Best New Albums - Pitchfork

• Killer Mike: R.A.P. Music May 15th 2012 05:00

  Does a rapper need to make a truly great album before he's considered one of the best alive? It's a question with no objective answer. Some rappers are phenomenal with verses and punchlines but have no knack for hooks or song structure. Some can do all of those things but lack personality. Some never get the production budget they deserve; many do and just have the worst ear for beats. Some fail to capitalize on their buzz, and others are completely incapable of making themselves relevant. And yet, none of that explains why Killer Mike has been able to consistently make some of the most visceral and intellectually potent hip-hop of the past decade and a half without having a true classic under his belt. 

  On the unimpeachable R.A.P. Music, Mike hooks up with 2012 MVP frontrunner El-P and Adult Swim subsidiary Williams Street to create what's described on the title track as "what my people need and the opposite of bullshit." It's the 2012 equivalent to Ice Cube and the Bomb Squad's similarly inspired bicoastal union on AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted. Limiting himself to one producer, legends-only guest spots, and a real sense that he'd better make this one count, Killer Mike rises to the occasion.

  But while this record is sure to please longtime fans, it also works as a compelling introduction. As in the past, R.A.P. Music takes a stand politically without going off the grid into conspiracy theorizing or sounding so circumspect that you'd think Mike himself was running for public office. On "Reagan", he calls out the government for spending billions of taxpayer dollars invading foreign land as "a hobby paid for by the oil lobby." To him, the "War on Drugs" is mostly an excuse for crooked cops to illegally search and seize young black men. But if you happen to be a phony rapper that's dumb enough to spit that "fiction sold by conglomerates" in Mike's neighborhood, you can expect to leave without your chain and dignity. None of this is contradictory to anyone with a lick of sense, but there's a tangible thrill in hearing someone tell it like it is with such conviction.

  There was enough spleen vented on the Grind mixtapes to last until the next decade; on R.A.P., there's more heart and soul, both musically and spiritually. In a recent interview with Pitchfork.tv, Mike seemed particularly fond of the scene he sets during "Untitled", wherein the women closest to him in life are placed within an epic historical scale: "Will my woman be Corretta take my name and cherish it?/ Or will she Jackie O drop the Kennedy, remarry it/ My sister say it's necessary on some Cleopatra shit/ My grandmamma said 'no, never that, it's sacrilege.'" It's part of a deep respect for family that runs throughout R.A.P. Music, whether it's to his cop father during the "fuck the police" narrative "Don't Die", or his wife amidst astonishing Southernplayalistic pimp shit on "Southern Fried". He dedicates the last verse to her ("I married a Trina/ Pretty as a singer/ Fine as a stripper"), informing all other girls that if you want a piece of Killer Mike, you gotta service his woman too. It's actually kinda heartwarming.

  Let's take a moment and talk about the actual rapping on R.A.P. Music. Dear lord, the rapping on this thing. When he first started appearing on dirtier OutKast tracks like "Snappin' & Trappin'", Mike might've been seen as the devil on Big Boi's shoulder opposite André. It's become clear since then he takes a backseat to no one in the Dungeon Family. Transcribing a jaw-dropping bout of dexterity like, "And what's happenin'/ Ménage-a-nage in my garage/ With these two young ladies is the reason I A.D.I.D.A.S./ That's all day I dream about that sex scene/ You textin' hopin' that they call you/ I just barbecue and call 'em up and say, 'hey fall through,'" feels about as effective as trying to explain Led Zeppelin IV with guitar tablature. Mike introduces himself on "Untitled", saying, "You are witnessing elegance/ In the form of a black elephant," and it's a perfect summation of Mike's muscular yet impossibly nimble vocals. There's no reason for him to make a two-minute, no-hook track like "Go!" other than to prove he can destroy anyone in terms of pure technique "even when I ain't sayin' sheeeit." The sheer sonic effect of the volley of words on R.A.P. could thrill a hip-hop fan who doesn't speak a word of English.  

  Not that you shouldn't be paying attention to what Killer Mike says throughout R.A.P. Music.  "Reagan" is the one that names names and cites facts to denigrate the presidency as little more than "telling lies on teleprompters" to serve the "country's real masters." But on "Anywhere But Here", the trickle-down effect of corruption is felt on a more local scale. After solemnly acknowledging the police brutality and economic stratification of New York, Mike takes a look at his home city of Atlanta, seemingly a "black male's heaven" as one the most racially progressive in the nation, "Even though it's blacktop from the mayors to the cops/ Black blood still gets spilled." "Don't Die" shows a vivid example of that: Cops break into Mike's house on a hunch and things inevitably get violent. Though the concept of their being there in the first place because "a nigga on this rap shit" might initially sound trite, if you don't believe the suspicion of being a part of that culture is enough to get you harassed and then killed, you might need to start watching the news. That's really why "Don't Die" can take its place alongside anti-authoritarian classics like "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos": The big picture is timeless; the news fills in the blanks to make it depressing in its timeliness.

  There are plenty of hip-hop records with worthy causes but the good intentions don't always make your car stereo knock. That's not an issue here: I don't think we'll hear a better end-to-end production job on a rap record than we do on R.A.P. Music. El-P has managed to make strides in learning to give a rapper like Mike what he needs: on 2009's ATL RMX, he reconfigured Young Jeezy's "I Got This" with a punishing beat that somehow managed to overexert its will on the guy rapping. We get wheezing organs, incessantly ticking hi-hats, guitar skronk, and soul claps tamed to do Mike and El's evil bidding whether it's B-boy boom bap ("Jojo's Chillin'") or chain-swang braggadocio ("Butane (Champion's Anthem)"). I'm tempted to call it "warm," but so is nuclear radiation, and the bass most often sounds like a monstrous, gleefully evil sandworm that could guest star on "Aqua Teen Hunger Force".

  On the closing title track, Mike equates R.A.P. Music to something holy, within the lineage of the most legendary black musicians: "That Miles Davis Bitches Brew, that 'beee-yatch' said by playboy Too [$hort]." More appropriate are the multiple lyrical nods to Public Enemy and N.W.A., even if R.A.P. Music doesn't break enough rules or have enough of a platform to reach the levels of Fear of a Black Planet or Straight Outta Compton or Death Certificate. But it does come off as the kind of powerful mid-career album those acts should've been able to make as hip-hop's elder spokesmen-- artists granted an evergreen relevance similar to Bruce Springsteen or Neil Young-- had it not been for their irreparable personnel issues: impervious to trends, passionate about politics and pleasure, something that a college professor could base a lecture on even as his students blast it at house parties later that night.

  

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• Beach House: Bloom May 14th 2012 05:00

  Beach House's decision to call this record Bloom is almost too perfect. Over the course of four albums that's exactly what this band has done. Two people from Baltimore started by making incense-smelling, curtains-drawn bedroom pop. Now, eight years later, they make luminous, sky-sized songs that conjure some alternate universe where Cocteau Twins have headlined every stadium on Atlantis. "Bloom" is also what these 10 songs do, each one starting with the sizzle of a lit fuse and at some fine moment exploding like a firework in slow motion. The word captures the music's slow sonority: the round, gleaming edges of Alex Scally's arpeggios and how, in Victoria Legrand's unhurried mouth, all words seem to have a few extra vowels.

  And here we thought they'd already bloomed. Two years ago, Beach House signed to big-time indie Sub Pop, started selling out larger rooms, and put out their first great record, Teen Dream. Brimming with lush sadness and lyrics that painstakingly documented the evaporation of a love ("It can't be gone," Legrand gasped on "10 Mile Stereo", "We're still right here"). Teen Dream was a break-up album, a clearer and more assured exploration of the exquisite, minor-key feelings the band had been mining since their self-titled debut. It felt like such a complete realization of the band's potential that it had to make you wonder-- a little worried, even-- where could they possibly go from here?

  Bloom suggests that this is the wrong question. "I hate it when bands change between records," Scally admitted recently. "[T]hat's not the way we work." And he's right: Beach House haven't changed, or at least not much. Bloom doesn't stray far from the structure or the emotional tenor of its predecessor. It finds the band making small, sharp adjustments to its craft, but these shifts are so subtle it takes a few listens for them to sink in. The songwriting is tighter, yet the atmosphere feels more diffuse; the lyrics are more straightforward, yet they're somehow suggestive of larger things. By just about every measure, Bloom's wingspan is fuller than anything Beach House have done before.

  Much of the power of Beach House's music lies in the way it forgoes simple, this-means-this storytelling in favor of communicating indescribable emotions. Still, Bloom has a definite thematic fascination with idle youth and the bittersweet residue that remains once it's gone. "Troublemaker" looms with the threat of bad romance, and the brazen, epic "Wild"-- one of their best songs yet-- conjures teenage feelings of boredom, broken homes ("Our father won't come home, 'cause he is seeing double"), and the inordinate amounts of faith placed in the things that take someone out of those particular hells ("That's when your car pulls up, its hood is black and gleaming"). Legrand's ethereal contralto huffs so much life into her lines that even lyrics that look plain on the page take flight. Throughout, Legrand and Scally sound in perfect sync: his nimble riffs punctuate her long, drawn-out notes to add depth and layered rhythm to the tracks.

  Toward the end comes a mid-tempo, quietly spectacular song called "Wishes", on which Legrand sings about "the moment when a memory aches." It might be tempting to call that feeling nostalgia. But the sort of nostalgia Bloom employs feels so distant from the definition that word has taken on lately when we talk about music. What they do feels not just wonderfully self-contained but improbably intimate: It's a huge testament to Legrand and Scally that, although they're one of the most popular bands in the indiesphere at the moment, their music still has the hushed air of an overheard secret.

  Filmmakers call the part of the day right before the sun goes down "the magic hour." It's that brief moment when the waning daylight causes everything to take on a holy, hazy glow. It took Terrence Malick about a year to shoot his 1978 movie Days of Heaven because he insisted on filming only during this time of day, but the results perfectly capture and distend that dizzy, overripe feeling of right before something very good ends. Bloom does that, too. "What comes after this momentary bliss?" Legrand wonders on "Myth". It's a question Beach House don't seem interested in answering any time soon. Because that's become their signature magic trick: stopping time right before the sun disappears over the horizon, tricking you into believing a feeling can last forever.

  

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• Actress: R.I.P. Apr 26th 2012 05:00

  Darren Cunningham is one of those dance music producers who has spent most of his career moving away from the dancefloor. The London-based artist's first two albums as Actress, 2008's Hazyville and 2010's Splazsh, sounded like mid-1980s house and techno collaged together and played on a radio from under the freeway. Half of his newest, R.I.P., doesn't even have beats. Listening to him discuss his process making it-- which included reading John Milton, philosophizing about death, and smoking weed-- you'd think he was a PhD candidate.

  "I want to make cool, classical stuff for a modern generation," he said in a recent interview. The phrase "classical stuff" alone will probably disqualify him from the academy. Good. It's not where he belongs. Like Oneohtrix Point Never, what makes Cunningham special is that he's an artist capable of referencing extroverted, populist music like house and rap in order to create a meditative, introverted experience.

  In general, his productions are less about their build-and-release than their atmosphere, which hovers over the bones of the music like some sick gas cloud. The innovation on R.I.P. is to put as much effort into making things clean as making them dirty, and the result is a sense of contrast: Fog gives way to clarity; fat, puffy synthesizer sounds play off pinprick-sharp ones. Like all good contrasts, it's simple and eureka-like: By bringing the acidic sounds to the surface and keeping the air-conditioner hum somewhere in the depths, Cunningham takes the monolithic sound of his earlier productions and breaks them into layers-- compared to Splazsh, it's practically prismatic.

  It's not the sound that makes the music, though, but the structure of it. R.I.P. is a deliberately uncoordinated album. Rhythms, basslines, and melodies slip in and out of line with each other. Comparatively straightforward, house-oriented tracks like "Shadow From Tartarus" are situated next to murk and ambience like "Tree of Knowledge". The emphasis here, though, is on "comparative": Even R.I.P.'s steady 4/4 tracks sound grimy and deconstructed. But there's something almost flirtatious in the way he lets the sounds worm around in the dark, looking to hook up with something firm. When they do, it's both mechanical and mystical, like watching a sculpture cut from raw stone. 

  The thick crud over Cunningham's earlier albums mimicked a sense of loss and erosion, as though he'd found the music abandoned in an alleyway and brought it back to something resembling life. The disparate sounds on R.I.P don't need resuscitation, just room to breathe. Given that room, they arrange themselves. If the album could be called intimate, it's paradoxically because there's so much distance and disconnect to it. Listening to it can be like seeing the city you live in from a plane: You can't reach out and touch it but you're comforted by how manageable and well-planned it all looks.

  Cunningham's scope is already wider than producers like Burial or Zomby, who tend to keep dance music's vocabulary intact, even at their most abstract. When Splazsh first started going around, Cunningham called it "R&B concrete," which, as marketing speak, was terrific, but as self-description was mostly aspirational. On R.I.P., the blending between the traditions of techno and the traditions of ambient and minimalist music are more apparent. Until he comes up with something better (or it ends up being used for a soda campaign), "cool, classical stuff for a modern generation" will have to work. As for his shift in focus, he confesses to not getting quite as stoned as he used to. The fresh air has done him good.

  

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• Death Grips: The Money Store Apr 24th 2012 05:00

  Death Grips are angry. It's unclear why. But their thirst for vengeance, their monomaniacal desire to visit fiery destruction on the powers-that-be, is crystal-clear on The Money Store, even if nothing else-- where the hell this album came from; who plays which instrument; what the lead singer is yelling about; and what on earth this band of insurgents is doing signing an Epic Records contract with L.A. Reid-- makes much sense at all. When playing this album, the only thing I'm sure of is my overwhelming desire to split my forehead open on a cinder block.

  The Sacramento group seems to have landed from an alternate planet, or at least an alternate decade when defiantly mutant outfits like this were occasionally given major-label backing. They've been persistently tagged as "rap rock" for context, but it's not a very useful description of their music. For starters, not much of The Money Store scans as rock: It's confrontational, abrasive, and chaotic, but only one of its 13 tracks includes a remotely guitar-like noise ("I've Seen Footage") and even that turns out to be a bent, sickly synthesizer. Most of the album is an alien swarm of buzzing and sputtering noises. Death Grips' Zach Hill, a drummer for the fiendishly technical noise-rock band Hella, has also chewed his way through numerous projects, including work with Marnie Stern and Boredoms, and bits of all this float through The Money Store's wildly unpredictable 41 minutes.

  Whatever L.A. Reid was thinking when he signed these guys, he surely didn't meddle in their creative process. Sometimes this hands-off approach backfires, but Death Grips have actual designs to be left to, and The Money Store is a million-mph blur of ideas. One can only imagine how many hours it took to make Hill's drums sound like they're traveling inward from every corner of the mix toward its center, but the music seems to be constantly lunging out at you from all sides. A Bollywood vocal sample on "Punk Weight" is obliterated by a mortar-round hailstorm of viciously treated percussion. On "Hustle Bones", a tar-thick drone of indeterminate origin (guitar? computer?) pops into a glitter of synthesized voices. And "Hacker", the final track, hits a peak that the entire album seems to gather towards: With its simple chorus chant ("I'M IN YOUR AREA") and uncharacteristic amount of empty space, it's the only song Death Grips have recorded so far that tugs at your hips as much as it bludgeons your skull.

  As for "rap": To call what lead vocalist Stefan Burnett (aka MC Ride) does "rapping" stretches the definition of the word beyond what even an avowed Lil B and Waka Flocka Flame fan like me can endorse. Burnett's deranged shouting brings a lot of things to mind-- Mark E. Smith with his mouth full, Jim Jones during an air raid, Sloth from The Goonies-- but rapping isn't one of them. Follow his lines closely and you'll slam up against the realization that you're largely transcribing word salad: "The fuck you staring at/ You know I'd be so quick to flash/ Terrified of the way a basilisk come out and skin so fast," Burnett barks on "The Cage". But his hoarse, panicked voice functions as primal fight-or-fight communication: Things Are Not All Right.

  The clearest link through all the pop-culture static to the music Death Grips make is back to the ultra-aggressive, defiantly ignorant, and proudly dumb American hardcore punk-metal moment of the 1980s-- right along the Suicidal Tendencies/Fear/Cro-Mags axis. I don't watch a lot of skate videos these days, but I know a great highlight-reel song when I hear it, and every moment of The Money Store qualifies. Like those bands, Death Grips appeals to the knuckle-dragging troglodyte and the smirking smart kid in us: thick-headed goonery and bookish, viscera-free nerdiness, making beautifully misanthropic music together. Granted, The Money Store is about as intellectual an experience as a scraped knee. But it's just as good at reminding you that you're alive.

  

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• Spiritualized: Sweet Heart Sweet Light Apr 16th 2012 05:00

  Since the release of Spiritualized's last album, 2008's Songs in A&E, band leader Jason Pierce went on a nostalgic detour. The frontman has always weaved rock'n'roll history into his tunes, but this was different. The last few years saw Pierce reissuing his defining 1997 monument Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space as a boxed set and playing the grandiose album in full at a handful of memorable shows. The redux was a welcome reminder of that album's strung-out, gospel-blues magnificence; Ladies and Gentlemen aimed for the heavens, always, and reached them more often than not. But it also reminded us of how his ensuing three albums haven't quite stacked up, how his psychedelic take on early rock may have nowhere else to go. As he told me earlier this year, revisiting his past masterpiece had Pierce thinking: "If I'm going to make new music now, it better be fucking good." 

  Sweet Heart Sweet Light fits that description. Yet it's not a drastic transformation as much as an acute refinement. Pierce is still using large orchestras and choirs to take his Robert Johnson blues way past the crossroads, to vistas that are as endless as they are empty. He's still singing his own rock'n'roll gospel: Jesus, fast cars, girls named Jane and Mary, pimps, death, fire, freedom, and God all show up, giving life to Pierce's alternate-universe Eden, inhabited by Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, self-loathing, and a spitty syringe. He's still his own genre-- this tiny voice elevated by the super-church-sized arrangements in his head. "I want to make music that catches all the glory and beauty and magnificence, but also the intimacy and fragility, all within the space of the same 10 seconds," Pierce has said. It's a mad goal. But it's also an inherently intriguing and universal one, just as ancient myths or Biblical tales can be. Pierce isn't religious, but he uses Christian language and figures as a thematic shorthand. "As you have a conversation about Jesus, you know you're talking to him about how it is to be fallible and question yourself and your morals," he told me. "When I sing, 'Help me, Jesus,' you know I'm not asking for help fixing the fucking car." Such an all-or-nothing attitude is risky, but that's the whole point.

  Pierce mixed Sweet Heart over eight drawn-out months under something of a drug-induced stupor. But it wasn't the kind of drug-induced stupor Pierce is known for. At the time, he was being hit with experimental chemotherapy treatments to combat a degenerative liver disease. (Three doctors are thanked in the liner notes; Pierce is apparently OK now.) During this album's creation, the singer referred to it as Huh?-- a nod to his jumbled mental state. All of which would make one assume that Sweet Heart would be messy, fucked-up, and completely depressing. That is not the case. This is probably the most uplifting album of his career. 

  Relatively speaking, that is. "Sometimes I wish that I was dead," he sings on "Little Girl", "'Cause only the living can feel the pain." Safe to say: Jason Pierce will not be singing next to Big Bird on "Sesame Street" anytime soon. This is an end-of-your-rope, nothing-left-to-lose kind of comfort marked by equal doses of fierce distortion and sentimental strings. And there's more reflection here, too. "All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away," he famously sang, starkly vulnerable, on Ladies and Gentlemen's title track. Here, though, he's more considered. On the lovelorn ballad "Too Late", most of the movie-score violins drop out as Pierce sighs out the kind of profundity perhaps only age can offer: "This is dedicated baby, what more can I say?/ I won't love you more than I love you today/ And I won't love you less, but I've made my mistakes/ Stay away from love dear if that's what it takes." Naturally, he doesn't take his own advice and can't help but fall in love on the track anyway. But the disclaimer adds another layer to Pierce's from-the-vein emoting. 

  This wiser perspective is also found on the nine-minute first single "Hey Jane", where the titular rock'n'roll hellion is given some shade. Though the song's narrator is taken with the fast-living Jane, he "ain't got time to waste my time with you," too. Meanwhile, the music piles up into a car crash before returning as a sky-bound motorik pulse, like a Cadillac going 110 straight into the atmosphere. The scathing "Get What You Deserve" pairs "Kashmir"-like strings with what sounds like a guitar being popped in and out of its socket as Pierce offers a biting critique of rock'n'roll excess (and, by extension, the entire capitalist enterprise). "Gonna shoot you while you're laying still/ I lost all of my emotion," he sings, taking the role of too-far-gone rock star/hedge-fund manager/corrupt politician, while the song's nagging dissonance suggests a chaos just beneath the surface.

  Similarly, Pierce uses his deadpan to great effect as he casually dismisses the whole lot of humanity on the tremendous "Headin' for the Top Now": "In our haste to find a little more from life/ We didn't notice that we'd died." Once again, not too life-affirming on paper. But the song's mash of angry feedback and a rumbling juke-joint piano/bass/drum backbone locates the unpredictable excitement of our collective folly. The song's outro, which has Pierce's 11-year-old daughter Poppy singing of pimps and hustlers in a rhyme reminiscent of "Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary", only adds to the bizarre (and bizarrely joyful) disorientation. 

  So it makes strange sense that this exhilarating album about death and destruction should end with "So Long You Pretty Thing". The title references Bowie's glam-generation anthem "Oh! You Pretty Things", but this is no simple tribute. It's a eulogy to those classic rock'n'roll dreams, as Pierce sings over and over: "So long you pretty thing, God save your little soul/ The music that you played so hard ain't on your radio/ And all your dreams of diamond rings, and all that rock'n'roll can bring you/ Sail on, so long." Which, coming from this 46-year-old who's never exactly set the charts ablaze, sounds like a terrible finale. And yet, backed by that choir and those horns, this is the finest, most enduring refrain Pierce has ever written-- a goodbye you never want to end.

  

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• Chromatics: Kill for Love Apr 03rd 2012 05:00

  Chromatics formed in the Pacific Northwest as a rickety no-wave band more than a decade ago, but re-emerged in the mid-2000s with a revamped lineup and a new sound that nicely coincided with a resurgence of interest in the slow, dreamy, not-always-Italian dance-pop subgenre known as Italo disco. As with other acts on New Jersey-based Italians Do It Better, a label co-founded by group mastermind Johnny Jewel, Chromatics didn't just incorporate the vocoders and vintage synth arpeggios of the turn-of-the-1980s originals, they added the brittle guitars, dubby reverb, and urban dread of post-punk. 

  In the years since, the label's emphasis on grainy synths, smokey ambience, and analog-fetishizing textures became the M.O. of an entire class of artists. And the band's 2007 Night Drive set the blueprint for last year's Nicolas Winding Refn-directed thriller Drive; featuring two Jewel-assisted tracks, the film's soundtrack exposed this music to a wider audience. Earlier this year, Jewel built on that momentum by releasing a two-hour epic created with fellow Chromatics member Nat Walker. Titled Symmetry, Themes for an Imaginary Film, the set culled material from a full score that the duo were said to have composed for Drive. 

  Kill for Love, Chromatics' first album since Night Drive, finally gives this loosely associated, prematurely decayed musical aesthetic its magnum opus-- and brilliantly transcends it. The moonlit vibe of previous highlights like street-skulking stunner "In the City" or haunting Kate Bush cover "Running Up That Hill" recurs, and various tracks still crackle and pop with the all-too-mortal degradation of vinyl. And despite the unfinished-seeming recording quality of the music videos that preceded the album's release, the completed product also boasts some of the most engrossing synth-pop songs so far this year. 

  The 90-minute Kill for Love signals its tour-de-force ambitions from the opening track, a synth-draped cover of Neil Young's "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)". As with their past brooding renditions of Bruce Springsteen's "I'm on Fire" or Dark Day's "Hands in the Dark", it's a thoroughly rewarding pop deconstruction, setting one of singer Ruth Radelet's most affecting performances against an evocatively restrained backdrop. "There's more to the picture than meets the eye," Radelet coos, in what emerges here as a key lyric. There's more to Kill for Love than the sum of its best songs.

  That said, Kill for Love's clearest improvement over Night Drive comes in its impressive clutch of left-field synth-pop standouts. The pill-dropping insomniac rush of the title track is the most likely to propel Chromatics onto the kinds of late-night TV stages and festival billings lately seized by M83, but the existential ache of "Back From the Grave" is no less gorgeously catchy. The bleakly yearning "Lady" returns to the group's signature Italo glide but wisely ditches the robotic vocal effects of a previously released late-2005 recording. When Jewel suggested in a recent Pitchfork interview that he was more influenced by Madonna than by crate-digging Eurodisco rarities, it was logical to wonder if he was being falsely modest. That is, until hearing "These Streets Will Never Look the Same", which stretches "Eye of the Tiger"-like guitar tension into an eight-minute treatise on loneliness and includes the album's first male lead vocal, rendered cyborg-like by a vocal harmonizer. Or take the vampire-pallid lament "Running From the Sun", another male-led track, based on piano chords reminiscent of those found on Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time". Fans who discovered Chromatics through Drive will find plenty of easy entry points here.

  Still, just as the pop songs on Kill for Love are more direct than on Night Drive, the interstitial tracks are also more expansive and abstract. "Time is stretching on/ And it keeps repeating/ As the beat goes on," Radelet sings, on the deceptively uptempo last-ditch plea "At Your Door", and those words could just as easily apply to the album's instrumentals (and near-instrumentals). Nevertheless, even the record's most ephemeral moments are more deeply engaging than their equivalents on the last album, livened up by disembodied vocals and orchestral touches. Though there appear to be as many references to walking and riding trains as to driving, the album is at least as cinematic as Themes for an Imaginary Film. In fact, the languorous "There's a Light Out on the Horizon" goes so far as to revive Night Drive's phone-call conceit, though with results that are more beautifully agonizing.

  After a front-loaded opening and sprawling, bewitching midsection, Kill for Love resurfaces with two tracks that encapsulate what Chromatics do, in an uncompromising way that's sure to confound as many people as it awes. "The River" reprises the Symmetry album's nearly a cappella closing track as glacial synth-pop, with finger snaps and artificial strings lending emotional support to Radelet's stiff-lipped vocal performance as a woman left behind. And then there's a sparsely forbidding 14-minute instrumental finale, available on the digital versions of the album, which is appropriate of Jewel's recent tendency to talk up 20th-century classical composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage rather than film scorers like John Carpenter.

  If Kill for Love had been a 10-track LP, with its most immediately striking songs each edited down to around 3 minutes, it would've still been impressive. In fact, as recently as an interview posted last month by Self-Titled, Jewel hadn't yet made up his mind about whether to put out one or two discs. Ultimately, he made the right choice. Closer "No Escape" may not be as immediate as the title track when heard in isolation, but luckily, we don't have to listen to it in isolation. Just as on albums by the War on Drugs, Deerhunter, and countless others, the experimental interludes here help create a context that makes the pop songs that much more effective; by including so many mood-oriented parts, Kill for Love paradoxically rises above hazy synth-pop's occupational hazard of dissolving into a blur of mood and mood alone. It's not just a collection of hits; it's an album, one that gives the project's familiar nocturnal foreboding a new sense of grandeur. 

  

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• Lotus Plaza: Spooky Action at a Distance Apr 02nd 2012 05:00

  Deerhunter is one of the most fascinating bands going because they're a democracy functioning the way most of us experience democracy, whether in politics or the workplace: fully participatory, but with a wildly disproportionate power structure. With Bradford Cox fronting the group as one of rock's most dominant personalities, it's easy to view Lockett Pundt as following in the lineage of reclusive guitar wizards who serve as a necessary counterbalance.  Whether or not Cox goes off the grid any given night, you can catch Pundt standing catatonically still and staring off into the distance when his gaze isn't intently focused on an armada of effects pedals. 

  Based on that persona, no one could've been surprised by his solo bow as Lotus Plaza, 2009's The Floodlight Collective. A mélange of looped guitar and amorphous vocals slathered in amniotic goo, it wouldn't have stood out in any year, and released smack dab in the midst of indie's deadbeat summer, it was the kind of solo record that could only be the result of a guy who goes to the greatest lengths possible to not get noticed. But even if he gets approximately 0% of the good quotes in any Deerhunter interview, the relatively egalitarian division of the band's songwriting labor makes Spooky Action At A Distance every bit as unsurprising as its predecessor. In an infinitely more rewarding way, of course: save for a minute-long intro that recalls Floodlight, these are nine reminders that Pundt also is responsible for soft-focus beauty of "Agoraphobia", "Neither of Us, Uncertainly", and the juggernaut centerpiece of Halcyon Digest, "Desire Lines". This consistency means Spooky Action lacks the galvanizing force of Deerhunter and the unpredictability of Atlas Sound, but in fully realizing its comparatively modest ambitions, it's one of the strongest indie rock records of the year so far.

  Comparing how Cox and Pundt function in their solo ventures tempts a needless quarterback controversy, but nonetheless, it is helpful to see how they're complementary. While Atlas Sound allows Cox to indulge in genres, collaborations, and haircuts that wouldn't vibe with Deerhunter, Pundt tends to find inspiration in limitations, patterns and forms. Pundt prefers echoing guitar, slow-moving vocal melodies, and distorted washes that generally signify qualifiers like "shoegaze" and "dream-pop," but neither of those really sit well with me. The "dream" part implies exaggeration or illogic, while nearly all of Spooky Distance is handcrafted, thriving on structure and restraint-- a constant, kraut-like pulse, strict patterns of verses and choruses broken down into repeating chord progressions, loops, loops, and more loops. 

  Moreover, along the lines of Real Estate and especially the War On Drugs, Pundt embodies a wakeful, meditative state associated with various forms of transit: your physical being stays relatively still while being in motion, a symbiosis between human and mechanical effort. I can't help but think of each song here as having some sort of vehicular spirit animal, so to speak. As with "Desire Lines", the anti-flash "solo" that breaks from the casually soaring chorus of "Strangers" could be visually represented as medians on a deserted open road, and the anticipatory effect of its repetition brings the relief of arrival during the final minute of decrescendo. Meanwhile, the timbres on "Out of Touch" are fit for a vigorous bike ride, sleigh bells and metallic guitar loops jangling rhythmically over a cyclical kick drum pattern. The shambling acoustic closer "Black Buzz" feels just right for foot traffic, and "Jet Out of the Tundra" cruises at speed like its namesake, the same handful of chords repeating throughout a remarkably brisk seven minutes while Pundt seamlessly adds and removes trebly acoustic strums, Superball bass riffs, and a gorgeous, one-finger piano melody like he's slowly pulling levers in the cockpit. Spooky Action then plays out like ten self-contained, daily commutes where familiarity brings not contempt but a private joy in recognizing the landmarks and shortcuts.

  Lest it seem like Spooky Action is an overly subtle work, it's worth reiterating that its 44 minutes are unerringly tuneful and immediate, the sort of thing that seems unambitious until you step back and ask yourself just how many records out there manage to actually pull it off. And Pundt's means of cranking out one instantly memorable chorus after another brings to mind someone who's incredibly good at sports wagering: there's surely some intuition and luck involved, but Pundt's a guy who's figured out how certain mismatches and trends work to his advantage. To get specific: the hyperextended guitar bends that push "White Galactic One" are technically a slight bit off, yet it's that serration that demonstrates why things like these are called "hooks." Where a specific minor chord might be more harmonically congruent, Pundt inserts a major and the result finds "Monoliths" and "Strangers" stocked with ear-turning melodies as opposed to folky familiarity. Heck, it's likely the greatest testament to Pundt's abilities that Spooky Action is in a major key and dedicated to simple pleasures of escape and memory more often than your typical "power-pop" record, and yet it always comes off as warm and generous rather than cloying.

  And so while Lotus Plaza is truly a solo project for Pundt, I hear more purposeful solitude than isolation-- like reading a book or swimming laps, "antisocial" with all the pejorative connotations removed. Maybe I'm reading too much into things, but in light of Deerhunter's notoriously volatile personnel dynamic preceding Halcyon Digest, it's tempting to hear Lotus Plaza as Pundt's platonic ideal for a band, where people are as predictable and helpful as loops and are united in their pursuit of the kind of reverberant pop music that makes perfect sense for the times you most enjoy getting caught up in your own thoughts. It's a common ambition for artists to capture the music that plays out in their head and if Spooky Action is really what Pundt's hearing, you can't really blame him for looking so lost within himself all the time.

  

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• The Shins: Port of Morrow Mar 19th 2012 05:00

  The Sopranos ended. The United States elected an African-American president. The global financial system more or less keeled over. The U.S. stopped sending people into space and "got" Osama Bin Laden, both in the same year. Harry Potter peaced out-- twice. Zach Braff's career shit the bed. Martin Scorcese won an Oscar, finally. Jeff Mangum returned. R.E.M., LCD Soundsystem, the White Stripes-- called it quits, all of 'em. Michael Jackson died, and so did Whitney Houston. Pop music headed out to the club, mainstream hip-hop more or less went bust, people started buying more vinyl (and, to a lesser extent, cassettes), and "indie" culture traded its guitars for turntables (or, at the very least, pirated audio software and synthesizers that didn't take up too much space in the bedroom).

  A lot can happen in five years, the amount of time since the Shins released their last album, the eclectic and overlooked Wincing the Night Away. During that stretch, the band's primary songwriter and sole constant member, James Mercer, also went digital. In 2010, he teamed up with Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton to form Broken Bells, a collaboration that has led to an album and an EP, both of which were light on things like "songs" and "choruses." The problem with Broken Bells is that it took up so much of Mercer's time and didn't provide a proper outlet for one of big-tent indie pop's strongest songwriters. For a few years, the idea of a new (never mind good) Shins album seemed unlikely. Mercer sounded hopelessly adrift.

  A deep breath, then: James Mercer has returned to Earth. Port of Morrow, the Shins' fourth studio album in 11 years, is a triumphant return from a project that once risked being reduced to an indie-went-mainstream tagline. It's the perfect distillation of the Shins' back catalog-- the jangly, wistful airs of Oh, Inverted World, Chutes Too Narrow's genre-resistant playfulness, Wincing the Night Away's expansively detailed production. But in other ways, its colorful, detail-oriented approach sets it apart from anything Mercer's done before.

  Mercer invited a cast of characters both new (Janet Weiss, production wiz Greg Kurstin, singer/songwriter Nik Freitas) and old (Modest Mouse's Joe Plummer, Fruit Bats' Eric D. Johnson, on-and-off supporting players Marty Crandall and Dave Hernandez) to realize his ornate pop-rock creations. All contributions are felt-- you don't need liner notes to tell how many people worked on this thing-- but none more so than Kurstin's. His multi-instrumental arrangements and behind-the-boards know-how are what make Port of Morrow one of 2012's best-sounding records thus far. Every element here is tricked out for maximum emotional effect-- experience total power-pop pleasure overload from "Simple Song"'s acrobatic pile of guitars, get the chills from the drifting sea breeze-echo of "September", and wrap yourself in "For a Fool"'s string-laden lushness. Needless to say, these songs would sound great on Natalie Portman's humongous headphones.

  Of course, Kurstin wouldn't matter if the raw materials weren't so strong: Mercer (who also co-produced) delivers the goods, mostly by being himself. He's either missed out on the last few years of indie's ever-shifting microtrends or simply doesn't care about "the conversation." And thank fucking god for that. More so than any other Shins album, Port of Morrow doesn't sound like it belongs to any particular decade or style, instead hopping around like some fully loaded AM radio dial that cranks out gem after gem. There's the sugary new-wave "Bait and Switch", "No Way Down"'s meat-and-potatoes American pop-rock (right down to the "Jack & Diane"-biting guitar hook), the title track's creeping psych-soul bombast. Most surprisingly, there's "Fall of '82", a Steve Miller Band-meets-Chicago lite-rock hybrid-- muted trumpet solo!-- that also works as a "Summer of '69" update. (These are all good things.)

  Lyrically, I've always thought of James Mercer as a cousin of A.C. Newman, another songwriter with a gift for spinning gold from the sounds from the past. Newman's never been shy about writing kinda-nonsensical lyrics that simply sound good accompanying a solid melody (think "Sing Me Spanish Techno", or "Submarines of Stockholm"). Although Wincing the Night Away had dark undertones drawn from Mercer's personal life, he's got a similar knack for writing beautiful words that don't need to mean anything in particular. Along with its other strong points, Port of Morrow proves he hasn't lost that talent, especially when rhapsodizing on matters of the heart. "Simple Song" and "Fall of '82" score points for sharp, nostalgic description, but "September" is the real winner, a straightforward stunner of stumbling affection with a shining pearl of a couplet buried within: "Love is the ink in the well/ When her body writes."

  Despite all the hullabaloo about band members getting "fired," the fact is that Mercer isn't a member of the Shins-- he is the Shins, and he always has been. In a recent interview, he expressed his frustration over how to represent that specificity: "Bands I really loved were these auteurs who presented themselves as bands-- Neutral Milk Hotel, the Lilys-- and I just felt, 'Why am I not allowed to do that?'" Consider Port of Morrow, then, the results of an auteur's accepting that role while having a load of fun with his friends in order to realize it. Comeback stories don't get much better than that.

  

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• The Men: Open Your Heart Mar 05th 2012 06:00

  "huh-HAAWWWACK." I don't know if I transcribed it properly, but Chris Hansell's revolting cough, which appeared midway through the Men's 2011 LP Leave Home, was pretty much everyone's favorite lyric from the record. Understandably so. While Leave Home was often ugly and brutal, it felt almost physically necessary, an allergic reaction to the repression of all things abrasive and loud amidst indie rock's digitized echo chamber. The music itself was bracing enough, but perhaps the biggest shock of all was hearing a Brooklyn band that didn’t carry themselves like they were primarily motivated by a desire to make friends.

  But for fans of aggressive indie rock as described in Our Band Could Be Your Life, that's an easy image to project on the Men and, as the band told us in a Rising interview earlier this year, not necessarily a correct one. Now a steady four-piece, they're setting the record straight on Open Your Heart, the title of which is so plainspoken and commonplace it's easy to overlook just how much the band backs it up by maintaining every last bit of visceral power of Leave Home while letting in so many more people to the party. Open Your Heart is both tremendously physical and friendly, knocking you on your ass one second, then immediately helping you back up to put a beer in your hand.

  And I can't stress the word "party" enough, because it's difficult to remember a rock record that managed to be this much fun without resorting to cheerleading. Most people I've played opener "Turn It Around" for have remarked on its resemblance to Foo Fighters' introductory salvo "This Is a Call". It's pretty on-point: Mark Perro's vocals sound remarkably similar to those of a young Dave Grohl on this particular song, but what's crucial is how they align in spirit. "Turn It Around" comes off like a tribute to the pure rejuvenating powers of rock'n'roll itself by going nuts with all the things that got you hooked the first time: breakneck Zep riffs! Duel-guitar leads! Drum solos!  It's essentially a teenager's highlight reel, and the giddiness of Open Your Heart comes through in ostensibly meaningless slogans like "I wanna see you write a love song!/ I wanna see you go down!/ I wanna see you when you try so hard!/ I wanna see you when you turn it around!" Compare it to the only lyric of Leave Home's opener "If You Leave…": "I would die."

  While there's a surface shift in attitude, Open Your Heart shares Leave Home's uncanny ability to balance reverence and irreverence, enthusiasm, and expertise, treating the last four decades of rock music like an amusement park rather than a museum. "Country Song" isn't even the one song on Open Your Heart deserving of that title (that would be "Candy"), but it shows how their minds work. A gummy tremolo riff, whining pedal steel, and an atypical waltz beat are the raw ingredients, but through the Men's artistic prism, it becomes something akin to a Southern bar band saying "fuck it" and letting their freak flag fly for a lengthy last-call jam.  Likewise, is the title of "Presence" an indication that they're trying out the sort of loose, blues-prog of that particular Led Zeppelin album? With its patient, patient build and tamboura-ish drone, maybe it is, but like most of Open Your Heart, the referential recognition is a bonus rather than the end result.

  Of course, the question with Open Your Heart is how it can manage to be such a thrill despite conceivably doing nothing actually new. Not to demystify what the Men do here or downplay the artistry, but these guys strike me as fixers and problem solvers. I hear a band analyzing modes that have just become tired and stodgy and delivering them back running smoother than ever. Liked the coed ragers from the last Fucked Up album, but wish it wasn’t neutered by thousands of overdubs? Have a blast with the all-id caterwaul of "Animal". Wish krautrock ditched the metronomic straitjacket and actually rocked? There’s "Oscillation", which hums more like a motorbike than a motorik, punctuated with blasts of pure MC5 ruckus. Want Isn't Anything-styled shoegaze with a backbone? An SST throwback without the razor-thin production? Alt-country without having to deal with Deer Tick's obnoxiousness? Enjoy the midrecord trifecta of "Please Don’t Go Away", the title track, and "Candy".

  It isn't diversity for diversity's sake, though-- Open Your Heart is smartly sequenced to metabolize genre and morph like a masterful DJ mix, subtly rationing out its true peaks even while seemingly going full-throttle throughout. After the 1-2 headbutt of "Turn It Around" and "Animal", "Country Song" provides a momentary breather and also a swooning leadup to the Men at their most gorgeous and overwhelming, the tail end of which has "Please Don't Go Away" ushering in Open Your Heart's most traditionalist stretch. But just when it feels like Side B is going to be the Men's straight-up indie rock record, they burn that bridge with the willfully destructive two and a half minutes of "Cube", which then builds another one towards the LP's bright and expansive closers. And while "Ex-Dreams" doesn't overtly sound like a curtain call, there are two points during Open Your Heart's finale where everything drops out but a steady, crowd-pleasing drum break and you can all but imagine Perro happily lending the listener a chance to give themselves a round of applause for being such a good audience.

  We haven't talked much about what the Men actually say on Open Your Heart-- about half of its 10 songs are instrumentals or something close. To get to its lyrical center, you'll have to go through "Candy", the one I imagine many might consider the dud or at least the outlier on account of foregrounding acoustic guitars. On the toast-worthy chorus, Perro sings "When I hear the radio play/ I don't care that it's not me." Around the same time I stared hearing "Candy", many of my colleagues were pushing "Radio" as the true standout on Lana Del Rey's Born to Die, a song that uses hearing oneself on the airwaves as a means of self-validation and smiting one's enemies. That sort of thing can only help "Candy" to be misread as being another in a long line of "Left of the Dial"-type, anti-mainstream indie rock lectures-- that its drunk-country shamble recalls the Replacements doesn't hurt either.

  But when you consider the lyrics that come immediately after-- "Remember the days I'd shout anything for you to see me/ I could never sing now my voice it rings.../ I just quit my job/ now I can stay out all night long"-- it's clear that like most of Open Your Heart, it's not at all angry and, in fact, quite content.  All four members of the Men are at the border of 30, an age where you have enough critical distance from your youth and life experience to really start to figure out what success means to you. If I read "Candy" correctly, it's about being able to make a living off this thing while being a very loud band with no radio prospects whatsoever on a boutique label: the rewards seem modest by most standards, but once achieved it means everything, the sort of self-sufficiency that's inspired indie bands to form since forever.

  Before Leave Home became their first widely available LP, the Men's recorded output consisted mostly of self-made cassettes that they recently gave away for free through their website.  They had to play a little rough if they wanted to be heard.  A year later, Open Your Heart is the sort of record that proves while pain and loss are often viewed as great art's true catalysts, bands like the Men can be inspired by the sort of confidence born of the bills being paid and the boss no longer breathing down their necks. And they're passing on the goodwill to everyone who made it possible: if you bought their t-shirt, came to their show, raved about Leave Home on your Tumblr, or seek to carry on tradition by starting your own band, Open Your Heart is the Men thanking you in the best way possible.

  

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• Julia Holter: Ekstasis Mar 02nd 2012 06:00

  "I hear a lot of music that's just lazy-- you know, people in their bedrooms singing some shit into the microphone." That's California singer and songwriter Julia Holter, talking to Pitchfork recently. This passage from the interview leapt out at me because it gets at what makes her second full-length album special. Like a lot of home-recorded music in the indie sphere in the last few years, Ekstasis makes heavy use of atmosphere. There's plenty of reverb and vocal tracks are braided together into drones; it's the kind of swirly production that's good for hiding mistakes. But nothing Holter does feels random. This album is above all careful, and its deliberate construction allows it to work on a different plane from most music that scans as "ethereal." Ekstasis is not the sort of oceanic wash you lose yourself in; instead, Holter's music has a way of snapping tiny moments and small sonic gestures into focus. Ekstasis is above all smart, and it makes no apologies for it.

  Holter's work exists at the intersection between pop and "serious" music. The mayor of that particular corner is Laurie Anderson, and there are obvious parallels between the two. You can hear Anderson in Holter's flat, chant-like inflection, which allows her music and lyrics to do the emotional work. You can also hear it in her love of simplicity and approach to mixing traditional instrumentation and electronics. Another touchstone is the dark magic of Klaus Nomi. It's not just that the tracks like "Fur Felix" bear a similarity to Nomi tracks like "Keys of Life", there's also an undercurrent of ritualism and theatricality in Holter's music. Ekstasis is certainly mysterious, but not because meaning is hard to pin down; it's more that there are so many possible meanings, so many places to focus your attention.

  Listening to Ekstasis, I keep thinking about how it differs from music that feels superficially similar. The music of Julianna Barwick, for example, has liturgical overtones, bringing to mind stone and glass and voices rising in cathedrals. Barwick wants to tap into something beyond words. But Holter's music sounds like it was assembled in a dusty library a floor or two below the sanctuary. It's a few shades darker, but it's also based on ideas first and intuition second. Despite using vocoders, drum machines, and electronics, it feels "old" in part because Holter so deliberately connects her music to the distant past. On her debut album, she did so by basing her songs on a play from ancient Greece by Euripides; here, she pulls words and scenarios from literature and mixes them with her own idiosyncratic approach to words. The songs include quotes from the likes of Virginia Woolf and Frank O'Hara. A line from O'Hara's poem "Having a Coke With You"-- "I look at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world"-- animates "Moni Mon Ami", nestled amid the twinkling synths, strings, and keyboards that sound like harpsichord are original lines like "Hours become years when you're gone!"

  Where Holter's Tragedy felt more like a tapestry, with vocal tracks mixed in with instrumental bits and interludes, Ekstasis leans toward proper songs, and it palette is more uniform. "In the Same Room", despite its chintzy drum machine and mechanized hand-claps, is actually a drama unfolding in close quarters. "In this very room, we spent the day and looked over antiquities. Don't you remember?" to which the other character replies, "Do I know you? I can't recall this face but I want to." You see it play out on paper on the lyric sheet and it feels like a linear exchange, but Holter twists the voices together and the narrative folds in on itself. It's there as pure, gorgeous sound if you want it-- you don't need to know what the songs are about to immerse yourself in this record-- but the deeper you go, the more the songs open up.

  "I can see you but my eyes are not allowed to cry..." is a lyric from "Goddess Eyes", a new version of a song that appeared on Tragedy. It's a line from the Euripides play that inspired her first album, and it's delivered in processed voice reminiscent of a vocoder. So we have a 2,000-year old phrase run through a device that makes a human sound like a 1970s version of the robots of the future. And at the center of all this time travel stands Julia Holter, pulling in references and sounds from everywhere and shaping them into a music that's both haunting and life-affirming, something to make you dream and think.

  

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• Pallbearer: Sorrow and Extinction Mar 01st 2012 06:00

  Doom is a broad category, one of those descriptors that needs an extra word like "stoner," "funeral," "sludge," "death," or "drone" to help narrow things down a little. It can bring to mind the slower, low-tuned psychedelic metal of post-Sabbath American groups like Saint Vitus, Trouble, and Pentagram along with Sweden's Candlemass, UK act Cathedral, and descendants who are crustier (YOB, Asunder), more flatlining (Sunn O)))), seemingly suicidal (Loss), and exceedingly smoked-up (Sleep). Then come the backward-glancing modern traditionalists like weathered North Carolina crew Hour of 13, Rhode Island upstarts Pilgrim, and now, even more gloriously, Pallbearer.

  The Little Rock, Ark., quartet sounds much older than its years on its fantastic debut LP, Sorrow and Extinction. The band released a three-song demo in 2010, but reach greater heights here, due to both sharper songwriting and better production. Really, even though they end their Sorrow thank-you list with a blushing "and, of course, Black Sabbath," they go much deeper than that. You could throw in Saint Vitus and early Candlemass (1986's Epicus Doomicus Metallicus, especially), but it almost makes more sense to reference post-Sleep duo Om for the way each song insistently, specifically reaches for a focused transcendence. That said, there's more variation and catharsis here, despite the occasional Mick Barr/all-nighter riffing. It seems like a simple formula, and maybe it is, but the execution's flawless. It also shifts subtly and continually: They mix in psychedelia, 1970s prog melodies, clean vocal harmonies, and ambient keyboards without sacrificing a certain smoked-up genre purity.

  We get five songs in just under 50 minutes, each mountain of slow, majestic chords bleeding into one glorious cathedral of riffs and soaring vocals. Here is where their insistence on an overall flow pays off. The longest and best piece is the scene-setting opener, "Foreigner". It starts with tentative, pretty nylon-stringed acoustic guitars that, after two minutes, are joined by carefully played, delicate drums until everything crashes with a huge distorted crescendo. The riffs are beautiful and memorable, somehow both gentle and crushing, but the real key here is vocalist (and guitarist) Brett Campbell, who I first heard via his soaring (and surprising) guest spot on Loss' beautifully bleak 2011 collection, Despond, an album that more usually features a guttural vocal gargle.

  That contrast is an essential aspect of the band, which is why when we posted an "An Offering of Grief", I mentioned the Pallbearer featured "[a] vocalist who sings." Campbell has been described as a young Ozzy Osbourne, and that influence is certainly there, but imagine if a young Ozzy had the ability to transform into Geddy Lee. This is music that would be interesting as instrumentals-- the guitars are that good-- but when you add a singer who can match that kind of dynamic surge, it goes somewhere else entirely. The songs have room to be extra patient in part because Pallbearer possess this weapon. On "Given to the Grave", for instance, we get more than five minutes of the acoustic strumming before the crunch and an ever-escalating Campbell. There's no need to rush when the climaxes are that huge, and with his voice, there's always one new wrinkle on the horizon.

  The clean, anthemic feel is reminiscent of 40 Watt Sun's 2011 LP, The Inside Room. That band features vocalist and guitarist Patrick Walker of the 1990s UK doom group Warning taking five songs to just about 50 minutes, but with a more obviously introspective feel than we have here-- The Inside Room's an apt title-- with moments that feel a bit like slowcore heroes Codeine. Sorrow and Extinction isn't first-person in that way, and it's more clearly metal: This is sweeping, outdoor, mountaintop music. The lyrics have a mannered, sword-and-sorcery feel, situating death and sadness in towers, pyres, journeys, and the ancients; but even if you don't follow along with what the songs "mean," Campbell has one of those deliveries that brings shivers regardless of what he's singing.

  That's the other thing that sets Pallbearer apart: As "down" and death-focused as the words and band name might be, this is uplifting stuff. (When the overlapping solos and subtle, arcing synth haze of "Given to the Grave" bring Sorrow and Extinction to an ecstatic end, you'll be thinking more about life than death, believe me.) Ultimately, it feels like Pallbearer have created their own version of a traditional jazz funeral march, or like they went ahead and invented some sort of "celebratory doom." Whatever you want to call it, the record's a triumph.

  

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• Perfume Genius: Put Your Back N 2 It Feb 27th 2012 06:00

  How do we deal with personal trauma? After it's over, what comes next? These are some of the Big Questions Seattle singer/songwriter Mike Hadreas addresses on his second album as Perfume Genius. Put Your Back N 2 It follows Hadreas' overlooked 2010 debut, Learning, and it feels like a proper sequel to that album's suite of dysfunction and devastation. On his first album, Hadreas tackled subjects such as molestation, substance abuse, suicide, the complications of inappropriate sexual relationships, and the struggle for acceptance from those you love. The morose subject matter and melodic simplicity of Learning's piano-based songs drew comparisons to indie-pop artists like Stephin Merritt and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone's Owen Ashworth. But Hadreas' ability to set a scene and convey detail, which brought to mind Sufjan Stevens circa Seven Swans, lent the songs extra force. There were moments of impressionistic, synth-smeared beauty on that first record, but the overriding sense of despair and hopelessness could be overwhelming. On Put Your Back N 2 It, there's a crack of light coming through the darkness.

  Hadreas is still exploring the more harrowing corners of human behavior. "Dark Parts" details the abuse his mother suffered at the hands of her grandfather; opener "AWOL Marine" takes inspiration from a tape of homemade pornography that Hadreas viewed, in which one of the participants admits, camera still rolling, that he's just trying to get medication for his wife. "Floating Spit" also deals with drug addiction, "Take Me Home" explores prostitution in the context of the need to be loved, while "17" uses a metaphor of a body stuffed into a violin, covered in semen, and hung up on a fence to shine a light on corrosive self-loathing. So don't let the whimsical album title fool you: If you're looking for something low-key to vibe out to, you've come to the wrong place.

  The "light" the album allows has to do with how Hadreas approaches the material. He has a brilliant feel for poetic imagery ("The hands of God were bigger than grandpa's eyes/ But still he broke the elastic on your waist," from "Dark Parts", is particularly haunting), but he's mostly moved away from storytelling to explore emotional themes at their most fundamental. Put Your Back N 2 It is an album about love-- what happens when we feel sheltered by it, how we fail to love ourselves and the people around us-- but amidst the heartache and bruised tenderness, there's hope, too. Hadreas sums it all up in the hollowed-out torch song "No Tear": "I will carry on with grace."

  For all its violence, Back radiates warmth. Much of the beauty is due to the expanded instrumentation, from the swooning, countryish guitar bends of "Take Me Home" to the interspersed snare rolls on "No Tear". The brutal low fidelity of Learning is gone, replaced with clarity and sonic intimacy that, when paired with these rich songs, raises every hair on the back of your neck. The more expansive sound gives room for experimentation, from the submerged electronic percussion on "Floating Spit" (contributed by UK producer David Edwards, aka Minotaur Shock) to the robust and surprising full-band blast of "Hood". The latter, with its bloom-and-burst structure, is the perfect example of Hadreas' growth as a melodic songwriter, having moved well beyond the the functional melodies that marked Learning.

  Many of these songs-- "Hood", "All Waters", "Take Me Home", "17"-- forego resolution and basically build tension and drop everything, in silence. Hadreas likes to steer clear of cathartic release, since in this world, there is no easy way out. On "All Waters", he begins singing in a low register and ends in his highest falsetto, as the song dissolves in wordless cries and frissons of far-away distortion. The song is a wish for a world where he and his boyfriend, Alan Wyffels (who also serves as his main musical collaborator), can hold hands in public without fear, and the lyrics ("When all waters still/ And flowers cover the earth") suggest that it's not going to happen any time soon.

  Mike Hadreas is gay, and many of the songs here focus on the issues that young gay men face in their lives (he referred to "17" in a press release as "a gay suicide letter"), even as Back's sustained exploration of love and hate has resonance for anyone. There is a lot of him in this music, the minutiae obviously pulled from a single person's life and experiences. But the album is less about confession as a form of release and more about trying to bring something positive into the world. "I don't want it to seem like I've been through more than other people...", he says in promotional materials for the album. "Staying healthy can be more depressing and confusing than being fucked up. But I want to make music that's honest and hopeful."

  With so much recent conversation about marriage equality and gay teen suicide, and with the predictable election-year demonization of homosexuality, Mike Hadreas' work is not only satisfying on a purely musical level, it also feels of-the-moment and above all necessary (it's so topical, he found himself in the middle of a standards-of-decency "family values" battle earlier this year between his label, Matador, and internet-media titans Google and YouTube). Independent music has woefully few artists dealing with these issues and asking difficult questions, and doing so in a context that never forgets about the importance of songwriting. That's a disappointment, but at least a handful of people like Hadreas are doing something about it.

  

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• Lambchop: Mr. M Feb 22nd 2012 06:00

  For the first 20 seconds of Mr. M, all the listener will hear is the sound of a string section, gliding, pretty, and warm, like something from an old Disney movie. The strings are followed by brushed, rolling snare drums. Soon, Kurt Wagner, the band's singer, stumbles into the mix. "Don't know what the fuck they talk about," he sings. His voice sounds beery and disoriented. It seems possible that he's in the wrong room.

  Coming from some singers, the line might sound like a challenge, but coming from Wagner, it's a simple admission. Lambchop is a band that has spent the past 20 years in Nashville building its own idiosyncratic universe. For better and worse, the current state of music, its trends and its innovations, pass them by completely. Even during the days when alt-country seemed like a viable art form, Wagner's ornery sense of humor-- the kind that drives you to cap your album with a 40-second-long song called "I Sucked My Boss' Dick"-- made them seem totally out-of-step with their supposed contemporaries. In a lot of ways, Lambchop is a band that seems committed to its own irrelevance.

  Irrelevance, though, isn't a burden for Lambchop as much as it is a jumping off point for what makes them them. "I see your Pitchfork I-rock saviors," goes one line on 2006's Damaged-- "I'm sorry, I still prefer Jim Nabors." If you aren't sure who Jim Nabors is and you're still reading our reviews about I-rock saviors, you've unknowingly participated in Wagner's self-definition: He hears the conversation going on but damn if he'll take part in it.

  Nothing on Mr. M is designed to pop, not in the conventional sense of the word. To describe the band's current style is to invoke genres with an almost negative cultural cachet: lounge, 1970s country, Burt Bacharach-- styles so fixated on sounding high-class that they run the risk of feeling trashy. On paper, Lambchop is a band that would appeal primarily to grandparents and drunks.

  Wagner's voice is a low, wounded-sounding instrument whose character has only deepened with time (though Wagner, in his self-effacing Wagnerian way, has attributed it to cigarettes). At root, he's a crooner, but his croon sounds alternately fragile and gruff-- the elderly neighbor who returns your lost dog one day and commands you to step off his azaleas the next, spittle hanging from his lip.

  His lyrics are a mix of minor, concrete observations and poetic flights. "We have crawled among the elements, taking pictures of our phones" is one. "Sleep makes you possible" is another. His writing has the power to transform the everyday into a mystery, but his voice-- and the music behind it-- attempts to transform the mystery into something unplugged and emotionally direct-- to make "The wine tasted like sunshine in a basement" sound a little bit like "I love you."

  If Lambchop's music bears some essential ambition, it's to marry ambivalence and sentimentality. My favorite turn on Mr. M is on "Buttons", a portrait of a small-town loser by a narrator who seems to neither love nor hate the man he sings about. "Been better times for those that are in trouble," Wagner sings, "and maybe there'll be better times for you. The weight you've gained has made your head a bubble, and your button eyes are brown and not her-- black and blue."

  On the last words-- "black and blue"-- Wagner's voice warps into an almost grotesque croon, like he's either about to giggle or weep over the string section, and yet the image in my head is of a pudgy, small-town loser and the woman who he may or may not have beaten with his own sad fists. What we are supposed to do with these mixed emotional cues, I have no idea. It's to Lambchop's credit that their music avoids comfortable resolutions. Instead, it hangs there, no moral, no judgment.

  Apprehending Mr. M does not take a genius, nor does it take an English degree, nor does it take 180-gram vinyl and an $800 Scandanavian turntable with counterweights made out of rare geodes. What it does take, I think, is patience. I like tarted-up, throat-grabbing music as much as the next frantically inattentive twentysomething. I also find a deep satisfaction in Lambchop's subtlety, which never makes the mistake of thinking that being high-minded or instructive will get us over to their weird team. Nobody, not even the most depraved among us, needs to be slapped on the wrist in order to see beauty. And still, despite Wagner's protests that he doesn't know what the fuck they talk about, Mr. M sounds aware of itself as an argument-- an argument for the kind of patience the music on it demands.

  And so we return to this idea of Lambchop's irrelevance. For the purpose of barroom reductions, Mr. M sounds like a bunch of guys tapping delicately on acoustic instruments from deep within a mausoleum, or the sound of wind blowing gently through the pages of an open book resting on a front-porch rocking chair. But how rare is it that a band asks you to listen to so little, and how much rarer is it that they make it sound like so much?

  

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• Frankie Rose: Interstellar Feb 21st 2012 06:00

  Frankie Rose spent a few years kicking around the Brooklyn jangle-pop scene before striking out on her own: As the most charismatic member of Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, and Dum Dum Girls, she was a reliable bolt of onstage electricity enlivening the often noncommittal presences around her. It was pretty clear, even then, that she was eventually destined for bigger things, but her first solo record, recorded under the name Frankie Rose and the Outs, still felt constrained by a reflexive sort of cool-kid slouch. Between that record and Interstellar, she has dropped the pretense of a backing band entirely, and is recording simply as "Frankie Rose." The implicit point is clear: This time around, she's going for it.

  The first moments of "Interstellar" make this point immediately. The song opens on a cool-blue vista of synthesizers, a transportingly vast sound of the sort Frankie's never made before. When her voice enters the mix, cooing about interstellar highways and moon dust, it's piped from above, passed through a series of filters so until she slightly resembles the Laurie Anderson of "O Superman". A minute in, a massive, Valhalla-pound drum hit resounds, the synths explode sideways, and Frankie hurls us down a flume ride of descending vocal harmonies. It's the most colorful, thrilling music of her career, and as grand a pronouncement as one can make that we're not doing things the same way anymore.

  Interstellar is a big, second-album leap of faith into deeper waters, a sparkling synth-pop record that wants very badly to mean something to dreamy, hyper-emotional twentysomethings. For her model, she's taken the impression of some of the dreamiest, most hyper-emotional records of her youth. The production on Interstellar is gorgeous, and clearly modeled on the Cure's big, panoramic pop records, like Disintegration: booming-canyon drums, acres of spannable horizon. The drum beat that opens up "Know Me" is virtually identical to that of "Close to Me", and the silvery guitar leads on "Gospel/Grace" are pretty much mimeographed from "Plainsong". But although Rose indulges pretty heavily in the Cure's primary colors, she paints something distinctly her own with them. The world of Interstellar is a vision of paradise as lifted from the front of a Trapper Keeper: air-brushed, pastel-hued, and gloriously vivid.

  Interstellar is not a thematically rich experience-- it basically has one single invitation, and that is to swim with Frankie in the glorious bath of echoes she's drawn for herself. "All that I want is a pair of wings to fly/ Into the blue, a wide open sky/ Show me your scars, I'll show you mine/ Perched out of the city on a pair of power lines," she sings over and over on "Pair of Wings", and you can hear this yearning for escape echoed in the record's every upward-spiralling note. Her singing has always been breathy and modest, but on Interstellar, her voice seems to mist on contact, even when she's swirling herself into a prismatic mini-choir of Frankies. On her record, she's just another celestial body orbiting larger ones.

  The resulting album isn't one you actively explore so much as bask in gratefully. The longer I spend immersed in it, the more I appreciate its details: the haunting, truncated piano chords that the melody of "Apples for the Sun" clumps around, or the way Frankie's voice melts into and becomes one with the bloom of synthesized strings in the last minute of "Gospel/Grace". Rose is tapping the same slightly shameless clear eyes/full hearts well of teen melodrama that sourced M83's Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, and she demonstrates the same kind of focus and vision in carrying it off. On Interstellar, she transports us further and takes us higher than she ever could have as the drummer of an indie pop revivalist band. Amen to breaking free of sonic restrictions when they outlive their usefulness.

  

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• Grimes: Visions Feb 17th 2012 06:00

  As a child I feared the day the world would be taken over by robots; these days I am seized by a much more potent fear that I am becoming one. Digital interfaces invade our imagination in strange, tangible ways, and with each day I spend in front of my computer screen, the red Gchat dots representing my friends and co-workers start to look more and more like HAL. Have you ever caught yourself trying to open a new tab in your brain? Was the Wikipedia blackout of 2012 as important a cultural moment as the New York City blackout of '77? Do androids dream of electric sheep, or do you not have an app for that yet?

  "Post-internet" is a term that's stuck all too easily (guilty as charged) to Grimes' airy cyborg-pop, thanks in part to her endless quotability in acknowledging the digital world's influence on her aesthetic ("The music of my childhood was really diverse because I had access to everything.") But Visions, the latest and best album from one-woman project of Montreal-based Claire Boucher, complicates the all-too-tidy "post-internet" tag by bringing into focus the many contrasts at the heart of her music: tensions between pop structure and diffuse atmosphere, between technology and the human body, between sensory-overloaded hyper-presence and transcendence. More solidly constructed and a lot more fun to listen to than anything she's put her name to so far, the electro cotton-candy of Visions is an inviting entrance into Grimes' peculiar kind of bliss.

  On her first albums, Geidi Primes and Halfaxa, Grimes buried pop impulses within textured muck and gloomy tones. But Visions finds Boucher mining not just the clean brightness of Aphex Twin-like atmospherics but also the immediacy of straight-up mall-pop: "Vowels = space and time" recalls nothing so much as Stacey Q's 1986 hit "Two of Hearts", while "Infinite Love Without Fulfillment" sounds like Boucher broke into the Apple store after hours and turned on all the display iPads to the same Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam video, rhythmically looped into something sublime. Some of Grimes' reference points call to mind the experimental pop of Nite Jewel or some of the artists on the 100% Silk roster. But that music seems interested in obscuring pop's immediacy or keeping a distance from the pleasure center, while Visions is an unabashed embrace of its source material, whether it's K-pop, new age, or bubblegum.

  Boucher spends most of Visions singing in a vaporous falsetto. She occasionally manipulates her voice (as on the steely, Transformers-jam "Eight") but mostly she just loops it, layers it, and cloaks it in reverb; there are moments when what she's doing doesn't sound too far off from what Julianna Barwick's music might sound like if she were interested in making a synth-pop record. The most common complaint I've heard of Grimes come from people wishing her songs were more structured or hooky, or that her voice was more "present." But-- never mind the fact that even the haziest moments on the record are anchored by melody-- this diffuseness is one of Visions' most refreshing charms. Another oft-cited quote from Boucher the "post-internet" poster girl: "Basically I'm really impressionable and have no sense of consistency in anything I do." This is pop music for ambient fans, but it's also a welcome change for anyone exhausted by post-Gaga pop's tethers to artifice, theatricality, and skronky, turned-up-to-11 beats. To reach out and touch this music would be like putting your hand through a cloud.

  But there's still that tension: Song titles such as "Be a Body", "Visiting Statue", and "Skin" are all testaments to Visions' interest in the corporeal. When she sings the titular lyric on "Be a Body", it sounds like a nagging request to come back down to earth, while "Skin" (which has a sputtering sensuality, like a robot programmed to write a slow jam) feels even more revealing: "Soft skin/ You touch me with it and so I know I can be human once again." Still, don't confuse these moments with any kind of new-agey, back-to-nature longing. One spin of "Genesis" is enough prove it: Post-humanism sounds like a blast.

  Late last year, Simon Reynolds described electronic music's response to our digitized world as a new kind of maximalism: "a hell of a lot of inputs... in terms of influences and sources, and a hell of a lot of outputs." That's an apt description for the music that Grimes was making before, but Visions showcases a streamlined aesthetic, resulting in a statement that feels focused, cohesive, and assured. It's simple enough to leave room for Grimes to grow, but this thing is so compulsively listenable it's hard to come away from it wanting much more. Anchored to the digital imagination but unbridled from its skittish anxiety and concerns, Visions gestures skyward and beyond.

  

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• Burial: Kindred EP Feb 15th 2012 06:00

  When last year's Street Halo came out, it was met with the same breathless hysteria that has greeted every new morsel of Burial music since Untrue. But you couldn't help but feel that the ghostly two-step master had become a little predictable. Even as the producer experimented with house music on the title track (which he had done previously on "Raver" and "Versus"), it felt as if he were re-using the same sounds and effects. A year later, and with still no sign of a third album, we're treated to another three-track EP. But unlike Street Halo, Kindred, currently available digitally only, breaks nearly every Burial precedent there is, from the 12-minute-long tracks to an new sound design that feels consummately richer than the genius of his earlier work.

  Of the three, "Kindred" (12-minute symphony No. 1) will be the most recognizable to Burial die-hards, featuring that same clanking metal-on-metal garage skip-and-swing. But this time something just feels heavier, harder, more devastating. Burial's been credited since the beginning as a prophet tying together UK genres old and new, but there's never been a better argument than "Kindred", which hints at the agility of jungle with the lead-footed heft of dubstep as seen through elliptical garage beats. They tumble and timestretch like vintage Metalheadz underneath smouldering Reese basslines, and the vocals lack Burial's usual phrases, instead choking out syllables smothered by the aural ash and soot that seems to soak the recording in a humongous, unearthly rumbling. As a whole "Kindred" sounds bigger than anything he's done before, an infinitely detailed behemoth that lumbers and shakes the ground beneath it with every little stroke of movement.

  "Kindred" is basically a suite in itself, a new kind of tumult that only heightens Burial's usual wrenching sorrow, an ambitious new venture repeated in Kindred's other two tracks. "Loner" outdoes the sad-sack ecstacy of Untrue's similarly housey "Raver"-- for one thing, it's a lot faster-- but it's coated in MDMA residue, its chugging kick-and-snare pattern and almost prog-house pumping chord progression drowning in gloss. That chemical energy lends its fatalism an almost heroic sense of momentum, moving and moving and never quite getting anywhere but into the same empty, desperate silence that swallowed "Kindred". It's a well-timed track, navigating the same obsession with house and techno that's gripping the entire bass music world and turning it into something distinctly Burial, perverting house's speedy metronome (and prog house's politics of bliss) into profound, otherworldly sadness.

  But as impressive as those two tracks are, there's no real way to prepare for "Ashtray Wasp", also built on a broken house lope. This time it's overloaded with funereal synths and arpeggios that twirl frantically in anguish as if they had nowhere else to go, saturating the cloudy soundscape with particulate matter so intricate it's a wonder all this sound data can be contained in a single mp3, nevermind a groove in wax. The fluttering effects are only further confused by the bleary smudge of it all, cinematic and grand but stuck in Burial's world of canned frequencies: The locust-swarm effect of the filters is impossibly stirring, far more visceral than perfect clarity ever could have been. It falls apart about seven minutes in before reconstructing into an even more decayed beat, violently wedged apart by static-- recalling the most challenging work of the Caretaker and his vinyl experiments. "Ashtray Wasp" suggests a structural intricacy and awe-inspiring execution from one of electronic music's mopiest producers, and the result might be his definitive track.

  It's hard to talk about Kindred-- whether in the context of electronic dance music or just in the Burial discography itself-- without resorting to superlative terms, because it really is just that impressive. It's easy enough to take a talent such as Burial for granted, but Kindred is like a convenient slap in the face, a wake up call. Never before has his music possessed this much majesty, this much command, this much power: The pathos here has moved from sympathetic to completely domineering. The amount of dialog around Burial can be a little hard to swallow sometimes, especially when the guy himself seems so resistant-- or at least indifferent-- to the ongoing intellectualization of his music. But what we get on Kindred isn't some loner unknowingly making genius out of samples from Metal Gear Solid on his Playstation. You might not think of refinement when you think of Burial's productions, but just try to imagine it, and you'll get an idea of the kind of glory that Kindred carries. It still might not be the follow-up to Untrue that everyone's been waiting for, but format feels completely irrelevant. When those beats fall into place on the title track, nothing else matters for the next 30 minutes, until the crackle and fizz of "Ashtray Wasps" finally fades away. Then you put it on again. And again. And again.

  

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• John Talabot: ƒIN Feb 07th 2012 06:00

  When the Irish techno producer Donnacha Costello released his debut album, Growing Up in Public, its title crystallized a key dilemma of any emerging artist: At what point do you decide you're ready to venture out of the bedroom? That was back in 2000, well before the internet had shifted into high gear; since then, the coming-out process has gotten only harder.

  Barcelona's John Talabot and his first album, ƒIN, make for an interesting case study of the musical debutant: This is actually the artist's second time around. Under a different alias, as a resident DJ at one of Barcelona's techno institutions, he began his recording career in the mid 2000s, making punchy, melodic dance music with a clear debt to labels such as BPitch Control and Border Community. A few years later, around the same time that Barcelona's techno scene and the styles that fueled it began to go stale, his own productions began to shift. He eased into a mid-tempo chug and set aside buzzing synthesizers in favor of sun-bleached samples, trading neon fizz for dandelion fluff. Like a company de-listing itself from the stock market, the local fixture took himself private, assuming a new alias and wiping the slate clean.

  It was a smart move. In the past two years, Talabot has become an exemplar of a new breed of producers working at the intersection of deep house, disco, and indie pop, and he has carved out his own niche somewhere between the slow-motion theatrics of artists such as Mark E and Tensnake, the globe-trotting jewel tones of Four Tet and Caribou, and the psych-pop rush of Animal Collective and Delorean. Having interviewed him a few times, I don't think there's a calculating bone in the-artist-currently-known-as-John-Talabot's body, but he has nevertheless benefited from being in the right place at the right time. His slow tempos, supersaturated colors, and tropical accents fit right in with the woozy, humid dance music that's currently in vogue, and he has found himself in esteemed company-- remixing the xx, recruiting Glasser's Cameron Mesirow for guest vocals, and releasing on Young Turks. He's currently on tour in Australia with SBTRKT, another indicator that his star is on the rise.

  Ironically, this all means that, his quasi-anonymity aside, Talabot finds himself growing up in public all over again as he graduates from singles and remixes to the full-length album form. Perhaps it's those raised stakes that make ƒIN feel like such a triumph. Across the album's 11 tracks, Talabot builds upon his distinctive sound-- bursting with color, nostalgic but never retro, easy-going yet slightly unhinged-- without repeating himself.

  Talabot's early singles tended to follow a single trajectory, beginning with a bed of chunky percussion and then piling on loops of acoustic guitars, Philly strings, and soaring, pitched-up voices, usually culminating in a swollen, almost over-the-top climax. He hasn't entirely abandoned that approach, but he hasn't remained shackled to it, partly because he has shortened his track times considerably: Where his singles and remixes routinely ran seven, eight, even nine minutes, most of ƒIN's tracks come in around the four-minute mark, giving him the opportunity to experiment with more modest ideas that say their piece and move on.

  The album's first three songs show off his range. The opening "Depak Ine"-- at seven-and-a-half minutes, it's the LP's longest cut-- is disco by way of Depeche Mode, with stabbing synths, eerie vocal samples, and an inexplicable chorus of croaking frogs. (The title resembles the brand name of a mood-stabilizing drug, which might explain the shift from minor to major halfway through; perhaps the frogs denote side effects?) "Destiny", a co-production with Madrid's Pional, is one of the album's obvious standouts, with beautifully harmonized vocals over lilting Caribbean chimes and a cozy, reassuring chord progression. Then, like a kind of palate cleanser, the three-minute "El Oeste" is a sleek little miniature of melting synthesizers, scraggly drum machines and dub delay that gradually swells into a folky, Boards of Canada-gone-house vibe.

  A few times, Talabot tries to recreate the sensation that he nailed on "Sunshine", an early hit that was as subtle as an ice-cream headache. With its stabbing chords and sped-up vocal loops, "When the Past Was Present" shows Talabot at his excessive best-- buzzing and slightly out of tune, with everything pushed into the red and teetering on the verge of collapse. "Journeys", the album's only misstep, goes for the same vibe, but there's something clunky about its construction, and the vocals, from Delorean's Ekhi Lopetegi, can be distractingly pitchy.

  A kind of happy melancholy informs most of the album, but that unity of mood doesn't get in the way of the songs' potential to surprise. As many times as I listen, I keep discovering new sounds, phrases, and even entire songs that had previously passed me by, such as "Estiu", a demure, three-minute funk bumper that sounds like Dâm-Funk on Percoset, or "Last Land", whose breakbeat sounds based on the same sample used in Mr. Cheeks' 2001 club-rap hit "Lights, Camera, Action!".

  ƒIN saves its best song for last: "So Will Be Now...", another Pional co-production, which loops sampled vocals into a dreamy haze before digging into a sparse, deep-house groove. It's restrained, but there's real power there. A friend raved to me about how the song moved the dance floor at Berlin's Panorama Bar one Sunday morning. On your home speakers, it's as comforting as a lullaby, but played loud, apparently, those stark finger snaps and swooning coos are a call to collective ecstasy. Those contradictory qualities inform the whole record as it luxuriates in the space between private and public, just as its ambiguous title blurs the line between ends and means.

  

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• Schoolboy Q: Habits & Contradictions Jan 27th 2012 06:00

  Schoolboy Q is the most promising foot soldier in Kendrick Lamar's Black Hippy crew, a small circle of talented rappers currently reinventing West Coast hip-hop, but he's more than that. His second full-length statement, Habits & Contradictions, is a sumptuously produced and deeply enjoyable hour-plus slab of weed-clouded rap, but it's more than that. I've spent the past four days immersed in it, trying to resolve its conflicting impulses and ferret out all of its weird corners, and the only thing I can say for certain is that, while listening to it, I feel pulled completely into someone else's center of gravity, which is maybe the most gratifying listener's sensation there is.

  The record's first layer is sheer sound: Habits & Contradictions is full of plush, inviting, high-thread-count production, the kind that pulls you toward fat headphones and a chair. Like Kendrick Lamar's Section.80, there is a woozy drag to the drums and a thick, clotted feel to the sounds surrounding them. It shares a metabolic rate with Houston screw music, but the album's chilly mood is closer to the heron'-gray-skies gloom of RZA and Mobb Deep. In fact, when Mobb Deep affiliate the Alchemist shows up halfway through Habits on "My Homie", he feels right at home.

  Habits & Contradictions is, accordingly, a dark and moody listen, but it never bogs down in momentum or succumbs to despair. "There He Go" flips a sample of Portland trio Menomena's brittle "Wet and Rusting" into a hard-hitting anthem. "Druggys Wit Hoes Again", with its gabbling bursts of vocal samples and bone-jarring snare kicks, is a prime slab of Bay Area gangsta music. Even when everything slows to a crawl, there are small sounds tucked in everywhere, enlivening the darkness: the spaghetti-western guitar twangs on "Sacrilegious", or the heavy-breathing Portishead drum break of "Raymond 1969".

  It helps that Schoolboy is an odd, genuinely unpredictable presence who sometimes seems to be rapping entirely for his own amusement. There's audible dryness in his voice as he drunkenly croons the off-key hook, "House fulla money/ Tub fulla bitches," on "How We Feeling", and you can hear he's holding the words in air quotes, as if he's just trying the words on, since they're the Sorts of Things One Says in Rap Songs. On "Nightmare on Fig St.", he teases the opening "Ball so hard" bars of "Niggas in Paris" for no obvious reason, and then launches into sharply worded threats ("The landlord, turn your lieutenant into a tenant"), head-turning non sequiturs ("We drive to pussy more than we do to church/ No AC but the heater WOOOORK!") and a riot of demented ad-libs.

  This lily-pad hopping means that it takes a while for the buried emotion in Habits to surface. Schoolboy raps in a wearily flat voice that evokes Prodigy's, and his lyrics deal with all the dark stuff of gangsta rap: poverty, violence, drugs, hopelessness. But his music has none of gangsta rap's implacable, survival-at-all-costs forward motion. Schoolboy's music is dank with the lousy weather of disappointment, with human-sized failures. When he tells us about selling oxycontin with a lifelong friend who sold him out, he doesn't sound like murderous Vengeance Incarnate; he just sounds hurt. His tangled past as a set leader of the Hoover Crips, meanwhile, leaks out in small bits. "Contradictions in my thoughts, and I just execute my feelings," he mutters on "2 Raw", and it hints effectively at an unspoken well of remorse.

  Schoolboy Q has little of Black Hippy alpha Kendrick Lamar's gloomy-paladin aura, or his rap-Hamlet charisma. But it's worth noting that, at least right now, Schoolboy is making stronger music than Kendrick. Habits & Contradictions sounds comfortable in its skin, at home its own quiet strangeness, in a way that Section.80 never manages. It's better-paced. He's probably not going to be a break-out star, but it's hard to imagine that there will be many more original or satisfying rap long-players this year.

  

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• Cloud Nothings: Attack on Memory Jan 23rd 2012 06:00

  About a year ago, it seemed easy to predict what Dylan Baldi's first great album would probably sound like. After the release of the Turning On, a self-recorded collection of CD-Rs filled with tuneful alt-punk songs wrapped in tinfoil and steel wool that was released by the tiny California imprint Bridgetown Records, Cloud Nothings' self-titled debut on Carpark was an identifiable point on a familiar trajectory. The clarity afforded even by its modest budget made sweet and airy singles like "Forget You All the Time" and "Should Have" sound revelatory, while more overtly aggro tracks like "Rock" and "Not Important" felt thin and regressive, unnecessary vestiges of lo-fi provocation that didn't do Baldi many favors.

  And then "No Future/No Past" arrived as the first single from Attack on Memory. It was brightly produced but tonally dark with a queasy anti-melody-- a confrontational act that suggested that Baldi was going off script. Turns out "No Future/No Past" is the least representative track on Attack on Memory, but it opens the album with a necessary slate-clearing. While a full record of fizzy pop-punk would've been welcome, Cloud Nothings are trying for more. As an accidental concept album affirming the enduring power and purity of early emo (as defined by Dischord, Deep Elm, and especially Jade Tree), Attack on Memory feels above all necessary, a corrective for indie rock making allowances for everything except music that actually rocks.

  The overhaul is radical: It's literally a different band from the one that made Cloud Nothings. For one thing, Cloud Nothings is actually a band now rather than Baldi's solo project, retaining the lineup that toured with Fucked Up and likely learned a lot from them. While the freedom and ease of being a bedroom artist has its advantages, you can't make your own Sunny Day Real Estate and Wipers records without a beastly rhythm section. Even beyond the short window of time that passed between Cloud Nothings and Attack on Memory, this is a record that crackles with "let's get this on tape now" immediacy-- eight tracks, about half an hour, blunt lyrics, big choruses, lots of screaming. Fussing over these songs would've sapped their urgency.

  "No Future/No Past" is the first gauntlet Baldi throws down but it's not the most daunting. At more than nine minutes, "Wasted Days" is far longer than anything on Cloud Nothings. As a radio edit, it could be something like Cloud Nothings' answer to Foo Fighters' "Everlong", a fanged beauty of barbed chords, torrential drum rolls, and impassioned emoting. But as it rolls on, "Wasted Days" becomes simultaneously forbidding, disorienting, and psychedelic, something like a black-and-grey kaleidoscope. As the band hurtles to the finish, Baldi repeatedly yells, "I thought! I would! Be more! Than this!" in a high-voltage scree as a painful paradox after such an ambitious display of more.

  Baldi has always been a hooks guy, and Attack is every bit as catchy as the more rigid and user-friendly Cloud Nothings, and the spaciousness of Steve Albini's recording gives plenty of room for these hooks to careen into each other: "Stay Useless" is an anthemic tantrum that shifts rhythm without warning, the bludgeoning riffs of "No Sentiment" give way to the plaintive vocals and jittery snare runs on "Our Plans", while "Cut You" fades out the record on a gracefully arcing chant that's equally vengeful, self-loathing, and hopeful.

  There's the temptation to give too much of the credit to Albini, whose open-door policy has attracted an endless number of cred-deficient bands.  Attack on Memory is unmistakably his work-- Baldi's vocals are close-mic'd and raw, the drums are loud as hell, the guitars are economically panned and almost entirely free of effects processing, and there's actual space in between of all of them. But here's Baldi explaining Albini's role to Pitchfork's Jenn Pelly: "Steve Albini played Scrabble on Facebook almost the entire time [we were recording]. I don't even know if he remembers what our album sounds like." It was meant as a compliment, but the lesson is clear: A lot of producers would be better off stepping back and doing nothing. Attack on Memory isn't what typically gets classified as a "headphones record," but that's the best way to first experience how alive it sounds, aggressively leaping out at you with real dynamics. Check the giddy explosions out of the pockets of silence punctuating "Stay Useless", the offbeat harmonies and rhythmic stumble that sound like happy accidents on "Fall In", or Baldi's serrated bark shredding the uneasy full-band détente following the solo of "No Sentiment".

  That's where you'll find Attack on Memory's key lyric, "No nostalgia and no sentiment/ We're over it now and we were over it then," making the title's implications clear: If you enjoy this as a work of art, there's an invitation to adopt it as cultural critique. Baldi shares stages and a label with Toro Y Moi and joked about "Forget You All the Time" being "our most chillwave song" at a Los Angeles show, so the title is more of a call to be heard in the current climate rather than a total negation of it. But the last Fugazi album came out when Baldi was 10, and it's easy to see "memory" as a stand-in for indie's stylistic pervasiveness: de-emphasis of guitars and live performance, passivity over aggression, past over presence, singing like you don't care if you get understood or even heard. That just doesn't cut it for a lot of people his age who wonder if they'll ever witness "The Argument"'s kind of life-affirming vitality firsthand.

  There's a fundamental irony in how a record titled Attack on Memory is such a sonic throwback, while Baldi's lyrics obsess over arrested development and missed opportunities. But like the best of indie's recent guitar bands that dare to skew retro-- Yuck, the Men, WU LYF, to name a few-- Attack on Memory is too visceral to feel like escapism, too vital to feel like cheap revival. Not when this sound's death was the wrongful diagnosis of trendwatchers: Those of us who grew up on Drive Like Jehu, Braid, and Jawbreaker can listen to Attack on Memory and sense their artistic legacy is in good hands, but there will inevitably be teenagers for whom Attack on Memory stands to be that kind of record to call their own. And hopefully we'll all meet up in the mosh pit.

  

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• Sepalcure: Sepalcure Nov 22nd 2011 06:00

  Bass producers tend to treat innovation like daily prayer: If not duly performed at regular intervals, some ill-defined Very Bad Thing will happen. The thirst for innovation is such that some scene-watchers have likened current bass music to post-punk, stratifying its sounds in search of growth. Previous British dance movements-- drum'n'bass and garage-- found such terrifying end-games that the bass scene has made a constant effort to never stop swimming. To brand an artist as someone who simply executes, however masterfully, is to damn him with faint praise. Increasingly, bass producers have looked backward (thumping, linear 4/4 bangers) or forward (mutated footwork fever-dreams), largely ignoring (as Pitchfork writer Philip Sherburne put it in discussion), the fertile terrain between Burial and Joy Orbison.

  On their debut full-length for Scuba's Hotflush label, New York duo Sepalcure nimbly incorporate current trends but arrive at a sound-- politely mysterious rhythms put to life by haunted vocal samples-- that's familiar and rich. Sepalcure is a collaboration between two dance veterans, Praveen Sharma and Travis Stewart. That their album scans as a bit of a melting pot should not surprise. Sharma runs dance media hub Percussion Lab and records misty, retro-futuristic house as Braille. Stewart hops genres as Machinedrum, whose footwork-fusion album Room(s) is widely regarded as one of the year's best dance releases (I regret underrating its idiosyncrasies).

  Admittedly influenced by the scores of talent massing on forward-thinking bass labels like Hotflush and Hessle Audio, their collaboration was the result of boredom and opportunity (Sharma's girlfriend, visual artist Sougwen Chung, was studying abroad; she handles all of the group's visuals). Some combination of serendipity and skill saw the duo's first tracks fall into the hands of Mary Anne Hobbs and Paul Rose (Scuba); two well-received EPs later, a short two-week recording session birthed Sepalcure.

  That Sepalcure is so balanced and organized can be attributed to the experience and seeming calm of its principals; that it sounds so lively and inviting is the greater achievement. While syncopated rhythms-- pattering cymbals and kicks with now-familiar handclaps-- and probing bass sponge up dubstep's urban paranoia, Sharma and Stewart add plenty of more explicitly emotional touches to their work. How else to explain the Who's "See Me, Feel Me" stretched transparent over, um, "See Me Feel Me"? (And how the hell did that sample get cleared?) Or the hammy Italo-disco pianos that build up under the fingernails of "Hold On" and "Yuh Nuh See"? Sepalcure's moody haze and mid-song shifts prevent it from being dance-floor fodder ("The One" is a welcome exception), but neither is it music by which to lonesomely stare at rainstorms.

  Vocals play a prominent role throughout. During their best moments, Sharma and Stewart subject rave-y house divas to dubstep's pinched nausea, turning the gospel-like fervor of their sources into grimy hymns. (Those new to the group should acquaint themselves with early single "Love Pressure".) "Breezin" is especially devoted, its tremulous refrain-- "Mountains high and low!"-- ascending above its buzzy synths. The duo recorded many of the instruments live, and there is a punch especially to the pianos (electric and acoustic) that their contemporaries frequently lack. They layer these instruments expertly, and tracks such as lead single "Pencil Pimp" and "Eternally Yrs" function as bass-y, house-y suspensions: discrete parts bound by weightless float. Tufts of melody chunk off "Yuh Nuh See", as its meticulous, six-note sequence snakes around a vocal hum and sprinkled, choral beauty.

  Straightforward descriptions of Sepalcure-- a finely manicured mix of dubstep, house, UK funky, and footwork-- make it sound pedestrian, even contrived. The reality is anything but; Sharma and Stewart have found an alleyway that few other producers have traversed in 2011. Bass producers can treasure-hunt all they want, but increasingly it feels like someone should stay behind to stack the doubloons. Stewart is moving to Berlin, casting doubt on Sepalcure's future. If they never record again, their collaboration may mirror their achievement here: an evolutionary moment, familiar and brief enough to gloss over, rich enough to return to.

  

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• Kate Bush: 50 Words for Snow Nov 21st 2011 06:00

  On "Wild Man", the first single from Kate Bush's winterized 10th album, the singer tells of an expedition searching for the elusive Abominable Snowman. "They want to know you," she coos, "They will hunt you down, then they will kill you/ Run away, run away, run away." Of course, when it comes to modern popular figures-- who often court fame and adulation with an obsessiveness that can be fascinating or just plain sad-- Bush herself is something of a mythical beast. 50 Words for Snow is only her second album of original material in the last 17 years, and she hasn't performed a full concert since her groundbreaking and theatrical Tour of Life wrapped up its six-week run in 1979. So it's no surprise that she readily sympathizes with the misunderstood monster at the center of "Wild Man": "Lying in my tent, I can hear your cry echoing round the mountainside/ You sound lonely."

  50 Words for Snow is teeming with classic Bush-ian characterizations and stories-- fantasies, personifications, ghosts, mysteries, angels, immortals. As quoted in Graeme Thomson's thorough, thoughtful recent biography Under the Ivy, she explained her attraction to such songwriting: "[Songs] are just like a little story: you are in a situation, you are this character. This is what happens. End. That's what human beings want desperately. We all love being read stories, and none of us get it anymore." She's onto something; in our postmodern era, the idea of a tale can seem quaint and simple.

  But Bush continues to infuse her narratives with a beguiling complexity while retaining some old-school directness. Because while most of this album's songs can be easily summarized-- "Snowflake" chronicles the journey of a piece of snow falling to the ground; "Lake Tahoe" tells of a watery spirit searching for her dog; "Misty" is the one about the woman who sleeps with a lusty snowman (!)-- they contain wondrous multitudes thanks to the singer's still-expressive voice and knack for uncanny arrangements. And mood. There's an appealing creepiness that runs through this album, one that recalls the atmospheric and conceptual back half of her 1985 masterpiece Hounds of Love. Indeed, when considering this singular artist in 2011, it's difficult to think of worthy points of reference aside from Bush herself; her onetime art-rock compatriots David Bowie and Peter Gabriel are currently MIA and in rehash mode, respectively. And while current acts including Florence and the Machine are heavily inspired by Bush's early career and spiritual preoccupations, none are quite able to match their idol's particular brand of heart-on-sleeve mysticism. In an interview earlier this year, the 53-year-old Bush told me she doesn't listen to much new music, and after listening to the stunningly subtle and understated sounds on Snow, it's easy to believe her.

  The album's shortest song, the gorgeous closing piano ballad "Among Angels", clocks in at almost seven minutes. "Misty" rolls out its brilliant, funny, and bizarrely touching tale across nearly a quarter of an hour. It's not one second too long. During the 12-year gap between 1993's The Red Shoes and 2005's Aerial when she was raising her son Bertie, Bush gained a new level of compositional patience. She's now allowing her songs to breathe more than ever-- a fact reinforced by this year's Director's Cut, which found her classing-up and often stretching out songs from 1989's The Sensual World and The Red Shoes via re-recordings. So while "Misty" is an eyebrow-raiser about getting very intimate with a cold and white being with a "crooked mouth full of dead leaves," it hardly calls attention to its own eccentricities. Propelled by Bush's languid piano and the jazzy, pitter-pattering drums of veteran stick man (but relatively new Bush recruit) Steve Gadd, the song is about as appealingly grown-up as a song about having sex with a snowman can possibly be. In her early career, Bush sometimes let her zaniness get the better of her, highlighting her tales of sexual taboo and bizarre yarns with look-at-me musical accompaniment and videos. Those days are long gone. And her heightened sophistication works wonders here. So when the song's titular being is nowhere to be found the following morning-- "the sheets are soaking," she sings-- there is nothing gimmicky about her desperation: "Oh please, can you help me?/ He must be somewhere."

  The ending of that song brings up another common thread through Snow, aside from its blizzard-y climate. This is an album about trying, oftentimes futilely, to find connections-- between Bush and her characters, reality and surreality, love and death. "Snowflake" is a duet with her 13-year-old son, where he plays the small fleck of white falling down from the sky, his high-pitched, choir-boy voice hitting the kind of notes his mom was originally famous for. On the track, Bush encourages her son-- "The world is so loud/ Keep falling/ I'll find you"-- and yet the plaintive piano that steers things is seemingly aware that, once the flake arrives, it'll either melt or disappear among millions of other icy bits. Similarly, while the lake-bound ghost of "Lake Tahoe" is overjoyed to find her long-lost dog-- coincidentally named Snowflake-- at the end of the song, the reunion comes with its own specter of bittersweet afterlife. The same sort of disconnect defines "Snowed in at Wheeler Street", an eerie duet with Bush's teenage idol Elton John about a star-crossed pair who have "been in love forever"-- literally. The time-traveling track finds its leads going from ancient Rome to World War II to 9/11, always losing each other along the way. It acts as something of a sequel to Bush's "Running Up that Hill", another tale of pained co-dependence. There's no happy ending. "When we got to the top of the hill/ We saw Rome burning," sings Elton.

  While much of 50 Words for Snow conjures a whited-out, dream-like state of disbelief, it's important to note that Bush does everything in her power to make all the shadowy phantoms here feel real. Her best music, this album included, has the effect of putting one in the kind of treasured, child-like space-- not so much innocent as open to imagination-- that never gets old. "I have a theory that there are parts of our mental worlds that are still based around the age between five and eight, and we just kind of pretend to be grown-up," she recently told The Independent. "Our essence is there in a much more powerful way when we're children, and if you're lucky enough to... hang onto who you are, you do have that at your core for the rest of your life." Snow isn't a blissful retreat to simpler times, though. It's fraught with endings, loss, quiet-- adult things. This is more than pure fantasy. When faced with her unlikely guest on "Misty", Bush pinches herself: "Should be a dream, but I'm not sleepy."

  

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• Drake: Take Care Nov 14th 2011 06:00

  In 1976, Marvin Gaye holed up in his Hollywood studio and began recording Here, My Dear, a brutally candid album-length dissection of his divorce from wife Anna Gordy. The soul great found beauty within the wreckage, and the album doubled as an emotional exorcism that pushed out pain, anger, regret, spite, vengeance. "Memories haunt you all the time/ I will never leave your mind," he threatens on a song called "When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You". Reviewing the album upon its release in 1978, critic Robert Christgau wrote, "Because Gaye's self-involvement is so open and unmediated... it retains unusual documentary charm."

  The same could be said of Drake, whose unrepentant navel-gazing and obsession with lost love reach new levels on his second proper LP, Take Care. Running with Gaye's ghost, Drake offers a profane update of his forebear's twisted heart: "Fuck that nigga that you love so bad/ I know you still think about the times we had," he sings on the insidious hook of "Marvins Room", a song recorded in the same studio where Gaye originally exposed his own unedited thoughts more than three decades ago.

  In this age of reality television, 24-hour celebrity news, and second-to-second documentation-- where behind-the-scenes sagas mix with what's on screen and on record, creating an ever-morphing, ever-more-self-aware new normal-- Drake is an apt avatar. Naturally, he knows this, too. "They take the greats from the past and compare us/ I wonder if they'd ever survive in this era," he contemplates on the album, "In a time where it's recreation/ To pull all your skeletons out the closet like Halloween decorations." We can thank Kanye West for legitimately kicking off this open-book hip-hop era, and it's increasingly apparent that Drake is the most engaging new rap star since Ye. While fame causes some to withdraw and cling to what little privacy they have left, this 25-year-old Canadian's penchant for poetic oversharing has only been emboldened by his success. When he's not making the most epic drunk-dial song in pop history with "Marvins Room", he's openly pleading with former flame Rihanna on the record's title track, or duetting with Twitter wife Nicki Minaj on "Make Me Proud" only to call out such publicity-baiting "relationships" two tracks later, where he raps, "It look like we in love, but only on camera." With its startlingly frank talk and endless heartbreak, Take Care often reads like a string of especially vulnerable-- and sometimes embarrassing-- Missed Connections.

  This time around, Drake has a better grasp on his own notoriety and the mind-fucks that come with it. While he expressed wonderfully wounded trepidations about his sudden rise on Thank Me Later, he's learning to embrace it more here. "They say more money more problems, my nigga, don't believe it," he raps on closer "The Ride". "I mean, sure, there's some bills and taxes I'm still evading/ But I blew six million on myself, and I feel amazing." And on "HYFR (Hell Ya Fucking Right)", he all but gives away his hand, turning his sadness into strategy: "What have I learned since getting richer?/ I learned working with the negatives could make for better pictures." And while he claims "I think I like who I'm becoming" on "Crew Love"-- about as ringing an endorsement you'll get from a guy so bent on exposing his own disappointments-- he's still more interested in contradiction than triumph. Even when staring at a pair of unnatural breasts, he highlights the incision rather than the size: "Brand new girl and she still growing/ Brand new titties, stitches still showing/ Yeah, and she just praying that it heals good/ I'm 'bout to fuck and I'm just praying that it feels good."

  Just as his thematic concerns have become richer, so has the music backing them up. Thank Me Later banked on a sonic tableau that was slow and sensual and dark-- equal parts Aaliyah and the xx-- and Take Care takes that aesthetic to an even more rewarding place, spearheaded by Drake's go-to producer Noah "40" Shebib, who gets a writing and production credit on almost every song. While the bombastic style of producer Lex Luger's work with Rick Ross and Waka Flocka Flame threatened to turn the tide on Drake and 40's moody atmospherics last summer, the pair stick to their gut here and delve further into smooth piano and muffled drums, fully committed to the idea of doing more with less. This is sensuous music that breathes heavy somewhere between UGK's deep funk, quiet-storm 90s R&B, and James Blake-inspired minimalism. (Drake reportedly had a vinyl copy of Blake's debut LP on display in the studio while recording Take Care.) Its subtlety is a direct rebuke to the rash of in-the-red Eurotrance waveforms clogging up radio dials. Even the more upbeat tracks take pains not to rely on a simple thump. "Take Care" features Rihanna and a four-four beat, but the singer shows off her little-heard whispering delivery and the instrumental comes courtesy of the xx's Jamie xx, who nimbly tailors his remix of Gil Scott-Heron's "I'll Take Care of You" for the occasion.

  Drake's worked on his own technical abilities, too, and both his rapping and singing are better than ever here. Notably, he only brandishes the hashtag flow he quickly became famous (or infamous) for over the last few years, turning it into a knowing knock on copycats: "Man, all of your flows bore me/ Paint drying." And he breathlessly runs through the opening verse on the vicious "HYFR" at a speed that would likely garner respect from Busta Rhymes. And then there's "Doing It Wrong", a brilliant, barely there slow jam that borrows some lyrics from an unlikely source (Don "American Pie" McLean's twangy 1977 track "The Wrong Thing to Do") and features an unlikely guest in Stevie Wonder. Fitting the album's classy, unshowy demeanor, Wonder is tapped not to sing but play harmonica-- and uncharacteristically downcast harmonica at that-- for the track's crushing denouement. The song has Drake chronicling the conflicting emotions of a difficult breakup and giving us his finest singing to date. His words are simple, universal, true: "We live in a generation of not being in love, and not being together/ But we sure make it feel like we're together/ 'Cause we're scared to see each other with somebody else." Elsewhere, André 3000 references Adele's unimpeachable "Someone Like You" in one of the album's many well-placed guest verses; "Doing It Wrong" deserves to follow that song as pop's next Great Heartbroken Ballad.

  The cover of Take Care shows its star sitting at a table, dejected and surrounded by gold, like a hip-hop Midas. Considering some of the money-doesn't-buy-you-happiness sentiments inside, the picture is apropos enough. But it's much too obvious to truly represent what Drake and his crew have done here. A better image would be the grainy, amateur photo he released with "Marvins Room" when he originally leaked it in June, which shows the rapper walking away from a group of private jets, his face obscured by a puff of smoke making its way up to an overcast sky. It lets his reality do the heavy lifting while Drake stands by, taking it all in.

  

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• Oneohtrix Point Never: Replica Nov 11th 2011 06:00

  Everyone who reads about music has a list of descriptors made meaningless by overuse. "Hazy" (rhymes with "lazy") is right up there for me, but another that makes me wince though I've used it myself dozens of times over the years  is "cinematic." It's the term we reach for with instrumental music because movies are where we first learned about the emotional impact of abstract sound. If we'd have grown up in the silent era, we'd be leaning on different adjectives, but given our level of "moving image + instrumental music" saturation, "cinematic" is what comes to mind. Fair enough. In the past, the music of Oneohtrix Point Never-- the main project of the busy producer Daniel Lopatin, also of 1980s pop revivalists Ford & Lopatin-- fit this term. Albums like the Rifts collection and 2010's Returnal had drones and moods and thematic shifts that hinted at some kind of on-screen drama. And Lopatin has said that he's been influenced by film music and would love to work on movie scores. But the new OPN album, Replica, which also happens to be Lopatin's best work to date by far, is coming from somewhere else. This is music that exists independently, each track a tiny universe with its own cracked logic.

  A few people have mentioned the Books to me in reference to this album, and the comparison holds water. It's not that Replica sounds anything like the Books-- though it uses tight loops of sampled voices, the voices exist to convey texture rather than language-- but Lopatin shares with them a fresh ear that creates an uncanny sense of wonder in the music. Also like the Books, Replica puts a premium on silence; just as important as all the odd, hard-to-place sounds is the space that frames it. And the combination of unusual textures and all the room, plus the way the music seems unbound to any particular era or aesthetic, makes the whole thing feel playful. The music is by turns dark, ethereal, frightening, and silly, but regardless, it carries in it a feeling of joy. There's a real sense of discovery here, or possibilities being probed, and that feeling is infectious. You can hear the person making it getting deep into what these sonic elements could mean, and he's bringing us down into this fantastic place with him.

  Aside from the intricate production detail, what's most striking about Replica is how well-constructed these tracks are, which is especially impressive given the record's brevity (the first nine average less than four minutes each). Each has an arc and the music is constantly changing, but the tracks go into unexpected places. The opening "Andro" starts with a lonely, distant synth tone and fuzzy layers of robo-voices before becoming overtaken by noisy samples and, eventually, an explosion of percussion from what sounds like a a digital jungle. "Sleep Dealer" starts off like a pop version of a Steve Reich tape piece, zeroing in on percussive phonetic ticks and a loop of a human sigh, but it gradually resolves itself in an almost geometric way, as the relationship between the various samples snaps into focus just before the ending. The title track pulls us out of the machine by starting with a simple piano figure and then folding in bits of synth and finally a buzzing drone, becoming something alien and foreboding after starting so warm and melancholy. Lopatin doesn't just introduce sounds, add loops, and fade out; his pieces move, tripping from one place to somewhere far away over the course of just a few minutes.

  A couple of tracks, like "Submersible" and "Remember", come closer to the pure synth drone work that marked earlier OPN material, but even these are full of weird surprises, like the distorted and warbly vocal loop at the tail end of "Remember" that manages to sound like a field recording of some ancient religious rite, even though it's probably something like a processed syllable taken from a life insurance advertisement. "Remember", like the album as a whole, feels peculiar and just out of reach, and it makes me realize how hard it is these days to find music imbued with genuine mystery. A huge part of the fun with this record is that these sonic miniatures are truly puzzling even as they remain accessible and highly musical; Replica is "experimental" music that also feels open, and somehow, despite coming out of two speakers like all my other records, it manages to feel participatory. I can feel myself filling in space and making connections as I listen.

  Most film music is functional and is meant to reinforce images and amplify what's happening in the story. It is manipulative by design, serving to bend the affect of the viewer in accordance with the director's wishes. These 10 tracks are packed with detail and rich with feeling, but they are also, to a strange degree, devoid of manipulation. Even though they're uniformly stirring, they don't point you in any direction in particular, and you could see each listener creating his or her own meaning. Instead of pushing, they serve mostly to draw you closer and remind you of the power of sound as sound. Lopatin may have used samples from 1980s commercials to create many of these tracks, but Replica doesn't use nostalgia as an end in itself. This is music that digs deeper and burrows beneath the level of shared associations to discover the sparkling emotional potential of carefully arranged vibrations moving through the air.

  

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• A$AP Rocky: LIVELOVEA$AP Nov 10th 2011 06:00

  A$AP Rocky violated rule number one of the 10 Crack Commandments: Never let no one know how much dough you hold. The cheddar bred $3,000,000 worth of jealousy after the 23-year old New York rapper disclosed the value of his deal with Sony/RCA last month. The offer was tendered largely off the strength of his first two videos, "Purple Swag" and "Peso", a pair of codeine fever dreams that recast Harlem World as a slick-talking color-corrected suburb of Houston.

  To cool-hunting 360-wielding record executives, the videos might as well have been advertisements for the A$AP lifestyle: Colt 45, purple weed and purple drank, dice games, bike riding, brandishing Berettas, clothing designers ostensibly known only to Kanye, and a pretty blonde girl in a grill mouthing the phrase: "this is for my niggas getting high on the regular." Picture an episode of "Gossip Girl" where Blake Lively watches Traffic and subsequently opts to explore the Danger Zone of 125th and Lennox.

  Unavoidable in the conversation is the enduring absence of a New York commercial force under 30. Since the emergence of Dipset and G-Unit in the first half of the last decade, NYC rap aspirants have largely fallen into four categories: ringtone wunderkinds ("This Is Why I'm Hot", "Chicken Noodle Soup"), technically skilled personality voids (Papoose, Saigon), artful traditionalists (Action Bronson, Roc Marciano, Ka), and Maino.

  By contrast, Rocky was telegenic and chanting swag. His lead singles poured syrup-slow Houston ride music atop the malt liquor melodies of Harlem's Max B. What Rocky lacked in lyricism, he made up for in narcotic charisma. Seeking street-cred, Drake announced plans to take Rocky on tour. Seeking swag-cred, Lloyd Banks and Jim Jones hopped on tracks with him. Hype metastasizes fastest in New York, and it's easy to conflate the need for a standard bearer with the desire for a savior. Rocky was the chosen one. Hence, $3,000,000.

  Commence the hating. Odd Future's Hodgy Beats called him "A$AP Copy." Old heads looked askance at his appropriation of styles alien to the five boroughs. Blogs painted it as the worst New York investment since the Yankees gave Brien Taylor $1.55 million. Rocky didn't help matters when he allegedly punched out a soundman at the Fader Fort and announced that he and his whole crew had adopted vegetarianism. Thus, every mention of his debut mixtape, LIVELOVEA$AP has pondered whether it justifies the price tag of a Bugatti and several dozen ivory backscratchers. Good isn't enough. People expect Rakim Mayers to be the second coming of his namesake.

  Of course, the odds are slanted in your favor when you're a rapper named Rakim. You can't exactly sell life insurance. And throughout LIVELOVEA$AP, Rocky embodies the sweat-free cool of someone who has stolen the test and memorized the answers ahead of time. It sidesteps the usual pitfalls of the heavily anticipated debut; there are no ill-fitting famous rapper cameos or last-cup leftovers from $10,000-a-beat producers. Rocky makes no cornball radio plays, nor any awkward attempts to prove his depth. Even on "Demons", the record's most emotionally raw track, Rocky is preternaturally self-assured. He's got stomach pains but dreams with the inevitable triumphalism of someone who can convince RCA/Polo Grounds to hand over their Pitbull blood money. After about a minute of complaining, he's back to "fucking the chick you're next to." By rough estimate, Rocky fucks about 13 or 14 different girlfriends in the course of the album's 56 minutes. There are two different mentions of Naughty by Nature's "O.P.P.". He is nothing if not efficient.

  That's the thing. It's pretty easy to point out the pitfalls of LIVELOVEA$AP. Thematic and lyrical concerns are basically limited to Rocky being a pretty motherfucker, repping Harlem, doing drugs, and getting more women than James Worthy in Houston. Rocky raps effortlessly, switching back and forth between Midwestern double-time to something that resembles Wiz Khalifa auditioning for Byrd Gang. The dark, drugged visions of Memphis rap also creep in throughout. But to his credit, he doesn't waste much time persecuting haters, preemptively striking only once on "Leaf": "They say I sound like André/ Mixed with Kanye/ A little bit of Max/ A little bit of Wiz/ A little bit of that/ A little bit of this/ Get off my dick."

  It's more difficult to point out where exactly Rocky excels. He's a good rapper, but he's not Kendrick Lamar. He's melodic, but he's not a walking hook like 50 Cent. His voice is strong but not completely singular. Instead, Rocky has great instincts: the moment when he abruptly switches to his Bone Thugs-N-Harmony flow for a few bars in "Trilla", the bizarre song structure of "Bass", where he just repeats "Bass" in lieu of a hook; the last minute and a half of "Demons", where his scrambled lo-fi refrain fades into the chlorine fog of the Clams Casino beat.

  If anything LIVELOVEA$AP is a triumph of immaculate taste. Rocky's ear for beats is worthy of Rick Ross or early Game. Courtesy of Clams Casino, Burn One, Beautiful Lou, A$AP Ty Beats, and SpaceGhostpurrp, the stellar production makes this something like a swag-rap generation The Documentary. He cherry-picks from the best of internet micro-trends-- taking celestial based weirdness, the funk of country rap, the stoned pace of screw, and the tape-warp of Memphis. But at the core is the French-braided, gold-toothed kid from money-making Manhattan, inflecting his songs with hints of third-generation Spanish Harlem and West Indian patois. For someone who brags, "the only thing bigger than my ego is my mirror," Rocky wisely cedes the spotlight to well-chosen guests, including Oakland's Main Attrakionz, Houstoner Fat Tony, and the larcenous intensity of L.A.'s Schoolboy Q. Meanwhile his A$AP crew shows few signs of being there for reasons of nepotism or weed carrying.

  "Houston Old Head" might be the best sign that Rocky can deliver on his seven-figure potential. It's not necessarily the most memorable song, but it's his most surprising-- a swaggering lean-sipping version of Neil Young's "Old Man", with it's chorus, "If you listen when your old head talk/ You'll be straight." It's basically the opposite of Odd Future's youth worship-- the admission that occasionally your elders can put you up on game. It shows he's willing to listen and soak up different styles and sounds-- crucial elements for evolution. Even if the fusion initially seems unorthodox, LIVELOVEA$AP is exactly the sort of record you'd expect to hear in 2011 from a New Yorker who was 13 when "Big Pimpin'" came out. Rocky did what should've been expected of him; he made a very good record. Now we wait to see if he'll get clientele.

  

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• Atlas Sound: Parallax Nov 07th 2011 06:00

  Bradford Cox knows a thing or two about creating a schism between his everyday self and the one he presents on record. In interviews he's garrulous and outspoken, ostensibly brimming with confidence, yet plagued by insecurity. All that self-doubt manifests itself in his solo project, Atlas Sound, where he often sounds small, alone, and cut adrift from the world. At times Cox seems at odds with himself, but dig deeper and there's usually a thread running through his real-world activities and the ideas he obsesses over when recording.

  And he's always recording. Last year, Cox released four albums of Atlas Sound demos as the free-download Bedroom Databank series. It's a wonder he can keep track of all his work, but one of his biggest talents-- aside from his rich vein of form as a songwriter-- is as an editor. Not only does he know exactly what to release officially and what to preserve as a blog-only treat for fans, he's also intuitively adept at compartmentalizing material into his Deerhunter and Atlas Sound worlds.

  Despite the separation, those two modes aren't mutually exclusive, and it's always interesting to see how Cox's two guises feed off each other while retaining strong individual identities. The last Deerhunter album, Halcyon Digest, ended with "He Would Have Laughed", built around a spaghetti-like loop of synthesized noise. It mirrors a trick that's revisited just a few songs into Parallax, on "Te Amo". Here, Cox leans on a repeating pattern, then pulls away from it by testing the elasticity of his vocal range, stretching into a gruff register he's rarely tried out before. Atlas Sound often functions this way, taking baby steps on the road to evolution and leaving traces of previous material to ground the listener. The two constants are Cox's fascination with ambient music and the unabashed sadness at the heart of his writing. "When you're down, you're always down," he croons on "Te Amo".

  Crooning has held Cox's interest for a while now. Versions of Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" and the Rodgers and Hart standard "Blue Moon" appeared on his blog back in 2008, and his cover of Joe Meek's "Valley of the Saroos" is one of his most impressive giveaways. Lately, Cox has been playing around with image, something he hasn't attempted much since his early dress-wearing days in Deerhunter, and he appears to have settled on a hybrid of Meek-ian high hair and David Bowie's plastic emulation of the rock'n'roll era circa Let's Dance. On the Mick Rock-shot cover of Parallax he's even depicted clutching a vintage 1950s microphone. So it's appropriate that this record begins with "The Shakes", where Cox casts himself as an idol who's grown bored of fame, money, and hangers-on masquerading as friends. It echoes Bowie's weary exasperation at the clamor for fame in the documentary Cracked Actor, where he rides around middle America in a limo and compares himself to a fly swimming around in his glass of milk.

  That link to Bowie loops back to the Young Americans-style sax solo on "Coronado" from Halcyon Digest, further indicating how one Cox project informs his others. But his omnivorous approach to music history, and the restraint that keeps him from drawing too much from his heroes' own sounds, makes Parallax a constantly shifting delight. In the past, Cox's affinity for masked vocals allowed him to keep his guard up, stopping listeners from encroaching on his malaise. Here, he uses fewer vocal effects, and the gentle balladry of "Modern Aquatic Nightsongs" and "Terra Incognita" benefit greatly from it. This cleaner approach to his art demonstrates his growing confidence as a singer and songwriter and feels more involving.

  But that's only part of the picture. Because Cox likes to confound, surprise, and keep his audience guessing, one of his shiniest pop moments yet lies at the center of this record. "Mona Lisa" is a jaunty piece of melancholia-tinged guitar rock, hung up somewhere between the livelier moments on R.E.M.'s Green and the rural tug at the heart of the Kinks' best material. Comparing this track with the deliberately jaded lyrical framework of "The Shakes" highlights one of the most fascinating juxtapositions about Cox; he's so well versed in music history that he knows he'll hate the pitfalls that await him if proper fame comes beckoning, and yet his inclination toward deeply accessibile songwriting and infernally catchy pop melodies might drive him in that direction anyway. There's also more bridge-building on "Mona Lisa" and the garage-y "My Angel Is Broken", where he sounds confident and vulnerable at the same time, drawing some of that swagger he possesses in real life into his art.

  Parallax feels like a more complete work than any other Atlas Sound record, with the differences between the songs less distinct and everything flowing together more naturally. "Quick Canal" was a standout on Logos but it also stood alone, feeling like a neat one-off collaboration with a hero (in that case, Stereolab singer Laetitia Sadier) that didn't readily come into focus in the overall picture. There are no such loose strands here, and the closing "Lightworks" ends the album wonderfully with a tremoloed guitar shuddering against Cox's hankering vocal line and uncanny pop nouse. It's another testament to his editing skills; he can effortlessly balance a sizable load of contrasting styles and slot them together like it's the most natural thing in the world. That lightness of touch is on display throughout this album, providing greater gravitas to Cox's brittle self-examination. Parallax still makes him sound small, alone, and cut adrift from the world, but the way these songs breathe suggests he's more comfortable in his own skin, allowing him to draw his audience closer than ever.

  

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