Ambitiously detailed tendrils of sound

Daniel Lopatin’s work as Oneohtrix Point Never has been evolving in recent years to a fine point. R Plus Seven, his ninth Oneohtrix album overall, is ambitiously detailed, each tendril of sound — whatever its source, human voice or digital static — seemingly painted onto the aural canvas with a fine brush. Maybe he was inspired by his December 2012 participation, with visual artist Nate Boyce, in a multimedia evening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art; there’s a fine-art quality to R Plus Seven‘s gradations. But there’s a public-spiritedness that it shares, along with a few compositional qualities, with the ’70s downtown New York minimalism in whose steps it proudly follows.

On the 94-second “He She,” Lopatin cuts and arranges a litany of vocal sounds into a tune that evokes both Todd Edwards (who cut up the vocals on Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” and “Face to Face”) and Meredith Monk. Sometimes it can get abstruse — “Inside World” stops and starts so much it can grow wearying, despite some lovely embellishments — but more often the trickery opens the music up wide rather than making it hermetic. “Chrome Country,” the closer, is an uplifting organ and choir chamber number. It’s a lift, and so is the album.

Moby first broke through in 1991 as a New York club DJ (he’d been a regular at the multi-level space Mars, in the Meatpacking District, where he’d play everything from hip-hop to dancehall reggae as well as house music and early techno) who’d scored a novelty hit: “Go,” which utilized Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks theme. Within two years of “Go” hitting the UK Top 10, the small, geeky multi-instrumentalist was signed to a major label (Elektra) and issuing critically-acclaimed titles (1993′s Move EP and 1995′s Everything Is Wrong) that bridged the rave underground and the pop mainstream. Dance purists blanched at first (and pop fans shrugged, at least in the States), but by 1999 — after a detour into loud rock with 1997′s divisive Animal Rights — Moby had perfected the amalgam with Play, a warm recasting of downtempo beats, sampled blues vocals, and inviting instrumentation that sold more than 12 million copies worldwide.

Since Play, Moby has settled into a comfortable niche as both a dance-music forefather (he frequently DJs at festivals around the world) and singer-songwriter whose songs are often sung by others. That’s particularly the case on the songful new Innocents, which pairs Moby not only with his first outside producer — Mark “Spike” Stent, who worked on Massive Attack’s early records as well as, in more recent years, Lady Gaga, Usher and No Doubt — but a half-dozen vocal guests of note: Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, Mark Lanegan, Damien Jurado, Cold Specks, Skylar Grey and Imyang Bassey, Moby’s longtime touring vocalist. eMusic’s Michaelangelo Matos spoke with Moby about the new album, the shrinking of New York studio space, and L.A.’s confusing topography.

Innocents is the first album you’ve made with an outside producer. Did that change how you wrote?

I’ve been working on music the same way for the past 30 years. I go into my studio and I play guitar or play keyboards or play around with different equipment and I just keep writing until I end up with something that I like. Sometimes I’ll read interviews with musicians who will talk about an erratically different way in which they approach making one record different from the next. I wish I had those interesting stories, because it’s really just me alone in my studio with a bunch of weird equipment, and it has been for quite a long time.

Because you were recording with someone else, did you treat your initial recordings as demos?

Yeah. I would go into my studio and spend about six months coming up with a bunch of ideas. When I first started meeting with Spike I had around 200 ideas, but clearly they weren’t 200 good ideas. We focused on probably 30-40 of those ideas and then we started reaching out to people who we thought might be interesting to have on the record. I got really lucky, because only a couple of people didn’t get back to us.

When did you begin to meet with Mark “Spike” Stent?

I think a year ago. To be honest with you, my grasp of time is kind of not that great. Like, the other day I was signing something and I had to put the date in there and I felt like the Absent-Minded Professor because I couldn’t remember what year it was.

[Stent] afforded me a degree of objectivity and perspective that I normally don’t have. Your perspective on what you’ve written really changes qualitatively the moment you share it with someone else. That for me was the main benefit of working with the producer is having this regained objectivity.

What led you to work together? Did you meet socially before this?

I’ve been signed to Mute Records for a while. Daniel Miller [the owner of] Mute Records, kept working with Spike and Alan Moulder, who did a lot of records. I really liked the records that Spike had worked on, some of the early stuff like the KLF and Massive Attack and Björk, which is ironic because a lot of people who want to work with him are interested in more of his pop productions [including Beyoncé and Madonna]. In turn, I think the reason he wanted to work with me is because I wasn’t interested in making a big pop record. I wanted to make something more lo-fi and weird.

You take a couple of guys in their 40s who spent most of their lives in studios, and the first thing they start talking about is their favorite weird old equipment. I have a slightly compulsive collection of tape delays — about eight of them. None of them work particularly well. You end up almost having an orchestra of tape delays. At one point the record was sounding very, very clean. So we ended up spending a couple of days putting the record through some sort of processing that would make these clean recordings sound more grimy and characterly.

The odd thing about…I would almost call it the new way of making records, because in the old days things were more compartmentalized. There was a writing period, followed by a recording period, followed by a tracking period: You’d have the drummer come in and spend a week doing drums, and then the bass, and then the vocals. Now you keep writing and recording and adding things to songs and playing around with stuff until things are done. The mixing process, rather than being a separate, added process, is almost a continuation of the creative process.

What changed the most from your initial idea of what the album might be and what it became?

When I first started thinking about this album I wanted it to be an underground, lo-fi dance record. Spike got me to change the focus to a more lo-fi melodic album. He said that when he listens to my records, what resonates with him is the more melodic music. He is the one who pushed it to become more like a singer-songwriter album. “Don’t Love Me” and “A Long Time” originally were very grimy, minimal dance tracks. He pushed me to give them more an emotional quality and more interesting chord structures. Those are the two holdovers from what the album was originally meant to be.

What lo-fi dance records inspired that initial idea?

Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English; a lot of early electronic music like Silver Apples and Suicide; Manu DiBango; a lot of Jamaican dance music and African dance music; and especially things that Wally Badarou played on. He’s one of my favorite musicians of all time. He’s the unsung hero of so many dance records. And a lot of New York records made in the early ’80s: Liquid Liquid, ESG, the Bush Tetras, Medium Medium, Konk. Just the records I grew up on. I’ve rediscovered them.

It’s funny — one of the people who helped me rediscover them was my old assistant Alex [Frankel]. He’s now in the band the Holy Ghost!, on DFA. When he was working with me, I would hang out with him and his friends, and they were all in their early 20s, and their favorite records were my favorite records when I was in my teens in the early ’80s. They kind of reintroduced me to the kind of music I loved. He was my assistant at the time [of 2008's Last Night]. I was playing the tracks I was working on to him. Every now and then he would get excited about something, and that was when I knew it was probably worth pursuing.

You moved to L.A. three years ago. Do you approach music differently there than you did in New York?

I think so. I have a sort of poetic-philosophical understanding of how living in L.A. has affected how I make music, and also a very practical, direct way. The direct way is college radio. Living in New York, I mainly listened to music that I owned. New York has good college radio, but terrible broadcast signal strength. Whereas in L.A., there’s KCRW and KXLU — really great college radio — and I think that’s affected how this album sounds.

On a more poetic level, L.A. is so vast, so byzantine, so weird and so un-cohesive, so in a way, when you move you have to make this huge effort to try and understand Los Angeles and make sense of it. Most cities are very cohesive: New York, Paris, Frankfurt, San Francisco, D.C., amazing, wonderful cities that are quite small and quite cohesive. Then you come to L.A. and it’s just [got] absolutely no cohesion. It almost makes people who live here search out a degree of smallness and comfort, because the city is so huge and confusing. I feel like this album has a smallness and comfort to it that might, oddly enough, [come from] living in L.A.

I thought I’d live in New York forever. Then I stopped drinking five years ago, and when I got sober I suddenly realized that New York is the single best place to be a drunk and unfortunately not the best place to be sober. The culture in New York revolves around going out and drinking and doing drugs and being degenerate, which is amazing when you can do that, but then you get sober and you feel kind of left out. Everyone in New York is out having the best time of their lives, and I’m at home watching 30 Rock DVDs. Also, I realized I wanted to be warm in the winter, and I wanted to be around nature.

New York, because it’s so affluent, most of the writers and musicians have been pushed out, so I wanted to live in a place that’s got more creative community. At some point I guess four or five years ago I realized that I actually had more friends [in L.A.] than I did in New York, especially when it comes to music. The real estate in New York is too expensive for anyone to have studios anymore. A couple of years ago, some friends of mine in L.A. were looking to record an orchestra in New York. There wasn’t a single recording studio in New York where they could record an orchestra. They ended up having to rent an empty space in a theater — and while they were recording, there was a huge Korean birthday party happening next door. They actually had to cancel [the session], because the Korean dance party music kept coming through the walls. Now, I actually don’t know too many professional musicians who don’t live in L.A.

You’ve been putting out records frequently these past few years. What kind of clock do you work on? Do you write music every day you can?

I don’t know how to do anything else, and it’s what I love to do. When I was 13 or 14, I spent a lot of time reading books, and some of my heroes from back then were Flannery O’Connor and Woody Allen and Picasso. I was always impressed by their work ethic, that idea of: When you’re inspired, go into the studio and work. When you’re not inspired, go into the studio and work. If you have success that means you should work more. If you have failure that means you should work more. No matter what’s going on an artist or writer or musician’s life, the only appropriate response is to keep working.

You’ve worked with vocalist Inyang Basey for a while now. How did you meet her?

When I was going on tour with the album Wait For Me I had a singer I was working with in the UK who couldn’t get a work visa to tour in the States, so at the last minute I had to hire a new singer. The very last person I auditioned was Inyang. The moment she started singing I knew she was the one. It turns out she’d never really sung professionally; her day job at the time was working at Carnegie Hall in their 20th Century classical music division. Her background when she was growing up was listening to the Dead Kennedys and the Sex Pistols. It’s funny that this skinny white kid was introducing her to older gospel and soul music.

Did Spike suggest any singers for the album?

Yeah. I basically started asking friends of mine whom they would recommend. My criteria were quite specific: I was looking for people who had really interesting emotional voices but who could also write really interesting lyrics. Spike’s one recommendation was Skylar Grey. She’s known more for being a pop person, but her background is more singer-songwriter based and a little more experimental. I asked Daniel Miller, and his one recommendation was Cold Specks. The way it works with all the collaborators is, I sent them about five instrumentals to see if anything resonated with them. Each of them picked one or two that they liked. Once the vocals have been recorded and sent to me I then rewrote the song around the vocals.

Did you resend a track to multiple vocalists before you got a yes?

Oh yeah. I had 10 instrumentals I really loved and really wanted vocals on. I’m kind of mercenary when it comes to trying to get the right vocals on the right track. It’s almost like a weird form of musical promiscuity, where I would sometimes send the same instrumental to three different people to try to see if it resonates with anyone.

Where was the third time the charm?

The song that Mark Lanegan co-wrote, ["The Lonely Night"] — that had been instrumental for a few years. I had never quite felt comfortable with what people had sent back. Then I gave it to him, and all of a sudden it felt like the vocals and the music made sense together. I made the final mix around his vocals. The music is mixed very quietly; the whole intention was to draw attention to his vocals.

Do you end up editing lyrics a lot?

Sometimes. The only person [I did that with] on this record was Skylar Grey. She’d written a line in the song: “Shades of grey.” This was right at the height of the Fifty Shades of Grey popularity. Skylar, because she lives up in the mountains, hadn’t heard about the book. I had to get her to make some suggestions for things that didn’t sound like they were referencing Fifty Shades of Grey. She thought it was funny.

I want to ask you about “Saints”: It’s obviously your instrumental style, but it seems looser and grander than usual — a big sweep with a lot of moving parts. Did it take a long time to put together?

It was supposed to be an instrumental that someone was going to write lyrics to, and I couldn’t find the right person. At some point Spike and I realized it was pretty good as an instrumental, so the focus was to try and finish it. I hired an arranger at the very end — I’d written orchestral parts, and I wanted to know what it would be like if someone came in and wrote orchestral parts. There’s a lot of big, bombastic brass parts. I think there are 300 different string players on it. It’s mixed in a way that the orchestral stuff doesn’t overwhelm the track. It almost makes me want to do a weird orchestral mix of it that strips out the drums.

Were you thinking of how some of these songs might be interpreted live?

No [laughs]. I knew from the beginning that I wasn’t going to go on tour with this record. I’ve had that frustration in the past of recording music, putting it on a record, and then realizing that it’s impossible to play it live in any interesting way.

What led to the decision not to tour?

A lot of it involves aging. As I’ve gotten older I’ve started to realize that life is short, and as much as I like standing on stage and playing music, I love being at home working on music. Of course, it drives my manager crazy, because in 2013 very few people buy records and the only way musicians make money is by touring. Basically, I’m focusing on the one aspect of the music business that’s not at all lucrative, while turning my back on the only lucrative side of the music business.

Well, you’ve always had a contrary streak.

Yeah, I guess so. I appreciate that we all need to eat and need to pay the rent. But if you have a finite amount of time, shouldn’t it be spent on things that you really love and find important? Even if that means making less money and making my business manager and manager very unhappy, I’d still rather be in my studio working on music.

A set polished as brightly as their breakout hit

When Swedish singers Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo, aka Icona Pop, performed at Seattle’s Showbox during the beginning of an electronic-pop showcase — part of the city’s annual Decibel Festival — in September 2012, they played to fewer than 100 people. But those people were into it, bunched at the lip of the stage and chanting hard with every word. There was something appealingly scrappy and ready for anything Hjelt and Jawo exuded, even as the music itself prides itself on sheen. More than just an electro-pop group, they came across as electro-pop purists, the way a garage-rock band might be a different kind of purist.

Few songs have gotten to prove their own inexhaustibility in an extended space the way “I Love It” has — a hit that keeps bubbling up in the charts, not to mention in DJ sets via an endless array of remixes. It kicks THIS IS… ICONA POP off just right — a thrill ride you’d have to be Scrooge to resist. The rest is polished just as brightly, albeit to greater degrees of resistibility. The faster stuff — shock — is better overall; the Vegas-jaunt-ready “On a Roll” and the fizzy-lifting new wave synth hook of “Then We Kiss” are particularly spirited. Thirty-three minutes is plenty; they make Red Bull cans small for a reason, too.

Fourteen years later, the angst is still there

What can it mean when a band whose defining trait was angst comes back after 14 years and sounds exactly the same? That’s Sebadoh’s Defend Yourself, their first full album since 1999′s The Sebadoh, whose ballad-heaviness made it among the lesser-loved items in the band’s catalog. The folks who missed the gnarlier guitars and faster tempos of classics like 1994′s Bakesale have their wish granted here. Defend Yourself is outright sprightly in places, whatever the lyrical temper: “This is how we waste our time,” Lou Barlow croons on the pop-punky “Oxygen.” He also milks his depressive streak for laughs on “State of Mine”: “Failure is a state of mine…It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done/ And I haven’t even done it yet.” He’s helped up from the slough by the riffs — Jason Loewenstein’s guitar parts are springy throughout, even when the words are as wound up as when both men were a lot younger. Yet the album carries its makers’ age gracefully — the craft makes even the crabbier moments sing.

Possibly the Glasgow band's most curious album

A hot new band crafts a world-beating hit that threatens to pigeonhole them forever. What then? Should they simply let it, by doing the same thing over and over? Or should they ping pong from one idea to another just to escape the one-hit-wonder mantle (and never mind that they’ve written other hits)? Over a decade, Glasgow’s Franz Ferdinand have charted a middle path. The new wave slam that made “Take Me Out” 2004′s most beloved hit is proudly in abundance on Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action, their fourth album. The snazzy herky-jerking “Love Illumination” and the brisk pogo of “Bullet” could slot easily into any part of their catalog.

But they’ve never been afraid to detour — see, for example, the Small Faces twee of “Fresh Strawberries.” It’s also the album’s primary dud — but it’s of a piece with an album that feels deliberately classicist in a way their previous albums don’t. Thirty-five minutes short and largely shorn of the frills that marked 2009′s Tonight, Right Thoughts may be the band’s most curious album: The first time they’ve sounded like they were trying to make a “Franz Ferdinand album.” They’re still good at it, even when they slow down, as on “The Universe Expanded” (the loveliest ballad to mention the ASPCA in memory). “Goodbye Lovers & Friends” closes it out with singer Alex Kapranos avowing, “I don’t play pop music/ You know I hate pop music…This really is the end.” If it is indeed the band’s last gasp, it’s a sharp one.

An immersive mix that invites, not overwhelms

On 2010′s Full Circle and 2012′s Lineage, composer-producer Zack Shigeto Saginaw, who records under his middle name, was a cool practitioner of twilit beatscapes: indie-crossover-friendly, tempo-variable, suggestive of hip-hop. No Better Time Than Now has a much heavier early-’70s astral-jazz feel than his prior work — if the title of the opener, “First Saturn Return,” isn’t enough of a clue to Shigeto’s orientation, the crinkly percussion and slow-rippling Fender Rhodes line and chimes ought to do it.

That sound echoes throughout No Better Time Than Now, which acts as a reminder, along with Theo Parrish’s Black Jazz Signature mix and Flying Lotus’s recent Apocalypse, of how deeply Detroit techno is grounded in the Alice Coltrane-Return to Forever-Weather Report axis. But No Better Time isn’t “techno” any more than it is “jazz.” These tracks are so drifty that they need to be played loudly if they’re to be apprehended much at all — and a gain in volume equals a gain in legibility as well as playfulness, which is best appreciated on the soft, Brazilian-tinged undertow of the groove on “Ringleader” and the curling videogame FX of the title cut. It’s an immersive mix that invites, not overwhelms — a pretty bitching brew.

Few desert-blues bands are this captivating

Etran Finatawa’s back-story is resonant — the 10-piece unit from Niger features members from two traditionally antagonistic ethnic groups, the Tuareg and the Wodaabe. But each of the band’s four albums plays easy and cuts deep, whether you know the first thing about the band or not. The Sahara Sessions isn’t markedly different in tone than their first three. Dry-toned, fleet-fingered guitar runs dance atop ruminative rhythms, like a mind unreeling after a long day’s work. Lead singer (and lead guitarist) Ghalitane Khamidoune’s warm, slightly parched voice is conversational and full of gravity without sounding heavy-handed; the pinched pitch of second lead Alhousseini Mohamed Anivolla lends the stretched vowels of “Djojaréré” a kind of homespun surrealism. Simple tunes like the easy-swinging “Matinfa” and its more searching twin “Is Ler Is Salan” keep opening new doors. Few desert-blues bands are this captivating; in fact, few bands are, full stop.

Straightforward rhythms and good hooks, with a homespun quality

The throwback impulse has become so predominant in electronic dance music that it’s almost cliché to mention it, and yet it’s hard not to think about the ’80s when you hear Ikonika’s second album. On Aerotropolis, the West London producer (real name: Sara Abdel-Hamid) favors neon-plastic synths redolent of the Miami Vice era, crossed with the beat structures and floor-filling imperative of early house music and techno. (No surprise the album’s title recalls Cybotron, the band Juan Atkins was in before nailing the techno blueprint solo with Model 500.) Like a lot of people who were identified with dubstep in the late 2000s, she’s moved into more straightforward 4/4 rhythms, but even the most obviously anthemic tunes have a homespun quality. She writes good hooks, too, none better than “Lights Are Forever,” a G-funk synth whine that’s far better L.A.-freeway music than most of Random Access Memories.

His sharpest and most sprawling work since the mid '80s

Sometimes you have to go away for a while in order to sound like you haven’t gone anywhere. Grant Hart hasn’t been the most prolific recording artists since the demise of Hüsker Dü — only five full solo albums (plus two with his band Nova Mob) since 1987. But at 74 minutes, The Argument is a big mouthful, his most sprawling work since the mid ’80s — and his sharpest. Hart has always written big melodies and sharp lyrics, and the wallop of songs like the rockabilly-tinged “Letting Me Out” (“You can let more in by letting me out”) and the “Sea of Love”-channeling “So Far From Heaven” (“Are you one of those angels who attempted to rebel?/ You waged a war in heaven, were defeated, and you fell/ Are you one of those angels who went all the way to hell?”), complete with whistle solo, is both no surprise and entirely welcome. His voice has taken on a David Bowie tint, and the album is based loosely on Paradise Lost, but the triumph of The Argument is Hart’s alone.

Thoroughly steeped in invigorating, choppy rhythms and chants

As half of Closer Musik and on his own, dance producer Matais Aguayo was always an odd duck of Kompakt Records — a label that’s hatched a few. Aguayo is Chilean, and South American rhythms and percussion have made their way increasingly into his recordings; in 2009 he founded the label Cómeme to explore the intersection of analog gear and Latin grooves. It’s not surprising that Aguayo’s decision to issue The Visitor on Cómeme (which Kompakt distributes) means that it’s his most thoroughly steeped in invigorating, choppy rhythms and chants, as well as his archetypal Berlin-bred minimalist psychedelia. “El Sucu Tucu” even nods to the queen of Latin crossover herself, Gloria Estefan, briefly quoting Miami Sound Machine’s “Conga” in the midst of a hard-popping samba groove. The album is stuffed with percussion, as was 2009′s Ay Ay Ay, but this album is less abstruse, friendlier and fully assured.

His leanest, tightest, most to-the-point album ever

Earlier in his career, Kanye’s ego was the one getting all the attention, but Yeezus, his sixth solo album, is all snarling Id. Nothing can wait, not even the “damn croissants,” which he demands with characteristically insta-quotable brio on “I Am A God.” Fittingly, Yeezus is West’s leanest, tightest, most to-the-point album ever: 10 songs, 40 minutes (almost to the nose), and full of the aggression of mid-’80s Def Jam.

No surprise, then, that Rick Rubin worked on several tracks here, or that Kanye links up with Daft Punk again (their three album-opening tracks that have the lean whap of their early work and none of the middlebrow-soundtrack diddling of Random Access Memories). Sonically, Yeezus connects the scrappy clang of that era’s rap with the more detailed sonic possibilities of modern electronic-dance production. (Warp Records fiddler Hudson Mohawke co-produced “I Am a God” with Daft Punk.) Wax Trax!-style industrial, early U.K. grime, and El-P’s production for Killer Mike’s R.A.P. Music are useful coordinates as well.

West isn’t saying anything particularly different than usual; he’s just being more severe and forthright about it. “New Slaves” is Kanye’s latest and most searing indictment of African-American consumerism, the force of which he nearly guts by declaring, “I’d rather be a dick than a swallower.” “I’m in It” is his latest Sexaholics Anonymous confessional, like a seedier “Hell of A Life,” which features the racist equation of “Asian pussy” with “sweet-and-sour sauce.” Call Yeezus his Vice Magazine album — stark, confrontational, willfully offensive and more crafted than it first appears.

Years of odds and ends that hang together while still being flagrantly unfinished

The rule with Madlib albums — no matter who raps or sings or does whatever on them — is that even the lousy ones invariably contain at least a couple songs worth knowing, especially if you’re a fan. And the rule with collections of previously unreleased material — as Madlib’s third album as his helium-voiced layabout alter ego Quasimoto is — is that only a couple of things are going to turn your head. So call Yessir Whatever proof of its form two different ways — it’s not great like the pseudonym’s debut, 2000′s The Unseen, or even really good like its follow-up, 2005′s The Further Adventures of Lord Quas. Instead, these dozen songs culled from as many years’ worth of sessions manage to hang together while still being flagrantly unfinished, whether it’s “Youngblood” petering out shortly after a low-voiced Madlib intones, “I used to chase rabbits/ Now all I seem to chase are bad habits,” or the found spoken-word announcement, “Alcohol and drugs become crutches for people who can’t achieve closeness with others,” layered over local-radio-ad rock, circa 1968. We also get the original versions of DJ Design’s “Sparkdala” and The Unseen‘s “Green Power” — both vastly different from the available versions, enough to make you think that even as he scrapes his vaults, Madlib’s got more quality work laying around than you could fathom.

Rounds was Four Tet’s third album, but it was his first fully-realized one — the kind of album you’d have expected from Warp in its ’90s heyday. The music-box melody of “My Angel Rocks Back and Forth” balances elegantly against a beat full of stylus noise; separately, they might be too cute and too dry, but not here. This 10th-anniversary version adds a 74-minute second disc of a show from Copenhagen shortly after Rounds‘ release. It doesn’t supplant the original, but its extended variations on the album’s songs are worth a hear, particularly “Spirit Fingers,” whose speedy squelching riffs are taken so far past themselves they practically become ambient music.

Indiepop pioneers pick up right where they left off

“Indiepop” is a genre with many parents, but there’s good reason that Glasgow’s the Pastels tend to be of the first names to come up in discussions of its lineage. Led from the beginning — 1982 — by Stephen McRobbie, aka Stephen Pastel, the group’s output has been rickety and tender, as homemade as a patchwork quilt and as fuzzy as a cardigan. They play rock-by-name that doesn’t necessarily rock-by-design — better suited to hanging your head than banging it — a sound and style so set in stone they’d have to go full-on brostep in order to surprise their fan base.

Luckily, their first album since 1997′s Illumination doesn’t do that. Slow Summits picks right up where the band’s earlier work left off. Sure, there’s a lot of guest help: a couple Teenage Fanclubbers (Gerard Love and Norman Blake) and a couple of To Rococo Rots (Stefan Schneider and Ronald Lippok), most notably. But you won’t mistake it for anyone but the Pastels: Hazy, glistening, and beguilingly filled out with subdued but rich winds and guitars. “Summer Rain,” the album’s centerpiece, is a perfect example, a murmured melody winding slowly in on itself, growing lovelier as the overdubs pile gently on.

A straightforwardly beat-driven release

Electronic album artists often use EPs to sluice out small batches of tightly-knit tracks that might or might not indicate a future direction. Let’s hope that in the case of Laurel Halo’s Behind the Green Door EP, it does — it’s a more straightforwardly beat-driven release than 2012′s Quarantine, something she’s quite good at. Of course, she still bends the framework into all kinds of aural shapes: The stalactite-like keyboards of “Throw,” the opening track, evokes mid-’90s Aphex Twin or µ-Ziq, while “UHFFO” is a phased-dizzy minimalist techno, everything from the beat to the zapping keyboard duel that livens it up midway in, coated with gauze. The heavily dubbed-out “Sex Mission,” meanwhile, contains zero heavy breathing, unless you count the way the rhythm track heaves — not in a cartoon-porn way, but something more meditative while still evoking arousal.

Invigorating retro soul

This invigorating retro-soul album comes from a duo consisting of one-time UK 2-step garage star Terri Walker and Nicole Wray, whose “Make It Hot” (under her first but not last name) was one of a half-dozen Jeep bombs Timbaland concocted in 1998. Nothing about Lady, also the name of their act, feels forced — Walker and Wray sound like they’re having the time of their lives, not least because nothing is stopping them from getting to dig in lyrically. “If You Wanna Be My Man” analyzes a relationship sharply but without rancor (“You changed, and I changed/What we used to be”) over a groove that’s equal parts Spinners and Bill Withers. And the amazing “Money” is a bad-boyfriend anthem (she likes the green better than him) that doubles as a proud feminist declaration (“I feel proud that I’m an independent lady”) — not to mention a classic soul single, whatever the calendar year.

An oddly congruent cross-section of styles that effectively build a narrative arc

We can call the Quentin Tarantino soundtrack a legitimate subgenre of its own now, can’t we? After all, the director has said that he constructs his scripts partly by crafting accompanying mixes. Naturally, Django Unchained, the director’s eighth film, features an accompanying disc constructed of an oddly congruent cross-section of styles that effectively build a narrative arc. It’s also his eighth soundtrack album, and the fourth in a row — preceded by Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004), Death Proof (2007), and Inglourious Basterds (2009) — to prominently feature vintage pieces by the master Italian soundtrack composer Ennio Morricone.

This time around, though, Morricone dominates — as he should, since Django Unchained is a spaghetti-Western homage. And since so much of those films’ mood comes is set by the music, QT borrows heavily as well from vintage soundtracks by Luis Vacalov (the Rocky Roberts-sung theme to 1966′s Django) and Jerry Goldsmith (“Nicaragua,” from 1983′s Under Fire, featuring Pat Metheny). And since Django Unchained is also a Blaxploitation homage (aka a Quentin Tarantino film), it makes room for “Unchained (The Payback/Untouchable),” a no-brainer dead-guy extravaganza between James Brown and 2Pac, and John Legend sounding even more like an old soul singer than usual. It will make your local coffeehouse seem that much livelier.

A landmark that's still wall-to-wall fun, perfectly paced and endlessly inviting

It’s funny, a decade on from the Strokes/White Stripes/Hives “rock-is-back” moment, to re-listen to these 27 tracks and realize just how widescreen the founding “garage rock” document is in comparison. Those ’00s bands made their name by stripping everything away, but the majority of the bands on Nuggets, Lenny Kaye‘s still-amazing 1972 collection of suburban American kids’ experiments with amplifiers, are aiming for widescreen. The Electric Prunes’ “I Had Too Much to Dream,” the set’s keynote, announces itself with a hovering fuzztone shard that’s like nothing so much as an Ennio Morricone harmonica sounding in the distance, signaling as much artful violence as a Sergio Leone western, only Kaye’s one-hit wonders tend to be a lot giddier.

Amazing fakes abound: Sagittarius’s “My World Fell Down,” which sounds like a frat-dorm dweller’s idea of what the Beach Boys were really trying to do with Smile; the Knickerbockers’ “Lies,” a perfect Beatles-’65 snarl; Mouse’s “A Public Execution,” a perfect Dylan-’66 gleeful leer. The Nazz’s “Open My Eyes” opens with some Who “I Can’t Explain” chords before future space-pop auteur Todd Rundgren redirects it toward something more obviously bubblegum (the unbelievably glottal bass sound is pretty chewy, too), not to mention way more studio-phased.

Of course, almost no one thinks of Nuggets as a bunch of songs anymore. It’s a totem, a landmark, a signal shot in the War Against Prog Rock and the Battle For What Would Eventually Become Punk, arguing against auteurist concept albums and getting-it-together-in-the-country songwriting sessions and in favor of one-hit wonders and nasty cases of arrested development. But you know that drill, right? Are you bored with it yet? Then put on this album and try to forget what it engendered. Nuggets is still wall-to-wall fun, perfectly paced, endlessly inviting. While it plays, history, including its own, seems less than relevant.

Keeping his loose sense of humor and rebellious lyrics intact

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. Just check the Monty Python kazoos of “Your Parents’ Cocaine” or the tinny punk beat of “You Are Not a Riot,” not to mention some of that song’s pissy lyrics: “You are the tight leather pants on the old ex-general/ You, you are not rebellion/ I got the invite to your party and I threw it away.” “Riot” eventually morphs into drawling, Bernie Worrell-style synth, but it’s spare rather than enveloping, and that’s Sorry to Bother You as a whole as well. Riley wants to spotlight musical schisms as well as societalones.

Silly, but it moves anyway

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.

Juicy tunes, forthright and irrestible grooves

It makes sense if you know the name Daptone Records before you know the label’s artists – there, the retro-R&B aesthetic comes first. There are exceptions, though, and along with Sharon Jones and Antibalas, the Thomas Brenneck-led Menahan Street Band is a big one. It’s telling that Menahan’s second album inaugurates a new sub-label, Dunham – clearly, these lush, full arrangements recall classic Philly soul far more than they do the James Brown-style funk Daptone made its name on. Though Brenneck, along with everyone else in the lineup, has a hand in multiple other Daptone affiliates, the two albums with him as leader rank among the camp’s most consistently rich. And just because you can hear Philly in the mix doesn’t mean The Crossing is anywhere near disco. In fact, the album’s second half veers into blues (the slide guitar that keynotes “Seven Is the Wind”) and spaghetti western atmosphere (“Bullet for the Bagman”). Throughout, the tunes are juicy, the grooves forthright and irresistible, the instrumental décor lively. Sure it’s retro. But that’s not nearly all it is.

Both reflective and madcap

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.