eMusic » eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com Wed, 08 May 2013 20:32:38 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2-alpha New This Week: Pistol Annies, Talib Kweli, Little Boots & More! http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-pistol-annies-talib-kweli-little-boots-more/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-pistol-annies-talib-kweli-little-boots-more/#comments Tue, 07 May 2013 18:40:46 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=emusic_spotlight&p=3055753 Pistol Annies, Annie Up: The trio of Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley goes from side project from supergroup on their second LP. Stephen Deusner says:

Despite the success of their debut, it’s still a hard-knock life for these Annies, who smartly chronicle the joys and trials of being a woman in the 2010s. On “Being Pretty Ain’t Pretty,” they spend a lot of time and money applying make-up and even more time and money taking it off, but they never play it off as a joke. Instead, they sympathize with the woman in the mirror and their close harmonies invest the song with a deep melancholy. Songs like “Trading One Heartbreak for Another” and “Dear Sobriety” are quietly devastating, but the Annies’ sass and smarts remain.

Talib Kweli, Prisoner of Conscious: On his latest, Talib Kweli sounds liberated and awake. Says Christina Lee:

While 2011′s Gutter Rainbows updated the neo-soul sound of Kweli’s onetime label Rawkus, Prisoner of Conscious reaches back to even older genres. Samba revivalist Seu Jorge adds wistfulness to “Favela Love,” a song about wandering abroad. On “Come Here,” R&B singer Miguel does his best Marvin Gaye while Kweli composes a valentine made of hip-hop references: “We can do it like Common and Mary and ‘Come Closer’/ We can do it like Barack and Michelle, give me a fist bump.”

Patty Griffin, American Kid: The Americana songwriter’s first collection of new songs in six years. Stephen Deusner says:

American Kid is a meditation on wanderlust of all kinds — emotional, physical and musical — and it may be Griffin’s most adventurous and diverse effort yet. Rather than record again in Austin or Nashville, Griffin decamped to Memphis, where she absorbed the Bluff City’s deep, rich history and recruited Luther and Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi All-Stars as her backing band. Fortunately, this is no kneejerk approximation of local blues or soul. No musical tourist, Griffin is not interested in re-creating that Sun or Stax sound; instead, she hits the crossroads and goes in all directions at once.

Still Corners, Strange Pleasures: Still Corners try to rid themselves of the “ethereal” and “dreamy” sound they’re associated with. Alex Naidus says:

Greg Hughes smartly juxtaposes the more traditionally “dreamy” elements of Still Corners’ sound with some crisper textures and more insistent rhythms. His songwriting and production style still skews sweeping and epic: On single “Fireflies,” the synths stack — pillowy pads, twinkling upper-octave melody lines and punchy synth-bass — and are buoyed by Tessa Murray’s vampish vocals. With Strange Pleasures, Hughes has carefully crafted a set with songs that inspire grandeur while remaining taut and gripping — an impressive feat.

Natalie Maines, Mother: Dixie Chick Natalie Maines returns scarred, but smarter, on her first real rock ‘n’ roll record. Stephen Deusner says:

Mother is not merely a shift in musical direction or a crossover attempt; instead, it’s the sound of a woman fighting defiantly to redefine herself with a harder, steelier sound. Fortunately, Maines’s commanding voice remains intact. She nimbly navigates the slow build from soft melody to full gospel finale on “Free Life,” while “Trained” binds a torrid sex metaphor to a rowdy blues-rock groove courtesy of co-producer Ben Harper.

Little Boots, Nocturnes: The long-awaited second LP from synth-pop chanteuse Little Boots. Barry Walters says:

Nocturnes isn’t a total break from her buzzy beginnings. For “Broken Record,” Hesketh writes with veteran songsmith Rick Nowels, spinning the same obsessive love angle as her attention-grabbing first single, “Stuck on Repeat.” But here and elsewhere, she downplays the ’80s vibe in favor of more eclectic synth sounds largely overseen by former Mo’ Wax/DFA honcho Tim Goldsworthy.

Joshua Redman, Walking Shadows: A diverse mix of American songbook standards, pop hits and originals. Says Britt Robson:

Redman plays with gorgeous aplomb on Kern and Hammerstein’s “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” and Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” (the latter also features Mehldau’s best solo). He teases out the familiar melodies of The Beatles’ “Let It Be” and “Stop That Train” by John Mayer before taking transformative liberties with them via deft improvisations. The most arresting of the originals is Redman’s atmospheric “Final Hour,” in which his tenor has the low-toned plangency of a bass clarinet.

The Child of Lov, S/T – 25-year-old Netherlands musician, with the blessing of Damon Albarn (who guests here), turns out self-produced record that sounds like late-period Outkast in a bonfire, or a robot with a dying battery singing Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.”

Astrid Engberg, Poetry is Gone – This seemed intriguing. Cool, Erykah Badu-ish vocals over smoky exhalations of Dilla-esque dusty loops. “Alright” is a jam.

Bajram Bili, Sequenced Fog – Minimal techno mazes built of tiny synthesizer parts. Rudimentary in an intriguing, mysterious way. Sounded interesting.

Shannon Wright, In Film Sound – Pretty brutal, gunky riffing plus Wright’s sneering voice. Basically sounds like the kind of record Steve Albini would have recorded for Touch & Go in the late ’90s. Take a sample, I think it’s pretty boss.

The Hussy, Pagan Hiss – Tinny garage-rock with some Judas Priest-chug guitars, vocals a thousand miles in the mix. One number also seems to be enhanced with a free-recorder solo. Pretty good, bratty-primitive stuff.

Sam Sanders, Mirror Mirror – Pretty sweet, SUPER rare R&B/Soul/Funk record (apparently, this new cover art had to be created from scratch, the original is that obscure). Kind of a nice, digging-in-the-crates type find.

The Uncluded, Hokey Fright – Not the world’s biggest fan of Kimya Dawson over here, but Aesop Rock is good, and this collaboration, while blood-draining on paper, yields a pleasantly quirky (as opposed to unbearably so), finely observed and pleasant listen. If you are even marginally a fan of either of these guys, I feel pretty comfortable recommending this to you.

James Cotton, Cotton Mouth Man – Latest offering of viscerally traditionalist harmonica blues from modern classic bluesman James Cotton.

Spirit of the Garden – Gorgeous chamber art-folk band led by the adventurous contemporary-classical cellist Jody Redhage. Shades of Dead Can Dance…

Lady Antebellum, Golden – Latest studio LP from the pop-country juggernaut.

Michael Hersch, The Vanishing Pavilions Suite – Shuddering, darkly portentous suite for solo piano by the American composer and pianist Michael Hersch. This was a landmark work in the contemporary classical community when it premiered in 2007, and while casually recommending a recording of this monumental work is a little bit like casually recommending that someone read Proust, I still heartily recommend it. (N.B.: I have never read Proust; I just use him as a handy-dandy reference point for “daunting commitment,” because that is essentially what that row of grey books on my shelf represents to me.)

Original Concept, Straight From the Basement of Kooley High! – I do not know what made this come around the New Arrivals turnpike this morning, but there’s no good reason for a self-respecting hip-hop fan not to have heard it. This is the loose, fun, funny and impressive debut LP from Dr. Dre—Andre Brown, that is, of “Ed Lover and,” not the Good Doctor out West. It came out in the earlier days of the major-labels and hip-hop (this was before Yo! MTV Raps) and didn’t sell much, but it’s stuck around because it’s witty and great.

Rod Stewart, Time – Hoo boy, look at that cover. And when there was only one set of footprints, that is when Rod carried you. Do you want to hear 2013-era Rod Stewart sing a song called “Sexual Religion?” Ask yourself that, preferably while looking into a well-lit mirror, and decide what the answer reveals to you about your soul. (NB: I love the first four Rod Stewart solo LPs almost as much as I love anything.)

Various Artists, Music From The Great Gatsby, OST – Here it is – the very expensive soundtrack to The Thing That Baz Luhrmann did to The Great Gatsby. Curated by Jay-Z; featuring Jay-Z, Lana Del Rey, and others.

Courtney Jaye, Love and Forgiveness – Latest from Nashville country singer/songwriter, whose bell-like voice will have sympathetic vibrations with Neko Case and Jenny Lewis Fans. Real Laurel Canyon, Mellow Gold vibes here. Produced by Mike Wrucke, who is known for his work with Miranda Lambert among others.

]]> http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-pistol-annies-talib-kweli-little-boots-more/feed/ 0 New This Week: Phoenix, Laura Stevenson, Craig Taborn, & More http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-phoenix-laura-stevenson-craig-taborn-more/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-phoenix-laura-stevenson-craig-taborn-more/#comments Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:37:46 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=emusic_spotlight&p=3055198 Phoenix, Bankrupt!: Of this week’s biggest release, Barry Walters argues that Phoenix are still “the epitome of rock-disco dialectic.”

Their new one picks up where 2009′s mainstream breakthrough Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix left off, maintaining that album’s crowd-pleasing formula while accentuating the group’s gentle waywardness. Mostly, there’s pleasure on top of pleasure, sweat mixed with digital mathematics, both equally generous.

Laura Stevenson, Wheel: One of our editors’ favorite records of the year, Laura Stevenson’s Wheel is the New York singer-songwriter’s most focused and self-assured release. Rachael Maddux says:

Rather than make the choice between draping the record in heartstring-plucking orchestral folk or loading it with unstoppered rock ‘n’ roll sass, Stevenson and producer Kevin McMahon (Titus Andronicus, Swans) went with all of the above, and it’s for the best; the songs plot themselves out one by one, each as connected and disconnected from what comes before and what comes next as the endless numbered days they taunt and lament. They bloom unexpectedly, then wither away; they blindside, linger and end before you’re ready.

Craig Taborn Trio, Chants : Craig Taborn, Gerald Cleaver and Thomas Morgan are not your grandfather’s piano trio. Of Taborn and co.’s latest, Britt Robson says:

Craig Taborn set a daunting standard with his two previous outings as a leader: 2004′s Junk Magic is a jazz-electronica masterwork that updated Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew for the 21st century; while 2011′s Avenging Angel has been hailed for expanding the language of solo piano improvisation. Chants doesn’t detract from the luster of that legacy. It scrolls out like a seamless series of surprises, with interplay that is earthy and organic, yet whirring with intimate, nuanced colors, like a pastel kaleidoscope.

Junip, Junip: On Junip’s latest, Jose Gonzalez and co. withdraw further into their comfortable cocoon of airy melancholy and spacey synths. Marc Hogan says:

Throughout, Junip is unassumingly elegant, particularly on bleary-eyed dancefloor pick-me-up “Your Life Your Call,” jagged psych excursion “Villain” and tranquil epiphany “After All Is Said and Done.” Over African-style rhythms, “Baton” finds a way to make even whistling sound subtle. As suggested in the lyrics of patiently propulsive first single “Line of Fire,” sometimes it’s best to beat a graceful retreat. There’s more than one way to deconstruct the mechanisms of consumer culture.

Luke Winslow-King, The Coming Tide: a long-ago eMusic Selects artist maters the art of revival folk on his latest. Hilary Saunders says:

The 29-year-old singer/songwriter, slide guitarist Luke Winslow-King is from Michigan, but he has called The Big Easy home since 2001. On his third full-length, you can hear that the city has made its way into his bones. On The Coming Tide, Winslow-King masters the art of revivalist folk, seamlessly blending New Orleans jazz, Delta blues and ragtime into an album as sweet and satisfying as devouring plate of beignets and sipping a café au lait on the banks of the Mississippi.

Slava, Raw Solutions: The debut from this Moscow-born, Chicago-raised, Brooklyn-based DJ/producer. Andy Battaglia says:

Many of the tracks on Raw Solutions take a snippet of a vocal sample and circle around it until it’s been spied from every conceivable angle. Apart from his love for spin-cycle sampling, Slava showcases a nimble production style that favors house music-derived rhythmic syncopation and infusions of pan-electronic elements like rave sirens (“Heartbroken”) and quasi-jungle “rinse-outs” (“Girls on Dick”). It’s all clenched and economical and tight, and it never lets up.

Lilacs & Champagne, Danish & Blue – Grails members continue their dusky, loop-soul side project with another album of album of pastiche-sampling you can smell the used-record bin on. Nate Patrin writes:

Grails members Alex Hall and Emil Amos struck beat-geek paydirt in 2012 with their self-titled debut as Lilacs & Champagne, a musty, scraped-up soak in sample-based psychedelia that played like the lost score to a 1972 Italo-American giallo set in a desert. To continue that cinematic analogy, Danish & Blue is the soundtrack to the best stoner-rap neo-noir never made. It’s the kind of album where RZA-eerie piano loops pair up with heatstruck AOR guitar riffs and decaying fragments of Gary Wright’s synthesizer, before everything is soaked in whiskey, and set on fire at 4 in the morning.

Amy Dickson, Dusk & Dawn  - I know, I know – another classical saxophonist performing Faure. How crowded can one niche get? Jokes, obviously. This is a tastefully and beautifully played selection of light classics that steer well clear of Muzak; Dickson has a wonderfully pure, even tone, and she interprets “I Only Have Eyes For You” as elegantly as she does Faure’s Pavane.  An unusual treat.

Bill Ryder-Jones, A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart – The former Coral guitarist continues his solo career with a wonderful collection of sad-eyed, gently warped ballads, in the vein of XO-era Elliott Smith.

Black Milk, Synth or Soul – Black Milk is a phenomenally talented hip-hop producer from Detroit, and this beat tape reaffirms that. I want him to make more music with Danny Brown soon.

No Joy, Wait For Pleasure -  No Joy’s second record sends them diving further into Lush/Swervedriver territory, and they turn up with sharper songwriter and bigger hooks this time around.

Frank Turner, Tape Deck Heart – Hmm, a “tape deck heart.” Does that mean…it eats whatever goes into it? Curious. Frank Turner’s punky folk rock is pretty meat-and-potatoes, and it sounds like Frank Turner fans are getting what they want here.

Har Mar Superstar, Bye Bye 17 – The swarthy soul man’s latest is a sort of tribute to Sam Cooke, apparently. Lead singer “Lady You Shot Me” (the last words Sam Cooke is ever said to have spoken), however, has a distinctly ’70s Rod Stewart meets the Daptones vibe. Makes sense, as Rod was initially a white guy trying to sound like Sam Cooke.

Snoop Lion, Reincarnated – Snoop Dogg went to Jamaica for the first time. Snoop Dogg is now Snoop Lion. He has made a reggae album. Careful, folks: visiting Jamaica can be very dangerous. Featuring Drake, Mavado, Mr. Vegas, Akon, and others.

The Thermals, Desperate Ground Demos – Some demo versions of Thermals balled-fists triumphal new one.

Tom Jones, Spirit in the Room – Tom Jones attempts his geezer-stares-down-mortality, Johnny-Cash-on-The-Man-Comes-Around moment, covering Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Odetta, Bob Dylan, and more.

Lana Del Rey, Young and Beautiful – LDR sings another version of her exact same song. This time for the up-and-coming Thing Baz Lurhmann Is About To Do To The Great Gatsby.

]]> http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-phoenix-laura-stevenson-craig-taborn-more/feed/ 1 New This Week: Flaming Lips, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Iron & Wine & More http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-flaming-lips-yeah-yeah-yeahs-iron-wine-more/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-flaming-lips-yeah-yeah-yeahs-iron-wine-more/#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:39:10 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=emusic_spotlight&p=3054909 A lot of big names this week! Starting with:

The Flaming Lips, The Terror: Darker things lurk in the cheery public persona the Flaming Lips have offered in the last decade. Dan Hyman says of their latest:

While the Oklahoma-based psych rockers have been moving aggressively in a bleaker direction since 2009′s trippy Embryonic, The Terror may well be their most dour and disturbing display to date. It’s a challenging listen, but an undeniably cohesive one, with each track fusing onto the next.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Mosquito: Karen O and co.’s fourth LP is sparse, jagged and impressionistic. Says Ryan Reed:

Mosquito, unlike the band’s first three albums, takes some time to simmer before it eventually clicks. But it does, eventually, click: “Under the Earth” is a clear standout — twitchy electro-pop with bass tones that boom like elephant cries; “Always” is saturated with sensual tension, Karen O’s voice wandering nimbly through ethereal synth mist. But the real breakthrough is “Wedding Song,” which harkens back to the emotional grandeur of early gem “Maps,” referencing the singer’s recent marriage and closing the album with a blissful serenade.

Shuggie Otis, Inspiration Information/Wings of Love: A lengthy collection of dusted-off recordings from a shoulda-been soul superstar. Jim Farber says:

Shuggie Otis enjoyed his widest exposure in 1977 for writing the funky, Top 5 Brothers Johnson hit “Strawberry Letter 23.” Though the indie label Luaka Bop re-released Inspiration Information 12 years ago, Otis couldn’t convince any label to put out the amazing recordings he’d created since. As these dusted-off — and belatedly introduced — recordings prove, Otis’s solo approach to funk utterly rethought the genre. He made it float instead of stomp, abstracting the sound through the kaleidoscope of psychedelia.

Iron & Wine, Ghost on Ghost: Sam Beam’s new LP goes into jazz-fusion, Bee Gees-y territory. Rachael Maddux on why that’s not too terrible of a thing:

Tracing the genealogy of Ghost on Ghost, its plaid polyester vibe even begins to seem a little bit inevitable. Beam’s layering up of anything besides tickled guitar and hushed vocals began two releases in, on 2004′s Our Endless Numbered Days, with some pitter-pat drums; The Shepherd’s Dog, in 2007, introduced a reinforced backbone of percussion, strings and layered vocals not always his own; in 2011 Kiss Each Other Clean brought both noodlier song structures and more distorted instrumentals while aiming not only for radio-friendliness but a certain early ’70s rock/pop pedigree.

Major Lazer, Free The Universe: Without Switch gone, Diplo called on some friends to help make the new Major Lazer record. Bill Brewster says:

On Free The Universe something strange has happened. What seemed like an off-the-wall dancehall collaboration in 2009 has turned into something far poppier, featuring an unlikely line-up of guests including Shaggy, Wyclef, Peaches, Ezra Koening of Vampire Weekend and even Bruno Mars. Yet it still has that oddball edge that follows Diplo’s productions around like a lost puppy.

Ghostface Killah & Adrian Younge, Twelve Reasons to Die: Ghostface teams up with the killer funk-soul revue live band Nate Patrin says:

Though his persona draws from comics, true crime and 42nd Street double features, it can still be pretty easy to see Ghostface Killah as simply a skilled amplification of an actual person. That’s why Twelve Reasons to Die, his collaboration with soundtrack composer and psychedelic-soul maestro Adrian Younge, is such a unique addition to his catalog: It’s an elaborate, conceptual attempt to give the Tony Starks-turned-Ghostface identity a fantastical origin story, set two years before his birth and drenched in a sound that uncannily evokes both Ghost’s fictional and real-life come-up years.

Fall Out Boy, Save Rock and Roll: The pop-punk superstars reunite, but this isn’t back to basics. Says Barry Walters:

It starts out with an orchestral flourish on the galloping and flat-out fantastic “Phoenix,” and on the way to its piano-lead and even more symphonic finale, there’s white-knuckled relentlessness: Buzzsaw guitars blare while the zinger-packed songs — now credited to the entire band — pile on the hooks. A proven master at bridging the pop/rock gap, producer Butch Walker pumps even the most delicate filigree to stadium-sized proportions. Fall Out Boy has always been dramatic, but here they sometimes lapse into desperation, as if what they’re truly intent on saving is their fanbase.

The Thermals, Desperate Ground: The Thermals’ Saddle Creek debut is their most rousing and most animated. Stephen Deusner says:

This is the sound of a band girding for a hard fight: “The sword at my side will allow me to be the last thing my enemies see,” sings frontman Hutch Harris on the punk-triumphal standout “The Sword at My Side.” The Thermals have strategized and streamlined their attack, pummeling through these songs as a three-person rhythm section: Harris playing furious rhythm guitar, Kathy Foster adding dexterous melodies on bass, and drummer Westin Glass pounding away like they’ll face the firing squad if any song exceeds three-and-a-half-minute mark. The Thermals sound reinvigorated, but rather than smite their enemies, they rally to remind themselves why they keep waging their own personal battle of the band.

Steve Earle & The Dukes (& Duchesses), The Low Highway: This set could almost be a retrospective of Steve Earle’s three-decades-and-counting career. Holly George-Warren says:

Earle’s oeuvre encompasses country, folk, rock, bluegrass and protest music, and his superb new album represents all these facets with a loose-limbed assurance. Back in the saddle is Earle’s road band, the Dukes, amended to include “the Duchesses,” featuring vocalist Allison Moorer (a solo artist and Earle’s wife) and violinist/vocalist Eleanor Whitmore (comprising half of recording artists the Mastersons, along with Dukes guitarist Chris Masterson). This family affair also boasts Earle’s co-producer Ray Kennedy, for the first time since 2004′s Grammy-winning The Revolution Starts Now.

Various Artists, Way To Blue – The Songs Of Nick Drake:Way To Blue isn’t your typical tribute album, with a few well-known acts and plenty of new names. Peter Blackstock says:

Exquisite arrangements and recording techniques result in a live album that doesn’t sound like a live album; it doesn’t sound like a tribute album either, since the tracks weren’t gathered from disparate studio sessions. It also differs from typical tributes in that the big names aren’t the primary draw. There are a few well-known acts — Lisa Hannigan takes “Black-Eyed Dog” into uncharted territory with eerie harmonium tones, Robyn Hitchcock is well-suited to the lyrically offbeat “Parasite,” and Teddy Thompson approaches the hypnotic lure of Drake’s voice on “River Man” — but newer names make the most memorable impressions.

Born Ruffians, Birthmarks: Canadian indie rockers sound like a whole new band on their latest LP. Ryan Reed says:

Birthmarks is an effusive U-turn: radiating confidence and chemistry where 2010′s Say It so often sagged. “Needle” opens with a startling statement of purpose: Gleaming choral harmonies give way to a springy bass/kick-drum pulse, as frontman Luke Lalonde wraps his chipper croon over shards of staccato guitar. Instead of relying on clumsy lyrical metaphors, as they often did on Say It (see: the awkward puns of “Sole Brother”), Lalonde’s words now pack an emotional sting.

Ghost B.C., Infestissumam: Too Satanic for commercial radio, Jon Wiederhorn says Ghost B.C.’s Infestissumam is “more illuminating than 100 burning Bibles:

Despite its bleak atmosphere and epic structures, the album is ultimately more classic rock (think Blue Oyster Cult and Jethro Tull) and proggy pop (early Genesis and Marillion) than metal. There’s no question it’s far more accessible than Opus Eponymous, featuring only a few riffs that could really quality as headbanger-worthy. That said, there’s plenty here that’s thoughtful, provocative and heavy, and the way Ghost B.C. combine influences throughout Infestissumam is uncanny.

The Haxan Cloak, Excavation: The Haxan Cloak’s Bobby Krlic dwells on the dark side, but Sharon O’Connell argues that his dark and chilly aesthetic goes deeper. She says:

There are echoes of Burial’s cavernous dub and Demdike Stare’s haunted techno in Excavation, but its magnificently maleficent, post-dubstep soundscapes have more in common with musique concrete, Expressionist cinema soundtracks and medieval monastic cantos than so-called witch house or drone metal. Krlic’s sounds are again rooted in acoustics (cello, violin, guitar, vocals) and field recordings, but this time they’ve been heavily processed — magnified, stretched, dissembled, reconstituted and rearranged — to produce nine micro-symphonies of stark beauty and extraordinary menace.

Houses, A Quiet Darkness  - An incredible concept to this one; this concept record tells the story of a husband and wife attempting to reunite in the wake of a nuclear apocalypse. Dream-pop with nothing but bad dreams.

The Aluminum  Group, Plano – Low-key lovely, late-80s-to-early-90s indie-pop from Chicago on Minty Fresh. Will remind you of The Clientele, who they predate.

Art Brut, Top of the Pops – Compilation of B-sides, unreleased and best-of by the some of the best stand-up-comedy indie rock that the early ’00s saw.

Barn Owl, V – Pitch-dark doom-dub – enveloping clouds of ambient synths and acres of implied space. A good companion, sonically and spiritually, to that Haxan Cloak record.

Dead  Can Dance, In Concert – Live album from the beloved, and recently returned, classical/indie folk outfit.

John Parish, Screenplay – Frequent PJ Harvey collaborator brings together all of his soundtrack work.

Major Lazer, Free The Universe – Features-heavy part from Diplo’s Major Lazer alias, featuring Amber Coffman, Ezra Koenig, Beenie Man, Shaggy, Bruno Mars, Tyga, and many many more.

Elvis Depressedly, Holo Pleasures – Elliott Smith melodies, tin-can synth-pop casios, and dream-pop haze.

Various Artists, The Cumbia Beat Vol. 2 – The always-great Vampisoul returns with another platter of shrewdly sourced cumbia, this time from Peru. Grooves for days here.

Zomes, Time Was – Zoning, meditative drone-rock, based on organ, guitar fuzz, and cooing vocals.

The Shouting Matches, Grownass Man – This is Justin Vernon (aka Bon Iver)’s latest side project, and it is straight-ahead blues rock.

A bunch of Daniel Barenboim recordings showed up today from Warner Classics – The world-famous pianist and conductor’s shrewd and expansive takes on a treasure trove of repertoire. Here are a few highlights.

Brahms : Symphony n° 2 / Tragic Overture Op.81

Mozart : Piano Concertos Nos 11, 14 & 15

Brahms : 4 Ballades op.10 & Piano Sonata op.5 in F minor – Elatus

Bach, JS : Goldberg Variations & Beethoven: Diabelli Variations

SINGLES/EPs

Cannibal Ox, Gotham – The legendary New York duo return after untold years with that classic sharp, druggy haze they do so well.

The Blank Tapes, Holy Roller – Strummy, jangling garage-pop single.

Egyptian Hip-Hop, Tobago – Warm, sensual Balearic synth-pop, shades of Cut Copy.

Guided By Voices, Noble Insect – Three-song morsel from the reunited GBV. Title track here sounds pretty good.

Jimmy Eat World, I Will Steal You Back – Emo has been in the slow process of coming back/not coming back for the last three or four years; if it ever does have its moment in the spotlight again, I want these guys to get a little more shine. New single.

]]> http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-flaming-lips-yeah-yeah-yeahs-iron-wine-more/feed/ 0 New This Week: The Knife, James Blake, Paramore, & More http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-the-knife-james-blake-paramore-more/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-the-knife-james-blake-paramore-more/#comments Tue, 09 Apr 2013 17:17:46 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=emusic_spotlight&p=3054670 The Knife, Shaking the Habitual: The Knife’s latest is exhilarating and maybe the freakiest record this year. Kevin O’Donnell says:

What is clear is the Knife’s gift for crafting some of the most forward-thinking electronic music around — Shaking the Habitual is an exhilarating, what-the-fuck-is-going-on-here listen. It’s definitely their freakiest set yet — maybe the freakiest record this year. Cuts like “Full of Fire” and “Raging Lung” are packed with synth earworms and djembe drums and storm-the-floor electronic beats and flutes and recorders and art-damaged acoustic guitars and feedback drones. In a time when pop stars and television personalities offer up every mundane detail of their personal lives for the sake of a retweet, sometimes it’s nice to have an artist who remains shrouded in nothing but mystery.

James Blake, Overgrown: James Blake might sound like blue-eyed soul to some, but if you think he sounds like Jamie Lidell, you should get your ears checked. eMusic’s Andrew Parks says:

James Blake revisits the profoundly weird stomping grounds of his self-titled debut on Overgrown. Free of Feist or Joni Mitchell covers, the only creative voice that’s tortured or tweaked this time around is Blake’s own, whether that means something as live and direct as “DLM” or the patience-rewarding returns of, well, everything else.

Paramore, Paramore: Paramore stray from safe, simple hooks on their super-long self-titled LP. Says Ryan Reed:

“No one’s the same as they used to be,” sings Hayley Williams at the outset of her band’s boldly catchy fourth album, her lightning-rod yelp ricocheting off new-wave synths and tense punk-pop riffage. For Paramore, it’s a prophetic lyric: On this expansive self-titled set, they’ve all but ditched the emo stiffness of their early Warped Tour days, plunging head-first into the slick, arena-friendly stylings of modern pop.

Villagers, {Awayland}: The second LP from Irish troubadour Conor O’Brien, aka Villagers. Dan Hyman says:

Villagers, the musical outlet for troubadour Conor O’Brien, is a folk act at its core. But on 2010′s Becoming a Jackal, O’Brien drew justifiable comparisons to fellow Irishman Glen Hansard and Bright Eyes for his ability to expand outside the genre’s steel-stringed framework. With {Awayland}, O’Brien pushes these experiments further and expands this experimental bent, dabbling in lush orchestration and electronic textures.

Dawes, Stories Don’t End: Dawes embrace their folk-rock strengths on their latest LP. Hillary Saunders says:

Full of irresistible harmonies, clear-ringing guitar solos and astute lyrical self-awareness, Stories Don’t End serves as a graceful evolution from 2009′s debut North Hills and 2011′s Nothing Is Wrong. The album offers a more optimistic, or at least hopeful, tenor that you can hear most clearly in “Someone Will” and “Most People,” as well as the Blake Mills cover “Hey Lover.

Numbers And Letters, Guns Under Water: The debut full-length from Austin’s Numbers And Letters. Stephen Deusner says:

Austin alt-country outfit Numbers And Letters open their full-length debut with a brash declaration: “The fire’s been lit,” sings frontwoman Katie Hasty on “Ghost.” “I hope you still love this house, ’cause I just burned it down.” She’d rather torch the place than share it with ghosts who lurk but don’t pay rent. It’s a memorable introduction to an album littered with memories of doomed loves and populated by lovers pushed to emotional extremes.

The Postal Service, Give Up -  The side project that swallowed the career of everyone involved. For something so unassuming and wispy, this record changed a lot of lives, straight up. I do not have much to say about this album that you all don’t already  know/feel, but “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight” remains one of the  greatest songs of the last decade, and will be around for a long while.

Various Artists, Fania Records 1964-1984, The Incendiary Sounds of New York – Tito Puente, Ralfi Pagan, Celia Cruz, and more on this dazzling and true-to-its-name (INCENDIARY!) compilation of NY salsa, as presented by the legendary Fania records. Hear a city boiling.

Jaimeo Brown, Transcendence -  A stunning statement from the “drummer/conceptualist” Jaimeo Brown, as Britt Robson calls him. In his rave review, he observes:

Jaimeo Brown’s Transcendence is “essential” music, in the sense that the essence of the black church, the blues, and the emotional gutbucket that marks the best jazz improvisation help distinguish its identity. And yet this is almost the opposite of a “roots” album; Brown, a drummer-conceptualist in his mid-30s, has fostered a species of music that incorporates the scalding blues-rock guitar and hip-hop sonics of Chris Sholar (probably best known for his Grammy-winning work with Kanye and Jay-Z on “No Church In the Wild”); extended samples from the rural Alabama gospel group the Gee’s Bend Quilters from their recordings in 1941 and 2002; the sinuous, Carnatic-styled East Indian vocals of Falu; the resonant, ductile jazz tenor sax of J.D. Allen and piano of Geri Allen; and Brown’s own polyrhythmic, African-bush-to-NYC-club assaults on the drum kit. After a couple of straight-through listens, the entire package soaks into your soul.

Dave Douglas, Time Travel – The celebrated trumpeter brings his new quintet back to the clean-lined basics for his latest offering.

Julieta Venegas, Los Momentos – Airy, off-kilter Spanish-speaking indie/folk pop from the Mexican singer-songwriter Julieta Venegas.

Joey Bada$$,  “Unorthodox” – Talented, throwback-NY rapper, not yet twenty years old, links up with DJ Premier.

Vondelpark, “California Analog Dream” – Lovely, smooth, Arthur Russell-influenced watery dance-pop.

Sinkane, “Warm Spell” – Jittery, light-stepping rock/pop single given a number of bouncy, buzzy remixes.

The Juan MacLean, “You Are My Destiny” – Fluidly propulsive new one from DFA faves The Juan MacLean.

Kid CuDi, “Girls” – New single from Kid CuDi.

Kids on A Crime Spree, “Creep The Creeps” – This song sounds great; The Cure in a tin can,  just wonderful pop songwriting.

]]> http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-the-knife-james-blake-paramore-more/feed/ 1 New This Week: Charles Bradley, Rilo Kiley, The Besnard Lakes & More http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-charles-bradley-rilo-kiley-the-besnard-lakes-more/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-charles-bradley-rilo-kiley-the-besnard-lakes-more/#comments Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:12:34 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=emusic_spotlight&p=3054448 Charles Bradley, Victim of Love: Charles Bradley, who’s taking over eMusic this week, recaptures and transcends the southern soul grooves of his last record. Barry Walters says:

Charles Bradley is not the kind of guy to sing of love in fantastical terms; he’s much too real for that. Bearing a voice streaked with the ravages of inner torment, this nomadic 64-year-old soul shouter — now based in a Brooklyn very different to the one in which he grew up — instead captures the pains and pleasures of love in sobering but unrestrained tones: He screams, shouts, pleads and moans of desire and disappointment so extreme that words alone cannot suffice. Not merely singing, he testifies of love and social injustice: This former James Brown impersonator does not hold back.

Bleached, Ride Your Heart: Sisters Jennifer and Jessie Clavin left their old band Mika Miko behind, but now they’re back as Bleached. Alex Naidus says:

Bleached’s motto might be “Sisters just wanna have fun.” The L.A. four-piece orbits around Jennifer and Jessie Clavin, the two primary songwriters and sisters who specialize in exuberant garage-punk. After the dissolution of the Clavins’ previous band — the locally-beloved, yelpier Mika Miko — the pair took joyous refuge in writing sweet, revved-up three-chord songs together. Ride Your Heart comes down a bit from the wide-eyed, sugar rush-ed bubblegum punk of early singles, mixing in some slower tempos and minor-key melodies, but Bleached’s primary m.o. is still the simple, sunshine-y, chunky-chorded Ramones-esque jam.

Rilo Kiley, rkives: An odds-and-ends comp from Jenny Lewis & co. Says Patrick Rapa:

Mostly unreleased or barely released, these tracks span the band’s career to create a lovely and peculiar listening experience. The antsy, lo-fi demo of the Sennett-sung “Rest of My Life” from 2001′s Take Offs and Landings can’t be from the same planet as this clubby remix of the Lewis-sung “Dejalo” from 2007′s Under the Blacklight — and, hey, Too $hort just popped up for a verse about tapping asses, just in case you weren’t confused.

Milk Music, Cruise Your Illusion: The first proper LP from Olympia, Washington’s Milk Music. eMusic’s Ilya Zinger says:

On Cruise Your Illusion, the first proper full-length from Olympia, Washington’s Milk Music, the quartet wedges itself somewhere within the SST Records-Neil Young-Wipers universe, pitting sweat-stained, heavy hardcore punk against indelible melodies and endless sincerity. Since their early output, a 2009 demo cassette and a 12-inch in 2010, the band has turned their DIY determination into full-fledged ambition, and the songs on Cruise are as honest and spiritual as they are messy and loud.

 

Mudhoney, Vanishing Point: David Raposa argues that being eligible for AARP hasn’t done much to make Mudhoney soft. He says:

The so-over-it cynicism and exhaustion that’s been the group’s m.o. all these years is a much better look on them as distinguished gentlemen. Granted, it’s hard to imagine a younger Mark Arm taking the time to write a song about white wine. But the 96-second scorched-earth screed that is “Chardonnay” shows that no subject is safe from Mudhoney’s indomitable anger and ennui. There’s no rose-colored nostalgia trip happening here, though: As Mudhoney enters their 25th year, still wrestling with whatever crawled up their backside and died way back then, they’re arguably at the height of their powers.

The Besnard Lakes, Until In Excess, Imperceptible UFO: On their third LP, The Besnard Lakes perfect their blend of dreamy indie rock. Arye Dworken says:

On their fourth album, Until In Excess, Imperceptible UFO, they hit a new, blissful peak. Frontman Jace Lasek, bassist (and Lasek’s wife) Olga Goreas, along with drummer Kevin Laing and guitarist Richard White, once again ply their elongated, swooning harmonies, like The Beach Boys at half-speed, over majestic, glacially moving rock suites.

Tyler, The Creator, Wolf: The face of Odd Future takes a page from Eminem on his third LP. Says Nick Murray:

In the past, Tyler, the Creator has made it clear that his favorite album by Eminem, the man he once referred to as his atheist God, is Relapse, the dark, dense comeback record that preceded the chart-topping Recovery. Wolf, the producer/rapper/clothing designer/cockroach-munching troublemaker’s third full-length, inherits the Shady influence that marked its predecessors, but it also looks back past Relapse to earlier entries in the older rapper’s discography, The Marshall Mathers LP in particular.

A Hawk & A Hacksaw, You Have Already Gone To The Other World: A Hawk & A Hacksaw’s sixth release is loosely based on a score written to accompany Sergei Parajanov’s 1965 documentary film Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors, and Luke Turner says it’s their finest work yet:

Over the past decade, the New Mexican duo of Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost, aka A Hawk & A Hacksaw, have taken a fascinating journey through the music of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Turkey and beyond. They also have a long-standing connection with cinema: Their first release was the soundtrack to a documentary about Slovenian thinker Slavoj Žižek. This album, their sixth, is loosely based on a score written to accompany Sergei Parajanov’s 1965 documentary film Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors, about the Slavic Hutsul people in the Carpathian mountains that run through Central and Easter Europe. Clearly, there’s magic in those hills, and it’s richly mined here, as the pair put some fierce twists on the music of the Ukraine, Hungary and Romania.

Generationals, Heza: Jangly indie-rockers expand their sonic palette with their third LP. Ryan Reed says:

The New Orleans duo have completely expanded their sonic palette, branching into some fascinating new directions: “Say When,” with its tongue-tied percussion and sputtering sequenced synths, sounds like New Order on a beach vacation; “Put a Light On” is adult-contemporary funk, bolstered by electronic loops and digital handclaps; “Kemal” is the biggest head-scratcher (and maybe their best song ever) — a barrage of stabbing reggae guitar, sweaty hand drums, and twinkling glockenspiel.

Cold War Kids, Dear Miss Lonelyhearts: Cold War Kids make a bold move that puts emphasis on frontman Nathan Willett’s blaring, soulful voice. Ryan Reed says:

Lead single “Miracle Mile” is the most hard-hitting track they’ve ever penned, Willett warbling over a surge of bar-room piano and Matt Aveiro’s primal pound. It’s the sole moment of familiarity on an album of colorful new twists: The creeping “Lost that Easy” buzzes with electronic hi-hats and new-wave synth-bass; “Bottled Affection” marries hip-hop programming to drizzled guitar noise and a monster chorus falsetto; the closing “Bitter Poem” is a slow-building ballad, laced with melancholy keys and grizzled sax.

Merchandise, Totale Night – The incendiary Tampa trio Merchandise continue to push outward on their sound. Here, they deliver five sprawling, anthemic, passionate rockers over thirty-four epic minutes. Watch these guys: They are building towards a Statement, and if they’re not yet all the way “there,” they’ve hit upon something.

The Black Angels, Indigo Meadow – Blown smoke rings of psych-rock revival from The Black Angels’ latest. Killer guitar tones on this.

Burger Records! Burger Records! Burger Records! – One of our favorite labels. Just go and play here for awhile! Burger Records is one of the best purveyors of lo-fi home-taped indie-rock and indie-pop around these days. Just clicking around on random titles will give you joy, I promise; I just bopped in my seat to Garbo’s Daughter’s recorded-in-a-trash-can surf-pop ditties, the warped campfire-rock of Burnt Ones, and the thrillingly cruddy home-piercing punk of The Cosmonauts. You can also find CLASSIC jangle-pop from groups like Cleaners From Venus. Trust us on this one, guys; there is something for you here!

The Gates of Slumber, The Wretch – Balefully lumbering down-tuned stoner metal, heavy on riffs. Satisfying.

Martin Hall, Phasewide Exit Signs – The Danish singer/songwriter/composer/multi-instrumentalist/author’s latest batch of heady, forbiddingly beautiful art songs, on his own Panoptikon label. RIYL: Solo Nico, Scott Walker.

Fairport Convention, Live in 87 – As the title says, a live set from the legendary folk-rockers.

Gun Outfit, Hard Coming Down – This band has been around for awhile, wallowing sexily around in bad vibes and barely-tuned guitars. This is their strongest-sounding release yet, their dual male/female vocals and dirty guitars hitting a new groove.

Mad Season, Above (Deluxe Edition) – The one-album side project featuring members of Pearl Jam (Mike McCready), Screaming Trees (Barrett Martin), and, of course, Layne Staley of Alice in Chains. These guys weren’t exactly the highest artistic peak of grunge, but this is still an interesting moment in music history, and this is a definitive reissue of their project.

Anne Sofie Van Otter/Thomas Quasthoff, Schubert: Lieder With Orchestra -  Schuber lieder, sung with mellow late-afternoon-sun glory by Van Otter Quasthoff, two of the greatest lieder singers on the planet, backed by the Berlin Philharmonic. A-list stuff.

Olafur Arnalds, For Now I Am Winter – Lovely, subdued neoclassical miniatures.

Various Artists, The Music is You: A Tribute to John Denver – An indie-world tribute to good old John Denver, whose music could use to be rescued from its thick layer of accumulated cultural cheese. Here, J Mascis, Lucinda Williams, Josh Ritter, Edward Sharpe, and others pitch in with covers of their favorites.

The Baptist Generals, “Dog That Bit You” – Ornery Crazy Horse homage going on here, right down to pinched, hollering Neil Young-style vocal.

Guided By Voices, “Xeno Pariah” – New single from band that just won’t stop releasing music. It sounds like classic GBV, which you know by now is something you want in your life or not.

50 Cent, “We Up” - New track from 50 Cent, featuring Kendrick Lamar.

]]> http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-charles-bradley-rilo-kiley-the-besnard-lakes-more/feed/ 0 What is an eMusic Takeover? http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/what-is-an-emusic-takeover/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/what-is-an-emusic-takeover/#comments Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:10:47 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=emusic_spotlight&p=3054314 All this week, we’ve invited Charles Bradley and his co-writer and co-producer Tom Brenneck (also of the Menahan Street Band) to “Take Over eMusic.” The “eMusic Takeover” is a special honor we extend to artists we feel are true visionaries — forward-thinking, aggressively committed to their art, and unwavering from expressing their unique point of view in song. All it takes is even a cursory listen to Bradley’s second record, the slow-smoldering Victim of Love, to realize that he meets all of these criteria and then some. We are honored to have him as our honorary editor-in-chief for the week.

Any artist we ask to take over eMusic gets control over our editorial for that week: They assign interviews with artists they like and they handpick albums to run as Reviews of the Day that week. Past eMusic Takeovers have been conducted by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Jens Lekman, Edwyn Collins, John Lydon and Bjork. We are thrilled to add Charles Bradley to that esteemed list.

We’re always on the lookout for artists to add to this roster. So we turn the question to you: Which artist would you most like to see take over eMusic in the future?

]]> http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/what-is-an-emusic-takeover/feed/ 3 New This Week: Justin Timberlake, Phosphorescent & More http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-justin-timberlake-phosphorescent-more/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-justin-timberlake-phosphorescent-more/#comments Tue, 19 Mar 2013 18:31:56 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=emusic_spotlight&p=3053928 Excellent week for great new indie records, starting with:

Phosphorescent, Muchacho – One of the greatest records of the year.  Jayson Greene interviewed Matthew Houck for us, and Ashley Melzer wrote the review:

Two takes on the sun’s ascent bookend Muchacho with yogic serenity. They’re a primer to the fuzzy emotional place where Houck finds himself. His trademark warble starts out shrouded in soft electronic beats and yearning violins (“Song for Zula”). Then he plays to old strengths, letting lonesome lap steel cozy up to the piano and make room for a swells of horns (“Terror in the Canyons (The Wounded Master)”). There’s a hint of that old spiritual hunger, “so holy and wasted like a prayer in the wind” (“A New Anhedonia”). But even when our ragged guide is facing up to mistakes, the music meets him with tenderness (“Down to Go”).

Low, The Invisible Way –  The beloved, long-running trio’s latest is “their most sanguine in over a decade,” according to Sam Adams:

The measured tempos and fragile harmonies of the Duluth, Minnesota, trio Low — core couple Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker plus bassist Steve Garrington, who joined in 2008 — have often concealed turmoil beneath their placid surface. But their 10th album, The Invisible Way, is their most sanguine in more than a decade, less tempestuous than 2005′s The Great Destroyer and resolving the marital tensions of 2011′s C’mon. Decamping from their own recording studio for producer Jeff Tweedy’s digs, they’ve made an album that feels more suited to the inside of a church than those they’ve actually recorded in one.

Marnie Stern, The Chronicles of Marnia – The unconventionally brilliant/brilliantly unconventional indie-rock guitar virtuoso crafts the statement of her career. Our own J. Edward Keyes writes:

The first song on the fourth record from Marnie Stern is called “Year of the Glad” — a nod to Infinite Jest as well as a declaration of its theme — and crests with Stern yelling, “Everything’s starting now.” For a second it feels likeThe Chronicles of Marnia is going to be an album about rejuvenation — about letting go of the things that trouble you and kicking open the door of the dark house to let the sunshine pour in. And then the next song starts, and before long Stern is shouting, “The fear creeping in, and I am losing hope in my body.” So it goes throughout Chronicles, a breathtaking spiral of sound that fizzes and pops like a pinwheel of fireworks. It’s not only Stern’s best record, but one of the best of the year to date.

Justin Timberlake, The 20/20 Experience - Pop’s reigning do-no-wrong boy wonder returns from his long hiatus. Barry Walters writes:

“He’s so talented he can do anything!” That’s the gist of what’s typically said about Justin Timberlake, and for the most part it’s absolutely true. He’s an exceptionally nimble and unfettered singer/dancer, an extraordinary mimic with a drummer’s sense of timing. These gifts have helped him tremendously in comedy as well as drama, and despite the increasing maturity of his music and acting pursuits, he hasn’t let go of his ample boyish charm: This ex-Mouseketeer, ex-’N Sync-er still radiates mischievous yet all-American fun … These are the stats that have empowered Timberlake to make a supremely — and, at times, foolishly — confident 20/20 Experience.

 Anais Mitchell, Child Ballads – “One of today’s most creative and authentic rising songwriters,” as our own Laura Leebove calls her, returns with a collaboration with Jefferson Hamer to “interpret and modernize seven of the 305 English and Scottish ballads collected by Francis James Child in the late 1800s.” Leebove writes:

Their collection is short, sweet and intimate, with little more than acoustic guitars and vocals telling the tales of an ill-fated sailor, a quick-witted sister, and disapproving parents. (If you thought your in-laws were trouble, listen to “Willie of Winsbury” and “Willie’s Lady,” where you’ll meet a king who orders her daughter’s lover to be hanged, and a witch mother who casts a spell on her son’s pregnant wife.) Mitchell and Hamer have recorded accessible, American-folk renditions of these centuries-old songs, a fitting addition to the countless modern artists — among them Joan Baez, Nickel Creek, even Fleet Foxes — who have who have passed them on throughout the years.

Suede, Bloodsports: There is no way I’m ever calling this band “The London” Suede, so you can all go straight to hell right now. Suede are back! This one is more triumphant-sounding than they’ve been in the past — huge choruses and Brett Anderson’s fantastic, keening voice. I saw this band in the UK on one of their 2010 reunion shows and they were spectacular.

Conquering Animal Sound, On Floating Bodies: ALRIGHT!! Man, do I love this band. Their last record, Kammerspiel, was one of my favorite surprises. I didn’t even know a new record was on the way but, man, am I glad it’s here. This one sounds a little nastier than the last one — the vocals a bit sharper and tougher, the electronic production a bit more stammering and stuttery and arty — fewer soft curves, more sharp angles. I am excited to spend more time with this.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Specter at the Feast: Former merchants of gloom return with a record of crisp, bright rock music. Most notable is their cover of The Call’s bright-eyed “Let the Day Begin”; Robert Levon Been is the son of Call frontman Michael Been, who passed away two years ago at a BRMC show.

Alice Smith, She: A pretty radical reinvention for Alice Smith. The onetime smoky, jazzy R&B singer gets glossier and poppier without sacrificing any of her trademark warmth and emotion. The result is a confident soul record with gilded edges.

  Simone Dinnerstein & Tift Merritt, Night – The singer/songwriter and beloved classical pianist come together on record  for an unlikely but fruitful collaboration. Peter Margasak writes:

 Self-taught Americana singer-songwriter Tift Merritt and Julliard-trained classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein would hardly seem likely collaborators, but the rapport and cross-hatching of styles they achieve on Night sure makes it seem like they were destined to work together. The album’s stark beauty and seamless flow owes part of its success to the decision of Merritt and Dinnerstein to keep the work modest in scale and free of conceptual baggage. There’s a feel to the collection that harkens back to the sheet music era, when folks entertained themselves in their parlor room and playing songs rather than listening to records or the radio. Together they make transitions between some of Merritt’s most translucent balladry: Billie Holiday’s “Don’t Explain,” Bach’s “Prelude in B minor” and Johnny Nash’s indelible “I Can See Clearly Now” seem not only effortless, but also logical.

 KEN Mode, Entrench – Brutal, sharp and zero-fat hardcore/noise rock from long-running Canadian trio. Jon Wiederhorn writes:

Over the past decade, Winnipeg, Canada’s KEN Mode — who took their name from Henry Rollins’s acronym for Kill Everyone Now (as detailed in his book Get in the Van) — have evolved from a bracing hardcore metal band into something more experimental and complex. The band’s fifth album, Entrench, is their most inventive yet, matching raw musical gristle and asymmetrical acrobatics with unexpected sonic flourishes, from the scribbling violins of the opening cut “Counter Culture Complex” to the undistorted arpeggios and pensive piano of the closer “Monomyth.”

Call of the Void, Dragged Down a Dead End Path: New, nasty, grindy stuff on Relapse. This Colorado group is adept at all the things that make grind great — the larynx-wrecking vocals, the avalanche of percussion, the oil-drill riffs. Perfect loud music for warm weather.

Dur-Dur Band, Vol. 5: Another home run from Awesome Tapes from Africa. This one is from Somalia’s Dur-Dur band, who land somewhere between highlife and what we’ve all come to (incorrectly!) term Afrobeat. There are popcorn rhythms and tangled-up guitars and beaming, jubilant vocals, and the whole damn thing is RECOMMENDED

And So I Watch You From Afar, All Hail Bright Futures: Irish art rock band return with another knotty, tumultuous effort. Complicated song structures, full-body rythms and plenty of prog-like lurch for those who like their music dense and tricky.

Batillus, Concrete Sustain – Doom metal with a groove. Jon Wiederhorn says:

The 2011 debut full-length from New York’s Batillus, Furnace was crushing, oppressive, bleak and morose, one of the top dark horse doom metal albums of the year. Not content to remain within those parameters, the band has undergone a facelift for its new album Concrete Sustain. In addition to an abundance of trudging, mid-paced riffs played on densely distorted guitar and bass, Batillus have built a framework of counterpoint rhythms that provide tension and contrast: Grinding, whirring industrial samples abound, as do textural washes of feedback that border on the post-rock nihilism of Neurosis.

Thalia Zedek  Band, Via – Zedek returns with another one of her signature knotty, pleasing, and distinctive solo records.

Colleen Green, Sock it To Me: I’m a pretty big Colleen Green fan, I have to admit. Her latest doesn’t stray too far from all of the things she does best: the Casio still sounds like it was nicked from a garage sale, the guitars are tinny and fizzy and her voice is soulful and searching. Her knack for sugary hooks is what pulls the whole project together — if you are charmed by rickety indiepop as much as I am, this one’s for you.

Inter Arma, Sky Burial: Thick, murky, ashen and doomy, this is the sound of the walls closing in and hell coming to claim its sons. It’s got plenty of long, hammering passages, but also incredible moments of beauty — acoustic guitars and moody synths — making for a fascinating record that grips from beginning to end.

Tomasz Stanko, Wislawa – Excellent new record from Polish jazz eminence. Peter Margasak writes:

The veteran Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko has long been a reliable and rewarding source for jazz of smoldering intensity. He’s a deeply lyrical, probing player whose investment in free jazz is real, but he’s consistently couched his most “out” explorations in a brooding elegance. Over the last decade or so he’s made a series of gorgeously meditative and quietly scalding albums for ECM with rhythm sections half his age. While he continues to keep a residence in Warsaw, for the last five years he’s also kept an apartment in New York, fostering relationships with younger American players. The magnificent double album Wislawa is the first fruit of those new collaborations.

]]> http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-justin-timberlake-phosphorescent-more/feed/ 0 The Luck of the Fictional http://www.emusic.com/book-news/book-collection/the-luck-of-the-fictional/ http://www.emusic.com/book-news/book-collection/the-luck-of-the-fictional/#comments Fri, 15 Mar 2013 22:43:38 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=book_hub&p=3053817 We’ve all heard about the luck of the Irish, that mythological good fortune that clings to the Emerald Isle and all of its inhabitants. But we’d wager that the luckiest people around aren’t Irish at all…nor are they, technically, people. Fictional characters have the highest good luck-to-mishaps ratio around, finding themselves in the most impossible of impossible situations and then, just as unexpectedly, coming out unscathed (and maybe even enlightened) on the other end.
There’s something about good fortune that’s intensely appealing to writers, a notoriously down-on-their-luck group, and they can’t help but grant their creations with the deus ex machine they themselves could use so much. Here, we’ve gathered five of our favorite lucky characters, a disparate group connected by a common good fortune.

Sal Paradise & Dean Moriarty

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    On the Road

    Jack Kerouac
    2008 | Unabridged


    When you’re 15 or 16 and you read On the Road for the first time, no one has ever been luckier than Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty as they careen from adventure to adventure, taking in women, drugs, and cities like so much fuel to be burned through and discarded. Depending on your own longings and inclinations, you either end up thinking that Sal’s the lucky one — the one with the... modicum of stability and skepticism, the one for whom the road is a choice, not a necessity — or Dean, who, for all the chaos of his life and his eventual descent into madness, bears the mythology of the True Prophet. To revisit Kerouac’s freewheeling epic as an adult is to realize the ways in which, as a kid, you were likely to equate luck with unaccountability, or recklessness, but also to remember how fiercely those old longings once burned. Even if you can no longer think of Sal or Dean as lucky creatures, you realize that you were lucky to have once thought of them that way. — Sara Jaffe

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Brian Robeson

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    1 Credit

    Hatchet

    Gary Paulson
    2011 | Unabridged

    One might not think of a boy as terribly lucky when the plane he’s on (ferrying him between divorced parents) crashes in the wilderness. However, in many ways, 13-year-old Brian Roberson is lucky: Not only does he survive the crash (the pilot does not), he lands in a forest of plenty. During his 54 days in the wild, Brian learns how to create fire, make shelter, and hunt, all using the titular... hatchet that his mother had just happened to give him right before the trip—luckily, it took place before TSA restrictions went into effect. After a tornado hits Brian’s campsite, he’s able to access the crashed airplane and its survival kit, which includes an emergency transmitter that, happily for Brian, still works. Ultimately, he’s rescued and brought home. If you have to be stranded alone in the woods, having luck on your side certainly helps. — Claire Zulkey

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Piscine Molitor Patel

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    2 Credits

    Life of Pi

    Yann Martel
    2013 | Unabridged

    First, how lucky is the little boy who has a zookeeper for a father? You always have playmates, you’ve always got something for show and tell, and you’re never bored. However, Piscine “Pi” Molitor Patel’s luck momentarily runs out when the freighter that’s ferrying his family and their zoo animals from Japan to Canada sinks, taking his family with it. Lucky for Pi, he manages to escape the shipwreck, along with a... hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, and a tiger. The animals aren’t terribly lucky— they all, save the tiger, kill each other.But Pi is fortunate enough to survive not just by fishing and obtaining fresh water but because of his experience with animals, as well, for he’s able to train the tiger to refrain from killing him or capsizing the boat. Ultimately, the boat washes up in Mexico and, luckily for them, both Pi and the tiger survive. — Claire Zulkey

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Raoul Duke

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    1 Credit

    Hell's Angels

    Hunter S. Thompson
    2012 | Unabridged

    To call Hunter S. Thompson (or his fictional alter ego, Raoul Duke) a daredevil would be a gross understatement. The original gonzo journalist wrote exclusively about situations that would scare ordinary people; if they weren’t scary enough, he’d just add more drugs to the mix. In 1967, when Hell’s Angels was originally published, the eponymous motorcycle gang inspired fear and loathing throughout America. The intrepid Thompson decided to investigate their outlaw lifestyle... and hateful worldview by going to their parties, interviewing them, and getting intoxicated alongside them. This electrifying first-person narrative could have resulted in his incarceration or death, but it didn’t, and that alone made Thompson a very lucky man.

    Thompson’s good fortune also came in another form: the creation of Raoul Duke. Toward the end of the book, Thompson names his alter ego as a true outlaw in the vein of Alexander King or Elizabeth Taylor. Duke later took Thompson’s luck and ran with it, emerging as the protagonist of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which cemented his (and Thompson’s) status as American rebel icons. — Arianna Stern

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Clarissa Dalloway

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    2 Credits

    Mrs. Dalloway

    Virginia Woolf
    2010 | Unabridged

    Mrs. Dalloway, famously, begins with flowers and closes with the eponymous flower-getter entering, finally, the room in which her long-awaited party is being held, while all the loves of her life look upon her entrance with anticipation. Luck — blooming flowers, steadfast admirers — pervades Clarissa Dalloway’s life. But so does pain, and it is that struggle — how to acknowledge oneself as a lucky person in a world so rife with... pain that one has caused and felt and witnessed — that provides one of the book’s central conflicts. Clarissa is lucky to have experienced the love of Peter Walsh and Sally Seton and luckier still to have chosen the simpler, solid Richard over both of them. She is lucky to have experienced the horrors of World War I only indirectly. But one gets the sense throughout the book that Clarissa feels a deep guilt over the luck that has been afforded her. She is lucky is to be alive, but suffers, too, the guilt of living. — Sara Jaffe

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]]> http://www.emusic.com/book-news/book-collection/the-luck-of-the-fictional/feed/ 0 New This Week: David Bowie, Devendra Banhart and More http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-david-bowie-devendra-banhart-and-more/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-david-bowie-devendra-banhart-and-more/#comments Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:03:15 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=emusic_spotlight&p=3053694 There’s not a whole lot out this week, probably because everyone is in Austin for SXSW (including eMusic’s editorial team: Follow our coverage here) — except that, oh wait, there’s a new David Bowie record out today! So at least we’ve got that — and a few other notables, below.

David Bowie, The Next Day — The return! Barry Walters, who wrote the review for us, seems to have right measure on this one:

As confirmed by “The Stars (Are Out Tonight),” the album’s second single, Bowie hasn’t entirely abandoned his post-heyday habit of leaving his vocal melodies frustratingly underdeveloped. Sometimes when the groove is tight and he pours on the vocal razzle-dazzle, that matters little: The opening title track comes on like gangbusters and — befitting the album’s self-reflexive and iconoclastic artwork — recalls Heroes‘ kick-starter “Beauty and the Beast. “The Next Day ultimately proves itself too musically self-referential to be groundbreaking, but it does capitalize better than the singer has in decades on his own assets: This is Bowie doing Bowie.

Devendra Banhart, Mala — Banhart’s latest finds him musing on the peculiarities of love in his own inimitable way. Dan Hyman writes:

Emerging in the early-aughts as the focal point of the then-burgeoning freak-folk movement, the Texas-born Venezuelan fought restriction with each successive album: Meander alongside him, he offered, down patchouli-scented paths strewn with jazzy asides, sitar-slathered daydreams, acoustic-flecked British folk and Brazilian Tropicália. Mala, Banhart’s seventh album and first for Nonesuch, is, on the surface, no less diverse than its predecessors. Throughout, Banhart sizes up his favorite topic — love’s cruel ways — often in less time than it takes to create an online dating profile.

Carmen Villain, Sleeper — The debut recording by a former model, Carmen Hillestadt, who makes darkly evocative, Sonic Youth-inspired post-punk. Dan Hyman writes:

A former cover model, Carmen Villain’s longtime gig was to effortlessly exude beauty. Things haven’t changed too much: Now a musician, on her remarkably engaging, dark and oftentimes abrasive debut album, Sleeper, the singer and multi-instrumentalist simply expresses her loveliness in a more nuanced shade. Heavy on reverb and made for headphones, the decidedly lo-fi album, its tracks washing up onto another, calls to mind Sonic Youth and Royal Trux.

Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics — A loving tribute to one of the greatest Philly soul groups of all time. Nate Patrin writes:

The original Delfonics lineup split up decades ago, but their legacy has lingered. The hip-hop generation saw to that, using Thom Bell’s velvety arrangements and the achingly sweet falsetto of lead singer William Hart to striking effect. Enter Adrian Younge, the Black Dynamite soundtrack mastermind who’s also collaborated with avowed Delfonics fanatic Ghostface Killah (Pretty Toney highlight “Holla” famously paid homage to “La-La – Means I Love You”). Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics is an unusual type of throwback: Younge’s muddy, lo-fi atmospherics recall low-budget early ’70s local-label 45s more than they do Bell’s vintage lushness.

Various Artists, Sound City: Real To Reel — To hear Ken Micallef tell it, this all-star tribute to a famous L.A. sound studio, masterminded by Dave Grohl, is the best kind of rock-star vanity project:

Writing and performing alongside Paul McCartney, Stevie Nicks, Rick Springfield, Trent Reznor, Josh Homme, Rick Nielsen, Lee Ving of Fear, Corey Taylor, Brad Wilk and Tim Commerford of Rage Against The Machine, and the Foos, Dave Grohl’s Real to Reel is a nostalgic tribute to L.A.’s closed Sound City studio, the birthplace to Rumours, Damn the Torpedoes, Rage Against The Machine and Nevermind. Sound City – Real to Reel is high on energetic hits, worthwhile rock-star vanity pieces, and one extremely nasty miss. The album was recorded on Sound City’s original analog Neve console, now safely ensconced in Grohl’s 606 recording studio.

Nadia Sirota, Baroque — The violist and leading force in NYC contemporary classical’s second album. Seth Colter-Walls writes:

Nadia Sirota is the violist of choice for the New York contemporary-classical scene, and on Baroque, she follows up here her astoundingly assured debut, First Things First, with fresh works from many of the composers who contributed to that recording.But there are new composers this time as well, even if they are generally familiar to the New Amsterdam coterie. Shara Worden’s “From the Invisible to the Visible” is a brief, attractive offering that introduces keyboards and organs into the mix to considered effect. While more tricked-out electronically than Sirota’s first offering, Baroque retains her aesthetic imprint.

Brandt Brauer Frick, Miami — a new one from this classical-electro trio. Says Ben Beaumont-Thomas:

Classical music and club culture aren’t easy bedfellows, which is one reason why Brandt Bauer Frick are such an intriguing proposition. The Berlin trio plays minimalist techno on classical instruments: Their 2011 album Mr Machine was a clubbing soundtrack re-imagined by a 10-piece orchestra. Miami is another album of groove-led chamber music, although this time, it has a more supple, spontaneous feel, enhanced with guest vocalists.

The Virgins, Strike Gently — sophomore release from the New York quartet.

The Mary Onettes, Hit the Waves — dreamy, summer-ready indiepop from Sweden.

Wild Belle, Isles — the soulful, genre-hopping debut from the buzzy brother-sister duo Wild Belle.

]]> http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-david-bowie-devendra-banhart-and-more/feed/ 0 25 Must-See Bands at SXSW 2013 http://www.emusic.com/music-news/music-collection/25-must-see-bands-at-sxsw-2013/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/music-collection/25-must-see-bands-at-sxsw-2013/#comments Thu, 07 Mar 2013 18:25:16 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=emusic_hub&p=3053461 Do we even need the preamble? You know what next week is and, like any right-thinking person, you’ve probably put off working out a schedule until the very last second. So as you start to hammer out your crazymaking week — probably on the plane, probably an hour or so before touching down — here are our picks for the 25 must-sees in Austin next week.

Free SXSW Sampler

Pissed Jeans

  • Honeys album cover

    Honeys

    Pissed Jeans
    2013 | Sub Pop Records

    Snarling and spitting, growling and kicking, Honeys won't surprise those who love the Allentown, Pennsylvania-based Jesus (Lizard) freaks Pissed Jeans, nor is it likely to attract those that deplore the band. "Write what you know," as they say, and Pissed Jeans knows pummeling, antisocial punk. When lead yeller Matt Korvette isn't "in the hallway screaming" (that's from riotous opener "Bathroom Laughter"), he can often be found smirking. You'd think four dudes who... all recently became fathers would be tamer than this. — Austin L. Ray

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Marnie Stern

  • Marnie Stern album cover

    Marnie Stern

    Marnie Stern
    2010 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

    In years past, Marnie Stern's shorthand description usually involved the words "guitar" and "shredding," but the New Yorker has grown equally adept over her career at revealing just how big her heart is. Stern's frenetic fingertapping and the bonkers drumming of Kid Millions illustrate the way that the best response to bone-crushing sadness is, sometimes, a pealing laugh. Confidence and the lack thereof are also common lyrical themes, although the bravado with... which Stern wields both her guitar and her anguished voice masks those facts on first listen. — Maura Johnston

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Waxahatchee

  • Cerulean Salt album cover

    Cerulean Salt

    Waxahatchee
    2013 | Don Giovanni Records / Believe Digital

    As Waxahatchee, Katie Crutchfield uses her brief tracks to paint a very specific but familiar portrait of 20-something American youth, first on the deeply personal, lo-fi acoustic guitar-filled American Weekend, and now on the plugged-in Cerulean Salt, in which her subtle gut-punches translate just as powerfully once the volume's been dialed up. — Carrie Battan

Charles Bradley

  • No Time for Dreaming album cover

    No Time for Dreaming

    Charles Bradley
    2011 | Daptone Records / The Orchard

    It's time to put to bed, once and for all, Charles Bradley's oft-repeated origin story as a James Brown impersonator. The Screaming Eagle of Soul, The Original Black Swan and, most recently, The Victim of Love, Bradley is at this point a performer fully his own, possessing boundless charisma, gallons of passion and the kind of unstudied, unadulterated joy that SXSW — a week fully fucking lousy with marketing and branding and... consumer-facing outreach opportunities — desperately needs. To stand in the presence of Charles Bradley is to be basked in 100 percent pure love — so completely unsullied and unpolluted you feel yourself choking up before the first song ever hits the chorus. To put it another way: if James Brown were alive today, he'd be impersonating Charles. — J. Edward Keyes

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METZ

  • METZ album cover

    METZ

    METZ
    2012 | Sub Pop Records

    On their debut album, Canadian trio METZ has delivered a sound that's reasonably scarce in 2012: post-hardcore, pre-grunge, noise-addled punk rock. You can hear the influence of the Jesus Lizard in particular everywhere: in Alex Edkins's strained screams; in Hayden Menzies's crashing drum assault; in their relentless wave of screeching guitars, in the frenzied pace of "Wet Blanket," in the sludgy industrial instrumental "Nausea," and in their grim, dour lyrics. But the... sheer volume and force of the music don't take away from their musicianship. — Evan Minsker

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Torres

  • TORRES album cover

    TORRES

    TORRES
    2013 | TORRES / TuneCore

    Torres's songs feel as if they were bound to come crawling out of singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott's body no matter what she did or where she was. Dominated by the wavery tones of her Gibson 355 electric, the songs explore the fragile architecture of human relationships, often finding Scott standing amid a steaming pile of rubble, wondering not about what caused the house to fall but what to do, now, with all the... shattered pieces left behind. — Rachael Maddux

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Parquet Courts

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    Light Up Gold

    Parquet Courts
    2013 | What's Your Rupture?

    On Light Up Gold, the irresistible debut from Brooklyn band Parquet Courts, the principal songwriters Andrew Savage and Austin Brown cast a jaundiced eye on our troubled times with a series of infinitely quotable bon mots: On regional cuisine? "As for Texas: Donuts Only. You cannot find bagels here." On the value of wisdom? "Socrates died in the fucking gutter." These nuggets are dropped between jagged guitar lines that sound like they... were lifted from Wire's 154 — bent-coathanger leads that teeter on the steep incline between punk and post-punk. — J. Edward Keyes

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Matthew E. White

Roc Marciano

  • Reloaded (Deluxe Edition) album cover

    Reloaded (Deluxe Edition)

    Roc Marciano
    Decon

    Roc Marciano's music exists to remind you what NYC rap sounds like in the idealized bubble of your memory, and he's frighteningly good at it. He's so good, in fact, that after awhile you forget that his music is a kind of Civil War reenactment, one in which Swizz Beatz plays General Sherman and the Battle of Five Forks is the moment he started fooling with a Casio. Marciano's rap world exists... before all of that, a vanished kingdom of urban despair, gnarled street slang, and unglamorous night shifts conducted out in front of public housing. — Jayson Greene

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Mac DeMarco

Solange

  • True album cover

    True

    Solange
    2012 | Terrible Records / The Orchard

    Sure, Solange is the sister of R&B/pop princess Beyoncé — a fact that will probably never be omitted from her CV. But while her musical means (a soaring soprano; wisely chosen collaborators) are similar to the elder Knowles, the ends are significantly different. For her 2012 EP True, she enlisted production help from Blood Orange's Dev Hynes and ended up with a candy-coated, left-of-center R&B playground. — Laura Studarus

The Coup

  • Sorry To Bother You album cover

    Sorry To Bother You

    The Coup
    2012 | Anti/Epitaph

    Boots Riley has had a few other things to do than rap for Oakland collective the Coup as of late — appearing at the forefront of the Occupy movement, for one. But for their seventh album in 20 years, Riley's loose sense of humor remains intact in much the way as his taste for lyrics that spell out rebellion. — Michaelangelo Matos

Samantha Crain

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    Kid Face

    Samantha Crain
    2013 | Ramseur Records / The Orchard

    Oklahoma singer-songwriter Samantha Crain has always sounded like an old soul, her dusty alto worn down by restless thoughts and free-floating anxiety. On her latest LP Kid Face, she comes into her own as a lyricist, using the songs to examine her place in the world. — Annie Zaleski

Autre Ne Veut

  • Anxiety album cover

    Anxiety

    Autre Ne Veut
    2013 | Software

    Arthur Ashin typically spends the duration of his performances as Autre Ne Veut curled up on the ground like a potato bug. So if you go to see him at SXSW, you should kind of prepare for the fact that you might not actually see him. That's OK, though: His music is more about feeling than seeing. If Terence Trent D'Arby returned from self-imposed exile and pulled off the perfect comeback record,... it might sound a lot like Ashin's recently-released Anxiety: supple, R&B-informed vocal lines glide over stormy-sea synthesizers, the tensions perfectly mirroring the existential unease in his lyrics. Case in point? His most beautiful song, the slinky "Counting," is about his terror that his grandmother was going to die. How can you expect a man to have the strength to stand upright while singing about things like that? — J. Edward Keyes

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Maria Minerva

  • Will Happiness Find Me? album cover

    Will Happiness Find Me?

    Maria Minerva
    2012 | Not Not Fun / Revolver

    Maria Minerva, a somewhat mysterious artist from Estonia, has a playfulness that's alternately cerebral and coy, and a lightness of touch at the controls. She sings too, with a voice that stretches out and rises up from deep pools of echo. On her latest effort, Will Happiness Finds Me?, she plays with different sounds and different tempos, with a mind toward both vintage club music and futuristic pop at once. — Andy... Battaglia

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My Gold Mask

  • Leave Me Midnight album cover

    Leave Me Midnight

    My Gold Mask
    2013 | Goldy Tapes / CD Baby

    Chicago duo My Gold Mask amplify the effects of a breakup album on their debut, Leave Me At Mightnight. They don't skimp on dramatics, with Gretta Rochelle's pleading vocals, Jack Armondo's spiraling guitar riffs, and lyrics that grapple with psychosis and reference Gothic literature and Italo horror flicks. The result achieves a spellbinding emotional intensity that's easy to inhabit. — Marissa G. Muller

Skeletonwitch

  • Forever Abomination album cover

    Forever Abomination

    Skeletonwitch
    Prosthetic / The Orchard

    Hands-down the most fun you will ever have a metal show, period, Skeletonwitch combine blasphemous guitar firepower with a self-aware sense of humor without ever tipping once into icky archness or loathsome, smirking heavy meta. It helps that they're an astonishingly tight band, whipping from one burst of split-second riffery to the next with all the frenzy and fury of a speed-of-sound rollercoaster car desperately hugging the curves. Who knew unabashed Satanism... could be so uplifting? — J. Edward Keyes

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Icona Pop

  • Iconic EP album cover

    Iconic EP

    Icona Pop
    2012 | Big Beat Records/Atlantic

    Here is Swedish duo Icona Pop summed up in six words: "I don't care! I love it!" That refrain — cribbed from last year's giddiest breakup song — perfectly captures Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo's exuberance and reckless abandon. Their songs are straight-up sugar shots, firework synths and hollered vocals and drum machines that wallop and squelch like medicine balls full of purple Kool-Aid. It's the sound of pure joy — a... nonstop barrage of leaping neon exclamation points. — J. Edward Keyes

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Pearl and the Beard

  • Killing the Darlings album cover

    Killing the Darlings

    Pearl And The Beard
    2011 | Family Records / The Orchard

    Pearl and the Beard are a trio of loud and goofy Brooklyn songwriters, their songs a mix of acoustic folk and jazzy cabaret via a soft-voiced guitarist (Jeremy Styles) and a cellist and percussionist (Emily Hope Price and Jocelyn Mackenzie) who seamlessly switch between brassy wails and Disney-princess croons. — Laura Leebove

Chelle Rose

  • Ghost of Browder Holler album cover

    Ghost of Browder Holler

    Chelle Rose
    2012 | Lil' Damsel Records / TuneCore

    Even Satan knows better than to fuck with Chelle Rose. That's the truism she lays out in the center of the slow-moseying, creepy-as-hell "Leona Barrett," seething, "I don't know who I trouble more: The mean ol' devil or the good ol' Lord." Need further proof? It's all over the brooding, beautiful Ghost of Browder Holler, a record that takes the same sinister spirit found in bands like Nick Cave & the Bad... Seeds and transplants it to ragged booze-bucket country music. Rose's voice is a wonder, a smartass sneer that jabs like a hundred middle fingers. Her pronunciation drips with delicious contempt: she shrugs off a louse of a lover by drawling, "My skin ain't sowft enuff, my kisses would not douww." She dispenses with him like she's flecking a fly from the lip of her MGD. — J. Edward Keyes

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Night Beats

  • Night Beats album cover

    Night Beats

    Night Beats
    2011 | Trouble In Mind Records / TuneCore

    Here's the ideal environment for enjoying the music of gloomy garage ghouls Night Beats: It's 4 a.m. and you've ended up, after a long night of boozing and carousing, at some sparsely-attended party in a barely-furnished loft apartment in some remote part of the city, and a band is bashing out sneering numbers that sound like Nuggets with an upset stomach while a movie projector beams lava-lamp-like images on to their swaying... bodies. Also, it's 1967 and you're in an instructional film about the hazards of LSD. Failing that, a stage in the sunlight in Austin, Texas, is the next best thing. — J. Edward Keyes

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Dana Falconberry

  • Leelanau album cover

    Leelanau

    Dana Falconberry
    2012 | Antenna Farm Records / The Orchard

    Dana Falconberry writes delicate orchestral-folk songs; her airy mezzo accompanied by plucked strings, fingerpicked guitar and gentle rim clicks. Though she's now based in Austin, her debut LP is an ode to her childhood spent in northern Michigan's lush Leelanau peninsula. — Laura Leebove

Royal Thunder

  • CVI album cover

    CVI

    Royal Thunder
    2012 | Relapse Records

    One of last year's best new bands by a long sight, Royal Thunder's greatest asset is the unsettling, purple-blue bellow of frontwoman Mini Parsonz. Over a bevy of murky, churning chordage, she serenades the undead, sings of ancient family curses and groans out the very kind of infernal incantations those old Christian anti-rock 'n' roll videos used to warn against. That the songs are so tuneful is a sly infernal trick: the... best way to get people to sing the praises of the devil is to make that praise hooky as hell. — J. Edward Keyes

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Holydrug Couple

  • Noctuary album cover

    Noctuary

    The Holydrug Couple
    2013 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution

    In case the name didn't clue you in: This is heavy-lidded, slow-moving, psyched-out, pinwheel-eyed bliss. The Chilean duo Holydrug Couple imagines what might happen if you put a brick on the turntable while you were playing old Byrds records. A loose netting of guitars drifts down slowly, drums thud and shudder and vocal lines — keening and melodic — expand like echoes in the Grand Canyon. In the midst of the hyperactive... Austin chaos, Holydrug Couple provide a grinning, dreamy respite. — J. Edward Keyes

    more »

Jacco Gardner

  • Cabinet of Curiosities album cover

    Cabinet of Curiosities

    Jacco Gardner
    2013 | Trouble In Mind Records / TuneCore

    Indie rock's own Little Prince, Jacco Gardner's music is magic and precious, sumptuous orchestral pop that summons the spirits of The Zombies and The Left Banke while sounding openly derivative of neither. In fact, it's Gardner's own assured gift for melody that makes Cabinet of Curiosities such a wonder — even more than the swirling, meringue-like strings. His vocal lines dart off at odd acute angles, poking rude holes in the tissue-paper... orchestration. Witness opener "Clear the Air": xylophones and mellotrons and violins pirouette like tiny ceramic music box ballerinas; but then Gardner's weirdo trapezoidal voice spirals in, making what was once simply soothing seem suddenly ominous and mysterious. It's like the unadulterated versions of Aesop's Fables, where childlike fantasy often gives way to moments of genuine, thrilling danger. — J. Edward Keyes

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]]> http://www.emusic.com/music-news/music-collection/25-must-see-bands-at-sxsw-2013/feed/ 6 eMusic Welcomes Brilliance Audio http://www.emusic.com/book-news/book-collection/emusic-welcomes-brilliance-audio/ http://www.emusic.com/book-news/book-collection/emusic-welcomes-brilliance-audio/#comments Fri, 01 Mar 2013 21:31:57 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=book_hub&p=3050811 Over the past few months, our audiobooks ranks have been growing even more than usual. The reason? We’re thrilled to welcome our newest publishing partner, Brilliance Audio, who have been creating great audiobooks for nearly 30 years in all genres, from bestsellers like Dean Koontz and Lee Child to award-winning nonfiction and memoirs, classics, and more. The one thing they have in common is a focus on marrying the author’s voice with the narrator, creating a listening experience that’s thrilling or emotional, instructive or inspiring. We’ve rounded up some favorites from the first crop of Brilliance titles below for you to start exploring; there are many more to come.

Thrills and Kills

Celebrity Skin

Other Voices, Other Worlds

Fiction Heavyweights

Deep Thoughts on Pop Culture

]]> http://www.emusic.com/book-news/book-collection/emusic-welcomes-brilliance-audio/feed/ 0 Free eMusic Samplers http://www.emusic.com/music-news/music-collection/free-emusic-samplers/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/music-collection/free-emusic-samplers/#comments Fri, 01 Mar 2013 19:42:35 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=emusic_hub&p=3039398 It’s easy to get stuck in a musical rut. The amount of new music that’s released, at this point, on a daily basis can feel overwhelming, and the deluge can cause you to run panicked to old favorites instead of looking for something new. That’s where we come in. We’ve assembled this page of samplers — all of them free — as a way to help you find your next favorite band without burning through your precious balance or making you spend hour after hour digging through the stacks. Just grab a bunch, load them on to your music player of choice, and let the discovery begin.

]]> http://www.emusic.com/music-news/music-collection/free-emusic-samplers/feed/ 58 New This Week: Autre Ne Veut, Sally Shapiro, Emmylou Harris & More! http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-autre-ne-veut-sally-shapiro-emmylou-harris-more/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-autre-ne-veut-sally-shapiro-emmylou-harris-more/#comments Tue, 26 Feb 2013 17:53:53 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=emusic_spotlight&p=3052815 Autre Ne Veut, Anxiety: A new one from Arthur Ashin aka Autre Ne Veut. eMusic’s Andrew Parks says:

So while Anxiety features more than its fair share of Timbaland-vis-Timberlake tropes and unironic Top 40 nods, the shuffle and sheen of the singer/producer’s muscular studio mix can’t hide the confessionals that are exorcised across 10 mildly creepy tracks. It’s as if we were all invited to Ashin’s American Idol audition, only to watch in horror as he writhes around the floor to a rubberized Rihanna beat like a freshly-killed eel.

Sally Shapiro, Somewhere Else: The third set from the mysterious Sally Shapiro and producer Johan Agebjörn. Laura Studarus says:

An unabashedly romantic head rush, the third effort by the Swedish duo (consisting of Shapiro and producer Johan Agebjörn) contains a world of candy heart-worthy sweet nothings, rendered irresistible by Shapiro’s coquettish whisper. No longer simply contented to fall lockstep with Italo Disco, Somewhere Else lets elements of acid house, dance and good ol’ fashioned electro pop bleed around the edges of each track.

Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell, Old Yellow Moon: A long-awaited collaboration between country greats. Holly George-Warren says:

Old Yellow Moon, with its rough-hewn, live-in-a-room ambience, offers what Harris refers to as “living room music.” “This project — like Rodney’s and my relationship — started with sitting around on the floor with two acoustic guitars and finding songs that we love,” according to Harris. “This record represents that.”

The Mavericks, In Time: A triumphant turn after a decade-long hiatus. Says Peter Blackstock:

In Time is awash in Latin rhythms and horn flourishes that suggest The Mavericks would be a better fit for the Buena Vista Social Club, and that’s as it should be: Leader Raul Malo’s powerful, distinctive voice is at its best when freed from boundaries of market or genre.

Charles Lloyd & Jason Moran, Hagar’s Song: These two are generations apart but make a perfect musical pair. Peter Margasak says:

Jason Moran, one of the most visionary composers, improvisers and conceptualists of his generation, has appeared on three of Charles Lloyd’s albums since 2008, and with Hagar’s Song, they not only share equal billing for the first time, but they demonstrate that their artistic partnership has never been more simpatico and sublime.

Various Artists, Change the Beat: The Celluloid Records Story 1979-1987 - Stunning  compilation highlighting Celluloid Records, an imprint that can boast post-punk bands like Killing Time as well as the earliest hip-hop releases. An overview of some of the most fertile of late-1970s to 1980s downtown NYC cross-genre experiments.

Doldrums, Lesser Evil – Maxed-out, overload electronic pop from a mischievous experimenter. Stevie Chick says:

Montreal-based fractured-pop auteur Airick Woodhead is a sonic collagist who clearly isn’t happy until he’s saturated his track with untold layers of noise and fragmented melody. “She Is The Wave,” a collaboration with Canadian electronic artist Guy Dallas, is a case in point. It’s a cyclone of elements that, at first, seems random, but on closer inspection, has a beautifully choreographed tunefulness deep in the chaos. On “Egypt,” Woodhead weaves industrial noises, blips and crashes into ever-changing, sweetly discombobulated pop — it could be Art Of Noise for the GarageBand generation.

Johnny Marr, The Messenger – Marr’s back, this time not as a sideman but with a breezy, agreeable solo record.

Nadia Sirota, Baroque  - The violist Nadia Sirota’s follow-up to her vital disc of new classical works First Things First. New works by Judd Greenstein, Missy Mazzoli (of former eMusic Selects alums Victoire), Nico Muhly, and more.

Olafur Arnalds, The Winter EP - Patient, glowing miniatures from this composer who works in a soundtrack-friendly ambient-classical mode.

Bilal, A Love Surreal - Liquid, languorous and understatedly funky and weird neo-soul record from Bilal, whose career has never been paid the attention of his contemporaries. This record is excellent, shades of Shuggie and Frank Ocean.

Mogwai, Les Revenants – New EP from post-punk legends is a soundtrack to a French television show, and it sounds like it suits their alluringly dour mood just fine.

Ed Harcourt, Back In The Woods - Latest effort from the singer/songwriter finds him in fine, dependable, apple-wry form.

Kutt Calhoun, Black Gold – Hard-bitten raps from the Midwest rapper Kutt Calhoun, from Tech-9 Strange Music imprint.

Ill Bill, The Grimy Awards  - Former Non Phixion member releases another brutal, hardcore testament to his roots.

Gensu Dean, Abrasions - Low-key street erudition, shades of GZA, from Gensu Dean, who makes crisp, cold DJ Premier-style classic rap out of Texas.

10,000 Maniacs, Music From the Motion Picture - The return of 10,000 Maniacs! The band’s first studio LP in 13 years.

Darkthrone, The Underground Resistance - The black metal progenitors continue blazing down their late-period operatic path, confounding early fans and discovering new territory along the way.

Kavinsky, OutRun – The debut from the French house artist, out today.

Girls Names, The New Life - Indie-poppers from Belfast go darker and more cinematic on their excellent-sounding Slumberland second LP.

Popstrangers, Antipodes -Britpop-influenced New Zealanders ready their first missive.

Golden Grrls, Golden Grrls - More cuddly indie-pop, with guitar tones fuzzier than a baby chick and boy/girl vocals. Great songwriting and perfect production help this one stand out.

Vietnam, an A.merican D.ream - New record on Mexican Summer, slightly bent and drunk-sounding jangle-pop.

Various Artists, FatCat Records Winter Sampler 2013 – FREE SAMPLER, everyone, with new material by Frightened Rabbit, Twilight Sad, U.S. Girls, Mice Parade, and many more flagship Fatcat acts! Your “no reason not to click this button” of the day. 

SINGLES

David Bowie, The Stars (Are Out Tonight) - The second inkling of what to expect from David Bowie’s new record A New Day,. This one snarls and scrapes where “Where Are We Now” sighed and moaned. This record is going to be interesting.

Ducktails, Letter of Intent - Latest single!

]]> http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-autre-ne-veut-sally-shapiro-emmylou-harris-more/feed/ 0 Stand-Alone Soundtracks http://www.emusic.com/music-news/list-hub/stand-alone-soundtracks/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/list-hub/stand-alone-soundtracks/#comments Tue, 19 Feb 2013 21:27:19 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=emusic_list_hub&p=3052384 Though it’s often taken for granted, scoring a film is no easy task. Go too minimal and you risk killing dramatic tension. Too grandiose, and an entire film can become ham-handed. Striking the perfect balance is a feat few have truly mastered. Even harder, though, is constructing a soundtrack that stands on its own — creating a work that’s less a companion piece, more a bona fide, start-to-finish album. The 11 soundtracks in this list, remarkably, do just that. These soundtracks are full of music that’s compelling, engaging and entertaining, whether or not you’ve seen the movie it was designed to accompany.

  • The Point! album cover

    The Point!

    Harry Nilsson
    2006 | RCA/BMG Heritage

    Inspired by an acid trip in which singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson realized that trees and houses and more or less everything in some form or another has a point, this soundtrack to ABC Television's 1971 animated movie is presented as a children's bedtime story. Although the narrator-father's voice was originally supplied on TV by Dustin Hoffman (and Ringo Starr for home video), Nilsson here tells his own story about how even apparent outsiders... all fit into nature's plan: At one point, you can even hear him turning a page. Despite the running, punning theme, there are few hard edges to be heard: Whether speaking or singing, Nilsson is as gentle as any dad could be with his child, and the music – deftly arranged by early Nilsson collaborator George Tipton and executed by such studio session greats as Carol Kaye – ranks among his most melodious. That's a high standard indeed. — Barry Walters

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  • Trouble Man album cover

    Trouble Man

    Marvin Gaye
    1998 | Motown

    As a movie, Trouble Man is mediocre at best, but it'd have to be a stone-cold film noir classic to live up to Marvin Gaye's haunting, moody score. Gaye took the creative clout he earned from What's Going On and poured it into Trouble Man, giving a fittingly cinematic blues-tinged soul-jazz cast to compositions that incorporated sumptuous orchestral strings and cutting-edge synthesizers alike. While his voice is scarce on the LP, Marvin... makes it count: the title theme is one of his most moving performances, showcasing both his smooth falsetto and his raw power. — Nate Patrin

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  • The Master: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack album cover

    The Master: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

    Jonny Greenwood
    2012 | Nonesuch

    As long as PT Anderson is making movies about uber-driven weirdos, Jonny Greenwood's piercing, experimental classical compositions are going to fit the bill. And though Greenwood brings some of the same, eerie glissando effects to this film that he also contributed to There Will Be Blood, the sonic palette is a little broader this time around — as in the chamber lyricism of "Time Hole," or else "Alethia," where the gorgeously woozy... arrangement recalls some of Anderson's own attractive-yet-unsettling vistas. — Seth Colter Walls

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  • Paris, Texas - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack album cover

    Paris, Texas - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

    Paris, Texas Soundtrack/Ry Cooder
    2001 | Warner Bros.

    The soundtrack for Wim Wenders's 1984 Palme d'Or-winning existential desert noir Paris, Texas is as sparse and mysterious as the South Texas landscape from which Harry Dean Stanton arises in the film's opening shot. Composed by hired-gun guitarist and chameleonic solo artist turned soundtrack master Ry Cooder, his mesmeric bottleneck lines slither in the arid ambient space provided by accompanists David Lindley and Jim Dickinson, touching upon blues, folk, and rancheras. Evocative... with just a handful of notes, this is a stark, dustbitten classic. — Andy Beta

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  • Rushmore album cover

    Rushmore

    Various
    2011 | ISLAND RECORDS

    Few directors define their characters through music as succinctly as Wes Anderson, never more so than when he pegged the Creation's "Making Time" to afterschool overachiever Max Fischer. Although it's heavy on the British invasion, Rushmore's soundtrack is as peripatetic as the film's beret-sporting protagonist, ranging from Yves Montand's Francophone croon to the mock-baroque contraptions of Mark Mothersbaugh's score. And yet it all hangs together splendidly, telling a story all of its... own. — Sam Adams

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  • Anatomy Of A Murder album cover

    Anatomy Of A Murder

    Duke Ellington
    1999 | Columbia/Legacy

    This soundtrack for Otto Preminger's classic legal thriller isn't often placed in the front-rank of the Duke's output, which is natural for an album that features some cues meant to serve purely as background. But as moody, noir-ish accompaniment goes, this is hardly anonymous work: The band's swagger in "Flirtbird" and "Grace Valse" is unmistakable. The main title theme snarls with intrigue; when it swings into action, you'll perk your head up... (just like those who were in the film's first audiences probably did). Look for Ellington's cameo in the film, too, in the role of Pie-Eye: a character that inspired the pianist's catchy-as-hell "Pie-Eye's Blues." An early run-through (titled "More Blues") is now included in Columbia's remastered edition of the album. — Seth Colter Walls

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  • Moog: Original Film Soundtrack album cover

    Moog: Original Film Soundtrack

    Various Artists
    2004 | Hollywood Records

    Synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog had an extraordinary connection with machines: "I can feel what's going on inside a piece of electronic equipment," he says in this 2004 documentary. This soundtrack brings out the human side of his creation. The space-oddity freakouts in Bootsy Collins's "When Bernie Speaks" play like unfettered stoner comedy, while the muted bell tones in the Album Leaf's "Micro Melodies" evoke late-night isolation. A second disc showcases the Moog's... place in rock history, from prog (Yes's "Close to the Edge") to new wave (New Order's "Blue Monday"), from cheesy (Gary Numan's "Cars") to sublimely deranged (Devo's "Mongoloid"). — Karen Schoemer

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  • One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest album cover

    One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

    Various Artists
    2006 | Fantasy Records

    While this 1975 film from Milos Forman swept every category save Best Soundtrack (that went to Jaws), the score from Phil Spector and Neil Young associate Jack Nitzsche is a masterpiece in its own right. Nitzsche enacts musical mood swings that match the film's subjects. There are gentle orchestral strings that act as medicated haze, bits of sprightly Hawaiian guitar licks and marimba, and for the theme itself, a gorgeous amalgam of... orchestra with Indian tom toms and singing saw. Freak-folky, elegant and stunning. — Andy Beta

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  • The Fountain OST album cover

    The Fountain OST

    Clint Mansell / Kronos Quartet
    2006 | Nonesuch

    It may be Darren Aronofsky's most (wrongly) maligned movie, but even those who flinched from his cosmic fairy tale can luxuriate in its score. Availing himself of the Kronos Quartet and Mogwai, composer Clint Mansell, who also penned the much-recycled theme for Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, moves from melancholy strings through Tibetan chant and feedback storms, climaxing with the stellar sweep of "Death Is the Road to Awe." Both epic and... intimate, The Fountain's soundtrack goes around the galaxy only to find its way back home. —Sam Adams

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  • La Planète Sauvage (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) album cover

    La Planète Sauvage (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

    Alain Goraguer
    2011 | Master Classics Records / The Orchard

    This strange and wonderful album didn't single-handedly invent trip-hop, but it could've: Air, Portishead and DJ Shadow all sound like it, while Madlib, Big Pun and many others simply sampled it. The soundtrack for a supremely trippy 1973 French-Czechoslovakian animated sci-fi flick, it's comprised of small but buttery-smooth and nearly seamless pieces by Alain Goraguer, former arranger for Serge Gainsbourg, France Gall, Juliette Gréco and other Gallic pop titans. His ability to... combine rock instrumentation, orchestral strings, horns, woodwinds, jazz-funk percussion, wordless choirs and avant-garde experiments with layers of audio trickery is so advanced that even now, 40 years later, the whole thing still sounds as though it seeped out of some fantastical symphonic synthesizer of the future. — Barry Walters

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  • Suspiria album cover

    Suspiria

    Goblin
    2010 | Cine Vox / Believe Digital

    A creepy hybrid of up-to-the-'70s electric prog rocking and acoustic medieval evil, Italian group Goblin's expressionist score to Dario Argento's gory 1977 giallo masterpiece is as startling as the film itself. In addition to the film's memorable fourteen-note theme, keyboardist Claudio Simonetti (on Mellotron, Moogs and celesta) and company explore "Sighs" (acoustic guitars and heavy breathing), the mechanically motivated "Markos," and more orthodox jazz-rocking evocations of Argento's characters ("Black Forest") as... they are variously sliced, diced, and covered with maggots. — Richard Gehr

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]]> http://www.emusic.com/music-news/list-hub/stand-alone-soundtracks/feed/ 7 New This Week: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Samantha Crain & More http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-nick-cave-the-bad-seeds-samantha-crain-more/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-nick-cave-the-bad-seeds-samantha-crain-more/#comments Tue, 19 Feb 2013 19:17:47 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=emusic_spotlight&p=3052397 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Push The Sky Away: First, the real big news. To celebrate their 15th studio album Push The Sky Away, we invited Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds to take control of eMusic’s editorial for a week. And they agreed! Which is awesome. To access the full suite of features surrounding Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds eMusic Takeover, go here and have a blast poking around; you’ll find Andrew Perry’s exclusive interview with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis; a list of Warren Ellis’s handpicked eMusic favorites; an interview with Ed Kuepper, and Sam Adams’ glowing review of the record, which goes a little something like this:

The past, or more specifically its absence, comes up a lot on Push the Sky Away. Warren Ellis’s skittering loops, which recall the atmospheric spread of the soundtrack albums he and Cave have made in recent years, have no beginning and no end, like the woman on “Jubilee Street” who “had a history but she had no past.” Myth and reality jumble in an eternal present, with Robert Johnson on one end and Miley Cyrus on the other … It’s certainly not as self-consciously weighty as Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, or as primal as Cave’s Grinderman albums, but Push the Sky Away‘s free-associative trawl exerts a strange fascination, like a dream you’re not quite sure you had.

Matmos, The Marriage of True Minds: The fearlessly experimental electronic duo tend to follow their own inquisitive minds wherever they lead, and on their ninth record, they have lead Matmos into the exploration of telepathy. Andy Battaglia has more:

For those who thought the endearingly eggheaded conceptualists in Matmos could not get more cerebral — this is a duo, after all, whose music has been sourced from the sounds of surgery, digitally deconstructed 19th-century battlefield hymns and readings of the serpentine philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein — consider The Marriage of True Minds. The concept intriguing: Willing test subjects submitted to sensory-deprivation techniques, then “listened” as Matmos member Drew Daniel tried to telepathically communicate the concept for the new Matmos album to them. Recordings of the resulting interactions (the spoken ones, of course, but who knows if that’s all?) figure into each of the songs on The Marriage of True Minds, which covers all kinds of strange ground.

Beach Fossils, Clash the Truth: Brooklyn’s premiere indie-pop janglers return with their follow-up to their 2009 self-titled breakthrough. Matt Fritch writes:

Beach Fossils singer/songwriter Dustin Payseur is talking about his generation; he just sounds like a relic from 1980s post-punk England doing it. His friends are doing it, too, to the point where you can argue that a mostly Brooklyn-centric cadre of bands — including Wild Nothing, Frankie Rose and DIIV, among others — has come to own the busy-yet-bare aesthetic borne on heavily reverbed guitars, brittle drums and washed-out vocals. Beneath the surface, however, Payseur doesn’t seem very interested in the past. The disaffection or apathy we associate with vocalists like Payseur — Ride’s Mark Gardener comes to mind — does not apply here. Beach Fossils’ shimmering guitars can seem similarly cool to the touch, but the album is more inclined toward dense, three-minute blasts of melody and rhythm than dreamy splendor.

The Relatives, The Electric Word: Long-disbanded gospel-funk group from the 1970s reunites, rains down undimmed righteous funk on the populace fury forty years later, on Yep Roc Records. Mike McGonigal spoke with the Rev. Gean West of the group, and Richard Gehr wrote the review:

Gospel singer Rev. Gean West and his brother Rev. Tommie formed The Relatives in the early ’70s and disbanded by 1980, but their electrifying, innovative gospel-soul hybrid finally saw the light of day when their early singles and unreleased sessions were compiled on 2009′s Don’t Let Me Fall. The lo-fi glory of those recordings is now utterly fulfilled on this very long-time-coming full-on debut, The Electric Word, which augments the Relatives’ familial voices with members of Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears. The added members powerfully facilitate the Relatives’ remarkable ability to blend the Temptations’, Four Tops’ and Isley Brothers’ gnarliest acid-soul experiments with traditional gospel.

Jamie Lidell, Jamie Lidell: Warp’s crown prince of blue-eyed glitch-soul returns with a record that merges the two halves of his recording persona. Andy Battaglia writes:

Jamie Lidell has made a career-long habit of swerving, with periods devoted to out-there electronic futurism and then, by surprise, vintage throwback soul. His self-titled album makes good on the prospects of both, with an expansive, prismatic sound and a heartrending voice that proves decidedly human. More digital than recent Lidell albums, which paid explicit tribute to ’60s soul, it sounds more in line with the ’80s, when the influence of New Wave brought swelling psychodrama into R&B.”

Lady Lamb The Beekeeper, Ripely Pine: Lovely, arresting, left-field folk-rock, with the gnarled edges left exposed. Rachael Maddux gives us more:

On Lady Lamb the Beekeeper’s first record cut in a proper studio, nothing is quite as it seems … songs tend start in one place, end in another, and cycle through sometimes a dozen imaginings of themselves on the way — like “You Are The Apple” which, over seven minutes, slides from a nervous acoustic twitch to a swampy low-slung romp to a billowing, spiking orchestral swoon. The album’s lyrical turf is both elemental and surreal, like a funhouse mirror turned on a dream of an anatomy lab; hearts are eaten like strawberry cake, blood is canned like jam, love is handled like a newborn’s skull.

Samantha Crain, Kid Face: A beautiful folk album from an in-house eMusic fave. Annie Zaleski writes:

Singer-songwriter Samantha Crain has always sounded like an old soul, her dusty alto worn down by restless thoughts and free-floating anxiety. On the autobiographical Kid Face, the Oklahoma native sounds even more wizened as she explores loneliness, wanderlust and emotional disruption. Produced by John Vanderslice, Kid Face is a sparse record, laced with stark folk and Americana signifiers: acoustic guitar, wobbly piano, curled pedal steel and keening violin.

Campfires, Tomorrow, Tomorrow: Shambling, lo-fi taped-together indie pop is generally my favorite kind of music, so it’s no surprise that this Portland band has caught my attention. Lots of fuzz and creaky vocals, pretty primitive instrumentation — recalls the early days of indie rock before people cared about boring details like staying in tune or hiring professional stylists.

Concrete Knives, Be Your Own King: Tense guitar-based indie rock with the right amount of reach and flourish. eMusic’s Andrew Mueller says:

Concrete Knives rigorously observe one of the cardinal rules of the post-punk genre: terseness. The 10 tracks on Be Your Own King are rattled out in a squeak over 34 minutes. Concrete Knives are not, however, humorless minimalists; at heart, they’re a commendably unabashed pop group. Witness the giddy shout-along chorus of “Brand New Start,” which recalls The B-52s, the surging Joy Division bassline that carries “Happy Mondays,” and the raggedly triumphant opening track “Bornholmer,” which boldly posits that Nena’s “99 Luftballoons” is territory worth mining.

Eat Skull, III: Grotty lo-fi stalwarts get a little less lo-fi. Marc Hogan has the review:

III is still garage pop, and no one will mistake Eat Skull for Phoenix anytime soon, but the album’s synth-wielding, psychedelic turn succeeds at moving beyond shoddy recording quality as end in itself. Taking on space-rock anthems and ramshackle dance-punk with equal aplomb, Eat Skull are still perverse enough to punctuate the grotesque “taxidermy eyes” imagery of “Dead Horses” with a swooning “Crimson and Clover”-style breakdown. A pair of campfire-psych tracks mid-album also pays unexpected dividends. It all coheres in the fuzzy drone of the closing track, which offers a choice — between burning bridges and buying “brand new ones” — that’s really no choice at all.

Black Twig Pickers, Rough Carpenters: I really do not have a ton of positive things for the “old-timey” music that’s been making sudden inroads into mainstream culture lately. Suspenders and off-mic shouting do not a hootenanny make, my friends. Would that any fraction of the people who have been going gaga over [REDACTED] would instead discover The Black Twig Pickers. Sawing violins, bristling banjos and loose, swinging tempos, this is the good-time wheat-chewin’ music you’ve been looking for. Recommended

Maxmillion Dunbar, House of Woo: Cerebral dance music, tugging at your brain at your hips at the same time. Andy Battaglia writes:

Maxmillion Dunbar, a DJ/producer from Washington, D.C., makes sleek, spacious electronic music pitched between the current vogues for the rhythmic action of vintage Chicago house and the heady contemplation of cosmic synthesizer jams. About half of House of Woo plays as certifiable dance music, with upright rhythms that assert themselves with force, while the other half has nary a beat to speak for.

Mark Kozelek, Like Rats and Live at Phoenix Public House: Pair of new albums from the erstwhile Red House Painters/Sun Kil Moon frontman. The former takes a pretty dicey concept — acoustic versions of classic metal and punk songs — and manages to execute it without a trace of irony. The latter is simply a Kozelek live performance that’s graceful and tender.

Baptists, Bushcraft: YES. Thoroughly hammering speed metal album from this Vancouver group is full-bore panic attack music, nail-gun guitars and hardcore howling. Almost wolflike in its ferocity. Recommended

Puscifer, Donkey Punch The Night: The goofy side project of Maynard James Keenan gets a little less goofy, but not so serious that they can’t name their album Donkey Punch the Night. Here’s Jon Wiederhorn with more:

Unlike Puscifer’s sillier output, Donkey Punch seems like a concerted effort to demonstrate that the group is as gifted, sincere and intoxicating as Tool, A Perfect Circle or Keenan’s Caduceus brand wine. The only tongue-in-cheek moment on Donkey Punch is a cover of metal band Accept’s 1983 anthem “Balls to the Wall,” which converts the forceful, testosterone-pumped original into a vulnerable, ethereal number that replaces manly chants of “God bless you!” and “Hey!” into wispy tendrils of female vocals … With Donkey Punch the Night, Keenan continues to push boundaries of what Puscifer are capable of — which at this point includes just about anything.

Various Artists, The Crying Princess: 78 Records from Burma and Scattered Melodies: Korean Kayagum Sanjo: GREAT new pair of comps from the fine folks at Sublime Frequencies. Both of these gather up ancient, obscure music from far-flung parts of the world. The music on The Crying Princess dates back as far as 1909, and much of the music is fascinating and melodically unpredictable — almost avant-garde in its reach and approach. The latter is a compilation of “Kayagum Sanjo” music from Korea. “Kayagum Sanjo” translates to mean “Scattered Melodies,” and the music here backs that up. Lots of wobbly, faltering guitar-like melodies and erratic, thumping rhythms. Totally absorbing. Both are Recommended

Country Mice, Hour of the Wolf: Brooklyn band play moderate, moody indie rock. Despite what they name says, there’s not much “country” about this — think an airier Buffalo Tom and you’re on the right track.

EULA, “I Collapse”: New single from eMusic Selects alum EULA is their strongest work yet, a wild tiger of a song that starts rangy and dissonant and explodes during the chorus. Recommended

Botanist, IV: The award for world’s craziest concept album this week doesn’t even go to Matmos. No, that honor is reserved for the black metal weirdo The Botanist; here’s our metal expert Jon Wiederhorn, breaking it down:

IV Mandragora is a concept album about a scientist (the Botanist) who cultivates an army of mandrakes to wage war against mankind. Throughout, The Botanist seems several seeds short of a full garden: A textbook misanthrope, he dwells in his private sanctuary, The Verdant Realm, in the land of Veltheimia and talks to his plants about the day when greenery will again conquer the earth. In keeping with the dark green theme, five of the songs are named after actual flowers, giving The Botanist extra credibility for those who thrall to the work of Carl Linnaeus and Norman Borlaugh. For open-minded black metal fans, IV Mandragora isn’t just different, it’s just about essentially, expressing old themes in an entirely new way.

My Gold Mask, Leave Me Midnight: I really, really, really love this record. Sleek, spooky, pouty, gothy music from this Chicago duo is full of chilly songs and roaring tempos — this is some great, blue-back nightmare pop, alluring and addictive. Recommended

Atlas Genius, When It Was Now: Australian band blends a U2-like flair for grandeur with twitchy guitars and the steady thump of dance music for an album that feels spit-shined and easy to absorb.

Lusine, The Waiting Room: Tranquil synth songs that pair deliberately minimal instrumentation — surges of synth, blipping rhythms — with mannered, laconic vocals.

Godflesh, Hymns Special Edition: Sixth and final Godflesh album gets the reissue treatment. Less industrial than earlier outings, more clawing and feral and nasty.

Endless Boogie, Long Island: They’re back! The latest greasy groover from Endless Boogie is full of everything you’ve come to expect from these dudes: whiskey bar riffs, motorcycle vocals and a general spirit of anarchy. They’re like a lo-fi Steppenwolf, these guys.

LA Phil and Gustavo Dudamel, Mahler 9­: America’s most closely watched conductor and the charismatic new music director of the LA Phil, Gustavo Dudamel, continues to prove himself even in the face of astronomic, unreasonable expectations. Here, a sorrowfully expressive and emotionally immediate reading of Mahler’s unearthly, drawn-out goodbye of a final symphony:

Been wondering whether the hotshot young Venezuelan conductor lives up to the hype? Wonder no more, for to be this distinctive in warhorse repertoire, mostly without resorting to willful exaggerations, is impressive. There’s a languorous fervor in this caught-in-concert reading that recalls Bernstein. This reading is so compelling that it’s easy to hear why the 32-year-old is the newest superstar conductor.

Portal, Vexovoid: New album from these metal weirdos whose lead vocalist looks like this. This is very good — churning and bleak and apocalyptic, amazingly suffocating and Recommended

Pyschic Ills, One Track Mind: Latest from spooky psych folkers continues their pattern of drowsy vocals and free-spirited, open-ended jamming. The results usually end up some place dark and foreboding.

Disperse, Living Mirrors: Typically arty and expansive metal on the Season of Mist label. This Polish group pulls off an unlikely marriage of insistently melodic vocals with truly chaotic, intricate arrangements. Lots of fleet-fingered fretwork and percussive heart attacks while the vocals maintain a steady, keening melodicism.

Useless Eaters, Hypertension: Brash, bratty music from these apostles of Jay Reatard. The Eaters are weirder and less high octane than Jay was, and their songs have the same snarl and bark as vintage Oh Sees. Recommended

Devourment, Conceived in Sewage: Latest flesh-scarrer from these death metal stalwarts, this one is the sound of being buried in a coffin only three feet underground and then having the devil’s horses stampede above you for all eternity. It’s pretty good.

]]> http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-nick-cave-the-bad-seeds-samantha-crain-more/feed/ 0 Discover: 2013 Grammy Winners http://www.emusic.com/music-news/music-collection/discover-2013-grammy-winners/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/music-collection/discover-2013-grammy-winners/#comments Mon, 11 Feb 2013 14:52:41 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=emusic_hub&p=3051823 fun., Gotye and Mumford & Sons came away with some of the 2013 Grammy Awards’ biggest honors. See who else took home golden gramophones and catch up on what you might have missed last year.

Album of the Year

Record of the Year

  • Somebody That I Used To Know album cover

    Somebody That I Used To Know

    Gotye
    2012 | EP/SINGLE

    Stepping out from behind the piano/drums of Melbourne indie pop three-piece the Basics for the third time, Belgian-Australian multi-instrumentalist Wally De Backer, aka Gotye's first solo record in five years, Making Mirrors, reveals a love of the '80s pop scene, which extends far beyond the usual influences of the current nu-synth brigade. Unexpected chart-topper "Somebody That I Used to Know," a collaboration with New Zealand vocalist Kimbra, is an oddball break-up song... whose stuttering rhythms, reggae hooks, and hushed vocals sound like the Police as remixed by the XX.

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Song of the Year

  • We Are Young album cover

    We Are Young

    fun.
    2011 | Fueled By Ramen

    fun. is one of those bands that came seemingly out of nowhere to ascend to the top of the charts. Usually, those groups piggyback the steez of some other currently radio-ruling act. fun. doesn’t. On its breakout second album, the New York trio draws from hip-hop, power-pop, emo, ’70s art-rock, singer-songwriter balladry, contemporary R&B and Broadway; a combo you’ll likely only find right here. Singer Nate Ruess — who also writes the... ardent lyrics and highly sing-able melodies — has a Freddie Mercury thing going on vocally, and Some Nights opens with a flurry of Queen-y harmonies and symphonic gallantry. But after that, all bets are off. The runaway success of “We Are Young,” the first substantial rock song in ages to not only top the pop charts but also put a justified critic’s darling, avant-R&B diva Janelle Monae, on the radio where she belongs, is particularly amazing considering that Ruess’s first band, the Format, was dropped by the same major that now distributes both fun. and Monae.

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Best Pop Vocal Album

  • Stronger album cover

    Stronger

    Kelly Clarkson
    2011 | RCA Records Label

    It's been nine years since Kelly Clarkson was crowned as the inaugural American Idol, and in that time she's remained the show's ideal; she's a technically gifted singer with charm to spare, an inviting smile, and a knack for inhabiting hooks like they're barnhouse lofts squirreled away on Texas farm. Even the most Idol-allergic music consumers have embraced the combination of melody, perfectly calibrated guitar grit, and wailing that made up her... 2004 hit "Since U Been Gone"; other songs in her catalog, like the sassy "Walk Away" and the girl-group throwback "I Want You," are similarly indelible.

    In keeping with Clarkson's career — and the ethos of Idol — her fifth album takes its inspirations from all over the pop map. While Dr. Luke and Max Martin, who shepherded "Gone" and the lead single from Clarkson's previous album All I Ever Wanted, aren't present, the producers in the mix give Stronger a texture that shows how the genre of "pop" can be a jumping-off point, and not an endgame. "You Love Me" is muscular guitar-pop with gorgeous new-wave flourishes blossoming on its pre-chorus; "Dark Side" has a delicate lullaby threaded throughout; "Honestly" opens with a floating haze of guitar distortion that could be mistaken for a chillwave track. The through line between all these stylistic leaps is Clarkson's voice, a formidable instrument that knows when to get vulnerable and when to absolutely blow. (Chillwavers could probably stand to learn a lesson or two from her.)

    What gives Stronger its extra oomph is the confidence exhibited by Clarkson as she sings lyrics about self-acceptance being a key to love ("Dark Side") and rumor mills that she wishes would stop churning ("You Can't Win"). Escaping the Idol machine has been a great thing for Clarkson, who sometimes takes on the role of the pop world's ombudsman when she's defending her former show against the "authenticity" police or rolling her eyes at former Idol meanie Simon Cowell's declarations that she's not interested in being a pop star. That Stronger allows her to drop the façade that other pop stars might depend on for dear life, and address both the characters in her songs and her audience directly, speaks both to Clarkson's charm and to her growing maturity as an artist.

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Best New Artist

  • Some Nights album cover

    Some Nights

    fun.
    2012 | Fueled By Ramen

    fun. is one of those bands that came seemingly out of nowhere to ascend to the top of the charts. Usually, those groups piggyback the steez of some other currently radio-ruling act. fun. doesn't. On this, its breakout second album, the New York trio draws from hip-hop, power-pop, emo, '70s art-rock, singer-songwriter balladry, contemporary R&B and Broadway; a combo you'll likely only find right here. Singer Nate Ruess — who also writes... the ardent lyrics and highly sing-able melodies — has a Freddie Mercury thing going on vocally, and Some Nights opens with a flurry of Queen-y harmonies and symphonic gallantry. But after that, all bets are off. The runaway success of "We Are Young," the first substantial rock song in ages to not only top the pop charts but also put a justified critic's darling, avant-R&B diva Janelle Monáe, on the radio where she belongs, is particularly amazing considering that Ruess's first band, the Format, was dropped by the same major that now distributes both fun. and Monáe. That Arizona band teamed with Redd Kross/OFF! bassist Steven McDonald for its second album, 2006's Dog Problems, and Ruess and McDonald continued honing their smarty-pants eclecticism on fun.'s 2009 debut Aim and Ignite, with the help of its multi-instrumentalists Jack Antonoff and Andrew Dost, formerly of Steel Train and Anathallo. Here the trio trade McDonald for Jeff Bhasker, a hip-hop/R&B guy who produced monster hits for Kanye West, Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Together, they layer seemingly incompatible genres with reckless but radio-friendly glee, as if a music nerd's iPod somehow got into the hands of a Bruno Mars.

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Best Dance/Electronica Album

  • Bangarang EP album cover

    Bangarang EP

    Skrillex
    2011 | Big Beat Records/Atlantic

    Nominated for five Grammy Awards, shortlisted for the prestigious BBC Sound of 2012 poll, and courted by everyone from Chicago producer Kaskade to metal icons Korn, former From First to Last frontman Sonny Moore's transition from post-hardcore vocalist to dubstep producer couldn't have realistically gone any smoother. However, despite his unprecedented success, there's still a question as to whether he can apply his now trademark, demonic, wobble bass drops and thumping syncopated... beats to a whole album. Named after the battle cry of the lost boys in Steven Spielberg's Hook, his fourth consecutive EP Bangarang (also his first Top 40 entry in both the UK and US) suggests he'll have to be on his game on the forthcoming full-length Voltage if he's to avoid an Emperor's New Clothes scenario. While the bombastic Wall of Sound displayed on 2010's Scary Monsters & Nice Sprites initially provided a unique take on the UK dubstep genre, Skrillex's lack of progression means there's a distinct sense of déjà vu among its seven tracks, particularly on the relentless, scattershot bleeps, chopped-up vocal hooks, and repetitive loops of opener "Right In" and the rap-metal fusion of "Kyoto." Even when he does think outside the box -- as on "Right on Time," a percussive, hard house collaboration with 12th Planet and Kill the Noise which eventually builds into a feverish slice of happy hardcore, and "The Devil's Den," a chaotic hook-up with Wolfgang Gartner which takes in everything from old-school rave to ska to techno — the results are more headache-inducing than thrilling. There are a few more encouraging signs, such as the Doors-featuring "Breakin' a Sweat," which combines proggy guitar hooks, psychedelic organ chords, and Jim Morrison samples with a snarling, Prodigy-esque vocal and a filthy slab of dub bass to produce one of the year's most unexpectedly successful partnerships, and the multi-layered trance of closer "Summit," given an ethereal sheen thanks to Ellie Goulding's lilting tones, both of which suggest Skrillex should utilize his melodic leanings more often. But overall, Bangarang is a disappointingly formulaic affair which hints for the first time that the wheels may soon slowly begin to fall off.

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Best Rock Album

  • El Camino album cover

    El Camino

    The Black Keys
    2011 | Nonesuch

    The Black Keys, Akron's unsuspecting blues-rock saviors, faced ridiculous pressure in following up their expansive 2010 breakout effort, Brothers. Big things happened in the subsequent year: The duo (vocalist/guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney) graced the cover of Spin, tucked away three GRAMMYs, played SNL and raked in huge piles of advertising cash — big-deal developments for a band that recorded their debut album in a basement nearly a decade earlier.... Brothers found the band at a creative and commercial high-point, simultaneously embracing soulful pop melodies and the spirited muscle of their live shows, even as they gently experimented with psychedelic overdubs — emphatically darting away from the sleepy, awkward soundscapes of the Danger Mouse-produced identity crisis Attack & Release.

    On El Camino, the Black Keys are done trying to impress anybody, sounding wonderfully unhinged throughout the album's compact 38 minutes. The name of the game is hard-hitting focus; spontaneity; keeping it simple, stupid; never over-thinking or over-cooking any swampy chorus or tossed-off lyric ("Hey, my my, she's a money-maker/ Hey, my my, she's gonna take ya," goes one gem). After only producing one Brothers track (the emphatic "Tighten Up"), Danger Mouse returns to man the boards — and though his approach on Attack & Release was heavy-handed, never quite gelling with the duo's style, he takes a wiser backseat approach on El Camino. His presence still lingers (check that whirring Hammond organ and retro-glock twinkle on the hooky "Dead and Gone"), but this time around, he's adapted to the Keys' raw rock approach, instead of forcing a synthesis with his bread-n-butter symphonic electro-pop.

    The looseness is intoxicating. "Money Maker"'s beastly bass lags behind a millisecond or two, pushing and pulling in gnarly blues warfare with Auerbach's guitars. Carney, charmingly, still swings with the finesse of a caveman on Ritalin — despite his finest efforts at a multi-tiered groove on standout "Stop Stop," dude nearly trips over his own drum sticks. Those sassy female vocalizers on "Gold on the Ceiling" would fit nicely onstage in a broke-down backwoods bar. The acoustic-ballad-turned-electric-stomper "Little Black Submarines" unintentionally evokes Tenacious D channeling Led Zeppelin, and the result is a goofier (yet no less rocking) "Stairway to Heaven" demoed in a truck-stop bathroom stall. Meanwhile, "Sister" is the Black Keys at their glammiest and hammiest, Auerbach's fuzz-bathed, bee-stung guitars layered impeccably over a wicked Carney stomp.

    Perhaps the Black Keys are America's finest rock band only because the competition is so depressingly slim. Regardless, with two straight knock-outs on their resume, these guys have clearly earned the title.

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Best Alternative Album

  • Making Mirrors album cover

    Making Mirrors

    Gotye
    2012 | Samples & Seconds / Republic

    Stepping out from behind the piano/drums of Melbourne indie pop three-piece the Basics for the third time, Belgian-Australian multi-instrumentalist Wally De Backer, aka Gotye's first solo record in five years, Making Mirrors, reveals a love of the '80s pop scene, which extends far beyond the usual influences of the current nu-synth brigade. The hugely experimental follow-up to 2006's Like Drawing Blood doesn't discriminate against other decades, as evident on the impossibly uplifting... '60s retro soul of "I Feel Better," the '70s West Coast harmonies of the ethereal lullaby-like closer "Bronte," the '90s Beck-esque scuzzy garage rock of "Easy Way Out," and the 2000s hushed, claustrophobic dubstep of "Don't Worry, We'll Be Watching You." But seemingly unaffected by the constant comparisons with the likes of Sting and Peter Gabriel, it's the era of early new wave, dub, and worldbeat which defines its 12 tracks. Unexpected chart-topper "Somebody That I Used to Know," a collaboration with New Zealand vocalist Kimbra, is an oddball break-up song whose stuttering rhythms, reggae hooks, and hushed vocals sound like the Police as remixed by the XX, "Smoke and Mirrors" echoes the avant-garde pop of Gabriel's So, with its pounding tribal drums, orchestral flourishes, and new age melodies, while there are also nods to George Michael's "Faith" on the acoustic gospel-pop of "In Your Light"; the impassioned Aussie rock of Midnight Oil on the ecologically themed "Eyes Wide Open," and electro pioneer Thomas Dolby on the strange, vocodered vocals, spoken word samples, and skank guitars of the trippy "State of the Art." Familiar they may be, but some credit has to go to De Backer for managing to weave these eclectic retro sounds into a cohesive affair, which proves that along with recent efforts by Art vs. Science and Architecture in Helsinki, Australia is fast becoming one of the biggest purveyors of quality experimental pop.

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Best R&B Album

  • Black Radio album cover

    Black Radio

    Robert Glasper
    2012 | BLUE NOTE

    Pianist Robert Glasper has jazz chops sophisticated enough to satiate diehard purists and an affinity for hip-hop and R&B that has resulted in collaborations with Q-Tip, Maxwell and Mos Def. Black Radio scrambles these influences, with Glasper's Experiment quartet (including Derrick Hodge on electric bass, Casey Benjamin on sax and vocoder, and Chris Dave playing drums), laying unpredictable music beneath a bevy of high-profile guests. In this era of... Pandora-style musical-profiling, where listeners can narrow down exactly what they think they want, the project absorbs genres like a sponge and squeezes out surprises with a tinge of tang and froth. It avoids the sappiness of "smooth jazz," the stilted self-reference of "hip-hop jazz" and the suffocating cushion of "quiet storm," yet there's a lush sensuality that permeates the beats, bop rhythms and bracing moments of curiosity and intellect.

    Glasper understands that this Experiment is best undertaken as a tactile experience - as Shafiq Husayn rap-drawls in the opener, "Lift Off," all you need is your ears and your soul. To drive home the point, the beguiling yawl and coo of Erykah Badu sends the Afro-Cuban classic "Afro Blue" into the air like a large kite in a steady wind, its tail trilling. Rappers Lupe Fiasco and yasiin bey (better known as Mos Def) variously distill verbal science and wig out on wordplay ("turtles from a man hole"?), knowing the live quartet can alter the texture and freestyle the route as the situation warrants, on "Always Shine" and "Black Radio," respectively. There is a throwback nature to Black Radio, and not only because Sade ("Cherish The Day," with Lalah Hathaway on vocals), David Bowie ("Letter to Hermione," featuring Bilal channeling Stevie Wonder) and Nirvana (a deconstructed and vocoderized "Smells Like Teen Spirit") are covered. There are moments reminiscent of the soul-jazz fusion of Bobbi Humphrey and Donald Byrd back on Blue Note in the late '70s, or Soul II Soul and Me Phi Me back in the '80s, or Alphabet Soup and Mint Condition in the '90s, with a dollop of 21st-century hip-hop on top. Why reinvent the wheel when you can modify the ride?

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Best Rap Album

  • Take Care (Deluxe Version) album cover

    Take Care (Deluxe Version)

    Drake
    2012 | Cash Money Records/Young Money Ent./Universal Rec.

    Drake shot to the upper echelon of hip-hop fame by bypassing nearly every single rule of traditional cred-getting, and none of the ensuing jokes about his role as Wheelchair Jimmy on DeGrassi: The Next Generation or his own penchant for soft-batch hashtag-rap have knocked him back down. If anything, sophomore album Take Care actively doubles down on the things that make him so contentious among traditionalists — the emotional exposure, the singsong... delivery (now manifested more often as straight-up R&B singing), the lyrical focus on relationships — but infuses them with a subtle dose of self-aware ambivalence.

    He still acknowledges success — the first line on the album is "I think I killed everybody in the game last year, man" — while "Underground Kings" and "Crew Love" are human-scale acknowledgments that he can afford nice cars and expensive vacations. Yet he still carries himself as though his main concern is connecting with other people without letting status obscure his intent. Most of the people in question are women; they get romantically flattered ("Make Me Proud"), ruefully drunk-dialed ("Marvin's Room"), anxiously reconciled with ("Take Care") and coldly, then regretfully, dumped (the Stevie Wonder feature, "Doing it Wrong").

    In the process, Drake foregoes hashtag gimmickry and stretched-to-fatigue punchlines in favor of straightforward confessions, letting the guests — including top-form Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross, Andre 3000 and mentor Lil Wayne — fill in the pull-quotes. The production does the rest — a gauzy atmosphere of post-Dirty South beats, built around muted, glowing ambient tracks from Noah "40" Shebib, T-Minus and one-shots from Boi-1da, Just Blaze, Jamie xx and Lex Luger — and the sound complements the nuances of Drake's voice in a way that subsumes it almost completely. The end result is an album that feels like the most integral fusion of hip-hop structure and R&B soul-baring since 808s and Heartbreak.

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Best Country Album

  • Uncaged album cover

    Uncaged

    Zac Brown Band
    2012 | Southern Ground/Atlantic

    In a sense, it's possible to measure the progress of the Zac Brown Band by the magnitude of their guest stars. In 2010, they consolidated the breakthrough of 2008's Foundation by enlisting Jimmy Buffett and Alan Jackson for duets — elders whose very presence suggested they were passing a torch (although, to be sure, Buffett has a far greater pull on Brown's sound than Jackson). Two years later, it is the Zac... Brown Band who occupy the power position, drafting in peers, not idols, to play alongside. And it is a diverse batch: twee, twiddly Jason Mraz co-writes the sprightly opening cut, "Jump Right In," with Zac, Trombone Shorty colors "Overnight" with some New Orleans funk, and upcoming folk/blues troubadour Amos Lee sings on "Day That I Die," each guest representing a different field for the ZBB, each suggesting the range of this ever-evolving nominal country band. And at this point, the Zac Brown Band would fit the grander stages of such worldly, knowing vaguely hippie enclaves as Bonnaroo better than they would a rocking country outlet somewhere in the Deep South. But Southern they are, in sensibility and sound, reflecting not the dusty beer joints and cutthroat honky tonks of the middle of the 20th century but the sports bars and sandy beaches of the present, the kinds of places where the kin of the Allmans feel as Southern as the descendants of George Jones...and where a bearded soft rock crooner like Zac Brown is happy to make evident his debt to James Taylor. Brown's sweeter side isn't hidden here but it's not quite as prominent as it's been in the past, either. He has plenty of soft, crooning melodies but there's a bit of bluegrass and a bit of reggae, a little blues and a lot of rock. Above anything else, Uncaged is a Zac Brown Band album, one that emphasizes the range of this quintet and its elastic interplay. It is the sound of a band operating from a position of considerable strength: they're confident, assured, even playful, having fun bending the rules and blurring boundaries, eager to please but never pandering. It's the rare album that suggests how good the band would be in concert yet still sounds vibrant on record.

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Best Jazz Vocal Album

  • Radio Music Society album cover

    Radio Music Society

    Esperanza Spalding
    2012 | Heads Up

    Now Esperanza Spalding is making even the Grammys look hip. In her first outing since she was named Best New Artist in 2011, Spalding puts a dozen tunes into her stylistic spin cycle for a tour de force of pop glitter, jazz swing, folk moodiness and a dollop of hip-hop swagger on the dense-but-dazzling Radio Music Society. This is the work of an artist who refuses to choose, mocking genre labels with... guileless ambition. (Her original concept was to pair this disc with the classically-oriented, string-laden Chamber Music Society back in 2010, until her record company convinced her the menu would be too large for public consumption.)

    By ignoring boundaries, Spalding upends expectations. She enlists august jazz tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano to provide a dulcet lilt to a Stevie Wonder cover ("I Can't Help It") and hip-hop titan Q-Tip to play glockenspiel and co-produce the jazzy tribute to her native Portland, Oregon("City of Roses"). Assembling a phalanx of 23 players and vocalists for a flashy, powerhouse "Radio Song," she sings about the giddiness of being seized by a new jam coming out of the speakers as her own electric bass wends its way through the song's buoyant center. Three songs later, with just the sparse backing of organist James Weidman, she tells the saga of a man falsely imprisoned for 30 years on a bogus murder conviction. On Radio, both extremes are fair game.

    As was the case with Chamber Music Society, Spalding's vocals are her ace in the hole. Her range is limited, but her assured and agile phrasing is ideal for carrying out her talk/sung approach. It enables her to credibly pull off a bluesy, big-band-like torch song ("Hold On Me") and to surf atop a youth choir on the anthem "Black Gold." And then there's "Vague Suspicions," a dense and sophisticated number with Jack DeJohnette on drums, about the tacit accommodations Americans make to avoid thinking too much about the consequences of drone strikes and the other elements of remote-control war. It's a grim, simmering number, its closing moments featuring Spalding sarcastically cooing, "Next on channel 4: celebrity gossip." It's a typically astute and self-aware take from an artist who is the closest thing jazz has to a young celebrity.

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Best Jazz Instrumental Album

  • Unity Band album cover

    Unity Band

    Pat Metheny
    2012 | Nonesuch

    Freedom from stylistic constraints has never been an easy thing for Pat Metheny. As one of jazz's greatest composers, guitarists and texturalists, he's compiled on a stockpile of characteristic compositional devices. Any Metheny fan can identify his white-noise-spewing guitar synths and Ornette-style "out" constructions from 40 paces. But Metheny's tools never become clichés; they're just steps from which he keeps climbing.

    Unity Band is yet another example of Metheny's perpetual growth spurt. Metheny's... first record to feature a tenor saxophonist since the mighty 80/81 (with Dewey Redman and Michael Brecker), it sounds both familiar and fresh. Metheny sandblasts new creative paths through well-worn terrain, joined by tenor player Chris Potter, perennial Pat Metheny Group drummer Antonio Sanchez and inspired young bassist Ben Williams. Potter is a muscular foil for Metheny, inspiring him to comp and solo with abandon. The guitarist, though typically brilliant, can sometimes sound hamstrung by his dense PMG studio arrangements. But revamping his afore-mentioned compositional tools through new band mates, Metheny sounds truly inspired on Unity Band.

    Metheny's bittersweet acoustic guitar (is there a better acoustic jazz guitarist?) opens "New Year" with a bossa nova lilt, quickly drawing you in. Metheny is soon subsumed by Potter's astringent tenor, followed by group solos over a Metheny-trademarked, high-flying vamp section. Fret-encompassing swoops ("vroom vroom") and guitar synth caterwaul infuse the funky Latin sashay of "Roofdogs," the band firing smoke and sparks as Potter's soprano sax solo winds through solar flare like explosions. Here on soprano, and elsewhere on bass clarinet, Potter shakes clean his hefty Brecker influences to improvise with originality. Sanchez storms Unity Band as well, constantly stoking the intensity level as Williams responds with graceful solos and empathetic support. His solo bass introduction (another Metheny device) to "Come and See" leads to heated solos all around over a feverish pulse. An acoustic guitar-driven ballad, "This Belongs to You," follows, then "Leaving Town," which touches on old PMG favorite "James" in its melody and overall shape. The bell-like chord structure of "Interval Waltz" recalls master guitarist Jim Hall, creating a lovely arc of an arrangement, leading to a beautiful guitar solo over a floating swing pulse. "Signals (Orchestrion Sketch)" is like nothing on any Metheny record, its clattering, Frank Zappa styled (Varese? Stravinksy?) orchestral bed emoting like humorous robots beating street percussion. "Then and Now" sounds a bit like Weather Report's "A Remark You Made" in spirit, followed by closer, "Breakdealer," which with its clunky race to the finish, is Unity Band's only deal-breaker.

    Should Pat Metheny replace his main group with the freshly minted Unity Band? The guitarist is re-inspired by material that hints at years of development to come, and this is one killer band. But probably not. Metheny's vision is too broad to be contained by one band and one band alone.

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Best Reggae Album

  • Rebirth album cover

    Rebirth

    Jimmy Cliff
    2012 | Jimmy Cliff - Rebirth

    In 1972, Jimmy Cliff's performance in The Harder They Come introduced U.S. filmgoers to the vibrant desperation ofKingston life, and his inspirational yet tough-minded songs highlighted the movie's soundtrack. Already an established hitmaker at the time, Cliff seemed poised to become Jamaica's first international superstar. Instead he misjudged American audiences, pitching vague homilies and pop professionalism to the AM crowd, allowing Bob Marley to leapfrog past him by assuming a prophetic mantle... and exciting hip FM rockers with his political defiance.

    On Rebirth, Cliff now eyes a more judicious audience: middle-aged rockers weaned on punk and alternative. Shepherded by his producer, Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong, the 64-year-old rides the lithe throwback grooves of reggae revivalists the Aggrolites and Hepcat with a young man's grace, particularly on two smartly chosen covers — the Clash's "The Guns of Brixton," which transplanted Cliff's character from The Harder They Come into a London slum, and Rancid's "Ruby Soho." ("Rebel, Rebel" is good too, but it's not the Bowie tune.) Cliff's political complaints haven't grown much more specific — "World Upside Down" cries out against "Too much injustice," then proposes "love" as the answer. But his exhortations not only retain the warmth and humane spirit of old but have gained depths of pained sympathy with age, especially when he laments how "They took the children's bread/ And gave it to the dogs."

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]]> http://www.emusic.com/music-news/music-collection/discover-2013-grammy-winners/feed/ 0 eMusic’s Alternate-Universe GRAMMY Nominees http://www.emusic.com/music-news/list-hub/emusics-alternate-universe-grammy-nominees/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/list-hub/emusics-alternate-universe-grammy-nominees/#comments Fri, 01 Feb 2013 14:25:52 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=emusic_list_hub&p=3050973 Let’s be honest: The Grammys are a great spectacle and fun bit of junk food TV, but few of us take it seriously as any kind of measurement of musical innovation. Even this year, when more indie-bred artists are on the ballot than ever before, with the notable exception of Alabama Shakes it still feels like the Grammy-nominating committee is getting to the party a little too late. So we decided to take 10 of this year’s nominees and use them to introduce you to your next favorite band. Like The Black Keys? See why we suggest Two Gallants. Loving the Lumineers? Read why we think Trampled By Turtles is a good next step. This way, when the 2014 Grammys roll around, you can say, “Those guys? Man, I was into them forever ago.”

Like The Lumineers? Try Father John Misty.

Nominated For: Best New Artist, Best Americana Album
On a recent Saturday Night Live, the Lumineers grinned and stomped their feet. Last summer on Letterman, Father John Misty’s Joshua Tillman swiveled his hips like a lecherous lounge act. But both the Grammy-nominated Denver folk-rockers and the L.A.-transplanted former Fleet Foxes crooner share a fascination with strummy Americana. And the Lumineers’ best moment so far, the aptly titled “Slow It Down,” leans toward Tillman’s own shadowy intensity. Father John’s debut showcases a broader range of all-American styles, from Gram Parson’s country-rock to Lee Hazlewood’s symphonic cowboy-pop comedowns. Luckily, though, Fear Fun isn’t so aptly titled. With the wild-eyed sincerity of a cult leader, Tillman riffs on sex, drugs, and his own newfound hometown for some of 2012′s wickedest lyrical wiseassery. — Marc Hogan

Like Carly Rae Jepsen? Try Chairlift.

Nominated For: Song of the Year, Best Pop Solo Performance
“Call Me Maybe” lords over an album — Kiss — that pleasingly serves up more than a few scoops of pink-and-purple Cars-indebted pop. Chairlift’s “I Belong in Your Arms” was a smash hit on a much smaller scale — it rubbed elbows with “Call Me Maybe” on various year-end lists, but not the radio dial — and similarly lords over an album that goes deep into the ’80s, though now we’re talking Cocteau Twins and Kate Bush. From both, the plea is the same: love the single, but pay attention to the album. — Jordan Sargent

Like Taylor Swift? Try Waxahatchee.

Nominated For: Record of the Year
“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” is Taylor Swift’s brightest blast of pop, a thrilling and antagonistic break-up exultation. But the foundation of her music — even last year’s Red — lies in the same type of bracing, lacerating relationship autopsies set to plaintive acoustic guitars that make up Waxahatchee’s American Weekend. Allison Crutchfield won’t soon be mistaken for a pop star that dates a Kennedy — her guitar tones are more ragged and her imagery much grimier — but in her songs the unrelentingly personal becomes universal all the same. — Jordan Sargent

Like Gotye? Try Radical Face.

Nominated For: Best Alternative Album, Record of the Year
Xylophones? Who needs that first-world instrument when handclaps and a tambourine can craft an equally irresistible groove. On this stellar cut from Floridian Ben Cooper’s project, he matches Gotye’s inescapable tune in the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink department. But Cooper’s resulting rollicking anthem — powered by double-tracked acoustic guitars, rustic piano and Cooper’s high, keening croon — is less like wandering the Australian outback and more like cruising in a boxcar with a bunch of hobos. — Kevin O’Donnell

Like Kelly Clarkson? Try Corin Tucker.

Nominated For: Song of the Year, Record of the Year
Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)” is a Nietzschean testament to the strength gained from overcoming a bad relationship. The girl-as-survivor anthem functions as heroic storytelling in pop, giving voice to female empowerment. But what about the struggle for respect that happens within a committed partnership? The Corin Tucker Band’s Kill My Blues celebrates strength in vulnerability by reflecting what it feels like when you turn your relationship into a family. And frankly, while Clarkson has never sounded better, nothing compares to Corin Tucker’s voice when it soars like a jet plane. — Tobi Vail

Like Jack White? Try Dead Sara.

Nominated For: Album of the Year, Best Rock Album
Jack White seemingly rifled through his classic rock collection to create Blunderbuss, but that album’s guitar-god moments pale in comparison to Dead Sara’s self-titled debut. The Los Angeles quartet storms through gnarly hard rock influenced by bluesy grunge (“Test On My Patience”), punk (the snarling “Monumental Holiday”) and metallic twang (“Timed Blues”). Credit for this raw power goes to the talents of lead guitarist Siouxsie Medley and vocalist/guitarist Emily Armstrong. The latter’s gravelly, vibrato-laden wail especially commands attention; think Stevie Nicks possessed by a demon — or the ghost of a wizened blues warbler. — Annie Zaleski

Like Mumford & Sons? Try Trampled By Turtles.

Nominated For: Album of the Year, Best Rock Performance
The dramatic sine curves of Mumford & Sons’ acoustic anthems, which begin quietly and progress straight to rousing climaxes, get tweaked and trampled on Stars & Satellites, the sixth album by Duluth, Minnesota, veterans Trampled by Turtles. Supporting Dave Simonett’s self-reckoning lyrics and earnest vocals, the band has grown into one of the most accomplished and ambitious string bands around. Each song here contains some lively flourish — the majestic fiddle cascades on “Midnight on the Interstate,” the tectonic rumble of cello on “Alone” — that shows these Turtles not only mastering the new folk genre but thinking well beyond it. — Stephen M. Deusner

Like Frank Ocean? Try Elle Varner.

Nominated For: Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Best New Artist
A confident R&B debut that isn’t afraid to reach across genre boundaries in order to make its point — that might describe Frank Ocean’s much-ballyhooed channel ORANGE, but it also serves as an introduction to the first album by Elle Varner. Not only can she out-falsetto Odd Future’s resident crooner, tracks like the fiddle-strung “Refill” (up for Best R&B Song) and the saucy “Sound Proof Room” have a brash confidence that demands repeat listens. — Maura Johnston

Like fun.? Try Foxy Shazam.

Nominated For: Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Best New Artist
Like fun., this Cincinnati septet draw from glam-rock, pop and R&B for a holler-from-the-rooftops, glory-glory-Halllelujah kinda vibe that totally cops to its own exaggeration and earnestness. Foxy Shazam, though, rock a lot harder; in fact, they never do anything to less than extremes: When they embrace Queen-like overdubbed choirs and scuzzy Led Zeppelin-eque stolen blues riffs on this, their fourth and most realized album, they really, really go for them. And so any appraisal of their most popular song, “I Like It,” where singer Eric Sean Nally repeatedly wails Robert Plant-style, “That’s the biggest black ass I’ve ever seen/And I like it, I like it – a lot!” should take into account that everything Foxy Shazam stand for is larger than life, including the soulfulness that’s intertwined with their innate ridiculousness. We all have obsessions that others could judge harshly, and if one of his is African-American backsides (he’s featured them the cheerleader-adorned cover of Introducing and similarly themed “Oh Lord” video), he’s also bold enough to admit it. This guy does not hold back, and, in the bigger picture, it’s endearing. — Barry Walters

Like The Black Keys? Try Two Gallants.

Nominated For: Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Best Rock Album
They say that you don’t sing the blues to wallow in them; you sing ‘em to rise above ‘em. This folk-blues duo’s reunion/comeback album draws its considerable power from a somewhat similar dichotomy. While embracing (really, for the first time) bloom as well as blight, they create a sound more crunching, grinding, shredding and thrashing than ever even as they are softer, sweeter, more soothing and intimate. So they come off as just like themselves only more so and there’s this whole new feeling. That ain’t easy, folks. — John Morthland

]]> http://www.emusic.com/music-news/list-hub/emusics-alternate-universe-grammy-nominees/feed/ 3 Discover: New York Hip-Hop http://www.emusic.com/music-news/music-collection/beats-rhymes-from-all-five-boroughs/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/music-collection/beats-rhymes-from-all-five-boroughs/#comments Mon, 07 Jan 2013 17:23:36 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/music-news/music-collection/beats-rhymes-from-all-five-boroughs/ Photo: Jay-Z

While we’re usually cruising down 8th Street in a cab, not an off-white Lexus, we know exactly where Jay-Z’s coming from in his new-school anthem, “Empire State of Mind.” From Brooklyn to the Bronx, and every borough in between, there’s no city like New York City when it comes to classic hip-hop records.

Here’s a quick, album-guided tour of the Big Apple…

Brooklyn

  • Reasonable Doubt album cover

    Reasonable Doubt

    Jay-Z
    1996 | Roc-a-fella / TuneCore

    Every rapper needs a creation myth — Illmatic opened with Nas and A.Z. counting money over snippets from Wild Style, the devil's sons redeemed by hip-hop. Biggie opened Ready to Die with a gripping audio collage of his first twenty-odd years, as though his rag-to-riches tale was one you needed to learn. Jay opened Reasonable Doubt with a heartbeat, but its quickening pace suggested it was the sound of fear —... of moving your first package; of holding your first gun; of seeing a man die; of the moment when you realize you have grown up too fast. This wasn't an album deeply concerned with where Jay had been, since he had already built his name as a rather successful drug dealer. This album was about one man's rebirth, and as soon as that ticking heart gave way to the gloss and floss of "Can't Knock the Hustle," it was clear that Jay, too, had arrived.



    "My pops knew exactly what he did when he made me/ Tried to get a nut and he got a nut," he bragged on that opening cut, as Mary J. Blige bellowed an achingly hopeful chorus borrowed from Mel'isa Morgan's "Fool's Paradise." But was Jay really a "nut," our "worst fear confirmed"? There is something cool and composed about Reasonable Doubt, as he plays straight man to Biggie's true nut on "Brooklyn's Finest" or earns his stripes on the icy "Dead Presidents II" — two of the finest songs of Jay's career. "We used to fight for building blocks/ Now we fight for blocks with buildings that make a killin'," he raps on the truly disturbing "D'evils." But even there he sounds chillingly assured against DJ Premier's spooked Allen Toussaint sample.



    History recognizes Reasonable Doubt as evidence of Jay's genius, but it all could have ended up very differently. Reasonable Doubt arrived during a tumultuous turn in the history of hip-hop. Nas'disappointing It Was Written would come out a week later, and hip-hop's obsession with the Mafioso lifestyle would soon bloat to cartoonish extremes. The Wu-Tang Clan would spool out of control, and within the next year, Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. would ascend to martyrdom. Yet the culture's growth was still exceeding all expectations, and hip-hop would need new, larger, flashier heroes. And in Jay-Z, it found its pinnacle.

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  • Daily Operation album cover

    Daily Operation

    Gang Starr
    1992 | NOO TRYBE

    Straddling the very fissures where the old school gave way to the new, Gang Starr's 1992 masterpiece Step in the Arena was the sound that took rappers 15 years to perfect. In the few months that followed, New York would be scrambling to reinvent itself in the year Los Angeles broke, but Daily Operation was coolly classic-sounding; like Led Zep's Physical Graffiti, it's an unstoppable summary of everything that makes its genre... great — the most rollicking breaks, the silkiest rhyme patterns, the most nimble cutwork, the most head-knocking snares.

    For being the greatest MC/DJ duo in rap history, Gang Starr were never flashy, gaudy or showy. Guru and DJ Premier are jazz heads at heart, and they understand the idea of "being in the pocket" — note how Guru brags that his vocals "complement the slow phat groove" in "Stay Tuned." But don't mistake their smoothness for soft: The production (handled by the duo) cycles through some of the most harried samples around, always hiccupping with hums and tics and audience noise and hummingbird strings — peaking with a manic one-second loop of hard-funk footnote Sugar Billy Garner in "B.Y.S."

    The magic is in the details — how Premier gently stretches and bends KRS-One's voice in "Ex Girl to the Next Girl"; the way Guru can makes something as devilishly simple as "You see the mic in my hand? Now watch me wreck it now" seem like liquid perfection; how "Take It Personal" adds extra bass drums hits to the iconic "Skull Snap" break to make it even more skull-snappy. Daily Operation is an uncluttered masterpiece by a group with a catalog full of them.

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  • Life After Death album cover

    Life After Death

    The Notorious B.I.G.
    1997 | Bad Boy Records

    Released just 16 days after his March 9 death by drive-by shooting, there's an eerie prescience to the Notorious B.I.G.'s Life After Death. Several things — that title, the hearse-featuring album cover, the crushing closing track, "You're Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)" — gave Life After Death a bizarre resonance. But this is much more than paperwork from the morgue. In fact, rap stardom gave The Notorious B.I.G. a new lease; he... attacks with testosterone-filled glee. The album's title is about second chances at money, fame and sex after a tumultuous youth; a true second life. The result, worth every second of its expansive double-LP running time, is actually more about light and wealth than its predecessor, which was defined by a grim fatalism. The hits say as much. Consider that old speedboat-riding chestnut of hip-hop opulence, "Hypnotize" or the Diana Ross-lifting exuberance of "Mo Money Mo Problems." The giddy, quite funny "I Got A Story To Tell" finds Biggie creeping with the lady friend of a New York Knicks player and then retelling the tale to his boys, embellishing like a grandfather serenading some awestruck tots. Biggie's desire to croon — really, croon — crops up repeatedly here, as on the goofy extended "Playa Hater" or the thudding Miami bass of "Another." Even "Ten Crack Commandments," a steely DJ Premier production and drug-dealing manifesto has a delightful service-y quality — memorable and useful! So many of his lyrics became sampled and repeated hip-hop aphorisms — "If you don't know, now you know"; "It was all a dream..."; "Went from ashy to classy"; and so on. This is a crucial part of the Biggie mythology, the stickiness of his writing.

    After the success of Ready To Die Biggie used his follow-up to indulge his fantasies. Working mostly with Puff Daddy's in-house production crew, The Hitmen (Carlos "July Six" Broady, Nashiem Myrick, Deric "D-Dot" Angelettie, Stevie J, Ron "Amen-Ra" Lawrence), it's surprising how many of the songs here are about sexual conquest; at times you may yearn for his debut's brutality. But over time, Life After Death reveals itself as a sensual work — the lyrics to the R. Kelly-featuring "Fuck You Tonight" are specific, attentive, lascivious in ways that might make Luther Campbell blush. Biggie is less rapid-fire throughout, whether rapping or singing, letting that charismatic, jowly burr traipse into Isaac Hayes territory. His reach is longer, too, featuring paeans to his beloved '80s R&B, production from distinguished contemporaries like Mobb Deep's Havoc and Wu-Tang Clan's RZA, and guest shots from stars old (DMC, Too $hort) and new (onetime paramour and protégé Lil' Kim, a young friend named Jay-Z, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony).

    That collaboration with Bone Thugs, the whirring "Notorious Thugs," forced a flood light on rap's ever-expanding regional purview. Exposing — and paying homage by emulating their distinctive half-sung double-time flow — to Cleveland's own was just one more example of Biggie's almost perverse palm-reading — he simply knew where the genre needed to go. The song's reference to "So-called beef with you know who" anchors the album's more serious undertones. Biggie, of course, was feuding with ex-friend 2Pac for some time as he began recording the album. Pac was gunned down in Las Vegas six months before its release, but that didn't stop Big from including "Going Back To Cali," a perhaps too-braggadocious act of defiance in the service of an insatiable ego.

    The backend of the second disc is the most tremulous and grandiose. The underrated single "Sky's The Limit," a defiant turn on "My Downfall," and RZA's "Long Kiss Goodnight" are all mythmaking songs that ultimately sting in light of Big's fate. And the closing track, "You're Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You)," is the hazy epilogue to a cinematic reconfiguration. That it all doesn't end in death is its own sort of optimism, tragically inaccurate though it was.

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  • Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star album cover

    Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star

    Black Star
    2002 | Rawkus Entertainment

    While Puff Daddy and his followers continued to dictate the direction hip-hop would take into the millennium, Mos Def and Talib Kweli surfaced from the underground to pull the sounds in the opposite direction. Their 13 rhyme fests on this superior, self-titled debut as Black Star show that old-school rap still sounds surprisingly fresh in the sea of overblown vanity productions. There's no slack evident in the tight wordplays of Def and... Kweli as they twist and turn through sparse, jazz-rooted rhythms calling out for awareness and freedom of the mind. Their viewpoints stem directly from the teachings of Marcus Garvey, the legendary activist who fought for the rights of blacks all around the world in the first half of the 20th century. Def and Kweli's ideals are sure lofty; not only are they out to preach Garvey's words, but they also hope to purge rap music of its negativity and violence. For the most part, it works. Their wisdom-first philosophy hits hard when played off their lyrical intensity, a bass-first production, and stellar scratching. While these MCs don't have all of the vocal pizzazz of A Tribe Called Quest's Phife and Q-Tip at their best, flawless tracks like the cool bop of "K.O.S. (Determination)" and "Definition" hint that Black Star is only the first of many brilliantly executed positive statements for these two street poets.

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Queens

  • Paid In Full album cover

    Paid In Full

    Eric B. & Rakim
    2005 | ISLAND RECORDS

    One of the most influential rap albums of all time, Eric B. & Rakim's Paid in Full only continues to grow in stature as the record that ushered in hip-hop's modern era. The stripped-down production might seem a little bare to modern ears, but Rakim's technique on the mic still sounds utterly contemporary, even state-of-the-art -- and that from a record released in 1987, just one year after Run-D.M.C. hit the mainstream.... Rakim basically invents modern lyrical technique over the course of Paid in Full, with his complex internal rhymes, literate imagery, velvet-smooth flow, and unpredictable, off-the-beat rhythms. The key cuts here are some of the most legendary rap singles ever released, starting with the duo's debut sides, "Eric B. Is President" and "My Melody." "I Know You Got Soul" single-handedly kicked off hip-hop's infatuation with James Brown samples, and Eric B. & Rakim topped it with the similarly inclined "I Ain't No Joke," a stunning display of lyrical virtuosity. The title cut, meanwhile, planted the seeds of hip-hop's material obsessions over a monumental beat. There are also three DJ showcases for Eric B., who like Rakim was among the technical leaders in his field. If sampling is the sincerest form of admiration in hip-hop, Paid in Full is positively worshipped. Just to name a few: Rakim's tossed-off "pump up the volume," from "I Know You Got Soul," became the basis for M/A/R/R/S' groundbreaking dance track; Eminem, a devoted Rakim student, lifted lines from "As the Rhyme Goes On" for the chorus of his own "The Way I Am"; and the percussion track of "Paid in Full" has been sampled so many times it's almost impossible to believe it had a point of origin. Paid in Full is essential listening for anyone even remotely interested in the basic musical foundations of hip-hop -- this is the form in its purest essence.

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  • Raising Hell album cover

    Raising Hell

    Run DMC
    2005 | Arista

    There's no mistaking Run-DMC's loud-and-proud staccato flows for today's crop of mumbly-even-when-they-shout rappers; if one thing dates the trio's rhymes, it's that they sound like they're having fun lobbing lines back-and-forth, rather than monomaniacally droning through gangsta clichés. (Just listen to the way Run shouts "Ronald's!" to DMC's "Those burgers are..." set-up on the 27-second personal history lesson "Son of Byford.") It's no surprise why Raising Hell became one of the first... hip-hop albums to truly break through to Middle America after a few years of post-"Rapper's Delight" woodshedding for the genre: that sense of play between the two MC's is infectious. With one of the best opening four-song runs of any old-school hip-hop album, these Hollis boys may not have expected to change pop, but they sure knew how to put their best foot forward.



    That quartet is the core of Run-DMC's legacy: "Peter Piper" introduced many a non-New York resident to the sampled drum break, with its effervescent scratched-in segue from a terse, monochromatic drum machine beat to the funky, full-color bells of Bob James' "Take Me to the Mardi Gras." Future auctioneer-shaming fast-rappers may have made "It's Tricky" sound slow, but even if it's no longer the tongue-twister to beat, Russell Simmons' and Rick Rubin's cut-up of "My Sharona" makes it the funkiest, fuzziest rock-rap this side of Tone Loc's Delicious Vinyl classics. With some of Jam Master Jay's most vicious scratching and zilch in the way of ear-friendliness, "My Adidas" is one of the most counter-intuitive, and perversely catchy, examples of corporate name-dropping in rap history. And "Walk This Way," the culturally ingrained collab with a brink-of-extinction Aerosmith, is the model of raunchy, no-sell-out selling-out. Perhaps nothing, even near-numbing familiarity, can fully clean up Joe Perry's riff.



    But that's only four songs out of 12. The rest of Raising Hell may lack the first quarter's immediacy, but it's a reminder that, even as one of the groups that put hip-hop over the top from a pop standpoint, Run-DMC were first-and-foremost servicing a hardcore audience of rap fiends who'd stuck with the genre through its commercially lean years. "Is It Live" is as much a percussion workout as a flow showcase, the backing track little more than an agitated duet for drums and scratching. And "Hit It Run" subsists on just a steady thwacking rhythm, frenetic beat-boxing, and more amelodic turntable interjections. What sells the album's minimalist excursions into almost pure rhythm is that aforementioned vocal enthusiasm. Like those millions of fairweather pop fans tricked into picking up Raising Hell on the basis of its MTV-monopolizing hit, the rappers 'glee sells the album as "pop" even if it resembles the modern-day version even less than 1986's crop of Billboard hitmakers.

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  • Illmatic album cover

    Illmatic

    Nas
    Columbia

    The very first thing you hear on Illmatic is the lonely sound of a subway train rolling over the tracks and disappearing into the distance. It's followed by the faint sound of young Nasir Jones's very first on-record appearance, on Main Source's "Live at the Barbeque." The "Barbeque" verse made clear that this kid was A) excitable, and B) very eager to make an impression: before his 32 bars are over, he... has dubbed himself a "police murderer"; kidnapped the president's wife "without a plan,"; compared himself to the Ku Klux Klan; and confessed that he "went to hell for snuffing Jesus" (when he was twelve). As far as ear-grabbing first appearances go, it's pretty serious stuff, right up there with Busta Rhymes's jack-in-the-box verse on "Scenario."

    But here it's just background music, prelude. Only two years have passed since "Live At the Barbeque," but from the first moments Nas's voice enters on "The Genesis," it's clear that it might as well have been a thousand. "Niggas don't listen, man," he sighs wearily while his crowing buddies count cash behind him. At 23, he had already become the oldest soul in the room, and Illmatic is a document of every single thing that soul has seen. In one long, deep breath, Nas unfolds all of 1980s New York City — "The ghetto is like a maze, full of black rats, trapped" — with himself rattling around inside, neither the hero nor the anti-hero, just the observer. Illmatic is a life's work — a life — in eleven songs, and it's no wonder Nas will never top it. It can't be topped. He can title his late-period albums as many controversial things that he wants, but Illmatic will reverberate forever beyond him, for it is a reinvention of New York rap, an unimpeachable poetic document, a timeless bildungsroman, and a source of more ill rhymes than almost all other rap albums ever recorded combined. You may recoil at gangsta rap's nihilism, it's zero-sum view of life, it's anger and darkness, but if you have any desire to know anything about hip-hop, than you must own this.

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  • The Infamous album cover

    The Infamous

    Mobb Deep
    1995 | RCA Records Label

    An album featuring "Shook Ones Pt. II" repeated 16 times probably would have been enough to secure Mobb Deep's legend. Their signature song — one of the 1990s' signature songs — remains haunting both musically and lyrically, a collection of moments wherein the listener is awestruck by how Prodigy and Havoc wrote, arranged or said that.

    Luckily, The Infamous, the diminutive Queensbridge duo's 1995 follow-up to the patchy Juvenile Hell, is one of... the greatest albums ever made. It feels as desperate, claustrophobic and exhausting as Havoc and Prodigy's rhymes, from the somber "Survival of the Fittest" or the nightmarish "Trife Life" to the depressingly upbeat "Drink Away the Pain" and the Queens anthem "Give Up the Goods." Even the carefree Crystal Johnson hook of "Temperature's Rising," their radio lunge, is neutralized by their weed-pushing lyrics and a bed of face-smack drums. It's a punishing, relentless hour of music — the sound of two kids who've grown up too fast, not wanting to forget a second of it. A personal favorite is "Right Back At You," a funeral march of a posse cut that features plucky Mobb disciple Big Noyd, Raekwon and Ghostface, back when they together ruled the food chain and took no orders, every stereo "bangin' Nas, Mobb Deep and Wu."

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Manhattan

  • Licensed To Ill album cover

    Licensed To Ill

    Beastie Boys
    1995 | Def Jam/RAL

    Wherein being a dickhead is an asset. Adam Horowitz, Mike Diamond, and Adam Yauch — three punk-y, pissant Jewish kids from New York's Lower East Side — took rap in its nascent years and predicted the future: lying. Or, at least, kidding. Before the Beasties came along rap had certainly been fun, and clever, too, but rarely this funny. And their debut, a colossal success that eventually sold 9 million copies, bridged... a social gap with producer Rick Rubin's chest-caving classic-rock refixes that nicked Sabbath and Zeppelin and Steve Miller. Rubin's perfunctory drum programming and keen ear for mega-riffs makes these songs as pumped as ever. But it's the kids who kicked it.

    What has traveled through the cycle of examination in the 20-plus years since its release, are the relative merits of cultural appropriation. When Licensed was released, many rap allegiants rejected the caustic and puerile punchlines of these three white boys. It's not hard to see why — rhyming about robbing, drinking, drugging, and girls. And the hits — particularly "Fight For Your Right" and "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" — have developed a kind of mustiness, used in one too many movies, championed by too many dunderheads. What early critics missed was the skill the Beasties brought with them. On songs like "The New Style" and fan favorite "Paul Revere," we hear three hip-hop loyalists doing their best Run DMC impression, rapping furiously, dropping their shrill voices hard on the one, and doing the mic-sharing routine as well as any of their contemporaries. That sort of lyric-writing, from line-to-line, rather than verse-to-verse is a complex process, but it sounds seamless here. And when it really sings, as on the booze-binge ode, "Brass Monkey," you can hear these nice boys completely redefining party music.

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  • Straight Out the Jungle album cover

    Straight Out the Jungle

    Jungle Brothers
    1989 | Warlock Records

    If you heard DJ Red Alert's Hot 97 radio show in the late '80s, the Jungle Brothers — MCs Afrika Baby Bam and Mike G, with DJ Sammy B — were familiar fixtures, and this record is a beautiful throwback to the so-called Golden Age.



    The production on their debut, by the group, with some seasoning from Red Alert (who is, in fact, Mike G's uncle), is far from polished. And that's part... of its allure. One listen to "Braggin'and Boastin'" and it's clear that Sammy B was cutting live as Mike and Bam threw loose rhymes back and forth.



    "Jimbrowski" is equally sloppy, with a Funkadelic drum sample so amplified it almost feeds back. And the mock-tender "I'm Gonna Do You" let's you know that these guys love booty, but aren't going the LL "I Need Love" route to get it. And just when you think that all the JBs are about is goofin', they hit you with one of the more important "conscious" (before the word was ever bandied about) cuts of the decade, "Black Is Black."

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  • No Way Out album cover

    No Way Out

    Puff Daddy & The Family
    2005 | Bad Boy Records

    Before releasing his first solo album, Puff Daddy (aka Sean "Puffy" Combs) was famous as the producer of the Notorious B.I.G., Junior Mafia, Craig Mack, Lil' Kim, and many other rappers. As he was making his solo debut, the Notorious B.I.G. was murdered, and that loss weighs heavily on Puff's mind throughout No Way Out. Even though the album has some funky party jams scattered throughout, the bulk of the album is... filled with fear, sorrow, and anger, and it's not only evident on the tribute "I'll Be Missing You" (a duet with Faith Evans and 112 that is based on the Police's "Every Breath You Take") but also on gangsta anthems like "It's All About the Benjamins." That sense of loss makes No Way Out a more substantial album than most mid-'90s hip-hop releases, and even if it has flaws -- there's a bit too much filler and it runs a little long -- it is nevertheless a compelling, harrowing album that establishes Puff Daddy as a vital rapper in his own right.

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The Bronx

  • By All Means Necessary album cover

    By All Means Necessary

    Boogie Down Productions
    1988 | Jive

    The murder of DJ Scott La Rock had a profound effect on KRS-One, resulting in a drastic rethinking of his on-record persona. He re-emerged the following year with By All Means Necessary, calling himself the Teacher and rapping mostly about issues facing the black community. His reality rhymes were no longer morally ambiguous, and this time when he posed on the cover with a gun, he was mimicking a photo of Malcolm... X. As a social commentator, this is arguably KRS-One's finest moment. His observations are sharp, lucid, and confident, yet he doesn't fall prey to the preachiness that would mar some of his later work, and he isn't afraid to be playful or personal. The latter is especially true on the subject of La Rock, whose memory hangs over By All Means Necessary -- not just in the frequent name-checks, but in the minimalist production and hard-hitting 808 drum beats that were his stock-in-trade on Criminal Minded. La Rock figures heavily in the album opener, "My Philosophy," which explains BDP's transition and serves as a manifesto for socially conscious hip-hop. The high point is the impassioned "Stop the Violence," a plea for peace on the hip-hop scene that still hasn't been heeded. Even as KRS-One denounces black-on-black crime, he refuses to allow the community to be stereotyped, criticizing the system that scoffs at that violence on the spoken recitation "Necessary." "Illegal Business" is a startlingly perceptive look at how the drug trade corrupts the police and government, appearing not long before the CIA's drug-running activities in the Iran-Contra Affair came to light. There are also some lighter moments in the battle-rhyme tracks, and a witty safe-sex rap in "Jimmy," a close cousin to the Jungle Brothers' "Jimbrowski." Lyrics from this album have been sampled by everyone from Prince Paul to N.W.A, and it ranks not only as KRS-One's most cohesive, fully realized statement, but a landmark of political rap that's unfairly lost in the shadow of Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions.

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  • Return Of The Boom Bap album cover

    Return Of The Boom Bap

    KRS-One
    2007 | Jive

    Released in 1993, KRS-One's first official solo album opens with "KRS-One Attacks," a DJ Premier-hatched collage of the legendary rapper's most famous moments with his previous group, Boogie Down Productions. It was a bold gesture, especially for someone who had spent the previous seven years redefining the sound of hip-hop — but by the end of Return of the Boom Bap, KRS-One's old credentials no longer mattered. This was a fantastic, hard-hitting... record, its creator's preexisting legacy notwithstanding.

    It was important that KRS' solo debut didn't merely feel like another B.D.P. record, and his collaboration with producers like DJ Premier, Showbiz and Kid Capri helped move him toward a new, more stripped-down style. "Outta Here" is hip-hop history in less than five minutes, as KRS runs down his autobiography over a hammering Premier beat. The blunted escapades of "I Can't Wake Up" is a rare moment of levity, while the title track is exactly what you imagine "boom bap" should sound like. The most memorable moments are shout-outs to law enforcement: the furious "Black Cop" and the still-thrilling "Sound of Da Police." Return of the Boom Bap is a milestone in two regards: while it's a bracing update of the B.D.P. sound, it's also the beginning of a wholly new legend.

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Those Other Two Islands

  • It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back album cover

    It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back

    Public Enemy
    1995 | Def Jam/RAL

    There are no words too hyperbolic, no expressions too excited to describe the tectonic impact Public Enemy's second album had on the world. It is that vital and that infecting. Nominally a rap album, It Takes A Nation... is more like a sound grenade, thanks to the Bomb Squad's quadruple-stacked sampling, hypeman par excellence Flavor Flav's sonorous squeal, and leader Chuck D's stentorian flow — dependent not so much on meter, like... most rappers, but instead a kind of confident, formless roar.

    "Chuck's a powerful rapper. We wanted to make something that could sonically stand up to him," The Bomb Squad's Hank Shocklee told the Daily News when the album was released. So drum maniacs Hank and his brother, Keith, along with the musical heart of P.E., Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, seized the challenge, creating songs, if you can call them that, that whinny and snarl and ping and clash, incorporating screeching saxophones, cross-cutting vocal samples, hissing teapots, hard-nosed breakbeats, and empty hallway pianos lines. It's a fast and new kind of electric blues — or, in places, a broken, discordant jazz — they stumbled upon. Chuck takes the music and uses its harshness to deliver unrepentant political jeremiads. "The follower of Farrakhan/ Don't tell me that you understand/ Until you hear the man/ The book of the new school rap game," he raps on "Don't Believe The Hype," the totemic single. Chuck's politics are confusing beyond calls for righteous Black Panther and Nation of Islam-inspired unity. But as The New York Times' Jon Pareles wrote at the time of the album's release, P.E. refracted the notion of "individualism" in rap, demanding a new "community," encouraging activism and cynicism in equal measure. Whether denouncing a rotting, rotten prison system and governmental authority on "Black Steel In The Hour of Chaos," or the locally debilitating crack epidemic on "Night Of the Living Baseheads," Chuck's fury is so persuasive, you may find yourself punching the sky during these songs without regret. It Takes A Nation... has aged remarkably well, as sonically arresting, and socially unforgiving as any album you're likely to hear. No one made being uncompromising so inspiring.

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  • Enter The Wu-Tang album cover

    Enter The Wu-Tang

    Wu Tang Clan
    1993 | RCA Records Label

    Along with Dr. Dre's The Chronic, the Wu-Tang Clan's debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), was one of the most influential rap albums of the '90s. Its spare yet atmospheric production -- courtesy of RZA -- mapped out the sonic blueprint that countless other hardcore rappers would follow for years to come. It laid the groundwork for the rebirth of New York hip-hop in the hardcore age, paving the way for everybody... from Biggie and Jay-Z to Nas and Mobb Deep. Moreover, it introduced a colorful cast of hugely talented MCs, some of whom ranked among the best and most unique individual rappers of the decade. Some were outsized, theatrical personalities, others were cerebral storytellers and lyrical technicians, but each had his own distinctive style, which made for an album of tremendous variety and consistency. Every track on Enter the Wu-Tang is packed with fresh, inventive rhymes, which are filled with martial arts metaphors, pop culture references (everything from Voltron to Lucky Charms cereal commercials to Barbra Streisand's "The Way We Were"), bizarre threats of violence, and a truly twisted sense of humor. Their off-kilter menace is really brought to life, however, by the eerie, lo-fi production, which helped bring the raw sound of the underground into mainstream hip-hop. Starting with a foundation of hard, gritty beats and dialogue samples from kung fu movies, RZA kept things minimalistic, but added just enough minor-key piano, strings, or muted horns to create a background ambience that works like the soundtrack to a surreal nightmare. There was nothing like it in the hip-hop world at the time, and even after years of imitation, Enter the Wu-Tang still sounds fresh and original. Subsequent group and solo projects would refine and deepen this template, but collectively, the Wu have never been quite this tight again.

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]]> http://www.emusic.com/music-news/music-collection/beats-rhymes-from-all-five-boroughs/feed/ 0 eMusic’s Best Audiobooks of 2012 http://www.emusic.com/book-news/book-collection/emusics-best-audiobooks-of-2012/ http://www.emusic.com/book-news/book-collection/emusics-best-audiobooks-of-2012/#comments Thu, 03 Jan 2013 21:05:37 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=book_hub&p=3049594 A good book is a funny thing. Sometimes we know from page 1 that a book is going to be a classic, while others are a slow burn, and we’ve made it through to the end – perhaps a few times – before we realize we just can’t stop reliving that one climactic scene or fixating on a turn of phrase.

Over the course of 2012, this happened to us a lot. Most of our favorite books were slow-burn stunners, ones that woke us up in the middle of the night weeks later. There were a few showpieces and, for once, a few books that deserved every second of the publicity they received. By December we were walking around brimming with all of the fantastic books we’ve read – like burning sage, this list is a cleansing opportunity to let them all go and get ready for next year.

With only 40 slots to fill, it was inevitable that some great books got left off, and we hope you’ll fill in the gaps with your favorites in the comments. Here are our best books of 2012.

40. David Levithan, Every Day

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    Every Day

    David Levithan
    2012 | Unabridged

    David Levithan has spent the last 10 years writing about teenagers in love in many different forms — from the whirlwind angst of Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist to the sensitive happy-go-lucky treatment of gay teen life in Boy Meets Boy. His most recent novel complicates the theme, following A, a character who wakes up inside a different person's body every morning and must learn to live their life... without disruption before starting over again the next day. Falling in love with Rhiannon upends all of A's coping mechanisms, as he foregoes normalcy to be with her every day. Meanwhile, her reciprocation questions both the characters' and our deep-seated beliefs about attraction, sexuality. The result is a beautifully crafted allegory for the confused, all-consuming, thrilling, baffling nature of first love.

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39. Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue

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    Telegraph Avenue

    Michael Chabon
    2012 | Unabridged

    After five long years, Michael Chabon came back with this sweeping novel of the collision between nostalgia and progress in the borderlands between historically black Oakland and hippie-white Berkeley. With a jazz-funk soundtrack, a cameo appearance from soon-to-be President Obama, and the creation of the greatest black action hero since Shaft, no novel has had such a deep respect for the way pop culture shapes our identities since High Fidelity.

38. Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

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    The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

    Mark Leyner
    2012 | Unabridged

    It was the mid-’90s when cult classicist Mark Leyner released his last novel. Known for his antic prose, free-associative humor and postmodern mind games, Leyner now appears, in retrospect, to have been eerily prescient, his early work like drafts of the sort of Internet culture we’re all now accustomed to.
    In The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, we get multiple and recursive narratives: not only the biography of Ike Karton, an unemployed New Jersey butcher,... but also the story of the universe’s very origin, as well as its eternal pantheon of gods, who no longer get along and spend all their time in Dubai, squabbling on the top floor of a skyscraper and obsessing over Ike’s fate.
    The book is an epic, a supernatural oral tradition infinitely revised. Its every aside and mistake is part and parcel of what the gods, who are in fact recanting it in real time, intended. Even your reaction to the story — your enthusiasm, your boredom, your break for a snack — has been predetermined.
    In the Internet Age, we take infinite scrolling, constant distraction, and the existence of a never-ending collective story as matter of course. In that light, the strangest thing about The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is how un-strange it seems.

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37. Keigo Higashino, Salvation of a Saint

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    Salvation of a Saint

    Keigo Higashino
    2012 | Unabridged

    It seems as if Japanese detective novels as a whole are more finely crafted than their American counterparts, with a flair for bone-dry absurdity and psychological twists that would seem forced in less skilled hands. Case in point: Keigo Higashino's Salvation of a Saint, the latest installment in the adventures of Detective Galileo, an erstwhile physics professor who made his first appearance in The Devotion of Suspect X. Galileo's calculations point... the police in ever-more-preposterous directions as they try to unravel the murder of a philandering CEO. The minutiae of modern Japanese urban life coupled with astonishing flights of logical speculation combine to make a truly gripping, original thriller.

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36. Maria Semple, Where’d You Go, Bernadette

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    Where'd You Go, Bernadette

    Maria Semple
    2012 | Unabridged

    The story of a family of flawed geniuses, written as a semi-epistolary novel in diary entries, letters, fragments of conversations, and government reports, Where'd You Go, Bernadette could easily veer into uber-twee Wes Anderson territory; instead, it's a sharp, hilarious delight made even better by one of the best adult-playing-teenager narrations we've ever heard. It helps that author Maria Semple is a longtime comedy writer — most recently for the beloved Arrested... Development —and that the story is a searing satire of life in Seattle.

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35. Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy

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    Hope: A Tragedy

    Shalom Auslander
    2012 | Unabridged

    The title of Shalom Auslander’s debut novel is as tersely comic as the prose it contains. If a previous book of short stories (Beware of God) suggested that the author might deserve a place within the hallowed tradition of literary Jewish pessimists, his newest effort confirms it. Hope, a gutsy book with a gutsy premise – begins when a man named Solomon Kugel hears tapping noises coming from his attic. Kugel follows... the sounds and discovers a living, elderly Anne Frank residing in the uppermost reaches of his farmhouse in upstate New York. She’s working on a novel; what Kugel heard was the typewriter.
    To this living arrangement, add one tyrannical hypochondriac of a mother, one semi-sympathetic wife and one toddler. Then stir. The result is a satire that transcends its clever conceit thanks to Auslander’s unmistakable voice. That voice, incidentally, is one that some listeners will recognize from This American Life, where the writer often pops up with stories that bridge the territory between soul-crumpling and hilarious. What make for a brilliant radio piece, it turns out – economy, rhythm, stylishness without frippery – make for an equally beguiling novel.

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34. Richard Zacks, Island of Vice

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    Island of Vice

    Richard Zacks
    2012 | Unabridged

    Island of Vice is like a greatest hits of the tropes of historical nonfiction; you've got a skeptical look at Victorian mores, an investigation of the seamy underbelly of a city, an age-old struggle that still echoes today, and a beloved historical figure playing an unexpected role. Like Rudy Giuliani a century later, it turns out that Teddy Roosevelt spent years attempting to clean up New York, which was apparently nothing but... brothels and opium dens in the 1890s. Roosevelt was New York police commissioner at the time, and his attempts were mostly thwarted by Byzantine regulations and double standards. A compelling portrait of a town at a turning point, the book moves quickly along, buoyed by anecdotes and letter excerpts that add levity and character to the essential plot.

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33. James M. Cain, The Cocktail Waitress

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    The Cocktail Waitress

    James Cain
    2012 | Unabridged

    OK, so this one's kind of a cheat. James M. Cain, the classic noir author, wrote The Cocktail Waitress in the 1970s, right before his death. But the novel languished in fragments for 30-plus years, and was only just assembled and published this year by intrepid editors, so we get to count it as one of the best books of 2012. While it's not Cain's best (with Mildred Pierce and ... href="http://www.emusic.com/book/james-m-cain/the-postman-always-rings-twice/10026306/">The Postman Always Rings Twice just a few of his many, it's a tough crowd to compete in), the master of dark, moody suspense still looms large over contemporary mystery authors.

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32. China Mieville, Railsea

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    Railsea

    China Mieville
    2012 | Unabridged

    Moby Dick has retained a particular hold on the global literary imagination in the century-and-a-half since its publishing. Some writers have been seized enough by Melville’s epic to spin off new stories based on its characters, while others have taken on the theme of Ahab’s suicidal single-mindedness to frame new tales of obsession. China Mieville’s Railsea is a new literary heir on the scene: fantastical, post-apocalyptic and, like its predecessor, packed with... equal parts exhilarating chase and incisive reflection on the nature of the chase itself. In this case, the one doing the reflecting is Sham ap Soorap, a bumbling young introvert who finds himself taken on as a doctor’s assistant aboard the Medes, a mole-hunting train on the railsea. In this never-stated, probably-future time, the earth (if it is the earth) is covered with mile after mile of snared and tangled rails, and, like the seamen of yore, those who ride the rails form a culture unto themselves. And, oh yes, I said “mole-hunting” – out of the ground on which rails are laid come all manner of vicious, burrowing creatures, from pesky carnivorous rabbits to vicious ferrets to the bounty of the Medes: the moldywarpe, a bad-tempered giant mole. One particular moldywarpe, an ivory-colored one, no less, has taken the arm of the Medes captain, and it has become the life’s aim – the “philosophy,” as Mieville puts it – of Captain Naphi to track down said moldywarpe and harpoon it to kingdom come. At heart not a hunter but a dreamer, a would-be salvor (salvager of ancient junk), Sham gains a quest of his own when he learns of a place that’s unsullied by the endless snarl and clatter of the rails. Railsea enchants by its language alone, and reader Jonathan Cowley proves expert with Mieville’s invented vocabulary and his rollicking, alliterative sentences. Intended for readers of all ages, Railsea will enchant any reader who understands what it’s like to want something and to burn with the dream to discover it.

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31. J.R. Moehringer, Sutton

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    Sutton

    J.R. Moehringer
    2012 | Unabridged

    Wake up in Attica, go to bed at the Plaza. Fuckin’ America. Such was the life of bank robber Willie “The Actor” Sutton, an Irish kid from Brooklyn who came up during Prohibition and stole an estimated $2 million during his career. The con was released from Attica Correctional Facility on Christmas Eve 1969 to the acclaim and notoriety that a nickname like “The Actor” might have earned earned him – or... so Moehringer would have us believe. Sutton (who died in 1980) granted a single post-prison interview, though the resulting article, Moehringer writes, contained several errors and “few real revelations.” To, in effect, give a fascinating subject the profile he deserves, the Pulitzer-winning journalist and memoirist (The Tender Bar) has imagined Sutton’s first day of freedom, being followed around New York City by an unnamed reporter and photographer.
    Flashing between Sutton’s Christmas ’69 and his Prohibition-era bank schemes, Sutton is a witty, whiskey-soaked romp through a Gotham populated by Chesterfield-smoking hustlers and surly newsmen. Sutton is undeniably the story’s moral center, less a thuggish Dillinger clone than a romantic and intellectual who reads Cicero behind bars. Leading a tour from the Brooklyn waterfront to Times Square, Sutton is struck by the vanished landmarks of his criminal career and haunted by memories of his former love, Bess Endner. The wealthy daughter of a shipping magnate and the poor Irish son meet as kids at Coney Island, but her family disapproved and Bess disappeared around the time Willie entered the racket. He muses: “Money. Love. There’s not a problem that isn’t caused by one or the other. And there’s not a problem that can’t be solved by one or the other.”
    Narrated by actor Dylan Baker, Sutton shines a light on the class divide while affectionately adding to the legacy of a famous antihero.

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30. Alice Munro, Dear Life

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    Dear Life

    Alice Munro
    2012 | Unabridged

    Alice Munro has been quietly, guilelessly dominating the field of the short story for nearly 50 years and shows no sign of slowing. Maybe it's her Canadian-ness that keeps her flying below the radar, even after having won PEN, O. Henry, National Book Critics Circle and Man Booker awards. Or maybe it's the finely drawn, intimate quality of her work – no showy flights of language, no mystical beings or tricksy maybe-real-maybe-imagined... characters, just people writ small living lives that are at once infinitely relatable and emotionally universal. This collection is no exception, which is to say that it is essential reading.

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29. Etgar Keret, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door

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    Suddenly, a Knock on the Door

    Etgar Keret
    2012 | Unabridged

    It might seem a bit odd to call Etgar Keret’s collection a delight; it’s 35 stories about loneliness, alienation, depression and death that shoot out at a blistering pace. But there’s a disorienting hopefulness to many of them. Narrated by a who’s who of literati, artists and actors, including Dave Eggers, Miranda July, Stanley Tucci and Neal Stephenson, Keret’s stories exist in worlds of magical realism. Bodies literally unzip to reveal entirely... different people underneath the skin and dreams become portals to new, entirely real dimensions — where life is still unpleasantly banal. These are places in which everything is ordinary and nothing quite makes sense.
    Keret is Israeli, and much of Suddenly is an examination of that nation’s psyche, battered as it is by suicide bombings, isolation, and ideological division. In “Healthy Start,” one of the standouts in this strong collection, the actor Ben Foster narrates the story of Avichai, a man who, after being left by his partner, finds that no one quite seems to know who he is. Mistaken for several other men, he decides to abandon his own identity as easily as others have abandoned him.
    For these characters, the more unpleasant parts of life are made simultaneously more and less ordinary compared to the stranger events that befall them. Death is still something terrifying, incomprehensible, and sad, but is it any more so than finding an unpleasant German man inside one’s lover? Keret’s stories, in all of their sweet distress, say no.

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28. Baratunde Thurston, How to Be Black

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    How to Be Black

    Baratunde Thurston
    2012 | Unabridged

    Attention, black people. Listen up, white people. Hey, everybody. Baratunde Thurston — author, political blogger, cable-news talking head, comedian, tech nerd and the digital director of The Onion knows what you know and what you think you know about black people in America. He’s got 30-plus years experience as an African American. He’s heard the same things you have, from the stereotypes and the sad-but-trues to the diluted history lessons and popularly... accepted narratives. And he’s not buying them.
    “In the age of President Barack Obama, all of them are limiting and simply inadequate to the task of capturing the reality of blackness,” he writes in the introduction to this funny, poignant, biting (and a little bit baiting) memoir/satire. “In this book, I will attempt to re-complicate blackness.”
    From there he intertwines his personal journey (raised by his mom, simultaneously enrolled in a mostly white prep school and a “black power boot camp,” cleaned toilets/took classes at Harvard) with sometimes silly, but more often straight-faced and subtly scathing, chapters like “How to Be the Black Friend,” “How to Be the Black Employee,” and “How to Speak for All Black People.” Along the way he solicits input from a “Black Panel” of experts, mostly fellow writers and comedians (and all black except for that dude who wrote Stuff White People Like). There are plenty of tiny heartbreaking and hackle-raising moments in How To Be Black — race is serious business in America, after all — but the book is also funny as hell.

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27. Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers

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    Behind the Beautiful Forevers

    Katherine Boo
    2012 | Unabridged

    Katherine Boo's National Book Award-winning work could be described as Slumdog Millionaire without the Bollywood flash, but that would be missing the point. Yes, it's an unblinking look at life in the Mumbai slums, but it's at once much bigger and much smaller than that. It's a piece of journalism that shows how the unfathomable economic disparity of modern India is complicated by a new myth of upward mobility, drawing into relief... the concept of the American Dream and its own devastating effects. It's also a personal story of a handful of people; some happy, some not, living mundane lives and affected by grand tragedy. Not just pawns in a reporter's chess game, they are allowed to exist on the page in all of their complicated, human nature — a rare feat, indeed.

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26. John Hodgman, That Is All

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    That Is All

    John Hodgman
    2012 | Unabridged

    John Hodgman, Daily Show Resident Expert and celebrity glasses-wearer, completes his trilogy of Complete World Knowledge with this compendium of fake facts about wine and sports, tips on being a deranged millionaire and how the world will end. More comedy album than straightforward audiobook, That Is All features celebrity cameos from Paul Rudd, Patton Oswalt, Rachel Maddow and more, skits and original music. Fans of Hodgman’s highly formatted, stylized print books may... hesitate about listening to what is essentially a book of lists and trivia, but wonder no more — by the time you get to the audio wine tasting, you’ll be hooked.

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25. Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles

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    The Age of Miracles

    Karen Thompson Walker
    2012 | Unabridged

    What if you woke up one morning to discover that the earth’s rotation had begun mysteriously slowing overnight? And what if you were also a sixth grader, unable to do anything but watch while your world changed around you? This is the premise of Karen Thompson Walker’s compelling debut novel, in which 12-year-old Julia tries to navigate the difficulties of middle school in a world where tides, fault lines and magnetic fields... have all gone awry; days stretch into weeks; and animals and plants are dying en masse.
    If The Age of Miracles were a standard-issue sci-fi yarn, the story would center on the race against time to save Earth from certain doom. Instead, Julia is stuck in her California suburb, the lengthening days and nights merely one more uncontrollable thing. So what if the slowing forewarns the end of all human existence? It’s exactly as incomprehensible and inevitable as adolescence itself. The earth is slowing down, and Julia’s best friend will barely speak to her anymore; the birds are falling dead from the skies and her parents’ marriage is falling apart; people are crazy and people are crazy.
    The story is narrated not by adolescent Julia, but rather by a 20-something Julia, recalling the events of that pivotal summer. “I remember,” she says, often, and, “That was the last time.” She is prone to pensive, melancholic metaphor: After the slowing, she says, “We all had a little more time to decide what not to do. And who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret?” Hers is that wistful nostalgia earned only by time, one in which the meaning of small things is acquired in hindsight. Would you watch more closely the last bird you ever saw in flight? Would you say goodbye to the people you love?
    Despite its dystopian urgencies, the book moves quietly, softly, driven by characters rather than plot: a state of affairs both odd and fascinating for a book whose central premise conflates adolescence and apocalypse. But then, how does adolescence end? There is no satisfying denouement. There is only the gradual slide of one self into another, and the matching realization that one’s world will never again be quite the same.

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24. Timothy Egan, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

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    Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

    Timothy Egan
    2012 | Unabridged

    In the hierarchy of historical eras, turn-of-the-century America is about as low as it gets; it's all dusty frontiersmen and hoop skirts, long stretches of open country and stilted Victorian talk from politicians with ludicrous facial hair. Not so for Timothy Egan, the gutsiest, most balls-to-the-wall chronicler of the American experience writing today. Winner of the National Book Award for The Worst Hard Time, Egan has a knack for... cutting through the flowered speech and dirt to craft page-turners from decades of bureaucratic red tape. Short Nights is a biography of a little-known photographer who set out to, grandiosely, document every Native American nation on the continent. Surprise, he failed, and his failures both professional and personal make for a compelling narrative of a country in flux.

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23. Lydia Netzer, Shine Shine Shine

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    Shine Shine Shine

    Lydia Netzer
    2012 | Unabridged

    Lydia Netzer creates a sci-fi folk tale with her debut novel, weaving together an epic love story that transcends (literal) space and time, vibrant characters, and, naturally, robots.
    In Shine Shine Shine, Sunny, a congenitally bald little girl and Maxon, an autistic boy, fall in love and eventually get married. Flash-forward to the future, when Maxon becomes an astronaut on a risky, high-profile mission to the moon while Sunny remains at home, raising... their lovably robotic son, Bubber, gestating their second child, worrying about her dying mother and relinquishing her reliance on wigs as she struggles to maintain a normal life at home. Except that “normal” in this story is so not normal. There’s a recurring theme of learning how to be human and learning how to read emotions that applies sweetly to both the robots and the humans in the book.

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22. Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

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    The Dog Stars

    Peter Heller
    2012 | Unabridged

    We thought we were done with apocalypse novels too, really. But then along came Peter Heller's The Dog Stars, which somehow manages to be full of hope and beauty in the midst of the hideous struggle for survival. After an epidemic wipes out most of humanity and leaves the survivors infected with a deadly virus, our hero Hig spends as much time remembering the good from his former life and admiring the... natural beauty that remains (and in fact flourishes) in civilization's absence as he does fighting off marauders and searching in vain for friends in a savage wasteland. It's a potent reminder to stop and smell the roses — even if you're not being chased.

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21. David Foster Wallace, Both Flesh and Not

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    Both Flesh and Not

    David Foster Wallace
    2012 | Unabridged

    This posthumous collection of David Foster Wallace’s essays as published in various outlets over almost 20 years of his prolific career has its faults, as so many posthumous publications do. But while some of the 15 essays included have not aged well, when it works, it’s a reminder of the startling joy that truly great nonfiction The book draws its title from Wallace’s gorgeous essay on tennis phenomenon Roger Federer, which... opens the collection and which showcases his most dexterous moves as a writer — the breathtaking descriptive prose, the philosophically rigorous language interrupted by funny, humane, and surprising colloquialisms. It’s a rigorous and pleasing read, one that offers satisfactions and challenges both (as the title implies) material and abstract.

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20. Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth

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    Sweet Tooth

    Ian McEwan
    2012 | Unabridged

    We’ll go on record as never having been particular Ian McEwan fans, especially when he writes female characters. Maybe that’s why Sweet Tooth’s Serena Frome is such a delight – her simultaneous arrogance and palpable need for guidance post-Cambridge will ring painfully true for anyone who was once a know-it-all college graduate. Tied up in her personal development is a labyrinth of a story about the crumbling British espionage system in the... 1970s, at the end of the empire, as the old boys’ methods lost favor and they scrambled to stay current. While the gimmick of the final chapter’s reveal is bold choice that, understandably, lost this book a lot of fans, it’s a charming twist that belies the book’s real strength: as a fairy tale of a young woman’s self-discovery.

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19. Zadie Smith, NW

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    NW

    Zadie Smith
    2012 | Unabridged

    The title of Zadie Smith’s fourth novel refers to the neighborhood of North West London, where, for Smith’s characters, the main currency is voice. NW is structured around three voices in particular: Leah Hanwell, her best friend Natalie (nee Keisha) Blake and Felix, a young man whose brief section forms the pivot point around which the two women’s stories circle and collide. The daughters of Irish and Jamaican immigrants, respectively, Leah and... Natalie leave the neighborhood for college and brief plunges into the world beyond. Leah returns as a social worker and Natalie as an upwardly mobile lawyer, allowing Smith to chronicle a brilliant and nuanced range of spoken language. This also makes listening to the audiobook a particular pleasure, as the readers skillfully voice the dialogue-driven text. As Natalie reflects, listening to her mother gossip ruthlessly, “People were not people, but merely the effect of language. You could conjure them and kill them in a sentence.”
    NW‘s central contradictions rest in this succinct proposal, referring not only to the novelists task but to Leah and Natalie themselves, who face their own conjuring acts of self-reinvention and parenthood. Using fragmented chapters and a looping chronology to dilate what might have been a fleeting, faceless headline of neighborhood violence, Smith makes it clear that what’s at stake is the capacity for empathy – her characters’ and our own.

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18. Paul French, Midnight in Peking

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    Midnight in Peking

    Paul French
    2012 | Unabridged

    It’s very easy to write a decent true crime story, and very difficult to write a great one. Paul French’s Midnight in Peking should be required reading for all who plan on attempting the genre at some point; it’s a remarkably drawn tale of the end of the era of white decadence in the “exotic Orient” circling around the sensational murder of a young British woman in Peking (aka Beijing) in the... 1930s. Government officials from both sides confounded the investigation, which French details for the first time in 80 years. Overwrought and not entirely academic in places, the story is so gripping and evocative that factual vagaries go by unminded.

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17. Caitlin Moran, How to Be a Woman

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    How to Be a Woman

    Caitlin Moran
    2012 | Unabridged

    Since the end of the Riot Grrrl glory days of the early ‘90s, the word “feminist” has somehow made its way back onto the list of slurs thrown like a hot potato at women who talk about gender equity, make uncommon personal grooming decisions or simply speak seriously about anything unpopular. Caitlin Moran, the British essayist who has been writing hilariously opinionated, outspoken, confessional criticism since the age of 16, takes this... regression to task, weaving an appeal for more strident feminists around her formative lessons on femininity. Moran describes it as “an update of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch written from a bar stool” — while it is exactly as boozy and profane as that sounds, it’s also more touching, more hilarious and, ultimately, more convincing. Moran may singlehandedly haul feminism off of the scrapheap and back into the public discussion, where it belongs.

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16. Patrick Somerville, This Bright River

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    This Bright River

    Patrick Somerville
    2012 | Unabridged

    Patrick Somerville’s fourth book is one of those novels that’s both epic and intimate. Written from multiple first-person perspectives – all of them dead-on, authentic and hilarious – the novel tracks mysterious pasts, families in distress, substance abuse, and a favorite topic (rightfully so) of any novelist: social awkwardness. The story is mainly told by Ben, a brilliant, recovering drug addict, and Lauren, a doctor escaping a tragic marriage, who are former... high school classmates now returned to their hometown of St. Helens, Wisconsin. Somerville (The Cradle, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature) has a blessed gift for sharp, witty dialogue, and the plot zooms, which makes This Bright River an ideal audiobook experience.

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15. Charles Yu, Sorry Please Thank You

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    Sorry Please Thank You

    Charles Yu
    2012 | Unabridged

    Charles Yu is very smart. Some might argue too smart for his own good, but hiding under the formalist gymnastics and technical jargon in the stories in Sorry Please Thank You is a deep well of empathy and tenderness. Toying with sci-fi tropes, Yu turns the genre on its head with a deadpan stare into the heart of modern alienation as he effortlessly describes impossibilities like a machine designed to fulfill one's... greatest desires, a corporation that outsources the experience of pain, and the day-to-day realities of living inside a video game. Full of bleak humor and conceptual absurdities, Sorry Please Thank You is a delight that will surprise you with its ability to inspire some serious soul-searching.

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14. Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

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    Narcopolis

    Jeet Thayil
    2012 | Unabridged

    If you aren't already convinced that Indian literature is more than tales of colonial bad behavior, languid tropical scenery and upward-striving urchins, stand back and let Jeet Thayil drive the final nail in that coffin. Narcopolis is about Mumbai, yes, but more importantly it's a narrative of addiction, masterfully told from a multitude of perspectives in a beautifully harsh, poetic language. The city's underworld shift from genteel opium dens to the rough... desperation of the heroin trade serves as a mirror for the protagonist's descent, riots in the street serving as a backdrop to his ruin and rebirth. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this meticulously crafted book dazzles with its skill without ever feeling forced.

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13. Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

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    Bring Up the Bodies

    Hilary Mantel
    2012 | Unabridged

    In two consecutive books, Hilary Mantel has succeeded in accomplishing the impossible, a feat neither Shakespeare nor Showtime could achieve: making the political machinations of the reign of Henry VIII as gripping as a Tom Clancy thriller without resorting to heaving bosoms and bloody murder scenes. Following Thomas Cromwell, Henry's personal fixer who dealt with everything from arranging that first fateful divorce to prosecuting would-be traitors, all the while avenging the murder... of his own mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, the novels are relentlessly modern, told entirely in the present tense. Throughout, Mantel weaves in historical detail as effortlessly as she might mention Will & Kate. No wonder Bring Up the Bodies brought Mantel her second Man Booker Prize; we'd put money on the yet-to-be-published third part of the series taking the trifecta.

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12. Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

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    A Hologram for the King

    Dave Eggers
    2012 | Unabridged

    Dave Eggers’s latest protagonist, A Hologram for the King‘s Alan Clay, is a hollow man. Not in the T. S. Eliot “this is the way the world ends” sense, but the in the globally emasculated, forever-middle-management sense. He’s Willy Loman without the rage. In his past fiction, Eggers has often had an international focus. Unsurprisingly, his latest work retains that focus — but twists it around the average, recession-era American businessman.
    The down-on-his-luck... businessman may be the trope of American fiction in the last 70 years, but in presenting Alan Clay as such, we’re more aware of his everyman qualities. A “ghost” to his family, he’s holed up in King Abdullah Economic City (also known as the Arabian desert), designing holographic communications software with a team of contractors. Ruminating on his place in the world, we see the hints of a drive behind Clay — a new technology in a new economic power may make him a wealthy, and potentially worthwhile person.
    But truthfully, A Hologram for the King is all about emptiness. The vast tracts of the desert, the literal insubstantiality of connecting-via-hologram — not to mention the bland quality of Dion Graham’s narration all underline the degree to which Eggers’s Clay claws at relevance as the cohesive bonds of his life come apart.

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11. Louise Erdrich, The Round House

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    The Round House

    Louise Erdrich
    2012 | Unabridged

    Returning to the some of the same characters and geographies as in her 2008 novel The Plague of Doves, Louise Erdrich’s National Book Award-winning book is a wrenching work centered on three members of the Native American Coutts family in the aftermath of the rape of Geraldine Coutts, wife of tribal judge Bazil and mother of Joe.
    In a departure from Erdrich’s prior novels, The Round House’s sole narrator is the 13-year-old Joe,... voiced with honesty and conviction by Canadian First Nations actor Gary Farmer (best known for his featured role as Nobody in Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 acid western Dead Man). As his mother’s rape forces Joe to try to reconcile his own teenage desires with the reality of sexual violence, the crime finds itself in a dead zone of prosecution due to the overlapping jurisdictions of tribal, state, and federal law. The Couttses must balance their need for closure with their longtime efforts toward tribal sovereignty. As the investigation drags on, Joe remarks of his mother that “with all that we did, we were trying to coax the soul back into her. But I could feel it tug away from us like a kite on a string. I was afraid that string would break and she’d careen off, vanish into the dark.”
    Erdrich’s prose offers a compelling look at the grey areas of justice, sex, love, family and ethnic identity, while Farmer’s narration allows the Coutts’s North Dakota reservation to creep slowly under your skin until you feel an integral – if silent – part of the community.

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10. Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I’m Home

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    Tell the Wolves I’m Home

    Carol Rifka Brunt
    2012 | Unabridged

    Carol Rifka Brunt's debut novel, about a teenage girl coming to terms with her uncle's AIDS-related death in 1980s New York, is an unapologetic tearjerker. It's also a beautifully painted coming-of-age story and a nuanced, intimate portrait of the AIDS epidemic in its early, shadowed days. Protagonist June is caught up between taking care of her late uncle's partner, himself dying, and keeping peace with her family, whose rabid disapproval of their... relationship belies their fear and confusion about the disease. It's easier to blame one person for being the source of infection than to try to grasp the political magnitude of the epidemic's vicious spread and pernicious misinformation; as June uncovers these nuances, she finds herself further and further distanced from her parents, whom she once believed infallible, and from the childhood innocence we all enjoyed once upon a time.

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9. Moshe Kasher, Kasher in the Rye

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    Kasher in the Rye

    Moshe Kasher
    2012 | Unabridged

    Crammed into comedian Moshe Kasher's semi-preciously titled memoir are at least four separate, well-wrought memoirs: of being the hearing child of two deaf parents; of the parenting paradigm shift between his mother's secular liberalism and his father's deepening involvement in an orthodox Jewish sect; of growing up white in the predominantly black, relentlessly poor city of Oakland, proving ground for some of the '80s' most brutal, tell-it-like-it-is hip-hop; and of becoming an... addict at age 13, hitting rock bottom before his senior year of high school. Somehow Kasher manages to tell all of these stories well, with a hard self-awareness that leaves no room for the self-pity that could (rightfully) permeate the exposure of such painful experiences. Shot through with Kasher's dry wit and featuring some truly laugh-out-loud scenes, Kasher in the Rye is the disabled/religious/racial addiction memoir you didn't know the world needed.

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8. Cheryl Strayed, Wild

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    Wild

    Cheryl Strayed
    2012 | Unabridged

    At 26 years old, Cheryl Strayed was lost: A recent divorcee (and recent/former heroin user), she couldn't find her way out of a years-long funk after losing her mom to cancer. So she decided to do what very few 26-year-olds would think to do: got rid of all her things and with little hiking experience set off on a solo, 1,100-mile trek through the Pacific Crest Trail in California and Oregon. In... Wild, Strayed beautifully tells the story of her adventure with Monster, her over-stuffed backpack, and the people she meets on the trail — most importantly, herself.

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7. Lauren Groff, Arcadia

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    Arcadia

    Lauren Groff
    2012 | Unabridged

    All utopias fail (seen one around recently?), but the undoing of the titular hippie commune in Lauren Groff’s fantastic second novel is exceptionally spectacular and heartbreaking. Of course, there are cracks in Arcadia from the beginning: the endless influx of Frisbee-tossing d-bags, the shady weed deals, the labor disputes, the charismatic guru whose teachings on equality are undermined by his own weaknesses. It’s a hot mess.
    Still, for little Bit Stone, the first... kid born on this secluded stretch of upstate New York farmland, the place is a verdant wonderland stocked with fresh produce, fresh air, an extended family of oddball characters, and sexual awakenings at every swimming hole. It’s also the only home he knows, so when the real world finally drops by to tear Arcadia apart, it’s devastating — for Bit, for his wayward crush Helle, for all the dirty ol’ bohemians and new age types who’d worked so hard to build the place, for the readers who’d half-seriously started daydreaming about life off the grid.
    Groff, who turned heads with 2008′s wonderfully cockeyed family drama The Monsters of Templeton, has built something unassailably beautiful in Arcadia. Her sentences are lush, vivid, sensual things that twist and sprout in surprising but natural directions. Like Bit, the story goes where it goes, leaping forward in years and leaving familiar places for scarier frontiers. And when the world at large seems ready to collapse the way Arcadia did, it’s tragic and truthful. Lots of dystopias succeed, after all.

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6. Christopher Hitchens, Mortality

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    Mortality

    Christopher Hitchens
    2012 | Unabridged

    Originally published as a series of extended essays in Vanity Fair, the seven chapters that make up the meat of Mortality are vintage Christopher Hitchens: robustly philosophical, witty, blunt. The astonishing part is that their subject is Hitchens' own impending death. Begun shortly after his diagnosis with esophageal cancer and ending with a chapter of fragments left unfinished on his deathbed 18 months later, Mortality is mostly memoir, a clear-eyed self-assessment threaded... through with the stubborn refusal to resort to exceptionalism or fatalism. While dying with dignity has long been upheld as the ideal way to go, Mortality shows there's an even more desirable end: death with honesty.

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5. Jami Attenberg, The Middlesteins

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    The Middlesteins

    Jami Attenberg
    2012 | Unabridged

    In the depths of the obesity crisis, beset on all sides as we are by first ladies urging healthy habits and celebrity chefs revealing the hidden costs of fast food, it takes serious bravery to write about eating as lovingly as Jami Attenberg does in The Middlesteins. At the center of this family drama/black comedy is Edie Middlestein, whose relationship with food has been bringing her unequivocal joy from the liverwurst of... her childhood to the suburban Chinese food of her present. Diabetic, under strict orders to change her habits or die, Edie continues to eat in a noble, grandiose way. With her waffling, doubting husband gone and her grown children dealing with their own unhappinesses, Edie is free to draw a future for herself we're taught to believe is pitiable – until you see how happy it makes her. An entertaining portrait of suburban Jewish life and an eater's rhapsody, The Middlesteins' Edie may just be the most heroic character of the year.

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4. Anthony Shadid, House of Stone

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    House of Stone

    Anthony Shadid
    2012 | Unabridged

    It’s a little strange, hearing author Anthony Shadid graphically describe the toll a missile exacted on a Lebanese village in House of Stone; strange because one is immediately reminded that Shadid himself died suddenly and much too soon in the Middle East, though he couldn’t have known it as he wrote of victims choking on sand and dismembered corpses. Yet if death continually haunts House of Stone (as a veteran war correspondent,... Shadid saw his share of it), the book relentlessly pursues the life that goes on in death’s stead and gives it meaning.
    House of Stone‘s narrative concerns the reporter’s efforts to rebuild his great-grandfather’s house in Marjayoun, Lebanon, which was destroyed by an Israeli rocket in 2006. What comes of this effort is part national saga, part family history, and part tale of a stranger in a strange land. Shadid finds no shortage of amazement at the time and money he puts into a house that the Lebanese think should simply be destroyed. Suppliers cheat him, necessary parts prove difficult to find. He must clean human refuse out of the house’s water tanks. Interwoven with Shadid’s trials as he attempts to rebuild the house is an account of the histories of his family and their land, and it is here that House of Stone shines most brightly. It is almost as though Shadid, aware of how much of the story is not told by journalists like himself (“Television and the craft I practice show us the drama, not the impact,” he writes), now makes his best effort to fill in those spots. The result is a book that leverages Shadid’s keen reporter’s eye, complementing it with the emotion and in-depth engagement wrung from a family story. It is a tale of history with a heart, grounded in those familial bonds that we all have in common.

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3. Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise

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    The Signal and the Noise

    Nate Silver
    2012 | Unabridged

    There's no question about it: Nate Silver is this year's big winner. With the possibility of a sophomore slump gleefully held over his second presidential election at the helm of his blog, FiveThirtyEight, by pundits from both sides of the spectrum, Silver had a lot riding on his math. Thankfully, as he elaborates in his book, The Signal and the Noise, that math is basically foolproof. While the book is... not the victory lap he so richly deserves, it's just like Silver to give us something better, a measured call for continued logic in all arenas of speculation, from weather to finance to, yes, politics. As public debate becomes less about fact than about manufacturing drama, this call for open-eyed analysis may be our last hope for sanity.

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2. Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her

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    This Is How You Lose Her

    Junot Diaz
    2012 | Unabridged

    Some books, like some songs and movies, can be so achingly sad they’re pleasurable, and that’s the perfect balance Junot Diaz strikes with This Is How You Lose Her. The melancholy and pain of the displacement, romantic breakups and losses of loved ones in Di­az’s collection of loosely connected short love stories is balanced out perfectly by the writing’s snappy dialogue, dark wit and frank sexuality.
    Diaz fans will recognize Yunior, the subject... of several of the stories, from Di­az’s first collection, Drown, as well as from parts of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Di­az reads his own work in the audiobook, lending an even more distinctive tone to some already memorable narrative voices. Latin idioms are sprinkled throughout the stories with only context in the way of explanation, making the listener feel as though he or she is eavesdropping on a hyper-intelligent, vulgar person telling a really good story – to interrupt for clarification would throw things off entirely.
    This Is How You Lose Her will make listeners appreciate the simple joys of friends, lovers, work and the home, as well as the poetry that can be found when any of those can fall into discord.

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1. Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

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    Gone Girl

    Gillian Flynn
    2012 | Unabridged

    We will confess to reading the print version of Gillian Flynn’s third novel, Gone Girl, before listening to the audio version, tearing through it hungrily one lost weekend, feeling resentful of all interruptions, staying up later than usual to read just one more chapter. It is a book of twists and turns — page after page keeps the reader enthralled — but at the end of the book, when all is revealed... in this tale of a marriage gone awry with the wife gone missing, there’s a sensation of finally knowing everything at last. All the mysteries were revealed — why would one need to listen to the audiobook?
    And yet Gone Girl — a New York Times bestseller that has been optioned for film by Reese Witherspoon’s production company — is so engaging and funny, and the narrators Julia Whelan and Kirby Heyborne do such a knock-out job with the quick-witted prose, that it was simple to get sucked right back into the story all over again. Time flies with this audiobook, just as it did with the novel. Start listening, and suddenly it will be two days later.
    As for the plot, well, this is one of those books the less said, the better, so as to not reveal too much to the reader. But if we must: It is about Nick and Amy Dunne, two writers, late of New York, who move to North Carthage, Missouri, when the money runs out. Nick says of himself, “I have a face you want to punch.” Amy used to make up quizzes for women’s magazines, and is the child of two famous children’s book authors who made a fortune off writing about her. Gone Girl alternates between their perspectives. And whether you love them or hate them (and you will likely feel all kinds of emotions with this book), you will not stop listening until you get to the very end.

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]]> http://www.emusic.com/book-news/book-collection/emusics-best-audiobooks-of-2012/feed/ 1 2012′s Overlooked Books http://www.emusic.com/book-news/book-collection/2012s-overlooked-books/ http://www.emusic.com/book-news/book-collection/2012s-overlooked-books/#comments Thu, 20 Dec 2012 19:24:45 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=book_hub&p=3049274 When you read as much as we do, it’s inevitable that some of our favorite books will come and go without so much as a whimper of recognition, much less the great bang they deserve. Critical praise is never a great predictor of public success — and public success doesn’t always bode well for a book’s critical reception, either. Then there are those books that don’t get much of either, books that might be a little weird, or of a genre that never gets much respect, or that just came out on the wrong day. Whatever the reason, even though the rest of the world passed these books by on the first go-round (frankly, sometimes we did, too), we just can’t stop singing their praises. Here are our favorite unsung gems of 2012, each personally vouched for by one of our writers. It’s always a good time to discover your next favorite book; we’re willing to bet yours will be one of these five.

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    Immobility

    Brian Evenson
    2012 | Unabridged

    Judging Brian Evenson's books strictly by their titles is enough to give you a good idea of the kind of dark, thrilling experience you're in for when you read him — Contagion, Dark Property, Father of Lies and, of course, Altmann's Tongue, whose extreme violence led to Evenson's exit from Brigham Young University. But Evenson is no mere horror novelist; his cerebral, visceral thrillers have racked up praise from everyone from bestseller... Peter Straub to postmodern theorist Gilles Deleuze. But while Evenson has had a cult following for years, Immobility deserves a wider audience.

    Here's the deal: A cataclysm known as the Kollaps has left the Earth all but destroyed, and it is into this reality that Josef Horkai awakes after having been in stasis for 30 years. He's promptly informed he'll soon die of an awful disease: "Eventually you'll be completely paralyzed, suffering from utter immobility." Josef has been awakened because only he can withstand the ubiquitous post-apocalyptic radiation that poisons anyone who is exposed for too long, and he is needed to perform a task that might save what remains of humanity, a ragged community known as the hive. In the process, he's given a difficult choice that puts the fate of the human race in the balance.

    Though Immobility is, like so much of Evenson's work, a riveting horror story of bleak survival, it is so much more — the sharp prose and terse dialog probe deep questions about how we know things and what we believe. Josef comes across as a post-apocalyptic version of Camus's Meursault, a man struggling to remember who he is while dealing with a much more pernicious question: Is the human race worth saving? — Scott Esposito

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    Office Girl

    Joe Meno
    2012 | Unabridged

    A wisp of a novel, Office Girl was easy to miss when it arrived in summer, its intimacy and quirky charm quickly overshadowed by the year's fall blockbusters — liken it to the indie film that plays for a week and lives on through word-of-mouth hype. Joe Meno's story of a romance between two 20-somethings during a Chicago winter is best savored as a few hours' escape from the cold. It's February... 1999 when Odile, the titular girl and an art school dropout, meets Jack working in adjoining cubicles at their dreary third-shift gig answering phones. She gets her kicks biking around the city and vandalizing signs, while he's up for anything if it means she might fall in love with him. Written in short, angsty bursts — which are narrated with eye-rolling perfection by Julia Whelan — Meno's novel sets these two dreamers in dank cubicles and cozy walkups late at night and captures the optimism and nervous energy of the Y2K moment. — Kate Silver

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    I Am an Executioner

    Rajesh Parameswaran
    2012 | Unabridged

    Why didn't everyone I know rush me and demand that I read I Am an Executioner back in April when it came out? Were the sturdy, hilarious narratives too accessible for the experimentalists I sometimes run with? Was the formal playfulness too weird for my fellow fiction devotees? After all, in this debut collection, tigers, cinematographers, aliens and humans bray, mate, devour, love and write. Even so, Rajesh Parameswaran's fiercely imaginative plots... and hyper-precise prose add up to a must-read. Parameswaran tests the line between nature and culture — or between one culture and another — to ask, what happens when that dividing line shifts?

    "Demons" tells the darkly humorous tale of an immigrant couple, using realist conventions to discuss the assimilationist potential of Thanksgiving turkey. In other stories, an elephant dips her tusk in ink to write a memoir and an Indian stationmaster pines over his peculiar clerk in a queer retelling of Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener." What unites these varied characters are the ever-present forces of love and death. As one extraplanetary being muses, pondering the fatal culmination of his mating ritual, "Life feeds other life. It is equal with the act of love." — Amanda Davidson

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    When I Was a Child I Read Books

    Marilynne Robinson
    2012 | Unabridged

    Marilynne Robinson's essay collection illuminates what matters to the author about philosophy, literary criticism, U.S. history, and religion. These may sound like heady matters and, indeed, this is not an audiobook for bopping around town doing errands. Read by Robinson herself (in exactly the voice devotees of Housekeeping and Gilead would expect her to have — considered, warm, a tinge of prairie) this is the audiobook to savor on a long solo... car trip, preferably through some wide open spaces, when you've got the time and headspace to contemplate the big questions.

    When I Was a Child garnered critical praise upon its release, but I was one of many, I think, who were interested but ultimately turned off by the extent to which the book is informed by Robinson's Christianity. Wrongly so; it turns out that for Robinson, religious belief is not mere dogma. To her, it is an opening up of thought, rather than a circumscribing, and the essays in this volume provide ample evidence to support her belief that religion, like literature and like America itself, is about generosity, wonder, and possibility. — Sara Jaffe

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    Zoo

    James Patterson
    2012 | Unabridged

    I'll admit it, there are some formidable reasons James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge's Zoo does not belong on a list of unsung literary gems. For one, while legit reviewers of literature wouldn't touch this thing with a 10-foot quill, the book was a bestseller, read by — and I'm just guessing here — 100 million people, many of whom had just learned their flight was delayed. And as for its "gem" qualifications,... Zoo is a deadly serious adventure yarn about, basically, a full-on global war between animals and humans. Yeah, OK, the Man Booker Prize people probably needn't waste their time.

    The thing is, lit nerds like myself — OMG, George Saunders just accepted my friend request! — have been shamed away from reading Patterson (and Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins, etc. etc.), but maybe that sort of snobbery is outdated. Surely we can switch our brains to energy-saver mode and just have fun with a book like Zoo, despite its clichés and inconsistencies and parts where the scientists don't seem to know much about science. Because it's wild and weird and unexpected. Because guilty pleasures are still pleasures. Freed from shame and pretense, we can all admit that a scene in which thousands of dogs take over Manhattan and have a giant, disgusting orgy is just plain awesome. Sometimes, that's what a gem looks like. Like a giant dog orgy. — Pat Rapa

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]]> http://www.emusic.com/book-news/book-collection/2012s-overlooked-books/feed/ 0 Discover: Labels We Love 2012 http://www.emusic.com/music-news/music-collection/discover-labels-we-love/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/music-collection/discover-labels-we-love/#comments Thu, 13 Dec 2012 14:22:47 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=emusic_hub&p=3048678 If there’s one characteristic that binds all of the labels we’ve grouped together here, it’s that all of them operate with complete indifference to the boundaries of genre. None of them are simply a “rock label” or an “electronic label.” Instead, the bands on their rosters cherry-pick from across the entire musical encyclopedia, combining formerly isolated ideas and sounds to create entire new worlds of song. These are the labels we loved in 2012.

Carpark & Acute

Who They Are: Based in Washington D.C., Carpark and its sublabel, Acute, was founded by Todd Hyman in 1999 and has remained defiantly left-of-the-dial ever since.

What to Expect: Free-roaming and obstinate indie rock that nods toward the past – Cloud Nothings contain a few well-chosen shards of ’90s emo, TEEN gently references the more ethereal end of late ’80s post-punk – while still maintaining a distinct musical voice.

  • Attack On Memory album cover

    Attack On Memory

    Cloud Nothings
    2012 | Carpark Records

    For the last few years, 20-year-old Cleveland native Dylan Baldi has been recording a steady torrent of endearing lo-fi pop contagions. Released under the name Cloud Nothings, Baldi's songs are so simply constructed, so innately hooky, they almost sound easy: His 2010 compilation Turning On was a happy murk of lint-covered guitars, three-floors-below drums, and vocals so crackly, they could have been sampled off a ham-radio. Last year's self-titled follow-up was crisper... and snappier, bounding along with the sort of energy of school kids finally released into the wilds of summertime.

    Baldi could easily have replicated that joyful noise sound for a few more albums, and no one would really have objected. Thankfully, though, he got bored. And bold. And kinda angry. Attack on Memory contains a lot of recognizable Cloud Nothings DNA - speedy riffs, forebrain-hugging melodies - but it grafts them onto a monstrous-sounding framework, courtesy of engineer Steve Albini. On Memory, Baldi's ostensibly straightforward power-pop numbers are stretched out and bulked up so efficiently, it feels like he somehow jumped three records ahead in less than year.

    In fact, Memory veers so forcefully from its predecessors that, at first listen, it's a bit jarring: The opening track, "No Future No Past," is a slow-burn grind of spangled, in-utero guitars and tortured vocals, with Baldi intoning the words "give up/ come to/ no hope/ we're through" so harshly, it sounds as though his larynx is going to flip him off and jump out of his throat. Even more adventurous is "Wasted Days," a nine-minute(!) peal with a lithe, lupine guitar break that sounds like Greg Sage conducting Hawkwind.

    Baldi hasn't given up on the quick-fix pop song, as evidenced by short, piercing numbers like "Fall In" and "Our Plan." But even those tracks feel mega, emboldened by Jayson Gerycz's battering-ram drums and Baldi's squeezed-dry vocals (by the time the album finishes, you're surprised he's able to get a word out at all). Those who've followed Cloud Nothings thus far will be happily walloped by Memory, yet even newcomers will find it a blast, in every sense of the word.

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  • In Limbo album cover

    In Limbo

    TEEN
    2012 | Carpark Records

    Kristina "Teeny" Lieberson used to play keyboard for Brooklyn indie rockers Here We Go Magic, and while her own dreamy electro-psych sister act relies on slightly different ingredients, the results can be similarly spellbinding. TEEN's 2011 digital-only EP Little Doods leaned toward narcotic lo-fi jangle that recalled Mazzy Star. Mixed and produced by Spacemen 3's Sonic Boom, and engineered by Here We Go Magic's Jen Turner, full-length debut In Limbo is a... brainy, immersive and often-intriguing blend of pulsing krautrock drone and bouncy Phil Spector harmonies. The 11-track set has its share of reverby retro-pop gems, whether confidently thrumming "Better," lovesick space-prom waltz "Charlie" or insistent, surf-flecked "Electric." Elsewhere, on tracks like free-flowing synth workout "Unable" or crunching, Beta Band-skewed "Why Why Why," TEEN sprawls out to suit the youth-appropriate album title. Either way, In Limbo is an alluring, sometimes-enchanting stroll along the blurry line between hooks and incantations.

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Hippos in Tanks

Who They Are: Nicking their name from a novel by William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, this L.A. label is known for their similarly stream-of-consciousness approach to electronic music.

What to Expect: At a time when the acronym EDM is doubled over with exhaustion, Hippos in Tanks represents everything the genre can be at its best. There’s an eeriness and otherworldliness to their albums – every last one – that the genre’s more popular practitioners woefully lack.

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    Sushi

    James Ferraro
    2012 | Hippos In Tanks / Redeye

    On 2011's Far Side Virtual, James Ferraro specialized in gleaming surfaces: Bright tunes played on ultra-bright neo '80s synths, festooned with FX that alluded to the sonic detritus of digital life (the squeal-pop that announces you've logged onto Skype, for instance, which ends Far Side's title cut). Sushi sounds more deliberately broken, like a cross between Machinedrum's Room(s) and old Prefuse 73 – arrangements that halt and stammer a la Chicago juke... ("Playin Ya Self"), crumple up old house music ("Baby Mitsubishi"), and push hip-hop through a crisply fluttering laptop sieve ("Jet Skis & Sushi"). Ferraro initially planned on calling this album Rainstick Fizz Plus, then Shoop2DaDoop – jokey names that get to the geeked-out party spirit embodied by the likes of "SO N2U" (clap-happy and funky, a la Si Begg's late-'90s Buckfunk 3000 releases) and the sideways skank of "Flamboyant." It's silly, of course – but it moves anyway.

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HoZac

Who They Are: Todd Novak’s Chicago-based label that also hosts the raucous and aptly-named HoZac Blackout festival every year.

What to Expect: 50 million tons of melody, delivered at the highest possible volume. HoZac’s roster likes it loud – they specialize in garage and amped-up power pop – but there’s always an infectious hook lurking beneath the din, waiting to burrow deep into your brainspace.

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    Radar Eyes

    Radar Eyes
    2012 | Hozac / Revolver

    Don't call it just another garage-punk offering; HoZac's been doing that for years. On Radar Eyes' self-titled debut LP, the Chicagofoursome offers a pop-centric affair, all layered, fuzzy guitars and hook-laden vocals. The driving, forward momentum of "Accident" and the shit-kicking guitars of "Summer Chills" front like these Windy City residents wanna fight, but it's their pretty melodic sensibilities that encourage repeated listens. "Prairie Puppies" is an unabashed Jesus and Mary Chain... hat-tip, "I Am" attempts to hide its candy-shop leanings underneath an impenetrable wall of feedback, and songs like "Secrets" and "Disconnection," with big bass, heavenly organs and druggy atmospherics, suggest they may be the spiritual brethren of the Black Lips. The entire affair ends with the spooky, Suicide-esque "Side of the Road," reaffirming that Radar Eyes are just as effective students of rock as they are practitioners.

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Mello Music

Who They Are: Alarmingly consistent – their 2012 docket of releases contained exactly zero misses – this Arizona hip-hop label ably carries on the tradition of major label genre pioneers like Tribe Called Quest and Black Star.

What to Expect: Expertly-crafted, consistently thoughtful hip-hop that puts an emphasis on deft wordplay, usually over beats that recall the genre’s Golden Age. It’s to their great credit that their releases never once sound dated or self-consciously retro. They’re sharp, sturdy and surprising, every single time.

  • As Himself album cover

    As Himself

    Stik Figa
    2012 | Mello Music Group / The Orchard

    For hip-hop fans who value authenticity, Stik Figa is as real as it gets — it's just that for him, reality is an ordinary-dude life in Topeka, defined by pragmatic goals and modest honesty. Originally locally-released in 2009 and picked up for wider distribution after some productive collaborations with Oddisee, the fittingly titled As Himself is a short but comprehensive introduction to an engaging, hard-working everyman MC. With an easygoing voice that... glides through finely detailed, scenario-setting lyrics, he finds insightful personal angles on daily-grind things — the elusiveness of aspirational materialism ("Flaudgin"), the community-anchoring nature of the local mom-and-pop shop ("Corner Store"), growing up self-aware of his childhood awkwardness ("Class of 2000") — while still coming correct on big-picture material like the Aaron Neville-invoking Great Recession study "Medicine." Producer Michael "Seven" Summers bolsters the album with sinuous funk that splits the difference between box-Chevy South and Rhymesayers-style Midwest, making an unpretentiously perceptive rapper sound even more down-to-earth.

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Profound Lore

Who They Are: This Canadian label may have started as a hobby for its founder Chris Bruni, but its profile elevated rapidly in the notoriously discriminating metal scene.

What to Expect: The most challenging, forward-thinking and inventive metal around. The bands on Profound Lore typically roam far outside hard rock’s usual boundaries, incorporating doomy ambience and oblong song structures into their infernal albums.

New Amsterdam

Who They Are: Brooklyn-based label specializing in populating the gap between “indie” and “classical”

What to Expect: Depending on the release, you might get wry, witty chamber pop; avant-garde a cappella; steampunk big-band jazz; a conservatory student’s take on ’70s AM radio, or something even more delightfully weird.

  • Roomful of Teeth album cover

    Roomful of Teeth

    Roomful of Teeth
    New Amsterdam

    Unless you have already seen and heard Roomful of Teeth live, there is little to prepare you for the effect of this avant-garde a cappella octet from New York. Well, actually, there's a lot to prepare you – if you've heard, say, the chanting of Tibetan Buddhist monks, and Bobby McFerrin's Circlesong improvisations, and John Cage's Songbook, and the Swingle Singers – and, let's say, pygmy yodeling and Meredith Monk – then... you're good to go. Roomful of Teeth creates a richly-textured sound that uses a seemingly endless palette of vocal techniques: overtone chant, rhythmic clicks and buzzes, luminous chords and piercing Balkan-style close harmonies, drones, and spoken word (usually to found texts). In the wrong hands, this kind of thing could be dangerous, but Roomful of Teeth has fallen in with the right crowd.

    Released by New Amsterdam Records, which has become a home for the so-called indie-classical movement, the group's debut release includes new works written specifically for the band by some of that movement's leading lights, including composers Judd Greenstein, William Brittelle, Sarah Kirkland Snider and indie rocker Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs. With such a distinguished list of guest composers, it might be a little surprising to find that some of the record's highlights come from the group's own Caroline Shaw, whose suite of pieces named after Baroque dance forms (Passacaglia, Courante, Allemande and Sarabande) is a tour de force of vocal mischief-making, with collage-style spoken texts woven into a web of singing, semi-singing, and other less easily identified vocal noises. Again, in the wrong hands it would be a mess, but Roomful of Teeth is never less than completely musical, even lyrical.

    Snider's "Orchard" is sensuous and beautiful, and possibly a little darker than it seems at first. Greenstein's works are the most reliably rhythmic and will appeal to fans of Meredith Monk; this particular Meredith Monk fan thinks "Montmartre" might be the best of the three. And Brittelle's "Amid the Minotaurs," on the surface one of the most conventionally-structured pieces here, is a truly subversive piece of anti-pop.

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  • Victoire: Cathedral City album cover

    Victoire: Cathedral City

    Victoire
    New Amsterdam

    You know that numb, nagging feeling at the base of your brain when you're awake at 4 a.m., watching the ceiling cracks start to swarm in front of you? Victoire's hesitant, haunted instrumental miniatures are that feeling made manifest. Comprised of five women from the NYC contemporary classical scene, Victoire first came to our attention in 2008. eMusic released their moody, inscrutable four-song EP A Door Into the Dark on eMusic Selects.... The evocative title perfectly matched the music contained within — the four pieces were a chill of creeping unease, the breath of cold air from behind the cracked-open basement door. The four songs lasted a total of 20 minutes, but they lingered like a premonition.

    The move from A Door Into the Dark to their full-length debut is summed up, again, in the title — Cathedral City is a bold step from dank, cramped beginnings into real space. The four songs on A Door Into the Dark are here, but they have been re-recorded, and in the process, have acquired a whole new bottom floor. The music now resounds startling in all directions. The MIDI keyboard that wells up in "Like A Miracle" now sounds less like a glitch in the drum programming software than an all-devouring monster run amuck. There is a new note of bassy menace in Lorna Krier's glittering electronics as well; "I Am Coming for My Things," the gorgeously lonely and unresolved meditation on an achingly sad voice mail, has a new seismic rumble beneath it.

    There are four new pieces on the album as well, and they flesh out the band's morbid, anxious vision. Missy Mazzoli, the composer and musical engine behind the band, loves staircase chord progressions — most of these pieces are built on a four-chord descent with a few unexpected detours built in. They are poised on the trap-door hinge between major and minor, with melodies that probe their way hesitantly from bar to bar, the clarinet often floating free while the violin and keyboards circle warily. The sunburst of unison vocals on the title track offers the lone shaft of light, lifting the album uncertainly, and fitfully, toward a kind of transcendence. But soon the mood sours again; Mazzoli's music never settles. Painting the funk of a cloudy head-state with a virtuoso palette of blacks and greys, Victoire suggest volumes of unspoken emotion before gliding away.

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  • Song from the Uproar (The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt) album cover

    Song from the Uproar (The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt)

    Missy Mazzoli
    New Amsterdam

    Young Brooklyn composer Missy Mazzoli's exhilarating and ultimately heartbreaking Song from the Uproar contains traditional operatic elements – among them, romance, tragedy and cross-dressing. However, the story of the real-life Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904), who traveled nomadically through the mountains and deserts of North Africa dressed as a man, converted to Islam, and joined a secret Sufi brotherhood to struggle against French colonialism before perishing in a flash flood, strains against the bounds... of belief. Does this tale demand three tidily arcing acts or a thousand and one nights?

    Mazzoli's solution is to concentrate on the heaviest emotional moments of Eberhardt's journey in 15 songs linked by electronic sounds. Performed by the five-member Now Ensemble (clarinet, bass, electric guitar, piano, flute), four singers and the splendid mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer as Eberhardt, Uproar splits the difference between opera and alt-rock. (Mazzoli's all-female modern classical ensemble Victoire was a 2008 eMusic Selects pick.) Melodic and other epiphanies bubble up unexpectedly and dramatically from Mazzoli's personal minimalist palette. These include the birdlike flute song of delight in "I Have Arrived," the heady instrumental color wheel of "Oblivion Seekers," and perhaps the opera's real tragic climax, the two-part "Mektoub (It Is Written)," a lacerating threnody in which Eberhardt mourns the betrayal of her Algerian lover, singing "How quickly love evaporates / Leaving me a desert." Not so much opera as distillation, Mazzoli's version of Eberhardt's short, memorable life is a marvel of compact complexity itself.

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  • the rain is a handsome animal (17 songs from the poetry of e.e.cummings) album cover

    the rain is a handsome animal (17 songs from the poetry of e.e.cummings)

    Tin Hat
    New Amsterdam

    Tin Hat, formerly the Tin Hat Trio, is a quartet here, but this remarkable album has a fifth collaborator: the poet e. e. cummings. The Rain Is A Handsome Animal is a song cycle comprised of settings of cummings's poetry by all four members of the group (there are also three instrumental settings), and features the earthy, distinctive voice of the group's founding violinist, Carla Kihlstedt. Like all Tin Hat albums, this... one offers a contemporary acoustic take on Americana, chamber music and jazz. And while their previous albums have included one or two vocal tracks, with guests like Tom Waits and Willie Nelson, this is the first one to make Kihlstedt's vocals the center of attention.

    The choice of cummings is a natural one for Tin Hat; the American poet held the classical forms of poetry in high regard, but not so high that he neglected the sounds and rhythms of vernacular American English, and the blues. For the musicians in Tin Hat, which includes Mark Orton on guitar and dobro; Ben Goldberg, clarinet; and Rob Reich on accordion and piano, cummings must have seemed a kindred spirit. Elegantly woven through a fabric of typically quirky instrumentation, those texts lead the quartet in several directions. "anyone lived in a pretty how town" is the most clearly rooted in traditional American music, with the poem's bluesy/folksy quality echoed in Rob Reich's setting. "Buffalo Bill," an elegiac text by cummings, is perhaps the most poignant, culminating in an emotional, if ambiguous, brass choir. "little i," a Kihlstedt setting, features the silvery tone of her e-string violin (a fiddle with four high, thin e-strings that suggests the sound of the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle) and some of her most appropriately tremulous singing.

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]]> http://www.emusic.com/music-news/music-collection/discover-labels-we-love/feed/ 0 New This Week: Big Boi, Green Day, & More http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-big-boi-green-day-more/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-big-boi-green-day-more/#comments Tue, 11 Dec 2012 20:54:46 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=emusic_spotlight&p=3048536 Big Boi, Vicious Lies & Dangerous Rumors – Second full-fledged solo album from Big Boi, one-half of Outkast — his third if you count his half of Outkast’s 2004 Speakerboxxx/The Love Below — finds him mixing it up with collaborators as wide-ranging as A$AP Rocky and indie-poppers Phantogram to Wavves and fellow ATL stars Ludacris and T.I. Dan Hyman writes:

On Vicious Lies there’s no genre, collaborator or experiment too out-there for Daddy Fat Sax. What’s more impressive though, is that (nearly) all of it works. Whether he’s chopping it up with underrated indie-pop duo Phantogram on the electro drugged-out funk groove “CPU,” letting Wavves’ Nathan Williams go punk-apocalyptic on “Shoes For Running,” or unspooling Xanax-popping depression rap alongside Kid Cudi during “She Hates Me,” it’s Big Boi’s willingness to go for broke that sells this sometimes overstuffed album.

Green Day, ¡TRÉ! – Third in the punk-pop institution’s bang-bang-bang rapid-fire trilogy of records this year, all in an attempt to scale back down from their American Idiot grandeur back to the three chord yearners they were in their Kerplunk days. You can never go back, of course, but it’s nice to hear Billie Joe work out his sweet tooth on this smaller scale.

Julia Holter, Ekstasis (expanded) – The vocalist and composer’s beautiful, shimmering Ekstasis reissued with some revelatory live takes on her crystalline music.

The Jam, The Gift – The final studio album by the legendary Jam. This is the one with “A Town Called Malice” on it.

Jawbreaker, Bivouac – One of the classic emo records, reissued, full of as much raw, ragged power as the day it was released.

Gil Shaham, Arvo Part: Tabula Rasa – A masterpiece of mystic minimalism, performed by one of the most spiritually attuned violinists on the planet.

The Game, Jesus Piece – The West Coast stalwart catches the holy ghost for his fifth album of classical gangsta rap, featuring appearances, as per usual for him, by half the functioning mainstream rap industry.

Masta Killa, Selling My Soul – Latest from the Wu-Tang’s quietest and most enduring member. He seems to understand his own place in the game: He opens the record with a dialogue snippet from the cult film The Spook Who Sat By The Door, in which a voice wonders, “I forgot he even existed. He has a way of fading into the background.” His low-key delivery and reflective tone never goes out of style.

Howard Shore, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack – Special Edition – In advance of Peter Jackson’s new film version of The Hobbit, Howard Shore provides a more regal, sumptuous, orchestral version of that misty mountain hop. You can practically hear Ian McKellen’s whispered dialogue over these sweeping, Romantic cues. Plus, a couple of tankard-clinking Hobbitt drinking songs, for good measure, perfect for your next really, really nerdy party.

Various Artists, On The Road OST – The soundtrack for the Kerouac film adaptation features period-appropriate bebop jazz and blues as well as compositions from Gustavo Santoalla, whose work you might know from the Brokeback Mountain score.

 

Peaking Lights, Lucifer In Dub – In the “what it says on the tin” department: a deep-dub dive into Peaking Lights’ 2011 Lucifer.

Eat Skull, Where’d You Go – Grotty, dazed lo-fi dirges from former Siltbreeze act Eat Skull; for the primitivist in you. Some of these even have the vague shape of love songs.

Marsha Ambrosius, Cold War – A nicely sultry Quiet Storm R&B-influenced single from one half of Floetry.

Hanni Al Khatib, Roach Cock – Abhorrently repulsive song title/cover art of the day award aside, this is more infectious, greased-up punkabilly from a guy who knows how to summon the spirit.

Ra Ra Riot, When I Dream – New single from the beloved indie-rockers finds them going surprisingly laptop soul. We’ll see what the album brings.

Marnie Stern, Year of the Glad – Maaaybe an Infinite Jest reference in the title of this new Marnie song? Hard to know, but it would suit the too-brainy-for-my-own-good, over-caffeinated vibe of Starn’s music. Sounds tantalizingly great.

]]> http://www.emusic.com/music-news/spotlight/new-this-week-big-boi-green-day-more/feed/ 0 eMusic’s Best Albums of 2012 http://www.emusic.com/music-news/list-hub/emusics-best-albums-of-2012/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/list-hub/emusics-best-albums-of-2012/#comments Mon, 10 Dec 2012 16:59:34 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=emusic_list_hub&p=3046924 Every year, when eMusic’s editorial staff compiles our annual best-of list, the goal is never to come to some kind of academic determination of the year’s best records via a series of complicated formulas and criteria. To do so would be as maddening as it is impossible. I’ve been thinking a lot about the way our list comes together over the course of the last few weeks and I think, above all else, what we try to do with this list is to tell a story — to represent the music that mattered most to us at eMusic in an almost narrative form. We don’t really give much consideration to which albums may or may not make other people’s lists. We don’t care a whole lot about which albums were popular or unpopular, or which albums may or may not have resonance 10 or 20 or 30 years from now. And we certainly don’t care about which albums sold the most. Instead, we try to collect the albums that impacted us the most, with the belief that these are the albums that will impact other people, too. If an album is on this list, it means we love it and we endorse it, and we think you’ll love it, too. And if it made our Top 20? We consider it essential. These are our picks for the 100 Best Records of 2012. — J. Edward Keyes, Editor-in-Chief

#100 Gentleman Jesse, Leaving Atlanta

  • Leaving Atlanta album cover

    Leaving Atlanta

    Gentleman Jesse
    2012 | Douchemaster / Revolver

    "No turning back, I gotta get out of town," Jesse Smith sings on Leaving Atlanta's "What Did I Do." Four years in the making,Atlanta power-pop king Gentleman Jesse's sophomore album was inspired by a series of wildly unfortunate events in his life. The album is dedicated to friends he lost to cancer (ATL punk staple Bobby Ubangi) and drugs (Jay Reatard), and in the time between his debut full-length and this one,... Smith had his nose broken in a violent mugging, the result of which graces the cover of his 2010 HoZac single. For a time, it seemed like the only away Smith could get away from the drama would be to flee the city.

    But, as he told ATL alt-weekly Creative Loafing in a recent interview, "Atlanta is like an abusive lover that you can't leave." And even on opener "Eat Me Alive," one of the album's strongest statements musically or otherwise, Smith sings that "this city's trying to eat me alive," but tempers the statement instantly with the follow-up, "it's as good a place as any to try to survive." A handful of Leaving Atlanta's tracks reinforce the album title's thematic leaning, but there are also songs of triumph ("Rooting for the Underdog"), and lost love ("You Give Me Shivers," the fantastic "I'm Only Lonely [When I'm Around You)]") mixed in throughout.

    While the years may have been rough on Smith, they've been kind to his songwriting. As he's admitted frequently, the former Carbona rarely emphasizes lyrics, instead focusing on titanic melodies and infectious guitar licks. And yet, Leaving Atlanta boasts several inspired lines. Milton Hammond's organ parts flesh out the arrangements, and three-part harmonies delight. There are several distinctly Springsteenian moments, too, and these, along with an utterly dark tale of a killer on the run ("What Did I Do"), show that Smith is not content to be "The Power-Pop Guy" forever. Much like his self-titled debut, Leaving Atlanta concludes with a quintessential closer, this one called "We Got to Get Out of Here." As the groove-locked tune barrels along, it becomes clear that the "here" in question could be referring to a negative mindset as much as a locale.

    "I know you're feeling kind of uptight/ but you should come out with me tonight," Smith sings on "Kind of Uptight." Is he talking to a girl? Maybe, but it could just as easily be a self pep talk to and from a guy who needs to break free of the drudgery of a city turned against him. After all, you can give up on a situation when things get difficult, but it takes real character to push forward and find the bright spots, even if they're obscured by all manner of death and nastiness. Or to take on an optimistic attitude, as Smith sings in the very same song: "Everything will be all right/ So, come on, and take my hand tonight."

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#99 ERAAS, ERAAS

  • Eraas album cover

    Eraas

    ERAAS
    2012 | felte / The Orchard

    Like urban explorers, Brooklyn post-rock duo ERAAS haunt the gloomy husks of krautrock, darkwave, industrial and dreampop, finding pulsing life within them. Their dark and beat-driven self-titled debut draws on well-established subgenres, but feels utterly new: The immaculate production, full of audible space and teeming with intricate layers, is part of the reason, but most of it is due to the duo's keen command of their style. The result is a clean... draught of weird beauty.

    The vocals are mostly blurred or submerged, but the rhythmic music itself gibbers and groans volubly, intimating all kinds of fearful and wonderful things. Each track combines the sensuous with the spiritual and the highbrow with the underground in some fresh way: Some tracks, like "Crescent," toy with dissonance and subtle tonal tension, yet go silky across the ears. Others, like "At Heart," ride quasi-house beats and post-punk bass lines while somehow evoking sepulchral stillness. It's so varied that listening can feel like they're scanning through netherworld radio stations. Ghastly drones resolve into haunted new-wave hooks. Horror-film score movements give way smoothly to tribal folktronica. And it's all relentlessly pretty and surprising, beguiling expectations at every turn. The musical ideas are complex and abundant but never tedious, so it's a visitation as satisfying as it is eerie.

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#98 Pop Zeus, Pop Zeus

  • Pop Zeus album cover

    Pop Zeus

    Pop Zeus
    2012 | Pop Zeus / TuneCore

    Like a John Singer Sargent trapped beneath a greasy glass frame, Pop Zeus – the project of one Mikey Hodges – smothers opulent hooks in buckets of scuzz. It's no surprise he nicked the project's name from a Bob Pollard song; like the Fading Captain himself, Hodges cuts sweetness with sand, nodding lazily towards '80s jangle pop but ruthlessly chipping off the high-gloss, making what's left feel as raw and as... twitchy as an exposed tendon. But don't be fooled: The attention to melodic detail – the graceful melodic slopes and canny moments of counterpoint between vocals and guitars make it clear Hodges is no yawning, indifferent de-composer. "Devil's in the Details" is the album's dollar-store "Lust For Life," its rangy guitars and busted-jalopy percussion doing its best impersonation of Pop's raw thunder. "It doesn't even matter to me," Hodges hollers over and over as the song winds down. That he sings it with such conviction is proof that he's lying.

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#97 Maria Minerva, Will Happiness Find Me?

  • Will Happiness Find Me? album cover

    Will Happiness Find Me?

    Maria Minerva
    2012 | Not Not Fun / Revolver

    "I hate the idea of 'gigs,'" Maria Minerva told eMusic earlier this year. "It's boring! When I go out, I just want somebody to DJ from about 10 to 6." Maybe that's why Minerva's second proper LP unfolds like a break-of-dawn set from one of her crate-digging 100% Silk compatriots. Caught in a K-hole where disco balls spin in time to handclaps, rubberized bass lines and glitter-dusted beats, it's woozy and... weightless — dance music meant for actual moon walking.

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#96 Fresh & Onlys, Long Slow Dance

  • Long Slow Dance album cover

    Long Slow Dance

    The Fresh & Onlys
    2012 | Mexican Summer

    By virtue of their hometown (San Francisco) and the labels they've worked with (In the Red, Captured Tracks, Sacred Bones, and now, Mexican Summer), The Fresh & Onlys are often grouped with shaggy-haired maniacs such as Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees. In reality, their gorgeous, glassy-eyed pop is more in line with The Shins, or, to use an era-appropriate comparison for the Nuggets-inclined set, the Zombies. The noisier, feedback-drenched reference points... made a little more sense when the band was just getting started, but with each subsequent release, The Fresh & Onlys have refined their tunes, trading lo-fi riffs for jangling strums, garage rhythms for elegant, choral-enhanced accompaniment. What once could've served as the soundtrack for a Vice-funded documentary now sounds appropriate for starring placement in a Wes Anderson flick, and we mean that in the best possible sense.

    Long Slow Dance feels like a young band discovering their true calling. The title track meditates on finding true love alongside an acceptance that nobody's perfect. "Presence of Mind" grapples with precisely that, trying to attain it amidst a world of lies and disappointment. Multiple tracks feature a protagonist longing to unshackle himself from foolishness, sometimes over clean, dramatic guitars, other times backed by horn sections seemingly borrowed from an epic Calexico jam. The whole thing feels like a coming-out party for a band that's been leaning toward its destined path all along. Perhaps the finest distillation of this weight-off-the-shoulders thesis comes in "20 Days and 20 Nights," when frontman Tim Cohen sings, "Something so heavy in my mind/ I think I wanna try and let it out." Feels good, doesn't it?

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#95 John Talabot, Fin

  • Fin album cover

    Fin

    John Talabot
    2012 | Permanent Vacation / GoodToGo

    John Talabot's Fin opens with a quiet halo of evocative nighttime sounds – owls, crickets, croaking frogs. It evokes a David Attenborough-narrated nature film, and is definitely not the intro one might expect from a house DJ based in Barcelona, let alone a guy who grabbed so many ears with a song called "Sunshine." The mist-filled seven-minute song that emerges from this dark bog, called "Depak Ine," an inscrutable reference to the... seizure medication Depakote, gathers force like a nagging doubt, accruing melodic force and rhythmic layering as it goes.

    It is the first of the 11 consecutive welcome surprises that comprise Fin, a record that quietly upends whatever narrative expectations you assign to it at every turn. If you heard the first single, the fleetly throbbing "Destiny," and expected a record full of moody Depeche Mode-aping synth pop, you will hit a big red Stop sign the second the following track, a motionless, melted pool of sound called "El Oeste," begins. I have listened to it 30 times or more so far this year already, and my memory still hasn't quite nailed down the track listing's pretzel logic – always a good sign.

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#94 Laurel Halo, Quarantine

  • Quarantine album cover

    Quarantine

    Laurel Halo
    2012 | Hyperdub / The Orchard

    There's something wonderfully unsettling about Laurel Halo's debut full-length Quarantine. A beat-less electronic album, its 12 tracks bleed into one another, creating a kind of woozy, ambient cloud cover. Hints of pop periodically break through; "Holoday," in particular, feels like the receding echo of dance music past. But ultimately, song structure is bypassed in favor of a sense of ghostly possibility that echoes both early Dntel and classical composer Steve... Reich.

    Halo coaxes a stark beauty out of her cascading ones and zeros, and Quarantine's tension and character stem from Halo's juxtaposition of moments of disquieting minimalism with her all-too-human voice. Prime example: "Thaw," which begins with a sentimental synth refrain that's paired with Halo's Nico-like warble — hesitations, missed notes and all. She loops her vocals on "Years" to create a breathy choir, but for most of the record they're left unadorned, sitting naked at the front of the mix, the masterpiece-defining chip in an otherwise elegant sculpture. Halo's is a world of supernatural unease, splitting the difference between the ethereal and the haunted.

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#93 Jimmy Cliff, Rebirth

  • Rebirth album cover

    Rebirth

    Jimmy Cliff
    2012 | Jimmy Cliff - Rebirth

    In 1972, Jimmy Cliff's performance in The Harder They Come introduced U.S. filmgoers to the vibrant desperation ofKingston life, and his inspirational yet tough-minded songs highlighted the movie's soundtrack. Already an established hitmaker at the time, Cliff seemed poised to become Jamaica's first international superstar. Instead he misjudged American audiences, pitching vague homilies and pop professionalism to the AM crowd, allowing Bob Marley to leapfrog past him by assuming a prophetic mantle... and exciting hip FM rockers with his political defiance.

    On Rebirth, Cliff now eyes a more judicious audience: middle-aged rockers weaned on punk and alternative. Shepherded by his producer, Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong, the 64-year-old rides the lithe throwback grooves of reggae revivalists the Aggrolites and Hepcat with a young man's grace, particularly on two smartly chosen covers — the Clash's "The Guns of Brixton," which transplanted Cliff's character from The Harder They Come into a London slum, and Rancid's "Ruby Soho." ("Rebel, Rebel" is good too, but it's not the Bowie tune.) Cliff's political complaints haven't grown much more specific — "World Upside Down" cries out against "Too much injustice," then proposes "love" as the answer. But his exhortations not only retain the warmth and humane spirit of old but have gained depths of pained sympathy with age, especially when he laments how "They took the children's bread/ And gave it to the dogs."

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#92 Pilgrim, Misery Wizard

  • Misery Wizard album cover

    Misery Wizard

    Pilgrim
    Metal Blade Records / The Orchard

    The debut full-length by Rhode Island's Pilgrim may be one of the most heralded doom-metal albums of the year (along with Pallbearer's Sorrow and Extinction), but the members of Pilgrim are completely uninterested in the recent rise of hipster doom, which is probably why Misery Wizard sounds so authentically effective. Pilgrim's apocalyptic tones are generated from piles of Lovecraft, some powerful weed and intensive study of the giants of the first two... generations of sludge, Black Sabbath, Pentagram, Trouble Saint Vitus, Sleep and Electric Wizard. By never breaking above a bloody-kneed crawl (with the exception of the mid-paced "Adventurer"), Pilgrim's lengthy, down-tuned songs maintain a genuine sense of despair and enough rhythmic variation to keep them captivating and transcend the artificial bleakness of many of their peers. When vocalist The Wizard emotes the melodic lines, "In solitude I lie alone/ In the void, a sweet release/ In darkness I can feel at peace" he sounds like he's not play acting, he's crying for catharsis, or at least some good SSRIs. But as the title implies, The Wizard's misery is our gain. Just don't let him near any sharp objects.

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#91 Alice Russell & Quantic, Look Around the Corner

  • Look Around the Corner (with The Combo Barbaro) album cover

    Look Around the Corner (with The Combo Barbaro)

    Quantic & Alice Russell
    2012 | TRU THOUGHTS LTD

    A band manager of my acquaintance used to regularly warn his acts against "flutes and bongos." And he was mostly right. When modern musicians — especially British musicians — start affecting the signifiers of conscious 1970s soul and jazz, it tends to be just that: affectation. Even Tru Thoughts, one of the finest jazz/funk/hip-hop labels in the U.K., has had its misfires on this front, bands and records that may brim over... with virtuosity and good vibes, but fail to match to the heart, guts and, well, soul of their inspirations.

    In fact, even Will "Quantic" Holland, Tru Thoughts's star producer/bandleader, has veered into pastiche in the past. Not here, though; not by a long chalk, even though flutes and bongos abound. Alice Russell has previously voiced many of Quantic's finest moments in England, and in these sessions recorded in Holland's adopted home of Cali, Colombia, over a couple of visits by Russell between 2007 and 2011, it's clear that absence had made the heart grow even fonder.

    Russell's voice remains formidable, but it's her song-writing that comprises the core of this record. The arrangements and production meticulously recreate the feel of Minnie Ripperton and Rotary Connection, or vintage Colombian cumbia, but they are backdrops for the songs with a life all their own, rather than knowing retro nods. There are great stylistic twists, too: "Boogaloo 33" reminds us just how much mambo there was in classic rock 'n' roll, and the opener "Look Around the Corner" delivers the same liquid-sunshine string arrangements and grooves of Nuyorican soul. Through all of this, Russell is Quantic's anchor, singing with her characteristic blend of toughness and smoothness, and investing these impeccably written songs with emotional life.

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#90 Donny McCaslin, Casting for Gravity

  • Casting For Gravity album cover

    Casting For Gravity

    Donny McCaslin
    2012 | eOne Music / Entertainment One Distribution

    Donny McCaslin has long seemed a prime candidate to update and upgrade fusion jazz-rock. Since as far back as Seen From Above in 2000, his tenor saxophone style has been fueled by a rambunctious lyricism that isn't afraid to leave skid marks on his phrases. By "Rock Me," off Declaration in 2009, he'd discovered a fertile and yet phosphorous crossroads between prog-rock and hard bop, and a year later ... href="http://www.emusic.com/album/donny-mccaslin/perpetual-motion/12340045/">fattened the mix by adding electric bassist Tim Lefebvre.

    But Casting For Gravity represents McCaslin's most dogged effort thus far to redefine fusion. Lefebvre is back, paired with powerhouse drummer Mark Guiliana for a potent yet still ruggedly jazz-centric rhythm section, the backbone of the quartet. Versatile keyboardist Jason Lindner occasionally steps out for a spirited solo, but is more influential in helping to determine the texture and in setting and coloring the mood. Along with producer David Binney, a longtime McCaslin ally who also sparingly adds synthesizer, they provide McCaslin with the ability to create grand gestures. There are stop-and-go grooves that escalate in intensity and fall back on themselves in dramatic tension-and-release; tonal layers that morph from liquid silk to electric sizzle and evaporate; rhythmic struts containing melodic swagger and impulsive outbursts.

    There are also ambient, gossamer shadings and trip-hoppy segments and songs (most obviously on the title track, "Love Song for an Echo" and "Alpha and Omega") to which McCaslin credits Richard D. James of Aphex Twin as his inspiration. While they impressively broaden the bouquet, the bolder, burning tracks like "Tension," Binney's "Praia Grande" and the shifting, suite-like "Losing Track of Daytime" feel more impressive for blending the brutish revelry of rock with the harmonic complexity and gymnastic improvisation of jazz. Or, put more simply, "blazing a trail."

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#89 Hundred Waters, Hundred Waters

  • Hundred Waters album cover

    Hundred Waters

    Hundred Waters
    OWSLA

    Gainesville, Florida-based avant-folk outfit Hundred Waters defy easy definitions on their beguiling, absorbing and richly detailed debut album. They've toured with Skrillex and recorded for his OWSLA label, and Hundred Waters has an expensive-sounding attention to production value. But it's cheap to sound expensive these days, and singer-percussionist Samantha Moss's fleetly wandering vocals here, swathed in sinuous electronics, have more in common with those of Björk, Bat for Lashes or another recent... tourmate, Julia Holter. Or a smokier-voiced Joanna Newsom: The twinkling synth tones and winding harmonies of "Boreal" belie a heroic narrative that lets its freak-folk flag. Hundred Waters run deep.

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#88 Peaking Lights, Lucifer

  • Lucifer album cover

    Lucifer

    Peaking Lights
    2012 | Mexican Summer

    Peaking Lights — husband-and-wife duo Aaron Doyes and Indra Dunis — make distinctly modern music of understated joy and optimism. The pair, clearly both avid crate diggers and knob twiddlers, refract their love of Krautrock, dub and analog synth music into an enthusiastically lo-fi jumble. Listening to Lucifer, where Doyes and Dunis irreverently tinker with, poke and prod these influences, can feel like peering down into the basement of a record store... through a kaleidoscope. It's an album of guts-out experimentation tamed into something intimate and sweet.

    The duo have said Lucifer is largely about "play and playfulness" and it's hard to disagree. "Beautiful Son," a lilting ballad about, you guessed it, the couple's new son, is a gently warped groove of electronic pulses buoyed by a spare piano melody and Dunis's simple and tender vocal. On "LO HI," baby Mikko can be heard cooing over a shuffling reggae interlude. Talk about playful. Elsewhere, Lucifer teems with sportive sounds — the bubbly romp of a bass line on the frolicking "Live Love" and the addictive, gurgling groove of "Dream Beat" stretch out nearly seven minutes each and set the rollicking tone.

    Despite the seemingly weighty recipe of obscure influences and tangled electronics, at the heart of Lucifer is a fun, hallucinatory, rampant spirit. It's evident the album was a joy to create and, appropriately, it's a contagious and joyous listen.

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#87 PAWS, Cokefloat!

  • Cokefloat! album cover

    Cokefloat!

    PAWS
    2012 | FatCat Records / The Orchard

    "She wasn't only just my mother," Phillip Taylor slurs over rickety, distorted guitar in the opening seconds of PAWS' Cokefloat!, continuing, "She was my friend, a good friend." As an introduction to the Glasgow trio's rowdily impressive debut album, it could hardly be more fitting, showing off both the band's throwback slacker-rock style and Taylor's blunt, decidedly un-macho lyrics. But on this 13-track, 42-minute set, what separates PAWS from so many other... garage-bound pop-punks printing out Pavement and Sonic Youth guitar tabs is how expertly – and emotively – they assail a relatively wide range of song types. "Sore Tummy" and "Miss American Bookworm" put bubblegum melodies beneath heavily scuzzed noise-pop and throat-rending screams, like early Foo Fighters but more awkward and relatable. While "Get Bent" comes across as a post-Girls acoustic kiss-off to a distant father, the stylishly chiming "Pony" steps back to critique parent-funded underground scenesters. Best of all is mid-tempo anthem "Homecoming," which begins as a bully-baiting comeuppance but morphs into a self-actualizing mission statement recalling recent European tour-mates Japandroids: "Thanks for the punches of encouragement/ I've turned my world into sing-alongs." Shout-alongs, even – punchdrunk and easy to love.

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#86 Roomful of Teeth, Roomful of Teeth

  • Roomful of Teeth album cover

    Roomful of Teeth

    Roomful of Teeth
    New Amsterdam

    Unless you have already seen and heard Roomful of Teeth live, there is little to prepare you for the effect of this avant-garde a cappella octet from New York. Well, actually, there's a lot to prepare you – if you've heard, say, the chanting of Tibetan Buddhist monks, and Bobby McFerrin's Circlesong improvisations, and John Cage's Songbook, and the Swingle Singers – and, let's say, pygmy yodeling and Meredith Monk – then... you're good to go. Roomful of Teeth creates a richly-textured sound that uses a seemingly endless palette of vocal techniques: overtone chant, rhythmic clicks and buzzes, luminous chords and piercing Balkan-style close harmonies, drones, and spoken word (usually to found texts). In the wrong hands, this kind of thing could be dangerous, but Roomful of Teeth has fallen in with the right crowd.

    Released by New Amsterdam Records, which has become a home for the so-called indie-classical movement, the group's debut release includes new works written specifically for the band by some of that movement's leading lights, including composers Judd Greenstein, William Brittelle, Sarah Kirkland Snider and indie rocker Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs. With such a distinguished list of guest composers, it might be a little surprising to find that some of the record's highlights come from the group's own Caroline Shaw, whose suite of pieces named after Baroque dance forms (Passacaglia, Courante, Allemande and Sarabande) is a tour de force of vocal mischief-making, with collage-style spoken texts woven into a web of singing, semi-singing, and other less easily identified vocal noises. Again, in the wrong hands it would be a mess, but Roomful of Teeth is never less than completely musical, even lyrical.

    Snider's "Orchard" is sensuous and beautiful, and possibly a little darker than it seems at first. Greenstein's works are the most reliably rhythmic and will appeal to fans of Meredith Monk; this particular Meredith Monk fan thinks "Montmartre" might be the best of the three. And Brittelle's "Amid the Minotaurs," on the surface one of the most conventionally-structured pieces here, is a truly subversive piece of anti-pop.

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#85 Jeremy Siskind, Finger-Songwriter

  • Finger-Songwriter album cover

    Finger-Songwriter

    Jeremy Siskind
    2012 | Brooklyn Jazz Underground Records / The Orchard

    There is a classic intimacy to the piano, sax, vocals of the Jeremy Siskind's Finger-Songwriter. Siskind's piano is a mix of elegance and storyteller charm. The slow burn of Nancy Harms's vocals is an enchantment oftentimes dispelled with a smoldering vulnerability. On sax, Lucas Pino is drifting smoke, and on clarinet, a brooding melancholia. Siskind's love of literature the inspiration for each album track, he's created an album of songs about heartbreak,... loss, and hope, delivered with a warmth and immediacy that brings the late-night jazz club to the listener.

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#84 Family Band, Grace & Lies

  • Grace and Lies album cover

    Grace and Lies

    Family Band
    2012 | No Quarter / SC Distribution

    Grace and Lies: two ghostly characters envisioned by Family Band vocalist (and former visual artist) Kim Krans as a pair of girlish sirens with wily intentions, capable of quick seduction and even quicker betrayal ("I saw them in a field behind our cabin, singing and slow dancing," she's said). It's a sinister and defeating image, but fitting; Krans and her guitarist husband Jonny Ollsin, formerly of the metal bands Children and S.T.R.E.E.T.S.,... make aching, languorous goth-folk, vaguely reminiscent of the Handsome Family and Beach House, but slower, stranger, more hollow-eyed. Grace and Lies, their second full-length, isn't a record for the nights you have people coming over, or for a midday stroll through the park — Ollsin's stark, velvety guitar and Krans's disconcertingly affect-less vocals are better suited to those very-early-morning, there's-the-sun slumps, the moments when you catch yourself reconsidering every last decision you've ever made. If that sounds impossibly depressing, fear not: Grace and Lies is buoying, a meditation on darkness that yields light. As Krans explains in "Moonbeams," it's the questioning that'll save you: "If you wonder what I need/ I'll tell you just what I need/ But I gotta hear your wondering sounds."

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#83 Pig Destroyer, Book Burner

  • Book Burner album cover

    Book Burner

    Pig Destroyer
    2012 | Relapse Records

    Like other extreme acts, Pig Destroyer write songs about murder, insanity and mayhem, but there's something grimier and more disconcerting about their tunes than your average Cannibal Corpse gorefest. With the release of 2004's Terrifyer, the band was already rising above the constraints of traditional grindcore, incorporating industrial sound bites, death-groove riffs, doomy atmospherics and math-metal tempo changes into their schizophrenic songs. Brutally misanthropic, their songs grimly reflect the rage, intensity and... social disconnect of minds on the edge. Book Burner is no different: "The Bug" begins with a dissonant audio collage, over which a demented voice declares, "I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse" and from there evolves through cacophonous blast beats, propulsive riffs, and pained moans. Equally nightmare-inducing is the opening track, "Sis," where vocalist J.R. Hayes (ex-Agoraphobic Nosebleed) roars, "My sister's dangerous/ She climbs the barbed wire fence/ Changes clothes in the back seat/ Medical gown to red jeans." There is nothing "pretty" about their music, but visceral savagery has its own allure.

    Book Burner delivers all flesh and no fat; Pig Destroyer attack with pinpoint precision, plowing through 19 cuts in just under 33 minutes and mapping out when to pummel, trudge and lacerate. The tag team of acrobatic drummer Adam Jarvis (who also plays in Misery Index) and guitarist and producer Scott Hull (ex-Anal Cunt) both boast the ability to turn sick, horrific and off-kilter clamor into coherent, memorable compositions.

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#82 Sea of Bees, Orangefarben

  • Orangefarben album cover

    Orangefarben

    Sea of Bees
    2012 | Team Love Records

    When I was 11 my parents sent me to a hellhole of a sleepaway camp where I was miserable (one of the counselors made me eat tomatoes – gross!). It was at that terrible camp where I first heard the song "Leaving on a Jet Plane" played over and over, and to this day I have a Pavlovian response to those familiar lite rock folk chords: When I hear them I'm overtaken... by homesickness. It's fitting, then, that Sea of Bees' sophomore effort – a tearjerker of a breakup album written by Julie Ann Bee in response to the demise of her first relationship after coming out to her friends and family – features a lovely (and much hipper) reinterpretation of the song (simply called "Leaving") that zeroes in on that same panicky feeling, that same sense of dread. Homesickness and heartbreak, after all, come from that same sad place located in the gut-area.

    With sunny-sounding guitars and a sweet, ethereal voice that belies the agony of which she sings, Bee makes Orangefarben a meditation on mind over matter, the importance of gasping "I'll be fine" again and again, even when it's clear you're not. "And I know I shouldn't think those thoughts/ but I've gone ahead and thought those thoughts and I'm fine," she confesses on "Teeth," as if convincing herself that the worst may be over, that time might go about its business and provide some relief. And if that grief is never fully eradicated, if she still finds herself longing for the comfort and safety of old attachments (oh, the sad letters I wrote to my parents from summer camp!), then at least the baggage she lugs around with her will be beautiful.

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#81 Christian Mistress, Possession

  • Possession album cover

    Possession

    Christian Mistress
    2012 | Relapse Records

    The full-length debut byOlympia,Washington, quintet Christian Mistress is more than a savage, irony-free '70s metal flashback. It's an honest and lovingly composed epic that combines the sludge of Black Sabbath, the guitar harmonies of Judas Priest and the amphetamine bursts of Motörhead.

    Several elements levitate Christian Mistress above their peers. The most blatant is vocalist Christine Davis, who unleashes a barrage of skin-stripped melodies that support even the heaviest songs. Equally important are... the band's immaculate arrangements, which range from thuggish to progressive, recalling cult heroes like Angel Witch and Diamond Head as much as Priest and Sabbath. Also, while the Mistress clearly love great metal, they also covet classic and southern rock (check out the ZZ Top-style lick in the chorus of "Black to Gold" and the gloomy slide guitar on the acoustic intro of "The Way Beyond"). Possession offers NWOBHM and doom fans a dragon's lair of gems to behold, but to pigeonhole Christian Mistress as sword and sorcery "retro metal" is a crime worthy of a squeeze in the ol' iron maiden.

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#80 Glen Hansard, Rhythm & Repose

  • Rhythm And Repose album cover

    Rhythm And Repose

    Glen Hansard
    2012 | Anti/Epitaph

    There's irony in the fact that Glen Hansard's first solo album comes just a week after the Broadway musical Once triumphed at the Tony Awards. 2007's film-version original of that musical, starring Hansard and the wispy Czech pianist Marketa Irgolová, brought the romantic and creative duo widespread fame. The duo, who eventually dubbed themselves The Swell Season, began recording together in 2008, but the love affair didn't last: They announced... their breakup after touring behind 2009's Strict Joy, and Irglová married producer Tim Iseler in 2011. Hansard, meanwhile, has been living in New York, keeping an eye on Once while breaking in a new set of collaborators. While the end product isn't leagues away from his work with Irglová or his longtime band, The Frames, Rhythm and Repose steers away from the latter's anguished anthems and the former's fragile harmonies.

    R&R is a heartbreak album through and through, but it leans more towards self-reflection than self-laceration, like a more melancholy, less pissed-off Blood on the Tracks. (It's not surprising that the late Levon Helm was asked to guest on a track.) Those sifting for shards of autobiography will seize on lines like "We talked about talk of a gold ring/ You brought me one step closer to the heart of things" and "We married on an August night/ No priest, no church, just the big moon shining bright," from "You Will Become" and "Maybe Not Tonight." Unless you've got a chronic weakness for Irish melodrama, the album's front-loaded breast-beating starts to wear thin after a while; it's hard to hear "The Storm, It's Coming," nestled just after the midpoint, and suppress the temptation to remark that it's already done come.

    Fortunately, Hansard pulls out of his emotional nosedive with "What Are We Gonna Do," where a female voice (not Irglová's) lifts him out of his torpor and sets him on the path to recovery. He's still only beginning to heal by the time Rhythm and Repose draws to a close; a little "Revelate" style catharsis would have done much to lift the album out of its perpetual doldrums. But its limited palette is a lovely one, sustaining a mood that lingers like the bittersweet scent of lost love.

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#79 METZ, METZ

  • METZ album cover

    METZ

    METZ
    2012 | Sub Pop Records

    On their debut album, Canadian trio METZ has delivered a sound that's reasonably scarce in 2012: post-hardcore, pre-grunge, noise-addled punk rock. You can hear the influence of the Jesus Lizard in particular everywhere: in Alex Edkins's strained screams; in Hayden Menzies's crashing drum assault; in their relentless wave of screeching guitars, in the frenzied pace of "Wet Blanket," in the sludgy industrial instrumental "Nausea," and in their grim, dour lyrics. But the... sheer volume and force of the music don't take away from their musicianship – no individual element is covered by fuzz, thanks in part to production work from Graham Walsh (of Holy Fuck) and Alexander Bonenfant (who was behind the boards of the first two Crystal Castles records). The production shows off an intricate variety of textures lurking beneath the noise: On "Get Off," a chaotic drum barrage toward the end of the track is paired with a wavering high-pitched screech of white noise, bolstering an already-urgent moment. It's small details like that on METZ that sharpen the band's anger and attack, elevating them from your average Touch & Go apostles into a seething, unique operation.

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#78 Lotus Plaza, Spooky Action at a Distance

  • Spooky Action at a Distance album cover

    Spooky Action at a Distance

    Lotus Plaza
    2012 | kranky / The Orchard

    That Lockett Pundt, he'll sneak up on you. In Deerhunter, frontman Bradford Cox's outsize personality makes him an easy lightning rod, but Pundt has played a hardly less electrifying role as the band's guitarist. His first solo album as Lotus Plaza, 2009's The Floodlight Collective, was woozy, winsome dream-pop that confirmed Pundt's familiar gifts for ethereal sonic textures but only hinted at his growing strength as a songwriter. This follow-up is strikingly... the work of the man who wrote "Desire Lines," the rousing centerpiece of Deerhunter's peak so far, 2010's Halcyon Digest. Crystalline guitar arpeggios meet precise krautrock pulses, time-bending codas – and ear-catching '60s pop melodies. Wistful stoners' anthem "Monoliths" distills the album's shoegaze-informed style most concisely, but equally essential non-album single "Come Back" best previews the mesmerizing yet propulsive live show. Proof soft-spoken daydreamers can pump their fists, too.

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#77 Amit Friedman, Sunrise

  • Sunrise album cover

    Sunrise

    Amit Friedman Sextet
    2012 | Origin Records / The Orchard

    Creating his own mix of jazz and Middle Eastern music, saxophonist Amit Friedman offers a debut album of richly-textured tunes full of bombast and beauty. The use of additional percussion and an oudist brings intricacy and detail to the music, but it's Friedman's crafting of simple yet vivid melodies that elevates the songs to something very special, a splendid balance between the complex and the catchy. Furthermore, the addition of a string... trio lifts songs up to euphoric heights, but amidst all that soaring, Friedman doesn't forget to let his jazz ensemble swing. This is the kind of majestic album that'll sweep listeners up out of their seats.

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#76 Gonjasufi, MU.ZZ.LE

  • MU.ZZ.LE album cover

    MU.ZZ.LE

    Gonjasufi
    2012 | EP/SINGLE

    It's one of the more unlikely stories from U.S.beat culture: San Diego's Sumach Ecks moves to Las Vegasto work as a yoga teacher, but not before contributing an edgy, Billie Holiday-like vocal to one track on Flying Lotus's 2008 debut Los Angeles. Impressed with his distinctive scatting, Warp Records offer him his own deal. It's a nice creation myth, and Ecks, who records under the suitably wigged-out moniker Gonjasufi, has thus far... lived up to its billing.

    Warp Records are classifying this as an EP, but MU.ZZ.LE – the follow-up (in 10 short tracks) to 2010's A Sufi and a Killer - sounds in many ways like the bigger record. Taped somewhere out in the Mojave, this dubbed-out desert music occasionally trips into emotional ditches that are bleak enough to soundtrack an end-times movie like The Road. MU.ZZ.LE sounds like it was recorded on filthy equipment salvaged from RadioShack dumpsters, with Gonjasufi's searing, blurted vocals dissolving immediately upon emerging from the speaker cones. Vinyl flecks dot the opener "White Picket Fence," whose dread-fuelled electric piano chords are reminiscent of Tricky's mid-'90s debut. "Rubberband' is slow, sad and stately as a Procol Harum anthem, strained by DJ Shadow through a sieve of hiss; while "Blaksuit" is a chopped-and-screwed, syrupy jam over garage punk guitar chops.

    You never quite know if MU.ZZ.LE's gloopy, ramshackle character is painstakingly crafted or the genuine record of serendipitous moments of improvised dementia; whatever, it breathes new life into the corpse of "triphop" and confirms Gonjasufi as a gloriously eccentric new broken beatmaster.

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#75 Neurosis, Honor Found in Decay

  • Honor Found In Decay album cover

    Honor Found In Decay

    Neurosis
    2012 | Neurot / Revolver

    Like the band's last album, 2007's Given to the Rising, Neurosis's 10th studio album in 27 years, Honor Found in Decay, is a cinematic, multi-dimensional exploration of texture and emotion that weaves together doom-metal, atmospheric rock, dark psychedelia, tribal metal and proto-industrial. But the experimental post-metal pioneers also delve deep into the apocalyptic folk that frontmen Scott Kelly and Steve Von Till have explored on their recent solo albums. "At the... Well" starts with slow, reverberant guitar strums and cryptic existential musings: "The blaze of a Helios sky/ Rage will blossom into iron/Blind as a worm in the earth." And "Casting of the Ages" opens with dual acoustic guitars and deep, rattling vocals atop a lolling bass line and a lazy accordion before sparking into a thudding, trudging doom trek.

    Honor Found in Decay is hardly uplifting; here's the opening line from the propulsive opening track"We All Rage in Gold": "I walk into the water to wash the blood from my feet." Yet the bands presentation is so artful and symphonic it reveals sheer beauty in lyrical hopelessness and inspiration in rhythmic ugliness. Unlike many post-metal albums that seesaw between reflective calm and turbulent chaos, Neurosis's dualism is more subtle and natural, and at times almost spiritual in its nihilism.

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#74 Ab-Soul, Control System

  • Control System album cover

    Control System

    Ab-Soul
    2012 | TopDawg Ent. / TuneCore

    Ab-Soul is the resident word-nerd of Black Hippy, the rap crew that includes the Dr. Dre-anointed young rap prince Kendrick Lamar and the brooding, heavy-lidded, ex-Crip leader Schoolboy Q. He's easily the most cerebral of a fairly brainy crew, and on the ferociously excellent Control System, he produces an immersive, dark and wide-ranging piece of work that takes listeners to Saturn and Andromeda ("Pineal Gland"), sardonically salutes Obama as a "puppet" ("Terrorist... Threat"), breaks our heart with a devastating first-person tale of young love and loss ("The Book of Soul"), puffs out some post-Tribe Called Quest weed clouds ("Bohemian Grove") and oh, also finds room for a sex joke as goofy as "She got that magical vag/ Let me hocus poke."

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#73 Lilacs & Champagne, Lilacs & Champagne

  • Lilacs & Champagne album cover

    Lilacs & Champagne

    Lilacs & Champagne
    2012 | Mexican Summer

    Alex Hall and Emil Amos are the personalities behind Grails, a Portland instrumental rock collective that's happily traversed so much sonic terrain over the past decade and a half that they'd seemingly make side projects unnecessary. But where Grails absorbs and perverts genres, Hall and Amos's self-titled debut as Lilacs & Champagne is an act of deconstruction and rebuilding: The duo were inspired by Madlib's dank crate-digging and sample-stitching technique, and they... also share a love for similar source material. Unquestionably stoned in demeanor, L&C leans heavy on underground hip-hop, Krautrock, '70s psych and even an occasion Jayne Mansfield recording to create ambient music for the kind of people who find the idea of ambient music boring, or a solution for anyone who wished the sample-happy travelogues of Avalanches or Quiet Village transported them to somewhere darker.

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#72 Pop 1280, The Horror

  • The Horror album cover

    The Horror

    Pop. 1280
    2012 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution

    "Burn, burn/ burn the worm," goes the ominous chorus of The Horror's pissed-and-pulverizing opener, the perhaps-unsurprisingly titled "Burn the Worm." Subtle, Pop. 1280 is not. But you don't really need a gentle hand when your band regularly and fiercely recalls the finer moments of Liars, the Birthday Party and Swans. Where 2010's The Grid EP sported the occasional synth-heavy hook, The Horror is positively relentless, piling brutal rhythmic grinding on top of... lyrical references to dead people, bodies, death, and, well, the kind of horror that's often reserved for the cinema. Perhaps it's the addition of Twin Stumps former drummer Zach Ziemann or the apparent improvisational, on-the-spot writing process that created The Horror, but the album is a relatively bleak and corrosive listen - an accomplishment for a band that's previously broached topics including bed bugs in low-income housing projects and dystopian future worlds. But that's also part of the fun. Like their fellow wall punchers the Men, Pygmy Shrews and White Suns - bands the Village Voice has credited with drudging up the pigfuck spirit of yore - Pop. 1280 is making quite a glorious racket. If you can't stand it, maybe you should get out of the basement.

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#71 Lianne La Havas, Is Your Love Big Enough?

  • Is Your Love Big Enough? (Deluxe Edition) album cover

    Is Your Love Big Enough? (Deluxe Edition)

    Lianne La Havas
    2012 | Nonesuch

    While inspired by the more robust Who Is Jill Scott?, Lianne La Havas's promising debut Is Your Love Big Enough? ponders dating an older man (fluttering ditty "Age") and lobs bitter accusations of betrayal (downbeat duet "No Room for Doubt") over finger-picked, reverb-tinged guitar tinged. Over top, La Havas's vocals beckon like flickering candlelight.

#70 Frankie Rose, Interstellar

  • Interstellar album cover

    Interstellar

    Frankie Rose
    2012 | Slumberland Records / The Orchard

    Frankie Rose spent the early part of her musical career as a member of a ragtag coven of Brooklyn retro-garage bands, including Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts and Dum Dum Girls. Interstellar, her second solo album since moving on from those groups, shows exactly how to move your music out of the garage: Clean out all the grit and grease, put on some makeup, imagine yourself as a dragon's teardrop... on the moonscape of a Yes album cover, and blast off into a colder space. An appreciation for early-'80s new wave blankets Interstellar with a certain iciness - drum machines, oscillating keyboards, brittle-sounding guitars - but it's not frozen solid. Rose's voice unlocks these songs like a key; rather than apply the steely, remote effects given to so many electronic-pop vocalists, producer Le Chev (whose very name makes this album seem even more tilted toward the '80s) keeps Rose's voice at a tender, close distance. Though some fairy-dusted moments occur (such as the feather-light title track or the strange wood-sprite chanting on "The Fall"), this isn't a Cocteau Twins record. Rose has pop songs to sing, from winning A-side "Know Me," with its brisk Smiths rhythms, to the I-am-a-bird-now ballad "Wings To Fly." There are big, warm choruses here, and an almost childlike sense of joy and dreaming, that would seem to clash with Interstellar's cold-pressed instrumentation . But mismatched styles never seem to bother Frankie Rose - her music contains galaxies.

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#69 Chris Cohen, Overgrown Path

#68 Liars, WIXIW

  • WIXIW album cover

    WIXIW

    Liars
    2012 | MUTE

    With every release, invigorated both by self-imposed limits and half-baked experiments, Liars discover new aesthetic worlds. Consider the 30-minute dance-punk-to-drone closer "This Dust Makes That Mud" off their 2001 debut They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top. Nothing specific about that song, just you know, that it happened. And chew on the go-for-broke concepts of 2004's They Were Wrong So We Drowned (witches, dude) and 2010's... Sisterworld (Los Angeles, man).

    On WIXIW, the goal is retrofitting the past's electronic pop and dance presets into rhythmic, art-damaged dirges. Save for acid-squelch rave-up "Brats," WIXIW's songs are all nervous tension and no cathartic release. Imagine the brutal minimalism of Iggy Pop's The Idiot sharing a slow dance with the transcendent cheapness of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 85-92. As sun-faded synths unfold on opening track "The Exact Colour of Doubt," you almost expect lead singer Angus Andrew to croon, "I want my MTV." So retrolicious, and therefore, totally right now. For the first time since their debut, Liars sound of-the-moment rather than out on a limb. That may be the only affront left to savvy listeners anticipating the latest sea change from these puckish, post-post punks.

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#67 Miguel Zenon & Laurent Coq, Rayuela

  • Rayuela album cover

    Rayuela

    Laurent Coq & Miguel Zenon
    2012 | Sunnyside / Entertainment One Distribution

    Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar's 1963 classic Rayuela – in English, Hopscotch – is a fragmented tale of a Bohemian adrift on two continents. To underscore his hero's dislocation and odd thought processes, Cortázar maps a zigzag alternative route through the book for adventurous readers. On their Rayuela, Puerto Rican alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón and French pianist Laurent Coq variously evoke the novel's playfulness with language, mobile-like structure, transatlantic breadth and fascination with... jazz, as well as the bittersweet nature of expatriate life. Ably abetted by instrument switchers Dana Leong on cello and trombone and Dan Weiss on drums and tabla, they make smart, inventive, heartfelt music.

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#66 Flying Lotus, Until the Quiet Comes

  • Until The Quiet Comes album cover

    Until The Quiet Comes

    Flying Lotus
    2012 | Warp Records

    What was Flying Lotus supposed to do, twist our synapses till they turned blue every single time out? Please – not even Hendrix could have done that. British DJ Mary Anne Hobbs may have declared FlyLo Jimi's modern equivalent, but Until the Quiet Comes, his fourth album, plays like something Jimi didn't get to stay around and make: both reflective and madcap, full of details scurrying in the margins. Take "Tiny... Tortures," which rides a near-subcutaneous bass pulse, twitchy, subtle clicks and clacks, ruminative jazz guitar flecks and flurries. Is it fusion? Maybe, but it doesn't show off the way most fusion does – it's too busy sneaking up on you.

    Seventies cosmic jazz has always been a FlyLo touchstone, and his forays into it can feel ponderous, such as on the brief "DMT Song," on which Thundercat's vocals are echoed into gauze over glittery electric piano and twisting double bass. But mostly he's impish, as is evident even on broader-stroked tracks such as the overtly daffy "Pretty Boy Strut," where a walking bass line meets cartoon-voiced keyboards and insistent electro-handclaps. There are fewer giant flourishes of the sort that marked 2008's Los Angeles or 2010's Cosmogramma, though. Even the big guest stars—Erykah Badu on the circularly rhythmic "See Thru to U," Radiohead's Thom Yorke on the dense whorl of "Electric Candyman" – are ingredients he stirs into the mix with impunity. As always, the signature is FlyLo's alone.

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#65 Screaming Females, Ugly

  • Ugly album cover

    Ugly

    Screaming Females
    2012 | Don Giovanni Records / Believe Digital

    New Brunswick, New Jersey's Screaming Females have turned out roaring punk album after roaring punk album since 2006, amid booking hundreds of their own shows – some in basements and others in massive club venues warming up for the likes of Ted Leo, the Dead Weather and Garbage. Their Steve Albini-produced fifth LP Ugly is a darker, less melodic affair than its 2010 predecessor, which thrived on a perfect balance of... hooky choruses and frontwoman Marissa Paternoster's masterful guitar acrobatics. Paternoster hasn't lost any of the full-throated, low-alto howl, best showcased in "Rotten Apple" ("Hell is within me/ Hell's all around me now," she snarls), and as she bellows "I want you to tell me to expire" in "Expire." Ugly is long and it can feel that way, at 14 tracks, almost 54 minutes, but the high points ("Expire," "Help Me," the acoustic, string-backed closer "It's Nice") are high enough to make it worthwhile.

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#64 Bowerbirds, The Clearing

  • The Clearing album cover

    The Clearing

    Bowerbirds
    2012 | Dead Oceans / SC Distribution

    In "Overcome with Light," Bowerbirds' Phil Moore and Beth Tacular sing, "Yes, we had some hard work, but now it's right." Their lush third LP, The Clearing, is about unexpected challenges: Tacular's near-death experience; the ending and rekindling of the couple's relationship; building a home by hand. And despite all of that, they pulled through with their best work yet: clear, full instrumentation and a celebration of new beginnings.

#63 Ty Segall Band, Slaughterhouse

  • Slaughterhouse album cover

    Slaughterhouse

    Ty Segall Band
    2012 | In The Red / Revolver

    Each Ty Segall record is a new outfit in the garage-rock prodigy's ever-increasing wardrobe. Slaughterhouse, his latest quick change, is the first release billed under his touring band, a group which includes punky wunderkinds Charlie Moothart and Mikal Cronin. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that this is a group that's been traveling the road together, Slaughterhouse is a loose, scrappy set. Some songs are given ample jamming room ("I Bought My Eyes"), while... others are haunted-house screamers ("Slaughterhouse"). There are inspired covers with humorous studio banter ("All right, here we go, extra fast," Segall says by way of introducing "Diddy Wah Diddy."), and staring-contest noise parties (the 10-plus-minute "Fuzz War"). It's a glorious grab bag, uncouth and unkempt in its exuberance, but with a worn-in feeling derived from the players' comfort with each other.

    Like he did on his Singles 2007-2010 compilation, Segall forgoes the catchier, cleaner vocals he's sometimes showcased, opting instead for the feral yawls and yelps that earned the young Segall so many comparisons to the late Jay Reatard early on. Elsewhere, he does his best, fuzz-soaked Led Sabbath impression ("Wave Goodbye"), and only occasionally hints at the comfy, Nuggets-influenced jaunts he's so good at ("Tell Me What's Inside Your Heart," "Muscle Man"). Slaughterhouse isn't exactly a consistent record, but that doesn't exactly seem to be the point, either. If Segall's going to keep trying on new, inspired costumes every few months, who's complaining?

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#62 Grizzly Bear, Shields

  • Shields album cover

    Shields

    Grizzly Bear
    2012 | Warp Records

    Remember when Grizzly Bear was Edward Droste's solo project? Didn't think so. And that's okay; while the disconnect between Droste's bedroom-pop beginnings and the band's longtime status as a democracy – with Daniel Rossen at the helm half the time – has been a source of tension in the past, their third album as a full-fledged quartet is sleek and self-assured. Or as Droste admitted in a Pitchfork interview this past June,... "As we get older, more confident and more mature, we're becoming more comfortable with stepping on each other's toes."

    That doesn't mean that Shields is marred by muddled ideas and misdirected hostility. Thanks to several "songwriting retreats" in New York and Cape Cod, the effort is decidedly collaborative, an autumnal listen that feels alive and full of welcome left turns rather than heavy-lidded and hazy. The LP's leadoff single ("Sleeping Ute") is a perfect example of the group's push-and-pull dynamics – a tidal wave of rippled rhythms, honeyed harmonies and burbling synths. The rest of the record is much more subtle yet no less effective, as Rossen's rich melodies and spare riffs play a perfect counterpoint to Droste's fragile, emotionally-charged confessionals. Repeat listens reveal the hours that went into every hook, too, whether the finish line is reached through windswept strings and woozy jazz ("What's Wrong") or one long walk on the beach, a slow build that seems to be on the verge of a total breakdown ("Sun In Your Eyes"). Grizzly Bear emerges unscathed, however, as ready to assume the mantle of Brooklyn's most promising crossover band as they've ever been.

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#61 Woods, Bend Beyond

  • Bend Beyond album cover

    Bend Beyond

    Woods
    2012 | Woodsist / Revolver

    When Jeremy Earl left Brooklyn for the tiny upstate town where he grew up – Warwick, New York, a rural, rail-side area best known for its annual Applefest – a few years ago, his decision wasn't surprising so much as long overdue. And not just because dude's the founder of a ramshackle rock band called Woods and a lo-fi-leaning label that goes by the name Woodsist. Forestry nods aside, Earl has always... seemed like a hippie who's constantly lumped in with "hipsters" – a soft-spoken Neil Young fan who'd rather hang out with his cat, a considerable wooden owl collection, and a freshly packed bong than a poorly ventilated house full of cool kids.

    More important, however, is his musical vision, which has long hinted at but lurked just below the level of psych-steeped greatness that's achieved on Bend Beyond. Led by Earl's lovelorn falsetto and loose, fiery riffs, Woods' seventh album offsets its tales of frustration (lots of "it's so fucking hard" talk) with red-blooded arrangements and a clean mix that brings the frontman's hooks right into focus. It helps that the well-oiled quartet saved their jam-band tendencies for the stage and let their individual parts shine at the same time instead, from the rambunctious organ rolls and roaring guitar leads of "Find Them Empty" to the curve-hugging rhythm section of the title track. It's inviting enough to make us big city folks briefly ponder our own move to Deliverance-town, USA Well – almost.

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#60 White Lung, Sorry

  • sorry album cover

    sorry

    White Lung
    2012 | Deranged Records / The Orchard

    White Lung's pummeling second album, Sorry, isn't for the faint of heart. "I'm the disease that you've already caught," frontwoman Mish Way spits on "I Rot," one of 10 punk bursts driven by tension-filled riffs, frantic drum assaults and macabre lyrics. Yet Sorry's violent imagery is also deeply poetic – more Plath than Poe – and the album has plenty of melodic moments (unexpected chorus harmonies on "Bag," lively guitar spikes on... "Take The Mirror" and "St. Dad") to temper the aggression. Urgent and inspiring.

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#59 Ravi Coltrane, Spirit Fiction

  • Spirit Fiction album cover

    Spirit Fiction

    Ravi Coltrane
    2012 | BLUE NOTE

    It's been a little more than two decades since saxophonist Ravi Coltrane fully broke into the top-shelf jazz world (as a member of drummer Elvin Jones's Jazz Machine), thus finally overcoming the daunting task of emerging from the shadow of his father, jazz god John Coltrane (who passed when Ravi was two). Now in his 40s, Coltrane continues to develop as an artist; for demonstration of his singular tenor/soprano saxophone voice and... his creativity and intimacy as a leader, look no further than his superb Blue Note Records debut, Spirit Fiction. He employs two primo bands as the anchors of the sessions: one, his longtime quartet of pianist Luis Perdomo, bassist Drew Gress and drummer E.J. Strickland and the quintet he used on his 2002 sophomore album From the Round Box; the other, trumpeter Ralph Alessi, pianist Geri Allen, bassist Lonnie Plaxico and drummer Eric Harland.

    Produced by Joe Lovano, Blue Note's modern-day tenor titan, Spirit Fiction shows how forward-thinking Coltrane has become as he continues to steer clear of standard formulas and aims straight for imaginative contrasts and convergences. He experiments with tunes developed by disparate layers of improvisation, notably on the doubleheader of the scrambling "Roads Cross" and the sprightly "Cross Roads", where pairs of players from his quartet are recorded individually with the results spliced together. Coltrane also opts to record in a variety of instrumental formats, including duo ("Spring & Hudson," an original with Strickland that bursts with brio), trio (a redolent take on Paul Motian's "Fantasm" with Lovano and Allen), and sextet (as Lovano joins in again with the quintet's rollicking-to-reflective spin through Ornette Coleman's "Check Out Time").

    On Coltrane's ballad "the change, my girl," his tenor delivers a lyrical mix of melancholy and joy, and on the three Alessi-penned tunes, the two ebulliently converse and criss-cross. As a saxophonist, Coltrane may not be a flashy, blow-with-bravado type, but his playing communicates on levels ranging from the vigorous to the ruminative. Spirit Fiction is yet another giant step in his maturation.

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#58 How to Dress Well, Total Loss

  • Total Loss album cover

    Total Loss

    How To Dress Well
    2012 | Acéphale / S.C. Distribution

    When one-man R&B deconstructionist Tom Krell, aka How to Dress Well, released his 2010 debut Love Remains, he was one of a a host of bedroom artists – Krell, plus James Blake, the Weeknd and others – re-interpreting FM-radio slow jams and twisting the slinky genre into new shapes. Since then, the number of contemporaries has grown while unchartered paths have shrunk, so it's commendable that two years later, Krell has distinguished... himself again, this time with tighter arrangements and more substantive lyrics.

    While Love Remains' longing murmurs and blown-out falsettos kept listeners at a distance, Total Loss sees Krell laying out his diary pages in tight close-up for everyone to read. Written while he was grieving the death of his best friend and recovering from a recent breakup, songs like "Cold Nites," "Running Back" and "How Many?" bare the heartbreak in Krell's somber croon. Without the low fidelity of his previous offerings (and with help from the xx producer Rodaidh McDonald) it's clear that the scratches and crackles weren't a cover for a lack of a voice: Krell's falsetto soars when refined. It's a remarkable evolution: Somewhere in the time he was fine-tuning his warped take on the genre, How to Dress Well has moved towards becoming a real R&B artist.

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#57 Yellow Ostrich, Strange Land

  • Strange Land album cover

    Strange Land

    Yellow Ostrich
    2012 | Barsuk Records

    Yellow Ostrich mastermind Alex Schaaf has said that the title of his new album refers to his move in 2010 from Wisconsin to New York City. Yet after making last year's The Mistress under humble bedroom-recording conditions, Schaaf upgraded to a professional studio for Strange Land, and it's that unknown habitat he seems most intent on exploring here. Opener "Elephant King" shows his hand straightaway, riding in on a sparkling guitar figure... that slowly accumulates all kinds of indie-pop filigree: harmonized singing, sustained horn tones, and an escalating parade-drum beat by Michael Tapper, whose consistently inventive percussion work comes to distinguish Strange Land in a way that recalls Steven Drozd's avant-Bonzo beats on The Soft Bulletin. Elsewhere, Schaaf builds intricate loops from tiny vocal slivers ("Marathon Runner") and chops up Tapper's playing into a kind of nimble white-guy funk ("I Want Yr Love"). None of this high-end studio tricknology distracts the frontman from making memorable melodies, as the elemental fuzz-rock gem "Stay at Home" demonstrates; "Daughter," too, should satisfy Built to Spill fans impatiently waiting for that band's new one. But it's definitely a kick to hear him let Yellow Ostrich run wild.

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#56 Wymond Miles, Under the Pale Moon

  • Under the Pale Moon album cover

    Under the Pale Moon

    Wymond Miles
    2012 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution

    When he wasn't conjuring dust storms of noir-ish, twanging guitar with San Francisco garage-rockers Fresh & Onlys, Wymond Miles was quietly stockpiling his own songs. Not that we're sure where he finds the time: aside from the building buzz of F&Os, Miles earned a degree in the humanities and also became a father. Earlier, he released Earth Has Doors, which evinced a deep appreciation for the lyricism of Scott Walker. His full-length... debut is darker and more somber than the Fresh & Only's; Miles indulges his inner goth, singing of torn desires and fragile flesh on opener "Strange Desire" and sounding at times like Robert Smith fronting the Bad Seeds. Though his words tend towards the lugubrious, it's Miles's hooks, expert six-string playing and tactful placement of sounds that make the album a luminous whole. See how the theremin sweeps in during "The Thirst" or how the guitar feedback upticks on "Lazarus Rising" before receding to its original jangle. Perhaps his strategy is laid out best on "Singing the Ending," where he croons about "go(ing) gentle into that goodnight."

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#55 Esperanza Spalding, Radio Music Society

  • Radio Music Society album cover

    Radio Music Society

    Esperanza Spalding
    2012 | Heads Up

    Now Esperanza Spalding is making even the Grammys look hip. In her first outing since she was named Best New Artist in 2011, Spalding puts a dozen tunes into her stylistic spin cycle for a tour de force of pop glitter, jazz swing, folk moodiness and a dollop of hip-hop swagger on the dense-but-dazzling Radio Music Society. This is the work of an artist who refuses to choose, mocking genre labels with... guileless ambition. (Her original concept was to pair this disc with the classically-oriented, string-laden Chamber Music Society back in 2010, until her record company convinced her the menu would be too large for public consumption.)

    By ignoring boundaries, Spalding upends expectations. She enlists august jazz tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano to provide a dulcet lilt to a Stevie Wonder cover ("I Can't Help It") and hip-hop titan Q-Tip to play glockenspiel and co-produce the jazzy tribute to her native Portland, Oregon("City of Roses"). Assembling a phalanx of 23 players and vocalists for a flashy, powerhouse "Radio Song," she sings about the giddiness of being seized by a new jam coming out of the speakers as her own electric bass wends its way through the song's buoyant center. Three songs later, with just the sparse backing of organist James Weidman, she tells the saga of a man falsely imprisoned for 30 years on a bogus murder conviction. On Radio, both extremes are fair game.

    As was the case with Chamber Music Society, Spalding's vocals are her ace in the hole. Her range is limited, but her assured and agile phrasing is ideal for carrying out her talk/sung approach. It enables her to credibly pull off a bluesy, big-band-like torch song ("Hold On Me") and to surf atop a youth choir on the anthem "Black Gold." And then there's "Vague Suspicions," a dense and sophisticated number with Jack DeJohnette on drums, about the tacit accommodations Americans make to avoid thinking too much about the consequences of drone strikes and the other elements of remote-control war. It's a grim, simmering number, its closing moments featuring Spalding sarcastically cooing, "Next on channel 4: celebrity gossip." It's a typically astute and self-aware take from an artist who is the closest thing jazz has to a young celebrity.

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#54 Baroness, Yellow & Green

  • Yellow & Green album cover

    Yellow & Green

    Baroness
    2012 | Relapse Records

    Before the release of Yellow & Green, Baroness frontman John Baizley stressed in interviews that the records were going to take some risks and expand the band's sound, partly by being more direct and placing greater emphasis on songwriting. Fans of the metal band's notoriously complex music weren't quite sure how to take this assessment; their responses tended toward wariness and curiosity mixed with guarded optimism.

    As it turns out, the... double album Yellow & Green is pretty much just how Baizley described it: The burly metal fury of previous Baroness efforts has settled into something far more daring and diverse. Look no further than Yellow's "Twinkler" and "Cocainium." The former's primary sounds are throaty flute, stately acoustic guitar and stacked vocals — think Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven" at a Renaissance Faire, or a lusher version of Blue Record's "Steel That Sleeps The Eye." In contrast, the latter's tar-bubble riffs and oil-slick keyboards rumble like Iron Butterfly, before the song explodes into a fuzzed-out The Sword/Metallica hybrid.

    Although this simmering tension between aggression and restraint permeates both albums, Yellow is more focused and accessible. A nimble bass line gives "Little Things" an elastic quality, while the cattle-stampede riffage of "March to the Sea" is classic Baroness. Still, these tunes exhibit impressive concision; even the turbocharged stoner rockers "Sea Lungs" and "Take My Bones Away" contain discernible (and catchy!) hooks.

    Green overall is far moodier, slower and quieter than Yellow. The instrumental "Stretchmarker" is heart-wrenching psych-folk, while the ominous "Collapse" is nothing more than a tangled arrangement of folky acoustic guitar, some surging sound effects and a patient kick-drum thump. Other interesting influences crop up, too: The melancholy "Mtns. (The Crown & Anchor)" conjures Thrice's brooding post-hardcore musings, and the watery guitar textures of "Foolsong" and Green's closing instrumental track, "If I Forget Thee, Lowcountry" are reminiscent of Explosions in the Sky.

    It's obvious these stylistically sprawling albums represent the next step for Baroness: Like Metallica once did, or, more recently, Mastodon, they have begun to grow beyond their niche and have accordingly set their sights on expanding beyond a cult audience. If much of Yellow & Green sounds like metal for people who don't necessarily identify as metal fans, then, it hardly means the band is hardly consciously dumbing down its music for the mainstream. On the contrary, these daring albums cement Baroness's reputation as an uncompromising group of musicians who's never been afraid to flout convention when pursuing ferocity.

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#53 THEESatisfaction, awE naturalE

  • awE naturalE album cover

    awE naturalE

    THEESatisfaction
    2012 | Sub Pop Records

    In this cloud-computing age where everyone is a fan of a bit of everything, it's good to see Sub Pop, the label most famous for bringing grunge to the world, continue to define itself not by genre but merely by brilliant music. They released their first hip-hop album in Shabazz Palaces' much-lauded Black Up last year, which featured Afro-futurist Seattle duo THEESatisfaction; the latter now get their own Sub Pop release with... their debut full-length.

    Opening with a fanfare of stumbling polyrhythms and speaker-blowing pomp before swerving into nimble, pared-down poetry recitation, the pair recall the boom-bap collages of J Dilla and Madlib, with a touch of Erykah Badu's simultaneous languor and clarity. With constant gear changes like these, and songs that rarely break three minutes, the record is full of personality and verve, a feeling cemented by the rapped and sung vocals. Stasia Irons and Catherine Harris-White recite everyday dramas of sex and politics and give them a magic mushroom logic, full of tangents and florid imagery; Palaceer Lazaro of the aforementioned Shabazz Palaces returns the favor on a brace of tracks mid-album, laying his nimble non-sequiturs over "God," with its beat like an elegantly stuck Bill Evans record, plus the deranged funhouse of "Enchantruss."

    Meanwhile, the filtered pop-rap of "Queens" could have come from Alan Braxe or Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter in their more laidback moods, and it's easy to imagine Lil B waxing surreal over the thickly aquatic "Juiced." Irons and Harris-White have lyrical flair, melodic gifts and a varied production voice, blending it all in a sensually blunted modern soul music. But like Sub Pop, you should forget genre labels — to tie this record to one is to undermine its richness.

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#52 Nas, Life Is Good

  • Life Is Good album cover

    Life Is Good

    Nas
    2012 | Def Jam Records

    Nas's career path has been a strange, contradictory one: It's clear that he's a legend, but he's always being pressured to live up to it, as though Illmatic was his own personal Citizen Kane. The last time he reasserted his status back in 2001, it was thanks to a feud with Jay-Z that lit a fire under his ass. But after a series of increasingly uneven late-career albums, Nas has found another... route back to form, embracing the idea that maybe his position is already secure and he doesn't have anything left to prove. But don't mistake this attitude for complacency: Life is Good, his 11th studio album, is steeped in reflection, a mixture of gratitude and regret, retrospect and foresight.

    The first four tracks are the kind of intricately constructed, human-level crime narratives Nas has always excelled at — statements of influence ("No Introduction"; "Loco-Motive"), tense come-up/fall-down scenarios ("A Queens Story"), payback gone tragically wrong ("Accident Murderers") — but tinged with the bittersweet undertone of not having enough peers who made it big alongside him. The last three — the ruminative, frustrated "Stay", the romantic-daydream "Cherry Wine" and the Kelis breakup wrap-up "Bye Baby" — reveal that he's just as adept talking about the aspirations and frustrations of love. And in between there's Nas figuring out how to be a model father ("Daughters"), reconciling his hood roots and his jet-set present ("Reach Out"), invoking his origins to dress down pretenders ("Back When"), and doing the memory of Heavy D proud with his hardest got-mine anthem since "Made You Look" ("The Don"). The production fits the legacy-minded tone — no brostep or Guetta, no attempts at exhuming an ossified '94, just a slate of good-to-excellent beats from names that've always suited him well (Salaam Remi, No I.D., Buckwild) and A-list R&B hooks (Mary J. Blige, Anthony Hamilton, Amy Winehouse). In a hip-hop era where the most pivotal icons are dealing with the idea of becoming elder statesmen, Life Is Good is the kind of album an Illmatic acolyte would hope a pushing-40 Nas could make.

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#51 Vijay Iyer Trio, Accelerando

  • Accelerando album cover

    Accelerando

    Vijay Iyer Trio
    2012 | ACT Music

    Let's not mince words: Accelerando is a source of rippling power and resplendent beauty that deserves to be called a masterpiece. (Except I suspect that Iyer, who recorded this a month before his 40th birthday, might top it on some future project.) As with the acclaimed, chart-topping Historicity in 2009, the pianist leads his trio through a stimulating collection that blends sharp originals and a surprisingly disparate array of cover tunes, from... Heatwave to Herbie Nichols to the Thriller track, "Human Nature." But in the nearly three years between the discs, the trio has been able to turbo-charge the force of their ensemble collective, without sacrificing the depth of their interactions. There are magnificent stretches throughout Accelerando — the rising to crescendo of the last half of "Optimism," much of Henry Threadgill's agile and agitated "Little Pocket Sized Demons," the title track, and Iyer's "Actions Speak," among others — where the effect is like a rock power trio along the lines of Cream or The Who, but using the language of jazz, and with a piano instead of a guitar. Iyer's two-handed chordal phrasings are cavernous, anthemic and intensely personal — he says he wants his music to be visceral, and he succeeds in spades here. Bassist Stephen Crump is a great enabler of intensity — his plucking (especially "Wildflower" and "Little Pocket Sized Demons") and bowing ("Accelerando") are brusque and bristling with contagious energy. Masterful drummer Marcus Gilmore keeps time and regulates the current with aplomb and unerringly good judgment. Accelerando feels like a unified magnum opus: The opening "Bode" pleasantly ushers you in, and the closing "The Village of the Virgins" carries the amiable goodwill of a benediction. In between is a wild, wonderful ride.

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#50 Robert Glasper, Black Radio

  • Black Radio album cover

    Black Radio

    Robert Glasper
    2012 | BLUE NOTE

    Pianist Robert Glasper has jazz chops sophisticated enough to satiate diehard purists and an affinity for hip-hop and R&B that has resulted in collaborations with Q-Tip, Maxwell and Mos Def. Black Radio scrambles these influences, with Glasper's Experiment quartet (including Derrick Hodge on electric bass, Casey Benjamin on sax and vocoder, and Chris Dave playing drums), laying unpredictable music beneath a bevy of high-profile guests. In this era of... Pandora-style musical-profiling, where listeners can narrow down exactly what they think they want, the project absorbs genres like a sponge and squeezes out surprises with a tinge of tang and froth. It avoids the sappiness of "smooth jazz," the stilted self-reference of "hip-hop jazz" and the suffocating cushion of "quiet storm," yet there's a lush sensuality that permeates the beats, bop rhythms and bracing moments of curiosity and intellect.

    Glasper understands that this Experiment is best undertaken as a tactile experience - as Shafiq Husayn rap-drawls in the opener, "Lift Off," all you need is your ears and your soul. To drive home the point, the beguiling yawl and coo of Erykah Badu sends the Afro-Cuban classic "Afro Blue" into the air like a large kite in a steady wind, its tail trilling. Rappers Lupe Fiasco and yasiin bey (better known as Mos Def) variously distill verbal science and wig out on wordplay ("turtles from a man hole"?), knowing the live quartet can alter the texture and freestyle the route as the situation warrants, on "Always Shine" and "Black Radio," respectively. There is a throwback nature to Black Radio, and not only because Sade ("Cherish The Day," with Lalah Hathaway on vocals), David Bowie ("Letter to Hermione," featuring Bilal channeling Stevie Wonder) and Nirvana (a deconstructed and vocoderized "Smells Like Teen Spirit") are covered. There are moments reminiscent of the soul-jazz fusion of Bobbi Humphrey and Donald Byrd back on Blue Note in the late '70s, or Soul II Soul and Me Phi Me back in the '80s, or Alphabet Soup and Mint Condition in the '90s, with a dollop of 21st-century hip-hop on top. Why reinvent the wheel when you can modify the ride?

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#49 Dum Dum Girls, End of Daze EP

  • End of Daze album cover

    End of Daze

    Dum Dum Girls
    2012 | Sub Pop Records

    Sporting black leather jackets, bright red lipstick and hangdog poses, Dum Dum Girls resemble high-school dropouts from another time – the '50s, maybe; or maybe it's the '60s; or maybe it's the '80s. Whenever it is, it's not now. But no assembly of retro references, however clever, will get you to sing with a voice as bold, outsized and sad as Kristin Gundred, nor will they get you to write melodies as... instantly indelible as she can either. Over the course of two albums, and now two EPs, her band has gone from playing misfit little garage songs punctuated by "bang-bang"s and "la-la"s to dark, glittering music exploring resignation, regret, and other big subjects that sound surprising coming from a band calling themselves "Dum Dum Girls."

    End of Daze, their latest, follows in the footsteps of convincingly sad bands from the Shangri-Las to the Smiths: They treat raw emotional vulnerability with musical confidence. Guitars buzz, drums boom and everything cocoons comfortably in reverb. At 18 minutes, End of Daze has no standouts and no weak spots: It's beautiful all the way through. The spiritual heart of the EP comes from the lone cover, of 1980s Scottish pop-rock group Strawberry Switchblade's "Trees and Flowers." "I hate the trees and I hate the flowers," Gundred sings over shimmering, reverberant guitars – "I hate the buildings and the way they tower over me." With just the slightest push, the simplicity that once made them playthings gets elevated to metaphor. As a title, End of Daze might be a little joke about their own maturity: The fog lifts and leaves nothing but clarity, naked and bittersweet.

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#48 Eternal Summers, Correct Behavior

  • Correct Behavior album cover

    Correct Behavior

    Eternal Summers
    2012 | Kanine Records

    Nicole Yun only knows a handful of guitar chords, but she plays them passionately. Her band, Eternal Summers, has expanded sizably on sophomore effort Correct Behavior, building on their debut's ramshackle indiepop foundation with stadium-sized hooks, extra layers of guitar, and loads of reverb. But in spite of their sonic makeover, Eternal Summers (now a trio with the addition of bassist Jonathan Woods) still understand the power of brevity and focus, striking... a balance between the naïve, home-spun charm of early gems like "Running High" and "Safe at Home" and the more expansive style they've branded "dream-punk."

    "Millions" is a hell of a re-introduction. With its jangly guitar lines and see-sawing chorus melody, the track sounds like New Pornographers stuck in the garage, with Yun channeling her inner Neko Case. They have their stoner-poet moment with the atmospheric prog-pop of "Heaven and Hell," Yun philosophizing "Death itself will die" over cavernous distortion – epic shit for a band who probably used to record in their mom's basement. Eternal Summers seem to have a blast exploring the limits of a legitimate studio (check the skronky, drunk toddler guitar solo on "Disappear," or the rocket-snare blast on "You Kill," or the Beach House-y preset keyboard beat on closer "Summerset"), but they rarely experiment at the cost of joyous, chest-pounding pop. Correct Behavior indeed.

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#47 The Men, Open Your Heart

  • Open Your Heart album cover

    Open Your Heart

    The Men
    2012 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution

    There's nothing quite like a good old-fashioned, skull-splitting album-opener. Judged on those merits alone, Open Your Heart's "Turn it Around" completely fucking aces its final exam. Moreover, it's a refreshing, accessible upgrade for the Men, the Brooklyn noisemakers who set speakers smoking with last year's overdriven, occasionally overindulgent and ultimately overwhelming Leave Home. Its mix of shoegaze grandiosity and punk grit was exciting and powerful, but there were moments where one... wondered what they'd sound like if they reined it in with a couple of hooks.

    Open Your Heart is the answer. The album is divided roughly into three categories: rockers (the abovementioned "Turn it Around," the Buzzcockian power pop of the title track, and the straight-up hardcore "Cube"), chill-outs (the aptly titled instrumental "Country Song," the halcyon-era-Meat-Puppets-doing-Poison drinking song, "Candy") and Leave Home sister songs (building, stretch-outs "Oscillation" and "Presence"). These categories aren't compartmentalized. Instead, they mix and mingle like you do at any great party, screamers butting elbows with blue-collar laments, rave-ups doing shots with the burnouts.

    It's uncommon for a rock 'n' roll band to show such proficiency in genre-dabbling, but the Men pull it off, and it's exciting to think about what they might do given full-on immersion into one of the many directions hinted at on Open Your Heart. When American Sun's Holly Overton shows up to croon on a couple tracks, her feathery backing vocals providing balance to a screaming mix that often threatens to push too far into the red, it's tempting to hope she'll join the band. A record-length meditation on upbeat, Big-Star-inspired love songs would thrill, no doubt, but hey, what if they did a full-on country album? The potential, clearly, is unending. Thankfully, so are the rewards.

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#46 Bat For Lashes, The Haunted Man

  • The Haunted Man (Deluxe Version) album cover

    The Haunted Man (Deluxe Version)

    Bat For Lashes
    2013 | Parlophone

    As suggested by its striking cover art, The Haunted Man is the moment where Natasha Khan, aka Bat For Lashes, proves she's strong enough to stand naked, both figuratively and literally. Her third, gentlest and most ballad-oriented effort yet is lightly adorned with autoharp, electronically estranged guitars, gossamer keys and symphonic orchestration that never upstage her whole-hearted vocals. As co-producer, Khan favors an incorporeal approach, placing phantasmic textures before hooks. She makes... room for beats, but they are typically halting, stopping and starting again as if to reinforce the album's underlying theme of building up and letting go – sometimes at the same time – of intimate yet unstable connections.

    Over and over again, Khan sings of lovers traumatized by the past, and how those ghosts haunt the present. In the album's most immediate track "All Your Gold," Khan sings of "a good man" that she struggles to trust with a heart that a previous lover turned black. She often adopts a motherly protector role, as on the percussive "Rest Your Head," but she also battles with her own demons: In the slow-burning title track, she aims to heal a wounded soul, but admits, "Yes, your ghosts have got me too." Khan may be the most self-contained and confessional of the current crop of female sing-songwriters, yet she resists over-sharing. Instead, she balances empathy and aching sincerity with understatedly nervy arrangements that favor mystery over familiarity. What might come off as austere in others simply seems natural for Khan.

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#45 Sun Araw, M. Geddes Gengras, The Congos, Icon Give Thank

  • Icon Give Thank album cover

    Icon Give Thank

    Sun Araw, M. Geddes Gengras, The Congos
    2012 | RVNG INTL. / SC Distribution

    After six installments of Johnny Cash's American series and well-received late-career efforts by Mavis Staples and Jimmy Cliff, there's very little novel about a weathered pioneer musician teaming up with a younger admirer in the hopes of lending a bit of the old fog-and-polish to their artistic reputation. The results are, broadly speaking, similar: a restrained, tasteful facsimile of the artist's best work, prim as a pressed suit and comforting as a... cup of afternoon tea. Which is what makes the thoroughly batshit, opium-gobbling collaboration between reggae legends The Congos and the Austin musician Sun Araw so irresistible. Rather than focusing on the sound of their legendary Heart of the Congos, Araw set about to recreate the mood: murky, mysterious, vaguely occult and more than a little spooky. Like Heart, the songs still center around glassy-eyed, endlessly-repeated choruses, but on Icon Give Thanks they're distended and wobbly, strange voices drifting eerily through some narcotic hallucination. And though it can't rightly be called a resurrection – it's stranger and spookier than anything the band did in their prime – Icon Give Thanks undeniably feels like the work of the undead, coming back for a final haunting.

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#44 Orrin Evans, Flip the Script

  • Flip The Script album cover

    Flip The Script

    Orrin Evans
    2012 | Posi-Tone Records / The Orchard

    As a pianist, Orrin Evans features a muscular attack with a meaty tonality and impatience with elongated or predictable phrasing. As an artist, he has emerged as a formidable, increasingly indispensable presence in jazz, whether leading the balls-to-the-wall Captain Black Big Band, the politically charged Tarbaby, or small ensemble recordings. Flip The Script is a trio outing with bassist Ben Wolfe and drummer Donald Edwards, both necessarily sturdy, exceptionally sentient players when... charged with accompanying Evans's dynamic approach, which blends supple conception with bold, brawny execution. Like Faith In Action from 2010, it contains Evans originals that are often jagged and fragmented but ever-purposeful, brimming with rough-and-tumble rhythms and ruminations variously reminiscent of McCoy Tyner, Muhal Richard Abrams, Bud Powell and Art Tatum. They are gusty and assured, with apt titles like "Clean House," "Flip The Script" and "The Answer." On a slower note, "Big Small" is a steadily stalking, rough-hewn blues that cuts deep into the blues tradition without losing a jazz sensibility.

    Evans's choice of covers are generally revealing for their contrasts and/or message. The four here begin with "Question," a chopped up bebop number by Tarbaby bassist Eric Revis; and a rendition of Luther Vandross's "A Brand New Day" that finds Evans in full McCoy Tyner mode much of the time. But the final two inject poignant reflection into the mix. The standard "Someday My Prince Will Come" is performed with prolonged, lingering resonance, highlighting the wistful and sadder aspect of a song usually framed more hopefully. And the closer, Gamble and Huff's "The Sound Of Philadelphia," is a touching eulogy for Soul Train creator and emcee Don Cornelius, who died six days before this recording session. "TSOP" was the Soul Train theme song, and Philadelphia also happens to be Evans's hometown and ongoing wellspring of musical inspiration. His soulful take carries that weight just right.

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#43 Swans, Seer

  • The Seer album cover

    The Seer

    Swans
    2012 | Young God / Revolver

    Whether he's conjuring up a quiet storm with an acoustic guitar or sharing the asphyxiated psalms of "Sex, God, Sex," Michael Gira has never been the subtle type. That's especially the case with the second coming of Gira's iconic post-punk band Swans, which obliterated the notion of a cash-grab reunion with a series of resoundingly LOUD shows, and 2010's uniformly excellent, AARP-be-damned album My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to... the Sky.
    Now just two years away from turning 60, Gira has delivered a double album that may be his bravest release yet. Clearly the sound of someone who still doesn't give a goddamn what you think, The Seer isn't just a sprawling listen. It's a record that just went off its meds, a striking, supremely challenging mix of manic melodies, endless experimentation, ritualistic drones and rigorous repetition.

    Which is to say, it's not for everyone. Aside from a couple palette cleansers ("The Daughter Brings the Water," "The Wolf") and a delicate duet with Karen O ("Song For a Warrior," which recalls the Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer's recent rock opera run), The Seer devotes most of its two-hour running time to destroying any semblance of sane songwriting. That goes for everything from the murderous chase scene that is "Mother of the World" to the way Alan and Mimi of Low chant "lunacy!" until the word really sinks in on the record's opener. And then there's the "A Piece of the Sky," "Apostate" and the title track, a trio of EP-length epics that shift between showers of nihilistic noise, hypnotic vocals (including contributions from two key Gira collaborators, Akron/Family and former Swans member Jarboe), ominous orchestral parts, and unexplained phenomena (the "acoustic and synthetic" fire sounds of Ben Frost come to mind).

    Amazing stuff — if you can make it to the other side without blowing your speakers.

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#42 Bill Fay, Life is People

  • Life Is People album cover

    Life Is People

    Bill Fay
    2012 | Dead Oceans / SC Distribution

    Life is People is the first new record from Bill Fay since 1972, a British singer-songwriter whose beatific and keenly observed music might remind you of Randy Newman or Wilco. It's a worthy addition to a small but hallowed canon of material. Wilco have covered him over the years, and he returns the favor with a solemn, still rendition of "Jesus, Etc." Fay's voice is ragged, pleading, and gentle, and his music... sits in a glowing pool of "Hallelujah" chord changes and restrained, soul-inflected touches. It has a numinous simplicity that feels healing; when he enlists a gospel choir to swell up on the chorus of "Be At Peace With Yourself," you find that suddenly you are.

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#41 Actress, R.I.P.

  • R.I.P. album cover

    R.I.P.

    Actress
    2012 | Honest Jon's Records / Finetunes

    With a sound that's nearly as heady as its concept – "a conceptual arc taking in death, life, sleep and religion" – Actress's third album burrows its way into your brain and stays there long after you hit stop. If 2012 was the Year of EDM, R.I.P. signals a return to Intelligent Dance Music. And not the bloodless kind that's more concerned with plugins than an actual pulse. More like an... elegantly designed surrogate for the album Aphex Twin's been threatening to drop for more than a decade.

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#40 Alabama Shakes, Boys & Girls

  • Boys & Girls album cover

    Boys & Girls

    Alabama Shakes
    2012 | ATO Records

    The chatter that southern blues-rockers Alabama Shakes have generated in the months leading up to their debut is usually reserved for legends twice their age, or at least groups with more than a couple of songs to their name. There have been Janis Joplin and Otis Redding comparisons, endorsements from the likes of Jack White and Adele, and fans talking about their raucous live shows like they're enough... to convert you to a new religion. And — if you can believe it — the Athens, Alabama quartet's full length debut Boys & Girls lives up to the hype.

    The first thing that will bowl you over is that voice. "Bless my heart, bless my soul/ I didn't think I'd make it to 22 years old," howls singer/guitarist Brittany Howard in the opening moments of stellar single "Hold On," showing off her gritty, soulful pipes and making those Joplin comparisons feel earned. But they're not the whole story, either: Boys & Girls finds the Alabama Shakes pulling from the greats of rock and blues (catch the Bo Diddley reference in the opening lyric?) into a distinctive, and occasionally downright personal, sound. ("Come on Brittany!" she hollers to herself. "You gotta come on up!")

    From the barroom piano stomp of "Hang Loose" to the Stones swagger of "Be Mine," Boys & Girls sounds like the work of a group of weary, wizened road warriors who've been playing together for decades, rather than a group who formed a couple of years ago when its principle players were still in their teens. With all this talent and confidence already on full display on their debut, imagine all they can do with the years ahead.

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#39 Kathleen Edwards, Voyageur

  • Voyageur album cover

    Voyageur

    Kathleen Edwards
    2012 | New Rounder

    The too-obvious shorthands here - given that this album was produced by her new beau Justin Vernon (aka Bon Iver) in the wake of her marital split from her longtime guitarist Colin Cripps - is that this is Kathleen Edwards's "indie rock" record and her "divorce" record. Both may be true, but only to a point, and neither gets to the heart of Edwards's voyage on Voyageur. Though Vernon has an imposing... indie pedigree, it's not as if his own records are that far removed from the rugged Americana that has been Edwards's turf up to this point; and for another thing, her albums always sounded more "alt" than "country," anyway. And so it's not surprising that the clearest reference-point here is Neko Case, another singer who, like Edwards, has both Canadian and American ties. It's the latter Edwards sounds most excited about on the opening "Empty Threat"; the cool confidence in her voice as she repeatedly insists, "I'm moving to America," amid gliding acoustic and electric guitars indicates this isn't an empty threat at all. True enough, that song relates to her divorce, as do "Change The Sheets" ("and then change me"), the elegiac John Roderick co-write "Pink Champagne" and the wistful relationship postscript "For The Record." But the record also offers a way forward. Edwards and Vernon harmonize exquisitely on the redemptive ballad "A Soft Place To Land," and on "Sidecar," co-written with her longtime confidante Jim Bryson, Edwards exults in finding a new companion after "feeling so lost for so long." With a little help on Voyageur, she finds herself as well.

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#38 Death Grips, The Money Store

  • The Money Store album cover

    The Money Store

    Death Grips
    2012 | Epic

    The first impulse after listening to Death Grips' The Money Store might scan similarly to the initial take of their debut Exmilitary: hip-hop as skater thrash, the more aggro strains of both worlds fused in some Bomb Squad meets Bones Brigade shit. But that's what second impressions are for. As easy as it is to draw parallels to the old punk-rap touchstones, there's something about this vital noise that makes it hard... to situate it at any specific moment in either genre's hardcore continuum. MC Ride's raspy bellow has the kind of harsh tone East Coast heads will appreciate — think Bobby Digital-era RZA shouting himself hoarse, cranked up to Waka Flocka Flame levels of intensity, turning cryptic threats and manic free association into shout-along lines. Meanwhile, the clamor throbbing beneath his voice pulls more from the brain trust of contemporary West Coast bass music — a la the popular L.A. club night Low End Theory — than anything else. Southern bounce, electro and boogie funk all with the gloss beaten off are full-Nelsoned into raw-hamburger renditions of grime and dubstep, with the EQ levels pushed into snarling, aching overload. If that sounds a bit brutal, it's the kind of brutality that pulls you along instead of dragging you under — no matter how belligerent the sound gets, it's less a confrontation than an appeal to shared catharsis.

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#37 Standard Fare, Out of Sight, Out of Town

  • Out Of Sight. Out Of Town album cover

    Out Of Sight. Out Of Town

    Standard Fare
    2011 | Melodic / Southern Record Distributors

    In "Fifteen," on their 2010 debut The Noyelle Beat, Sheffield trio Standard Fare sang about being 22 and not knowing what to do. On the band's sophomore effort Out of Sight, Out of Town, they talk about mindless day jobs, crushed hopes and being "destined to die unknown." Bassist-vocalist Emma Kupa, guitarst-vocalist Dan How and drummer Andy Beswick have carved out a space alongside like-minded British indiepop acts Los Campesinos! and Allo... Darlin', with songs that will resonate with fellow 20-somethings trying to figure their lives out through dead-end jobs and romantic missteps. Among the best tracks is "Call Me Up," a hilarious but probably-relatable number about a post-nightclub hookup ("I never said you weren't hot, it's just that all this drinking does these things to me," sing How and Kupa). The rest of the set finds them musing on older women ("Older Women" — a stark contrast to "Fifteen," the last album's tale of lusting after and going home with a teenager), reconnecting with a love interest from teenage years ("Kicking Puddles"), and the nervousness of starting a new relationship ("051107"). It's not a musical change from their first LP — clean, bouncy guitars, quick, punchy bass lines, occasional use of horns or strings, and Kupa and How's back-and-forth vocals — but it's a solid display of pop hooks and quick wit.

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#36 Mac DeMarco, 2

#35 Jessie Ware, Devotion

  • Devotion album cover

    Devotion

    Jessie Ware
    2013 | Interscope/Cherrytree

    In the video for breakout single "Wildest Moments," UK singer Jessie Ware appears, dressed in white, in front of a blank white backdrop and begins to sing. And that is pretty much all that happens. But the thing is, not much more needs to happen: The song itself is potent, big, "Paper Plane"-style bass drums and Ware's smoky alto preaching the gospel of two-way love as a path to self-actualization. It's like... that throughout Devotion, Ware's sneakily seductive debut that fuses the best parts of '90s R&B with current trends in UK dance. Throughout, the music is deliciously underplayed: cool blankets of synths, percussion that percolates like an 8-bit coffeepot and the occasional filigree of guitar. It makes for a new kind of high-tech lover's rock, cruising sleek and quiet as a sports car on a city street in the hours just before the sun comes up. Like all the best crushes, it sneaks up on you unexpectedly, and takes a firm, unwavering hold.

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#34 Animal Collective, Centipede Hz

  • Centipede Hz album cover

    Centipede Hz

    Animal Collective
    2012 | Domino Recording Co

    The word on the street is that Animal Collective's ninth studio album – yes, ninth – is a red-blooded response to the sunshine and puppy dogs of Merriweather Post Pavilion. Which is true in regards to its approach (bashed instruments rather than stacked samples) and overall vibe (wild and wooly), but it's not like the group's core quartet is back to baking batches of incoherent noise rock. To understand where they're coming... from this time around, it helps to first cue up the podcasts that Animal Collective leaked in the weeks leading up to Centipede Hz's release; namely Geologist's set, which is based on an elaborate mix he made for producer Ben Allen before Animal Collective hit the studio.

    "We put together a list of songs that either encompassed the overall sound and vibe, or just had specific things we liked, such as drums sounds, or vocal effects," Geologist wrote in his Mixcloud notes. "For the final show of AC Radio we thought it'd be cool to play this inspirational mix and the album back to back."
    Sure enough, Animal Collective's leading loop surgeon offers more than a few clues about the background of what's initially a very bewildering listen, from Barrett-era Pink Floyd and latter day Portishead to slivers of psych, rarified garage rock and manic world music. None of which are immediately apparent on the first or 50th spin. Instead, Centipede Hz unfolds like a series of scrambled radio transmissions, right down to the tortured transitions between each track. It's as if the band's tapping into a broadcast from the great beyond, with little regard for the amphitheater-ready hooks that made Merriweather Post Pavilion such a joy. Where that album's leadoff single ("My Girls") flooded the endorphin levels of anyone within earshot, this one is prefaced by the stuttering rhythms and ravenous "let, let, let, let, let, let GO!" choruses of "Today's Supernatural." Listen to any of these songs loud enough and you'll be forced to step back a few feet; it's that harsh and heavy, from the trash compactor intro of "Moonjock" to the skittish synths of "Wide Eyed," the first song to feature lead vocals from the group's guitarist, Deakin.

    In conclusion, do not take the brown acid at your next Animal Collective show. Your synapses will thank you.

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#33 Christian Scott, Christian aTunde Adjuah

  • Christian aTunde Adjuah album cover

    Christian aTunde Adjuah

    Christian Scott
    2012 | Concord Jazz

    New Orleans native Christian Scott has often shown a penchant for pushing the envelope. Though reliably anchored by his warm, typically muted trumpet work, his previous albums have incorporated influences from fusion to funk to world music. But with Christian aTunde Adjuah, the 29-year old takes a bold leap: A two-CD release comprised of 23 tracks, Christian aTunde Adjuah draws on New Orleans second-line rhythms, the African Diaspora and the electronic loop... programming of Squarepusher and Aphex Twin. These influences aren't always literal, but they dance around the edges of Scott's charged compositions like ghosts haunting a dream.

    Scott and his explosive, adventurous band — guitarist Matthew Stevens, drummer Jamire Williams, bassist Kris Funn, pianist Lawrence Fields, tenor saxophonist Kenneth Whalum III, alto saxophonist Louis Fouche IIII and trombonist Corey King — tackle some pretty serious themes, including, as the liner notes mention, "ethnic cleansing, kidnapping and…the rape of 400 indigenous African Sudanese." And that's only in the first track, "Fatima Aisha Rokero 400." Instrumentally, the group's common language, beyond their serious improvisation skills, is based on manually cycled loops, with each musician performing repetitive figures that recall electronic dance music, or, some might say, Live Evil-era Miles Davis. Scott's band imbues the music with a playful and fragmented nature, and his muted, Miles-inspired trumpet lends the music an eerie, forlorn quality.

    Disc two takes a similar approach, though with backbeats suggesting a contemporary, if still dark, pop-funk approach. "Jihad Joe" spirals and dances over a trancelike 7/4 pulse, Scott spewing trumpet scrawl, drummer Jamire Williams soloing like a spongy Tony Williams roving over the kit. "Liar Liar" could be Miles Davis's "Decoy" sampled and spliced for contemporary ears. The album closes with "Cara," a surprisingly gentle, piano based ballad that has the feel of sunrise to it, not the catharsis that came before.

    Though his band's cyclical rhythms sometimes sound static instead of propulsive and Scott's trumpet has a sameness in tonality and mood, there's no denying that Christian aTunde Adjuah is one hell of a growth spurt. The only moment in the set's two-disc sprawl where Scott acknowledges straight-ahead jazz bears a telling, sardonic title: "Who They Wish I Was," The message is clear: Scott will not be categorized.

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#32 Anais Mitchell, Young Man in America

  • Young Man In America album cover

    Young Man In America

    Anais Mitchell
    2012 | Wilderland Records / The Orchard

    Anaïs Mitchell is a writer whose medium happens to be music. As a musician, though, her writerly achievements are undeniable: Her previous effort, 2010's Hadestown, reconceived the myth of Orpheus, coming to life first as a touring theater production and then as a 20-track album. On the follow-up (which also launches her own label), Mitchell avoids trying to top it and simply turns in 11 confident, moonlit folk songs that hang together... as a loose narrative concerning the dire state of the world, especially for those younger people who might have been more optimistic in another time. "Nothing's gonna stop me now," she sings repeatedly in "Coming Down," with hope replaced by weariness. Mitchell's voice is high and nasal, and it's to her and producer Todd Sickafoose's credit that the varied arrangements, which can evoke naturalistic scenes much like in Laura Veirs's music, are so complementary (especially on the dramatic one-two punch of the opening songs, "Wilderland" and the title track).

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#31 Converge, All We Love We Leave Behind

  • All We Love We Leave Behind album cover

    All We Love We Leave Behind

    Converge
    2012 | Epitaph

    In an era of decreasing album sales, making a living as a long-running band requires extensive touring. And yet, the longer a band has been around, the harder it is for them to drop everything and hit the road. Converge's eighth album, poignantly titled All We Love We Leave Behind, is a revealing glimpse into the kinds of personal frustrations that the band has typically kept behind closed doors. Songs like "Empty... on the Inside," "Sadness Comes Home" and the title track, in which frontman Jacob Bannon laments, "You deserve so much more than I could provide," vent pain and self-contempt with every verse.

    And yet it's these very same frustrations that have ironically helped keep the band fresh. Not only do Converge rage as hard as they did in 1994, when they released their first album Halo in a Haystack, they have developed numerous approaches with which to pummel listeners. "Aimless Arrows" contrasts speedy salvos of melodic guitar with hyper-kinetic drumming. The ironically-titled "Tender Abuse" matches death-metal blast beats with feral vocals and guitars that ring like sirens before ending with a half-speed breakdown that would put most metalcore bands to shame. "Trespasses" contrasts double-bass drumming and short, sharp riffs with angular flurries of blues-inflected guitar that sound more like Jesus Lizard. And "Sadness Comes Home" is augmented with Van Halen-style fingertapping that pogos through a kinetic hardcore forest fire. With All We Love We Leave Behind, Converge have expanded their horizons both lyrically and musically without compromising an iota of intensity, proving in the process that speed isn't the only path to sonic demolition. Twenty-two years into their career, Converge continue to craft sincere, relentless and aggressive metallic hardcore.

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#30 Mount Eerie, Clear Moon

  • Clear Moon album cover

    Clear Moon

    Mount Eerie
    2012 | P.W. Elverum & Sun / The Orchard

    Phil Elverum almost never writes a song that's entirely its own thing. His body of work, initially as the Microphones and more recently as Mount Eerie, is full of missing twins, separated partners, self-pastiches and negative space. Clear Moon is itself a twin (he made another album, the forthcoming Ocean Roar, at the same time). It begins with "Through the Trees Pt. 2," a sequel to a song from 2009's Wind's... Poem. That's followed by (different!) songs called "The Place Lives" and "The Place I Live," both of which appeared in drastically different versions on a recent single. As usual, Elverum's lyrics draw on a tightly circumscribed vocabulary of phrases and nature images; the closest thing to a conventional song here is "House Shape," which resolves into My Bloody Valentine-style dream-pop after a couple of minutes of squinty drone-and-beat, as if he's finally worked out its shape.

    But Clear Moon is also just about the darkest recording Elverum has ever made — he's talked about how he was inspired by Werner Herzog's soundtrack composers Popol Vuh and black-metal band Burzum. Most of these songs are dominated by menacing, echoing synthesizer drones, punctuated by occasional terrifying shifts, like the blast-beat barrage of drums that crushes the final 30 seconds of "Over Dark Water." Elverum's voice is as naked and subdued as ever, and in the context of the slow, thunderous tracks here, it sounds as if he's pacing helplessly toward a final judgment.

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#29 Mirel Wagner, Mirel Wagner

  • Mirel Wagner album cover

    Mirel Wagner

    Mirel Wagner
    2012 | Friendly Fire Recordings / The Orchard

    "All day I stay by her side," Mirel Wagner sings of her beloved in "No Death," the undeniable buzz cut from this Ethiopian-Finnish singer-songwriter's self-titled debut. "But death has a claim and a right to my bride." In fact, death has already exercised that claim: A stark minor-key blues made only of voice and guitar, "No Death" turns out to be one of an exceedingly small handful of tunes about the joys... of necrophilia. "Her body is cold/ Well, it's gonna get colder," Wagner acknowledges over carefully fingerpicked arpeggios, "But my love will ignite what was left to smolder." (Think she was tempted to sing "what was left of her shoulder"?) Elsewhere on this haunting nine-track set Wagner dials down the lyrical shock-and-awe a bit; in the relatively jaunty "No Hands" she even pauses a bike ride long enough to admire "the sun filter[ing] through the trees." But there's never any of the sweetening you expect from folks working in this kind of post-Nick Drake mode: no pillowy string arrangements or harmony vocal parts designed to reassure you that somebody else is out there. Wagner keeps her music as lean — and as sharp — as a razor's edge.

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#28 The Walkmen, Heaven

  • Heaven album cover

    Heaven

    The Walkmen
    2012 | Fat Possum / The Orchard

    If you want to know why your smartest, most iconoclastic friends speak in hushed tones about The Walkmen, check out the opening track of their new album Heaven. In five minutes, this band seemingly sums up rock history, referencing doo wop, "The Duke Of Earl," folk-rock and Lou Reed's street poetry. All crowned by Hamilton Leithauser's winsome croon. This might explain all the hipster fuss.

    Still, Heaven isn't pastiche, despite betraying its influences.... Take "The Witch." Sure, the organ icily echoes Elvis Costello circa '78. But here, Leithauser's brings his very own romantic anomie. "It starts like this," he sings, "A kiss is just a kiss." Which introduces the overarching theme of the record: Love, man! Love so right. Love gone wrong. Guys who drive through Michigan just to taste it. But this album ain't just a mopefest for lovelorn eggheads. The band, especially guitarist Paul Maroon, backs Leithauser like an indie U2. That means muscle, not bombast. And U2 could never play a roadhouse instrumental like "Jerry's Tune."

    Maybe such eclecticism hasn't helped the band's commercial fortunes. But slip on these Walkmen and you won't care. Ten years on? Hah! These "Men" are just hitting their stride.

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#27 Spiritualized, Sweet Heart Sweet Light

  • Sweet Heart Sweet Light album cover

    Sweet Heart Sweet Light

    Spiritualized
    2012 | Fat Possum Records

    Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space is undoubtedly Jason Pierce's masterwork, but that hasn't stopped him from trying to top it from a variety of quixotic angles — witness the orchestral overkill of Let It Come Down, Amazing Grace's fairly unconvincing garage-rock rebranding, and Songs In A&E trying to micromanage spiritual epiphanies. Fortunately, Sweet Heart Sweet Light is a record that feels like a sigh of relief, his least labored... since Ladies and also the best since then. As you might be able to tell from the fact that two of its fantastic songs are titled "Hey Jane" and "Mary," and a song that begins "My mother said/ When she was so concerned/ Don't play with fire and you'll never get burned," this is quintessential Pierce, redemption rendered in seven-minute epics with bombastic string arrangements, gospel choirs, and the most transparent Velvet Underground references possible right alongside instantly memorable melodies. The glorious thing about Sweet Heart is how colorful, portable and manageable it is — every bit as skyscraping as Ladies And Gentlemen but nearly a half hour shorter, it's the closest thing to a Spiritualized "pop album" and subsequently one of the best of 2012 thus far.

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#26 Matthew Dear, Beams

  • Beams album cover

    Beams

    Matthew Dear
    2012 | Ghostly International / The Orchard

    At this point — 13 years, five albums, and several side projects into a preconception-skirting career as a producer/DJ/performer — it shouldn't be surprising to find Matthew Dear fully embracing his inner Eno, Bowie and Byrne. And yet, longtime fans still shout "play 'Dog Days'!" at some of his shows, as if they wish he'd stop trying to be a bandleader and return to his twisted techno roots behind the soft glow... of a laptop and some MIDI triggers.

    That's not gonna happen. Beams is yet another step in Dear's welcome evolution as a songwriter. Not a party-rocker. Not a floor-filler. A songwriter. And since he started off as more of a club crawler — a micro-house auteur, to use the short-lived, oh-so-2003 term — Dear isn't quite a pop star just yet. He's getting there, though, as proven by the unparalleled perfection of this album's lead-off single, "Her Fantasy." A career standout, it's willfully wild and downright weird, from its Kenneth Anger-cribbing music video to its woozy rave whistle and incessant sampled chorus of "Pump it!/ Pump the bass!" The rest of the record follows suit with one decidedly strange detour after another, including the tortured nervous tics of "Earthforms," the lava-like loops and minor-keyed downward spiral of "Shake Me," and the deviant disco of "Up & Out."

    It takes at least 10 listens to sink in, and even then it's a grower, but Dear's released yet another record that's completely removed from the rest of his catalog. Now all he needs to do is cut 10 tracks that are as tight as "Her Fantasy." Then he'll have a true classic on his hands.

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#25 Angel Olsen, Half Way Home

  • Half Way Home album cover

    Half Way Home

    Angel Olsen
    Bathetic Records

    "You won't always be walking the safest street/ but you can find your way home," Angel Olsen sings in "Lonely Universe," from her sophomore album Half Way Home. The album's seven-and-a-half-minute centerpiece is a poignant, gut-wrenching account of losing a loved one: "Goodbye, sweet Mother Earth/ without you now, I'm a lonely universe," she laments. But instead of just sulking, she assures others in her position that if they've even begun to... think about the path back to normal, they're already halfway there. Throughout these 11 tracks, Olsen attempts to make sense of the journey from lost to found, and she does it gracefully with songs about birth and death, darkness and lightness, and giving and receiving love.

    Olsen, who's spent the last couple years singing alongside Bonnie "Prince" Billy, has a soulful voice that often cracks as it slips into her higher register, setting her somewhere in the same range as '70s folkie Judee Sill. Her songs are often founded on acoustic fingerpicking and vocals, best in delicate tracks like "Safe in the Womb" and "You Are Song." But in "The Waiting" she channels jangly '60s girl groups as she sings, "I need you to be the one who calls," and it's easy to imagine the album closer "Tiniest Seed" with a gospel choir singing behind her.

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#24 Royal Headache, Royal Headache

  • Royal Headache album cover

    Royal Headache

    Royal Headache
    2012 | What's Your Rupture?

    In the end, it all comes down to Shogun's voice, a ragged rasp that falls somewhere squarely between young Rod Stewart and sad Otis Redding and infuses every one of the songs on Royal Headache's roaring debut with a big old battered heart. It's easy to miss the first few times: The songs whoosh by like vintage funny cars whipping around a red-dirt race track, antic and spitting flames. But look a... little closer and it's clear the driver is crying: On "Girls," he howls, "Didn't I tell you over and over I want the key to your heart?" and on "Really in Love," which kicks and struts like a rough demo from the first Jam record, he asks, "Maybe you think you're smart…but are you really in love?" It's as if Shogun got lost en route to a Stax cover-band audition and ended up sitting in on a Buzzcocks tribute instead. His searing yelp and full-body delivery make Royal Headache's songs feel instantly vital. Call it the Sound of the Young Down Under.

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#23 Tame Impala, Lonerism

  • Lonerism album cover

    Lonerism

    Tame Impala
    2012 | Modular Fontana

    Aussie psych-rocker outfit Tame Impala's sophomore effort opens not with a bang, but a whisper – a literal whisper, breathy and insistent, that lazily warps into something else. Fractals of reverb and pedal effect peel off into a glass-eyed haze. Frontman Kevin Parker sings like a latter-day John Lennon, Instagrammed and amplified and fed through subpar speakers. The whole thing builds to a psych-rock anthem so shimmery, so positively prismatic, that it's... easy to forget that Parker prefers downers to stimulants. There lies the weird, cognitive dissonance at the heart of Lonerism: It's an album about sadness that sounds anything but sad.

    In the U.S., at least, that's a pretty novel concept; we demonize loners and introverts to the point that PhDs give TED talks on the subject. But Lonerism, like Innerspeaker before it, plays more like a celebration of isolation than a confession or defense. Songs like "Elephant" and "Why Won't They Talk to Me?" are trippy Rorschach blots – full of sun and slow burn if you don't listen to lyrics, and subsumed by self-pity if you do. "Elephant" seems particularly destined for edgy car commercials or dancey dive bars, with its obstinate one-two baseline and weird organ whorls. It's too bad Tame Impala draw so much inspiration from loneliness – Lonerism will make them plenty of friends.

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#22 Beach House, Bloom

  • Bloom album cover

    Bloom

    Beach House
    2012 | Sub Pop Records

    On Bloom, the fourth record by Baltimore duo Beach House, there aren't hooks so much as sultry tendrils perpetually beckoning towards some smoky, purple-lit back alley that never entirely materializes. Alex Scally's guitar ribbons and diddles over synths that twinkle and grind, and Victoria LeGrand's voice is woozy and dark and supple. Increasingly, the words she sings hardly seem to matter, but listen close and there are snippets of sleepless nights, strange... paradises, and the ability of the world to swallow you whole. Bloom's tracklist looks slight, but with every song pushing five minutes it's actually a long, slow burn; there's even an old-school hidden track tacked onto the nearly seven minutes of silence that following thrumming closer "Irene." It's a record that almost expects to hang around in the background, pulsing and twirling and ebbing in and out of consciousness. But it also functions incredibly well as an intimate headphones album: Even piped through dinky earbuds, it makes one hell of a private soundtrack, rendering the most gloriously mundane moments of life unreasonably, fiercely cool.

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#21 godspeed you! black emperor, Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!

  • Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! album cover

    Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!

    godspeed you! black emperor
    2012 | Constellation / SC Distribution

    When Godspeed You! Black Emperor disbanded in 2003, they didn't exactly go out with a bang: Their last album, 2002's undercooked, over-thought Yanqui U.X.O., was upstaged by its packaging, which included a chart that linked missile companies to major labels. So when the group reconvened in late 2010 to play a handful of dates, including All Tomorrow's Parties in Minehead, England, it seemed like a second chance. Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!, their... comeback full-length announced just two weeks ago, offers resounding redemption.

    Along with their penchant for cryptic, seemingly coded titles, the group's facility with sprawling, majestically apocalyptic suites remains intact. 'Allelujah!, like their best material, conveys an unnamable dread that lies well outside the purview of lyrics (they don't have any) and standard song structures (which they explode). The expected elements remain – heraldic guitars, jarring sound collages, disquieting drones, roiling crescendos – yet they combine in new and unexpected ways. In fact, it shows the band rediscovering and reclaiming its primary mission, which is to make music that is heavy in both sound and concept.

    'Allelujah! contains four tracks: two short drone/collage pieces as well as two towering compositions that lurch and lumber well past the ten-minute mark, contorting into unexpected shapes along the way. Despite being persistently tagged "post-rock," Godspeed do not stray far from actual rock, specifically the proto-metal of the late '60s and early '70s. "We Drift Like Worried Fire" moves with an apocalyptic stomp similar to Black Sabbath, while a Zeppelinesque exoticism/eroticism defines opener "Mladic." That heaviness lends the album a gravity and immediacy that Yanqui lacked, yet there are no solos, no lead instruments, no blazing displays of technique. In short, no egos. That each Godspeeder is absorbed into the collective makes 'Allelujah! sound bracing and bold, instilling these doom-laden songs with a sense of renewed promise.

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#20 The Twilight Sad, No One Can Ever Know

  • No One Can Ever Know album cover

    No One Can Ever Know

    The Twilight Sad
    2012 | FatCat Records / The Orchard

    White-knuckled brooding, it turns out, is a many-splendored thing, as the Twilight Sad fortuitously discovers on its triumphantly depressive third album. The gloomy Glasgownoise-rockers' 2007 debut, Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters, introduced a cathartic, tempestuous band in the tradition of other downcast Scottish racket-makers like Mogwai or Arab Strap. 2009 sophomore outing Forget the Night Ahead, meanwhile, did away with the arena-ready choruses and dialed up the churning My... Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth guitar tempests, intensifying the guilt-wracked emotional purge but doing away with easy entry points. From there, it wouldn't have been unreasonable to predict a career of diminishing returns. Or else implosion.

    The latter, in a sense, is what happens on No One Can Ever Know, and it's a brutally gripping thing to behold. Working with famed U.K. producer-remixer Andy Weatherall, who's credited as having "anti-produced" the album, lead moaner James Graham and the lads delve deeper into the recesses of their own unfathomable personal darkness, and emerge with a compelling new sound salvaged from the scrap metal of a previous recession's industrial blight. Mechanical beats and icy synths spar with stormy guitar and Graham's ever-richer Scottish burr in a jagged, lonesome space that updates the band's forebears in foreboding. See the Radiohead-haunted guitar of advance single "Sick," the Depeche Mode bass line of "Another Bed," or the hammering Krautrock throb of "Dead City." Setting it all apart are Graham's obliquely harrowing vocals, which end the album almost a cappella, the scent of blood in the air.

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#19 Julia Holter, Ekstasis

  • Ekstasis album cover

    Ekstasis

    Julia Holter
    2012 | RVNG INTL. / SC Distribution

    Julia Holter makes music for an ever-changing carnival of the mind. One moment she's cooing dreamily, like a woman lost in the clouds of her own imagining, and the next she's thinking her way through incisive lyrics about the cerebral '60s art-film Last Year at Marienbad. Some of her sounds come across as childlike and lost, others are clearly and thoroughly composed. She demonstrates incredible range, often in the space of a... single time-defying song. It makes for an impressive mix of moods, one that Holter first revealed on Tragedy, her striking debut from late 2010 that wowed most of those who heard it. Just a few months later comes Ekstasis, another album made up of its own distinctive charms. "Marienbad" opens in a stately fashion, striking out into in an expectant expanse between the Beach Boys at their most elegant and the smeary psychedelic surplus of bands like Broadcast. Somehow, even as it invokes allusions to styles from distant pasts, Ekstasis sounds contemporary and new. Parts played on what sounds like lutes and harpsichords mingle with ethereal electronics, and Holter's affecting voice - small but resourceful in the way it wanders - makes for a sense of immediacy that rewards full attention in the here and now.

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#18 First Aid Kit, The Lion’s Roar

  • The Lion's Roar album cover

    The Lion's Roar

    First Aid Kit
    2012 | Wichita Recordings / Redeye

    Stockholm's a long way from Folsom Prison, a fact that hasn't escaped First Aid Kit. The Lion's Roar, the Swedish duo's sharp, sepia-toned sophomore album, bridges that gap with "Emmylou," an homage to Ms. Harris that makes the ultimate offer for lovers of Woodstock-era country: "I'll be your Emmylou and I'll be your June/ if you'll be my Gram and my Johnny, too," sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg pledge. As it turns... out, though, they're not looking for leading men: "No, I'm not asking much of you/ just sing, little darling, sing with me."

    The Lion's Roar is a record of romantic pragmatism and bold orchestration. Producer Mike Mogis (notable mainly for his work with Bright Eyes, whose Conor Oberst appears briefly here on "King of the World") helps clothe the naked twang of the band's debut with light-handed percussion, pedal steel, strings and rippling pianos, keeping the spotlight brightly on the Söderberg's familial harmonies. A Neko Case-like minor-key gloom rolls in on the title track and "I Found a Way," among others, but most of the songs stick to the sunshine. Gram and Johnny can rest easy - First Aid Kit can take it from here.

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#17 Passion Pit, Gossamer

  • Gossamer album cover

    Gossamer

    Passion Pit
    2012 | Columbia

    Passion Pit's 2009 debut, Manners, had a childlike approach to music. The album's Technicolor electropop felt akin to messy fingerpainting experiments, with its sing-song vocals, playground-joyful keyboards and squirrelly synth effects. Gossamer isn't quite as playful, but that's a good thing: The album's forays into slinky R&B ("Constant Conversations"), sleek Swedish indiepop ("Cry Like A Ghost"), neon new wave ("Carried Away") and Disney-movie whimsy ("On My Way") evince more depth. The songs... themselves are also rich with detail, from the music-box-gone-mad twinkles at the start of "Love Is Greed" to the warm background coos from Swedish a cappella group Erato that are sprinkled throughout.

    Gossamer's lyrics reflect this measured, meticulous approach, addressing fragile romance, fallible humanity and love's sweet simplicity. "I'll Be Alright," on which a soaring pop lilt gets mussed by what sounds like a malfunctioning cassette, chooses optimism in the face of self-loathing: "I've made so many messes/And this love has grown so restless/ I won't let you go the mess/ I'll be alright," sings vocalist Michael Angelakos. "Where We Belong" channels James Blake by way of Björk, grafting Angelakos's harrowing falsetto to glitchy programming and sweeping strings as he delivers aching sentiments: "But I believe in you/ Do you believe in me, too?"

    For Angelakos, uncluttered headspace is a luxury — and, judging by his well-documented struggles, it doesn't come easy. However, his willingness to address this entire emotional continuum, while still maintaining Passion Pit's sense of adventure, makes Gossamer a win.

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#16 The Flaming Lips, The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends

  • The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends album cover

    The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends

    The Flaming Lips
    2012 | Warner Bros.

    No one combines sawmill-roar noise, dying-planet sadness and mad-scientist glee with the heartfelt sincerity of The Flaming Lips. In return, the music world writes Wayne Coyne and his fellow Oklahomans a blank creative check, which they cash with sonic shenanigans that should leave a big, unruly mess but instead reliably yield something endearingly sweet. Amid all their gratuitous drug references and onstage theatrics, the Lips can shape chaos into emotionally comprehensible order... in a way that's uniquely their own, no matter how thoroughly they pillage classic rock's bathroom cabinet.

    Here, they put that good will to daredevil use on a collaborative album that combines tracks from vinyl EPs recorded and released last year with other co-op cuts. The opening track, "2012 (You Must Be Upgraded)," pulls off an unlikely trick, uniting Ke$ha's bad-girl drunk-pop with the Lips' psychedelic noise in a one-chord dance jam that takes an unexpected turn into Strawberry Fields territory before circling back to where it spastically started. "Ashes in the Air," meanwhile, spoofs Bon Iver but with Bon Iver's actual participation on falsetto vocals. Like many of the duets on the album, its phantasmical balladry is violently interrupted by gusts of distortion, feedback and other baloney.

    The influence of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" drifts like a specter throughout Heady Fwends: The Tame Impala collabo, "Children of the Moon," echoes it via kindred acoustic guitar strum and cosmic dada lust, while on the self-descriptive, Lightning Bolt-assisted "I'm Working at NASA on Acid" Coyne floats in his tin can until it blasts off, descends back to earth, and then buoys away again to be reconfigured with Neon Indian in "Is David Bowie Dying?" The clincher is the slo-mo rendition of Ewan MacColl's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face": Erykah Badu sings the Robert Flack-popularized standard an echo-laden childlike soprano even more spaced-out than her usual croon, and the Lips send her off like a helium balloon into a cotton candy cosmos. There's the strong suggestion that, like Bowie's Major Tom, she may never return to Earth.

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#15 Parquet Courts, Light Up Gold

  • Light Up Gold album cover

    Light Up Gold

    Parquet Courts
    2013 | What's Your Rupture?

    Anyone looking for a shorthand to describe the devil-may-care attitude pervading Light Up Gold, the irresistible debut from Brooklyn band Parquet Courts, will find it 24 seconds into the first song, when Austin Brown first sneers the album's most indelible hook: "Forget about it!" It's meant sarcastically — he's playing the part of a privileged one-percenter looking down his nose through his monocle at the unwashed masses — but it's a good... indication of the jaundiced eye through which Parquet Courts view our troubled times. Like the most beloved cult movies, the thing that makes Light Up Gold so addicting is its infinite quotability. On regional cuisine? "As for Texas: Donuts Only. You cannot find bagels here." On the value of wisdom? "Socrates died in the fucking gutter." And on the job market? "The lab is out of white lab coats/ 'cause there are no more slides and microscopes/ But there are still careers in combat, my son." They drop these bon mots between jagged guitar lines that sound like they were lifted from Wire's 154 — bent-coathanger leads that teeter on the steep incline between punk and post-punk. But Light Up Gold's greatest irony is that its creators aren't ironic at all. In their interview with Douglas Wolk, they stressed the importance of emotional honesty, and as the album goes on it becomes clear their acrid wit isn't the result of disaffection but deep-seated alarm. Sarcasm is the scalpel they use to dissect contemporary culture, turning its ambivalence against itself and exposing is rotten core. Insight like that is as rare as a bagel in Texas.

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#14 Marina and the Diamonds, Electra Heart

  • Electra Heart album cover

    Electra Heart

    Marina And The Diamonds
    2012 | Elektra

    Writing performance art pop with titles like "Bubblegum Bitch" and "Teen Idle" for an insular indie audience is one thing. Doing it with A-level producers who've crafted hits for Madonna, Britney and Rihanna while coming on like an explicitly feminist cross between Tori Amos and Katy Perry is quite another. On her U.K.chart-topping second album, Welsh singer Marina Diamondis of Marina and the Diamonds battles errant boyfriends, critiques feminine societal roles, and... examines her own psyche and how it unravels in failed relationships — all in synch to relentless dance beats aimed squarely at the international mainstream.

    Diamondis makes her message even more challenging by freely flitting from satire to sincerity and back again so that it's never really clear if she's playing at being a "Primadonna" — a deserved U.K. hit — or confessing that, yeah, she is indeed guilty of self-absorption. Her warbling, dramatic vocal tone magnifies that ambiguity; even when she's flat-out declaring, "My life is a play," Diamondis suggests that her theatrical disconnect from her own genuine feelings isn't simply personal; that it's part and parcel of being female in a conflicting world. What she sometimes lacks in nuance she compensates with hooks honed by Dr. Luke, Rick Nowels, Greg Kurstin, Stargate, a former Sneaker Pimp and one-third of Swedish House Mafia. This isn't a women's studies course taught by a seasoned professor; it's an unabashed dance record in which an ambitious young singer uses the tools of popular culture to examine both her self and her sex.

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#13 El-P, Cancer4Cure

  • Cancer 4 Cure album cover

    Cancer 4 Cure

    El-P
    2012 | Fat Possum Records

    El-P's music has always been a mix of sci-fi futurist grandiosity and old-school rap grime, like watching a chromed-out chromed-out, mile-long spaceship reenact the Licensed to Ill cover. Cancer 4 Cure has some familiar hallmarks: El still pushes analog synth distortion until it growls like a '70s stoner-metal guitar; he still sneaks classic hip-hop signifiers into an otherwise dystopian-tomorrow sound (Billy Squier and the J.B.'s always seem to survive the apocalypse), his... drums still break bones, and he still spits verbiage like he's letting loose internal-rhyme-twisting panic attacks. (His words, in opener "Request Denied": "I'm a 'holy fuck, what did he just utter' marksman".) But he's rarely sounded this full-throttle start to finish — the sounds aren't just pushed to the red but knifepoint immediate. And for all the hints of space-age debris on the margins, El recognizes that 2012 NYC is its own kind of Ridley Scott future. So he stays a master of reality, from the domestic-victim solidarity story of "For My Upstairs Neighbor" (the indelible sing-song chorus: "if you kill him I won't tell") to the police-state-ducking "Drones Over BKLYN" to the con-artist psyche-out "The Jig Is Up."

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#12 Japandroids, Celebration Rock

  • Celebration Rock album cover

    Celebration Rock

    Japandroids
    2012 | Polyvinyl Records

    Japandroids' Celebration Rock begins and ends with fireworks — not the county-fair variety, but the cheap, barely legal kind you set off in the woods with friends and then run away, giggling uncontrollably. The sound sets the tone for a sizzling, incandescent burst of a record, one that conjoins punk-rock fist-aloft solidarity and weepy heartland-rock sentimentality in one 35-minute-long bro-hug. Expect a lot of sloppy back-patting, acres of generous sentiment and a... surplus of the sorts of lines perfectly calibrated to shout joyously in the face of your closest friends. "We're lashing out at evil's sway tonight," for example. Or "Don't we have anything to live for?/ Well, of course we do, but until they come true/ We're drinking." It's a record that demands to be heard, and loved, in groups.

    Which doesn't make it mindless. As is usually the case with especially fierce good cheer, Celebration Rock is borne of desperation: The two-man Japandroids were minutes away from breaking apart, wilting under a lack of momentum, when they recorded its eight gasping, suitcase-compact anthems. Lead singer Brian King nearly died (perforated ulcer, an ailment about as far from "carefree rock 'n' roll" as you can get). A scan of the lyrics, excised from endorphins, unearths some fairly dark thoughts: "It's a lifeless life/ With no fixed address to give/ But you're not mine to die for anywhere, so I must live," King screams on "The House That Heaven Built." With just a guitar and a drum kit, meanwhile, the lifelong friends generate enough heat and momentum for an entire E Street band. Songs surge forward recklessly, explode, and then plow forward again. The relentless hurtling mirrors the philosophy expressed in the lyrics: Embrace life with the energy of an over-eager Labrador Retriever, no matter what it throws your way.

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#11 Dirty Projectors, Swing Lo Magellan

  • Swing Lo Magellan album cover

    Swing Lo Magellan

    Dirty Projectors
    2012 | Domino Recording Co

    Before Dirty Projectors' David Longstreth sings his first lead vocal on the Brooklyn sextet's sixth album, the bandleader clears his throat. Swing Lo Magellan is that kind of album — pointedly casual. It mixes dryly recorded, seemingly live-in-the-studio performances with strings/flute/clarinet/trumpet accompaniment on several songs by the avant-classical chamber ensemble yMusic. Most of Longstreth and Amber Coffman's guitars sound as though they were plugged directly into their amps without effects pedals or... distortion, and the band's harmonies appear similarly blunt and candid: Even when they emulate the twists and turns of contemporary R&B, there's nary an AutoTuned note. Yet few would deem anything here folksy, artless or improvised: This is strategically unpolished stuff from the complicated heads of well-educated aesthetes.

    The result is both immediate and puzzling. More than ever, Longstreth writes accessible pop melodies, but he still puts the accents and the syncopations in unexpected places, like on the otherwise uncharacteristically direct love ballad "Impregnable Question." His singing evinces both the rawness of indie rock and the heart-on-sleeve emotiveness of mainstream pop, while the accompaniment boasts the bumpy time signatures and wrench-throwing extra measures the bandleader mastered while studying music composition at Yale.

    And then there are the lyrics, which alternate between straightforward statements and allegorical poetry without any shifts in tone to suggest what's what. It's implied from its title that "Just from Chevron" deals with the evils of the oil industry, but Longstreth intentionally garbles some of the key lines; this song, like much of the rest, requires close, repeated studying to fully reveal itself. The notable exception is the last one, "Irresponsible Tune," which offers strummed acoustic guitar, bucketloads of reverb, and haunted background harmonies to suggest the gospel outings of Elvis Presley. In it, the toiling musician despairs over the ultimate significance of his artistic endeavors in a violent world until, suddenly, a bird at his window capriciously chirps. It's a moment that, unlike the enigmatic rest, needs no explanation.

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#10 Sharon Van Etten, Tramp

  • Tramp (Deluxe Edition) album cover

    Tramp (Deluxe Edition)

    Sharon Van Etten
    2012 | Jagjaguwar / SC Distribution

    Tramp, the emotionally candid third album from Brooklyn-based songwriter Sharon Van Etten, is a slow burn: most of the songs capture the intensity of the moments before a quietly smoldering tree becomes a raging wildfire. Take the lead-off single, "Serpents," which begins with calmly strummed yet unmistakably ominous chords. Then it explodes into something blazing and defiant: "You enjoy sucking on dreams," Van Etten seethes, "So I will fall asleep with someone... other than you."

    Since her 2009 debut Because I Was In Love - which featured largely acoustic guitar work and her beguiling, cigarette wisp of a voice - Van Etten's sound has become more expansive with each release. Tramp isn't just her best yet, it's also her most densely populated, boasting an impressive roster of indie guest stars like Beirut's Zach Condon, Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner (who contributes vocals on "Serpents"), avant-chanteuse Julianna Barwick, Walkmen drummer Matt Barick, and most prominently guitarist Aaron Dessner of the National, who also recorded Tramp in his Brooklyn garage-turned-studio.

    Tramp may be an unflinching chronicle of a relationship gone sour (check out the exceptionally poignant "Give Out": "It's not because I always give up/ It might be I always give out"), but it's at its most powerful when it's about more than just getting burned; Van Etten also sings about gathering the courage to build something new on charred ground. "Time is what I would need," she tells a new lover on "Leonard," while the lively mandolin strums spring up like sprouts after a long winter. Tramp finds transcendence in its final act, with the sparse closer "Joke or a Lie" glimmering like a new dawn. "It's bad to believe in any song you sing," she sings on the penultimate track, but the resonant honesty of Tramp proves 12 times over just how wrong she is about that.

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#9 Killer Mike, R.A.P. Music

  • R.A.P. Music album cover

    R.A.P. Music

    Killer Mike
    2012 | Williams Street Records

    Atlanta-based rapper Killer Mike and NYC rapper/producer El-P are local legends who have at times seemed like their best years were behind them. In that sense, R.A.P. Music is a little bit like Blaqkout, the excellent 2009 collaboration between DJ Quik and Kurupt — an album made that much sweeter by the fact that so few would've predicted it.

    Mike is a classicist, a real-talk rapper doing what in his view, song and... dance men wouldn't dare: "This is church, front pew, amen, pulpit, what my people need and the opposite of bullshit," he boasts on the title track. Given how gifted he is, his own lack of commercial success serves as proof that the state of rap as popular music might be as fouled-up as he claims. Mike's clever this way: What might've been interpreted as failure has been recycled as badge of integrity. It's an angle he's been pushing at least since last year's Pl3dge: "I'm in positions that these other rappers envy/ They major-broke and I get-rich indie."

    Part of what makes R.A.P. Music better than Mike's past efforts is its concision, but an even bigger part is El-P's production. For all its throwback talk and references, R.A.P. is a wildly diverse album, mixing north with south and '80s with aughts, an album so schizoid in its approach to time that it could probably only have been made now. As a lyricist Mike is, well, discontent — about politics, about black American life, about the state of the music he loves. At one point he manages to finagle two women into his garage and he still sounds pissed off. Whatever nuance is lost in his opinions is gained in how he delivers them — if for no other reason, appreciate Mike as a stuntman who, regardless of how long the jump, never falls. Despite all the wrist-slapping and heavy pretenses, it's a great album, one so carefully calibrated to sound like a rap classic that someday it might actually turn out to be one.

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#8 Miguel, Kaleidoscope Dream

  • Kaleidoscope Dream album cover

    Kaleidoscope Dream

    Miguel
    2012 | ByStorm Entertainment/RCA Records

    Just what kind of R&B visionary is the ascendant star Miguel? While every bit as ambitious Frank Ocean and just as committed to the craft of songwriting as Terius Nash, aka The-Dream, Miguel is far less interested in making big conceptual statements. Because of this, it's hard to know right away who he is, exactly, or what his goals are. Is he a fearless freak? An introvert? A do-you crooner? Or a... canny chart-seeker?

    The answer turns out to be all of the above. His first album ran 43 minutes and opened with a sharp, undeniable pop song ("Sure Thing"). Kaleidoscope Dream is 42 minutes, and kicks off with the already-popular lead single "Adorn," a supplicant's mid-tempo jam with a telling angle: Miguel makes the case for his lover-man bona fides not on it'll-move-the-earth-under-your-feet grounds, but because it'll work for what you've already got going on, like a sharp accessory: "Let my love adorn you," he pleads modestly. The self-negation involved in his come-ons — he openly requests to be defiled during "Use Me" — gives more insight into what might be driving Kaleidoscope Dream than its title does.

    There's a bashful quality even on some of the more direct offerings. "Don't Look Back" starts out in radio-courting fashion but closes with a surprise coda that reveals a songwriter's affinity for making every part of a pop song count. He only stumbles towards the end, with "Candles in the Sun," which flicks at a social consciousness he hasn't figured out how to carry as convincingly as the seduction-and-pain material. But who said sharply played, tightly written R&B isn't meaningful all on its own? Miguel, rather like Prince, is a weirdo with a surfeit of hooks and the chops to put them over. In an age of outsized R&B innovators, he's our subtle auteur.

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#7 Cloud Nothings, Attack on Memory

  • Attack On Memory album cover

    Attack On Memory

    Cloud Nothings
    2012 | Carpark Records

    For the last few years, 20-year-old Cleveland native Dylan Baldi has been recording a steady torrent of endearing lo-fi pop contagions. Released under the name Cloud Nothings, Baldi's songs are so simply constructed, so innately hooky, they almost sound easy: His 2010 compilation Turning On was a happy murk of lint-covered guitars, three-floors-below drums, and vocals so crackly, they could have been sampled off a ham-radio. Last year's self-titled follow-up was crisper... and snappier, bounding along with the sort of energy of school kids finally released into the wilds of summertime.

    Baldi could easily have replicated that joyful noise sound for a few more albums, and no one would really have objected. Thankfully, though, he got bored. And bold. And kinda angry. Attack on Memory contains a lot of recognizable Cloud Nothings DNA - speedy riffs, forebrain-hugging melodies - but it grafts them onto a monstrous-sounding framework, courtesy of engineer Steve Albini. On Memory, Baldi's ostensibly straightforward power-pop numbers are stretched out and bulked up so efficiently, it feels like he somehow jumped three records ahead in less than year.

    In fact, Memory veers so forcefully from its predecessors that, at first listen, it's a bit jarring: The opening track, "No Future No Past," is a slow-burn grind of spangled, in-utero guitars and tortured vocals, with Baldi intoning the words "give up/ come to/ no hope/ we're through" so harshly, it sounds as though his larynx is going to flip him off and jump out of his throat. Even more adventurous is "Wasted Days," a nine-minute(!) peal with a lithe, lupine guitar break that sounds like Greg Sage conducting Hawkwind.

    Baldi hasn't given up on the quick-fix pop song, as evidenced by short, piercing numbers like "Fall In" and "Our Plan." But even those tracks feel mega, emboldened by Jayson Gerycz's battering-ram drums and Baldi's squeezed-dry vocals (by the time the album finishes, you're surprised he's able to get a word out at all). Those who've followed Cloud Nothings thus far will be happily walloped by Memory, yet even newcomers will find it a blast, in every sense of the word.

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#6 Matthew E. White, Big Inner

  • Big Inner album cover

    Big Inner

    Matthew E. White
    2013 | Domino Recording Co

    Richmond, Virginia-reared singer/songwriter/arranger Matthew E. White recently confessed to music blog Aquarium Drunkard that he had made a pilgrimage of sorts to Randy Newman's home in L.A. a few years back. Rather than stalk the venerable songwriter/Oscar-winning soundtrack composer at a distance, though, White worked up the nerve to ring the man's doorbell and hand off his own music. If it was a copy of his poised debut, Big Inner, there's a... good chance Newman might soon be ringing White up.

    The biggest man to ever utter a line like "I am a barracuda/ I am a hurricane" and make it into the gentlest of admissions, White emerges on Big Inner fully steeped in the nuanced, vigilant and incisive songcraft of the likes of totemic American tunesmiths like Newman, Allen Toussaint and Lambchop's Kurt Wagner. And while such debuts are usually tinged by youthful exuberance and metabolism, there's such patience in White's delivery and his backing band's pacing that belie their years.

    Opener "One of These Days" simmers and sees through the temporality of the world, White assuring his betrothed that even though "we all pass away/ everyone finds a way," he still wants to be there "when the glory fades…and never turn away." His whispers mingle with Dixieland horns and a crisp backbeat on "Will You Love Me," and he sounds positively sage when he sings at that song's climax: "Darkness can't drive out darkness/ only love can do that." The dilapidated yet regal strings of "Hot Toddies" sound as drunken and quietly mirthful as vintage Newman, while the nine stirring minutes of closer "Brazos" cloaks itself in cresting strings, a driving bassline and gospel choir that evokes Spiritualized's sense of redemption through sound. Underneath almost every song there pulses New Orleans's second line strut. You can hear it buoy the uptempo "Steady Pace" as White ensures his love with the same sense of calm that he and his band deploy throughout this magnificent debut: "We can take our time."

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#5 Allo Darlin’, Europe

  • Europe album cover

    Europe

    Allo Darlin'
    2012 | Slumberland Records / The Orchard

    "You said, 'A record is not just a record, records can hold memories/ All these records sound the same to me, and I'm full up with memory,'" Elizabeth Morris sings on "My Sweet Friend," the last track of Allo Darlin's sophomore album Europe. The U.K. indiepop band's 2010 self-titled debut was about the anticipation and excitement of new love: Morris sang about kissing on Ferris wheels, wondered where she'd end up... after the bar closed, and insisted, "One fine day, I'm gonna be your girl." Europe has the same emotional intimacy and nuance of its predecessor, but instead of sitting on the edge of her seat waiting for something to happen, this time Morris is writing from a distance, reflecting on love that's come and gone.

    Many of Europe's songs begin with an idyllic setup — in the sun with a bottle of wine, in a car with the windows down, walking down a street in New York — with Morris implying that everything was better back then. In opening track "Neil Armstrong," she sings, "Then why did you say that you miss a simpler time?/ Well, so do I, and I find myself pining for you." In "Some People Say," she wishes "some things would stay the same," while remembering a perfect day and wondering what her then-lover is doing now.

    The record also tells the story of music's power in a relationship — how certain songs suddenly Mean Something when you think you might be in love. In "Some People Say," a slow number with strings and bending lap steel guitar, Morris references "a song that to me has a hidden meaning," and in "The Letter," she looks back on a failed relationship, singing, "But we can't help the things we choose/ And I pictured you singing the Silver Jews." This arc shows how much the band has matured in the last couple years, and you can hear it in their sound as well. There's still a sunny surf-pop vibe in tracks like "Northern Lights," "The Letter" and "Still Young," and playful, triumphant guitars in "Capricornia" and "Wonderland." But on Europe, Allo Darlin' sound bigger and fuller, and they've found a perfect balance where everyone's heard but no one overpowers. Morris's voice also has more muscle, and they've left a tiny bit of the twee-ness behind without losing an ounce of charm.

    But while part of what makes Europe so special is its grandiosity, its best song is its most simple. "Tallulah," played only on ukulele, begins in a car with bad music on the radio, until Morris's partner finds a cassette containing the Go-Betweens album Tallulah. Later, they're in a bar with a shitty DJ, so they flee to another one that's playing Toots and the Maytals. With letters written on magazine pages and postcards, and thoughts of what could have been, it's an anthem for all of us romantic saps who do things like make a mental playlist of songs and bands it'll be hard to listen to after the breakup. In that song she also sings, "I'm wondering if/ I've already heard/ all the songs that'll mean something/ and I'm wondering if/ I've already met/ all the people that'll mean something." In a way, those lines sum up all of Europe: There's no way to tell whether life would have been better had things worked out differently, or if the best is still yet to come, or if everything is perfect the way it is right now.

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#4 Kendrick Lamar, good kid, m.A.A.d city

  • good kid, m.A.A.d city album cover

    good kid, m.A.A.d city

    Kendrick Lamar
    2013 | Top Dawg / Aftermath / Interscope

    The connective tissue of Kendrick Lamar's major-label debut is a series of not-quite skits — prayers, voicemails, front-seat conversation — that string together an album that reveals itself as a long day in his adolescence. This isn't exactly a new trick in rap, but it's rare that found sound is so immersive, and so effective at absorbing the listener. Then again, the Compton rapper subtitled the album "a short film by Kendrick... Lamar," so maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that good kid, m.A.A.d city is purely cinematic in scope and execution.

    It is, to be clear, a striking achievement. Yet the truest strength of the album is that it still hits even once you've untangled its various knots. The complex narrative is a leap in ambition for Lamar, but in doing so he's retained the elements of his writing that made him famous in the first place. On his last album, Section.80, he showed a keen eye for observing, analyzing and understanding those close to him, and it's from that place this record grows.

    The story isn't the only thing that stuns. Despite being raised in L.A. rap's epicenter and mentored for years by Dr. Dre, good kid sounds like it was stewed in the South. Its sonic bedrock is the same muted, plaintive future-funk that bathed the Alabama group G-Side's Starshipz & Rockets — a sound shaped for, and by, dark nights and deep thoughts.

    In totality, the album awakens the spirits of Outkast's legendary Aquemini — no small praise, indeed. That is rarified air in hip-hop, but Kendrick Lamar, out from the jumble of a new class of rap stars, now finds himself in very different company.

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#3 Fiona Apple, The Idler Wheel…

  • The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do album cover

    The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do

    Fiona Apple
    2012 | Epic

    "I just want to feel everything," sings Fiona Apple in "Every Single Night," the lead track and first single on her fourth album, which, just like her second one, comes bearing a title so ridiculous it dares you to dismiss her. She's got the problem that afflicts sensitive folks; that of piercing awareness. But instead of running from it, she repeats those words like a mantra to help her endure the pain... that comes with perception, truth, love and all those other difficult things that make life worth living. And while she's doing that, she lets us know what the rest of the album is like: There's Apple's piano, her voice (sometimes overdubbed), a celeste, some percussion, a sound effect or two, and not much else.

    But there's a lot of Apple here. Throughout The Idler Wheel, she's front and center so simply that the starkness feels almost avant-garde. As she admits on that first cut, she's fighting with her brain and there is no referee — just Apple, her drummer/co-producer Charley Drayton, and generous doses of silence between notes. Nothing comes between her and us. This is the polar opposite of all those claustrophobic, super-compressed, "loudness wars" records, and the extra space gives the 34-year-old songwriter the room to be baldly ferocious, particularly when she's vulnerable. "Gimme, gimme, gimme what you got in your mind in the middle of the night," she implores in "Daredevil" with a lust so unguarded it borders on wacky. But it's nevertheless inviting, because she's musically, as well as emotionally, naked.

    The Idler Wheel is a spectacularly erotic record. Its contours are irregular like the human body, constantly shifting its weight with the way Apple leans into her piano and then pushes away from it. And within that instability lies sadness: She sings a sweet but barbed "Jonathan" to her ex, writer Jonathan Ames, and in the very next song she's "Left Alone," admitting that she's making that isolation inevitable over a suitably restless piano riff that, like a lot of the album, recalls those ageless Vince Guaraldi jazz scores for Peanuts TV specials. But there's no melancholy: "Nothing wrong when a song ends in a minor key," she shrugs in "Werewolf." And although they're typically played and sung with disarming gusto, these songs often do exactly that. In the slowest, angriest one, "Regret," she screams so hard that the words almost fall away. Apple's feeling everything here the way she wants to. She fights the good fight.

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#2 Frank Ocean, channel ORANGE

  • channel ORANGE album cover

    channel ORANGE

    Frank Ocean
    2012 | Def Jam Records

    R&B auteur Frank Ocean's masterful and disarming major-label debut channel ORANGE is meticulously structured like a long-planned confession, and as Ocean announced shortly before its release, it presents a major one: The first love Ocean alludes to in lead track "Thinkin Bout You"; the unreciprocated love that haunts him in "Bad Religion" and who ultimately runs away in "Forrest Gump" at the end, is a man. Celebrating an autobiographical same-sex attraction, however... anguished, and pinpointing its subject with masculine nouns, is nothing less than revolutionary for a mainstream African-American male performer. It would overshadow a lesser work, but it is but one revelation among many here. Ocean presides over his album like a visionary filmmaker, one who favors bright colors and stylized mise-en-scène to offset dark and raw emotional states.

    Ocean narrates ORANGE as both participant and shell-shocked observer of "the sweet life": Drugs are everywhere. Women are riding him like an escalator to the heavens. Super-rich kids and their super-fake friends swarm around him like bees. Despite his bemused detachment, there's a fireball of hurt smoldering at the center of Ocean's psyche, and he drifts through ORANGE's dream-reality, hanging on to the memory of his painful but profoundly true first love as if it were the ladder of a swimming pool that suddenly got way too deep. Meanwhile, a fluidly shape-shifting backdrop morphs from kaleidoscopic soul grooves to bleak techno to lush orchestral interludes and beyond, further intensifying his inner and outer visions.

    He cries out for help with a clarity that's both stunning and disarming, flipping double and triple entendres the way showier singers get churchy: He likens the "Pink Matter" of his lover's womb to peaches, mangos, cotton candy and Dragon Ball villain Majin Buu. His subject matter and vocabulary similarly bares the schooling of hip-hop bards: The multi-part epic "Pyramids" concerns a time-traveling Cleopatra the unemployed narrator ultimately pimps in a motel so shabby it's still got a VCR; "Crack Rock" bemoans the difference between the death of a dope-pushing cop and a brother who gets popped — one brings out a search party 300 strong, the other dies "and don't no one hear the sound."

    Yet Ocean spins this grit with the luminous vibrancy of the best singer-songwriters, burnishing everything to brilliance with pleading delivery and love of wandering jazz chords. He's both R&B classicist and rebel; a buoyant Stevie Wonder with Elvis Costello's acerbic wit while serving up his own favorite flavor — bittersweet. "You run my mind, boy/ Running on my mind," he croons to his muse, then whistles to him like Otis as if sittin' on the dock of the bay, gazing at one of the album's many pink skies that mask the blues within.

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#1 Cold Specks, I Predict a Graceful Expulsion

]]> http://www.emusic.com/music-news/list-hub/emusics-best-albums-of-2012/feed/ 22 eMusic’s 13 to Watch in 2013 http://www.emusic.com/music-news/list-hub/emusics-13-to-watch-in-2013/ http://www.emusic.com/music-news/list-hub/emusics-13-to-watch-in-2013/#comments Mon, 10 Dec 2012 15:59:47 +0000 eMusic Editorial Staff http://www.emusic.com/?post_type=emusic_list_hub&p=3046892 We hate to gloat, but last year, we predicted Purity Ring, Kendrick Lamar, Porcelain Raft and Nicolas Jaar would have big years in 2012. Were we wrong? That’s a decent success ratio, sure, but we’re aiming for an even better guess-rate for next year. And looking through our list of 13 to Watch in 2013, I feel confident in saying this year’s hopefuls will be next year’s breakouts. Take a few minutes to get to know them now.

Oh, and one more note on last year’s list? We also named Lady Lamb the Beekeeper and Bleached, both of whom may not have blown up in 2012, but who just signed significant record deals for 2013. As it turns out, we weren’t wrong. Just early.

Parquet Courts

White Lung

  • sorry album cover

    sorry

    White Lung
    2012 | Deranged Records / The Orchard

    In 2012, the widespread acclaim for Japandroids bolstered the profile of other bands from Vancouver, including (and especially) thrashing punks White Lung. The quartet capitalized on this boost, touring with Ceremony and releasing a scabrous second album, Sorry, which melds corrosive guitars to frontwoman Mish Way's gritty lyrics and bellowing vocals. Like their sonic kindred spirits Pretty Girls Make Graves, the band succinctly confronts the anti-women sentiments that permeate society. And given... that those attacks are occurring with distressing regularity, White Lung's music – and fierce feminism – is vitally important. – Annie Zaleski

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Merchandise

  • Children Of Desire album cover

    Children Of Desire

    Merchandise
    2012 | Katorga Works / SC Distribution

    While most of the U.S. hasn't even heard of Merchandise, the defiantly DIY band had a room full of record execs foaming at the mouth on the outskirts of Brooklyn recently. Listen to any of their self-released records (free of charge here for the time being), and it's easy to hear why; despite hailing from Tampa's hardcore punk scene, Merchandise whip up a racket that's equal parts Krautrock and noise-pop. Depending... on where they decide to go next, they could either implode spectacularly – like Death Grips did this year – or become The Next Killers. – Andrew Parks

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Icona Pop

  • Iconic EP album cover

    Iconic EP

    Icona Pop
    2012 | Big Beat Records/Atlantic

    There's been no shortage of pop ringers in 2012, but Swedish duo Icona Pop still managed to make a lot of noise with just a handful of EPs. The group, consisting of Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo, belong to the new class of underground artists pushing pop to new heights with massive hooks and thrashing beats that hit with the force of a champagne glass smashed on the dancefloor. They've had some... help: Their peer Charli XCX penned their celebratory breakup banger "I Love It" and Patrik Berger (Robyn) produced it. Lyrics like "I threw your shit into a bag and pushed it down the stairs" are proof enough Icona Pop are not to be underestimated. – Marissa G. Muller

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Pure Bathing Culture

  • Pure Bathing Culture album cover

    Pure Bathing Culture

    Pure Bathing Culture
    2012 | Father/Daughter Records / TuneCore

    Pure Bathing Culture are as tranquil and luxurious as their name implies Рgently lapping guitars and rippling layers of synth, topped with Sarah Versprille's lazy purr. But listen closely to the lyrics of "Lucky One," the intoxicating first track on their too-brief debut EP, and that cool fa̤ade starts melting fast. As Daniel Hindman's guitar does a sock hop slow dance in the background, Sarah Versprille rebuffs an indifferent ex-lover by... bragging about the suitors lining up at her door ("Who's the lucky one now?" she asks) and in "Silver Shore's Lake," in front of a rippling, translucent musical backdrop, she laments, "I wish my heart was deep enough." Pure Bathing Culture were 2012's most alluring mirage: foamy waves of sound that hide stinging nettles. РJ. Edward Keyes

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Joey Bada$$

Savages

  • I Am Here album cover

    I Am Here

    Savages
    2012 | Pop Noire / Republic Of Music

    The four women in London post-punk act Savages are bringing danger back to indie rock. Formed in late 2011 (and a U.K. media darling by this past May), the quartet turned heads with their abrasive concerts, androgynous look and a stark sound: doomy, greyscale post-punk with boiling basslines and a bleak outlook. (Think early PJ Harvey meets the Pop Group.) With just a live EP and 7-inch to its name, Savages have... kept demand high for new music – and primed itself to become massive in 2013. – Annie Zaleski

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Night Beds

  • Every Fire; Every Joy album cover

    Every Fire; Every Joy

    Night Beds
    2012 | EP/SINGLE

    Like Justin Vernon in Bon Iver or Justin Ringle from Horse Feathers, Winston Yellen, of the Nashville-based chamber-folk outfit Night Beds, leads with his voice. Tensile and slightly androgynous, it swoops among the acoustic strums of their recent single "Even If We Try," and swells against the cinematic strings throughout their 2012 EP Every Fire; Every Joy. It all sounds like a warm-up for Night Beds' forthcoming debut, Country Sleep, out in... February from Dead Oceans; that will surely offer a richer showcase for Yellen's distinct instrument. – Stephen Deusner

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Sky Ferreira

  • Ghost EP album cover

    Ghost EP

    Sky Ferreira
    2012 | CAPITOL

    Between Sky Ferreira's Lolita-like stage presence, repeated Terry Richardson visits, and Pitchfork-approved repositioning as an edgier example of post-Robyn pop music (see also: her "Youth Quake" co-stars Charlie XCX and Grimes), the singer's bound to become one of 2013's Downtown 'It' Girls. Translation: when her long-awaited debut album finally drops, expect photo spreads and think pieces everywhere from Vice magazine to The New York Times. Scrappy in spirit yet... sleek in execution, this is Top 40 music for a Tumblr world. – Andrew Parks

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Daughn Gibson

  • All Hell album cover

    All Hell

    Daughn Gibson
    2012 | White Denim / TuneCore

    As first pointed out in an extensive eMusic piece earlier this year, Daughn Gibson's rural upbringing makes him a man of contradictions. On one hand, yes, he enjoys blasting country music, joyriding down back roads, and pelting watermelons with shotgun shells. But that's only half of the story. As first revealed on All Hell – a low-key release on the label of Pissed Jeans frontman Matt Kosloff – Gibson sings like... Johnny Cash but constructs his lonesome highway hooks around a thoroughly modern mix of thrift shop loops and spooky laptop samples. And now that he's joined the Jeans on Sub Pop, a joint tour/takeover mission can't be far away. – Andrew Parks

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Jessie Ware

Blut Aus Nord

  • Memoria Vetusta II - Dialogue with the Stars album cover

    Memoria Vetusta II - Dialogue with the Stars

    Blut Aus Nord
    2009 | CANDLELIGHT/TANGLADE

    With Cosmography, the third album in their 777 trilogy, French iconoclast Blut Aus Nord (fronted by the cryptic Vindsval) completed its evolution from a strange, experimental black metal band into an underground entity that transcends borders and boundaries. Sounds ranging from ethereal choir music to Godflesh-inspired industrial rock are well within its grasp, as are more avant-garde electronic-based compositions, Pink Floyd-ish psychedelia, mesmeric drones, downcast goth, otherworldly Krautrock and ripping, blast beat... battering metal. It's staggering that the group released all three 777 albums as well as the 30-minute EP What Once Was… Liber II (the follow-up to 2010's What Once Was… Liber I) in less than 18 months. It's too bad Vindsval doesn't promote his achievements by playing live, conducting interviews or updating fans with Tweets. But given Vindsval's track record, it probably won't be too long until 888 – or whatever he chooses to call it – is upon us. Chances are it will be just as jaw-dropping and groundbreaking as 777. – Jon Wiederhorn

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Ducktails

  • Ducktails III: Arcade Dynamics album cover

    Ducktails III: Arcade Dynamics

    Ducktails
    2011 | Woodsist / Revolver

    Matt Mondanile, the guitarist of Real Estate, has been recording his one-man ultra chill psych pop project Ducktails as a one man project since 2007. But things have changed for his upcoming album The Flower Lane: He's added a full band (the members of Big Troubles), several prominent collaborators (Oneohtrix Point Never and Madeline Follin of Cults), and got signed to Domino. Early tastes of the album suggest that Mondanile and company... tap into some Steely Dan grooves to make catchy, smooth music. – Evan Minsker

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