Discover: Labels We Love 2012
If there’s one characteristic that binds all of the labels we’ve grouped together here, it’s that all of them operate with complete indifference to the boundaries of genre. None of them are simply a “rock label” or an “electronic label.” Instead, the bands on their rosters cherry-pick from across the entire musical encyclopedia, combining formerly isolated ideas and sounds to create entire new worlds of song. These are the labels we loved in 2012.
Carpark & Acute
Who They Are: Based in Washington D.C., Carpark and its sublabel, Acute, was founded by Todd Hyman in 1999 and has remained defiantly left-of-the-dial ever since.
What to Expect: Free-roaming and obstinate indie rock that nods toward the past – Cloud Nothings contain a few well-chosen shards of ’90s emo, TEEN gently references the more ethereal end of late ’80s post-punk – while still maintaining a distinct musical voice.
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For the last few years, 20-year-old Cleveland native Dylan Baldi has been recording a steady torrent of endearing lo-fi pop contagions. Released under the name Cloud Nothings, Baldi's songs are so simply constructed, so innately hooky, they almost sound easy: His 2010 compilation Turning On was a happy murk of lint-covered guitars, three-floors-below drums, and vocals so crackly, they could have been sampled off a ham-radio. Last year's self-titled follow-up was crisper... and snappier, bounding along with the sort of energy of school kids finally released into the wilds of summertime.
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Baldi could easily have replicated that joyful noise sound for a few more albums, and no one would really have objected. Thankfully, though, he got bored. And bold. And kinda angry. Attack on Memory contains a lot of recognizable Cloud Nothings DNA - speedy riffs, forebrain-hugging melodies - but it grafts them onto a monstrous-sounding framework, courtesy of engineer Steve Albini. On Memory, Baldi's ostensibly straightforward power-pop numbers are stretched out and bulked up so efficiently, it feels like he somehow jumped three records ahead in less than year.
In fact, Memory veers so forcefully from its predecessors that, at first listen, it's a bit jarring: The opening track, "No Future No Past," is a slow-burn grind of spangled, in-utero guitars and tortured vocals, with Baldi intoning the words "give up/ come to/ no hope/ we're through" so harshly, it sounds as though his larynx is going to flip him off and jump out of his throat. Even more adventurous is "Wasted Days," a nine-minute(!) peal with a lithe, lupine guitar break that sounds like Greg Sage conducting Hawkwind.
Baldi hasn't given up on the quick-fix pop song, as evidenced by short, piercing numbers like "Fall In" and "Our Plan." But even those tracks feel mega, emboldened by Jayson Gerycz's battering-ram drums and Baldi's squeezed-dry vocals (by the time the album finishes, you're surprised he's able to get a word out at all). Those who've followed Cloud Nothings thus far will be happily walloped by Memory, yet even newcomers will find it a blast, in every sense of the word.
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Kristina "Teeny" Lieberson used to play keyboard for Brooklyn indie rockers Here We Go Magic, and while her own dreamy electro-psych sister act relies on slightly different ingredients, the results can be similarly spellbinding. TEEN's 2011 digital-only EP Little Doods leaned toward narcotic lo-fi jangle that recalled Mazzy Star. Mixed and produced by Spacemen 3's Sonic Boom, and engineered by Here We Go Magic's Jen Turner, full-length debut In Limbo is a... brainy, immersive and often-intriguing blend of pulsing krautrock drone and bouncy Phil Spector harmonies. The 11-track set has its share of reverby retro-pop gems, whether confidently thrumming "Better," lovesick space-prom waltz "Charlie" or insistent, surf-flecked "Electric." Elsewhere, on tracks like free-flowing synth workout "Unable" or crunching, Beta Band-skewed "Why Why Why," TEEN sprawls out to suit the youth-appropriate album title. Either way, In Limbo is an alluring, sometimes-enchanting stroll along the blurry line between hooks and incantations.
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Hippos in Tanks
Who They Are: Nicking their name from a novel by William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, this L.A. label is known for their similarly stream-of-consciousness approach to electronic music.
What to Expect: At a time when the acronym EDM is doubled over with exhaustion, Hippos in Tanks represents everything the genre can be at its best. There’s an eeriness and otherworldliness to their albums – every last one – that the genre’s more popular practitioners woefully lack.
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On 2011's Far Side Virtual, James Ferraro specialized in gleaming surfaces: Bright tunes played on ultra-bright neo '80s synths, festooned with FX that alluded to the sonic detritus of digital life (the squeal-pop that announces you've logged onto Skype, for instance, which ends Far Side's title cut). Sushi sounds more deliberately broken, like a cross between Machinedrum's Room(s) and old Prefuse 73 – arrangements that halt and stammer a la Chicago juke... ("Playin Ya Self"), crumple up old house music ("Baby Mitsubishi"), and push hip-hop through a crisply fluttering laptop sieve ("Jet Skis & Sushi"). Ferraro initially planned on calling this album Rainstick Fizz Plus, then Shoop2DaDoop – jokey names that get to the geeked-out party spirit embodied by the likes of "SO N2U" (clap-happy and funky, a la Si Begg's late-'90s Buckfunk 3000 releases) and the sideways skank of "Flamboyant." It's silly, of course – but it moves anyway.
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HoZac
Who They Are: Todd Novak’s Chicago-based label that also hosts the raucous and aptly-named HoZac Blackout festival every year.
What to Expect: 50 million tons of melody, delivered at the highest possible volume. HoZac’s roster likes it loud – they specialize in garage and amped-up power pop – but there’s always an infectious hook lurking beneath the din, waiting to burrow deep into your brainspace.
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Don't call it just another garage-punk offering; HoZac's been doing that for years. On Radar Eyes' self-titled debut LP, the Chicagofoursome offers a pop-centric affair, all layered, fuzzy guitars and hook-laden vocals. The driving, forward momentum of "Accident" and the shit-kicking guitars of "Summer Chills" front like these Windy City residents wanna fight, but it's their pretty melodic sensibilities that encourage repeated listens. "Prairie Puppies" is an unabashed Jesus and Mary Chain... hat-tip, "I Am" attempts to hide its candy-shop leanings underneath an impenetrable wall of feedback, and songs like "Secrets" and "Disconnection," with big bass, heavenly organs and druggy atmospherics, suggest they may be the spiritual brethren of the Black Lips. The entire affair ends with the spooky, Suicide-esque "Side of the Road," reaffirming that Radar Eyes are just as effective students of rock as they are practitioners.
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Mello Music
Who They Are: Alarmingly consistent – their 2012 docket of releases contained exactly zero misses – this Arizona hip-hop label ably carries on the tradition of major label genre pioneers like Tribe Called Quest and Black Star.
What to Expect: Expertly-crafted, consistently thoughtful hip-hop that puts an emphasis on deft wordplay, usually over beats that recall the genre’s Golden Age. It’s to their great credit that their releases never once sound dated or self-consciously retro. They’re sharp, sturdy and surprising, every single time.
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For hip-hop fans who value authenticity, Stik Figa is as real as it gets — it's just that for him, reality is an ordinary-dude life in Topeka, defined by pragmatic goals and modest honesty. Originally locally-released in 2009 and picked up for wider distribution after some productive collaborations with Oddisee, the fittingly titled As Himself is a short but comprehensive introduction to an engaging, hard-working everyman MC. With an easygoing voice that... glides through finely detailed, scenario-setting lyrics, he finds insightful personal angles on daily-grind things — the elusiveness of aspirational materialism ("Flaudgin"), the community-anchoring nature of the local mom-and-pop shop ("Corner Store"), growing up self-aware of his childhood awkwardness ("Class of 2000") — while still coming correct on big-picture material like the Aaron Neville-invoking Great Recession study "Medicine." Producer Michael "Seven" Summers bolsters the album with sinuous funk that splits the difference between box-Chevy South and Rhymesayers-style Midwest, making an unpretentiously perceptive rapper sound even more down-to-earth.
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Profound Lore
Who They Are: This Canadian label may have started as a hobby for its founder Chris Bruni, but its profile elevated rapidly in the notoriously discriminating metal scene.
What to Expect: The most challenging, forward-thinking and inventive metal around. The bands on Profound Lore typically roam far outside hard rock’s usual boundaries, incorporating doomy ambience and oblong song structures into their infernal albums.
New Amsterdam
Who They Are: Brooklyn-based label specializing in populating the gap between “indie” and “classical”
What to Expect: Depending on the release, you might get wry, witty chamber pop; avant-garde a cappella; steampunk big-band jazz; a conservatory student’s take on ’70s AM radio, or something even more delightfully weird.
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Unless you have already seen and heard Roomful of Teeth live, there is little to prepare you for the effect of this avant-garde a cappella octet from New York. Well, actually, there's a lot to prepare you – if you've heard, say, the chanting of Tibetan Buddhist monks, and Bobby McFerrin's Circlesong improvisations, and John Cage's Songbook, and the Swingle Singers – and, let's say, pygmy yodeling and Meredith Monk – then... you're good to go. Roomful of Teeth creates a richly-textured sound that uses a seemingly endless palette of vocal techniques: overtone chant, rhythmic clicks and buzzes, luminous chords and piercing Balkan-style close harmonies, drones, and spoken word (usually to found texts). In the wrong hands, this kind of thing could be dangerous, but Roomful of Teeth has fallen in with the right crowd.
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Released by New Amsterdam Records, which has become a home for the so-called indie-classical movement, the group's debut release includes new works written specifically for the band by some of that movement's leading lights, including composers Judd Greenstein, William Brittelle, Sarah Kirkland Snider and indie rocker Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs. With such a distinguished list of guest composers, it might be a little surprising to find that some of the record's highlights come from the group's own Caroline Shaw, whose suite of pieces named after Baroque dance forms (Passacaglia, Courante, Allemande and Sarabande) is a tour de force of vocal mischief-making, with collage-style spoken texts woven into a web of singing, semi-singing, and other less easily identified vocal noises. Again, in the wrong hands it would be a mess, but Roomful of Teeth is never less than completely musical, even lyrical.
Snider's "Orchard" is sensuous and beautiful, and possibly a little darker than it seems at first. Greenstein's works are the most reliably rhythmic and will appeal to fans of Meredith Monk; this particular Meredith Monk fan thinks "Montmartre" might be the best of the three. And Brittelle's "Amid the Minotaurs," on the surface one of the most conventionally-structured pieces here, is a truly subversive piece of anti-pop.
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You know that numb, nagging feeling at the base of your brain when you're awake at 4 a.m., watching the ceiling cracks start to swarm in front of you? Victoire's hesitant, haunted instrumental miniatures are that feeling made manifest. Comprised of five women from the NYC contemporary classical scene, Victoire first came to our attention in 2008. eMusic released their moody, inscrutable four-song EP A Door Into the Dark on eMusic Selects.... The evocative title perfectly matched the music contained within — the four pieces were a chill of creeping unease, the breath of cold air from behind the cracked-open basement door. The four songs lasted a total of 20 minutes, but they lingered like a premonition.
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The move from A Door Into the Dark to their full-length debut is summed up, again, in the title — Cathedral City is a bold step from dank, cramped beginnings into real space. The four songs on A Door Into the Dark are here, but they have been re-recorded, and in the process, have acquired a whole new bottom floor. The music now resounds startling in all directions. The MIDI keyboard that wells up in "Like A Miracle" now sounds less like a glitch in the drum programming software than an all-devouring monster run amuck. There is a new note of bassy menace in Lorna Krier's glittering electronics as well; "I Am Coming for My Things," the gorgeously lonely and unresolved meditation on an achingly sad voice mail, has a new seismic rumble beneath it.
There are four new pieces on the album as well, and they flesh out the band's morbid, anxious vision. Missy Mazzoli, the composer and musical engine behind the band, loves staircase chord progressions — most of these pieces are built on a four-chord descent with a few unexpected detours built in. They are poised on the trap-door hinge between major and minor, with melodies that probe their way hesitantly from bar to bar, the clarinet often floating free while the violin and keyboards circle warily. The sunburst of unison vocals on the title track offers the lone shaft of light, lifting the album uncertainly, and fitfully, toward a kind of transcendence. But soon the mood sours again; Mazzoli's music never settles. Painting the funk of a cloudy head-state with a virtuoso palette of blacks and greys, Victoire suggest volumes of unspoken emotion before gliding away.
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Young Brooklyn composer Missy Mazzoli's exhilarating and ultimately heartbreaking Song from the Uproar contains traditional operatic elements – among them, romance, tragedy and cross-dressing. However, the story of the real-life Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904), who traveled nomadically through the mountains and deserts of North Africa dressed as a man, converted to Islam, and joined a secret Sufi brotherhood to struggle against French colonialism before perishing in a flash flood, strains against the bounds... of belief. Does this tale demand three tidily arcing acts or a thousand and one nights?
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Mazzoli's solution is to concentrate on the heaviest emotional moments of Eberhardt's journey in 15 songs linked by electronic sounds. Performed by the five-member Now Ensemble (clarinet, bass, electric guitar, piano, flute), four singers and the splendid mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer as Eberhardt, Uproar splits the difference between opera and alt-rock. (Mazzoli's all-female modern classical ensemble Victoire was a 2008 eMusic Selects pick.) Melodic and other epiphanies bubble up unexpectedly and dramatically from Mazzoli's personal minimalist palette. These include the birdlike flute song of delight in "I Have Arrived," the heady instrumental color wheel of "Oblivion Seekers," and perhaps the opera's real tragic climax, the two-part "Mektoub (It Is Written)," a lacerating threnody in which Eberhardt mourns the betrayal of her Algerian lover, singing "How quickly love evaporates / Leaving me a desert." Not so much opera as distillation, Mazzoli's version of Eberhardt's short, memorable life is a marvel of compact complexity itself.
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Tin Hat, formerly the Tin Hat Trio, is a quartet here, but this remarkable album has a fifth collaborator: the poet e. e. cummings. The Rain Is A Handsome Animal is a song cycle comprised of settings of cummings's poetry by all four members of the group (there are also three instrumental settings), and features the earthy, distinctive voice of the group's founding violinist, Carla Kihlstedt. Like all Tin Hat albums, this... one offers a contemporary acoustic take on Americana, chamber music and jazz. And while their previous albums have included one or two vocal tracks, with guests like Tom Waits and Willie Nelson, this is the first one to make Kihlstedt's vocals the center of attention.
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The choice of cummings is a natural one for Tin Hat; the American poet held the classical forms of poetry in high regard, but not so high that he neglected the sounds and rhythms of vernacular American English, and the blues. For the musicians in Tin Hat, which includes Mark Orton on guitar and dobro; Ben Goldberg, clarinet; and Rob Reich on accordion and piano, cummings must have seemed a kindred spirit. Elegantly woven through a fabric of typically quirky instrumentation, those texts lead the quartet in several directions. "anyone lived in a pretty how town" is the most clearly rooted in traditional American music, with the poem's bluesy/folksy quality echoed in Rob Reich's setting. "Buffalo Bill," an elegiac text by cummings, is perhaps the most poignant, culminating in an emotional, if ambiguous, brass choir. "little i," a Kihlstedt setting, features the silvery tone of her e-string violin (a fiddle with four high, thin e-strings that suggests the sound of the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle) and some of her most appropriately tremulous singing.
