eMusic » ZZ

Moby’s eMusic Picks

Michelangelo Matos — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 12:49:08 +0000

[To celebrate the release of his 11th studio album, Innocents, we invited Moby to take control of eMusic's editorial for a week. You can read our exclusive interview with him here. Moby asked us to interview Cold Specks as part of his takeover — you can read that here — and we also resurrected Ryan Reed's interview with the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne, who sings on Innocents. And below, he reveals his 10 favorite albums on eMusic. — Ed.]

The Best Of John Lee Hooker: Vol.1

John Lee Hooker
2004 | Tribute Sounds / Entertainment One Distribution

My mom is my biggest influence — which, in print, is probably the least cool thing anyone has ever said. When I was bored I would take her records and go through them. I must've been 13 or so when I first heard John Lee Hooker. There's some music that, when I first heard it, didn't make sense to me and years later made sense to me, but the first thing I... heard was "Boom Boom," and the immediate visceral appeal even made sense to me when I was 12 years old. Later, I started hearing blues in different circumstances and contexts, [and] I started appreciating the austerity of it.
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Greatest Hits

Neil Young
2004 | Reprise

I picked Greatest Hits because it would be really hard to pick one individual Neil Young album. Harvest, or — where would you even start? I read an interview with Neil Young, and he said that when he was compiling his Greatest Hits he didn't let his ego get in the way. He actually picked the songs that people wanted to hear. Some greatest-hits — and I'm guilty of this — you... tack on a few records that you hope people will listen to, even though they technically aren't hits. Whereas Neil Young's Greatest Hits, it really is just the most phenomenal collection of iconic, remarkable songs. His comfort with simplicity I find really inspiring; also that he writes very emotional music that almost always stops short of being too autobiographical. The songs are personal, but enigmatic at the same time.
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Bryter Layter

Nick Drake
2003 | ISLAND RECORDS

My first real good job was working in a record store called Johnny's — the counterculture store of Darien, Conneticut. One day I was working and [the owner] was playing Nick Drake. I fell in love, and he almost forced me to buy it — to take six dollars out of my paycheck and get my discount version of Bryter Layter. I became a Nick Drake evangelist, because at the time I... didn't know anyone who knew Nick Drake. It took quite a while — it wasn't until "Pink Moon" got used in that Volkswagen commercial that people became more aware of him. It made me happy, because he made so much remarkable music and it always was baffling to me [he] languished in obscurity. I like that he had a posthumous career.
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Greatest Hits: Donna Summer

Donna Summer
1998 | Island Def Jam

When I was nine or 10 years old I'd listen to Casey Kasem's Top 40 religiously. One of the highlights of my life professionally when I was on a panel and he was the moderator. Hearing my name said by Casey Kasem was just amazing. From nine, ten, I'd listen to Casey Kasem's [American] Top 40 — this would've been 1974-75, so it was Donna Summer and Kiss and Abba and Queen.... You couldn't turn on a radio in the mid 70's without hearing Donna Summer. "I Feel Love" is the greatest piece of electronic dance music ever made, hands down, bar none.

At [the L.A. restaurant] Soho House, I was having dinner, and someone I knew was at the table next to me. They said, "By the way Moby, this is Giorgio Moroder." I was like, "Really? How is this possible?" It's probably one of the best things about being a quasi-public figure — getting to meet your heroes.
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Suicide

Suicide
2013 | Mute

I bought it in 1980 as a cut-out — you remember cut-outs? — at Johnny's, the record store. At the time I was cutting lawns. The big ones would drive you insane, because it would take three or four hours; it's 90 degrees and you're getting stung by bugs. The whole time I was thinking, "When this woman gives me the $10, I'm going to go to Johnny's and by the cut-out... version of the Suicide album."

I used to go to CBGB all the time. New York in the late '70s and early '80s, checking IDs never happened. The drinking age was 18, and New York was just an amazing disaster. It never even dawned on us we were 15 and 16 going to clubs. I went to go see Depeche Mode at the Ritz, and that's the only time anyone ever checked my ID. I was 16 and the guy just looked at my ID and let me in. It was just such a lawless time. We'd go to CBs and get really drunk and see Bad Brains and whoever was playing.
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The Man-Machine (2009 Digital Remaster)

Kraftwerk
2009 | Astralwerks

Electronic music in the early and mid '70s — the phenomena of it meant that you were exposed to it more than you would imagine. Especially audiophiles, the guys who have these $5,000 stereos, loved Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre, and Kraftwerk fit into that. If you would go over to someone's house and their dad would have this amazing stereo, so they'd buy electronic music just to showcase the stereo. I... would go to stereo stores and salivate over the Macintosh pre amps. But I was broke.

"Neon Lights" — the fact that it lets itself be so drawn out and pastoral and pretty, that really inspired me. Also, there was this recurring criticism of electronic music that it was cold and unemotional. I remember just being generally nonplussed because I would listen to something like "Neon Lights" that was so warm, so melodic, and so emotional, that when people would say that electronic music is cold, I was just baffled. I've never understood that criticism of it, that it lacks warmth or humanity.
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Miami

The Gun Club
2012 | Sympathy for the Record Industry / The Orchard

The way I heard albums back then was, my friends and I had this understanding about who was going to buy which album. One person would buy it and the rest of us would tape it. It was piracy based on necessity, because we were all broke. My friend Dave bought Miami. I remember when I heard early Gun Club I thought it was really fun, and then I heard Miami and... it had this emotional depth and breadth to it that the first album didn't have.
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Power, Corruption & Lies [Collector's Edition]

New Order
2008 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

It was one of those records where you'd look at the Peter Saville cover and listen to it and just knowing their history — not just the music was perfect, but the presentation, the history, the context. It's just perfect.

This [was] when I first started DJing. You couldn't DJ in 1984 and not have every [New Order] 12-inch: "Blue Monday" and "Confusion" and "Ceremony" and "Temptation." Most nights I'd play both of... those records at least twice, [at] a nightclub called the Beat in Port Chester, New York, that held 50 people. My first job was on a Monday night DJing from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m., getting paid $25. New Order was one of those bands — almost everything they did was guaranteed to make people dance.
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Floating Into The Night

Julee Cruise
1989 | Reprise

What a perfect record — beautiful and non-ironic and disconcerting and strange and conventional all at the same time. I'd been an obsessive David Lynch fan since I first saw Eraserhead. I can't think of a filmmaker even remotely similar to him in terms of creativity and the uniqueness of his output. You didn't go to see a David Lynch movie because of the subject matter; you went because it was a... David Lynch movie. The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet are strong narrative movies, but you went because you wanted to spend time with David Lynch's creative vision. And when Twin Peaks came out of course every single person in the western world became justifiably obsessed with it.
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No Protection

Massive Attack
2004 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

One of the things that I loved about dance music in the '80s into the '90s was its femininity and multiculturalism. I'd go out to nightclubs in '88 and '89 and listen to DJs like Larry Levan playing very feminine gay disco. As a straight white guy from the suburbs I found it really compelling and emancipating, in a way. Then, in the early '90s dance music became whiter and less feminine... and tougher. Sometimes that was great; sometimes tough-white-guy dance music sounded really cool. But I really missed disco femininity. What I really loved about Massive Attack was that they really channeled that early R&B, feminine, disco sensibility, those first two albums, especially. Massive Attack made really thoughtful, atmospheric, interesting, dance-inspired music. Especially the song "Protection," with Tracey Thorn — part of my criteria for evaluating a lot of music is what the musician has excluded. That song "Protection," there's no bass line. By not including that, it actually plays up the sparseness and vulnerability of the song.
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Ha Ha Tonka, Lessons

Annie Zaleski — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 15:20:27 +0000

Vulnerable, life-affirming and acutely self-aware

Ha Ha Tonka’s music has always been richly steeped in Americana, folk and bluegrass. But on Lessons, the Southern Missouri quartet’s fourth and most diverse full-length, these genres are starting points. The familiar stylistic signifiers — four-part harmonies, prickly mandolin, stomping acoustic guitar — merely add texture to songs that, at various points, conjure Shearwater’s strummy introspection (“Staring At The End Of Our Lives”), Spoon’s compact pop (the bass-heavy, wrinkled title track) and Wilco’s rugged alt-country (“Pied Pipers”). Whimsical piano, plush organ and jagged electric guitar contribute additional color.

Alongside this sonic progression, Ha Ha Tonka continue to broaden their songwriting voice. Lessons is a vulnerable, life-affirming, acutely self-aware record that addresses both personal foibles and strengths. (The band members come by this wisdom — and the album title — honestly: Frontman Brian Roberts says the record was jumpstarted by an inspiring 2011 NPR interview with the late author Maurice Sendak.) “I can’t keep learning the same lessons over again,” Roberts pleads wearily on the title track, before contradicting himself in the very next line: “I keep learning the same lessons over again.” Yet despite this frustration spiral, he’s committed to self-improvement and figuring out his lot in life, as well as staying positive. “No, I don’t want to be dead to the world around me,” the frontman cries over and over again on “Dead to the World,” as majestic strings pirouette around his words, buoying his pained optimism.

Discover: Paradise of Bachelors

Stephen M. Deusner — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 13:00:59 +0000

In April 1855, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine published a curious short story by Herman Melville titled “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” It’s one of his more experimental pieces, a narrative diptych set among an enclave of attorneys in London (the bachelors) and a regimen of female mill workers in Massachusetts (the maids). It’s loosely about industrialization linking disparate worlds on both sides of the Atlantic. Writes Melville: “Sweet are the oases in Sahara; charming the isle-groves of August prairies; delectable pure faith amidst a thousand perfidies: but sweeter, still more charming, most delectable, the dreamy Paradise of Bachelors, found in the stony heart of stunning…”

North Carolina?

155 years after its publication, the phrase “Paradise of Bachelors” graced the spine of the first album released by a couple of Tar Heel Staters — Brendan Greaves and Jason Perlmutter — who had no idea they were launching one of the most promising labels in the Southeast, arguably the entire country. “What a title for a story, especially one by an author we consider to be a paragon of American literary excellence,” says Greaves, co-founder and Melville fan. “I just thought the title was so compelling and humorous. That was my primary justification.”

It might seem like an odd literary reference for a label so focused on American — specifically North Carolinian — regional music, but Greaves says the name has taken on new weight and significance since its first release, a compilation of homegrown soul songs written, produced and originally released by a stereo salesman named David Lee. “It’s a story about labor,” he says. “That idea appealed to me because when I was in grad school, I wrote a bit about labor lore and occupational booklets — the culture and everyday experiences of work among Americans. And in retrospect, the fact that half the story is about lawyers has become particularly relevant. You deal with lawyers a lot in this business, and that can be both educational and extraordinarily frustrating.”

Neither Greaves nor Perlmutter (who runs the site Carolinasoul.org) had high expectations for their 2010 maiden release, Said I Had a Vision: Songs & Labels of David Lee, 1960-1988, but surprisingly, it sold out before it even hit stores. “We thought maybe we’ve got something here,” recalls Greaves, “maybe we can do another project.” Next on the docket was Poor Moon, the new album by the Durham-based band Hiss Golden Messenger.

As the label grew and matured, Greaves and his new partner, Christopher Smith (late of the band Espers) would work to maintain a sharp balance between intriguing new music (such as the self-titled debut from Nashville folk-rock upstarts Promised Land) and fascinating archival releases (such as Chance Martin’s Music Row obscurity/absurdity In Search). “I’d like to braid the two together in a compelling way,” says Greaves. “I’m interested in older music to the extent that there’s more of it. There’s a lot yet to be discovered.”

Based in Durham, Greaves — a New Englander who moved to North Carolina to study folklore — handles copyright research, oversees most of the graphic design, and writes liner notes. His wife Samantha handles the bookkeeping, and Smith (based in Philadelphia) is in charge of A&R and artist management. “That’s his background. Through Espers, he has had intensive tour experience and understands these matters from the artist’s perspective. I don’t really have that. It’s a shared burden.”

Despite the many miles in between Greaves and Smith, Paradise of Bachelors remains entrenched in the culture and traditions of North Carolina and is becoming an increasing presence in the bustling Tar Heel scene. “One could argue that North Carolina is the birthplace of country music in a broad sense,” says Greaves. “There were a lot of important early country recordings in Charlotte before Nashville took control of everything. All the old-time banjo music string-band traditions, all the bluegrass traditions came from here. And then there’s this amazing wealth of African-American musical traditions, both secular and sacred.” He sees local acts like Hiss Golden Messenger, Megafaun, and Horseback as continuations of those traditions.

Even so, as Paradise of Bachelors grows, Greaves understands that its scope will transcend state lines. In fact, the label is planning a new set of reissues for a UK artist, which would fulfill the transatlantic nature of its namesake story. “We’d like to maintain and even accelerate our pace,” he explains,” without losing attention to detail or our ability to represent our artists effectively and accurately.”

Speaking by phone from his home in North Carolina, Greaves elaborated on some the label’s small, but growing catalog.

Said I Had a Vision: Songs & Labels of David Lee, 1960-1988

Various Artists
2013 | Paradise of Bachelors / Redeye

I studied folklore at UNC and one of my first freelance folklorist gigs was consulting for the future Earl Scruggs museum in Shelby, North Carolina — about 40 miles west of Charlotte. The idea was to celebrate Scruggs's contributions to bluegrass but also to document the musical contributions from Cleveland County at large. It's an amazing place — home to a lot of incredible country, gospel and soul traditions. David Lee ran... three little independent record labels out of his stereo supply store in Shelby, North Carolina. He had one big hit with an Ann Sexton song; she's a singer from Greenville, South Carolina, who went on to some fame and now tours Europe all the time. David wrote her biggest hits from that era and recorded them. I interviewed him for the project and met Jason Perlmutter. Jason and I decided to do a compilation of Mr. Lee's recordings over the years. We did it to honor him and his accomplishments. We both were impressed by his work and felt like he had gone unrecognized.
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Poor Moon

Hiss Golden Messenger
Tompkins Square

Beyond that original project with David Lee, we had no real plan or strategy for Paradise of Bachelors, and the next thing that crossed our paths was the Hiss Golden Messenger record, Poor Moon. It was very different from the David Lee compilation in many ways, except that it was another North Carolina artist who had navigated the industry in a similar way as Mr. Lee. Mike [Taylor, the creative force behind... Hiss Golden Messenger] was fiercely independent and had been frustrated by his experience in the music industry. He was already a friend, and we both went through the folklore program at UNC.
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Over There ... and Over Here

The Red Rippers
2013 | Paradise of Bachelors / Redeye

The Red Rippers was a guy named Ed Bankston, who served in the Navy on an aircraft carrier in Vietnam and wrote about the experience on this record. It's one of the most brutally honest pieces of music I've ever heard about the experience of war. We're used to, even inured to, musical statements about the Vietnam War from the perspective of onlookers. Some of it is very powerful, but there's a... lot less music written from the soldier's perspective. Of that very small body of music, there is very little that is as unflinching and as frightening as the Red Rippers album. It is bathed in the blood of that conflict without glorifying anything. It's a very conflicted piece of music — not easy to listen to, but fascinating. Ed had had difficulty talking about those years. He did the album, then stopped playing music. It was like he needed to get those songs out of him. His children have told me that the reissue has offered him some access to those memories so that he can discuss that understandably very wrenching period in his life. I hope it's helped him be proud of that music.
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In Search

Chance
2013 | Paradise of Bachelors / Redeye

Chance's story is an incredible one, and I think it's a story about Nashville and its strange, dark underbelly. Chance was on the fringes of the inside of the Nashville music machine, but he made this incredible outsider's statement. It's a strange and difficult, but really fascinating piece of music — kind of a private triumph of the imagination and a deeply personal document for Chance. It was unknown not only to... the world at large, but also to his friends and family. I was down in Nashville a few weeks ago, hanging out at Chance's house by the pool, and a number of people who worked with Chance at Sirius XM — where he DJs — dropped by. I was really excited to meet them, and they kept saying, "Oh yeah, Chance's record…we didn't know anything about that." It's not like he's kept it a secret or anything. He's proud of the album, as he deserves to be.
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Promised Land Sound

Promised Land Sound
2013 | Paradise of Bachelors / Redeye

Like most of the work we've been engaged in, this was really the product of serendipity. Chris and I were in Nashville this past fall, spending some time with Chance, and we DJed at the Stone Fox, which is our friend William Tyler's club. We were on a bill with James Toth of Wooden Wand, and opening up for him was this band that was known at the time just as Promised... Land. We were blown away. They were all between 19-22, but they sounded like they had torn through the history of Nashville and Los Angeles country rock. And they're developing so quickly, so what they're playing now is very different from what's on the record. They're moving more into West Coast and European psych territory. The songs are getting swampier and longer and more biting. So their next record is going to be very different.
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Haw

Hiss Golden Messenger
2013 | Paradise of Bachelors / Redeye

Haw was the first record Chris and I did collaboratively. Mike's songwriting continues to develop in fascinating ways, especially how he's exploring notions of faith and spirituality in what is a highly secular musical form. This record has become a lot more relevant and powerful to me in the last few months, as my wife and I are preparing to have a baby in October. Haw is basically about children: having babies... and raising them. That experience is one Mike was really able to capture. I find myself listening to it a lot lately as we're making these preparations for this new phase in our lives. I think Hiss Golden Messenger makes music for adults, which is refreshing. There's a lot of adult music out there that is incredibly pasty and anemic and inconsequential. But his is adult music that gets at what it means to be terrified of being a grown-up.
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Time Off

Steve Gunn
2013 | Paradise of Bachelors / Redeye

Steve grew up with my label partner Chris. They're from the same Philadelphia suburb of Landsdowne, which is also where Kurt Vile grew up. So Chris has been able to watch Steve's artistic development. I've always been impressed by his playing, but thought he was beyond the purview of Paradise of Bachelors for some reason. When I heard the rough mixes for Time Off, though, I knew we needed to do this... record. I was exciting to hear this turn inward from his more exploratory solo guitar work. He was already headed in that direction, but this was just a huge leap forward. It's the opposite kind of career narrative from previous generations. You think of John Coltrane beginning as a phenomenally skilled bop saxophone and then take it further and further into the realm of free improvisation. Steve started in that realm, with a very free and largely improvised style that could be quite beautiful but also very challenging. He's gradually restrained himself and honed in on his skills in service of songcraft.
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10 Hidden Gems from the Jimmy Webb Songbook

Peter Blackstock — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 13:00:49 +0000

If you know the songs of Jimmy Webb, chances are it’s because of Glen Campbell, whose string of city-titled Webb tunes in the late 1960s — “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston” and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” — became American country-pop crossover classics. That’s just the tip of the iceberg among Webb-penned tracks that can be found in eMusic’s vaults, though. Beyond the dozens of versions of those three songs is a fascinating range of material that testifies to Webb’s status as one of popular music’s greatest living songwriters. On his new star-studded-duets album Still Within the Sound of My Voice, Webb went deep into his catalog to rescue a few forgotten numbers. Inspired by his efforts, we’ve gathered some others you may not have heard.

Zumpano, “Rosecrans Boulevard”

Look What the Rookie Did

Zumpano
Sub Pop Records

A.C. Newman's pre-New Pornographers band reached way back into the Webb archives on their 1995 Sub Pop debut. Originally done in 1967 by Johnny Rivers (who played a major role in Webb's early career), "Rosecrans Boulevard" is classic Webb unrequited romanticism, with a melody awash in catch-you-off-guard key changes and dramatic crescendos — clearly an influence on Newman's subsequent work.

Waylon Jennings, “If You See Me Getting Smaller”

Ol' Waylon

Waylon Jennings
2003 | RLG/BMG Heritage

It's largely unknown or forgotten that Waylon is the only artist who won a Grammy for recording Webb's polarizing magnum opus "MacArthur Park" (in 1969 with the Kimberlys). More lasting, though, is his take on this mid-'70s Webb confessional about retreating from the spotlight, which Jennings recorded at the peak of his career. It's telling that Webb drafted Waylon's best pal Willie Nelson for the version on Just Across the River, his... 2010 duets disc.
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Renee Fleming, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”

Haunted Heart

Renée Fleming
2005 | Decca

Though no one ever charted a hit version of this exquisite ballad, it tends to summon major-league vocalists: Joe Cocker did it first in 1974, Linda Ronstadt revived it in 1982 and it turned up on a mega-selling Celtic Woman collection in 2010. But there's no topping operatic chanteuse Fleming for vocal star power, even if the crowning touch here is actually the presence of jazz greats Bill Frisell and Fred Hersch... on guitar and piano, respectively. (Webb and Cocker sing it together on Webb's Still Within The Sound Of My Voice duet album.)
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Iain Matthews, “Met Her on a Plane”

Journeys From Gospel Oak

Iain Matthews
Its About Music.com / The Orchard

Iain Matthews remained relevant to pop music after leaving legendary folk-rock ensemble Fairport Convention in part through applying the sweet clarity of his voice to songs by such rising early-'70s tunesmiths such as Tom Waits, Jesse Winchester and Mickey Newbury. He tuned in to Webb, too, plucking this obscure cut from Jimmy's 1971 album And So: On for his 1972 LP Journeys From Gospel Oak. If Webb's material hadn't already found a... perfect-for-AM-radio vocalist in Glen Campbell, Matthews might have produced a similar run of Webb-penned hits.
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Scud Mountain Boys, “Where’s the Playground, Susie”

The Early Year (Reissue)

Scud Mountain Boys
2007 | Ashmont Records / Redeye

Though this song reached No. 26 on the pop charts for Glen Campbell in 1969, it didn't imprint on the American consciousness like "Wichita Lineman" and "Galveston." It got a fresh airing in 1995 when Joe Pernice's band the Scud Mountain Boys recorded a haunting lo-fi version of the tune for their sophomore LP. Sub Pop later packaged that record with the band's debut into this twofer reissue, which also includes their... take on "Wichita Lineman."
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Richard Harris, “Paper Chase”

A Tramp Shining

Richard Harris
1993 | Geffen

It was, of course, British actor Richard Harris who immortalized Webb's "MacArthur Park," taking it to No. 2 on the charts in 1968. It was the highlight of Harris's LP A Tramp Shining, but Webb also wrote every other track on the album, and some of the lesser-known numbers are quite appealing without the bombast. "Paper Chase" may be the best, an instantly hummable little pop ditty (once you get past the... grandiose string intro).
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Fifth Dimension, “Pattern People”

Up, Up And Away

Fifth Dimension
2009 | Arista/Legacy

The title track to this album, "Up, Up And Away," was Webb's first big breakthrough, literally taking his music all the way to the moon (it was played in space by astronauts on the Apollo missions). But it's far from the only Webb song the Fifth Dimension recorded. Many of them were dripping with a late-'60s groovy hippie vibe, such as this counterculture barb tossed at cookie-cutter "Pattern People." The lyrics are... a gas in hindsight, yet it's pretty sophisticated stuff musically, with vocal layers, horn accents and a sharply delineated chorus.
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Alice Clark, “I Keep It Hid”

Alice Clark

Alice Clark
1972 | Mainstream Records / Audio Bee

R&B/soul renditions of this early-career Webb tune were recorded by Ray Charles, Margie Day and the (Diana Ross-less) Supremes, but it's the more obscure Alice Clark who knocks it out of the park on her self-titled 1972 debut. Producer Bob Shad had worked with the likes of Sarah Vaughan and Janis Joplin before issuing Clark's debut on his Mainstream Records label; how she never caught fire seems a mystery, especially given the... power and emotion of this recording.
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Declan, “The Last Unicorn”

Thank You

Declan
2007 | Lama Ani Records / BFM DIGITAL

A child singer was a good fit for this theme song from a children's movie, even if Irish sensation Declan Galbraith's 2005 version came more than two decades after The Last Unicorn was in theaters. Folk-rockers America did the film version, but Declan brings just the right touch of wide-eyed innocence to the yearning lyrics. And if he was a teen idol, well, he had a voice that warranted the attention.

Amy Grant, “If These Walls Could Speak”

Lead Me On 20th Anniversary Edition

Amy Grant
2008 | AMY GRANT / SPARROW

Shawn Colvin also recorded this song on her 1994 collection Cover Girl, but its finest reading came a few years earlier from Amy Grant on her 1987 album Lead Me On, as Grant was crossing over from contemporary Christian audiences to the pop mainstream. Her voice is ideally suited to the song's heartfelt message; Webb acknowledged that compatibility when he enlisted her to join him on his song "Adios" from his Still... Within The Sound Of My Voice duet album.
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The Louvin Brothers, Satan Is Real

Andrew Mueller — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 16:14:31 +0000

Grimly beautiful gothic country with an influence that still resonates

It’s a minor tragedy of the internet age that millions will have been introduced to this astonishing album as a joke. The cover of Satan Is Real, which features Charles and Ira Louvin, clad in gleaming white suits, pleading melodramatically before a clearly home-made plywood Lord of Darkness, features regularly on those much-forwarded lists of gauche and ill-considered sleeve art.

The arch chuckling is misguided. The Louvins were Christians — devout to the point of being terrified — who grew up in northern Alabama and began recording during the 1950s, creating a canon of grimly beautiful gothic country whose influence still resonates. Satan Is Real, released in 1959, was probably their crowning accomplishment, the Louvins’ trademark haunting harmonies perfectly suited to what is essentially a series of anguished pleas to a God whose ultimate mercy they are not taking for granted.

Certainly, the many artists who’ve since covered tracks have not done so for laughs. Johnny Cash (“The Kneeling Drunkard¹s Plea”), Emmylou Harris (“Satan’s Jeweled Crown”) and the Byrds (“The Christian Life”), among others, all understood and appreciated the Louvins’ total and terrified sincerity. The enduring power of Satan Is Real is rooted in the fact that it is an altogether unironic record, made by unironic people, at an unironic time, in an unironic place.

Neko Case, The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You

Stephen M. Deusner — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 13:00:35 +0000

Her defiantly impressionistic style reaches a peak

Neko Case has spent the last 15 years perfecting both a dark strain of alt-country and a lyrical style that rejects songwriting conventions in order to build up wholly new personal mythologies. As her songs have grown moodier and more cinematic, Case has become less willing to state anything outright, instead finding ever more circuitous routes around her subjects. Hers is a defiantly impressionistic style, both withholding and revealing, and it reaches a peak on her latest album, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You.

Despite a title that might leave Fiona Apple shaking her head, Case’s idiosyncratic record yields lovely and chilling moments. “Calling Cards” builds to a curious confession — “I’ve got calling cards from 20 years ago” — yet Case takes what sounds like a banal line about her hoarding tendencies and turns it into a devastating declaration of love and friendship, set to a lighter-than-air arrangement. “Man” is the most New Pornographic she’s sounded by herself, and “Night Still Comes” gains its considerable power from both her electric vocals and from her skewed imagery about puking up sonnets and the oblique accusation “You never held me at the right angle.” Who is addressing who, exactly, is up to the listener to decide.

And yet, The Worse Things Get contains a few of Case’s most direct tunes, such as the touring diary “I’m From Nowhere” and the murder ballad “Bracing for Sunday” (with its succinct confession, “he died because I murdered him”). The a cappella “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu” splits the album down the middle, with no discernible verse of chorus but some surprisingly frank lyrics. Singing about a child abused by her mother, Case multiplies her voice sympathetically, as though summoning an army to protect the kid. It’s so plainspoken that it veers toward artless, but for Case it’s an endeavor of enormous empathy, which is the engine that drives that mighty voice.

Billy Bragg Picks His Favorite Albums

Andrew Perry — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 13:00:31 +0000

To celebrate Billy Bragg’s being honored for his Outstanding Contribution to Music at the Association of Independent Music awards 2013, we invited him to burrow through eMusic’s vast catalog and pick out some of his own favorites. What follows are Billy Bragg’s favorite records on eMusic, with some commentary from the man himself. He also nominated the soulful Tennessee singer/songwriter Valerie June for an interview and sat down with Andrew Perry for a long interview himself.

Pushin' Against A Stone

Valerie June
2013 | Concord Records

Snakily be-dreadlocked chanteuse raised in Memphis, Tennessee, brings the gospel/country/blues roots for 2013.

What an incredible record. I've been listening to it every day for the last two weeks. I bored the band with it on the way to Belgium. My understanding is, she's from Tennessee. I heard her playing the first track live on "Woman's Hour" [on BBC Radio 4] in the car, would you believe, and I was just like, I... must remember — Valerie June. They didn't have it in the local store, so when I got home — I don't often just download things immediately, but I did, 'cos I liked the bits I heard.

I think the playing's amazing, the singing is great, the songwriting is just impeccable — great hooks, with echoes of all sorts of different styles. I don't even know if she wrote all the songs herself, or if someone else helped her write them. But a really great record, my favorite record of the year so far! I'm hoping I'm gonna get the chance to see her play at the Electric Picnic in Ireland in a couple of weeks, because she's on the bill. Just amazing.
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The Show Goes On: Songs Of Ronnie Lane

Slim Chance
2012 | Fishpool Records / The Orchard

Erstwhile backing combo for Faces/Small Faces legend Ronnie Lane keep his memory alive with a brand-new, barnstorming live set of his tunes.

I was a huge Ronnie Lane fan. I still am. He's probably the only artist whose CD never left my car, and that's saying something — I had this best-of under the dashboard. I was a big fan of the Faces, but when he left I thought they lost something that... they never found again. He just managed to bring together something really special ¬— he takes me to that sweet place somewhere between English music and American country music.

His old band Slim Chance have just got back together recently, I saw them at Glastonbury, and they've put an album out. Obviously Ronnie had an iconic voice, which is kind of irreplaceable, but keeping those songs alive, they're doing us all a favor by doing that, so more power to them.

So this is something contemporary, they're still out there doing it, and the fact that it harks back to the famous travelling show that Ronnie did, the picture on the cover, no-one's ever really done that thing — taking rock 'n' roll round in a tent, just setting up and playing — without permission! It's a crazy hippie type thing to do, but I'd love to do it. They did it in some old diesel van — there's great stories in that Faces biography about him doing it in the '70s — totally crazy, but you have to do those kind of things.
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One True Vine

Mavis Staples
2013 | Anti/Epitaph

This year's second hook-up with Wilco's Jeff Tweedy for gospel-soul icon and sometime Staples Singer.

Since Mavis signed up with Anti-, she's made some great records. I'm a huge fan of The Staples Singers. Their album Soul Folk in Action — I mean, talk about folk-punk [as Bragg himself has been categorized], what a record that is. So to see her be reborn, initially working with Ry Cooder, now with Jeff Tweedy, I... think they've both been really sympathetic to what she does well. I did some shows with her in 2011, and she's still got the spark. She let me get up and sing [The Band's song] "The Weight" with her, in Los Angeles — how incredible is that? It blew my mind.
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Zoom

Rachid Taha
2013 | naïve / Naive

54-year-old Franco-Algerian maverick, this year blending North African raï with Western rock, funk and blues with typical garrulousness.

Rachid did an Arabic cover of "Rock the Casbah" [by the Clash], didn't he? I think I may have played with him at Glastonbury one time, when I was doing [Damon Albarn's] Africa Express. That thing tends to be a whole lot of people onstage all playing together, so we didn't hang out as such,... but he was a dude, an amazing guy. For someone from Algeria, he seemed to be pretty rock 'n' roll to me.
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Barbed Wire Blues

Wilko Johnson
1989 | Jungle Records / The Orchard

Proto-punk R&B guitar-mangler from Canvey Island, in mid-'80s, post-Dr Feelgood solo majesty.

He was down here [in Dorset] a couple of years ago; I took my son along to see him. It just blew his mind. Wilko was very important, coming from Essex, as I do. Much more important than that even, the Feelgoods were the British Ramones, in the sense that they woke everybody up to the possibility of going back to... basics. Wilko is our Johnny Ramone. He's the guy who says, "You can look like a dork, and still be cool." And for those of us that already looked like dorks, that was visionary!

I remember seeing him on the television, and it just did my head in, as a guitar player who at the time was being fed images of Peter Frampton as a guitar hero. You know? Wilko Johnson invented punk just by doing up the top button of his shirt — that's all he had to do, to invent it. He pointed us the way. I didn't ever see him in Canvey back in the day, sadly, but I did see him in Bridgeport last year. That was pretty good.
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Satan Is Real

Louvin Brothers
1996 | CAPITOL NASHVILLE

Ira Lonnie Loudermilk and Charlie Elzer Loudermilk, aka the Louvins, were one of country music's finest old-time duos — here, in fine, god-fearing mood in '59.

One of the greatest country records ever made, if only for the cover — it's a picture of them standing in front of the flaming coals of hell. I love the Louvins for their pure harmony style. They were very influential on the Everly Brothers, and Simon... & Garfunkel. Their songs are just so sad. Someone usually dies in the first verse, or the second, or sometimes they save it right until the end.

But for me it's that high lonesome sound that they've got, which still resonates. If you ever spend any time driving round Appalachia in the United States of America, the Louvin Brothers provide the ideal soundtrack. And there's some crazy Christian songs, too, like "I Love the Christian Life," as covered by the Byrds in Sweetheart Of The Rodeo — that's on here.
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Wassaic Way

Sarah Lee Guthrie and Johnny Irion
2013 | Rte.8 Records / Redeye

Scion of the Guthrie folk dynasty strikes out in more alt-rockin' direction for 2013, in team-up with her hubby Johnny.

Sarah Lee I know, obviously, from working with the Guthrie family [on Bragg & Wilco's 1997 collection of unrecorded Woody songs, Mermaid Avenue]. She's a great songwriter as well, and this record, I think, really speaks for her talent as herself. She's moving away from being Woody Guthrie's granddaughter, and coming into her... own now, and I think that's really great to hear. Broadly, I guess it's Americana, and Woody's almost like the father of that, but she's getting her own spin on that now, getting an edge on it, moving out of the shadow of her parents' generation, which includes Arlo Guthrie of course, and into something altogether her own.
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Imidiwan: Companions

Tinariwen
2009 | World Village / The Orchard

Malian Afro-blues troupe, who wield electric guitars with the same defiance as they do AK-47s, in their sideline as political freedom fighters.

They're great. The rhythmic aspect to what they do is so hypnotic, I really, really like that. There's a tiny little bit of that griot playing in the first track on that Valerie June record — she does this weird little rhythm that made me think I must go back and... rediscover some of that stuff, like Tinariwen.
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Big Smash

Wreckless Eric
2007 | Stiff Records / The Orchard

The irrepressible Eric Goulden, wildcat songsmith of New Wave-era proto-indie Stiff Records, as-was in 1980.

A great album, one of my favorite releases on the old Stiff label. Wreckless Eric, again, is almost forgotten now in the pantheon of punk songwriters, and if remembered at all, it's usually for his first album, rather than this, which is his second. But this has got some great songs on it: "Broken Doll" is an amazing... song — I've always wanted to do a cover of it. In fact, Cliff Richard did a version once, I read somewhere. I don't think my flabber could be more ghasted than by the idea of Cliff covering Wreckless.

He's maybe best known for "Whole Wide World," off the first record — I hear my son playing that some nights on his guitar. I saw him play a few times, he was in vogue at Go! Discs [Bragg's old label] for a while, under his real name, Eric Goulden, so I knew him in that period. He was pretty hairy — pretty out there. He didn't have the same self-control, that knotted, chip-on-his-shoulder sensibility that early Elvis Costello had. He kind of let it go. He started out like that, but then he had a few too many drinks, and slept in his clothes. But we've all done that — I certainly have! He's still out there somewhere, still gigging.
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Electric Landlady

Kirsty MacColl
2012 | Union Square Music / The Orchard

Bawdy Anglo-Irish chanteuse, whose cover of Bragg's "A New England" charted high in '85. Tragically, she died at sea in 2000.

A brilliant, brilliant record. You have to understand, Kirsty was the real deal. She was an incredible songwriter, but also an amazing singer. When she makes a record that has both "Walking Down Madison" with Johnny [Marr] on it, and "My Affair," which sounds like something Bette Midler would record — there's... an amazing mind at work there. I know she wasn't a confident performer, she didn't like going out on the road, but when she did, it was amazing.

By the look of things here, it also has me and her dueting on a song called "Darling, Let's Have Another Baby." Hang onto your hat here — it was the B-side of a Johnny Moped single on Chiswick, back in the '70s. Kirsty and I both had our first records out on Chiswick, at the same time — me with Riff Raff [Billy's punk combo], and she was part of a group called the Drug Addix. Chiswick put three EPs out at the same time, and called it Suburban Rock 'n' Roll, all people from outside London. It was the Duke, Riff Raff and the Drug Addix.

Because she'd been on Chiswick, she was familiar with Johny Moped. We were on the Nicky Campbell Show, and we decided to have a go at "Darling Let's Have Another Baby," which is a great song. [Quoting lyric] "Let's make one soon, on our second honeymoon." [Calls it up on computer, song plays in background] Yeah, this is the stuff! [Quoting again] "Darling, if you ever leave me, I'll cry a million tears/ I'll go to the nearest boozer, and drink 10 pints of beer."

There's a Johnny Moped movie? A biopic, with Johnny Depp playing Johnny Moped? That would be so fucking great. Oh, it's a documentary. [A little disappointed.] Oh, OK.
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New Boots And Panties (Deluxe Edition)

Ian Dury
2007 | Demon / The Orchard

Utterly classic, none-more-English album of New Wave-era observations of East London, set to visionary, Clash-influencing blend of jazz/funk/reggae/blues.

Again, the "Essex man" thing. That really came totally out of leftfield. I'd always locked into Stiff via Elvis Costello, who was a hero of mine. But when you're coming out with stuff like "Billericay Dickie" and "Plaistow Patricia" and "Clever Trevor"…Yeah, it was a world I knew.

That's what punk was all about. It... brought rock 'n' roll home. It was away from the stadiums and the glitter. That shop he's standing outside of on the cover, we had shops like that in Barking — big shop fronts, with loads of hand-written signs. His love of place, I found that really inspirational. That's something I tried to connect with, both in my songwriting, but also in my book, The Progressive Patriot.

Are you familiar with the song, "England's Glory," that's on this Deluxe Edition? He originally wrote it for Max Wall [slapstick comedian]. It's a great song, amazing. It should be our national anthem, really.
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Interview: Valerie June

John Morthland — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 13:00:25 +0000

[To celebrate his receiving the Outstanding Contribution to Music Award from the Association of Independent Music, we invited Billy Bragg to take control of eMusic's editorial for a week. He nominated the soulful Tennessee singer/songwriter Valerie June — maker of his favorite album of 2013 — for an interview and shared his favorite albums on eMusic. Read our exclusive interview with Bragg here. — Ed.]

Youthful Tennessee native Valerie June plays a crude, but oh so endearing, guitar and banjo and sings in a one-of-a-kind voice with phrasing and intonation that embraces the wrath of Nina Simone, the cheeriness of Dolly Parton and almost everything in between. Her songs sound traditional but with a contemporary twist, and she’s the best thing to happen to Americana and roots music in quite a while. So far she’s better established in Europe than in the USA, but with the release of Pushin’ Against a Stone, her first album to receive national distribution at home, that’s about to change. You’re going to be hearing a lot about Valerie June.

What’s the first music you can remember being really moved by?

Oh, Walt Disney, I had on my Mickey Mouse ears and was going over each lyric. The one that really got me was “Bare Necessities” from The Jungle Book; that was incredible. I was about five.

When did you begin writing songs yourself?

When I moved to Memphis. My first husband was a guitar player; he played all around the house and I just made up words to the music he was playing. We split up because we were too young, straight out of high school, 18 years old, graduated and then got in the van and moved the next day. We got about six or seven songs early on in Memphis and then I said I was gonna book a show at the coffee shop where I worked. I knew at least my friends that worked there with me would show up. They’d say, “She’s crazy so at least it’ll be interesting,” and I am crazy to go into music. I did it the same way when I first starting performing alone. I got some songs so I said, “Now you’re gonna go out and play them for your friends.” So I’ve been doing it eight years now, though I never quit my day jobs until now.

For all the talk of your roots leanings, there’s such a strong, and personal, singer-songwriter element in your music.

I love singer-songwriters: Tracy Chapman, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison…If you’ve got a story to tell I want to hear it. So it’s nice to be in the singer-songwriter world. I consider myself someone who plays an instrument but is not a musician; I’m a songwriter and singer who plays her own songs. I didn’t even realize about the singer-songwriter thing until I got older and thought I should look into it, and that’s what got me moving towards folk music. Old songbooks are a big thing to me; I have endless amounts of folksong books now. And I spent a lot of time at the Library of Congress, just listening to the old songs and all the different ways different people performed them; I really studied those songs. I also learned a lot from older musicians, like Robert Balfour in Memphis. I don’t even have much time for that now, but I love studying, and learning.

But what in particular do you think drew you in that direction?

Through music you get an idea about how it was for people who lived on plantations, or whatever was going on in their time. You hear the voices, listen to the songs and hear their energy; the songs carry the energy of the people at that time. Then you move on into your time. My album is an amalgamation of folk, blues, gospel and country and I really feel like I can sing those songs night after night. But the genre thing just kinda happens when you record them with a producer, and certain instrumentation. I think some of my songs could be done as hip hop songs, but they aren’t. At the same time, the songs are always changing. Like, on “Working Woman Blues” I worked with Hungarian musicians and when I hear it I say, “Wow, how did that happen?” I’ve never done the song anything like that before. I have no idea where this version came from, but I wouldn’t change a thing about it. Stories grow and change, and you can see how; same with my songs. When you record them, they’re like snapshots, and it’s always different no matter who I’m working with. Every time I get in a room with different musicians the songs go different ways. It’s really great.

Of all those traditional songs you studied, which is your absolute favorite?

“The Crawdad Song.” I love it. There’s so many different versions of it. It changes from one part of the world to another. People make it their own, and that’s the way it should be; they sing it their way and make it their song.

Interview: Billy Bragg

Andrew Perry — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 08:00:08 +0000

[To celebrate his receiving the Outstanding Contribution to Music Award from the Association of Independent Music, we invited Billy Bragg to take control of eMusic's editorial for a week. This is our exclusive interview with him about his decades-long career. He also nominated the soulful Tennessee singer/songwriter Valerie June for an interview, and shared his favorite albums on eMusic. — Ed.]

There is no more fitting or hard-earned recipient of the Association of Independent Music’s Outstanding Contribution to Music Award than Billy Bragg. He has ploughed a lone furrow these past three decades, as a songwriter of urgent radical awareness, often in a musical landscape of near-total political apathy.

Along the way, he has worked with many of the independent sector’s leading lights, including Johnny Marr, Jeff Tweedy and California producer Joe Henry, as well as alt-rock icons REM and free spirits like Kirsty MacColl, whose cover of his early classic, “A New England,” first shot the busking East Londoner into the pop charts.

Known as the “Bard of Barking,” after his blue-collar neighbourhood, Billy released his epochal six-track debut, Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs. Spy, exactly 30 years ago, its stark combination of witty lyricism and clanging electric guitar helping him stand out amid the prevailing post-punk and New Romanticism.

Shuttling around on public transport with guitar case and amp, Bragg became British rock’s best-known activist, putting together the Red Wedge collective in opposition to Margaret Thatcher. Though he drew support from luminaries like Paul Weller, Thatcher was re-elected, and many expected Bragg to fall away in her wake.

This, however, was seriously to under-estimate his excellence, musically. He once described himself as “a love songwriter who also does political songs,” and through the remainder of the 1980s and ’90s, hits such as “Sexuality” confirmed his ability to touch on affairs of the heart (and body), while also finding time to hurl polemic boulders where necessary — in later years, online, often within a day or two of a political issue hitting the headlines.

With this year’s Tooth & Nail, he returned to a stripped-down sound, if not quite as bare as when he started out, then very subtly embellished under Joe Henry’s masterful guidance. In conversation, Bragg remains as enthusiastic yet as uncompromised as ever.

Tooth & Nail is your first album in four or five years. How come it’s been so long?

It’s been a very strange time. After my last album, Mr. Love & Justice, in 2008, I was sort of watching what was happening to the music industry, thinking to myself, “Well, is there really a viable place for me in the industry, or should I just put stuff out through mail order myself?” I self-released a compilation of all the topical songs I’d put out in the last 10 years, but there’s only so far you can reach with that, you can’t get beyond the people you know, so you really have to engage again with the music industry.

In the spring of 2011 my mum passed away — that changes your perspective on everything. My dad passed away 35 years ago, but losing my mum brought everything into sharp focus — not least, what was I doing and was there any worth in it? She’d had a lovely life, and it was her time, it wasn’t a terrible shock or anything, but at the end of it I really felt like I needed to do something now to move on. If I was gonna move on, I needed to actually get involved in something, and the elephant in the room at the time was a new Billy Bragg album.

So by the end of 2011 I was ready to record, and I went to see my friend Joe Henry in California. He’s a great songwriter, but the last decade or so he’s turned into an ace producer as well. He told me we could make an album in his basement in five days, and that was where my mind was. I didn’t really wanna do an album that took six weeks stretched over 18 months, which was how we made the last one. I needed to get in and get it done, so I could come away with something. It was most likely that I would come away with the foundations of a new record that I could bring back to England and add to.

There was always a chance I was gonna make the most expensive demos I’d ever made, but what I wasn’t really expecting was to come back with a complete album, that sounded amazing, which is what happened. So then I spent most of 2012 doing gigs, building up some money for a promotional budget, so that I could then in early 2013 get the record out.

In the words of your great heroes, the Clash, you had “complete control”?

Yeah! Which is scary, isn’t it. As long as you plan these things, and don’t just expect to waltz in there, it is possible to take on some of the jobs that the label used to do for you. Cooking Vinyl are great at getting the record out there, both digitally and physically — things I can’t do from where I am — but the crunch comes down to what I wanna do, and what I’m prepared to fund, so it’s a lot more realistic than it used to be. I did notice on the albums of a few people I admired, like Steve Earle and Tom Morello — if you look on the back, they made it in a week.

Funny you should mention Steve Earle, I was going to say your voice has matured into his sort of territory — it’s a bit gruffer, and more lived-in these days. This album really feels like a wise man sharing his wisdom with the listener.

I think there’s a couple of reasons for that. One was making the record in California with Joe and his studio guys, and the sympathy that they gave to my songs, around my voice. It just shines through, it was just so easy to sing. And for that I’m hugely thankful. But also I wanted to go back and re-visit that Mermaid Avenue space [his 1997 collaboration with Wilco on unrecorded Woody Guthrie songs], which I hadn’t really been able to do in the UK, for whatever reasons.

With England, Half English [the 2002 album recorded with his band, the Blokes], my head just wasn’t in that space, it was in the “taking on the BNP” space [the far right-wing British National Party had been gaining ground in his native East London constituency], which is why I was making a record about personal identity that sounds like world music.

Then with Mr. Love & Justice, I should’ve been a bit more engaged in the making of that record. I was sort of losing interest in making albums. I started to think, “Is there really any point in this anymore? Are people gonna still make records?” Well, clearly they are, so it behooves me to get back on it again, and that’s what I’ve sought to do with this record, and in doing that, I’ve tried to make a record that hangs together as an idea, and as a sound.

Billy Bragg, of all people, was considering throwing in the towel — that’s inconceivable!

What’s happened — because the internet allows you now to write a song one day and put it up for live download the next — which for a topical songwriter like me is really enticing — I’ve tended to make mine available that way. Take, for instance, “Never By The Sun,” my song about the phone-hacking scandal [in the British tabloid media], I wrote that the week the Millie Dowler story broke, and it was up for a free download before News of the World had even closed [the tabloid paper was forced to close, due to public and political pressure]. So that immediacy…Whereas, to get “There Is Power in a Union” out, I had to wait until 1986 when “Talking to the Taxman about Poetry” came out — a song I wrote in 1984, about the miner’s strike.

So that’s great. But what it means is, when I come to make an album, I’ve used up all my political songs, so the songs on Tooth & Nail tend to be more personal and reflective, and after the year I had in 2011, that’s not a bad thing.

You actually revisit Woody Guthrie’s canon to cover “I Ain’t Got No Home.” Lines like “the gambling man is rich, while the working man is poor” obviously resonate in the wake of the 2010′s banking crisis. In that context, it feels pretty bleak, even despairing, which is rare for you…

I think maybe reflection might be the word. I try not to despair. I’m a “glass half-full” kind of guy. It’s all in there in “Tomorrow’s Gonna Be a Better Day,” which closes the album, and in opener “January Song,” which says, I’m gonna pick myself up, I’m gonna get through this — this is where the end begins; I’m gonna finish with this, where I am now, and I’m gonna move forward.

Interestingly, the album was recorded in January 2012, and that was the very last song I wrote, on the last day. It was a song that needed to set the tone for the record, because it was a bit weird — by the time we got to Wednesday, we’d recorded 10 songs, and I thought to myself, “If I write another couple of songs, I could walk away with an album here.” So when everyone went home in the evening, I was busily away in Joe’s spare room — I was staying at his house — trying to get a couple of songs finished.

With that one, literally as we were recording it, a couple more verses came through, so I had to run upstairs, while the musicians stood there looking at the wall, and scribble them down. Then I came back down again and sang it. So it was — not an epiphany, but certainly a commitment to myself to move on to whatever comes next, to pick myself up, dust myself down, and get on with it. That’s what I really needed to do.

Did it feel like the right time for you to become the confessional troubadour?

Well, there’s a lot of that about. The sort of artists I’ve been listening to in the last few years have tended to be the more intense, personal singer-songwriter — Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes. I’ve always been a fan of that, ever since Simon & Garfunkel and Dylan, when I was a teenager.

Since 2000 or so, you’ve had a full band at your disposal, the Blokes, with the Faces’ Ian Mclagan on keyboards. Even before that, your oeuvre has been a bit schizo, veering between the stripped-back, often solo sound of you and guitar, and the more full-band stuff — it was even pretty much presented that way on your two career-overview box sets, Volume One and Volume Two, respectively. What was your initial motivation in doing the one man and his guitar act in the early ’80s?

Well, it was to escape. It was pretty risky, but it was hugely exciting. The adrenaline rush was incredible. That’s always been a big part of why I wanna do this, to get that adrenaline buzz, but a lot of the artists I used to listen to as a teenager were singer-songwriters who started out solo — the idea of the single figure alone onstage. That, plugged into the power and velocity of the Clash and the Jam, seemed to me like good wires to cross, to see what sparks flew off.

I initially had difficulty convincing pub guv’nors to put me on. I was just trying to find a way to escape from a world where my choices were getting fewer. The band I’d been in [Riff Raff] had broken up, punk had ended, I joined the army but that didn’t work out — what was I gonna do? This was like my last attempt, almost like a bayonet charge, you could say, and thirty years later I’m amazed I’m still making a living doing it. I feel really fortunate for that.

They called you the “one-man Clash”. I recently saw you defined as “folk punk,” which, if it is indeed a genre, certainly didn’t exist before you came along!

Yeah, but there was a strong connection between Woody Guthrie and the Clash. Joe Strummer used to call himself Woody, before he called himself Joe. The Clash painted slogans on their guitars because Woody did. And in some ways punk was a form of folk music, like skiffle was — a sort of do-it-yourself, get-up-and-play kind of thing that really put more onus on expression than on musicality, which is what folk music does, really. I think folk music really is music that they make for themselves, as opposed to music they buy commercially, to dance to or listen to. It’s a raw definition, but I think it’s as good as any. And punk was like that — music for ourselves.

You’ve always said that seeing the Clash perform in front of 100,000 people at a Rock Against Racism gig in London’s Victoria Park in 1977 changed your life. Why?

It was a huge catalyst, not only in my political development, but also my understanding of how music affects society. It didn’t change things, that gig, but it did send me away with a different perspective, that I hadn’t got before from the media I was taking in — the broadsheet newspapers. I was 20, but I hadn’t made the connection — there were a lot of gay people at that march, partly because Tom Robinson was performing. I hadn’t made that connection — that it was about discrimination, it wasn’t just about black people. So the world didn’t change, it stayed exactly the same, but my perception of it did, to such an extent that I wouldn’t probably being doing this job now, if it hadn’t been for what happened there. So, knowing that there’s the potential to do that every night at a gig, you’re always trying to put out ideas that you think just might send someone away with a different view of the world. You’re bringing the news from one place, like Woody did, and taking it to another.

Because you were active in extreme political times of mid ’80s Thatcherism — and with hindsight, we can definitely say they were extreme times…

Yup, I think that’s fair.

But through all of that, your musicality got a little eclipsed by the urgency of what you were saying. Is that fair, too?

Yup, for sure. The interesting thing was, I’d grown up listening to those singer-songwriters who had engaged in the Civil Rights Movement in America, and in the anti-war movement, who’d stood up and sung a song that somehow defined the moment. I suddenly found myself in a similar position.

You know, can music change the world? Well, I don’t know, but I’m gonna have a damn good go, and see if it does. I’m gonna push it as far as I can, as logically as I can, and taking my cues from the mistakes that I thought that the previous generation had made, and prime to me among that was the failure of the Clash to engage with mainstream politics. That was my analysis at the time — crude though it was.

I thought, the best vehicle, after the miners’ strike didn’t produce a revolution, which everyone promised me it would, rather than just go back to singing songs, it seemed to me we needed to find another vehicle to help defeat Margaret Thatcher, and the most obvious vehicle was Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party at the ’87 Election, and that’s how Red Wedge came into being. In the end, if you’re gonna sing these songs, you’ve gotta do your best to match your actions to that, rather than just observing politics. I’ve always tried to engage. I’m a songwriter, and I’m an activist as well.

When Kirsty MacColl charted with “A New England” in 1985, it put you on the map as a songwriter — like, hang on, this guy’s not just hollering away in a political void, he actually writes good tunes!

Yeah, that changed everything for me. It was a real badge of honor, because I was a huge Kirsty MacColl fan back from the days when I was working in a record shop. She herself had an incredible ear for a tune, and a great voice. And obviously through her dad she had the political chops as well, so for her to come to me and ask if she could record one of my songs was like winning the pools really. When it turned out so fabulous and got in the Top 10, and you could buy my album for the price of her 12-inch, all of a sudden I was reaching people that previously I hadn’t done.

And still that’s the song that most people know. Even David Cameron! When he said he liked the Smiths [in a famous press conference], someone said, “You’ll be saying you like Billy Bragg next, and he said, I do like ‘A New England,’ but I like Kirsty’s version,” which was like a glancing blow — it was close, but I just managed to avoid the full weight of it.

Did Kirsty’s cover open up the idea for you to start putting instrumentation on your records, to make them a bit prettier for people?

I think it was working with Johnny Marr that changed that. “Greetings For The New Brunette” [1986] was great, but the real thing was when he produced “Sexuality” on Don’t Try This At Home [1991], because me and the actual producer of the album, Grant Showbiz — when we got Johnny’s track back, we thought, “Oh fuck [laughs], now we’ve gotta make an album that sounds like that.” He set the bar really high.

I have no qualms about pop music. I love pop music. If I could sing like Marvin Gaye and dance like Fred Astaire, I would totally have gone for it in the ’80s — although it would’ve been political. I always thought my strength lay in what I was writing — content over style, I suppose. But I’ve always liked to think I have enough of a pop sensibility to be able to engage with people.

The thing is, when people talk about writing a political song, they often forget the song bit. People remember a song like “What’s Going On?” because of its great hook, and the orchestration. These things are important. The lyric should be able to deal with the attitude in it. You don’t need the music to do that too. The music should be drawing people in.

2002′s England, Half English, was loosely about Britain’s tradition of multiculturalism, stretching back for centuries. That led you on to writing your book, The Progressive Patriot. What were you able to write there, that you couldn’t in song?

All you can do with your records is send a message from where you are. That’s what Tooth & Nail is, and it’s definitely what England, Half English was. I ended up needing to write the book, because subsequent to England, Half English, the BNP got 12 councillors elected in Barking & Dagenham [Bragg's constituency] in 2006, and I was like, “What can I do? I can’t just write another record. I’m gonna have to engage in this in a much more detailed way. I’m gonna have to go on, in real detail about why I love my country, why I’m not willing to stand by and watch the town I grew up in turn into the racist capital of Britain.” There are different types of patriotism, let’s explore that. All those things, I could’ve done them each in a song. The book allowed me greater scope.

In the late Noughties, a freshly politicized new generation of British artists started name-checking you, including Jamie T, Hard-Fi and Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly. Was that like a final validation for you? Like, your music has endured?

Yeah, that was a welcome surprise. I still feel I have something to say. At the tail end of 2011, I thought to myself, I really need to engage with the industry again, because I haven’t finished. I still have some fight in me. Let’s do this, and see what happens. When this period of touring and promotion is over in about a year’s time, I’ll step back, and hopefully I will be in a different place, both emotionally and career-wise — that Tooth & Nail will have made people look at me in a different perspective. I’m hoping — because I don’t expect to be in the charts and playing Wembley Arena. I don’t think that was ever really in the plan for me, just to carry on making a living, and still having people come along and ask you to play tracks from your newest album. That’s all I can hope for.

The 10 Best Replacement Songs (Not by the Replacements)

Michael Tedder — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 17:52:16 +0000

Later this month, the legendary underground rock icons/heart-rending poets/drunken screw-ups the Replacements will play their first shows since breaking up onstage in Chicago 22 years ago. (Well, Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson and some other dudes will play some Replacements songs, if you want to get technical about it.) Though the Replacements have not been an active recording or touring unit for more than two decades, their influence has never waned. Paul Westerberg was perhaps one of the most openhearted, emotionally fluent songwriters working in the 1980s college-rock scene, and this embarrassed him so much that he overcompensated by acting like a drunken lout. Plenty of artists have been inspired by the push and pull of Westerberg’s sensitive-brat worldview, and to celebrate the Replacements’ return, eMusic has gathered 10 of the best songs from their acolytes. All of these songs seem tough on the outside, even the ballads, but look closer and you’ll hear a strain of compassion, yearning and understated wit worthy of Saint Paul.

Against Me!, “Thrash Unreal”

New Wave

Against Me!
2007 | Sire/Warner Bros.

Against Me! singer/guitarist Laura Jane Grace has never been shy about her love for Minneapolis's finest. Against Me! has previously covered both "Bastards Of Young" and "Here Comes A Regular", and during their first New York set after Grace came out as transgendered, Against Me! brought Joan Jett on stage to cover "Androgynous." That's an impressive hat trick, but perhaps an even more impressive tribute is the New Wave single... "Thrash Unreal," which basically combines the wasted life chronicle of "Here Comes a Regular" with the ode to outsiders "Achin' to Be." The song tells the story of a lifelong alcoholic who misses the days of the "rebel yell," and in classic Westerberg fashion it finds empathy for its subject's problems without condescending or moralizing.
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Wilco, “Misunderstood”

Being There

Wilco
1996 | Reprise

During the tour for their double-album opus Being There, Wilco regularly covered early Replacements classic "Color Me Impressed," and it's obvious from one listen to "Misunderstood" that Jeff Tweedy had spent serious time studying his Hootenanny. It's all there: a winding, detailed narrative of a lost young man who feels stuck in his hometown, losing himself in booze, bad parties and self-pity, culminating in a cathartic, mocking outro that finds him... repeating "I want to thank you all/ for nothing at all" until he finally finds a moment of peace. Ever the A-plus student, Tweedy also slyly alludes to a few Replacement classics with the line "Take the guitar player for a ride/ 'cause he ain't never been satisfied."
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Jessica Lea Mayfield, “Our Hearts Are Wrong”

Tell Me

Jessica Lea Mayfield
2011 | Nonesuch

Paul Westerberg's songs are filled with characters who want the wrong things, even though they should know better. Ohio singer/songwriter Jessica Lea Mayfield can relate. On this standout song from her sophomore album Tell Me, Mayfield does her best to figure out if she is in love, or if she hates someone so passionately that she can't tell the difference. Over an ominous, twangy shuffle, she eventually realizes that it's a bit... of both, and she needs to leave well enough alone.
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Justin Townes Earle, “Someday I’ll Be Forgiven for This”

Midnight at the Movies

Justin Townes Earle
Bloodshot Records

Justin Townes Earle is the rebellious country outsider Steve Earle's kid, and his middle name is a tribute to the legendary Townes Van Zandt, but there's plenty of Westerberg in his songwriting DNA. On this piano-led barroom waltz from 2009's Midnight at the Movies (which, natch, also includes a cover of "Can't Hardly Wait"), Earle is a lovesick bastard who is mired in regret for breaking someone's heart, but he's able... to take the long view and realize that one day it won't hurt so much. Well, he hopes so, at least. And like Paul at his best, he's able to extend some sympathy for someone other than himself. It takes two people to ruin a good thing sometimes, but someday she'll be forgiven as well.
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Art Brut, “The Replacements”

Art Brut vs. Satan

Art Brut
2011 | Downtown Records / The Orchard

With "Alex Chilton," the Replacements both introduced and perfected the songwriting sub genre of "Tribute to a Songwriting Genius Most of the World Wasn't Fortunate Enough to Get." So clearly, they required their own tribute, and Art Brut were only happy to comply. On the English band's third album, Art Brut vs Satan, lead ranter Eddie Argos talks about always being let down by the bands he loves, and then beats himself... up that in his late 20s he's "only just found out about the Replacements." While it most have been agonizing for Eddie to realize how much better his teenage years would have been if he had a copy of Let It Be, it's better to come late to "Swingin' Party" than never arrive at all.
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Lucinda Williams, “Real Live Bleeding Fingers and Broken Guitar Strings”

World Without Tears

Lucinda Williams
2003 | Lost Highway Records

Lucinda Williams has called Westerberg an influence on this song, telling Billboard, "He's just really good at combining literary lyrics — really good lyrics — set against a really cool, rock 'n' roll musical bed." This track from 2003's World Without Tears proves that she's really good at that as well, saluting some wannabe rebel with the Westerberg-worthy quip, "You've got a sense of humor/ You're a mystery/ I heard a... rumor/ You're making history."
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Green Day, “Why Do You Want Him?”

1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours

Green Day
2006 | Reprise

What made Paul Westerberg a cut above was his ability to occasionally walk away from the pity party and write about the troubles that other people were going through with as much care and detail as the lyrics about his own heartaches. This is a lesson that longtime fan Billie Joe Armstrong got right away. One of the first songs he ever wrote, "Why Do You Want Him?" (found on the compilation... 1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours) is a plea for his mother to break up with a man Armstrong thought was unworthy of her. He sings his shockingly-insightful-for-a-teenager lyrics with enough youthful passion that it sounds like he's trying to make her value herself more through sheer force of will.
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Ryan Adams, “To Be Young (Is to Be Sad Is to Be High)”

Heartbreaker

Ryan Adams
2000 | Pax Am Records / TuneCore

Adams is such a 'Mats fan that he even got Tommy Stinson to play on Pneumonia, the final album by his band Whiskeytown. The lead off song from his classic solo debut Heartbreaker sees him channeling Westerberg's cocky swagger and big-brother humanity, telling a character (probably himself) that the best way to get over heartbreak is get back out there and live it up. Which will inevitably lead to even more heartbreak,... but Adams makes it sound like it's the only path worth taking.
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Swearin’, “Here to Hear”

Swearin'

Swearin'
2012 | Salinas Records / Believe Digital

This Philadelphia- and Brooklyn-based group features two songwriters, Allison Crutchfield and Kyle Gilbride, both of whom have a knack for documenting youthful confusion while still sounding like a prime mixtape of '80s and '90s left-of-the-dial favorites. This highlight from last year's self-titled debut finds Gilbride back home and utterly lost, unable to fit in anymore or convince himself that this is where he belongs. When he sings, "I second-guess it all the... time/ I'm losing my capacity to lie," it seems clear that he wishes he could make himself believe things will be OK, but he's gottten old enough to know better.
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Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, “Into the Great Wide Open”

Into The Great Wide Open

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
1991 | Geffen

The Replacements were infamous for stepping one foot into the mainstream, and then promptly shooting directly at said foot. So when they accepted an opening spot for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, they promptly did everything they could to antagonize Petty and the crowd. But no matter how bratty they acted, Petty seemed to be listening, and the line "rebel without a clue" from their 1989 single "I'll Be You" popped... up in Petty's 1992 single "Into The Great Wide Open." We're not saying that Petty ripped anyone off — just that he knew a great put down when he heard it, and knew it would fit right in with his tale of a young star who overdoses on his own hype.
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Laura Veirs, Warp and Weft

Hilary Saunders — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 13:00:05 +0000

A needlepoint-precise portrait of modern Americana

The warp and weft, the two over-under types of knitting technique, take special narrative direction on Portland-based songstress Laura Veirs’s new album. Veirs recorded Warp and Weft while she was eight months pregnant with her second child, and her husband and longtime collaborator Tucker Martine later produced the 12-track release. As such, themes of love and loss, protection and ultimate surrender weave their way throughout Warp and Weft, with Veirs’s own motherhood experiences serving as the connecting thread on her ninth LP.

The album’s songs are both surprisingly realistic — paying homage to real personas like Hiroshima survivor Sadako Sasaki, jazz harpist Alice Coltrane, and folk artist/minister Howard Finster — and utterly fanciful. Musical guests include members of My Morning Jacket and The Decemberists, as well as kd lang and Neko Case, all of whom add welcome musical texture to Veirs’s already-established progressive folk palate and ultimately helps fashion Warp and Weft‘s needlepoint-precise portrait of modern Americana.

Glen Campbell, See You There

Jim Farber — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 13:00:19 +0000

Rethought versions of his top hits, plus a few recent cuts

In the same way Rick Rubin rushed to record as much of Johnny Cash’s music as he could in his dimming days, so those around Glen Campbell have aimed to cut songs with him while they can. Campbell is famously facing Alzheimer’s. In the meantime, he has toured extensively and has now released a CD featuring rethought versions of his top hits, along with recent cuts, previously unreleased.

Campbell comes at classics like “Galveston” and “Witchita Lineman” more deliberately now, savoring the great arcs of their melodies, while imprinting them with his memories. The airy arrangements leave more room for Campbell to show off a voice still agile and robust, despite small fissures in its timbre. His performances glow with awareness, deepening songs that always addressed connection and parting. The long goodbye they chronicle won’t leave a dry eye.

The Civil Wars, The Civil Wars

Stephen M. Deusner — Mon, 12 Aug 2013 13:05:19 +0000

Love is a battlefield on the Civil Wars' sophomore album

Thanks to the austere folk instrumentation and the sepia-toned imagery on Barton Hollow, their 2011 debut, the Civil Wars have been lumped in with new old-time revivalists like the Avett Brothers and Mumford & Sons, but the duo has never been quite comfortable among the overalls-and-trucker-hats set. On their self-titled follow-up, Joy Williams and John Paul White distance themselves from that acoustic/authentic movement with a rawer, harder, darker sound that makes room for abrasive electric guitars and stoical programmed beats. There are quiet numbers here, like “Dust to Dust” and the nearly unrecognizable Smashing Pumpkins cover “Disarm,” which don’t stray too far from the plaintive strumming and pillow-talk harmonies of their debut. But on The Civil Wars those songs contrast dramatically with surprisingly heavy numbers like “I Had Me a Girl” and “Eavesdrop.” First single “The One That Got Away” could be a demo for a metal tune, as the percussive riffs and unsettling silences convey the horrors of soured love. Ratcheting up the rural-gothic drama and sexual tension to a nearly operatic level, Williams and White may be accused of sounding overwrought. Yet, such baroque intensity suits them well, as The Civil Wars not only offers a compelling expansion of their sound but also definitively distinguishes them from their musically conservative peers.

Free eMusic Samplers

eMusic Editorial Staff — Wed, 07 Aug 2013 18:00:35 +0000

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.

Eddie Cochran’s Blues

Lenny Kaye — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 17:11:08 +0000

I’m in a music store in Berlin, looking at an old Gibson Skylark amp, when “C’mon Everybody” comes spilling out of the battered speaker on the wall. I haven’t heard it up close and so loud for a long time, though I know each inflection by heart: the snare a cardboard box smacked by Cochran’s producer, Jerry Capeheart; the stolen moments’ pleasure of the lyric’s invitation to party. And undercurrenting it all, like a thrumming electrical cable, is the guitar line, providing a pulse to the song, putting bite and adolescent urgency into this paean to kicks grabbed on the fly, when the folks are gone, when the bare feet will be stompin’ on the floor, when you’re gonna dance with three or four. There’s always the prospect of retribution, but who cares?

The Who cared. Their version of another Cochran song, the iconic “Summertime Blues,” is a centerpiece of Live at Leeds, a high-powered version contemporaneous with Blue Cheer’s amps-on-amphetamine rendition that became an unlikely hit single in 1968, when the influence of Cochran’s insistent guitar was beginning to make itself felt a generation beyond his compressed lifespan. Of all his contemporaries in the golden era of rock ‘n’ roll, Eddie Cochran was the master of the guitar riff. For me, playing that too-young-to-vote anthem each night this summer while on tour in Europe, where Cochran’s reputation has always exceeded his recognition in the States, raising a fuss and a holler and seeing first-hand how unmistakably recognizable and rousing that two-bar hook is, is to return to his work with renewed respect and admiration at how much he accomplished in a short time.

Eddie was perfectly positioned age-wise to turn his guitar prowess to rock ‘n’ roll. Born October 3, 1938, in Albert Lea, Minnesota, he took to the instrument early on. His family was originally from Oklahoma, but he only began thinking about a career in music after the Cochrans moved to Bell Gardens, California, where he hardly lasted a year in high school. The country and western influence might have been uppermost when he began performing with Hank Cochran (later a Nashville songwriter whose credits would include “Little Bitty Tear”) as the Cochran Brothers in 1955, even if they were no relation. But they were soon swept up in the whirlwind that would become rock and roll. The duo’s first records, which can be found on The Many Sides of Eddie Cochran, were tinged with western swinging (“Mr. Fiddle”) or hillbilly harmonies (“Two Blue Singing Stars” referencing Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams). Their last disc together was an unabashed bopper, “Tired and Sleepy,” leading to their divergence and Eddie becoming a solo artist.

Through his session work, backing such country boogies as Skeets MacDonald, Cochran came in contact with Jerry Capeheart, an aspiring songwriter looking for someone to sing his demos. The two hit it off, and soon produced Eddie’s first record under his own name: “Skinny Jim,” recorded in July 1956, a month after Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-A-Lula” was released. Was Eddie aware of Gene’s recording when he inserted the catchphrase into his roughened and heavily echoed vocal? The song, not a hit at the time, shows how much Cochran had absorbed the new style. It led to a cameo in one of the first rock ‘n’ roll movies, The Girl Can’t Help It, starring Jayne Mansfield. Someone turns on a television and there’s Eddie doing the hip-shake with his Gretsch 6120 to “Twenty Flight Rock,” his shoulders hunched over his guitar, his face radiant in the Technicolor, as promissory a performance in its own modest way as Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show.

The renown led to a contract with Liberty Records, and a minor hit with “Sittin’ In The Balcony,” written by John Loudermilk, our hero nuzzling his date in the “very last row.” Its teen romance softened Eddie’s appeal in Liberty’s eyes, and the album that followed — Singin’ To My Baby (tracks of which can be found on the Undying Love compilation) — seemed to position him in the pretty boy mode that the Philadelphia Italians — Frankie Avalon, Fabian, Bobby Rydell — would soon claim as their own. “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You” and “(Baby Let’s Go) To A Drive-In Show” might have been pleasantly sultry, but Eddie was made of sterner stuff, as when he suddenly lets out a growl in “Mean When I’m Mad,” a song that otherwise hardly sounds miffed. Though 1957 was highlighted by a package tour of Australia with Little Richard and Gene Vincent (opening the door to the latter’s friendship and their consequent touring together), Cochran’s records weren’t earning him wider acclaim.

Recognizing this, Eddie visited Jerry’s Sunset Parks apartment in Hollywood in March of 1958 to toss around song ideas. “I knew there had been a lot of songs about summer,” Capeheart would recall, “but none about the hardships of summer. And of all the seasons there had never been a blues about summer. They had ‘em for winter, fall spring…” Eddie had the classic riff, and Connie “Guybo” Smith, his bass player since high school, strummed underneath the vocal like another rhythm guitar, part of the growing upsurge of the Fender electric bass as it began to transform rock ‘n’ roll’s bottom end (both Buddy Holly and Elvis had started with “doghouse” stand-up bass players), helping to create the template of the modern rock ‘n’ roll band. Cochran double-tracked his guitars, a relatively new technique. The surprising thing about the texture of “Summertime Blues” is that it’s driven by an acoustic guitar, punctuated by a clattering, hand-clapping drum pattern. A sense of humor helped. Eddie liked to answer his phone with the Kingfish’s distinctive “Hello dere!” and used the voice to deliver his sonorous taglines of adult authority.

His were specifically teenage blues, their subject matter all too youthful. But he was a teen idol in a game that many thought wouldn’t last much past a fad. He wasn’t alone in this mindset: Buddy Holly was recording with strings; Elvis had starred in films and was preparing to go into the army; Bobby Darin followed “Splish Splash” with Brecht’s “Mack the Knife” backed by a full big band. Eddie began to think of a future in production, session work, going home. But in early 1960, he went to England to join a package show with Gene Vincent headlining. Considered the “first full tour of England by an American rocker” according to Nik Cohn in Rock From The Beginning, the ensuing furor was so great, and Eddie’s stage presence so forceful, that soon they were equally billed, as the tour became a sensation, especially for those waiting in the wings, including a young George Harrison, who followed the tour from stop to stop. Where in America he was just another teenage singer pushing 22, in England Eddie Cochran was becoming a superstar.

Even with Sharon joining him on the tour, the long weeks at the Odeons and the Hippodromes were exhausting, following on a series of one-nighters in the Midwest before he’d left America. He was due to go home for 10 days on Easter Sunday, then return to Britain for another 10 weeks, after which, he told his family, he hoped to be off the road. He planned on working with Capeheart on a new singer they’d found, Glen Campbell, and other studio projects. He was mindful of his friend Buddy Holly, whom he’d attempted to pay tribute to with “Three Stars In Heaven,” recorded the summer before, and the toll the road exacted.

Cherished Memories, a 2001 documentary, tells the story of that fateful drive on the night of April 17 to Heathrow airport along the A4 near Chippenham. Gene, Sharon and Eddie are sitting in the back. The taxi is going too fast. There is a missed turn, a frantic swerve to get back in the right direction. Gene and Sharon survive; Eddie doesn’t. In May, 1960, “Three Steps to Heaven” is rush-released in the UK, hitting No. 1. In America it doesn’t chart. But Eddie is already a Legendary Master, or at least that’s what his record company (now absorbed within United Artists) calls the series in which he is given a double-album greatest hits collection in 1971, and for which I was asked to write liner notes.

It was summer when I started gathering anecdote and b-side, talking to Capeheart and Sheeley and even, I believe, his mother. It was to be a long-form essay, and I’d reserved all of August to make sure it was worthy of the songs Eddie has placed in my heart all these years. But then my own summertime blues began when I get a call from S., with whom I was in the same college class, and the object of a long abiding post-teenage crush. She invited me to drive to Canada with her, all the way to the West Coast, and who knows where after that. It was tempting, but I couldn’t go, even as I imagined nights camped under the stars, somewhere between Winnipeg and Vancouver. “You can’t have the car/ ’cause you didn’t work a lick.”

Eddie knew how to work a lick, that’s for sure.

Amanda Shires, Down Fell the Doves

Stephen M. Deusner — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 13:59:58 +0000

Strange and spry country with eccentricities running wild

When Amanda Shires sings about the devil on “Deep Dark Below,” a standout on her latest album, he “plays a mean fiddle and his bow’s made of bone.” The Texas native plays a mean bow herself: She joined the Texas Playboys at 15 and has backed an array of musicians, including Justin Townes Earle, Todd Snider and her husband Jason Isbell. Members of his band the 400 Unit back her on Down Fell the Doves, creating a strange and spry country sound that fits her fantastical lyrics about emotional risk and unfathomable doubt. Musically and lyrically, Shires lets her eccentricities run wild, whether she’s pondering invincibility on the unsettling daydream “Bulletproof” or wondering about death’s “beautiful dream” on “Box Cutters.” Her fiddle ranges fluidly from textural to melodic, as she plucks, bows and strums feverishly. One minute she’s holding her own against Isbell’s abrasive electric guitar on “Devastate”; the next she’s conjuring a full Stax horn section on “Stay.” On Down Fell the Doves, Shires isn’t fiddling to beat the devil. Instead, she draws her bow to keep the darkness at bay.

Dumpstaphunk, Dirty Word

Wayne Robins — Tue, 06 Aug 2013 13:28:59 +0000

Full-on homage to the funk and soul bands of the 1970s

Dumpstaphunk started 10 years ago backing local hero and keyboard player Ivan Neville at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage festival, caught a breeze and never stopped. Though boasting two members of New Orleans first family (Art Neville’s son and Ivan’s cousin Ian plays guitar), Dirty Word has little in common with the elastic sound of the Neville family brand. It’s full-on homage to the funk and soul bands of the 1970s, the big bold bass lines and wily chants of arena acts like Parliament-Funkadelic, the Ohio Players, Cameo, and the “Brick House” Commodores. The two covers — Betty Mabry Davis’s overlooked “If I’m In Luck, I Might Get Picked Up” and Graham Central Station’s highlight “Water” prove the durability of that ’70s pocket.

The new angle is the two-bass hit of Tony Hall and Nick Daniels III, creating, with drummer Nikki Gillespie, a booming bottom that in isolation could be compared to the sound of IMAX theaters showing Transformer movies. Guest appearances dot the landscape — Ani DiFranco, Skerik, Flea — but it’s the visiting horn sections that are necessary, because in the great ’70s funk bands, the bass was the body but the brass was the head. Consider the finale “Raise the House,” in which the Rebirth Brass Band and Trombone Shorty not only tear the roof off, they turn it into kindling and light a bonfire.

Who to See at Lollapalooza 2013

eMusic Editorial Staff — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 20:41:47 +0000

Headed to Chicago but still not sure who you want to see in Grant Park? Fear not: We’ve boiled the brain-busting Lollapalooza schedule down to 15 essential sets.

Nine Inch Nails

The Downward Spiral

Nine Inch Nails
1994 | NOTHING

There's a sense in which this write-up feels ridiculous — recommending you go see Nine Inch Nails is a little like saying you ought to check out eating and breathing some time. Whether or not you like their music is irrelevant; Trent Reznor consistently delivers one of the best live shows in the business, with no exceptions. It's not just smoke and fire — the show is meticulously crafted to follow... a story arc, the songs moving from anger to despair to, believe it or not, redemption and healing. The visuals — which, make no mistake, are stunning — are just a complement. Make no mistake: Nine Inch Nails are a live act completely without equal. — J. Edward Keyes
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The Killers

Battle Born

The Killers
2012 | ISLAND RECORDS

Anyone aching for the unselfconscious pomposity of old-style rock 'n' roll: Look no further. For 12 years running the Killers have been delivering all-smiles feel-good cotton-candy-rush-n-roll and bringing gloriously, heartbreakingly sincere reminders that sometimes rock clichés actually became clichés because they are the greatest. Their show is pretty much all crescendo; they've been opening with "Mr. Brightside" lately, which is the kind of move you pull when you're cocky enough to believe... you've got two better hours in store. And the thing is, they do. Even their hokiest songs feel vital live, their cornball lyrics ringing incredibly true and hitting the softest spot in your heart every goddamn time. Spoiler alert: They usually end with "When You Were Young," which sounds more like "Born to Run" now — in the best possible way — than it ever has. One more spoiler alert: When they do play it, you will lose your shit. — JEK
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Kendrick Lamar

good kid, m.A.A.d city

Kendrick Lamar
2013 | Top Dawg / Aftermath / Interscope

Kendrick Lamar is a tiny stub of a man — standing onstage, he doesn't seem to come much past 5'4". But his quiet charisma widens out around him like a crop circle, and with his triumphant 2012 masterpiece good kid, m.A.A.d city still resonating in the air, he will likely arrive trailing clouds of rap-savior glory. Liquid, languorous songs like "Bitch Don't Kill My Vibe" and "A.D.H.D." transform into shout-alongs when he's... onstage, and come prepared to rap along to every tongue-twisting verse: He usually gets heavy with the crowd participation. — Jayson Greene
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Eric Church

Chief

Eric Church
2011 | EMI RECORDS NASHVILLE

Eric Church's debut Sinners Like Me was the kind of sly alt-country classic that somehow sneaks into the mainstream once every few years, rollicking and dust-caked, every song ending either in a hug or at the bar (his "Two Pink Lines" remains one of the cleverest, funniest songs about a pregnancy scare ever written — twist ending and all). He foundered a bit on its follow-up, but his most recent album, 2011's... Chief, righted the ship, restoring his wise-guy persona and leavening its Jesus references with enough good-ol'-boy drankin' songs to keep you cockeyed 'til Tuesday. His live show is a big, boisterous party, his band spiking Church's songs with clever AC/DC quotes and ramping up the volume until the ground shakes. — JEK
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Matt & Kim

Lightning

Matt & Kim
2012 | FADER Label / The Orchard

Matt & Kim play punky electropop with huge, beaming choruses and feel-good lyrics about living every second like it's your last. In the last few years, the duo has risen from tiny club shows to a staple at every summer festival, and it's because they take on every live show with mile-wide grins and more energy than a 24-pack of Red Bull. Keyboardist/vocalist Matt Johnson is known for climbing up the side... of the stage, drummer Kim Schifino seems to stand on her drumset more than she plays it, and they both crowd surf. — Laura Leebove
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Father John Misty

Fear Fun

Father John Misty
2012 | Sub Pop Records

"Father John Misty" is actually Josh Tillman, the somber folkie and former Fleet Fox. Father John Misty is kind of Tillman's Tony Clifton persona; in case you are prone to conflating a musician with his music, Father John Misty is here to remind you that every song is a pose, and hey, also, your fly is open, thanks for coming and try the veal. Misty is a wisecracking, soused, Laurel Canyon singer/songwriter... scoundrel, prone to running naked in broad daylight and doing ayahuasca, and his 2012 record Fear Fun was a rollicking tumble in Harry Nilsson's bedraggled bathrobe. Live, he brings a sharp tongue, a Borscht Belt comedian's timing, and a practiced road warrior's worn charisma. Short version: If you're bored by Fleet Foxes, and indie-folk in general, go and be surprised by Father John Misty. — JG
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Jessie Ware

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 Planes"-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. — JEK
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Icona Pop

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. — JEK
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Ghost B.C.

Infestissumam

Ghost B.C.
2013 | Seven Four Entertainment / Republic

As soon as Ghost swarmed out of the depths of Linköping, Sweden, in 2010, the metal community came running. Not only was the band's underground blend of Mercyful Fate riffs and Blue Oyster Cult melodies instantly appealing, its evil shtick was too goofy to ignore. Fronted by Papa Emeritus II, a cryptic skull-faced vocalist in a pope costume, and backed by musicians who all went under the moniker "Nameless Ghoul," Ghost were... a Satanic Spinal Tap with crafty, infectious songs they clearly sold their souls for the ability to write unforgettable songs. Ghost's (who had to add "B.C." to the end of their name to avoid confusion with another Ghost) blatantly Satanic content is likely far too extreme for commercial radio, but for those who value strong, unique songs regardless of genre or lyrical content, they're more illuminating that 100 burning Bibles. — Jon Wiederhorn
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Charles Bradley

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 an outdoor festival 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. — JEK
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Heartless Bastards

Lianne La Havas

Is Your Love Big Enough?

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. — Christina Lee

Baroness

MS MR

Secondhand Rapture

MS MR
2013 | Columbia

"We fear rejection, prize attention, crave affection/ Dream, dream, dream of perfection!" That's the refrain of "Salty Sweet," a song MS MR wrote about signing to a major label — but on their stellar debut, Secondhand Rapture, it would seem that the duo's fears didn't materialize. Not only do Lizzy Plapinger and Max Hershenow deliver an array of haunting, period-skipping pop gems: They strike a rare balance between maintaining their DIY background... and opening up their sound for a larger audience to enjoy. By meshing classic pop with more experimental sounds, they're making up their own rules, as well as borrowing from the playbooks of some of the bands Plapinger helped launch on her label Neon Gold, like Passion Pit, Gotye, Ellie Goulding and Icona Pop. MS MR's approach is similar — as they put it: "Pop rooted in an indie ethos." — Marissa G. Mueller
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Martin Simpson, Vagrant Stanzas

Chris Nickson — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 08:00:13 +0000

Delightfully intimate and close

In folk circles, any new album from Martin Simpson is an event, and the beauty is that he never disappoints. Co-produced by his Sheffield neighbor Richard Hawley, this strips everything back to just vocals and guitar, and after the full band outing of 2011′s Purpose + Grace, it sounds delightfully intimate and close. It’s a disc of first takes, recorded quite literally at Simpson’s kitchen table, with barely an overdub on it — the perfect showcase for the talents of one of the world’s greatest fingerstyle guitarists. He gets to strut his stuff on a pair of instrumentals — “Shepherds Rejoice” is a moody pleasure — but mostly he’s accompanying his own singing with a rippling cascade of notes; his playing is breathtakingly beautiful.

Simpson’s greatest fame is as a guitar virtuoso, but in recent years he’s also grown into a world-class songwriter: His 2008 track “Never Any Good” won Song of the Year in the BBC2 Folk Awards. Here the standout moment is “Jackie and Murphy,” based on the true tale of Jack Kirkpatrick, a World War I donkey handler who used his animal to rescue the wounded, but was refused the Victoria Cross because he was nominated in the wrong category. It’s a low-key piece that doesn’t blare its outrage, and is up there with his best compositions.

Simpson also artfully interprets other artists. There’s a cover of Bob Dylan’s “North Country Blues,” a take on Chris Woods’s acerbic blast at organized religion, “Come Down Jehovah,” and a remarkable version of Leonard Cohen’s “Stranger Song.” It’s rare that an artist can make one of Cohen’s songs his own — Jeff Buckley is one of the few who has managed it — but Simpson changes the rhythm and picking style and pulls it off: a remarkable feat.

Forty years into his career, the folk luminary continues to push himself. And with each album his ear for a tune gets sharper and sharper.

Bombadil, Metrics of Affection

Annie Zaleski — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 15:00:29 +0000

A confident amalgam of stately folk, '60s pop, alt-country, orchestral indie and classical

North Carolina folk quartet Bombadil has had a tough go since the release of 2009′s Tarpits and Canyonlands, mainly due to a mysterious (and debilitating) nerve injury suffered by bassist/pianist Daniel Michalak that prevented the band from touring. With Metrics of Affection, Michalak is fully on the mend, which perhaps explains why the album sounds so much more confident than the band’s last full-length, 2011′s All That The Rain Promises. Rich, warm production enhances the record’s amalgam of stately folk, ’60s pop, alt-country, orchestral indie and even classical (the lovely piano instrumental “Patience Is Expensive”). While there’s a decidedly Southern bent throughout — mainly due to the easygoing vocal style of Michalak, guitarist Bryan Rahija and pianist/ukulele player Stuart Robinson, who take turns singing lead — British artists are Metrics of Affection‘s biggest underlying influence, from XTC (“When We Are Both Cats”) and Elvis Costello (“Have Me,” the piano-driven “What Does It Mean”) to the Beatles (the White Album-like “Whaling Vessel”).

Unsurprisingly, the record does seem to reference Michalak’s injury; in particular, the spoken-word verses on “Isn’t It Funny” contain imagery such as “a wheelchair is your new bridle and horse bit.” But mostly, Metrics of Affection contains sharp vignettes about life’s small victories (feeling deep gratitude for friends and family, an implausible love story becoming reality) and tiny pangs of heartbreak (a significant other suddenly moving out, a relic from an ex accidentally resurfacing). Yet even these darker lyrical moments never feel hopeless — in fact, there’s a palpable current of optimism that buoys Bombadil’s music, making it easy to empathize with Metrics of Affection‘s joys and sorrows.

Shelby Earl, Swift Arrows

Laura Studarus — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 14:24:01 +0000

Tart, wry pop, delivered with a wicked grin

Seattle-based singer/songwriter Shelby Earl begins her genre-blurring sophomore album Swift Arrows in girl-group land: Against the charming doo-wop piano stroll of the title track, she sings with a theatrical sweetness that channels Regina Spektor by way of Ronnie Spector, with a hint of St. Vincent’s poised regret. “You’ll find one poison-tipped swift arrow in your mind/ And they’ll find one poison-tipped swift arrow in their eye,” she sighs, over chiming bells and strings. It’s a moment that tips her hand: The sound is sweet, but this is a singer/songwriter unafraid of dirty riffs and dark lyrics—all delivered with a wicked grin.

With Damien Jurado in the producer’s chair, Earl strays from the winsomeness of her debut, Burn the Boats. She still dabbles in folk, as on the echo-filled backcountry lament “Grown Up Things” or the hypnotic “The Seer,” which hinges on nothing but Earl’s mournful vocals and a single acoustic guitar before spiky electric guitars rough things up. Swift Arrows is the work of an artist who has discovered her tart, wry voice, which infuses her songs no matter what shape they take: “I love you/ You love you too,” goes the mocking singsong of the Phil Spector-leaning “The Artist.” “I’ll make the bed while you are off to shoot the moon,” she sings, tongue firmly planted in cheek. Yeah, right. Earl may be an adroit shapeshifter, but she’s no one’s woman but her own.

Nadine Shah, Love Your Dum and Mad

Sharon O'Connell — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 13:00:18 +0000

Startling emotional honesty is the currency on this striking debut

Her thrillingly muscular and darkly lustrous voice is a dazzling distraction, but to bend an ear to Nadine Shah’s lyrics is to be suddenly struck by how very rarely singers assume another gender in their own songs. When she claims, “I was once a virtuous man…I was once a handsome brute,” in “To Be A Young Man,” it’s both genuinely shocking and momentarily confusing.

Not that the South Tyneside artist has set out to confound listeners with her debut album; in fact, emotional honesty and directness are very much her currency, even if transparent narrative isn’t her trade. And if there’s an undeniable aesthetic empathy with early PJ Harvey, Nick Cave and My Brightest Diamond here, then the settings Shah gives her swarthy yet haunting songs is what marks them apart. Alongside piano, guitar and subtly parping reeds, she uses textured electronic noise and – on strikingly minimal opener “Aching Bones” — a kind of ominous percussive clanging that Scott Walker would probably approve of. Throughout, the dramatic ante is upped by Ben Hillier’s deep, at times cavernous production.

Moody and melancholic Shah’s album may be, but it’s far from fragile; “Runaway” is underpinned by an urgent driving beat while “The Devil” has a slightly lascivious sting in its tail, and “Dreary Town” affects a fairground breeziness, despite its themes of expectation and entrapment. It’s quite a trick to manage this much darkness without plunging into unvarying despair; Shah manages it stylishly, and seemingly without effort.

Guy Clark, My Favorite Picture of You

Britt Robson — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 11:42:30 +0000

The reigning sage of Texas singer/songwriters

On My Favorite Picture of You, Guy Clark’s first studio album in four years, the reigning sage of Texas singer/songwriters remains allergic to pretense and vigilant against pathos, lest it siphon away the dignity and essential truth of his music. The title track, for instance, is a plainspoken paean to Susanna Clark, his wife and fellow songwriter for more than 40 years, who succumbed to cancer in 2012. It slides beside “Randall Knife” (about the death of his father) in Clark’s indelible musical autobiography.

He surrounds this obvious centerpiece with songs about a returning Iraq war veteran with PTSD (“Heroes”), Mexican immigrants left in a van to die (“El Coyote,” a kindred spirit to Woody Guthrie’s “Deportees”), and a heartbroken young woman hitchhiking out of town (“Rain In Durango”). The worn leather of Clark’s 71-year-old voice powerfully parses the understated lyrics, and one can’t help but marvel at the alliteration, assonance and seemingly effortless rhythm balled up in lines like, “Standing in the rain in Durango/ Right side of wrong/ Wrong side of gone.” Or the emotional weight of a couplet like, “A silver star and a pistol in the drawer/ The morphine just ain’t workin’ no more.”

Clark balances these riveting sagas with a formal waltz (“Cornmeal Waltz”), a somewhat skewed Appalachian murder ballad (“Death of Sis Draper”), and the self-skewering grumpy-old-man plaint (“Good Advice”). He also includes a pair of closing cautionary tales about living hard, “The High Price of Inspiration” and “I’ll Show Me.” Then again, the inspiration for this album, his favorite picture of Susanna, which he holds up on the cover, shows her angrily storming out of the house away from an inebriated Clark and Townes Van Zandt. Such is the price, and the beauty, of art that seeks to overlap so completely with life.

Hidden Treasures 2013

eMusic Editorial Staff — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 12:00:21 +0000

Every year, hardcore music fans wrestle with the same wonderful problem: There are too many records. Even if we listened to nothing but new records, non-stop, the numbers just don’t add up; we’re going to miss something, it’s certain, something strange and special. But what? What are we missing?

We at eMusic know this exquisite pain better than anyone; the question “What are we missing?” keeps us up nights. Our Hidden Treasures feature is a partial answer. The records in this list span genres, from vintage soul to frozen Gothic pop; from death-obsessed classical song cycles to sloppy garage rock; from chamber music to churning doom metal. Some of these records were overshadowed by higher-profile releases in the same style; some are on labels that never get the attention they deserve. Some of these records are simply damned weird. They all caught our ears and hearts, however, for one reason or another, and we think they’ll do the same to you.

Bleak Visions

Lang: Death Speaks

David Lang
Cantaloupe Music

First, I feel it's important to say that, as of this writing, David Lang is nowhere near death. I see him walking through the neighborhood from time to time and he is his usual cheery, deadpan self. And yet the Bang on A Can co-founder has produced an incandescent string of pieces in recent years focused exclusively on death and dying. His Pulitzer Prize-winning Little Match Girl Passion gravely watches a poor... young girl freeze to death as passersby ignore her. His yet-to-be-recorded Love Fail takes an oblique look at the fatal love affair between Tristan and Isolde. His haunting, drifting Salle des Departs (recorded here under the title "Depart") was written for a hospital morgue. And then there's Death Speaks, a five-movement work which takes up most of this recording. Here, death is not an event, but a figure, like something out of an engraving by Albrecht Dürer. But unlike the American folk song "O Death," in which Death is a scary, implacable foe — the singer asks, "oh Death, won't you pass me over another year" — Lang has assembled a text in which Death is addressing us, with a message that is ultimately reassuring, and comforting.

The text is built around the many and varied instances in the songs of Franz Schubert in which the figure of Death speaks. The music, as in the other death-themed works named above, has a transparent texture that sets off and subtly colors those texts, and the voice delivering it. That voice belongs to Shara Worden, one of the current breed of musicians who move fluidly between the worlds of classical music and indie rock. While still leading her own band, My Brightest Diamond, Worden has become the go-to voice for the so-called "indie classical" crowd. The rest of the ensemble here is equally remarkable: Bryce Dessner, one of the twin electric guitarists from the popular rock band The National, and a fine composer himself; Owen Pallett, the violinist, vocalist and composer who formerly recorded as Final Fantasy; and Nico Muhly, the in-demand composer and keyboardist whose works range from choral to electronic. With essentially an all-star band, Lang has chosen to write music which is not conventionally virtuosic, relying instead of the quartet's musicality and precision. The results are quietly stunning. Highlights include the gentle, chiming minimalism of part 1, "You Will Return"; the resonant percussive use of the piano's bass end in part 2, "I Hear You"; the deft, rhythmic use of the violin in part 3, "Mist Is Rising"; and the lovely duet that blossoms in part 5, "I Am Walking."

After Death Speaks, the album invites you to relax in the dark-hued but warm ambience of "Depart," for chorus and strings. Probably best not to think too much of the French morgue for which it was written.
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Meir

Kvelertak
2013 | Roadrunner Records

Metal typically exists in a kind of "either/or" dichotomy: either bands are grinding and infernal or they're triumphant and anthemic. The Norwegian group Kvelertak is strictly "both/and." Their scorching second record Meir pairs the bludgeoning brutality of bands like Cannibal Corpse Rotting Christ with the kind of sugary hookiness typically found on an album by Andrew W.K. "Manelyst" is the perfect example: It opens with a barrage of barnstorming chords, a terrifying... asteroid shower of sound, before cruising up into a refrain that's practically singable, sounding like something from the Rocket From the Tombs catalog, if someone set vocalist John Reis on fire. "Burane Brenn" opens full-hurtle, frontman Erlend Hjelvik's wrecked-larynx howls offset by a holler-along soccer-anthem chorus. Kvelertak ride AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" right to its fiery end, and stage a never-ending kegger amid the flames.
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Excavation

The Haxan Cloak
2013 | Tri Angle Records / SC Distribution

It may be glib to assume that London-based producer Bobby Krlic dwells exclusively on the dark side, but given the evidence it's hardly unreasonable. His alias references a 1922 Scandinavian docudrama about witchcraft and inquisition, and his 2011 self-titled debut album aligned him with avant-black-metal/doom acts like Mayhem and Sunn O))). And the sleeve of his gloomily titled follow-up depicts a single length of rope coiled into a noose.

However, The Haxan Cloak's... thrillingly dark and chilly aesthetic goes far deeper than the kind of parent-bothering occult primer these details might suggest. 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. Whether suggesting the dull throb of an old nuclear power plant, the spooked echo inside an abandoned iron foundry or the howl of an Arctic wind at a remote scientific station, they evoke a compressed anxiety that seeps into every note, causing the likes of "Dieu" to heave and quiver before it dies away and underlining the fact that despite its title, epic closer "The Drop" is concerned with something rather more ominous than build-and-break patterns.
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Abandon

Pharmakon
2013 | Sacred Bones Records / S.C. Distribution

Pharmakon is noise artist Margaret Chardiet, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it was some infernal ghoul. Abandon opens with a scream, and then plunges to unholy depths, full of icepick electronics, horrifying turbine wooshes and suffocating layers of static. It makes Swans sound like The Byrds.
A Breathtaking Trip to That Otherside

Alexander Spit
2013 | Decon

Alexander Spit's bleak, baleful Breathtaking Trip to That Otherside is not good-times music. Spit is from California, but his dank, druggy rap music feels allergic to sunshine. Spit produced the entire album, and his sticky, bleary sound owes more to Dilla and RZA. Everything seems to move through a thick film, including Spit's raps, which gob up into bits of blacklit surrealism about Roswell and chemtrails and unspool into long spleen-venting rants.... If you've ever sat, stoned, in an apartment during a blazingly hot day with the blinds drawn, Breathtaking Trip will feel clammily familiar.
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Vexovoid

Portal
2013 | Profound Lore / Revolver

Nirvana once wrote a song called "Endless, Nameless." Take a look at this picture of Portal's lead vocalist, and then submit to the swirling, backed-up churn of "Orbmorphia," from the Australian death metal band's fourth album Vexovoid, and you may find yourself with an entirely new appreciation of what those two words can mean.

Portal, as a band, is all texture, no melody. But they have mastered so many different textures... that you never think to yearn for melody. The down-tuned guitars, gurgling beneath the ever-shifting blastbeats of the drums, bring to mind all kinds of things, none of them musical: the alarming suck of wet mud when you walk in loose boots, the sounds old motorcycle engines make. The album title evokes a zone of confusion, a place where you can't get your bearings and the ground is constantly shifting. Exactly.
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Arriving Angels

Helen Money
2013 | Profound Lore / Revolver

Play any of the songs on the harrowing third record by Alison Chesley — who records as Helen Money — on electric guitar, and you'd have one of the most brutal, unnerving metal records of the year. But play them as she does on cello, and — well, you still have one of the most brutal, unnerving metal records of the year. Much of this comes from Chesley's command of dynamic. Aptly-titled... album-opener "Upsetter" starts with a low thrum that skitters forward like a tarantula before erupting into slasher-film goring, Chesley's instrument so distortion-caked it sounds like a rotary saw. She's joined by Neurosis drummer Jason Roeder on "Beautiful Friends," which progresses from seasick lurch to undead horse stampede, growing more violent and insistent as it goes on. It's a snarling, suffocating record, and by the time you get to the avalanche that concludes "Radio Recorders," it's clear the angels of the title aren't coming down from the sky, but up from below, horns gleaming, eyes yellow as old bones.
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Obsidian Spectre

Crosss
2013 | Telephone Explosion / The Orchard

In the chilling video for CROSSS's "Bones Brigade", a figure in an ominous black cloak kneels motionless on a beach, staring blankly off into the grey sky, as if in a trance. He remains like that, stock still, hypnotized, for a full three minutes and 30 seconds, his motionlessness becoming more sickeningly unsettling the longer it lasts. Finally, at the end of the video, he bows — as if in supplication... to some god or spirit or eerie form that only he can see. He straightens, and the video cuts to black. That turns out to be a handy encapsulation of the Halifax group's aesthetic: slow-moving, hypnotic and deeply, deeply creepy. Sounding something like Thee Oh Sees slowed down to about 2 RPM, the group tops grimy, repetitive chord patterns with wicked-warlock sneering, making for a final product that feels invested with prime '70s sorcery rock black magick. "Smoke" warns, "Look into your mind's eye/ don't forget to not let your guard down" as guitars churn and boil like the steaming liquid in a witch's cauldron. "Old Sound" draws its dark strength from its continual, gooseflesh-raising dives from major to minor key. Throughout, its members acquit themselves as if they've all just done kegstands with the blood of Kali Ma — dead-eyed, dutiful, and wearing sickening grimaces.
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Lost Mixtape Gems

Out of View

The History Of Apple Pie
Marshall Teller Records

On their debut album Out of View, London quintet The History of Apple Pie blend the most precious of indie-pop impulses with the messiest squalling noise-rock has to offer. Vocalist Stephanie Min's feathery vocals float high in the mix, leaving her teen-romance lyrics ("We're having so much fun in the light of the sun/ You're so cool") faintly discernible above the thick clouds of My Bloody Valentine-style glide guitar that threaten to... overwhelm them. It's that constant give-and-take between pop and art-rock chaos that keeps Out of View interesting: A gruff chord or two always cuts the cotton candy at just the right moment, like when the full-on breakdown interrupts the strawberry lemonade-flavored workout "I Want More." On "Mallory," the daydreaming verses and the yearning melody are tossed about by an underlayer of sneering riffs and distorted noise. No one side ever wins out over the other for long and the seesawing can give you a powerful sugar buzz.
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Cruise Your Illusion

Milk Music
2013 | Fat Possum Records

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. On "Lacey's Secret," Alex Coxen's shouting, imperfect voice cuts through the instrumental heap with lines that that scan endearingly like poetry in a rest-stop bathroom: "You got to get all you can here/ when you're burning every night".

The songs on Cruise Your Illusion bask in youthful charm. "…And although the sun sets heavy on the dreamer/ You can feed your pain to the song," Coxens sings on "No, Nothing, My Shelter" as the band rips into the overdriven wail of "Coyote Road" before running amok on "I've Got A Wild Feeling," a populist manifesto that might as well be the band's anthem. When Milk Music started out, their songs were loud, fast and full of Big Muff. And while the sound is still bruising on their debut, they've found a larger scope and a deeper message. On "Cruising With God" Coxen invites the listener into the band's inner sanctum: "They all love our songs/ But even with the music on/ Baby you've got it all wrong/ You haven't danced in so long."
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Sock it to Me

Colleen Green
2013 | Hardly Art / Sub Pop Records

Colleen Green writes simple songs about simple things and records them as simply as possible. The first song on the irresistible Sock it to Me is basically just Green singing, "Oh yeah, uh-huh, oh God, I really love my boyfriend," and the lazer-light dollar-store Elastica song "You're So Cool" builds to an equally straightforward refrain: "You're so cool, how do you do it? You act like there is nothing to it." Her... logo is a stick-figure drawing of herself that looks not entirely unlike Fido Dido's long-lost sister, and her music is defiantly, joyously basic: just Green's distorted guitar, pouting voice and a Goodwill Store drum machine.

But lean closer in and the images start to distort. Green opens the provocatively-titled "Every Boy Wants a Normal Girl" by singing, "Sometimes I wish I was a normal girl," and then follows it with the height of abnormality: "Like the ones on TV, like the ones in the movies." The drowsy "Darkest Eyes" scans quickly as plainspoken puppy love, with Green celebrating her true love's eyes and contemplating how to retain his affections. And what's her solution? "There's no better way to keep appearances preserved/ than a razor to the optic nerve." And then you skip back to that first song, the one where she's singing about loving her boyfriend, and catch what she says near the ending: "When he tells me that he loves me, I lose the air from my lungs/ his love has finally killed me." Sock it to Me is strychnine-laced Strawberry Fanta.
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Mozes And The Firstborn

Mozes And The Firstborn
2013 | Mozes And The Firstborn / The Orchard

Anyone looking for a 21st-century analog to Weezer's "El Scorcho" should start with "I Got Skills" from the debut album by the Belgian group Mozes & the Firstborn. It's got a similarly motley, gang-hollered chorus, that same nerdish braggadocio ("I got skills to make it through your doorway") and a shambling, thrown-together aesthetic that is charming in spite of itself. The rest of the record pinballs between that same kind of... Jr. High sheepishness — "Skinny Girl" is what Mellow Gold might have sounded like if Beck was a teenager when he recorded it — and genuine star swagger. "Peter Jr." opens with an instant-classic rock couplet — "The longer you work here/ the less you get paid" — before sailing straight into the kind of cruising melodicism that characterizes the best Brian Jonestown Massacre songs (its cocky stride singlehandedly earns the group the right to own this coat) Mozes and the Firstborn are teenage panic and grown-up confidence all at once.
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Paper Moon

Georgiana Starlington
2013 | Hozac / Revolver

As K-Holes, Jack and Julie Hines kick up an unholy racket. Their work as Georgiana Starlington is different in sound, but just as grim in feel. Their dusky, country-influenced songs foreground their dazed, trancelike vocals as they glide over arid guitar like phantoms across the prairie at midnight.
Ex-Cult

Ex-Cult
2012 | Goner / Revolver

Boasting the same feral ferocity as '70s US post-punkers like Rocket From the Tombs and Pere Ubu, Ex-Cult (nee Sex Cult) solder clambering riffs to half-spoken, half-hollered vocals and drench the resulting songs in enough echo to make them sound almost alien. Much murkier and moodier than the music of their producer Ty Segall, Ex-Cult seethe and stalk where Segall storms right in. "Shade of Red" circles and circles, guitars humming like... old Cessnas looking for a place to land. "On Film" is doomier — its downcast bassline could have been lifted from Unknown Pleasures, its howled chorus coming off like some dark warning from a fortune teller. Throughout it sounds both ragged and well-aged — like a relic from an earlier era, recently unearthed. That they are both new and still active is to our great fortune.
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Ultramarine

Young Galaxy
2013 | Paper Bag Records / The Orchard

On their fourth LP, Young Galaxy go big, trading woozy, lo-fi-leaning dreampop for busy, dancefloor-ready electropop hits. They returned to producer Dan Lissvik, who worked on 2011's Shapeshifting, but this time the group traveled from Canada to Lissvik's studio in Sweden instead of sending their unfinished recordings overseas. The result is slick, cinematic and cohesive: There are disco influences ("Out the Gate Backwards"), tropical beats ("Fall For You"), and glorious pop anthems... ("Pretty Boy," "Fever"). In losing all hints of the haziness that masks their earlier releases, Young Galaxy simultaneously shed the Slowdive comparisons and make their best record yet.
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Peach Kelli Pop

Peach Kelli Pop
2013 | Burger Records / Redeye

Like a lollipop caught in a lint filter, Peach Kelli Pop nestles sticky sweetness beneath layers of cottony fuzz. The group, fronted and more or less embodied by White Wires' Allie Hanlon, takes their name from a Redd Kross song, and in many ways, they're that group's cheaper, sunnier analog. Both bands have a fondness for immediately-memorable hooks and piles of guitar, but Peach Kelli Pop seems to be constantly operating in... fast-forward. "Panchito Blues II" sounds like the Shangri-La's trying to outrun The Monkees, and "Julie Oulie" is floor-filler at a jackrabbit sock hop. By the time your brain has caught up you're ready to savor the sweetness, the next song is half over.
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Ready For Boredom

Bed Wettin' Bad Boys
R.I.P. SOCIETY

Australia's Bed Wettin' Bad Boys are basically a drunker version of The Faces, a bunch of hooligans getting shitty on Foster's then stumbling over to their guitars, cranking the amps and seeing what happens. Their live shows are notoriously sloppy (and, depending on whom you talk to, hilarious or infuriating) — bend members swap instruments, goof off interminably between songs and pound beer after beer after beer.

We're spared all of that on... the amazingly-titled Ready for Boredom, skipping instead right to the busted Mustang riffing and the blown-throat vocals. "Sally" is to The Rolling Stones "Happy" what Turkish Star Wars is to regular Star Wars: It has a lot of the same component parts — a blues lick deep-fried in axle grease, a somersaulting two-note hook — but is decidedly lower-budget and flaunts its inattention to detail. Their closest US analog is probably The Men — both bands mine classic rock for its junkiest spare parts — but the Bad Boys are sloppier and soggier still. The glistening album-closer "Keep it From You" is the closest they get to actual sentiment, but Nic Warnock's heartsick lyrics sound like they're coming from the business end of a drunk dial. He may not remember what he said in the morning, but he sounds like he means it in the moment. And isn't that all that matters?
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White Orchid

French Films
2013 | GAEA Records

The phrase "French Films" doesn't generally evoke the happiest images: the last-act betrayal in Breathless, a stricken Jean Pierre-Leaud standing balefully on the beach in The 400 Blows, pretty much all of Shoot the Piano Player. So chalk up the fact that this impossibly hooky Finnish band chose it as their handle to either irony or bad translation. Or move right past it and get right to the main thing that matters:... the songs. And what songs they are: French Films force-feed uppers to the Field Mice and kick the keyboard player out of New Order, delivering a batch of breathless Britpop-inspired songs with gargantuan choruses and guitar lines that glisten and glide like tiny tin airplanes. "Never let me go, never let me go," is the central plea on the rocketing "Where We Come From" — which, sonically, is the Pains of Being Pure at Heart by way of recent Mikal Cronin. As if shaking free of songs this addictive were even an option.
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Rare Birds & Strange Beasts

Sing to the Moon

Laura Mvula
2013 | Columbia

"I don't need love to rescue me/ I'll be all that I choose to be," Laura Mvula sings on "Make Me Lovely," the second track on Sing to the Moon. The British soul singer's voice is as strong as her sentiment, augmented further by delicate orchestra flourishes, soulful handclaps and college-a cappella-style vocal acrobatics. Elsewhere, Mvula fights against ideas of conventional beauty ("That's Alright"), sings about the power of music during hard... times ("Sing to the Moon"), and triumphs over loves that didn't work out ("Flying Without You"). A truly stunning, powerful debut.
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Apocalypse

Thundercat
2013 | Brainfeeder

Apocalypse, the follow-up to the madcap jazz-fusion/Saturday-morning-cartoon hallucination that was The Golden Age of the Apocalypse, explores the more chilled-out and unzipped side of Stephen Bruner. Bruner's command of jazz, R&B, Quiet Storm and straight-ahead bachelor-pad pop is stunning, and this gorgeous album makes a nice companion to the new Daft Punk.
The Moths Are Real

Serafina Steer
2013 | Stolen Recordings / PIAS Digital

Creating a sense of mystery in an age of instant information is difficult, but Serafina Steer manages it beautifully with her third album, The Moths Are Real. There's nothing particularly enigmatic about her CV — classically trained London harpist who has worked with Bat For Lashes, Patrick Wolf and John Foxx — but left to her own devices, Steer enters a world of her own, drawing you in by her side. Produced... by Jarvis Cocker, The Moths Are Real flickers between the physical realities of love, sadness and urban life — the naked romance of "Skinny Dipping," the wintery alienation of "Ballad Of Brick Lane" — and a frosted mythological wonderland that lurks the other side of the looking glass. It's a record that trembles on the threshold between worlds, not just in its merging of folk, psychedelia, prog and electronica, but in the way the lyrics are sweetly conversational one second ("Of course, my scanty life philosophy, as you suspected all along, is actually based on lines from songs," shrugs "Disco Compilation") and as stylized and strange as a temple oracle the next ("Island Odyssey," "Lady Fortune"). The reference points might seem to be in place — Joanna Newsom, Shirley Collins, Alice Coltrane, Robert Wyatt — but Steer sends the compass needle spinning, charting the places where magic and mystery poke through threadbare normality.
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Flume

Flume
2013 | Mom & Pop Music / The Orchard

Few have ever looked to Australia for the latest trends in electronic music. Although it has produced its fair share of innovators, from disco flirts Vanda & Young to hip auteurs The Avalanches, Down Under electronic music is largely seen as the foppish cousin to rock's more masculine manoeuvres. There was a brief flirtation with acid house in the early '90s, mainly fueled by British ex-pats, but interest was always confined to... pockets of aficionados. Until, that is, the arrival of Flume on forward-thinking label Future Classic.

With comparisons to The Weeknd and Toro Y Moi (whom he supported on a recent London date), 21-year-old Harley Streten has seemingly risen from nowhere to produce one of the most exciting electronic debuts of the year. Breakthrough single "Holdin' On" is a sublime slice of wobblesome R&B, while the instrumental "Ezra" has crunk beats leavened with a hook that could have been lifted from the Art of Noise. "Left Alone," which features Melbourne's magnificently-named Chet Faker, feels delivered straight from a Pentecostal church rather than a precocious kid from the Sydney 'burbs, while "More Than You Thought" veers towards stomping Skrillex territory without ever resorting to the easy pay-offs the American producer favors.

This album has already knocked Justin Bieber off the No. 1 spot in Australia — an astonishing achievement for music that is still some way from being pure pop. From a trickle to a torrent: This Flume is unstoppable.
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Leave Me Midnight

My Gold Mask
2013 | Goldy Tapes / CD Baby

At this point, the breakup album has been bent into countless shapes. So rather than try to re-shape it, on their debut album My Gold Mask's Gretta Rochelle and Jack Armondo simply amplified its effects. They didn't skimp on dramatics, with Rochelle's pleading vocals, 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.
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Baroque

Nadia Sirota
New Amsterdam

Nadia Sirota is the violist of choice for the New York contemporary-classical scene, and on Baroque, she follows up her astoundingly assured debut, First Things First, with fresh works from many of the composers who contributed to that recording. Judd Greenstein's piece for seven violas (all of them multitracked by Sirota), "In Teaching Others We Teach Ourselves," employs a variety of dizzying riffs, separated by episodes of subtle pizzicato, in order to... evoke the many stages of cosmos-crossing undertaken by the famous "Golden Record" shot into deep space by NASA back in 1977. It's also a tour de force opportunity for Sirota to show off her otherworldly chops and a variety of techniques: Nico Muhly's jaunty "Etude 3" is as memorable as the two others in his series, which he gave Sirota the first time around, and is a showcase for Sirota the player.

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. Missy Mazzoli's "Tooth and Nail" continues the electronic theme and is the album's standout, featuring some exciting hyper-glitch programming by the composer in during its opening minutes. Solid pieces from Paul Corley and Daniel Bjarnason complete this satisfying program, which, while more tricked-out electronically than Sirota's first offering, retains her aesthetic imprint.
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Smart Ass Black Boy

Fat Tony
2013 | Young One

Fat Tony is the kind of guy fated to slip between the cracks. He's from Houston, but sounds like no Texas rappers; occasionally political, but not much of a firebrand; muted and thoughtful, but no one's idea, really, of a "conscious rapper." He has a casual, conversational voice, and his raps tumble out like early Common, before he got too serious. There are dumb puns, a few trenchant insights and, above all,... an appealing confidence. The entire project was produced by Tom Cruz, a producer with a rubbery, cut-and-paste style, and Smart Ass Black Boy slips by agreeably like a late night dorm room bull session.
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Your Turn

Ceramic Dog
2013 | Northern Spy Records / Redeye

"We have a new business model, we'll blow you for a nickel." This is the acidic guitarist Marc Ribot, summing up the effect that the internet has had on the value of recorded music, in one pithy quote. Ribot, who played with Tom Waits just as the singer was morphing from hobo crooner to glass-spitting carnie barker, has never been afraid of sharp edges, and has made his career since his Waits... days in the avant-garde circuit. But Your Turn is a veer back into rock-song territory, albeit rock songs with big crayon doodles all over them: Title track "Your Turn" is a driving motorik groove defaced with a sloppy guitar solo that could be a Shreds video.
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Clayton: The Julius Eastman Memory Depot

Jace Clayton
New Amsterdam

In his performances as DJ/rupture, Jace Clayton has been part of that experimental breed of DJ/producers who draw on the sounds of the classical avant-garde. But while names like Edgard Varese, Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen have become hip in DJ culture, Clayton has turned to one of music's true outliers, the gay African-American composer Julius Eastman. (Both his sexual orientation and race figure prominently in his titles.) The Julius Eastman Memorial... Depot is neither a mash-up nor a straight remix. It is a recasting and reimagining of two of Eastman's most important and defining works, "Evil Nigger" and "Gay Guerrilla," both originally for four pianos but arranged here for two pianos and live electronics. And it is a remarkable, heartfelt tribute to a man who was a fixture on the New York "downtown" scene in the '70s and '80s, performing with Meredith Monk and singing the lead role in Peter Maxwell Davies's Eight Songs For a Mad King before succumbing to alcohol and drug addiction, homelessness and death at the age of 49.

"Evil Nigger, Part 1" is almost pretty, with the layered chiming of its minimalist pianos; Part 2 abruptly switches to a more obviously electronic sound; Part 3 takes on a darker, dramatic hue as the music descends to the bass end of the keyboards, heaving and rolling in waves of increasingly dense sound that almost sounds like a kind of broadband drone. The final part announces itself with the sounds of glitch electronica, while the piano textures thin out, creating a sense both of space and of expectation that something will soon come rushing in to fill it. Shards of gamelan-like piano, impossibly rapid trills and tolling chords hover around the edges of the mix, until a brief explosion of massive piano sounds takes over. It ends as ambiguously as one of Bela Bartok's nachtmusik ("night music") pieces, with the half-remembered echoes of those earlier trills in a haunted electroacoustic haze.

"Gay Guerrilla," in five parts, begins with the steady pulse of the pianos; Clayton's electronics are subtle but telling, often hard to distinguish from the pianos themselves. In Part 2, a web of shifting electronic drones grows out of the patter of almost bell-like tones in the upper registers of the keyboards. When the pianos return, in a gently galloping rhythm, the result is perhaps the most conventionally beautiful music here. "Conventionally" being a relative term, of course. Part 3 begins to build up rhythmic counterpoint that sounds reminiscent of Steve Reich's work, but no sooner does that happen then the sound of a turntable dying brings the music to a grinding halt — at which point we hear Martin Luther's hymn "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." (This appropriation appears in Eastman's original version of the piece.) Echoes of that tune flit through the thick piano textures of Part 4; and Part 5, with its endlessly ascending pianos, has a more reflective, even valedictory cast.

The album concludes with a Jace Clayton original, a short song that takes the wry humor of Eastman's own work and turns it on the usual "equal-opportunity employment" speech, turning it into a pensive contemplation of a man who was driven to despair in part by a lack of employment opportunities.
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Betty Rubble: The Initiation

Mykki Blanco
2013 | UNO NYC

Mykki Blanco is a performance artist, a black gay drag queen and a rapper. She is the center of her own Venn diagram, in other words, and on Betty Rubble she went from "promising" to great. Her voice is raspy and manic, a bit of Lil Wayne at his most enthusiastically unhinged and a bit of Young Dro in how audibly she relishes the vowel and consonant sounds leaving her mouth. The... beats on Rubble are a collision of electro, snap music and Neptunes, a lot of empty space and room for attitude and personality. Blanco obliges, calling herself "Richie Rich with a clit in the middle" and interpolating "If I Was a Rich Man" on "Angggry Birdz" and telling a hilariously detailed story about a tour-stop conquest on "Vienna."
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Out-of-Time Dispatches

Sudden Elevation

Ólöf Arnalds
2013 | One Little Indian / The Orchard

The most attractive thing about Ólöf Arnalds's music is the sense of mystery. Beginning with her beguiling 2007 debut Við og Við, Arnalds spun songs that felt like recitations from some yellowing old elvish spell book, her soprano curling like enchanted vines and gentle guitar spinning out notes like spiderwebs reflecting sunlight. That she sang in Icelandic — with its strange vowel runs and twisting cadence — only made her songs feel... more otherworldly. So it's no small risk for her to write and sing the entirety of Sudden Elevation in English; like a sitcom actor suddenly deciding to go Method, peeling away Arnalds's gauzy façade leaves the raw essence of her music exposed.

The good news is that the songs can bear the scrutiny. Sudden Elevation contains all the tender beauty of Arnalds's previous efforts — the wandering-bard guitar playing, the vocal melodies that bob like butterflies in a spring breeze. And though her lyrics are in English, that doesn't mean they're any more easily parsed. The verses in the gently waltzing "Return Again," for instance, are tangled as old riddles. Though the decision to forsake her native tongue could be read as a bid for more mainstream acceptance, thankfully, Arnalds has resisted any temptation to further burnish her sound. There are no horn charts, no swooping orchestras, nothing much beyond Arnalds's guitar and voice. All of this only contributes to Sudden Elevation's dreamlike feel: You can understand the words and make sense of the general narrative, but the overall meaning remains as alluringly ambiguous as ever.
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Leanin' On Slick

Aceyalone
2013 | Decon

From the breaks that first propelled Kool Herc's parties in '73 to Dre's minimoogs to Mystikal's manic James Brown tics, funk has not only provided a foundational structure to hip-hop, it's often risen to the surface and flat-out driven it. West Coast indie-rap vet Aceyalone has spent more than 20 years riding the outskirts of that territory, through his time with Freestyle Fellowship to his cult-classic solo debut All Balls Don't Bounce... to the later-career triumph of RJD2 teamup "A Beautiful Mine" (aka the Mad Men theme song). So after a long career — concurrent with a stab at making another excursion into grown-man rap — Leanin' on Slick sees Aceyalone toeing that line between underground rap and the traditions that scene built its base on.

The title track draws off the J.B.'s sound more in a way befitting a '70s indie-label garage-funk band (or a Daptonian revivalist group) than, say, the Bomb Squad, and the lyrical conceit isn't the only throwback — Acey's smooth-rolling delivery relays hustler tales from days when Caddies rolled long and low instead of high on 24s. That's not the only nod to vintage soul: "I Can Get It Myself" cockily struts through the door that James Brown demanded be opened back in '69, the handclaps and horn stabs of "What You Gone Do With That" is an old-school road-show with Acey's own overdubbed echoes standing in for call-and-response vocalists, and the pairing of his steady-job grind motivation with a wailing Cee-Lo chorus makes "Workin' Man's Blues" the closest Aceyalone's come to a genuine but uncompromised potential pop crossover. If the record vibe skews older, it's by design — leadoff cut "30 and Up" practically decrees it — but if this is the album young Aceyalone figured he'd be making once he approached middle age, he had some right-thinking foresight.
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The Coming Tide

Luke Winslow-King
2013 | Bloodshot Records

The 29-year-old singer/songwriter, slide guitarist and eMusic Selects alum 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.

Accompanied by his girlfriend, the sugary-voiced, washboard-wielding Esther Rose, Winslow-King amasses a fine collection of traditionalist originals and personalized covers on The Coming Tide. Rose sings harmony while a thumping upright bass and a brass section leading call-and-repeats accompany them, and the album sways with easy confidence. Winslow-King particularly shines in his blues numbers, namely a faithful, slower rendition of Blind Willie Johnson's "Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning" and a slide-driven cover of "Got My Mind Set On You," made famous by George Harrison in the late '80s. Nostalgia rains heavy on The Coming Tide, but Winslow-King reins it in, refashioning weathered words and sounds and branding them his own.
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The Stand-In

Caitlin Rose
2013 | ATO Records

Given her avowed love of old Hollywood glamour (just check out that album cover), the title of Caitlin Rose's sophomore full-length likely refers to the 1937 backlot comedy The Stand-In, about a love triangle between the title character, a hapless number cruncher and a hopeless film producer. While Rose does write about similar romantic confusions, the film reference nevertheless comes across as false modesty: On these dozen songs, she emerges as a... confident, distinctive pop-country artist with a biting lyrical style and a smart way with a hook. Perhaps A Star Is Born sounded too cocky?

Like any good actress, Rose has impressive range. The Stand-In has roots in classic country, displaying the poise of Tammy Wynette on "Everywhere I Go" and the assertiveness of Loretta Lynn on "Waitin'." Standout "Golden Boy" casts her as a countrypolitan chanteuse against a widescreen arrangement that recalls Owen Bradley, and she turns that chorus into a gently devastating plea: "Golden boy, don't go away/ I won't ask you what you're here for/ If you stay." Occasionally she holds her twang in check, but for the most part her vocals are expressive, building from the conspiratorial whisper of "When I'm Gone" to the full-throated belt of "Only a Clown."

Rarely reverent to one style or genre, The Stand-In mixes country with classic rock, radio pop, and even speakeasy jazz on closer "Old Numbers." The rollicking Hank- and Tennessee Williams-inspired "Menagerie" and first single "Only a Clown" both hinge on Byrds-style guitar riffs that suggest an affinity for West Coast nuggets, and the Las Vegas-set "Pink Champagne" is debauched country folk, a sad-eyed and slightly sloshed reimagining of Gram Parsons's "Sin City." No matter how blue she sounds, there's always a lively hint of humor even in her despair — a distinguishing trait that suggests she may be ready for her close-up.
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Berberian Sound Studio

Broadcast
2013 | Warp Records

When it came to soundtracking Peter Strickland's horror film Berberian Sound Studio, about a British sound engineer working for an Italian film company in the 1970s, there could have been no other name on the list than Broadcast. The band, aka Trish Keenan and James Cargill, were recording this album when Keenan died from pneumonia in 2011, age just 42, and it is a sublime, sad reminder of a remarkable talent lost.... On their own albums, the pair's haunting songs are constructed from elements that evoke half-remembered television themes, or a ghostly folk group transmitting from the future. It's rare that a soundtrack album constructed from fragments of music and snatches of dialogue is a rewarding listen, but Broadcast — perhaps because they are so adept at creating otherworldly sounds from pop's detritus — managed it beautifully here. Some of the tracks are genuinely unnerving, such as "Mark Of The Devil," its mean electronic pulses and chants sounding like wraiths in charge of a power station, or the guttural gabbling of "A Goblin." These terrifying moments are contrasted with pastoral instrumentals, built largely from flute, xylophone and organ, which could soundtrack a cold, misty morning as well as the original film. A bewitching last Broadcast.
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Kid Face

Samantha Crain
2013 | Ramseur Records / The Orchard

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. Shambling banjo, stabs... of synthesizer or electric guitar add occasional jolts of urgency to the mix.

But significantly, Crain comes into her own as a lyricist on Kid Face. Besides being a meticulous wordsmith ("I'm going to shows, counting my toes and crying over you" is how she describes one particularly trying breakup), she offers thorough, unflinching self-analysis. Crain uses Kid Face's songs to examine her place in the world — and figure out how her actions affect others, for better and for worse. "Churchill" addresses the realization that "my whole life I thought I was an opportunist/ But I'm not"; "Sand Paintings" struggles with overcoming self-sabotaging tendencies; and "Ax" is a call to be kind in the face of negativity. Perhaps most impressive is "Never Going Back," which describes (hopefully) breaking free from a disastrous affair: "The ending of 10,000 dreams/ My soul has finally been set free from his cool eyes." The song is devastatingly effective because of its economy, the same trait that also makes Kid Face a wonderful record.
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Fairouz: Native Informant

Mohammed Fairouz
Naxos

Native Informant begins with a tense, mournful clarinet, sobbing quietly in bent phrases. The soprano Melissa Hughes joins in, her voice blending eerily with the clarinet. The piece is "Tahwidah," by the composer Mohammed Fairouz, and it blends harmonic languages and geography in a way that will remind modern classical listeners of the famous Osvaldo Golijov, before the composer got lost in his own hype. The piece is meant as a lullaby,... but it carries a deep sadness that could curdle milk.

Native Informant is an arresting showcase for Fairouz's voice, which is plangent, melodic, folkloric and unpredictable: His lines spool out in ways that don't follow your ear's predetermined path for them. He wrote eloquently of soaking in Armenian and Lebanese art and poetry for the Huffington Post, and Fairouz's music is that of a thoughtful traveler: Native Informant traverses boundaries without ever losing its gentle footing.
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Nightmare Ending

Eluvium
2013 | Temporary Residence Ltd. / SC Distribution

As gentle as mist settling over a lake at daybreak, Nightmare Ending, the latest album from Eluvium, is a work of tender beauty. Piano drifts down slow as snowflakes, soft bands of sound expand and Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan turns in a lovely, fragile vocal on "Happiness."
Selected Studies Vol. 1

Lloyd Cole & Hans-Joachim Roedelius
2013 | Bureau B

Hans-Joachim Roedelius is a towering figure of Krautrock: He formed Qluster (later renamed Cluster) and Harmonia, and his deceptively simple synth pieces in the late 1970s and early '80s are a genre unto themselves. Lloyd Cole is better known for literate guitar rock than synth drones, but here the two find a serene common ground, creating an airy, spacious album full of twinkling, twirling little mobiles. The music seems to move forward... and backward at once: Roedelius's genius was in creating gently hypnotic pieces out of minimal materials, and Selected Studies, belying its forbiddingly dry name, sparkles.
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Lady

Lady, The Band
2013 | Truth & Soul Records

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.
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Underdogs and Introverts

TORRES

TORRES
2013 | TORRES / TuneCore

The debut album by this woman who calls herself Torres (real name: Mackenzie Scott) was recorded in a creaky old Nashville house that happens to be owned by Tony Joe White, he who gave the world "Polk Salad Annie." But that may have just been a lucky coincidence. These songs feel as if they were bound to come crawling out of Scott's body no matter what she did or where she was,... a strange litter of scowling, writhing fuzzballs just dead set on getting born. 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. "Everything hurts, but it's fine, it's fine," she sings — almost seethes — on "Honey," the album's lead single, a languid meditation on stasis and confession that builds up slow around a ground-out guitar line and crests in waves of pummeling drums, frayed vocals, frayed everything. Though lit up with distortion and drum-machine pulses, Torres is easily imaginable as a stripped-down acoustic affair, and in some ways might be better as such; "Come to Terms" finds Scott unplugged and fingerpicking, allowing lines like "just because the two of us will both grow old in time/ don't mean we should go old together" the time and space to make their full devastation known.
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Ripely Pine

Lady Lamb the Beekeeper
2013 | Ba Da Bing! / Revolver

The first two minutes of Lady Lamb the Beekeeper's Ripely Pine seem to reinforce the notion of fragile acquiescence that 23-year-old Aly Spaltro's stage name suggests. "Take me by the arm to the altar/ Take me by the collar to the cliff/ …Take me by the braid down to my grave," she croons on "Hair to the Ferris Wheel" over a languidly-thumbed electric guitar, the ghost of an autoharp shuffling around in... the background. But on this, Lady Lamb the Beekeeper's first record cut in a proper studio, nothing is quite as it seems. Just when a lesser song might be content to wrap up its delicate reverie, the wool is ripped away and a Technicolor blast of crunchy guitars and detached-garage drums gush forth, Spaltro's dusky voice bottoming out over the deluge. This is par for the course on Ripely Pine; these 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. By the end, it's clear those opening lines weren't a coy feint, but a trap; it's you who is being led, and Lady Lamb the Beekeeper with her claws in your arm. And you will go with her — to the altar, to the grave, wherever — and love every weird minute of it.
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A Love Surreal

Bilal
2013 | eOne Music / Entertainment One Distribution

Bilal's career is odd: He is indelibly associated with the rise of early-'00s neo-soul, and while he hasn't become as famous as some of his contemporaries, he also didn't disappear down a wormhole like D'Angelo. Bilal's elastic, glorious voice has been a reliable presence on Roots records and other rap projects over the last 10 years, but his solo career, hampered by the usual setbacks, sputtered. His name seemed destined to be... forever preceded by a "ft."

A Love Surreal, released last winter, is only his third in 12 years, a batting average only slightly higher than D'Angelo's. The album doesn't reflect any bitterness or discontent, however; it is a lush, relaxed album, one that pivots neatly between styles. "West Side Girl" is grotty, sexy and Prince-ly; "Slipping Away" gazes at the stars like Donny Hathaway; "Lost For Now" even sounds remarkably like Big Star.
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Open the Crown

Arrington de Dionyso's Malaikat dan Slnga
2013 | K Records / SC Distribution

Now 16 years into his career, Arrington De Dionyso is essentially doomed to be underrated. His work with the brilliant, ignored Old Time Relijun channeled the same chaotic mania of The Pop Group, full of slashing voodoo guitars, hyperventilating percussion and De Dionyso's urgent, terrified howl — which bore more than a passing resemblance to Pop Group frontman Mark Stewart. Since embarking on a solo career in 2006, his work has only... gotten more daring and more fascinating. It's guaranteed to appeal to anyone with any measure of fondness for pioneering late '70s UK groups like the Slits, Swell Maps and PiL. Like those groups, De Dionyso dismantles jazz, dub and reggae and uses the individual elements to create something riveting and otherworldly. "There Will Be No Survivors" crawls grimly forward, a strangled saxophone punctuating De Dionyso's seething promise: "We're going down in flames." "I Create in the Broken System" is essentially Satanic reggae, De Dionyso doing his best Don Van Vliet over burnt-to-a-crisp, undead two-step. The title track is glorious cacophony, full of falling-down-the-stairs drums, horror-house organs and De Dionyso's madman proclamations ("I am the shapeshifter! I am the song of psychic fire! 10,000 tigers in my temple!") It's one of the year's most fearless records, daring music for those who dare investigate.
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House of Woo

Maxmillion Dunbar
2013 | RVNG INTL. / SC Distribution

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. Representing the former, "Slave to the Vibe" opens with... unbound '80s keyboard sounds, patiently arrayed in floating fashion, that snap into a formalist grid when the beat kicks in a little more than two minutes in. The way the hi-hat hangs in what sounds like a sweaty expanse of the stratosphere evokes old Chicago house anthems by the likes of Larry Heard (Mr. Fingers, Fingers Inc.), but "Woo" pulls back, quiets down, and drifts into comparatively ambient territory. A few beats still clack and clang, but the background textures creep the fore, and a wandering, thinking-out-loud synth-riff establishes itself in a way that remains present in tracks like "Coins for the Canopy" and "The Figurine (Nod Mix)." The funky dancefloor-filler "Ice Cream Graffiti" goes big and beat-intensive again, but it's never long before the sound spaces out and spreads in a manner befitting the title of "Loving the Drift."
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Ugly Heroes

Ugly Heroes
2013 | Mello Music Group / The Orchard

Ugly Heroes is comprised of two rising emcees, Verbal Kent and Red Pill, and one veteran producer, Apollo Brown, who set out to create rap music that embodied the spirit of the diminishing blue-collar workforce. "It's the person that works on your car. It's the factory worker that's counting parts all day, smelling like oil and grease," Brown says. "That individual that provides for their family, makes a living and is a... human being — that's a ugly hero." Ugly Heroes' debut, self-titled album takes a hard look into a life of grueling work: clocking in long hours, drinking afterward and somehow maintaining enough strength to continue.
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Haw

Hiss Golden Messenger
2013 | Paradise of Bachelors / Redeye

After making music for nearly 20 years, veteran Michael Taylor is just now finding his largest audience with Hiss Golden Messenger. It's actually his third band, following the short-lived punk group Ex-Ignota and the longer-lived San Francisco alt-country act The Court & Spark. When the latter broke up in 2007 — after four albums and nearly a decade of near-constant touring — Taylor settled down in Durham, North Carolina, where he started... a family, pursued a degree in folklore, and made music more as a hobby than as a priority.

Over several albums — a few self-released, a few more via North Carolina indie label Paradise of Bachelors — Hiss Golden Messenger has alternated between an austere solo acoustic project for Taylor and a full band featuring Scott Hirsh on guitar and Terry Lonergan on drums. For Haw, the fourth and arguably best release under the HGM moniker, they added members of Lambchop, Megafaun and the Black Twig Pickers to the line-up. Whether alone or with friends, however, the primary elements of Hiss Golden Messenger remain constant: Taylor's voice, which sounds both genial and mysterious, and his lyrics, which examine thorny issues of faith, fidelity and family.
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Bazooka

Bazooka
Slovenly Recordings

The house band at the Wild Rumpus, Greek grime peddlers and brothers-in-arms with fellow countrymen Acid Baby Jesus and Gay Anniversary deliver big, clanging songs built for late-night deep-woods campfire dancing. They've got two drummers, which is probably part of what makes the music feel so frantic: "Koritsi Stin Akti" roars forward like some kind of demonic Mustang out for one last, doomed street race; "Bye Bye Girl" is deranged country, twanging... guitar and full-gallop percussion while "Ravening Trip"'s steady chug almost sounds like a bunch of greasers mocking Madchester, its shuffling backbeat smothered by horror-film riffing. This is party music for 20-foot monsters.
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Come Cry With Me

Daniel Romano
2013 | Normal Town Records

Singer/songwriter Daniel Romano hails from Canada but sounds like he's from America's Deep South as he writes old-school country ballads sung in a deep, Man-in-Black drawl. On his latest record, this year's aptly titled Come Cry With Me, there's a dirge about unrequited love, reflections on being a rejected middle child, and a rambling saga about getting a ride with a guy who calls himself Chicken Bill.
Jay Arner

Jay Arner
2013 | Mint Records / Revolver

Jay Arner's self-titled solo debut begins with a low bass groove that sounds like an engine idling, ready to rev "Midnight on South Granville" into high gear. To say the song never bolts away is no complaint, though, as the lyrics recount a night spent catching the bus, missing your stop, getting lost and wandering aimlessly. Set against that chugging bass line, those buzzy synths and that stoner guitar, half-drunk anomie has... rarely sounded quite so epic. A Vancouver-based musician who has helmed album by Mount Eerie, Apollo Ghosts and Rose Melberg, Arner recorded these new songs during lonely sessions at his practice space, recording straight to laptop to emphasize a DIY mid-fi sound, and the resulting Jay Arner mixes mopey postpunk instrumentation with power-pop song structures. Even though the unhurried tempos are far too laidback to sell the "power" in the pop, that spacey, narcotized vibe can be deceptive: The music reveals new sonic and lyrical details with each listen, whether it's the M.C. Escher hook on "Broken Glass" or the world-weary cautions of "Nightclubs," which finds a tricky balance between wry and romantic.
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