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Wrekmeister Harmonies: Night of Your Ascension

We don't always recognize it, but the ability to hold back until precisely the right moment is crucial to the act of making even the most concise or chaotic forms of music. As listeners, we both expect music to adhere to familiar formulae while also teasing our ears with traces of the unexpected. And, as with foreplay, certain artists are just more skilled at extending climaxes into exquisite torture.

On Night of Your Ascension, it takes a full 15 minutes of guest vocalist Marissa Nadler's chanting within a funereal 16th-century/Renaissance-styled organ/string/choral arrangement before elephantine guitar chords and drums come crashing through the mist. Even if you listened to this album without any context, you would get a sense that it was building up to something. And if you're aware of the backstory or personnel going into it, you'll no doubt wonder when the metallic element is going to rear its head. Either way, Ascension tests your patience in the best possible sense.

Like Wrekmeister Harmonies' two previous albums, Night of Your Ascension consists of madrigal/sacred choral music, experimental ambient music, and doom. This time around (thanks to help from arrangers Eric Chaleff, Cooper Crain, and Sanford Parker), J.R. Robinson takes a developmental leap forward in all three arenas, but it isn't until the beginning motif of the second track "Run Priest Run" where all these disparate elements actually blend together, in a passage that lasts in excess of 8 minutes and could easily have appeared on Hundred Waters' last album. Before being gradually overtaken by electric guitars à la the title track, "Run Priest Run" initially fulfills the potential that Wrekmeister Harmonies show on paper as a 30-plus member ensemble drawing on musicians from metal, rock, and new music circles.

Alongside Nadler, harpist Mary Lattimore, electro-acoustic sound artist-composer Olivia Block, and Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten, the album features members of the Body, Cave, Indian, Bloodiest, Anatomy of Habit, Come, Twilight, and Mind Over Mirrors. Robinson leans heavily on these musicians to flesh out his compositions and give Ascension its shape and character. For the title track, Robinson nods to 16-century Neopolitan composer Don Carlo Gesualdo, whose experimental approach to madrigals pre-dated widespread use by a good 300 years.

Gesualdo is also infamous for murdering his wife and her lover. Robinson bases the first half of the title track on Gesualdo's techniques which, incidentally, influenced Igor Stravinsky and inspired author Aldous Huxley to describe Gesualdo's work as "a kind of musical no-man's land." The juxtaposition between the tune's classical and doom modes is clearly meant to invoke a sense of the friction between Gesualdo's towering creative presence and the internal torment that drove him to commit murder. Likewise, for "Run Priest Run" Robinson looked to the case of Boston Catholic priest Father John Geoghan, who was accused of sexually abusing over 130 boys, convicted, and murdered in prison in 2003 while serving a life sentence.

Once aware of these narrative backdrops, the atmosphere on Night of Your Ascension (and in particular the black metal-styled vocal screeching on "Run Priest Run") becomes charged with a dread that elevates this music above the ho-hum gestural negativity of other doom outfits who sound like they're reaching for something to frown over. Robinson draws from real-life tragedy and sexual pathology and does his earnest best to honor the nuances of each case. At the same time, this album's obvious equation of heaviness to violence and psychological despair comes off as heavy-handed.

Nevertheless, Night of Your Ascension faces rote themes like killing, death, and despair from a fresh perspective that aspires to be illuminating. It's also, strangely enough, an album listeners can use to make new friends. Given the way Robinson disposed of musical boundaries to put this music together, it spurs the audience to do the same practically by default. If you're into experimental rock or metal, Night of Your Ascension naturally incites curiosity about madrigals and Renaissance composition. The same applies in reverse. If your tastes fall in any of those areas, you can use this album as a bridge to another world by walking up to someone across the aisle and asking "Have you heard this? What's your take?" It's bound to be a lengthy, engaging conversation, not unlike the album itself.

Punch Brothers: The Wireless EP

Few modern roots musicians have amassed the critical acclaim and international popularity enjoyed by the honey-voiced, quick-fingered mandolinist Chris Thile. As the frontman and principal songwriter of the progressive bluegrass trio Nickel Creek, the California-born musician spent the early '00s pushing an invigorating, risk-taking acoustic melange he dubbed "newgrass", imbuing an art form commonly thought of as static with modernist quirks. Since then—Nickel Creek's 2014 reunion notwithstanding—Thile has shifted focus to Punch Brothers, a quintet who churn out the same dexterous roots music with a little more oomph. (Meanwhile, Thile’s Nickel Creek comrades Sean and Sara Watkins issued Watkins Family Hour, an LP birthed from the siblings’ monthly residency at Los Angeles’ Largo). Along the way, he’s won a Genius Grant and released several successful solo albums. Next year, he’ll host A Prairie Home Companion. 

Recorded during the same sessions that beget their last album, last year’s T-Bone Burnett-produced The Phosphorescent Blues, Punch Brothers' latest, The Wireless EP, combines three cuts previously included on that record's deluxe vinyl edition with two never-before-heard tracks, bridging their most recent musical statement with their next avant-American LP. The collection’s diverse blend of pensive instrumentals, rousing singsongs, and stylistic experiments—namely, a roots-y interpretation of Elliott Smith’s "Clementine"—makes it a great introduction to the Punch Brothers’ quirky, clever bluegrass, as well as a satisfying (if modest) addition to the quintet’s catalog.

Guitar, mandolin, fiddle/violin, banjo, bass, and whiskey-smooth vocals: six sounds—no more and no less—comprise the bulk of Punch Brothers’ deceptively full sound, a paradigm familiar to anyone who’s heard put on an Alison Krauss or Doc Watson LP. The biggest challenge for the group is molding this simplistic sonic recipe into a multitude of forms without falling victim to redundancy (or even worse, directionless noodling)—and Thile and company make it look like nothing. Where slow-churning opening track "In Wonder" pits soaring harmonies against a relentless, defiant fiddle, slinky instrumental "The Hops of Guldenberg" offers a country-fried take on jazz improvisation. There’s even room for existential banter: centerpiece "Sleek White Baby" stars Ed Helms of "The Office" fame as an old-timey announcer hawking the answer to all life’s problems against a serendipitous shuffle.

If Punch Brothers' barbershop-quartet harmonies and old-school instruments are the roots tethering the group to bluegrass convention, then their covers are the shoots reaching onwards and upwards, transgressive in origin but puzzlingly traditional-sounding in practice. Thile and company regularly toss tunes fashioned outside of their rusted wheelhouse onto their setlists, as well as on their studio releases; past interpretations include spindly, creaky takes on Radiohead's "Kid A" and "Packt Like Sardines In a Crush’d Tin Box", as well as a prickly spin on "Icarus Smicarus", from post-hardcore heroes Mclusky. Like the rest of the band’s covers, "Clementine" is not so much a playful dalliance as it is another 20th century addition to the Punch Brothers’ envelope-pushing interpretation of the bluegrass canon. What’s more, by seamlessly integrating Smith’s booze-soaked hymn into the Appalachian-indebted mix, Thile and company don't just solidify the song’s latent transcendency: they propose a challenge to modern conceptions of bluegrass.

Doug Hream Blunt: My Name Is

Even with assistance from the Internet, some cult records still have to travel off beaten paths, their pleasures imparted by friends in the know. Just how I came to know about a singer from San Francisco named Doug Hream Blunt four years ago, I am not exactly certain, though I suspect it was on a tip from either a member of Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti or else Park Blvd. Records co-owner Jason Darrah. But the moment that pneumatic, rinky-dink keyboard figure that opens "Fly Guy" wheezed and wormed into my ears, I was charmed and confounded. The sleeve art was nothing but a generic white sleeve with a gold sticker advertising the 'hit' "Gentle Persuasion" and it was hard to tell if it was a put-on or else proof that outsider music could remain relevant and vital in an age when any musician could upload his music to MySpace and be discovered, when most clues could be tracked down with a simple Google search. I’m not the only one besotted by Hream Blunt, as Ariel Pink is a champion, while former Hype Williams member Dean Blunt posits himself as the progeny of the man.

Once hovering in obscurity and mystery, My Name Is makes Doug Hream Blunt readily accessible thanks to David Byrne’s Luaka Bop imprint, no stranger to tracking down itchy, quirky folks like William Onyeabor and Tom Zé. Even as the comp clarifies some of the Frisco fog that enshrouded that self-released CD and its bootlegged 12", there remains a slippery, eel-like quality to these 10 songs. We learn in the liner notes that in the mid '80s as a 35-year-old prone to taking odd jobs, Blunt answered a flyer for a workshop called 'How to Form a Band.' Nevermind it was intended for Bay Area teens, Blunt approached the classes with a similar sense of the naïf, imparting that spirit onto the other adult students, four of them women who comprise his band.

There's the spirit of the Troggs, the Shaggs, and Half Japanese to the grooves, something stupid yet undeniable, unlearned yet impossible to replicate. The whinnying, cyclical keyboard figure that Jeannie Killmer repeats ad nauseam on "Fly Guy" brings to mind '90s Ethiopian pop as well as what you might come up with at Guitar Center on a synth using the flute patch and your thumb. Even more charming and baffling are the lyrics, where Blunt makes a streetwise observation about capitalism: "The rich use paper then they charge you more," talks about teaching the youth and then adds: "Girl, I just wanna chill."

A similarly simple yet inveigling melody and needling guitar sidewinds through the wobbly boogie of said hit, "Gentle Persuasion". For all the speculation as to what it means "to do the ninety-nine", the notes just equivocate it to the mystery dance itself. Still, it takes a certain kind of Romeo to make a panty-dropping non sequitur of "like ice, your butt is like dice now, daaaamn."

Charming as those two tracks are, they both run past six minutes and verge on exhausting. But as "Big Top", "Caribbean Queen", and "Break Free" reveal, Blunt sets about recycling both melodies onto other songs to where their appeal becomes threadbare. Perhaps in keeping with the Haight-Ashbury spirit of his home, each song also contains extended, aimless guitar soloing. And while he might have a two-track mind musically, it's solely one track when it comes to his primary theme. Outside of the last song (an instrumental version of "Fly Guy"), the other nine share a similar beat and subject, the word "girl" uttered in every song. So even as My Name Is pulls back the curtain on Doug Hream Blunt’s mystery music, it also makes clear that the opposite sex will always remain one to him.

John Coltrane: A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters

John Coltrane was a late bloomer. Born in 1926, the same year as Miles Davis, he spent his twenties in and out of small-time bands, a promising journeyman moving between playing jazz and the more bar-friendly music that was starting to be called R&B. During these early years he had problems with narcotics and alcohol, alternating stretches of heroin use with periods of binge drinking. Charlie Parker—every sax player's hero when Coltrane was coming up in the 1940s and '50s—had given the junkie life a romantic aura for some naive souls, connecting drug use with creativity. But the underachieving Coltrane was a run-of-the-mill addict, someone broke and in ill health whose habit clearly kept him stuck in place. He was fired from Miles Davis' band in 1957 for showing up on the bandstand dressed in shabby clothes and visibly drunk—by some accounts he took a punch from the trumpeter before being given his walking papers. And if Coltrane had spiraled and his career had ended there, he'd be remembered now as a musician who flamed out just as he was discovering his voice.

But that's not what happened. Everything changed for Coltrane in 1957 when, as he wrote in the liner notes to his defining album, A Love Supreme, he "experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life." During that year, Coltrane stopped drinking and kicked heroin, and from that point forward, his career would unfold with an almost frightening amount of focus and intensity. These final 10 years are when Coltrane made his mark on the world of jazz as a leader, and he was then seemingly always on the move, in transition, each moment glimpsed as a blur on a continuum rather than a fixed point in space. He wasn't just covering ground, he was accelerating, and every phase of his later career has the attendant feeling of stomach-dropping free-fall, of being pushed forcefully into new places.

A Love Supreme, recorded with what was later called his classic quartet, is Coltrane's musical expression of his 1957 epiphany. It's the sound of a man laying his soul bare. Structured as a suite and delivered in praise of God, everything about the record is designed for maximum emotional impact, from Elvin Jones' opening gong crash to the soft rain of McCoy Tyner's piano clusters to Coltrane's stately fanfare to Jimmy Garrison's iconic four-note bassline to the spoken chant by Coltrane—"a-LOVE-su-PREME, a-LOVE-su-PREME"—that carries out the opening movement, "Acknowledgement". By the time the record gets to the closing "Psalm", which finds Coltrane interpreting on his saxophone the syllables of a poem he'd written to the Creator, A Love Supreme has wrung its concept dry, extracting every drop of feeling from Coltrane's initial vision. It's as complete a statement as exists in recorded jazz. Hearing it now as part of this exhaustive 3xCD set, which gathers every scrap of material recorded during the sessions as well as a live performance of the suite from later the same year, you get a clearer sense than ever before of the different forms A Love Supreme might have taken, and how Coltrane's desire to communicate something specific and profound led to its final shape.

A Love Supreme is also one of the most popular albums in the last 60 years of jazz, selling the kind of numbers usually reserved for pop (it quickly sold more than 100,000 copies, and has almost certainly sold more than a million since). If Miles Davis' Kind of Blue is the most frequently bought first jazz album for those curious about the genre, A Love Supreme is easily number two. But though they were released just seven years apart, there's a world of difference between the two records, and the success of A Love Supreme is trickier to explain. For all its structural daring, Kind of Blue also functions as an ambient record, with slower tempos and late-night ambiance. A Love Supreme is harder to get a handle on. If you can think of Coltrane's work on a continuum, from the gorgeous melodicism of "My Favorite Things" or Ballads or his album with Duke Ellington on one end and the brutal noise assault of the 1966 concerts collected on Concert in Japan on the other, A Love Supreme sits perfectly at the fulcrum, challenging enough to continually reveal new aspects but accessible enough to inspire newcomers.

Coltrane may have structured the record for just this effect. He had already been further "out" than the music heard on A Love Supreme, including some of the knotty extended jams like "Chasin' the Trane" recorded at his 1961 sessions at the Village Vanguard. He was fascinated with the innovations of Ornette Coleman from the minute he heard them in the late '50s, and though he never completely abandoned chord changes, he regularly flirted with atonality, improvising outside of a fixed key. With A Love Supreme, it was almost as though Coltrane knew he had to dial things back a little in order to share his message of spiritual rebirth with a wider audience. Though conventionally beautiful in many ways, A Love Supreme is, for many, the exact point beyond which jazz becomes too experimental.

It's possible to hear on this set how the album might have gone even further. At a time when a single track might have a dozen collaborators working on it over the course of weeks, it's a little mind-boggling to consider that the music on A Love Supreme was recorded on a single day, December 9, 1964. This wasn't uncommon for jazz records of the time. But though they had the music in the can from that first day, Coltrane wanted to try something else. So on December 10, he called the young tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp, and a second bassist, Art Davis to play with his quartet. The six musicians then ran through two versions of A Love Supreme's opening "Acknowledgment", so that Coltrane could explore what the music might sound like with another horn and additional low-end rhythm. Shepp was an up-and-comer deeply influenced by Coltrane; the two takes of "Acknowledgment" featuring Shepp find him serving as a kind of textural counterpoint, his more brittle and biting tone commenting on the melody from an oblique angle and hinting at possibilities existing outside of the version recorded the day before. You sense a more abrasive road not taken, one that almost certainly would have found a smaller audience.

We hear a different perspective on the fantastic live version of the suite recorded in France five months after the album's release. Five months in '60s Coltrane time was like a decade in the career of other jazz musicians, and he was already imbuing the A Love Supreme material with an extra intensity. Tyner's clanging chords on "Resolution" have a harsher edge, and Coltrane's attendant soloing is much rougher and more pointed, his notes seeming to attack the structure of the composition from several directions rather than floating along above it. This is the hard-blowing sound that Coltrane would show on Meditations, another spiritually focused album-length suite recorded later in 1965 that never had a chance at A Love Supreme's level of mainstream acceptance.

In the same year, Coltrane would also record Om and Ascension, two harsh and challenging pieces of music that strain against the boundaries of what most people would even consider music. Given what surrounds it, and how sweet and gentle it so often is, A Love Supreme was an expression of a very specific time and place, a conscious attempt by Coltrane to communicate something to his audience that was broad enough to be understood but rich and complex enough to honor both where he was as a musician and the depth of the subject matter. A Love Supreme sounds like nothing else in John Coltrane's discography, and indeed like little else in recorded jazz, sitting at the nexus of so many competing musical ideas.

The final piece of the A Love Supreme equation concerns the civil rights movement and black liberation, and how those swirling ideas were inextricably tangled up with the jazz avant-garde.  Coltrane was never overtly political, but he did allow his thoughts and feelings to bleed into his music. Coltrane met Malcolm X, wrote a piece for Martin Luther King Jr., and his 1963 dirge "Alabama", a piece with a close tonal connection to A Love Supreme's "Psalm", was written to commemorate the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing that year. As the '60s wore on, politically conscious "fire jazz" grew in currency, much of it directly inspired by Coltrane's music, but during his life he never quite felt the need to connect his music to specific social currents, even as others drew inspiration from it in that context. Coltrane was seeking something broader, communing with God as he understood it.

For Coltrane, that spiritual journey led him to A Love Supreme, which became the base he'd explore from during his short time left on Earth. Coltrane occupies a unique position in jazz history. He was famous, especially in the jazz world, but he wasn't really a personality. He was not inclined toward interviews and he wasn't very good at them, preferring to let the music speak for itself. He didn't have the mystery of a Thelonious Monk, the tragic genius of a Charlie Parker, the cool comfort with celebrity or flamboyance of a Miles Davis, the combative verbal dexterity of Charles Mingus, the theoretical underpinnings of Ornette Coleman, the comfort with the mainstream of Louis Armstrong, or the symbolic stature of Duke Ellington. He led a quiet life, putting everything into his music.

His chaotic years mostly came when he was an unknown; by the time he was a major jazz figure, almost his entire life was music. If he wasn't on stage or in a recording studio, he was practicing or studying records. Seemingly every other story of an encounter with Coltrane in the 1960s involved him in a room with a saxophone in his hand, playing scales. In his mind, God had saved him, and he was going to give back. A Love Supreme was his expression of gratitude, a hopeful prayer for a better world.

Parquet Courts: Monastic Living EP

On "No No No!", the opener of Parquet Courts’ new mini-LP Monastic Living, Andrew Savage declares in a mangled grunt, "I don’t want to be called a poet/ Don’t want to hang in a museum/ Don’t want to be cited, tacked onto your cause/ No, no, no/ I’m just a man." From a band who've typically resisted disenchantment against the odds, it’s an alarming statement of rejection. On 2012's Light Up Gold, Savage and co-songwriter Austin Brown blazed through mundane minutiae–"train death paintings, anti-meth murals"–yet saw beauty in the banality; on last year’s "Content Nausea", released as Parkay Quarts, Savage yelled denunciations of the digital era in excited bursts, like a smalltown newsreader reporting alien landings. Pitched between stoner gags and urgent instructions, their sizzling one-liners felt like a bulwark against capitalist dread, the battle between righteousness and resignation. Monastic Living, their debut EP for Rough Trade presumably ahead of a full-length in the new year, is them saying, "We’re tired, that’s enough."

"No No No!" is unique to the record, in that it has words, a hook, a rhythm you could tap, a sonic and philosophical destination, and replay value. In the liner notes, the track’s expanded lyric sheet blends cliché ("We’re just a band," "retreat into solitude") and aphorism—"Perhaps silence is purity of spirit"—into a grave mission statement. The remaining eight tracks aren't just wordless but tuneless; they're sometimes baffling, often boring, and always deliberately so. 

Part of what makes "No No No!" work is that its litany of targets—"open letters, long reads"—is broad enough to appeal to everyone’s digital unease. Parquet Courts are resolutely unchill ("Life’s lived best when scrolling least," Savage sang on "Content Nausea"), bewildered by the hot takes and the jostling think-pieces, as are we all. But these are popular targets, and without the counterweight of wit, Parquet Courts' grand disavowal feels reactionary. On Monastic Living, they make a personal decision to reject a web culture constantly renegotiating what it means to be socially conscious ("I don't want to be an essayist!" begins Savage's salvo), and in doing so they reclaim art’s right to political neutrality. As statements go, it’s fine but hardly revolutionary—a passionate shrug. 

Redeeming moments in the music are scarce. One is "Vow of Silence", with its clattering drums, pleading, squealing guitars, and haywire arpeggios, which resemble the misfiring pistons of a manic brain. "Alms for the Poor", comprising several seconds of a postpunk riff that dies suddenly, sounds like the husk of a practice session; a chugging number called "Monastic Living I." is Battles without the epiphanies.

Unlike that paragon of artistic rejection, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, which actually coheres rather nicely, the EP has little textural detail; the music is not immersive, much less transcendent. It isn’t just a score to modern ennui but a work that itself feels indifferent. Yet it’s presented with a straight face: The band are touring the EP and we can buy it, though I’m unsure why anyone would—perhaps its existence as a paid-for product is part of the statement. What it means for the band’s future is, for now, a mystery, though not the kind it is fun to unravel.

Horrendous: Anareta

The Philadelphia death metal trio Horrendous were dubbed vintage revivalists just three years ago, with their 2012 debut The Chills. But their sound opened up drastically for Ecdysis, the album's glimpses of outside influences earning the band increased attention. On Anareta, a record captured during one obsessive, month-long session spent sequestered in bandleader Damian Herring's home studio, Horrendous' playbook feels truly open. It's as if, bona fides well established, the band set out to form a link between the past they once embraced and a future they imagine.

This shift is as clear during opener "The Nihilist", where seething whispers curl around a complex math-metal figure, as it is during closer "The Solipsist", where a kaleidoscopic melody spins like a spotlight inside a thrash metal bulwark. There are references to antecedents throughout: "Stillborn Gods" invokes Slayer, while moments of "Ozymandias" sound like a Big Four mixtape. The legacy of Swedish death metal looms large, too. But these are the foundations from which Horrendous now sprawl—with bright solos that whip in the wind, with rubber-band basslines that run counterclockwise to the leads, with whiplash rhythms that suggest a short-circuiting carnival ride.

Through all of these twists and churns, the band never seems to be showing off its dexterity, or attempting transitions for their own sake. Horrendous have become masters of pacing and dynamics, instinctively knowing when to let the album and audience breathe. "Polaris" progresses from doom metal to black metal to death metal and back to doom seamlessly, as though a DJ had spent hours perfecting the cuts between it all. On the first five minutes of "Acolytes", they plow through a grindcore sprint and settle into a dense and demanding death-metal section, with a squealing little riff tucked carefully into a rhythm section that refuses to sit still. These additions lend the momentum of mystery to these songs, which surprise every time you hear them.

One of the most glorious moments on the album, and in metal this year, arrives as a revelation at the end of "Acolytes". Unexpectedly, the guitar stalls, locking into one glowing note as the drums retreat into a low-tempo tap. Then, a new arching riff radiates outward, as though the guitar has suddenly emerged from a mountain's shadow and into the midday sun. The drums double and triple their pace, while Herring musters one final, fade-away scream, like a hero taking his leave of a scene. It's a beautiful passage, as redemptive as anything on Deafheaven's Sunbather and as cathartic as the closing moments of a symphony.

Though they sound quite different, Anareta has a lot in common with my other favorite metal album of the year, Tribulation's The Children of the Night. On their earliest albums, both bands wrestled with the past, rendering death metal anew as competent revivalists. But in 2015, they have both stretched those traditions, filling accepted frameworks with unlikely elements. The influences are still recognizable, but the results are no longer obvious. This quest even comes written into Anareta's wonderfully narrative lyrics, where the aim for mortal meaning serves as the cri de cœur. "Forging a new reality/ Embrace the burning dawn in me," goes the end of "Acolytes". Indeed, metal can value faithful, enthusiastic recreations more than heretical ingenuity, and vice versa. But like Tribulation, Horrendous show the value of compromise within a record that creates its own middle ground—and stands right there for eight tracks, stunning.

Dragged Into Sunlight / Gnaw Their Tongues: N.V.

"That's when my rape fantasies first started, when I was in college," explains the late serial killer Michael Ross, who is centrally featured on the aptly titled "Visceral Repulsion", perhaps the most jarring example of the pointless and even malicious shock that characterizes N.V. A collaboration between English extreme-metal quartet Dragged Into Sunlight and Dutch noise musician Maurice "Mories" de Jong, who releases music under several monikers and has put out upwards of 30 records as Gnaw Their Tongues, N.V. ("negative volume") is littered with samples of true-crime confessions from the likes of Ross.

As if his presence weren't unpleasant enough, the sample delves into the various techniques Ross used to murder his victims. Presumably, the team of artists who made N.V. would argue that real-life horror is fair game for evoking a reaction(namely: disgust) with art. In fact, judging from two recent interviews, it seems likely that Dragged Into Sunlight even managed to disturb themselves with this record, and that de Jong draws from headline-news violence in his work because it genuinely frightens him. Not to mention that the sound clips are lifted from TV documentaries that sensationalize these acts while purporting to condemn them.

Still, the inclusion of these samples is flat-out despicable and speaks volumes about how decades of desensitization have blurred not only the lines of good taste but of common decency as well. If N.V. is any indication, actual murder has become indistinguishable from any other image we passively ingest from the safe, numb remove of our computer monitors. Once artists adopt "extremity" as the cowardly affectation that it is, they leave themselves little choice but to keep pushing the envelope. The musicians on N.V. would probably insist that they went this far precisely because they wanted to make the audience feel something. But to indulge them in a rewardless thought-loop by debating their intentions is to allow them to manipulate you and waste your time.

It's a shame, because N.V.'s lurid first-person homicide monologues overshadow its wealth of sonic character. Both of these acts are defined by their (arguably unparalleled) ability to create atmosphere, which makes their yin-yang pairing a natural fit that, on paper, overflows with possibilities. Judging from their respective bodies of work, there's no doubt that Dragged Into Sunlight and Gnaw Their Tongues could have rendered tunes like "Visceral Repulsion" scary—and taken the audience into a truly murderous, sexually depraved headspace—through other, more imaginative means. Pig Destroyer frontman-lyricist J.R. Hayes, for example, scares the daylights out of you and dives even further into the same thematic terrain but manages to get there without trampling on anyone's grave.

Billed as a joint effort, N.V. actually bears the stamp of two other significant contributors, Godflesh/Jesu founder Justin Broadrick and Corrupt Moral Altar drummer-producer Tom Dring. Having produced the first two DIS albums, Dring once again had a hand in shaping the sounds throughout the making of N.V., while Broadrick stepped in as co-producer and sonic overseer later, during the mixing stages. By that point, the initial collaboration had yielded three hours' worth of raw material spanning five years' worth of on-again, off-again back and forth with DIS and de Jong working out of their respective homebases in England and the Netherlands.

Stretched as it was over time, distance, and multiple perspectives, N.V. sounds surprisingly focused and, musically speaking, rather non-indulgent (perhaps because Broadrick, Dring, DIS, and de Jong boiled the final product down to a 32-minute runtime). Broadrick's input is somewhat difficult to discern, but de Jong's touch saturates this music. Even in the spots where Dragged Into Sunlight blasts away and it seems like there's no room to cram in any more sonic information, de Jong is there, hovering like a toxic, mind-altering haze that burns your eyes, chokes your throat, and soaks into your skin -- sensations that are not without their appeal.

Dragged Into Sunlight had already created a sense of psych-ward hysteria with the black-grind hybrid they established as far back as 2008's Terminal Aggressor, and their ability to use raw ingredients like cymbal wash, inhuman-sounding vocal shrieks, reverbs, and delays gave their music a queasy hall-of-mirrors feel that set the band apart from other likeminded peers. On N.V., they turn to Mories as a kind of set designer who fleshes out and brings spacial and tactile dimension to the Liverpool quartet's caustic exorcisms.

Naturally, as an almost supergroup-like meeting of the minds between three highly production-conscious acts, N.V. is crammed with details that don't initially reveal themselves. There's undeniably an art to N.V.'s execution. But even if de Jong and Dragged Into Sunlight grasp the scale of the tragedies they've chosen to rub the audience's nose in, the fact is they're contributing to trivializing the victims in these cases. Will listeners respond to N.V. the way we might once have tittered at the gross-out slasher fantasies on early Cannibal Corpse records, or will they recognize the distinction?

At this stage in the game, metal bands should consider it their creative if not human responsibility to view these well-worn subjects through new lenses. Being "more extreme" for its own sake is not only lame but creatively and ethically bankrupt. That said, there is undeniably an art to N.V.'s execution. Together, its participants combine layers of abrasion that can be rewarding if you can, well, get past the visceral repulsion.

Joey Anderson: Invisible Switch

Joey Anderson came to house music first as a dancer: Not your average weekend clubber, but a devoted student of a vernacular form, house dancing, that thrived in New York and New Jersey nightclubs in the 1990s—expressive, fluid, acrobatic, and competitive. You can hear that influence in the sparse, wiry productions that he has been recording since the beginning of this decade. They're not made for fist-pumping, and they don't follow neat verse/chorus structures. They ripple and writhe unpredictably, marked by an improvisational sense of movement. They seem to move of their own accord.

Anderson comes from the same corner of the house and techno universe that has given us artists like Levon Vincent, Anthony Parasole, and DJ Qu, a fellow dancer. Like them, he favors analog drum machines, hardware synthesizers, and what sounds, above all, like a lot of playing of keys and twisting of knobs in real time. Much contemporary electronic music is composed visually, assembled brick by brick on a computer screen, but Anderson's snake-in-the-grass meanderings suggest live takes stacked one on top of another, thanks to the magic of multi-tracking.

"18 Arms" goes straight to the heart of his approach. True to its name (leave it to a dancer to come up with a title like that), it opens with a synthesizer pattern that squirms like an octopus' tentacles, and as the track accrues its fistfuls of counterpoints and layers, it becomes easy to imagine the producer as a one-man band. At any given point on the album, three or more synthesizer parts are being woven together; drum hits are flaring up and being muted again; a hi-hat's pitch seesaws up and down. The cumulative effect of all these techniques is at once chaotic and elegant, and fluid above all.

But how the music is put together is ultimately less important than how it feels, and Anderson's music is all about feel. It's hard to put your finger on the emotions they evoke, but you're moved all the same. ("'Deep' to me is like the human condition that you don't talk about, that you hold in forever until you are in front of that right person" Anderson told Resident Advisor, which might go some way towards explaining the slipperiness of his music's emotional register.) A song might be calm and meditative: the spacious "Organ to Dust" is a study in stillness in which quietly accelerating figures move like quarters spinning to a halt on the floor. "Nabta Playa", named for a drained basin in the Egyptian desert, is fleet and mysterious; in both sound and mood, it's reminiscent of Drexciya's Afro-futurist fantasies, and the Detroit icons' fizzy textures and frantic movements also inform "Amarna", whose title refers to the tomb of the Pharaoh Akhenaten. It's the album's most unhinged track, with wildly filtered drums that thrash desperately about. It sounds like music for punching mirrors; it moves like someone trying to escape his own shadow. True to the corporeal bent of Anderson's album, it locates emotion not in the mind but in the muscles.

Kneebody and Daedelus: Kneedelus

Under his Flying Lotus codename, Steven Ellison continues to push his distinctive strain of abstract hip-hop into the direction paved by his Great Aunt Alice and Great Uncle John. You could hear the family history coursing through the interstellar spaces he explored with his cousin Ravi on 2010's Cosmogramma and that Herbie Hancock jam on last year's You're Dead!. But Ellison's advancement of creative jazz has been more crucial as curator of the Brainfeeder label, which he founded in 2008 as an outlet for himself and his buddies down at Low End Theory in Los Angeles.

Kamasi Washington's The Epic hinted at FlyLo's A&R prowess, and Kneedelus puts an exclamation point on the imprint's new direction. The relationship between exploratory, Grammy-nominated funk-jazz outfit Kneebody and pioneering Cali beat scientist Daedelus (born Alfred Darlington) goes back almost a decade, evidenced by remixes on Bandcamp and a stage collaboration at the Jazz à Vienne Festival in 2009. Kneebody saxophonist Ben Wendel and Darlington are high school friends, while Darlington and Flying Lotus go back to 1983, Ellison's debut, and Darlington's indelible remix of the title track.

What all of this six-degrees business adds up to is this supernova of a record, rounded out by Adam Benjamin on keyboard, Shane Endsley on treated trumpet, bassist Kaveh Rastegar, and drummer Nate Wood. As a collaborative unit, the friendship between the parties undoubtedly lends itself to the fluidity of these 10 original compositions. In some cases, as on tracks like the rugged "The Hole" and the hypnotic "Move", you can't really even tell where Kneebody ends and Daedelus begins. Darlington's deft rhythmic impulses come to the fore on "Drum Battle", but in other moments, the invincible horn section of Kneebody runs the show. On "Loops", Endsley's trumpet is cat-like and cool, as the group takes the scrambled-signal breakbeat Daedelus delivers to the snapping point around the horn's calm center like a hurricane eye. On "Platforming", meanwhile, Wendel's fantastic Art Pepper-esque tenor work is transformed into a wild, distorted-violin sound. Elsewhere, its Benjamin who is leading the charge on the seven-minute Mwandishi-flavored space-out "Thought Not", and the haunting processed upright piano he plays on "Not Love".

Yet its when Kneebody and Daedelus fuse that Kneedelus achieves its potential. And perhaps no other track really embodies that idea more than "Home", the album's deep modal center that simmers together Tubby dub, TNT-era Tortoise, and Lalo Schifrin. It's no matter of happenstance the cover of Kneedelus is a shameless emulation of the design format of another game-changing jazz record label, ECM. This album exists in a very similar atmosphere to some of Manfred Eicher's bolder production moves throughout the last 40-odd years (dig that Jack DeJohnette box set for proof). And above all, it's a vision offering one last reminder before the year is out that Brainfeeder is very serious about its place in the jazz world. 

Natalie Prass: Side by Side EP

Let me be the first to formally apologize for accidentally contributing to the execrable proliferation of analyses that Natalie Prass sounds like "a Disney princess." This writer was in attendance for a show where she took a moment to defend herself from the claim, which was followed by a not-sober fellow yelling out an unprintable word and the name of this website, a moment that made at least one person in the vicinity feel very uncomfortable. You can understand how she would take it as a backhanded compliment: There's something unavoidably infantilizing about the suggestion that your voice resembles a fictional cartoon monarch's, even if Snow White could really sing.

It makes her sound so… formal, too, and while Prass makes music inspired by classic artists like Dusty Springfield and Dionne Warwick, she's no traditionalist. Covers of modern musicians like Janet Jackson and Ryan Adams have snuck their way into her sets, and she even popped up on the AV Club last month to turn the gory chug of Slayer's "Raining Blood" into an inside-voice delight. Side by Side shows that playful side, comprising two live cuts of songs from her self-titled solo debut, as well as covers of Grimes, Anita Baker, and Simon & Garfunkel, artists whose only obvious connection is "singers that Natalie Prass decided to cover on her new EP."

Her take on Baker's "Caught Up in the Rapture" does away with those awesomely '80s gated drums and sparkling filter sweeps, instead pushing the tempo and adding guitar for something a little more lively. On the original, Baker welcomes the listener with open arms through some magical doorway, where the evening of a lifetime awaits. Prass sings from a more present place, like she's three beers into a muggy summer night at a Nashville bar. She makes the gentle folk-rock of "Sound of Silence" a little more lively, nailing those melodies with her graceful, nimble voice. "REALiTi" is done as a straight up ragtime jaunt, and if her press release commentary on the cover ("[Grimes is] probably going to say 'what is this jazz shit' and hate it") is maybe a little too accurately self-deprecating, she at least commits. 

The live versions of "My Baby Don't Understand Me" and "Christy" strip away the dense orchestral instrumentation and let a Wurlitzer piano do the driving. The arrangements are cleaner, and show her mastery over negative space. One knock on the self-titled record was that Prass sometimes sounded secondary to the orchestra, but here the same can't be said. My favorite moment on the original LP was at the end of "My Baby Don't Understand Me", where the repeated refrain of "our love is a long goodbye" built to a grand climax. On the live take, she lets the groove ride a few seconds longer, transforming the swelling romance into something steamier.

Similarly, the nighttime vibe of the unadorned "Christy" precludes all future Disney princess comparisons, as she lets the lonesomeness of the lyrics ("Why does it have to be that she can take the hand of anyone she meets?/ Still, the only one she sees belongs to me") really sink in. In this, Side by Side does what a good EP should—it reminds us of what she's skilled at, while showing off some other strengths. There's even something like a mission statement to her music in the title, and the song it's taken from: "When I feel the magic of you/ The feeling's always new." It's an old sentiment, and the lyric belongs to another artist, but Prass makes it hers.

Adele: 25

Adele is only 27 years old, still young by any sensible metric, but much of 25, her third album, concerns itself with the passage of time: the inevitable accumulation of both years and vantages. It’s as if she knows intimately the nauseating experience of waking up one morning, surveying a half-lived life, and thinking, "Oops." She never adopts a schoolmarm’s consternation (and she is entitled to some authority, having sold a boggling 30 million copies of her last record, 2011’s 21), but she is nevertheless cautionary, encouraging her listeners to do better, act faster, stop being such a bunch of clowns. Get up and get over, friend, she seems to be saying—you are a grown person now.

Or: "We both know we ain’t kids no more," which is how she puts it on "Send My Love (To Your New Lover)", a song co-written by Max Martin, the 44-year-old Swedish super-producer who has now penned almost as many number one singles as Lennon and McCartney. Stack ‘em up, and all of Martin’s songs follow a particular formula: they’re prickly, quick-moving affairs that braid the precision of Swedish pop like ABBA with the more groove-oriented rhythms of American R&B. To that end, Martin is as exacting of a songwriter as I’ve ever heard: like he did with the tracks he made for Taylor Swift ("Shake It Off", "Blank Space", "Style") and Katy Perry ("I Kissed a Girl", "Teenage Dream", "Roar"), he relies on some enigmatic internal cadence, clipping syllables like a hiccuping poet, taking a tiny scalpel to his melodies. He keeps his lines pointy and balanced. "Send-my-love/ To-your-new/ Luh-uh-ver." The results are like encountering a person with perfectly symmetrical features—both instantly appealing and deeply, existentially unsettling. The song opens with carefully plucked acoustic guitar, and when the chorus comes in it’s as if someone yanked the curtains up on a dark room.

Lyrically, Adele leans on a familiar kind of outrage, reckoning with a lover who broke every promise he ever made to her. There's unrequited love, but then there’s love that changes shape; if you’re unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of that transaction—made unwilling witness to the mysterious, alchemical shift in which devotion suddenly thins, sours—true understanding is impossible, a fool’s errand. This is the love that Adele sings of, the kind where there’s nothing left to do but resign: "I’m giving you up, I’m forgiving it all." Nurturing grudges is a young woman’s game.

Almost every song on 25 addresses heartache in one form or another. "Send My Love" is anomalous in its confidence; more often, Adele sounds excruciatingly aware of her own blunders and bereavements, and the ways in which time has made them indelible. Sometimes, Adele herself is the agent of grief, like on "Hello", in which she attempts to reach an ex-lover on her flip-phone. Surely, on some level, Adele knows the message she’s so hungry to deliver—"I’m sorry/ For breaking your heart"—is not the kind of sentiment that’s going to yield her much more than a slowly raised middle finger (the indignation of the recently forsaken is vast, merciless). She is arguably more desperate to reach an earlier iteration of herself, to correct something, quiet some panic.

Other times she is a victim of loss. In the piano ballad "When We Were Young", which was co-written with Tobias Jesso Jr., she sings: "Let me photograph you in this light/ In case it is the last time/ That we might be exactly like we were/ Before we realized." The instrumentation swells, quiets. The precise nature of that realization is not named, but of course it doesn’t need to be, or not explicitly (as Joan Didion wrote, in 1967, "It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends."). The song itself is a kind of homage to the booming, soft-focus singer-songwriters who dominated AM radio in the 1970s (Barbra Streisand, Shirley Bassey), and Adele’s vocal performance is astonishing, full of vigor and beauty.

Still: the cumulative effect is sometimes as treacly as the heavily frosted sheet cake being slid onto the buffet table in the carpeted banquet hall where this song will be blasting, on a loop, for all of eternity. Even your most adorable aunt—the one who loves a Yankee Candle—will eventually drain her flute of sparkling wine, lean forward, and be like, "Dog, this shit is corny."

Taken as a whole document, it is truly staggering how many of these songs—all of them, as far as I can tell—address the foibles of romantic love. It’s not so much that Adele’s lyrics are platitudinous (although they often are), it’s that the album’s prevailing sentiment eventually becomes wearying. In his book The Song Machine, John Seabrook interviews Bonnie McKee, the 31-year-old songwriter behind some of Katy Perry’s bigger hits and a frequent collaborator of Martin’s; McKee offers a pat, sorry-dude response to the question of lyrical uniformity in contemporary pop. "Most people still just want to hear about love and partying," is what she tells Seabrook. A shrug—a "Hey, it’s not us, it’s you! You dummies are the ones who want that!"—is implied.

Perhaps that is what people want: Adele is presently on track to break N*Sync's record, held since 2000, of 2.24 million copies sold in the first week of release (on Friday, more than 900,000 people downloaded 25 from the iTunes store alone). And perhaps these songs are trifles, foregone conclusions that, instead of facilitating or inviting a deepening, allow for just one outcome: a peaceable head-bob, a wistful smile. They are one-way, dead-end roads, emotional shortcuts to wells of loss and contrition. But regardless of how one might feel about the spiritual utility of pop music, Adele’s instincts as a singer remain unmatched; she is, inarguably, the greatest vocalist of her generation, an artist who instinctively understands timbre and pitch, when to let some air in. It does not seem unfair to ask that dynamism of her songs, too.

En: City of Brides

In their five years of making music as En, Maxwell August Croy and James Devane have built a career imbuing drone music with innocence and wonder—a little glimmer of light from the depths of a well. A co-president of the beloved, minimalist-focused Root Strata label, Croy devotes much of his time to building a sophisticated, wonderfully weird roster of artists (Grouper, the Alps, and Driphouse have all issued LPs on the label): but he's also earned a reputation as a gifted electroacoustic auteur. Devane, meanwhile, comes from a guitar background, tempered by a love for the digital greats (as his acoustic cover of Aphex Twin's "Rhubarb" attests). The duo’s latest, City of Brides, is their most cohesive—and perhaps paradoxically, sonically varied—statement to date. 

Establishing a sense of momentum when nothing moves is one of the biggest challenges in drone music. On City of Brides, Croy and Devane supply propulsion through juxtaposition: not just between the organic and the artificial, but also between the serious and the playful. For every period of restraint—the two-part, vaguely erotic shadow play of "Songs for Diminished Lovemaking", for instance—there’s a burst of playfulness to balance it. On the buoyant "Mendocino Nature Rave", the duo ventriloquize their motherboards to reproduce the sounds of dolphins, bats, and other wildlife, while "Hall of Mirrors" sounds like a thrilling, grim game of Peek-A-Boo, constantly threatened by melodramatic synth swoops. 

There are no samples to speak of on City of Brides; every sound we hear is built from scratch. Each song is a crystalline Russian doll, a stylistic experiment in layering sounds both comforting and caustic. "Blonde Is Back" is the most magnificent, its warm swathes of synths simultaneously soothing and suffocating. The experience of listening to it isn’t that far off from being smothered by a fleece blanket.

The diversity of the instruments here helps distinguish City of Brides from peers like Pete Swanson and Oren Ambarchi, or influencers like La Monte Young. On "Mark of the Slav", En use a koto to create a foggy soundscape before drifting out into the horizon. In addition to honoring its reputation for graceful precision, En challenge the koto’s inherent solemnity by way of energetic arrangements that render it assertive, even abrasive; its shattered-glass-strums break the reverent murmur of "Secret Samba". Indeed, one could make a strong case for Croy’s playing as City of Brides’ secret weapon: a valuable source of energy on an extensive, occasionally exhausting album.

If you’re not a fan of drone, City of Brides probably won’t turn you into an acolyte. The LP gets off to a sluggish, vaguely narcotic start with "Blades" and "Dead Ringer", two relatively straightforward ambient pieces that lack the standout quirks of later tracks. Those looking for a more leaden approach may walk away disappointed as well; Devane’s guitars never reach the intensity of, say, Sunn O))). Nevertheless, there are plenty of secrets refracted through City of Brides' glassine spaces—and peering through such a globally-inspired prism is arguably as compelling as any seismic axe riff.

Enya: Dark Sky Island

It can be difficult to differentiate between Enya records. Her early work still feels only slightly displaced from 4AD and ambient music; though Enya has never been comfortable identifying her music as "new age," it shares new age's fixations on geology and infinity, which also appear in the music of contemporary acts, from Oneohtrix Point Never to Mark McGuire. But as her career advanced her songwriting and the architecture of her albums solidified into a kind of extreme aesthetic discipline, and her songs began to melt inextricably into each other. Dark Sky Island is her first album in five years, since 2008's Christmas-themed collection ...And Winter Came. I can say with some confidence that it's her best record since 1995's The Memory of Trees, but I'm not certain if that means anything to anyone, including myself. Her albums generate a very specific environment, one which envelops the listener regardless of the quality of her individual songs.

Enya's music is primarily about distance: between minutes, between people, between stars. Her songs stretch accordingly, synthesizers advancing and receding within them like shadows. Sometimes her music seems to move with the velocity of a glacier. Drums are employed sparingly. Either her vocal is the rhythmic engine of the songs (as in "Orinoco Flow", or on this album, "Echoes in Rain") or the rhythm is organized into arpeggios that sound like crystal, and which are often generated from a Roland Juno 60 synthesizer. There are also sudden clusters of sampled timpani in her music, but they provide shape to her songs more than they provide any animation. The way she constructs her music out of samples gives her otherwise warm and amniotic compositions a kind of Arctic and alien dimension.

Her songs feel sharper on Dark Sky Island than they have in years. Its textures are glassier; the individual sampled string hits on "Echoes in Rain" sound like arthritic branches sprouting from a frozen earth. The ballads are heartbreaking. "I Could Never Say Goodbye" and "So I Could Find My Way" describe an incredible distance that can't be collapsed; in the case of "So I Could Find My Way", that distance is the vastness between life and death. (She wrote it about her producer Nicky Ryan's mother.) Elsewhere she (somewhat invisibly) experiments; in "Sancta Maria" a synthesizer collides gently against more classical instruments in a way that seems to clarify each. She sings several interstellar ballads in Loxian, a language her lyricist Roma Ryan invented, though the language is mainly experienced on record as a blur of vowels. (These "experiments" of course merge seamlessly with the rest of her work; they're composed of the same glossy surfaces and drift through identical rhythms.)

Her first two albums, Enya and Watermark, are much more digressive and rhythmically diverse than her later work, including Dark Sky Island; for every gentle, shapeless ballad, there would be exercises in more precise, classical forms, or a song would unfold into a more distracted rhythm. Most of her songs since have been subject to a merciless symmetry. She drifts somewhat out of her aesthetic on Dark Sky Island's "Even in the Shadows", which pulses like an artery from the double bass playing of Eddie Lee; as a result, it's one of the best songs on the record. But it matters little. Though her approach has calcified, the environments generated by her records are still singular, a gentle, untroubled, indefinite ambience that is very soothing to inhabit. It's like being embraced by the air.

Jaala: Hard Hold

The debut album by Melbourne four-piece Jaala constantly shifts between time signatures, but it's not a virtuoso showcase. The band's guitarist, singer, and songwriter Cosima Jaala has said that she would struggle to identify any tempo—with the exception of 4/4, which, in her words, can "go fuck a dead donkey." Instead, the record's rushing, halting feel is her attempt to reflect life's complex rhythms. It's complemented by an unusual but brilliant pop palette that splutters with the chaotic energy of a Jackson Pollock.

The interplay between guitarists Jaala and Nic Lam, bassist Loretta Wilde, and drummer Maria Moles recalls Thrill Jockey's '90s Chicago set, splashy as Tortoise and richly mellow as the Sea and Cake. "Lowlands" ambles around a crooked bass line; "Order" has a splayed ska-punk lilt that evokes Clash ballads. Jaala sings with a jazzy, muscular intonation and a chalky squeak in her throat that recalls a punkier Amy Winehouse or Jeff Buckley, and also owes a debt to the skittish incantations of Life Without Buildings' Sue Tompkins. When she screams, as she often does, it's not with rage, but roller coaster joy. Considering how rampant the pace is—and Jaala's predilection for "brain-melting shit"—Hard Hold is often remarkably soothing, yet always surprising. 

Jaala's lyrics are just as playful as her delivery, full of twists and wonderful imagery. They often deal with the ties that bind humans—love, obsession, violence—and she's just as interested in stretching the bonds of language. On "Hard Hold", she wrings the endless potential of a single syllable. "It's hard, a heart to a heart/ Too hard to unfold this hold with you," she sings, as if massaging out her own heartbreak, working agility back into her ticker's knotted muscle. "If sharing is a bowl of soup, then you drunk it dry," she tells her ex before she proclaims her newly discovered strength, a moment heralded by the song's buoyant lope bursting into a frenzied thrash. 

Swaying between downbeat and more anxious passages, "Salt Shaker" captures Jaala's relief and guilt at leaving her humdrum seaside hometown. She licks salt off her hand to remind herself of the waves, and observes: "Those happy-holy-heinous houses/ They spread out and out for mileses." She's a distinct voice, and a versatile one, too: "Ticket" is a serrated tirade against an ex who used her, full of ugly screams and jagged riffs. But then comes closer "Hymn", a tender devotional where the band's edges soften to glimmer like sea ripples reflected on a cave wall.

Hard Hold is a clever record that rarely foregrounds that fact—perhaps because it was recorded in a week, it hangs onto a scampering, impromptu quality that only adds to its appeal. While they sound nothing alike, Jaala's debut has a similar sense of fluid, approachable experimentation to a record like Bitte Orca: the kind of bright weirdness that seems to illuminate a whole new set of colors.

Freddie Gibbs: Shadow of a Doubt

Freddie Gibbs doesn’t believe in resting on his laurels. After dropping last year’s Piñata with Madlib at the helm — the rapper’s most commercially and critically successful project to date — he could have taken some well-deserved time off. Instead, he toured non-stop and played festivals, put out two EPs The Tonite Show with the Worlds Freshest and Pronto, and last but not least, became a father.

Now with little advance notice, and a raised middle finger to Q4 release schedules and anyone foolish enough to be making their best-of year-end lists early, the pride of Gary, Ind. is back with his third full-length studio album. A quick scan of the credits reveals the biggest difference between Shadow of a Doubt and his last LP—instead of one singular producer, there’s over a dozen wide-ranging names contributing beats here from Canadian hitmaker Boi-1da to 808 Mafia’s Tarentino. While the final result is less cohesive, and could benefit from trimming two or three songs, there’s no denying Gibbs’ versatility. 

 If there’s any question as to whether or not acclaim has mellowed the man who frequently refers to himself as both "Gangsta Gibbs" and "Freddie Corleone", look no further than the two tracks that bookend the record. The sparse, atmospheric "Rearview", which opens with a "Welcome to Los Angeles International Airport" P.A., sees the rapper offer up a bullet point summary of his career to date before dismissing would-be copycats with trademark precision. In contrast, "Cold Ass Nigga" sees Gibbs with two feet on the gas, with frequent Kanye West collaborator Mike Dean providing a suitably urgent, glitchy trap beat. It’s nothing like anything else in Gibbs’ vast catalogue (its closest spiritual companion might be "Old English", his 2014 track with A$AP Ferg and Young Thug) and it’s proof that the 33 year old is still more than willing to push himself out of his sonic comfort zone.

His lyrics capture the pursuit of the American dream like a Scorsese screenplay (drugs, sex, and all-too-frequent bloodshed included). He’s hardly the first artist to incorporate a sample from "The Wire" into a song, but he’s one of few able to do so without it coming off cliché or rote (Boi-1da and Frank Dukes’ sinister piano loops greatly help). Another highlight is the understated, introspective "Insecurities" produced by Dukes and Montreal’s Kaytranada (who teamed up with the rapper this year for the menacing one-off "My Dope House"). 

As for the record’s handful of guest spots, Gibbs has picked a mix of newcomers and veterans who complement but never overshadow him. Rising Miami-via-Toronto emcee Tory Lanez contributes a bleary-eyed hook to dealers’ anthem "Mexico"; elsewhere, L.A. R&B singer-songwriter Dana Williams propels "McDuck". On "Extradite", the Roots’ Black Thought’s politically charged verse is sharply juxtaposed with Mikhail’s bright, jazz-influenced production, which eventually gives way to dialogue taken from a fiery speech on Ferguson by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Then there’s "10 Times", featuring Gucci Mane floating over the beat like plumes of blunt smoke (perhaps Gibbs’ own "Freddie Kane OG" strain), before West Coast veteran E-40 swoops in to gleefully extol the virtues of a woman "thicker than a buttermilk biscuit."

On the outro of "McDuck", we hear an excerpt from an interview he did with Snoop Dogg this past summer discussing Gibbs’ background. "You just sound like you not from nowhere," says Snoop to which the rapper replies, "I created that sound." The cover artwork of Shadow of a Doubt might depict Gibbs’ face half-cloaked in darkness, but his roots and aspirations have never been clearer.

Cavanaugh: Time & Materials

Michael Eagle and David Cohn knew each other years back as a couple fellow Southern Illinois University students. Both were interested in doing nervy hip-hop that rendered personal neuroses into allusive, bittersweet comedy (and vice-versa). They know each other now as transplanted Angelenos with deep mutual respect, a faithful cult fanbase, and a creativity-stoking environment of collective support—but those neuroses can still be hard to shake. They keep finding successful ways to exorcise those frustrations, cracking jokes and facades at the same time. Naturally, they'd have a lot to ricochet off each other, something that sporadic teamups only hinted at.

Time & Materials gives that dynamic a shot over the course of 26 short minutes, proving more than anything that there's more depth still left unexplored. The album's recorded under the name Cavanaugh, and the setting of this brief-but-deep album is intriguing, in a J.G. Ballard-via-The Coup kind of way: the inhabitants and social structures of a Florida mixed-income project featuring units for both luxury condos and subsidized housing tenants. "Mike and Dave" are resident handymen who schlep from residence to residence, glimpsing other people's lives while doing what they can to keep the same systems functioning for the rich and the broke alike. And in the process, they channel the residents' class-war conflicts into their own combative moods, fueling their own stress over money, relationships, and an uncertain future that keeps them from being the assertive successes they want to be.

Time & Materials tackles sociological themes that would be sledgehammer-obvious in less-nuanced hands. But the duo draws you in by skimping on or misdirecting details. Serengeti disappears deeper into his lyrical role than Mike does—understandable from an MC who's been known to do half a live set in the guise of a cranky, bellowing 50-year-old. But for his first full-length production job, Mike sets a tone as raw-nerved and abrasively contemplative as the concept demands. A soupy drone on "Typecast" evokes the stress and sweat of the escape-seeking protagonists, including guest turns by P.O.S., Busdriver, and Future Islands' Sam Herring in his purposefully-awkward rap alter ego Hemlock Ernst. The creaking sludge of opening track "Zorak" underscores the TV-casualty free association of the lyrics.

The big drawback of the production's distorted, synthwave-on-codeine atmosphere is that it threatens to muffle the rewind-demanding intricacies of both MCs—Serengeti's motormouthed turns of run-on worldbuilding in particular get trickier to grasp. It's also not always clear whether the characters Mike and Serengeti inhabit are the maintenance guys or the people they cross paths with and intrude on by necessity. Of course, the larger question is whether they're really inhabiting or observing outside characters at all—"I" heavily outnumbers "you" and "they" in the whole narrative pronoun department, and the fraying seams of their own mind states stand out no matter who's being profiled.

Kurt Stenzel: Jodorowsky’s Dune OST

In 1974, surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky was tapped to direct his adaptation of Frank Herbert's monumental sci-fi novel Dune. The film was set to star David Carradine, Gloria Swanson, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí, and Amanda Lear. Meanwhile, after the producers considered none other than Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pink Floyd was slated to compose along with contributions from the French prog-rock outfit Magma. Jodorowsky was given a lavish budget but the film didn't make it past its intensive pre-production stage.

As Frank Pavich's 2013 documentary Jodorowsky's Dune illustrates, Jodorowsky and his production team put a great deal of effort into storyboarding and design, with an eye for detail that would've made Stanley Kubrick blush. As it turns out, the great irony of Jodorowsky's career is that he made his most widely-felt impact with a film he never even began shooting. To this day, his work on Dune continues to reflect in popular cinema and culture. In a sense, his version of Dune died giving birth to the genre-defining films that emerged in its wake. Alien, for example, was written by Dan O'Bannon and of course bore the unmistakable design aesthetic of Swiss painter H.R. Giger—both of whom had been brought in for Jodorowsky's production. This backstory, of course, frames Kurt Stenzel's score to Pavich's documentary and vice-versa.

So many things could have gone wrong here had Stenzel attempted to encompass the pretense and grandeur of the subject at hand. "We need to try," he writes in the liner notes—the implication being that we as the audience should put forth our best effort both to imagine the film Jodorowsky envisioned and to honor the scale of what he was aiming to accomplish. But Stenzel's score—which consists mainly of a bunch of analog synths that he sequenced and mixed in real time (with no additional digital sequencing)—actually requires little effort from listeners.

Given the psychedelic quality of Jodorowsky's most well-known films, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, it's no surprise that in the documentary the maverick Chilean director talks about wanting to mimic the effects of LSD with Dune. But his goals didn't stop there. Jodorowsky breathlessly describes how his film was to serve as a "prophet"—not as a prophecy, but as a living, breathing entity with a consciousness of its own. "For me," he declares on camera, "Dune will be the coming of a God. An artistic and cinematographic God."

To Stenzel's credit, although he does fall prey to a bit of reverence—most notably in passages that feature audio samples of Jodorowsky waxing poetic on what moviemaking means to him—the music doesn't strive to be anywhere near as lofty as that. Stenzel is wise to go for a more discreet, at times even whimsical, tone that supports the documentary's easygoing, storytelling structure. It's too bad that Stenzel, when he does opt to use Jodorowsky monologues, doesn't get more creative with them by chopping them up or subjecting them to effects, but the samples occur rarely and end up being incidental to the score's overall flavor anyway.

Charmingly, the liner notes include a list of all the synth gear Stenzel used, just in case you're interested in geeking-out. But that would be missing the point. Stenzel's score doesn't stand out so much for the tools he used to create it as much as for the choices he made while using those tools. Pavich instructed Stenzel to go for a "Tangerine Dream-type feel," and as such the predictable path would have been to mimic the wheezing, primitive synthesizer sounds that define sci-fi cinema of the '60s and '70s—sounds that now feel quaint at best and moldy at worst. Had Stenzel emulated the audacious bleeting style of, say, early Moog pioneer Richard Teitelbaum, Emerson Lake & Palmer, or any number of artists from the period, he would have artificially encased this music in a temporal ambience it doesn't actually require in order to engage your attention. Ultimately, not unlike the French electronic duo Air, Stenzel has too much creative inspiration to settle for being a stylist, and though he openly references the past, he lands with both feet firmly anchored in the present.

Pavich's documentary more or less consists of a string of interviews undercut with shots of old photos and storyboard drawings. Clearly then, Stenzel's job was to keep the music moving along to match whatever pace Pavich set as appropriate for the audience's patience threshold. Stenzel shifts quickly but gracefully from one motif to the next, weaving sounds in and out like a choreographer who prefers to stay offstage while guiding each "dancer"—each new instrument, melody, textural element, or structural change—into the fray on cue. By turns dramatic, spaced-out, otherworldly, entrancing, stately, ominous, hopeful, playful, and chatty, most of the tracks on Jodorowsky's Dune run about a minute long and manage to cover more than one mood before they run that course. Taken as a whole, they stream by yet never feel rushed, and Stenzel establishes his dual knack for patience and economy very early on.

In what is perhaps this album's defining moment, a high-pitched synth line wails and echoes in a vast empty space. Stenzel gives it a character and shape not unlike those celestial bodies that appear to us via deep-space photography as giant, colorful plumes. The lone synth line segues into a live drumset, the first appearance of organic instruments and room ambience on the whole album. The drums don't last long, and soon they too meld into vaguely Middle Eastern-sounding chants before the voices grow more distressed. Then, a snarling, heavily filtered electric guitar riff that recalls Tool's "Forty-Six & 2" makes its entrance before flaring out as quickly as it came. One might expect these elements to step on each other's toes. But, as with just about every other sound that leads up to this passage, Stenzel creates a sensation of smooth sailing, even as he radically alters the scenery every few minutes. On Jodorowsky’s Dune, Stenzel takes you across topographic oceans that never rock the boat.

Wreckless Eric: amERICa

"Several Shades of Green", the opener on Wreckless Eric’s amERICa, is flush with memories of "the hit parade," feckless backing musicians, and silly jackets recommended by magazine stylists. The music—a spare backbeat and bass guitar lollygag, busied by skittish piano runs and a modest choral section—belies the ragged, bemused delivery of an artist reflecting on his time as a journeyman power-pop artist on Stiff Records in the late 1970s. "If I’d known then, what I know now," goes the chorus—but it’s a tease. He stops and snickers at the temptation. That nimble maneuver—to reminisce, but jettison nostalgia—makes it a great opener for amERICa, an album rooted in classicist rock gestures but fixated on the contemporary United States.

Wreckless Eric, born Eric Goulden, wrote a lot of songs about the music industry. "Take the Cash (K.A.S.H.)", for instance, urged artists to get paid up front. And peers such as Nick Lowe memorably looked at the era’s intersection of fandom and commerce in songs such as "I Love My Label" and "Rollers Show", too. But Goulden’s return to the show business theme—which, perhaps because it seemed crass in the wake of punk, faded from rock lyricism forever and today thrives in rap—acknowledges the chasm of time between then and now. With distance, he gains lucidity.

It’s the same with the Englishman’s observations of the United States, which are dappled in telling detail and really rather astute. "White Bread", for instance, looks at the normalized delusions of a Middle America gun nut. On the rustic "Sysco Trucks", Goulden hovers over the wholesale food business: remote diners, kitchens, and markets all stocked with the same goods. There’s a critique implied, if not of capitalism at large then at least of monopoly and its subtly unsettling consequences for common cuisine. As he lightly notes, "Everything we’re eating comes from somewhere." The slaphappy typography "amERICa" is a bad indicator of Goulden’s tone; he’s mistily allusive, often playful, but never ham-fisted.

Wreckless Eric recorded amERICa at home in upstate New York. He played many of the instruments himself. The palm-muted guitars and roaring refrains of his old work remain, but the record is more reserved and instilled with zany, fanciful flourishes. Goulden rarely grasps for big, beaming hooks. Instead, reverse reverb and spectral keys temper his creaky, pliable voice. And that blurred, homespun atmosphere makes amERICa sound modern; it puts him in league with bedroom revivalists such as Home Blitz, who ply weirder, less commercially aspirant versions of Wreckless Eric’s classic power-pop sound.

Many artists of Wreckless Eric’s era and tradition have imitators, but few of yesteryear’s outliers can catch up with their descendants, let alone best them. amERICa is that rare record. Goulden is grownup, with all of the stereotypical benefits: an air of wisdom, emotional texture, and, perhaps most cliché of all, a seasoned voice. And yet, amERICa isn’t complacent or satisfied; Wreckless Eric anatomizes his surroundings with the wide-eyed thrill of discovery. His American flyover reveals simmering cultural disturbances and essential beauty alike—a late capitalist hellscape beneath "Bobbie Gentry’s Mississippi skies."

Nef the Pharaoh: Nef the Pharaoh EP

The odds tend to permanently be stacked against San Francisco-area rap artists, exportability-wise. Even the undisputed legends of the area have never become true household names outside of their home state—Too $hort, E-40, and Mac Dre. It’s a disheartening trend, but it’s easy to theorize about why the pattern has continued for decades. In general, Bay artists tend to like staying independent and favoring sometimes-indigestible levels of prolificacy over carefully curated releases. They also build off of their region’s existing musical traditions — sticking to their corner rather than trying to reinvent the sound of the genre. There always seems to be a gold standard of slapper already in mind—for well over a decade, it’s hinged on a handclap snare, a thin kick beating out Morse code, and a foghorn bass lick—and targeted at all times.

Charismatic 20-year-old Vallejo up-and-comer Nef the Pharaoh also holds these truths to be self-evident, and basically fits the usual bill of a regional Bay star. The young rapper gained momentum mostly through creatively covering classic beats—a swaggy flip of Nas’ "Oochie Wally"—and delivering crisp neighborhood pride anthems: Last year’s muted "Bitch I’m From Vallejo" turned the heads of local hero Cousin Fik and his mentor and labelhead E-40. 

Nef’s first release for 40’s Sick Wid It Records is also full of stylistic references and hat-tips, though—perhaps surprisingly for a Bay MC—mostly to idols from far outside San Francisco. Quotes from classic '90s Cash Money Records singles structured his January single "Big Tymin’", and the influence of this kind of music weighs heavily on the entire EP. "Boss Me" is based around a sing-songy bounce cadence, and Nef recycles Juvenile’s "Ha" line construction on his Auto-Tune-riddled twerking ode "Meantime". Nef is contributing to what seems to be a mini-trend in post-hyphy rap toward turn-of-the-millenium Southern music these days: His tourmate, collaborator, and Heartbreak Gang sideman Kool John regularly bites Hot Boys flows (his most recent single with Joe Moses interpolates 2002 Big Tymers hit "Get Your Roll On"), L.A. affiliate Problem notably interpolated Master P and Young Bleed, and Juvenile himself hopped on the popular remix to fellow HBKer Iamsu!’s strip club anthem "100 Grand".

If Kool John likes to play the Juve or Mannie role, the less laconic Nef favors Wayne. Just when the likeness starts to become eerie, Nef backs off and switches hats, always with an overtly comic, lightly ironic timing, like he’s carrying off an elaborately plotted series of pranks. His verses pit in-and-out-of-phase, cartoonish rambling (à la his mentor and labelhead E-40) against lilting but controlled double-time. Snap-jumps between simpering bad boy posturing in his high range ("Trips to Rome, shrimps and calzones/ I’m always outta range, I’ma text you when I get home"), a more intimidating low purr, and a diplomatic, Drake-ian midrange (see introspective closer "Come Pick Me Up") give his verses a character-driven quality that's almost Jim Carrey-esque. Luckily, this isn't a When Nature Calls scenario; Nef’s sensibility isn't exhausting. The rapper can embody the obnoxious neighborhood bully, the smoothest game-spitter in school, and a conscientious father in one song all without spoiling the mood, or upstaging the beat.

The flow and intonation shifts as Nef pans between scenes: after-shift rendezvous with strippers, hustling rituals encrypted in dense slang, and more bald-faced, confessional anecdotes. He tends to pick simple governing metaphors and pushes them to logical but satisfying conclusions—in the marimba-studded nu-G-funk strut "Michael Jackson", most effectively, he uses an extended King of Pop metaphor to forge an elaborate tribute to designer shoe shopping.

This six-song EP does not provide a definitive answer on whether Nef is just an effective conduit for great party songs, or if he’s got a voice that’s resonant enough for a full career of albums and features. It’s a bunch of stabs in promising directions—a more ambitious extension of his earlier YouTube drops and his #RichBy25 mixtape. Success is ensured on the EP by the neighborhood heroes he’s got supporting him: rising talent June on Da Beat, G-Funk wizard and indispensible area talent scout DJ Fresh, and P-Lo, HBK’s more baroque answer to DJ Mustard. 

Even in the Bay—which, from Mac Dre to Shady Nate to Husalah, has birthed an untold amount of slickness—charm as strong and effortless as Nef’s doesn’t come along everyday. He may slide into other people’s flows so well that you lose track of him for a moment, but the style and grace with which he ducks and weaves between them imbues everything he does with personality. His brand of unfailingly zany energy has characterized the best hip-hop of his region for decades, and Nef’s never been ashamed to acknowledge it ("Mac motherfucking Dre lives in me," he claims at the beginning of last year’s "M.A.C."). He’s pretty good at making anything sound cool, and maybe even cleverer than it is. See his song-stealing verse on DJ Mustard's "You Know It" from earlier this year, which closes out with: "Money on my mind like a headband/ Fucking with my ‘fetti, you a dead man/ Shoot him in his chest, watch his head split/ Every day I make a band and never play the instrument."

What he has that many of his local peers don’t is a consistent ear for hooks, a willingness to play the field stylistically without outpacing himself, and a precision of purpose. "In the land of the lost, I’m the nigga to win," he claims on "Mobbin". With industry cosigns, a "Big Tymin’" remix from Cali-stars-turned-national-influencers Ty Dolla $ign and YG (included here) and a national tour with the latter under his belt, Nef has a rare entry point for success beyond Solano County. If this EP is any indication, he may also have the pop prowess and adaptability to make the most of it.

Jamie Woon: Making Time

A classic singer-songwriter never goes out of style. The soulful and enigmatic crooner Jamie Woon rediscovered this in the four long years between his charming-but-uneven debut album, Mirrorwriting, and the release of his second, Making Time. Rising with a fresh crop of UK-based, slightly experimental vocalists and collaborators in the London bass music scene (think Jessie Ware, James Blake, and Sampha), Woon’s debut produced sophisticated music that ultimately failed to catch on as strongly as his contemporaries.

Like many artists in his position, Woon could have become a victim of the time, a footnote to a rising scene. But Woon took the opportunity to realign with his musical origins. In a 2011 interview with BBC, Woon said "At the heart of what I do is R&B; it’s groove-based vocal-led music." On Mirrorwriting that "R&B" was partially obscured in production atmospherics, but Making Time exhibits a renewed focus. The album sounds loose and organic, revealing layers of precision in the production and recording on repeated listens.

Inspired by D'Angelo’s Voodoo, Woon was interested in recording with a live band in the room for Making Time, a far cry from the electronic-roots of his debut. "My starting point was that I wanted to hear a funky rhythm section," Woon offered to Pharrell Williams in an interview on Beats 1. Mirrorwriting was distinguished in part by collaborations with revolutionary musician and producer Will Bevan (otherwise known as Burial), but Making Time reduces songs to their core elements: a perfect harmony, strong melodies, and a crooning voice that is unlike any other.

Woon's vocals are rare and stunning, the kind of sound that washes over its listeners, and no synths or heavy-handed production is needed to make that effect possible. The instruments here play supporting roles. "Movement" transforms halfway through its length into a groovy, throwback jam, and the slinky, snake-like bass guitar cocoons Woon’s voice without overpowering it. Later the horns gradually stomp in. Their sound is elastic and ominous, pushing and pulling against the light fluidity of Woon’s ad-libs. And on "Sharpness", the album’s lead single, the bass pops in and out of the song just as much as the steady drums. The result shouldn’t surprise, but still does.

Channeling pieces of piano jazz and folk as well as R&B, Making Time feels philosophically similar to Jessie Ware’s restrained 2014 sophomore effort, Tough Love. Many described the work as "adult contemporary"—an insult, if not entirely untrue. But that sort of designation fails to engage with the work at hand, lumping it all together. And while it never hit as hard as "Running" on Ware’s debut, songs like "Kind Of … Sometimes … Maybe" and "Champagne Kisses" offered surprises brimming underneath the surface. It’s smart music that doesn’t beat you over the head with its intelligence. If Woon’s last album was an attempt to incorporate the contemporary sounds he favored at the time, this current album is a testament to the strength of traditional music composition: simple guitars, slinky bass lines, and sophisticated songwriting. Woon has, from the start, been his strongest when he lets his voice say everything that’s necessary. This might come across as traditionalist, but that is OK. With songs this good, little else needs to be said.