eMusic » ZZ

Blood on the Dancefloor: 12 Essential Avant-Dance Albums

Andrew Parks — Wed, 01 May 2013 15:09:20 +0000

“I don’t think of music as cathartic or a release,” Dominick Fernow once told me in a cover story about his former band Cold Cave. “A release implies that something is leaving you. It’s not that so much as a transformation.”

Whether he’s whipping up whirlpools of noise as Prurient or delving into the darkest corners of dance music as Vatican Shadow, Fernow has always followed that path — music as a purification process, only instead of the poison being drawn out of his productions, it’s harnessed in the form of distorted tape decks, chain-linked synths and rust-encrusted samples.

He’s not alone either; while house producers have been revisiting their rave cave roots as of late, underground techno has turned 50 shades of grey. Literally and figuratively, as melodies get maimed, tempos get turned on, and rhythms embrace the very notion of electronic body music.

In the following guide, eMusic breaks down 12 essential avant-dance albums that will flood your endorphin levels (or plunge you into a pit of despair) faster than a midnight screening of Spring Breakers. Think of it as EDM’s evil twin, music that makes you move without resorting to crowd-pleasing power chords or answering the question that seems to be on everyone’s minds these days: “Where’s the drop?”

And as a bonus, we’ve also included a secondary set of recommendations and a “Panic Room” collection of deviant downtempo tracks…

Suckfish

Audion
2005 | Spectral Sound / The Orchard

Matthew Dear was way ahead of the current deviant-techno curve with the debut album from this dearly missed alias. In case you couldn't tell from oh-so-subtle song titles like "Titty Fuck," "Just Fucking" and "Your Place or Mine," Suckfish funnels Dear's darkest fantasies through hardcore techno tropes, ravenous rhythms and hypnotist hooks that are the polar opposite of "you're getting sleepy, very sleepy." If anything, you'll be wired as hell after hearing... this record.
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Liber Dogma

The Black Dog
2011 | Soma / PIAS Digital

A cursory look at the Black Dog's mixes page (especially the aptly-titled "Dark Wave" series) is all it takes to understand how one of Warp's earliest (accidental) IDM adopters has only gotten more ashen with age. Sometimes that approach reveals itself in ambient stunners like the Eno nod Music For Real Airports — arguably an improvement on the original — and sometimes it lands directly on the dancefloor, as is... the case on this masterclass in metallic, muscular techno.
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Transverse

Carter Tutti Void
2012 | Mute Artists

A student of Throbbing Gristle's "industrial music for industrial people" teaching — Factory Floor's Nik Void -- meets two of its founders — Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti, also of the incredibly influential Chris & Cosey — in a one-night-only collision of bowed guitar chords, metronomic melodies, HAM radio harmonies, and rhythms that won't let go. No wonder why the capacity crowd — part of Mute's celebratory Short... Circuit festival in 2011 — couldn't help but responding with resounding cheers at the end.
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LP

Container
2012 | Spectrum Spools / Kudos Records Limited

Ren Schofield is not as well-known as his fellow noise defectors — people like Prurient, Nate Young and Pete Swanson — but in a perfect world, he would be. Maybe even more so. Both of his Spectrum Spools albums are simply called LP, which makes them sound more vanilla than they really are. If there's any dance full-length worth a floor-punch or slamdance, it's this one, from the bendable basslines of... "Paralyzed" to the loony vocal lines of "Perforate," which might as well be considered the terrifying, long-lost twin of Cajmere's house classic "Coffee Pot (It's Time for the Percolator)."
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Faint Hearted

the miles
2013 | Modern Love / Revolver

As in "Not for the...," Miles Whittaker's first solo album under his own name is a three-car pileup of the highest order. Not quite as noisy as his Suum Cuique alias or witchy as his work with Demdike Stare, but demented dance music nonetheless. Even the most serene moments (the galaxy-hopping ambient loops of "Loran Dreams," the deep listening drones of "Sense Data") sound like they're seconds away from veering... off the tracks, and everything else is increasingly erratic and engrossing, as if Whittaker is trying to break on through to the other side — or at the very least, your living room wall — with his skittish samples.
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Man With Potential

Pete Swanson
2011 | Type Vinyl / Morr Music GBR

A couple of strange things happened after Yellow Swans broke up. On one side of the aisle, Gabriel Saloman went the cobweb-y neo-classical route with his Adherealbum. Pete Swanson swung to the other extreme, expressing his basement punk roots through mangled techno opuses like Man With Potential. Not exactly the kind of thing you want to blast at 1 a.m. when you're landlord lives right across the hall, but when... you need a reality check that's fallen from the same rotten apple tree as Surgeon and the Sandwell District fam, this is a decent start.
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Complete Works 1997 - 1998

Regis
2012 | Downwards

Minimal techno doesn't get any more murderous than Karl O'Connor's flawless run as Regis. Maybe that's why he formed BMB (a.k.a. British Murder Boys, a recently reactivated project with Surgeon) a little over a decade after delivering the steely slabs of sound that hammer away at the core of this chaotic compilation. Definitely one of the godfathers of gloom — cool, calculated and calm like a bomb.
Feed Forward

Sandwell District
2011 | Sandwell District

When Sandwell District — an audio/visual collective that counted Function, Silent Servant and Regis among its ranks — "repressed" this limited double LP in digital form a few years ago, its growing cult following interpreted it as a mission statement. Turned out it was more of a death knell. For the label at least; the group continues to tour and work together, from Regis's executive production credits on Silent... Servant's first solo album to the sprawling mix Function and Regis recently cut for Fabric under the now-familiar Sandwell District name. Witness the origins of it all right here, as truly underground techno takes on the form of tractor beams and centrifugal forces.
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Crossed Paths

Shifted
2012 | Mote Evolver / N.E.W.S. NV

Let's say you're really excited about finally getting into a secretive dance spot like Berlin's epicenter of underground techno, Berghain. The night's going great, but then this Shifted guy goes on, starting with nearly seven minutes of mood-manipulating drone tones, then dropping into a black hole of clouded chords and beats that murmur and moan like a heart in desperate need of a transplant. Maybe you should head home before things get... too bleak? Why does the door appear to be locked? Looks like you'll have to wait until the storm passes.
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Force+Form

Surgeon
2010 | Tresor / N.E.W.S. NV

Four songs, 40 minutes — zero bullshit. Bow down to the one of the undisputed bibles of club music that literally makes you want to club things. (Please don't; we're just making a point here.)
Ornamented Walls

Vatican Shadow
2012 | Modern Love / Revolver

So this is why Dominick Fernow suddenly left Cold Cave last year — so he could perfect the tranced-out Muslimgauze tributes with the project that was quickly eclipsing his endless stream of Prurient releases. In many ways, Ornamented Walls is a transitional record, using Side A to hint at the next direction of Fernow's infamous live show (with frenzied rehearsal footage of "Operation Neptune Spear") and showing us what's up his... sleeve studio-wise throughout the chemtrail cuts on Side B. That the record came out on Modern Love — the same label as Miles, Demdike Stare and Andy Stott — sealed the deal even further for Fernow's emerging role in the sadomasochistic techno scene.
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Luxury Problems

Andy Stott
2012 | Modern Love / Revolver

Considering he's been doing the whole shadow boxer thing since 2006's Merciless LP, the recent attention foisted upon Andy Stott is long overdue. That, and understandable considering how far he's raised the bar with Luxury Problems, a gorgeous exploration of electronic music's Darth Vader side, complete with melancholic melodies (from Stott's old piano teacher!), an endless supply of murky fog machines, and beats that'll make you break into a cold sweat.... Think of this as the blissful breather you're gonna need after having your head bashed in by the rest of these records.
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Further Dancefloor Destruction

Slava, Raw Solutions

Andy Battaglia — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:00:02 +0000

Vertiginous dance music that takes cues from the Chicago-borne "footwork" sound

In its serious, almost spiritual commitment to repetition, Slava’s vertiginous dance music takes cues from the Chicago-borne “footwork” sound. Many of the tracks on Raw Solutions, the Moscow-born, Chicago-raised, Brooklyn-based DJ/producer’s debut album, take a snippet of a vocal sample and circle around it until it’s been spied from every conceivable angle. “Girl Like Me” offers an early example, with an R&B-tipped diva voice singing, “No, you never had a girl quite like me” once and, then ad infinitum. It happens to more delirious effect in “Heartbroken,” which revisits the titular word dozens of times, with ethereal electronic processing, until the result turns hallucinatory. The effect is similar to the disassociation you feel when speaking a single word repeatedly (think or say the word “king” 50 times and see if you’re still having visions of royalty after). Apart from his love for spin-cycle sampling, Slava showcases a nimble production style that favors house music-derived rhythmic syncopation and infusions of pan-electronic elements like rave sirens (“Heartbroken”) and quasi-jungle “rinse-outs” (“Girls on Dick”). It’s all clenched and economical and tight, and it never lets up.

The Haxan Cloak, Excavation

Sharon O'Connell — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:00:22 +0000

Nine micro-symphonies of stark beauty and extraordinary menace

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.

Major Lazer, Free The Universe

Bill Brewster — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:00:12 +0000

Diplo brings pop sensibility back to his own eccentric rhythmic dalliances

On their debut album, Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do, Diplo and Switch of Major Lazer took Jamaican dancehall as a starting point and had a blast messing with its DNA. On the party-starter “Pon De Floor,” they all but created a new genre, fusing dancehall, military drum tattoos and hip-hop into a crazed floorfiller that was sampled by everyone from Beyonce to Nicola Roberts. The big change with Free The Universe is the absence of Dave “Switch” Taylor, Diplo’s long-time collaborator. Diplo has said, “In terms of actually making records and finishing them, Switch doesn’t do that. He just can’t finish songs.” So Diplo called for help. And, boy, did he get it.

On Free The Universe something strange has happened. What seemed like an off-the-wall dancehall collaboration in 2009 has turned into something far poppier, featuring an unlikely line-up of guests including Shaggy, Wyclef, Peaches, Ezra Koening of Vampire Weekend and even Bruno Mars. Yet it still has that oddball edge that follows Diplo’s productions around like a lost puppy. The album’s real turn-up is the brilliant “Get Free,” featuring Amber Coffman of Dirty Projectors — exhilarating pop that has the faintest whiff of the Art Of Noise about it.

On “Jah No Partial,” chart parvenus Flux Pavilion adds grimy drops to the boombastic dancehall. Peaches and Timberlee come on like a demented Shampoo on “Scare Me.” There is a brush with EDM on “Sweat,” where Dutch house don Laidback Luke creates a caustic soundbed for Ms Dynamite to deliver a minimalist sermon. And there are some killer rumpshakers in “Wind Up” and the brilliant paean to the shapelier derrière “Bubble Butt.”

Diplo has long been an innovator in his production work for the likes of Santigold and Azealia Banks, but here he brings that pop sensibility back to his own eccentric rhythmic dalliances. Ground control to Major Lazer: Check ignition. Blast off.

Interview: Karl Bartos

Andy Battaglia — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 19:33:21 +0000

Karl Bartos was a member of Kraftwerk, which makes for legendary status and then some. His tenure in the gob-smackingly influential German group ran from 1975 to 1990, and his contributions include melodies and rhythms in the midst of such classic albums as The Man-Machine and Computer World. It’s hard to imagine music sounding the way it does now without such canonical accomplishments, even if Bartos himself holds a certain ambivalence about Kraftwerk after the fact.

More recently, after a stint as a professor in Berlin, Bartos revisited archival sounds he made during his Kraftwerk years and refashioned them in the form of Off the Record, an album full of taut, allusive synth-pop songs that signal back to the past while peering toward the future. Over Skype from Berlin, Bartos talked about both with a mix of objective dispassion and palpable excitement — characteristics that play into the music he favors more than 60 years after he was born.

Looking back at your years in Kraftwerk, with so much accomplished and such profound influence put into play, what makes you most proud?

We had so much rejection at the time that there was really no time to be proud. We struggled really. I remember for the first concerts in England, for instance, we had this huge centerfold in the paper New Musical Express, and they made a collage with us sitting in the center of the Nuremberg Trials. We had to face a lot of rejection. Finally, in the end of the ’80s with MTV and especially in the ’90s, it was getting better all the time. But I was not really very proud of it. It was just daily work.

Did you not think the music significant, personally? Did it feel powerful and new to you, or not necessarily?

We felt we were always some sort of pioneers in terms of production. Before the computer arrived in the studio we had good analog machinery working, with sequencers and electronic drum devices. They were custom-made, and we always thought, “When will the black guys from America discover that a drum box can have a really groovy beat?” Finally, they did! I remember, when I visited, going down the streets of Manhattan and seeing a guy with a boombox, or ghetto blaster, and doing some weird dancing. Now I would call it “breakdancing,” but I didn’t know it at the time. They were listening to loops of Trans-Europe Express, a segment from “Metal on Metal,” and they were head-spinning and stuff like that. That made me really happy.

Did you breakdance yourself?

I tried it, once. [Laughs.] When I first came to America, it was 1975, and I remember being in Memphis, Tennessee. After a concert, all four of us — there was a cover band playing some rock ‘n’ roll tunes, and all four of us were dancing. It was a very happy time. It was one of the Elton John hit singles. The covers band played the pop charts, and they were really good players. This was pre-hip-hop, pre-club music, pre-Detroit techno, pre-all that stuff.

In reference to the cover band as good players and musicians, do you think of yourself, as an electronic-musician, as a good player, or is it something else, something different? Do you think of your work more in the language of programming and organizing, or is it all musicianship to you?

If I had to come up with one occupation, I would say “musician.” That’s true. But for the last 10 years or so, I stepped more into the convergence of image and sound. When I was a professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin, I was free to come up with my own curriculum, so I had a closer look at the history of filmmaking and what role sound played in film. All the theoretical stuff, people like [storied sound-editor] Walter Murch, came up. In terms of music culture, to me at least, it’s much more important how the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino’s new movie is than the latest Lady Gaga record. I think all the intelligence, since the business model is no longer of any interest for a huge industry, the interest of music culture is in filmmaking: music in films and with films. And music is only one part of sound in movies. We have dialogue, we have the sound of the environment, we have the ambience, we have music. So there’s much more to talk about.

What is the earliest interesting use of sound in cinema that you teach?

I look at sound in a broader picture. Beginning of the 19th century, painting was getting abstract. Kandinsky was very jealous of what musicians and composers could do. He was drawing and it was very hard for him to get emotion in a picture. So he thought, “What can I do to bring music into my pictures?” He was desperate with this idea. He called his paintings like “Movement in Blue,” “Composition in Yellow” and so on. At the same time, there was this new medium of film coming up. People who read Kandinsky’s [journal] The Blue Rider had the idea of bringing abstract painting onto a timeline. So suddenly you have on this timeline rectangles, circles and so on, and those geometric pieces started to dance. Doing so, they thought, “OK, we have now what we’ll call Gesamtkunstwerk (translation: “a total work of art”). It’s really interesting how these media are talking to each other and how they complement each other. This tradition brought me into the kind of performance I do nowadays. During the ’90s, we had this movement of VJs — in any club they had VJ putting on the walls of the clubs visual candy, or whatever you want to call it. So I wanted to take early movements, from Oskar Fischinger and Walter Ruttman — these very early ideas of abstraction on a timeline — and treat them visually like music together with the VJ movement. This brought me to the kind of performance I do nowadays.

There was a fantastic exhibition of films by Oscar Fischinger at the Whitney Museum in New York recently.

Fischinger went to Disney and he took part in Fantasia. But he was never happy really in Hollywood.

Your new album draws inspiration from sounds sourced from your past. What motivated you to revisit them?

It was very simple. A guy from the label kept asking me, again and again and again, if I had any old tapes from the ’70s or ’80s when I was in Kraftwerk. I kept saying no, but after I stopped teaching I wanted to do a new record, and he brought me back to this time. Finally I decided to do this marathon effort — it’s nothing you want to do: to clean up your attic. It was all in boxes, huge amounts of material. I always thought, “Oh, maybe later, maybe next year…” But then, being German, I ended up transferring it all into the computer. When I was there in the computer, I only saw the dates — 77-8-2, 76-7-4, and so on. It looked like an auditory diary, and that’s when I thought I could make it concept and make it real. I delved really deep into all this material. I brought together pieces that didn’t belong together and stuck them together and worked them into a collage. Remakes [new simulations of pre-existing sounds] were done with old instruments: an old Moog, an Arp, all this old stuff. I recontextualized. I replayed the instruments, old synthesizers from the ’70s, with their pitch and so on.

The sounds go back to your years in Kraftwerk. Are you in touch with any members of the group still?

I just had a telephone conversation with Wolfgang [Flür]. My other colleague Florian [Schneider] is very happy not to be a robot for the rest of his life. So there is just one person left [Ralf Hütter]. But Florian, Wolfgang, and I are in contact.

Have you talked to Ralf?

[Makes shrugging gesture with his shoulders, beneath a suggestively sly smile.]

A press-release for your new album says “Forget about nostalgia in 3-D.” Have you seen any of the recent Kraftwerk shows?

I got invited by The Guardian to attend the Tate Modern shows [in London] and to write a review, but I turned it down. I don’t have the time. I have so much to do now. This record took me two and half years now, and I’m still working on it, because I’ve made six videos. I’m going to London to do screenings, and I’m going to big cities in Europe. I know all the material of the Kraftwerk concerts, so I’ve been there already, sonically.

In the history of Kraftwerk, you’re credited for making big contributions in terms of melody and in terms of rhythm. Often those are regarded as separate and distinct musical properties. Do they work that way for you, or are melody and rhythm one and the same?

Music is a time-based art, and there are a lot of ways to articulate time. In life, we came up with this concept of dividing time into years, months, weeks, days and so on. In music, we came up with this dimension of meter. We invented bars and can say this bar is 4/4 or 3/4 or 7/4, and within these metric devices we put our rhythms. But the question if I make a distinction between rhythms and melodies or not…Well, first of all, what we think of as rhythm is a formula, because we are used to a drummer playing a rhythmic formula and repeating it. So the “Numbers” beat is a formula. But if I compose a song or a piece of music, rhythm for me is how all the instruments complement each other. It’s very important that the bass line and the melodic line and the chords each all have a rhythmic quality. But in the end, it’s all a line that you can see in a score. The drum beat is just one part of it.

Do you keep up with contemporary electronic music? Do you go to clubs in Berlin?

I had the privilege for about five years to talk to young musicians in Berlin. They had a lot of respect because of my biography, so the first thing I did with them was take them to see the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra to attend a rehearsal. Afterward, we talked about scores what [conductor] Simon Rattle does in front of the orchestra. We discovered all the similarities between a score and the timeframe used by a computer. In the end, all these young DJs and musicians got the idea that it’s all the same, and it really doesn’t matter where it comes from. If it’s from someone in front of a computer or 80 people onstage in an orchestra, they have the same blood in their veins. We are all musicians, and we are all doing the same thing. It really doesn’t matter. It’s all about how the recipient receives it.

When you speak of the audio-diary aspect of your new album, do you mean a diary in a soul-baring kind of way or was it more a store of archives?

The intention was not to write a diary — it was just a scrapbook to evaluate ideas. I had no emotional thing going on where I wanted to write down what was going on in my life or how I felt. Years later, when I put it into a computer, I decided to call it a diary because in the end, that is what it is, if I look at it as a whole. It was sort of like meeting myself as a young guy, innocent and naïve, and now, with my experience as a producer, I could speak with myself. I was not trying to patronize that young guy, but it was OK — I think he would have liked it!

In your song “Without a Trace of Emotion, “you sing “I wish I could remix my life to another beat.” What did you mean?

Everybody keeps referring to my former band because it got so important over 40 years of existence. But I’m quite ambivalent about it. Sometimes it’s nice, because people are interested in my work still and I have contributed to some famous songs that became evergreens. But sometimes it’s really annoying that I always have to work so hard to get even close to the same reception for my music now. It’s not that good — a song like “The Model” cannot be that good because “The Model” was written more than 30 years ago, and it has gone through so many filters of time. Maybe in 30 years from now people won’t want to be so picky with my solo stuff. With that song in particular ["Without a Trace of Emotion"], I was trying to work this out. I came up with a story where I meet Herr Karl, which was the name of Kraftwerk showroom dummy, and I start a conversation with him. I talk to him and he talks to me. “I won’t let go, I won’t let go,” he says. And I tell him, “Red shirt, black tie, you’re history, you’re history.” I made a video for it, and it shows Herr Karl in all of his costumes: a red shirt, a Tour de France outfit, acting like a model. It became really funny without being comic. You can see me walking on this famous street in Hamburg where the Beatles used to play — I live very close by. Then suddenly I am passing this Panopticon and see Herr Karl. I had to do it just once in my life, to make it subject of an album and especially one song. “Without a Trace of Emotion” sums it up for me very well.

Six Degrees of James Blake’s Overgrown

Ryan Reed — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:00:12 +0000

It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five other albums we've deemed related in some way. In some cases these connections are obvious, in others they are tenuous. But, most important to you, all of the records are highly, highly recommended.

The Album

Overgrown

James Blake
2013 | Universal Records

By 2011, the year James Blake released his beloved self-titled debut, a crop of like-minded young musicians (including fellow Brits the xx) were revolutionizing electronic music, blurring the borders between dubstep, indie rock and R&B. Blake ultimately emerged as the poster boy for this blossoming musical culture: layering icicle keys with disorienting electro hiccups, singing in a soulful, melismatic croon — one typically looped and chopped and auto-tuned and sampled into surreal,... static-y choirs. But for all its lavish textural splendor, James Blake was fascinating more for its influential production style than its actual songs.

With his sophomore full-length, Overgrown, Blake has expanded his reach in every area: as a singer, as a producer and especially as a songwriter. Where James Blake rarely exuded any degree of warmth (burying his voice so deep within mountains of effects that it hardly registered on an emotional level), Overgrown has a prominent human pulse, best evidenced on a pair of striking new collaborations: "Digital Lion" balances electronics with organic instrumentation (including a brief acoustic guitar passage) from ambient godfather Brian Eno, while Wu-Tang veteran RZA crashes the party for a gruff guest verse on the dust-blown "Take a Fall For Me." Working with other artists (even dating back to 2011's "Fall Creek Boys Choir," his one-off collaboration with Bon Iver's Justin Vernon) has helped Blake realize the importance of tension and release. "Retrograde" is the most fully-realized song he's ever written, building gradually, layer-by-layer (pianos, gurgling bass, digital handclaps), until the chorus opens into a haunting whirlwind of synths and vocal acrobatics. By refining his style, Blake hasn't tarnished his pioneering mystique — he's added to it.
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The Ambient Godfather

Another Green World

Brian Eno
2004 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

It's no shock that Blake sought out a collaboration with Eno on Overgrown — after all, during his pioneering run in the 1970s, Eno basically invented the blueprint for blending acoustic and electronic elements in the recording studio. The duo's new collaboration, "Digital Lion," points back to Another Green World, Eno's 1975 masterpiece, particularly that album's fizzy, grandiose synthesizer tones (best evidenced on the funky instrumental "Over Fire Island"). Both Eno and... Blake are masters of sonic space and texture, but they're both also both capable of writing intricate, off-kilter pop music. Another Green World represents Eno at his peak in both areas — from the evocative, dream-like ambience of "The Big Ship" and "Zawinul/Lava" to the quirky sing-along of "St. Elmo's Fire." They may have been born 40 years apart, but Eno and Blake are obvious kindred spirits.
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The Dubstep Icon

Untrue

Burial
Hyperdub / The Orchard

Before Blake and his late-aughts peers brought dubstep's influence into the mainstream, obscure Brits like Burial were making the genre a critical buzzword on a smaller scale. Untrue, the mysterious producer's sophomore LP, remains the dubstep pinnacle — defining the movement's sonic hallmarks and refining them through one immersive headphone journey. It's clear Blake spent plenty of hours absorbing this album — its oceanic pacing, its fractured R&B vocal loops (sampling neo-soul... artists like D'Angelo and contemporary hit-makers like Christina Aguilera), its left-field sound effects (culled from video games like Metal Gear Solid and films like David Lynch's Inland Empire), its woozy bass, its skittering snares and rim-clicks. It's a relatively simple sound, and a fairly repetitive one; the album basically plays like extended track — a hypnotic radio transmission from a mid-'90s R&B station, decaying quietly in outer space. Basically every electronic artist, Blake included, has been hovering inside Untrue's shadow ever since.
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The Indie Falsetto Bro

Blood Bank

Bon Iver
2009 | EP/SINGLE

Like Blake, Bon Iver's Justin Vernon is a rare breed of vocalist: distinct, emotive and polarizing — blurring the line between cartoonish and spiritual. And also like Blake, Vernon's voice (particularly his melismatic falsetto) is the essential ingredient in his music, no matter how much orchestration or how many sprawling overdubs he throws into the mix. Vernon broke out to international acclaim with his debut, the heart-melter For Emma, Forever Ago... — but in a roundabout way, his most influential release is the Blood Bank EP, his slightly obscure follow-up from 2009. Three of the four tracks are more in line with the folky art-rock of Vernon's earlier repertoire, but the disc's standout, the a cappella stunner "Woods," was a bold leap forward, layering Vernon's gorgeous falsetto harmonies through the densest auto-tune ever laid to tape. It was a groundbreaking moment, cemented in history when Kanye West wrote an entire song around its main melody for his 2010 track "Lost in the World." But the song's influence also rippled through the indie community, and Blake is no exception.
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The Art-Rock Pioneers

Kid A

Radiohead
2008 | CAPITOL

Regardless of genre, it's practically impossible to name an artist that hasn't been influenced, at least in some small part, by the eclectic body of work Radiohead have amassed over the past two decades. But ever since the quartet's groundbreaking fourth album, 2000's Kid A — in which restless frontman Thom Yorke pushed their adventurous art-rock sound into the glitchy unknown — the lines separating "rock" and "electronica" have been thrillingly indistinct.... That ambiguity between organic and synthetic, acoustic and electronic, is a defining element in Blake's style; and with his abstract lyrical approach and fondness for vocal manipulation, he's no stranger to a Thom Yorke comparison. Over a decade since its original release, can feel the ghosts of Kid A lurking throughout Blake's music — from the layered, choppy loop-pedal chaos of "Everything in its Right Place" to the muffled synth-pad lullaby of "Kid A" to the frenetic programmed hallucinations of "Idioteque."
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The Like-Minded Collaborators

Crooks & Lovers

Mount Kimbie
2010 | Hotflush Recordings / S.T. Holdings

Like Blake, British duo Mount Kimbie (Dominic Maker and Kai Campos) make very unconventional electronic music — too organic to be dubstep, too soulful and busy to be ambient in the traditional sense. But Blake's connection to the band runs deeper than that: He actually contributed vocals and keyboards to Mount Kimbie's live shows in 2010 — the same year they released their hugely acclaimed Warp Records debut, Crooks & Lovers —... and he's also collaborated with the band on a remix for their 2010 EP, Remixes Part 1. The template for Crooks & Lovers is a bit spacier and more trance-like than Blake's work, layering pitch-shifted R&B vocal loops into a blissful instrumental stew of fractured acoustic guitars, synths, and programming. But there's a reason these guys are such close friends — in many ways, Blake is the enigmatic frontman that got away.
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James Blake, Overgrown

Andrew Parks — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 13:16:10 +0000

Revisiting the profoundly weird stomping grounds of his self-titled LP

After spending the tail end of 2011 pushing his idiosyncratic productions down two very different paths — the freakish experimental flourishes of Love What Happened Here and the manic emoting (complete with a Bonny Bear collab!) of Enough Thunder — James Blake revisits the profoundly weird stomping grounds of his self-titled debut on Overgrown. Free of Feist or Joni Mitchell covers, the only creative voice that’s tortured or tweaked this time around is Blake’s own, whether that means something as live and direct as “DLM” or the patience-rewarding returns of, well, everything else.

Like his last LP, Overgrown will sound like a beat head’s version of blue-eyed soul to most people, which sells Blake’s songwriting far too short. Thanks to his obsession with sound itself, the record doesn’t reveal itself unless you actually listen. Only then will you notice the dying embers and buzz-sawed sonar blips of “Our Love Comes Back,” the devastating build of “Retrograde,” or the catastrophic time changes of “Digital Lion,” a knob-twiddling duet with Brian Eno that’s got more in common with Kid A than Eno’s own recent run of selected ambient works.

He’s not the only guest that benefits from Blake’s restless imagination either; RZA also makes a highly unexpected appearance on “Take a Fall For Me,” rapping oh-so-softly about the rules of attraction and how he’d sure like to have a “candlelight dinner/ fish and chips, with the vinegar.” Taking all of Overgrown‘s left turns together, something that Blake told Pitchfork a few years back suddenly makes sense: Asked about critical comparisons to Jamie Lidell, the classically-trained singer said, “If you listen to some of Jamie Lidell’s stuff and hear the way he’s singing, it’s revivalist. Frankly, if that’s the comparison being made, I think some people need to get their hearing checked.” Amen.

The Knife, Shaking the Habitual

Kevin O'Donnell — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 13:00:26 +0000

An exhilarating, what-the-heck-is-going-on-here listen

“I’m telling you stories,” Karin Dreijer Andersson shrieks on the opening track “A Tooth For an Eye,” before letting rip with “Trust meeeeeeeeeeee-aaaaaaahhhhhh!” And what stories those are: On their long-awaited follow-up to their 2006 U.S. breakthrough Silent Shout, this Swedish brother-sister duo have crafted the musical equivalent of a Wes Craven horror movie for PhDs. Politics, feminism, gender studies, social class, “commercial homogenization,” as they state in their biography — all those weighty ideas are explored on 13 tracks.

Whether any of this makes sense in the hands of a press-shy, costume-wearing duo is another question. Andersson has long reveled in screwing around with audiences: She famously accepted a televised award in 2010 for her side project Fever Ray while wearing a mask that looked like molten flesh. And on Shaking the Habitual, she remains equally opaque: Plainspoken, politically-charged lyrics (“Not a vagina/ It’s an option!”) get masked with all sorts of vocal effects, shrieks, yelps, groans and grunts. Then there are downright silly sentiments: “A handful of elf pee/ That’s my soul.” Huh? Sure, Andersson and her brother Olof Dreijer have said in interviews that they want to challenge the listener’s understanding of race, class, sexuality, etc., on this album. But over a double-disc set, it’s hard not to think this is a giant practical joke — a musical version of a 4chan troll.

What is clear, however, is the Knife’s gift for crafting some of the most forward-thinking electronic music around — Shaking the Habitual is an exhilarating, what-the-fuck-is-going-on-here listen. It’s definitely their freakiest set yet — maybe the freakiest record this year. Cuts like “Full of Fire” and “Raging Lung” are packed with synth earworms and djembe drums and storm-the-floor electronic beats and flutes and recorders and art-damaged acoustic guitars and feedback drones. And is that the Munchkins from the Wizard of Oz shrieking on “Without You My Life Would Be Boring”? That reference would sense — L. Frank Baum’s fictional character is all about illusion — and Anderson clearly revels in playing with the role of a modern-day sonic wizard. In a time when pop stars and television personalities offer up every mundane detail of their personal lives for the sake of a retweet, sometimes it’s nice to have an artist who remains shrouded in nothing but mystery.

Bonobo, The North Borders

Ian Gittins — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 13:13:10 +0000

Rarefied headphones music to be played loud and often

In a contemporary world of electronica seemingly in thrall to the sleek, serrated-edged futurism of Flying Lotus, Bonobo is a welcome anachronism. The UK dance producer born Simon Green specializes in beats that are warm, mellow and swathed in vinyl-style crackles; his deft digitalia sounds sweetly, quaintly analog. The easiest shorthand would be to label his oeuvre as ambient downbeat, or even chillout, but this undersells the ferocious intelligence and meticulous attention to detail that pulses beneath his gentle rhythms. On his fifth studio album, he once more appears intent on capturing and channeling the profound moments of still, intimate reflection that can follow nights of wild hedonistic and/or narcotic abandon. There are shades of James Blake’s spooked, narcoleptic electro-pop on opener “First Fires,” with guest vocals from New York neo-folkie Grey Reverend, while the agitated yet spectral “Transits,” featuring the siren tones of newcomer Szjerdene, recalls the under-celebrated 1990s mistress of drum-and-bass-tinged comedown pop, Nicolette. Best of all is the suitably divine “Heaven for the Sinner,” on which Erykah Badu ladles her preternaturally honeyed tones over quick-stepping beats like a hypnotically alluring ghost in the machine. This is rarefied headphones music to be played loud, and often.

Discover: Finders Keepers

Sharon O'Connell — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 21:23:59 +0000

An enthusiasm for sounds lost, unknown, ignored or brain-meltingly weird is the principle behind Finders Keepers, the reissue label Andy Votel founded in 2005 with Doug Shipton. A mainstay of Manchester’s music scene, Votel made his name as an electronic musician, respected DJ and the man behind the Twisted Nerve label, which first brought Badly Drawn Boy to the public’s ears. Votel is a long-term enthusiastic crate-digger and his early love of hip-hop taught him to be interested in — and to buy — records wherever they came from, irrespective of the strictures of “youth culture.”

Finders Keepers is a horizon-broadening enterprise, the success of which relies not only on the interests of a curious record-buying public, but also on the passion, in-depth knowledge and deep love of its curators. The catalogue ranges far and wide — from Welsh folk music and ’70s horror-film scores to ’60s Turkish psych-punk and “Lollywood” (from Lahore, Pakistan) movie soundtracks. “Making global sound local” is the label’s motto, and Finders Keepers, which Votel describes as “pretty much genre-less” is supported in its aim by various sibling labels, each with their own focus: the on-going Twisted Nerve (contemporary releases only), Bird (music by female artists), Cache Cache (punk, new wave, ’80s electronic music), Battered Ornaments (Shipton’s own label) and a new imprint called Cacophonic (jazz — “but it’s almost like a noise label”). Votel is clearly committed to pressing forward — however much time he necessarily spends looking back.

Sharon O’Connell spoke with Andy Votel about running a true label of love.

What was the initial spur to launching Finders Keepers?

Working within the mainstream music industry got me down. It became very stringent. A lot of the records we put out on FK are 35-40 years past their sell-by date, so a desperate, four-week promotional campaign is not going to make any difference to sales. Most of the artists on FK now are — and I mean this in the most positive way possible — failed pop musicians, whether for political reasons, through a miscarriage of justice, the failure of the music industry or because they were ahead of their time, so you’re already creating a new music industry. When we set up FK, that’s exactly what it was. It was starting anew, so there was pretty much no rulebook. It was very, very refreshing.

What does the FK motto, “Making global sound local,” mean?

It’s making old records feel young, I suppose. These records were so ahead of their time that they’ve not dated, even after 40 years or so. They were never middle-of-the-road, so they still feel as fresh as the day they were created. It’s virtually impossible to be really experimental nowadays, because everybody knows you can make any sound you could possibly want, no problem. So it’s hard to experiment without restrictions. A lot of the records we’re releasing now are from the ’70s or ’80s, which was the heyday of experimental pop music.

Does a lot of the archive work you do involve playing detective?

For me, the most exciting thing about it all is meeting these artists and going round to their houses, spending time with them and meeting their families; the records are just the by product. But two things are insulting from the outset: one is when people say, “What are these weird records?” A lot of the time, they only think they’re weird because they’re sung in a foreign language, so that’s…almost racist. The other is people think that these records are from primitive industries, so you get a lot of bootlegging by various companies. And you can’t think like that. Everything that we do is on a very human level, and a lot of it is personal hero worship. Luckily, because I’d been working with Twisted Nerve when the internet was still in its infancy, I was able to contact people quite quickly and find a lot of my heroes. The question was what do you do from that point? So, we decided to reissue old records together.

What’s coming up next for FK?

Recently, I’ve been working with a tape engineer from Manchester called Andy Popplewell. He worked for the BBC for a short time, and has been baking [restoring] tapes for people in Manchester and London and all over the world, for a very long time. But it seems like I’m the only person to ever have asked him if he made music himself — and it turns out he did. He built his own synthesizer when he was 17. He has this unreleased album, TRASE and it’s the best thing I’ve heard in about five years. It’s amazing.

Andy Votel Shares 5 Treasures from the Finders Keepers Trove

L'enfant Assassin Des Mouches

Jean Claude Vannier
2007 | B-MUSIC

Orchestral, psych-rock concept album by Gainsbourg's right-hand man, and FK's first release.

When we set up Finders Keepers, I'd already had this record for about four years. There was a rumour going around that there was a sequel to Histoire de Melody Nelson by Serge Gainsbourg, who I'm a big fan of, but it soon became evident that I was more a fan of his arranger, Jean-Claude Vannier, as most of the stuff... I like was between 1968-73 — their years together. Nobody could find this album because there's nothing written on the sleeve — no title or name — but after years and years, I just found a copy in a shop. Everybody in France put me off speaking to Vannier — they told me he was arrogant and that he couldn't speak English — but it was like they were protecting him, really. When I finally met him I discovered he was a polite, encouraging and influential man who has since become a good friend — and he can speak English better than I can. No one dared release this record in France, but I just thought, it has to be out there.
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Minor White

Emma Tricca
2010 | B-MUSIC

Spare and timeless, finger-picked folk-blues from John Renbourn-approved singer-songwriter.

One of the key attractions of music for me is its femininity and sadly, you don't get that much in Manchester. All I ever talk to Emma about is Italian horror films, because she's Italian. I never talk to her about music, because I'm really not qualified; she's almost like a genius. Jane [Weaver, recording artist and Votel's wife] and I saw her at... the Green Man Festival in 2006 and couldn't believe how brilliant she was, but you could put her up a tree and she'd be amazing. Emma could have existed 300 years ago and she could exist in 300 years time. What she does is 100 per cent honest.
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Possession

Andrzej Korzyñski
2012 | FINDERS KEEPERS

Polish composer's previously unreleased, experi-chestral OST for the 1981 horror classic.

Korzynski was a mainstay in my record collection for years, but I didn't know anything about him. It's hard to find out about anything Polish, really, but I've been collecting Polish records since I was about 18, when I went to there on an art-school trip. Soundtracks were never released as records in their own right in Poland, and as Korzynski was... primarily a soundtrack artist, he wasn't a household name. But he did go to Paris in the late '60s and that explains everything about Korzynski's sound — people always say he's like the Polish Jean-Claude Vannier.
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Selda

Selda
2007 | B-MUSIC

Debut Anatolian folk/psych-rock album from acclaimed Turkish singer/ songwriter and musician.

Selda's a folk heroine, but super-militant; she'll wear Gucci sunglasses and a Fendi handbag, with a parka and a bullet-belt. I discovered Turkish music when I was in Germany and there was a really heavy, fuzz guitar sound on this record that blew my mind. Then I realized it was actually a saz, put through a fuzz pedal. People say The Beatles... are the most influential band in the world, but they're not. The Shadows are, because they're instrumental, so language isn't an issue. That's how the Andalou rock scene started and Selda was one of its earliest female musicians. She has this incredible voice, full of pain that's just unrivaled.
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Man Chest Hair

Various Artists
2012 | FINDERS KEEPERS

Compilation of hirsute and avowedly male '70s rock from the Mancunian underground.

Manchester has got a habit of approaching music with its elbows out, pushing to the front of the queue; it's very male-oriented. But the stuff that didn't force its way to the front got forgotten. It sickens me that people think music in Manchester just went straight from The Hollies to The Smiths, like the '70s didn't exist. In the '60s... when all the clubs in the city centre got shut down, the music went to satellite towns like Bolton and Stockport. There was a German record I'd been after for years and years, and then I found out the band were from Stockport and that blew my mind.
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eMusic Editors’ Finders Keepers Picks

Pomegranates: Persian Pop, Funk, Folk and Psych of the 60s and 70s

Various Artists
2010 | B-MUSIC
Sarolta Zalatnay

Sarolta Zalatnay
2009 | B-MUSIC
Paint a Lady

Susan Christie
2007 | B-MUSIC
Well Hung

Various Aritsts
2009 | B-MUSIC
Selda

Selda
2007 | B-MUSIC
Absolute Belter

Various
2010 | FINDERS KEEPERS
Solla Solla

Ilaiyaraaja
2011 | FINDERS KEEPERS
The B-Music of Jean Rollin

Various Artists
2012 | FINDERS KEEPERS

Interview: Sally Shapiro

Laura Studarus — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 17:35:39 +0000

Sally Shapiro is genuinely happy to be a part-time diva. Having eschewed the trappings of a full-time music career (no late-night performances or tireless promo appearances, and all but a handful of interviews), what we know about her is largely derived from her three albums of unapologetically romantic Italo disco. While Shapiro will admit that she prefers not to sing anything she can’t identify with, the details of Shapiro’s personal life — and even her real name — are all but lost in the haze of producer Johan Agebjörn’s effervescent electro pop, acid house, and dance tunes. Just the way she likes it.

eMusic’s Laura Studarus caught up with Shapiro and Agebjörn, and the two joined her in a conversation about their new album Somewhere Else, the power of nostalgia, and the cinematic possibilities of their back catalog.

Being film fans, do you ever picture how your music might be used in movies?

Agebjörn: On “Sundown” on Somewhere Else, we tried to recreate the sound of a certain type of ’80s ballads, or maybe not exactly ballads, but some kind of slower 80s pop. With the saxophone solo at the end it sounds (especially on the vinyl version of the album) very much like something played in a cheap bar in the ’80s — for example, in the bars on the Viking Line ferries between Sweden and Finland. The lyrics are about having lost your love, so we imagine a scene in a movie taking place in the ’80s, where someone has just lost her/his love and is sitting in a bar, drinking in order to forget, while the live band is playing this song.

Shapiro: Our track “Casablanca Nights” [from Agebjörn's album with the same name] was originally inspired by the film Love Actually, and all the complicated love stories in there. The writing of the song started with the phrase “Since when did love get uncomplicated?” However, if we got to set one of our tracks to that movie, we would choose the last minutes of our first track, “I’ll Be By Your Side,” to the happy ending scene with people hugging each other.

Agebjörn: When we made “Swimming Through The Blue Lagoon” [from the album My Guilty Pleasure], we didn’t have the film The Blue Lagoon from 1980 in mind, but we had watched the film many years ago, so probably it was a subconscious influence. Our track would suit pretty well, we think, to the scenes where they are swimming in the lagoon, obviously.

With love as a running them throughout your music, do you consider yourselves to be romantics?

Shapiro: [Laughs.] Yes, I would really say so!

Agebjörn: Music is a good way to express that. Because I don’t think we are more romantic than everyday people in our ordinary, day-to-day actions. But inside, yeah.

What’s more fun for you, to create a tragic love song? Or one that’s a bit happier?

Shapiro: I think a tragic one is better. Or funnier, in a way. It feels more real, even though there are happy love stories also. But it feels more strong.

Agebjörn: Maybe you have a need to express it more.

Shapiro: Happy love, it feels like it should happen more with a different sound than [ours]. Happy love songs have to be good — at least if you’re going to bother to make a whole album of them.

Agebjörn: I think it can be some kind of therapy for yourself, to express melancholic feelings in the music.

Who brings most of these themes to the table?

Shapiro: I don’t really know who does the most. It feels like we both do. But I can’t really say. I think it’s quite equal.

Agebjörn: In the beginning it felt a bit more like my project than it does now. At least the first few songs.

Shapiro: Yes. I feel more a part of it now. Not that I didn’t have a chance to be more a part of it before, but it feels like I’m taking a bigger part in it.

Agebjörn: I don’t have to convince Sally as much as I did in the beginning. So that’s good.

Shapiro: No [laughs]. In the beginning it was more like my saying “yes” or “no” to the things that Johan wrote for me. But now I’m more in the process.

How important is it to you that your personality comes through in these songs?

Shapiro: It is important that it’s not a total other personality. There is more to both me and Johan’s personality than we express in the songs, but it’s important that it feels like us. Or at least one of us.

Agebjörn: I remember you weren’t too fond of “Space Woman From Mars.”

Shapiro: No. Exactly. Because that’s not something I can really identify with. But I can identify with most of the other songs. Therefore the lyrics are very important for me.

Do you see music as an escape from your day-to-day life? Or is it an expression of it?

Shapiro: A tough question!

Agebjörn: Maybe it’s an escape if you look at what you do. We both have other occupations.

Shapiro: But not in a feelings way. It makes feelings get stronger.

Agebjörn: You feel like you’re more of yourself. I didn’t realize when we first made Disco Romance, but when I thought about the songs, I was just thinking that, “OK, let’s do this the Italo disco way.” I didn’t realize until afterwards that there was a lot of my personality in it as well.

I think that that could be hard to escape, not putting your personality into a project, even when you’re working in a frame like Italo disco.

Shapiro: [Laughs.] Yeah. It would probably not be very good either. Maybe it depends on the artist.

Agebjörn: when I look back at the different types of music that I tried to create back in 2005 or 2006, the songs that were most successful were probably the songs where I expressed my personality. I also made French Filter House music, which was popular about 10 years ago. I tried to do some of that. When I listen to it today, it sounds pathetic, since I was just copying things. Where as Sally Shapiro and my own music, there’s more of myself in it.

Do you find that now you’re taking even more ownership of your music, Somewhere Else expresses who you are maybe more than Disco Romance did?

Shapiro: Maybe in some way, with some of the songs.

Agebjörn: On the other hand, “Find My Soul” from Disco Romance, it’s a song about having a boyfriend who doesn’t understand you, which was a theme in your life.

Shapiro: Yeah, yeah! That’s true. [Laughs.]

Is it easier for you to be vulnerable about things like a boyfriend that doesn’t understand you in song than, say, discussing them with a friend?

Shapiro: Absolutely. Yeah.

Agebjörn: That’s something we’ve talked about. Sally sometimes says if everyone knew her name and who she was, she wouldn’t be able to do this in the same intimate way.

Shapiro: Yeah. I don’t think so. I think that’s also important. You are more free in this way. Some of it can sound very intimate. And that’s a frightening feeling if you’re called out. But I think many people feel that but can’t express that, because it’s been expressed so many ways before. But doing it this way, it feels like you can do it, and not think about that all the time. In that way it’s better.

Was music a major part of both of your childhoods?

Agebjörn: Yes. I recorded stuff to tape when I was five or six years old. I still have some of those tapes. It’s fun to listen to them. I recorded myself singing and making sounds and things.

Shapiro: We both — like most people in Sweden, really — went to this music school in our spare time where we learned to play piano.

Agebjörn: My strongest musical memories are all from the time I was a teenager. It seems like that’s pretty common.

Shapiro: It’s also a period when you start to build up an identity. What kind of music you listen to becomes part of your identity.

Agebjörn: What’s funny with Sally Shapiro is that I didn’t listen to disco so much when I was in my late teenage years. I listened to disco when I was 12. Electronica was part of my later teenage period. Then I returned to my love from childhood.

It’s amazing how we do return to things we loved as children.

Shapiro: Yeah. It’s hard to say if we really do still like them.

Agebjörn: We are very nostalgic people, both me and Sally.

Is there a song or a band that reminds you of the first time you fell in love?

Agebjörn: I remember I was listening to an album by Erasure when I was in a period of unhappy love when I was 17 years old. It was the album I Say I Say I Say that contains the song “Always” [sings], “Always, always, do do do.”

In the past, your music has been called a “guilty pleasure.” What do you think would be the greatest compliment that someone could say about your music?

Agebjörn: Sometimes we get emails from people who tell us stories, personal stories about our music and how it has affected them. That’s the best thing that can happen in terms of feedback. Someone told us our music helped them start a relationship — that’s really fantastic.

Shapiro: It is fun when people feel that they can identify, that it expresses their feelings. I like that.

Six Degrees of Matmos’s The Marriage of True Minds

Philip Sherburne — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:27:24 +0000

The Album

The Marriage of True Minds

Matmos
2013 | Thrill Jockey

Musicians who have been visited by the muse are fond of remarking that a song or album "practically wrote itself." To create The Marriage of True Minds, Matmos's Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt came up with an ingenious conceit to facilitate that sort of automatic writing. Inspired by experiments in telepathy, they invited friends to submit to mild sensory deprivation and then attempt to divine "the concept of the new Matmos album,"... which Daniel mentally projected at them from an adjacent room. They then used those transcripts as the guidelines for the album, availing themselves of cues both straightforward (Latin rhythms, chanting) and esoteric ("squelchy, squishy" sounds, rendered with chocolate pudding and an espresso machine).

The concept may sound off the wall, but the results turn out to be eminently listenable and, in places, surprisingly traditional — particularly when compared to the squirrelly bleeps of their last album, Supreme Balloon. Alongside organ drones and knotty sound collages, there are reassuring pentatonic melodies, sashaying samba rhythms, Krautrock miniatures and funky Afro-techno rave-ups; it's all deftly stitched together in a way that suggests the hyperactive stream-of-consciousness of a mind firing on all cylinders. Or, in this case, many minds. Here, we unpack the album's ideas by looking at some of the precedents for Matmos' experiments in social neural networks.
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The Uncanny Volley

An Introduction To Evp

The Ghost Orchid
2006 | Ash International / Kudos Records Limited

Although Matmos's telepathic investigations carry more weight as a compositional exercise (or a "conceptual gambit," as M.C. Schmidt put it), they nevertheless highlight the unstable relationship between sound and representation, between waveform and essence. Could recorded sound carry a resonance that goes beyond the merely emotional? Could it tap into other dimensions? That might sound like quackery until you consider that Thomas Edison himself speculated about the possibility of a device that... would facilitate communication with the spirits of the dead. (Edison must have had a morbid streak; he envisioned the phonograph not only as a tool for playing back music and speeches but also to preserve "the last words of dying persons.") For researchers in EVP, or electronic voice phenomena, Edison's dream is a reality: they claim that spirit voices, inaudible in person, can be captured on ordinary recording devices. This 1999 album collects dozens of alleged examples of EVP recorded by Raymond Cass and other researchers, representing various types of phenomena: polyglot voices, which seem to speak in tongues; voices that sneak through radio transmissions; "singing" voices, which haunt musical broadcasts; and even alien voices, which sound like emanations from a world far beyond the afterlife. Skeptics are unlikely to be persuaded by many of these examples, in which transcribed track titles bear only the most tenuous relationship to the sounds on tape, and even then ("Uppsala Sun Countess"?) come close to nonsense. (One would hope, too, that if Philip Larkin did speak to us from the dead, he'd have something more profound to say than simply, "Something.") However, augmented with running commentary from Leif Elggren and the researchers themselves, the album makes for a fascinating archival document, and the strangeness of the captured sounds, combined with eerie radiophonic squeals and static, may just raise the hackles of even confirmed non-believers.
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The Abstract Revolutionary

Cardew: Treatise - Live Prague 1967

Quax Ensemble
2009 | Mode / Entertainment One Distribution

One of the challenges Matmos faced in transforming their participants' visions into music was deciding how to interpret certain cues. What does a "very large green triangle" sound like? That question has its roots in the work of Cornelius Cardew, a radical thinker and composer who might have answered, "However you want it to sound." Cardew's Treatise, composed throughout the late 1960s, marked a revolutionary upset in the battle between intention and... interpretation: a graphic score, ultimately 193 pages long, in which conventional musical notation was replaced by cryptic shapes and markings with no explicit musical meaning. Cardew wrote, "Treatise is a continuous weaving and combining of a host of graphic elements (of which only a few are recognizably related to musical symbols) into a long visual composition, the meaning of which in terms of sound is not specified in any way. Any number of musicians using any media are free to participate in a 'reading' of this score ... and each is free to interpret it in his own way." This 1967 recording by Prague's QUaX Ensemble was performed using a portion of the score, which Cardew would not complete until 1970. Flautist Petr Kotik leads his colleagues (tenor saxophonist Pavel Kondelík, trombonist Jan Hyncica, percussionist Josef Vejvoda and pianist Vácav Sahradník) in a two-hour journey that travels far and wide through passages both dulcet and dissonant and across aching silences, as though the music were summoning itself into being by virtue of thought alone. In many ways, it was.
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The Concrete Mixer

Schaeffer : L'Œuvre musicale

Pierre Schaeffer
INA GRM / Abeille Musique

For "Ross Transcript," Matmos decided to play it straight, translating the sounds imagined by one of their experimental subjects on a roughly one-to-one level. The result, a linear stream of radio-dial swirl, snippets of easy-listening music, ringing telephones and all manner of gurgling noises, is intended as an homage to classic musique concrete, the style of musical collage that has informed Matmos' work since their very earliest recordings. The French composer and... theorist Pierre Schaeffer was the first person to utilize recordings of everyday sounds as the basis for musical composition. Making good on the futurist sonics envisioned by Russolo in his "Art of Noises," Schaeffer cut and pasted "sound objects" on magnetic tape into vivid, perception-bending collages. This three-disc set of Schaeffer's collected works begins with "Etude aux Chemins de Fer," which manipulates train sounds into a radical fusion of noise, music and representational sound; 1950's "L'oiseau R.A.I." plays with tape speed, overdubbing and electronic effects to turn twittering birds into an alien chorus. By 1959's "Étude aux Objets," the sounds of conventional instruments are stretched to the breaking point, while 1975's "Trièdre Fertile" leads us to a world of pure, abstract electronic sound.
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The Oral Historian

Steve Reich: Different Trains

Steve Reich
2004 | naïve / Montaigne / Naive

Occasionally, the voices of Matmos's experimental subjects surface in The Marriage of True Minds, which makes for a neat trick: recordings of participants imagining the new Matmos album become part of the shape of the music itself. (Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies!) Steve Reich began his career by turning spoken-word recordings into music; "It's Gonna Rain" loops an evangelical preacher's thundering sermon into rhythmic surges of pure fire and brimstone, while "Come Out"... is constructed using the testimony of a 19-year-old beaten by police in the Harlem riot of 1964. For 1988's Different Trains, a meditation on American exceptionalism and the European Holocaust that takes train travel as its central motif, Reich expanded upon this kind of documentary expressionism by modeling string melodies after spoken-word passages taken from interviews with Holocaust survivors and train conductors. Turning memory into music, it's a remarkable kind of transubstantiation.
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The Brain Wavers

Love Bites (Special Edition)

Buzzcocks
2008 | EMI

Once you get past its paranormal gimmick and conceptual trappings, The Marriage of True Minds is really about something far simpler: the mystery of romance — or, more specifically, the possibility of truly knowing a romantic partner, as Schmidt and Daniel have been for 20 years. The telepathic experiments out of which the album emerged are, in this sense, just a dramatization of the entirely prosaic sort of "mind-reading" to which every... lover will succumb, on occasion. The album's closing song, a cover of the Buzzcocks' "ESP," plays out the lover's conundrum in straightforward terms: "Do you believe in E.S.P.? / I do and I'm trying to get through to you / If you're picking up off me / Then you know just what to do – think." Love Bites, the 1978 album on which the song originally appeared, is a masterpiece of anguished lovers' punk, tearing at the loose ends of unrequited love with the adolescent fury of ragged, back-to-basics rock and roll. (Where most punks turned their rage outwards, the Buzzcocks, doomed romantics to the core, tended to sink the blade deep into their own hearts.) Even committed Buzzcocks fans might not at first recognize the provenance of Matmos' version, however. It begins with death metal growls and cavernous guitars and then morphs into a kind of psychedelic hoedown; Daniel and Schmidt sing the chorus in unison before the music abruptly cuts off and Schmidt intones, "So…think." The moral of the story? If telepathy fails, try telempathy.
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Brandt Brauer Frick, Miami

Ben Beaumont-Thomas — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 12:00:30 +0000

Wittily redefining the parameters of bass music

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

After the portentous funeral procession of the 10-minute opener, “Miami Theme,” the sensational second track, “Ocean Drive,” is a slice of fiery funk, piano stabs jabbing around a 4/4 bass beat. It is cinematic, oxygenated techno that uses the piano’s percussive heft to drive the track forward.

German electronic musician Gudrun Gut uses deranged repeated whispers to embellish the ornate instrumentation of “Fantasie Madchen.” Sun Ra member Om’Mas Keith, who crafted a number of tracks on Frank Ocean’s Channel ORANGE, chants in the slipstream of the beats on “Plastic Like Your Mother.” And Jamie Lidell brings an intoxicating sensuality to album highlight “Broken Pieces,” where the trio ditches steady beats in favor of pure syncopation.

These guests slots smooth out the potential fussiness of the instrumentation, which includes everything from plucked strings to warm brass. The bottom end of a tuba’s range rumbles through “Verwahrlosung” — it could be the trio wittily redefining the parameters of bass music.

John Foxx and The Maths, Evidence

Ian Gittins — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 14:14:48 +0000

The electronic music godfather still sounds fresh and vital

An under-celebrated godfather of electronic music, John Foxx might flippantly now also be described as its grandfather, but at 65 his fecund productivity shows no sign of abating. Evidence is his third album with his latest band The Maths inside two years, and close on his 40th since he emerged as Ultravox’s original vocalist in 1977. Musically he still sounds fresh and vital. In a digital era, Foxx sticks doggedly to his analog guns, which means that inevitably, the Moog synthesizer-driven squeals and arabesques of Evidence recall the post-punk futurists of the early 1980s. The glacial sci-fi fantasia of “Neon Vertigo” and “Walk” show exactly why Foxx was a bigger hero than even Bowie for Gary Numan, while “Myriads” is a gossamer whirl of skittering keyboards. The wily Foxx even turns the cosmic psychedelic sprawl of Pink Floyd’s “Have a Cigar” into a throb of menacing electro-goth. He has always been a compulsive collaborator and guest artists abound here, with the pick being Brighton vocalist Gazelle Twin’s Liz Fraser-like poise amidst the spectral This Mortal Coil-esque calm of “Changelings.” At an age when most musicians are picking up their bus pass or milking the nostalgia circuit, it’s laudable that John Foxx is still striving to invent his idiosyncratic vision of the future.

25 Must-See Bands at SXSW 2013

eMusic Editorial Staff — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 18:25:16 +0000

Do we even need the preamble? You know what next week is and, like any right-thinking person, you’ve probably put off working out a schedule until the very last second. So as you start to hammer out your crazymaking week — probably on the plane, probably an hour or so before touching down — here are our picks for the 25 must-sees in Austin next week.

Free SXSW Sampler

Pissed Jeans

Honeys

Pissed Jeans
2013 | Sub Pop Records

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

Marnie Stern

Marnie Stern
2010 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

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

Cerulean Salt

Waxahatchee
2013 | Don Giovanni Records / Believe Digital

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

Charles Bradley

No Time for Dreaming

Charles Bradley
2011 | Daptone Records / The Orchard

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

METZ

METZ
2012 | Sub Pop Records

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

TORRES

TORRES
2013 | TORRES / TuneCore

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

Light Up Gold

Parquet Courts
2013 | What's Your Rupture?

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

Roc Marciano

Reloaded (Deluxe Edition)

Roc Marciano
Decon

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

Solange

True

Solange
2012 | Terrible Records / The Orchard

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

The Coup

Sorry To Bother You

The Coup
2012 | Anti/Epitaph

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

Samantha Crain

Kid Face

Samantha Crain
2013 | Ramseur Records / The Orchard

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

Autre Ne Veut

Anxiety

Autre Ne Veut
2013 | Software

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

Will Happiness Find Me?

Maria Minerva
2012 | Not Not Fun / Revolver

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

Leave Me Midnight

My Gold Mask
2013 | Goldy Tapes / CD Baby

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

Skeletonwitch

Forever Abomination

Skeletonwitch
Prosthetic / The Orchard

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

Iconic EP

Icona Pop
2012 | Big Beat Records/Atlantic

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

Killing the Darlings

Pearl And The Beard
2011 | Family Records / The Orchard

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

Chelle Rose

Ghost of Browder Holler

Chelle Rose
2012 | Lil' Damsel Records / TuneCore

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

Night Beats

Night Beats
2011 | Trouble In Mind Records / TuneCore

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

Leelanau

Dana Falconberry
2012 | Antenna Farm Records / The Orchard

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

Royal Thunder

CVI

Royal Thunder
2012 | Relapse Records

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

Noctuary

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

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

Cabinet of Curiosities

Jacco Gardner
2013 | Trouble In Mind Records / TuneCore

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

Andy Battaglia — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 16:42:40 +0000

A pointedly eclectic double album

One way for a long-running electronic-music act to ensure their listeners stay freaked out and confounded — two emotional qualities that have been Autechre’s specialties since their dawning IDM days — is to release a double-album that clocks in at a little over two hours. Another is to make a hectic opening track that falls apart so drastically that listeners might wonder if their playback systems have entered their death throes. So it goes about halfway through “Fleure,” the first of 17 pointedly eclectic tracks on Autechre’s superabundant Exai. The album begins its dissertation on variety with the English duo’s patented mix of abstract haphazardness and meticulous organization, and they expand outward exponentially from there. The 10-minute “irlite (Get 0)” opens with a grotty mix of refracted beats and noise before drifting into a spell of (comparatively) sumptuous groove science, almost like an Autechre version of house music. Melodies snake and swerve through almost every track otherwise, taking their time to develop and resolve, when they resolve at all. And the beats — well, they bristle, bray, lean back, zoom forward, break up, and beam out toward the outer edges of the cosmos, where music so serious and austere might provide a suitable soundtrack.

Young Dreams, Between Places

Laura Studarus — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 14:00:59 +0000

Brimming with youthful vigor and energy

On their debut Between Places, the Norwegian collective Young Dreams rounds out a subgenre in your music collection you didn’t even know existed: well-adjusted coming-of-age anthems. As evidenced by the driving album opener “Footprints,” where the band’s multiple singers toss out vocal harmonies as though auditioning for the musical adaptation of Fight Club, Young Dreams isn’t lacking for scrappy enthusiasm, and Between Places brims with youthful vigor and energy. They’ve obviously worked their way through the Beach Boy’s catalogue, as the bucolic multi-part harmonies on “When Kisses Are Salty” attest, but they don’t merely parrot their influences. Like Vampire Weekend of Fleet Foxes, they work in a light, retro-pop style that came to prominence that came to prominence years before they were born, updating it with lyrical signifiers of modern life: cell phone chargers, drinking games, and the otherworldly quality of summer vacation. Weaving in orchestral flourishes into the mix, Young Dreams haven’t just managed to make what’s old sound fresh, they’ve created something entirely new. Who says youth is wasted on the young?

Youth Lagoon, Wondrous Bughouse

Ryan Reed — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 14:00:48 +0000

A fascinating follow-up with a slightly out-of-focus aesthetic

If The Year of Hiberation, Trevor Powers’s debut album under the name Youth Lagoon, felt like riding a slow-moving, psychedelic county-fair carousel, then his sophomore effort, Wondrous Bughouse, is like being strapped into the spinning teacups at Disney World while on psychotropic drugs. This woozy, slightly out-of-focus aesthetic is a sharp U-turn, arriving after the pixie-dust electro-pop of Hibernation — it’s as if Powers grew disinterested in idyllic prettiness and purposely decided to uglify and intensify his trademark sound.

“Through Mind and Back” opens Bughouse with two minutes of discordant, fractured ambience, and the vibe only gets weirder from there: “Attic Doctor” is a trippy spookhouse waltz with dilapidated carnival synths, and “Pelican Man” channels the proggy mysticism of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. Even the warmest, cuddliest tracks here (like the mortality-driven fairy tale “Dropla”) find curious ways to meander and wilt: Check “Sleep Paralysis,” with Powers just missing those high notes; or “Mute,” with its organs chiming in and out of tune; or “The Bath,” in which percussion loops abruptly shift in tempo — a detour from the track’s emotional crescendo. But these left-field nuances offer Powers’s music grit and dynamic range: Even at its strangest, Wondrous Bughouse is never less than fascinating.

How to Destroy Angels, Welcome oblivion

Jon Wiederhorn — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 14:00:23 +0000

Both totally familiar and unlike anything Trent Reznor has ever done

Welcome oblivion, the first full-length album with Trent Reznor’s new band How to Destroy Angels, is both totally familiar and unlike anything Reznor has ever done. It’s dark, brooding and filled with angst, but the anger that drives Nine Inch Nails is mostly absent, replaced with a sense of urgent desperation, as if Reznor knows time is passing and he wants to explore new, challenging sonic avenues, much like his idol David Bowie.

At the end of “And the Sky Begins to Scream,” Reznor whispers, “I wanna tear it down to the ground and build another one.” The song follows this aspiration; it starts with a shower of fuzzy keyboard notes that flicker in and out as if emanating from a short-circuiting soundboard, before evolving into an alien soundscape of layered noises, and mid-paced beats and ethereal pop vocals by Reznor’s wife Mariqueen Maandig.

In part, How to Destroy Angels is the natural hybrid of Nine Inch Nails and the spacious, inventive film scores Reznor wrote with Atticus Ross for David Fincher. Ross is also a member of How to Destroy Angels, and he and Reznor continue to work with unsettling noises, ambient tones and dynamic arrangements. Yes, Reznor’s industrial arsenal is ever-present, but most of the songs are built around a haunting, almost meditative combination of syncopated electronic beats and deep keyboard bass lines. Comparisons can be made to Tricky’s 1996 album Pre-Millennium Tension and many of the ambient structures resemble Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV. But writing off Welcome oblivion as an amalgam of Reznor’s past work sells the project short.

The track with the most commercial potential, “How Long,” weaves a Peter Gabriel-esque chorus through a mélange of clattering beats and skewed melodic keyboard lines, while “Ice Age” balances picked, muted and transmuted acoustic guitar with Maandig’s soft, soothing vocals. While there are undercurrents of feedback throughout, the song maintains its twisted folk roots until five minutes in, when waves of digital noise — some of which sounds like an underground bagpipe — starts to infect the beauty of the melody. In “Too Late, All Gone” Maandig and Reznor sing together, “The more we change, everything stays the same.” Maybe it’s a personal revelation that regardless of how far he strays sonically, he remains the same brooding artist that wrote 1989′s groundbreaking Pretty Hate Machine. If he’s not happy with that for some reason, at least it wasn’t for a lack of trying.

March Music Days: The Crucial 100

J. Edward Keyes — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 12:45:00 +0000

Enter for a chance to win $500 in eMusic Credit!

I’m going to be candid about the inspiration for this list: In 1995, Alternative Press published a list of the 99 best records to be released since they began publication 10 years prior. As an amateur student of rock music, by that point I’d consumed dozens of lists like this, all of them in established, respectable music publications, and all of them bearing an eerie similarity to one another. So you can imagine my surprise when I scanned the Alternative Press list and came across not familiar glorified workhorses, but names like The Dwarves and PJ Harvey and the Fastbacks.

That list was revolutionary for me. It was the first list that dared to say the canon was wrong. It was the first list that redefined which records mattered and why, and the first list to present popular music through a decidedly defiant perspective. Most importantly, it was the first list to suggest that maybe you don’t really need to own all those James Taylor records. It is in the spirit of that list that we present eMusic’s Crucial 100: 100 albums that we think it’s important you own. These are the albums that rearranged our brains, and influenced the music that we care about. And for you lucky winners of our $500 credit contest: This is where we think you should start spending.

Songs of Unrest & Revolution

There's A Riot Goin' On

Sly And The Family Stone
2007 | Epic/Legacy

No one — not Bob Dylan sneering at Mr. Jones, not Roxanne Shanté tearing other female rappers to ribbons, not U-Roy sending up "gal-boy I Roy"— has put so vicious a mockery on record as Sly Stone did with There's a Riot Goin' On. Only he wasn't attacking a straw man or the competition: as his band disintegrated around him (Sly did much of the instrumental work himself, with few full-band performances... and a handful of guitar parts handled by Bobby Womack), Stone was side-eyeing his impossibly hopeful earlier records. Riot turns everything he'd ever done inside out — and, as the ultimate proof of his genius, made it even stronger. Here, the affirmations of old turn queasy, and set up withering denouements: The brave and strong survive . . . But you're crying anyway 'cause you're all broke down. When I'm lost, I know I will be found . . . Look at you fooling you. That extended to the music, too, most clearly on "Thank You For Talkin' to Me, Africa," in which the audaciously celebratory 1970 single "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" is sent back on the road covered in soot and at a third of its previous gear, but it's equally easy to hear the stuttering horns of "Brave & Strong" and the jagged guitar vamp of "Africa Talks to You 'The Asphalt Jungle'" as Bizarro World versions of "Dance to the Music" and its kin. It's the longest, darkest night of the soul ever put on record; it's also the deepest, most compulsively listenable album Sly — or anybody else — ever made.
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Things Fall Apart

The Roots
2004 | Geffen

In February 2000, the Roots won their first and only Grammy for "You Got Me," the lead single from fourth studio effort Things Fall Apart. In its chorus, Erykah Badu sings as if she's already lost hope in her tour-diary romance; remorse breaks her words into two. But Things' Grammy-winning single barely indicates just how much the Roots had learned to illustrate the hip-hop stories they'd grown so adept in telling —... tales of a pained, conscious existence rather than a drugged-up one, orchestrated by mellowed-out arrangements far more nuanced than even Badu's masterful aching. In "Table of Contents (Parts 1 & 2)," ?uestlove's cymbals whirr as if being sucked into a vacuum cleaner as Black Thought ricochets across his retelling of the band's origins in South Philadelphia. A playful tit-for-tat with Mos Def ("Double Trouble") simmers and pops around gently pulsing chimes. Scott Storch's fingers listlessly drag their way through a keyboard melody over which a fraught Black Thought cries: "Building his fifth foundation in the wilderness/ thoughtless, trespassing into the Thought's fortress." "You Got Me" helped the Roots sell more than 900,000 copies of Things Fall Apart — more commercial attention than the Philadelphia band's ever received before. But as soon as the Grammy-winning single thrust the Roots into mainstream airwaves, the band decided to stray as far from Top 40 territory as possible. The result? The genre-bending Phrenology.
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Radio Ethiopia

Patti Smith Group
1996 | Arista
New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)

Erykah Badu
2008 | Motown

The C.D. Version Of The First Two Records

Bikini Kill
1994 | Bikini Kill Records

"We're Bikini Kill, and we want revolution girl style noooooow!" On this album's first song, nestled between shards of feedback, lead singer Kathleen Hanna howled the battle cry that lit riot grrrl afire. But it wasn't a double dare, it was a promise: for an instigative seven years, Bikini Kill dealt fierce blows to punk rock's misogynist "White Boy" (as one song is titled) through abrasive guitar blasts and lyrics that combined... feminist polemic with the distinct intellectual valley-girl patois of their progressive hometown — teeny-tiny Olympia, WA. Encouraged by the DIY dictum that playing music sloppily was better than not playing music at all, Bikini Kill tore through their riffs with punk-rock vehemence and vision — but it was Hanna's exceptionally raw singing style that really got the band motoring. Sounding like the final hour of an exorcism, she growls, grunts, sasses, snarls, whines and screams this mother out; witness the snotty, possessed energy of "Suck My Left One" (a song congruous with X-Ray Spex's "Oh Bondage Up Yours"); the bloody shrieks and feedback tilt-a-whirl of "Thurston Hearts the Who"; and the self-determined anthem "Feels Blind," where Hanna spits, "I eat your hate like love!" Though their best album, Pussywhipped, arrived two years later, these tapes (half-produced by Fugazi's Ian MacKaye) seethe with untamed, eruptive energy and the thrilling first spark of ideation.
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Money Jungle

Duke Ellington
2002 | BLUE NOTE
We Can't Be Stopped

Geto Boys
Rap-A-Lot Fontana

Legalize It

Peter Tosh
1999 | Columbia/Legacy

The token communal house/dorm room/juice bar/island resort's reggae album (second only Bob Marley and the Wailers' Catch A Fire), Peter Tosh's solo debut Legalize It remains a stone classic, even if most of its fans rarely explore beyond the dense foliage of the front cover and title track to the treasures within. As a teen in the early '60s, Tosh befriended Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer and the trio became... a vocal group before eventually evolving into the Wailers. After two smash successes (Catch A Fire and Burnin') as well as a car accident that fractured Tosh's skull, Island refused to release a Tosh solo album and he left the fold to pursue his own rebel path to stardom.

While "Legalize It" has remained a rallying cry for decades (most recently in California), it's actually his least politically-charged album, though it is his most emotionally-fraught. Aside from the lilt of "Ketchy Shuby," Tosh grapples with darker moods. The heave of "No Sympathy" has Tosh match his aching guitar line: "Only me feel the pain/ not one good word of advice/ from any of my so-called friends" and "Why Must I Cry" — despite its bright synth line and island meter — finds him isolated by his heartache. On the roiling piano of "Igziabeher (Let Jah Be Praised)," Tosh conjures up biblical disasters to scatter non-believers and his enemies "as the smoke was driven away." And he doesn't mean that kind of smoke.
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Fear Of A Black Planet

Public Enemy
1994 | Def Jam/RAL
London Calling

The Clash
2000 | Epic

Repeater (Plus 3 Songs)

Fugazi
Dischord Records

If 13 Songs was a soup of dubbed-out Stooges songs, Repeater boiled it all down to screeches and thuds, welding shards of feedback, bass thrum and tom rolls — a sound as stark as the album's blue-and-white cover, and as dynamic as the interior photos. Lyrical impressionism mixes with guilt and rage. At one end: "What a difference/ a little difference would make." At the other: "We are all bigots/so filled... with hatred /we release our poisons." The title track bellows at D.C.'s crack crisis; "Merchandise" reminds you of what they don't sell on tour. "Provisional" from Margin Walker gets a two-guitar reboot as "Reprovisional," hinting at power that was once only implied. "Shut the Door," a compassionate, furious look at a heroin overdose, is almost haiku-like in its simplicity and all the more powerful for it.

The CD pressing of Repeater was appended to include the 3 Songs 7-inch. "Joe #1" is a thudding instrumental, "Break-In" an older song about assault, but "Song #1" is a almost a post-hardcore manifesto: "Fighting for a haircut?/ Then grow your hair/ Crying for the music?/ I doubt you really care/ Looking for an answer?/ You can find it anywhere/ It's nothing."

Dig the new breed.
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Pink Flag

Wire
2009 | CAROLINE WORLD SERVICE
Lyte As A Rock

MC Lyte
2010 | Rhino/Elektra

Dark Nights of the Soul

Exile in Guyville

Liz Phair
ATO Records

In 1991 — at least five years before the first blog was identified as such — Oberlin art history grad Liz Phair quietly sent around a series of home-recorded cassettes she'd made under the moniker Girly Sound. The recordings were crudely rendered, rudely conceived (covering such post-feminist subjects as "Black Market White Baby Dealers" and "Willie the Six-Dicked Pimp") and immediately caught the ear of alt-nation's underground cognoscenti, who recognized an art-damaged... rebel without a cause when they heard one. Those recordings quickly went down in rock history as one of the finest albums of its era, maybe even of all time: she released 1993's Exile in Guyville, which for all intents and purposes reads today as an eighteen-track, album-length blog, replete with all the technologically-enabled oversharing and snarktastic, hit-and-run gender politics this description implies.

Phair was living at home with her parents in Winnetka, Illinois (suburbia being the best locale from which to wage war on an unsuspecting, male-dominated rock hierarchy) when she began re-recording some of her early Girly Sound demos with producer Brad Wood. What took shape was originally touted as a song-by-song response to Pussy Galore's noisy assassination of the Rolling Stones classic Exile on Main Street — a claim that no longer seems plausible (is "Girls! Girls! Girls!" really Phair's answer to "Turd on the Run?"); the record helped paint her as something of a pop-culture pirate princess from the get-go. The album quickly established its no-holds-barred M.O. with "Glory," an ode to cunnilingus ostensibly meant to "empower" but equally intended to shock, to determine which people were paying attention (and most certainly, the little girls understood, championing Phair as their tough-talking older sister almost immediately). This was followed in rapid succession by rough-and-ready autobiography that portrayed Phair as little but "a cunt in spring, you can rent me by the hour" ("Dance of the Seven Veils"), a scheming pleasure addict who "jumps when you circle the cherry" ("Canary"), a commitment-phobic tramp who secretly wishes for a boyfriend who "makes love 'cuz he's in it... and all that stupid old shit" ("Fuck and Run"), employs devastatingly personal self-critique ("How sleazy it is, messing with these guys") on "Shatter" and showcases her signature Girly Sound tune "Flower," a multi-Liz madrigal promising some anonymous indie rock dude she'll be his "blowjob queen" and "fuck you and your minions too" (unfortunately changing the "and your girlfriend too" lyric from her original tapes). All of this devastation was delivered in a voice so deadpan and emotion-free it was described by Rob Sheffield as "Peppermint Patty on a bad caffeine jag" and came across like the alt-nation's musical answer to another Liz, Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose self-skewering pseudo-confessional narratives also oddly prefigured the stylistic norms of the blogosphere by a number of years.

How an album so prescient and influential — one can argue that Alanis Morrissette owes the entirety of her career to the firewalk first traveled on Guyville — ever disappeared from Matador's catalog is beyond me, particularly when you consider that in this post-digital, file-sharing age, nothing should ever truly go "out of print." But the album's re-release, while not offering anything particularly revealing in the way of extras save for Phair's interpolation of "Wild Thing" as something of a Mean Girls rewrite, does underscore its importance by stripping away the pretend-porn veneer that originally defined it and revealing the core of what it was, is, and always shall remain: the document of a generation of women in transition, preparing the way for what the New York Times recently described as the lingua franca of the internet, a dialogue that, by turn, has emerged as "smart yet conversational, funny in a merciless way, righteously indignant but comically defeated, where every man [cheats] on his partner and all the women are slutty." Welcome, boys and grrls, to the 21st Century.
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De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas

Mayhem
1997 | Century Media / The Orchard
Blood On The Tracks

Bob Dylan
1984 | Columbia

Low

David Bowie
1999 | VIRGIN

"One day I blew my nose and half my brains came out." That was David Bowie in 1976, nearing the end of a years-long coke binge that had burned through the better part of his nasal passages and rendered him so clammy and paranoid he was diving into black magic to escape, drawing pentagrams on the floor of his L.A. apartment, keeping his own urine in jars in the refrigerator and burning... black candles as protection from evil spirits. He was seeing ghosts, giving loopy interviews heavy on Hitler-praising pull-quotes and his marriage to Angie was on the verge of collapse.

And so Bowie, with Iggy Pop in tow, went to Berlin to get clean (an aim at which he only fitfully succeeded) and, as he put it, "[to discover] a new musical language." Low, the first part of his celebrated Berlin Trilogy and the first stage in a full sonic reinvention. Unlike the plastic soul of Young Americans or Station to Station's manic panic, Low revels in total existential blankness. Bowie was openly in the thrall of bands like Neu! and Kraftwerk, and Low clearly reflects the influence of the former's stentorian, motorik rhythms and the latter's subzero synthesizers.

The album is famously divided into two halves, with a batch of Bowie-sung "song fragments" counterbalanced by a suite of gorgeous but deeply unsettling ambient-instrumentals; what's most notable is that, spiritually, Bowie feels as ice-cold and absent on the songs where he sings as on the ones where he doesn't. Herky-jerk "Breaking Glass," with its hectoring Carlos Alomar guitar line finds Bowie as self-referential as he'd ever been, darkly warning "don't look at the carpet — I drew something awful on it," before snidely declaring: "you're such a wonderful person — but you've got problems." De facto pop single "Sound And Vision" — if only because no other song on the album features an immediate hook — finds him distrusting his own senses, cooing "Don't you wonder, sometimes, 'bout sound and vision?" over the kind of chilly cascading synths that typically turn up on Joy Division albums.

As solid and striking as the vocals are, though, Low's back half is where it moves from experiment to masterpiece. Using layer upon layer of unholy synthesizer, Bowie — with the help of producer Brian Eno, himself no stranger to the power of ambiance — create an entire, flickering nighttime urban cityscape, where hustle and busyness ("A New Career in a New Town") slowly give way to the awful eeriness of nighttime ("Subterraneans"). Bowie's voice appears in fits and starts, mostly chanting strange, monosyllabic nonsense words — a thin, pale warlock looking glumly into his cauldron, drawn and spent. Taken together, the two halves of Low offer a picture of an artist at a crossroads, unsure of where to go next, but knowing all roads lead to darkness.
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Children of God/World of Skin

Swans
2003 | Young God / Revolver

Up until 1987, the last place in the world you might have expected to hear an acoustic guitar was on a Swans album. But with Children of God, the band augmented its brute physicality with a "New Mind," as the opening track put it, and a new palette to match. ("I will be there/ With my eyes wide open/ I will be there/ I will be ready/ To receive/ The new mind.")... From the cover alone, with its puce-and-fuchsia color scheme, its swirls and crosses, you could guess that Swans had entered a new phase, and the album's first three tracks made that abundantly clear. "New Mind" sounded more or less like the Swans of yore — more cleanly produced, perhaps, but still displaying the same doomy riffs, the same war-dance drums, the same call-and-response vocals — but the "In My Garden" came from a different universe entirely, with a high-necked bass melody inspired by Joy Division, limpid pianos reminiscent of Harold Budd, and a wraithlike Jarboe intoning, "In my garden/ We'll never die." "Our Love Lies" completed their transmutation with strummed acoustic guitars and tambourine and Michael Gira not just growling but singing, his baritone sinking to the lower limit of his register like a body weighted by stones. The rest of the album alternates between slow-motion head-bangers, like "Our Love Lies" and "Like a Drug," and deathly folk songs judiciously touched up with synthesizers and effects, like "Blood and Honey" and "You're Not Real, Girl." On the hypnotic title song, Jarboe's ecstatic mantra ("We are children/ Children of God") swirls above see-sawing guitars and stark, metallic drum beats; there's little doubt that, whatever their previously nihilistic outlook, Swans finally see the light of redemption, however fleetingly.

A few months before Children of God, Gira and Jarboe explored even more gentle textures on a pair of albums recorded under the name of Skin. Jarboe's voice carried Blood, Women, Roses, while Gira assumed center stage on Shame, Humility, Revenge, but both albums shared the same downy textures, forsaking Swans' usual sturm und drang in favor of strings, acoustic guitars, hushed synthesizers, and echoing electronic drums — a mixture that could almost have been mistaken for This Mortal Coil. Both records were repackaged in 1988 as the double LP, The World of Skin, and 14 songs were selected for 1997's Children of God / World of Skin reissue.
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Sister

Sonic Youth
1987 | Squeaky Squawk / TuneCore
American IV: The Man Comes Around

Johnny Cash
2013 | American Recordings

Bone Machine

Tom Waits
1992 | ISLAND RECORDS

Released after a five-year break between albums — then the longest in his career — Bone Machine marks the beginning of a era in which Waits's records are isolated and self-contained, as if he goes dormant after each session and reemerges only after he's come up with something to say. The marionette march of "Earth Died Screaming" recalls the clatter of Rain Dogs' "Singapore," but Waits strips the songs bare as he... goes, paring away the excess; "Jesus Gonna Be Here" is just upright bass, dobro, and Waits's voice echoing in what sounds like an empty warehouse. On "In the Colosseum," he sounds as if he's been to hell and back and might just consider repeating the journey, the clanking percussion forging a concrete link to the album's title. Like the contemporaneous The Black Rider, Bone Machine risks falling into a fire-and-brimstone rut, but "Black Wings" shifts the album into a slightly less apocalyptic register. "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" could be a demented Disney theme, and "That Feel" closes with a dash of ghostly gospel harmony. It's hardly Waits's most approachable album, but its skeletal embrace is surprisingly welcoming.
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Enter The Wu-Tang

Wu Tang Clan
1993 | RCA Records Label
Pornography

The Cure
2006 | Rhino/Elektra

Funhouse [Deluxe Edition]

The Stooges
2005 | Rhino/Elektra
The Queen Is Dead

The Smiths
1986 | Rhino

Rid Of Me

P.J. Harvey
1993 | ISLAND RECORDS

The cover of PJ Harvey's second album shows her in the shower — a typical setting for a male fantasy, but one that she upends by being depicted mid-hair-flip, creating an arc of wet hair and water that frames her gently grinning face. That upending of traditional tropes of desire was all over her debut, Dry, but it becomes even more in-your-face on Rid of Me, which is littered with body parts... and fluids and the emotions brought forth by their deployment. Engineered by Steve Albini in such a way that it brought the essential tensions of Harvey's music — masculine/feminine, beautiful/ugly, ecstatic/unfulfilled — right to the forefront, Rid of Me contains some of the most iconic songs of Harvey's career — the ode to swagger "50ft Queenie," the low-end-plumbing depiction of female frustration "Dry," the take-the-reins cover of Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited." There's also "Yuri-G," a depiction of romantic madness that might be one of the most-overlooked songs in her catalog, despite its garage-borne chorus and fearless troop toward its endpoint.

But it's the differing treatments of the gender-flipping "Man-Size," which are presented as both a straightforward, slow-build rock song and as a piece arranged for strings and voice (called "Man-Size Sextet"), that perhaps best encapsulate the tension that's all over the album; while the Albini-engineered "Man-Size" has at least a bit of foreplay involved before Harvey breaks into a caterwaul on the song's final chorus, on the string-assisted version (which was arranged by Harvey's percussionist Robert Ellis) nerves crackle and snap against each other thanks to the strings clashing against each other in an icy, dissonant way as Harvey declares her dominance — at times, though, she does it in such a controlled way that it sounds like she's communicating through a jaw wired shut from repressed desire. The beauty brought forth by the strings only serves to underscore the jitters brought on by the idea of possibly possessing what is desired; that fear isn't brought on by the idea of possible transcendence as much as it is borne by the idea of losing that always-desired feeling, and subsequently having to root around the ugly, unfulfilling world of debasement and thwarted intentions explored elsewhere on the album.
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Sonic Terrorists

The Cold Vein

Cannibal Ox
2001 | Definitive Jux / The Orchard

The enduring idea of a hip-hop underground relies on our faith in the entrepreneurial spirit. Nobody wants a boss, and this is part of what compelled El-P to leave Rawkus in the late 1990s and form his own label, Definitive Jux, future home of Aesop Rock, Cage, Mr. Lif, Murs and others. He poured himself into the label's first album, the debut from Harlem rappers Vast Aire and Vordul Mega. The Cold... Vein remains an outlier classic, El-P channeling his inner Eno, and Vast and Vordul looking up from their comic books and imagining their escape from the present might come in the form of teleportation.
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Richard D. James Album

Aphex Twin
2005 | Rhino/London-Sire

Arguably Aphex Twin's definitive album — and not only because it bears his birth name — 1996's Richard D. James Album keeps you guessing. How can something feel at once so slight and so substantial? Whimsical melodies play out like music-box fantasias against forbiddingly complex drum programming; James has never seemed more like a trickster, with his self-evident sense of humor running from goofy ("Milkman") to deranged (the strange outro to "Girl/Boy... (Redruth Mix)"), but tracks like "Boy/Girl Song" and even the quadruple-time "4" hide an unmistakable sense of melancholy beneath their cartoonish folds. Many of the tracks here run to a measly two or three minutes — a blink of the eye, compared to the epic inclinations of so much electronic music. But with tempos racing to 180 BPM or so, and with chopped and rearranged breakbeats sprayed in a kind of hyperrhythmic slurry, James squeezes more action in his short-form sketches than many producers manage in an entire album. Hyperactive and/or mischievous listeners will get their fix in the brazenly kinetic antics of "Corn Mouth" or "Inkey$"; sensitive types are advised to start with the coy "To Cure a Weakling Child" or the plangent "Figerbib."
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Dummy

Portishead
1994 | Island Def Jam
Screamadelica

Primal Scream
1991 | Sire/Warner Bros.

Untrue

Burial
Hyperdub / The Orchard

We all know about the "Difficult Second Album" — the oft-rushed record made amid suffocating expectations and incessant touring. But some follow-ups not only make good on a promising debut but also retroactively imbue the entire enterprise with more intrigue than could have been recognized at the start. In 2007, M.I.A.'s Kala and LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver entered the ranks of this special kind of second album, and so did Burial's... Untrue.

Part of the allure of dubstep, the sound that Burial — an anonymous London musician — helped establish, is that it's so sparse and elemental that it eludes description almost by design: To formally address the qualities of dubstep is to paradoxically do damage to its most evocative parts — the parts that aren't there, the haunted parts, the spectral spaces that surround the tangible sounds and make it all happen through the force of their very absence. It's complicated, but it's also extremely compelling — and more immediately so on Untrue than it was on the self-titled 2006 debut that made Burial's name.

Untrue benefits from the conspicuous presence of vocals that prove newly forceful and free. Whereas voices served as atmospheric agents on the debut, here they drive tracks into the space of certifiable songs. "Archangel" announces the change at the start, with a mercury-mouthed male diva singing about "kissing you" and "holding you" in desperate, unsettling tones. A similar strategy plays out in "Near Dark," in which the vocal sentiment in the refrain "I can't take my eyes off you" applies just as much to ears.

The way that Burial foregrounds vocals as melody-makers veers back toward 2-step garage, the poppy post-jungle sound that ultimately evolved into grime and then into dubstep. The formal lures of dubstep proper remain here, but they also sound more kinetic and progressive. Even when the voices fade and drift like mist in the background, there are moods to be gleaned from the beats — the ticks and trips that toggle like drum 'n'bass risen from the grave as something irretrievably decayed but also irresistibly angelic.
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Homework

Daft Punk
1997 | VIRGIN

The mid-1990s was a prosperous time for aspiring dance artists, as big beats graced TV commercials and briefly invaded the charts. But the album-length statement of genius remained an elusive quest. That's what made Homework, the debut album from the mysterious French duo of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, so absorbing. Rather than a collection of singles — massive though they were — Homework managed to capture a feeling of discovery... and exploration.

So there were the era-defining hits "Around the World" and "Da Funk," as well as throbbing club wonders like "Phoenix," "Revolution 909" and "Indo Silver Club." But there were also occasions for reflection and nostalgic pauses, like the ethereal, cresting "Fresh" and the noisome funk of "Oh Yeah," or skits like "Daftendirekt" and "WDPK 83.7 FM," a tribute to the teachers broadcasting daily along the FM dial. As the name suggested, Homework resulted from years of careful study of the finest house, techno, electro and hip-hop records. Perhaps this appreciation for musical history is what compelled Daft Punk to even greater heights in the years to follow. Despite the mystery around their true identities, this is a debt they were never above repaying, from the elaborate, reference-filled Homework album sleeve to "Teachers," a roll call of the duo's personal heroes.
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The Raincoats

The Raincoats
1979 | We ThRee / The Orchard
The Shape Of Jazz To Come

Ornette Coleman
2005 | Rhino Atlantic

Short Films & Diary Entries

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

Lauryn Hill
1998 | Ruffhouse

Wanting to shed the sexist perception that fellow Fugee and ex-boyfriend Wyclef Jean had shaped her, Lauryn Hill retaliated by creating one of the best albums of the 90s. "Music is supposed to inspire," she sings on "Superstar" — perhaps to Jean, her failed svengali, perhaps to her label bosses, perhaps to her own demanding audience. "So how come we ain't getting no higher?" She then sets out to answer the... question for herself.

Like Marvin Gaye's epic albums of the 1970s, "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" is an emotionally raw set of performances. Hill's voices proliferate, sometimes moving in unison or harmony, sometimes commenting on or responding to one another, sometimes pleading, preaching, declaring and doubting all at once.

The incendiary, hard-rocking "Lost Ones," the witty, winning "Doo Wop (That Thing)," the angry, avenging "Final Hour," and the sweetly remembered "Every Ghetto, Every City" are her moments of clarity. But for the rest of the record, she works through the confusion and ambivalence wrought by love and betrayal — never more intensely than on "Ex-Factor" and "I Used To Love Him." Even the songs about uplift, like "Tell Him," "Everything Is Everything" and "Forgive Them Father," are rooted in the possibility things truly might not improve.

"The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" reached its commanding heights only by ruthlessly plumbing the depths. It remains a searingly honest, deeply wrung portrait of a great artist at the peak of her powers.
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Mama Tried

Merle Haggard & The Strangers
2001 | CAPITOL
What's Going On

Marvin Gaye
2003 | Motown

Court And Spark

Joni Mitchell
1975 | Rhino

At a time when the lyrics "ro-ma, ro-ma-mah/ ga-ga, ooh-la-la" can land a singer a spot high up on the Billboard charts, it's fun to play an album like Court & Spark, if only to remember the range of feeling that the English language can express when one knows how to use it. A quintessential Joni Mitchell record, Court & Spark looks at loneliness, solitude and love from many sides, and... concludes that no matter whom you're with or what good times you may be having, the sad, gray days will soon come calling.

At least it's not a bummer to listen to. Far from it, in fact. Mitchell's voice is clear and lovely, as fresh and flawless as spring. And her music is a wild, beautiful tangle of jazz and folk that gives audible form to love's crazy contradictions. (Not surprisingly, it's the best-selling album of Mitchell's career). Listen to Court & Spark, and you might imagine that, instead of giving her lover a clutch of pretty flowers to show how she feels, Mitchell would take him by the hand and run with him through a fragrant garden labyrinth. A simple woman she is not.

Court & Spark yielded her highest-ranking single: "Help Me," which reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1973. It also features a cover of the Wardell Gray bebop composition "Twisted," which jazz singer Annie Ross popularized with her swinging 1952 rendition. But for me, its telltale track is "Down to You." Mitchell sings, "Everything comes and goes/ Marked by lovers and styles of clothes/ Things that you held high/ And told yourself were true/ Lost or changing as the days come down to you." It's practically a Joni Mitchell manifesto: feeling love fully yet expecting — no, knowing — that it will end and that we are all ultimately alone. Oh, Joni.
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It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best

Karen Dalton
2006 | CAPITOL
Illmatic

Nas
Columbia

My Life

Mary J. Blige
1994 | Geffen

Both singer and sound were more confident on this second album from Mary J. Blige, the first she co-wrote, and considered by many fans her best. Out went the chilly New Jack Swing echo and synth deco of her debut; in came an extended heart-to-heart with fans by the fire over a beat that meant business.

Let it be admitted that the sound is more conventional: The '70s soul samples of... the title track and "Be Happy" are seamlessly blended or recreated rather than recontextualized in a rap way — the direction executive producer Sean "Puffy" Combs and frequent studio guest the Notorious B.I.G. were taking hip hop in general. But if D.C.-hired producer Carl "Chucky" Thompson was brought in to make Blige sound like a true soul singer at home in her mother's music, he did his job: Blige makes Rose Royce's "I'm Goin' Down" her own, in part because down was exactly where she was going.

Or as she would sing 11 years later, "'94 was My Life, and my life wasn't right, so I reached out to you and told you what I been through." She also told you what she was still going through: "I'm satisfied even when I cry," she sings on "No One Else," presumably to the track's co-producer K-Ci Hailey, whom she later described as the inspiration for much of My Life's blueness. "Mary's Joint," with its longing melody later borrowed for Janet Jackson's "I Get Lonely," sounds like hopelessness kidding itself, while the No. 1 dance hit "You Bring Me Joy" seems unconvinced. Most double-edged of all is "I Love You," with its repurposed Isaac Hayes piano line and dog-whistle synth (a nod to Dr. Dre), as funky and resigned as Marvin Gaye at his most autumnal. Has the title sentiment ever sounded more doomed?

Blige put the question to herself squarely on "Be Happy": "How can I love somebody else, if I can't love myself enough to know when it's time, time to let go?" The album sold 2.8 million copies in the U.S. and was nominated for a Grammy in the R&B album category. But it marked the twilight of Uptown Records and a parting of ways with Puffy.
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The Belle Album

Al Green
Hi Records / Fat Possum
Car Wheels On A Gravel Road

Lucinda Williams
1998 | Island Def Jam

Coat Of Many Colors

Dolly Parton
2007 | RLG/Legacy

Coat of Many Colors is the moment when Dolly Parton became a star. Its title track a Top Ten narrative of Dolly's humble origins a story that follows her still Coat brought her out from Porter Wagoner's shadow and cast her as country's Self-Made Woman No. 1. It also wonderfully encapsulates every element of the nearly 40 years of Dolly's career that have passed since its release: it dabbles in bluegrass and... roots music, features triumphant, Memphis-style R&B, and winks at the majesty of pure pop, all in a tidy 27 minutes. It's a killer. The best song by a long shot is "Here I Am," a song so stupendous it's a miracle it was never an enormous, career-defining hit. Written by Dolly (as is almost every song here), "Here I Am" is a big, '70s-style power ballad, a finger-wag to any man that might underestimate how great even a little bit of Dolly would be in your life. "I can help you find what you've been searching for," she brags with stunning boldness. No bashful lady, she. It's hard to call Coat of Many Colors a country record; it's so much more than that. But every song has its roots in Americana, in the humble hollows of the Appalachians and the songs and tunes passed down through God, through love and through sorrow. Dolly knows all of these. She sings from experience "Traveling Man" and "My Blue Tears" (which can make you weep from its beauty) and it's one she boldly shares. Dolly's career has been incredible in its longevity and its sincerity. And even amidst all of her success, this is her best moment.
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Different Class

Pulp
1996 | ISLAND RECORDS
Ready To Die The Remaster

The Notorious B.I.G.
1994 | Bad Boy Records

Leviathan

Mastodon
Relapse Records

Featuring two ex-members of influential noise-metal band Today is the Day, Mastodon creates fringe music for the mainstream — proggy, rhythmically complex torrents of melodic noise that incorporate elements of death metal, grindcore, hardcore, thrash and math rock, and somehow still groove like Skynyrd on crank. With Leviathan, the band funneled its multifaceted attack into a concept album based on Herman Melville's literary classic Moby Dick. Nothing could seem less metal;... little sounds more metal.
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Bakesale

Sebadoh
Sub Pop Records
Being There

Wilco
1996 | Reprise

Innervisions

Stevie Wonder
2000 | Motown

Early '70s protest soul had as much silliness and bandwagon jumping as any other musical era. But it can't be a coincidence that Stevie Wonder's greatest album is also his most deeply pessimistic — not only because there was so much to rail against in 1973, and that the government's and society's crimes against humanity had a special sting that would dissipate the more frequently they occurred (familiarity breeds disinterest at least... as much as contempt), but Stevie has always been at his sharpest when he has a direct target to aim for.

On Innervisions, Wonder took stock of the world around him and found a good deal of it wanting — yet he refused to give in to despair, even when sneering at drug abuse on "Too High," cutting a flim-flam man to pieces on "He's Misstra Know-It-All," or, most unforgettably, turning his voice to gravel to warn against damnation on "Living for the City." There's an inherent optimism that lights the darkest passages of this very dark album; that fits with Stevie the activist. But surely the amount of wrong to lament in the early '70s did its share to spur Wonder to his peak.

Rather than a soothing, instantly iconic rolling electric-keyboard melody of the sort that opened Talking Book ("You Are the Sunshine of My Life"), "Too High" worms in at a daunting angle, heavily informed by jazz (Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters was released only two months after Innervisions) as well as funk, and sounds as slippery as the song's subject. The falsetto doo-doo-doo refrain is a little shticky the first time it appears and mournful the last, after the woman who lets drugs take her life over dies: "What did her friends say?/ They said she's too high." "Misstra Know-It-All" and parts of "Jesus Children of America" dig at false preachers. "Living For the City" ends on a sermon. Stevie was a scold, all right, but he picked his targets perfectly.

The mammoth Songs in the Key of Life is rightly seen as Wonder's I-can-do-it-all culmination, but Innervisions ranges more confidently across nearly as much terrain. "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing" goes to Cuba and brings back a great spoken intro: "I speak very, very, um, fluent Spanish." "Visions" is a spiderweb of guitars (and Stevie's Fender Rhodes) that could have been on any number of the period's folk albums. The moony synths of "Golden Lady" turned prog heads around; "All in Love Is Fair" will surely end the first act when Broadway finally gets around to a Stevie jukebox musical (step on it).

And "Higher Ground" is classic rock, flat out: the rhythm swinging and jittery, pounded along by Wonder's sinewy drumming, the twining synthesizers and clavinet tangling like guitars, and Stevie at his most call-the-troops. It's like a totally sober version of John Lennon in "Tomorrow Never Knows": "Believers, keep on believing/ Sleepers, just stop sleeping." Yet listen close to the song's fade-out. There's an ad-lib, just barely audible: "Don't you let nobody bring you down — and they'll sho' nuff try." Brrr.
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Mystic Visions

Judee Sill

Judee Sill
2005 | Rhino/Elektra

With her tender, imperfect vocals, lank brown locks and low-slung acoustic guitar, the singer and songwriter Judee Sill embodied the earnest, folksy spirit of California's Laurel Canyon in the 1970s. Sadly, Sill also embraced the era's excesses, and her dark biography is befitting of a martyred cult idol: After running away from home as a teenager, she married an aspiring gangster, was arrested for armed robbery and hauled off to reform school,... picked up a heroin habit, and hustled for cash as a petty thief. But with help from Graham Nash, David Crosby and David Geffen, Sill channeled her personal lapses — and the gospel hooks she collected in reform school — into two stunning folk records before dying of a drug overdose in 1979.

Judee Sill was released in 1971, and — unsurprisingly — it's lyrically preoccupied with grand notions of redemption and hope. "Sweet silver angels over the sea, please come down flyin' low for me," Sill begs on the impeccable "Jesus Was A Crossmaker," over building piano and eventual percussion. On opener "Crayon Angels," Sill lodges another plea for rescue: "Nothin's happened but I think it will soon, so I sit here waitin' for God and a train — to the Astral plane," she sings. Like Nick Drake, Sill's records weren't particularly appreciated in her lifetime, and her posthumous canonization feels almost cruel, but Judee Sill remains a haunting, evocative portrait of a singer using her voice to seek salvation.
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Ah Um

Charles Mingus
1999 | Columbia/Legacy

If you're looking for a first serious jazz album to listen to, this might be the one. Charles Mingus occupied a unique place in jazz, one foot planted squarely in tradition — particularly the composer's tradition of Duke Ellington — and the other in the new thing which, in 1959, when this was recorded, was in the process of coming into existence. Both tendencies are in full display here, with one... of Mingus's finest bands (although he referred to it as a "workshop," which is quite accurate) running through a brace of originals that pay tribute to the past ("Open Letter to Duke," "Jelly Roll") and express the present ("Fables of Faubus" refers to the governor of Arkansas 'bitter opposition to racial integration).

There are first recordings of two of Mingus 'immortal classics here. "Better Git It In Your Soul" is infused with a gospel feeling, with Mingus yelling encouragement in the background, and was a shout-out to the "soul" movement in jazz, which stood in opposition to some of the more hyper-intellectual stuff on the scene. "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" was Mingus 'obituary for the great tenor saxophonist Lester Young, who had just died. The overwhelming sadness of the melody disguises the fact that it's absolutely of its moment in structure and harmony.

Mingus, as a bassist, relied heavily on his reedmen, and three of his best, John Handy (alto sax, clarinet), Booker Ervin (tenor sax), and Shafi Hadi (alto and tenor sax), are on board. The trombone underlying the ensemble is Jimmy Knepper on some tracks, Willie Dennis on others, piano is by the incredibly underrated Horace Parlan, and Mingus 'long-time rhythm partner, Dannie Richmond, sits at the drums.

It doesn't get much better than this: I've been listening to this album for over 30 years, and I hear something new every time I sit down with it.
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Fables Of The Reconstruction

R.E.M.
1998 | IRS CATALOG
Sign 'O' The Times

Prince
2007 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

Manos

The Spinanes
Sub Pop Records

The first indie-label album ever to hit No. 1 on the college radio charts was an unlikely one: this debut by the peculiar, wonderful duo of singer/guitarist Rebecca Gates and drummer Scott Plouf. The Spinanes had initially been very much a part of the early-'90s "international pop underground" scene ("Entire" mentions a cassette by Olympia, Washington, band the Go Team), but they quickly became as interested in precision and complexity as in... soft, fragrant melodies. Gates's lyrics here are impressionistic and emotive, but the duo plays so crisply that they sound absolutely specific. It helped that half of their hooks were rhythmic: "Spitfire" is built around Plouf's snare cracks, "Noel, Jonah and Me" around variations on a stop-time lurch. And they had a sense of negative space that's rare for a rock band — Gates's dreamy murmur and resonant, open-tuned riffs up top, Plouf's inexorable attack at the bottom, and nothing but air between them.
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Psychedelic Soul

The Temptations
2003 | Motown

When Dennis Edwards replaced David Ruffin in the Temptations in 1968, producer/songwriter Norman Whitfield gave a brand new bag to Motown's most popular male group. Introduced to the psychedelic sounds of Sly and the Family Stone via Temp's member Otis Williams, Whitfield took Stone's fusion grooves and made them cinematic. Starting with "Cloud Nine," Whitfield de-emphasized Ruffin's departure by distributing the vocal line across the Temptations' widely differing voices á la... Sly and Family, while white session guitarist Dennis Coffey brought the wah-wah of Jimi Hendrix. "Cloud Nine" won Motown its first Grammy, and it established the label's new sophisticated, yet streetwise style soon embraced by all of its stars. For its 1969 sequel "Runaway Child, Running Wild," Whitfield expanded the track's length to nearly 10 minutes, and the prototype for disco's extended mixes was born.

What distinguished Whitfield's sprawling productions from lengthy acid-rock tracks was that they weren't mere jams. Based on verses and choruses just like the group's early hits, "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" and the others are paced as miniature symphonies with multiple peaks and valleys. The same strings that gave Motown its density during the mid '60 were now isolated over the beat. Instead of a constant blare, instrumentation came and went, swelled and subsided. The constant fluctuations made the listening experience more like a journey — a key disco metaphor. Rather than encouraging dancers to sprint, Whitfield paced his records to suspend them in rapture.
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All-Night Dance Party

Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds & Nigerian Blues 1970-6

Soundway: Various Artists
2011 | Manufacturer / Believe Digital

Some compilations that highlight a particular sound during a particular time follow a straight line. But when that time and place is as relatively under-documented as early '70s Nigerian pop, such tidiness isn't so necessary — it's enough to just crack the door and to keep it open for an enticing while. That's why Nigeria Special, a brilliant two-hour tour through a musical world that ranged far more widely than even a... serious fan of this era and place might have been aware, is such a triumph. Covering the period just after the Biafran War (1967-70) had ended, Nigeria Special concentrates on the region's late highlife and the post-Fela Kuti fallout of Afrobeat — Kuti was an exemplar of the style, but by no means the sole model of success. If that means the collection's focus blurs a little, that's more than made up for the sheer breadth, range and intrigue on display here.

Many of Nigeria Special's cuts are so juicy it's impossible to believe they've never been made available outside of Nigeria before. The Funkees'"Akula Owu Onyeara" — originally released in two parts, and edited together here for the first time — works like Fela at his most rhythmically sinuous; the simple keyboard figures could be Morse Code signal for uncut funk, and it has one of the most perfect endings you'll ever hear. George Akaeze & His Augmented Hits'"Business Before Pleasure" is delectably light-footed Afrobeat with laconic chants and jazzy horns so friendly they belie the title: this is business as pleasure. The nonstop forward motion of the Semi Colon's "Nekwaha Semi Colon" is formally disco — the hi-hat/kick-drum pattern points right at it — but it's so hypnotic it seems rooted in something far older (and more intrinsically Nigerian). The highlife tracks are equally hot: St. Augustine & His Rovers Dance Band's "Onwu Ama Dike" is made even lovelier by its slightly messy rhythmic feel, not to mention the semi-sweet horn line.

Compiler Miles Cleret claims that there are thousands more such goodies that have just been sitting in Nigeria waiting to be rediscovered. The 26 included here are such a pleasure to listen to that, for anyone who loves them, they could inspire fantasies of booking a flight to Lagos and starting a treasure hunt of one's own.
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New York Dolls

New York Dolls
1987 | Island Def Jam
In the Jungle Groove

James Brown
2003 | Polydor

Get Happy

Elvis Costello & The Attractions
2007 | Hip-O Records

After a drunken quarrel on the Armed Forces tour turned into a disaster that left Costello looking like a dick at best and a racist at worst (in retrospect, it was definitely "dick"), he took solace in old soul records — the deep Southern soul of Stax most of all — and somehow ended up cranking out even more amazing songs than he had been over the previous few years. The album... that subsequently came out of a frantic recording session in Holland speeds through 20 songs in 48 minutes, and it's the Attractions' most impressive work as a group: flexible, powerful, psychically synched-up, and above all fast. They effortlessly pull off one soul groove after another (keyboardist Steve Nieve cops licks from Booker T. and the M.G.s all over the place), as well as tear-in-my-beer country ("Motel Matches"), ska ("Human Touch") and garage rock ("Beaten to the Punch"). Those last three, by the way, all happen in a seven-minute span.

If some of these songs are formal exercises, they're fantastically entertaining formal exercises: The opener "Love for Tender," for instance, is the riff from "You Can't Hurry Love" taken at bottle-of-amphetamines speed, wrapped around approximately five thousand puns about money ("I pay you a compliment/ You think I am inno-cent"), and executed in less than two minutes. The first single, oddly, was a cover — Sam & Dave's downtempo soul duet "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down," reworked as crazed new wave — but Costello's original songs reward ungnarling their tightly-knotted wordplay, especially "New Amsterdam," a little waltz about portable exile that he recorded on his own. The big lyrical picture of Get Happy!! is a bitter young man measuring himself against the guys that the girls he likes seem to be more interested in, and figuring out reasons to despise them all; by the end, though, he's figured out that he's kind of a dick, too.
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Rocks The House

Etta James
1992 | Geffen

This 1963 show from Nashville's New Era Club is a candidate for best live album ever, and you need only hear her version of Jimmy Reed's "Baby What You Want Me to Do" to realize that. It's one of the sexiest things ever recorded, with Etta wailing and moaning before making erotic nonverbal sounds — you can't even call it scat-singing — that bring the house down. The raunchy band, featuring David... T. Walker on guitar, is torrid; the audience, which roars out call and response with Etta, is fevered. "Tell Mama," indeed. Or else.
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Gold

Buddy Holly
2005 | Geffen
Aquemini

Outkast
1998 | Arista/LaFace Records

One Night Stand - Sam Cooke Live At The Harlem Square Club, 1963

Sam Cooke
2005 | RCA/Legacy

1963, Miami, Florida — below the Mason Dixon line. Jim Crow was still law, Martin Luther King was just about to march on Washington, and the bluntly named Chitlin Circuit (the collection of clubs where black artists played and sang for black audiences) was still in full operation. Sam Cooke had been a star for most of his life by the time of this now-legendary gig at the Harlem Square Club. At... 32, the singer already had a best-selling Greatest Hits album, and had entranced legions of church-goers as a certified gospel sex symbol through the fifties (including a very young Aretha Franklin, who has always admitted her melismatic signing style was a straight-up tribute to her friend's liquid vocals). Cooke had been working his audience members, especially those of the female persuasion, into bosom-heaving frenzies for years — and not just because of his movie-star good looks. The plain truth: Cooke could sing like no other man before or since.

This live recording shows off all of Cooke's gifts. "It's All Right," is the gospel classic "Touch the Hem of His Garment" (which, not coincidentally, Cooke had already made into a hit with the Soul Stirrers), secularized. Except instead of praying to Jesus for mercy, Cooke advises each man in the audience to "shake and wake" his woman up when he comes home at night, wait until she "wipes all the sleep from her eyes," and tell her "Believe me baby, it's all right." A perfect lullaby.

Songs such as "Cupid" or "Twistin 'the Night Away" may sound retro now, even corny at times, especially to ears used to the tough funk of James Brown or George Clinton. But that's because it's almost impossible, in our current Yes We Did era, to imagine what it must have been like back then for a soul singer whose rough edges were so easy to smooth. Cooke could charm with such ease, it would have been a piece of cake for him to go the Sammy Davis route. But he didn't. And JB and Dr. Funkenstein, not to mention Prince and (early, fantastic) Michael Jackson, wouldn't have been the same if he had. Live At the Harlem Square Club does have a bit of a preserved-in-amber quality. That's not the record's fault, however. By 1964, Cooke was dead, shot to death in a motel under circumstances that were never clear (his last masterpiece, the introspective, heartbreaking, "A Change is Gonna Come," was not released until after his death). It's wonderful to be able to hear his voice here, so relaxed and true, and with the audience he knew and loved the best. As Cooke tells the ladies in the crowd, and they ecstatically croon back, "I think of you every morning, and dream of you every night."
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Off the Wall

Michael Jackson
1983 | Epic
Absolute Belter

Various
2010 | FINDERS KEEPERS

Bruised Knuckle Bottle-Breakers

Dig Me Out

Sleater-Kinney
2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

t the end of the decade of "women in rock" (yes, Virginia, we only get one), this trio born of the Northwest "riot grrrl" scene defined feminist punk by ingraining the lessons they'd learned in their Women Studies classes as deeply into their music as phallocentrism is etched into the sound of Led Zep or Snoop Dog. Go beyond the lyrics (which do read like a punk Sisterhood Is Powerful) to revel... in the non-linear dialogue of awesome yowler Corin Tucker and chatterbox Carrie Brownstein, the taut-yet-flexible song structures rising up from Janet Weiss's Amazonian drums and Brownstein's guitar heroism, which sparkles in circles instead of hammering for the gods. Dig Me Out has the anthems any grassroots movement needs, but the band can also do lovestruck ("One More Hour"), funny ("Little Babies") and spooky ("Jenny") —` thus proving conclusively, for any doubters, that grrrls are people, too.
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Lifestylez Ov Da Poor & Dangerous

Big L
1995 | Columbia
New Day Rising

Hüsker Dü
1985 | SST Records / The Orchard

Exile On Main Street

The Rolling Stones
2010 | UME Direct

The re-release of a treasured cultural touchstone is occasion for seeing how the work in question has telescoped the years, and, more to the point, how your own perceptions and persona have evolved and grown along with it. With the second coming of Exile On Main Street, the Rolling Stones' controversial and iconic masterwork, the looking-back not only encompasses myself, but the glimmering binary stars of the Stones, Mick and Keith; and,... in some ways, these responses overshadow the album itself.

I have particular reason to welcome a chance for reappraisal, since two weeks after Exile's original release in the late spring of 1972, I reviewed the album for Rolling Stone, giving it a medium-cool analysis I've had some cause to regret over the years. It was a classic case, as the cliché goes, of not seeing the forest for the trees. Song by song, even over the kitchen sink of a double album set, individual highlights seemed hard to come by, though the thrill of hearing "Happy," "Rip This Joint," and "Shine A Light" has been burnished on this reissue by their many sing-alongs over the years, and "Tumbling Dice" is a undeniable classic. But to my then rock-critical ears, thinking with head instead of heart, this was a comedown from the Stones scaling the peaks of some of the most cataclysmic music of their career, an arc that seemed to ascend around Beggar's Banquet, continue through Let It Bleed and burst into fireworks with Sticky Fingers, when, not so coincidentally, they were at their apex of creativity and influence. I was spoiled, and my disappointment showed, especially given the first long form double album of the Stones' career.

But Exile, as the title implies, is more about time and place, a mood and atmosphere, and its sprawling, ramshackle track listing, trying on blues forms and extending heightened jams, stretching out for long solos from Stones' sidemen like sax player Bobby Keys and pianist Nicky Hopkins, with an especial nod to the group's slide guitarist at the time, Mick Taylor, gives the album a documentary in-the-making feel, enhanced by a remastering, which seems to clear up some of the tube-driven haze of the original vinyl edition (whether this is a good or bad thing I will leave to your speaker system).

The tale has oft been told of the Stones setting up a mobile recording studio in Keith Richards's basement in the south of France, inside a mansion called Nellcote, though the album was later pieced together in sessions that transported tapes from London to Los Angeles; and it is within this compressed, hothouse atmosphere, a heart of darkness on the verge of tropic (see the claustrophobic "Ventilator Blues," and the booklet photos of sprawled bodies on the floor of the makeshift studio, not to mention Charlie's striped jacket being used as a bass drum muffler!), that the Stones put together the loosest, most freewheeling album of their career.

That's the way Keith wanted it, and his current view of Exile is that it is a sacred text, allowing no tampering within its concentric circles of recorded groove. Mick, however, couldn't resist and in the bonus disc, gathered with the help of Don Was, adds new lyrics to four songs that are a call-and-response to his younger self: "You always brought out the best in me," he lays his heart on the line in the frankly beautiful "Following The River," and I wonder if he's talking about Keith. The alternate takes and "bonus" material don't change Exile so much as show its process, the tracks that didn't make the official release holding their own: "I'm Not Signifying" is lascivious in its cakewalk, and "Plundered My Soul" is all impassioned romp, galvanized by Charlie Watts' archetypal loping drums, affectionate regret coloring the remembrance.

Beyond bonus, however, it is Exile's remarkable resilience as an album that pushes play in this decade. Much of its myth is just that — a celebration of lifestyle and rock stardom that took root in a fecund, overheated basement as the hours ticked till dawn. It was Mick who gathered the tapes of the Nellcote sessions and overdubbed the gospel-ish feel that imbues Exile with its sense of redemption amidst decadence. The duality of the Stones' was never more manifest than here, with Keith's voice entwining harmonies with Mick, Mick slightly back in the mix, and the force of the band carrying them forward. It's interesting to compare the two versions of "Soul Survivor" with each fronting the song, just as it is fascinating — now almost four decades later — to contemplate the roads not taken: In the opening "Rocks Off," one of the Stones' many nigh-trademark barrelhouse stompers, a bridge appears out of nowhere, and the song slows, turns psychedelic as tremolo phasers wash over the guitars and vocal. It seems almost contrary to the festive mood, a malevolence and an intimation of gathering storm clouds, and I find myself wishing they would have followed its tangent.

But then, I'm not so different than I was when I first took a stroll down Main Street. Neither is Exile.
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Walk Among Us

Misfits
1982 | Rhino/Slash
Songs For The Deaf

Queens of the Stone Age
2007 | Interscope

The Black Album

Jay-Z
2010 | Roc-a-fella Records

The song that has always enchanted me on The Black Album is the last song, which is called "My 1st Song," which is meant to be the last song of Jay-Z's career. Got that? It is a beautiful, bedeviling denouement; Jay has rarely rapped better, more intricately, and with such purpose. It's because he knew exactly what he was meant to be doing: Saying goodbye. "Goodbye, this is my second major breakup/... My first was, with a pager/ With a hooptie, a cookpot, and the game/ This one's with the stool, with the stage, with the fortune/ Maybe not the fortune, but certainly the fame."

Knowing what we know now — Jay-Z would be back to full-time recording artist status in three years — makes examining the self-flagellation of The Black Album something of a fool's errand. Elizabeth Mendez Berry wrote for The Village Voice that he'd become "bored by the alter ego he'd outgrown." So how seriously do we take the musings on a half-hearted retirement? Well, maybe without that specter hanging, we can hear it for the achievement it is: a great Jay-Z album.

Originally conceived as a single-producer venture in 1998 with DJ Premier, The Black Album wouldn't come together until years later. It was later advertised with a one-producer, one-song plan, which also never panned out. Finally, it became a typical sort of Jay-Z project, featuring contributions from trusted collaborators, in-house Roc-A-Fella super-producers, Kanye West and Just Blaze, sensing the moment as much as Jay, and crucial additions from a murderer's row of sound men (Timbaland, Eminem, DJ Quik, The Neptunes twice, Rick Rubin, out of rap retirement for a spell) and a handful of then-unknowns and never-heard-from-agains (9th Wonder, The Buchanans, Aqua). Together, there are canonical songs: "Public Service Announcement (Interlude)," initially just a tossed-off one verse proclamation of pride that became a defining document for the MC, with lyrics — from "got the hottest chick in the game wearing my chain" to "like Che Guevara with bling on, I'm complex" — that became rallying cries. Rubin's stomping "99 Problems" still sounds like a tank full of cowbells taking a 40-foot drop onto the pavement. Kanye's "Encore" is a convivial farewell song, though it comes early in the mix. Eminem's "Moment of Clarity" is tightly wound, but never tight-lipped, as Jay raps, "I've dumbed down for my audience and doubled my dollars/ They criticize me for it yet they all yell holler." Even "Threat," the then-ascendant 9th Wonder's contribution, returns Jay to the creeping majesty of his debut, Reasonable Doubt.. And what would a pro forma Jay-Z album be without a Neptunes trifle? At the time of release, "Change Clothes" seemed a grievous error, a cold calculating move designed to ensure record sales. So many years on, it is what it was supposed to be: a palate cleanser.

"My 1st Song" still kills me. It's that "maybe not the fortune" line. Jay-Z has long been a dramatist, a self-styled orchestrator of his own mythology. And nothing could be more grand than a ceremonial retirement. Except, maybe, for the even grander comeback. But then, there is one more Easter egg worth parsing on The Black Album. From "Encore": "When I come back like Jordan, wearin' the 4-5/ It ain't to play games with you/ It's to aim at you, probably maim you." Considering said comeback, he was more right than he knew.
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The Score

Fugees (Refugee Camp)
2008 | Columbia
Let It Be [Expanded Edition]

The Replacements
2008 | Ryko/Rhino

Moody and Beautiful

Post

Björk
1995 | 143/Lava/Atlantic

Having established herself on the pop stage with Debut, follow-up Post (1995) saw Björk's ambitions go widescreen.With everyone from Tricky to Howie B to 808 State's Graham Massey fighting over the producer's chair and a musical palette ranging from ambient dub ("Possibly Me") to strident techno-pop ("Army of Me") Post boasts a musical vision to match Cecil B. DeMille.

And then there's the lyrics. Bizarre, brazen and remorselessly tongue-in cheek,... songs like "Enjoy" and "You've Been Flirting Again" are dark, delirious examinations of the mating game whilst "Hyperballad" is euphoric — "We live on a mountain/ Right at the top/ There's a beautiful view" — but only to disguise a damning rejection of consumerism. It was smash hit "It's Oh So Quiet" which kept the accountants happy, however. A reworking of Betty Hutton's Hollywood showtune "Blow a Fuse" delivered with a kindergarten cutesiness, confirming her role as indie-rock's reigning queen of weird. From this point on, Björk was in the big league.
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Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul [Collector's Edition]

Otis Redding
2008 | Rhino Atlantic
Tapestry

Carole King
1999 | Ode/Epic/Legacy

Sketches Of Spain

Miles Davis
Columbia/Legacy

Arranger Gil Evans was one of Miles Davis's key allies throughout his career. Starting in 1957 they collaborated on four projects for trumpet and orchestra, beginning with the fine Miles Ahead and ending with the problematic but still rewarding Quiet Nights. The series 'middle volumes are Porgy and Bess, where Gershwin's music inspires some of Miles's most poignant trumpeting, and the exquisite Sketches of Spain. Its long flagship number recasts a... slow movement from a 1939 guitar concerto by Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo; it's enlivened by Evans 'gorgeous dissonances for flutes and massed brass, and flamenco echoes from rattling castanets. But the album's real marvels are a pair of shorter pieces derived from field recordings, which push Miles into previously uncharted territory. "The Pied Piper" is based on a Peruvian Indian pennywhistle melody, played by a pig castrator to advertise his services as he makes his rounds. Miles imbues it with such deep feeling, it's as if he empathizes with the pigs. "Saeta" draws on music for a Spanish Holy Week procession, right down to the sound of a brass band advancing from and then retreating into the distance, like something out of Charles Ives; the dire, wounded sound of Davis's trumpet is unforgettably stark.
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Bandwagonesque

Teenage Fanclub
1997 | Geffen
My Favorite Things

John Coltrane
1998 | Rhino Atlantic

Voodoo

D'Angelo
2000 | NOO TRYBE

The success of his 1995 debut Brown Sugar left D'Angelo in a minor funk, irked by the music industry and suffering from a bout of writer's block. The unease that accumulated during his sabbatical surfaced with his 1998 single, "Devil's Pie." Built on a paranoid, tail-chasing DJ Premier bass loop, D'Angelo turned away from the earthly delights of Brown Sugar and crooned about the spiritual crisis in hip-hop and beyond: "Drugs and... thugs, women and wine/ Three or four at a time/ Watch them all stand in line/For a slice of the devil's pie." From its very title to its dark aesthetic, Voodoo fixed on the possibility of purpose and redemption beyond the material world — this was an album that explored the meaning of "soul" as something more than a musical classification. There were still crushing moments of conventional beauty, like "Untitled (How Does it Feel)" or the charming "Send it On," and Method Man and Redman lend their intimate chemistry to the muscular "Left and Right." But on moments like "Chicken Grease," with its sketches of a bygone Southern simplicity, and the captivating "Africa," Voodoo felt ghostly and haunted, as though D'Angelo and Soulquarians were trying to conjure a portal to the past during their marathon jam sessions.
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The Bends

Radiohead
1995 | CAPITOL
Nina Simone Sings The Blues

Nina Simone
RCA/Legacy

Lady Soul [w/bonus selections]

Aretha Franklin
1987 | Rhino Atlantic

The first four songs here, including the gigantic hit "Chain of Fools," are Aretha the newly minted superstar stepping out from behind the gospel pulpit to address the secular world. The rest, from the "I Never Loved a Man" outtake (!) "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" to her sister (and backup singer) Carolyn Franklin's deep ballad "Ain't No Way," are all about the pulse and ache of sex —... they're not come-ons, exactly, but meditations on what happens behind the bedroom door, and what that means to everything outside it. And the all-star band, featuring Bobby Womack, Spooner Oldham, and (briefly) Eric Clapton, rolls toward the blues right alongside her.
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Six Degrees of Rihanna’s Unapologetic

Hua Hsu — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 19:28:08 +0000

The Album

Unapologetic

Rihanna
2012 | Def Jam Records

What's left for Rihanna? The young star has far exceeded every conceivable metric of pop success, whether it is awards or album sales or her designation as the most popular person on all of Facebook. The 24-year-old recently released her seventh album, Unapologetic, essentially a cross-section of all pop music's various strains circa 2012. There's the arena-sized electronic buzz of "Phresh Out the Runway" and "Right Now," the over-the-top, funhouse wooziness... of "Numb" and "Loveeeeeee Song," the classic pop march of "Diamonds." Its sound is broad and universal, thanks to continent-hopping producers like David Guetta, Stargate, Benny Blanco and The-Dream. This savvy versatility has always been at the heart of Rihanna's appeal, from her dancehall-tinged debut to her present-day attempts to master some kind of global pop template. But Unapologetic's attitude and moods are resolutely her own, and nowhere is this clearer than on "Nobody's Business," the disarmingly buoyant duet with her — to put it mildly — controversial boyfriend Chris Brown. Like many of Rihanna's albums, Unapologetic is a collection of choices that seem both calculated and somewhat eccentric — consider the famously strange week she spent commemorating Unapologetic's release by playing seven shows in seven different cities around the world. In a way, it's those erratic moments that make Rihanna — a new kind of flexible, carefully stage-managed, frighteningly efficient worldwide pop star — still seem human. Everyone knows the names in Rihanna's immediate orbit — her influences Bob Marley and Madonna, her boss Jay-Z, her mates Brown and Drake. Here, we consider the broader constellation of Rihanna — from her lesser-known collaborators to the far-flung, future heirs to her style.
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The Visionary

Private Life: The Compass Point Years

Grace Jones
1998 | ISLAND RECORDS

Before Janet Jackson or Madonna — Rihanna's musical influences growing up — there was Grace Jones. The Jamaican-born Jones was one of the most singular artists of the early 1980s, a fashion icon and a visionary of modern-day club music. She had released some well-received disco records throughout the late 1970s, but for 1980's Warm Leatherette, Jones relocated to Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas to record with the legendary reggae drum-and-bass... duo of Sly and Robbie. The result was a breakthrough, a vibrant collision of New Wave and island riddims. Jones recorded two more albums at Compass Point, Nightclubbing and Living My Life. The best material from that period is collected on Private Life. Her alien arrangements of familiar songs (she covers Tom Petty and Smokey Robinson, among others) represented everything fresh about the burgeoning club culture, and the way Jones carried herself — the androgynous style, the almost confrontational raunchiness — was visionary. Rihanna's copped her look on more than one occasion. Don't think Jones doesn't notice these things. Just ask her what she thinks of Lady Gaga.
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The Hit-Maker

Just A Little More Love

David Guetta
2009 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

The Parisian Guetta already had a successful, decade-long career DJing and throwing parties when he finally decided to record his debut album in 2002. It was easy to overlook Guetta, given the acclaim that had met countrymen Daft Punk, Air or Cassius. But Guetta chose a more populist, bombastic approach to French house on Just a Little More Love. It was more vocal driven and club-oriented, its clean sound shaped by massive... hooks and friendly throbs. "Give Me Something" was an amped-up version of classic New York disco, while "Can't U Feel the Change" and the title track — both featuring singer Chris Willis — whittled house down to its fist-pumping basics. The most brazen statement here was "Just for One Day," which threw David Bowie's "Heroes" into the middle of an electro-thunderstorm. By the end of the decade, Guetta would be one of dance music's sought-after producers, particularly among those looking for new audiences. In 2010, Guetta and Rihanna collaborated on "Who's That Chick?" for the former's path-breaking One More Love release. They got back together for Unapologetic, cutting the standout "Phresh Out the Runway" and recent hit "Right Now."
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The Collaborator

tracks

Mikky Ekko
2013 | RCA Records Label

One of the high points of Unapologetic is "Stay," a stirring, stripped-down, piano-backed duet between Rihanna and the song's writer, Nashville-by-way-of-everywhere singer Mikky Ekko. Despite his faintly futuristic name, Ekko makes for an unusual collaborator, as evidenced by all the Rihanna devotees wondering who the rumpled vagrant was onstage with her when she performed the song at the Grammys. There's a delicate, rangy confidence to Ekko's songs, and he's equally at ease... singing atop a rollicking band, a Clams Casino beat or nothing at all. Check out the Reds EP, which features the gorgeously woozy "Secret to Sell" and the swashbuckling "Who Are You, Really?" After the recent success of "Stay," his label released Tracks, an EP of new tracks and live sessions. It's a startlingly versatile collection. "Pull Me Down" commissions some moody pop triumphalism from Clams Casino while "Feels Like the End" is an epic brew of falsetto, synth and strings. The EP closes with the most intensely atmospheric cover of the xx's "Chained" you'll likely ever hear.
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The Charismatic Heir

Halcyon

Ellie Goulding
2012 | Interscope/Cherrytree

Rihanna's transition from radio R&B toward global club pop has been massive influential for a new generation of young singer/songwriters, and perhaps the most important lesson to be learned is that the songs themselves still matter. Consider Ellie Goulding's carefully restrained cover of Rihannas' "Only Girl (in the World)," which seems to deconstruct the original's hypnotic grooves and overheated synths and highlight the perfectly proportioned melody at the song's core. From... the indie synthpop of 2010's Lights to the cavernous spaces of last year's Halcyon, Goulding has become one of the more charismatic heirs to Rihanna's versatile style. What distinguishes Goulding is that her music, for all its busy, layered production, is quite old-fashioned. YouTube is full of Goulding doing acoustic versions of her own songs, and suddenly singles that sound huge and interplanetary are revealed to be simple and intimate.
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The Global Pop Forerunners

2nd Mini Album

2ne1
2011 | YG Entertainment Inc. / Ditto Music

Artists like Rihanna, Pitbull and the Black Eyed Peas may be forerunners of a global pop aesthetic, but this kind of thing has been going for years in South Korea. Beyond "Gangnam Style" lies a healthy and rapidly evolving pop scene, and a group like 2NE1 — pronounced "21" or "To Anyone" — is probably one lucky break away from global domination. All the songs on their latest EP feel instantly familiar... — there's the hyper absurdism of "I Am the Best," the slightly less hyper anthems "Don't Stop the Music" and "Hate You," the guitar-strum introspection of "Lonely." Maybe a breakthrough isn't as far off as it seems. Korean pop idol-watchers were abuzz with recent news that 2NE1's "baddest female" CL had acquired a famous new follower on Instagram: Rihanna.
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Who Is…Autre Ne Veut

Marissa G. Muller — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 18:17:13 +0000

File under: Deconstructed R&B with art-pop sensibilities

For fans of: How To Dress Well, Jamie Lidell, Miguel, Terence Trent D'arby

From: New Orleans

Personae: Arthur Ashin

Call it a case of either good timing or musical clairvoyance, but Autre Ne Veut’s Arthur Ashin beat many of his indie peers to the punch when it comes to re-framing R&B. The Connecticut-born musician premiered his falsetto’d, synth-laden take on the genre in 2010, and has fine-tuned it with each new release. Anxiety, his sophomore album, is his most wrenching to date, pushing his unhinged vocals and diary-like lyrics about a failed relationship to the forefront. He’s still finding ways to outstrip his contemporaries too, either with gospel-nodding harmonies — contributed by the Zambri sisters, Cristi Jo and Jessica — or with the unparalleled earnestness in his vocal delivery.

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller spoke with Ashin about his love for soul and R&B, his willingness to write about the failure of a relationship while that relationship was still in progress, and how his study of psychology informed his music.

On the roots of his moniker, Autre Ne Veut:

Years ago, I was up at the Cloisters, a metropolitan museum on the Upper West Side with a lot of Medieval artifacts, and there was a gold and amethyst hat ornament and on the back was inscribed “Autre Ne Veut.” I can’t verify this at all — in fact, I’ve even called one of the historians there who says that there’s no evidence of this being true — but I have this memory of someone telling me that it was a gift from a French duke to his mistress. I can’t speak a lick of French but it translates to “I want no other.” I thought the tension of the space between what one has and what one wants was kind of poetic. I chose it then and I’m stuck with it now.

On his musical beginnings in college:

I had a rock band for a while and [then gradually] started making Brian Eno-rip off music for cinema. My band was ’90s-nodding alt rock and had a Pavement, Yo La Tengo vibe. I screamed on top a lot. I’ve always been into songwriting and, except for a stint trying to make ambient electronic music, it’s always been something that I’ve thought a ton about. To me, songwriting is the crux of everything I do.

On his move from away from rock:

I’m a big folk music fan still; I love Joni Mitchell, and a lot of classic female folk songwriters. I love, love, love Van Morrison: Astral Weeks is one of my favorite records, ever. But rock isn’t my thing now. I feel like rock is a technology that’s really reached its limit. I like music that sounds like it’s pushing some sort of boundary and, to me, that’s what’s exciting about hip-hop and R&B. It’s still an evolving form and people are constantly looking for new sounds, and even the highest level of popularity. There’s still new things happening and new approaches, and I don’t think that’s really happening in rock. I’m trying to work against what’s there while still maintaining a healthy level of respect for what’s come before me. My approach is a little bit different than other peoples’, in terms of production in particular.

On re-imagining R&B without nostalgia:

I have problems not being nostalgic enough in my life. Even my first record — which, incidentally had a lot of similarities to [other music that was nakedly nostalgic] — I was not going for that. Any similarities [to earlier music] came from being an amateur with synthesizers, which a lot of people were in the ’80s, because they were just getting their hands on them. I’m against nostalgia as a creative practice. I listen to a lot of old stuff, but it’s not because of nostalgia.

I listen to lots of R&B, and have all of my life, so I don’t mind being classified as R&B. [Anxiety] is definitely a pop record. I’m working against it as much as I’m working with it, but I’m definitely working within those modes on the record. The musical references on my previous recordings were more classic soul, and I think that the Stax Records paradigm for songwriting is at the heart of everything I’ve ever done. I was definitely looking to make something more contemporary on this record, so a lot of the melodic decisions were more related to R&B rather than soul or reggae — which my older stuff nodded more heavily to.

On his tribute to Whitney Houston, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”:

I’m pretty unsentimental, but Whitney Houston was unbelievable in the way that she walked that line between making soul, gospel, R&B and pop. The restraint that she had — and everything about her — freaks me out. I was pretty bummed out when she died and wanted to make a little homage, so I titled my song after one of hers.

On keeping his identity under wraps for so long:

Music has been my fantasy — and the fact that anyone cares at all is amazing — but my big Plan B was to be a clinical psychologist. My music started happening and I wanted to preserve a clean Google search. Clinical psychology is super conservative as a field and it’s also really rigorous and competitive and it’s one of those things where it’s supposed be your priority 100 percent. With jobs and fellowships, I don’t want the first thing that comes up in a search to be a video of me jerking off on stage.

On bonding with How to Dress Well’s Tom Krell over their chosen genre and student status:

He did an interview for Village Voice a few years ago and the way that he wrote felt so private to me in an exciting way, so I hit him up while he was still doing his mixtapes and we’ve been in touch since then. I don’t know how he multi-tasks — all I’ve done is complain to him about it.

On his diary-like lyrics:

I do stream-of-consciousness singing — I mostly sing on the spot. Most of the ideas are really personal and are about relationships I’ve had with different people and complicated moments that I don’t really know how to deal with, so I put them into songs. “Play By Play” is a song about jealousy and paranoia. “World War” is a portrait of my relationship with an ex and some of the difficulties with that. Those two are the most powerful to me and were the hardest to deal with.

The record was written over the past three years. I was in grad school and intense psychoanalysis, and the record is about this period of my life where I felt particularly overwhelmed and anxious about a lot of things. It was interesting: I was in a relationship at the time and the songs are not all positive, and her response was complicated. But, at the end of the day, the difficulties are what make music feel important.

On championing his earnestness:

I’m a super sensitive dude, really fragile, but I also function in the world. So I have to take myself with a grain of salt. On one level, I’m being completely earnest and on another level I’m aware of the fact that it’s kind of corny to be as earnest as I am. I spent my whole life hiding from my earnestness so there is a wink in there, a little bit. But I get more out of people taking it seriously, even if I can’t.

On putting his vocals at the forefront of the record:

I think it’s something you have to do at some point: strip away the veils and try not to hide. I felt ready. The recording space is a safe space for me. I loved being in the studio and working with Dan [Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never]. He’s been my music consultant since I started demoing out this project in 2005 — he was the first person to hear it. I’ve been a singer for a long part of my life and I’ve been a vocalist in live projects before, and I think I was trying to make things more complex than I needed to in my earlier releases. I decided this time I’m going to really sing and see what happens.

Autre Ne Veut, Anxiety

Andrew Parks — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 14:12:08 +0000

Exorcising confessionals across 10 mildly creepy tracks

Everything you need to know about Autre Ne Veut’s new album is in the bleak video for its chilling lead-off single, “Counting.” In case you overlooked the line “I’m counting on the idea/ That you stay alive” the first time around, Arthur Ashin hammers its profoundly depressing point home with a clip that features a few forlorn Mykki Blanco verses and the last dying breaths of Ashin’s grandmother. Your typical love song this is not.

So while Anxiety features more than its fair share of Timbaland-vis-Timberlake tropes and unironic Top 40 nods, the shuffle and sheen of the singer/producer’s muscular studio mix can’t hide the confessionals that are exorcised across 10 mildly creepy tracks. It’s as if we were all invited to Ashin’s American Idol audition, only to watch in horror as he writhes around the floor to a rubberized Rihanna beat like a freshly-killed eel. And yet, as the last skittish sample scampers away, something truly special happens — the judges are into it, especially Nicki Minaj and Randy Jackson, who actually says, “You’re crazy dog…crazy catchy!” Believe it or not, Ashin’s bringing his baggage to Hollywood. Let’s just hope he doesn’t have a nervous breakdown in the middle of covering “Climax.”

Sally Shapiro, Somewhere Else

Laura Studarus — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 14:12:08 +0000

An unabashedly romantic head rush

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

As with previous albums, retro turns are delivered with a knowing wink (See: dance-floor filler “This City’s Local Italo Disco DJ Has A Crush On Me”). “Sundown” contains a “Careless Whisper”-era saxophone solo, paired with a saccharine synth that blurs the line between slinky and sleazy. Upbeat ode to impossible love “Starman” features both a four-on-the-floor beat and the time-tested metaphor for romantic satisfaction — a trip to outer space. The album implies a promise: that the listener will be transported by the sheer strength of Shapiro’s longing. And indeed, many songs play like a daydreamer’s manifesto. But Sally Shapiro’s music has always been a testament to the transportive power of longing, lust and love, and going Somewhere Else, by now, is just what we expect.

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