The Sound Hunter: Best of 2011 by Dave Knight

aty Perry is nominated for Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards. Not that the Grammys carry a hell of a lot of clout for anyone who isn't already a member of NARAS, but that's still an important talking point. A professional organization that ostensibly has an investment in both the commercial and the artistic viability of popular music came right out and said, "In the two thousand and tenth year of our Lord, we stand firm behind Katy Perry and her Teenage Dream as the embodiment of the highest achievements of our industry and of our art, with the hope that other artists will look to all that she has accomplished and will strive to be more like Katy Perry. Amen." Now, it's easy to pick on the geriatric membership of NARAS, just as it's easy to throw shade on Perry, but her nomination flies in the face of the notion that year-in-review listmaking and awards-

giving should be all about the consensus picks. It's a bold, editorial choice that recognizes the value in a group having a distinct point of view, however WTF? that point of view might seem. The flipside to that argument, though, is that there can be just as much value to consensus, at least in a year like 2010, when it has become easier than ever before to get trapped in one's own little special-interest bubble. It's the cream-rises argument, and, while that inevitably means that more obscure titles get swept away in the deluge of year-end lists, that consensus ensures that some of the year's strongest work from across the full musical spectrum ends up getting highlighted. And this year, it seems like most everyone can agree on the notion that Kanye West managed to channel his public persona, which he has constructed from being an absolutely insufferable douchebag and a motherfucking monster of absolutely 1

epic proportions, into a challenging, divisive hip-hop record that demands a strong reaction. It's an album that our staff has reacted to quite favorably, and the same can be said of Robyn's series of progressive, emotionally devastating dance-pop EPs and of Janelle Monรกe's weird-ass Robot Messiah song cycle. Sometimes, when everyone agrees that something is pretty great, it's because it's actually pretty great. That's not a preemptive mea culpa for the fact that our best-of albums list includes some albums that a host of publications have also cited as among the best of 2010, so much as a statement of principle that a consensus can only emerge from individual voices. And, with acts like Lizz Wright, Jenny Wilson, and How to Dress Well also included here, the voices of our staff 's individual writers are reflected just as strongly as the consensus picks. And no, we still can't stand Katy Perry. Jonathan Keefe

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We Most Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves SPUTTERING DRUM MACHINES AND AN ARSENAL OF 1980s VINTAGE SYNTH PRESETS UNDERCUT HIS LYRICS

By John Maus

ohn maus first gained notice while collaborating and playing with fellow Cal Arts classmate Ariel Pink more than 10 years ago. Though both have since developed cultish followings by releasing distinctive takes on murky lo-fi, Maus has steeped his music in new wave signifiers, an association furthered by his deep, commanding voice. Whether he’s evoking Joy Division’s Ian Curtis or Bauhaus’ Peter Murphy, Maus opts to abstract the genre, inserting noise into unexpected places and walking the line between sincerity and surreality. From the beginning, he’s been an artist fascinated by the parameters,

paradoxes, and possibilities of pop. Earlier this year, Maus took a walk through New York’s Central Park Zoo with a journalist from Self-Titled. “I didn’t realize that the music I was making was especially weird,” he says in the piece. “Honestly, I thought I was making Top 40 kind of stuff. It wasn’t 2

until people kept telling me so that I realized my work was thought of as something ‘other’ than that.” If you’re at all familiar with the Minnesota native’s swampy retro-futurist synth-pop, you may understand why he might place emphasis on the word “other.” One experience with his body of solo work (or brave live performances) makes clear that his could be categorized as “outsider” art, but it’s difficult to say that without also seriously considering why. He makes thought-provoking music that’s disguised as something else. We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves, his latest full-length, is the most vibrant and toothsome expression of Maus’ pursuits yet. He keeps his vocals awash in gothic reverb and echo-driven effects, blurring the lines between what he’s saying and emoting. Sometimes, as on “Cop Killer”, a Jan Hammer-indebted number on which Maus sings over an iced bed of keys, the results are outlandish and oddly funny at the same time, in the way that certain scenes in David Lynch films can leap from chilling to comically exaggerated. And then there’s “Matter of Fact” immediately thereafter, a song whose staccato, orc-like chorus line is “Pussy is not a matter of fact.”

or the past few years, Horrors frontman Faris Badwan has frequently turned his gaze to past sounds and styles, from the rockabilly gutter-punk lurking under the dirty fingernails of his band’s 2007 LP, Strange House, to its surprisingly successful about-face embracing of dark, melodic post-punk on 2009’s Primary Colours. The past continues to be the focus in Cat’s Eyes, Badwan’s collaborative project with Canadian opera singer and multi-instrumentalist Rachel Zeffira. Leading up to the duo’s self-titled debut LP, Badwan cited Joe Meek, Phil Spector, and the film Dirty Dancing as sources of inspiration; there are merely strains of those influences throughout Cat’s Eyes. Instead, Badwan and Zeffira have created an enjoyably sinister, richly atmospheric backdrop for their soft-focus pop fragments. The influence of Portishead’s Geoff Barrow producing Primary Colours continues to bear fruit, as the intense claustrophobia that marked Portishead’s 2008 comeback Third similarly colors these proceedings. The death-march horns in “Bandit” suggest that the badly behaved lover in question is more of a murderer than a philanderer; when the infamous opening rhythm to the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” finally appears in the kiss-off “Not a

Cat’s Eyes By Cat’s Eyes

Friend”, it sounds not like a heartbeat, but a pair of feet, trying to get the hell out of town. Zeffira sounds like she’s already gone, though: She maintains her distance throughout Cat’s Eyes. Any hint of her operatic training has been wiped clean and replaced with a delivery that rarely breaks past a coolly delivered sing-chant. Initially, the choice not to exercise what’s a fairly unique ability comes off as a bit strange; you’d think that she would want to see how at least one of these songs would sound in her full-throated soprano. As it turns out, though, Zeffira’s vocal stylistic departure is a solid fit, emphasizing the damaged loneliness captured on the record. She floats over these songs, dropping quiet bombs on “Best Person I Know” 3

and adding weariness to the brassy proclamations of “Over You”. At times, her voice is reminiscent of late Broadcast member Trish Keenan in vocal tone and enunciation, adding an occasionally eerie feel to Cat’s Eyes. Badwan and Zeffira are credited with writing, orchestrating, and arranging the record on their own, and despite all the fluttery horns and Disney strings it wears like Christmas bells, the result is tight in form and execution. The two non-Cat’s Eyes cuts from the Broken Glass teaser EP released earlier this year, the punky “Sunshine Girls” and “Love You Anyway”, would have no place on this album, revealing a talent for self-editing that makes a miserable, moaning momentum-killer like “Sooner or Later” feel wholly extraneous.

ZEFFIRA’S VOCAL STYLISTIC DEPARTURE IS A SOLID FIT EMPHASIZING THE DAMAGED LONELINESS CAPTURED ON THE RECORD.

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The music itself is intricate with dizzying layers of synth arrangements and stray sounds

Era Extraña By Neon Indian

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ome people laugh at chillwave precisely because so many of its practitioners lack a sense of humor. But Alan Palomo is an exception. In 2009, the Texas-raised musician’s Neon Indian project debuted with the excellent Psychic Chasms. Like a lot of young musicians, the then-21-yearold Palomo was inspired by Ariel Pink, and he certainly shared that art-pop oddball’s sense of irreverence. Below the static and sneakily intricate synth patterns, Psychic Chasms was a funny, playful record, with goofy, drugged-out moments exemplified by song titles like “Laughing Gas”. As the buzz around Psychic Chasms increased, the narrative shifted. Neon Indian attained a surprising level of popularity that was bolstered by a rocking, party-ready live show, drawing in fans of populist acts like Passion Pit and MGMT. After that raised profile, Neon Indian’s second album, Era Extraña, shows a commitment to tighter, wide-reaching songcraft and appeal. The production value is at a higher level, with additional mixing by big4

name studio guy Dave Fridmann (the Flaming Lips, MGMT), who forgoes his usual noise-bombing style for a more subtle approach. Those drawn to Psychic Chasms’ warped view of pop or outré work like the difficult, abstract EP with the Flaming Lips last year may be disappointed; Era Extraña instead builds on Neon Indian’s one-off single with Green Label Sound last year, the straightforward “Sleep Paralysist”. Reflecting the shift, there’s an increased focus on streamlined melodies; the vocal gasps and moans that streaked previous highs like “Terminally Chill” are still here, just not as suffocating. The wordless chorus of “Hex Girlfriend” is all but set to rock a festival stage or two, while “Halogen (I Could Be a Shadow)” is a rush of lifeaffirming, upwards-moving melodic optimism. The music itself is intricate and accomplished, with dizzying layers of synth arrangements and stray sounds crammed into even the most big-tent cuts-- we’re talking rocket-ship noises, phone conversations, lasers, and visceral video-game samples. Despite the kitchen-sink arrangements, the results are taut and defined. Palomo is anything but sloppy and he seems focused on the album as a unified whole: one of his finest songs yet, the melancholy, remix-ready “Arcade Blues”, was given bonus-track status because he felt it didn’t fit in with Era Extraña’s overriding themes.

whokill By tUnE-yArDs

he stylization of the name tUnE-yArDs in print is a bit off-putting, but it at least gives people fair warning: This is not an act with any interest in politely conforming to expectations. tUnE-yArDs is the music project of Merrill Garbus, a songwriter, vocalist, percussionist, and ukulele player who has fused elements of acoustic folk, R&B, funk, Afro-pop, and rock into a bold, uncompromising hybrid all her own. Garbus is blessed with an extraordinary voice, and she wields it with great confidence, always coming off in total control of her phrasing while seeming totally uninhibited in her expression. There’s an authoritative quality to her voice-- she often sings with a commanding, full-bodied boldness, but even at her softest, Garbus sounds assertive and forthright.

w h o k i l l, Garbus’ second album as tUnE-yArDs, delivers on the promise of her 2009 debut, BiRd-BrAiNs. Unlike that album, which she recorded almost entirely on her own using a digital voice recorder and the sound editing program Audacity, w h o k i l l was mostly made in traditional studios in collaboration with bassist Nate Brenner, engineer Eli Crews, and a handful of other musicians. The music benefits from the increased professionalism, but Garbus has not abandoned her lo-fi aesthetic. As on BiRd-BrAiNs, Garbus layers sound to create a patchwork of contrasting textures. This time around, the greater clarity allows for more exaggerated dynamics. This is most apparent in “Gangsta”, a carefully arranged track that evokes danger and fear with bluntly abbreviated blasts of horn noise and sounds that cut in and out erratically like a set of headphones with a busted wire or a cell phone that can’t hold its signal. On the opposite end of the spectrum, she creates an almost unsettling intimacy on “Wooly Wolly Gong” by mixing the ambient

hum of room sound with closely mic’d arpeggiated chords and vocals. Brenner’s presence on bass is the biggest difference between w h o k i l l and BiRd-BrAiNs. His style is loose and jazzy, with fluid, melodic lines that add dimension to Garbus’ compositions. She sounded so isolated on BiRdBrAiNs, but suddenly her music is like a conversation, with Brenner’s parts bouncing off her voice and rhythms like thoughtful banter. He brings a janky funk to “Es-so”, a zippy groove to “Bizness”, and a delicate weight to the airy “Doorstep”. On “Powa”, his lead lines slink around Garbus’ slo-mo rock riff as if in a subliminal duet with her expressive vocal performance. That song builds steadily over the course of five minutes until it reaches a stunning climax in which Brenner’s bass bounces gently as Garbus hits a glorious high note like a feral Mariah Carey. She mostly sticks to personal narratives, suggesting big ideas and complex tensions in her subtext while emphasizing the urgency of small moments and concrete details.

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Garbus is fascinated by violence; most of the tracks on whokill deal with power struggles that arise from inequity and lead to further cruelty and injustice.

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Watch the Throne By Jay-Z & Kanye West

atch the Throne features the following things: absurdly expensive samples, a pair of choruses from Odd Future R&B singer Frank Ocean at the exact moment where he’s turning the corner and becoming a Thing, another chorus from long-been-a-Thing Beyoncé, a buddy-buddy shoutout to the President of the United States, multiple namechecks of brands so expensive that you’ve probably never heard of half of them, a murderers’ row of producers working on almost every track, and a fleeting moment where Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon sounds like the funkiest man alive. And yet for Jay-Z and Kanye West, this could actually be viewed as a relatively minor album. Amazing. The album comes hot on the heels of career-landmark albums from both

rap expansiveness; to create it, Kanye sequestered himself in Hawaii and flew in an endless stream of creative-peak collaborators. Jay, meanwhile, is still cruising on the momentum of The Blueprint 3, an artistically flat but commercially massive grab for continued relevance that did everything he wanted it to do. Watch the Throne brings little of Twisted Fantasy’s boundary-melting ambition or The Blueprint 3’s commercial acumen. It’s just two of rap’s biggest figures and best friends getting together to make some of the swollen, epic music that comes so naturally to them. Listening to it is sort of like watching George Clooney get all his movie-star friends together for a party at his Italian villa, and, along the way, maybe dream up Ocean’s Twelve. (I liked Ocean’s Twelve.) In the past week, Internet sleuths have pointed out that the release of many Jay-Z albums have coincided with some national or international calamity, 9/11 not excluded. Watch the Throne is no exception: its release on the same day as yet another catastrophic stock market downturn has led some critics to conclude that the pair’s boasts of obscene wealth is out of step with the times. That’s a fair

26 artists, but the few months they spent recording it on multiple continents were practically vacations compared to the way they usually work. Kanye’s opus My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, still less than a year old, won across-theboard critical raves for its lush, prog-

But while Jay might be billed for seniority’s sake, Kanye is this album’s obvious guiding force. he displays levels of unequaled audacity.

case to make. But one of the striking things about Watch the Throne is how often Jay and Kanye address matters beyond their bank accounts. On “Why I Love You”, it’s Jay’s dismay at past crewmates’ betrayals. On “Murder to Excellence”, it’s black-on-black crime and the scarcity of people of color at society’s highest seats. On “Made in America”, it’s the hardships of youth and coming of age. “New Day” is framed as a letter to the pair’s imagined sons, a device that mostly gives them a chance to soul-search and self-criticize. On “Welcome to the Jungle”, Jay, never a tortured pop star, actually says,

“I’m fuckin’ depressed.” Despite all the triumphant bravado these two bring to practically everything they do, they work overtime here to bring a sense of empathy to this enterprise. Once in a while, they even sound vaguely humble. These subtler moments are admirable, but they don’t always work. Consider, for example, the song “That’s My Bitch”, on which Kanye and his collaborators flip the classic “Apache” break into a devastating dance-rap monster with synths zooming off in every direction and Justin Vernon making the aforementioned sweaty soul moves. It’s a vicious song, catchy as fuck, but it turns

out to be weirdly awkward. Despite the title, Jay’s verse is all devotional-prophet; it mostly concerns the way American beauty standards so often work against women of color. The sentiment deserves respect, but his laidback delivery, on a track with production and structure that call for ferocity, drains his ideas of force. Watch the Throne works best when Jay and Kanye are just talking about how great they are. The single “Otis” is dizzy fun, with Jay and Kanye rapping hard and swapping mics like hungry kids. “Niggas in Paris” rides an impossibly propulsive synth riff and gigantic 7

drums and gives Jay a chance to display the technical rap wizardry he still has in him. (It also features this great Kanye moment, “Doctors say I’m the illest because I’m suffering from realness/ Got my niggas in Paris, and they going gorillas,” followed by a sample of Will Ferrell in Blades of Glory talking about how awesome shit doesn’t have to mean anything.) “Gotta Have It” unites Kanye and the Neptunes to crazily chop up James Brown vocal samples and Eastern flute melodies. And “Who Gon Stop Me” finds Kanye cussing in Pig Latin while turning dubstep-rap into a viable subgenre.

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Or in the case of the excitable “Baby Missiles” it’s as if the Spiritualized and Springsteen albums filed

lidin’. Ramblin’. Driftin’. Movin’. Strugglin’. The War on Drugs frontman Adam Granduciel is all of these things on Slave Ambient, the Philly outfit’s second fulllength release. Given these professed feelings of restlessness and uneasiness, it’s no surprise the band’s-roots-rock is all about forward motion and momentum, favoring steady, locomotive rhythms that rarely pause or waverelements that reinforce Granduciel’s efforts to make his problems disappear in the rearview mirror. Slave Ambient shares several qualities with its 2008 predecessor, Wagonwheel Blues: a sense of openfreeway abandon and splendid isolation set against a glorious expanse; an

25 unabashed admiration for FM-radio Americana icons of yore (Springsteen, Dylan, Petty); and a willingness to buff the band’s gritty edges with serene, if randomly deployed, instrumentals and reprises. In other words, the War on Drugs still deal in “excellent road trip music,” as Pitchfork’s Stephen Deusner described Wagonwheel Blues.

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Slave Ambient By The War on Drugs However, this time Granduciel is less interested in documenting the environmental and economic travesties he sees unfolding outside his window as he is the internal dramas swirling around in his head. Nearly every song here expresses some desire to get outta town and start anew. The band responds by amplifying the more textural qualities of their sound: dreamy synth drones, liquefied electric-guitar leads that linger and fade like raindrops rolling down the windshield, and the most tasteful use of smooth saxophone this side of Kaputt. (Interestingly enough, Slave Ambient was recorded without founding member Kurt Vile, who applies a similarly lysergic approach on his latest solo release, Smoke Ring For My Halo-- for fans of rustic rock’n’roll, the two albums co8

llectively yield an embarrassment of riches not experienced since Wilco and Son Volt released A.M. and Trace in tandem.) When the band’s widescreened psychedelic flourishes are fused with Granduciel’s wellworn Dylan- and Petty-isms, songs like “Brothers” and “It’s Your Destiny” wondrously conjure nothing so much as the Traveling Wilburys recording for mid-1980s 4AD. Or in the case of the excitable “Baby Missiles” it’s as if the Spiritualized and Springsteen albums filed alphabetically next to one another in your record collection had melted together on a hot August afternoon. But as much as the War on Drugs make music to accompany an escape to something better, they’re the sort of band that believes the journey is more important than the destination.

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Space is Only Noise By Nicolas Jaar

trange can exist anywhere, but we have a habit of thinking only the maximal and unhinged-Captain Beefheart, Basement Jaxx, R. Kelly-- are truly weird. How bizarre can the music of Philip Glass or Wolfgang Voigt really be? It seems contained, planned; the curio is the choice to be so on-keel in the first place. One of my favorite aspects of Nicolas Jaar’s debut full-length, Space Is Only Noise, is how thoroughly it scatters this misconception. Space is leftfield electro-pop, farflung and without reserve, but it is also patient, quiet, and small.

24 Jaar is a Providence via New York via Chile producer. He is 21, he attends Brown University, and he already has several well regarded singles and EPs to his name in addition to running the Clown & Sunset imprint. Requisite hot remixes: check. He exhibits all of the earmarks of a rising techno star: He remixes dance music, and his early singles were released as 12”s on dance labels. He counts Chilean techno giant Ricar-

do Villalobos as This a prime inspirasounds like tion. Little with a lot to Jaar is straighttake in, but forward, howeJaar goes ver. His father is an acclaimed to great visual artist. His lengths mixes play like to ensure outsider pastiche. that Space There are consettles flicting reports lightly. about whether his downtempo beats-- usually clocking between 90 110 bpm-- actually move dancefloors (Jaar himself is skeptical). Here is an alternate theory as to why Jaar occasionally fails to shuffle Nikes: He makes weird, self-contained music that only lands a glancing blow on house or any other particular dance subgenre. Jaar’s music incorporates lounge pop, African jazz, hip-hop, and sound collage in addition to house and pinches of dubstep. The type of soundsystem most appropriate for Space isn’t a sleek club hi -fi but a Victrola in a stop-motion film (“steampunk house”-let’s please not go there). The textures and ingredients of Jaar’s music exist in the context of 10

techno-- rhythm and repetition are clearly important to him-- but Space is not dance music. It’s too slow, sure, but it’s also too diffuse in its methods and results. Pianos, organs, guitar strings, and, most surprisingly, Jaar’s voice all fall under Space’s sepia-toned veil. This sounds like a lot to take in, but Jaar goes to great lengths to ensure that Space settles lightly. The tracks are short, funny, and always hitched to a melody. He sidesteps impulses-- during the quivering “Almost Fell”, for instance, or during “Specters of the Future”, during which actual techno threatens-to drift into full-on ambience, skronk, or extended beat passages. The goofy bass bumbling is as likely to stick with you as the elegiac “Colomb”.

Native Speaker By Braids

here are dreams, there are nightmares, and then there are those night visions that don’t quite qualify as either, the unnerving images and dialogues that rattle about your head in your waking life for the rest of the day and reveal strange, forgotten details every time you pick at them. That’s the kind of stuff we need to be talking about if we’re going to call Braids “dream-pop” as so many others have. The quartet’s bracing debut Native Speaker is almost Inception-like in its warping of reality, equally tactile and dissolute, cerebral and surreal and ultimately haunting for its refusal to answer questions the same way twice. The Montreal group is constructed like your typical indie rock outfit-- keyboards, guitar, bass, drums, all parties contributing vocals-- but each element is employed in a way that embodies the best ideals of post-rock, where each member coaxes sound like they’re trying to learn something new about their instruments at each turn. The same exploratory nature applies to structure-- Native Speaker’s seven roomy compositions (ranging from four to over eight minutes) rely heavily on loops and drones, pinwheels of guitar, and clusters of bell tones. There’s constant motion, each layer pushing and prodding until they prop each other into something like stasis, its minimalist bent never drawing too much attention to how it’s working really hard.

The loop that drives “Lemonade” reads like an EKG, dipping and rising steadfastly as the rhythm section builds a limber, athletic pace and introduces Raphaelle Standell-Preston’s intriguing and idiosyncratic vocals. She’s not without precedent: tonally there’s some Régine Chassage in her higher register, and her knack for knocking the listener off course with well-placed vulgarity recalls prime-era Jenny Lewis. But the loopy, playful interaction of her and the strange, gripping placidity of Native Speaker feels like something all its own. She’s demure as “Lemonade” begins but gets more and more unhinged as Braids hurtle forward. Despite the bizarre imagery she sets forth, the song is ultimately an impressionistic

can hear them disassembling “Lemonade” only to rebuild each aspect of it into longer forms. It’s no discredit to the band that it eases into the record’s biggest sounding moments, while amidst the catharsis the vocals do the heavy lifting. “Glass Deers” plays it as straight as it gets on Native Speaker: the closest they come to typical strumming and clean guitar lines, while Standell-Preston recalls fellow deconstructionist Sue Tompkins (Life Without Buildings), repeating “I’m fucked up” for as much of a percussive effect as an emotional one. Coasting on volume swells and whirring sound effects, the title track finds a point where Braids capture a woozy warmth not far removed from a more tactile take on Animal Collective circa

23 commentary on suburban romantic prospects-- “what I’ve found is that we’re all just sleeping around.” As Native Speaker truly starts to take shape toward its midsection, you 11

Feels. But within post-coital calm, the lyrics drop their often coy logic puzzles for about as straightforward of a cry for sexual need and desire as you’ll hear in indie rock.

The loop that drives “Lemonade” RISES steadfastly as the rhythm section builds a limber, athletic pace and introduces Raphaelle intriguing vocals.

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22 She has a tone that creates the impression you’re listening to a precocious tween fronting Phil Spector BaND

Cults By Cults

hen Cults’ “Go Outside” first appeared on the web last year, it spread like wildfire. It was catchy and sweet, the kind of sing-along that felt like it was pulled from the air, with a sentiment perfect for anyone stuck in an office or addicted to the Internet. But how many communal sing-alongs can a

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band make before the approach goes stale? Cults have opted not to find out. “Go Outside” is on their debut album, and it still gives you your entire recommended daily allowance of vitamin D, but its dreamy drift is just one side of a band that proves it has the dexterity and songwriting chops to make a varied and memorable album. Much has been made about the speed with which Cults signed to Columbia, as if they’re the first group to release a debut album on a major. That kind of rapid ascent isn’t anything new, but the speculation that came with it-online chatter pronouncing them destined for the one-hit-wonder bin-- now looks grossly off the mark. At the center of the band’s appeal is singer Madeline Follin’s youthful alto. She has a tone that creates the impression you’re listening to a precocious tween fronting a band well versed in Phil Spector’s Back to Mono and three decades of climactic indie pop. The 1960s girl-pop element of their sound is pretty evident on the surface-- “You Know What I Mean” even borrows its verse melody from the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go”-- but what they’ve done with it is 12

pure 21st century, cutting it with synths, guitars, and softly integrated samples. The samples, of cult leaders speaking to their followers, could have been a distraction had they chosen to make a big deal out of them, but they’re woven tightly into the album’s sonic fabric and processed to varying degrees of decipherability, which turns them into an effective textural element. Those voices bounce around in the intro to “Oh My God”, originally released last year as part of Adult Swim’s singles program, but subtly remixed for the LP. The music hasn’t changed here but the beat is amped up, and the bass has been moved forward in the mix, giving the song a much more powerful groove to support its melody. And if Follin’s lyrics aren’t necessarily deep-- “I can run away and leave you anytime/ Please don’t tell me you know the plans for my life”-- she delivers them with relatable and affecting conviction. This taps into a vein of petulance that runs through the album. “I don’t need anyone else,” from “Never Saw the Point”, may read as a tossed-off line, but in a strangely positive way, it feels like the record’s main message.

ike any band with a clear, identifiable concept-- in this case, a penchant for verbose, highconcept screeds-- the Decemberists are beloved and chastised for all the same reasons: The quirks that make them such a target for snickering, disaffected aesthetes (namely, stuffing their songs with arcane historical allusions and library language) are also what make them a boon for drama kids in threebutton vests. Whether the Decemberists are actually any nerdier than, say, Animal Collective isn’t worth arguing-- the ambition is the thing, and the Decemberists reached a gumption apex on 2009’s The Hazards of Love, a proggy rock opera based loosely on an EP by the British

folk singer Anne Briggs. The record follows the story of a woman who falls in love with a shape-shifting creature she meets in the woods; there’s forestsex, spells, an overbearing queen, and plenty of thick, quasi-metal guitar. As an antidote of sorts, the band comes back with The King Is Dead, a breezy country-folk record with no discernable narrative. The concept here-- wait for it-- is that there is no concept. Recorded in a converted barn on Oregon’s Pendarvis Farm, The King Is Dead eschews the high, mystical wailing of British folk for its North American counterpart. Rustic and roomy, the record nods to Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, early Wilco, the Band, Neil Young, and especially R.E.M. In places, it almost feels like a disrobing: “Let the yoke fall from our shoulders,” frontman Colin Meloy bellows on opener “Don’t Carry It All”, his voice loose and easy, freer than he’s sounded in an awfully long time.

Meloy is an established fan of certain strains of Americana music, and he’s enlisted a few inimitable guests: R.E.M.’s Peter Buck plays on three tracks, Gillian Welch sings on seven, and Welch’s songwriting partner, the guitarist Dave Rawlings, appears every so often as a backing vocalist. There are moments when the record’s twang can feel a little overcooked (the Decemberists have never been great at spontaneity, exactly), but there’s an interesting tension between the inherent unpretentiousness of country music-- it’s rural, it’s populist, it’s based in universal emotions-- and the Decemberists’ literary cartwheeling. So while there’s still plenty of fussy wordplay Meloy bleats in “Calamity Song”) and at least one Infinite Jest joke, there are also loads of simple, rousing choruses. In the past, Meloy’s ability to write a sweet, memorable melody has occasionally gotten lost, but on King, his songwriting shines.

The King is Dead By The Decemberists

For all its rural pedigrees The King Is Dead is still a clean and well crafted album; the production is smooth and the performances are unnervingly error-free

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Wounded Rhymes By Lykke Li

o date, Lykke Li’s biggest exposure was her song “Possibility” appearing on the Twilight: New Moon soundtrack. From a producer’s standpoint, her inclusion was a nobrainer: Not only was her debut titled Youth Novels, but it captured the intense yearning of youth, which is also an aim of the Twilight series. Few indie artists seemed as well poised as Li to vocalize Stephenie Meyer’s heroine’s point of view. As the singer herself told Pitchfork recently, “I like that age when you feel misunderstood and still believe in the pure idea that love conquers all”-

20 The result is depressive without being depressing, dark without being bleak, as it rejuvenates refines, and redirects her.

- perhaps the most concise and astute explanation of that franchise’s appeal. That is, however, only one aspect of Li’s considerable appeal. As vampire franchises go, she has much more in common with Buffy Summers than the shrinking Bella Swan: Li can kick serious ass, yet even at her toughest, she nurses a persistent desire for a normal and secure life, which-- if her second album, Wounded Rhymes, is any indication-- involves intense love, great sex, and weird dance moves. Li proves a rich and compelling character in her songs, which are dark but also complex, contradictory, and, thank goodness, still rough around the edges. Like Joss Whedon’s show, Wounded Rhymes is an album of stark, scinti-

llating contrasts: between fantasy and reality, between the powerful and the vulnerable, between the brash and the quiet, between the rhythmic and the melodic. Audacious anthems jostle next to heartbreak ballads like “Unrequited Love”, with its simple guitar and shoo-wop backing vocals. Dense, busy numbers give way to emotionally and musically stripped tracks like “I Know Places”. “I’m your prostitute, you gon’ get some,” she sings on “Get Some”, a come-on so blunt that it’s become the talking point for this album. As a single, the song brazenly grabs your attention, but in the context of this album, alongside such forlorn songs, it becomes a desperate statement, disarmingly intimate in its role-playing implications but also uncomfortably eager to shed or adopt new identities to ensure a lover’s devotion. Rather than adjust or reconcile them, Li lets all those contradictions ride, having grown more comfortable in her musical skin. While there are no highs here quite as high as Youth Novels’ “Little Bit” or “Breaking It Up” (and no low nearly as low as “Complaint Department”, though “Rich Kids” comes pretty damn close), there is a sense of cohesion missing from that debut, as well as an understanding that a record can be a document of a particularly tumultuous time and place. To write these songs, Li spent long months in New York and Southern California, spending a great deal of time alone in the desert. The result is depressive without being depressing, dark without being bleak, as it rejuvenates, refines, and redirects her eccentricities. The biggest moments on 14

Wounded Rhymes take the form of slower ballads, whether stripped down like “I Know Places” or grandiose like “Sadness Is a Blessing”. But they gain their power in contrast to the more upbeat tracks like opener “Youth Knows No Pain”. Dropping some of the coy affectations of Youth Novels, Li proves a surprisingly dramatic singer with a powerful voice and strong phrasing, able to render the emotional pain of “Sadness Is a Blessing” as somehow exultant a transcen dent state of being. Like any good vocalist, she knows when to bow out and let the music speak for her. “I Know Places” cuts off early to set up a long, dreamy coda that acts as both a quiet promise of escape and an album intermission that sets up the penultimate “Jerome”, which seems to synthesize every single emotional and musical urge on the album. Both ballad and banger, the song sheds its elements until only the thunderous heartbeat rhythm remains. That moment bleeds into the finale, “Silent My Song”, a nearly a cappella closer that swells and fades dramatically. “No fist needed when you call,” Li sings. “You silent my song.” It’s a devastating statement, yet ultimately an untrustworthy one: She has harnessed her heartache and her happiness to amplify her voice, not to lose it.

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The King of Limbs By Radiohead

ow that the music on In Rainbows has had four years to outshine its launch mechanism, it’s easy to forget that the album originally came bundled with an honest attempt to solve a business problem. The pay-what you-think-is-fair system wasn’t just Radiohead being magnanimous, it was using their popularity and their newly won independence to ask what might have been the single most important question facing a shaken music industry: What is an album in the download era actually worth to fans? Announced on Monday of last week and then chucked out to rabid fans like flank steak a day ahead of schedule, the band’s eighth album dispenses with the honesty-box pricing model but still finds them using their influence to interrogate the terms around how we consume and relate to music. Containing a slight eight tracks across 37 minutes, The King of Limbs is Radiohead’s first album to clock in under the 40-minute mark, falling into that limbo between a modern fulllength and an EP. What’s more, it feels like it stops short intentionally, almost confrontationally, as if Radiohead are trying to ask a new kind of question about their music. “None of us want to get into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again,” Thom Yorke told The Believer in August 2009. “It’s just become a real drag. It worked with In Rainbows because we had a real fixed idea about where we were going. But we’ve all said that we can’t possibly dive into that again. It’ll kill us.” This wouldn’t be the first time that a member of Radiohead publicly fantasized about disowning the album format, but it might have been the most convincing. How better to unburden themselves of the stress of making more records in the mold of The Bends, OK Computer, Kid 17

A, Amnesiac, and In Rainbows than by simply changing the terms of their engagement? Radiohead’s eighth record, The King of Limbs, represents a marked attempt to create a considered and cohesive unit of music that nonetheless sits somewhere outside of the spectrum of their previous full-length discography. And that’s not to say that it doesn’t ripple with the dazzling sonics or scenery that have become the band’s stock in trade, but just that, unlike so many of their milestones, there’s no abiding sense of a band defying all expectations in order to establish new precedents. Instead, we get eight songs that feel mostly like small but natural evolutions of previously explored directions. Opener “Bloom” announces Radiohead’s return with a scattershot sequence of chewed-up drum loops and peeling horns that dissolve into a rhythmic tangle. “Morning Mr. Magpie” re-casts an old live acoustic ballad in a more anxious light, its once-sunny disposi-

tion frozen into an icy glare. With its crumbling guitar shapes and clattering, fizzing percussion work, “Little By Little” sounds dilapidated and rundown. Meanwhile, “Feral” contorts Yorke’s voice into a reverb-infused, James Blake-like wriggle that pings around the stereo channel against a mulched up drum pattern that sounds sharper than glass. In this more rhythmic first half of the album, electronic percussion figures in heavily as usual, but also with heightened emphasis on drummer Phil Selway’s uneven time signatures.

This is well-worn terrain for Radiohead, and while it continues to yield rewarding results, the band’s signature gamechanging ambition is missed.

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Anna Calvi By Anna Calvi

The delicacy of its second half-ghostly, yearning singing and spacey makes for a bigger payoff when the drums kick back in and her guitar doubles the vocal lines, giving the ending a truly anthemic quality.

nna Calvi recently listed classical composer Claude Debussy, filmmaker Wong KarWai, and Flamenco music as influences on her self-titled debut album. While none of these signifiers seem to directly shape her music, Calvi’s record feels like it has much in common with cinema and literature. She uses sonic textures to evoke feelings-- from spaghettiwestern guitars to her lung-busting take on gothic melodrama. Musically she’s indebted to a lineage of female songwriters from Edith Piaf and Patti Smith to PJ Harvey. The latter comparison is bolstered by the appearance of longtime Harvey collaborator Rob Ellis on production duties. His rangy, atmospheric handling of the music is one of the record’s standout qualities. While the sound is suitably bombastic, Ellis also takes care to open up enough emptiness in the mix to allow Calvi’s twisting guitar to snake with menace. On the strongest moments, such as “No More Words”, Calvi pushes herself into darker territory, as Ellis allows cavernous space to open up, her voice and guitar sounding as if they are being played into a black hole. It’s also one of the softest songs on the record, crafting a coiled feeling when Calvi’s voice quietens to a 18

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Calvi explores the pained lyrics of goth with references to the devil, darkness, and unrequited love.

whisper, hanging like a thread but never snapping. The restraint has an edge to it that feels provocative. Still there are moments where Calvi ratchets up the drama too readily, and sometimes hams it up-- see “I’ll Be Your Man”, which comes across as campy. More often than not, however, Calvi gets the balance right: “Suzanne and I” feels grand as it lurches from bare guitars underpinned by pounding drums into a skeletal breakdown. The delicacy of its second half-- ghostly, yearning singing and spacey fingerpicking-- makes for a bigger payoff when the drums kick back in and her guitar doubles the vocal lines, giving the ending a truly anthemic quality. On much of the record Calvi explores the pained romanticism of goth with references to the devil, darkness, and unrequited love. These passing

18 allusions are reduced into something elemental on “Desire”, with its impassioned wail against loneliness, as Calvi sings, “You don’t have to be lost”; it’s a rare moment of togetherness and empathy on an album where Calvi can sometimes seem cold. She dresses up in the same outer strength as Piaf often did, but without the same sense of underlying vulnerability. Calvi’s outstanding vocal tone and arrangements carry the emotional punches, while her lyrics can occasionally take a backseat role. She never allows herself to sound truly exposed, and this adds to a sense that, for all its perceived boldness and big climaxes. It can sometimes feel more like a series of controlled demolitions than something from the gut. But once you accept these shortcomings and give yourself over to Calvi’s wall of theater, there are plenty of excellent moments to lose yourself in. 19

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The English Riviera By Metronomy

evonshire, England’s Metronomy have traveled an impressive stylistic distance in the short span of three albums. The group began in 2006 as glitchy electronic smirkers, proffering a garishly irreverent take on chinstroking IDM. Yet for their third full-length effort, The English Riviera, they’ve fully transitioned into a sleek, urbane pop-rock outfit, taking polished cues from the wellheeled likes of Steely Dan and Phoenix. The subtraction and addition of band members during that time surely played a role, yet Metronomy have largely always been the baby of singer and multi-instrumentalist Joseph Mount. And while the music Mount and his

17 comrades are making might sound a lot different from what they were turning out at the group’s inception, the two sounds do have a philosophical kinship. There’s a significant amount of deliberation apparent in both sonic approaches; as loopy as “early” Metronomy may have been, when you’re making electronic music mostly without words that isn’t meant for the dancefloor, craft is necessarily going to be a major selling point. Likewise, finely

all of the songs on The English Riviera sound great, and really involve the listener, there’s an appreciation of that effortlessly attractive sheen

calibrated pop-rock invites an appreciation of its studio-sculpted contours. As you’d imagine given that description, The English Riviera is an extremely listenable album, starting with “We Broke Free”, an exquisite, low-slung slice of 70s studio rock redolent of Boz Scaggs and the Dan. That seductively contented vibe pervades much of the record, including “She Wants”, “Loving Arm”, and the waltzing “Trouble”. While still vigorously scrubbed, songs like “Everything Goes My Way”, “The Look”, and “The Bay” reflect dance and indie sensibilities, aligning those efforts more closely 20

with the likes of Phoenix, Hot Chip, Junior Boys, and Stars. But where Steely Dan’s lounge-lizard odes were laced with irony and venom, and where the springy pop of Phoenix is animated by giddy energy, Mount’s immaculate compositions remain mostly inert. Almost all of the songs on The English Riviera sound great, yet few of them really emotionally or physically involve the listener, and there’s little to take away besides an appreciation of that effortlessly attractive sheen. Metronomy deserve a ton of credit for so quickly and satisfyingly mastering a sound that’s so disparate from the band’s origins.

hat’s up with that guy’s singing, anyway? That question was tossed around quite a bit back in 2008, when Crystal Stilts emerged as one of the more interesting acts in the lo-fi Brooklyn jangle-pop pile. On the band’s debut LP, 2008’s Alight of Night (as well as the preceding Woodsist-co-released self-titled EP), frontman Brad Hargett often sang in a tone-wary, bass-heavy voice, his vocals cloaked in enough echo to nearly smother his dark incantations. However, you didn’t really need to know what he was saying (or, for that matter, what key it was supposed to be sung in) to dive deep into the lonely, dark, and difficult-to-inhabit world of Alight of Night. The band’s somewhat standoffish early live shows further suggested the presence of a complicated aura. Even as the clouds began to break with 2009’s excellent single “Love Is a Wave”, there was still a fair bit of vague menace hanging over what the Stilts were doing. The murkiness continues to recede on the band’s sophomore effort, In Love With Oblivion, but the menace mostly persists-- only, here it feels less introverted and more vivacious, largely due to Hargett’s improvements as a lyricist.

Save for the macho bellowing that stains “Blood Barons”, he’s a smarter, more descriptive presence here, whether he’s bemoaning losing a winter’s love to the “Silver Sun” or surrealistically describing a disappearing act on “Through the Floor”. He can be funny, too-- like on “Invisible City”, when he sings about crawling into a sarcophagus with a girl before repeating, like a too-clever suspect in the interrogation room, “We know what happened at death/ But I don’t have to say why.” This is all, of course, only when you can understand him-- reverb still abounds, and whether this is a feeling triggered by lack of comprehension or listener fatigue in 2011, it comes off as a hampering effect. The cavernous echo that places distance between Hargett and everything else seems especially out of place when taking into consideration how damn good the rest of the band sounds. Joining up with David Feck, frontman of indie pop vets Comet Gain, for last year’s self-titled LP as supergroup Cinema Red and Blue, clearly served them well, as the singular chugging force that ran throughout Alight of Night is replaced here by tight intra-band cohesion and playfulness. You can practically hear the tightly coiled guitar line

In Love with Oblivion By Crystal Stilts

Like their contemporaries, Crystal Stilts are a band meant more to be cultishly admired than embraced as “big ticket” or any of that nonsense.

16 and insistent rhythm in “Invisible City” snap against each other, while all the elements contained in “Half a Moon” sway in unison without congealing into a grossly blaring whole. Also, for a band that might never escape the “lofi” tag, this is a surprisingly ornate and atmospheric record. The jarring effect of the lovely, reedy woodwind melody that emerges from within “Flying into the Sun” is offset by barely there harpsichord dithering that creates an enticing depth of sound, while the elegiac horn that briefly moans in the middle of the unfortunately titled “Alien Rivers” adds an affecting touch to the otherwise turgid, seven-minute-plus dud. Songs open with creaking bug noises, car crashes, shivering tonal squelches-- they’re thinking not just about the song but also how to sing it, in a sense, and the commitment shows. What about that voice? Well, as a vocalist, Hargett’s definitely made some positive strides. And yet, you wish he’d work up the confidence here to embrace his surprisingly affecting upper register.

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Blood Pressures By The Kills

ted toward the latter, that doesn’t mean the Kills can’t continue to summon that frisson through roleplay. But on Blood Pressures, there’s a creeping sense that their individual preoccupations outside the band-- Mosshart as Jack White’s feisty foil in the Dead Weather; Hince as the paparazzi-hounded fiancé of the world’s most famous supermodel-- has diffused some of that intensity, as the duo attempts to evolve its dynamic.

here’s a cute little joke lurking in the background of Alfonso Cuarón’s otherwise bleak dystopian thriller Children of Men. The film is set in the year 2027, and at one point

15 a deejay overheard on a car radio introduces “a blast from the past all the way back to 2003,” before spinning the Kills’ country-blues serenade “Wait”. Even if 2003 was only eight years ago, for the Kills, it might as well be 24, given how far Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince have been able to push the limited parameters of their guitar/drum-machine set-up and develop an identity increasingly distinct from their formative junior-Royal-Trux roots. But even as the Kills have gone from covering Captain Beefheart on their debut 2002 EP, Black Rooster, to teaming up with Spank Rock producer XXXChange for 2008’s electro-fied Midnight Boom, Mosshart and Hince have always conveyed a sense of anxiety and nervous energy through their music. And the duo’s lusty performances eagerly play up the ambiguity of their platonic partnership. It’s a quality that defines them as much as Mosshart’s feverish moan, Hince’s hand-slashing guitar riffs, and the synthetic beats-just Google “the Kills + sexual tension.” And even though the will-they/won’tthey question has been definitively til-

feels at once a return to the Kills’ beatboxblues origins as well an attempt to broaden their palette with more sensitive, intimate turns Sonically, Blood Pressures retreats from Midnight Boom’s dancefloor directives and energized, in-the-pocket pop. The new album feels at once a return to the Kills’ beatbox-blues origins as well an attempt to broaden their palette with more sensitive, intimate turns. Notwithstanding the motorik garage-rock of “Heart Is a Beating Drum” and brash, big-beat stomp “Nail in My Coffin”, this album will present Hince and Mosshart with fewer opportunities to stare each other down suggestively on stage in predatory, fuck-or-fight fashion. Whether it’s the swampy reggae groove of “Satellite”, the clock-punching blues-rock prowl “Damned if She Do”, or the mid-album tandem of Hince’s Lennon-esque reverie “Wild Charms” and Mosshart’s slow-simmering answer track “DNA”, there’s an overarching sense of restraint and resignation that’s disappointing in light of how fearless and adrenalized the band sounded on Midnight Boom. On that album’s standout moments (the desperation of “Last Day of Magic”, the spiky outbursts of “Tape Song”), you could hear Mosshart really pushing herself to project a more passionate persona from behind the Kills’ ultracool, cigarette-smoky pose. By contrast, Blood Pressures’ would-b 22

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et’s get one thing out of the way: Gloss Drop shouldn’t really be compared to its predecessor, Mirrored. The sole Battles record to feature Tyondai Braxton’s digitally cartoonified vocals, Mirrored is now consigned to brilliant one-off status in the Battles catalog; Gloss Drop, created after Braxton left the group entirely, is more of a refinement and expansion of Battles’ early work. In a way, for fans, the loss of Braxton was the best thing that could have happened to Battles. It meant they couldn’t record a true follow up, which might then pale (or just come off as more of the same) next to one of the most distinctive and unexpected debut LPs of the 21st century. Battles could have recorded an all-instrumental album in the Mirrored mold, or they could have drafted in another singer to try and imitate Braxton’s crucial contribution. Instead, they forced themselves, having lost their most immediately striking and divisive element, to move in a new and potentially radical direction. So the important questions with Gloss Drop become, “Is this new direction interesting?” and “Have Battles made it thrilling?” The answers are: “Yes,” and “More often than you might guess.” Mirrored was an album that made its impact via complexity and speed and wild humor, a sound that owed as much to the orchestral zaniness of classic

cartoon soundtracks as the grimmer heads-down virtuosity of the metal and math-rock bands in which the Battles members made their names. Not only could these guys pull off these wild instrumental zigzags at high velocity, they made ultra-tricky, computer-assisted pop-prog sound like fun. For their circumstances-dictated new direction, Battles have slowed their roll a bit, foregrounding both the pop and propulsive qualities of the music rather than its can-we-top-ourselves inventiveness. It still sounds like devious fun, but the sort you get from a band tweaking audience expectations. Gloss Drop is the most ride-thegroove record Battles have ever made, owing plenty to the straight-forwardness of house and rock and the crazed syncopations of soca and dancehall, where Mirrored’s whole point could seem like leaving listeners breathless with this-could-go-anywhere prog invention. Battles are possibly the tightest man-machine unit going now that LCD Soundsystem are dead, you can imagine how hot these grooves burn, and how meticulously they’re constructed, their most audacious attempt yet to make the line between “programmed” and “played” completely invisible. Of course I say these two albums shouldn’t be compared, but that won’t stop most people from doing just that. Inevitably the starker differences bet-

Gloss Drop By Battles

ween the two will leap right out on first listen, but if you’re worried about a complete makeover, Gloss Drop still does sound an awful lot like Battles.

14 There’s the same blurring until you can’t be sure what instrument is responsible for which melodic or rhythmic element of the mix: Are those steel drums all over this record, or a guitar processed to sound that way, or some sort of “Caribbean” software patch?.

Despite all the guests, Gloss Drop will still be best enjoyed by groove heads, whether they come from the rock or dance worlds

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Whether a calculated retreat or just a natural maturation the Horrors have found a sound more content with background and atmosphere, and it suits them nicely.

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t must be hard for a young British band growing up as NME darlings, but the Horrors seem to have handled it all rather well. They made the cover of the magazine in 2006 before having even released an EP, presumably on the strength of their black cottoncandy haircuts and their media connections. And they debuted first single “Sheena Is a Parasite” with an equally uncommon assist from director Chris Cunningham, who had previously done his unsettling, special effects heavy work for more musical outliers such as Aphex Twin and Autechre. But if the Horrors’ high profile debut was baffling, their follow-up moves were encouraging. They spoofed themselves with an appearance on an episode of the British comedy “The Mighty Boosh”, as a band called the Black Tubes, in an episode revolving around protagonist Vince Noir trying to squeeze into a pair of impossibly

13 skinny jeans so he can join the band. They quickly shed the campy, dark garage shocks of debut Strange House,

Skying

By The Horrors

announced a sophomore album produced by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and Cunningham (the latter resulting in a lot of “cinematic” talk despite his decidedly claustrophobic small-screen style), and started stretching out their sound to accommodate eight-minute krautrock jams. This is perhaps the best you can hope for from your rising rock stars: a willingness to laugh at oneself and a will to evolve. Skying continues the evolution set in motion 2009’s Primary Colours, but with an emphasis on melody and pop form. This time, the band recorded and produced in their own studio, crafting a sound that recalls both the gothic pomp of 80s new wave and the big-screen dreaming of early-90s shoegaze, just as it was beginning to transform into

chart-conquering Britpop. That the record can be heard as a catalogue of influences is nothing new for this outfit. They’ve routinely been tagged as “record collector rock” for their unabashed aping of influences from the Cramps to Can-- and indeed their well-selected covers indicate a group that has spent some time in record shops. Skying isn’t likely to change that perception. The insistent chorus and Badwan’s breathy delivery on “I Can See Through You” comes off like the Psychedelic Furs run through the effects rack of My Bloody Valentine. “Monica Gems” nods to Suede with its decadent guitar swirl and Badwan’s moaning sighs. On “Endless Blue”, a horn section pops in for the floating intro as if borrowed from a James Bond theme by way of Blur or “This Is Hardcore” before the song abruptly surges into an impressive rock nosedive. The debts owed here are obvious, but the taste is impeccable, and the application is more often than not convincing.

12 Nine Types of Light By TV on the Radio

n paper, TV on the Radio’s recent accomplishments look like the work of textbook careerists. They left renowned indie label Touch and Go to join Interscope. Their major-label debut boasted a cameo from David Bowie. Singer Tunde Adebimpe starred opposite Anne Hathaway in a Jonathan Demme-directed drama. Guitarist/producer Dave Sitek made a record with Scarlett Johansson and is now possibly joining Jane’s Addiction. Of course, one listen to any TV on the Radio album quickly dispels any notion of calculated opportunism. Even as their art-rock soul has blossomed out

of their home-recording roots into something bigger and bolder, their music is still fraught with a simmering unease; even the dancefloor-ready maneuvers of 2008’s Dear Science exuded a jittery, restless energy that was as tense as it was celebratory. However, as Nine Types of Light suggests, perhaps they just needed to get out of Brooklyn. The new album marks two significant changes in TVOTR’s methodology: It was made in the wake of a one-year hiatus following six years of non-stop recording and touring; and it was recorded in Los Angeles, where Sitek has been steadily building his celebrity clientele list over the past few years. Both factors seem to have influenced the sound and feel of the album: Nine Types of Light is unquestionably TV on the Radio’s most patient, positive recording to date, taking its cues as much from Dear Science’s serene ballads (“Family Tree”, “Love 25

Dog”) as its brassy workouts. Each of the band’s albums has opted for a tonesetting opening salvo, and mission statements don’t come more concise and clear-headed than Tunde Adebimpe’s ecstatic, falsettoed hook on Nine Types’ first song, “Second Song”: “Every lover on a mission/ Shift your known position/ Into the light.” Love songs are, of course, nothing new for TV on the Radio, but they’re usually cast against the grim backdrop of life during wartime: Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes’ doo-wop serenade “Ambulance” spoke of emotional commitment using the language of hospital care; Return to Cookie Mountain’s “Province” effectively equated a declaration of love with an act of radicalism. On Nine Types of Light, however, there seems to be a more concerted effort on the band’s part to not let external pressures sully their inner spirit: Set to steady shuffle beats.

Nine Types of Light shows how TV on the Radio’s songs can be just as effective and affecting when delivered free of static and noise.

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Eye Contact By Gang Gang Dance

ang Gang Dance started as free-form noiseniks; over the years, they’ve managed to mellow out without moving to the center-evolving into purveyors of pan-cultural body-music, marrying club beats with lyrics about communing with the dead. Like Arthur Russell before them, they give equal floorspace to the spiritual and the sensual. By those loopy standards, Eye Contact-- the group’s latest album-is Gang Gang Dance’s finest, weirdest, and most uplifting statement yet. Eye Contact doesn’t kick off so much as it wakes up, easing into existence via 11-minute opener, “Glass Jar”. Synth and piano arpeggios shine through the stereo field, percolating through a filter of jazz percussion before settling into a propulsive Eastern groove. It’s a song about reincarnation. It’s “Darkstar” and Alice Coltrane and the Boredoms in one blissed-out burst of sound. They’re not much of a singles band, though. Gang Gang Dance’s vision tends to require a larger, album-length, canvas. Since 2005’s God’s Money, each of the band’s records has played as a single piece-- each song slurring into the next, building toward an ecstatic climax, mirroring the feel of a concert performance or a DJ set. Eye Contact holds to that ideal. Seven songs are strung together into a single composition, bound by abstract ligatures. But it’s an improvement of the formula. On Eye Contact, Gang Gang strike a better balance of song craft

and atmosphere. The band’s previous record, Saint Dymphna, had admirable futurist-pop ambitions-- collaging elements of hyphy, grime, techno, and contemporary R&B into a psychedelic stew-- but it sometimes came off overcooked. The instrumentals were often bursting with soupy sonic details, while Gang Gang’s passes at honestto-goodness pop-- other than Kate Bush-homage “House Jam”-were at times stiff and overconsidered. Eye Contact is considerably more relaxed. It’s a smooth and moody record. The composed parts are more memorable. The interludes are, well, shorter.

Following Dymphna, the band’s original drummer, Tim Dewit, parted ways with the group. His distinctive, stuttering rhythms are missed, but his replacement, Jesse Lee-- a steadier and harder hitting player -- brings a more consistent feel to the rhythm section. Ariel Pink bassist Tim Koh adds some

quiet storm-style bass to the airy and melodic “Chinese High”. Hot Chip frontman Alexis Taylor wanders onto the mic during “Romance Layers” to croon over some a new jack-era soul. And yet this is not a pop record, per se, but the stuff of pop records collected, melted down, and then dribbled Jackson Pollock-style onto a canvas. Singer Lizzi Bougatsos borrows melodies from Indian pop, Brian DeGraw swipes some

sub bass from the UK underground, and guitarist Josh Diamond nicks some riffs from North Africa. But Gang Gang aren’t just collecting exotic hooks for the sake of bragging rights. The band seems to consciously gravitate toward cultures and genres where music is still overtly tethered to spirituality. Maybe it’s because they miss their friends. Eye Contact is a ghost-heavy record. Two songs are dedicated to fallen New York

Eye Contact is more relaxed. It’s a smooth and moody record. The composed parts are more memorable.

art scene comrades. “Glass Jar” pays homage to former band mate Nathan Maddox, who was killed by a lightning bolt in 2002. “Sacer” is a shout-out to artist Dash Snow, who perished in 2009, from a drug overdose. Eye Contact dials back the aural fog, at least by Gang Gang standards. It’s a tighter and more focused record that pares back the band’s habit for noisy embellishment and psychic jewelry to reveal taught rhythms and catchy hooks. “In the past, I imagined our music being more about closing your eyes and escaping,” explained DeGraw during a recent interview. “This one felt wide-eyed, as if we were just staring at

11 the listener.” Whether they’re comfortable with the outside world is less clear. “Better call the neurosurgeon,” sings Bougatsos on album closer “Thru and Thru”. “Our dreaming space it is open.”

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rika M. Anderson has talked about finding “true bliss and terror” in the live performances of her former band, Gowns. The pressure-cooker atmosphere she and her partner in that group (and in life) Ezra Buchla immersed themselves in had to crack at some point, and it did, fatally and finally, at the beginning of 2010. Anderson’s way of propping open an escape hatch from the bruised purging of Gowns was to retreat into herself, by gathering her collective musical ideas and putting them out under her own initials. But it’s immediately apparent

on hearing Past Life Martyred Saints, her debut full-length as EMA, that she’s still all tangled up in “bliss and terror.” For the most part, it’s a white-knuckle ride. There’s no pretense or pose here. No pulling back from the brink to foster an air of cool detachment. Anderson’s music has the power to plummet to the depths and drag you right down there with her. There’s a lack of timidity in the way this music is expressed. It’s almost as though Anderson snoozed her way through the past decade and is picking up threads that have mostly lain dor28

mant since the early-to-mid 1990s. The boldness in her language, which thematically pings back and forth between emotional and physical duress, has the same naked volatility as Kat Bjelland circa Spanking Machine or Courtney Love in her Pretty on the Inside phase. It’s often terrifying, distressing stuff. There’s a feeling that you’re watching someone in the midst of several life crises. It’s a strange kind of testament to Past Life Martyred Saints that it often feels like a daunting proposition to listen to, as if spending too much time with it will leave you as scarred as its creator.

Past Life Martyred Saints By EMA

The lyrical fixations here frequently zoom in on Cronenberg-ian body horror, with Anderson exploring the gnarly elasticity of the human frame when it’s placed under threat. EMA songs often duck into little mantras; “Butterfly Knife” bears one of the most unnerving of those in its “20 kisses with a butterfly knife” line. “Marked” is similarly nauseating and obsessed with physical abuse. Over a noise that sounds like water chugging down rusty steel piping Anderson devolves into repeating: “I wish that every time he touched me he left a mark.” It dwells in the same

kind of unsettling territory as Goffin/King’s “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)”, and the bare-bones musical arrangement heightens the severity of the message just as Phil Spector’s production did on the Crystals’ song. That ability for her arrangements to acutely reflect her lyrical mood is one of Anderson’s trump cards. She knows exactly when to add and subtract elements, bringing “Marked” out of the doldrums at its close with a warm organ tone that she deploys whenever things get a little too heavy (see also: “Milkman”). The opening “The Grey Ship” is one of her most ambitious conceits in that regard. It shifts in style several times, from its earthy, folk-y opening to a midsection where all the instrumentation vanishes suddenly as if the bottom just fell out of the world. It’s a sign of her confidence and am29

bition that she can open the record with such a multi-faceted song, full of odd diversions and unexpected twists that need multiple plays to really sink in. But the hit-rate here is high. “California” is among Anderson’s best works, a stream-of-consciousness rant about displacement and alienation set to a musical backing that feels like civilization collapsing around her. “California” shows off her enviable talent for finding a comfortable place where big-topic sloganeering and personal tales can coexist. It’s that sweat-soaked headrush of repulsion, sadness, anxiety, and nostalgia you get when you feel the tug of home. Past Life Martyred Saints is a fiercely individual record, made by a musician with a fearless and courageous approach to her art. Crucially, the desire to let such raw emotion out in song never feels forced. It simply wouldn’t work this well if there was a hint of artifice, or a suggestion that Anderson hadn’t regurgitated all these feelings of loss, loathing, and rejection from a pit of genuinely volatile emotion. There’s a conviction to her delivery that leaves you in no doubt that this is something she needed to flush out of her system.

There’s a lack of timidity in the way this music is expressed. It’s almost as though Anderson snoozed her way through the past decade and is picking up threads that have mostly lain dormant since the early-tomid 1990s.

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he headline of one of the best Hollywood gossip stories you’re likely to encounter this year reads, “Shia LaBeouf and Michael Bay Got in a Really Big Fight Over Feist.” To prepare for an emotional scene in Transformers 3, LaBeouf plugged his iPad into a pair of on-set speakers and was vibing to The Reminder ballad “Brandy Alexander” when Bay abruptly shut the song off. Things got heated, “spit [was] flying,” and Bay stormed

9 off set. Whatever this incident tells us about Michael Bay (like maybe he’s just really impassioned in his opinion that Let It Die was a better record), it tells us even more about where we’re currently at, culturally speaking, with Feist. Even among Hollywood titans, she’s divisive. She has probably, over the past couple of years, helped an infinite number of jocks and action stars get in touch with their latent emotions (“It’s a little feminine,” LaBeouf told the Los Angeles Times of “Brandy Alexander”, “but it touches me”). But most importantly, the low croon of her honeyed, creaky-door voice has become pop culture shorthand for “the diametrical opposite of what robots blowing shit up sounds like.” And yet, her third album, Metals, is full of dynamic outbursts. There’s the chorus of austere, male shouts that punctuates “A Commotion”, the towering, climactic swell of strings in “Anti-Pioneer”, and plenty more folk-pop numbers that begin small but explode suddenly into stomping, hollering, densely peopled jamborees. Building on some ideas she first explored in The Reminder’s lively take on the folk traditional “Sealion”, Metals is a record animated with, as she put it, “the movement of a lot of humans.” Though her least immediate album-- it lacks The Reminder’s pop showstoppers or the charm of Let It Die’s restless genre-hopping-- Metals is a vivid evocation of a place that touches on fittingly vast themes about nature, love, and life itself. To record Metals, Feist-- along with

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her trusty producers Chilly Gonzales and Mocky (who’ve been working her since she was Peaches’ hypegirl back in early-2000s Toronto)-- headed out to Big Sur and built a studio on the side of a cliff. All the things you might associate with the area (majestic expanse, outdoorsiness, and Kerouac-sized spiritual interrogation) seep into Metals’ sound, which conjures panoramic vistas with quiet ease. String and brass arrangements (the latter of which heavily feature avant-saxophonist Colin Stetson) are omnipresent but never overworked: check out the way they briefly balloon into the frame toward the middle of “Anti-Pioneer” and then gracefully recede a moment later. Metals is invested in subtle, textural detail and shifting dynamics; it sometimes stays so quiet that a whole flock of birds would feel compelled perch on it, and then in the next breath it does something surprising enough to send them scattering in a flurry. Metals is the Meek’s Cutoff of Feist records, both in the way it eschews the traditional rules of the crowd-pleasing blockbuster, and also because there’s a lot of talk about pioneers and mountains. Nature imagery is everywhere: the

Metals is invested in subtle, textural detail and shifting dynamics; it sometimes stays so quiet that a whole flock of birds would feel compelled perch on it, and then iit does something surprising enough to send them scattering in a flurry.

Metals By Feist

serene meditation “The Circle Married the Line” escapes the busy squiggles of modern life (“I’ll head out to horizon lines/ Get some clarity oceanside”) by boiling down a sunset to its simplest geometric forms, while the gorgeous acoustic number “Cicadas and Gulls” takes flight: “The land and the sea/ Are distant from me/ I’m in the sky.” Metals displays a shift in Feist’s perspective as a songwriter; after The Reminder she’s said she’s now less interested in writing songs that could be read as intimate and personal but instead crafting lyrics that read almost like sparse proverbs. (She’s likened some of the lines on Metals to “adages and morals that you find embroidered in junk shops.”) The resulting tracks feel universal, and not unlike Bill Callahan’s Apocalypse, in their attempts to use the contrast the elegance of the things around us with the weird, erratic ways of human beings. And now to address the break-dancing, earbud-wearing, silhouetted elephant in the room: there’s no “1234” on this record. In fact, though it’s by no stretch a difficult album,

Metals feels deliberately uninterested in courting pop audiences or crafting easy hooks, which is why it feels like such a refreshing and slyly badass statement of artistic integrity. At the same time, this is also the reason it doesn’t reach The Reminder’s heights. It’s a bit too even-keeled to incorporate the sense of pastiche that made her earlier two records so exciting. Side B’s most exquisite highlight is “Anti-Pioneer”, a song that Feist started working on 10 years ago but could never quite capture to her liking on tape. Here, she got it so right: An unhurried guitar lick and the bluesy gust of her vocals roll like tumbleweeds over a minimal soundscape as she sings about a woman who was used to moving but, “for a year,” set down her roots and “was anti-pioneer.” A touring musician since her teens, Feist has spent the past 15 years more or less on the road, so it’s hard not to read these lines as autobiographical. But the chorus brings in the universiality, applying that sense of restlessness to a healthy creative process: “When the flag changes colours/ The language knows.” It’s a fitting statement about Metals, and Feist herself-- shifting between moments of repose and restless explorations of new frontiers.

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Circuital

By My Morning Jacket

y Morning Jacket have always been something of a mythic outfit. Back in 1999, when the band released its de-

My Morning Jacket can sometimes sound like a band struggling against its own best interests, huge, ghostly, terrifying rock’n’roll-it does so disarmingly well.

but LP, The Tennessee Fire (and again in 2001, after the release of At Dawn), its legend was whispered quietly, like a ghost story: Kentucky, grain silos, reverb, that high, liquid voice. As 2001 was the apex of a certain kind of dark, New York City cool-- with the Strokes and Interpol slouching around the Lower East Side in threadbare t-shirts and tiny ties-- My Morning Jacket were steeped in a warm, eerie other-ness that culminated, cathartically, with Jim James howling “All your life/ Is obscene.” Well, sure. In the ensuing decade, the band became legendary for its heroic live show (in 2008, they stormed through a near-four-hour set at Bonnaroo), but its studio work has always been a little

less triumphant. On record, My Morning Jacket can sometimes sound like a band struggling against its own best interests, purposefully eschewing the exact thing-- huge, ghostly, terrifying rock’n’roll-- it does so disarmingly well. Accordingly, the reigning press narrative surrounding Circuital, MMJ’s sixth LP, has been focused on the band’s supposed “return to form,” a response that feels like a direct reaction to its title. But what are they returning to, exactly? My Morning Jacket’s early discography is rooted in oddball experimentation: Despite the open-mouthed riffing, impenetrable reverb, and whipping hair, they’ve never really been a straightforward rock band, especially on record. Jim James’ penchant for psychedelic soul is constantly manifesting in new ways, and while Circuital is closer, certainly, to 2005’s Z than Evil Ur-

ges, it doesn’t feel like a step backwards, or even like a lateral hop. The record opens with James tooting a half-serious introductory “horn” riff that belies a goofy sense of humor. James has always been something of a jokester, but his voice is so naturally dramatic that even silly bits can sound like earnest proclamations. That’s why- and this is unique to MMJ-- he often sounds best when he’s delivering vague platitudes. Still, anyone who’s ever heard James wail in concert is likely to be frustrated by the eternal underuse of his voice in the studio, even when the songs were ostensibly recorded live. There are a few tracks here where producer Tucker Martine captures it in all its intoxicating splendor-- the acoustic lament “Wonderful (The Way I Feel)” especially-- but most only hint at what James is capable of delivering in person. His falsetto comes back for “Holdin on to Black Metal”, a bizarre bit of jam-funk that alternates between pleasantly spirited and genuinely stupid (it’s a cautionary tale about not growing out of black metal fandom, and ends with a shout of “Let’s rock!”). On “Slow Slow Tune”, James sounds remarkably vulnerable, singing to his future progeny over a barely there, bubblegum guitar figure that recalls the Everly Brothers before transitioning into a Flaming Lips-style burnout.

irected by French New Wave great Éric Rohmer, 1972’s Chloe in the Afternoon tells of a man caught between fidelity and a stylish old friend named Chloe, who usually pops up at his office after lunch. But just when it looks like the two are going to consummate their affair, the husband is struck with a crisis of conscience and runs back home to his wife. The opening track on Annie Clark’s third album as St. Vincent is also called “Chloe in the Afternoon”, and while Clark has acknowledged the influence of Rohmer’s film on the song, she takes the story to a darker, more dominatrix-y place. In her telling, Chloe carries a “black lacquered horse-hair whip,” and, presumably, is paid to use it on white-collar exhibitionists looking for a sadistic tea-time fix. Clark’s monstrously corroded guitar riff stands in for the bruised skin and wincing faces; it’s hard to tell if she’s singing as the person wearing heels or the person being

stepped on with them, and that’s most definitely the point. Across three albums, the Dallas native has become a master of subverting her picture-perfectness with violence, rage, and mystery-- “I’ll make you sorry,” sang Clark in creepy lullaby tones on the very first song on her debut album. The juxtaposition is naturally intriguing, a sophisticated twist on finding out that the horror-movie killer was actually the girl next door all along. “Physically, I’m a very demure-looking person,” Clark said in a recent Pitchfork interview, “but I certainly have as much aggression or anger as the next person, and that’s got to come out somehow.” On her fine, art-rocking debut, Marry Me, those feelings of hurt, loss, and bloodlust could translate a tad cutesy. (On new track “Cheerleader”, the lines, “I’ve played dumb when I knew better/ Tried too hard just to be clever,” sound more self-consciously frank than usual.) Follow-up Actor found Clark over-em-

bellishing at times, adding superfluous strings and flutes that often muddied her message. But Clark’s recent live Big Black covers saw her taking the pretty/ugly contrast to raw new levels: “I think I fucked your girlfriend once, maybe twice,” she sang, fervently, on “Bad Penny”, “I fucked all your friends’ girlfriends--

now they hate you!” And anyone who’s seen the Berklee dropout do her seizured duckwalk in concert while soloing on unhinged tracks like “Your Lips Are Red” knows her not-so-secret weapon is a lurching guitar style somewhere

Strange Mercy By St. Vincent between Robert Fripp’s sheet-metal prog and Tom Morello’s 10-ton riffage. On Strange Mercy, she ditches Marry Me’s naivety and Actor’s ostentatious arrangements, boosts the inventive guitar playing, and ends up with her most potent and cathartic release yet. Some tracks build like a hot kettle, puffing out ragged smoke in the form of instrumental curlicues. “Surgeon” finds Clark zonked, despondent, paralyzed. “Turn off the TV, wade in bed, a blue and a red, a little something to get along,” she sings, “best, finest surgeon, come cut me open.” 33

Some tracks build like a hot kettle, puffing out ragged smoke in the form of MUSICAl curlicues

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Burst Apart By The Antlers

The Antlers won’t hold your hand through Burst Apart, which will inevitably make it more of a grower...

rooklyn’s indie scene can feel like a series of bands each trying to be hipper than the next, but thankfully nobody told Pete Silberman. In the dog days of 2009’s deadbeat summer, the Antlers frontman emerged from his bedroom with his third LP, Hospice. On it, he unfashionably embraced hackles-raising choruses and concept-album ambition, and he pushed the button on emotional nuclear options: abortion, cancer, death, all that fun stuff. Now a trio, the Antlers have claimed the influence of

“electronic music” for Burst Apart, a typical omen for a typically “difficult follow-up album.” But while Burst Apart sheds the PR-bait bio and Arcade Fire aspirations that made its predecessor a word-of-mouth success, it’s still tethered to a magnanimity and expressive clarity that makes it almost every bit as devastating. Lead single “Parentheses” didn’t do much to show their hand; it’s pretty misleading out of context. Sounding like a higher-BPM “Climbing Up the Walls”, the knockabout electronic percussion and tweaked piano ripples rightfully marked some connection to the post-OK Computer, pre-Kid A application of Mo’ Wax and Warp textures to alt-rock song structures. But the aggression in Silberman’s falsetto and the gnarly guitar distortion are revealed as total outliers, and Burst Apart can actually be seen as Hospice turned inside out: Where before, long swathes of calm white noise linked emotive outcries, Burst Apart moves patiently through luxurious downtempo tones belying some serious romantic disturbance. Those well-versed in dream journal interpretation could gather that from the mere title of “Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out” (a common symbolic 34

manifestation of sexual frustration). After all, Burst Apart does open with “I Don’t Want Love”, a heartbreaking wallow in a numbing hangover from a singer who previously seemed doomed to feel too much. Its glistening melody at least helps it scan as pop, but “Parentheses” and “Every Night” feel cut from the same cloth as the Walkmen’s “The Rat”, holding onto sanity with white knuckles, sexual congress seen as mutually assured destruction. Aside from those, Burst Apart’s atmosphere is nocturnal and desolate. Foreboding death-crawl “No Widows” fears for vehicular disaster; brief flickers of light are allowed full exposure on the gorgeous, incantatory centerpiece “Rolled Together”, whose brushed drum work and silvery guitars could be heard as a studiously completed homework assignment on Agaetis Byrjun. Meanwhile, the tender, nearly beatless balladry of “Hounds” and “Corsicana” are wholly the Antlers’ own and painfully pretty to behold-- however depressive Silberman’s lyrics, one can simply revel in the zero-gravity synth and vocal moans and feel some sort of uplift. Shame that it makes Burst Apart’s missteps all too egregious. This isn’t the sort of record that calls for a showstopping power ballad.

epic proportions. Her bouts of nihilism feel nervier and more bracing in the unforgiving light of sonic clarity. The closer she gets, the more enigmatic she’s revealed to be.

it’s refreshing and exciting to hear music that relies on bone-hard essence rather than gauzy trimmings to create an aura of mystery.

5 Conatus is mainly built from thundering toms, majestically revolving synthesizers, and warm courses of classical stringed instruments. “I kept having these primal images,” she said of the music, “just quite strange landscapes and shapes I couldn’t shake.” That may sound like a meaningless gloss, but on “Swords”, the minute-long opening track, you can hear exactly what she means. Concussive drums and scrolling mechanical textures vividly evoke a terrain. Whatever biosphere you choose to project on it (I get desert), Danilova’s voice remains fixed on a faraway horizon, receding as you approach. When she bursts into the foreground on “Avalanche” and stays there for the remainder of the album, the impression of impassable distance lingers. This is partly because of the authority of Danilova’s voice, and partly because the music gives nothing away, thrumming along

Conatus

By Zola Jesus

ika Roza Danilova began her Zola Jesus project with a formidable arsenal already in place. She had a richly gothic perspective honed by a rural upbringing and studies in philosophy, a background in opera conjoined with a taste for industrial music, and a scarred-yetcommanding voice. The albums and EPs she issued over the last couple of years were startlingly realized for such

a young artist, but Conatus, a big record that keeps turning dark and strident, makes them seem like warning shots. Most traces of obscuring murk have burned away, so that every pock and ridge in the rugged, elemental music stands out distinctly. It’s new wave mounted on a geological scale, where Danilova’s solipsistic spirit-- “I was able to communicate this universe that is my prison,” she said of “Vessel”-- assumes 35

with power that shades into ambivalence toward the shifting emotional register of the singing. The results are dramatic but never melodramatic, as Danilova maps the dimensions of her self-imprisonment with resolve. Though some may miss the approach of her last two EPs, it’s refreshing to hear music that relies on bone-hard essence rather than gauzy trimmings to create an aura of mystery.

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Father, Son, Holy Ghost By Girls

the record comes alive with color and personality largely thanks to Girls’ singer and songwriter Christopher Owens. He has a gift for turning clichés into into deeply affecting songs

e may eventually remember 2011 as the Year of Retro. Critic Simon Reynolds’ recent book on the subject tapped into a feeling a lot of people had but couldn’t quite pin down: In the age of the limitless archive, the relationship between new artists and their influences are changing. Since the retirement of LCD Soundsystem, San Francisco’s Girls, who return here after the terrific debut LP Album and an also-great follow-up EP, just might be the band best making use of the current situation. Their music pilfers from the past without shame but also manages to sound like no one else. The first listen to Father, Son, Holy Ghost brings with it an almost eerie sense of familiarity, like these are songs you’ve been hearing your whole life even

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when you can’t place them, and it’s sometimes startling just how specific the references can be. The opening “Honey Bunny” has a shuffling beat and riff that is close to Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome”; “Love Like a River” has a verse structure, chord changes, and tinkling piano arrangement almost identical to the Beatles’ “Oh! Darlin”, which was itself a direct rip of songs like “Blueberry Hill”. “Magic” has bouncy sunshine pop chords that bring to mind something from a Have a Nice Day comp, “Die” has almost the same melody as Deep Purple’s “Highway Star”. The arrangements throughout have whirring organ, guitar fills, solos, flutes, and backing vocals borrowed from classic rock and placed exactly where you would expect them to be. And tying it all together is the production from Doug Boehm and the band, which sounds “old” simply because it sounds so incredibly good. This is one of the best-sounding rock records in years, redolent of a time when there was more money to spend in getting the basic tracks perfect, better ears to figure out which microphone should be used and precisely where it should be placed, and no pressure to make the mix ultra-hot for digitally-driven radio. But if Father were merely an exceptionally recorded album built on obvious nods to the past, it wouldn’t add up to much. Instead, the record comes alive with color and personality largely thanks to Girls’ singer and songwriter Christopher Owens. He has a preternatural gift for turning clichés into into deeply affecting songs, and as they jump from one style to the next, from delicate acoustic balladry to noisy rave-ups, Owens’ voice and point of view ground the record and make it distinctive. He is the center. As long as he is writing and singing, no matter what else is going on and being referenced, the music will be utterly his. A lot of that is up to the timbre of his voice. On Album, Owens often had the pinched, clogged-sinus tone of Elvis Costello without the sneer, but here his vocals are warmer and softer, often bringing to mind the whispery tone of Elliott Smith. It’s a testament to the care of the recording that even when he seems to be cooing into the microphone while the sometimes-thick arrangements grow around him, every word is clear and in balance. His voice 36

exhibits both weariness and innocence and manages to convey hope and despair in equal measure. It also has an androgynous quality that fits the themes of Girls’ music. Owens’ songs often seem to have an undefined and undirected desire for love and sex and friendship that exists outside of any one idea of sexuality. It’s about feelings first, and the object of them second; who or what the singer wants is less important than the fact that the yearning is there, and it’s unfulfilled, and that hurts. The lack of specificity can give Owens’ songs a narcissistic slant, but it feels most like the self-obsession of early childhood, where lines between the self and the outside world aren’t clear. “I can see so much clearer when I just close my eyes,” he sings at one point, and it feels like the work of someone who has done a lot of thinking in the dark. Indeed, so much about Owens’ lyrical outlook, from how he uses shopworn imagery to the disarming simplicity of his declarations, conveys the sense of a child feeling around, discovering for the first time things we all found and absorbed years ago. So when he sings “My love is like a river/ She just keeps on rolling on” and “Lay my burden down by the river’s edge” in “Love Like a River”, it sounds like someone starting from the simplest conventions of the pop song and working inward to see if life actually functions the way that the songs tell us it does. Not since Jonathan Richman has there been a songwriter so willing to convey honest and deep feelings through the most basic pop syntax, and Owens also shares Richman’s desire to use familiar song forms to get these essential messages across. On Album, it was easy to hear the words and focus on Owens’ backstory, which included being raised in a cult whose belief system contributed to the premature death of his brother. But these songs feel too essential and relatable to connect it to Owens’ life alone. It’s more about what we make of it as listeners and less about the damage of his early years. On the heart-warming opening song, “Honey Bunny”, he sings about how his mother loved and accepted him and told him that “everything will be all right” and then follows by saying, “I need a woman who loves me! me! me! me!”

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Bon Iver

By Bon Iver

he guy who recorded an album alone in the woods. This line might end up on Justin Vernon’s tombstone. There’s something irresistible about the thought of a bearded dude from small-town Wisconsin retreating, heartbroken, to a cabin to

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write some songs-- especially when the result is a record that sounds as hushed and introspective as Bon Iver’s 2007 debut, For Emma, Forever Ago. These days, Vernon is more likely to poke fun at the image, but it endures because it fulfils a fantasy for us as listeners. Even if we don’t care for the outdoors, most of us occasionally want to escape our lives, be alone with our thoughts, and see if we can tap into something true. In a time of easy distraction, the idea 38

of heading into a cabin at the edge of the world to create is alluring. By tying the intimacy of that image to Justin Vernon’s music, we’re able to take the trip with him. Since that album’s release, Vernon’s approach to writing and recording has changed. “I don’t find inspiration by just sitting down with a guitar anymore,” he recently told Pitchfork. “I wanted to build a sound from scratch and then use that sound to make the

song.” That difference is clear on Bon Iver. Instead of something that scans as “folk,” the music here is more like rustic chamber pop with an experimental edge that makes careful use of arrangement and dynamics. And rather than being tied together by a central theme of loss, Vernon has fully shifted into a more impressionistic mode; these songs are broader and more musically sophisticated than those on For Emma at every turn. But the thread between this album and its comparatively skeletal predecessor is Vernon’s voice, an instrument that feels warm and personal and close regardless of setting. Now that we’ve heard him singing hooks with Kanye West and taking the lead with Gayngs on songs that touch on R&B and soft rock, the general sphere of Vernon’s voice is clear. He simultaneously evokes the grain and expression of soul music along with the mythological echoes of folk. But more importantly, no one else sounds like him. The Beach Boys have been the primary touchstone for layered vocals in indie music for years, but Vernon’s timbre comes from somewhere else entirely. Where “Beach Boys harmonies” have a spiritual undercurrent that brings to mind a choirboy’s dream of perfection, Vernon sounds like a man who has outgrown such ideas. His voice is earthy and wounded and, despite his astonishing upper register, not something you would describe as “angelic.”

“Holocene” contains one of this album’s many virtuosic vocal performances. “Part of me, apart from me,” Vernon sings early on, and those six words hold a lot. The evocative nature of his diction is apparent even in a simple line like “I was not magnificent.” He sounds centered and clear while taking stock and allowing memories to be mixed in with the details of the present. His conflicted vocals trigger a half-dozen feelings all at once before releasing the tension with a refrain that finds the fleeting moment where the world seems right: “I could see for miles, miles, miles.” Vernon posted Bon Iver’s lyrics shortly after the album leaked last month, but they’re not easy to parse-- the storytelling here is oblique. But there are connections. The song titles reference actual places (“Calgary”) and places that sound real, but aren’t (“Hinnom, TX”, “Michicant”); they’re less about geography and more about putting a name to a state of mind that mixes clarity and surrealism. And the deeper you sink into these tracks, the harder it becomes to extract specifics. One recurring element is intoxication-lines about being drunk or high that come with recounted details. Which makes sense, because the album deals with escape and the struggle to get outside yourself. The narrator takes in what’s around him, mixing those thoughts with memories of where he’s been. Sometimes the lines have a

3 startling specificity (“Third and Lake it burnt away, the hallway/ Was where we learned to celebrate,” on “Holocene”) and sometimes they contain words that seem to function more as sound (“fide” or “fane” on “Perth”) Throughout, there’s a strong sense of an observer taking things in and processing confusing images, trying to figure out what can be learned. If you caught Vernon live after For Emma, you gradually saw him putting more and more emphasis on his band, moving Bon Iver from that solitary project into something that felt more like the work of a group. And Bon Iver, with its rich and layered arrangements, extends that development in a striking direction that’s both logical and surprising. Blending natural instrumentation supplied by recruited players-- such as string arranger Rob Moose (Antony and the Johnsons, the National, Arcade Fire) and a horn/ woodwind section that includes versatile saxophonist Colin Stetson-- with an array of electronic and treated sounds, the album combines varied textures in ways that are ambitious and unusual but often subtle enough to miss on first glance.

Vernon has taken that voice, and these sounds, and crafted an album that unfolds like a suite. The structure is flawless right up to its conclusion,

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Let England Shake By PJ Harvey

“T

he West’s asleep,” PJ Harvey declares on the first line of her new album, Let England Shake, before spending the next 40 minutes aiming to shame, frighten, and agitate it into action. When Polly Jean Harvey burst into the public consciousness in the early 90s, her gravelly voice, outsized personality, and often disturbing lyrics gave the alt-rock world a crucial shot of excitement. That early work is still among the most raw and real guitar music to emerge from the past few decades, so no surprise, it’s a version of PJ Harvey a lot of people still miss. But if you’ve paid attention to her in the years since, the one thing you can expect is that she won’t repeat herself. On Let England Shake, Harvey is not often upfront or forceful; her lyrics, though, are as disturbing as ever. Here, she paints vivid portraits of war, and her sharp focus on th e up-close, handto-hand devastation of World War I-depicting “soldiers falling like lumps of meat”-- provides a fitting setting for today’s battlegrounds. From the Zombies to the Pogues, artists have often gravitated to the confused, massive loss

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of life of the Great War. If it doesn’t resonate as much in America as it does in Europe-- and it doesn’t-- that’s more our fortune than our shame. The Great War remains a rich and resonant subject for art because it briefly caused the world to step back, aghast and afraid to look at what it had done. The collective trauma of World War I did indeed shake England, specifically, out of the end of its imperialistic Victorian stupor. The rest of the world gasped as well: WWI hastened the Russian Revolution, coaxed the U.S. into isolationism and a flirtation with pacifism, and set the tone for a shunned Germany to embrace the Third Reich. Culturally, the result was modernism, dadaism, and surrealism continuing to overtake the giddiness of la belle époque; geopolitically, it redrew European borders, creating roughly a dozen new nations; diplomatically, the League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations, was meant to prevent war, at least on this scale, from ever happening again. On “The Words That Maketh Murder”, Harvey blackly and comically shakes her head at those post-WWI diplomatic hopes. After spinning tales lamenting what a soldier has seen and done, she and her cohorts-- frequent collaborators John Parish and Mick Harvey-- break into the jaunty closing refrain from “Summertime Blues”: “What if I take my problems to the United Nations?” It’s a hilariously depressing coda; her song’s character has experienced the unimaginable and is looking to an international peacekeeping body for help. Throughout the record, Harvey sings in her higher register, as she often did on the underrated White Chalk, granting her some detachment from her surroundings. Instead of owning the spotlight outright, as she did in the 90s, she floats above and beside it; it’s a neat trick that forces listeners

With autoharp, zither, saxophone, and other new instruments added to her palette, Harvey crucially crafts sturdy, earwormy melodies.

2 to crawl closer to her words, allowing them to slowly come into focus. The textural and tonal qualities of her voice are made malleable, a scalpel wielded with precision rather than a sword. On the whole, she carries distant echoes of her peers and successors-- Joanna Newsom, Björk, Kate Bush-- while remaining clearly and identifiably herself. Harvey does this musically too, incorporating traces of English folk, early rock, reverbed dream-pop, and disparate familiar melodies (as well as “Summertime Blues,” she appropriates Niney the Observer’s apocalyptic “Blood and Fire” on the one directly Iraq-related song here, “Written on the Forehead”, plus a close approximation of “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” that originally played a larger role on the record) as a foundation. With autoharp, zither, saxophone, and other new instruments added to her palette, Harvey crucially crafts sturdy, earwormy melodies. If you didn’t listen to the words, the record would scan as beautiful, even docile or tame. Harvey forces you to locate the real world behind a pleasantly hazy foreground. Even considering all of the horror on display, this is her most straightforward and easy to embrace album in a decade. Along with “The Words That Maketh Murder”, the bouncing title track, the radio rock of “The Last Living Rose”, and “Written on the Forehead” would all make excellent singles. They’ll all get a chance, so to speak: Harvey commissioned war photographer Seamus Murphy to craft videos for each of the record’s dozen tracks. (Three of them have already been released: “Let England Shake”, “The Words That Maketh Murder”, and “The Last Living Rose”.) As much of a piece as this record is, its songs also work in their own contexts, and despite using a limited number of players and instruments, Harvey and co. locate a wide range of approaches to their central subject; alongside the singles, those include the rousing folk-rock of “Bitter Branches”, the delicate “Hanging in the Wire”, and the acoustic “England”. 41

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Helplessness Blues By Fleet Foxes

leet Foxes’ unpretentious, crowd-pleasing directness was the key to their rapid rise. Their Sun Giant EP and self-titled debut LP, both released in 2008, brimmed with inviting melodies, evocative lyrics, and open-armed harmonizing that seemed designed to reach a wide variety of listeners. Their bright folk-rock sound wasn’t exactly “cool,” but that was sort of the point-- it’s familiar in the most pleasing way, lacking conceit or affectation. Their expression of their love for music (and making music) was refreshing three years ago, and that sort of thing never gets old. But clouds inevitably roll in. On the band’s follow-up, Helplessness Blues,

the mood is darker and more uncertain, adding shade to their gold-hued sound. The change in tone reflects the tumultuous road Fleet Foxes traveled during the album’s creation. In late 2009, Fleet Foxes had an album’s worth of songs ready, but the tracks were mostly scrapped before mixing. The arduous creative process took a toll on the group members, particularly songwriter Robin Pecknold, who told Pitchfork at the time, “The last year has been a really trying creative process where I’ve not been knowing what or how to write.” The group’s persistence paid off, though: Helplessness Blues is comparatively deeper, more intricate, and more complex, a triumphant follow-up to a 42

blockbuster debut. Working again with producer Phil Ek, they’ve crafted a cavernous record that allows more room for them to breathe and stretch. The album’s longer, episodic cuts contain disquieting shifts in tone. “The Plains/ Bitter Dancer”, for example, begins as a spindly, psychedelic folk tune reminiscent of some of the Zombies’ more introspective moments, and then, after a brief pause, bursts suddenly into the type of gangland chorus Fleet Foxes have practically trademarked by now. Elsewhere, shorter songs seem to end mid-thought; the rollicking tumble of “Battery Kinzie” cuts off suddenly, while “Sim Sala Bim”’s heavy-strummed raga quickly unfurls like broken strings. This

Helplessness Blues’ analytical and inquisitive nature never tips into self-indulgence. Amidst the chaos, the record showcases the band’s expanded range and successful risk-taking.

battle between tension and serenity is new to the band’s repertoire, and it lends the album a compelling uneasiness that starkly contrasts the sunnier disposition of their first two releases. The group harmonies that flowed from Fleet Foxes are in shorter supply here, employed largely to embellish tracks, allowing Pecknold to take a clearer lead role, both vocally and lyrically. He first emerged as an impressionistic songwriter, but he’s since become stronger and more descriptive, conjuring vivid imagery of men striking matches on suitcase latches and penny-laden fountains. Mostly, he spends time working out his own personal puzzles, pondering the big questions of existence

and meditating on the dissolution of his five-year relationship during one of Helplessness Blues’ more difficult creative periods. The record reflects his determination to deal with the present while leaving the past behind. At times, Pecknold’s voice takes an aggressive tone, as on the eight-minute breakup saga “The Shrine/An Argument”; other times, it cracks slightly, exposing his pain on the bittersweet “Lorelai”. But the warmth is there. On the album’s most intimate track, “Someone You’d Admire”, he contemplates the contradictory impulses to love and to destroy, accompanied by spare harmony and softly strummed guitar. 43

Pecknold confronts more universal concerns as well, starting with “Montezuma”’s memorable albumopening lines: “So now, I am older/ Than my mother and father/ When they had their daughter/ Now, what does that say about me?” He wrestles throughout the record with his own measurements of success, and whether any of it adds up to anything. He asks questions only to come up with more questions, and they all lead into a sort of resolution on the album’s title track, “Helplessness Blues”. Here, he retreats from the world into idyllic, pastoral imagery and wishes for a simpler life before trying to come to grips with his newfound renown.

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bonus L

ate last year, Anthony Gonzalez announced his next album was almost complete and would be "very, very, epic." With all due respect, consider the redundancy of that statement: Since 2003 breakthrough Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, every new and increasingly colossal M83 studio record has led to widespread crowdsourcing of synonyms for "epic." What exactly was he promising other than simply another album? Well, throughout the past decade, the 30-year old Gonzalez has honored the tremendous impact of growing up during the golden age of CD buying by implicitly serving as a patron saint for

those who treat the weekly trip to the record store as a pilgrimage and still covet the album as a physical proposition: His output always comes stylishly packaged, with cover art worth obsessing over and credits that need to be scoured in order to spot the guest appearances. Unsurprisingly, he ups the ante here by aspiring to what is still the paradigm of artistic permanence, both in terms of legacy and tactility: the double album, that occasionally ambitious, usually decadent, and almost always fascinatingly flawed endeavor of musicians convinced (rightfully or otherwise) that they're at the peak of their own powers. Hurry Up, We're Dreaming might be all 44

of those things, but above all else, it's the best M83 record yet. But let's talk about restraint for a moment: While each side of Hurry Up would be oddly slight for an M83 album, the demands of its 74-minute runtime are hardly daunting. It's actually the easiest M83 album to consume in one sitting, a reverse accumulation of past strengths that makes for Gonzalez's most compact and combustive music yet. He continues the path set by Saturdays=Youth by easing out of the mini-movie business in exchange for pop songcraft, while trading that LP's pretty-in-pink pastels for the urban neons and fluorescents of Before

Hurry Up, We're Dreaming By M83

the Dawn Heals Us and embodying Dead Cities' mile-wide expansiveness. But the most crucial change is how touring with the likes of Depeche Mode has inspired a newfound showmanship in his vocals: Previously, Gonzalez enlisted outside help, piped in plotadvancing narratives, or sang in a low, tentative murmur that submitted to its massive surroundings. But here, within the first minutes of "Intro", he's matching blows with the juggernaut bellow of Zola Jesus' Nika Danilova to the point where it's much tougher than you'd think to tell them apart. It's really not too different from the first chords of "Planet Telex" or Lil Wayne's "Tha

Mobb" in terms of being an unmistakable sign that you're going to be listening to this familiar act differently. M83 have never stood for half measures in any aspect, but Gonzalez is absolutely going for ithere in a way that sheds new light on known tricks: The hair-triggered drum rolls of "New Map" recall Before the Dawn's searing carcrash fantasy "Don't Save Us From the Flames", but Gonzalez's nervy punctuation at the end of each line sells the idea that he's along for the ride this time rather than being a passive observer. Dead Cities' "In Church" was the sound of blissful acquiescence, but amidst the swaggering synth-metal of "Midnight 45

Hurry Up instead serves as a framework to realize the marvelous capability of our dreams and daily lives, should we be open to experience it.

City", Gonzalez hollers, "The city is my church!" empowered and present, finding a voice for the evangelical zeal always implicit in his work. Gonzalez has stressed Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness as a major inspiration (and by extension, its forefather, The Wall), and its influence can be spotted in Hurry Up's power ballads "Wait" and "My Tears Are Becoming a Sea", sumptuously arranged tracks that could still be played solo on an acoustic guitar. Thankfully, he didn't retain much from "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" or "The Trial", and rather than one man lashing out at the world from the safety of his own thematic construct, you feel that Gonzalez is trying to connect with it. As such, the moments of indulgence are in service of the album's most endearing and silly emotions: Some might consider "Raconte-Moi Une Histoire" a throwaway because it's "the one about a magic frog," but besides embodying the whiplash emotions of youth by following the magnificent melancholy of "Wait", its almost eerie brightness and Windows 95-era sound effects capture a technological optimism better than a lot of artists who are trying only to do that. Meanwhile, "Year One, One UFO" attempts to distill the percussion-mad, organic ecstasy of Vision Creation Newsun into three minutes, while on the opposite side, "Claudia Lewis" and "OK Pal" show a mastery of slapbass-poppin', corporate funk-rock comparable to Ford & Lopatin or Cut Copy without the twinge of pastiche. As with any double album, there's a temptation to strip away the instrumental tracks or simply pick the best 50 minutes for your daily commute. But the interludes here are intended to be every bit as purposeful as the singles: The shorter the track, the more evocative its title. While many of them stand as intriguing meditations on their own merits, they reinforce Hurry Up's intentions to be an immersive universe-check in whenever you want, but the magic's in the exploratory phases. And why leave out what falls in between, like the thermite burst of the two-minute "This Bright Flash" or the stately "When Will You Come Home?"-to-"My Tears Are Becoming a Sea" triptych that serves as the connective transit between Side 1 and Side 2.

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