John Renbourn: The Attic Tapes

The Attic Tapes is a 20-song archival hodgepodge cobbled together from early recordings of the late British guitarist John Renbourn, who died in March. Renbourn sourced the core of the tracklist from a tape labeled "1962" that he discovered in the attic of fellow folk revivalist Mac MacLeod, pairing those few songs with various onstage collaborations from his salad days, before he and his guitar-sparring partner Bert Jansch and their band, Pentangle, helped redefine the scope of modern folk. Renbourn had yet to sign a record deal, so these takes are rough with their age and his youth. But the finale, a live duet with Davy Graham of "Nobody Knows You When You’re Down Out", is pristine, with the thin, lithe tone of the dual guitars rendered perfectly. Had Graham and a teenaged Renbourn somehow stolen into a proper studio back in 1962?

Actually, their Clapton Unplugged-like take on the American standard comes from an onstage rendezvous several decades after the heyday of the British folk revival. As a memento, it is quite poignant. Not only did Graham serve as a de facto mentor to Renbourn, but the younger guitarist opens this set with a hurried version of "Anji", one of Graham’s trademark numbers. But as a set-closer, it’s a bit of a bore, the sound of two old friends romping through the blues for their own amusement but without much payoff.

Alas, that makes it a fitting close for The Attic Tapes, a tedious if spirited set that lets us hear Renbourn learn where folk and blues had been rather than guide where it might go. It raises more questions about archival albums than it answers of Renbourn’s genesis.

The Attic Tapes mostly confirms what we already know about Renbourn and, really, the bulk of his motley crew of fellow crooners and pickers: They loved the rawness and magnetism of American blues and folk music, and they tried the best they could to recast it in their own image. There are a few originals here, like the halting and smart blues reordering of "Plainsong" and the peppy "Judy". But mostly, Renbourn plainly shows his roots. He turns Blind Boy Fuller’s doting but vaguely threatening "Little Woman You’re So Sweet" into the sprightly "Beth’s Blues". Like most every other pasty kid with a piece of carved wood and some strings, he works his way through Blind Willie Johnson’s "Lord I Just Can’t Keep From Crying". He flits between the notes and lifts and leaps with his voice in a way that suggests he’s celebrating his own vulnerability, a young man not old enough to know how painful it all could get.

Likewise, Renbourn’s take on "Portland Town", by itinerant and largely overlooked American banjoist Derroll Adams, seems to delight in tragic lyrics about bad marriages and dead children. And his cover of Jackson C. Frank’s perfect anthem, "Blues Run the Game", is overly emphatic, the verses brandished with unwarranted relish. It’s clear that Renbourn is an incredible guitarist, capable of making intricate patterns seem effortless even at such a young age. His jejune takes on these hard old songs suggest that he was, to date, simply an instrumentalist short on experience.

If you’re worried that The Attic Tapes is an opportunistic ploy to profit from Renbourn’s recent death, like a youthful journal published without the deceased author’s consent, don’t: Renbourn seemed enthusiastic about this project, even penning playful and informative liner notes that trace his lineage and sources more clearly than the recordings themselves. According to Riverboat Records’ owners, Renbourn died the day before they would have sent him the final artwork; he never had a chance to dig deeper for exact dates on these sessions.

Aside from its redundancy, though, the real worry with The Attic Tapes stems from the way it reflects reissue-and-archival culture at large. Though many labels interested in such work do essential excavations of forgotten sessions, albums and artists, there seems to be an increasing tendency to regard most anything that’s survived as a masterpiece—as though time transformed it like common carbon into a rare diamond. Everything presumed to be lost doesn’t need to be found. The situation seems doubly pronounced when the music involves an artist we already know—or, in the case of The Attic Tapes, a panoply of them.

In some way, I wonder if our relatively new era of seemingly instant and infinite information about what our favorite singers had for breakfast or where they’re vacationing and with whom has made the salvage of such basement reels and attic tapes seem more paramount, as though we’re retroactively rebuilding as much of the past as we can. That’s an intriguing endeavor, but it doesn’t necessarily make for essential records. During his 50-year career, Renbourn contributed to several of those, from Bert and John and The Pentangle to The Black Balloon. This makeshift reliquary—perhaps the final release in which Renbourn had a hand—is not among them.

Yautja: Songs of Lament EP

Technical progress is vital to metal's character. Metal bands have always pushed themselves to be faster, heavier, more challenging, and more musically dextrous than their predecessors. That said, it's still rare when an act genuinely succeeds at altering the meta-structure of the form. Anytime a Meshuggah or Dillinger Escape Plan comes along, you can bet dime-a-dozen imitators will cheapen the impact of their innovations. To make matters worse, today we're swarmed by retro-obsessed bands hell-bent on recreating the vibe and tone of, well, name any year and heavy metal subgenre. Not to mention that rampant sectarianism fosters a mentality where superficial differences between camps become paramount and crossing barriers becomes a transgression.

Every now and again, though, a band comes along that sidesteps these conventions. With their debut album, last year's Songs of Descent, Nashville trio Yautja (named after the extraterrestrial creature from the Predator film series) reminds us that what we think of as metal today can be as boundless and mutable as the range that jazz had encompassed by 1970. A prog-minded act that combines grindcore and Amphetamine Reptile-era noise with the artier shades of hardcore and death metal, Yautja doesn't just stack hairpin turn after hairpin turn—an approach that was tired by technical death metal's mid-'90s peak. Instead, bassist Kayhan Vaziri, guitarist Shibby Poole, and drummer Tyler Coburn create a highly malleable, mercury-like alloy that changes shape with liquid ease yet retains the solidity of its structure. (The way their music moves, it might've been more fitting for these guys to name themselves after the villian in Terminator 2.)

As its title suggests, the new EP Songs of Lament was crafted as a companion piece to the full-length, but there are some key distinctions. For starters, Lament leans closer to a grimier, more punkish production aesthetic. Meanwhile, because Yautja came out of the gate with a flair for tempo changes, the lean toward slower sections this time around doesn't seem drastic. With Songs of Lament, Yautja once again shows that, like the art of the fastball, sheer speed is most effective when a band can mix up its delivery and hit you from unexpected angles.

Case in point: Songs of Lament closes with the nine minute-plus "Crumbling", which climaxes in a sludge/doom buildup where Poole and Vaziri churn out an ominous riff at a crawling tempo. When Coburn suddenly explodes into a flurry of fills, followed by a blast beat and a jazzy double-time figure on the ride cymbal, the song feels like it's taking off even as it trudges through muck. That one passage speaks volumes about Yautja's mindfulness when it comes pacing. In fact, one marked contrast between Lament and its predecessor is that the EP plays like an extended suite of music. As for subject matter, all three of Yautja's members write lyrics and supply vocals, with Vaziri doing the lion's share of the barking. And while the cutting lyrical content does linger at the irate end of the emotional spectrum, Yautja's nonpartisan musical approach lends the words a more sophisticated hue by default.

Understandably, Songs of Lament doesn't accomplish as much as its full-length companion does in terms of furthering metal's evolution. Moreover, the new material is rendered somewhat two-dimensional by a mix that sounds flatter in comparison to Songs of Descent's full-fidelity production. Still, the new songs certainly show what this band is capable of when it makes subtle tweaks in its approach to structure. Indeed, Songs of Lament extends the pleasures of the debut while whetting the appetite for what new wrinkles Yautja might have in store the next time around.

Basic Soul Unit: Under the Same Sky

Anyone with an interest in left-of-center house or techno can find something impressive in the catalog of Stuart Li, aka Basic Soul Unit. It's a testament to Li's chameleonic nature that he has proven a seamless fit with the cult Japanese deep house imprint Mule Musiq; the UK bass driven techno label Nonplus Records; Berlin behemoth Ostgut Ton; and Jamal Moss' purposefully abstract Mathematics Recordings. Each of these labels has successfully staked out a patch of deep and slightly weird dance music territory, and Li's edgy-yet-accessible style has endeared him to the DJs who also reside there; he appeals to selectors of many stripes, as his productions consistently come to life when thundering down towards darkened dancefloors.

It is Li's professionalism that ends up being the slight undoing of Under the Same Sky, his second artist album and debut release for Amsterdam tastemakers Dekmantel. This is the toughest-sounding version of Basic Soul Unit thus far, with walloping techno drums, old school breakbeats, and industrial percussion that replicates the grind of machinery and the scraping of metal on metal. However, he ends up drawing unwelcome attention to the downside of his talents. Li's sound is so tailored to the blast of monitor speakers and big club rigs that it bogs down under closer inspection, revealing pixelated weaknesses in the bigger picture.

There are some exceptions where Li seems prepared to throw some dirt and grit into the mix, and it's always for the greater good. The slowly menacing "Until the End Comes" very suddenly inhabits all three dimensions, cleverly allowing a 90-second introduction of measured static and pillowy bass drum to then click into a full-bodied and richly textured version of itself. In a similar way, "Restless in Thoughts" works to makes disorientation seem balanced and appealing, circling around lopsided dubby loops and itchy percussive accents, and it glows with warmth. While lacking the qualities of those two tracks, "Temptress" and "Without Fears" will appeal to fans of Skudge and Levon Vincent, who aren't at all concerned with separating the swing of house from the gruff ruggedness of techno.

Elsewhere on the album, Li is to be found mostly returning to the same sound palette. "The Rift Between", "Unwavered", and "Landlocked" may look to broken beats, classic techno, and electro, but they're all a little too bleak, too clean and undynamic. "Fate in Hand" may well be an attempt to alleviate some of the grayness toward the album's end, but its overbearing drums are too present to be enjoyable, and not textured enough to provide a good counterweight to the track's delicate and Detroit-indebted melody.

Each track of Under the Same Sky will undoubtedly find a home in a record bag or set list somewhere, and rightly so, as there's really nothing fundamentally wrong with any of them. As an album, though, Under the Same Sky leaves you wanting more of a moody, immersive experience, and less of its clean surfaces and precise negative spaces.

Eartheater: RIP Chrysalis

Alexandra Drewchin has roughly 100 different voices, and she employs all of them to chilling effect on RIP Chrysalis, her second record as Eartheater. There’s the high, weeping one that turns up at the beginning of the icy psyh-Appalachia ballad "Petal Head"; there’s the bamboo-brittle alto that crackles menacingly at the center of the rippling "Wetware". And then there are all the others, rendered almost inhuman with digital effects: baritone-low and groaning, solemn and choir-like, chattering and mechanized. She layers them several at a time, so that it often seems like she’s in conversation with herself: two Drewchins—one way up high, one way down low—share the melody on"“Humyn Hymn", making lyrics like, "Chemical computer syringe/ Memories are fading away/ Rolling off the side of the bed," seem like they’re written in code that only the two singers understand.

It’s a fitting approach for a record which, as its title implies, deals with personal transformation; later in "Hymn", Drewchin sings, "The more I look back, the more I want to look ahead," and she spends the bulk of the album deep-diving into herself, delivering haunting descriptions of the shapes and spirits she encounters along the way. Arriving just eight months after the first Eartheater record, Metalepsis, Chrysalis displays a startling new firmness and depth to Drewchin’s songwriting. Where her first record felt more deliberately synthetic, making ample use of synthesizers and electronics, on Chrysalis, Drewchin operates from a base of American folk music. Dry-board banjos and plucked acoustic guitars form the foundation of most of the songs, leaving plenty of room through which Drewchin winds her snaking voice. There are still plenty of synths, but on Chrysalis, they augment rather than dominate. It’s as if Drewchin had raided The Anthology of American Folk Music but only absorbed the songs about ghosts. The closest recent comparison would be Cat Power’s Moon Pix, but Drewchin’s songs are more expansive and more free-form, showing hints of her time spent in the psych outfit Guardian Alien. One of the reasons Chrysalis is so fascinating and absorbing is because Drewchin obliterates the notion of song structure, starting from something as time-honored as folk, but bashing down the walls and ceiling around it to create music that feels mystical and searching.

As much as it’s about personal change, Chrysalis also seems to be about discovering new ways of songwriting, one that leaves the borders porous and the time elastic. A fiddle corkscrews at the opening of the title track before Drewchin’s banjo takes over; eventually, the background is filled with the sound of a ringing telephone and a fog of electronics, a bleary canvas of sound that Drewchin’s ethereal alto gradually floats across. She recites the lyrics of the creeping "Wetware"—"Deprogramming false fundamental makeup"—as if she’s casting a spell, while synths pulse like an android heartbeat behind her. And she begins "Mask Therapy" by repeating the words "identity crisis" over rippling, mirage-like guitar, a rhythm track that sounds like a failing air compressor thudding beneath. Songs enter and fade at their own pace, like clouds ribboning out across the sky at dusk.

The album’s title can be read two ways—the tearing of the chrysalis that allows new life, and the death of the same once that new life has begun. On "Ecdysisyphus", she flatly declares, "There’s a first time for everything/ More like, everything is the first time." At first, it seems empty—the equivalent of a dorm room stoner’s bug-eyed command to "Think about it, man." But after hearing the record that follows, it feels like a profound personal declaration. RIP Chrysalis is the sound of someone figuring themselves out in real time, making all of their distinct voices harmonize, and creating new musical forms to share their discoveries.

Patrick Cowley: Muscle Up

Like Arthur Russell, another cult hero whose status rose years after he died of AIDS, San Francisco’s Patrick Cowley was known during his short lifetime for left-of-center disco; with songs like "Menergy" and "Megatron Man", he was the prime architect of the uptempo electronic disco variant Hi-NRG, later popularized by hits like Dead or Alive’s "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)". Also like Russell, Cowley’s roots were avant-garde; where Russell's lineage came from experimental classical composers like Christian Wolff, Cowley drew inspiration from early Moog masters Tomita, Wendy Carlos, and Tangerine Dream. Unlike Russell, however, some of Cowley's work reached the mainstream: What Giorgio Moroder was to Donna Summer, Cowley was to LGBT pioneer Sylvester—the mustachioed background figure who contemporized a disco diva’s hot soul with cool technology.

Yet unbeknownst to even most of his disco fans, Cowley also created synth compositions in the even-more-underground medium of gay porn. Muscle Up is the second of two releases compiling this work, spanning time spent as a student at the City College of San Francisco to the period shortly before his death in 1982, when he scored his final smashes with Sylvester, Paul Parker, Loverde, and other Bay Area acts. As with 2013's School Daze, it takes its name from a real 1980 porn film, released by L.A.'s Fox Studio, that Cowley soundtracked. The music here documents an important cultural shift: As Super 8 gave way to VHS, DVD, and digital, much of gay and straight porn music alike would be synth-centric.

Like porn itself, electronic music references reality while signaling a fantastical break from it. For gay men born in the '50s like Cowley, synths suggested a refuge from repression, an escape hatch from a world where police entrapped, beat, and jailed them; where they lost their jobs or unwillingly severed family ties. This is one of the reasons why synth-disco milestones like Summer's "I Feel Love"—a track Cowley further intensified in his legendary 15+ minute remix—resonated so strongly with gay dancers of its era: Synth music was dream/sci-fi music, and it competed with R&B at the bathhouses where its suspension of time and space heightened the otherworldliness of unlimited sexual expression central to pre-AIDS gay experience, as if every man-on-man encounter after Stonewall and before Plague was a trip to the moon. 

Appropriately, the first track of Muscle Up, "Cat's Eye", begins with a whooshing interplanetary-wind sound, and the ominous processional tom-toms that follow lets us know that sex is about to happen in the furtive way animals anticipate an earthquake. Cowley's keys ape ceremonial trumpets much like the pseudo-horn fanfare that opens Devo's Duty Now for the Future. That was 1979; this piece was allegedly recorded in '75. The recording is crude and there's a moment of cacophony when two martial drum patterns crossfade and collide, but even this accidental frisson suggests porn's glitchy, clandestine low-budget production values.

As a former drummer who switched to synths (but plays everything here besides didgeridoo and a bit of bass), Cowley comprehended both discipline and exploration. There's little on Muscle Up that sounds robotic; "5oz of Funk" echoes the syncopated beat and bass from Patti Jo's "Make Me Believe in You". Only once do machines keep time, on a 1975 instrumental demo version of "Somebody to Love Tonight", a song that Cowley revisited four years later with Sylvester, yielding understated but profoundly aching results. Even at this stage, it's supremely sultry, simmering with desires then considered utterly vile beyond the San Francisco bubble.

Today, the city's technology occupies a different kind of frontier, one often driven by motives not entirely artistic. And so it's instructive to hear what one guy then just blocks away from where Twitter now resides created with far cruder but perhaps more sensitive, pre-digital tools some 40 years ago. Rather than clean precision, he gets dirty invention, overheated homage. Instead of considered silences between notes, there's the strong suggestion of one man's impulsive sweat and spunk and stink. Cowley's interplanetary sex music is paradoxically earthy for the same reason his parallel cosmic club grooves were so righteous; because it reveled in freedoms long denied.

J Dilla: Dillatronic

During his brief lifetime, James "J Dilla" Yancey produced thousands of tracks. As Erykah Badu, who worked with him on her Mama's Gun album, once said during a RBMA lecture, Dilla made "beats all day long." He collected many of them onto CDs, and handed them out to friends and colleagues. These "beat tapes" had begun circulating across the Internet by the time he passed in 2006 at the age of 32.

Dilla's work has since become fodder for dozens of compilations, posthumous "collaborations" like the 2013 album Sunset Blvd. with Frank Nitt and his brother Illa J, and unnecessary reissues like a "badge-shaped" Record Store Day 2015 version of his 2001 12-inch "Fuck the Police". The Yancey estate has also begun issuing his beats in raw form, without vocals. (Before, they were available as "instrumental" accompaniments to projects like Rebirth of Detroit, which paired Dilla's beats with newly recorded vocals by various rappers.) Last year's The King of Beats: Ma Dukes Collector's Box Set boasted some memorable packaging—it included four 10-inch records, a cassette, and a floppy disk formatted for an E-mu SP-1200 sampler keyboard—as well as an imposing $207.74 price tag.

The King of Beats, as well as 2013's Lost Tapes Reels + More, and now Dillatronic are like sketchbooks from a widely recognized master of the art form. On the latter, each track bears the spartan title "Dillatronic 01", et cetera. According to its promotional materials, Dillatronic represents his "electronic-influenced" material, but that's a loose theme at best. There is nothing here as gloriously techno as "Nothing Like This" from the 2003 EP Ruff Draft, or the Kraftwerk homage "B.B.E. (Big Booty Express)" from his 2001 album as Jay Dee, Welcome 2 Detroit. If anything, many of these virtually unnamed and undated "beats batches" float along like the rudimentary, keyboards-and-bass-drums beats of late-'90s indie rap producers like Shawn J. Period and 88-Keys. Most have a running time of around two to three minutes, while a few last less than a minute. Yet in total, they bear traces of his superior instincts.

There are echoes of better-known productions here: the penetrating synth keyboard of "Dillatronic 10" is reminiscent of "E=MC2" from The Shining, and track 35 unfolds a neo-soul guitar groove that evokes his work on Phat Kat's "Dedication to the Suckers". With its enchanting yet disembodied chorus of "ooohs," "14" is like a distant cousin of Slum Village's "Get Dis Money". "29" whips a blaxploitation funk lick around a sample of M.O.P.'s "Ante Up", while a sample of Whodini's "Escape (I Need a Break)" girds the hallucinatory track 34. The latter is one of the more fully realized electronic instrumentals included here, but there are others, like the "Tetris"-like effects on "22", and the ghostly electro on "24" that cruelly ends in 45 seconds.

A few of these files suggest paths unexplored. "05", which only lasts a minute and three seconds, weds a bhangra-like melody to a drum kit. It's an avenue Dilla's close friend Madlib explored more fully on his Beat Konducta in India. "31" builds like a '70s horror cut (or perhaps a porno flick?) around an unnamed woman breathing "No" as a solitary keyboard sound throbs creepily. "33" weaves around a sped-up recording of a voices chirping as if out of The Wizard of Oz.

Dilla's familiar techniques are evident, like his frequent use of air sirens and hard, slapping percussion. He speaks only once, near the end of the minute-and-three-second track "39". "Yeah! Bounce with a nigga!" he commands to us over loping bass and spacey keyboard effects. This might be a data dump of studio experiments, not a cohesive Donuts-like experience that casual listeners might crave. But admirers of this brilliantly inventive musician will find much to rhyme over, get inspired by, or simply bounce to on Dillatronic.

Long Beard: Sleepwalker

Sleepwalker, the debut by New Brunswick's Long Beard, is a romantically restless record, but in an inward, idle way. Their reverb-laden dream-pop calls to mind Azure Ray, Yo La Tengo, and Galaxie 500, and it conceals an antsy yearning. "You'd hide out for hours, dreaming of other rooms to lie in," lead singer Leslie Bear sings on "Dream".

When Bear asks questions in her songs, as she often does, her inquiries seem more directed to the silence of her brain than to someone in front of her. "If I ask politely, will you ask me the question of: who do you love?" she sings on "Porch", repeating her question again and again. If there is a drama played out on Sleepwalker, it’s the sort being played out to a mirror, or a diary, or to a love interest’s face imagined in the ceiling above one’s bed.

Sometimes the album meanders, shuffling around noncommittally before finding its footing. "Turkeys", "Dream", and "Morning Ghost" sound nearly made up on the spot, with their minimalist set-up of noodling electric guitars and pitter-patter percussion not quite synchronized. And on "Moths", Bear’s voice is obscured by scratchy, layered guitar and the watery echoes of her own already-breathy vocals.

They sound like a band not trying to find their voice, but to project the one they have with confidence. Bear's voice is a literal manifestation of that hesitance: She’ll draw out words until they’re so high-pitched and thin that they seem to evaporate into the rest of the track mid-song, becoming hard to decipher. "Alone in the dark, is it more alone, than alone in the light," she sings on "Hates the Party", every word spoken firmly as if they exist alone on the page, until "light," heightened in her sing-song and suddenly like another instrument.

Sleepwalker is a very cozy record, full of porch-sitting, moth-watching, sunset-watching. It even ends with a warped rendition of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". Bear said in an interview that she ended up writing most of these songs "very late when everyone else was asleep," which is exactly when you should be listening to this album. Sleepwalker doesn’t quite feel polished, or take many risks, but Long Beard is good at making the music that sounds best played in a lit bedroom, late at night, on a suburban street when everyone else is snoozing in their beds.

Rabit: Communion

Rabit (Eric Burton) is from Texas, and though his music has generally maintained a loose dialogue with UK grime, it has also increasingly nurtured its own identity. His early work found an uneasy midpoint between violence and grace: On 2013's Sun Showers EP, misty synths crept on cat feet, surrounded by jabbing, staccato rhythms. This year's Baptizm EP, his first for Tri Angle, amped up both his tendencies in equal measure, but on Communion the truce has broken, and all hell breaks loose.

Communion is definitely not grime, even with the genre's telltale signifiers—bruised 808 kicks, broken-glass and gun-cock samples, lurching 140-BPM tempos. It's definitely not industrial, either, though it draws inspiration from the queasy frequencies of acts like Throbbing Gristle and Coil. It is violent music, and even though part of living in the 21st century entails being desensitized to all kinds of mediated awfulness, Communion feels genuinely unsettling: You emerge even after just a few minutes' worth of the album's unrelenting barrage of beats and palette of sampled shrapnel feeling dazed and punch-drunk. Needless to say, it is also thrilling, even when it leaves a sick pit in your stomach.

The sullen melodies are studiously minor key, and with the exception of the occasional desolate spoken-word fragment ("The flesh covers the bone"; "There aren't any people") there are no vocals, just yelps of distress. In "Fetal", the listener swings to and fro as though lashed to a pendulum above a riot, between machine-gun rhythms and gibbering voices and a whinnying horse. These juxtapositions offer their own kind of enjoyment, but he's not afraid to fight against pleasure, either: "Pandemic" is plodding and heavy-footed, and its climactic machine-gun volley is so intense that it is no fun, but you suspect that's the point.

It's not all brutal, exactly. The opening "Advent" features a sad synth melody reminiscent of the Cure's "A Forest", and "Artemis" toys with tentative vocal samples reminiscent of Laurie Anderson's "O Superman". "Burnerz" and "Black Gates" feel almost like traditional grime tunes, with their concussive kicks and synth stabs, and "Trapped in This Body" might be deconstructed drum'n'bass, with pitched-down sirens and beaten-up tech-step framed by radiophonic bleeps. These are welcome respites; if the album has a drawback, it's that the grim consistency of its palette and techniques leads many songs to blur together in your memory. Still, I'm guessing that is by design. Communion plays out like a kind of fever dream, a delirium of cold sweat and disturbing visions in which there are only brief moments of daylight before you're plunged back into the maelstrom once more.

Dave Gahan / Soulsavers: Angels & Ghosts

For nearly four decades now, Dave Gahan has been the predominant vocalist in Depeche Mode. As such, Gahan's voice has only grown stronger over the years—deeper, more controlled, and more iconic. During this time, that voice has mostly been employed in the service of someone else's songs, that person being Depeche Mode co-conspirator and the band's primary songwriter Martin Gore. It only makes sense that at some point—namely, around the time of 2005's Playing the Angel—that Gahan would want a more active role. Outside of the band, he would eventually release two solo albums—2003's Paper Monsters and 2007's Hourglass—and two collaborations with Soulsavers (aka British producer Rich Machin).

Angels & Ghosts is Gahan's second full-length album with Soulsavers. Much like 2012's The Light the Dead See, the record offers an opportunity for Gahan to stretch his legs creatively and shake off some of the baggage that a band with a 35-year history like Depeche Mode invariably has to carry around. In doing so, Gahan and co. largely abandon heavy electronics in favor of something resembling blues rock and gospel-infused Americana, complete with churchy backup singers and quietly shaken tambourines.

The album opens with "Shine"—a kind of stomping, slide-guitar heavy slow burner in which Gahan imbues a ridiculous line like "when you look around, it's so profound, what we can do" with a kind of gravitas that only someone with his particular pipes can pull off, but it still feels like a lightweight version of Depeche Mode's "I Feel You". "You Owe Me" could be a distant cousin to Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game"—all midnight hues and romantic yearning—while "One Thing" is the kind of piano-driven ballad that you could almost imagine popping up on a Depeche Mode record. "Just lay down next to me," Gahan sings, "We can watch those tasteless shows on our TV." It's the kind of 'no one understands us and it's us against the world forever' track that Gahan has made a career out of perfectly articulating, but in the end the entire thing gets punched in the face by a chorus lyric so hackneyed that one wonder how on earth it actually made it onto the record: "You just need one thing/ Love."

As a frontman, Gahan is a marvel of preening and grandstanding, which means that he actually shines on tracks that aren't afraid to get all messianic and pump up the melodrama. In that sense, the album's lead track, "All of This and Nothing" (despite also famously being the title of a Psychedelic Furs song and album) is perfect for him. The song is populated by black waters, heavy storms, and ghosts that hover continuously outside of windows, which means it's classic territory for Gahan. "I'm all of this and nothing/ I'm the dirt beneath your feet/ I'm the sun that rises while you're sleeping/ I'm all you need" he sings, sounding for the first time like the kind of equally doomed and exalted kind of character that he embodies so well. If there's something decidedly lacking on Angels & Ghosts, it's more of his famously gothy bravado. Gahan clearly has a predilection for casting himself as the tortured sinner ("One hand in my pocket/ One foot in the grave/ Standing here, waiting to be saved"), but the nine tracks here—packed full of twangy guitars and tastefully deployed string sections—reach for a kind of holy redemption that they don't ever actually earn.

Angels & Ghosts isn't a bad record, but it's frustratingly tepid. Superfans will still find pleasure in hearing Gahan's voice tear through these songs. But at this point, a truly radical departure—or even some kind of insanely catastrophic creative failure—would be more interesting than another selection of songs half-heartedly playing around with tired blues and gospel motifs. One certainly can't fault Gahan for needing his own private creative outlet, but at this point just writing more flatly on-the-nose songs about sin and faith and redemption doesn't sound refreshing or the least bit fun, but instead like something you've already heard him tackle a million times already.

VHÖL: Deeper Than Sky

VHÖL are the ideal modern metal band—they fuse battle-tested forms of metal with impressive arrangements and a progressive fire that traditionalists and revivalists can't match. Their personel is bulletproof—John Cobbett and Sigrid Sheie hail from San Francisco's prog-power masters Hammers of Misfortune, Mike Scheidt is the vocalist and guitar player behind YOB, and Aesop Dekker is the black metal punker from Ludicra (where Cobbett also played) and Agalloch. All four involved have a rare, vital chemistry, and Deeper Than Sky keeps that fire alive while finding more ways to bend traditional metal formulas. This is the bar metal bands have less than two months to clear if they want to unseat them this year.

One of the strongest tracks on their underrated self-titled debut was "Arising", which added a healthy dose of thrash, Thin Lizzy, and Rob Halford to VHÖL's alien version of black metal. Sky continues in this direction, with Cobbett focusing on the thrashier end of his playing. On opener "The Desolate Damned", he bends a conventional galloping rhythm just enough to render it strange. "3 AM" begins with 30 seconds of straightforward thrash, before VHÖL add choral screams and off-kilter soloing: In VHÖL's world, nothing can ever be simple.   

Scheidt is primarily known as a guitarist due to the popularity of YOB, but he continues to stick mostly to vocals here, and it suits the project. He sounds more liberated in VHÖL—there's life to his "OOGHS!," his homages to Tom G. Warrior's signature grunts, and his death-thrash growls. The contrast between his rhythm and lead tones on the title track makes for a trippy thrash experience; VHÖL know how to disorient without obvious weed/space/psych/drugs signifiers. "Red Chaos" draws upon underrated Dallas thrashers Rigor Mortis, in particular their late guitarist Mike Scaccia, who also played in Ministry. Scaccia had an unrelenting rhythm hand that didn't sacrifice detail; Cobbett takes that same approach, creating soloing that isn't layered on so much as it protrudes through the rhythm.

Sky's real gem, though, is "Paino", a d-beat piano instrumental. The idea seems gimmicky in the hands of lesser players, but Sheie and Dekker lock in with each other. Like in his other bands, Dekker provides just enough muscle to elevate Sheie while still making her the center of the song. There are big-bottomed rhythms and soloing that climaxes like the volcano George Lynch posed on for Dokken's "Just Got Lucky" video. Only metal could make this high-minded absurdity work; it's the intersection of straight-faced practice and boundless joy, and it's as much of a metal song as anything run through miles of Marshalls. Leave it to VHÖL to find another dimension to the ever-bountiful combination of hardcore and metal, where the cerebral and the primal stomp heads next to one another.

The Chills: Silver Bullets

If there is one characteristic that has defined the music of the New Zealand group the Chills over the course of their 35-year, on-and-off, up-and-down existence, it’s their ability to summon a kind of effortless beauty. Their best songs occur in soft focus, the vocals of frontman and sole consistent member Martin Phillipps hushed and controlled, his guitar lines sturdy and gleaming like gold thread. His best melodies arrive as easy a sigh—gliding steadily through the center of "Satin Doll", spinning through "Tied Up in Chain" between tumbling piano. Where their contemporaries in the New Zealand scene of the early '80s capitalized on shambling charm (the Clean) or loose, looping jangle-pop (the Bats), the Chills were gentler and—especially as their career progressed—more regal, the corners of their songs filled with almost baroque detail. They feel designed to soundtrack some storybook undersea kingdom, sumptuous and mystic.

This is remarkable, considering the group’s history is shot through with turmoil and darkness. Founding drummer Martyn Bull succumbed to leukemia shortly after recording "Pink Frost", the haunting meditation on death for which the group is best known. Forever tipped as the breakout band from the Dunedin indie scene, they cycled through as many as 15 different lineups, releasing an endless string of singles and EPs for New Zealand’s storied Flying Nun label, but always seemed to collapse when they were finally hitting their stride. Case in point: they inked a deal with Warner Bros. in 1990 and scored a modest success with the smart and self-aware "Heavenly Pop Hit" from the utterly immaculate Submarine Bells but they failed to capitalize on the momentum. The intervening years delivered more EPs, compilations, and even a box set of rarities, but nothing like actual forward movement, And then there was the darkness surrounding Phillipps himself: After grappling with immobilizing depression in the late-'90s, he turned to heroin, and contracted hepatitis C after sharing a needle with a fellow user who carried the disease.

So, it’s both a surprise and relief to hear Phillipps in full fighting form on the title track from Silver Bullets, the first Chills full-length in 19 years. The song—and the album that contains it—handily erases everything from 1990 forward and seems to pick up exactly where Submarine Bells left off: guitars wreathed in reverb, organs heaving, Phillipps’ voice, as quietly assured as ever—even if what he’s singing is tinged with militance. "And if it’s true they kill a heinous vampire/ Charged with magic charm/ If forced to fight your evil empire/ We have the means to harm." Much of Silver Bullets strikes this kind of oppositional stance, Phillipps positioning himself as a kind of kiwi pop Tom Joad, pushing back against larger forces that threaten to swallow the less-fortunate whole. Often, the political is personal: on the roaring "I Can’t Help You", Phillipps grapples with the knowledge that he’s done harm to others, working through his feelings as his guitar and a whistling keyboard turn somersaults in the foreground. On the elegiac "Underwater Wasteland", he uses environmental destruction as a metaphor for social Darwinism, describing plesiosaurs and sea serpents with a kind of awestruck wonder. The music that surrounds him is rich and whispering: guitars that spiral like paper streamers in a breeze, drums that seem smothered in feathers. Combining delicate grace with ornate detailing is no easy feat, but on Silver Bullets, Phillipps manages it again and again.

But the album is not without its missteps. Phillipps’ songs are most effective when his enemies are faceless and generalized—it’s better suited to the album’s storybook mystique. The leaden bromide "America Says Hello" comes off like a conspiracy theorist’s 3 a.m. Facebook rant. Ditto "Tomboy", a song about a girl who’s picked on by her classmates whose graceful melody and good intentions are undone by Phillipps’ numbing repetition of the title. And "Molten Gold", a tumbling number about the healing power of love, feels rote compared to the richness that surrounds it.

The album is best when it’s at its broadest, and it’s never more so than in the expansive, eight-minute "Pyramids / When the Poor Can Reach the Moon". It’s the most ambitious song in the group’s entire catalog, and one whose firm grasp of melody and dynamics more than justifies its length. The tension builds for a full five minutes, the rich getting richer and the poor getting smarter, until it arrives at its glorious, sun-drenched conclusion when, instead of violence and chaos, the gates to the mansion are flung open, guitars and pianos sparkle, the oppressed are liberated and, in Phillipps’ words, "the poor can reach the moon." The net effect is warm and rousing, speaking to the power of hope in the face of darkness. After three decades of near-misses and dark alleys, Phillipps has finally embraced his role as king of the underdogs. On Silver Bullets, he fights back the only way he knows how: with beauty.

Built to Spill: There’s Nothing Wrong With Love

It's May 1994 in Boise, Idaho—one month after the death of Kurt Cobain. Though this town is 500 miles southeast of Seattle, almost an eight-hour drive, that's not so far in this part of the country. You have your car, and everything is spread out, and you're always ready to cover ground when you need to. So despite the distance Boise could conceivably be considered part of the Pacific Northwest, if you stretch the definition a little bit, and the music scene there, such as it is, has some connections to its larger neighboring cities. There's a Boise band called Built to Spill led by Doug Martsch, who used to be in an indie rock band based in Seattle called Treepeople.

Two of the stories in the Pacific Northwest rock scene in the '80s and early '90s are the ramshackle D.I.Y. scene surrounding K Records and of course grunge, which by this time had gone so far overground it was on its way to becoming a cliché. Martsch's songwriting has some parallels with the wide-eyed and playful perspective of indie pop, but his twee impulses are tempered by his epic guitar work, which is not connected to grunge proper but can be traced to one of the scene's influences, J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. Having made one album, 1993's Ultimate Alternative Wavers, Built to Spill return to Seattle to record their follow-up, There's Nothing Wrong With Love, the record that would change everything for the band. "That was the last record when I was able to make music without thinking a lot of people would hear it," Martsch told SPIN in 1999. "It makes a difference. I'd like to think it doesn't matter, but it does."

That relative anonymity, free from the nebulous expectations of what eventually became a sizable fan base, gave Martsch license to write his most personal album. There's Nothing Wrong With Love, newly reissued on vinyl after being out of print on the format for almost two decades, has come to define a certain strand of indie rock, leaving a cluster of threads picked up by Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie, and many more. But beyond its influence, it captures a truly original songwriting voice at the exact moment he realized what he had to offer. It's the album as snow globe, a small place where interconnected stories happen and you can get a different perspective on them depending on your vantage point. Built to Spill had some great records ahead of them, but they would never make another album with this level of intimacy.

There's Nothing Wrong With Love finds Martsch on the cusp of true adulthood (his first child was born around the time it was made, and his feelings around that are documented on "Cleo"), but the past is close enough where he sees it with tremendous clarity. The songs highlight the tiny feelings and sensations that have no obvious consequences in the moment but somehow stay with you in every detail. And Martsch has a special talent for pinpointing the tossed-off moments that others might connect to. As a kid, I was excited to learn about the constellations— where they were supposed to be, how the dots were connected, the mythology they represented—but I quickly realized the only one I could make out was the Big Dipper. I spent 20-something years with that meaningless thought pinging in my head, and then I heard a song on this album that started with the words "When I was little someone pointed out to me/ Some constellations but the Big Dipper's all I could see" ("Big Dipper") and suddenly this stray private thought became a shared experience, one wrapped inside an ultra-catchy power pop song.

Nuggets like this, borne of Martsch's keen sense of introspection and emotional generosity, are the lifeblood of There's Nothing Wrong With Love. On "In the Morning" he explores the difficulty of enjoying the present moment when filled with anxiety about the future ("Today is flat beneath the weight of the next day, next day, next day, next day") and how instinct takes over in moments of uncertainty. All the album's hyper-specific lyrical details—and there are many—check out. "Seven Up I touched her thumb, she knew it was me" (from "Twin Falls") might sound impossibly precious from another songwriter, but Martsch always leavens his sweetness with self-aware humor. "My stepfather looks just like David Bowie/ But he hates David Bowie," goes a line in "Distopian Dream Girl", certainly the first time in pop music history that this particular thought has been expressed. Then he follows with "I think Bowie's cool/ I think Lodger rules, my stepdad's a fool," showing just how in touch Martsch is with the feelings of adolescence, those years when you're floating through life, a bundle of nerves, and nothing quite makes sense.

The music and arrangements on the album are every bit the match of the subject matter. Built to Spill showed only hints of the explosive rock machine they'd later become. Acoustic guitar features heavily, a cello saws away in the background, serving as a sort of Greek chorus tracking the emotional arc of a given song's characters. Once in a while, Martsch hits the stomp box and unleashes a noisy solo, the distortion dusting his effortless melodicism with longing. There's plenty of open space, and his voice is much cleaner than it would be later. The sequencing and editing is brilliant, from "In the Morning"'s split-second pause after Martsch yells "Stop!" to the pause between "Twin Falls" and "Some" that makes them seem like one long song. It's a sound that is simultaneously tiny and huge, a keepsake tucked into a pocket that could at any moment magically become the size of a billboard.

With its focus on childhood, the nature of existence, and the search for meaning, it's possible to hear There's Nothing Wrong With Love in the terms of "What if there was another universe in my fingernail?"-style stoner dorm-room philosophy. But Martsch's open heart keeps you on his side. There's real beauty in the fumbling exploration he describes in "Car", a song filled with lines that crystallize what it's like to be an excited-but-frightened kid learning about life in fits and starts: "You'll get the chance to take the world apart/ And figure out how it works." Listening to this album in 2014, another line in the song, "I want to see it when you get stoned on a cloudy breezy desert afternoon," kept bringing me back to the final scene in Richard Linklater's film Boyhood, when the main character we've watched grow through the years takes mushrooms and hikes through a canyon in West Texas, a landscape not unlike parts of Idaho. It reminded me that one reason young people do drugs is because they offer a second chance to see things for the first time. To borrow one last line from "Car", on this album Martsch remembered when he wanted to see "movies of his dreams." For the vast majority of us that wish is never fulfilled, but There's Nothing Wrong With Love is a celebration of the desire itself, the vulnerability that comes with allowing yourself to imagine possibility.

Christine and the Queens: Christine and the Queens

The Christine and the Queens project is guided by one woman, the French synth-pop auteur Héloïse Letissier. At home she is a known quantity: She capped off a string of EPs and touring gigs with Lykke Li and Woodkid with her debut Chaleur Humaine in June of 2014. But the U.S. release this fall of Humaine, repackaged as a self-titled debut, marks her introduction to the American market: Some of the French lyrics were redone in English, accompanied by a couple of Anglophone bonus tracks. As with the French edition, the record starts with an unequivocal declaration of her arrival. "I'm a man now," she sings in a bold voice on "iT", "And there's nothing you can do to make me change my mind."

A few verses later, she offers up a line whose regal, gory quality seems worthy of Lorde or Kanye: "I'll rule over all my dead impersonations." Out of context, it sounds like a very 2015 pop move: burying past incarnations of yourself that the public never even witnessed and calling yourself king from the off, fueled by nothing but divine belief in your own selfhood. Letissier has the chops and charisma to pull off this role, too: "iT" has gorgeous minimal production—just a sputtering beat, tarnished synth glimmers, and canny employ of sprite-like backing vocals. Her expressive voice leads the lone melody, at first vulnerable and then rasping with defiance.

But it's a feint: Letissier spends the next 11 songs pulling back from this grandstanding (which was inspired by her discarding her feminine identity as a teenager) to explore the nuances of her queer identity and what that means in private and public spheres. On the way, she comes out with some pin-sharp lyrics to rival collaborator Perfume Genius' "no family is safe when I sashay," full of daring and vulnerable truths. "Science Fiction" unravels on spacey burbles that underpin the alienation she and her partner feel when out in public: "They look at me when I stare at you... In this sea of eyes, every move's a coup." Letissier reclaims the discrimination she experiences for not passing as a prescribed gender ideal on "Half Ladies", which moves between percussive gasps indebted to Michael Jackson and pared-back, angular funk: "Every insult I hear back/ Darkens into a beauty mark."

That particular image seems to reference the source of her own liberation. A few years ago, beset by depression, Letissier ran away from college in Paris and crossed the Channel to London, where she was taken under the wing of three Soho drag artists. They heard her humming and encouraged her to make music, so she locked herself away for weeks, garrote-style, as she taught herself to write. Letissier named her act Christine and the Queens in tribute to her saviors, an act that also highlights her knack for self-mythologizing. At the end of Christine and the Queens, there is a second arrival, "Here", a work of unbroken tension hooked around disintegrating, crackling beats and an organ's glow. She sings, in French, "I evolve in living trace."

The production of Christine and the Queens follows that mystical sense of becoming. Most of the songs are built from tapestries of microbeats that have an organic, sinewy feel, unfolding with the intricate flow of a centipede's spine. She often forms strong rhythms from a surprisingly delicate percussive backbone—"No Harm Is Done" has a feather-light, trap-indebted beat that sounds as though it was sampled from recordings of magnesium fizzling across water. Tiny shifts in impact or intensity can have a massive effect: The simple beat that hardens halfway through "Tilted" adds a new level of confidence to Letissier's tale of a wonky but thriving relationship. It's a constellation of experience, the sense of a body being animated, twitching and jerking into existence. Letissier literally espouses the power of movement on "Safe and Holy", but the heavy beat and synth-scapes drown out the effect that flows naturally elsewhere.

Letissier's melodic sensibility is as strong as her subtle percussion. "Paradis Perdus" is the work of a real pop scholar, an interpolation of Christophe's 1973 song "Les Paradis Perdus" and the chorus of Kanye West's "Heartless" that unites their common sense of loss over soft piano and a knocking beat. "Jonathan", Letissier's duet with Perfume Genius, confronts a lover whose internalized shame means that their relationship is only acknowledged by night. It's a song of immense grace, the funereal pace guided by exquisite synths and expanding strings. "Can you walk with me in the daylight?" Letissier asks, her head held high.

Christine and the Queens is a beautiful, important negotiation of these liminal states at a time when the media is quick to bandy about the term "post-gender" as if the hard work is done. Her music is bold and fully formed, but Letissier unpeels the façade of outer confidence to shine a light on the way that queer identity requires constant negotiation, to deal with the world's often unforgiving gaze and the one that can come from within—on "Safe and Holy", she admits that her own eyes "mock and judge" her. It's empowering, bold, and vulnerable, and made for dancing. Chaleur Humaine translates as "human warmth", and the album makes good on that intimacy. You get the sense of Letissier guarding her own precious, burgeoning fire, and inviting listeners to share in its glow.

Madlib / M.E.D. / Blu: Bad Neighbor

Madlib’s calling card is his ability to spin obscure funk into woozy rap instrumentals. With the lack of precision and attention to mood, they feel out of time and slightly off-kilter, and they fit perfectly with artists like Erykah Badu and Georgia Anne Muldrow. Recently though, it seems the Cali composer has reined himself in a bit: 2014’s Piñata had all the grit you'd expect from Madlib, but it was crisper and recessive, allowing more space for Freddie Gibbs' menacing, in-the-pocket flows. He further restrains his sound on Bad Neighbor, a collaborative LP with rappers M.E.D. and Blu. This is a light-hearted jaunt, with the rappers leaping from topic to topic, as if passing a blunt between verses. Don’t expect anything profound here. At its core, Bad Neighbor is about three dudes and their friends, spitting verses over great beats without sweating structure.

The producer fits well into this free-flowing group. He also feeds off seemingly random ideas, connecting dots between misplaced vocal clips and Afro-rock samples, and despite his talents he can be easy to take for granted. M.E.D. had a nice showing on 2004’s Madvillainy, the revered outing from MF DOOM and Madlib, but his output has been sparse from there. Blu has been incredibly prolific, but many of his releases are marred with improper mixing and unfocused rhymes, with as many standouts (Below the Heavens, Her Favorite Colo(u)r) as bricks, like Jesus. and the short-lived ucla. On their own, all of these guys are good but sometimes get overlooked.

Bad Neighbor is their second release. In 2013, the trio put out The Burgundy EP, powered by the fluid single "Burgundy Whip". That song re-emerges near the end of Bad Neighbor, but it feels like an afterthought compared with the stronger, more vivid material around it. "Peroxide", featuring Dâm-Funk and DJ Rome, resembles "Planet Rock"-era electro-funk, and the MCs bounce nimbly atop its darting synthetics. "The Stroll" flashes a bright, disorienting synth like a flood light, the beat so full of little noises it's like an event itself.

Anderson .Paak, the grit-voiced singer/rapper who featured prominently on Dr. Dre's Compton and who recently dropped his own noteworthy EP, appears almost out of nowhere on Bad Neighbor track "The Strip", lending his strained voice to the proceedings. There are a few appearances like that, and they feel purposefully casual, allowing everyone to thrive on their own terms. On "Finer Things", Foreign Exchange frontman Phonte Coleman sings the hook and raps about adult romance. MF DOOM shows up on "Knock Knock" to offer his signature disconnected one-liners. Bad Neighbor whizzes by in a blunted haze, which might be an insult to another project, but it works well here, when the stakes are low and the mood is most important.

Luke Vibert: Bizarster

Thanks in part to a Trent Reznor co-sign, American electronica listeners were introduced to the peculiar talents of producer Luke Vibert in 1997 by Drum 'n' Bass for Papa. Released under his Plug alias, it wasn't his first album, but Vibert's caffeinated take on the still-underground dance form was given Interscope distribution. This meant that many stateside listeners were introduced to drum'n'bass via Vibert's goofy and furious rollercoaster tracks set to offbeat samples, like John Goodman's howling admonishment from Barton Fink: "I'LL. SHOW. YOU. THE. LIFE. OF. THE. MIND."

Since then, Vibert has spun off aliases to match his productions, each one slotted to fit a particular genre. Wagon Christ signified the trippiest trip-hop, Amen Andrews made dizzying jungle, Kerrier District did filter disco. Albums under Vibert's proper name spread even further: Big Soup spanned breakbeat and downtempo, YosepH dipped into acid, while a compilation, Nuggets, found Vibert digging deep into library music.

The lone constant throughout has been Vibert's corny humor, which comes up often on Bizarster, his first album for his peer Mike Paradinas' Planet Mu label in six years. "Knockout" flashes the tricky, skittering footwork of Paradinas and Aphex Twin, with left-field harp runs, analog synth bloops, and the requisite cheeky vocal sample (this one from Mike Tyson's Nintendo game "Punch Out!!"). "L Tronic" uses the neon nightcrawler squiggle from Stone's "Girl I Like the Way That You Move", some more 8-bit bubbles, and an old hip-hop freestyle atop it.

It's a formula that Vibert has done to death no matter the moniker: infectious drum programming, off-center synth melodies, and/or arcade game FX as the next layer, all topped off by vocal snippets from old records or old VHS movies. There's a soul sample, a railing preacher, and a howl to go with the crisp hi-hats and handclaps of "Officer's Club", a boast about "[makin'] like the ghetto [to] blast ya" sped up so as to move from menacing to cartoonish. Vocal lolz reach peak Vibert on "I Can Phil It", built from—as the punny title soon bears out—Phil Collins asking "can you feel it?" soon joined by the MC shout from the live version of Mr. Fingers' "Can You Feel It?", and all manner of "feels", piled up on a track that ultimately doesn't feel like much.

In 2012, Vibert unearthed more of his Plug material, releasing it as Back on Time. Much like Bizarster, it's fun enough, but there's little to suggest it might not have been put to DAT in the late-'90s and dusted off nearly 20 years on, even though those jokey samples no longer land quite right. Strip the clever vocal snippets away from Vibert's productions and you're left with those choice drums and goofy melodies, but there's little beyond that to mind.

New Found Glory on Becoming Self-Aware, Their Less Obvious Influences and Streamlining the Band

​Frontman Jordan Pundik and guitarist Chad Gilbert talk about steering their band through a difficult time, their early days of being the only pop-punk band on a hardcore tour, and drawing inspiration from bands that sound nothing like them.

Philip Jeck: Cardinal

At their best, the records of experimental British composer and producer Philip Jeck can make you reimagine the way you hear the world. For most of his career, Jeck has used the record and the record player as both primary inspiration and chief instrument. He processes the static sounds archived on forgotten LPs, sampling and obfuscating the source material until it yields and blurs into new pieces. Though he uses little but effects pedals and processors to transmogrify the music, it can seem at times that Jeck physically warps the grooves themselves, turning concentric circles into Catherine wheels or paisley vectors or interconnected figure eights. If hip-hop’s architects sampled aging sounds to create their own modern world, Jeck uses many of the same tools to create an alternate, individual one that he then invites you to enter.

Jeck had been at this for decades when, 13 years ago, he seemed to find an enviable stride. Released between 2002 and 2008, a triptych of records—Stoke, 7, and Sand—turned his tests into solo turntable symphonies, fully formed compositions meant to be inhabited and analyzed. Jeck merged the audio on the records with the essence of the records, creating new music that popped and cracked beneath the charm of vinyl antiquity. The process seemed to break linear time by giving a universe of lost voices and performances new life at once. You, the listener, went away with Jeck and his record-store finds for a pleasant spell.

But on Cardinal, Jeck’s first new album in five years, that motion and those feelings have calcified a bit. The edges of his sources and samples have hardened, as though he’s confronting the harsh exigencies of the moment rather than escaping to the drift and peace of fantasy. The voices and instruments Jeck once built around slink into the background here, ceding instead to an unexpectedly discomfiting vision. Brittle dins and soft tones, beautiful drones and static shocks participate in a theater of revolving reality and intentional violence.

Jeck indeed created Cardinal with turntables, a technique best heard here through the fractured loop that anchors "Broke Up" or the sunbaked wobble that defines "The Station View". These 13 tracks, however, often feel powered more by their accessories—"Casio keyboards, Ibanez bass guitar, Sony MiniDisc players, Ibanez and Zoom effects pedals, assorted percussion, a Behringer mixer," he lists—than the source records. There are jarring moments, as during the menacing "Brief" or the lurid "Called In", that suggest Jeck has suddenly slammed his palm against a distortion pedal, like some much younger noise lord gunning for the set’s climax. During "Saint Pancras", he seems to shake sleigh bells in the distance; pitted against the neon whirr of his electronics, the addition is strangely disconcerting, like a threat voiced from the lips of a longtime ally.

That is the prevailing sentiment of Cardinal, an album where Jeck’s general sense of wonder slips toward dystopian bewilderment. The move makes for a more fragmented listen than expected from Jeck, whose albums are typically immersive and enchanting. Still, the transition comes with unlikely rewards. Rendered in short spans that overlap until they form casual rhythms, the hovering bass and shredded treble of the terrific, terrifying "…bends the knee 1" recall the successes of the Haxan Cloak’s Excavation. During "Barrow in Furness (open thy hand wide)", Jeck slowly mutates a simple carousel melody until it becomes a dense web of ghastly oscillations, a little like Prurient’s electro phase. Yes, those are surprising references for a British sexagenarian with highbrow bona fides, but again, Jeck’s music has always recast the established world in a singular image. Does it come as any mystery that, now more than ever, he would conjure a setting as or more odious than our own?        

Records are now in vogue in ways they’ve never been during Jeck's career. For decades, he repurposed a medium that seemed bound for obsolescence. At times, his use of the LP felt like a moral imperative, a valiant attempt to spin voices and ideas and forms that might be lost. But records, of course, have become such desirable commodities that it’s now difficult to have them made due to an overburdened market that once seemed destined for dismantling. It’s fitting, then, that this is one of the least turntable-centric albums of Jeck’s career, rendered so that you may be able to hear it all without guessing at the signal path at all. Rather than try to stake some here-first claim with vinyl or turn his past with it into new cachet or credibility, Jeck has used the turntable as a platform for exploring larger sounds and asking bigger questions. Cardinal is a break in his once clear direction, and it’s not his most cohesive album. But it is a logical and necessary leap for Jeck, who has always turned at oblique angles so as to reorder the sounds around him.

Karamika: Karamika

In the mid-'70s, Brian Eno was so taken with the strange sounds emanating from Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius's studio in the rural village of Forst—both the duo music they made as Cluster as well as their trio with Michael Rother as Harmonia—that he traveled from England to Germany to record with them. The results of that meeting only came to light in the past few years (it's fully documented on the forthcoming Harmonia box set) but the meeting sprang to my mind while listening to Karamika.

Karamika is a duo of British musician George Thompson (who does numerous remixes as Black Merlin), and Gordon Pohl, who's one half of Düsseldorf act Musiccargo. At times, their work together evokes the chilly sounds of early-'80s minimal wave and some of John Carpenter's analog synth soundtracks. But the snaking, immersive 12 tracks that comprise their debut often brings to mind the primitive, visceral early electronic music that Cluster themselves made back when they were still known as the woolly, circuit-bending band Kluster.

Karamika's music is reactive in that sense, pulling away from the use of readily available software and computers to revisit an era when these electrical surges weren't so easily tamed and manageable. "Ton 01" begins with a slowly undulating sine wave and throb, and when the metronomic drumming enters it brings to mind Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter's first forays as Kraftwerk. As the track moves along, a noisy guitar appears, reminiscent of the one that worms through Neu!'s "Hallogallo", showing where early electronics grappled with rock instrumentation, each pushing the other into strange new realms.

There's nothing especially novel about emulating the likes of Cluster, Kraftwerk, or Neu! in 2015 (nor would it have been back in 2005), but it's hard to get the parameters right. The exploratory spirit remains intact, but Karamika's resultant tracks feel more focused and they are judicious in adding new layers and noises to the initial framework so that it doesn't all collapse under the weight. More often than not, the deeper you travel into the pieces, the more mesmerizing they become.

A sense of claustrophobia and dread lurks beneath the surface throughout. As "Ton 04" moves through its nine minutes, the throbs gather in density until they feel like a migraine. The cavernous clattering on "Ton 07" begins as an early experimental piece might. Disembodied voices appear on the album highlight "Ton 9", and at the peak of tension a child's laugh comes in, which has a horror-film effect, prickling the skin rather than breaking the tension. In that way, Karamika's homage to their German forefathers forgoes the utopian spirit of some of those albums. Instead, Thompson and Pohl hint at the isolating, disconnected present. 

Shining: International Blackjazz Society

On their 2010 album Blackjazz, the Norwegian jazz/prog collective Shining absorbed metal into their aesthetic, and it seemed to focus them. On earlier records the band, organized around multi-instrumentalist Jørgen Munkeby, were more elusive, but Blackjazz was an album made entirely of jagged shapes, like the irregular, violent architecture of a cliffside. It feels aggressively assembled, as if its ideas of metal and jazz were less harmonized than magnetized together. The follow-up, 2013’s One One One, reduced them into an atomically unstable industrial rock band. While thrilling, the album could have the remoteness of a formal exercise.

International Blackjazz Society sounds like a compression of these two approaches, but it evolves into something distinct as you listen. Unlike One One One, the songs here don’t simply accelerate until they expire. There’s more space in the arrangements, and the songs expand into the room they’re afforded. Some of this shift can be credited to new drummer Tobias Ørnes Andersen, who plays industrial music with more patience and tension than previous drummer and founding Shining member Torstein Lofthus. "Thousand Eyes" feels like stoner metal, of all things; the riff is a little more drunk than the band usually allows. "House of Warship" is free jazz, which is actually new territory for Shining; even their freest moments on previous records seemed premeditated, a kind of organized collapse. Whenever Munkeby plays saxophone on International Blackjazz Society the songs sound as if they’re sprouting fractals.

Still, even as the band relaxes into new atmospheres there’s an extreme, ascetic discipline on display. The architecture of their music is modernist, a series of inelastic and inorganic shapes colliding with the velocity of a distant level of "Tetris". On International Blackjazz Society’s final track, "Need", you can feel this refined performance begin to rupture. It’s as unhinged as it is straightforward; as it acquires mass in the choruses it seems to list off the ground into some new, uncertain gravity. For all the blur and motion of their music, this hint of deeper chaos might be the album's most exciting moment.

Rival Consoles: Howl

Ryan Lee West felt moved to a brief outburst back in August. The Leicester-born, London-based producer who makes music as Rival Consoles tweeted in protest of the ongoing boom of deep house, asking artists to quit contributing to the genre, currently in vogue. "There's probably enough to last us till 2089," he wrote.

West's ire makes sense, if only because the music he makes as Rival Consoles feels diametrically opposed to the luxuriant, lengthy bath evoked by deep house. West is a musical engineer in the mold of luminaries like Aphex Twin and relative newcomers like Dave Harrington, and the soundscapes he's constructed on his third LP, Howl, are spiky and imposing, too solid to sink into. The music is always shifting, so it's impossible to lose track of time while listening. You're always aware that any given composition is morphing, is in flux. Reams of electronic producers luxuriate in the safety of creating a comfortable atmosphere. But Howl is impossible to ignore, and hard to forget.

That's partly because West so often feels comfortable disrupting his own patterns. "Afterglow" seems as if it's going to build on an early synth loop, but what at first seems like the track's foundation turns out to be its foyer: halfway in, and suddenly we're in an entirely new room, one that's louder, brighter, more expansive. Our understanding of his pieces broadens as they move through time, so that once they're nearly over we apprehend the entire structure as if by a drone camera hovering above.

That vivid view is studded with allusions: the title track makes extraordinary reference to trains and tunnels, and at times the dusky track "Pre" recalls the snaking sounds of a film projector. West has said that he's a fan of "sloppy things and rough things happening in music," but even the little blips and isotopes here feel as if they've been cast in concrete, accidents granted purpose. In contrast to the last two Rival Consoles LPs, Howl was largely forged from hardware (as opposed to digital technology), and the record's analogue origins would be obvious even if you knew nothing about its genesis.

West is a labelmate of Nils Frahm and, this year alone, has toured with Clark and Nosaj Thing. He shares with all three the instincts of a classical composer. Howl's closer, "Looming", is a six-and-a-half-minute mini-epic that reflects the depth of emotion that West says he poured into Howl. But the catharsis it induces comes as much from the musician's restraint and sense of composure as anything else. What isn't there is as important as what is.

West's grumbling about deep house might make him seem like a dinosaur. But he doesn't seem bothered by its existence; he's complaining about a surplus, and, like a true progressive, his momentary gripe stands as mere prelude to more concerted action. His music—rocky, spiky, warm, titanic—drives us to re-evaluate whether referring to someone as a dinosaur might not be quite as pejorative as we thought.

Ty Dolla $ign: Airplane Mode

Ty Dolla $ign (born Tyrone Griffin, Jr.) has cultivated an aesthetic as grimy as it is sexy: His party songs feel sleazy, and his sex songs feel like they're happening in public. You could see glimpses of this direction from his beginnings as one half of the duo Ty & Kory, but it wasn’t until he went solo that he developed the persona that made him a star. He has the skill to make his woozy, grainy songs about parties and women seem so effortless that sometimes it looks like he’s not even trying, which is evident on his latest tape, Airplane Mode.

Airplane Mode feels designed as an afterthought, a placeholder to keep Ty’s buzz afloat until his major label debut, Free TC, arrives. Yet it’s cohesive and engaging even when multiple songs cut out in the middle of verses. This is a purposely unfinished project, one that doesn’t reveal much about Ty that we don’t already know: "I’m a pop a molly, pop a percocet, sippin' Actavis/ My momma mad at me, told me I spend too much money/ I’ve been buying bottles like sure, what, you only live once," he raps on "Do Thangs". He’s still caught up in a tidal wave of women, drugs, money, and never-ending parties. "Back in the City" and "Money Ruin Friendships" are satisfying records that showcase both Ty’s charming singing voice and his gift for making a DJ Mustard beat feel fresh again.

But songs like "No Fake Shit" and "All" are more intriguing, because they hint at a larger "there" with Ty Dolla $ign. "No Fake Shit" is a deeply caring love song and "All" hints at the trappings and boredom of fame. More importantly, the latter ends with a voicemail from his brother TC, who is currently serving a life sentence. The brief moment gives the EP a hint of soul and signals that Ty might have something more to say to us.

Airplane Mode isn't quite that place, though. There are two references to the EP title here, both telling: "These days gotta keep my phone on airplane mode/ To dodge these hoes," Ty croons on the title track. The second comes from TC’s message from jail. In it, TC he acknowledges that Ty’s phone probably went straight to voicemail because it’s on airplane mode, as if this is a common occurrence. Airplane mode is the setting you put your electrical device in to completely disconnect it from the network. You can’t get text messages, phone calls, or access any apps needing the Internet and, at the risk of sounding precious, it is a bit of a metaphor for Ty Dolla $ign the persona. Disconnected from the outside world, yet still functioning in it, he’s garnered a steady buzz and made plenty of great songs by projecting a disaffected cool.

Martin Courtney: Many Moons

Leave it to Martin Courtney to turn a solo album into a gesture of self-effacement. The singer/guitarist's New Jersey band Real Estate have spent the last six years elevating effortless indie pop into a deeply moving art form, and his fellow group members have routinely worked in side projects—bassist Alex Bleeker with his woolly'n'rootsy Freaks outfit, and guitarist Matt Mondanile with the watery dreamscapes of Ducktails. But Courtney's debut solo outing arrives with his own name pushed to the fore. And yet, Many Moons is hardly the work of a narcissistic singer/songwriter. ("I just couldn't come up with a band name," he recently shrugged.) Instead, the charmingly low-key album is an act of humility and, beyond that, quiet grace.

Courtney's voice, like his name, is front and center here, markedly stripped of Real Estate's signature reverb. And rather than relying on his familiar turn-of-the-millennium indie rock touchstones, the singer inhabits winsome, lightly orchestrated '60s psych pop and '70s power pop (documented in a nicely complementary playlist). The album gains shape thanks to an enviably accomplished band that includes Real Estate keyboardist Matt Kallman, like-minded Jerseyite Julian Lynch, and Woods' Jarvis Taveniere, who produced. Plus, for a set that casually began as a stress-relief outlet ahead of Real Estate's 2014 album Atlas, Many Moons works as a remarkably cohesive album, meandering its way across themes of past and present to a state of aching clarity that's modest, but no less genuine for it. Once heard quasi-chanting about suburban suds, Courtney is now the lawnchair-Zen dad.

The album’s title phrase occurs first amid a hodgepodge of images on the lushly jangling "Vestiges": "Many moons for it to grow/ Phases they will come and they will go." These are the musings of an artist often associated with nostalgia accepting the truism that what we really have left from yesterday is the same ol' never-ending flux. It's a concept he darts around on the equally fine "Foto", which finds Courtney reflecting on an old passport photo: "The past is just a dream." While a line like that could seem nursery-rhyme commonplace on its own, it builds force nestled amid tracks like "Awake", a gentle apology for strumming next door that offers its own ruminations on the past, and "Asleep", a backwards-effects reverie that's somewhere between an "Oh Yoko!" dream and "I'm Only Sleeping". The terrain may be narrow, but Courtney finds subtleties to explore in his quest for a wisdom that will keep growing in meaning as months and trend cycles pass.

Many Moons isn’t all painstaking philosophy on the inevitability of change. A more immediate highlight is "Northern Highway", which cruises along, suitably upbeat, as it balances existential questions ("Do you feel just like a stranger?") with the narrator's avowal that he could never retire to a place without seasons—all via a chiming arrangement befitting the Left Banke. Or "Little Blue", a windows-down listen about windows-down listens that’s named after Courtney’s old car. By contrast, on "Focus", when Courtney implores, as if giving Magic Eye advice, "The trick really is not to try," it's a bit too on the nose; besides, he already put it better on Real Estate's 2011 sophomore LP, Days, singing, "Our careless lifestyle, it was not so unwise." The trick is not to reveal it's a trick.

The simple complexities of Many Moons all come together on the 10th and final song, "Airport Bar". It's about, yes, airport bars—places that stay the same while the people who pass through them speed around the globe. The music here is the album's most hypnotic; the lyrics are its most observant. Courtney's raconteur has been asleep, dreaming, before he finally realizes what’s real: "Please don't go forgetting about me," he repeats, understanding full well that Timehop, Facebook's "On This Day" feature, or even ripped-jeans-pocket Polaroids are no substitute for "just being here." It's all unassuming enough that it almost breezes past, and, if Courtney didn't know better, he might even say that's the point.

Dan Friel: Life

The sound Dan Friel has created is so uniquely specific, it's easy to oversimplify: distorted nursery-rhyme melodies over cracked drum-machine beats. But dig just a little below the surface and there's a lot more going on. At various points Friel evokes noise, industrial, punk crossed with techno, video games, even jazz. On Life, his fourth full-length, he covers that range more thoroughly than ever, which perhaps explains the album's all-encompassing title. Pretty much his entire musical existence is locked in these grooves.

The title might also refer to the fact that Friel has literally created life—this is the first album he's recorded since his son Wolf was born in 2013. Friel's music has always had childlike qualities, but here he makes that connection explicit. He opens with a sweet, woozy jingle called "Lullaby (For Wolf)", following later with the even-more sugary "Theme", which could pass for an outtake from Raymond Scott's Soothing Sounds for Baby. The warped, off-speed crunch of "Sleep Deprivation" would fit on any Friel album, but pinning its title to parenthood reveals how well his music captures the half-awake fog of early child-rearing.

The rest of Life may not be about kids, but every track contains some simple melodic nugget that any toddler would happily hum along to. The best songs revel in that anthemic innocence, particularly the catchy "Cirrus", an immediate earworm on the level of Friel's 2012 insta-classic "Valedictorian". The two title tracks are nearly as memorable, though a lot more abrasive, ringing with distortion and bullet-like fuzz blasts. 

But again, hearing Friel through a single thematic prism is unwise. Some sections in Life sound like hip-hop bathed in nitrogen, or even like lost Bomb Squad beats. Friel's way of taking his melodies off on tangents evokes jazz solos; his obsession with gritty texture gives some pieces, like the clanging "Bender", the musique concrète feel of a busy construction site. And for all its machinistic beats, Life can also sound like a sloppy punk band rattling basement walls. That's especially true during "Jamie (Luvver)", Friel's wordless cover of a Joanna Gruesome song, which gives the already-energetic original a huge shot of late-night caffeine.

What unites all the styles in Friel's sonic fryer is playful momentum. His main instrument, a Yamaha Portasound keyboard, is literally a toy, and throughout Life it sounds like he's rolling around on the floor. Most of his songs include a constant whirr, and leave you with the echo of that eternal buzz—an effect that I imagine is a mirror of Friel's bleeping brain. Give Life some time and you might find it infecting your synapses, too.

G Herbo: Ballin Like I’m Kobe

Can street rap really raise alarm bells? Or are profit-minded artists merely preaching to the sociological choir—did you know the hood is fucked up?—while affirming and banking off conservative America's worst stereotypes? Certainly it would be difficult to suggest gangster rap tropes are winning a PR war over middle America. But at the same time, the implicit realism of Chicago's street rap scene makes armchair cynicism about its stars' motives impossible: Ballin Like I'm Kobe is no lazy b-ball double entendre, but a reference to Jacobi D. Herring, a friend of G Herbo's who was killed in 2013, and over whose tombstone he crouches on the tape's cover. Likewise, "I'm Rollin", the tape's underground smash single, opens with a roll call of lost friends, and the drug they'd do with Herb if they were here today.

That Southside-produced track comes near the tape's conclusion, and it's the most structurally compelling on the album. This isn't the kind of hit you can force; it just happens. It sounds as if it were hewn from craggy granite, each segment of the song—the beat, the backgrounds, the chorus, Herb's rapping—grinding into place, sparks flying. It takes up an aggressive amount of space, forcing listeners to open themselves to its heft and rough edges. Formally, the record is his most innovative, one which ambitiously reimagines the rules of songcraft. Thematically, it captures the strange dissonances of what's been called drill music, its heightened stakes and tragic context contrasting starkly with its artists' armored detachment.

No other song on Ballin Like I'm Kobe feels quite so one-of-a-kind. Sometimes it's pro forma; drill records like the DJ L-produced "Gang" sound as if they could have been recorded any time within the past three years. But outside of "I'm Rollin", Herbo's doesn't traffic in the kind of pioneering stylistic breakthroughs common to the first wave of drill artists—King Louie, Lil Durk, or Chief Keef. He is not drill's most versatile talent, preferring to play to his own strengths. His more traditional approach is an ability to wring narrative pathos from the song without letting his voice's cracked shell fully break. His vocal style is ragged but forceful, and in contrast with the East Coast influences to which it might be readily compared—the LOX, say—there's a sense of Herbo's words scratching past the lines, moving with a looser, less precise rhythm, as if to suggest an anxious undercurrent. And likewise, his subject matter seldom moves toward the humor of classic New York mixtape artists, preferring to shift from the autobiographical to very real-seeming threats.

There's a tendency to approach Herb—in contrast with other artists on the scene—as if he were his genre's moral conscience, the Manichean good to drill's unmitigated baseline of evil. This reduces the genre's complexity to a simplistic binary. Herb's strength is less about moralism than it is about showing a complete human being in your speakers—an honest rendering of a morally compromised soul. These are the album's best moments. There is the DJ L-produced "Eastside", with scribbled double-time verses and contradictory tones of resignation and pride. It's an approach that works similarly on opener "L's": "The shit I been through made me heartless, all my feelings on this glock." And it's readily apparent on the melancholy "Bottom of the Bottom", which frames the rapper's aggressive approach with a crying string sample, which lends an echoing power to an atypically pointed chorus: "Now the judge hang us with a hundred years, used to hang us with a tree."