any way downcast affair is, first of all, probably not a very realistic person and, secondly, gearing up for a serious disappointment. Otherwise, it's hard to imagine anybody being disappointed by the Australian sparkle-pop princess' sophomore outing, which is every bit as lovably bright and sunny as her debut. (Unless, of course, the listener in question doesn't have the stomach for this sort of frothy, sugary-sweet musical confection to begin with -- which is certainly understandable, though still a darn shame.) That said, Two definitely does have a bit more bite than its predecessor, and a slightly more modern sound, tending away from Lenka's lavish, Hollywood-style orchestrations toward lightly embellished small-group arrangements and, occasionally, sleek electro-pop. The major exception is first single "Roll with the Punches," a big, buoyant creampuff of a tune that revisits the singsong cadence of Lenka's breakout hit "The Show," with all the requisite layers of strings, trumpets, organs, and backing vocals. But the other similarly "vintage"-styled swing numbers here -- the bouncy "Everything's Okay" and cutie-pie nursery rhyme "Everything at Once" -- keep things relatively simple and piano-based. Meanwhile, the title cut shows Lenka at her leanest and meanest, with a stripped-down kicks'n'claps beat and a funky acoustic guitar/fuzz-toned synth bass riff. "Blinded by Love" and "Here to Stay" are classically styled pop/rock ballads that go easy on the instrumental theatrics, instead gleaning their emotional power from Lenka's increasingly impressive singing and songcraft. And the slinky "You Will Be Mine" shows that she could hack it as a competent (if somewhat faceless) seductive indie electro diva, although the sparkly, effervescent "Shocked Me into Love" is a far more gratifying synth pop foray, sounding not unlike a young Kylie Minogue at her bubbliest, and just a remix away from serious dance chart potential. It's a considerable stylistic range for one album, but Lenka pulls it off and keeps it cohesive, thanks to an unerring gift for melody and a subtly sophisticated understanding of pop poetics. She knows how these things can work in reverse -- "Sing me a sad song and make me feel better/Sing me a happy song and I might start to cry," she croons on the deceptively titled "Sad Song" -- which might explain why perhaps the sweetest number here is about the apocalypse: "The End of the World," which plays as sort of an inverse of a Skeeter Davis classic. All told, Two is just as wonderfully winning as its predecessor, fully deserving a spot alongside it (and alongside Regina Spektor, Marit Larsen, and the Bird and the Bee) on the top shelf of shiny-smart, retro-contemporary happy pop.

Thao and Mirah: Thao and Mirah review

For a collaboration between a couple of noted songwriters, it's striking that the songs are often the least interesting thing about Thao & Mirah. There are a handful which stand out on their own merits -- Thao Nguyen's singsongy "How Dare You," an R&B-tinged call-and-response that's the only proper duet here; Mirah Zeitlyn's characteristically hushed, thoughtful "Hallelujah," which dares to brush against the deathless Leonard Cohen classic and fares impressively well, considering. But by and large, the album is more notable and enjoyable as an exploration of sounds and textures (both instrumental and vocal) than as a collection of melodies and lyrics. The tip-off comes early, with the joyfully dense, clattering opener "Eleven," an energetic if loosely structured three-way collision with Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs, who provides not only the simple, lusty vocal hook (tellingly, and perhaps a little troublingly, the most memorable one here) but also a hefty dose of her band's percussion-heavy, chant-friendly, loopy D.I.Y. spirit. Garbus also co-produced the album and contributes instrumentally or vocally to all but one song (that's two more than Nguyen, who sits out on three of Zeitlyn's five solo compositions), and it's tempting to imagine what they might work up together as a fully collaborative trio -- Mirah, Thao & Merrill, which might have been a more accurate title here anyway. Nothing else bears Garbus' influence quite so overtly, though it's not hard to hear her fingerprints on, for instance, Zeitlyn's breathily sultry "Rubies and Rocks," whose simmering, Afro-tinged groove and swirling horn riffs eventually develop into a full-on jazz-funk blowout. Of course, there's also plenty of room for the distinct and notably divergent voices of the much-loved marquee duo. And they manage a more successful and satisfying merger than on their previous collaborative venture, a joint 2010 tour wherein Thao's livelier, rockier numbers alternated incongruously and sometimes disruptively with Mirah's softer acoustic folk. Here the pair find a wide-ranging middle ground, with some fruitful artistic stretching on both sides -- Thao trading rangy rock for tender prettiness on "Teeth" and "Folks" (but letting it out on the scrappy, screwball slide-fest "Squareneck"); Mirah taking a playfully bluesy turn on "Sugar and Plastic" (and saving her habitual solemnity for the oddly humorless sci-fi oddity "Spaced Out Orbit" ). It's not an especially coherent album, nor a very revealing one, offering surprisingly little insight into Thao & Mirah's relationship either as musical or romantic partners. But it does sound like they're having fun, and that counts for a good deal.

Sorry Bamba: Volume One: 1970-1979 review

The fascinating decentralization of African music dissemination proceeds with Thrill Jockey's second Malian release of the year, one that's worlds from the rustic desert folk-blues of Sidi Touré. Hitherto little-known in the West, the orphaned Sorry Bamba defied his noble birth caste to become one of the recently independent Mali's most prominent bandleaders, competing successfully in multiple National Biennial celebrations during the period showcased here. As befits a state-endorsed post-colonial cultural effort, these selections (compiled by Extra Golden's Alex Minoff and Ian Eagleson with input from an enthusiastic 73-year-old Bamba) find a deft balance between heritage and modernization, with a mixture of populist originals and folk songs (representing three distinct ethnic groups); traditional percussion combined with spry electric guitars, horns and the occasional psych-dappled synthesizer (plus Bamba's piercing flute and vigorous vocals), and swirling, lavishly hypnotic grooves that, while not as dense or forceful as Fela's afrobeat, display some palpably Western soul and funk influences – and, on "Astan Kelly," the unmistakable rhythms of Cuban salsa. Speaking of unexpected borrowings, the sweetly harmonized "Aïssé" is distinctly reminiscent of another "Bamba": the familiar Son Jarocho made famous by Ritchie Valens.

Radio Dept: Passive Aggressive: Singles 2002-2010 review

The dreamy, fuzz-loving Swedes of the Radio Dept. built up an impressive amount of critical respect and a small but devoted following over the course of a career that often seemed as hazy, understated, discreet, and ephemeral as their music typically feels. Issued in the wake of 2010's well-received Clinging to a Scheme, which earned the band their highest profile to date, this fittingly titled collection takes a somewhat selective approach to the A-sides-plus-B-sides singles-comp strategy. The Radio Dept. are great candidates for this treatment: like any indie pop outfit worth their salt, they've amassed a considerable catalog of 7" singles, EPs, and stray digital tracks, alongside their leisurely paced (three in eight years) album output. Especially since much of that material is at least as strong as the stuff that made it to the albums, this collection will be just as worthwhile for newcomers to the band as for all but the most obsessively completist fans: true completists might, conceivably, already have most or all of these tracks, but more casual fans will be happy to note that, of the 14 A-sides on the first disc, only a mere six overlap with the albums. Those six -- sterling dream pop nuggets all -- are clear highlights here, naturally enough, but there's also plenty else of interest: the lusciously depressive "This Past Week," the late-2010 internet single "The New Improved Hypocrisy," whose melody is as sharp as its politics, and, curiously, an early cover of the Scottish folk song "Annie Laurie." The second disc of B-sides (which, incidentally, includes nothing from the group's two standalone EPs) may not host as many immediately obvious standouts, though there are a few definite keepers toward the end, including the tremendously sweet and tender "On Your Side," but it's arguably an equally strong listening experience, one which emphasizes the band's overwhelming preoccupation with texture (particularly on the several instrumentals, and songs with vocals so muffled they might as well be instrumentals). Since the As and Bs are segregated, but both sequenced chronologically, the two discs present more or less parallel arcs tracing how that approach to texture developed over the years: an essentially linear progression from rougher, guitar-based noise-pop to a more refined, more electronically oriented, cleaner -- though no less hazy -- sound (along with the occasional reggae flirtation.) It wasn't necessarily all that great of a stylistic distance to traverse, but it's certainly been a pleasurable journey. And while there are quite a few extant non-album cuts that might have found space on a more slavishly inclusive comp, what is included here is pretty close to perfect.

Cass McCombs: WIT'S END review

In several sometimes perplexing ways, Cass McCombs' fifth full-length outing, Wit's End, veers moderately but decisively away from the appealingly direct, rootsy indie folk of its predecessor, Catacombs. In its place is a stark, occasionally stifling collection of dark, literary, chamber folk, melodramatic piano balladry, and one sterling piece of country-pop classicism. Album-opener "County Line" is a quiet stunner: a mellow-grooving country-soul burner so achingly smooth you'd swear it was a turn-of-the-'70s chestnut from the L.A. soft rock scene -- a stray cut from the vaults of Asylum Records, perhaps, or maybe a particularly glossy tune by the Band -- complete with that iconic Fender Rhodes twinkle. (Its restrained melancholy and vintage-styled craftsmanship also call to mind Beck's Sea Change.) But it's hardly an accurate indication of what's to come, at least musically: although several songs feature a similar instrumental palette, and the moody, subdued tone persists throughout, nothing else here is nearly as warm or winningly melodic. Lyrically, "County Line"'s tale of loss and rueful homecoming (seemingly about a hometown transformed by new development, rather than a doomed romantic relationship, though it could be both) is just a taste of the darkness and desperation that, as the album's title hints at, pervade these eight songs. Elsewhere, we get the desolate, jilted lover of the maudlin "Saturday Song," the chilling "Buried Alive" (whose title is evidently not metaphorical), and the wracked "Hermit's Cave," which plays like a gloomier variation on the Beach Boys' "That's Not Me" with an added dose of mysticism. When McCombs' often heavily stylized, antiquarian verse is paired with a suitably intriguing arrangement (as on "Memory Stain," a forlorn piano waltz that gets some much-needed color and lift via accordion, bass clarinet, and a few well-placed castanets) or a decently forward-moving melody ("Buried Alive," which is both tender and almost delightfully macabre), the results can be effective, if not exactly inviting. On the other hand, no amount of celeste can save "The Lonely Doll," an overly precious fable set to a maddeningly harmonically static waltz -- with the title phrase repeated after every awkward couplet -- from being utterly insufferable. The album's most ambitious -- and, possibly excepting the incongruous "County Line," most successful -- moment comes with nine-minute closer "A Knock Upon the Door," a rambling narrative ballad and yet another waltz, this time with a rustic, old world lilt spiced up with a coolly sinister backing combo of banjo, bass clarinet, organ, chalumeau (a Baroque relative of the recorder), and found-sound percussion. It's the most potent and captivating expression of the gothic sensibility that runs through Wit's End, and one of a few potentially promising directions suggested by this odd, somewhat bewildering, and perhaps hopefully transitional effort.

An Horse: Walls review

Rearrange Beds wasn't exactly the most spectacular or innovative debut in indie rock history, but it introduced An Horse as an immensely likable band, getting plenty of mileage out of sheer, nervy energy, an old-fashioned allegiance to a certain loud-and-proud indie/punk ethos, and the scrappy interplay between Damon Cox's fiery drumming, Kate Cooper's churning guitar work, and her breathlessly ardent (and endearingly accented) vocals. (The duo's fresh-faced, spunky blond looks didn't hurt either.) Well, the first words out of Cooper's mouth on Walls are as follows: "I have nothing new to tell you since the last time I wrote." Sure enough, the Aussie twosome mostly stick to a tried-and-true approach for album number two, which should come as good news to those already in sway to their considerable charms. The album's front end, in particular, serves notice that not too much has changed: there may not be a standout here that comes close to the poppily anthemic "Camp Out," but "Dressed Sharply" and the driving "Trains and Tracks" are reasonably serviceable substitutes, and there's plenty more tunefully gritty rock where those came from. But there's also a slightly frustrating sense of stagnancy which isn't necessarily helped by the occasional signs of musical growth. The duo's playing has gotten tighter and more refined, with Cox in particular unleashing some impeccably precise bursts of ferocity behind the kit: check the fireballing "Trains" and his merciless snare work on the tightly wound "Leave Me." But Cooper's songs don't always match that energy; the title track's acoustic guitars and group harmonies make for a nice change of pace, but much of the album's latter half feels overly restrained, and even uncharacteristically subdued. So while Walls generally finds An Horse treading water, enjoyably enough for the most part, it also suggests that they've arrived at a slight impasse as to how to proceed from here; how to balance artistic development and expansion with the youthful urgency and directness that has marked their best moments, at least so far. It's a classic, all-too-familiar sophomore-album quandary, and it's somehow reassuring, even endearing, to know that An Horse are sticking to the script.

Eddie Vedder: Ukulele Songs review
There's an unshakable, perhaps not unsuitable taint of novelty about any one-off ukulele record, and the discrepancy between Eddie Vedder's notorious earnestness and the instrument's frivolous associations make this one seem especially punchline-worthy. But it doesn't sound that way, even if that tension is subtly evident throughout. Vedder has his sweetness; the uke has its quiet integrity, and the two find a way to make it work; the singer tempering his tremulous baritone to meet the instrument's cheery brightness halfway. He's not half playful enough for this to truly feel like a lark, but he's smart enough to keep the stakes small, devoting over a third of the disc to perennial standards – "Dream a Little Dream," "More Than You Know," the Everly Brothers' classic "Sleepless Nights" and perhaps the ultimate uke tune, "Tonight You Belong To Me" – inviting his buddies Glenn and Chan to duet on the latter two. And while Vedder's originals falter when they venture into rockier terrain, and (of course) can't compete with the genuine golden oldies, he does just fine when he sticks to the ukelele's proper métier: sweet, simple love songs.

Fredrik: Flora review

By the time of Flora, Fredrik's third full-length, the Malmö, Sweden-based outfit expanded into a trio with the inclusion of an additional multi-instrumentalist/vocalist, Anna Moberg. But relatively little changed in terms of their music, which remains highly tactile, atmospheric, gently surreal folk-pop, although that genre tag hardly does justice to the idiosyncratic particulars of their sound, as they continue to wander gradually further from anything readily recognizable as either folk or pop. Meanwhile, their careful attention to intimate, intricate sonic detail has only deepened, with a new profusion of curious, clattering, enchanted, and occasionally haunted soundscapes; instruments listed in the credits this time include balalaika, zither, alto horn, music box, glass objects, owl whistles, and "tree trunk kalimba," but it can sometimes be hard to envision how music this murky and mystical could even be of human origin. Tonally and energetically, Flora falls somewhere in between its two predecessors: there's a greater sense of activity and a more pronounced rhythmic drive than on the largely subdued, often somber Trilogi (particularly on the pounding "Chrome Cavities" and the polyrhythmic, cowbell-led instrumental "The North Greatern," though it's true throughout), but Flora never quite recaptures the clarity and brightness that made certain moments of their debut, Na Na Ni, so utterly captivating. Song for song, none of Flora's seven vocal numbers (there are four brief instrumentals) announces itself with the melodic charm and arresting simplicity of "Black Fur" or "1986," or even Trilogi standout "Flax," although the sweetly tuneful "Inventress of Ill" is in the same general ballpark. But by this point in their career it's clear that Fredrik are less interested in creating immediate, hummable stand-alone numbers than they are in crafting an expansive, evocative listening experience. They haven't lost the ability to pen strong, simple melody lines -- there is still a handful of them here -- but the often dense, mesmeric layers of sound surrounding them, combined with Fredrik Hultin's typically hushed, understated vocal delivery, render them far less prominent. Still, it's hard to deny that their music has grown richer as it's gotten subtler, and in keeping with that tendency Flora is their lushest, dreamiest, most sonically and texturally abundant exploration to date.

Here We Go Magic: The January EP review

Just less than a year on from Pigeons, a sophomore album that found Here We Go Magic simultaneously expanding their personnel, stylistic scope, and mainline indie rock critical profile, the Brooklyn quintet returned with the inexplicably titled January EP. (Perhaps they decided to split the difference between the May release date and the Halloween-ish cover art.) Pigeons already felt like a somewhat less than coherent grab bag of odds and ends, so the prospect of six holdovers from the time of its recording isn't overwhelmingly enticing. But January acquits itself surprisingly well, often offering a sharper sense of focus than its parent album. Not that anything here is a major departure from Pigeons' hazy, lazy psychedelia, but tunes like the gently pretty, Shins-ish "Hands in the Sky" and the jaunty, slightly goofy "Backwards Time" arguably boast sharper, clearer melodies than anything included there. The brightly woozy five-beat psych-popper "Tulip" and the gorgeously lilting "Song in Three" (which is actually in six) also manage to make more out of less, highlighting the band's gift for unobtrusively subtle rhythmic complexity, while the brief "Hollywood" is an enjoyably eerie bit of sparse, spectral choral folk. That leaves only one truly negligible cut, making this EP a definite keeper for fans and worth a listen for the curious. Even if the primary common characteristic of this stuff is how exceedingly pleasant it all is, there's always a place for that, regardless of what month it is.

AMG review round-up, volume XXIII: 2010's tomatoes = 2011's ketchup

2011-06-18T12:28:00.006-04:00

okay, tomatoes is a bit harsh – i like some of these records very much, even if none of them is really an especial favorite. but i'm definitely in catch-up mode here: this is the last batch of 2010 albums i reviewed for all music guide, only about half a year late. well, one or two of them are 2010 albums i only managed to actually review in 2011 (not necessarily for want of trying.) proceeding here in no particular order, let's start off with one of those:

Gold Panda: Lucky Shiner review

London-based beatmaker Derwin Panda (for want of a more plausible surname) is one of the most appealing and subtly distinctive producers to emerge in recent years, with a versatile, emotionally resonant style, a keen sense of texture, and an equally strong melodic bent. Blowing against the prevailing electronic musical winds of his particular place and time -- i.e., dubstep and its myriad offshoots -- his music can instead be likened, at least in places, to the hypnotic, hip-hop-influenced work of Los Angelenos like Nosaj Thing and Flying Lotus, the tender glitch-pop of Dntel (see, especially, the complementary "Before We Talked" and "After We Talked"), and the gliding, quasi-ambient trance of the Field (check "Snow & Taxis" and "Marriage"). More than anything, though, Lucky Shiner posits Panda as a true successor, even a peer, to his inimitable countryman Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet, particularly in light of the latter's recent, clubbier output. One thing he shares with Hebden, and all of the aforementioned artists, is a fundamental focus on texture, which manifests both at the level of individual sounds -- most of these tracks' constituent elements have a highly organic warmth and graininess, including plenty of artifactual static and vinyl crackle -- and at the macro level of composition and layering. Like Four Tet and the Field, Gold Panda's music is largely sample-based, with its source material chopped up into such short, clipped fragments (then rearranged into stuttering, yet strangely fluid, heavily rhythmic "melodies") that it sometimes recalls the microsampling of producers like Matthew Herbert. A good example is the stunning opener, "You," probably Lucky Shiner's greatest highlight: a sliced-and-diced, sitar-laced snippet of the titular word (and, occasionally, "me"), repeated in incessant syncopation atop a steady but constantly evolving backdrop of tambourines and flute-like drones, pegged to a slinky, half-time boom-clap oddly reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails' "Closer." "Vanilla Minus" and "Snow & Taxis," the most straightforwardly constructed pieces here, function similarly, with ostinato sample-riffs and a dance-friendly 4/4 thump. But even Lucky Shiner's simplest moments manage to be tremendously engaging and effective, thanks to the freshness and evocative power of the specific sounds involved. As hinted by track titles like "Same Dream China" and "India Lately" (as well as "Quitter's Raga," his 2009 breakthrough track, and, incidentally, his moniker itself), Gold Panda often draws on a distinct if diffuse Asian influence, employing a wide array of Eastern sounds and timbres -- bells, flutes, strings, chanting, percussion, etc. -- which are novel enough to sound fresh but usually treated with a sufficient degree of distance and abstraction to avoid the canned exoticism of "ethno-techno." With its array of vibrant, vivid sounds, pop-friendly track structures and lengths (mostly three to five minutes), and emphasis on emotion and musicality, Lucky Shiner is an immensely likable and listenable album that should appeal to listeners of many stripes.

Radioclit: present the Sound of Club Secousse, Vol. 1 review

London-based DJ/production duo Radioclit, best known for their work with Malawian singer Esau Mwamwaya as the Very Best, compiled this top-notch collection of street-level African dance anthems, all of which have become favorites in their DJ sets worldwide and specifically at their monthly Secousse parties in London and Paris. (Though note that the selections here are presented in complete, unmixed form.) The word "secousse" is French for "shake," aptly enough, and it's also the source of the term soukous, the Congolese dance music that's just one of the myriad musical styles surveyed here. Pulling together tracks with roots all over sub-Saharan Africa, the compilation offers glimpses of contemporary urban club sounds and scenes from across the continent -- most notably Angolan kuduru, Côte d'Ivoirian coupé decalé, South African shangaan disco/electro, and Cabo Verdean funaná -- but despite a well-informed curatorial approach there's clearly no emphasis on cultural anthropology or painstaking genre delineation: to the contrary, it's all about cross-pollination and infectious, spirited engagement. Reflecting the restlessly recombinant spirit of global post-colonial "ghetto pop" culture, this music is a colorful tangle of cheap-sounding electronic beats, tinny synths, warmly fluid guitars, polychromatic tropical percussion, and all manner of fiery, fluttery, sung, shouted, and semi-spoken vocals, borrowing from hip-hop, Caribbean music, house, and techno as well as any number of more traditional African cultural forms. The whole affair is frantic, immediate, joyous, and, of course, relentlessly danceable, right from the drop of Bab Lee's urgent, pounding instrumental banger "Sous les Cocotiers," but there's a rough progression from more overtly musical, comparatively relaxed fare to increasingly frenzied, preposterously high-bpm selections, peaking with the chintzy organs and manic, soca-inflected pace of Naty Kid's "Sereia" and Tshetsha Boys' "Mosemana Wa Dikgomo," two cuts whose merciless intensity is liable to induce fatigue among home listeners (not to mention dancers), but which nevertheless fit right into the energetic flow. A few more particular highlights include Magic System's cheerful "Petit Pompier," a mildly blippy Afro-pop charmer with irresistible chanted harmony vocals, Jusa Dementor's gleefully demented "African Airhorn Dance," which introduces vuvuzelas to Auto-Tune over a thumping UK Funky beat, and Kaysha's anthemic, "Axel F"-paraphrasing "On Est Ensemble." Tremendous fun throughout, and highly recommended.

Husky Rescue: Current Affair Medium Rare review

Britta Persson's third collection of smart, spiky indie rock/pop is well named, at least if you gloss the title as something like "modern relationships, served semi-bloody." As is by now habitual, this batch of tunes mostly finds the Swedish songwriter experiencing various shades of ambivalence, anxiety, alienation, and regret regarding her attempts to find connection with other humans, whether she's expressing exasperation at a friend's superficiality ("Still Friends"), remembering exes with something less than fondness ("Annoyed to Death," "Time Machine"), or just generally, pensively pondering the perverse complexity of the whole romantic enterprise ("Some Girls Some Boys"). Persson's gradually broadening musical modus -- rooted in an artfully deliberate, guitar-heavy, tough 'n' tender approach that's been relatively rare in songwriterly circles since the late '90s or so -- is a good match for her unflinching, occasionally squirm-inducing lyrics; both her words and her songs feel at once wary and yet a little uncomfortably exposed. Still, she never entirely lets go of that small, nagging spark of optimism: in "He Flies a Jet," she pleads with a pilot to return her safely to a new lover (even if, she admits, "I might have told you differently last time"), while a couple numbers find her gamely striking out again "with hopes to discover/the big fuss about being a lover." Perhaps not coincidentally, those songs -- "Big Fuss" and "For the Steadiness" -- feature two of the album's biggest, catchiest choruses (in the latter case, a frantically peppy refrain that's somewhat uncomfortably grafted onto much slower verses), forming a nice counterpoint to the more subtle, subdued melodic pleasures sprinkled elsewhere, like the lilting minor-key guitar line that winds through "If You Don't Love Him." The best things here, though, are the intriguingly dark, driving "Meet a Bear" -- which is, among other things, about wanting to empower teenaged Japanese girls to leave unhealthy relationships with older men -- and the surprisingly sweet "Toast to M," a touching reflection on a friend's suicide that adopts a curious but never accusatory or condemnatory attitude, and offers an oddly anthemic, rousing refrain: "We don't hold your suicide against you." Though it's slightly front-loaded with these highlights, Current Affair Medium Rare is a solid effort throughout -- perhaps not quite up to the level of 2008's very fine Kill Hollywood Me, but definitely close, and an entirely worthy successor.

Devon Sproule: Live in London review

Devon Sproule's not only one of the finest roots-folk songwriters to emerge in the last decade, she's also a tremendously charming live performer. So there's plenty good cause for a document of the young Virginian in action, and the U.K. -- where she's perversely managed to attract a much larger following than in her home country -- is an appropriate venue for it (even if, given how vividly and specifically Sproule's songwriting draws from her Southern small-town experience, a recording of a hometown Charlottesville gig might be even more fitting.) This release, compiled from a couple of 2009 performances with a strong supporting band including legendary pedal steel player B.J. Cole, offers just about all fans could ask for from such a proposition: faithful but gorgeously loose recastings of several of her best songs, a generous smattering of covers, and a bit of characteristically personable banter. Of course, that said, this is hardly a replacement for catching Sproule in person, and neither does it supersede her excellent studio recordings. Newcomers will find plenty to enjoy here, but they'd be even better served with any of her three previous albums -- especially 2007's Keep Your Silver Shined, though each is stellar in its own right. The CD portion of Live in London contains two originals from each of those three albums, including a lovely, extended rendition of her 2003 masterpiece "Plea for a Good Night's Rest," and is rounded out with five covers, among which are some of the finest treats here. Along with her lively bluegrass take on the traditional "Weeping Willow" and her curious, slinky reading of Black Uhuru's "Sponji Reggae" (both previously recorded), she features two excellent songs written by friends: Megan Huddleston's deliciously dark, murderous "One Eye Open," and Matty Charles' "Steady and True," a wonderfully tender love song that could easily pass for an old-time folk chestnut. There's also an unlisted encore rendition of Johnny Cash's "I Still Miss Someone," done as a sparse and wistful duet with her husband (and guitarist) Paul Curreri; a re-creation, as she explains here, of the first night they met. The DVD portion of this package, while worth a look for fans, is definitely more of a bonus than a selling point in itself: it's a 45-minute film containing eight songs -- only three of which are not duplicated on the CD, including "I Wanna Die in My Shoes," a funky new co-composition with Curreri and an amusing back story -- well performed, but somewhat amateurishly, "artfully" shot (with an excess of quick cuts, extreme close-ups, and odd camera angles) and intercut with obnoxiously nonsensical "tour footage."

Husky Rescue: Ship of Light review

The third outing from this Helsinki-based crew is an impressionistic voyage through icy Nordic soundscapes and atmospheric pop, with captain and head dream weaver Marko Nyberg at the tiller, deftly navigating his band through little-charted interstices of sound -- touching on orchestral grandeur, acoustic folk, hazy synth-draped ambience, and surprisingly robust rock -- and of emotion -- evoking both wistful sweetness and dark, melancholic gloom without fully succumbing to either. If that description makes the album sound like so much amorphous sonic wallpaper, well, it does make for perfectly lovely background music, but it's also got a bit more character than many similarly inclined operations. Once again, Reeta Vestman (née Korhola)'s wispy vocals -- texturally slight, even babyish (and certainly far from husky), but striking nonetheless -- provide a crucial focal point, whether menacingly whispered (as on "When Time Was on Their Side"), layered over themselves (as on the curious, sing-song quasi-lullaby "Beautiful My Monster"), paired with Nyberg's or left to their lonesome plaintive purity. But her voice is only one on an album full of distinctive sounds -- symphonic and synthesized, ordinary and otherworldly -- that are regularly blended in fluid and intriguing ways. Ambient-folk interlude "Grey Pastures, Still Waters," for instance, intersperses woodland animal noises and alien spaceship bleeps over a bed of placid, space age lounge; shape-shifting album standout "Wolf Trap Motel" spends over half of its length as a gentle, electric piano-led instrumental before a fleeting, glorious French horn note ushers in Vestman's vocal, an enchanting transformation even if she does little more than list the names of the days. Across the spectrum from these dreamy offerings are the livelier and somewhat more commonplace likes of "Fast Lane" and "We Shall Burn Bright," driving rock tracks which call the Arcade Fire to mind in their anthemic urgency, bringing loud guitars and drums to the forefront without lacking for the sonic inventiveness present throughout the album. They aren't bad songs, but their energy feels somewhat out of place here, coming off in this context as cluttered and pedestrian, and highlighting the challenges of combining expansive and adventurous soundscaping with direct, conventionally minded songwriting. There is, though, at least one entirely successful marriage of melody and moodiness: "Sound of Love," a simple, circular tune with a taut, danceable beat that pairs shadowy oddness and an instantly ear-catching hook, and forms a welcome portal -- or should that be porthole? -- into Ship of Light's lush, luminous leisure cruise.

Kendl Winter: Apple Core review

Kendl Winter is an Arkansas-born, Olympia-based picker and songwriter who's active in numerous bands in the area and has a handful of solo albums under her belt as well. Her fourth, Apple Core, first appeared in early 2010 in a handmade limited run of 250 available on Etsy.com, but was picked up for reissue later in the year by local D.I.Y. mainstay K Records, making it her first release to see wider distribution. As that history suggests, Apple Core is a proudly homespun affair: it was recorded in a basement and on a boat in Puget Sound, and features spirited, skillful musicianship that nevertheless emphasizes feel over precision -- and it sounds every bit as warm and inviting as you would imagine. Roughly a third of the album is overtly bluegrass-based; the remainder is tuneful indie folk with more or less pronounced country influences. (Though even the least country-inflected number, the opening urban-bohemian biking ode "Made It Through the Yellow," features a sufficiently folksy pronunciation of "avant-garde" to let us know we needn't worry about any arty indie pretensions here.) It may be largely a one-woman show -- Winter's acoustic guitar and banjo work and her sweetly twangy vocals (and multi-tracked harmonies) form the album's core, sometimes augmented by slide guitar, piano, drums, and the occasional fiddle or horn section -- but there's a friendly, collective, front-porch vibe throughout. Winter's songwriting is sweet but not too sticky -- her conversational lyrics, on everyday love, life, and death, peppered with pastoral imagery and the occasional good-natured joke, don't always leave a strong impression, though she fares better on the topical "Dr. Tiller," a pointed pro-choice ballad documenting the 2009 murder of Wichita abortion provider George Tiller, and the title cut, a two-part fiddle tune/nursery rhyme pairing backyard lovesickness metaphors with gardening tips (and banana slug taunts). But she's got plenty of gently soaring melodies to make up for it, with the loping, low-key "Dance Gently on My Grave" and the farewell waltz "On to Me" offering two of the most memorable. All told, a winning introduction to an easily likable talent who will hopefully have plenty more to offer in the future.

Simian Mobile Disco: Is Fixed review

James Ford and James Shaw are no strangers to the DJ mix. Back when they were two-fourths of the eclectically sunny, latter-day Brit-pop group Simian, they created a handful of highly enjoyable promotional mixes which, embracing the "anything goes" mash-up spirit of the times, slotted the likes of Kenny Rogers and Dr. John alongside more typical techno and hip-hop selections, or, in the case of 2002's Simian Mobile Disco mix, whose title would later became the name of the pair's production outfit, found equal space for Aaliyah, Tom Zé, Squarepusher, Beenie Man, Kraftwerk, and the Byrds. After Simian disbanded, the Jameses' mix output has edged gradually closer to more conventional, electronica-bound territory; their 2008 installment in the FabricLive series -- their highest-profile mix to date -- snuck in oddities by left-field grandaddies Moondog and Raymond Scott, along with a smattering of house classics, but otherwise kept things mostly minimal and recent. This 2010 offering, the duo's first domestically released mix in the U.S. (and the first in a series celebrating the New York party Fixed), follows suit, maintaining a strict, synth-heavy focus, with almost all the cuts dating from the past two years. Is Fixed arrived just in time for Halloween, which is a good thing because this is one dark, spooky dance set: kicking off with the retro-Italo horror-disco of Etienne Jaumet, highlighting the warped, gothic intonations of Pantha du Prince's "Behind the Stars," and Bam Bam's feverish, acid-jacking 1988 nugget "Where's Your Child?," and generally playing host to a horde of doom-laden drum tracks, needlingly ominous synth lines, and other nightmarish, nerve-wracking noises, not least on SMD's own "Nerve Salad." It's not quite all darkness and gloom, though. Conrad Schnitzler's "Ballet Statique" offers a respite of shimmering, ambient prettiness early on -- but it's telling that perhaps the year's most positive, life-affirming anthem, Hot Chip's "One Life Stand" (presented here in Carl Craig's extended PCP remix, and wedged slightly uncomfortably against Chateau Flight's percolating "Baroque") comes off a little bit queasy in this context. The set closes, fittingly, with an excerpt from Delia Derbyshire's 1964 radio-collage "The Dreams," wherein a woman describes a drowning nightmare. Fans of Simian Mobile Disco's albums (and their earlier mixes) will definitely miss the sense of freewheeling fun that characterizes most of their output, but Is Fixed offers an experience that is, in its own way, just as expertly crafted. This might be one to avoid dancing to alone in the dark.

The Extra Lens: Undercard review

An undercard, in boxing, features preliminary matches between newer, lesser-known fighters. There's a touch of modesty, then, in the title of this second album from the long-running though infrequently active collaboration between two seasoned indie world heavyweights, the Mountain Goats' John Darnielle and Nothing Painted Blue's Franklin Bruno. But it also alludes to the typically lowered expectations attending such side projects -- for performers and audience alike -- which in this case work out quite nicely: while hardly a major work, this is the loosest, spryest album Darnielle's been in involved with in ages. And it is Darnielle, understandably, who'll receive most of the attention here. As was previously, he takes lead vocals on every song and wrote the majority of them, though this time, Bruno (who arranges throughout) also contributes three songs, along with one co-credit. The two are such similar writers -- tenderly witty, richly descriptive but meticulously economical and often elliptical -- that the switch-up is barely detectable, though Bruno's cheerily morbid "How I Left the Ministry" and ironic, suicide-rejecting "Some Other Way" offer a strain of overt black humor that's mostly been absent from Darnielle's recent work. That macabre sensibility crops up elsewhere, too -- possibly in the cryptic fish tale "Tug on the Line"; certainly in the unexpected (but faithful, and perfectly fitting) cover of Randy Newman's "In Germany Before the War," which is given a sparse, creepy, Weimar-esque treatment: a tonal reach that pays off beautifully. But generally speaking, there's no particular unifying element to these songs, as Darnielle turns his typically crystalline pen to topics from filmmaking ("Only Existing Footage") to boxing ("Cruiserweights") to adultery ("Adultery"). That in itself marks something of a departure for him; or rather, a return to a much older way of doing things. Interestingly, this album, taken together with the first full-length by (as they were then called) the Extra Glenns -- 2002's Martial Arts Weekend -- forms a pair of discographical bookends to the Mountain Goats' celebrated stint on 4AD: six albums, all but one with overarching thematic or conceptual frameworks. And though that period's increased production fidelity and instrumental lushness (which were, incidentally, foreshadowed by Weekend) carry over here, there are traces of Darnielle's older, scrappier strumming style on "Rockin' Rockin' Twilight of the Gods" and gleefully ragged opener "Adultery" -- both songs that feel like throwbacks and were indeed written well before the 4AD era. As Darnielle's first release on his new label, Merge, opening a new chapter in his career, Undercard may not be a total knockout, but it's an eminently worthy diversion from (or preface to) the main event.

Houses: All Night review

Arriving amidst a bumper crop of dreamy, drowsy, evocatively textural electronic and semi-electronic artists in the early 2010s, and appearing on a label, Lefse, which introduced several of that aesthetic's most ballyhooed purveyors (Neon Indian, How to Dress Well), it's easy enough to slot Chicago duo Houses -- primarily the outlet of Dexter Tortoriello, along with his girlfriend Megan Messina -- into the amorphous, somewhat makeshift category of chillwave. And it's not at all an inappropriate designation: All Night veritably glows with the requisite hazy, burnished, synth-kissed vibe, and is well-schooled in the curious central conceit that electronic beats designed for dancing can function equally well for lounging and relaxation. Certain moments here, especially "Rose Book," immediately recall the dense, torpid chug of chillwave frontrunner Washed Out. But the album is also rife with stylistic referents to a wider array of related sounds which, while hardly negating its zeitgeist, do serve as a reminder that folks have been making music in this vein for much longer than the latest blog cycle. To some extent, All Night works as a summary of at least a decade's worth of mellowed-out electro-organic sounds. Representatively languorous first single "Endless Spring" and the sprightlier, sweetly tuneful, bliss-disco standout "Soak It Up" both suggest the ersatz tropical vibes of the recent neo-Balearic wave (with audible antecedents stretching back to Sainte Etienne and well beyond); beatless instrumentals "Medicine" and "Sun Fills" offer richly blanketed smears of sound reminiscent of Eluvium (with some of Julianna Barwick's wordless vocal layering technique); "Lost in Blue" strikingly recalls the glitch-infused ambient pop of Dntel's 2001 landmark Life Is Full of Possibilities, an album which now sounds amazingly prescient. Also like Dntel, but even more than any of the aforementioned acts, Houses inhabit the perennially blurry boundaries between melodically oriented electronic music and texturally oriented pop music -- reductively, between noisy pop and poppy noise -- foregrounding songcraft and vocals (though not necessarily intelligible lyrics) more than most of their chillwave/lo-fi/electro peers, and even calling to mind the rock-based swoon of acts like Mazzy Star and Slowdive. And so forth. There are doubtless more strains of reference to be detected for those so inclined, but, naturally, the album is best enjoyed (and is resoundingly enjoyable) on its own atmospheric merits. Despite or perhaps because of the familiarity of the sounds it contains; with or without knowledge of its back story (it was recorded during Tortoriello and Messina's stint with living off the grid in a remote Hawaiian village); All Night, like the best of its influences, feels intimate, personal, and welcomingly warm.

Violens: Amoral review

Amoral kicks off with a sharp, springy bass riff leading into "The Dawn of Your Happiness," an aptly named slice of buoyant, Beatlesque power pop in the vein of XTC or Jellyfish. It's a stunning, unexpected opening move coming from a hiply appointed N.Y.C. rock band c. 2010, but it turns out to be something of a bait-and-switch. Although there are similar strands of melodic sweetness and gobs of '60s-sparked harmonies scattered throughout the rest of the album, they rarely come together again in such a distinct, indelible fashion, save perhaps on the much gentler "Violent Sensation Descends," a lovely bit of paisley pop with a particularly Shins-ish vocal turn from frontman Jorge Elbrecht, bookended by freakish noise barrages which sound something like the Zombies being devoured by actual zombies. Instead, Violens work their way through a sea of arty guitar pop/rock influences, dredging up a slew of familiar post-punk, noise pop, and shoegaze touchstones, often all in the same track -- "Until It's Unlit," for instance, veers from a lite punk-funk groove oddly similar to Madonna's "Holiday" to dreamy, swirling psych-pop, to a crunchy, thrashing coda -- and often with pleasant results, but without ever settling on a coherent signature sound. Which is fine as far as it goes -- Amoral sounds quite lustrous, and yields a few worthy take-away moments, including the soft, gauzy "Trance-Like Turn," and especially the gritty, propulsive, cheekily titled single "Acid Reign" (which hints at the muscular majesty of School of Seven Bells -- a band, by the way, who manage to do something far more distinctive with a similar set of influences) -- but it adds up to a disappointingly undistinguished whole. Violens are descended from Lansing-Dreiden, a dormant-if-not-defunct band (or, as they'd have it, "art company") notorious for their opacity and anonymity, who were frequently accused of using enigmatic, overblown posturing to mask a fundamental lack of substance. It's a lot easier to figure out what's going on -- and what's not -- with this new incarnation, and even though there's still something slippery about their stylistic orientation, and perhaps a dearth of tangible content, it's great to hear these guys ply their considerable musical gifts in the interest of musical pleasure rather than high-concept artiness. Amoral or not, this album serves as a reminder that the superficial can still sound pretty super.

Diamond Rings: Special Affections review

Rather atypically for an act receiving the type of blog-buzz boost that Diamond Rings enjoyed leading up to this album's release, Special Affections presents John O'Regan (the singular man behind the confusingly plural moniker) as -- above all -- a singer and songwriter in the great pop/rock tradition of literary romantics. Granted, that probably wasn't the quality which first caught the attention of internet tastemakers -- more likely it was his rainbow eye-makeup, retro-‘80s synth pop stylings, goofily glammed-out low-budget video clips, and/or his knack for naggingly catchy hooks. Certainly, the fact that virtually every one of these songs boasts a melodic smart missile of a chorus contributes greatly to the album's appeal. Likewise, O'Regan's ear for crunchy, punchy, bedroom pop arrangements is just as keen as his flair for visual style: using a mid-fi palette of bare-bones drum machine beats, gritty electric guitars, a smattering of piano, and plenty of analog-sounding synths, he crafts tracks that feel fleshed out and full of fun while remaining relatively sparse and simple. Still, one senses that these songs could be just as effective accompanied by a full rock band or a lone acoustic guitar. The key thing is that these settings work wonderfully to complement O'Regan's voice, which is instantly the most distinctive sound on the record: a richly resonant baritone equally well-suited to crooning and brooding, redolent of Ian Curtis, Matt Berninger (the National), Neil Hannon (the Divine Comedy) and Stephin Merritt, although his tone is rarely as dour as the first two or as arch as the latter. Actually, the very timbre of O'Regan's voice lends an intriguing gravitas to a set of songs that are often otherwise quite playful, to potent if perhaps unintended effect, particularly on resolutely youthful anthems like "Wait & See," a paean to adolescent indecision, and the wistfully nostalgic "It's Not My Party." The combination of face paint and emotional earnestness calls to mind the New Romantic likes of Roxy Music and Duran Duran (not to mention David Bowie), but Diamond Rings is equally indebted to their less-fashionable contemporaries, like Bruce Springsteen and Warren Zevon, artists who demonstrated that being a singer/songwriter didn't mean you couldn't also be a rock & roller. Despite a weakness for waggish referentiality ("Born under punches and a real bad sign" might be a clever way to allude to Talking Heads and Albert King, but does it actually tell us anything?), O'Regan's lovelorn lyrics are typically both witty and heartfelt. Special Affections is both special and affectionate, highly infectious and recommended.

Bjørn Torske: Kokning review

It's hard to know what to expect from a new Bjørn Torske release -- apart from featuring playful, eclectic, highly musical and engaging electronica, none of the first three albums the Norwegian producer has released under his own name (issued over a ten-year span) sounded all that much like one another, and the range of sounds and styles he'll explore within a single album has only magnified as he's branched out farther and farther beyond the comparatively conventional, downtempo house of his mid-'90s work as Ismistik. To that end, the curious and delightful Kokning is a wonderful non-surprise, introducing some fine new elements to Torske's mixing table while also revisiting familiar territory and very much maintaining the endearingly offbeat, slightly impish spirit that has persisted throughout his career. Continuing a gradual trend, this is by far Torske's most organic-feeling album; most of its sounds are derived from instruments and other objects recorded acoustically in various spaces, creating a rich, undeniably warm textural palette. It's also his most clearly structured set, opening with a trio of lush, largely acoustic, genially mellow pieces focused on an assortment of guitar textures -- the hazy ambient pop of the title track, the playful Reich-ian polyphony of "Bryggesjau," and the gorgeously drifting, folk-tinged sweetness of "Gullfjellet" -- before transitioning, via a short, polyrhythmic hand percussion interlude, to a second, much longer segment of beat-oriented tracks. This asymmetrical second half functions like its own separate entity; perhaps -- to take a cue from the album's title, which translates as "boiling" or just "cooking," but refers more specifically to a Norwegian tradition of putting potatoes on to boil before heading out to catch the fish to accompany them -- as the meat of the musical meal after an ambient appetizer. The menu features a pair of pensive, percolating, midtempo burners and the growling goof "Versjon Wolfenstein," a throwback to the dub reggae experiments of Feil Knapp, but best of all are two fabulous bookending disco excursions: the deliciously funky roller-skating jam "Bergensere," complete with lasers, fog machines, and handclaps, and, for dessert, the lavishly extended "Furu," a full-on space-disco odyssey with a burbling, horny bassline and plenty of kitchen-sink percussion. This last track, in particular, is highly redolent of compatriots and colleagues like Diskjøkke, Lindstrøm, Idjut Boys, and Rune Linbaek, but it's a healthy reminder that Torske's been doing this stuff as long as any of them, and longer than most. Here he's prepared us yet another fine feast. Tuck in!

The Russian Futurists: The Weight's On The Wheels review

The Weight's on the Wheels trails its predecessor by well over five years, but impressively little has changed about the music of the Russian Futurists -- still, at least on record, the one-man indie pop operation of Torontonian Matthew Adam Hart -- in all that time. Indeed, little has changed over the whole course of Hart's decade-long, four-album career, save for a slow, gradual increase in fidelity and sonic clarity, a trend which continues here -- it's the first Russian Futurists album to feature an outside producer -- perhaps (though probably not) to the point that he'll finally be able to shake the knee-jerk "bedroom pop" tag. Certainly, "Hoeing Weeds, Sowing Seeds," which bounds out of the gate as if to signal an especially eager and joyous return, is the shiniest, punchiest-sounding thing Hart's ever unleashed: a thumping, club-ready electro-pop ditty with an instantly hummable melody; a fitting successor to the last album's euphoric calling card, "Paul Simon." Sadly, though, it's not all that representative. Only "Tripping Horses" tries for danceability in a similarly electronic vein, with decidedly more middling success, and while Hart's penchant for hip-hop-inflected beats is well-indulged throughout -- most blatantly with the new jack swing of "100 Shopping Days 'Til Christmas," an uneasy seasonal relationship dissection featuring some uncharacteristically hip bass playing -- nothing strays far from his comfort zone of scrappy, wheezing synths and low-rent symphonics, oddly poised between chintziness and grandeur. Even with a bit of extra polish, there's no hiding the quirkiness of his highly detailed musical confections; indeed, it's all the more evident that the Futurists' distinctive insularity has always stemmed not just from lo-fi production, but also from Hart's general idiosyncrasy as an arranger and a songwriter. And the songs on Weight are just as knotty (and nerdy) as ever, full of tongue-twisting, dense wordplay, cleverly inverted cliches, internal rhymes, the occasional neologism ("MelanJolly"?) -- so thick with words, actually, that Hart sometimes resorts to overlapping his own multi-tracked vocals to avoid cutting off phrases by pausing for breath (there's also an actual duet, with the Heavy Blinkers' Ruth Minnikin -- the starry-eyed "One Night, One Kiss" -- which serves the same function). Still, with a few exceptions -- "Horseshoe Fortune" for one, a sweet, upbeat closer with a chiming, folk-ish vibe and an odd but laudable message (be thankful for surgery, basically) -- most of these songs are not quite up to Hart's usual caliber. His inherent charms are hard to deny; they just feel slightly threadbare this time out.

robyn + rye rye

2011-06-17T12:19:00.004-04:00

hmm...just came across this. apparently it just appeared yesterday. (so, doing ok on the insta-blog-reaction tip, for once.) two of my fave genius poplets of the last while...together at last(!?):

worth a watch or ten, obv, for the clothes alone... rye's green jaguar jacket + turquoise illuminati dress combo is particularly amazing, but really nobody's wearing anything less than stunning here.

and the song? hm... well i think it successfully avoids tarnishing "be mine"'s delicate everlasting perfect magical tenderness, tho it hardly adds anything that the original song was missing. and ryeisha's spitting is on point as ever. but: i'm not at all sure that this is what i want/need to be hearing from either party here... rye can do so much better than what's basically a lazy whole-hog hook interpolation. [though if that's what it's gonna be, it's possibly preferable to something like this miley cyrus interp – which i previously didn't know existed – why did I not know there was a Rye Rye mixtape!?! – notwithstanding that the Philly flamethrower DJ Sega gutter club action is def closer to where I want her to be energetically. may or may not be preferable to this other brand-new rye rye jawn, which is a bit too rote of a banger – she quotes m.i.a. but it actually reminds me more of spiss' goofball, go-nowhere bloodshy-produced "my slang."]

it's also just sad to realize that "ft. robyn" doesn't mean what it once did [i.e. guaranteed utter brilliance] – see also teddybears' hokay-but-lackluster sub-dragonette fluff "cardiac arrest," which album i just reviewed for amg. even though it's good to hear her back in sensitive/ballad mode, which she does so beautifully but was mostly absent from her 2010 mega-output.

still: for a summery, easy-going pop'n'b trifle, it'll do just fine. [i guess time will tell if this has the staying power of "your love," but i kinda doubt it – that song at least had its own hook to offer too.] and it can't help but make me smile.

reminds me i need to get on de-warping my copy of the "bang (ft. m.i.a.)" 12". also, rye rye needs to put out an album already.

also, there better be some big summer pop hits pervading my consciousness right soon, cuz so far that has not happened. can we work on that?

first time kelly kissed a boy

2011-06-06T14:24:00.002-04:00

crushing on this song pretty hard right now:

Kelly by When Saints Go Machine

got to write about all this rubbishy annoying loutish techno gunk (pictureplane, sebastiAn), then maybe i'll have time to tell you something else about music in the common era.

get the lowdown on my hoedown

2011-01-19T16:21:00.008-05:00

[hey, did you ("you"?) notice how i haven't been making any references to last.fm in any of my 2010 year-end hoo-hah? ha!]

the magnetic fields were one of my very top last.fm artists in 2010 (#3 in fact, behind joanna newsom and hot chip, – isn't it nice when lists line up with reality like that?), and they're probably going to become my overall most-played artist in a matter of days, due to my preparations for the upcoming 69 love songs cover party (which will be amazing) [and which was also part of the reason they scored so many listens last year, along with needing to bring my girlfriend up to speed, getting excited about the movie, and an autumnal obsession with "100000 fireflies"] however i didn't even really listen to, or like, their 2010 album, realism, all that much. but, there was that one very (overly?) catchy song [hm, they're very tiny there] about scientology, which is sort of like the title track for this mix, except that it's not actually on it (cuz i ran out of space, but maybe it's better that way anyway):

title: H'010NANNY! [SONGS of 2010]
date: december 2010. the 22nd-ish? format: cd-r,+blogpost
packaged: with 2010isLove, at least most of the time, together in a devious white foldy.

come and take our personality quizzzzzzzz:
1. "When I Still Have Thee" – Teenage Fanclub
2. "Zorbing" – Stornoway
3. "Ain't That The Way" – Devon Sproule
4. "I Heart NY" – Samuel
5. "Heaven, Sittin' Down" – Phosphorescent
6. "Gloria" – Jonny
7. "'81" – Joanna Newsom
8. "Free Translator" – The Books
9. "Hang With Me (Acoustic)" – Robyn
10. "You Better Mind" – Sam Amidon (with Beth Orton)
11. "You Are Not Alone" – Mavis Staples
12. "My Heart Is A Drummer" – Allo Darlin'
13. "I Didn't See It Coming" – Belle & Sebastian
14. "Horchata" – Vampire Weekend
15. "All Yr Songs" – Diamond Rings
16. "Hormones" – Tracey Thorn
17. "Love And Do What You Will" – ceo
18. "Indeed" – Georgia Anne Muldrow
19. "Whole New Way" – Scissor Sisters
20. "All Matter" – Bilal
21. "I Can Change" – LCD Soundsystem
22. "Alley Cats" – Hot Chip

i didn't make a "favorite songs of 2010" list, not really. i made this mix, which has already been much acclaimed ("massive," somebody said, or maybe it was "major"), and which i am enjoying (still) surprisingly much (unlike last year's songs mix [scroll down, scroll down] which i was kind of already sick of by the time i made it, and have barely listened since.) and now, so that you'll have something to listen to, and look at, while i ramble on about the songs/artists/albums(?), it's now also a video playlist:

1. "When I Still Have Thee" – Teenage Fanclub

wow, what a glorious song! pretty close to perfect, i think. simple structure, simple chords that somehow sound fantastically fresh. i love the gradually expanding arrangement: first just clean, eternal, Byrdsian jangle guitar (and a bit of piano for emphasis), sounding like a fanfare, then the drums (and full band) crashing in (with "the rolling stones") for verse two, and then, surprise, even more!: warm, glowy churchy organ, (right on the word "hymn"!) for verse three. and a few more crafty details: sweet lil guitar solo that builds right up to and wraps around the penultimate refrain, then a nifty little cadence to bring it back around one last time. hard to believe it's well over three minutes; it feels so much like an elemental 2:30.

tremendous lyric too: again, quite simple but also wholly unexpected. yes, i enjoy mocking it for the preposterous pronoun in the refrain (which feels mostly like a blatant reach for a rhyme...though i suppose you could make an argument that it fits in with the "modern hymn" bit?) but it really just makes it all the more endearing(ly earnest.) elsa heard it as being about religion or god. it seems to be about several things at once which are really all the same thing: love, the goodness of life, and, most especially, music. specifically, [indie] pop, or rock and roll i guess; from the western isles to the tasman sea, i.e. scotland to new zealand, the heartlands of this particular strain of p!o!p!, incl. the name-checked go-betweens (who are australian) [and apparently this cornish band i have never heard of.] who knows what rolling stones song they're talking about [any wild guesses?], but i love that the singer describes it as being written "for him"...also, "a minor song in a major key" is reminiscent of erstwhile new world janglers the gigolo aunts but even better executed i'd say.

i never really paid too much attention to teenage fanclub, at least post-bandwagonesque (which i've liked but never loved), even though i always figured i should. and now, probably, i shall [also, see jonny, below.] i was surprised by how much their new 'un, shadows, sounded like the clientele (okay, a slightly more awake version of the clientele.) the whole album is pretty lovely, with lots of nice string bits and so on, but this one is far and away the standout for me...it's the kind of song, i knew right away, that will never lose its power to make me smile through any little heartbreak, and that is something to cherish. ok, on we go...

2. "Zorbing" – Stornoway

wow, what a glorious song! speaking of the western isles, stornoway is on one of them, though stornoway are not from there, they're from cowley, a part of oxford, which is mentioned in this song ["zorbing through the streets of cowley."] zorbing is highly fascinating, and i would love to learn more about it, but that's not really what this song's about. it's about love, of course, new love more specifically, and though zorbing is a pretty brilliant metaphor for the feeling (floating, tumbling, disoriented, inside a bubble), but wisely i think, they don't force it or make it fit too neatly, but find various other more and less outlandish ways (thunderstorms, sensory dissociation) to describe the same thing which are just as compelling.

this is one of those songs (like "when i still have thee," i suppose) that manages to express almost exactly the same feeling musically as it does lyrically; in this case an irresistible, barely controlled giddiness (the short eruptive trumpet breaks are almost too much – isolated from context they might be unbearably twee – but they provide exactly the release that the song needs.) another slowly building arrangement with wonderfully crisp details all arranged just so (love that slightly subliminal jaunty piano and of course the low laddish harmonies and bouncy bass.) and i haven't even mentioned the melody, which is a marvel unto itself.

this is the kind of song that, as i think rae said about hefner's "i took her love for granted" [which i wrote about at length here, and which it could probably argued is the solitary reason i am still a devoted darren hayman listener], makes me remember why i love indie-pop.

actually, for some reason [because this was technically first released in '09?] i'd intended to include "i saw you blink" instead, which is almost equally wonderful (the rest of beachcomber's windowsill, very very good as it is, is trying for something somewhat different and can't quite match these two pinnacles) but this fit better for some reason.

3. "Ain't That The Way" – Devon Sproule

wow, what a – well, actually this is a slightly different situation here. of course, it is glorious, like most everything the dazzling ms. devon does, plays or is. (even if the album this kickstarts, ¡don't hurry for heaven!, was a bit of a let down for me after her untouchably great last one.) this is a pretty astonishing piece of songcraft, right up there with "keep yr silver shined" and "plea for a good night's rest," which really could not have been written by anybody else. this one might actually be more immediately captivating and endearing than either of those. i don't know anybody else who does this thing, intricate and breezily poetic but homespun and humble at the same time, nearly the way dev can. actually, her poetics are less high-flown than usual here, and her virginny drawl (which feels maybe just slightly exaggerated on this one) makes it more feel even down-home.

not to get into too many of the little details, i'll just point out maybe my favorite lyric, in the surprise cyclical sorta-canon coda (which is all great), she hears on the way home "new ry cooder on the radio." then there are the little twinklies which lead us nicely into...

4. "I Heart NY" – Samuel
...a rather different vision of home. (hey, there's that word again...) a total out-of-nowhere hit for me (i have basically no sense of who or how many other people are even aware of it; i know next to nothing of this samuel, except that i think he's got a major label contract now. and i haven't heard any of his other songs, but i'm suspecting that maybe we all will in the near future?) an uncannily enchanting piece of candyfloss pop – unusually for this style [q.v. lenka, marit, etc.] sung by a male, which maybe tempers the candyflossness of it a bit (?) and partially explains why i hear a surprising degree of swag alongside the disney twinkles... could also be the zip-a-dee-doo-dah hip-hop beat (reminds me of "hard knock life" a bit) and the subject matter, not just that it's about new york (and a much more touching and cogent ode than, for instance "ny state of mind"), an unabashed celebration in spite of broken bicycles, pot paranoia, boredom and alienation. [also cf. hip-hop,] i like that "what makes [him] real" is the inexplicable queasiness he feels in his stomach.

p.s. i might have a soft spot for songs that mention coney island: "from out here," "strange powers," what else, lou reed of course, and that gybe! thing... (also, i was on coney island during a blackout!)

5. "Heaven, Sittin' Down" – Phosphorescent

aw sooky. another sweet groover. [nb. album version is better, but for some reason not on the yootoob...] the first time i heard this (on the train back from nj, as elsa was on her way moving up to boston) i was sure it was a trad. cover (partly because of the r.l. burnside album of the similar title, which i've not heard), but evidently no, it's a phosphy original, albeit based around a nicked line (cuz it is the title of a gospel oldie or sumpin.) well, add this one to the instant new sing-along standards pile, right on top of "wagon wheel" (and similarly, could easily see people just writing their own verses for this. i never even notice the verses anyway.)

i 'specially love the slightly loose, rushed scansion of that crucial, wrenching third line of the chorus ("i wish those nights of pleasure and those days of pain weren't so tightly bound.") never really thought about this, but the song sounds so jaunty yet is about utter exhaustion, so that's neat.

6. "Gloria" – Jonny

jonny = norman blake from teenage fanclub + euros childs from gorkys zygotic mynci, welshy goofball (though, as it turns out, maybe not quite as much of a goofy welshball as gruff rhys, cwwddyhthythgd.) seems likely he provided much of the goofiness of this song, but who knows. it's the first song from their free downloadable first ep (album coming soon, on merge!?) this is, awesomely, about gloria estefan, and if you hadn't noticed it's the third song on this mix so far to mention other musical artists by name, an appropriate unintentional theme for me. [i think there's two others still to come, unless james murphy slipped something by me.]

anyway, jonny, "gloria," short (!!) and sweet, couldn't resist. will probably be teaching this one at sing-alongs too.

7. "'81" – Joanna Newsom

sort of the obvious "single" from have one on me, i guess, in that it's short (but longer than the micro-sized "on a good day") and has a simple-ish, very catchy melody. "good intentions paving company" seems to be the consensus de facto standout, and it's also my favorite, in part because i love singing it and playing it on the piano. [but it's too long, natch, plus was already on the original (and frankly preferable) version of t-shirt weather. they're both spring songs, btw, unless this is summer.]

i love singing this one too – even though her phrasing is maddeningly difficult to pin down (slippery as a naked trout) – and i can almost imagine other people learning how to sing it as well, something i'd be hard pressed to say about any of her other songs (well honestly it's not true about this one either.) maybe it's more that i just want to sing it to other people, and have them hear it, and be comforted: "the unending amends you've made are enough for one life: be done. i believe in innocence, little darlin', start again; i believe in everyone."

8. "Free Translator" – The Books
equally as much comfort, utterly negligible sense. the story of this song is here. "Machines are dumb, but sometimes they do brilliant things because they can’t help themselves."

(also, the sufficient clues to the mystery of its palimpsestuous source material, which has had me curious for a while now, are in the comments to that tumbl. oddly enough – or not – this song does a surprisingly decent job of preserving the existential, open-ended feel of the unnamed original song which it "translates"; not unlike the semi-surrealist charlie king parody of said song i heard him sing years ago.)

i'd like to hear a bedtime story (a la "the story of hip-hop") or maybe a superhero comic about the instantly distinctive entities listed at the end of the song: the adventures of meteorological man and whirlwind girl, with their sidekicks, a careful goat and a talking plant. and a squid in a bag. etc.

9. "Hang With Me (Acoustic)" – Robyn

the best song of robyn's (aptly called) "magic 2010," i'm pretty sure. and, in this version, one of the few pieces of that output which comes close to matching the breathtaking, honest emotional nuance she achieved at the emotive peak (i.e. robyn's heart-stoppingly clear-eyed closing suite) of her magic 2005. [which isn't necessarily to say i like the disco single version any less.]

a subtly key moment: "i know what's on your mind/there will be time for that too": slyly, ambiguously supplementing her touchy-feely with some touchy-touchy, in a way that lets you know this couldn't have been written by anyone else (except maybe prince.)

oh, and just one little amendment i'd make, for my own selfish purposes: fall recklessly, headlessly in love with me; it won't all be heartbreak blissfully painful insanity.

10. "You Better Mind" – Sam Amidon with Beth Orton

awesome. [in the original, literal sense, even.] sam amidon was essentially new to me this year (though, turned out e's known him since they were at folksinging summer camp together), but this was maybe the most tragically overlooked alb of the year in my book. (even more than allo darlin', yes, because i recognize their somewhat more limited appeal, and because this is the more distinctive, original accomplishment.) this is both possibly my favorite cut (tho the sweetly sneaky r. kelly reenvisioning "relief" is close) and a good representation of the album as a whole. heard right, i think this song and this rendition just might be capable of putting the fear of god into ya. (also: nice to hear beth's voice again.)

11. "You Are Not Alone" – Mavis Staples

from old gospel sung by a young folkie to a song written by a young folkster for an old gospeller to sing. (and with moderately oppositional messages, to boot.) jeff tweedy wrote this for mavis staples' same-titled album, which he also produced, and much as you can absolutely hear the tweedy in it (the writing that is), staples and the song fit one another comfortably and completely. it's such an immediate standout (and instant classic) that it's a shame he didn't write more for the album.

message-wise, this isn't terribly far off from what joanna newsom tries to convey in "'81," and it's easily at least as powerful, probably more, particularly in the truly striking forcefulness the lyric adopts – taking on overtones of police aggression – in conveying its intent to get that message across: "open up this is a raid/i want to get it through to you: you're not alone." how fundamental that is, yet how hard to hear. by now we've seen quite a handful of old, faded (in terms of their visibility, at the very least) soul titans attempting to recapture some glory by basking in the genre's recent reflourescence, but this is one moment that really rises above the pack and manages to feel unambiguously vital.

12. "My Heart Is A Drummer" – Allo Darlin'

"deep down in the place where music makes you happiest," – i've said it before and i'll say it again: it's a place allo darlin' know well – do you really have life to waste on music that's less vibrant and direct and upfront than this song is? ok ok. it's not actually as good as graceland, and it doesn't have the carefully calibrated perfect-pop detailing of, for instance, the first two songs on this mix. (even the impressively convincing faux-afrique highlife outro, which in context doubles as a sly graceland nod, and which is the song's best showcase for bassman bill, the allo's greatest secret weapon – is more a triumph of feeling than of composition.)

no, this song's unabashed strength is in its personality, which, happily, is way more than enough to carry it. it's in the music, which positively bursts; it's in elizabeth morris' adorably accented vocal (notably, in the way she sings "telephieone"), and most of all, actually, it's in what she's singing. [also, it's in the fittingly handmade, albeit possibly too goofy, cankerblossom-esque video, which i hadn't seen until now – i've mostly avoided looking at the videos whilst writing these blurbs, probably for the best in the interests of ever getting this finished.]

"do i have to say i'm sorry for my happiness?" – she asks it almost weakly, as though it's actually a question. but there's more to the story than that: one of the things i love about this song is that it's about the comforting, satisfied self-knowledge of subtle, hidden depths of fortitude and resilience: the singer might seem all gushy and gooey as she slides her feet up and down the wall, but she's knows that she's actually stronger than you are. "baby, you don't know, but my heart is as strong as a drummer." (never mind that heart cancer might not be precisely what asthmatic smokers need to be mindful about.) some folks have pointed out the chorus' melodic similarities to cyndi lauper's breakout hit, which never really stuck out to me, but coincidental as that connection may be the two songs do have something similar to teach us: there is power in just wanting to have fun.

13. "I Didn't See It Coming" – Belle & Sebastian

polychrome in the 2010's
you go disco and i'll go my way

still not entirely sure how i feel about write about love as a whole (that is, whether i love-love it or merely like-like it) but this, track one, which just jumped out of the speakers from the first time i plopped it in, the day after it came out, at my birthday listening party, this just might be the best thing belle & seb have done since... well? waitress at least, though that's only two albums back. and this has a maturity and confidence that the closest parallels of that era ("your cover's blown"; "cuckoo," maybe; the excellent and overlooked "stay loose") don't quite.

eh, it doesn't really feel right to compare: in its stylistic freedom, formal adventurousness, impressionistic style, and fluid, unrepentant musicality, this consolidates many of the strengths of b+s mark 2; but then again, it also feels like something totally new. even if something about it (the lyric?) vaguely calls to mind "electronic renaissance." ["make me dance/i want to surrender" – what a dizzyingly potent little fragment.] anyway, it stands with the band's very best, of any era.

even if it flattens out a bit when it opens up (in the late-middle, before launching into the maddeningly beautiful tail-section that less-classically-versed music writers would probably describe as a "fugue"), and even though, when i'm listening to it, i wish it didn't fade out like that. or so fast. or ever. anybody can write about love: this song sounds like it. and the title makes it self-fulfilling prophecy.

14. "Horchata" – Vampire Weekend

my favorite songs from contra – an album that i adore for no real reason other than that i love listening to it, which sounds like a trivial statement but strangely doesn't feel that way [maybe it actually is as good as graceland?] – my favorite songs are all right at the end: "giving up the gun" (evidently my SotY), righteous banger "diplomat's son," and the momentously ineffable quasi-title track. but with the former well and adequately repped on both 2010islove and feet active vol. 1 (hm, i really ought to get that mix up here), and the latter on t-shirt weather, it was tricky to know what to rep contra with here, as few of the album's other great songs particularly stand out to me as being more great than the great rest. (according to my blog, the evidently-popular "white sky" was an early favorite of mine too, but i don't entirely remember that.)

i chose "horchata," even though it seemed a bit obvious, even though i initially thought it was overly goofy, because i really have continued to sing it, and it remains singularly playful and delightful, and also i liked the way it fit in to the belle&seb fade-out. at one point this song felt a bit like a hold-over from the sound of first album, but although it probably does work as a stylistic bridge to some extent it also definitely fits in, and works well as an opening statement.

my favorite things about this song are: the xylophones, the clattery offbeat rhythms, the full wistful singing on the chorus/bridge ("here's a feeling..."), the wormy, wiggly melody, the periodic mix-n-match drop-out-and-build-back-up that happens at the end, the all-over-the-place kitchen-sink arrangement, the sudden stop at the end. pretty much everything except for the lyrics, which are fun too.

15. "All Yr Songs" – Diamond Rings

i mighta overrated this album (i really wanted it to be reminiscent of warren zevon..), but this song is supa dope, any way. it's got a peppy fun cheap/sloppy bedroom fi steez but secretly it is really neatly and snazzily arranged. lots of subtle stuff going on. it has acoustic guitar breakdowns! it has beach boy "oohs"! it has (synth) bass come in on the second verse! it has bongos, mixed low on the chorus! and: it has a vibraslap! (like free energy's "something in common," absolutely one of my favorite songs of 2010 that didn't come out in 2010 because it was only on the ep and not the album for some crazy reason, but otherwise should totally be here. i want to keep a running tally of vibraslap songs but it's hard to remember, as they're best when used sparingly.)

this song is also totally sweet in the lyrics/sentiment department too. the sunscreen part always makes me think about best coast, but i don't like any best coast songs nearly this much. she should be more sing-songy. oh-woah-oh-oh-oh-woah-oh-oh-oh. i guess this was viral-ish in '09 but whatevs i didn't catch it until the album this year. woot!

16. "Hormones" – Tracey Thorn

hard to get past the attention-getting (and admirably non-traditional) subject matter [her menopause coinciding with her daughter's puberty], which tracey treats in typically frank, affecting, non-sensationalized fashion, but the music of this is pretty great too; nicely groovy, handclaps, neat piano riff, nice guitar punch-ups. it's probably the best song on love and its opposite for both reasons – though "oh the divorces" is also something pretty special. it's an album i can certainly appreciate and respect plenty, tho (and i don't think it's just b/c of my age) it didn't quite floor me like out of the woods did (and does.) but that's an unusually special recording. anyhow, tracey is still one of my favorite voices, and i'm happy to spread the love.

17. "Love And Do What You Will" – ceo

there is something so befuddlingly other about the tough alliance and, now, ceo – having spent plenty of time with their albums, and writing about them, and digesting white magic in particular (and it's not a long album), i still feel like; for instance, out of the albums in my top ten for 2010, ceo's is by far the one i'm least able to comprehend, or feel like i connect with, on a human level. which can make it hard to say exactly how much, or even whether, and certainly why, i like it.

but it's equally hard to deny that they/he make some pretty fantastic music, phenomenal both on its own terms and in its utter singularity. i'm also pretty sure that white magic is even better, and even more sui generis, than the tough alliance output to date. and it's great both as an album and as individual pieces. this song is great, for instance. i can't really tell you what's going on – there are tons of interesting sounds, an interesting, syncopated beat, a catchy melody, a catchy riff or two, some enthusiastic singing – but if we can "love and do what love and do what we want we will," [as someone once said of prince's equally inscrutable "7": if "together we'll love through all space and time,"] it can't be all that bad, can it?

18. "Indeed" – Georgia Anne Muldrow

though i sort of half forgot about her for a while – after i missed her show and left my copy of king's ballad in matt's cd player (which i should try harder to recover) – i was rocking the GAM jams pretty hard in the early part of the year, and this is definitely one of the sweetest and the fonkiest. it's an entirely touching, heartfelt, if not a little quirky, celebration of kids: "i love the mess out the children..." who can't get down with that?

19. "Whole New Way" – Scissor Sisters

i feel a little bad that i didn't find better ways to express my love for scissor sisters in 2010. night work is a pretty terrific piece of work from end to end, definitely a surprise and a step up for a group i'd all but written off – much as i loved their debut (and it's probably only gotten better with time), it somehow never seemed like they were fully able to live up to their potential. but this one is a total treat, chock-full of pop thrills, and i don't really understand why it was so overlooked.

for some reason it's a little tricky to take individual songs out of the context of the album, maybe because they have such a strong shared stylized aesthetic. this song (which is also shoehorned in at the end of 2010islove, paired up with "rude boy" for a deviant little quickie) isn't necessarily my favorite thing from the album (i think i like "skin tight" and "running out" slightly more, though it's a hard call), but it might be the best stand-alone cut. it's pretty delightful, either way. "subtext"-wise, the entendré-filled lyrics are winking pretty impossibly hard (ana matronic's overly labored live introduction/"apology" for this song, both times i saw them this summer [on the same day] was almost wince-inducing), but that's obviously a lot of the point, and the fun.

20. "All Matter" – Bilal

by contrast, i have pretty much no idea what this song is about. (apart than love, of course.) didn't know what to make of this cat when i saw him open for erykah badu this summer, and after a bunch of listens through the in any event staggering airtight's revenge, i still don't really know, but i think it's a good kind of making. as intriguing and often enjoyable as it is, there's been precious little in the recent wave of loose, clunky, atmospheric, post-dilla "broken-beat" electro-funk, whether instrumental or vocal (erykah, quadron, flying lotus, sa-ra – stuff that, for instance, andy kellman loves) that's really grabbed me. this one did it with just one little ineffable snatch of liquid vocal soul magic, which feels like i could listen to it forever. "you ain't even gotta try/all you've gotta do is realize..."

21. "I Can Change" – LCD Soundsystem

the new lsd screensaver album is bookended by towering standouts ("dance yrself clean", "home") or else the singles are the towering standouts ("drunk girls", "pow pow") or maybe it's all standouts (well, except, sorry, "somebody's calling me") or, i dunno, but this is the slyly crucial centerpiece after all, a quintessential "album cut" only in that it is fully and undeniably in and of its album, not that it can't work outside of it, and in any case it's the best solution to the quandary that "all i want" doesn't measure up to "all my friends" (quite), and nothing here touches "someone great" (even if "you wanted a hit" has the right feel for it), and yet this is happening is somehow a more complete and cohesive and consummate work than sound of silver, half of which now almost feels like throwaways in retrospect (actually, it felt that way at the time, tho i still loved it, and i still love it.)

"i can change" has only a few changes, but plenty of good lines (bad poetry my foot), if maybe not as many quotables as some others. but more than that its string of casual, lucid observations about relationships (which might or might not add up to a narrative sketch i've never bothered to really trace) add up to a vaguely wry, witty, alternately (or simultaneously?) cynical and hopeful meditation on modern (always modern) love that doesn't need much coherence to be curiously moving. and failing that, the bleeps and the beats – which, perhaps tellingly, barely change at all over the course of the track – offer some motion of their own.

22. "Alley Cats" – Hot Chip

one life stand is my favorite album of 2010. what is my favorite song from one life stand? "brothers"? the title track? "thieves in the night"? ["happiness is what we all want/may it be that we don't always want"...pretty hard to argue with that] earlier mixtape inclusions "hand me down your love" (on t-shirt weather) or "i feel better" (on 2010islove)? i'd almost be tempted to say the utterly sublime osborne remix of "take it in," although of course that's not on the album.

the truth is, i don't have one. this is about as close to a perfect album – not just in the sense of having no weak tracks, but having no tracks that are even notably weaker than any of the others – as i can think of in recent memory (a strange arrangement, my post-facto #1 of 2009, fits this bill too.) which isn't to say to say that all of the tracks are perfect: indeed, i could probably point to distinct, frequently lovable imperfections in just about every one. (that's called idiosyncrasy, and it's a large part of the appeal...though admittedly it's not nearly on the level of, say, kanye west.)

just at the moment, though, i'm having trouble coming up with anything that's particularly imperfect about "alley cats." it's not especially good for dancing to. joe isn't a technically brilliant singer. the words are quizzical and often hard to make linear sense of... but in this context, that last is actually a decidedly good thing (and probably the previous one too) – the lyrics feel warm and thoughtful and personal and as full of odd inscrutable private codes and pet references as an intimate chat between two lovers.)

one life stand, from its title on down, is overflowing with fresh, simple, unexpected and economical figurative yet immediate ways of talking about love, and this song has several: "we wear each others heads like hats"; "you painted a song...and now it is in my lungs"; the wonderfully succinct list of why people are like unhappy cats ("restless, needs attention, loses patience, seeks affection.") also, this song, like the album in general, recognizes that love is not only about two people: there are also pets, and parents, and plants, and even pop bands ("do you dig germs?"), and a whole lifetime full of those things together, even when the things you love want to kill one another, all of that, all together, is what makes up a life of love. that's all.

So I think it's time for us to have a post...

2011-01-12T22:46:00.006-05:00

ok, here it is. 115+ tracks of pure, mashed-up 2010 dance bangers, from ~100 bpm all the way up to ~95, in just under 80 minutes.

download it here (it's just one long track, though if you want it broken up for some reason i might get around to doing that at some point...) or you can stream it below. tracklist is down there too, but don't read ahead if you want to be surprised...

it's time to cut a rug:

WELL, OBVIOUSLY WE HAVE A TRACKLIST IN MINCING PARK (spoiler alert!):
0. Cornelius / 2010
1. Four Tet / Angel Echoes
2. Kanye West / Runaway
3. Houses / Soak It Up
4. LCD Soundsystem / Dance Yrself Clean
5. Javelin / Vibrationz
6. The Books / The Story of Hip Hop
7. Big Boi / Shutterbug
8. RJD2 / Let There Be Horns
9. D'eon / Recession Proof ($40 Paycheque)
10. Gil Scott-Heron /New York Is Killing Me
11. Aloe Blacc / I Need a Dollar
12. Mayer Hawthorne / No Strings
13. Rihanna ft. D.R.A.K.E. / What's My Name?
14. Nicki Minaj / Your Love
15. YG / Toot It And Boot It
16. Los Rakas / Abrazame [Uproot Andy Remix]
17. Gyptian / Hold Yuh
18. Holy Fuck / Latin America
19. Liz Phair / Bollywood
20. Escort / Cocaine Blues
21. The Black Keys / Tighten Up
22. B.o.B ft. Bruno Mars / Nothin' On You // Nothin' On You [Villains remix]
23. Matthew Dear / You Put A Smell On Me
24. Sia / The Fight
25. Alphabeat / The Spell
26. Eli "Paperboy" Reed and the True Loves / Name Calling
27. Azari and III / Reckless With Your Love [Tensnake Remix]
28. Lindstrom and Christabelle / Baby Can't Stop
29. Marina and the Diamonds / Shampain
30. Copy / Real Scared
31. M.I.A. ft. Jay-Z / XXXO [Fulton Yard/Waltboogie Remix]
32. Daft Punk / Derezzed
33. Diskjøkke / Big Flash
34. The Arcade Fire / Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
35. The Books / I Didn't Know That
36. Taio Cruz / Dynamite
37. Caribou / Bowls
38. Lady Gaga ft. Beyonce / Telephone
39. Gorillaz / Stylo [Alex Metric Remix]
40. Ratatat / Drugs
41. Nas and Damian Marley / As We Enter
42. Tensnake / Coma Cat
43. Ke$ha / Tik Tok
44. VV Brown / Everybody
45. Bjørn Torske / Bergensere
46. Clive Tanaka Y Su Orquesta / Neu Chicago
47. the cast of "Glee" / Teenage Dream
48. Storm Queen / Look Right Through // [dub version]
49. The Roots / How I Got Over
50. Delorean / Real Love
51. Tanlines / Real Life
52. The Chemical Brothers / Swoon
53. Soulja Boy / Pretty Boy Swag
54. School of Seven Bells / Heart Is Strange
55. Robyn / Don't Fucking Tell Me What To Do
56. Sky Ferreira / One
57. Yeasayer / O.N.E.
58. Swedish House Mafia / One
59. Katy Perry / California Gurls
60. Far East Movement ft. Cataracs / Like a G6
61. Hot Chip / Hand Me Down Your Love
62. Hot Chip / I Feel Better
63. LCD Soundsystem / Pow Pow
64. Robyn / Dancing On My Own [Fred Falke Mix] // [Chew Fu Extended Remix] // [J-Wow/Buraka Som Sistema Smoked Summer Remix]
65. Yolanda Be Cool & DCUP / We No Speak Americano
66. R2Bees ft. Wande Coal / Kiss Your Hand
67. Shakira / Waka Waka (Esto Es África)
68. Jusa Dementor / African Air Horn Dance
69. ceo / Come With Me
70. Cee-Lo / Fuck You
71. Duck Sauce / Barbara Streisand
72. Kylie Minogue / Put Your Hands Up
72. Wiley and Chew Fu / Take That
73. The Russian Futurists / Hoeing Weeds Sowing Seeds
74. Kingdom / Bust Broke
75. Justin Bieber ft. Ludacris / Baby
76. Joe / Claptrap
77. Malachai / Snowflake
78. Sleigh Bells / A/B Machines
79. Dominique Young Unique / Show My Ass
80. DJ Zinc Ft. Ms. Dynamite / Wile Out
81. Ramadanman / Work Them
82. Vampire Weekend / Giving Up The Gun
83. An Horse / Camp Out [R.A.C. Mix]
84. Katy B / Katy On A Mission
85. Kingdom ft. Shyvonne / Mind Reader
86. Rick Ross / B.M.F.
87. Girl Unit / Wut
88. Ludacris / How Low?
89. Major Lazer vs. La Roux ft. Candy Redd / Independent Kill
90. Jonsí / Boy Lilikoi
91. Yelawolf / Good To Go
92. Belle & Sebastian / I Want The World To Stop
93. Die Antwoord / Enter The Ninja
94. Janelle Monae / Cold War
95. The Gregory Brothers and Antoine Dodson / Bed Intruder Song
96. Kanye West / POWER
97. Sleigh Bells / Rill Rill
98. Drake / Over
99. The National / Bloodbuzz Ohio
100. Willow Smith / Whip My Hair
101. Wiz Khalifa / Black and Yellow
102. Taylor Swift / Mean
103. Nicki Minaj / Did It On 'Em
104. Grovesnor / Turn Your Radio Up
105. The New Pornographers / Moves
106. Rihanna / Rude Boy
107. Scissor Sisters / Whole New Way
108. Bonobo / Kiara
109. Sade / Soldier of Love
110. The Knife with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock / The Colouring of Pigeons
111. Iyaz / Replay
112. Free Energy / Bang Pop
113. Liz Phair / Bang! Bang!
114. Mark Ronson ft MNDR & Q-Tip / Bang Bang Bang
115. Gold Panda / You
116. Javelin / Intervales Theme
"I like your beard" - Ke$ha

i've been making these year-end megamixes for five years now, and i really think this is the best i've ever done. it's probably the most consistently danceable; it's nicely varied and pretty well-balanced stylewise [with a fun and unanticipated abundance of clapping songs]; it's relatively technically smooth [my latest mixmethod – recording each track "live" in traktor separately and then importing the results into garageband for editing – adopted for the first time here mostly out of necessity – worked out really nicely and was surprisingly quick and easy, not that that stopped me from obsessively tweaking and fussing with things after the fact] and, in particular, it has a lot of extended blends that i really enjoy (many of which suggest mashy titles that make we want to break this down into individual tracks, like Coma Ke$ha, Swoon Swag, and my hands-down favorite, Snow My Ass, Babyflake.) even if it does get pretty out of control in the last ten-fifteen minutes, as i tried to cram in probably way too many of the still unused tracks on my must-use list.

i also like how it reflects certain extra-musical aspects of 2010, such as the continued ravages of the recession [tracks 9-11], the african world cup/vuvuzelathon [tracks 66-68], the ascendancy of glee [trk 47], and the [relative] absence of lil wayne.

i could probably go on about this mix for quite a while, but ultimately i think it probably more or less speaks for itself. i do, though, want to quickly acknowledge a couple of my sources for finding all these amazing songs... most of these inclusions were already favorites well before i started mixing, but part of the fun of putting these things together is also poking around and trying to find some things i might have missed. this year the resident advisor top 50 tracks list was particularly helpful and intriguing... tipped me off to "work them" and "claptrap," both of which i have been enjoying tremendously both in the context of this mix and outside. (i really should figure out a way to follow these things better...) the singles jukebox, a regular haunt of mine, was where i initially discovered plenty of these, most notably "take that" and "wile out," which have been solid faves all year, as well as "katy on a mission" and "toot it and boot it" (h/t to bedbugs for reminding me of the latter.) lastly, gregzinho, by special request, clued me in to "kiss your hand" and "abrazame (uproot andy rmx)" and also put in a good word for "we no speak americano," which probably wouldn't have made it otherwise. so, thanks guys! (and thanks jeff for getting me to shoehorn in "dynamite." wouldn't be the same without it.)

two zero one zero

2011-01-11T00:12:00.009-05:00

2010 was a massive year for me in many ways, and, maybe more than in a while, music was a specific and intrinsic part of that: not just in the usual way of years being book-ended and de-facto-defined by listy/mixy nerdage, but in the in-the-moment experience of music helping to enhance and create the year's distinct character as it went along...

a general, gushing sense of all things firing on all cylinders, goodness and life and love springing up at every turn, high highs and low lows, the rush and comfort of the familiar-made-fresh, new things from old, rediscovery and revisitation, vibrancy and potency and possibility and life stretching out in strange and settling ways, and feeling ready, but not anxious, for it to arrive.

the very lived experience of it felt especially vivid, season by season: remember the blizztacular snowpocalypse?! {the night i fell in love with "angel echoes"} and the springiest springtime of my life, for sure (sweet, not fleeting)! {when that fateful, be-witchy joanna newsom re-directed my life once again} then there was a double-edged summer of loose ends, brownian instability and a couple of major meltdowns at home [meterological/horticultural, technological, personal/cohabitational...] {and also lazerproof living room dance parties} b/w endless rural road trips with my blueberrybaby and her blueberrymobile, full (too full) of ice cream and swimming and seafood and sweet little back-country towns ... and then the coziest, homeiest autumn – both resting up at the roost and flitting off to be with my home-away-from-home – leading up to the most fully festive december i can remember. {and a little record player asking "will you please spend new year's with me"...} wow...i hadn't even thought it all through like that before now, but truly, what a year it was...!

as often for me, the year [and, incidentally, the decade] started musically with a diversion into older music, in this case the manifold, mash-tastic sounds of the 2000s, via my january-engulfing mixburst project [which still hasn't quite gotten its due, i feel, though i've got a sense its last gasp hasn't yet passed] – other such forays came with bit of n'awlins noodling in march, a late-springtime round-up of sixties-era dancefloor stylings for our house sockhop, a midsummer investigation of woody guthrie in conjunction with the grapes of wrath and his birthday singalong, and un p'tit trawl of pop français for the like-titled event i dj'd for the philly jewish film fest in november [the results of which i really ought to post here sometime...]

but, really, i had precious little time in 2010 for anything from previous decades. right from the start, i was thrilled by a near-constant stream of new ishness. my AMG coverage skewed more to brand-new-new releases than ever before, and it was also the first year i was covering shows for CP on a regular near-weekly basis; both of these things meant that i was listening to and processing possibly more new music than i ever have, and definitely doing more to stay on top of what was coming out any given week, who was touring when, etc. etc. and it was exciting times! i saw tons of great shows, had a lot of fun writing, got many many great cds in the mail, generally felt like i was riding and cresting with the cycle. not to say that i'm necessarily keen on jumping back in for this year's go-round, but we shall see to that soon enough...

here are some lists: 20;10.

20 albums
1. Hot Chip, One Life Stand
1. Joanna Newsom, Have One On Me
3. Allo Darlin, Allo Darlin
4. LCD Soundsystem, This Is Happening
5. Robyn, Body Talk, Pt. 1-3 [Pt.1 if I have to choose]
6. Vampire Weekend, Contra
7. Javelin, No Màs
8. Sam Amidon, I See The Sign
9. ceo, White Magic
10. The Books, The Way Out
11. Scissor Sisters, Night Work
12. Yelawolf, Trunk Muzik [mixtape]
13. Free Energy, Stuck on Nothing
14. Malachai, Ugly Side of Love
15. Tracey Thorn, Love and Its Opposite
16. Big Boi, Sir Lucious Leftfoot: Son of Chico Dusty
17. Belle and Sebastian, Write About Love
18. Alphabeat, The Spell/The Beat Is...
19. Stornoway, Beachcomber's Windowsill
20. The National, High Violet

[1-8, and especially 1-6, feel totally solid – those are all absolute 5-star albums in my book – beyond that, it's carefully calibrated and yet still so arbitrary-seeming...nevertheless, continued to nearly 100 on the sidebar...enjoy?!]

10 songs:
Vampire Weekend - "Giving Up The Gun"
LCD Soundsystem - "Home"
Dominique Young Unique - "Show My Ass"
Joanna Newsom - "Good Intentions Paving Company"
Teenage Fanclub -"When I Still Have Thee"
Javelin -"Intervales Theme"
Devon Sproule - "Ain't That The Way"
Glasser - "Home"
Robyn vs. Salt'n'Pepa, "Push it Fembot (A Rokk Pie N Mash-up)"
Big Boi feat. George Clinton, Too Short & Sam Chris - "For Yo Sorrows"

[much harder to narrow down; nearly impossible to meaningfully numerate. hence. see also, soon: H'010nanny]

i'll have a bunch to say more specifically about the year's music in the next couple of posts, which will cover my pair of 2010 year-end mixes, but for now i'll just sketch a rough narrative of my year in music, inserting my best-of list rankings just in case they mean anything (mostly because it looked nice last year), framed around the curiously seasonal stylistic clustering that i kept noticing throughout the year – hard to say how much these month-or-two micro-trends were observable on a larger scale (they do make some amount of marketing sense, i suppose), but they definitely stood out to me as the seasons moved along.

the early months saw a lot of new records from well-established old favorites – as highlighted here; the Magnetic Fields, Spoon and Vampire Weekend {#6} [whom i came to love far more this year...i guess i can now accept matt's claim, which i'd forgotten, that it's "the first album of the new decade"] – Alphabeat {#18} (poor, misbegotten danes), Eluvium {#24} (essential wintertime) and, above all, Joanna Newsom {#1} & Hot Chip {#1•}, who made the two utter masterpieces – both, incidentally, with the word "One" in their titles – that jockied for the #1 spot on my year list [and ultimately sort of end up sharing it, though at my most honest i have to give the hot nod to the chippies].

new faves by old friends continued to be perhaps the most notable recurring theme of this year's music, with notables including the Books {#10}, Liz Phair {#22}, Nellie McKay, the Roots {#74}, Big Boi [i.e. ex-Outkast] {#16}, ceo [i.e. ex-TTA] {#9}, the Extra Lens [/sub-Mountain Goats] {#61}, Tracey Thorn {#15}, albeit via a slightly underwhelming detour away from electronics, the New Pornographers {#27}, who cut very possibly their best record since Electric Version – high praise coming from me, even if i still tend to underrate it almost as much as most people did, the Arcade Fire {#31} (it was shocking, but ultimately reassuring, to discover that i am still capable of fairly loving this band), Cee-Lo, Taylor Swift {#58}, Belle & Sebastian {#17}, and, most especially, LCD Soundsystem {#4} and Robyn {#5}, both of whom owned this year, in their own way, probably even more than JN and HC.

(and sure, there were also plenty of disappointments and misfires along the way from several once-dependables, most notably M.I.A. [whose album i may someday bring myself to revisit, but it's gonna take some doing], Damon Albarn [whose Gorillaz have never been my favorite of his projects, but in past i'd always been pleasantly surprised to discover their records after the fact; this time i jumped in from go and found a bewildering emptiness that i swear i've listened to, but can tell you almost nothing about...], the aforementioned Spoon [sigh], and even ye gods Elvis Costello, Jonathan Richman [fine but feckless, which is to say their albums have yet to make me give much of a feck], David Byrne and The Knife [both of the latter in curio-collaboratory mode, making conceptual opera/theater/narrative pieces that i have dutifully enjoyed listening to but not managed to fully plumb, which isn't a great sign.])

but i'm getting ahead of myself... the early part of the year also offered a clutch of accessibly sprightly, tuneful electronic albums from the old-guard likes of Four Tet {#29}, Caribou {#75} [forever in tandem; great to see that they're still growing that way], Bonobo {#67}, plus Pantha du Prince {#83}. and it did yield a few fast new friends; some splashy-delic and sample-happy [Javelin {#7}, Malachai {#14}], others fervent and folky [Mynabirds {#21}, Sam Amidon {#8}, Phosphorescent {#25}] also, fine and fancy rambling with Free Energy whose video shoot i missed [to garden, dang it!] but whose moniker sums up the spirit of the season maybe better than anything.

and then it was the summer of, as i've mentioned, Immaculate dance-pop. with the season signaled by LCD, the charge led by Robyn [holy hosannah Batman, Robyn Returns! was maybe the most beautiful musical mega-event of the year... she even revamped up the remix game for the occasion - I'd kill to get my hands on a fully-stocked "Dancing on My Own" 12", but i'm not convinced it actually exists...] and solid soldiering on the part of the mighty Kylie {#84}, Kelis {#76}, Sia {#89}, ceo {#9}, Scissor Sisters {#11} and Delorean {#72}, massive mixtapes from A-Trak {#86} and Major La Roux-zer {#63}, and fine chart fodder from B.o.B, Ke$ha {#80} 'n' Katy Pee. [h.m. Goldfrapp {#95}, Marina {#82}, and Sky Ferreira, from whom I looking forward to hearing more than just "One." good work keeping with the title theme though, Sky, (and, also, Yeasayer and Swedish House Mafia.]

and then it was September and there was a sudden outpouring of "serious" dark/arty prestige indie rock from mostly established acts [Deerhunter, No Age, Walkmen, Women, Abe Vigoda, Blonde Redhead, Crocodiles] little of which i really got into, save for the Arcade Fire, which came out in August but otherwise mostly falls in line there...seriously it felt like no-fun back-to-skool indie music Oscar season all of a sudden. meanwhile there was also a similar/simultaneous upsurge of variably artsy/abstract/fuzzy/hazy/gauzy/dreamy/blissy/questionably chillwave-associated? new indie stuff going on: How To Dress Well {#55}, Glasser {#51}, Teengirl Fantasy {#77}, Tamaryn, Candy Claws, Salem, among others, which may not all have had all that much to do with each other really, but seemed like some kind of convergence, and seemed like some new sort of thing happening, and certainly seemed like something that it was important for me to figure out. [of these, the first three crystallized as things i am at least fairly interested in, and it turns out they're all pretty different from each other, but i couldn't necessarily tell that in advance.]

(i never really got a handle on witch house (did anyone?), and meanwhile i mostly managed to avoid figuring out all that much more about dubstep this year either, despite Diplo's curatorial efforts, except that i guess most of it is kinda post-dubstep by now, or something? like, also despite spending an awful lot of time with Darkstar {#69} 's North almost-but-not-quite connecting with it...still feeling undecided [though "Aidy's Girl" is still awesome] but it's pretty obviously not dubstep at all...anyhow what do we call the mellower pretty stuff in this diaspora? i've only recently been digesting James Blake, which seems like something decidedly else as well...not entirely sure I get it yet, but it's nice enough to listen to. Likewise Mt. Kimbie and Ramadanman both of whom I've found exceedingly pleasant on at least one occasion or another. but this stuff mostly just seems like the new IDM, and i feel like i'm having the same slippery, unpredictable relationship with it that i had with the old IDM...well, hoping for some solid, solidifying full-lengths in future. it takes full-lengths i think. for me. or comps'll do... f'rinstance, on the more up tick; apparently i'm going to need to spend more time the Night Slugs comp too, that one snuck up on me...i might be just starting to understand "Wut," but again not entirely convinced... however, Permanent Vacation I can get with: funky disco and house, just like i like it. so, needing to get my hands on that too...) [/end electronica digression]

the rest of the year was more of a mixed bag, including many of the aforementioned old favorites, and also Diamond Rings {#26} (whom i did/do overrate somewhat, i suppose, but it's awfully easy to feel fond of him) and Sufjan {#52}, which I'm warming to, but mostly it was – especially in November/December– the most incredibly egregious glut i've ever seen of 'strategically-deployed' X-mas shopping seasonable R&B product, sorry, torrents, sorry, releases?: Rihanna {#29}, Nicki Minaj {#51}, R. Kelly, Jazmine Sullivan, Cee-Lo, Shakira, Ciara, Michael Jackson, Soulja Boy, Diddy-Dirty Money, Black Eyed Peas, Girlicious, Keyshia, Keri, Jamie Foxx, Ghostface, Young Jeezy, Kid Cudi and I'm sure I'm missing several, and, oh yeah, a little something from Kanye West... save, ok, for 'Ye (hang on, let me finish...) that's in roughly descending order of how much I can be bothered to care, although if these had been spaced out through the year a bit more I might have made more time for them (pace The-Dream...sigh, I'm sure I'll get around to liking him eventually. I did make a bit of progress this year...) Dunno what to say about this lot except that the Rihanna singles are pretty undeniable, and I look up to picking up plenty of these albums in used bins over the next few years... [in fact, I've already started - snagged the new Trey Songz for $2 last week.]

Kanye, Kanye, Kanye. OK. I have to say I have enjoyed MBDTF {#30} (meh, disappointing acronym...shall we just call it Twisted?) a lot, which is at least a fair amount more than I expected. It's probably replaced 808s as my favorite KW album – significantly, because it's at least as interesting. I guess it makes some amount of sense as an across-the-board consensus pick [though, really, why couldn't it have been This Is Happening!? – it's no less willfully obdurate, and has a much snappier title], though I can't really fathom it as something that you would give a perfect 10/10... [if anything, it seems like a perfectly imperfect 9.9/10 – no way is this album 1% better than Homogenic] well, sigh. anyhow – some catchy tunes and fun beats, and even some pretty good rapping, though there's also so much bone-headed clunkiness on there, musically, lyrically and production-wise... ok whatever.

So, speaking of: two notable areas that have more or less run throughout the year for me, in contrast to much of what i've been discussing above, are hip-hop and, to a lesser extent, indie pop. as I predicted/planned at the year's outset, i listened to substantially more rap this year than the past few, even if I never did get around to writing a post called 2K h1p-h0p or some such... got a lot of enjoyment out of Big Boi {#16} and the Roots {#74}, for sure, but my favorites were actually two new discoveries, Yelawolf {#12} and Dominique Young Unique {#23; top three song}, both formidable presences with fairly (though not entirely) divergent energies on the mic. also really enjoying the Curren$y mixtapes {#32} lately, as promised, and working my way into Rick Ross, Wacka Flocka Flame, and Das Racist {#49} (great, but somehow not as much of an instant click as they seem like they should be). definitely enjoying Nicki Minaj too (the pop stuff on her album doesn't bother me too much, though I guess I didn't have quite the same expectations other people, and after a bit of waffling [i listened compulsively for about a week this summer, then set it aside for months], i have to admit that Drake {#34} album is extremely compelling and well done, even in its cornier aspects.

As for indie-pop, the big whooping news was of course Allo Darlin {#3}, by some measure my favorite NEW band of 2010, and also the one i most successfully spread love for amongst my loves and friends (even if i did miss their real show, stupid stupid stupid...) Big ups to Stornoway {#19} too on that front (and they did get the chance to blow me away in concert.) Otherwise, Lucky Soul {#85} delivered a worthy follow-up that's just missing some crucial ballads to really connect, Teenage Fanclub {#40}, whom I've barely paid attention before, impressed me mightily, with a few songs in particular, and best twees alive (pretty much?) Belle and Sebastian {#17} made a somewhat mixed-bag record that has at least one of their all-time greatest songs, and at least a handful of pretty good ones. I guess Best Coast {#92} count too. and I guess they're ok.

On a related note: with a few obvious exceptions on the dance-pop front [R-byn, c-o, A-phabeat], and a couple of low-pro Smalltown electrofolks [Diskjokke {#73}, Bjørn Torske {#78}], there was extremely little Scandinavian music that got me at all excited this year – a major change from the last three-four-five years. I liked jj's follow-up {#54} maybe more than I wanted to admit (though it's still a sizable disappointment), I really dug the Love is All {#90} for a brief moment there, I'm enjoying the new Britta Persson {#59} , and, for maybe the first time, a couple of Finnish groups – Husky Rescue {#98} and Regina – caught my attention. And there were a few Hybris releases – Monty, Elias – that probably deserve more of it. Also, Silje Nes, Olafur Arnalds and Ölof Arnalds [no relation? this is confusing] made some amount of prettiness, and perhaps Jonsí did as well, though I'm dubious [except in the visual realm. there; yes.] But I have – so far – found little to love in the new ones from The Ark and Billie the Vision and the Dancers, who are two of my very favorite artists of the last five-ten years, and the Labrador records output mostly failed to shake me up either [Radio Dept, Club 8...Sambassadeur {#94} was oh-kay.] Oh yeah, and I hated the Jenny Wilson album, and Junip and First Aid Kit were boring. I already addressed The Knife, though I am curious about this Oni Ayhun business. (also, i've been draggin my feet on reviewing a number of the aforementioned albums.)

So. Have I dropped enough names yet? There's still a number of things I haven't even mentioned, like (mostly) rock music. Which I listened to a bunch of as well, maybe the most in a while. Like Tame Impala {#91}, The Futureheads, The Black Keys, Wavves {#99}, Dr. Dog {#79}, Foxy Shazam, and the aforementioned Free Energy {#13}. And do The National {#20} even really count as rock anyway? [Somehow their album went from boring off my pants to top 20...i think it had something to do with watching the snow fall to it.]

Well anyhow. There is no end to this story, really. It goes on and on and on. And it goes on and on and on... on to the next!

re:stocking

2010-12-15T00:57:00.006-05:00

the annually rejiggered pitchfork readers poll (now closed) – which somewhat arbitrarily requested five songs and albums of the year, yet a full top ten of favorite songs out of from their best of the 1990s list [a fun and interesting task..i ended up with the magnetic fields' "the book of love" on top, but it might have been different another year] – also asked us to pick the year's top three live acts.

that's always a hard one, and maybe even more so since i saw more live music this year than possibly ever, thanks to a steady stream of CP assignments. robyn came pretty quickly to mind – her august show with kelis at the trocadero was the apotheosis of an emphatically summer-pop-summer, and a great reminder that she's as much of an effortless bad-ass as a performer as she is as a record-maker. (one particularly brilliant bit of stagecraft: eating a banana during the lengthy build-up of "don't fucking tell me what to do" – finishing in time to deliver just the title hook vocal live – in, if this is possible, a relatively non-sexualized, or other-than-sexualized fashion.) it also showed a fairly dramatic progression from the intimacy and simplicity of the first time i saw her into a dazzling, larger-than-life-feeling pop-star spectacle, though the difference was as much about a clear shift in her way of relating to the stage and the audience as added production fireworks (not to mention the perhaps-unfortunately ballad-free setlist.) will be interesting to see how that evolves when she comes back to play an even larger venue, the electric factory, in february. anywhow, a world-class performer, no question.

i'd thought about lcd soundsytem (whom, like fellow top-tenners joanna newsom and vampire weekend, i saw for both the first and second time this year) until i remembered about mayer hawthorne [& the county], from this vantage point easily my favorite new artist of 2009 [and that's not even accounting for the weirdly lackluster live performances of jj and the very best], whom i saw for the first-through-fourth times this year, at four substantially different venues [the most recent time, regrettably and frustratingly preventably, occasioned my missing a chance to see easily my favorite new artist of 2010, allo darlin', for the second time – but first real-full time – all in one day...], and he consistently killed it every time. the mayer hawthorne show is a well-oiled, spit-polished thing of beauty, and those four performances were far more similar than they were distinct [though the latest included some very exciting sneak previews of his new material], but i hardly minded the chance to re-experience it.

for the third slot, i picked a band i'd just seen, and really only recently listened to: stornoway, about whom i wrote this preview for city paper. the first two (and best) songs on their debut album, beachcomber's windowsill – which probably oversell the extent to which they can be categorized as "indie-pop" – bookended a set that demonstrated both rock-solid chops (instrumental and vocal) and considerable musical range, from moody, arty chamber-ish pieces (some of it verging on slightly tedious) to straight-up (and very british) folk (including a really lovely new one, "november song," performed solo and acoustic by frontman brian briggs) to a surprising amount of rocking out, particularly on the big swelling codas to a few songs. there was also briggs' endearingly nervous/nerdy banter, including recitations of inventions made in philadelphia (the slinky, lemon meringue pie...) but the best part was almost certainly the two-song encore, performed entirely unplugged and un-mic'd, which elicited some of the most genuinely enthusiastic crowd-love i've witnessed in a while. [videos of the encore songs are here and here, thanks to my cp compadres.] it was truly a heartwarming feeling to be in that crowd.

let alone recapping the year in live music, this past week alone has been stellar. last friday i watched two fake-local groups – my buddy tom's band via audio and their piano-popping pals jukebox the ghost [aka cutebox the most] – sock-rock a fun-happy beatles-loving crowd that seemed to consist primarily of teens and their parents, some of them in white astro-jumpsuits, with (respectively) songs about slacking, godzilla, pitch-corrected divas, and babymaking, as well as some lovably dopey banter and a frenzied rendition of "what's this" from the nightmare before christmas (also glad i stuck around for the night-closing panda-monium-inducing team-up cure cover.)

on sunday i saw the utterly ineffable nellie mckay kick some life into the bewilderingly all-over-the-place tunes from her new album – from the latin-kitsch/broadway melodrama "¡bodega!" to the meat-is-murder "unknown reggae" – as well as a bunch of the doris day numbers (and some other assorted jazz standards), a few old faves ("dog song"! "sari"!), a possibly new (?), typically beautiful/insane seasonal political number – an anti-christmas tree eco-rant inexplicably wrapped around a broken-hearted love song – and a wtf tom waits cover (awesomely, if unsurprisingly, she can do a pitch-perfect waitsian growl.) i think this was the first time i'd seen her play with a band, a trio of game if non-smiling jazzbos who set a highly amusing contrast to her preposterous, precociously giddy/girlish and befuddlingly anachronistic stage presence. her albums may be (increasingly) hit-or-miss, but her performances never fail to remind me of her truly limitless talent, eccentricity and charm. it's hard to put it words.

finally, last tuesday i trekked up to hoboken with rae to catch night seven of yo la tengo's annual 8 nights of hanukkah at maxwells [ira's account is there], something i hadn't done since 2002, when the band were very memorably joined by ray davies (whom, incidentally, i would have seen in boston over thanksgiving if hadn't, very sadly had to cancel for health reasons...) this show was similarly a pretty transcendent experience, if only because it reminded me how much i dearly love this band (you wouldn't think i'd forget something like that, having written something like this, and i didn't, really, but i maybe hadn't thought about it in a while...)

this is what they played:

HOME = "feels like going home," from ...beat your ass, a really sweet gentle one which i really should have included on home, why did i not do that? [wasn't] BORN 2 FOLLOW is a carole king cover that i didn't know, but almost of the others were familiar YLT favorites, really a solid setlist of classics, if maybe a tad obvious, but just perfect for not having seen them in a while... definitely heavy on the soft pretty ones (season of the shark, last days of disco, shadows, little eyes, black flowers) but that's kinda how i like it, and helped set off the totally awesome noise/drone freakouts that bookended the set (the last and first tunes, respectively from the last two albums.)

they were joined for their entire set (except for "tom courtenay," since he broke a string wailing out during the late-set punk-out patch) by the amazing mr. nels cline (of wilco, nels cline singers, and assorted out-jazz excursions), in a rad eyeball t-shirt, which made the whole thing all that much more awesome, even if he sometimes made it hard to see georgia. then they came back and played two ramones covers – "pet sematary" (james on vox!) and "sheena is a punk rocker") – and were joined by openers bonnie prince billy + the cairo gang (who were also awesome! even though i barely recognized any of the songs they played...need to brush up on billy's last half-decade) to close the night with lou reed's "heavenly arms" (which tbh i only know from el perro del mar's closer.) heavenly indeed...

home

2010-12-14T00:30:00.003-05:00

home
home
home
home
home
home
take me home...

1 home • low
2 home • glasser
3 home • david byrne + brian eno
4 you remind me of home • ben gibbard
5 home in your heart • solomon burke
6 my home is nowhere without you • herman düne
7 you're my only home • the magnetic fields
8 nestbuilding • the french
9 home time (lemon & lime) • joe goddard
10 come on home to me • tracey thorn with jens lekman
11 climbing high mountains • sam amidon
12 let me go home • sam cooke with the soul stirrers
13 feels like home • randy newman
14 home again • kate taylor
15 i'm comin' home • arthur alexander
16 i'm going back home • nina simone
17 home sweet home • flatt + scruggs
18 this is where i belong • the kinks
19 home (RAC mix) • edward sharpe + the magnetic zeros
20 (far from) home • tiga
21 home • kelis
22 home • lcd soundsystem
23 this must be the place (naïve melody) • talking heads
[ross of love, november 2011]

mmm. home has been on my mind a lot this year – as the house i moved into last june has become ever-increasingly (and through no small effort along the way, even if it now feels almost effortless) more homely, and as i've chosen to spend more and more time away from that home to be with a person who now feels more like home to me than i might have ever expected, and as i've been contemplating leaving this city which has been my home for the last ten years (and this amazing home of a neighborhood, which may forever still belong to both of us) so that we can make a new home together.

and it just so happens that two of my favorite songs of the year – by one of my well-established very favorite artists, and by a unusually intriguing newcomer – are titled "home": glasser's bewitching, almost eerie, yet magnificently warm and comforting, harmony-rich marvel (the first song of hers i heard, and far and away the standout of her striking debut album) and lcd soundsystem's generous, gently epic album-closer (which i overlooked for several months until i found myself dancing to it one fine night...), which might just stand as my favorite song of 2010, if only because it shares some clear, undoubtedly not coincidental similarities to my favorite song of ever... [and also because – at least the way i hear it – it's a bold and thorny exploration of one of my favorite themes; gleaning positivity and resilience from togetherness and connection in the face of confusion and frustration: if you’re afraid of what you need / look around you – you’re surrounded / it won’t get any better.]

obviously, a mix-tape was in order. this was not too difficult to make – an obvious example of the "itunes search" mix-making method, which often feels a bit distressingly easy, though perhaps it just presents different sorts of challenges. in this case, a title search for "home" yielded over 500 songs in my library, so there was a good bit of narrowing-down to do... and of course, naturally, the idea was to make a mix about the concept of home, not just of songs with "home" in the title. i think it turned out quite nicely, with a simple, logical conceptual shape, and a lot of standouts both shiny-new and golden-olden.

apart from the aforementioned pair (which i made almost-bookends, the second and penultimate tracks), i was happy to find a few other suitable selections from 2010 – especially the sam amidon (from an album i'd love to share as widely as i can) and tracey thorn (not the most strictly topical inclusion, but hard to resist a collaboration from two of my favorite singers, even on a cover of a songwriter [lee hazelwood] with whom i've never really connected.) and it wouldn't have felt right to leave off kelis, who also had a great song titled "home" (on a conceptually beautiful album that i didn't quite manage to connect with as much as some people) just because including it required a slightly sharper-than-planned veer into dance-tronica from the largely soul/folk/songwritery oriented main body of the mix.

similarly, i was ambivalent about using the edward sharpe/magnetic zeros song which somehow, without my real awareness, has apparently become something of a modern standard, since i have a probably unfairly suspicious opinion of them/him (it's not even a him, right?) (like, why do they have to have such an obnoxiously long, stupid name?), but it seemed callous to leave it off, since it is so obviously apropos. a bit dubious of this so-called "remix artist collective" too, but always nice to switch things up with a remix.

meanwhile, just like my dear mr. byrne, my b'lov'd darren hayman also happens to have a song called "home," by his old/best-known band hefner, the last track on my favorite of their albums and evidently a personal favorite of his. but i couldn't quite bring myself to include it, even though it is, i guess, topical – i just don't really like it for some reason, maybe because for whatever reason darren himself isn't the main singer – so instead (though i could have done both) i used "nestbuilding," by his other old/obscure band the french, which is a totally beautiful song i really love, even if it sort of ends up being more about a relationship than the ostensible topic of fixing up an old house. still works i think.

otherwise, thanks to itunes for helping me discover the lovely low-flying low tune (more like a hymn, or a mantra) which wound up as an almost preternaturally perfect opener, beautifully setting up the more unsettled/ambivalent/homesick/searching/yearning first half of the mix (home to several more of my favorite songs, especially for singing; the ben gibbard and magnetic fields) before the midpoint tone-shift into homecoming hootenanny/celebration/dance party.

also: i couldn't really think of a good title (for the mix, or for this post) but i guess i'm already there.

as usual, let me know if you want a copy. limited edition potato-stamp printed artwork now available...

l8 > never

2010-12-09T23:29:00.003-05:00

so: i never posted my 2008>2009 new years mix, due to a couple of fairly minor production flaws that i have been meaning to correct ever since but never actually got around to until, well, today. in fact, it was almost entirely fixed as of sometime this past spring, but i only just got around to tidying up the final loose ends tonight, as a sort of warm-up/deck-clearing exercise prior to launching into 2010 mix (about which more soon! i'm excited!) in earnest.

it turned out to be almost entirely painless, and now i am proud to present to you, in its entirety, in two convenient halves, at 192kbps, rarely heard since its initial unveiling at the stroke of midnight on 1/1/2009, the official ross of love 2008 new years eve dance party mix: 2K8<3!!

first half
second half

download and enjoy! my tendency is to think of this mix as the weakest of my four year-end mashymixes to date (with '09 as second weakest), though that may be somewhat unfairly due to the too-long-standing glitch sitch (which has meant that i've probably not listened to it nearly as much as the others.)

listening now, i do think it has a lot of nice parts, scattered throughout and especially in the second half, but i'm not particularly fond of the opening section (always surprisingly tricky to do for these mixes, for some reason) and there are some (neglible) sound quality issues in various places (definitely a downside of the generally nifty traktor native mix feature, which i used for the last two years, but will not be able to use for this year's mix, because it's not in the new version of traktor that works on my computer.) though there is plenty of great music here, 2008 feels like a slightly weird, off year from this juncture (for instance: santogold shows up three times here; where has she been since? also, M.I.A.'s here four times, in various forms. sorry, that won't be happening in 2010.) anyway...still a very good, worthy mix - i'm happy with it, and particularly happy to have it as a finished piece.

here's a tracklist for ya:

first half
Ross of Love vs. Solange/Beastie Boys/Portishead/M83/Hot Chip/Lil Wayne vs. Ross of Love
Four Tet / Ribbons
Flo Rida / Low
Usher / In This Club
T.I. / Whatever You Like
Santogold / Creator
El Guincho / Antillas
Buraka Som Sistema ft. M.I.A. / The Sound of Kuduro
Benga / Night
Britney Spears / Womanizer
Sway / Say It Twice
Soulja Boy ft. A-rab / Yahh!
Jazmine Sullivan / My Foolish Heart
Keri Hilson ft. Lil Wayne / Turnin' Me On
Janelle Monae / Violet Stars Happy Hunting!
The Roots / I Will Not Apologize
Throw Me The Statue / Lolita
Jordin Sparks ft. Chris Brown / No Air
Ne-Yo / Miss Independent
The Knux / Cappucino
Jay-Z ft. Santogold / Brooklyn Go Hard
The Clash / Straight To Hell
T.I. ft. Kanye West, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne / Swagga Like Us
The Very Best / Tengazko
Erykah Badu / Soldier
Black Milk / Losing Out
Rhymefest with Mark Ronson / Foolin' Around
Beyoncé / Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)
Pop Levi / Never Never Love
Erupt / Click My Finger
Alphabeat / Fascination
Missy Elliott / Shake It Like A Pom Pom
Kid Rock / All Summer Long
Hercules & Love Affair / Hercules Theme
Sugababes / Girls
Kardinal Offishal ft. Keri Hilson / Numba 1
The Bug ft. Warrior Queen / Insane
Vampire Weekend / Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa
Max Tundra / Which Song
Yelle / Ce Jeu
Dragonette / Marvelous
Spiss / My Slang
Madonna ft. Justin Timberlake / 4 Minutes
Busta Rhymes / Don't Touch Me (Throw Da Water On Em)

second half
Juvelen / Don't Mess
Ashlee Simpson / Boys
David Byrne & Brian Eno / Strange Overtones
Invisible Conga People / Cable Dazed
Kanye West / Paranoid
Kleerup / Thank You
Aeroplane ft. Kathy Diamond / Whispers
Hercules & Love Affair / You Belong
Diskjokke / Staying In
Was (Not Was) / Your Luck Won't Last
Neon Neon / Raquel
Midfield General / Disco Sirens
The Chap / Ethnic Instrument (Joakim Remix)
Pink Skull / Gonzo's Cointreau
Santogold / L.E.S. Artistes (XXXchange Remix)
Nomo / All The Stars
A. R. Rahman & M.I.A. / O... Saya
Rye Rye / Shake It To The Ground
Lindstrøm / Grand Ideas
Tittsworth / Haiku
Busy Signal ft. M.I.A. & Rye Rye / Tic Toc
Estelle ft. Kanye West / American Boy
Snoop Dogg ft. Robyn / Sexual Eruption (Fyre Department Remix)
Cloetta Paris / Beat Street
Cut Copy / Out There On The Ice
Rihanna / Disturbia
Fuck Buttons / Sweet Love For Planet Earth (Andrew Weatherall Remix)
Kelley Polar / Entropy Reigns in the Celestial City
Wiley / Wearing My Rolex
Rex The Dog / Bubblicious
Johan Agebjörn ft. Sally Shapiro / Spacer Woman From Mars
Alphabeat / Fantastic 6 (Radioclit Mix)
Hot Chip / Ready For The Floor
Air France / Collapsing At Your Doorstep
Barack Obama / "You Have Earned The New Puppy"
Young Jeezy / My President Is Black