We acknowledge right up front that "overlooked" is a fraught term, but that's the best phrasing we could find to describe these thirtysome records. Some are more well-known than others (Lindstrom, Here We Go Magic, the Breeders), but none have gotten their proper due. These are some of our favorite records of 2009 so far, and most were the kinds of accidental discoveries that make being a music fan so great. We heartily endorse everything here.
There does seem to be a bit of fairy dust sprinkled on the self-titled debut from Here We Go Magic. The avant-pop of Here We Go Magic sounds sweet in a way that's welcome amongst the din of wanton experimentalism. Throughout the pulsing, shrouded album, there are bunches of unidentifiable sounds — spacey buzzes and hums, odd twinklings, synthesized and processed drums. It's a headtrip, definitely, but it's also undeniably beautiful and affecting.
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Now signed to Matador and on his way to stardom, the Philadelphia one-man bander Kurt Vile gets spooky on God Is Saying This to You…, his stripped-down, bedroom-pop record. Springsteen's Nebraska haunts this record, its insularity and paranoia palpable. "My Best Friends (Don't Even Pass This)" and "My Sympathy" are the best tracks, simultaneously taut and lackadaisical. A wonderful record.
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Iceland's Sin Fang Bous has created a whirlwind. Clangour whisks through 12 chattering folk-pop gems, with so many sounds coming from so many different angles they practically tumble out from the speakers. The traditional stuff (guitar, piano, tambourine) is buffered by everything from flitting flutes to plucked banjo to ramshackle 8-bit electronics. It sounds like a mess, sure, but the songs themselves are purposeful, driven and endlessly satisfying.
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If the Veils' high-concept frontman Finn Andrews — son of XTC keyboardist/Eno & Fripp sideman Barry Andrews — is to be believed, the band's third album is "a modern mixture of prayers, love letters and personal record-keeping." Maybe so, but Andrews' latest collection of candlelit melodrama has more bite than that bio pull-quote suggests. Especially the eight-and-a-half masterful minutes of "Larkspur," a stunner that pairs sinister overtones with patient, plodding dynamics, building to a car-crash crescendo that'll leave you screaming "something got a hold of me!" right along with Andrews.
The rest of the record steers clear of such wide-open spaces, instead striking a perfect balance between spare, starry-eyed ballads ("Scarecrow," "It Hits Deep," the title track) and startling snapshots of Andrews at his angriest. Don't let his pallid complexion and considerable pork-pie hat collection fool you — the guy unleashes a ragged, garagey snarl on songs like "Killed By the Boom" and "Three Sisters." While nothing on Sun Gangs is likely to change the Veils' hidden treasure status, Andrews has stoked anticipation for whatever he does next. Even if it only involves more episodes of "personal record-keeping."
The hissy, distorted production on Love Language's self-titled debut is a little scruffy, yes -- Stuart McLamb, the rueful-Lothario lead singer, regularly buries the needle when he starts belting, which is about once every twelve seconds -- but this North Carolina outfit is about as far from the current lo-fi punk/pop trend as you can get; the Love Language have made a big-hearted pop record, full of grand romantic gestures and widescreen emotion. The songs are generous and wry, and anyone who comes in contact with the buzzy, Dexy's-Midnight-Runners high of "Lalita" will feel premature spring coursing in their veins before the second time the grinning whoop of a chorus hits. If you swooned when you first encountered the bittersweet, wintergreen harmonies of The Guillemots, the Love Language will tap a similar well of giddiness.
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Just as you can never dip your foot twice into the same spot in a river, you can never hear a Julianna Barwick composition a second time. The uncannily poised Brooklyn performer builds her reverberant cathedrals of vocal harmony alone, piling her voice slowly and purposefully up in layers, and every time she sits down to record, it is a new experience. From a few wispy strands of melody, she erects massive, dreaming towers of sound; listening to her music is like witnessing an entire city rise from the ground and crumble back into dust. But when Barwick's foot comes up off the looping pedal and the last echo fades into the air, so does the piece you have just heard. You may still be sitting there spellbound, but Barwick has already moved on, to the next improvisation, the next show, the next moment. The methods might be constant, but the song never remains the same.
Which only makes this ineffably gorgeous six-song EP that much more precious. As a document of Barwick's trancelike approach to music-making, it is fascinating, a window into an intensely personal and spontaneous creative process that sometimes resembles a Zen spiritual practice. But taken at face value, as an album that rewards and demands repeated listens, it is just as stunning. The circling, high-pitched cries that wing the edges of "Cloudbank"; the small, heartbeat-like sound Barwick makes with her mouth on "Choose" that serves as the song's pulse before morphing gradually into a buzzing synth; and maybe most of all, the glittering ice palace that Barwick conjures on "Anjos" with just two rolling pianos, phased apart a la Steve Reich, and some wordless "ooohs": — such moments only increase in wonder when you realize they're essentially byproducts of a fruitful improv session; it's a reminder of just how much beauty you can spill out armed with nothing more than faith in serendipity and a little courage.
As an album, Florine is an immersion in the pure pleasures of sound: Anyone who has ever held down a foot pedal on a piano, banged out a chord, and sat there savoring the resonances will find deep satisfaction in the simple beauty of Barwick's voice as it layers endlessly atop itself. But Florine is much more than a warm bath in a New Agey reflective pool; her on-the-spot compositions are labyrinthine, and you can spend a lifetime getting lost in just one of them. Maybe Julianna has already moved on, but we're going to stick around for awhile with Florine; there's just too much here to discover.
I promise not to open this review with a viola joke. Okay, just one: What do you call someone who hangs around musicians a lot? A viola player. Okay, another: What's the difference between a violist and a dog? The dog knows when to stop scratching. Sorry, I digress. But if you've ever played in an orchestra, you are familiar with the lamentable social position of the viola — awkward, neither-here-nor-there, a continual butt of (bad) jokes, the perennial red-headed stepchild of the classical world. What you don't realize is that the viola is cooler than all of you. The viola is Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club, and you all are Emilio Estevez. Live it up now, because in ten years or so you are going to be working middle management somewhere outside Cleveland while the viola attends gallery openings in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Nadia Sirota knows this. She understands that this portly, awkward instrument has a secret emotional life, and she has the gumption and vision to believe that the person to show it to the world is her. On her solo debut First Things First — for the always-offbeat, always-interesting New Amsterdam Records — she proves it to be true, with a thrillingly fractured and impressionistic suite of works that will appeal to anyone who savored the Japanese-calligraphy starkness of Nico Muhly's Mothertongue or the flotsam-heavy sound collages of The Books. Although there are a few faint, glowing brushes of synthesizer color on the canvas, for the most part, Sirota's viola is the star of this show, and she takes every opportunity available to show off the instrument's limitless possibilities. The evocatively titled opening track "Chorale Pointing Downwards" — written, in fact, by Muhly — is the showcase, shifting restlessly from fat, meaty plunking to the insectoid shimmering of her bow trembling strings to tracing ghostly wisps of sound.
Elsewhere, she jigs her way through "Etude 1a," in which Muhly dips a jaunty Celtic reel in the kind of harmonic acid Prokofiev often used to curdle folk dances, then skips her way across a spiky landscape of sforzandos (sudden, violent accents) on Judd Greenstein's "Escape." It's enough of a revelation to make all those hoary old viola jokes (what do you get when you cross a viola player with a sheep? A sheep that plays out of tune and has lousy time) start to seem like plain old sour grapes.
A numbered series has a snapshot-of-a-moment effect by its very nature, and if this fifth installation of Skream's seemingly unending EP series doesn't exactly cohere like a great album, its six tracks offer a nice glimpse at the many ideas going on in the dubstep pioneer's head. After "Filth" loops Psycho-esque strings for a while, "If You Know" airs things out with a lovely synth-scape at the intersection of Detroit techno and the more future-soulful aspects of vintage drum & bass, while "One For the Heads Who Remember" harks back to the days when LTJ Bukem remixed Jodeci. So does "Rimz," which cutely throws in whistling keyboards that hark back to the days of Skream's first big hit, "Midnight Request Line," all of four years prior.
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Brooklyn's Crystal Stilts, graduates of our very own eMusic Selects program, have created their own irresistible universe of dark, shrouded pop. Their best songs manage to sound crystalline and crisp amidst the grain silo reverb and dollar-store twang — "Love is a Wave" is a prime example. Featuring underwater-sounding toms and tambourine, a Stilts staple even this early in the game, the track truly blooms with the unfurling of the central manic, chiming guitar riff. Even normally-deadpan vocalist Brad Hargett gets almost croony here — clearly he's as carried away by the tune as we are.
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Like Etran Finatwa, Tinariwen and Terakaft, Aziza Brahim comes from Western Sahara and plays what has been dubbed "desert blues," a style that intersects what can only be called an Arab sound and American rock and country. There's lots and lots of guitar — really the only American or Western element, but it's extremely prevalent — many layers of percussion and, in the case of Mi Canto, Ms. Brahim's solo debut, a vulnerable female vocal that tugs and pushes at all of the other elements, and delivers a much more human sound than the lauded contemporaries and sometime collaborators mentioned earlier.
"Alli Nahuah" and "Regresso" are the two best songs here, and it's no coincidence that they are the two most Western tracks. "Alli Nahuah" reminds me of "Norwegian Wood" — a bit of echoing of the melody back and forth via a couple of different instruments — and "Regresso" has these fantastic little starts and stops that give it a very rich structure that's engrossing and addictive.
We actually worked hard in 2008 to try and sign Aziza Brahim to eMusic Selects; that's how convinced we were of her promise, and the excellence of her recordings. Mi Canto confirms the rightness of that impulse.
"I know what it's like to be left out when all your friends try the new hip suicide thing," sang young Brazilian songwriter Yonlu — AKA Vinicius Gageiro Marques — in what became the first track of a remarkable posthumous debut assembled from music the 16-year-old left behind after himself committing suicide in 2006. ("Yonlu" was the screen name Marques used on the songwriters’ bulletin board where he posted several of these tracks). Some of the songs on this surprisingly uplifting collection — notably "I Know What It's Like," "Luana (Mêcanica Celeste Aplicada)," and "Waterfall" — stand up with the best Brazilian popular music on record. Others are obviously the work of a young experimentalist who had yet to find his voice and, in a very real sense, died trying.
Several tunes on A Society in Which No Tear Is Shed... address suicide directly, though usually with a deceptive, self-mocking wink. "I'll tell you why I wanna die," Yonlu sings of his latest romantic failure in "Humiliations"; he cries wolf again in the strangely literal "Suicide," which concludes, "Now my suicide is lit by the sunset/ It's pretty sad if you ask me." Indeed. As artistically precocious as he was emotionally fragile, Yonlu sounds more mature and confident in Portuguese — check out his suave cover of Vitor Ramil's "Estrela, Estrela" and "Luana (Mêcanica Celeste Aplicada)," a lush tropicalia-infused nod to sweet American teenage pop circa 1956 or so — than singing in his self-taught English.
At his best, Yonlu combines the cerebral sophistication of tropicalia star Caetano Veloso with the tragic fragility of Nick Drake. Yet judging by the rough edits and musique concréte of tracks like "The Boy and the Tiger" and "Q-Tip," Yonlu had plenty of room to grow as a sonic scientist. His wordless crooning in "Waterfall" is guaranteed to blend brilliantly with Panda Bear on your next heartbreak-inspired mixtape.
A marriage made in heaven, this latest installment in Strut's "Inspiration Information" series pairs Ethiopian oddball Mulatu Astatke with London-based astral jazz collective The Heliocentrics, in the company of a few well-chosen guests. The groundwork for the project was laid by the surprisingly effective chemistry that evolved between the two when they collaborated on a gig (after just one day's rehearsal!) in April 2008.
Astatke is best known as the most popular and accessible artist profiled by the mammoth Ethiopiques anthology, covering a brief but golden era of febrile innovation in Ethiopian pop music during the late '60s and early '70s. Wider exposure came with the inclusion of several of his songs in the soundtrack to the Jim Jarmusch film Broken Flowers in 2005. He's widely acknowledged as the inventor of "Ethio-jazz," which combines the pentatonic scales of traditional Ethiopian music with American jazz, lent a distinctly loungy, Latin feel by his use of vibes and congas. For their part, the Heliocentrics playfully mash up influences as diverse as James Brown, David Axelrod and Sun Ra, whose album Heliocentric Worlds inspired their name.
Such is the meeting of musical minds here that it's sometimes hard to tell the jammy compositions by the Heliocentrics from the mostly vintage material Astatke brought to the table. New composition "Cha Cha" meanders along nicely, as Astatke's subtle vibes emerge from a stew of woozy brass and eerie Moog sounds. "Mulatu" features some especially funky, elastic drumming by Malcolm Catto and Joel Yennior's honking horn arrangements, which also light up the stumbling, asymmetrical beats of "Chik Chikka".
The occasional flourish of Kat Arney's harp suggests the benevolent influence of Alice Coltrane, with whom Astatke once recorded. And there's also a suite of traditional Ethiopian instruments that jump out of the mix here and there, ranging from the breathy washint flute featured on "An Epic Story" to the deep, otherworldly buzzing of the begena (a.k.a."the harp of King David") on the dreamily pulsing "Anglo Ethio Suite."
As a music critic, Greg Tate almost single-handedly forced a reassessment of the dense '70s electric band recordings of trumpeter Miles Davis, a body of work once critically reviled but now embraced as a prophetic anticipation of hip-hop's patchwork ethos and an early manifestation of rhythm vs. sound aesthetics. Tate formed Burnt Sugar in 1999, inspired by those classic Davis recordings — like Agartha and Pangaea — and the improvised conducting ("conduction") ideas of Lawrence "Butch" Morris. The ensemble drew from New York's jazz, rock, funk, and soul scenes, and under Tate's baton it created a fresh hybrid.
Burnt Sugar has come a long way during the last decade, and Making Love to the Dark Ages — the dark ages of the title refers to eight years of George W. Bush — might be its most coherent and powerful effort.
The epic three-part opener "Chains and Water," a searing meditation on the middle passage, with singer Lisala intoning, "I go back / I go back / I go back / I go back / To water and chains," is representative of Burnt Sugar's massive sound, as 15 musicians, including top-notch jazzers like pianist Vijay Iyer, saxophonist Matana Roberts and trumpeter Lewis "Flip" Barnes, weave in and out of the foreground with probing improvisations against an ever-morphing sonic landscape.
Grooves drift in and out, mutate and accelerate; rich textures flow like lava, giving the listener a bottomless source of detail to investigate with each new spin. There's even a sly bebop homage in the concluding part. It's futile to pin it down to one style; you can hear many percolating throughout the journey.
Tate's "Thorazine" opens with free-jazz horns fluttering over a fierce and immediate groove, but the performance soon moves into a treatment of "81," a tune penned by Davis and Ron Carter from the Miles album E.S.P. A track like the funky "Love to Tical" draws out hip-hop, less through breakbeats than an ingenious DJ-like layering of disparate ideas at once, allowing for both discordant clashes and unexpected harmonies; the piece also features some furious electric guitar from Vernon Reid. "Dominata" is a gorgeous modal ballad with pleading saxophone solos by V. Jeffery Smith and "Moist" Paula Henderson. The title track drips with an appropriate gloom, considering the recent era it explores. The dragging, turbulent violin of Mazz Swift saws away at the heavy electronic groove. If you enjoy coloring outside of the lines, Burnt Sugar has created a seductive, elusive masterpiece.
In certain New York circles, everyone knows about Mike Sniper, but no one knows who Mike Sniper is. Over the past few years, the Brooklyn-based musician behind Blank Dogs has earned a cult following by releasing dozens of limited edition, record-store-clerk-recommended albums, EPs, singles and cassettes — all without any credits, liner notes, or hints about who was cranking out these haunting, post-punk gems. The only available Blank Dogs photo showed Sniper's face obscured by scarves, and his web site suggested that he lived in Madagascar. But with this 20-song double album — which comes on the heels of his first public performances — he's finally getting his coming-out party underground.
While it's easy to hear Joy Division in Sniper's deadpan vocals and the Cure in his angular guitar melodies, Under & Under plays like a love letter to classic lo-fi rock. "The New Things" begins with a gentle drum machine beat, crackling as if it was recorded over an old mixtape. "From Here" is a sweet, noise-layered ballad that could've been a lost track off an old K Records comp. And through it all, Sniper plays the tender bedroom-pop hero, singing about books and what he can see through his window. By the time he's yelling "Setting fire to your house!" on the single of the same name, you half-expect his mom to cut in halfway through, pounding on his door and asking him to keep it down. It's a thrillingly raw breakthrough — and, ironically, one that will make it hard for him to remain anonymous.
With their pixie haircuts, lilting voices and dreamy, pastel choruses, it's easy to dismiss Liechtenstein as the latest manifestation of the noise-pop craze. Trendy as their sound may be, however, Liechtenstein's debut album, Survival Strategies in a Modern World, has all the makings of a mainstay.
Drawing from the same '80s twee tradition as Vivian Girls and the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, the all-girl Swedish trio specializes in candy-coated noise pop, awash with soft, high vocals and distortion-heavy guitar. The girls are all chiming harmonies and ingénue charm on album opener "All At Once," and in "Roses in the Park," frontwoman Renée Gustafsson daydreams about playgrounds and unrequited love while her bandmates swoon in the background.
A few rougher edges add a sense of lingering eeriness to music that, traditionally, is all bubblegum and sunshine. A rapping snare guts "Wallpaper Stripes" of any lyrical sentimentality. More jarringly, the entropic "White Dress" descends from an airy verse to an almost Elfman/Burton-esque haunt — and by the end of the track, the girls are practically barking its nonsensical, breakneck chorus.
Survival Strategies isn't all sweet harmony and rosy romance, but even its darker moments have a sugary, dreamlike air. At only 23 minutes, it could stand to last longer; but like any decent dream, this twee-pop reverie is just as fleeting as it is sweet.
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