Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Mercury Rev: The Light In You

It’s been seven years since Mercury Rev's last album, and even by this long-suffering band’s standards, the ensuing period was tumultuous. When we last heard from them, they seemed to be tentatively stepping away from their Catskills-scaled orchestro-rock on 2008’s Snowflake Midnight and its ambient companion piece Strange Attractors. And more recently, they revisited their avant-garde film-school roots, performing live improvized soundtracks to screenings as the Cinematic Sound Tettix BrainWave Concerto Experiment. But given the recent upheaval in Donahue and Mackowiak’s personal lives, The Light on You finds Mercury Rev taking comfort in the familiar. The band spent much of 2011’s touring behind a deluxe reissue of Deserter’s Songs, and, in many respects, that campaign continues here. But on The Light In You, the proverbial deserters throw themselves a celebratory homecoming after years in the wilderness.

The album charts a gradual, linear journey from darkness to light, with the first half featuring the weightiest, most affecting songs the band has produced since 2001’s (vastly underrated) All Is Dream. For the first time in Mercury Rev history, bassist/producer Dave Fridmann was not involved in the recording, but after 25 years of working with him, Donahue and Mackowiak have a pretty firm grasp on how recreate his seismic sound. So even if the opening "Queen of Swans" begins as typically twee Donahue ode to a mythical goddess, its helium-huffing chorus is followed by a rupture that sounds like an orchestra tumbling into a fault line.

While that song serves as a reintroduction to Mercury Rev’s symphonic might, they wield it to more devastating effect on "Amelie", where mounting string swells accompany a junkie’s plea for forgiveness ("I’ll break the habit/ it’s my last score") that seems destined to go unanswered; the gorgeous, ELO-esque sweep of "You’ve Gone With So Little For So Long" doesn’t gloss over the tale of impoverished hardship couched within. And with the six-minute epic "Central Park East", Mercury Rev provide a staggering reminder of what made Deserter’s Songs so captivating: They conjure a sense of intense isolation amid vast, breathtaking vistas. It’s the sort of song that’s intimate enough to let you see the cold breath coming from the mouth of Donahue’s park-prowling protagonist, while expansive enough to conjure the glow of the skyscrapers surrounding him.

But The Light in You eventually lets go of urban tensions to revel in the psychedelia of nature. Delivering the sundazed serenades "Coming Up for Air" and "Autumn in the Air", Donahue sounds like someone who can get a contact high just from watching the leaves fall. On the latter track, he sings, "I guess this must be what it’s like/ to be in Beatle George’s mind,"  which actually proves to be a relatively subtle namedrop compared to what follows.

In what might be the most bizarre turn in this band’s disjointed trajectory, The Light in Yous final third sees Mercury Rev refashion themselves as the house band on some alternate-universe ’60s teen dance show, complete with exuberant brass fanfares, sitar accents, and bongo-powered go-go-dancer breakdowns. In their time, Mercury Rev have covered enough oldies-radio standards to fill several jukeboxes, but here Donahue practically turns into a pitchman for a Time-Life box set—on "Are You Ready," he’s getting down to The Rascals and The Pretty Things and episodes of Shindig! and Solid Gold; "Rainy Day Record" awkwardly extols the life-changing virtues of listening to misanthropic ’80s post-punk on vinyl in the context of a cheery paisley-soul romp. (Even if you happen to enjoy Jonathan Donahue, rap music, and The Fall, you don’t need to hear Jonathan Donahue rapping about The Fall.) In light of all this band has gone through over the years, it’s understandable that they’d want to let loose, have some fun, and reconnect with the feeling of discovering a favorite band for the first time. But as The Light in You’s dichotomous halves prove, Mercury Rev are much better at being trippy than being groovy.

David Bowie: Five Years 1969-1973

"Not only is this the last show of the tour", David Bowie announced at London's Hammersmith Odeon on June 3, 1973 by way of introduction to "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide", "but it is the last show we will ever do." The recording of that nugget of rock history appears in this box collecting most of Bowie's music from the years of his ascent, so let's take him at his word for a moment.

Imagine that Five Years (allegedly the first of a series, though Bowie has always announced many more projects than he's released) was all the documentation there was of his musical career—that he'd entered the public sphere with his 1969 single "Space Oddity", retired from the stage after the Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane tour, and vanished to a Tibetan mountaintop following a loving salute to his roots, Pin Ups. He'd certainly be some kind of glam-rock legend, even more than his friend and rival Marc Bolan. He probably wouldn't have the enduring cultural cachet he commands in our world, but there would still be a fervent cult around his three great albums and three iffy-to-good ones, and even more interest in his live recordings and ephemera. To put it differently, Hedwig and the Angry Inch would be the same; LCD Soundsystem wouldn't.

In our world, though, Five Years is only a slice of a much longer curve. The earliest album in the box, 1969's David Bowiea.k.a. Space Oddity, a.k.a. Man of Words/Man of Music—wasn't Bowie's recorded debut, or even his first self-titled album. (In fact, there could theoretically be a Five Years 1964-1968, tracing his evolution from rock 'n' roll wannabe to fussy vaudevillean, although it would mostly be kind of awful.) It was, however, a follow-up to his first successful single, a haunting novelty record about a lost astronaut that had been released a week and a half before the moon landing. The young singer/acoustic guitarist behind these songs obviously has a mountain of charisma, a gift for hooks, and a taste for the language of experimental science fiction, and not the faintest idea what to do with them most of the time. So he wears his influences on his sleeve ("Letter to Hermione" is intensely Tim Buckley-ish; "Memory of a Free Festival" is a hippie rewrite of "Hey Jude"), and constantly overreaches for dramatic effect.

As it turns out, what he really needed was a good hard rock'n'roll band. Bowie assembled a very short-lived group called the Hype with guitarist Mick Ronson and bassist Tony Visconti; by the time they recorded The Man Who Sold the World in April, 1970, they'd picked up drummer Mick "Woody" Woodmansey, and gone back to using their singer's name. The Man Who Sold the World is the dark horse of the Bowie catalog. There were no singles issued from it, and the title track didn't really become a standard until Nirvana covered it decades later. But toughening up the arrangements made Bowie's stagey warble vastly more effective, and a lot of his artistic risks paid off: the album's opener is a ferocious eight-minute metal sci-fi opus, "The Width of a Circle", with some of the most overtly homoerotic lyrics a pop musician had ever intoned ("He swallowed his pride and puckered his lips/ And showed me the leather belt 'round his hips").

The theme of shifting sexual identity became the core of Bowie's next album, 1971's scattered but splendid Hunky Dory: "Gotta make way for the Homo Superior," he squeals on the gay-bar singalong "Oh! You Pretty Things", simultaneously nodding to Nietzsche and to X-Men. He'd also made huge leaps as a songwriter, and his new songs demonstrated the breadth of his power: the epic Jacques Brel-gone-Dada torch song "Life on Mars?" is immediately followed by "Kooks", an adorable lullaby for his infant son. The band (with Trevor Bolder replacing Visconti on bass) mostly keeps its power in check—"Changes" is effectively Bowie explaining his aesthetic to fans of the Carpenters. Still, they cut loose on the album's most brilliant jewel, "Queen Bitch", a furiously rocking theatrical miniature (Bowie-the-character-actor has rarely chewed the scenery harder) that out-Velvet Undergrounds the Velvet Underground.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars from 1972 was the record that made Bowie the star he'd been acting like for a while, although its reputation isn't quite the same as its reality. It was mostly recorded before Hunky Dory was released; it purports to be a concept album, but doesn't actually have a coherent concept. ("Starman", "Suffragette City" and "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide" were all late additions to its running order.) It is, nonetheless, a fantastic set of songs, overflowing with huge riffs and huger personae. "Five Years" opens the album with Bowie's grandest sci-fi apocalypse yet, Mick Ronson shreds his way to the guitar pantheon, and the band's flamboyant performance of "Starman" on Top of the Pops famously gave the next generation of British pop musicians a bunch of funny tingling sensations. The whole album, in fact, is as erotically charged as an orgone accumulator: Bowie was probably the only person who could have remained sexually ambiguous after declaring "I'm gay, and always have been."

Aladdin Sane, recorded while Bowie and the Spiders were touring their asses off in an attempt to get America to love them the way England already did, is effectively Ziggy Stardust II, a harder-rocking if less original variation on the hit album. There's a paranoid sci-fi scenario ("Panic in Detroit"), a blues-rock stomp ("The Jean Genie"), a bit of cabaret ("Time"), a blunt sex-and-drugs nightmare ("Cracked Actor"). The big difference is that where Ziggy ended with a vision of outreach to the front row ("Give me your hands, 'cause you're wonderful!"), Aladdin is all alienation and self-conscious artifice, parodic gestures of intimacy directed to the theater balcony. Bowie overenunciates his cover of the Rolling Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together" to turn it into a caricature of a disinterested Casanova; his sneering rocker "Watch That Man" is a better evocation of the Stones themselves.

Then there's Pin Ups, a quick-and-sloppy covers album that's more interesting in theory than in practice. The repertoire is the songs he'd heard in London clubs when he'd been starting out as a professional musician (less than a decade earlier), and that had shaped his idea of rock: music by the Yardbirds, the Who, the Pretty Things, and the like. (In other words, not so much his idols as contemporaries who found their audience before he did.) But the original versions of every one of those songs are vastly better, because Bowie doesn't have much to say through any of them, and covers up for it through cruise-ship-entertainer oversinging. His art, in those days, was an art of persona, and songs like "Sorrow" and "See Emily Play" didn't have much to offer it. The band was falling apart, too: the Spiders' drummer Woody Woodmansey had been replaced by Aynsley Dunbar (a veteran of the same London scene), and Ronson and Bolder were gone by the next time Bowie recorded.  

Bowie released six studio albums in the '69-'73 period, but Five Years is a 12-disc set. The Ziggy film soundtrack, a document of that allegedly final stage performance that was first released a decade later, appears in its expanded, two-disc 2003 form, complete with a 15-minute "The Width of a Circle" and unnecessary Jacques Brel and Velvet Underground covers (still no sign of the songs on which Jeff Beck played at that gig, though). Live Santa Monica '72, a radio broadcast that was bootlegged for decades and officially issued in 2008, is included here too. Ziggy Stardust itself appears in both its original mix and co-producer Ken Scott's 2003 remix, which is frankly not all that different.

The selling point here for Bowiephiles who probably have all of that stuff already is the two-disc Re:Call 1 (its title cheekily adapts the old RCA Records logo's typeface), a collection of material that only appeared on singles. Some of them are triflingly different mono mixes, but there are a few fascinating oddities: both the never-previously-reissued 1970 dud "Holy Holy" and the much sharper 1971 remake that nearly made it onto Ziggy Stardust, both the frequently-reissued 1972 killer "John, I'm Only Dancing" and the just-as-good 1973 remake that nearly made it onto Aladdin Sane, and a peculiar '71 single (released under the name The Arnold Corns) with larval versions of "Hang On to Yourself" and "Moonage Daydream", both of which were heavily rewritten for Ziggy. Still, Re:Call is far from a complete collection of the officially issued recordings that Bowie made in the 1969-1973 era: there's no "Sweet Head" or "Lightning Frightening" or "Bombers", for instance, and it'd have been nice to include the version of "The Supermen" that he re-recorded in 1971 with the Spiders from Mars' classic lineup.

Five Years doesn't really reconsider or recontextualize Bowie's first classic period—that was more the job of EMI's Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane reissues a decade ago, and their 2009 Space Oddity reissue. (The book included with the new set features producers' notes from Tony Visconti and Ken Scott, contemporary reviews of the albums and the final Ziggy show, and reproductions of ads, but nothing especially revelatory.) It's just a collection of some superb records, and some less good ones, from an interesting era of a major artist. If those five years had been all we'd gotten of Bowie, this would be an essential artifact. But they weren't, and the wonders that followed them make the scope of this box seem both over-inclusive and incomplete.  

Big Boi / Phantogram: Big Grams

As a solo rapper, Big Boi has been pushing steadily against the old preconception that he was the less-daring half of Outkast. On all three of his solo albums—Speakerboxxx counts— he happily explored his quirks, establishing himself as someone more than just Andre 3000's more stolid counterpart. With Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty,  he pulled off an incredible, boisterously funky reintroduction. Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors paired him with Wavves, Little Dragon and Phantogram among others, and if the results were mixed, it was further evidence of Antwan Patton's voracious ear.

Vicious Lies paved the way for this full Phantogram collaboration. The indie-pop duo featured on three of the songs on Vicious, but on Big Grams they hit a bit more of a stride. This isn't a Big Boi-on-Phantogram beats project, and Phantogram's Sarah Barthel is nearly as central as the OutKast rapper as a lead vocalist. The two trade spots as lead vocalists playfully and Barthel's hooks are integral throughout. Barthel tries some rapping, and the results aren't actively embarrassing. 

"Run for Your Life", the lead track, is sparse and spacey, and the synth sounds lifted from Stevie Wonder's Moog on "Boogie On Reggae Woman". Big Boi's raps aren't deep on Big Grams, but they are captivating: His strategically fluttering drawl, doled out in pitter-patter bursts, is a trademark as recognizable as it is versatile. On "Fell in the Sun" he punches quickly with a staccato: "I whip the yellow Cadillac, I like my seats way back / I bust the sunroof open, beams hit the Braves cap."  This track, the lead single, is the obvious standout, and it's here that the collaboration clicks fully. Phantogram's Josh Carter builds up a throbbing wall of synths atop a snappy drum loop, and like elsewhere, horn stabs punctuates: proof, perhaps, that everything Big Boi does deserves a little funk.

 "Put It On Her" is one of two tracks on the outing not produced by Carter, and it's certainly the better and more natural of them. (That soulful pump fake of an intro turns out to be a subtle 9th Wonder calling card.) The Skrillex-featuring "Drum Machine", however, sticks out like a sore thumb and bogs down the end of the album. For a record that's so smoothly collaborative elsewhere, "Drum Machine" sounds contrived and clunky. Luckily it is tacked on the end, making it entirely skippable.

The Run the Jewels feature on "Born to Shine" fares better, and not just because of Big Boi's pivotal role in Killer Mike's career. Mike's verse steals the show—"Ric Flair'in' / Long fur coat wearin' / Rolex rockin' / Silk shirt wearin'"—while Big Boi happily takes a backseat. This may be a hallmark of Patton's career:  He's continually building up evidence that he doesn't care so much about being the lead as he is interested in being in the middle of something new and different. Given Atlanta's persistent vitality as a hotbed for innovative hip-hop, it's nice to know that one of the city's elder statesmen is off doing his own thing, carving out another little path for himself long after he helped pave the main road.

Deafheaven: New Bermuda

Nothing about the band Deafheaven makes literal sense, starting with their place in the world. They are a black metal-ish band, but black metal fans either hate them or engage in constant, spirited discussions about why they don't. Their breakout, 2013’s Sunbather, took basic notions about black metal and shoegaze from their first album Roads to Judah and airlifted them into a rarefied emotional realm where track lengths dissolved into the whole along with straightforward interpretations: George Clarke’s lyrics compressed earthbound experiences—depression, material envy, struggles for purpose— into wild, leaping abstractions about love, oceans of light, tears. This was music that yearned palpably to leap across distances, closing gaps like a firing synapse.

New Bermuda, if anything, is more overwhelming than Sunbather. The roiling peaks of that album—say, “Dreamhouse” or "The Pecan Tree”—are the resting temperature of this one. They have shaped a suite of songs into one pliable and massive 47-minute arc, one that is as easy to separate into distinct quadrants as the stream from a fire hydrant. Clarke still screams euphoniously, leaning into long vowel sounds and open tones so that phrases like “on the smokey tin it melts again and again” function as color more than as thought. (You could never discern the words without the aid of a lyric sheet, anyway.) They are a band that works best in colors, as the titles of the albums and the salmon color of Sunbather’s cover attest: On New Bermuda, they revisit an ecstatic sound world that resembles, as Clarke puts it on opening song “Brought to the Water”, “a multiverse of fuchsia and light.”

Having discovered this multiverse, New Bermuda finds them shaping it. The album is shorter and more compressed than Sunbather, and doesn’t telescope into “loud” and “quiet” sections quite as clearly. There is still a nauseous sort of beauty to their chord voicings: the lurches into minor key on “Luna” feel as heavy as their swings back into major, like the motion of a great, creaking iron gate. The second half of the “fuchsia and light” lyric is "surrenders to blackness now,” and if Deafheaven’s music at its best represents a brilliant collision of beauty and despair, the battle feels pitched at higher stakes than it did on Sunbather. Clarke’s voice is sharper and mixed lower, clawing at the smooth walls of the music like something wretched trying to escape a pit.

The lyrics suggest that this confining space might resemble the sort of manicured suburban prison that Sunbather was set inside: "There is no ocean for me. There is no glamour. Only the mirage of water ascending from the asphalt. I gaze at it from the oven of my home. Confined to a house that never remains clean,” runs a passage from “Luna”. But listening to Deafheaven, you don’t feel the particulars of this dilemma any more than you notice the pebbles of a gravel driveway from the window of an airplane. The music acts as an incinerator for any malaise you bring to it. It is a warm blur of noise, and fans of many different kinds of moody sensual guitar musics can close their eyes and place themselves inside it: If you have at any point worn a Deftones, Cure, My Bloody Valentine, or an Explosions in the Sky t-shirt, there is room for you inside here.

But Deafheaven reach further and further on this album: The drowsily sliding guitars on the long coda to “Come Back” conjure the easy warmth of Built to Spill. An organ wells up as the guitars fade, like something Ira Kaplan would do on a Yo La Tengo record. The thick palm-muted chugging on the beginning of “Luna” is reminiscent of the Slayer of Seasons of the Abyss. The undistorted downstrokes on “Gifts for the Earth” are a visitation from Joy Division, while the flagrant wah-pedal abusing guitar solo on “Baby Blue” is pure Load-era Kirk Hammett.  

All of these references, which bring together many bands that wouldn’t normally have much to do with one another, points to something dreamlike and uncanny in Deafheaven’s grand sound. At a moment when guitar-centric music feels less central to the conversation, and great indie-rock bands have retreated into hardy local scenes, Deafheaven play like a beautiful, abstracted dream of guitar music's transportive power. The year's most jolting guitar-centered rock records have reimagined the guitar's place in the constellation slightly—on Tame Impala’s Currents, the guitar glimmers distantly at us from beneath a glass, darkly—a distant shape moving beneath the larger, more legible shapes of the compressed drums and programmed synths. On Kurt Vile’s b’lieve i’m going down, it is part of a general out-of-time way of life, a devotion to anachronism and lived-in symbols that keeps the confusion of the outside world at bay.

Deafheaven, meanwhile, unabashedly treat the roar of electric guitars as a holy experience. But they have earned their sense of awe, and you can see audiences returning it tenfold in their live performances. The transcendence their music gazes towards has a long spiritual lineage. To wit: I pulled my earbuds out while listening to New Bermuda this morning in a store where Boston's "More Than A Feeling" was playing. The transition was seamless. They were aiming at the same horizon spot, made for the moment when you begin dreaming.

Ron Morelli: A Gathering Together

The phenomenon of noise dudes turning their hands to techno has become a familiar one, but to date there hasn’t been so much in the way of return traffic, and probably little wonder: club music presents access to a world of international travel, plentiful drugs, and beautiful strangers; while the noise life offers lightly attended shows in cold basements and all the Xeroxed fanzines about serial killers you can eat. In short, you have to want it, or more accurately, feel it—and Ron Morelli both wants it, and feels it. Morelli is chiefly known as boss of the New York-born, Paris-based techno imprint L.I.E.S., but A Gathering Together is his fourth release for Hospital Productions, the label run by Prurient/Vatican Shadow man Dominick Fernow. In Fernow, you sense Morelli has found a true bedfellow, one who shares his aesthetic of misanthropy, gutter eroticism, and sonic abrasion.

L.I.E.S.’ take on techno is brackish and lo-fi, and Morelli’s 2013 debut for Hospital, Spit, conformed to type: in broad terms, this was a club record, albeit one with torn clothing and dried blood under its fingernails. A Gathering Together is something more uncategorizable and disassembled. There are occasional hallmarks of dance music—a whoosh of sub-bass here, a vandalized vocal line there—but there will be, as Bill Callahan might have it, no dancing. Rhythms recall mechanical or industrial processes, pitched too fast or too slow for physical interaction. "Desert Ocean" is a hobbled march of throbbing generator tones and bold horn-like blasts that sound like a tanker lost in thick fog. The sounds of "New Dialect" bring to mind a needle puncturing metal, underwater scrapes, and the hiss of compressed gas. "Voices Rise" takes a brief vocal sample and suspends it in limbo with a variety of tics, scratches, and twists, while the miasmic drone of "Cross Waters" sounds like A Guy Called Gerald’s "Voodoo Ray", on fire, being lowered into tar.

This oppositional quality leads you to reflect on Morelli’s personal philosophy. "People are terrible and always have been," he told FACT in an interview two years ago, while the accompanying text for A Gathering Together describes the title track as being born from "rapid-paced dead-end urban environments that force people together." Perhaps the record’s most vivid, evocative cut, it begins with a disorienting field recording, before we hear what sounds like massed ranks of hands taking up percussion instruments and proceeding to beat out increasingly furious polyrhythms. The message seems plain enough—humanity can be horrifying—but there’s a paradoxical quality to its sense of barely corralled frenzy. If there is fear and disgust here, there is also elation and fascination, too—a recognition of life, even if it feels not so much empathetic as anthropological.

Is A Gathering Together a noise record, or not? The mechanistic looping and layering of "The Story of Those Gone" suggests Morelli might be familiar with the output of demented industrial recluses such as Maurizio Bianchi or Atrax Morgue. Equally, however, he might not, these being the sort of sounds you might discover given solitude and the right—that is, wrong—mental state. To Morelli’s credit, Gathering feels detailed and textured where it needs to, its shifting layers crisp and detached rather than blitzed into mulch. But Morelli’s negative energy, when robbed of an unrelenting bass drum, can drift toward monotony.

The idea that techno is more developed, or evolved, than noise is, of course, a false dichotomy. But take Dominick Fernow: his path from Prurient to Vatican Shadow has felt like a progression, opening up his compositional practice in a way that’s informed his many other projects to date. It’s hard to shake the feeling that Morelli, as he drifts from the dance floor, is taking a reverse path, somehow. Consequently, A Gathering Together is a bold move that falls short of being a landmark. But as an illustration of where Morelli might angle his music and label next—not to mention his readiness to confuse, confound, or destroy in order to explore more personal themes or private fancies—it still illuminates.

Wand: 1000 Days

On their third album, Los Angeles’ Wand gracefully sidestep the potential pitfalls of psychedelic songwriting—meandering guitars, rambling lyrics, directionless tracks. They ground the blurry, bizarre visions established on their previous efforts, Ganglion Reef and Golem, in colorful imagery, so that the faces of the monsters they’ve written about on past records come into full focus.

While the shadow of Wand’s mentor Ty Segall still hovers over Wand’s blown-out garage sound, the band’s own flickering light is beginning to shine through more often. They have added some progressive folk rock to the mix, fondly recalling unique and memorable records like Mellow Candle’s Swaddling Songs and Comus’ classic First Utterance without sounding like a carbon copy. Cory Hanson’s voice shimmers  against the acoustic palette of songs like the beautiful closer "Morning Rainbow", the song that also contains 1000 Days’ key lyrical thesis: "We will see this world together in its terror."

Paralysis, paranoia, disappearance, erasure, pure fear, and curdling dreams are all themes that reappear in Hanson’s lyrics for 1000 Days; even the titular song, a concise bit of folky garage pop with a sunny-sweet choral melody, seems like it might be a love song at first but quickly turns into the nightmare of relationship stasis, depression, and ennui ("I don’t need a thing ‘cause I’ve had every dream"). The mingling of beautiful, honeyed melodies with dark, bleak lyrical content is nothing new, but Wand do it especially well, and they have a precision in their songwriting that keeps their music from spinning off into glazed burnout territory.

Though one worries that with such a prolific release schedule that Wand will run out of ideas, 1000 Days is a heartening record, a record that sees a young band picking up steam, playing with their influences more deftly than on their prior LPs, and bringing a thoughtful approach to old and well-traveled sounds. There’s enough interesting moments on 1000 Days to hold onto these songs, go back to them, and explore within them. That’s more than many of their cohorts within the cluttered and long-trendy field of psychedelic garage—there are hundreds of disposable tape-label bands with little to say out there, and it’s wearying to search through all that crud for the occasional gem, which does exist—have to offer.

Peaches: Rub

Back at the turn of the century, Peaches' big and brash "Fuck the Pain Away" was a tsunami. Electroclash was at its peak, such as it was, and when the sultry, leering opening line of “sucking on my titties like you wanted me” would spit out of a club PA, crowds of all orientations turned their heads. Sometimes a first impression that arresting can be an albatross, and while Peaches has carved out a substantial career for herself in both the music and art world, the straight press largely moved on.With Rub, Peaches' sixth studio album, she extends and builds upon the body of work she's accumulated in the past 15 years.

The overarching themes of Peaches' work—gender identity and expression, queer sex, leftist politics—are now more than ever at the forefront of our culture, which means her lyrics sound less transgressive than they might have even five years ago: "Can't talk right now/ This chick's dick is in my mouth" she deadpans on the album's title track. But Peaches has always been able to use her outré, sometimes downright silly, personality to shed light on real issues, like society's patriarchal disgust at the natural state of a woman's body. In the same song, when she sets up a scene of "circle jerk girls who spray/ we've got a male in the middle and we bukkake", she may be the only female pop musician working today who sings about sex while firmly and intentionally diverting the objectifying male gaze. While it may not always be pretty or elegant, it's damn necessary, and Rub does an excellent job of it.

But is Peaches' music secondary to her politics? Interestingly, the first voice you hear on Rub isn't Peaches', but the distinctive whisper-moan of Kim Gordon. On album opener "Close Up", Gordon purrs for Peaches to get closer to the camera as she raps/speaks about her sexual exploits (the song's video features Gordon coaching Peaches through a shit-smearing wrestling match). The track's catchy, powerful bass drum beat threads throughout Rub, which benefits from a driving dance element, much like a sonic sequel to 2009's electro-heavy I Feel Cream. Rub is the first album in her career where the music feels as foregrounded as Peaches' persona, which makes sense, as she co-produced it with Vice Cooler.

Rub's centerpiece is "Free Drink Ticket", an altogether strange offering that doesn't quite mesh with the rest of the album. With her voice downpitched to sound more masculine, Peaches delivers an almost stream-of-consciousness diatribe against a pretentious club promoter. It sounds jarringly personal, and lyrically is strikingly different from every other track. It's a misstep that is corrected by "Dumb Fuck", the closest thing Rub has to a straightforward pop song (even though it contains about 35 F-bombs). With it's Robyn-esque disco synths and biting lyrics, "Dumb Fuck" is a call for feminists everywhere to ditch their boyfriends for Roland MC-505s.

"I Mean Something", the album's closer and duet with fellow Canadian/frequent collaborator/ex-roommate Feist, sees Peaches defiantly state Rub's most telling line: "No matter how old, how young, how sick/ I mean something." Is that a hint of desperation? Aggression? Bravado? Perhaps, realistically, a mixture of all three, both an assertion of Peaches' rightful place in the trenches of the culture wars and an artistic plea for attention.

The Dead Weather: Dodge and Burn

It's entirely possible that when Jack White allegedly threatened to beat up Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney in a New York City bar earlier this month he was doing some street-team marketing for the new Dead Weather record. Because whenever White steps behind the drum kit of this scuzz-rock supergroup, he hits with a crazed intensity that suggests he’s looking to pound a different sort of skin. Since the release of the band’s previous album, 2010’s Sea of Cowards, White has embarked on a solo career that’s seen his work turn both more intimate and extravagant; in this light, the Dead Weather have come to represent the hanging side of beef on which he can unleash his pent-up aggression.

Tellingly, White and his mates—Kills vocalist Alison Mosshart, City and Colour bassist Jack Lawrence, and Queens of the Stone Age guitarst/keyboardist Dean Fertita—have announced they have no plans to tour in support of Dodge and Burn. This news would reinforce the notion that this group essentially functions as an exorcism of its members’ most feral tendencies before they return to their day jobs. Theirs is a blues defined not by chord progressions but physical reactions, embodying the music’s storied tradition of howls and moans and demonic possession into a fierce, physical sound. There’s a restlessness to Dodge and Burn, from Mosshart’s seething vocals and Fertita’s spasmodic guitar solos to Lawrence’s corroded basslines to White’s abrupt breakdowns. Even when songs are built around a shopworn sentiment, they’re given a twist: on the opening "I Feel Love", Mosshart answers the song’s titular declaration with a withering "every once in a while."

The Dead Weather’s cabin-in-the-woods creepiness can verge on the contrived—like on "Three Dollar Hat", where White makes like a young Isaac Brock taking on Nick Cave’s "Stagger Lee", and losing. But the band’s theatricality mostly complements the agitated tone of the songs and the dubby, dread-of-night ambiance of White’s production, particularly in those moments when Mosshart and White go head-to-head. The mid-album knockout "Rough Detective" sees the two trading verses and pushing one another to hysterical extremes; instead of dropping the typical guitar solo after the second shout-it-out chorus, the song yields a carnival-like melee of chopped-up chatter and pitch-shifted squeals. And when White asks, "what’s happening?", he sounds genuinely spooked by the song’s sudden descent into madness.

Like its predecessors, Dodge and Burn can leave you wishing for more interaction between the two leads—the duets are always the highlight of any given Dead Weather record, the moment when all that simmering tension boils over. But Mosshart once again handles the heavy vocal lifting with menace to spare, be it the frisky sing-speak of "Mile Markers", the predatory soul stomp of "Let Me Through", or the violent mood swings of "Open Up", which upends its desolate opening verse with a riff straight off an early Rush record. And given her commitment to staying in character, it’s doubly strange how, in the album’s dying minutes, the Dead Weather completely abandon their monochromatic schematic.

Dodge and Burn is capped by the ill-fitting "Impossible Winner", a sensitive piano ballad that’s practically Oasis-like in its orchestral ascent (and which, in light of the equally stately "The Last Goodbye" from the last Kills record, prods Mosshart further toward her destiny as a torch-song chanteuse). It’d be one thing if there was anything else on this record—or in the band’s entire discography, for that matter—that showed the Dead Weather had any interest in opening up their airtight rock-noir aesthetic. But tacked onto the end of another dependably dank Dead Weather record, the song feels less like a graceful break-of-dawn denouement than the musical equivalent of being awakened in the middle of the night by a flashlight to the face.

Jay Rock: 90059

Top Dawg Entertainment first signed Jay Rock in 2005, in the wake of the Game's The Documentary. At the time, the Dr. Dre-sanctioned multiplatinum album seemed to promise a resurgence for Cali gangsta rap, which might reclaim the throne it abdicated in the mid-'90s after the death of 2Pac. Instead, Game’s Shady/Aftermath/G-Unit connection combusted spectacularly with the record still fresh in stores and L.A.’s stronghold broke, as Snoop became a ward of the Neptunes, Dre tinkered with a third album we’ve only just come to hear this summer, and everyone else fought nobly but ultimately lost footing in the mainstream for good.

This was the climate that Jay Rock found himself facing when he geared up to release his debut studio album Follow Me Home. The album's singles stalled, its release date languished, and it only saw release in 2011, when it sounded like a formalist relic amid the then-just-emerging DJ Mustard, YG, Ty Dolla $ign and Tyga. It stalled at retail, quietly matched for sales (but surpassed in acclaim) by Kendrick Lamar’s insular, world-weary Section.80, released the same month.

Four years later, Kendrick is the sun around which more than just TDE revolves: his gold and platinum successes have bushwhacked a space for young poetic everymen to coexist at radio. Jay Rock might not ever be top dog at his label again, but the lessons of his first failure to launch – that a magnetic persona and perspective outstrip shiny celebrity cosigns and cookie cutter image constructs every time – are crucial to the success of the TDE machine. Jay Rock’s taken the message to heart on his sophomore album 90059, which dramatically shifts the focus of his studio work from making him look tough and cool to illuminating the human struggles beneath.

good kid, m.A.A.d city’s “Money Trees” introduce a lot of listeners unfamiliar with Jay Rock’s history to his talents, so it’s fitting that the pre-album single to 90059 is a sequel: "Money Trees Deuce." The song is an excellent point of entry into the new album’s mood; its panoramic view of West Coast street life is more nuanced than old Jay Rock records, and the production freely traverses styles. The jazz rap of “Money Trees Deuce”, Dilla homage of “Fly on the Wall”, post-Dre Cali thump of “Necessary”, Southernplayalistic future soul of “Wanna Ride”, and Shaolin swordplay of “90059” collide, each a little bit of seasoning in this gumbo, as Rock notes on track three.

90059’s expanded palette allows the rapper to stretch out too, and he dazzles with limber diction and stunning, cinematic imagery. Opener “Necessary” unfurls the story of a drunken drive-by in lurid detail: “On Forgiato rim tire, automatics spit fire/ Yack in the black canister, look at this bastard go/ It don’t take much to aim, fingers be snatching souls”. Later, “Telegram (Going Krazy)” uses an almost imperceptible hairpin slight of tongue (“I see the telegram goin’ crazy/ I tell the ‘Gram I’m goin’ crazy”) to trip off the story of a couple drifting apart because one is freer with her emotions on social media than she is in close quarters with her lover.

Jay Rock’s concepts are braver and weirder here, his words more arresting and illustrative, but the major reinvention of 90059 is his delivery. On “Easy Bake”, Rock hovers around the high end of his register to counteract Kendrick’s deeper, richer tone. He’s singing a lot now, too, and not in the gruff gangster-on-Easter-Sunday mode of Follow Me Home. The melodic turns on 90059’s “Telegram (Going Krazy)” and “Money Trees Deuce” are unfussed and soulful, while the title track has a drunken Ol’ Dirty Bastard energy  completely unfamiliar to Rock's catalog. The album’s bolder vocal turns are credited to a “Lance Skiiiwalker”, but Lance is about as distinguishable from Rock as T.I. was from T.I.P. or Biggie from bizarro Biggie on “Gimme the Loot.” Cuts like “Gumbo” and “The Ways” juggle all of these tricks to showcase a lyricist gracefully in control of his instrument. It's a heartening showcase, and a reminder of just how much vitality there is in TDE's orbit. 

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Doe Paoro: After

It was bound to happen. As more and more bands in the extended Bon Iver family have made use of Justin Vernon’s April Base studio in the tiny village of Fall Creek, Wis., the location and the sensibilities of the musicians who overlap on these releases (and sleep there in bunk beds while recording) have begun to create a distinct sound. April Base seems like a place you’d find locally made art on the walls, Bruce Hornsby on the turntable, and half-eaten bags of trail mix on the counters. In the same way Matthew E. White's Spacebomb house band stamps its records with vintage-horn-section grandiosity, April Base recordings tend to have a liquid, woodsy aura like the one Vernon debuted on Bon Iver in 2011.  

Enter Doe Paoro, who turned heads with her smoky, soulful voice on 2012 debut Slow to Love, which she wrote on a Vernon-esque cabin retreat outside Syracuse, N.Y. Though she didn’t know Vernon, when it came time to record a new batch of songs, she reached out to him, and he ended up producing her single "The Wind" and also introduced her to the production team of S. Carey and BJ Burton, who has produced, engineered, or mixed several others in the extended family (Carey, Volcano Choir, Colin Stetson, Megafaun). Burton, who also produced Low’s recent Ones and Sixes in Wisconsin, wisely realized it wouldn’t make sense to give Low the heavy duty cycle of April Base’s sonic wash, which can be dialed up (Repave) or down (Range of Light). For After, Doe Paoro gets the full-on Wilson Phillips-in-the-woods treatment. It fits her just right.

A lot of the conversation surrounding Paoro (real name Sonia Kreitzer) has focused on her time in Tibet and her study of Lhamo, an ancient form of Tibetan folk opera. But rather than a direct influence on her sound, Lhamo seems to represent one of the many ways Doe experiments with form. On After, she’s not tied to a specific song structure or genre just as she’s not easily described by one type of vocal tradition. Vintage and modern R&B, soul, Fiona Apple, and '80s synth-pop all commingle. 

When Paoro originally released "Traveling", it was a minimalist performance video with just Paoro on vocals and Guy Blakeslee of the Entrance Band on guitar, but on After, the guitar is subbed for coughing woodwinds, muted synths, and processed keys. "Silence can be so loud, it’s abrasive," she sings, countering any preconceived, romantic notion of isolation. Holing up in a cabin can block out the din of humanity, but that withdrawal can also amplify your own thoughts, making them louder than you ever imagined. "I wanted solitude and that’s what I got/ Now I’m a living island with only one thought: Maybe I was wrong," she sings as organ and the April Base horn section swell and those "In the Air Tonight" drums kick in.

Either version of "Traveling" is a winner, and that malleability makes Doe Paoro something special. While there’s a familiarity to the production of Carey and Burton, the backdrops they create for Paoro are experimental and filled with surprises. Drums disappear as quickly as they appear. Pulsing bass drives "Nostalgia", while the patiently paced "Outlines" finds Paoro alone with a piano, pausing between bluesy phrases and relishing her chance to take center stage as a damaged but defiant torch singer. 

As much as the producers and collection of studio musicians imprint After, their influence wouldn’t allow just any songwriter to shine. Paoro, alongside co-writers like Peter Morén and Adam Rhodes, uses the album to reckon with loss and all of its implications, especially as it relates to time—knowing that you’re knee-deep in the aftermath, but not yet on the precipice of something else. The future is a bunch of white space, neither something to get excited about nor dread. So what do you do with the present? Well, for one, you don’t dwell on the past. "Nostalgia is killing us," Paoro sings. And on "Hypotheticals", she realizes questions like "What’s fair?" aren’t even worth answering. "I won’t indulge in hypotheticals," she spits out in a blast, turning something that could be a tossed-off sound bite from an Aaron Sorkin drama into a charged, anthemic refusal to let someone else change her story. Making peace with something as painful as loss is a messy task. After is a confident, beautiful, clear-eyed testament to that mess.

Graveyard: Innocence & Decadence

Though they’ve netted comparisons to everyone from Black Sabbath to Thin Lizzy, if there is an analog in the history of hard rock to the Swedish group Graveyard, it is probably Judas Priest. Both bands have roots in blues, both have a fondness for topping caramel-sweet melodies with gravel and tacks, and both know precisely how to ride the edge of bombast and camp without ever becoming the Darkness. On their fourth album, Graveyard root around even deeper in their record collections. In the kind of quote that becomes instantly regrettable, frontman Joakim Nilsson once said that he wanted the band to be a mix of Slayer and Howlin’ Wolf, but on Innocence & Decadence, they also find room for Motown, Dylan, and Queen. What makes the record work is the way they synthesize all of this into something that is swell-chested, triumphant, and surprisingly human, dosing each song with equal amounts of swagger and charm. In a genre that often prides itself on being forbidding, Innocence is a proudly welcoming metal record, throwing open its tattooed arms and carrying off even the darker material with a wink and a smile.

That all-in m.o. is evident from the outset. Opener "Magnetic Shunk" rides in on a deep-set, galloping blues groove, Nilsson’s eye on a woman at the far end of the bar. Instead of shaming or objectifying her for her sexual experience, Nilsson celebrates it—"It’s nobody’s business who you give your kiss"—before devising an almost comically ridiculous come-on: "No need to be gentle, baby, I like it raw/ Treat me like I was crime and you are the law." That kind of loopy wordplay turns up throughout Innocence; on "The Apple & the Tree", whose wandering guitar lead sounds like a distant cousin to "All Along the Watchtower", Nilsson opens singing, "I remember the days I don’t recall." Before the absurdity of the line can be fully absorbed, he’s skated clean into the song’s slow-winding chorus (the lyrics of which suggest the title’s apple might be the same one that turned up in Genesis Chapter 2). The hard-charging "Never Theirs to Sell" is a lean, mean-eyed, fist-pumping anthem of defiance, opening into a double-time, soul-clap break about halfway through that imagines Angus Young sitting in with the MGs.

Though the twin themes in the album’s title turn up in most of its songs, it’s the former that gets the most airtime. On the breathless, roller-coastering "From a Hole in the Wall", while low-end guitars pummel like rubber bullets, bassist Truls Morck sings, "Can you hear a big bird singing somewhere in the back of your mind?/ It’s loud enough to make you wonder/ ‘Can I please hear it one more time?’" Lines like this contribute to the album’s odd sense of sweetness—youth isn’t fetishized as a period of penalty-free rule-breaking, but considered wistfully, as a time of almost ceramic cleanness, before things like pain and disappointment became everyday occurrences. That same sentiment is given flesh, blood, and a broken heart in the straight-up soul ballad "Too Much Is Not Enough", which wouldn’t sound entirely out of place on an Amy Winehouse B-sides comp. Over a wood-fired blues lick, Nilsson mournfully watches a longtime lover walk out the door, before concluding, "I know you tried to keep us together/ But in the end, there was nothing left to keep." The gospel trio that parenthesize his verses provides the necessary dramatic flourish.

Innocence was recorded at Atlantis Grammofon Studios in Stockholm, which is the same place ABBA recorded their earliest material. While it’s not quite the same deep-dive into confectionary pop, Innocence shares both that group’s fondness for immediate melodies and their egalitarian spirit. Theirs is a club where you might get lucky, you might burn the night philosophizing, or you might reconnect with old friends. Best of all, it has a decidedly low barrier of entry: If you’ve ever nursed a drink while thinking misty-eyed about the good old days, you’re in.

Fetty Wap: Fetty Wap

It's hard not to root for Fetty Wap, the rapper whose irrepressible 2014 single "Trap Queen" went from Tri-State SoundCloud sensation to this year's late-pass song of the summer. The 24-year-old, born Willie Maxwell, is unshakably positive, turning a prominent disability (he lost his eye to glaucoma as a child) into a proud calling card that's already inspired a 10-year old to venture out into the world without his own prosthetic eye. He's from Paterson, N.J., a place we would almost certainly not be talking about were it not for Fetty Wap; he's fiercely loyal to his longtime Remy Boyz 1738 crew, including perennial sidekick Monty, a rapper we would assuredly not be talking about were it not for Fetty Wap. He's almost singlehandedly revived the ride-or-die thug love ballad with a serotonin-soaked ditty—now double-platinum—that turns a negative situation (having to cook dope to make a living) into not just an unforgettable date but a symbolic proclamation of undying, committed love. And though he's no longer in a relationship with "Trap Queen"'s muse, he's currently paying her college tuition as a thank-you. 

If there's any hurdle in Fetty's way at this point, it's his nagging reputation as a one-and-done singles artist that persists even as he smashes Billboard records. When "Again", the album's fourth single, entered the charts in August, he became the only artist in the history of the Hot Rap Songs chart to have his first four singles reach the Top 10 simultaneously. The same week, an article was published: "Is Fetty Wap Destined To Be Another One-Hit Wonder?" It's a bizarre dissonance, best understood as such: those four charting singles, addictive as they are, don't do much to break the mold of what we've come to expect from a Fetty Wap song. Which is to say: generous Auto-Tune, exuberant melodies, and a lot of warbled "Yeaaaaaaaa baby"s and "1738"s.

With Fetty Wap, released through the tech-savvy but still-transitional 300 Entertainment imprint, the rappa-turnt-sanga finally has the platform to show he's more than a singles guy. To that end, he put out a 20-song album with no new friends and no big-name producers—in short, this is the album he probably would have made with his RGF Productions squad in Paterson were there no label involved at all. Those looking for a new direction from Fetty, or who've already mined the depths of his prolific SoundCloud, may find this a letdown. But those who've embraced his loyalty and radical self-love should be delighted: Is there a more quintessentially Fetty Wap move than turning the year's biggest major label rap debut into a self-directed Paterson block party?

The first thing you might notice on Fetty Wap's tracklist isn't what's there—if you've kept up with his output over the last year and a half, there's a lot you'll recognize here—but who isn't. Drake's hastily added guest verse to "My Way" from earlier this year is missing; the album version features a verse from Remy Boyz' Monty, who appears on nine of the album's 20 tracks, the only guest aside from relatively unknown M80. As a whole, Fetty Wap adopts the same self-assured stance: Fetty's formula definitely ain't broke, and he doesn't seem in a hurry to fix it. In what can only be described as a flex, he opens the album with "Trap Queen", a seemingly audacious move he knows full well he can back up. Why coyly tease out your first and biggest hit when you've got 19 more just like it?

That's the thing: you could shuffle these tracks endlessly and the album would probably have the same effect. It's not that there are any missteps here, really; if you like what you've already heard from Fetty, you'll like these songs. There are variations, to be sure—second single "679" borrows some West Coast bounce, functioning as a clubby palate cleanser in the way that "Fight Night" did for Migos. "I Wonder" and "Boomin" successfully skulk into drill's shadowy corners. But for the most part, Fetty doesn't venture too far outside his comfort zone.

Still, when the highs are this high, it's hard to complain. "My Way" is still 2015's ultimate trap lullaby, lilting in hypnotic spirals. "RGF Island" turns somber keys into a hard-earned celebration, and "I'm Straight" dials the exuberance further up with triumphant steel drums. And though he's a much more natural singer, "Again" is Fetty's best rap performance. "I'm tryna finish who I started with/ I'm tryna spend it all who I got it with," he crows, reassuring his fed-up trap queen that his crazy life will all be worth it when they can enjoy it together. Fetty approaches everything in his music with the earnest devotion of matrimony: his trap queen, his money, his beloved Remy Boyz. So though it's tempting to wonder what may have happened had 300 recruited labelmates Young Thug or Quavo, or beatmakers du jour like Metro Boomin or Zaytoven, it's only right Fetty insisted on keeping things in the 1738 family.

Drew McDowall: Collapse

Like anyone involved in the intricate network of bands that sprang from Throbbing Gristle, Drew McDowall has contributed to a number of projects over the past few decades. He’s most notable for his tenure in Psychic TV in the '80s and Coil in the '90s, during which time he honed his craft as a manipulator of synthesizers, samples, and esoteric sounds. One thing he’s never done, though, is release a solo album—that is, until now. Collapse is McDowall’s debut full-length under his own name, arriving 37 years after the first recorded appearance by the Poems, the Scottish punk band he formed with his then wife, and future Strawberry Switchblade member, Rose McDowall.

It’s been a long journey from teen punk to avant-industrial vet, but on Collapse, McDowall sounds anything but spent. The album’s five tracks—instrumental, save for a smatter of vocal samples—tap into the same deep wellspring of ritual, apocalypse, and neopagan awe that fueled Coil, only with a fuller and more focused sense of dread. Nowhere is that as evident as on "The Chimeric Mesh Withdraws (Parts 1-3)", the 20-minute triptych that anchors Collapse with an arcane gravitas straight out of McDowall’s greatest achievement with Coil, 1999’s Astral Disaster. But where Astral Disaster folds ambience and emptiness into its spellbinding substance, "Chimeric Mesh" wields those elements like hammers. The result is cinematic, insectoid, and foreboding, even as it morphs gently from movement to movement in a fugue of skittering static and fractured blocks of noise.

Another through line of McDowall’s work over the years is psychedelia, inasmuch as it intersects with the finer pulverization of industrial. "Hypnotic Congress" takes a while to settle into its mesmeric groove, but when it does, its rhythmic cascade of echoing pulses, looped chants, and submarine blips segues into a mind-dissolving wash. There’s a ceremonially circularity to "Through Is Out" and "Each Surface of Night", each of which phases into a sequence of krautrock-like pings and oscillations by song’s end—McDowall has admitted to being warped at the age of 12 by an impulse purchase of The Faust Tapes—that tensely countermands their eerily organic, almost folk-like undertones. But the most starkly psychedelic stretch of Collapse is "Convulse", a staccato salvo of hollowed-out power electronics whose chilling sampled voice—"I convulsed," intones a woman, clinically—comes across like a radical dub reworking of Joy Division’s "She’s Lost Control", told from the perspective of the song’s subject, and played at the bottom of the ocean.

In recent years, McDowall has collaborated with numerous artists, including Tres Warren of Psychic Ills in the blissful drone project Compound Eye. On Collapse, McDowall is joined by Nicky Mao (of Effi Briest and Hiro Kone), who contributes violin, unspecified samples, and splices to the album’s beckoning mix of recursion and unease. In any case, those contributions are seamless; as a whole, the collection comes across as a unified meditation that channels an atmosphere of doom, morbid curiosity, and the perplexing pluralism of modernity. It’s also frequently beautiful, even if that beauty is undermined by a vagueness that might have been more sharply defined by wider dynamics. As a solo statement, though, Collapse is a winner—a field recording of the psyche of an extreme-music journeyman who’s finally started to settle in and harness his own dark voice.

Little Simz: A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons

Little Simz, the rapper from North London born Simbi Ajikawo, is starlike in many ways, including a strict one: having dropped eight mixtapes since 2013, she burns off energy at a colossal, dangerous rate. A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons is Little Simz’s first full-length album, and it marks a change from the catholic, unfurling experiments in her mixtapes. This is a tense, terse concept album: The tracks roll forward in one dark, uniform palette, each providing a different answer to a single line of questioning, as laid out by Simz in the opening track. Technically, she’s phenomenal: She revs up almost off-handedly, like she’s jumping rope, and she seamlessly shifts in and out of her singing voice like Drake. Twinning her meter almost classically, she spits: "They told her women cannot call themselves kings/ They told her fame isn’t made for everyone."

The album that follows is, in effect, a snarling refutation. She might not be a king, but she is certainly a prince, with cosigns from Kendrick Lamar, A$AP Rocky, and J. Cole, among others. She’s got fame in her crosshairs, and likely the other way around, too, but the defining note of Trials + Persons is one of ambivalence. Simz seems engaged with the naysayers—"This the type of music that ain’t never gonna sell/ Well, you should’ve never ever told me that," she repeats, in two separate songs—but her real fight is within herself. At 21, she raps with a shapeshifting hardness and ragged sense of spiritual burden that brings to mind Lauryn Hill, and Kendrick too.

Trials + Persons was recorded for free in the London Red Bull studio, and released on Simz' own label, Age 101, a corporate liberation that allowed her to make this 35-minute debut essentially hit one reverberating note. With the bigger producers and broader hooks a label might’ve asked for—even a single bright major chord, just once—Simz, an explosively skilled rapper, could’ve landed straight in the center. But instead, she’s keeping her talent under her own strict control, which means, by one calculus, curbing it. Instead of an album spiked with a big banging single, she offers a looping, obsessively focused experience, with her words providing structure and the pulsing orchestral instrumentation coming second. With a few exceptions, like the unprocessed drums and whining electric guitar on "Full or Empty", the album is a fugue state, unbroken and undifferentiated. It’s dark, but not impenetrable; Simz’s charisma keeps it lit in here, like headlights barreling around the corners of a dark room.

As a writer, though, Simz is less virtuosic. The album’s language is intelligent but wholly straightforward, rarely witty and almost device-less; Simz always says exactly what she means. She’s an original in stance, then, rather than substance or specifics, turning over her central dilemma from different angles, switching between personas from song to song. In "Gratitude", she imagines herself stuck at home with children; in "Tainted" (her "Backseat Freestyle"), she introduces her character and then jumps into a voice of a stone-cold, dead-eyed, alpha bitch. "God Bless Mary" is dedicated to her aggrieved neighbor (though it carries that "Zion"-esque double reading), and it takes palpable effort for Simz to step outside herself; she can conjecture nothing about Mary’s life except the woman’s reaction to this record.

 In a way, the album feels radically personal: Simz is her own primary subject, and as a result is necessarily exposed. But the soul of the album is abstracted. Other people are totally figural, practically hypothetical. There are almost no specific objects, no physical places, no set decoration whatsoever. It’s just curtains pulling back on a spotlight and Simz wrestling with her ambitions like Jacob with the angel, reaching no conclusions but activating something deep.

Monday, September 28, 2015

Anderson.Paak: The Anderson .Paak EP

Read the liner notes of Dr. Dre’s Compton and you’ll see the name Anderson .Paak appear six times: He produced or sang on songs "All in a Day’s Work", "Issues", "Deep Water", "For the Love of Money", "Animals", and "Medicine Man". It's the biggest look of Anderson’s career so far by a million miles, one that seemingly came from a chance encounter with the iconic producer. According to Mass Appeal, Anderson attended a studio session when his recent song, "Suede", caught Dre’s attention. "He comes in, and I’m just sitting in the room, and I saw him play it over and over again," Anderson told the publication. "At the third time, he was ready to work."

Until now, though, the California singer/producer had achieved marginal success: Following his 2012 debut under the name Breezy Lovejoy, Anderson’s follow-up—Venice—showed his promise as a storyteller, but the album was largely undercooked and whizzed by without much impact. Anderson has released a few singles and projects on Bandcamp, and he’s the vocal half of NxWorries with producer Knxwledge, a prolific composer who landed this great beat on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly.

The Anderson .Paak EP is the artist’s first release since Venice, and it's appearance is timely. Running just four tracks and less than 20 minutes, The Anderson .Paak EP is a quick listen, but it demonstrates Anderson’s talent and charisma. His raspy inflection evokes Bilal’s sensuous tenor and the lyrics explore mostly light fare—blowing weed, the highs of personal freedom ("Drifter II"), the captivating first moments of new love ("Make it Work").

Even when he discusses serious topics, like on the two-part "Cheap Whiskey.70’s Reisling", Anderson does so in the smoothest way possible. "Wish I had a chance to write ya," he croons, presumably talking about an absent father figure. "I wish I didn’t look just like ya." Produced entirely by Los Angeles/Chicago duo Blended Babies, who have worked with the Cool Kids and Ab-Soul and credit OutKast and Eric Clapton as influences, the music is laidback, spacious funk polished in a bright, psychedelic sheen. A longer release would've been ideal, but it's a worthy precursor to something greater.

Sarah Kirkland Snider: Unremembered

Released five years agoSarah Kirkland Snider's Penelope cemented her as one of the decade’s most gifted up-and-coming modern classical composers. Emotionally fraught and cloudy, the words used an amnesiac soldier’s past as a lens to explore memory and mortality over muted explosions of electronics and a weighty, restless orchestra. Her new group of songs, Unremembered, is more restrained than Penelope, but no less haunting.

Like Penelope, Unremembered features Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond on vocals. This time, Asthmatic Kitty vet DM Stith and Clogs’ Padma Newsome join her, while the ensemble is a collection of all-star new music players from ICE and So Percussion. Its vague stories are set in shadowy old houses, endless meadows, sinister thickets and forests lost souls enter to never emerge from. Snider’s multiple narrators spiral deep into dark memories of these places. The libretto comes from the poet Nathaniel Bellows, who takes his formal cues from 20th century imagists like Emily Dickinson and William Wordsworth, describing gothic New England vistas.

The foreboding and chaotic tenor of the music mirrors the fear and horror of the characters: Ghosts are ever-present, evoked by the constant surges of soupy, heavily reverbed background vocals that rise and fall behind each song’s primary narrator—either Worden, Stith, or both. Often, these anonymous voices assume a role in the story: In the pastoral "The Song", they are echoing bird calls, but on the more macabre "The Estate", they become taunting spirits ("The field has breath, the pond a voice...They told me then to leave this place/ Or stay and lose it all"). Eventually, they become buried underneath Snider’s mournful, kinetic instrumental figures (glissandi-punctuated violin lines, chimes, harp, or Snider’s own celeste), which sometimes recall the work of Snider’s former teacher, David Lang, and at more tuneful moments, Max Richter. Most songs build to booming climaxes, that dissipate along with the "vapor of the dead" at the end of each song.

The record is best when Snider’s music captures both the beauty and foreboding of Bellows’ setting at once; in restrained pieces like "The Orchard" and "The Past", she lets subversive dissonance creep slowly into her simple accompaniments. Many of Bellows' poems feature images of mirroring, water, and hazy vantages of landscapes or spirits, and Snider’s musical landscape complements this with a rippling, echoing quality. Her melodic shapes are as vague as the scenes she is describing: It is intelligent and evocative, but it takes a focused listen, and is best enjoyed with Bellows’ words on hand for reference. His poetry interacts closely with the musical pivots. Unremembered definitely lacks the haute tension and the fierce musical contrasts of Penelope, but there are plenty of pleasurably uncanny moments. Even in these more contemplative scenarios, Snider still keeps visceral emotion on the surface of her music.

Chevel: Blurse

Chevel is a young European producer with fashionable friends—he's had a long working relationship with fellow Italian Lucy—good DJ bookings, his own label (Enklav), and a fair amount of hype. He also has something a lot of precocious upstarts don't: a deep and evolving catalog, counting 15 singles and now three albums to his name. His latest, Blurse—out on Lucy's excellent Stroboscopic Artefacts label—is a bold, confident step away from the dance floor material he's been honing and into deep, abstracted structures and pristine sound design.

Blurse opens the way a lot of techno records do—with a grimy, compressed kick drum—and that's about the last time Blurse proceeds the way a lot of techno records do. The second kick arrives nearly a second later, an eternity on a dance floor. By the 90-second mark Chevel seems to have lost interest in the kick drum entirely, taking a mid-track siesta with the swirling harmonics and buzzing synths/insects. The drums come back—they almost always do—but these kind of aberrant structures define Blurse, which sees Chevel continually chart his way to abstraction and back again.

Blurse, then, is kin to a certain strand of hypnotic, percussion-heavy dance music that sits at the edges of house and techno, the kind only touched by adventurous and skilled DJs. There are elements of Pearson Sound's coptering drums, of Objekt's cryptic architecture, even of the spacey suspensions of early dubstep masters such as Loefah. And, impressively, Chevel never veers too far into the avant-garde; Blurse, with its hard gray surfaces and dubby quivers, is always identifiable as techno in some mutated form. Chevel is walking a tightrope here, maintaining structure while unmooring most of a track's conventional building blocks.

There's fun to be had in the details, too. The end of "Watery Drumming" features wildly rippling echoes as what sounds like an actual clock keeps time. "Down and Out" consists mostly of short, pitched percussion sounds and little stabs of an electric piano; skipping around the track with your mouse you're as likely to find utter silence as anything. The gorgeous "Loop #33" sees gooey, molten synths rise from beneath the cracks in the percussion.

Concrete melodies are a little thin on the ground, so Blurse can sound homogenous. The record sometimes lacks the dynamism of works by the aforementioned artists, at times bordering on ascetic and clinical. But this style, which results in a lot of short, compact tracks, lends itself well to the album format. Which might be the point: Chevel has released two EPs and a 10-inch this year, all of them showcasing his steady progression but aimed more squarely at the dance floor. Blurse has the precision of a practiced producer and mischievousness of a rogue. It's the result of a young producer not just making techno but taking it apart, rearranging it, breaking it.

The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die: Harmlessness

Emo is a genre built on divisive vocals, and the World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die represented the entire spectrum of such voices on their debut Whenever, If Ever. Between the screamy guy, the yelpy guy, the nervous guy who sang as if sweating through his pocket protector, and the open invitation for anybody else in the band to pipe in whenever they felt it might lend an extra energy to a song, it was a love-it-or-dismiss-it affair, even by the standards of an emo revival that favors messy, overstuffed statements. The eight-piece band may have filtered their updated emo through the sensibilities of some of the most broadly popular indie rock of the '00s, but they were fundamentally a niche act.

On their sophomore album Harmlessness, they become less of one. In an effort to smooth out their rough edges after some lineup changes, TWIABP start with the roughest of them all: those voices. The screamy guy is gone, and the singer who emerges as the de facto pack leader, David Bello, has ironed most of the jitters out of his delivery. Those more approachable vocals set the tone for a record that's more orderly than its predecessor but no less sweeping. These songs still build, crash, weep, and rejoice, often all within the span of a few minutes, and the band still has no interest in moderation. If anything, Harmlessness actually has more going on than Whenever, If Ever, but it’s all done more tastefully, and the album’s warm, open production makes it easier to take in just how sophisticated these arrangements are—without all those voices crowded on top of each other, for instance, you can hear every violin stroke. TWIABP have succeeded where past generations of emo bands have often stumbled: tidying up their sound without losing any of the exuberance and immediacy that made that sound so striking in the first place.

TWIABP tuck their most audacious song toward the front of the record. Condensing a subject loaded enough for a full concept album into five-and-a-half minutes, "January 10th, 2014" tells of Diana, the Hunter of Bus Drivers, the anonymous avenger from Juárez, Mexico, who shot and killed two factory bus drivers in retaliation for the rampant, unprosecuted sexual assaults committed by drivers on late-night routes. She became a folk hero, honored with statues in two cities. The song lifts some lyrics directly from a "This American Life" episode about her myth, including an exchange that’s acted out between Bello and singer/keyboardist Katie Shanholtzer-Dvorak. He voices a driver weary of a passenger who might be Diana; she speaks as every woman relieved to finally have some power over potential predators. "Are you afraid of me now?" she sings. "Well yeah," he responds, "Shouldn’t I be?"

The moment is so on-the-nose, so borderline musical theater, that it’s bound to make some listeners wince, but even those put off by it have got to admire the band’s temerity. Though Harmlessness’s primary fascinations lie with familiar subjects—overcoming depression, navigating changing relationships, finding a place in the world—the band detours from that safe territory to confront listeners with an uncomfortable moral quandary about whether taking a life is ever justified. The song sympathizes with Diana’s crusade while acknowledging the gruesome irony of celebrating a murderer.

Of course, Harmlessness does the safer subjects well, too. One of Bello’s many songs about wrestling himself from depression’s grip, "Rage Against the Dying of the Light" builds to a hooky alt-rock riff, then pivots right into the album’s celebratory highlight, "Ra Patera Dance", which channels the grizzled cheer of Good News-era Modest Mouse. Harmlessness is loaded with these kinds of seamless transitions, and the band’s smart sequencing keeps the record moving with brisk efficiency. "Haircuts for Everybody" takes just a minute and a half to build to its brutally pretty climax.

Where TWIABP’s last album ended with an epic seven-minute closing statement, "Getting Sodas", Harmlessness doubles down with two of them (actually, two and a half, if you count the lovely little hidden track tacked on to the end of "Mount Hum"). Stacking so many moments of grandiosity on top of each other should be overkill, but it isn’t; each suite pays off triumphantly. With Harmlessness, the World Is a Beautiful Place have accomplished a rare feat: a lofty, loaded album with the grace and momentum of a far leaner one.

Casey Veggies: Live & Grow

California rapper Casey Veggies desperately wants to create a storyline on his debut studio LP Live & Grow. His father—"Big Joe," a former Jay Z bodyguard—appears on the intro track, "I'm the King", praising his son's mixtape efforts and ability to balance school with his artistic ambitions. He closes out one of his monologues encouragingly stating, "Watch him work," and then Veggies hops in on his verse: "A lot on mind, and I try not to show/ Yeah, that's part of life, you live and you grow/ She suckin' me slow." The lines, among many others on Live & Grow, don't exactly broadcast personal progress, and the presence of Veggies' father only exaggerates the near-comical contrast between the title's stated thesis and the nature of the album.

Still only 22 years old, Veggies' career stretches back to high school when he founded Odd Future with Tyler, the Creator (who appears on and produced "R.I.P."). He's since moved on from OF, released five solo mixtapes, and launched the Peas & Carrots International clothing line. His biography alone demonstrates that Veggies has, in fact, lived and grown. Throughout the album, however, he often shies away from specific details, rendering the title more of a distraction than a mission statement. "New Face$", for example, is about Veggies' journey to fame—a road that inevitably includes many hiccups and fake friends—but he reveals very little about the trip. He offers possible insight ("New foreign chick and she famous/ She cashed me out and we dated"), but quickly abandons the thought in favor of played-out tough talk.

Veggies' vague lyrics are mirrored in the production, which flips between styles like a major label rap album of 10 years ago might. Tyler, DJ Mustard, Iamsu!, Hit-Boy, Top Dawg collaborator THC, and more contribute work, and there are genuine pop moments ("Tied Up", "Wonderful") alongside somber smooth cuts ("Sincerely Casey", "I'm Blessed"). There are even two takes on California's mainstream sounds: hi-hat-slappin' Northern California hyphy ("Backflip") and bassier L.A. post-g-funk ("Actin' Up"). It's a capable roster, but Live & Grow is more of a platter than a platform, and Veggies never gets to settle into a sound he can develop.

He is at his best on the more California cuts. "Backflip", for instance, is an instant earworm. Nonetheless he is still upstaged by YG, who delivers a more vulgar, memorable verse than Veggies by actually addressing the song's female subject. Veggies just speaks for her, and doesn't seem to see her as anything other than an object of his own success. This self-interest, instead of self-examination, comes through further on "Wonderful" and "Tied Up". On those tracks, as on many others, the respective hooks and verses don't relate very much at all. Flat lines like, "I spend every day like it's my birthday," fail to tell us about his lifestyle or to even communicate a mood. 

Without any real lyrical flourishes to make his character interesting, the listener is left with Veggies' work at face value. He relies too heavily on end rhymes, doesn't vary his flow often enough, puns too obviously, and regularly leans on cliches. The lack of variation makes more sincere moments, like "Aw Man", difficult to wade through, as well. The song should be the center of his bildungsroman, but when each line is delivered with a near-identical cadence, hashtag lines sound as important as confessionals, minimizing the song's gravity. It's melodic and quite catchy at times, but Live & Grow is less than the sum of those parts. The album's title isn't misleading as much as it is as trite as the music it contains.

Chvrches: Every Open Eye

Anyone who has spent more than a minute in a clothing store over the past few years has heard dozens of bands making a calculated, charmless attempt to duplicate what came so naturally to Chvrches on their zeitgeisty debut The Bones of What You BelieveWhich leaves the real deal facing a tremendous challenge three years after emerging anonymously from their basement with "The Mother We Share". "After making one record that people really like, some bands reject the things that everyone liked about them and make some really deep, thoughtful, dark record," Martin Doherty admitted to Pitchfork earlier this year. Fortunately, the hard work and meticulous fine-tuning of Every Open Eye is so deeply embedded in the finished product that Chvrches never come off as self-conscious. Instead, it manifests as that uncanny, priceless quality of the truly popular: confidence.

Chvrches toured The Bones of What You Believe exhaustively, so they don't have to overthink what things "everyone" liked about them and which parts were scare-quotes deep, dark, and thoughtful. You’ll be really let down if you hoped Chvrches would build on the proggier excursions of "Science/Visions" or if you believed Doherty’s expansive, nearly-six minute closer "You Caught the Light" justified a bigger role. Otherwise, the band rightfully assume that their unabashed embrace of pop's ruthless economy got them playing festivals in front of thousands of pop fans.

So, when Lauren Mayberry belts, "we will take the best parts of ourselves and make them gold," it can be read as the band's artistic edict rather than one of the examples of her occasional slip into Millennial Successorizing ("I am chasing the skyline more than you ever will"). Nearly every moment of Every Open Eye is filled with aspiration and there's not a false step or bum note, verses and pre-choruses and choruses in brutal competition to be called "the hook." Mayberry summed it up as "emo with synths in it" in a recent podcast while expounding on a teenage love of Jimmy Eat World, and you can suss out a structural similarity between Every Open Eye and Bleed American (five radio-friendly bangers, ballad, four more radio-friendly bangers, slow-dance closer). Even the obvious deep cuts have a functional purpose—"Afterglow" is a slight comedown that still feels necessary as exit music after nearly 40 minutes of constant peaks, while Doherty's light-stepping, funk-pop inclusion "High Enough to Carry You Over" is an allowable indulgence for a band that truly prides itself on being a band, rather than Mayberry and Those Other Guys.

There's also an irrepressible buoyancy and reassurance, even if it's not just in her head where Mayberry feels looked down on. Her detailing of the brutal rape threats and casual misogyny she faces as a female public figure are both shocking and sadly familiar; she's more cagey about the personal relationships that serve as the lyrical muse for much of Every Open Eye. Though Mayberry's background in law and journalism served as an early footnote in the Chvrches come-up, she draws on that as much as any musical thread here. Whether asking for reconciliation ("Clearest Blue", "Empty Threat") or demanding closure ("Never Ending Circles", "Leave a Trace"), Mayberry is judge, jury, and executioner, making convincing, carefully worded closing arguments set to casually devastate.

With nearly all of mainstream pop's biggest acts looking toward the '80s for inspiration, Every Open Eye might be even more of-the-moment than its predecessor—Mayberry’s extracurriculars cast her lyrics in a feminist lens à la Cyndi Lauper and Madonna, while the arena-ready hooks justify the comparisons to pre-Violator Depeche Mode (the synth riff from "Clearest Blue" can't get enough of "Just Can't Get Enough") and the Pet Shop Boys. But minus the occasionally violent imagery of "Gun" and "By the Throat", Chvrches lack any of the qualities that made the aforementioned feel subversive or rebellious. This can actually work in their favor—"Leave a Trace" was memorably described by Mayberry as a "middle finger mic-drop," but her words are neatly manicured and polite enough to painlessly decapitate rather than bludgeon or incinerate. You can't have peak efficiency without formulas, though, and by the time "Playing Dead" and "Bury It" threaten to get mixed up on title alone, the similarly beaming melodies and diffident references to bones, crossed lines, and oceans start to render heartbreak, joy, resilience, and exhaustion interchangeable.

The minor flaws of Every Open Eye are much more acceptable in light of the hedge-betting sophomore efforts from Purity Ring and Disclosure, perhaps the two acts who've been more imitated over the past two years than Chvrches. They've moved past their earliest days when their competition was assumed to be M83 or Passion Pit or even the Knife, but in leveling up, they actually seem more conservative sonically, lyrically, and visually than the pure pop acts for whom they're used as a foil, i.e., Taylor SwiftCarly Rae JepsenRihanna... hell, maybe Justin Bieber? If Every Open Eye is Chvrches taking the best parts of themselves and making them gold, I can't wait to hear them try to go platinum.