The Album

• 

  More Than Just A Dream

  Fitz and The Tantrums

  2013 | Elektra (NEK)

  Fitz and the Tantrums never pretended to be "above" their influences. In fact, part of what makes their music so fun is how it joyfully connects the dots between an array of instantly identifiable retro styles. The band's debut album, 2010's Pickin' Up the Pieces, wore Motown and Stax blatantly on its sleeve — that bone-dry Hitsville USA drum sound, the soulful sax and glistening keys, as well as frontman Michael "Fitz"... Fitzpatrick's playful vocal sparring with duet partner Noelle Scaggs. But there was also a bubbly layer of '80s New Wave under the surface. As Fitzpatrick has noted in recent interviews, the Tantrums have reversed that formula on More Than Just A Dream, broadening their palette with glossy synthesizers and propulsive drum machines while pushing their classic soul touches more to the background.
  
  Part of that sonic switch can be chalked up to fidelity: Where Pieces was created with an almost DIY aesthetic — it was written on Fitzpatrick's creaky upright piano and recorded in the living room of his L.A. apartment — More Than Just A Dream was envisioned as a slick, professional studio document. The sextet worked with Tony Hoffer, a producer and mixer (Beck, Air, Phoenix) known for highlighting a band's funky fringes even as he expands their sound. The result of this collaboration is a spastic, elastic album that feels fascinatingly out of time. Just take opener "Out of My League," which blends soulful piano chords with snaking drums and synths that blast like vacuum cleaners. On the infectious "Break the Walls," the organic mingles with the synthetic, Fitzpatrick and Scaggs harmonizing over a glorious wall of sound. (Is that a bass guitar or a synthesizer? Is that a drum machine or timpani? Does it matter?) More Than Just A Dream is a brilliant pop grab bag.

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The Retro-Soul Peers

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  Dap-Dippin' With…

  Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings

  2006 | Daptone Records / The Orchard

  Along with Fitz and the Tantrums (not to mention Adele, Charles Bradley and Amy Winehouse), wildfire belter Sharon Jones remains at the forefront of pop music's vintage soul revival. Actually, that last word is a bit of a misnomer; Sharon Jones (along with the rest of her label-mates at Daptone Records) isn't so much "reviving" soul music as continuing its legacy. Dap Dippin' with Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, the singer's studio... debut, isn't a "throwback"; it's a classic soul album that just happened to come out in 2002. Like The Tantrums, The Dap-Kings are fiercely funky (check the bass-driven stand-out "Got a Thing on My Mind"), their relentless grooves captured on crackling analogue tape. But, like Fitzpatrick, Jones has too much star power to be overshadowed, strutting through each and every deep-pocket groove like a queen mistress of sass.

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The Blue-Eyed Soul Influence

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  H2O

  Daryl Hall & John Oates

  2009 | RCA/BMG Heritage

  For white male soul singers, certain comparisons are unavoidable. Fitzpatrick has been labeled a Daryl Hall disciple from the very beginning, but he's never shied away from the influence — noting his love for Hall's expressive tenor in various interviews, even performing as a guest on his music webcast, Live from Daryl's House. On More than Just a Dream, that connection feels more pronounced than ever. With its various '80s instrumental tones... (the kitschy hand-claps, the drum machine blasts, the candy-coated synthesizers), it harkens back to the New Wave soul of H20, Hall & Oates's 1982 smash. As pure vocalists, Fitzpatrick and Hall share a similar timbre: soothing, subtly smoky and just a bit theatrical. Few frontmen can sell a pop anthem as campy as Hall & Oates's "Maneater," and even fewer can do so artfully. As he demonstrates throughout his new album (the outlandishly hooky synth-funk of "6am," the triumphant stomp of "Fools Gold"), Fitzpatrick boasts an awfully similar skill set.

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The Modern Camp-Pop Heartthrobs

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  Some Nights

  fun.

  2012 | Fueled By Ramen

  More than Just a Dream is brimming with soulful, kaleidoscopic pop: Its songs are densely produced and intimately crafted, clearly the work of a tight-knit band aiming to expand its sonic identity. But for all its studio magic, this is also an album stuffed to the brim with capital-H hooks. This kind of mega-pop LP — one that could easily produce five or six huge singles — is a dying breed; a... similar exception is fun.'s 2012 break-out, Some Nights. If you were conscious in 2012, you probably heard all three of the album's massive singles ("Some Nights," "We Are Young" and "Carry On") in almost-clockwork rotation. And, odds are, you loved them: Like Just a Dream, Some Nights is almost impossible to dislike. Bold production, instantly memorable choruses, rich instrumental performances — this is music that transcends pop boundaries, appealing equally to indie-rockers, soccer moms, and Gleeks.

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The Funky Producer

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  Midnite Vultures

  Beck

  2004 | Geffen

  As a producer, mixer and engineer, Tony Hoffer is a master at juggling eclectic, funky sounds. It's an approach he's applied masterfully to most of his projects — including the caffeinated head-rush of More than Just a Dream — but his most iconic studio work is found on Beck's 1999 masterpiece, the incredibly groovy and insanely goofy Midnite Vultures. If there's one album in pop history that would have proved a nightmare... to mix, it's this left-field clusterfuck ("Sexx Laws," for example, is a horn-driven soul revue work-out with unexpected banjo and hip-hop percussion). Hoffer didn't face quite that level of insanity with Just a Dream, but it's easy to see why Fitz and the Tantrums chose him as producer: Songs like "6am" (with its sci-fi synth-bass) and "The Walker" (with its overblown organs, beatboxing, and sax breakdown) are the work of a giddier, crazier band.

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The Sexual Tension

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  Workin' Together

  Ike And Tina Turner

  2007 | EMI

  Fitzpatrick is a natural pop star all on his own, but he's also smart enough to surround himself with incredibly talented musicians. Co-vocalist Noelle Scaggs is the Tantrums' not-so-secret weapon — singing with Fitz in radiant harmonies, balancing his quirkiness with palpable sass and sensuality. This boy-girl dynamic is one of the band's old-school charms — and an essential element of their live show — harkening back to the glory days of... Ike & Tina Turner. Though Tina was the star singer (with Ike regarded primarily as a producer and bandleader), there was still an undeniable tension between the Turners that charged every one of their songs. The duo's most iconic album is 1971's Workin' Together — mostly due to "Proud Mary," their show-stopping re-interpretation of the CCR anthem. With Tina's raspy attack anchored by Ike's guttural croon, it's one of the greatest vocal duets of all-time.

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The Album

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  Relationship Of Command

  At The Drive-In

  2012 | Twenty-First Chapter Records / Redeye

  At the Drive-In's discography is measly (three studio albums, a handful of singles and EPs), but incredibly substantive: From their modest, DIY formation in 1993 to their turbulent, bitter break-up in 2001, the El Paso quintet subverted the boundaries of emo and post-hardcore music, expanding the sonic vocabulary of guitar-based rock for the Clinton generation.
  
  The artistic growth was rapid — only five years separate their raggedly explosive debut, 1996's Acrobatic Tenement, from... their expansive send-off, 2001's Relationship of Command. But by the end, At the Drive-In were a ticking time-bomb of creativity — merging five distinct, often hostile, musical personalities (particularly the guitar crossfire of Omar Rodriguez-Lopez's psychedelic dissonance and Jim Ward's full-throttle punk assault) into one wholly unique package.
  
  As turbulent toms and swirling effects pedals segue into a crushing blow of distortion, "Arcarsenal" opens the album with its most potent blast; Cedric Bixler-Zavala, in his patented wind-tunnel shriek, spews surreal gibberish over the din, like a Pentecostal preacher speaking in prog-rock tongues. That track's relentlessly blunt force sets the template (check the emotive sing-along "Pattern Against User" and the unlikely MTV hit "One Armed Scissor"), but elsewhere, At the Drive-In experiment with bold new tonal colors: "Invalid Litter Dept." finds Bixler-Zavala speak-singing over textural guitar washes and the spooky grooves of drummer Tony Hajjar and bassist Paul Hinojos; "Enfilade" is a disorienting dip into electronica, with Rodriguez-Lopez channeling a Robert Fripp-esque squall.
  
  The union between those five musicians was as distinct as it was damning: Relationship of Command is the sound of a band with too many ideas and too much talent, one imploding — thrillingly — in the face of perfection. And it's the apex of their musical trajectory: Over a decade since its original release, it's a bittersweet listening experience — both sonic eulogy and iconic swan-song.

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The Post-Hardcore Godfathers

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  Repeater (Plus 3 Songs)

  Fugazi

  Dischord Records

  Fugazi is arguably At the Drive-In's most crucial influence. The entire band (but particularly Jim Ward) constantly flaunted their love for the post-hardcore godfathers to the press, praising their anti-commercial philosophy and DIY musical approach. But ATDI were also Fugazi disciples from a musical perspective: Like the rest of the band's catalogue, Relationship of Command harkens back to Fugazi's intensity and unpredictability, crystallized on the band's debut album, 1990's Repeater. The electric... guitars (played by Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto) form a disjointed, spastic symmetry, blending dissonant feedback with noisy asides and catchy bursts of power-chords. Tempos abruptly shift; instruments weave in and out of tune — every one of the album's 35 minutes feels naked and vulnerable, as if the songs might totally collapse at any moment. It's a model lesson in reckless abandon — one At the Drive-In clearly took to heart.

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The Emo Bretheren

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  Diary (2009 Edition)

  Sunny Day Real Estate

  Sub Pop Records

  Of all the acclaimed post-hardcore bands to emerge from the mid '90s, At the Drive-In and Seattle's Sunny Day Real Estate were arguably the most influential. But even if they technically fell within the same genre, the two bands represented opposite extremes: Where At the Drive-In were brutally aggressive, often violently so, Sunny Day Real Estate were moodier and more ethereal, balancing emotive intensity with nuanced introspection. Though they grew exponentially more... ambitious with each release (Their final album, 2000's The Rising Tide, with its swelling orchestrations and lavish art-rock arrangements, hardly resembles the urgent simplicity of their early work), 1994's Diary remains the band's most beloved moment. It's the sound of their classic quartet line-up firing on all cylinders: Dan Hoerner's squealing guitar leads, William Goldsmith's propulsive percussion, Nate Mendel's melodic bass, and Jeremy Enigk's grand, alien tenor.

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The Logical Spinoff

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  Wiretap Scars

  Sparta

  2002 | DreamWorks SKG

  After At the Drive-In's demise, the band split into two factions: Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala pursued a proggier, more experimental direction with The Mars Volta, while ATDI's remaining trio (Ward, Hajjar, and Hinojos) formed Sparta, maintaining the aggressive post-hardcore edge of their previous band. The ghosts of Relationship of Command loom large on 2002's Wiretap Scars (Being three-fifths of the same band who made that album, how couldn't they?), but Sparta also emerge... as their own powerful entity. Produced by reputable punk producer Jerry Finn, Wiretap Scars bears a no-nonsense sonic palette, built on freight-train percussion and razor-blade guitars. But the real revelation is Ward — always the tortured, yelped yin to Bixler-Zavala's swaggering, fiery yang — who fully embraces his role as sole frontman, whether he's screaming himself hoarse (throat-punching opener "Cut Your Ribbon") or swooning in a sweetly melodic style (the spacey atmospherics of "Collapse").

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The Head-Fuck Spinoff

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  Deloused in the Comatorium

  The Mars Volta

  2003 | Motown

  While Sparta sought to carry on the At the Drive-In legacy, Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez aimed to eradicate it from their resume. Joining forces as The Mars Volta, the duo established a chaotic, unpredictable writing partnership that lasted more than a decade. Their 2003 debut, the proggy head-fuck that is Deloused in the Comatorium, was an experimental left-turn from the sound of their previous band; nonetheless, the seeds for this new... direction were sewn on Relationship of Command, particularly with Bixler-Zavala's more melodic vocal style and Rodriguez-Lopez's barrage of mind-melting guitar effects. But where Relationship merely hinted toward a more prog-oriented direction, Deloused is totally immersed in that sonic landscape: the psychedelic guitar solos, the Latin-fusion grooves of the rhythm section (human wrecking-ball drummer Jon Theodore, one-man funk-machine Flea), the shifting song structures, the enveloping sonic textures. All in all, a jaw-dropping re-birth.

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The New Breed

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  No Devolución

  Thursday

  2011 | Epitaph

  Even if At the Drive-In's recorded output remains painfully small, the band's influence was seismic, inspiring an exciting new crop of emo and post-hardcore acts in the 2000s. One of those bands is New Jersey sextet Thursday, whose sixth LP, 2011's No Devolucion, best exemplifies their intelligent, forward-thinking approach. The album's grandiose aesthetic mirrors Relationship of Command: These are two albums with an epic sense of scope, produced with massive studio sheen,... venturing into more progressive territory with spacey keyboards and effects. But the biggest revelation on No Devolucion is frontman Geoff Rickly, who mostly ditches his usual blaring screams, moving toward an atmospheric, highly melodic vocal style. Sadly, the album also mirrors Relationship of Command as a career marker: In 2012, Thursday succumbed to intense "personal difficulties," triggering an "indefinite hiatus." It's a story At the Drive-In know all too well.

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The Album

• 

  Overgrown

  James Blake

  2013 | Universal Records

  By 2011, the year James Blake released his beloved self-titled debut, a crop of like-minded young musicians (including fellow Brits the xx) were revolutionizing electronic music, blurring the borders between dubstep, indie rock and R&B. Blake ultimately emerged as the poster boy for this blossoming musical culture: layering icicle keys with disorienting electro hiccups, singing in a soulful, melismatic croon — one typically looped and chopped and auto-tuned and sampled into surreal,... static-y choirs. But for all its lavish textural splendor, James Blake was fascinating more for its influential production style than its actual songs.
  
  With his sophomore full-length, Overgrown, Blake has expanded his reach in every area: as a singer, as a producer and especially as a songwriter. Where James Blake rarely exuded any degree of warmth (burying his voice so deep within mountains of effects that it hardly registered on an emotional level), Overgrown has a prominent human pulse, best evidenced on a pair of striking new collaborations: "Digital Lion" balances electronics with organic instrumentation (including a brief acoustic guitar passage) from ambient godfather Brian Eno, while Wu-Tang veteran RZA crashes the party for a gruff guest verse on the dust-blown "Take a Fall For Me." Working with other artists (even dating back to 2011's "Fall Creek Boys Choir," his one-off collaboration with Bon Iver's Justin Vernon) has helped Blake realize the importance of tension and release. "Retrograde" is the most fully-realized song he's ever written, building gradually, layer-by-layer (pianos, gurgling bass, digital handclaps), until the chorus opens into a haunting whirlwind of synths and vocal acrobatics. By refining his style, Blake hasn't tarnished his pioneering mystique — he's added to it.

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The Ambient Godfather

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  Another Green World

  Brian Eno

  2004 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

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

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The Dubstep Icon

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  Untrue

  Burial

  Hyperdub / The Orchard

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

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The Indie Falsetto Bro

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  Blood Bank

  Bon Iver

  2009 | EP/SINGLE

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

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The Art-Rock Pioneers

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  Kid A

  Radiohead

  2008 | CAPITOL

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

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The Like-Minded Collaborators

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  Crooks & Lovers

  Mount Kimbie

  2010 | Hotflush Recordings / S.T. Holdings

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

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The Album

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  The Marriage of True Minds

  Matmos

  2013 | Thrill Jockey

  Musicians who have been visited by the muse are fond of remarking that a song or album "practically wrote itself." To create The Marriage of True Minds, Matmos's Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt came up with an ingenious conceit to facilitate that sort of automatic writing. Inspired by experiments in telepathy, they invited friends to submit to mild sensory deprivation and then attempt to divine "the concept of the new Matmos album,"... which Daniel mentally projected at them from an adjacent room. They then used those transcripts as the guidelines for the album, availing themselves of cues both straightforward (Latin rhythms, chanting) and esoteric ("squelchy, squishy" sounds, rendered with chocolate pudding and an espresso machine).
  
  The concept may sound off the wall, but the results turn out to be eminently listenable and, in places, surprisingly traditional — particularly when compared to the squirrelly bleeps of their last album, Supreme Balloon. Alongside organ drones and knotty sound collages, there are reassuring pentatonic melodies, sashaying samba rhythms, Krautrock miniatures and funky Afro-techno rave-ups; it's all deftly stitched together in a way that suggests the hyperactive stream-of-consciousness of a mind firing on all cylinders. Or, in this case, many minds. Here, we unpack the album's ideas by looking at some of the precedents for Matmos' experiments in social neural networks.

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The Uncanny Volley

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  An Introduction To Evp

  The Ghost Orchid

  2006 | Ash International / Kudos Records Limited

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

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The Abstract Revolutionary

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  Cardew: Treatise - Live Prague 1967

  Quax Ensemble

  2009 | Mode / Entertainment One Distribution

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

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The Concrete Mixer

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  Schaeffer : L'Œuvre musicale

  Pierre Schaeffer

  INA GRM / Abeille Musique

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

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The Oral Historian

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  Steve Reich: Different Trains

  Steve Reich

  2004 | naïve / Montaigne / Naive

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

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The Brain Wavers

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  Love Bites (Special Edition)

  Buzzcocks

  2008 | EMI

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

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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

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  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.

  more »

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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The Album

• 

  Ray Of Light

  Madonna

  1998 | Warner Bros./Maverick

  When Madonna turned to the bold, buzzy sound of stadium-sized dance music for her 2012 album MDNA, some fans — those older than the teens at Miami's Ultra Music Festival, anyway, who cheered when the 54-year-old singer, businesswoman and mother made a not-very-subtle reference to the drug ecstasy — may have felt a sense of déjà vu upon déjà vu. A young Madonna Louise Ciccone got her start in New York's discos,... and her debut album featured contributions from club DJ John "Jellybean" Benitez, who lent a touch of freestyle to her world-conquering pop. That wasn't the last time she would lean on New York club scene, either: Her 1987 album You Can Dance collected dance-floor edits from the likes of Shep Pettibone and the Latin Rascals, and her 1990 hit "Vogue" nodded to gay ballroom culture. But her 1998 album Ray of Light offered an even more direct precedent for MDNA, incorporating as it did the whooshing synthesizers and rushing breakbeats of what was then being called "electronica."
  
  Just as MDNA found Madonna rushing to keep up with younger, hipper stars — most notably Lady Gaga, who ushered in the current era of dance pop — Ray of Light was also a rare instance where Madonna turned up slightly behind the curve. Rave had been bubbling up in pop-culture consciousness for several years, and by 1997 it had crossed over in a big way, thanks to acts like the Chemical Brothers, the Prodigy and Underworld. Regardless, it's safe to say that Madonna's LP, a kind of stylistic Trojan Horse, gave many listeners their very first taste of trance, trip-hop and deep house.
  
  To fashion the album's sound, Madonna made a somewhat surprising choice of collaborator: William Orbit, an electronic-music producer whose Strange Cargo project had a solid niche following but no major breakout success. He brought to Ray of Light the humid, breeze-kissed sound of Ibiza's chillout bars, imbuing songs like "Swim," "Ray of Light" and "Drowned World/Substitute for Love" with shuffling breakbeats, lilting guitars and warm, glowing synth pads; for "Shanti/Ashtangi," a rendition of a Hindu prayer in Sanskrit, Orbit even turned in a passable imitation of breakbeat hardcore, borrowing (and tempering) Aphex Twin's industrial menace. Several of the album's songs were co-written by Patrick Leonard, a New York dance-music DJ who had worked with Madonna in the band Breakfast Club, prior to her solo career. "Sky Fits Heaven" and "Skin" both recall the thumping pulses and trance arpeggios of Underworld, while "Nothing Really Matters" rides a silky house groove that wouldn't have been out of place on Everything But The Girl's club-oriented crossover, Walking Wounded. "Little Star," meanwhile, dips a toe into the ambient drum and bass of LTJ Bukem.
  
  Even by 1998's sprawling, double-album standards — Goldie's epic Saturn Returnz was released the same year, and Roni Size's Reprazent had come out in 1997 — Ray of Light is all over the place and overlong; as "pure" club music goes, it can be dilettantish. However, a decade and a half later, it's a fascinating snapshot of electronic dance music's first big crossover moment, with at least three major singles ("Ray of Light," "Nothing Really Matters" and "Frozen") that live up to the potential of subcultural sounds writ large.

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The Producer

• 

  Best Of Strange Cargo

  William Orbit

  2003 | IRS CATALOG

  If William Orbit didn't exist, the marketing executives behind the Café del Mar compilations would have had to invent him. The missing link between Bill Laswell and Deep Forest, no other artist better typifies the lackadaisical vibe of '90s chillout music — both for better and for worse. Between 1987-93, the British producer released three albums under his Strange Cargo alias, draping feathery Flamenco guitars over slo-mo breakbeats and pairing dub bass... with new age affect. It's a mixed bag: "Riding to Rio" sounds like Penguin Café Orchestra refashioned for a Lite-FM station, and the electric guitars of "Fire and Mercy" sound better suited for the end credits of a teen comedy from the '80s. But "Love My Way" is an engaging, Vangelis-inspired synthesizer excursion, and the digi-dub "Silent Signals" sounds surprisingly ahead of its time, right down to the proto-dubstep bass oscillations. A young Beth Orton turns up on "Water from a Vine Leaf," and Underworld turn in a moody remix of the same.

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The Arranger

• 

  As If To Nothing

  Craig Armstrong

  2003 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

  String arrangers rarely get their moment in the spotlight; in pop music, they play the most literal of supporting roles, laying down a bed of tone designed to cushion the music without ever drawing attention to itself. (They're sort of the Sealy Posturepedic of the music industry.) But the Scottish composer Craig Armstrong parlayed his work on Massive Attack's 1994 album, Protection, into a successful solo career, as well as work with... Madonna and U2 and film soundtracks for Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge. His debut album, The Space Between, built on his mood-setting work for Massive Attack (and featured the band on several tracks, along with Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser), and the follow-up, As If to Nothing, is an even more wide-screen affair, alternating between scene-setting vignettes like "Waltz," reminiscent of Ryuichi Sakamoto's score to The Sheltering Sky, and scene-stealing rave-ups like "Inhaler," which pairs dramatic string vamps with gnarled electric blues. Guests vocalists including Bono, Evan Dando and Wendy Stubbs give the album's most distinctive songs a sense of human scale, offsetting the bathetic swells with a quietly commanding presence.

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The Indie Antithesis

• 

  Trailer Park

  Beth Orton

  1997 | Deconstruction

  There's no confusing Beth Orton with Madonna; the British singer's acoustic-tinged arrangements and husky delivery take their cues from Joni Mitchell, Sandy Denny and Portishead, rather than from Madonna's anodyne club-diva tradition. From the cover of Orton's 1996 debut, Trailer Park — featuring the singer clad in jeans and red Converse and sprawled out on pavement, her face hidden behind her hair as she basks in late-afternoon light — it's clear that... she's the antithesis of Madonna's high-gloss image. It is tempting to wonder, however, if the cover of Ray of Light, with a windswept Madonna looking far more covered up than usual, wasn't influenced at least in part by the radical anti-glam of Orton's sleeve, just as the album's chiming, downbeat electronica followed from the "folktronic" sound of Orton's album. (Just compare Madonna's "Swim" with Orton's "She Cries Your Name," and you'll agree that there's a connection there, as unlikely as it may seem.)
  
  William Orbit, who featured Orton on his own Strange Cargo 3, co-wrote "She Cries Your Name," and his influence is all over Trailer Park's low-key sonics, but he wasn't otherwise involved in the album, which was mixed and produced by Andrew Weatherall and Victor Van Vugt. "In the end I had to break away from William because it was too much," Orton recalled in a 2009 interview with The Quietus. "I'd written all these songs and William wasn't really into them."

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The Shapeshifters

• 

  Walking Wounded

  Everything But The Girl

  2010 | Rhino Atlantic

  You might not expect that a group that started out covering Cole Porter and the Jam — not to mention collaborating with Robert Wyatt and the Style Council — would become club-music icons. It's a testament to the strength of Everything but the Girl's vision (as well as mention their musical open-mindedness and knack for choosing talented producers) that they could transition so seamlessly from the British indie scene to New York's... discos. It was a 1994 Todd Terry remix of EBTG's "Missing" that first introduced dance-music fans to the British duo, and they built upon that success with their 1996 album Walking Wounded. Featuring production from dance producers like Spring Heel Jack, Howie B, Omni Trio and Todd Terry, the album takes its rhythmic inspiration variously from New York house, drum and bass, and breakbeat, but it never loses sight of the songwriting that distinguishes their music.

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The Rave Outliers

• 

  Leftism

  Leftfield

  2012 | Hard Hands

  Electronic music is famously niche-driven, but Madonna's Ray of Light takes a relatively agnostic approach to dance music subgenres. The album's tracks range from downtempo to deep house to hi-NRG, and the style of each depends largely upon her collaborators. But if you were going to name one record from the rave scene that exerted the most influence over Ray of Light, you couldn't go wrong with Leftfield's 1995 album, Leftism. Leftfield's... Paul Daley and Neil Barnes knew how to rock a dance floor: the pulsing "Afro Left," "Black Flute," "Space Shanty" and a John Lydon-fronted "Open Up" were calibrated for teeming crowds knee-deep in mud and MDMA, but the duo's roots in the Balearic and acid-jazz scenes made them equally inclined to experiment with more contemplative (if equally psychedelic modes). Dubbed-out breakbeats, hip-hop and dancehall references and spiraling synth work made many of their debut album's tracks prime choices for chillout rooms and comedown mixtapes, while "ethnic" flutes and drums paved the way for Madonna's own fourth-world fixations.

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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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The Album

• 

  LONG.LIVE.A$AP

  A$AP Rocky

  2013 | A$AP Worldwide/Polo Grounds Music/RCA Records

  We will look back on the early 2010s as a time when hip-hop became obsessed with style — not lyrical style or anything so old fashioned, but personal style. Good, bad or strange, billowing black capes or crisp skatewear, leather kilts or retro gold: It pays to have taste, or at least the appearance thereof. The rise of Harlem rapper A$AP Rocky has as much to do with his entrancing, hybrid Harlem-Houston... sound as his keen, confident sense of fashion — as he raps on "Hell," "We used to wear rugged boots/ Now it's all tailored suits." Everything is fluid and stylized, every nanosecond of sound an opportunity for curation. The lures are obvious: the meticulously dark title track, the vice anthem "PMW," the Clams Casino-produced mission statement "LVL," the booming, short-attention-span posse cuts "F---in' Problems" and "1 Train." This is hip-hop circa 2013: a voracious, all-at-once sound that swerves, swaggers and preens from street to street, from the Internet to all corners of the map.

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The Namesake

• 

  Follow The Leader

  Eric B. & Rakim

  1988 | Geffen

  There were no baby-steps or first drafts; the teenage Rakim arrived fully formed. The singles that comprise his 1987 debut Paid in Full expanded the possibilities of rapping over a beat. It's a sign of the era's hyper-competitiveness that their second album, released the following year, didn't merely rehash their triumphant style. Instead, Follow the Leader feels much more minimal: the title track's guttural bounce, the straightforward, line-for-line wizardry of "Microphone Fiend."... A$AP Rocky's government name is Rakim Mayers, his mother's way of paying homage to the God MC. Follow was released a few months before Mayers was born, which is truly strange if your conscious memory reaches back that far. For someone of Rocky's vintage, perhaps Eric B and Rakim feel most inspirational as a series of poses: fearless, brash, cocksure. While the young Harlem rapper hasn't quite inherited his eponym's intricate rhyme scheme, there are traces of Golden Age gusto throughout his aesthetic, from his laidback confidence to the verging-toward-absurd style that plays like a modern-day Dapper Dan.

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The Home Team

• 

  Cam'Ron Presents The Diplomats - Diplomatic Immunity

  The Diplomats

  2003 | Roc-A-Fella

  There's a clip on YouTube about the making of the Diplomats and Master P's "Bout It, Bout It…Part III" video and, near the end, a 15-year-old A$AP Rocky gleefully appears, jostling around with his friend in front of a bemused Jim Jones. The first Diplomatic Immunity posse album was one of the high points of the colorful Harlem clique's career together. There was massive, block-rocking fare engineered for the New York canon... — "I Really Mean It," "I'm Ready," "Dipset Anthem," "Real Ni***s" — and then there were the over-the-top moments that suggested an arena-sized, verging-toward-mad braggadocio — "Built This City" or the Winger-sampling melodrama of "Ground Zero," for example. "New Orleans and Roc-A-Fella: It's bout it bout it," Master P warns, and this mingling of "up top" with "Down South" sounded like a blueprint for the future. Circa the mid 2000s, the Diplomats were a ubiquitous presence, the rare New York act that boasted connections throughout L.A., the Bay, Houston, London (S.A.S.!), "Dayton, Youngstown, Cleveland, Cincinnati."

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The New Normal

• 

  Greatest Hits

  Z-Ro

  Rap-A-Lot Fontana

  Representing New York might be A$AP Rocky's birthright, but he's far from a hometown purist. He came of age in the late 1990s and 2000s, when New York offered but one of many "regional" sounds. You can hear a swirl of influences in Rocky's music — the Uptown flamboyance of Dipset but also the creeping, John Carpenter-cribbing textures that haunt Memphis, the languid but dexterous sing-songs that soundtrack Texas's sprawl. Rocky acquired... his versatile approach to song structure by studying artists like Devin the Dude, U.G.K. or Scarface — the slowed-down choruses of "Peso," "Goldie" and "PMW," for example, all owe something to the South. A member of DJ Screw's original Screwed Up Click, the unheralded Z-Ro has one of the most disarming voices you'll ever hear. The perfect complement to Screw's syrupy sound, Z-Ro is hypnotic, enchanting, almost gentle-sounding. Time goes peaceful and languid, as he surveys his empire (the "Paid in Full"-styled "Mo City Don" or the classic "25 Lighters") or schemes to hit you with "the mule."

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The Scene

• 

  Fool’s Gold Presents: Loosies

  Various Artists

  2012 | Fool's Gold Records

  The longest track on Long.Live.A$AP is "1 Train," a Wu-sized posse cut featuring Rocky, Kendrick Lamar, Joey Bada$$, Yelawolf, Danny Brown, Action Bronson and Big K.R.I.T. It works as both a gesture of covering-his-bases realpolitik and a we-got-next manifesto, a bracing inventory of all that the present will allow. Loosies collects some of the hybrid-obsessed Fool's Gold label's favorite current hip-hop. Despite the diversity of acts, a shared aesthetic runs through these... selections: charismatic, Looney Tunes raps, EDM synths and massive, blast radius bass-lines. Danny Brown sounds ecstatically murderous on "Molly Ringwald," while Droop-E goes for cavernously lonesome on "Mind Gone." Action Bronson's retro "Twin Peugeots" and Flatbush Zombies' minimalist "36 Chamber Flow" flex two different approaches to being a New York rapper circa 2013, both Wu-indebted. The bedroom producer has more tools than ever at their disposal, and geography is no longer a form of determinacy.

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The Co-Conspirator

• 

  Born To Die

  Lana Del Rey

  2012 | Interscope

  "I made it acceptable to wear braids and play JFK," Rocky recently told Pitchfork. It says something about him (and our times) that that's not even the strangest thing he says in the interview. The old language of collaborations and cameos is now one of brand alliances, tie-ins, cross-promotion, and there were few moves as brazen as Rocky's aforementioned turn as a pomo Kennedy in Lana Del Rey's 2012 "National Anthem" video.... While Del Rey has come under scrutiny for her seemingly inauthentic image, Rocky's done a masterful job trading off his rather fluid attitude toward authenticity and borders. The LDR track intended for Long.Live didn't make the final cut, but Rocky's clearly got a larger crossover audience in mind, rapping over Skrillex's frenetic strobes on "Wild for the Night" and heading out on tour with Rihanna. On "Fashion Killa," Rocky raps about his ideal lady, "jiggy like Madonna" and "trippy like Nirvana," someone who might appreciate his mastery of men's and women's boutique brands. Where his predecessors may have worried about shady label politics, Rocky has other things on his mind: Lanvin, Balmain, Isabel Marant, Alexander Wang.

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The Album

• 

  Pearl (Legacy Edition)

  Janis Joplin

  2005 | Columbia/Legacy

  After all the long years of struggle to understand how she wanted to present herself on stage, the irony of Pearl, like her nickname, is that Janis was plucked from her shell at her most pearlescent. With the Full Tilt Boogie Band behind her, and a producer (Paul Rothchild) who empathically understood her mood swings, she was able to blend the ramshackle roar of her first band, Big Brother & the Holding... Company, with the R&B professionalism of the Kozmic Blues Band. She had become assured and confident in her persona, despite the self-doubts she may have had when she returned to her hotel room late one ill-fated night. That the persona was female might have been beside the point, except it couldn't be, and her visionary song and commitment to her muse continues to light torches all over the world.

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Mother Blues

• 

  Ma Rainey

  Ma Rainey

  2007 | Fantasy Records

  With her feathers and sashay, her salty suggestives and ribald way with a blueswail, the tradition that Janis embraced hearkened back to a time when the blues were emerging from the shadow of the medicine show. Born in 1886, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey made the rounds of the vaudeville circuit before recording with Paramount Records in the mid '20s, developing an urban blues style that placed her alongside such seminal musicians as Louis... Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson. Her earthy realism ("Trust No Man," "Jealous Hearted Blues") mingled with the whoop-de-do that the act of blues expression brings (the lascivious "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom") provided Joplin with a role model and modal that would define her character as it took shape on the stages of San Francisco's Summer of Love. And Ma's universal appeal was hardly confined to the crossroads of Haight-Ashbury. When poet Allen Ginsberg discovered that his illness was terminal and he had only months to live, he came home from his doctor and put on Rainey's "See See the Rider Blues," to assuage his pain and soothe his eternal soul.

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Mother Earth

• 

  The Best Of Tracy Nelson/Mother Earth

  Tracy Nelson

  1996 | 143/Warner Bros.

  Of all Joplin's peers from the late '60s, Tracy Nelson was perhaps closest in musical recipe, though hardly in temperament. During her tenure with Mother Earth, and in her later solo career, she seemed settled, comfortable in her own skin, moving to a rural farm outside Nashville from which she provided a steadfast, pastoral presence that spoke of lineage and depth, negotiating undercurrents of emotion with a knowing sense of quiet triumph.... Among her many exquisite performances, "Temptation Took Control Of Me And I Fell," is a masterwork deeply felt, couched in the understanding of hard-won experience, sung by a voice not afraid to wear those trials on its sleeve.

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Mother Mountain

• 

  La Grande

  Laura Gibson

  2012 | Barsuk Records

  There was always an Appalachian twang in Janis's delivery. I came to Laura Gibson through her Six White Horses EP, where she sang mountain ballads and ye olde folk songs in a voice that seemed at once wizened and innocent, one moment porch-rocking with a pipe in her hand, the next a child placing its hand in a gentle stream. Though the arrangements on La Grande are more sophisticated, adventurous and quirky... — the looping maze of "Lion/Lamb," the surface noise scratch and dizzying backing vocals of "the Rushing Dark" — she doesn't lose sight of her hillock'ed melody. I hear her through this prism of beguiling wonder at the music that springs from her, as if she is singing each song for the first time. "Milk-Heavy, Pollen-Eyed" is spell-weaving, affecting in its unadorned truths; "Crow/Swallow" has an aviary sense of flight, tying it to Janis's version of "The Cuckoo," gliding on air currents of simple orchestration; "Feather Lungs" breathes her campfire song into the night. Truly special.

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Mother Mover and Shaker

• 

  Boys & Girls

  Alabama Shakes

  2012 | ATO Records

  I like my fried chicken with Shake 'n Bake, popping and sputtering in a pan full of oil, just like the time I once witnessed Bo Diddley cook up a mess of legs and wings on a hot plate in an R&B hotel off Times Square. The Shakes, whose call-and-response has spiraled by word-of-mouth since they burst upon the scene less than a SXSW ago, have a fine sense of heritage about... them, bedrock soul that beckons and cajoles till you're impelled to the dance floor; but they are hardly bound by what has come before. There is a vibrancy to these songs that tosses nostalgia and genre references to the fore and aft, the headlong rush of Brittany Howard's ebullient cakewalk ripe for the slicing. There's a lot of Stax chop and a bass drum that has room to reverberate while the guitar lick chiks and Howard's wail covers all like an enveloping cloak. "Wait," she commands in "Hold On," but how could anyone in the face of the Shakes?

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Mother Forker

• 

  CVI

  Royal Thunder

  2012 | Relapse Records

  The forked tongue of lightning, responsing thunder. Miny Parsonz unleashes storms as she stands in the prow of Royal Thunder, an Atlanta band that loves a good careen along the shoulder of the heavy rock higher-way. She can howl with the best of them, as the band lays down pulsating riff after riff, and the frontal assault has a bracing lift to its pummel. They skirt the noisecore of metal but share... as much kin with Southern brethren and sistren like Drivin' and Cryin' or even Superchunk; and reference British moltens like the immortal Sabs and Maiden before engaging full thrust and velocity. "Whispering World" is more shout-it-out than its title would suggest, and had me headbanging in the kitchen as I was doing the dishes. Miny isn't afraid to slow it down ("Sleeping Witch," "Drown") but you know she's only awaiting the full throttle roar to come.

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The Album

• 

  Rage Against The Machine - XX (20th Anniversary Edition)

  Rage Against The Machine

  2012 | Epic/Legacy

  Though their music and their politics would grow more effective as they grew more nuanced, Rage Against the Machine's self-titled 1992 debut still packs a certain bratty rush. That gleefully inchoate — and occasionally just plain boneheaded — rebellious streak is best captured by the utterly shameless, profanity-heavy, eighth-grade-level agit-prop delivered at the end of "Killing in the Name." A beyond-blunt kiss-off to any and all authority figures, it remains Rage's most... iconic nine-word statement, for better or worse.
  
  But if Zach De La Rocha is still a little too comfortable complaining about a generic "system" this early in the band's career, his three bandmates help him sell the vague admonishments to big government (and bigger business) with fusions both of-their-time and prophetic. The slap-bass and pogo-stick grooves of "Take the Power Back" and "Bullet in the Head" are closer to peppy, turn-of-the-'90s California party-metal than the brawny, funk-informed heaviness of the band's later albums. But guitarist Tom Morello had already happened upon his classic mix of hip-hop-informed texture (the sonar-esque squeals on "Bullet in the Head") and straight-up hard rock raunch (the near-southern rock riff that boogies lead-footed through "Bombtrack").
  
  Some of the lesser-known tracks actually contain some of the album's best music, and Morello's most forceful playing: the chunky metallic twang of "Fistful of Steel"; the near-psychedelic, reverb-glazed dirge "Township Rebellion"; and the surprisingly atmospheric "Settle for Nothing," which merges the "extended psychotic breakdown" howling of Rollins-era Black Flag over a leaden groove squalling with feedback. It's the invention of the deep cuts that gives RATM a life beyond the historically weighted tracks that made the band's name.

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The Fellow Politicos

• 

  London Calling

  The Clash

  2000 | Epic

  London Calling pushes the Clash beyond the boundaries of punk rock. The music stretches out in a number of directions, with lyrics that make politics and anger factors rather than focus. "Koka Kola," "Death or Glory," "Clampdown" and Simonon's violence-threatening reggae rumble, "Guns of Brixton," hit reassuringly familiar marks, but songs about actor Montgomery Clift ("The Right Profile") and lonely youth ("Lost in the Supermarket"), plus the surprise hit single "Train in... Vain," don't encourage blood-boiling or fist-pumping. Few groups have redefined themselves so adroitly: Taken on its own terms, London Calling is nearly flawless.

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The Stunning Psychedelists

• 

  Maggot Brain

  Funkadelic

  Westbound Records / Alpha Pup

  From George Clinton's own mouth, I was told Eddie Hazel dropped that traumatic solo on "Maggot Brain" in one take after George told mama's boy Eddie to imagine he'd been told his mother was dead and then found out it wasn't true. Now that's what we call record producing! Bob Rock, take note — instead of spending one year in therapy with your uninspired band, just say some shit that will... send them into therapy and run the tape.
  
  The title track is your brain on LSD buried alive in a coffin and resurrected on the third day. There's a handful of guitar players who stand up to comparison to long-form Coltrane and Dolphy, not to mention

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The Would-Have-Been Tourmates

• 

  Enter The Wu-Tang

  Wu Tang Clan

  1993 | RCA Records Label

  Enter The Wu-Tang is the Velvet Underground & Nico of '90s hip-hop a glorious muddle that made it safe not to merely color outside the lines but to scribble in the margins. Like a punk-rock response to Dr. Dre's baroque gangsta-pop arrangements, the raw-no-trivia Wu-Tang Clan emerged from out of nowhere at the tail end of 1993 or seemingly out of nowhere, as their home borough of Staten Island hadn't contributed... much to rap beyond the pillow-soft Force M.D.'s. Hip-hop was becoming lush enough to sample the THX woosh, but Wu-Tang producer Robert "RZA" Diggs was dead-set on keeping it ugly, borrowing dust-worn VHS clips of kung-fu flicks. The Wu was equal parts cinema and free-association mind-bending poetry and skits that detailed drug sales, crime narratives and blood on the hot concrete so the sonics had to be grimy, lo-fi, flickering, grim, real. The sound of their drums alone, rusty thwomps mutated by distortion, would push once-popular rollicking James Brown breaks into the old school, setting the gnarled tone for a half-decade of New York rap. And, oh yeah, there were nine nine! phenomenal MC's without a bit of deadweight in the bunch, each one with style as unique and realized as the comic book characters they worshipped: Method Man's hissing drool-suck, Raekwon's effortless word-tumble, Ghostface's nasal scattershot, GZA's musky matter-of-factness and the screeching, atonal dementia of class cut-up Ol' Dirty Bastard. Not to mention RZA, Inspectah Deck, U-God and Masta Killa thorny wordsmiths, each strong enough to be stars in their own right, though quickly overshadowed by the crew's more oversized personalities. Raised mostly in the Park Hill and Stapleton projects of Staten Island, the Wu-Tang Clan were isolated from Manhattan by a 90-minute ferry-and-subway trek. In response, they created their own universe. They redubbed their borough "Shaolin," and by the time they released their debut, the crew had built an entire mythology: a swirl of kung fu flicks and mobster lore, Five Percent Nation teachings and Eastern philosophy, dozens of colorful nicknames, slang so impenetrable that even the most classic tracks need annotated notes (see RZA's book The Wu-Tang Manual). And, of course, there's a hazy blend of samples taken from records RZA pillaged from East Village record store Beat Street and sidewalk sales. Classic soul, funk, jazz, even the Underdog theme, were dragged across his smudged-microscope slides. RZA's ear for the moody and unprocessed created an ethereal vibe that turned hardcore street narratives into film noir.

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The Blueprint Writer

• 

  It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back

  Public Enemy

  1995 | Def Jam/RAL

  There are no words too hyperbolic, no expressions too excited to describe the tectonic impact Public Enemy's second album had on the world. It is that vital and that infecting. Nominally a rap album, It Takes A Nation... is more like a sound grenade, thanks to the Bomb Squad's quadruple-stacked sampling, hypeman par excellence Flavor Flav's sonorous squeal, and leader Chuck D's stentorian flow — dependent not so much on meter, like... most rappers, but instead a kind of confident, formless roar.
  
  "Chuck's a powerful rapper. We wanted to make something that could sonically stand up to him," The Bomb Squad's Hank Shocklee told the Daily News when the album was released. So drum maniacs Hank and his brother, Keith, along with the musical heart of P.E., Eric "Vietnam" Sadler, seized the challenge, creating songs, if you can call them that, that whinny and snarl and ping and clash, incorporating screeching saxophones, cross-cutting vocal samples, hissing teapots, hard-nosed breakbeats, and empty hallway pianos lines. It's a fast and new kind of electric blues — or, in places, a broken, discordant jazz — they stumbled upon. Chuck takes the music and uses its harshness to deliver unrepentant political jeremiads. "The follower of Farrakhan/ Don't tell me that you understand/ Until you hear the man/ The book of the new school rap game," he raps on "Don't Believe The Hype," the totemic single. Chuck's politics are confusing beyond calls for righteous Black Panther and Nation of Islam-inspired unity. But as The New York Times' Jon Pareles wrote at the time of the album's release, P.E. refracted the notion of "individualism" in rap, demanding a new "community," encouraging activism and cynicism in equal measure. Whether denouncing a rotting, rotten prison system and governmental authority on "Black Steel In The Hour of Chaos," or the locally debilitating crack epidemic on "Night Of the Living Baseheads," Chuck's fury is so persuasive, you may find yourself punching the sky during these songs without regret. It Takes A Nation... has aged remarkably well, as sonically arresting, and socially unforgiving as any album you're likely to hear. No one made being uncompromising so inspiring.

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The Quiet Defiance

• 

  Nebraska

  Bruce Springsteen

  Columbia

  A genuinely experimental record, with Springsteen playing all the (sparse) instruments, recording on a lo-fi 8-track, and peering deep into the lives of those for whom there's no escape, certainly not any of the sort hoped for in earlier songs such as "Born to Run," "Promised Land," and so many others. Its characters are pursued by demons — both inner and outer — of the kind that can turn the American dream... into a nightmare. The stories are bleak, but also complex and compelling — the events described in "Highway Patrolman" in fact inspired the Sean-Penn-directed film The Indian Runner.

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The Album

• 

  good kid, m.A.A.d city

  Kendrick Lamar

  2013 | Top Dawg / Aftermath / Interscope

  "I don't listen to too much rap when I'm writing my own music," Kendrick Lamar explained in a recent interview, "cause I really don't want it to sound like anybody else's." The Compton rapper's debut is a remarkably open-minded affair, a meticulously recorded day in the life of 17-year-old "K-Dot." It certainly doesn't sound like anybody else's music, and at times it's even hard to locate Lamar himself in it. He's neither... a hero nor villain, more of a bystander constantly shifting perspectives. He's wild and reckless on "Backseat Freestyle," coldly ambitious on "Money Trees," verging on collapse on "Swimming Pools." On "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst" – a song that only makes sense within the context of good kid – he voices the crowds around him, only not everyone makes it. The kid's challenges are legion: turf war realpolitik, best friends and their "peer pressure," the awful lows of dragging on the wrong blunt. It's an album stitched together by themes and skits, the pursuit of the same old thrills and the simple yet eternal dream of waking up to see tomorrow.

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The Soundtrack

• 

  In Our Lifetime

  Marvin Gaye

  2007 | Motown

  When he's recording his own music – songs, not guest verses – Lamar prefers listening to "oldies, melodies, anything outside of rap." While recording good kid he kept returning to Marvin Gaye and the Isley Brothers. Gaye's 1981 In Our Lifetime was the troubled singer's penultimate album and, consequently, a tumultuous and absorbingly schizoid affair. Following the commercial failure of Here, My Dear, wherein he documented in painful detail the dissolution of... his marriage, Gaye wanted to reestablish his pop chart bona fides with an album called Love Man. But over the course of his many vexed recording sessions in Los Angeles, Honolulu and finally London, it became clear that Gaye was only trying to fool himself – he was nowhere near as upbeat as his backing disco-funk arrangements suggested. Instead, he allowed the contradictions to sit side-by-side; there was no resolution between the sacred and the profane. Instead, In Our Lifetime – which probably could have been an untroubled collection of hit singles – captures Gaye at his most pensive, conflicted and self-doubting.

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The Inspiration

• 

  Straight Checkn 'Em

  Comptons Most Wanted

  1991 | Orpheus/Epic

  One of the few guests on good kid is MC Eiht, a West Coast legend who – and it pains me to even have to mention this – said "jyeah" decades before Ryan Lochte discovered the world of precious metal mouthwear. Eiht shows up as the elder statesman on "m.A.A.d city" – a sort of amped-up "Growin' Up in the Hood" – growling his verse with a cool intensity. Lamar recalls a... childhood spent driving around Compton with his father, listening to tapes from all their famous, rapping neighbors. One assumes that Straight Checkn 'Em, the second album from Eiht's group, Comptons Most Wanted, was in heavy rotation. Released in 1991 – when Lamar was four – it's a disarmingly mellow album, thanks largely to Eiht's laidback charisma. Classics like "Growin' Up in the Hood" and "Raised in Compton" comprised a local lineage – along with N.W.A., W.C. and the M.A.A.D. Circle and the Game – that Lamar would one day be a part of.

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The Moody Man

• 

  It's Dark And Hell Is Hot

  DMX

  1998 | RAL

  There's a throwback sensibility to Lamar's desire to craft his album as an album rather than collection of singles. "Doggystyle, The Chronic, It's Dark and Hell is Hot. I think probably subconsciously all the time in my head I knew when my debut album came I was going to formulate my album similar to these." While good kid is notable for its interwoven storylines, it also achieves a weirdly uniform sound given... its array of producers. DMX's 1998 debut achieves a mood and stays there – a rare thing, given the kitchen-sink approach and multiple personality disorder that afflicts most debuts. The Yonkers rapper made the most of his bark, and It's Dark is almost suffocating in its total commitment to being loud, ferocious, borderline unhinged.

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The Storytellers

• 

  Aquemini

  Outkast

  1998 | Arista/LaFace Records

  There's an obvious line to be drawn from Outkast and their classic, "poet and the pimp," contradiction-filled albums and Lamar's complex debut. There's a kindred spirit there, a willingness to ignore conventions and instead dwell within the fully-formed world of one's own creation. But there's also a sonic resemblance between good kid and the Atlanta duo's 1998 Aquemini, and it's not just because both albums have a few extra-long tracks. It's in... the way Big Boi and Dre allowed their songs to breathe, from the Southern dub of "SpottieOttieDopaliscious" to the wrenching, two-part "Da Art of Storytellin'" to those skits and snatches of dialogue that didn't carry the narrative so much as they conveyed context and character.

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The Peer

• 

  Take Care (Deluxe Version)

  Drake

  2012 | Cash Money Records/Young Money Ent./Universal Rec.

  The "Buried Alive Interlude" was a strange cul-de-sac on Drake's 2011 album Take Care, a few breathless verses from Lamar that seemed to float free of the album's larger narratives. To Black Hippy stans, Lamar's charismatically alien voice stole his host's thunder, while many of Drake's pop devotees merely wondered what was wrong with him. But it's a friendship that makes sense. Take Care was a record that aspired for a similar... kind of thematic and sonic coherence, and the collaborators offer two different version of charisma circa right now – Drake as the cool yet vulnerable lothario, Lamar the conflicted yet self-confident romantic. Drake returns Lamar's favor on good kid's nostalgic "Poetic Justice," playing wingman and rapping about sundresses.

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The Album

• 

  New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges

  Colin Stetson

  2011 | Constellation / SC Distribution

  Besides touring with Bon Iver and Arcade Fire, Colin Stetson does solo gigs at rock and jazz festivals, playing unaccompanied bass saxophone pieces with big-beat power, clear forms studded with catchy riffs and sequencer-like patterns, and an enormous sound befitting a giant horn. He pulls it off using a battery of techniques from jazz and improvised music, notably circular breathing (to keep blowing continuously, even while inhaling), multiphonics (singing one note, playing... another), slap-tonguing, controlled squeals, and split-tones that teeter between pitches. He also exploits incidental sounds: the brushes-on-snare sniff of drawing air through the nose, the slap of keypads on metal. His execution is a marvel of coordination; Stetson makes ridiculously complex stuff sound like it plays itself. He records the horn in real time with multiple close and distant mikes, then manipulates the mix to spotlight specific effects. For all that, the music's primal, suggesting ritual dances around a fire on the plains. "Three Blind Mice" lurks behind "A Dream of Water," narrated by Laurie Anderson in late-night-storyteller mode. My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden sings Blind Willie Johnson's "Lord I Just Can't Keep from Crying" over a didgeridoo-y drone. Whirling worlds intersect. (Volume one's a winner too.)

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And Now We Go A-Wailing

• 

  Wailin' Saxophone Legends

  Various Artists

  2009 | Stardust Records / The Orchard

  The difference between rhythm & blues and rock 'n' roll is sometimes as thin as the choice of saxophone or electric guitar as lead instrument. Reed players had a head start on pickers when it came to freak instrumental effects, going back to vaudeville, one of jazz's incubators. Overtone-rich honkin' and screamin' saxes came a-roaring in the 1940s, unleashed by Illinois Jacquet's catatonic wail on Lionel Hampton's "Flying Home." Umpteen raunchy riffing... jukebox hits followed: Jimmy Forrest's "Night Train," Paul Williams's "The Hucklebuck," Hal Singer's "Cornbread," and anything by Big Jay McNeely. Most every hornblower here takes cues from Count Basie tenor star Lester Young's economical note choices, foghorn blasts, drummer's timing, and alternative fingerings of the same note for microtonal shadings. They're all part of Colin Stetson's frame of reference.

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Circular Breathing I

• 

  Natural Black Inventions: Root Strata

  Rahsaan Roland Kirk

  2006 | Rhino Atlantic

  Was a time, even in hip jazz clubs, when holding one note via circular breathing always drew applause. That technique for continuous blowing – inhale through the nose while pushing air out the mouth using the cheeks as a bellows – was popularized in jazz by consummate showman and fearsome virtuoso Rahsaan Roland Kirk. He was fond of vaudeville stunts like that, or playing two or three saxes or clarinets at once,... or one flute with the mouth and another with a nostril. His circular breathing, showcased on the overwrought Prepare Thyself To Deal With A Miracle, sounds more striking as part of the showstopping mix on 1971's Natural Black Inventions. Save for occasional helpers, Kirk is a one-man band, on multiple horns, homemade shakers and foot percussion, creating a world of music via force of will and formidable chops. Circular-breathing features include a Gershwin piano piece, "Prelude Back Home."

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Circular Breathing II

• 

  Obliquities

  Evan Parker

  1995 | Maya Recordings / The Orchard

  Key elements in Colin Stetson's approach stem from England's free-improvising tenor and soprano sax virtuoso Evan Parker. He employs circular breathing to set up simultaneous melodic/rhythm cycles that crisscross each other in brainwave patterns of high and low layers. But where Stetson favors well-defined rock-ribbed riffs, Parker's spirals keep mutating, in solo performance, and in this duo with frequent ally Barry Guy on bass. Parker's corkscrew figures, gutturals and sputters sing out... on "Slope," "Lurch" and "Fleam" in particular. The music's more atomized and abstract than Stetson's for sure, though often there's a similar ritual air. But then circular breathing long predates music-hall stuntwork. It's behind the eternal hum of Australia's didgeridoo and the drone of varied Eurasian folk reeds.

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Roots of the Corkscrew

• 

  Terry Riley: A Rainbow In Curved Air; Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band

  Terry Riley

  Sony Classical

  Colin Stetson's repeater riffs and rotating arpeggios also derive from modern minimalism, where slowly unfolding processes may underpin a fast-moving surface. (Never mind that composers dubbed minimalists often reject that label.) Late-period John Coltrane's prayerful, iterative solos and swirly soprano skirling influenced Evan Parker, and also composer Terry Riley, one of the founders of modern repetitive music. Riley plays overdubbed electronic keyboards (including Sun Ra's beloved rocksichord) on "A Rainbow in Curved... Air," and soprano saxes looped and layered (via two-tapedeck tech years before Fripp & Eno) over keyboard drones on "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band." On either piece, he exploits the same power by accretion that Stetson does. Riley, like Coltrane, was also inspired by North India's classical music, with its own unhurried development and built-in drones. Dive deep, it's all connected.

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Music That Moves in Waves

• 

  Songlines - Songs of the East Australian Humpback Whales

  The Oceania Project

  2011 | Aqualise Music / Believe Digital

  Colin Stetson's bass saxophone is a leviathan, with all the slow-turning depths-plumbing gravitas that implies. The long steamship tones approaching from afar that begin New History Warfare Vol. 2 suggest aquatic mammals who make music with their nasal cavities, and sing 10- or 20-minute pieces everyone from their area knows (and which slowly evolve over time, to keep things interesting), songs where extraneous clicks, grunts and sputters enrich curving melodies of smeary... moans and whistling highs. Since Songs of the Humpback Whale put their sound in human ears in the 1970s, those wails have informed our idea of what music can be. For now zoologists can only guess what whale songs mean, making the title of this Australian compilation especially cheeky. No worries. When Messiaen and Eric Dolphy quoted birdcalls, did they know what the birds had in mind?

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The Album

• 

  Whitney

  Whitney Houston

  2007 | Arista

  It didn't have to happen like this. As the story goes, Clive Davis first heard Whitney Houston perform at a club in 1983, when she was 20. He was not the first who hoped to make a star of her. Labels had sought her out since middle school. But her mother, gospel singer Cissy Houston, had carefully and thoughtfully managed her daughter's career throughout her teens, making sure that she graduated from... high school. This was a time when patience was still possible. Houston's eponymous debut album wouldn't come out for two years, and it wasn't an immediate hit. But then came the singles: the polished "You Give Good Love," the instantly familiar "Saving All My Love For You," the MTV-ready "How Will I Know." By the end of 1985, Houston had established herself as one of the decade's most promising crossover stars.
  
  After all, diversity wasn't yet seen as a virtue in the mid 1980s, with radio stations, magazines and MTV still quite segregated. The time was right for a star capable of playing to all crowds and Houston's wholesome glamour fit the bill. Her 1987 album Whitney set all sorts of sales records, including ones that put her in the same conversation as the Beatles, Elton John and Bruce Springsteen. Whitney accentuated all of her debut's most appealing moves: The ballads were classy and polished, the dance tracks joyfully modern. "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" and "So Emotional" were ubiquitous that year, while "Didn't We Almost Have it All" epitomized the splendor of the 1980s ballad. Despite its crossover aspirations, there were gestures toward the world had nurtured her as well: a fine cover of the Isley Brothers' "For the Love of You," as well as "I Know Him so Well," a duet with her mother. Listening to it all 25 years later, in light of Houston's passing, it's difficult not to long for the album's youthful effervescence. The scars were imagined, the highs still rising. This was a young woman entering a world not of her own making, taking those first, confident steps toward discovering just how gigantic it would allow her to become.

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The Early Back-Up Gig

• 

  What Cha' Gonna Do For Me

  Chaka Khan

  2008 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

  Houston grew up in a musical environment — not only was her mother a gospel star, but her cousins were Dionne and DeeDee Warwick, and her godmother was Darlene Love of the Ronettes. One of Houston's early gigs was as a back-up vocalist on Chaka Khan's hit "I'm Every Woman" (which she would later cover herself). Perhaps if Houston had been born in a different era, Khan would have represented the apex... of possibilities. Khan was one of the most versatile performers of the 1970s and early 1980s, a major star capable of belting out diva-size torch songs, getting nasty over a funk grinder or commanding an ecstatic disco rhythm. Released in 1981, What'cha is one of her more interesting albums, especially on the blissful title cut and "I Know You, I Live You." Over the course of this strong, synth-driven record, she covers the Beatles, jams with Dizzy Gillespie and generally sounds like she's having a ball.

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An Oeuvre Oddity

• 

  One Down

  Material

  2005 | Musicom/Celluloid Records / The Orchard

  An oddity of the Houston oeuvre. Material began in the late 1970s as a No Wave band fronted by bassist Bill Laswell and an ever-changing cast of collaborators. In 1982, he and keyboardist Michael Beinhorn released One Drop, an ambitious collection of machine-drum dance funk. Among the collaborators were Nona Hendryx, Archie Shepp, members of Chic and a young Houston. It was the first time she was ever the featured vocalist on... a recording. She leads a cover of Soft Machine's soft, sweet "Memories," a reprieve from the rest of the collection's electro fascination. It's clear that she had yet to gain the confidence to use her powerful voice. She sounds disarmingly crisp and pure atop Material's minimalist arrangement, each of her verses met with a jagged response from Shepp's saxophone.

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Passing the Torch

• 

  Mary

  Mary J. Blige

  1999 | Geffen

  When Mary J. Blige emerged in the early 1990s, she was portrayed as the anti-Houston, a gritty antidote to how stately, composed and polished pop R&B had become. Houston's ascension had predated the arrival of hip-hop to the mainstream; Blige, on the other hand, had the brashness of a young MC. But during the 1990s, Blige slowly evolved into a diva in Houston's image. This growth culminated in 1999, when Blige released... Mary, an album of '70s-influenced grown-up soul. A sense of hope coursed through these songs, as Blige found comfort, power and, most of all, space within the album's sparse arrangements. Later that year, she performed with Houston on VH1's Divas special, one of the legend's many acts of torch-passing.

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The Diva’s Diva

• 

  Priceless

  Kelly Price

  2003 | DEF SOUL

  Soul stalwart Kelly Price has a strange, new claim to fame: She was on-stage with Houston during her last-ever public appearance, the two singing a duet of "Yes, Jesus Loves Me" at a pre-Grammy celebration. Price has long been the diva's diva, a brilliant singer and songwriter admired more by her peers than the record-buying public. She was a frequent collaborator with Houston, including a guest spot on the latter's 1998 single... "Heartbreak Hotel." Price's 2003 album Priceless was a sophisticated, lush affair, similar to the drama-tinged, mid-tempo R&B of Houston's later albums. Priceless is rich with the triumphs and struggles of growing (slightly) older — it is a captivating, memoiristic record. Alongside ascendant tracks such as "Sister" (featuring fellow Houston collaborator and devotee Faith Evans), there is the brilliant, bittersweet "How Does it Feel," when destiny comes undone.

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The Unlikely Interpreter

• 

  Love Remains

  How To Dress Well

  2010 | Lefse Records / The Orchard

  The fine, luscious textures and cliffhanger drama of contemporary R&B have inspired an unlikely new generation of bedroom producers. Among them, New York's How to Dress Well offers one of the more bewitching interpretations, turning the tropes of radio soul into something swirly, ethereal and half-awake. If Houston-era R&B was a celebration of the self — dancing one's way toward bliss, singing one's soul free — than there's something cerebral and distant... about HTDW. There are gorgeous songs buried deep within "Ready for the World" and "Can't See My Own Face," between the echo and the ambience. It's a challenge to hear the past his way, the hits of the 1980s and '90s deconstructed as euphoric bliss and disarming ruptures.

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The Album

• 

  Money Jungle

  Duke Ellington

  2002 | BLUE NOTE

  Jazz lore has it that the session was tense on September 17, 1962, when the mega-star trio of pianist Duke Ellington, bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach convened to record the rambunctious classic Money Jungle. Was hot-head Mingus pissed at old comrade Max, or were both steamed Duke would only play his own tunes? Maybe they were feeling the pressure of expectations. Ellington had been avant-garde in the 1920s, the others... in the '40s. But now jazz was in thrall to a new avant-garde (and the bossa nova). Could they still cut it? The album's opening minute answers that. Mingus pulls a yelping string around the side of the neck; Ellington reminds us he'd been mining the keyboard for impacted harmonies longer than Thelonious Monk or Cecil Taylor; Roach's interactive accents and deep cymbal groove show what even originals like Edward Blackwell and Elvin Jones got from him. The music doesn't taper off from there. Some nice ballads, but it's mostly a roof raiser. Can it really be half a century old?

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Mr. Gentle and Mr. Cool

• 

  Duke Ellington & John Coltrane

  Duke Ellington

  1995 | Impulse! Records

  The week following the tumult of Money Jungle, Duke went out of his way to be solicitous in the studio with the new king of the new jazz, saxophonist John Coltrane. Ellington still picked the tunes, but each co-leader brought his own bassist and drummer; the rhythm sections traded off. Coltrane's comments at the time suggest he was a bit awestruck. He was also in the midst of making a few tender... ballad records, and whose ballads were lovelier than Duke's? Their "In a Sentimental Mood" wowed everybody. If Ellington sounds almost bashful on piano when Elvin Jones get to bashing the drums, the pianist always did give great saxophone soloists leeway to be expressive. Duke even brought a new tune to wind John up, "Take the Coltrane." No Oedipal dramas here.

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Such Sweet Thunder

• 

  Inception

  McCoy Tyner

  1997 | GRP Records

  Ellington was eternally modern, but new strains were emerging in jazz piano by 1962. Early that year, McCoy Tyner made his debut as leader, in a trio with fellow Coltrane sidefolk Elvin Jones and bassist Art Davis. Before he joined Coltrane, Tyner could be terse and funky at the keys, though there were rumbling intimations of the expansive style to come. In the saxophonist's explosive quartet, Tyner developed new strategies. His thundering... open intervals, lightning-flash pentatonic runs and doleful fadeaway chords created a rich backdrop for Coltrane to fly over. That style worked just as well out front, on Tyner originals and the standards "Speak Low" and "There Is No Greater Love." McCoy set the style for umpteen jazz pianists to come. Fifty years after Inception, he was still showing them how it's done.

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Tippin’ and Whisperin’

• 

  Moon Beams [Original Jazz Classics Remasters]

  Bill Evans Trio

  2012 | Original Jazz Classics

  When Ellington came up, admired jazz pianists like James P. Johnson were making the instrument shout. By 1962, Bill Evans was making it whisper. He'd made his name in Miles Davis's band, and with his own subtly probing trio, which included drummer Paul Motian and bass virtuoso Scott LaFaro. After LaFaro's sudden death in '61, Evans took a hiatus, regrouping a year later with Chuck Israels on bass. That trio's initial sessions... yielded How My Heart Sings! and this all-ballad affair. Evans was a master of the moody moonlit rumination, infused with soft-around-the-edges impressionist harmony. His lyricism and precise keyboard touch made even the sparest improvised line sing, quietly buttressed by Motian's wire brushes and Israels' subterranean throb. Evans became another pole star for ambitious pianists.

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Madness in Great Ones

• 

  Town Hall Concert

  Charles Mingus

  1994 | BLUE NOTE

  A month after Money Jungle, bassist Mingus's next big date was a famous flop: a hybrid concert/live recording at New York's Town Hall. The big band was overstuffed (about double the normal size) and underprepared. The date of the concert had been moved up with little warning; during the show there were copyists on stage, writing out musicians' parts from Mingus's deadline scores. The curtain was lowered during an encore. The resulting... LP only reinforced the air of chaos, but the belatedly issued complete concert prompted upward re-assessment. Memorable themes, crisscrossing melodies, wah-wah brass and anchoring baritone sax showed Mingus's debt to Ellington, but he never stoops to chintzy imitation. "Freedom," with the leader's stunning recitation, is a meditation on African American history that builds on the maestro's masterworks.

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Regal Formal

• 

  It's Time

  Max Roach

  1996 | Impulse! Records

  Max Roach had lofty aspirations too, already manifest on 1960s's We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, jazz's definitive Civil Rights statement. In decades to come, he'd collaborate with orchestras and string quartets. That trend starts with 1962's It's Time, for which the drummer wrote and arranged music for his limber sextet — with Richard Williams, Julian Priester and Clifford Jordan on horns, pianist Mal Waldron and Art Davis on bass — plus... jazz orchestra and a mostly-wordless gospel choir. (They were conducted by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, jazz-tinged classical composer who'd play piano with Roach for a spell.) Abbey Lincoln gets the vocal feature "Lonesome Lover." It's Time is surprisingly light on its feet; the add-ons pack a punch without crushing the core combo. As ever, Max's drum solos are models of clarity, mini-concerti. His instant composing on Money Jungle confirms his flair for orchestration.

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The Album

• 

  The Bridge

  Sonny Rollins

  2003 | RCA Bluebird

  Once upon a time, tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins — still riding high when The Bridge turned 50 in 2012 — was jazz's most notorious dropout, taking long and much-lamented sabbaticals from the scene. His well-publicized 1959-62 break was partly in response to lavish praise for his improvisational depth; it made him self-conscious, more aware of his shortcomings. He took to practicing on the walkways of the Williamsburg Bridge, so's not to disturb... his Lower East Side neighbors. (The location was loud and windy; playing there built strength.) Word had it he was grappling with ideas raised by the Coltrane/Coleman avant-garde. Yet The Bridge, Sonny's comeback, was a set of vigorously swinging standards and originals — reaffirmation, not revolution. The lemony tang of Jim Hall's guitar, in place of piano, offset Sonny's garishly lush sound, with its echoes of East River tugboats. Hall gave everything a lighter feel, the relentless thrust of Ben Riley's or Harry T. Saunders's drums notwithstanding. (Bassist Bob Cranshaw? Still with Sonny, 50 years on.) No one deconstructs and reassembles every aspect of a tune like Rollins, refurbishing — and breaking your heart with — shopworn oldies like "Where Are You?"

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Vanishing Giants

• 

  Town Hall 1962

  Ornette Coleman

  2002 | ESP'Disk

  Not all sabbaticals are voluntary. Having shaken up jazz with his late-'50s freebop quartet, Ornette Coleman was mostly invisible in the early '60s; clubs and labels wouldn't meet his price. In December 1962, Coleman rented out Town Hall with money quietly advanced by friend Irving Stone, to present his colossal new trio, with big-eared classical bassist David Izenzon and crackling Texas drummer Charles Moffett. (The trio sat out the roughhewn string quartet... "For Poets and Writers," precursor to Coleman's symphonic Skies of America.) Ornette's new group was even rawer than his quartet, his crying alto sax more exposed. (The trio would sound even better by 1965, At the Golden Circle.) His ideas and Sonny Rollins' cross-pollinated; Sonny'd had his own pianoless trios, and not long after The Bridge he drafted two ex-Colemanites, trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins, into the wild quartet heard on Our Man in Jazz.

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A Sideman Steps Out

• 

  Concierto (CTI Records 40th Anniversary Edition - Original recording remastered)

  Jim Hall

  2011 | Masterworks Jazz

  When Rollins hired guitarist Jim Hall for The Bridge, he may've already heard him as saxist Paul Desmond's accompanist, when Desmond was on leave from Dave Brubeck's band. Hall was so good in support he barely recorded as leader before 1975's Concierto, which raised his profile, showing off his attractively muffled hollow-point tone and slingshot-swing phrasing. The album was glossy, if less so than other CTI releases, even factoring in the contemporary... touches of Ron Carter's rubber-band bass sound and Steve Gadd's ba-da-boom fusiony drumming. Arranger Don Sebesky's marathon take on Rodrigo's "Concierto de Aranjuez" didn't cut Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain version, but it's great to hear altoist Desmond mull over that and two other tunes. Understated, lyrical, he's a perfect fit for the guitarist. Trumpeter Chet Baker, so-so on the "Concierto," sounds surprisingly lithe and sunny on "Two's Blues."

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The Unkillable Father

• 

  Today And Now / Desafinado

  Coleman Hawkins

  2011 | VERVE REISSUES

  Jazz guitarists may've been busier than usual in 1962, when strummy bossa nova was the rage; even Cannonball Adderley made a Brazilian record. Rollins's idol Coleman Hawkins, the tenor's grand old man, recorded Desafinado with two shuffling guitars, but self-sufficient Hawkins could play anything with anybody and sound good. That album's now paired with Today and Now, waxed the same week. There Hawkins à la Rollins delights in resuscitating improbable relics like... "Put on Your Old Grey Bonnet" and "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," alongside trademark rapturous ballads. (On Desafinado he does "I'm Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover.") The following year, on Sonny Meets Hawk, Rollins and crew did their best to confound the master, who gave as good as he got, sounding almost avant-garde himself. But Hawkins had been keeping the competition at bay since 1922.

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It’s A Wonderful Town

• 

  New York, N.Y.

  George Russell

  1998 | Impulse! Records

  The title The Bridge was part metaphor — Rollins in transition from the hardbop '50s to the freewheeling '60s — but also referred to one very specific interborough landmark. New York's sights, pace and bustle have inspired rafts of tunes; Duke Ellington wrote more than a dozen for Harlem alone. In 1958 and '59, composer and jazz theorist George Russell arranged "Autumn in New York" and wrote new pieces that take you... around Manhattan, up to Spanish Harlem and down the East Side. Hip improvisers had all checked out Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept, a fresh way to think about balancing scales on chords, and his orchestra boasted New York celebrity soloists like Art Farmer, Benny Golson, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Max Roach and fast-talking tour guide Jon Hendricks. When the charts get busy, Russell's intersecting vectors mirror midtown traffic; the ballads are the park after dark.

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The Next Sabbatical

• 

  Sonny Rollins' Next Album

  Sonny Rollins

  2006 | Milestone

  In 1966, Rollins began a six-year recording break, disillusioned with the business and the world. He still worked some — at an odd Town Hall gig his band had seven bass players — but he also went to India to study meditation. Rollins' comeback was formally announced by 1972's Next Album, anticipating pretty much everything he's done since. His tenor tone had become more brittle and metallic, but it suits one of... his patented, irrepressible calypsos. (On "Poinciana" Sonny's on soprano, axe he'd abandon a few years later.) Bob Cranshaw was making a permanent transition from acoustic to electric bass; an extra percussionist embroiders the edges. The rhythms are more relaxed and populist, the band less interactive, even with George Cables on piano/electric piano, and Jack DeJohnette drumming on two tracks. Some claim Rollins now played better than ever. His long solo intro and cadenza to "Skylark" alone are essential. But his '50s and '60s were hard acts to follow.

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The Album

• 

  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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The Neo-Soul Sensualist

• 

  Who Is Jill Scott? (Words And Sounds Vol. 1)

  Jill Scott

  2008 | Hidden Beach Records LLC / TuneCore

  Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Prince all cast long shadows over Frank Ocean, but his major-label debut is filtered through the free-flowing bohemianism of the late-'90s and early-2000s neo-soul movement. Although Ocean sings about "keeping it surreal," he's less quasi-mystical than Erykah Badu, and although channel ORANGE shares a guitarist-bassist, eight-string virtuoso Charlie Hunter, with D'Angelo's Voodoo, Ocean is less interested in pure funk. Plus, channel ORANGE is more narrative-oriented than Maxwell.... In fact, the best comparison, and a great album in its own right, is this 2000 debut by Jill Scott. The Philly poet-singer-actress shares Ocean's lyrical bluntness, breezy keys and album-length relationship theme. Ocean sings of "Sierra Leone"; Scott invokes the Serengeti. Jazzy spoken-word cut "Exclusively," with its unrestrained sex talk and grocery store twist ending, and bass-heavy "Gettin' in the Way," the smoothest cat-fight song ever, both have similarities to Ocean's storytelling approach. On the flamenco-flavored "One Is the Magic #," Scott waxes whimsical in Spanish about the greatest love at all — an oddball move Ocean might appreciate, and a statement of self-worth he deserves to take to heart.

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The Blues-Pop Storyteller

• 

  Continuum

  John Mayer

  2006 | Aware/Columbia

  If all you know about John Mayer is that he dated Jessica Simpson, did a terribly insensitive Playboy interview and sang the femme-friendly seduction "Your Body Is a Wonderland," you might have raised an eyebrow at his inclusion on the album credits. But it's actually every bit as logical as the involvement of Earl Sweatshirt, André 3000 or Pharrell. In fact, Pharrell has called Ocean "the black James Taylor," a distinction that,... Bill Clinton-like, some wag might have applied to Mayer had the clearly talented singer-songwriter simply kept his mouth shut when asked about his "hood pass." Like Ocean, Mayer is a melody-minded, pop-oriented storyteller steeped in blues, jazz and funk. Also like Ocean, he has collaborated with Kanye West (Graduation bonus track "Bittersweet Poetry") and Jay-Z (at a New Year's 2011 show — after the offending interview). And 2006's Continuum, which also features channel ORANGE/Voodoo jazz-funk virtuoso Charlie Hunter, is Mayer's magnum opus, examining politics both global and personal with clear-eyed sincerity. It's a scope that Ocean might successfully achieve on a future album, delivered by one of his current masterpiece's most widely misunderstood guests. But you heard it from Mayer first: "Me and all my friends, we're all misunderstood," he begins, then launches into what dean-of-all-rock-critics Robert Christgau rightly called perhaps the greatest anti-fascist song of the Bush era.

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The Hitmaker-Turned-R&B Eccentric

• 

  Love Vs Money

  The-Dream

  2009 | Def Jam Records

  As a songwriter-for-hire, Terius "The-Dream" Nash wrote bigger hits than Ocean did. As a recording artist, The-Dream makes bigger albums, too, at least in terms of being larger-than-life. The scribe behind Rihanna's "Umbrella" and Beyoncé's "Single Ladies" set the no-holds-barred template for the present-day songwriter-turned-R&B-star. 2007 hit "Shawty Is a 10," from solo debut Love Hate, made "urban" Top 40 radio safe for bouncy piano before Drake — and bears no slight... resemblance to channel ORANGE's "Super Rich Kids." I'd listen to arguments in favor of any one of The-Dream's three albums, plus his 1977 mixtape or, maybe best of all, his Elektrik Red girl-group project, but 2009 sophomore outing Love Vs Money seems most spiritually in keeping with the record at hand. Lightly funky radio fare ("Walkin on the Moon," "Mr. Yeah") makes room for an expansive, ingenious mid-album suite. "Kellys 12 Play," which basically extended to R. Kelly's self-referential genius to its ultimate extreme, left no doubt: Where R&B meets hip-hop, anything goes. What's more, The-Dream's answer here to critics of his vocal ability is one that Ocean's fans would do well to memorize: "If they ask you, can I sing like Usher, say n o/ But I can make you sing like Mariah."

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The Emo-R&B Peer

• 

  Take Care (Deluxe Version)

  Drake

  2012 | Cash Money Records/Young Money Ent./Universal Rec.

  When Ocean told The New York Times he preferred not to make himself the focus point of all of his songs, likening himself to a filmmaker rather than a diarist, it made sense to think of Drake. Like channel ORANGE, Drake's 2011 sophomore outing Take Care expertly toes the line between hip-hop, R&B and more leftfield sonics, with a particular delight in gentle keyboards. The in-the-moment realism of Ocean's wonderful "Bad Religion,"... especially, brings to mind the intimacy of a Drake track like the "Marvin's Room," which trades a taxicab confession for a late-night drunk dial. Take Care also features contributions from the Weeknd, Gil Scott Heron and Jamie xx, all of whose styles have elements in common with channel ORANGE (though the Weeknd, after his diminishing-returns run of mixtapes, is now clearly no longer Ocean's peer). The Juvenile-sampling "Practice" shows Drake is unafraid of Ocean-style unexpected appropriations, while other late-album cuts like grandmother ode "Look What You've Done" and the nearly a cappella "The Ride" demonstrate an uncommon sensitivity to lyrical detail that Ocean certainly shares. It's possible channel ORANGE might definitively destroy the legitimacy of a club-obsessed record like Take Care, and Drake clearly lacks Ocean's vocal chops, but for now, in the world of word-wise, vulnerable artists whose appeal transcends genre, they represent each other's closest competition.

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The Pop-Idol Protectress

The Album

• 

  Songs

  Rusko

  2012 | Downtown Records / The Orchard

  Perhaps Rusko never set out to be dubstep's chief ambassador to the Americas — first with screw-faced bangers like "Cockney Thug," which suited the aggressive tastes of stateside fans weaned on rock, and then with his debut album, O.M.G., which had just enough variety to appeal to listeners not yet ready for an hour of unremitting wobble. (Getting signed to Diplo's Mad Decent label didn't hurt, either; an anointing from the king... of coolhunting does wonders for your bookings.) Released in 2010, it came just in time to establish Rusko as one of dubstep's most versatile performers, and one capable of bringing together both hardcore moshers and fair-weather fans, all while retaining his credibility as one of the U.K. scene's true innovators.
  
  In the meantime, of course, came Skrillex and a host of domestic dubsteppers with a homegrown take on the music, sometimes derisively called "brostep" — rougher, uglier and far less rooted in dub than its British sibling. Wisely, for his sophomore album, 2012's Songs, Rusko bowed out of the bass-driven arms race, disavowed his ties to brostep and expanded the parameters of his sound to include buoyant melodic house, old-school jungle, radio-ready R&B and even fizzy, uplifting trance. Just as importantly, though, he celebrated the musical continuum that made his own career possible — both a sign of respect and a canny means of cementing his own authority.
  
  The opening track makes it clear that he's all about homage, as a narrator pays tribute to Jamaica's reggae pioneers. (At the same time, he's not afraid to be a little audacious, as claiming the mantle of King Tubby certainly is.) Throughout the LP, Rusko avails himself of dance music's most enduring tropes, from piano house's thumping chords to jungle's roiling breaks and incendiary MC chatter; "Love No More," "Be Free" and "Mek More Green" are all essentially purist digi-dub tunes. At the same time, with his whole-hearted embrace of mainstream dance styles — just check the trance stabs of "Thunder" — he shows that he's not about to get bogged down in tradition. Not all of his populist gestures are successful, but even his failures are interesting. With Rusko's Songs, dubstep becomes less a format than a platform.

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The Engineer

• 

  If Deejay Was Your Trade: The Dreads at King Tubby's 1974-1977

  King Tubby

  Blood And Fire / Virtual

  Dubstep's debt to Jamaica is right there in its name. These days, it might be hard to detect much actual reggae in the harder, nastier, super-sized variants that have captured mainstream ravers' imaginations, but in the beginning, dubstep was essentially dub by another means. The genre's originators – artists like Horsepower Productions, Skream, Benga, Digital Mystikz's Mala and Loefah – raided grime and drum 'n' bass for their sounds (industrial strength percussion,... cheap synth presets, cavernous sub-bass) and reengineered them for a skanking, half-time groove that was unmistakably Jamaican in origin.
  
  Rusko's name may be associated with the aggressive excesses of so-called "brostep," but dude knows his history. To that end, Songs opens with an explicit tribute to one of reggae's greats, as an unidentified speaker explains to a chorus of assenting voices, "You see, roots music is creative music…You check out all dem man like King Tubbys and dem man dem, what were they doing? […] They pushed the boundaries and made different sounds, and experimented with sounds and echo, reverb and all dem kind of stuff. So what we're doing is the same ting!"
  
  If anyone pushed the boundaries of Jamaican music, it would be King Tubby, a Kingston radio repairman who applied his knowledge of electronics to building some of the island's most powerful sound systems; from there, he went on to pioneer the use of the mixing desk as an instrument in its own right, using delay effects and tape dubs to spin barebones rhythm tracks into 4D worlds of echo and phase. This 1994 compilation from Blood & Fire showcases Tubby's work alongside the producer Bunny Lee and his band the Aggrovators, backing a rotating cast of vocalists including Prince Jazzbo, Dillinger and Dr. Alimantado. With Tubby on the boards, hi-hats spin like flying saucers, voices spiral through wormholes and guitars shimmer like the Aurora Borealis. To hear how far out Tubby could get, just check "Barber Feel It," a black hole of a tune suffused in mad laughter and buzzing chainsaws.

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The Breakbeat Scientists

• 

  Reinforced Presents: 4hero - The Early Plates

  4Hero

  2008 | Reinforced Records / EPM Online

  Although breakbeats play only a minor role in dubstep, the latter genre's loping, swinging cadences are a direct offshoot of the chopped-up drum patterns that distinguished both drum 'n' bass and the more amorphous breakbeat hardcore that preceded it. Rusko's Songs makes no secret of his debt to jungle: "Roll Da Beats (Old School Edition)" and "Whistle Crew" both ride shuddering breakbeat grooves with an early-'90s feel, complete with hiccupping vocal samples,... sped-up piano chords and, in "Whistle Crew," riotous MCs hyping up the crowd with cries of "Whistles and horns!" While hundreds of producers, DJs and MCs contributed to the "scenius" that birthed hardcore, jungle and d 'n' b, few actors were more influential than 4Hero, who came up in the UK hip-hop scene before finding their true calling as master manipulators of breakbeat rhythms. The Early Plates surveys the dark, volatile material of the years before drum 'n' bass calcified, and 4Hero, reigning kings of the scene, moved on into an idiosyncratic brand of electronic jazz fusion. Here, the tempos vary according to the contours of their funk samples, from the slow-motion swagger of "Rising Son" to the speedy, slippery "Cookin' Up Your Brain." The rattling break behind "Kirk's Back" serves as the template for the rolling rhythm in Rusko's "Roll Da Beats"; the manic club energy of "Whistle Crew" is exactly what you would have encountered at one of 4Hero's Reinforced parties, back in the day.

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The Poptimists

• 

  Rooty

  Basement Jaxx

  2001 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

  The line between pop and rave music has never been as clear as some critics would like to believe, especially in the U.K. From the earliest days of acid house, pop and dance music commingled freely, whether it was bubblegum samples spun into sly pop culture references or underground club tunes that stormed the charts. (Heck, even Seal's "Killer" started out as a lumbering techno anthem.) But no one has managed to... blur the boundaries between dance floor and airwaves quite like Basement Jaxx, a Brixton duo that wrapped up Carnival bombast, rave cheek, acid-house grooves and gloriously over-the-top melodies into a druggy, jubilant sound.
  
  Rusko has clearly spent his time listening to Basement Jaxx; his zippy, 2-stepping vocal-house tune "Pressure" is obviously modeled on Jaxx hits like "Romeo" and "Jus' 1 Kiss." In fact, you could argue that, from its title on down, Rusko's sophomore album takes its inspiration from the way that Rooty (Basement Jaxx's second album, for what it's worth) is first and foremost about songs, no matter what the club-ready beats might suggest. (From hard funk to lilting reggae, it's also about variety – another lesson Rusko applied to his own LP.) Practically every tune on the album is a genuine anthem, from the sing-songy "Romeo" to the sweaty "Get Me Off." And if you're looking for the blueprint for today's amped-up festival sound, look no further than "Where's Your Head At," a hard-charging call to (flailing) arms.

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The Teacher

• 

  Skream!

  Skream

  2006 | Tempa / Southern Record Distributors

  Rusko began releasing music in 2006 – early in dubstep's ascendance, but still late enough to make him a second-generation producer, raised in the wake of pioneers like Mala, Loefah, Benga and Skream. In fact, it was the supergroup Magnetic Man – the trio of Benga, Skream and fellow Croydon first-waver Artwork – who came up with dubstep's first real crossover album, in 2010; before that, though, Skream was responsible for dubstep's... first solo long-player, 2006's Skream!. Although the album features plenty of searing rave tunes, like the grimy "Tapped," the unhinged "Kut-Off" and the anthemic "Midnight Request Line," Skream wisely balanced them out with plenty of laid-back digi-dub ("Blue Eyez," "Auto-Dub," "Dutch Flowerz") and even an unlikely foray into jazzy house ("Summer Dreams"). Taking cues from Skream, Rusko's Songs similarly makes extensive use of relatively purist dub reggae as a way of fleshing out his album – and adding some welcome respite from corrosive dubstep overload.

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The Trance-former

• 

  Electronic Dream (Deluxe Edition)

  araabMUZIK

  2011 | Duke Productions / The Orchard

  As electronic dance music has metastasized in the popular consciousness, a funny thing has happened: Genre distinctions like house, trance, electro and even dubstep have been steadily dissolving, and dance music's hyper-partisan culture has given way to the amorphous, all-encompassing "EDM." It's doubtless due in part to the format of today's large-scale festivals: In order to crack the short attention spans of tens of thousands of ravers roaming from tent to tent,... DJs have to offer a little bit of everything. That helps explain Rusko's forays into full-on, lighters-in-the-air trance music with "Opium" and "Thunder" and the incongruous R&B of "Dirty Sexy": in order to woo Tiesto and David Guetta's fans, he has to become them – at least for the span of a song or two. You can observe a parallel phenomenon in the work of Araabmuzik, an MPC champion and beat-maker for Cam'ron's Dipset who indulged a yen for airy trance on his 2011 album Electronic Dream. Sampling trance and progressive house icons like Jam & Spoon and Kaskade, the album catapulted Araabmuzik from the hip-hop world into festivals like the kandi-rave staple Electric Daisy Carnival, where he performed alongside acts like Tiësto, Guetta and, yes, Rusko.

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The Album

• 

  Skylarking

  XTC

  2003 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

  Unlike many of XTC's other albums (Drums & Wires, The English Settlement, Black Sea), Skylarking doesn't evoke easy comparisons to new-wave/post-punk compatriots (Talking Heads, B-52s, The Cars,) like so much low-hanging referential fruit. Perhaps that's why it stands as the tallest member of a catalog with several very real highlights, even with 25 years' worth of time to pick it apart. Eschewing the jittery, bounce 'n' roll of the band's late-'70s material,... Skylarking opts instead for pop pomposity and all the big melodies, elegant arrangements and witty lyrics that brings with it.
  
  "Psychedelic" is a word often employed to describe Skylarking — notable critics from Rolling Stone and Pitchfork hailed the album as "the most accomplished neo-psychedelic LP to date" and a "beacon of psychedelic greenery," respectively. But this is psych-rock more in step with The Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society or The Zombies' Odessey and Oracle than Nuggets or, say, Jefferson Airplane's Surrealstic Pillow. All of which is to say that it's quintessential, whimsical pop music, complete with Big Ideas and dark edges.
  
  With topics covering marriage ("Big Day"), theism ("Dear God"), public sex ("Grass") and providing for a family ("Earn Enough for Us"), Skylarking is ambitious, no doubt, but it's also lush, thank in part to Todd Rundgren's production, which Andy Partridge has since insulted and complimented in pretty much equal parts. Maybe it was the heady subjects, or Rundgren's apparent insistence that the songs form a narrative, but the discomfort resulted in a pinnacle XTC hadn't hit previously and would never hit again. An imperfect but nonetheless stunning long player, Skylarking received perhaps its best front-cover-sticker-blurb from the self-proclaimed Dean of American Rock Critics himself, Robert Christgau: "Imagine Sgt. Pepper if McCartney hadn't needed Lennon...and you'll get an inkling of what these insular popsters have damn near pulled off."
  

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The Change of Pace

The One-Hit Wonder

• 

  Singles-45's And Under

  Squeeze

  1989 | A&M

  While it's fair to say that, more often than not, one-hit wonders fall by the wayside due to lack of subsequent quality material, it should come as no surprise to any pop lover that many flashes in the pan do indeed possess both rewarding catalogues (see: Devo, Flaming Lips, Dexys Midnight Runners, etc.) and real songwriting chops. Real talk, though: If you only know Squeeze for "Tempted" (which, of course, is included... in this set), take a stroll through the other 11 selections included here, because they are a) often excellent, b) stylistically varied, and c) not as cheesy as "Tempted." Same goes for anyone who knows XTC for "Senses Working Overtime," "Making Plans for Nigel" or any of the band's other highest-charting singles. Skylarking is a different beast entirely.

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The Drama Major

• 

  Sheer Heart Attack

  Queen

  2011 | Hollywood Records

  In late 1974, Queen took a step away from the prog/mysticism/folklore of their first couple records; they "reeled in the prog, upped the pop, and pushed its magpie ways to a higher level of willfulness," as Barry Walters says in his eMusic review. Front and center, of course, is Freddie Mercury, his piano featured more prominently on Sheer Heart Attack, and his flair for the dramatic allowed to run wild, albeit within... the constraints of pop perfection, the best example of which is the awe-inspiring "Killer Queen."

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The Potential-Fulfiller

• 

  Chutes Too Narrow

  The Shins

  Sub Pop Records

  Just a few months before Natalie Portman would utter a phrase that would alter the way lazy writers introduced the band for years to come, The Shins released their most accomplished album. While Zach Braff's game-changing (for this band, anyway) movie had yet to drop, James Mercer and his crew had to know what was coming, which makes this song cycle that much more impressive. Chutes Too Narrow is simultaneously a promise... kept and potential fulfilled, its songs masking pain in brilliant melody, its heartbreak semi-convincingly covered up by ecstatic exaltations and handclaps. They may not have actually changed lives, but for a half hour or so, you'd be hard-pressed to argue otherwise.

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The Punks

• 

  The Undertones

  The Undertones

  2010 | Union Square Music / The Orchard

  Like XTC, Irish rockers The Undertones sang about relatable topics like the joy — and despair — surrounding the opposite sex ("Teenage Kicks," "Girls Don't Like It") and the anticipation of change ("Here Comes the Summer"), without sacrificing a sense of humor in the process ("Male Model"). Also like their brothers located 400 miles east of them (with an Irish Sea in the middle), The Undertones prioritized the hooks, even if theirs... often ended up on the punk-inclined end of the pop spectrum.

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The Album

• 

  Space Is Only Noise

  Nicolas Jaar

  2011 | Circus Company / Believe Digital

  If Nicolas Jaar didn't exist, someone like Don DeLillo or William Gibson probably would have invented him. With Chilean and French ancestry, and the son of the prominent contemporary artist Alfredo Jaar, the young New Yorker released his first record, appropriately titled The Student, when he was just 17 years old; he dropped his debut album, 2011's Space Is Only Noise, in between writing semiotics papers at Brown University. (Clearly, there was... some bleed-through between his studies and his musical moonlighting, as attested by titles like "Marks and Angles.") Jaar's rapidly developing career continues to play out like a contemporary novel, complete with multi-media museum happenings, cryptic art objects and the inevitable celebrity collaboration (with his classmate Scout Larue, daughter of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis).
  
  What's most remarkable, though, is how fully formed Jaar's vision has been from the beginning. His first record established the particulars of his sound, with processed acoustic piano burbling over a rustling bed of clicks; on subsequent recordings, he fleshed out his music with elements of disco, jazz, classical minimalism, tango and French chanson. He cites Erik Satie, Ethiopia's Mulatu Astatke and Ricardo Villalobos as influences, and he brought them all to bear on Space Is Only Noise, where Rhodes, guitars and African strings swirl in gentle eddies against rhythms that shuffle like rustling leaves. Along the way, he draws upon a wide array of inspirations, from Brian Eno's wallpaper sonics to Chris Isaak's bedroom balladry; "Specters of the Future" heralds the second coming of trip-hop, while the warbly vocals of "Colomb" take a page straight from Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak playbook.
  
  Like James Blake and Burial, two other nominally "electronic" musicians who have found a passionate fan base stretching far beyond the club scene, Jaar's music is tailor made for brooders and sensitive types, but it's a feel-good kind of melancholy, fleshed out with narcotic vocals and slowed-down beats that go straight to more sensual pleasure centers.

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The Architect

• 

  Penguin Café Orchestra

  Penguin Café Orchestra

  2008 | CAROLINE WORLD SERVICE

  Jaar's association with house-music labels like Wolf + Lamb and Circus Company has gotten him classed in the "electronic" camp, but that description only tells part of the story. It's true that he assembles the pieces of his music on a computer (as does practically everyone these days) and that sampling and other digital methods comprise an important, if subtle, part of Jaar's aesthetic. But his palette relies less upon self-evidently "electronic"... elements like synthesizers and drum machines than on acoustic piano, Rhodes, exotic string instruments and electric guitar suffused in vintage reverb. It's a palette informed by the jazz and Ethiopian music that Jaar grew up listening to, and it often scans like a contemporary adaptation of the downy chamber folk of the Penguin Café Orchestra, a collective of instrumentalists that formed around the British composer Simon Jeffes. Their debut album Music from the Penguin Café, released in 1976 on Brian Eno's Obscure Records, might be described as ambient by another means, with glistening strands of folk, minimalism and neo-classical spun into a warm, limpid sound — background music brimming with verve.

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The Designer

• 

  Jukebox Buddha

  Various Artists

  2006 | Staubgold / Finetunes

  Like many members of his generation, Jaar is something of an agnostic, when it comes to musical formats. His very first EP, 2008's The Student, was a digital-only release on Wolf + Lamb, a New York imprint that began as a free net-label and eventually moved into physical formats; since then, Jaar has often selected different formats according to the particulars of a given release: vinyl-only for unlicensed edits, or the vinyl/CD/digi... gamut for his debut album. To set his own Clown and Sunset imprint apart from run-of-the-mill record labels, he put out its first release as a memory stick. His latest such venture is The Prism, a 12-track compilation in the form of a fist-sized aluminum cube with two headphone jacks and four unlabeled buttons. He's not the first musician to attempt to free music from its commodity status by turning it into an art object. The most extreme example might be Merzbow's Noisembryo, a Mercedes Benz automobile outfitted with a modified CD player rigged to play the Japanese noise musician's music whenever the car was running. (Edition: 1. It went unsold.) Closer to Jaar's home-spun aesthetic, the Buddha Machine is a mass-produced plastic box, modeled on a Chinese gadget for playing back Buddhist prayers, that plays nine infinitely looping ambient tracks. Lo-fi in sound and kitschy in aspect, it's a novelty item that can really tie the room together, especially when multiple machines are deployed to roll out a rippling carpet of sound. In 2006, Berin's Staubgold label invited 15 artists to re-interpret the Buddha Machine's output; their remixes range from Sunn O)))'s eerie drones to Adrian Sherwood + Doug Wimbish's placid ambient dub.

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The Road-Tripper

• 

  Paris, Texas - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

  Paris, Texas Soundtrack/Ry Cooder

  2001 | Warner Bros.

  Part of the appeal of Jaar's music, particularly for American listeners, may be its bluesy cast: "Too Many Kids Finding Rain in the Dust," "Keep Me There" and "Problem with the Sun" evoke a dreamy retro sound that stretches from Elvis to Chris Isaak, right down to the twangy guitar and basso purr; "Variations" nods to acoustic blues. Jaar's dubby roots music has some precedent in Ry Cooder, particularly his soundtrack to... Wim Wenders' 1984 film Paris, Texas. While the pedal steel and plucked acoustic guitar are pure Americana, Cooder's meditative compositions also suggest drone-based music like Indian ragas; swimming in reverb, it's a profoundly naturalistic take on ambient music. "I Knew These People" begins with an extended sample of dialogue from Harry Dean Stanton's character, a melancholy wanderer in the desert; you can hear a similar kind of cinematic affect at work in the opening minute of "Être," the lead track on Jaar's Space Is Only Noise.

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The Time-Traveler

• 

  RE: ECM

  Ricardo Villalobos

  2011 | ECM

  You may not immediately hear much of the minimal-techno icon Ricardo Villalobos in Jaar's work. As a DJ, Villalobos plays epic, brain-scrambling sets of percussive house and techno, and his productions tap a similar energy, even at their most cerebral; Jaar's music, meanwhile, rarely makes it all the way up to a conventional club tempo, even on 12-inch. But Jaar often cites Villalobos as a formative influence, and not just because of... their shared Chilean heritage. Early on, he was struck by the elastic nature of Villalobos' timekeeping, where hypnotic repetition and morphing sound design warp the listener's temporal perception. It was Villalobos' 2004 album Thé Au Harem D'Archimède that originally blew Jaar's 14-year-old mind, but Villalobos and Max Loderbauer's Re: ECM, from 2011, delves even further into the tangled harmonies and glassy timbres that excite Jaar. A double-album set of remixes of Germany's legendary ECM label, it approaches jazz somewhat in the way that Jaar does: grasping gingerly at strands and twisting them into a loose, rippling weave.

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The Extended Family

• 

  DJ-KiCKS

  Wolf + Lamb vs. Soul Clap

  2011 | !K7 Records

  There's no doubt that Jaar is a self-made talent, but his career certainly wouldn't have developed in the way that it has were it not for the guiding influence of Wolf + Lamb. Masterminded by New Yorkers Gadi Mizrahi and Zev Eisenberg, Wolf + Lamb is simultaneously their musical duo, a record label, and a series of parties held at their own private venue, dubbed the Marcy Hotel, that became famous for... their late hours, slow tempos and intimate vibes. After encountering Wolf + Lamb on a local radio show, Jaar sent the duo his music; they provided not only feedback but also the venue for his first live show, as well as the platform for his debut release. But Jaar remains something of an outlier within the Wolf + Lamb community, where house and R&B influences keep the music moving in time to a slowly spinning disco ball. On the duo's DJ-KiCKS mix, a collaboration with their frequent co-conspirators Soul Clap, they show how the Wolf + Lamb aesthetic plays out on the dance floor, sketching the outline of a particularly woozy night in shuffling house beats and lascivious electro funk touched up with hints of early '90s hip-hop. Jaar's here, too, with a pair of short, pithy tracks that find him kicking it up a notch past his normally languid pace, all for the benefit of the rug-cutters.

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The Album

• 

  Dimanche a Bamako

  Amadou & Mariam

  2004 | All Other / Because Music / Because

  Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia had been recording for 15 years prior to 2005's Dimanche à Bamako. The blind Mali couple's first cassettes, recorded in Côte d'Ivoire and collected as 1990-1995: L'Intégrale des Années Maliennes, focused on the hypnotically repetitive two-chord vamps heard in southwest Mali's Wassoulou region, although by his second release Amadou had switched from acoustic to electric guitar and begun to display the influence of John Lee Hooker... and Eric Clapton. Although the duo had settled into their easygoing Afro-pop over the course of four earlier CDs, Dimanche à Bamako marked a leap further in their ongoing synthesis of Africa and Euro-America. Recorded in Paris and Bamako with the Basque-French rocker Manu Chao — who wrote, sings on, programmed and/or produced every track — Dimanche turned out to be the duo's richest bi-continental mashup of past and present to date.
  
  Evoking the deep tradition in which he was raised, Amadou salutes the Bamara empire's founder in "Coulibaly" and waxes nostalgic for the Mali countryside in "La Fête du Village" and "Beaux Dimanches." It's also a profoundly personal statement insofar as the couple's co-dependent intimacy shapes Mariam's melodically assertive version of French female pop music, "Mbifé Blue." Chao manages somehow to both get inside the couple's head while hewing strongly to his own agenda. He wrote Dimanche's gorgeous opening track, "M'bifé" (Love), as well as its tasty instrumental followup, "M'bifé Balafon." Later he indulges his quasi-radical sensibility in songs like "Senegal Fast Food," "La Réalité" and "Camions Sauvages" (Brutal Highways), which deplores the deforestation that puts wild animals at the mercy of Africa's long-haul truckers. Throughout, Chao also layers in the low-key Motorik percussion, chugging acoustic guitars, tense sirens, and ambient crowd noises that characterize his own records. Their cross-cultural synthesis works like a charm.

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The Tradition

• 

  Fanta Damba du Mali (Vol. 1)

  Fanta Damba

  2013 | Kalitex / Believe Digital

  Amadou & Mariam have mentioned Fanta Damba Koroba (b. 1938) as one of their earliest influences. And just as you can hear echoes of the Mali legend's stark, powerful attack in Mariam Doumbia's vocals, you can also hear the lucid repartee of Damba's longtime kora accompanist, Batourou Sekou Kouyaté, in Amadou's guitar vamps. While most griots are Malinkés from the western part of the country, Damba is a jalimuso, i.e., a Bambara... griot from Mali's southern Segou region. Already a star at 16, Damba in 1975 became the first jalimuso to tour Europe and retired at the top of her game a decade later. On this collection, Damba praises her patrons, dispenses advice, and, on its arguably most potent track, relates the history of Fulani empire founder Sékou Amadou in hypnotic, circling stanzas alongside Kouyaté's equally profound, articulate and timeless kora lines.

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The Big Band

Living the Blues

• 

  The Best Of John Lee Hooker: Vol.1

  John Lee Hooker

  2004 | Tribute Sounds / Entertainment One Distribution

  Although he sometimes claims Jimi Hendrix and David Gilmour as greater inspirations, Amadou Bagayoko's guitar playing is most often compared to Mississippi-born John Lee Hooker's iconic blues style. Hooker, a sharecropper's son, translated boogie-woogie piano to guitar, specializing in a relentless one-chord vamp that launched a billion guitar solos throughout the late sixties and seventies. Like Bagayoko, Hooker is less dazzling soloist than irrepressible force of human nature. It's surprisingly easy to... forgive him, even when he comes off as a creepy sexual predator in "Boom Boom" (a 1965 hit for the Animals) and "Crawlin' Kingsnake" (covered by Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, and countless others); Hooker's also the hapless victim of his landlady in "House Rent Boogie" and of the titular "Unfriendly Woman." Throw at him what you will, Hooker will boogie right through it.

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The Pop Factor

• 

  40 Succes En Or

  Dalida

  2007 | Decca International

  Born into Cairo's Italian-Egyptian community in 1933, Dalida (né Iolanda Cristina Gigliotti) lived most of her relatively short and tragic life in France, where she received 55 gold records for recordings in 10 languages before committing suicide in 1987. It's easy to see how Dalida fans Amadou & Mariam might discern a sympathetic career model in the former Miss Egypt's multilingual appeal and clear, strong presentation. Her best-known tunes include the cougar... anthem "Il Venait d'Avoir Dix-Huit Ans" (He Turned Eighteen), songs based on Egyptian folk music ("Salma Ya Salama"), borrowed American fluff ("Itsi Bitsi Petit Bikini"), France's first disco hit ("J'Attendrai"), hip nods like "Il Faut Danser Reggae," and, finally, numerous songs reflecting her Judy Garland-like descent. In other words: something for everybody!

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The International Feel

The Album

• 

  Some Nights

  fun.

  2012 | Fueled By Ramen

  fun. is one of those bands that came seemingly out of nowhere to ascend to the top of the charts. Usually, those groups piggyback the steez of some other currently radio-ruling act. fun. doesn't. On this, its breakout second album, the New York trio draws from hip-hop, power-pop, emo, '70s art-rock, singer-songwriter balladry, contemporary R&B and Broadway; a combo you'll likely only find right here. Singer Nate Ruess — who also writes... the ardent lyrics and highly sing-able melodies — has a Freddie Mercury thing going on vocally, and Some Nights opens with a flurry of Queen-y harmonies and symphonic gallantry. But after that, all bets are off. The runaway success of "We Are Young," the first substantial rock song in ages to not only top the pop charts but also put a justified critic's darling, avant-R&B diva Janelle Monáe, on the radio where she belongs, is particularly amazing considering that Ruess's first band, the Format, was dropped by the same major that now distributes both fun. and Monáe. That Arizona band teamed with Redd Kross/OFF! bassist Steven McDonald for its second album, 2006's Dog Problems, and Ruess and McDonald continued honing their smarty-pants eclecticism on fun.'s 2009 debut Aim and Ignite, with the help of its multi-instrumentalists Jack Antonoff and Andrew Dost, formerly of Steel Train and Anathallo. Here the trio trade McDonald for Jeff Bhasker, a hip-hop/R&B guy who produced monster hits for Kanye West, Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Together, they layer seemingly incompatible genres with reckless but radio-friendly glee, as if a music nerd's iPod somehow got into the hands of a Bruno Mars.

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The Kindred Post-Emo Kids

• 

  Pretty. Odd.

  Panic At The Disco

  2008 | Decaydance/Fueled By Ramen/ATL

  This is akin to fun. on Aim and Ignite, before the trio cracked the code to commercial success with Some Nights. fun. and Panic! at the Disco share more than a record label, a one-off collaborative single ("C'mon") and goofy punctuation; they're both far more clever than indie snobs might deduce from their hits and mainstream followings. Referencing a long line of baroque, psychedelic and sunshine-y pop from prime-era Kinks and... Beach Boys to XTC, Panic! put aside the drum machines and punk guitars of their smash 2005 debut for this far more nuanced 2008 follow-up. The whole thing flows with a continuity rare for the download era, but the killer here is "When the Day Met the Night," a string-packed, horn-swinging extravaganza, and one of the most accomplished songs to earn the term Beatle-esque. Years from now, musicologists will be scratching their heads and wondering why Panic! wasn't taken seriously in its day the same way we now can't comprehend why the Monkees got no respect.

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The Contemporary beat Connection

• 

  My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

  Kanye West

  2010 | Roc-A-Fella

  Like many music addicts, fun.'s Nate Ruess found himself living in an idealized past defined by his favorite vinyl. So he brought himself back into the present via hip-hop and got particularly obsessed with Kanye West's 2010 opus, which meant that he traded one kind of alienation for another. For as much as West embodies 21st-century celebrity/consumption/workaholism, he's also estranged from his own success. West's fifth album sets up a dichotomy between... his false self — the "Monster" he's created to cope with the pressures of being a powerful African-American — and the true self who's "Lost in the Woods," damaged and repelled by the conspicuous lifestyle lead by his other half. The monster finds representation in the distorted drums pounding through Twisted Fantasy and Some Nights, drums in part programmed by producer Jeff Bhasker, who helped helm both discs; the true self is the wounded cry of West and Ruess, divergent in tone but akin in feeling.

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The Co-Star

• 

  The ArchAndroid

  Janelle Monáe

  2010 | Bad Boy/Wondaland

  Despite guesting on Of Montreal's 2010's False Priest and subsequent tour, this Kansas City-born, Atlanta-based R&B visionary hadn't quite found the mainstream platform she deserved until she sang on fun.'s "We Are Young." But her 2010 debut full-length remains a must-have for fans of genre-jumping pop, rock and soul. Like Kanye West, Monáe spins metaphors from her own estrangement: She's cast herself as Cindi Mayweather, an android messiah of the future... who travels back in time to mend a suppressed and divided society where love has become a criminal act — a culture much like our own. The freedom she fights for finds expression in the album's fearless and finessed amalgamations; the seamless segue from the new wave ska of "Faster" to the Off the Wall-era Michael Jackson-isms of "Locked Inside" just might take your breath away.

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The Missing Link

• 

  Bellybutton

  Jellyfish

  1992 | CHARISMA

  When this San Francisco quartet arrived in the dawning of the '90s, it resembled something dreamt up by '70s kiddie-TV purveyors Sid & Marty Kroff, and sounded just like they looked: Packed with psychedelic, power-pop and art-rock references, 1990's Bellybutton and '93's Spilt Milk were everything the emerging grunge era was not — bright and playful, yet startlingly refined. But, like the Beatles, Jellyfish contained too much talent to contain, and... its key musicians — singer/drummer Andy Sturmer, keyboardist/singer Roger Manning Jr. and guitarist Jason Falkner — soon went their separate-but-overlapping ways; Falkner and Manning both worked with Beck and Air, while Sturmer penned and produced hits for J-pop duo Puffy AmyYumi. A longtime pal of the Format/fun. producer Steven McDonald, Manning appears on both the Format's Dog Problems and fun.'s Aim and Ignite, the latter of which also bears his considerable arrangement skills. All the things that made Jellyfish too sophisticated for its time still sound extraordinary today; listen to the way Sturmer builds from a whisper to a scream on album opener "The Man I Used to Be," the missing link between Cheap Trick and fun.'s supercharged studio pop.

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The Genre-Hopping Godfather

• 

  A Wizard/A True Star

  Todd Rundgren

  2005 | Rhino

  When it comes to fusing far-reaching rock, melodic R&B and studio-wise wildness, Todd Rundgren has few peers. He's produced key albums by Badfinger, New York Dolls, Meat Loaf, the Psychedelic Furs and XTC; his own work encompasses everything from Laura Nyro-styled pop to Zappa-ish prog. This 1973 solo disc captures him transitioning from mainstream rocker to full-on freak. Even while AM radio belatedly turned "Hello It's Me" — a piano ballad from... his previous album Something/Anything? — into Rundgren's most enduring hit, this album recast the singer as a daredevil equally at home with jump-cutting, Ritalin-induced micro-rockers like "You Need Your Head" as he is with a medley of suave soul hits delivered totally straight (well, at least until he hits "Cool Jerk.") If Of Montreal and other bands of the Elephant 6 collective claim to have not been inspired by A Wizard, a True Star, they're either lying or haven't done their homework. The strongest fun. connection comes in the last track, "Just One Victory," an end-of-the-night anthem as every bit as uplifting as "We Are Young."

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The Album

• 

  The Shape Of Punk To Come

  Refused

  1999 | Burning Heart / Epitaph

  If you had told Refused 14 years ago that The Shape Of Punk To Come would be counted as one of the seminal documents of the post-hardcore era, they probably would have laughed and said, "Get lost" in Swedish. The reason is simple: no one really cared about Shape when it was released. The band played their final show in a basement in 1998, and though there weren't blogs to report it... at the time, the news probably would have barely registered outside the punk underground anyway.
  
  So how did the album achieve Pinkerton-type levels of critical acclaim? Part of it is due to the fact that the band broke up shortly after its release, which added to the mystique surrounding this manic group of sharply-dressed Swedes. But it's also impossible to discount just how groundbreaking Shape is on a sonic level. Working techno beats into a hardcore song may sound terrible in theory (a theory proven fact when Brokencyde starting doing it a decade later), but Refused layered sequencing into songs like "New Noise" elegantly, showing there was still room for creativity in a genre that had become defined by certain stringent hallmarks.
  
  From the extended sine-wave break during "The Refused Party Program" to the avant-garde experimentalism of "The Apollo Programme Was A Hoax," the album nastily flashes the group's myriad influences. Jazz, radical politics and fashion all figured into the songs on Shape. The Beatles may have asked if we wanted a revolution, but Refused showed us what it would sound like.

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The Originator

• 

  The Shape Of Jazz To Come

  Ornette Coleman

  2005 | Rhino Atlantic

  On the surface, it may not seem like a jazz icon could have more than a tenuous connection to a group of Swedish noisemakers. But it's no coincidence that Refused's album title is so similar to that of Coleman's breakthrough. Songs like "Lonely Woman" may sound relatively tame by today's standards, but back in 1959 the album's very existence helped usher in the nascent free-jazz movement and helped loosen up the formerly... strict rules of what jazz is and isn't. When you think about it, what's more punk than that?

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The Subversives

• 

  Kick Out The Jams

  MC5

  1999 | Rhino

  Twenty-five years before Dennis Lyxzén announced, "Refused Are Fucking Dead," Rob Tyner of the MC5 commanded the audience to "Kick out the jams, motherfucker!" The profanity isn't the only commonality between those statements. When MC5 exploded onto the Detroit scene with their politically-driven proto-punk, nothing like them existed. The frenetic energy of the music and the group's steadfast dedication to radical politics made them one of the most important rock acts to... come out of America during one of the nation's most volatile times. Could the MC5 have existed if things in the government were perfect? No, but that's what makes their music so incendiary, and proves that the spirit of dissent is a potent motivator.

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The Inspiration

• 

  Plays Pretty for Baby

  The Nation of Ulysses

  Dischord Records

  The cover art for Plays Pretty For Baby alone is evidence that Refused aped their fashion sense and aesthetics from the pioneering D.C. post-hardcore act Nation Of Ulysses — to say nothing of both acts' love of French Situationist scribbling. Musically, Nation Of Ulysses shared Refused's affinity for incorporating sonic touchstones from various genres into their compositions, and their live performances were more like syncopated religious sermons than a typical punk show.... If you need more evidence of Nation Of Ulysses' influence, consider the fact that the latest edition of Plays Pretty includes a song called "The Sound Of Jazz To Come," which was also inspired by Coleman's influential 1959 collection.

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The Follow-Up

• 

  A New Morning, Changing Weather

  The International Noise Conspiracy

  2004 | Burning Heart Records/Epitaph

  Following the break-up of Refused, Dennis Lyxzén started T(I)NC, a Marxist influenced band that was rooted more in garage rock and soul than it was the hardcore aggression of Refused. Although songs like "Capitalism Stole My Virginity" are more palatable than Refused's output, it isn't any less subversive lyrically — and that dichotomy between a sexy exterior and a radical core also lies at the core of T(I)NC's music. Ironically, The (International)... Noise Conspiracy were putting out their best music right before the garage rock explosion occurred via acts like the Hives and White Stripes, proving that being a true visionary often means paving the way for others instead of basking in your own glory.

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The Next Generation

• 

  RIOT!

  Paramore

  2007 | Fueled By Ramen

  Everyone from Anthrax to Crazy Town to The Used have covered songs from The Shape of Punk to Come, but pop-punk act Paramore seem to have formed a deeper bond with the disc. Although Paramore's 2007 album Riot! is teeming with pop gems, it also sees frontwoman Hayley Williams singing, "We want the airwaves back" during the song "Born For This," which is a direct lift from Refused's own "Liberation Frequency." Ultimately,... the true beauty of Refused's legacy lies in the way they recontextualized influences and genres to create something completely new. The fact that Paramore is fronted by a 20-year-old woman with cotton-candy-colored hair illustrates just how dramatic the impact of that kind of shift can truly be. Paramore's commercial success suggests that Refused could have been huge, had they not imploded before they got a chance to be properly heard.

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The Album

• 

  Boys & Girls

  Alabama Shakes

  2012 | ATO Records

  Alabama Shakes' debut offers a soul-rock fusion so direct and simple it makes you wonder why nobody did it sooner. To put it simply, they play soul-derived music with a rock rhythm section (drummer Steve Johnson, bassist Zac Cockrell), and an extremely adaptable singer (Brittany Howard) and guitarist (Heath Fogg) on top. (Additional help comes from keyboard sideman Ben Tanner.) Their slow songs are imbued with a pastoral Southern feel, even at... higher volumes, while the faster ones ("I Found You") stomp and soar, with Howard riding the sound like a rodeo cowgirl and Fogg filling the holes with his biting, incisive licks. Tracks like the yearning "You Ain't Alone" have the rise-and-fall structure of classic soul, but are played with rock oomph, while "Heartbreaker" is, essentially, a soul power ballad. "Be Mine" builds to a hellacious climax, Howard unleashing some of her most fervent cries and whispers before going out in a cathartic frenzy. She's unlike any other singer out there right now; she can plead and she can strut, and she hits all the notes effortlessly in both her highest and lowest registers. And no matter how acrobatic her voice, she stays down to earth; tracks like "Hold On" ("Bless my heart/ Bless my soul/ Didn't think I'd make it/ To 22 years old," she sighs, sounding ancient) cast her as a rock Everywoman. Alabama Shakes may be a roots band specializing in punchy songs with concise players, but it's built for arenas as much as for clubs. What makes it hit with such power is the more subtle lessons taken from soul music — the way they flesh out the sound with Johnson's cymbal washes; Fogg's knack for jumping from fat rhythm lines to barbed fills and back; Howard's tangled rhythm guitar; the use of silence as a musical tool; the celebratory nature of even the saddest songs. Got-ta got-ta have it, and they do.
  
  Check out free tracks from Alabama Shakes and other great ATO bands on this sampler.

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Big Daddy

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  The Dictionary Of Soul

  Otis Redding

  1991 | Rhino

  Generally regarded as his finest album, and also his last studio set before he died, this could just as easily be called Encyclopedia of Soul for the way it expands on Redding's early style. What makes it extraordinary, besides Redding's singular vocal gifts, is the simpatico between him and Booker T and the MG's, especially guitarist Steve Cropper. Cropper's rhythm-and-riff backing for Redding is somewhat different from what he did behind countless... other soul stars; while his rock-solid rhythm lines similarly cement the bottom created by bass and drums, his succinct fills can be continuations of or contrasts with Redding's singing. They required a musical understanding between the two as intuitive as their songwriting partnership. While Otis would still be just as great a singer without Cropper, his style would probably be noticeably different. The interplay between guitar and voice is crucial.

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Blue-Eyed Boy & Girl

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  On Tour With Eric Clapton

  Delaney & Bonnie And Friends

  1987 | Atlantic Records

  Fried from his experiences with Cream and Blind Faith, Clapton chose to regroup by playing behind rock's 1969 flavor-of-the-month band. It was a good move. Delaney & Bonnie brought upbeat blue-eyed soul, shaded by gospel and country, to the ‘60s rock mix, igniting a trend that peaked with Joe Cocker's Mad Dogs and Englishmen. Bonnie could shout or purr with a languid Southern feel that embraced rural black and white cultures alike... — her solo turn on the retooled gospel of “That's What My Man Is For” is divine. And Delaney's own charged, red-dirt vocals pushed her harder. In a band that featured his future Dominoes as well as Dave Mason and George Harrison, Clapton felt less need than usual to flash; being Clapton, he did anyhow on “Coming Home” and “I Don't Want to Discuss It,” but just as often was content to drive the band on rhythm. Soul-rock heaven.

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Young Old Soul

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  The Essentials: Betty Wright

  Betty Wright

  2002 | Rhino Atlantic

  She was 14 years old when she first charted in 1968 with "Girls Can't Do What the Guys Do," a month shy of 18 when she had her biggest hit with "Clean Up Woman." She sounded very young on both. When “Tonight Is the Night,” which she'd first recorded in '74, was redone with a monologue on a 1978 live album and became a two-sided hit, she was closing in on 25... and she still< /i> sounded very young. Wright has a four-octave vocal range, and has always been able to sound as young or as old as she wants. Her Miami soul records often featured criss-crossing guitars that still sound sharp, and "Clean Up Woman" has been sampled repeatedly. She keeps up with modern music just enough to get by, but scorns sampling and likes the sound of real instruments. In these ways, Wright sounds timeless next to most of her peers.

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Time Is On Her Side

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  Two Phases of Irma Thomas

  Irma Thomas

  2008 | S.D.E.G. Records / The Orchard

  In 1973, Swamp Dogg brought this New Orleans veteran out of L.A. exile to cut In Between Tears. It was her first album as a mature adult, she was at her career peak as a singer, and her self-assurance helped carry polemics like the bitter “We Won't Be in Your Way Anymore.” Moreover, at that time Swamp Dogg was brimming with outsider-rock savvy. So while the music was undeniably soul — and... undeniably one of the great soul albums of its time — there was more (and a different) attitude than Irma flaunted before or since. But Swamp felt he never got to finish the album properly; two decades after its initial release, he replaced most of the original musicians with synthesizers and digital drums, dumped some songs while adding others, and mixed the results with echo overkill, re-titling it Turn My World Around. This edition combines both versions, with tracks one to 11 representing the original album. Save yourself some money and stop downloading after that.

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Unfortunate Son

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  Letters From Mississippi

  Eddie Hinton

  2003 | Mighty Field Of Vision / CD Baby

  For a guy who lived such a tortuous life, Hinton wrote remarkably triumphant songs most of the time, starting with this album's title track: “Always told you I'd be coming back in a Cadillac/ More riches than anybody else in town.” This, to kick off an album done after Hinton had been rescued from living on the streets of Decatur, Alabama, with mental issues intensified by drug and alcohol addictions. Eddie assimilated... Otis Redding like no other white boy, personifying heart-on-sleeve emotion with each utterance. He was heartbreaking on slow drags like “I Need a Woman,” exhilarating on rockers like “Uncloudy Days.” And his guitar licks (he'd been a key Muscle Shoals sideman) were unorthodox but always fit the song like a glove; he alternated between a razor-sharp choppiness that was Delta swampy and a rolling jangle that was almost folk-rock, unobtrusive but always right there. This is the Great Lost Post-Soul Soul Album.

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The Album

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  Quakers

  Quakers

  2012 | Stones Throw

  A hip-hop record for a different time, Quakers is a collaboration between Portishead's Geoff Barrow, his go-to engineer Stuart "7-Stu-7" Matthews, Australian producer Ashley "Katalyst" Anderson and 30-some MCs who generally range from the "obscure" to the "unknown." At this point in his career, Barrow has earned the right to cut what initially appears to be a vanity record. But Quakers is much more than that, an inspired triangulation of Portishead's captivating... textures, Dilla's hectic Donuts and one of those cast-of-dozens Tony Touch Power Cypha mixtapes.
  
  As expected, the Quakers production tends toward a sample-heavy, drum-break and bass-lurk dependent sound that has found no better descriptor than "blunted." Quakers is 1990s to the core, but the braintrust is savvy about keeping things moving, with few ideas sticking around for longer than a couple minutes. Spooked loops or hammered cymbals rarely outstay their welcome, while the cramped quarters mean few of the rappers here have to worry about shoehorned hooks or belabored concepts. The melted strings and distant choir of Estee Nack's "Lost and Found" lends it a feeling of weathered Wu-wisdom, while the charismatically hardcore Dave Dub enthuses all over the sparse, jaunty shuffle of "My Mantra."
  
  There are a few familiar names: Dead Prez pay tribute to "Soul Power," Aloe Blacc juggles hats over the blues-funk of "Sign Language," Organized Konfusion's Prince Po treats himself to the majestic horns of "Rock My Soul" and the Pharcyde's Booty Brown laments a civilization in decline on "TV Dreaming." But part of what distinguishes Quakers is its sense of discovery — Barrow found many of these MCs while trawling the Internet, and names like Silverust, Lyric Jones and Coin Locker Kid, a playful name-dropper of Axelrod, Murakami and everyone in-between, make the most of their opportunities. It could have sounded like an endless string of interludes. Instead, each new, ambitious MC raises the stakes a bit, resulting in an unlikely hour of old-school brinksmanship.

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The Mash-Up

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  Psyence Fiction

  UNKLE

  1998 | ISLAND RECORDS

  There are few testaments to the utopian ideals of cut-and-paste juxtaposition quite like the first UNKLE record. Featuring a dream team handpicked by the UNKLE duo of DJ Shadow and Mo' Wax boss and DJ James Lavelle, Psyence Fiction was a bracing, coarse, circa '98 vision of electronic music's future. Mostly, this was a future that sought to merge the possibilities of the sampler with the aesthetics of rock. The results were... forcible and sometimes thrilling: Kool G Rap talked gunplay over Frank Zappa drums on the furious "Guns Blazing," Badly Drawn Boy shook loose on the twitchy "Nursery Rhyme/Breather," bassist Jason Newsted lent some Metallica menace to Beastie Boy Mike D's forced "The Knock" while Richard Ashcroft starred on the weepy-grand, Verve-like "Lonely Soul." On tracks like the gorgeous, delicate Miami bass-lite of "Celestial Annihilation" or the morose, sweeping, Thom Yorke-assisted "Rabbit in Your Headlights," UNKLE felt like a paradigm shift away from showy arena grandeur, toward the possibilities of the bedroom and some well-picked machines.

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The Fantasy Camp

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  h II

  DJ Honda

  1998 | dj honda Recordings/E-Klectrik Music / GoDigital

  Sometimes all you need is good taste and maybe a decent amount of disposable income. Whether by the power of the dollar or tall tales of the Japanese market, DJ Honda forged alliances with scores of New York rappers throughout the 1990s, resulting in albums that basically sound like all-star soundtracks to imaginary, purist revival flicks. By his second album, Honda had perfected his own, slightly polished take on gritty, East Coast... Timberland rap — it's no mystery why the Beatnuts and their protégés feature on nearly half the cuts here. De La Soul's "Trouble in the Waters" is a masterpiece of grown folks rap, A.L., Cuban Link and JuJu show out on the Das EFX-inspired "On the Mic" and the Rawcotics' "For Every Day That Goes By" is one of the era's great, unheralded strugglers' anthems. But the highlight is the uplifting "Travellin' Man," featuring a jubilant Mos Def channeling Johnny Bristol one moment, looking forward to a future of traveling "around the world with a catalog of rap songs" the next.

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The Pranksters

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  So..Hows Your Girl

  Handsome Boy Modeling School

  1999 | Elektra Records

  The first Handsome Boy record was co-produced by Prince Paul and Dan the Automator, ostensibly as a satire of upper-crust snobbishness. While this comes through in their bizarre, Get a Life-inspired interludes and skits set in a cutthroat modeling school, So...How's Your Girl? never quite coheres as a concept album. Still, a playful, whimsical energy runs through the record: Del tha Funkee Homosapien's effortlessly dizzying "Magnetizing," Grand Puba and Sadat X's casual,... sauntering "Once Again," J-Live and Roisin Murphy of Moloko's standout "The Truth." DJs Shadow and Quest lend some texture to the patchwork braggadocio of "Holy Calamity" while "The Projects" captures the natural chemistry between Del and De La Soul. This was the highpoint of Paul and Automator's creative partnership, and they clearly had fun with some of these all-over-the-place sessions: Josh Haden of Spain, Paula Frazer of Tarnation, Sean Lennon and Money Mark jam with Father Guido Sarducci (of 1970s SNL fame) on "Sunshine" while "Megaton B-Boy 2000" pits El-P against Alec Empire, the result scabrous, loud and totally, eternally anti-handsome.

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The Futurist

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  Simply

  Tek9

  Crammed Discs / A Train

  Tek-9 is the alter ego of Dego McFarlane, best known as one-half of British drum-n-bass pioneers 4hero. For Simply, McFarlane eschewed the meticulous, string-laden arrangements and dense riddims of his day job and returned to the straightforward, stripped-down sound of his youth. Collaborating with a host of no-frills U.S. and U.K. indie stalwarts, Simply imagines one version of a future boom-bap, a synth-heavy, jazz-inflected hip-hop with nary a sample in sight. "Bruklon"... is "Big Beat" re-imagined as dueling robots, as "live poem ripper/vodka straight sipper" What?What? (Jean Grae) shouts out the fanatics from Philly to Samoa. "Interlude 2" sounds like a pixelated version of one of those whimsical Tribe interludes, while Capitol A and Rob Yancey's "Stand Clear" is old school mic-passing in zero-gravity. The formula works best on "2001," as an effortlessly cool Opio from Souls of Mischief "rolls loaded dice" and "blows hella hash smoke" over a squelchy, metal-on-metal head-nodder.

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The Latter-Day Purists

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  German Lugers

  Snowgoons

  2007 | Babygrande Records / The Orchard

  Europe seems to be the only viable market for a certain kind of hook-free, meat-and-potatoes, purist rap. Over the past decade, Germany's Snowgoon duo of Det and DJ Illegal have cut a series of guest-stuffed albums that feel like wistful strolls through Fat Beats circa 1997. German Lugers was their breakthrough and it tends toward the orchestral, owing a heavy debt to the string swells, spooky woodwinds and concert hall acoustics of... Alchemist and RZA. The challenge of projects like these is keeping everyone invested. Pumpkinhead spits a career's worth of punch-lines on the excellent "Snowgoons Sonata," and his challenger is left spilling his chromosomes everywhere. Wise Intelligent takes to "Teacher's Trademark" with a lively, nasty energy, eager to remind you why you should respect your elders: "Dirty Jerz in the house/Hit thirty birds on your couch/Put more than words in their mouth." MED and the Living Legends ride the awkward, Dilla-like stutter of "Black Woods," while flame-thrower Celph Titled threatens to "leave you black on both sides like we barbecuing Mos Def."

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