eMusic » ZZ

Mark Gergis, I Remember Syria

Richard Gehr — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 17:35:41 +0000

A stunning, evocative man-to-nation love letter

The final track on 2004′s I Remember Syria — producer Mark Gergis’s evocative man-to-nation “love letter” consisting of street sounds, political commentary, homosexual confession, random bursts of radio, plus a few actual musical selections — is a conceptual stunner. “The Norias of Hama (Blood Irrigation on the Orontes)” is eight minutes of what sounds like jets but is actually Hama’s famous wooden water wheels, which have been adopted as a symbol of resistance to current president Bashar al-Assadh, son of former president Hafez al-Assad, whose tanks and bombs killed some 30,000 Syrian Sunnis in 1982. I Remember Syria is thus more timely than ever, and its re-release benefits the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (Red Cross).

More than 70,000 Syrians have been killed during the current civil war, while another 2.2 million have either been displaced or fled abroad. I Remember Syria, with one disc dedicated to capitol city Damascus and another to its hinterlands, celebrates an ethnically and culturally diverse country noted for its hospitality and beauty. The religious chants of “Ramadan Radio,” the wonderous chaos of “Dueling Cassette Kiosks,” and Assyrian star Jermaine Tamraz’s lovely “Moumita” offer audio snapshots of the conflict’s catastrophic cultural cost.

Discover: Vampisoul

Richard Gehr — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 16:09:44 +0000

For Vampisoul founder Iñigo Pastor, it all began as a fanzine that mutated into a label with global aspirations. At age 15, Pastor began publishing La Herencia de los Munster (The Legend of the Munsters) from his home in Spain’s Basque region. Following flexidisks featuring Spanish garage bands, Pastor’s first vinyl release on his Munster label was an EP containing one track by Spacemen 3 and “two Spanish bands nobody outside of Spain knows.” Although it was essentially a label devoted to singles and albums from the fringes of punk, DIY and psych-rock culture, Munster’s most successful release turned out to be what Pastor believes to be the world’s first compilation of tracks by mildly raunchy R&B diva — and short-term Miles spouse — Betty Davis.

By 2002, Iñigo had traveled and listened widely enough to realize the need for a parallel label for his new international enthusiasms. “My musical friends made me listen to stuff and enlarged my spectrum. I got into Latin music, black American music, African music, everywhere’s music.” Assisted by his widening network of contacts, “We built up a nice catalog in a short period of time,” he says. Vampisoul’s first release was Back to Peru, a mixture of underground rock and tropical tracks from the 1960s and ’70s. Vampi slipped under the wire and managed to cut a deal to reissue classic albums by Joe Bataan, Joe Cuba, Pete Rodriguez and Ray Barretto shortly before the legendary Fania salsa label was sold again (and then once again). “It was kind of a dodgy label,” he recalls, “but you could somehow get a license from someone in New York City.” Releases of Nigerian afrobeat and highlife, Italian library music, vintage jazz from the Czech Republic, and Iranian underground rock soon followed.

Hits from the Vampisoul catalog include afrobeat co-founder Tony Allen’s albums with Nigeria ’70 and Latin boogaloo star Joe Bataan’s 2003 comeback, Call My Name. The latter, written and produced by the Phenomenal Handclap Band’s Daniel Collas, was one of the first Daptone studio projects and has the 1967 vibe to prove it. Other reissues include Peruvian cumbia from the Amazon, aka chicha, reconstituted from labels that haven’t existed for more than thirty years (which makes royalty payments difficult). Vampisoul has even spawned its own protégé label, Light in the Attic. Matt Sullivan, its founder, interned with Pastor while studying in Spain. “We became very good friends,” Pastor says. “He took the concept back to the United States, where he has surpassed us in many ways because his releases are so fantastic. Now he handles the Betty Davis stuff.”

Here’s Iñigo Pastor on some of his favorite, and odder, Vampisoul and Munster releases.

Los Pirañas,Toma Tu Jabón Kapax

Toma Tu Jabón Kapax

Los Pirañas
2012 | Vampisoul / The Orchard

These three young guys from Bogotá had the same backround as I did in rock, punk and DIY, and they decided to bring back cumbia in their own manner. They recorded this live studio album in a very free, experimental way. When their recordings came into the office, we had to figure out how to tag them for distributors: Basically, it sounds like Krautrockers playing experimental cumbia on bass, guitar, and drums... with no overdubs. Their main sound is cumbia, but it's a natural sort of fusion that really works. Their other bands are Frente Cumbiero and the Meridian Brothers.
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Cumbia Beat, volumes 1 & 2

We did this in collaboration with a good Peruvian friend who turned me on to his country’s music. He brought all his records to Europe and played me stuff every time I was at his place. This Amazonic psychedelic stuff was totally unheard and really vibrant. He said, “Let’s put them out. No one else is and I know the labels and musicians. I saw some of these bands with my father as a kid. On Sundays we’d go to a park and drink beer, eat food, and dance.”

Cumbia Beat Vol. 1

Various Artists
2010 | Vampisoul / The Orchard
Cumbia Beat Vol. 2

Various Artists
2012 | Vampisoul / The Orchard

Back to Peru, volumes 1 & 2

When you open a music book in the occident, it says things like, “In the ’60s, rock ‘n’ roll turned into the British invasion, then psychedelia, then progressive and then blah blah blah.” Peru has a similar progression but it’s not so clearly defined: It’s very mellow and mixed and special. Back to Peru is provides a general introduction to Peruvian music of the ’60s and ’70s. There’s some dance music, like the Gozalo compilations, but there’s a lot that’s moodier, midtempo and more psychedelic, like good Badfinger or late Beatles. They’re also good with melodies, like the Brazilians; maybe it has to do with their weather, food and education. Most of them are self-taught but were serious about making it sound good in the studio. You can find stuff like We All Together or Telegraph Avenue, who make a terrific sound comparable to any American band of the time.

Back To Peru Vol 1

Various Artists
2010 | Vampisoul / The Orchard
Back To Peru Vol 2

Various Artists
2009 | Vampisoul / The Orchard

¡Gózalo!, volumes 1 & 2

Gozalo means “enjoy” in Spanish, and these compilations focus on tropical dance music for partying and good times. Like Colombia, Peru is like a little continent unto itself. So much was happening there in the ’50s, ’60s and early ’80s, before the military took over in South America and everything turned a bit grayer. Listening to this music makes me jealous of anyone who lived there during that time because it was very open.

¡Gózalo! Vol 1

Various Artists
2010 | Vampisoul / The Orchard
¡Gózalo! Vol 2

Various Artists
2010 | Vampisoul / The Orchard

¡Saoco! The Bomba and Plena Explosion in Puerto Rico 1954-1966

¡Saoco! The Bomba and Plena Explosion in Puerto Rico 1954-1966

Various Artists
2012 | Vampisoul / The Orchard

We got in touch with Yannis Ruel, a French journalist. His wife is Puerto Rican, so he spent a lot of time there and found out about all this music. It was like when we started reissuing Fania stuff: You could find it in markets on cheaply done CDs with no liner notes. He thought it should be done right, and very few albums in Puerto Rico are like it. He wrote... an incredible essay that reads like a sociological and musicological dissertation. We're at work on volumes two and three.
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Rangarang: Pre-Revolutionary Iranian Pop

Rangarang

Various Artists
2011 | Vampisoul / The Orchard

A guy based in Washington, D.C., claimed to be the grandson of the guy who recorded these tracks. His grandfather was killed by the Iranian revolutionaries. He sent us a bunch of material to select and compile. It was very difficult. We couldn't find much information about some of the artists. We went by the music rather than by famous names or big hits. It's fascinating to think about this music in... the context of where it was being made and what came before it — a musical explosion in a strange social moment.
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Bola Johnson, Man No Die

Man No Die

Bola Johnson
2010 | Vampisoul / The Orchard

The guy representing Nigeria's Premiere label sent us a batch of 1960s and '70s material this trumpeter and bandleader recorded for Phillips. We learned that Bola has even more recordings out, but we don't know how many because even though he's on Facebook, he never replied to us for information or pictures or anything. He's still playing but doesn't seem to care. The world may seem much smaller these days, but there... are still big holes everywhere. Bola's a complete performer who can play all kinds of African music. This compilation has everything from soft highlife to hard funk like Fela Kuti's, who influenced him.
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Flipper Psychout

Flipper Psychout

Various Artists
2010 | Vampisoul / The Orchard

This was compiled by Alessandro Casella, a record collector and DJ who runs Rome's Micca Club. He got deep into Italian library music and was hired by Flipper to go into its vaults and find material to offer to labels. Mainly, it's music done for publicity, films and television in the early '70s, and the number of different moods and styles was endless. Alessandro came to us with tracks that are psychedelic,... sexy and quite incredible. That kind of music was being produced in Britain, of course, but it was also being done in southern Europe — France, Italy and even Spain. There's a lot more on the way. We're working on a project with the Spanish library music of Warner Chappell, which has something like 15,000 recordings. But it's too much. You need an expert or else you'll spend half your life on it.
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Los Saicos, ¡Demolición! The Complete Recordings

¡Demolición! The Complete Recordings

Los Saicos
2010 | Munster / The Orchard

This is the most significant Munster release at the moment for me. Los Saicos recorded six singles in 1964 and '65, but no albums at all. It was very mysterious. I used to play them for all my friends. I'd put the needle down and they'd say, "What is this?!" The band only played its own stuff, no covers. Their themes were a bit sinister: cemeteries, jails, executions, bombings and demolition. They... even had their own Peruvian TV show. They were stars, and then they split up, quit and didn't play any more music. The bandmember we got in touch with lives a very wealthy life in Washington, D.C., where he works for NASA. He became an engineer. We've gotten many licensing requests for them. I'm very proud of this because we may never see anything as unique as Los Saicos again.
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Lyres, Lyres, Lyres

Lyres Lyres

Lyres
2012 | Munster / The Orchard

I really worshipped the Lyres during my formative years when I was doing the fanzine, and I saw them live a few times. A gap opened between the punk explosion and grunge, and the Lyres were one of the more interesting bands to appear. It was not easy to deal with Jeff Connolly; he's a bit of a perfectionist [laughs]. But it's very good music and I'm glad we did it. No... one else had reissued them except for Matador more than 15 years ago. I'm happy we've made them wider-known.
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Red Baraat: An All-American Immigration Saga

Richard Gehr — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:56:44 +0000

Describing New York’s Red Baraat dhol ‘n’ brass band is like those blind guys and the elephant, only in reverse: What you hear depends on what touches you. South Asians will immediately recognize Bollywood hits like “Dum Maro Dum” and “Mast Kalendar,” devotional music like “Samaro Mantra” and “Aarthi, and the joyous party vibe of the baraat, a bridegroom’s wedding procession. Dancers in Virginia and Washington, D.C., will hear a go-go influence right off the bat, especially once sousaphonist John Altieri starts rapping. New Orleaneans will feel right at home once the brass kicks in, jazzbos will feel the swing, and Brazilians think it sounds like samba.

When the loud and proud nonet toured the UK for the first time in early 2013, however, founding dhol drummer Sunny Jain says “they thought it was a punk-rock band,” adding, “I’d never heard that one before.”

Formed in 2009, Red Baraat is the happy multicultural outcome of an all-American immigration saga. Sunny Jain was born in 1975 and raised in Rochester, New York. Originally from Pakistan’s Punjab region, his parents were devout Jains, adherents of the Indian religion noted for its commitment to nonviolence. Sunny was raised a strict vegetarian and prayed at pujas, Jain religious ceremonies, where he learned South Asian bhajan, or devotional songs. Outside the house he played ball with his American friends; inside he played “table tabla” with his uncles and father, an amateur harmonium player and Ravi Shankar fan, jamming out to vintage Bollywood hits and bhajan.

Jain’s two worlds didn’t entwine until he began writing jazz tunes while studying drums and composition at Rutgers. Frustrated by the music’s 32-bar AABA form, he yearned to return to the sounds he heard growing up. “They hold a place in my heart,” he says. “I began studying all the Tin Pan Alley standards when I was 10 years old. But when I started writing, I wanted to explore my standards.” As a bandleader, the drummer released three jazz albums — As Is (re-released as Mango Festival), Avaaz and Taboo — that inventively blend Eastern and Western styles no less distinctively than slightly older desi groundbreakers, and sometime-colleagues, Vijay Iyer, Rudresh Mahanthappa, and Rez Abbasi. Jain, however, was becoming increasingly ambivalent about the jazz scene; he missed the fellow feeling that connects musicians and audience in a communal moment.

Red Baraat was assembled as the wedding band for Jain’s own ceremony. A few years earlier, he’d pick up the double-head dhol drum, a sticks-struck staple of Punjab’s bhangra beats, and fell in love with it. Playing the dhol in drummer Kenny Wolleson’s Himalayas marching band rejuvenated Jain’s love of performance, and he realized that no one to date had combined Indian music, jazz, and electronic music with dhol. “I wanted to do something that reminded me of being a five-year-old in India watching my uncle getting married, when this brass band ensued, a dhol player showed up, and this cacophonous sound started happpening.”

Jain conceived Red Baraat as “another egg in the basket,” just one project among many. But it took on a life of its own. “I only wanted drums and horns, no electrified instruments,” though Altieri occasionally triggers electronic effects. “I wanted to take to the streets with a big boisterous sound.” Red Baraat joined a robust local brass-band cohort that included Slavic Soul Party!, Brooklyn Qawwali Party and Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All Stars. “I wanted a group where I could just play dhol and not drum set. But it’s taken over my life to the point where I hardly ever play drum set nowadays. I knew it was going to be unique, but I didn’t think it would take off like it did.”

Red Baraat’s new Shruggy Ji takes the energy of 2010′s Chaal Baby and 2011′s live Bootleg Bhangra and focuses it in a slightly new direction. As Jain explains, after the India Partition of 1947, “the eastern side gravitated to a rhythm called chaal, which you can hear all over Shruggy Ji. But the western side, and I’m simplifying here, went more to the faster-paced dhamaal, which you hear in ‘Dama Dam Must Qatandar,’ a three-centuries-old Sufi song. The Sufi dhol approach is much more intense.” Jain has been studying that approach on YouTube, picking up licks from the astounding “godfather” of Sufi dhol drumming, Pappu Saeen. “He’ll put the drum strap around his head and start swinging around, playing the most intense stuff and twirling for minutes. It’s ridiculous. I can do it for about 20 seconds before I fall down.”

40 Years of Catch A Fire

Lenny Kaye — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 20:24:29 +0000

“Time is my ammunition,” says Bob Marley in a room at the Chelsea Hotel in July of 1973. Now 40 years have passed — longer than Bob himself strode upon this earth singing his redemption song.

The night before we spoke, I had watched transfixed as the Wailers played Max’s Kansas City, opening for Bruce Springsteen. Not that it was an unusual billing for Max’s: A week later Iggy Pop would headline three midnight performances; in mid-August Tim Buckley was scheduled; coming attractions included the New York Dolls and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.

The Wailers fit right into this spatial mix. It was their first time in New York, and they brought with them the harbingers of a reggae poised to become a world music, breaking out of its West Indian shantytown stylee. After years of transmuting American pop songs into the characteristic loping rhythms of Caribbean music, a beat off-centered and on-kiltered, the cultural exchange was beginning to flow upriver: Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites,” Johnny Nash’s version of Bob’s “Stir It Up,” Paul Simon’s “Mother and Child Reunion,” the soundtrack to The Harder They Come. Infused with a sense of destiny, preaching the apocalyptic tenants of Rastafarian poetics, the sacrament of ganja amid lofty Biblical invocations, this was music ready to ignite.

Catch A Fire was the Wailers’ calling card. They were no strangers to recording, with a lengthy career dating back to 1963, when they made their debut under Leslie Kong’s aegis, and then worked with ska-master Clement Dodds, and through to the inimitable Lee Perry. If there is anyone responsible for turning the group from a harmony trio (Bob, Bunny Livingstone and Peter Tosh) into a more expansive mode, it’s Perry. “Scratch” was on the verge of losing himself in the welter of effect and reverberation that made his later dub-work so hallucinatory. But he administered tuff-love to the Wailers by tightening their rhythm section, a turnabout that became fair play when the Wailers hired the backbone of Perry’s Upsetters rhythm section, the brothers Barrett, Aston and Carlton, masters of the one-drop bass drum.

Chris Blackwell, who ran Island Records, had lived a hybrid life. He grew in Jamaica in wealthy circumstances (his family was in the rum business), and was aware of the bubbling-under sounds emanating from Jamaica. He founded his record label in 1962, and had leased early Wailers singles. Though his label was primarily known for its rock acts, from Traffic to Roxy Music, he had broad tastes (Millie Small’s “My Boy Lollipop” was one of his early hits in Britain and America), and instinctively understood the global possibilities of the infectious riddim of Jamaica. He was an investor in the movie The Harder They Come, had partnered with Trojan Records at one point, and saw in Bob’s songwriting ability and forward-looking acumen and charisma the only performer who might take the music to another, more international level. He even leased the early Wailers singles. His opportunity came when the Wailers found themselves stranded in London after a proposed European tour had fallen apart. He paid for their air fare home, and advanced the capital to record in Kingston. Then the group returned to England to complete the masters.

As co-producer on Catch A Fire, Blackwell suggested touches to make the album more appealing to non-reggae ears and seductive to non-reggae radio programmers. He enlisted studio musicians — Wayne Perkins, a Muscle Shoals regular, whose lead guitar lines bring a taste of southern-rock to the album opener “Concrete Jungle” and the long-form “Stir It Up,” which also features “Rabbit” Bundrick adding synthesizer and keyboard touches — and overdubbed them on the tapes Bob had recorded in Jamaica. Released in April of 1973, the album was acclaimed in the rock press, scraping the bottom of the Top 200 in America, serving its purpose to alert the world of reggae’s approaching firestorm.

Catch A Fire also marked a turning point in the evolution of the Wailers. The album is credited to the group, but Marley’s increasing preeminence in their stage show and his dominance as the group’s chief songwriter inevitably led to more emphasis being placed on his leadership role. Bunny would leave the original trio soon after, preferring to return to Jamaica and not tour, and though Peter Tosh writes two of the album’s best songs — “400 Years” and “Stop That Train” — his own solo career would soon inevitably be underway. Bob might have been increasingly drawn to the mystic groundations of Rastafarianism, but the album still offers such pop-ish material as “Baby We’ve Got A Date (Rock It Baby)” and “Kinky Reggae.”

When I spoke to him at the Chelsea, he was already shifting into the rhetoric of revolution and salvation that would, as the ’70s progressed, make him a spokesman for unity and spiritual transcendence and cultural brotherhood. Drawing deeply on a spliff, he preached the word to me, an eager congregant. “Take off your face, and strip down y’old self, and see who you is, that is who you really is. Rasta. We can’t pretend. I a Rasta. I live…”

And so he does, his message resounding, in this future prophesized by the burning bush that is Catch A Fire.

A Hawk & A Hacksaw, You Have Already Gone To The Other World

Luke Turner — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:00:10 +0000

Putting fierce twists on the music of the Ukraine, Hungary and Romania

Over the past decade, the New Mexican duo of Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost, aka A Hawk & A Hacksaw, have taken a fascinating journey through the music of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Turkey and beyond. They also have a long-standing connection with cinema: Their first release was the soundtrack to a documentary about Slovenian thinker Slavoj Žižek. This album, their sixth, is loosely based on a score written to accompany Sergei Parajanov’s 1965 documentary film Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors, about the Slavic Hutsul people in the Carpathian mountains that run through Central and Easter Europe. Clearly, there’s magic in those hills, and it’s richly mined here, as the pair put some fierce twists on the music of the Ukraine, Hungary and Romania. There’s an otherworldly atmosphere to “Where No Horse Neighs, And No Crow Flies,” where high tumbling notes give way to a sinister drone and rattling bells. On “Ivan And Marichka/The Sorcerer,” the drama is even more pronounced: It starts as a cheerful, skittish fiddle piece before becoming a terrifying tumult of drums and noise. The title track features more echoing, rattling rhythms and a gripping finale — it’s as if Liars had been transported via time-machine to an ancient pagan ritual on some dark mountainside. A Hawk & A Hacksaw’s music is a fusion of folk music styles that feels unforced, thoughtful and celebratory, and You Have Already Gone To The Other World is their finest work yet.

Ticklah, Ticklah vs. Axelrod

Nate Patrin — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 19:27:08 +0000

Melting-pot eclecticism done right

Victor Axelrod can do it all, or at least everything he feels like doing. As a contributing member of Antibalas, the Dap-Kings, Menahan Street Band and Easy-Star All Stars, he has covered Afrobeat, Latin soul, Southern funk, dub reggae, and any genre he feels like adapting into that already-broad scope. But it’s under the roots-reggae identity Ticklah that he originally made his name, and Ticklah vs. Axelrod is a fine amalgamation of all the styles Axelrod’s got stashed under his hat. There’s some deep dub, naturally — the melodica-soaked “Answer Me” and its sparse, ghostly choir are straight from the Augustus Pablo playbook, and the soaring trombone and canyon-echo cymbals of “Descent” have all the resonance of Vin Gordon traversing through King Tubby’s vast sonic landscapes. But there are also some fitting integrations of dub-compatible sounds, from the sunny ’60s ska-meets-boogaloo vibe of “Mi Sonsito” to the soul-jazz-tinged “Deception.” And it benefits well from a slate of guests that includes sound bwoy-burying roots singer Mikey General and Native Tongues go-to hip-hop vocalist Vinia Mojica. Less a soundclash than a soundmeld, this is melting-pot eclecticism done right.

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

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

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

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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Six Degrees of Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Gamak

Kevin Whitehead — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 15:44:11 +0000

The Album

Gamak

Rudresh Mahanthappa
2013 | ACT Music + Vision / The Orchard

Indian-American saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa sometimes looks for ways to bridge jazz and South Indian music, as on his celebrated two-alto collaboration with Kadri Gopalnath, Kinsmen. On Gamak, Mahanthappa's point of departure is the gamakas, the specific ways Indian classical musicians sculpt a note: sliding into it from just above or below, intensifying it with wide or narrow leaps, ending it with an upward swoop; it's these rococo designs that give Indian melodies... their distinctive character. Mahanthappa has written striking tunes with the same sort of pungent inflections ("Abhogi," "Stay I," "We'll Make More"), developing the details with input from his frontline partner, microtonal guitarist David Fiuczynski. Mahanthappa's bandmate in Jack DeJohnette's quintet, Fiuczynski makes Indian swerves and blues string-bends sound like they're part of the same tradition. With its Carnatic saxophone jitters and slide guitar, "Abhogi" sounds like a Gopalnath/Beefheart mashup. Dan Weiss applies his knowledge of tabla beat-cycles to the trap set; Francois Moutin is the jazz anchor on bass.
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Roots, For The Home Team

The Beloved's Call

Ustad Bismillah Khan
2006 | Venus Records & Tapes Pvt., Ltd. / The Orchard

Mahanthappa ally Kadri Gopalnath struck out on his own path decades ago, when he began playing Indian classical music on saxophone. India didn't lack for reed players he could look to for inspiration. In the South, musicians play the double-reed nadaswaram; in the North, the shorter quadruple-reed shehnai. In construction, they're similar to the oboe, though the comparison doesn't do justice to their blaring, quavery, insinuating tone. These... loud horns were mainly for festive occasions and outdoor use until Ustad Bismillah Khan brought shehnai into the concert hall and spread its fame well beyond India. You know that pinched, nasal tone jazz soprano saxophonists get? You can trace it back to John Coltrane's admiration for Khan, more of an apparent influence on Trane's soprano sound than Steve Lacy or Sidney Bechet. On alto, Rudresh Mahanthappa can sneak into that harsh downhome sound too — one more arrow in his sonic/conceptual quiver.
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Guitar As Sitar

Roger The Engineer / Over Under Sideways Down

The Yardbirds
2009 | The Yardbirds / Cadiz

Western musicians felt the call of subcontinental music in the early 1960s, when Coltrane recorded his undulating "India," and Bud Shank, Gary Peacock and Louis Hayes jammed with Ravi Shankar on "Fire Night." Rockers carried the torch from there. Before George Harrison plucked beginner's sitar on "Norwegian Wood," the Yardbirds waxed "Heart Full of Soul" with a sitar lead, replaced in the end by Jeff Beck playing the same... line with more punch on fuzz guitar. So began "raga rock" — raga being any of India's fastidiously sequenced scales that give a particular color to a performance, the way the blues scale and traditional ways of manipulating it tint that genre. The Yardbirds' "Over Under Sideways Down" was prime raga rock, with Beck's irresistible sitary guitar hook. Its one-chord boogieing had a faint raga feel, obscuring the tune's Bill Haley roots. More of Beck's sting-and-sustain sitar inflections crop up on the 1966 album that hit appeared on, even moreso on the bonus-track version where Jimmy Page joins him on "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago," with its psychedelic modern-art sound collage.
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East Meets West, More Or Less

Indo Jazz Fusions

The Joe Harriott-John Mayer Double Quintet
2006 | Rhino Atlantic

India having been part of the British Empire explains why many '60s stylistic fusions took place in the UK. Anglo-Indian composer John Mayer came over from Kolkata, eventually teaming with Anglo-West Indian alto saxophonist (and early free jazzer) Joe Harriott. Their Double Quintet was Harriott's two-horn combo plus an Indian-style ensemble with classical flute, Mayer's violin, sitar, droning-strings tambura and tabla. Mayer wrote the stairstep melodies and called the shots — say,... improvise using these six notes, over this 10-beat bass line: Indian music dumbed down for outlanders and insiders alike. The music sounds a bit stiff and bachelor pad-y on 1965's Indo-Jazz Suite, save when Harriott veers out of bounds. By Indo-Jazz Fusions the next year, the sound was more fluid and organic, the collective better integrated and more at ease. Harriott and trumpeter Shake Keane wing across amiably bustling backdrops; the jazz rhythm section and sitarist Diwan Motihar roll with Mayer's (still sometimes dippy) concept.
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East Really Meets West

Shakti with John McLaughlin

Shakti with John McLaughlin
1991 | Legacy/Columbia

John McLaughlin is a very fast guitarist, as he demonstrated with '70s-fusion champs the Mahavishnu Orchestra. That band's name spoke to India's influence on speedy metrical jazz rock — just as fusion and India both inform Gamak's precision drills. McLaughlin was especially drawn to India's rhythmic language, built on long complex beat cycles, the talas. Post-Mahavishnu, he put together an unplugged band that was a lot less loud but could be even... more intense: the crosscultural Shakti, with L. Shankar bending scales on violin and two or three crackling Indian percussionists including Zakir Hussain on tabla. Westerners may miss how radical the best of their music was. The rocketing "Joy" is Indian music with no time for droning: percussionists from Northern and Southern traditions mesh to set up an Anglo-Irish picker shredding on acoustic.
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Bringing It All Back Home

Extensions

Dave Holland Quartet
2000 | ECM

Rudresh Mahanthappa is one of many younger altoists indebted to Steve Coleman's slippery time and tonality, his oblique ways of relating improvised lines to underlying chords. Cascading saxophone lines all over Gamak betray the influence. Mahanthappa is also inspired by how Coleman puts his own old-world heritage to personal uses, drawing on the overlapping rhythm cycles in West African choral musics. Such wheels-within-wheels likewise fascinate the bass titan who spotlighted Coleman in... the '80s, Dave Holland. His 1989 Extensions was Mahanthappa's introduction to Coleman's playing and composing. Steve's "Black Hole" has his characteristic tumbling phrases, reversible rhythms and twisty melodic motion, while slinky Coleman ballads such as "101° Fahrenheit" echo in Mahanthappa's "Are There Clouds in India?" Rounding out Holland's hip young crew are guitarist Kevin Eubanks at his pre-Leno creative best, and ultra-tasty drummer Marvin "Smitty" Smith. Guess Mahanthappa liked the lineup; Gamak has the same instrumentation.
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Rudresh Mahanthappa, Gamak

Kevin Whitehead — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 15:38:12 +0000

Indian-American saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa sometimes looks for ways to bridge jazz and South Indian music, as on his celebrated two-alto collaboration with Kadri Gopalnath, Kinsmen. On Gamak, Mahanthappa’s point of departure is the gamakas, the specific ways Indian classical musicians sculpt a note: sliding into it from just above or below, intensifying it with wide or narrow leaps, ending it with an upward swoop; it’s these rococo designs that give Indian melodies their distinctive character. Mahanthappa has written striking tunes with the same sort of pungent inflections (“Abhogi,” “Stay I,” “We’ll Make More”), developing the details with input from his frontline partner, microtonal guitarist David Fiuczynski. Mahanthappa’s bandmate in Jack DeJohnette’s quintet, Fiuczynski makes Indian swerves and blues string-bends sound like they’re part of the same tradition. With its Carnatic saxophone jitters and slide guitar, “Abhogi” sounds like a Gopalnath/Beefheart mashup. Dan Weiss applies his knowledge of tabla beat-cycles to the trap set; Francois Moutin is the jazz anchor on bass.

Vusi Mahlasela, Sing to the People

Richard Gehr — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 14:12:03 +0000

A live performance of folky freedom songs that continue to resonate today

Pretoria-born Vusi Mahlasela’s ninth release marks the 20th anniversary of the South African activist-singer’s debut, When You Come Back, whose reconciliatory title track (also a popular 2010 World Cup anthem) continues to inspire the masses. Apartheid only began to end in 1994, but enough of its residue remains to make Mahlasela’s folky freedom songs continue to resonate today — hence the rowdy enthusiasm of his Johannesburg audience.

Singing in English, Sotho, Swahili and other languages, Mahlasela covers a lot of turf: “Our Sand” voices support for resettled Kalahari bushmen experiencing the “ghostly shadows of a vanished world,” while “Say Africa” claims a more global system of “UN loans and passport controls” is oppressing the modern African. Mahlasela’s wonderful voice turns sweet, strong or grainy depending on context. He scats intensely in “Ubuhle Bomhlaba,” evokes a dove’s summer celebration with a mbaqanga Zulu groove in “Amdokwe,” and swings hard in “Tswang Tswang Tswang.” The show’s highlight, unsurprisingly, is “When You Come Back,” which begins as an a cappella lament and evolves into a hard-jiving anthem. Go ahead and dance now, Mahlasela appears to imply; the struggle remains the same.

Tim Maia’s Superbly Idiosyncratic Soul

Richard Gehr — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 22:11:16 +0000

Although he died in 1998 at the age of 55 after nearly collapsing onstage a week earlier, Maia’s myth has been growing steadily since the 2008 release of Nelson Motta’s best-selling biography, Vale Tudo: O Som e a Fúria de Tim Maia (Anything Goes: The Sound and the Fury of Tim Maia). The book was turned into a hit musical that in turn inspired a forthcoming biopic. Not bad for a former lunch delivery boy and nearly lifelong dope fiend, who once revealed the secret to his three-decade recording career as “having a balance: Half of my songs are armpit soakers and the other half are panty soakers.”

Although Tim Maia continued to produce hit records throughout the ’80s and ’90s, the ’70s turned out to be his most artistically fertile period. And for Maia’s music, the decade can be further divided into the years before and after his involvement with Manoel Jacintho Coelho’s Rational Culture sect, whose bible, Universe in Disenchantment, Maia encountered while tripping on mescaline. Inspired by Coelho’s Scientological promises of purified consciousness and a flying-saucer rescue back to our real home planet, the Rational World, Maia cut his hair, dressed himself in white, gave away all his possessions, eschewed inebriants, and demanded that his band follow suit. Having already recorded everything except the vocals for his fifth album, Maia rewrote his lyrics, returned to the studio, and transformed his already epic blend of soul, funk and Brazilian into the two-volume 1975-76 masterpiece of propagandistic sect-acular hooey that is Racional.

You’ll find Racional‘s “Imunização Racional (Que Beleza),” “Bom Senso,” “You Don’t Know What I Know,” and 12-minute groove epic “Rational Culture” on The Existential Soul of Tim Maia – Nobody Can Live Forever. Released as part of the Luaka Bop label’s World Psychedelic Classics series on what would have been Maia’s 50th birthday, Nobody Can Live Forever cherry-picks Maia’s peak years, which began in 1970 with Tim Maia — the first of 10 eponymous titles among the baby-faced singer’s 30-something-album discography. His brilliant and eccentric blend of raw funk, remarkable soul screaming (“Eu Amo Voce”), insane instrumental rock (“Flamengo”), and breezy Brazilian pop sold more than 200,000 copies and made Maia a star.

Born in the Tijuca neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro on September 28, 1942, Sebastião Rodrigues Maia was the 18th of 19 children, of whom 12 survived childbirth. A natural when it came to music, Maia formed two bands while still in high school and performed on television. After his father died, Maia hustled his way to America, where he arrived with $12, no English to speak of, and the address of a family friend in Tarrytown, New York. His nickname “Tião” was shorted to “Jimmy,” then “Tim.” During his four years in America, Maia joined a soul group called the Ideals, worked odd jobs and committed petty crimes. In 1964, he was busted in Daytona, Florida, for smoking pot in a stolen car, and spent six months in prison before being deported. Moving to São Paolo, Maia got his break thanks to Elis Regina, who invited him to co-write and record “These Are the Songs” with her in 1970.

With his fluency in American English and soul bona fides, Maia became a powerful force for musical change in Brazil. He inspired the Black Rio movement associated with Jorge Ben, Banda Black Rio, and the Gerson King Combo. He also became an increasingly loose cannon well-known for his many concert no-shows and hard-partying ways. (His preferred “triathlon” mixed whiskey, marijuana and cocaine.) He was married five times, fathered a half-dozen children, and did yet more jail time.

Following an angry break from the Rational Culture club in 1976, Maia quickly released an innovative disco album (Disco Club) and then another excellent Tim Maia disk, which contains the poignant “Nobody Can Live Forever” and Marvin Gaye-like “Brother Father Mother Sister.” Where other Brazilian artists contemplated black America from afar, Maia had imbibed it deeply. He released tracks in English throughout a career that included a lot of late-period hits, misses, and two albums of nicely assayed bossa nova: Tim Maia Interpreta Clássicos da Bossa Nova (1990) and the valedictory Amigos do Rei – Tim Maia e os Cariocas (1997). Maia made a second and final trip to America, and Tarrytown, in ’97. This time, unfortunately, the country didn’t provide the fuel for another three decades of superbly idiosyncratic soul. Instead, Maia ballooned up to more than 300 pounds, which was his weight while attempting to record a television show in Niterói, across Guanabra Bay from Rio de Janeiro, on March 8, 1998. Perspiring heavily, he left the stage shortly after attempting to sing “Não Quero Dinheiro (Só Quero Amar)” — “Don’t Want Money (Just Want Love).” He was taken by ambulance to Antonio Pedro University Hospital, where he died a week later.

Various Artists, Diablos del Ritmo 1960-1985: The Colombian Melting Pot

Chris Nickson — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 20:39:38 +0000

A weird and wonderful journey where every twist and turn opens up colorful new vistas

The city of Barranquilla on the Caribbean coast of Colombia is the place where Latin America and Africa meet. The Spanish brought slaves here in hundreds of thousands, and over the centuries Barranquilla has grown into a melting pot where cultures, and music, blur.

This compilation celebrates a time of glorious musical experimentation in the 20th century, when the sounds of native cumbia and vallenato swirled together with funk and psychedelia from Europe and the United States, all underpinned with the rhythms of Africa. Half of this double-album focuses on the African side of Colombian music, half on its indigenous (Indian) styles, but what’s fascinating is how they come together. Try the Colombian dub experience of “Eco En Stereo,” or “Quiero Mi Gente,” a song aching for a Talking Heads cover, to hear how beautifully the fusion can work.

Two tracks by Wganda Kenya stand out on the African side. “Shakalaodé,” clocking in at nearly eight minutes, is a steaming slice of Afrobeat that would make Fela Kuti proud. But “El Caterete” is more twisted. A Latin piano line dances around African percussion and funk guitar, before a singer with operatic ambitions jumps into the fray. It’s a startling combination, especially when a fractured piano solo seems to pull ideas from the Cecil Taylor free-jazz songbook. Welcome to the new, transatlantic Colombia.

Andrés Landero represents the campesinos with his raw country style, shaped by Colombia’s indigenous music. Championed by both Joe Strummer and novelist Gabriel Garcia Márquez, his music starts out as a gleeful, anarchic mix of accordion, percussion and off-key brass, fighting for control of “Busca La Careta,” a compelling car wreck of a track. But on “La Pava Congona,” he mixes things up. The accordion and vocals are still heavily rhythmic – pure Colombian cumbia — but the drumming that underpins everything is straight out of the Congo. The funk comes to the jungle.

Lovingly assembled over five years by Analog Africa head Samy Ben Redjeb, Diablos del Ritmo is a weird and wonderful journey through a landscape where every twist and turn opens up colorful new vistas.

eMusic’s Best Albums of 2012

eMusic Editorial Staff — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 16:59:34 +0000

Every year, when eMusic’s editorial staff compiles our annual best-of list, the goal is never to come to some kind of academic determination of the year’s best records via a series of complicated formulas and criteria. To do so would be as maddening as it is impossible. I’ve been thinking a lot about the way our list comes together over the course of the last few weeks and I think, above all else, what we try to do with this list is to tell a story — to represent the music that mattered most to us at eMusic in an almost narrative form. We don’t really give much consideration to which albums may or may not make other people’s lists. We don’t care a whole lot about which albums were popular or unpopular, or which albums may or may not have resonance 10 or 20 or 30 years from now. And we certainly don’t care about which albums sold the most. Instead, we try to collect the albums that impacted us the most, with the belief that these are the albums that will impact other people, too. If an album is on this list, it means we love it and we endorse it, and we think you’ll love it, too. And if it made our Top 20? We consider it essential. These are our picks for the 100 Best Records of 2012. — J. Edward Keyes, Editor-in-Chief

#100 Gentleman Jesse, Leaving Atlanta

Leaving Atlanta

Gentleman Jesse
2012 | Douchemaster / Revolver

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

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

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

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

Eraas

ERAAS
2012 | felte / The Orchard

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

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

Pop Zeus

Pop Zeus
2012 | Pop Zeus / TuneCore

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

Will Happiness Find Me?

Maria Minerva
2012 | Not Not Fun / Revolver

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

Long Slow Dance

The Fresh & Onlys
2012 | Mexican Summer

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

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

Fin

John Talabot
2012 | Permanent Vacation / GoodToGo

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

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

Quarantine

Laurel Halo
2012 | Hyperdub / The Orchard

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

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

Rebirth

Jimmy Cliff
2012 | Jimmy Cliff - Rebirth

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

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

Misery Wizard

Pilgrim
Metal Blade Records / The Orchard

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

Look Around the Corner (with The Combo Barbaro)

Quantic & Alice Russell
2012 | TRU THOUGHTS LTD

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

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

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

Casting For Gravity

Donny McCaslin
2012 | eOne Music / Entertainment One Distribution

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

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

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

Hundred Waters

Hundred Waters
OWSLA

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

Lucifer

Peaking Lights
2012 | Mexican Summer

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

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

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

Cokefloat!

PAWS
2012 | FatCat Records / The Orchard

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

Roomful of Teeth

Roomful of Teeth
New Amsterdam

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

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

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

Finger-Songwriter

Jeremy Siskind
2012 | Brooklyn Jazz Underground Records / The Orchard

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

Grace and Lies

Family Band
2012 | No Quarter / SC Distribution

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

Book Burner

Pig Destroyer
2012 | Relapse Records

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

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

Orangefarben

Sea of Bees
2012 | Team Love Records

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

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

Possession

Christian Mistress
2012 | Relapse Records

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

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

Rhythm And Repose

Glen Hansard
2012 | Anti/Epitaph

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

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

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

METZ

METZ
2012 | Sub Pop Records

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

Spooky Action at a Distance

Lotus Plaza
2012 | kranky / The Orchard

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

Sunrise

Amit Friedman Sextet
2012 | Origin Records / The Orchard

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

MU.ZZ.LE

Gonjasufi
2012 | EP/SINGLE

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

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

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

Honor Found In Decay

Neurosis
2012 | Neurot / Revolver

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

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

Control System

Ab-Soul
2012 | TopDawg Ent. / TuneCore

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

Lilacs & Champagne

Lilacs & Champagne
2012 | Mexican Summer

Alex Hall and Emil Amos are the personalities behind Grails, a Portland instrumental rock collective that's happily traversed so much sonic terrain over the past decade and a half that they'd seemingly make side projects unnecessary. But where Grails absorbs and perverts genres, Hall and Amos's self-titled debut as Lilacs & Champagne is an act of deconstruction and rebuilding: The duo were inspired by Madlib's dank crate-digging and sample-stitching technique, and they... also share a love for similar source material. Unquestionably stoned in demeanor, L&C leans heavy on underground hip-hop, Krautrock, '70s psych and even an occasion Jayne Mansfield recording to create ambient music for the kind of people who find the idea of ambient music boring, or a solution for anyone who wished the sample-happy travelogues of Avalanches or Quiet Village transported them to somewhere darker.
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#72 Pop 1280, The Horror

The Horror

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

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

Is Your Love Big Enough? (Deluxe Edition)

Lianne La Havas
2012 | Nonesuch

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

#70 Frankie Rose, Interstellar

Interstellar

Frankie Rose
2012 | Slumberland Records / The Orchard

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

#68 Liars, WIXIW

WIXIW

Liars
2012 | MUTE

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

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

Rayuela

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

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

Until The Quiet Comes

Flying Lotus
2012 | Warp Records

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

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

Ugly

Screaming Females
2012 | Don Giovanni Records / Believe Digital

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

The Clearing

Bowerbirds
2012 | Dead Oceans / SC Distribution

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

#63 Ty Segall Band, Slaughterhouse

Slaughterhouse

Ty Segall Band
2012 | In The Red / Revolver

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

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

Shields

Grizzly Bear
2012 | Warp Records

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

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

Bend Beyond

Woods
2012 | Woodsist / Revolver

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

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

sorry

White Lung
2012 | Deranged Records / The Orchard

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

Spirit Fiction

Ravi Coltrane
2012 | BLUE NOTE

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

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

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

Total Loss

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

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

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

Strange Land

Yellow Ostrich
2012 | Barsuk Records

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

Under the Pale Moon

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

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

Radio Music Society

Esperanza Spalding
2012 | Heads Up

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

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

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

Yellow & Green

Baroness
2012 | Relapse Records

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

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

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

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

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

awE naturalE

THEESatisfaction
2012 | Sub Pop Records

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

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

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

Life Is Good

Nas
2012 | Def Jam Records

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

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

Accelerando

Vijay Iyer Trio
2012 | ACT Music

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

Black Radio

Robert Glasper
2012 | BLUE NOTE

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

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

End of Daze

Dum Dum Girls
2012 | Sub Pop Records

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

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

Correct Behavior

Eternal Summers
2012 | Kanine Records

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

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

Open Your Heart

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

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

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

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

The Haunted Man (Deluxe Version)

Bat For Lashes
2013 | Parlophone

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

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

Icon Give Thank

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

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

Flip The Script

Orrin Evans
2012 | Posi-Tone Records / The Orchard

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

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

The Seer

Swans
2012 | Young God / Revolver

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

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

Amazing stuff — if you can make it to the other side without blowing your speakers.
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#42 Bill Fay, Life is People

Life Is People

Bill Fay
2012 | Dead Oceans / SC Distribution

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

R.I.P.

Actress
2012 | Honest Jon's Records / Finetunes

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

Boys & Girls

Alabama Shakes
2012 | ATO Records

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

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

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

Voyageur

Kathleen Edwards
2012 | New Rounder

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

The Money Store

Death Grips
2012 | Epic

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

Out Of Sight. Out Of Town

Standard Fare
2011 | Melodic / Southern Record Distributors

In "Fifteen," on their 2010 debut The Noyelle Beat, Sheffield trio Standard Fare sang about being 22 and not knowing what to do. On the band's sophomore effort Out of Sight, Out of Town, they talk about mindless day jobs, crushed hopes and being "destined to die unknown." Bassist-vocalist Emma Kupa, guitarst-vocalist Dan How and drummer Andy Beswick have carved out a space alongside like-minded British indiepop acts Los Campesinos! and Allo... Darlin', with songs that will resonate with fellow 20-somethings trying to figure their lives out through dead-end jobs and romantic missteps. Among the best tracks is "Call Me Up," a hilarious but probably-relatable number about a post-nightclub hookup ("I never said you weren't hot, it's just that all this drinking does these things to me," sing How and Kupa). The rest of the set finds them musing on older women ("Older Women" — a stark contrast to "Fifteen," the last album's tale of lusting after and going home with a teenager), reconnecting with a love interest from teenage years ("Kicking Puddles"), and the nervousness of starting a new relationship ("051107"). It's not a musical change from their first LP — clean, bouncy guitars, quick, punchy bass lines, occasional use of horns or strings, and Kupa and How's back-and-forth vocals — but it's a solid display of pop hooks and quick wit.
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#36 Mac DeMarco, 2

#35 Jessie Ware, Devotion

Devotion

Jessie Ware
2013 | Interscope/Cherrytree

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

Centipede Hz

Animal Collective
2012 | Domino Recording Co

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

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

In conclusion, do not take the brown acid at your next Animal Collective show. Your synapses will thank you.
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#33 Christian Scott, Christian aTunde Adjuah

Christian aTunde Adjuah

Christian Scott
2012 | Concord Jazz

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

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

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

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

Young Man In America

Anais Mitchell
2012 | Wilderland Records / The Orchard

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

All We Love We Leave Behind

Converge
2012 | Epitaph

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

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

Clear Moon

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

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

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

Mirel Wagner

Mirel Wagner
2012 | Friendly Fire Recordings / The Orchard

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

Heaven

The Walkmen
2012 | Fat Possum / The Orchard

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

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

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

Sweet Heart Sweet Light

Spiritualized
2012 | Fat Possum Records

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

Beams

Matthew Dear
2012 | Ghostly International / The Orchard

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

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

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

Half Way Home

Angel Olsen
Bathetic Records

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

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

Royal Headache

Royal Headache
2012 | What's Your Rupture?

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

Lonerism

Tame Impala
2012 | Modular Fontana

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

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

Bloom

Beach House
2012 | Sub Pop Records

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

Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!

godspeed you! black emperor
2012 | Constellation / SC Distribution

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

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

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

No One Can Ever Know

The Twilight Sad
2012 | FatCat Records / The Orchard

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

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

Ekstasis

Julia Holter
2012 | RVNG INTL. / SC Distribution

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

The Lion's Roar

First Aid Kit
2012 | Wichita Recordings / Redeye

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

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

Gossamer

Passion Pit
2012 | Columbia

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

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

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

The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends

The Flaming Lips
2012 | Warner Bros.

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

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

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

Light Up Gold

Parquet Courts
2013 | What's Your Rupture?

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

Electra Heart

Marina And The Diamonds
2012 | Elektra

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

Diamondis makes her message even more challenging by freely flitting from satire to sincerity and back again so that it's never really clear if she's playing at being a "Primadonna" — a deserved U.K. hit — or confessing that, yeah, she is indeed guilty of self-absorption. Her warbling, dramatic vocal tone magnifies that ambiguity; even when she's flat-out declaring, "My life is a play," Diamondis suggests that her theatrical disconnect from her own genuine feelings isn't simply personal; that it's part and parcel of being female in a conflicting world. What she sometimes lacks in nuance she compensates with hooks honed by Dr. Luke, Rick Nowels, Greg Kurstin, Stargate, a former Sneaker Pimp and one-third of Swedish House Mafia. This isn't a women's studies course taught by a seasoned professor; it's an unabashed dance record in which an ambitious young singer uses the tools of popular culture to examine both her self and her sex.
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#13 El-P, Cancer4Cure

Cancer 4 Cure

El-P
2012 | Fat Possum Records

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

Celebration Rock

Japandroids
2012 | Polyvinyl Records

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

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

Swing Lo Magellan

Dirty Projectors
2012 | Domino Recording Co

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

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

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

Tramp (Deluxe Edition)

Sharon Van Etten
2012 | Jagjaguwar / SC Distribution

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

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

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

R.A.P. Music

Killer Mike
2012 | Williams Street Records

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

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

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

Kaleidoscope Dream

Miguel
2012 | ByStorm Entertainment/RCA Records

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

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

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

Attack On Memory

Cloud Nothings
2012 | Carpark Records

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

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

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

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

Big Inner

Matthew E. White
2013 | Domino Recording Co

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

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

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

Europe

Allo Darlin'
2012 | Slumberland Records / The Orchard

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

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

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

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

good kid, m.A.A.d city

Kendrick Lamar
2013 | Top Dawg / Aftermath / Interscope

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

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

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

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

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

Fiona Apple
2012 | Epic

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

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

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

channel ORANGE

Frank Ocean
2012 | Def Jam Records

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

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

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

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

I Predict a Graceful Expulsion

Cold Specks
2012 | MUTE

"A state of destitution is the starting point for I Predict a Graceful Expulsion, Cold Specks' stark, stunning debut and eMusic's Best Album of 2012. It's sung by a lost child, one who has moved from a place of great abundance to a place of great need. It is, by a good distance, the year's richest and most rewarding record..." Read more about why Cold Specks is our #1 album of 2012.

Moreno and L’Orch First Moja-One, Sister Pili + 2

Richard Gehr — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 19:21:21 +0000

Exceptionally effective mood elevators

Husky-throated baritone singer Moreno (born Batambo Wendo Morris in 1955) was among the wave of Congolese musicians who relocated to Kenya during the 1970s to take advantage of Nairobi’s relatively modern recording studios and thriving club scene. Sister Pili + 2 consists of his wonderful 1983 album with the ever-changing (and redundantly-named, since “moja” means one in Swahili) group First Moja-One, augmented by a pair of tracks from a 1977 session with the group Bana Nzadi.

Jubilant lost gems of sizzling Congolese harmonies, guitar wizardry and snazzy four-on-the-floor, 140 bpm drumming (courtesy of the wonderfully named Lava Machine), Pili‘s four nine-minute tracks are exceptionally effective mood elevators. Each consists of a loping introductory section that eventually drops into a fast three-guitar seben section full of intricate patterns and witty musical asides. Moreno may lead the band, but it’s high-spirited lead guitarist Mokili Sesti (later part of the terrific Orchestre Virunga) who steals the show throughout. Moreno and his two backing singers croon mostly about women, presumably, in French, English, Lingala and Swahili. The title track specifically praises his Tanzanian model girlfriend Pili Mikendo Kassim with such terms of endearment as “You are my sunshine, Pili, let’s get it on.”

Moreno’s voice rumbles to the forefront of Sister Pili‘s “bonus” tracks, “Rehema-Piri” and a six-minute edit of “Teresia.” Rougher-edged than Moja-One, Bana Nzadi was another the many groups to which Moreno lent his distinctively soulful pipes throughout a career that ended with the 38-year-old’s death in 1993, not long after the release of his chart-topping “Vidonge Sitaki.”

Mala, Mala in Cuba

Ben Beaumont-Thomas — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 16:47:15 +0000

As part of a cultural exchange sponsored by a rum brand, Gilles Peterson made a pair of albums showcasing Cuban musicians called Havana Cultura. For the recording of the second in 2011, South London dubstep pioneer Mala joined Peterson in Cuba, taking samples and threading them through his own asymmetric, chest-trembling bass. The result was this lithe, sensual album that seamlessly joins the music of Latin America with rhythms that reflect Mala’s own Caribbean and UK heritage. It was the sound of dubstep taking on the world.

Goat, World Music

Bill Brewster — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 16:40:22 +0000

Drawing mightily from the same retro well as the vaunted Tame Impala, Goat came out of nowhere (or, more accurately, Korpilombolo in northern Sweden) with their joyful and frequently uncategorizable World Music. Nominally Afrocentric in its approach – Fela Kuti and the glittery guitars of highlife heroes Bhundu Boys spring to mind – there’s also a distinct German kosmiche attack, leavened with some delicately psychedelic organ figures (as on “Disc Fever,” the album’s funkiest moment), that combine to provide – what else? – a hearty Goat soup.

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

J. Edward Keyes — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 20:24:15 +0000

An irresistible reggae collaboration

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

Trans-Global Expression: John Tchicai and Sean Bergin

Kevin Whitehead — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 14:52:30 +0000

Capsule jazz histories tell us European harmony and African rhythm came together west of the Atlantic. Yes, but: North Americans may forget that Africa and Europe are close neighbors whose cultures were interacting long before Columbus; even now, their musical mixes may bypass direct American mediation. In September and October 2012 two great and very different Afro-European saxophonists passed away: Denmark’s John Tchicai, well known to American fans, and the South Africa-born Dutchman Sean Bergin, who deserves much wider fame.

Born in Copenhagen in 1936 to a Congolese father and Danish mom, Tchicai struggled with bebop’s demands as a young alto player. When free music hit around 1960, he heard greater opportunities for self-expression. In 1962 he moved to New York, and soon was in the thick of the scene, recording with tenor Albert Ayler on New York and Ear Control and with John Coltrane on his big-group blow-out Ascension. Tchicai co-founded the New York Contemporary Five, where he was sandwiched between bugling cornetist Don Cherry and tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp, notorious for hogging solo space. (John also played on Shepp’s four-horn Four for Trane: rearranged Coltrane tunes.)

The altoist got more space in the New York Art Quartet, where – as on their 1964 debut – his thin tone contrasted with Roswell Rudd’s thicker trombone sound; that band also featured a new drummer with a dry, logrolling sound: Milford Graves. Tchicai’s sound is oddly cool, given free jazz’s usual heat. His long bent notes suggest Ornette Coleman’s influence, but where Ornette’s elasticity brings out his blues strain, Tchicai’s note-stretching sounds more like a straight taffy pull.

In hindsight, he sounds like he’s straining on alto, not least when competing with bigger horns. In the early ’80s Tchicai switched to tenor, and his sound became deeper, earthier and more confident: a new beginning.

But we get ahead of ourselves. In the mid ’60s he’d returned to Denmark, and began collaborating with other luminaries of the new European jazz – Holland’s Willem Breuker, Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink, Switzerland’s Irene Schweizer, fellow Dane Pierre Dørge – and with South African exiles like Johnny Dyani and Louis Moholo.

Later Tchicai made several weird, overlooked albums with pianist Kristian Blak, from Denmark’s far, far Faroe Islands. Blak’s music (as on 1982′s Ravnating with Tchicai on alto and soprano saxes and bass clarinet) is an unlikely amalgam of fake medievalism, early Keith Jarrett rolling and Canterbury rock, with some nature sounds thrown in. He and Tchicai were still at as late as 2000′s Anybody Home? under John’s name.

Tchicai’s tenor sounds great, voicing Curtis Clark’s catchy but curve-bally melodies on 1987′s Letter to South Africa, recorded in Amsterdam by an international quintet. As composer or pianist, Clark can be romantic but never sappy, and can go “outside” without forsaking lyricism, making him a good match for Tchicai, the lone wind player here. Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger alternates among sweet/sour/scratchy solos, frisky rhythm strumming, and syncing with Ernst Glerum’s bass. Moholo brings his South African swing to the drums.

John Tchicai spent much of the 1990s teaching at UC Davis, and recording with many younger American players on three coasts. His 1999 Infinitesimal Flash recalls his roiling ’60s New York bands; its sensibility reflects fellow tenor Francis Wong’s interest in traditional Chinese material as well as John’s own broad curiosity. His old slippery alto feeling returns on soprano sax, for the traditional “Autumn Moon.” There’s also a little spoken-word stuff, echoing Amiri Baraka’s recitation back on the first New York Art Quartet album.

Back in Europe, he made 2007′s Coltrane in Spring with three younger Danes: cornetist/pianist Jonas Müller, bassist Nikolaj Munch-Hansen and drummer Kresten Osgood. With its poetry recitation (the title track), one-world pentatonics and South African echoes (“Dashiki Man,” “Row Your Loveboat”), Ornetty/New York freebop (“Ude I Det Fri,” “Double Arc Jake”) and push-pull quartet dynamic (“On Top of Your Head”) it showcased John’s lyrical and blustery sides, and felt like a career summing-up.

In Holland, the soft-spoken Tchicai crossed paths with Sean Bergin, a volatile, cantankerous charmer in the Charles Mingus mode. Bergin was born in Durban in 1948 and settled in Amsterdam in the 1970s, where he too worked with Reijseger, Bennink and Mengelberg, and schooled younger players in workshops and weekly jam sessions. He stayed connected to South African roots, working with fellow exiles Moholo and bassist Harry Miller. Bergin may be best known Stateside for his go-for-broke alto and tenor playing on drummer Barry Altschul’s 1985 That’s Nice. But Sean’s greatest achievement was recorded two years later, the first and best album by his little big band the M.O.B. (My Own Band).

Kids Mysteries isn’t just one of the great documents of the amazingly fertile Amsterdam scene, it’s one of the great jazz records of the last 25 years, period, with an uncanny balance of loose feeling and precise execution. Bergin’s international tentet all but bursts out of the charts, yet the players are fully in tune in every sense: They nail the melody statements, delve deep into the written material in their solos, and never knock each other off balance for all the elbowing they do. Han Bennink’s whipcrack drumming snaps everybody’s rhythm into line.

Concertos for soloists include “Monkey Woman” for donkey-braying trombonist Wolter Wierbos and the penguin-sleek “Beach Balls” for clarinetist Michael Moore, but it’s all sterling. Sean’s orchestral writing can be knotty and clever, but there’s a strong whiff of South African streetcorner kwela in his catchy tunes; even the three-chord bassoon bassline to “Thoko’s Tune” will have you whistling. (The howling lead alto is Sean’s.) Kids Mysteries is a near-perfect masterwork.

António Zambujo, Quinto

Peter Margasak — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 13:17:53 +0000

Pushing against fado's stylistic strictures

Although men have long sung the emotionally charged Portuguese music known as fado, ever since the ascent of the genre’s legendary diva Amalia Rodrigues half a century ago the form’s most famous practitioners have been women. Today singers such as Mariza, Ana Moura and Joana Amendoeira are the popular face of fado, cleaving to tradition and forever held up to Amalia, even while expanding the repertoire. Perhaps the lack of public scrutiny given to male fado singers explains why António Zambujo comes off as a comparative risk-taker. On his superb fifth album Quinto, he’s never sounded more comfortable and accomplished pushing against fado’s stylistic strictures.

Zambujo isn’t an iconoclast: At the heart of his music is fado’s indelible blend of acoustic guitar, Portuguese guitar and upright bass, and his singing is distinguished by the expected melancholia. But as much as he flies the flag for fado, he also enlarges its possibilities, complementing his arrangements with masterfully deployed clarinets, and, on a few songs, electric guitar, drums, and trombone. While his phrasing is marked by tear-triggering pathos, his tone is much more delicate than other fado singers.

He’s a huge fan of Chet Baker, and there’s no missing their shared tonal fragility, a quality that gives each performance a sonic vulnerability that perfectly matches the poetic sentiments. Baker was an influence on the development of bossa nova, so it makes sense that Zambujo also adds a bit of that Brazilian music’s pin-drop softness to his delivery. On certain songs, such as the gorgeous “Rua dos Meus Ciúmes,” there’s an unmistakable trace of Caetano Veloso in his singing, and on “Fortuna” and “Mará” he continues to reach outside of his homeland for material, singing non-fado songs by Brazilians Márcio Faraca and Rodrigo Maranhão, respectively. He also gives another nod to Cante Alentejano, the rustic male choral music from his native southern Portugal, on “O Que á Feito Dela?” The cumulative picture paints Zambujo as fado’s most exciting practitioner of any gender.

Fanga & Maâlem Abdallah Guinéa, Fangnawa Experience

Ben Beaumont-Thomas — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 16:03:02 +0000

Combining North African desert blues with clattering percussion and funk guitar

Fanga are a French collective who play a mix of hip-hop, Afrobeat and highlife; “gnawa” is a trance-inducing North African spiritual ceremony set to mystical Islamic music and indigenous African rhythms. Fangnawa Experience, then, is a collision of these two worlds, featuring Moroccan music legend Maâlem Abdallah Guinéa (Maâlem means “master musician”).

Given the dizzying richness of this source material, it’s disappointing that the album opens with “Noble Tree,” a track that sounds like an Afrobeat pastiche, and shows the influence of Fanga’s old collaborators Fela Kuti and Tony Allen. From then on, though, African polyrhythms and horns are folded into a more nuanced hybrid, combining the delicacy of North African desert blues with clattering percussion and funk guitar. Guinéa plays beautiful lines on the gimbri, a three-stringed lute that lends a contemplative hue to even the wild organ and brass workout of “Gnawi.”

The vocals take in elegant chanting alongside brusque declarations. “Kelen” features a hypnotically repeated vocal line that places it somewhere between the mosque and the dancefloor, while rapper Korbo gives “Wouarri” a memorable charisma, before the track slips into a beautifully psychedelic electric guitar solo. The production sounds big enough for a soundsystem, without being too slick; the percussion-heavy “Dounya” could almost be a field recording. With most tracks drifting towards the 10-minute mark, the Fangnawa Experience becomes a truly immersive one.

Kaki King, Glow

Richard Gehr — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 17:19:18 +0000

Capturing an artist in anything-but-still life

On her sixth album, guitar-thwacking virtuoso Kaki King loops back to basics with her first all-instrumental release since Everybody Loves You, her 2002 debut. As an artistic reboot, Glow confidently recapitulates a decade of development. King augments her basic technical vocabulary – rapid-fire fanning, fingerpicking, fretboard tapping, harmonics scattering, and idiosyncratic tunings – with fresh ideas from classical and international musics, while still honing to her essential sound. “Streetlight in the Egg” and “No True Masterpiece Will Ever Be Complete” augment tastefully dazzling fretwork with subtle electronics and no-frills percussion – so, yes, it sometimes smacks of Windham Hill for the young and caffeinated. Helping King beyond her comfort zone, string quartet Ethel pours classical gas on the glowing embers of “Great Round Burn” and the dark, dense “Fire Eater,” while King solo invokes Tchaikovsky with lap steel on the spaghetti Eastern “Marche Slav.” Traveling elsewhere, she breaks land speed records on the Celtic-flavored “King Pizel” and lends a Chinese tinge to British Columbia’s “Bowen Island.” Glow captures an artist in anything but still life.

Janka Nabay: The Rebirth of Bubu

Richard Gehr — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 20:52:40 +0000

Sporting fingerless black leather gloves, a sleeveless festival T-shirt, woven armbands, shell necklace, and a full grass skirt, Janka Nabay looked the perfect Afro-Brooklyn expatriate hybrid during his opening set for Syrian dabke star Omar Souleyman this summer. Even the performance space – an open-air, concrete-floored industrial zone surrounded by stacked shipping containers and called The Well – split the difference between Williamsburg and Nabay’s former Freetown home. You couldn’t say the same for Nabay’s Bubu Gang band, however. A remarkable assemblage of three avant-afropopping Skeletons, acid-rocking guitarist Doug Shaw, and Syrian-American singer Boshra AlSaadi (aka Saadi), the Bubu Gang is the transcendent ingredient on En Yay Sah, Nabay’s full-length debut – not counting the 10s of thousands of cassettes he sold back home a couple of decades ago.

Ahmed Janka Nabay arrived in the United States in 2002. “I come here to promote my music and to build up my broken heart,” he says following a return to casual attire and a moment of herbal refreshment in the backstage trailer that serves as a dressing room. Souleyman’s electro-dabke pounds in the background. “Because I was doing very good in Africa, and then they fight. And when they fight, everything stop.” Nabay made his somewhat hasty departure (a protective warlord was involved) at the tail end of his country’s 11-year civil war, which he’d survived in no small part simply because his music – an updated version of the 500-year-old bubu sound – appealed to both sides of the conflict.

Doug Shaw describes the big bubu picture: “It’s an ancient ritual music that takes place over the course of twelve to fourteen hours during Ramadan, maybe even a whole day. It existed for hundreds of years and was played by percussionists and musicians playing single notes on multiple bamboo pipes. Until one day Janka had the idea to make it into an electronic beat. Then he came to the United States and we started playing it with live instruments again.”

The middle-aged Nabay looks fairly timeless himself. “It doesn’t matter!” he exclaims when asked his age. “I was born from creation.” Born and raised in the Central Sierra Leone village of Masimo, Nabay has been singing for his supper nearly as long as he can remember. “I started singing for food when I was, like, six years old,” he says. The fifth of 18 children by his father’s three wives, Nabay cadged food from the younger wife by serenading her with pop songs. He made his public debut singing “Aki Special” onstage with Prince Nico Mbarga in the late ’80s, and a few years later won a musical competition by singing bubu music, which he’d learned from his Temne-tribe mother, instead of the ubiquitous reggae covers favored by his competitors.

Thanks in large part to Nabay, bubu is now played on Sierra Leone’s Independence Day and other occasions in addition to Ramadan. The self-declared Bubu King eagerly hypes the sound he rediscovered, modernized, and delivered to the New World. “Bubu music is the backbone music of Sierra Leone – period,” he explains. “You make wedding, you play bubu music; you make society, you play bubu music; you make everyt’ing, they play bubu music.”

Despite bubu’s popularity, En Yay Sah – the title means “I am afraid” – largely reflects Nabay’s disappointing immigrant experience. “I go to America, Papa, meet with my brothers,” he sings in “Kill Me With Bongo,” a song in Sierra Leone’s national tongue, Krio. “They just overlook me with cold shoulders.” Nabay felt unsupported by the Sierra Leone diaspora upon his arrival. Unable to make a living as a musician, he worked at Crown Fried Chicken branches in Pennsylvania, among other day jobs. Finally, with the help of Afropop Worldwide radio producer Wills Glasspiegel, Nabay hooked up with Matador subsidiary True Panther, who teamed him with the Skeletons for his 2010 Bubu King EP.

Janka Nabay and the Bubu Gang dynamically reinvent bubu’s ritualistic power both on record and onstage. Jon Leland distills the beats of several percussionists into a single polyrhythmic web on his electronic kit while keyboardist Michael Gallope’s does the same with bubu’s galloping bamboo pipes on his synth, as Doug Shaw’s guitar sings, screams, and sputters overhead. After the show, Shaw notes how much Nabay was improvising, inverting cadences, and stretching the material – much like Omar Souleyman and keyboardist Rizan Sa’id but with more rock vitality.

After a few appreciative words about Africa superstar Tupac Shakur, Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo movies, and the enduring appeal of Bruce Willis, Janka Nabay steps out his trailer, talked out and ready to party. As I make my departure, I spy the lithe Sierra Leonean beaming delightedly at the end of a snaking line of dabke dancers. Janka Nabay has found his tribe.