MUSIC 2012:  A DECIDEDLY SELECTIVE SURVEY

Steven Greenfield

December 22, 2013

   
    Remember 2012?  The year of “Gangnam Style” and Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe”?  If it already seems a distant memory, this survey will serve as a refresher of sorts.  Because it took so long for me to get through this time around, I am dispensing with the usual introductory material, snark and all, in favor of just getting to the heart of the matter.  Please note that, where possible, I chose YouTube sample songs provided by the artists or record labels themselves, even if it meant selecting a lesser track to highlight.  Where none was provided, I took someone else's posting, fairly secure that the copyright gods will not come after me.

    I want to thank, as usual, Steve Holtje and Luis Rueda for their suggestions about what was worth paying attention to in 2012 and my darling Melissa for bearing with me all the time it took to get this survey finished.

    My list of the Top Twelve (of the pops) for the year follows:

1.      The Mars Volta, Noctourniquet
2.      Burial, Street Halo/Kindred
3.      Actress, R.I.P
4.      Flying Lotus, Until the Quiet Comes
5.      Goat, World Music
6.      Tame Impala, Lonerism
7.      Sigur Rós, Valtari
8.      Galactic, Carnivale Electricos
9.      Bat for Lashes, The Haunted Man
10.    Crystal Castles, Crystal Castles (III)
11.    Stars, The North
12.    Ondatrópica, Ondatrópica


    ROCK/POP ALBUM OF THE YEAR

THE MARS VOLTA, Noctourniquet (Warner Brothers Records)—Bands’ swan songs give us the opportunity to assess the span of a career in the popular music world.  The Mars Volta, essentially a duo that uses several other musicians for performing, lasted for a decade or so, longer than many of its peers.  Yet, that was in no small part because the El Paso–based group was, in its own peculiar way, peerless, as the leading exponent of the neo-progressive rock movement.  Some bands become pompous and bloated over time; this was never a possibility for the Mars Volta because excess, emotional overload, and overreach were part of the band’s formula from its very first full-length release, De-Loused in the Comatorium (2003), still its most forceful statement.  I would hesitate to use the word “pretentious,” though, because that implies an artist trying to be something that he or she is not.  Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez of the Mars Volta were always gloriously true to their obscurantist, phantasmagoric vision.  Noctourniquet’s concept is said to arise from various sources, from the Greek myth of Hyacinth to a story written by Bixler-Zavala called “The Boy with the Voice in His Knives,” although this is not going to be apparent to anyone casually perusing the verses.  Bixler-Zavala’s poetry is not sheer nonsense in the way that most Yes lyrics are, stringing words together for euphony rather than sense; he clearly intends to convey meaning, though lines such as “from the blossom rags of my jackal croon to the stems of this cinquefoil” (from “The Malkin Jewel”) or “obloquy is the bulwark of his implants” (“Aegis”) are head-scratchers.  Sometimes when it seems as though he is making up words, they are in fact abstruse (“vellicate”) or derived from mythology (“belial”).  The music was composed by Rodriguez-Lopez two to three years before his partner completed the lyrics.  For all of Noctourniquet’s grandiosity, it is not as cathartic as De-Loused in the Comatorium or Frances the Mute (2005), even if all the noise and high tension make it every bit as enervating.  Still, the sonic variety presented is impressive.  The record lacks the extended longueurs of deep quietude that earlier albums contained, though there are softer tunes, like “Empty Vessels Make the Loudest Sound” (the verse portion, anyway; the chorus is accompanied by some very gristly guitar cycling) and “Trinkets Pale of Moon.”  The opening song, “The Whip Hand,” is the most unsettled and grating, with irregular rhythms, a persistent, buzzy bass, and an agitated, yelping chorus; this is no doubt the sort of thing Bixler-Zavala had in mind when he referred to the new music as “future punk.”  Futuristic, for sure, but the punk esthetic is stripped down, and this music is anything but.  “Aegis” brings in the first memorable (hummable?) chorus—this more than compensates for the jarring incongruity of the verse line “where the children should be seen not heard,” seemingly dropped in at random—as well as the first appeal to “dasehra,” generally understood to be a Hindu goddess reference.  The Goth-opera quality of the album peaks with “The Malkin Jewel,” one of several songs that involves a fair amount of sprechstimme, a punchy number in which Bixler-Zavala channels the spirit of the late Freddie Mercury of Queen.  Rodriguez-Lopez’s compositional prowess comes through brilliantly on “In Absentia,” the longest piece on the album and the one that sits at the center of the thirteen-song track list.  This is a song that moves through several components, with dire, low-pitched, drilling guitar in the verse sections, a more ethereal and suspended, echoey transitional segment, and pure transcendence and radiant bliss in the coda, invoking “dasehra” once more.  “Trinkets Pale of Moon,” an exquisite and mystic ballad, rests above busy background conversation, à la Pink Floyd.  “A Zed and Two Naughts” (who speaks in that English-boarding-school style in America?), the concluding tune, in its chorus (following a fairly drab verse portion) importunes Saint Christopher, a patron of travelers, with a ringing intensity fitting to mark the end of this particular band’s journey.  Reviewing the Mars Volta was frequently an exhausting exercise, but I will miss the band all the same.        A

Sample song  “The Malkin Jewel”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh0stkLanx4

    And the rest . . .

ACTRESS, R.I.P (Honest Jon’s Records)—“Actress” is a curious moniker for a male music maker, but Britain’s Darren Cunningham chose it all the same.  R.I.P (the album title seems not to have a third period, yet the song of the same name does) tends toward the experimental end of the electronica spectrum without ever becoming forbiddingly conceptual.  Some song titles have religious or mythical associations.  A smattering of the fifteen generally short, all-“instrumental” (synthesized) tracks on this long recording are set to a danceable beat, such as “Shadow from Tartarus” and “The Lord’s Graffiti,” yet this is not meant to be a dance record, Cunningham’s D.J. origins notwithstanding.  The label’s own PR cites other U.K. electronica artists like Aphex Twin and Burial, and, indeed, there are passages where the sonic manipulation and distortion approaches that of Burial (see below).  The label promotion goes on to draw further-reaching comparisons to groups like Cabaret Voltaire, which I do not see at all.  The opening (title) track’s meterless, suspended haziness recalls Scotland’s Boards of Canada as much as anything.  “N.E.W.” mines similar resources, changing things up toward the end by messing with the rhythm, substituting long tones for the steadily cycling ones that prevailed up until that point.  “Marble Plexus” is a furtive-sounding track, with a loping, deep bass motoric element and an insistent, high-pitched tapping/clanking.  “Jardin” (Garden), as a kind of bookend to “Marble Plexus,” is filled with pastoral piano plinking and pacific strumming of the same three-note sequence over and over, with a sound of waves crashing or steam being released, all set to a metronomic popping.  It is the subtle variations in the keyboard part that keep the listener engaged.  An ultra-low, surging beat drives “Shadow from Tartarus,” with the tones above it reaching toward the heavens—the dynamism is compelling, yet the unchanging nature of the composition ultimately renders it less interesting than it might have been.  There are a couple of other tracks where things get a little dull because development of the main idea is minimal—I am thinking principally of “Raven” and “Ascending,” the latter of which introduces a bit of phase interference partially eclipsing the sound as the sole variant on a bright, chiming little theme.  For other compositions, however, their obsessiveness can be a strength, as is the case with the time-signature-warping, note-bending, sullen “Tree of Knowledge.”  “Caves of Paradise” is another monomaniacal song, with a mechanized, swingy beat accentuated by a flute motif and a Burial-style processed moan (the only approximation of a vocal sound on the record).  The final piece, “Iwaad,” moves into dubstep, which is familiar territory for Cunningham in his career as a producer and disc spinner.  This is precisely the sort of track one would expect to hear blasted at a fashion show or chichi nightclub, not that yours truly frequents such swish locations.  Even the shortest tracks, where one does not expect much exposition, like “Holy Water,” its percolations regularly punctuated by a rising electronic jangle, have a taut focus and sense of craftsmanship that is admirable.  Those who typically find electronica of this sort cold and repetitive still might discover this to be a likable and approachable disc.        A

Sample song  “Shadow from Tartarus”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q_AdHjYDno

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE, Centipede Hz (Domino Records)—The boys from Baltimore are back (in Baltimore).  Alas, although I have high regard for this foursome as one of the most creative bands of the day, this is, relatively speaking, their weakest effort in years.  Centipede Hz was billed as a return to the group’s experimental roots, with some South American and other influences sprinkled on top, following a dalliance with a more pop-oriented sound on the previous studio recording, Merriweather Post Pavilion (see the 2009 music survey).  Only thing is, it was precisely the opening toward pop accessibility, while not sacrificing the anarchic spirit, childlike wonder, and sheer, messy artistry that has always characterized Animal Collective, that made the band’s recent string of albums ever more spellbinding, culminating in Album of the Year honors here for Merriweather Post Pavilion.  While Centipede Hz lets on that the band is still capable of confecting pop hooks when it wants, too much of the disc is plodding, moving doggedly through its paces while losing sight of any animating inspiration.  For the current release, not only did the band all return to Baltimore, from various locations on the East Coast and elsewhere, but it welcomed back Deakin (a.k.a. Josh Dibb), the multi-instrumentalist member who chose not to participate in the making of Merriweather Post Pavilion.  There is nothing as enveloping as “Brother Sport,” from the previous record, on Centipede Hz, though “Monkey Riches,” the longest and best track, yanks itself into a higher gear of intensity—the verse portion seems merely obsessive—as it arrives at its chorus.  Yes, the primary melody is cramped and not terribly inventive, and the lyrics are somewhat tortured (did the band really want to have in the printed lyrics “it makes a monkey wretch” instead of “retch”?), but their agonizingly confessional nature, most atypical for this group, is touching.  “Today’s Supernatural” is another choice cut, with Avey Tare (Dave Portner) introducing the anguished but genial and funny refrain with a stuttering “Come on, l-l-l-l-let go!” yet even this song has sections that feel like wadded cotton stuffed into a prized photo album, notably the section that begins with “All the good things like avenue sun.”  These tedious verses serve only to pad what would otherwise be a very slim number.  “Moonjock,” the opener, a child’s-eye view from the back of a station wagon (modern-day “covered wagon”) on a trip from Maryland down toward Florida on Interstate 95, is another example of a perfectly good declarative song, with emphatic beats (in 7/4 time for the verse section!), that could have done with excision of the filler puffing up its latter stages.  “Father Time” effectively incorporates a tropical lilt, with Latin percussion and rhythms and keyboards that are a sort of electronic facsimile of a marimba.  It is easily the most mellifluous and gentlest composition on the disc, notwithstanding the scratchiness of Avey Tare’s voice when he reaches the portion of the refrain that culminates with “a long time ago.”  The concluding number, “Amanita” (how many pop music songs are named for poisonous mushrooms?), about going off into the wilderness to get one’s head straight, starts off in a galumphing rhythm that matches the ponderous theme.  Midway through, it shifts to a set of midtempo syncopated verses.  Then, finally, breaking all bounds of restraint, it races toward its conclusion as an Animal Collective–esque romp through the forest, a kid’s fantasy realized in song.  “Applesauce” (a prototypical Animal Collective song with a classic Animal Collective title), the second single released (after “Today’s Supernatural”), has an appealing chorus that rolls over sets of triplets in a clipped rhythmic pattern, as well as some exuberant syncopations later on, but it, too, feels overstuffed as a dowager’s couch cushion.  The remaining five tracks range from mildly pleasurable on downward but are not up to the prior standard this band has set.  A notable feature (the “hertz”) of Centipede Hz is the sensation of switching radio dials throughout—songs run into one another, with bits of sampled commercials and announcements and static/white noise sneaked into the transitions.    B+

Sample song  “Today’s Supernatural”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47xbkT3calM

ANTIBALAS, Antibalas (Daptone Records)—Having taken some time off from recording to participate as the house band for the off-Broadway musical Fela! (which later transferred to Broadway), about the life and music of Afrobeat progenitor Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Antibalas returned to the studio in 2011 to make its first full-length record in five years, since Security (see the 2007 music survey).  The Brooklyn Afrobeat big band is now recording on Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings’ label, Daptone Records, with the production assistance of Gabriel Roth, a.k.a. Bosco Mann, who wrote the songs “Him Belly No Go Sweet” and “Sáré Kon Kon.”  Antibalas’s ongoing strength is in its ensemble sound, energetic and tight, seamlessly pairing horns that bite with guitars primed for funk.  It is a jam band, in essence, meaning that it latches onto a groove and rides it for all it is worth—meaning as well that if you are looking for elegance and intricacy of composition, you will not find it in these tracks.  The lyrics still carry a decided political edge, though not quite as blunt as in the past.  “Dirty Money” is self-explanatory, and “The Rat Catcher” is a barely veiled metaphor.  There is much more sung in Yoruba than in the past; in fact, the entirety of the record’s second half is in that language, with translations provided on a sheet.  The best number, its fleet tempo (in spite of a heavy beat) matching its theme of “running fast,” is “Sáré Kon Kon.” Martín Perna, the bandleader, carries the melody initially in the baritone saxophone, soon echoed by the trumpets and other saxes, with plenty of lively improvising from Stuart Bogie on tenor sax and Cochemea Gastelum on alto sax.  It ends with a stop-time section in which the other band members cheer on Perna as he brings the theme to its rousing conclusion.  Taking second prize is the glistening funk of “Ari Degbe,” a quasi-instrumental invocation to the god of metallurgy that breaks down resistance with mellow charm.  Like “Dirty Money,” “The Rat Catcher” begins its verse portion halfway through the track, weaving its story of injustice and impunity as an exchange between the lead singer, Abraham “Duke” Amayo, and the female background vocalists, even as the instrumentalists, ever sharp on the attacks, devolve into a mere rhythm section.  “Him Belly No Go Sweet” (translation:  He will be unhappy), just as resignedly philosophical in its lyric as “The Rat Catcher,” is more laid back, even if it ends with a particularly raucous sax solo.  Listening to Antibalas is still a matter of separating the livelier passages from background tedium, but when the band has it going on, it is electric.        B+

Sample song  “Dirty Money” (abbreviated version):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMXlEqlnAIg

ASIA, XXX (Frontiers Records)—Most of the people represented in this survey are considerably younger than I am, but the members of Asia were the heroes of my own adolescent/young adult years.  John Wetton joined King Crimson as bassist during the latter stages of that band’s first incarnation and became its voice for Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (1973), Starless and Bible Black (1974), and Red (1974).  He has also played with Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry, Uriah Heep, UK, Steve Hackett (formerly of Genesis), and others.  Carl Palmer was of course the drumming third of Emerson, Lake & Palmer and also played in earlier bands such as the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Atomic Rooster.  Steve Howe, a guitar legend, was (and still is, with a couple of hiatus periods in between) the lead guitarist of Yes from 1970 onward.  Geoff Downes, the youngest of the quartet at age sixty, was one half of the Buggles (whose “Video Killed the Radio Star” from 1979 was the first song ever played on MTV in August 1981); together with his performing partner, Trevor Horn, he joined Yes, replacing Rick Wakeman on keyboards, while Horn took the place of singer Jon Anderson.  The first concert I ever attended was the “Buggles” Yes lineup, touring in support of the album Drama in 1980, at Madison Square Garden.  When Asia first formed as a so-called supergroup in 1981 (with the same lineup it has currently) and released its self-titled debut record in March 1982, the brickbats flew.  The critical barbs had considerable justification; Asia’s sound seemed watered down in a bid for arena-rock popularity.  Nonetheless, the album’s biggest hits, “Only Time Will Tell,” “Heat of the Moment,” and “Sole Survivor,” proved to have “legs,” still receiving play at, well, arenas all over North America and quite possibly Europe as well (and Asia?).  After three decades and about a dozen releases comes XXX, which marks the thirtieth anniversary of the band’s founding.  Wetton and company face the same problem all aging rockers do, that of relevance in a youth-dominated culture, and they do so in essence by not doing so.  XXX delivers what the band’s fan base (also past its prime) expects, with no gimmicks or concessions to current trends in pop music.  The “deluxe” edition package serves up eleven tracks (the proletarian edition has just eight), one of which is a remix of “I Know How You Feel,” and it is the same big sound, anthemic compositions, somewhat gloppy and clunky but with musicianship of the highest caliber, as ever.  My favorite tracks on the disc are “No Religion,” “Face on the Bridge,” and “Al Gatto Nero” (At the Sign of the Black Cat).  “No Religion” is one of several songs Steve Howe co-wrote (the rest are a Wetton-Downes collaboration).  It actually swings in a way that one would not associate with Asia.  The chorus sounds too much like Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” (1976), and the reference to having “a date with Miss Ludo, Ludovica Nabokov” is odd if evocative, but it is thoroughly enjoyable having an Asia song that one can actually bounce around to, and toward the end there is a nice fadeout with just chorus and acoustic piano.  The second-grooviest song is “Al Gatto Nero,” with its questioning chorus answered by Wetton’s solo, which demonstrates a facility with elementary Italian.  “Al Gatto Nero” has a weak bridge section but some crunchy power bass chords, and Palmer gets to let loose a variety of volleys as well.  Energized by a throbbing beat, “Face on the Bridge,” one of the two tracks chosen to showcase on the DVD (together with a mini-documentary/interviews on the making of XXX) that comes with the deluxe edition, reaches back toward the glories of 1970s progressive rock, falling short because its attenuated chorus cannot achieve the celestial heights of the best of those songs from yesteryear.  Still, the song’s expansiveness and its inexorable progress from intrigue toward ringing affirmation triumph in the end.  Of the other numbers, the opening “Tomorrow the World” and “Ghost of a Chance” are eminently listenable if hardly groundbreaking.  Each has sections that feature the musings of a Mellotron-like keyboard, although they are otherwise very different:  “Tomorrow the World” is thrusting and declarative; “Ghost of a Chance,” one of the bonus tracks, is a moving ballad touching on the possibility of redemption.  “Faithful,” the other song featured as a music video on the DVD, is the sort of number the critics can pounce on—a dull, sixth-grade-music-class-caliber melody dressed up in gaudy ornamentation that fails to rescue it from banality.  “I Know How You Feel” pierces closer to the heart than “Faithful,” though the secondary motif introduced with the verse “Somehow we find ourselves ...” is blankly ineffectual and  a missed opportunity for something that sets up a real contrast with the empathetic yet insistent main theme.  The furiously percolating electric piano chord cycles of “I Know How You Feel” nearly replicate the familiar opening of Supertramp’s “The Logical Song” (1979); these are absent from the more static and long-toned “Midnight Mix” bonus track version of the song, which does however feature some nice Spanish guitar filigree from Howe.  If you are a progressive rock fan from way back, you are obviously not going to trade in your battered copy of In the Court of the Crimson King, Days of Future Passed, or Dark Side of the Moon for XXX, but it holds up well against Asia’s debut from thirty years ago.    B+

Sample song  “Face on the Bridge”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BnTSkqNG_o

PAUL BANKS, Banks (Matador Records)—Interpol’s lead singer’s second solo record (but first released under his actual name) serves up about what one would expect:  songs that rock but in a more contemplative fashion and with less textural density than for Banks’s full band.  There are some guest performers, but not many—drummers on three tracks and some chamber string arrangements.  The low tenor/baritone of Banks has always been threaded with a distinct intensity and wiry tension that brings drama to the choruses of even fairly formless numbers like “Paid for That” or “No Mistakes.”  The very first song, “The Base,” which was issued as the album’s first single, sets the tone with a cinematic frisson of adventure and romance.  It skillfully interlaces quieter and more emphatic passages.  “Over My Shoulder” is the most Interpol-esque track, with shoegaze-style chiming guitars, muscular drumming from Charles Burst, and characteristically overwrought singing from Banks that insinuates itself into your soul as you listen.  Again, it makes effective use of the contrast between ensemble (i.e., arrangement-heavy) sections and quieter solo moments.  “Arise, Awake” is just as good but is of a different nature entirely, a moody, rhythmically and timbrally changeable, psychedelic fever dream, with the odd recurring phrase “Here come the dolphin times/I don’t call them filthy.”  The song packs a lot of complexity into its four minutes.  “Young Again” is far simpler but the most memorably tuneful piece on the disc.  It does seem droll for a thirty-four-year-old singer to be warbling, “I feel young again,” but no matter.  Alas, Banks front-loads its strongest material, so that by the end of “Young Again,” the high points have been hit, with one, possibly two, exception(s).  There is one instrumental (“Lisbon”), which is mellow in a nondescript way though it makes two sallies toward rousing passion, and one quasi-instrumental, the peculiar, pleading “Another Chance,” which is really just a musical setting of dialogue, spoken by the actor Chris McHenry, taken from a 2009 short film by Sebastian Ischer, Black Out.  In it, McHenry pleads with his interlocutor to understand that “there’s something wrong with my brain!” and that he must be given a second opportunity.  To say that it is “just a musical setting,” however, is to do the arrangement an injustice; in truth, this is one of the disc’s most convincingly theatrical compositions.  “Arise, Awake” has snippets of background chatter from Kareem Bunton, of the Juggs, some of it indecipherable but ending with him expounding on loss and how love cannot be for sale.  “Summertime Is Coming” holds up as a closing tune, another shoegazer in style, with intervals of big, reverberant choruses and drumrolls and others of rhythmic resets and acoustic calm, including the coda.  Yet, the lesser material still brings down the overall grade.        B+

Sample song  “Young Again”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=va2fqBjwBGg

BAT FOR LASHES, The Haunted Man (EMI/Capitol Records)—I only became hip to Bat for Lashes—real name: Natasha Khan—with this, her third album.  But what an impressive effort it is!  Bat for Lashes is a singer with a mutable voice, a light and delicate soprano at times, husky or quavery at others, ever rich in character and a fine conduit for the sheer emotionalism of her songwriting.  The Haunted Man dwells at the edge of fantasy and superstition (see the Maurice Sendak-esque video for “Lilies” in the link below), in classic English tradition, yet, notwithstanding its rapturous essence, it remains grounded in the here and now.  The record has drawn some comparison to Kate Bush’s work, with considerable justification; Bat for Lashes’ imagination is not as free ranging as Bush’s, but it took time for the older songstress to develop fully her artistic sensibility, whereas Khan, a relative latecomer to professional music, was in her early thirties when this album was created.  The eleven songs on The Haunted Man are, with the exception of the title track, tightly focused compositions, self-contained mini-universes of rock-infused pop.  “Lilies” sets the tone, effectively playing off its dreamy, stop-time intro and middle verse against a stately orchestral theme in the chorus.  “All Your Gold,” which, unlike “Lilies,” uses an actual chamber orchestra arrangement, actually sounds more stripped down, mostly just the singer, troubadour-style, over a clipped rhythm guitar accompaniment, briskly paced, with some harp embellishment.  “Oh Yeah,” a soft shuffle, is about as pure an expression of sexual ecstasy (with none too subtle floral imagery) as one is likely to find in today’s pop music, great washes of synthesizer smothering its male choral accompaniment, with particularly florid pianistic flourishes at the end.  The record’s principal single, “Laura,” the only song for which Bat for Lashes had a cowriter (Justin Parker), sounds wistfully downcast, like any number of downtempo piano-and-singer settings such as Bad Company’s theme song (1974), as it ambles along at 12/8 time, in spite of the showstopping hyperbole expressed in its chorus (“You’re more than a superstar”), which rouses the tune to a passionate denouement.  The other song carrying a woman’s name, “Marilyn” is even more starstruck in deference to its long-vanished screen idol.  Same leaps of intense feeling in the chorus, but the song is ultimately an emptier vessel than “Laura.”  “Horses of the Sun” has a split-personality issue:  its dark verse section, full of foreboding, is poorly matched to the major-mode refrain, which dispels the skillfully contrived atmosphere in a most unconvincing way.  The album’s second half (those songs that come after the vibrato-heavy, intense “Winter Fields,” with its exquisite woodwind and string choir) lacks the visceral immediacy of the earlier tracks.  “The Haunted Man” comes off as woolly and disjointed, its mumbling male chorus not well integrated into the body of the song, and “Marilyn”, as mentioned, does not measure up to “Laura.”  Still, “Deep Sea Diver” works well as a longer-form piece, a reverie set to an obsessively insistent piano figuration.  The “Rest Your Head” chorus of “Come on and rest your head! And I will protect you” invariably draws the gaze to The Haunted Man’s much-commented-upon album cover, showing the singer, wearing only a necklace, pendant, and ring, in a sort of cavewoman pose with a naked man draped over her shoulders, carried by her in a way that artfully hides what needs to be hidden to meet conventional standards of decency.        A/A-

Sample song  “Lilies”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCUCBCL8KKQ&list=UUx09syunjNWH6yz52xh1SvQ&index=2

BLACK MOTH SUPER RAINBOW, Cobra Juicy (Rad Cult/Frenchkiss)—Tobacco (Tom Fec), the driving force behind Black Moth Super Rainbow, has said he gets bored after three or four records, and Cobra Juicy is BMSR’s fifth full-length release.  So, is it time to shake up the formula and experiment with a new lineup?  Hard to say what the band’s intentions are since the publicity-shy Tobacco and his bandmates rarely give interviews.  It does seem that a handful of the tracks on Cobra Juicy are second- or third-rate BMSR, as if the concept had run its course.  On the other hand, others are as well designed and enjoyable as anything the group has put out.  “Gangs in the Garden,” for instance, has an overlay of grime and grit rock that makes for a striking contrast to the default mode of ethereal rapture and vocals so processed as to be computerlike.  It is one of several cuts set to beats steady enough for dancing, though it is the only one in which that beat is truly animated; “Like a Sundae” and “Dreamsicle Bomb” are more deliberate swayers, and “Hairspray Heart” and “We Burn” are more of a slow shuffle.  “I Think I’m Evil” picks up the grungy bass squelches where “Gangs in the Garden” left off, but here it is just an ostinato element rather than the primary focus, grounding the song’s treacly groove (I do not mean this dismissively; that is what the BMSR sound is all about) and yearning slide guitar interjections.  “Windshield Smasher,” the opening piece, is the most intricate on the record, with a typically weird and unsettling music video to accompany it (see the link below).  It combines a punchy beat and buzzy bass accents with classically dreamy Black Moth Super Rainbow melodies and silly lyrics.  (“You love my hair because it grows every day.”)  Toward the end, the synthesizers grow more noisy and insistent, even as the bass becomes more footloose in its accompaniment.  Among the slower numbers, “Blurring My Day” is an archetypal BMSR narcotics-laced psychedelic custard, with parabolic keyboard figurations and the occasional big drum flourish, while “Psychic Love Damage” is mellower, with jingling tambourines and similar synth parabolas, warping notes more than minds via its idly speculative lyrics.  Of the two freezer-compartment songs, “Like a Sundae” is the dopier, pairing a simple, genial theme with words that both wound and comfort.  Despite its barely four-minute length, it really goes on longer than it needs to, with the final minute-plus being instrumental coda.  “Dreamsicle Bomb” hews closer to the BMSR ideal of dressing up a rudimentary melody with thick textural overlays.  “We Burn” is as airily goofy as any Black Moth Super Rainbow tune, yet, its earthy, rattling percussion and blues-inflected guitar and bass lines align it more closely with the freak folk movement than the album’s other offerings.  “Hairspray Heart,” one of the more throwaway tracks, concludes with perhaps the lamest simile Tobacco has ever come up with:  “Like a f***in’ diamond/Fallin’ from my f***in’ eye.”  “Spraypaint” makes for an unsatisfactory concluding piece, with an uncharacteristically Top-40-bland theme, a colorless bit of fluff that goes on longer than any other song.  Cobra Juicy may come across as a little more flat-footed and less bubbly than earlier records by Black Moth Super Rainbow or by Tobacco as a solo recording artist, which takes away some of the fun.  But not all the juice has been squeezed out of this orange.    B+

Sample song  “Windshield Smasher”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L1jQ-VV9Fs

BOMBA ESTÉREO, Elegancia Tropical (Polen Records/Sony Music)—The successor album to the somewhat promising Blow Up (see the 2009 music survey) is a launch failure, not particularly elegant though indubitably tropical.  It is clear what the Bogotá-based electro-cumbia band is trying for, a sound modeled on outfits such as Dark Latin Groove, Si*Sé, or fellow Colombians Sidestepper, cool, dusky-toned grooves paired with assertive, quasi-spoken chanting that has its roots, ultimately, in Jamaican dancehall.  And in the first couple of tracks, plus one or two others, Bomba Estéreo manages to hit the mark.  That is not an impressive average by any means.  “Bosque” (Forest), the opening number, is easily the best, demonstrating that, in this case, the cream rises to the top of the track list.  It is more warmly melodic than the others, with lead singer Liliana Saumet focused on actual singing rather than “toasting.”  The background chords are darkly foreboding yet in a relaxed, downtempo manner, à la Supreme Beings of Leisure, and there are some interesting modulations and electronic sampling bits over the course of the song’s five minutes.  The following track, “Bailar Conmigo” (Dance with Me), revs up the motoric cumbia, and, although its limited range in terms of melody brings it closer to the monotone chanting that characterizes much of the disc, it still comes across as a genuine tune.  Of the reggaetón-style patter songs, the liveliest and most effective is “Caribbean Power,” as much for Saumet’s tongue-in-cheek feminist, in-your-face lyric and the way she spits it out in performance.  Both this song and “Pa’ Respirar” (To Breathe) feature longish electronic-instrumental codas with lots of feedback effects.  “Pájaros” (Birds) is meant to take flight but is too dronelike to soar; still, it is better than most of the material on the record.  “Lo Tengo Que Decir” (What I Have to Say), a short but talky song, is like one of the more confessional numbers from Calle 13 (see the 2010 music survey), though lacking the visceral, gut-punching quality of that Puerto Rican group.  Two tracks, neither of them terribly engaging, rope in artists from the Portuguese-speaking world:  “Rocas,” a sort of hip-hop duet between Saumet and the Rio de Janeiro rapper B’Negão, is percussive, noisy, grating, and mercifully brief; “Mozo” is similarly percussive, a tuneless back-and-forth between Saumet and Portugal’s Buraka Som Sistema that picks up somewhat in intensity as it proceeds, with no shortage of electronic whooping.  The appearance of Buraka Som Sistema on the record is payback; members of Bomba Estéreo collaborated on the final track on Buraka Som Sistema’s most recent recording, Komba (see the 2011 music survey).  The dullest stretch of the disc is from tracks three to five (“El Alma y el Cuerpo”—The Body and the Soul—to “Pure Love”); a computer-generated composition program might have done better, and not one of them merits a second listen.        B/B-

Sample song  “Caribbean Power” (live version):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EOTyidcP7Y

BURIAL, Street Halo/Kindred (Beat Records/Hyperdub Records)—Consistent and uncompromising in his vision, Burial (William Bevan) has triumphed like no other electronica composer out there.  Still not that well known outside of clubs and hipster circles in this country, his music—stylishly ghostly, dreamlike, hypnotic in its repetitions—has always had an affinity for the cinematic, and, indeed, “Loner,” which appears on this compilation disc, was used in the 2013 sci-fi film Elysium.  Burial has moved away from putting out full-length discs since his critically acclaimed second record, Untrue (see the 2007 music survey).  Street Halo actually came out as a three-song EP in 2011; it was followed by Kindred in February 2012.  Since the disc I have is a Japanese import, virtually all the credits are in Japanese characters, leaving me fumbling around in the dark, yet somehow that is appropriate to the music.  But Burial has said in interviews that he uses SoundForge, a digital audio editor, to create just about everything he does.  Although the effects are spectral, he does go in for soulful voices and bits of dramatic scene setting whenever the opportunity arises, and the friction generated by the juddering or throbbing bass pulses, permeating all, radiates a certain warmth, putting meat on the skeleton.  As for the beat samples, Derek Walmsley wrote in The Wire, “his percussion patterns are intuitively arranged on the screen rather than rigidly quantized, creating minute hesitations and slippages in the rhythm.  His snares and hi-hats are covered in fuzz and phaser, like cobwebs on forgotten instruments....”  Melodies are fragmentary and elusive, and for long stretches all that is heard are harmonic figures.  As on Untrue, the vocals are processed and heavily distorted even midstream, furthering the surreal atmosphere, though on the title track of Street Halo it appears that Burial might have let the female vocalist’s natural voice stand untouched.  Lyrics can sometimes be made out and other times are muddied by the processing, but they are every bit as wispy and ethereal as the melodies.  Street Halo is the shorter and more tightly focused of the two EPs.  But that is not to say that Kindred is a lesser effort; merely that its longer compositions (also three in number) are a little more episodic and suitelike.  Although Burial comes out of the U.K. dubstep tradition of electronic music, “Street Halo,” the first track, shows why it would be misleading to latch onto another term sometimes used to categorize his sound:  ambient or “ambient house.”  No wallpaper music this—though club-friendly and obsessive in its reiteration of patterns, it carries a fleet sense of progression and development through subtle shifts in texture and emphasis, as well as abrupt pauses near the beginning and end.  It finishes with a crackling static suggesting a needle coming to the end of an LP record.  “NYC,” which follows the title track, sustains a real, if tenuous, melody throughout, uncharacteristically.  “Stolen Dog,” a much sketchier piece, ends with more crackling, as well as wind chimes and what sounds like someone saying in a voice modulated to childlike, “I love you.”  The title track from Kindred is the most involved on the disc, picking up a beat sequence just after the intro that lasts (with a couple of dramatic pauses) into the tenth minute of an eleven-and-a-half-minute song.  Meanwhile, the voices coo and soothe, saying, “Baby, you can find love,” manipulated in a way similar to those on Untrue, going from falsetto to baritone in a single phrase.  A couple of sequences toward the end are thematically unrelated to the rest; the first keeps the percussion pattern going; the next is more of a shimmering coda.  “Loner” is furtive and tenebrous, with shuffling percussion and a Giorgio Moroder–style four-note repeating synth figuration above ominously cycling bass chords to convey a sense of action and urgency.  It ends, though, with a peculiar minute-long sequence that morphs from what sounds like a bit of R&B male/female duetting to a quasi-religious chant.  “Ashtray Wasp,” the closing and longest piece, is, like “Kindred,” a multipart composition, in which the rhythmic slippages Walmsley pointed out are especially apparent in the second thematic section.  Its first and second themes are, apart from “NYC,” the most fully fleshed from a melodic standpoint, which is to say that there is just enough aural pointillism for the ears to fill in the blanks.  And, as with “Stolen Dog,” it ends with wind chimes.  There may come a time when Burial’s methods become tedious and old hat; no sign of that happening, however.        A

Sample song  “Street Halo”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLyAVekUXug

CALEXICO, Algiers (Anti-)—When not on autopilot, this Latin-tinged, rootsy band can sound pretty good; on Algiers, this does not happen enough to make a convincing case overall.  Although the album is named for a New Orleans neighborhood that lies on the opposite bank of the Mississippi from the rest of the city, which is where it was recorded, there is little on it that evokes the Crescent City, other than a general notion that New Orleans is a melting pot of musical cultures and Calexico’s music is to some degree as well.  Consciously or not, however, the acoustic guitar accompaniment and yowling pedal steel in the final song, “The Vanishing Mind,” recall “The House of the Rising Sun,” as quintessentially New Orleans as any tune.  Better tunesmiths than wordsmiths, Joey Burns and John Convertino, the duo who are the heart of the Tucson-based Calexico, overreach with their verses, seeking heartfelt meaning but frustrating the listener with lyrical culs-de-sac or solipsism.  Still, they can pull off the occasional memorable image, as in the opening line of “Sinner in the Sea”:  “There’s a piano playing on the ocean floor between Havana and New Orleans.”  That song’s words are more ambitious than its music, which, beyond the lazy Latin piano vamp of the intro, is distinguished solely by a section, just before the final verse, of particular intensity with chilly organ tones and shouted vocals that is oddly Doors-like.  “Para” is the one song on which Calexico truly achieves the sublime, combining a verse section of anticipatory romantic tension with a fulsome chorus that is the verse’s logical extension, musically if not lyrically (what does “Take it all the way down below the waterline” really mean?).  “Epic,” the opener, has both strengths and weaknesses—a powerful harmonic refrain in the bass and rhythm guitars, supplemented by falsetto vocals, is undercut by a melody sorely lacking in originality—the chord progression is identical to, for one, the chorus of Supertramp’s “The Logical Song” (already the second time I have made reference to that classic; see the Asia entry above).  “Splitter” comes at you with an engagingly propulsive beat and saucy “mariachi” horn section but again in service of a melody too uninspired to hold up its end of the bargain.  “Puerto” is a patchwork quilt of a song, with many components that hang loosely together, including a touch of Latin-flavored acoustic guitar accompaniment that is overly familiar as if filched from other sources and a rolling piano harmonic and horn accents in what passes for a chorus.  Peculiar, though, that on a song overtly about Latin Americans (and colonial conquest, and immigration—the lyrical overreach is especially egregious here), the singer lisps his z’s and soft c’s, continental-Spanish-style, which no Latin American would do.  “Better and Better,” the shortest song, has an appealing, homespun simplicity to its musings.  “No Te Vayas” (Don’t Go), the one song sung entirely in Spanish (by guest vocalist Jairo Zavala, I think), is a maudlin Latin ballad, the sort of hoary chestnut that might be tolerable if it did not sound as if the composers were in thrall to the south-of-the-border crooners they idolize.  The title track, the one instrumental on the record, is pleasant but trite, as if copied off a Putumayo Latin folk sampler disc.  I should note that this is not the type of music I favor generally, but even so, Burns and Convertino ought to take a hard look at how many times the lines they are tracing have been shaped by others before them, and it shows.  Incidentally, Martin Wenk, who plays trumpet and a number of other instruments on this disc, also appears on the Nada Surf record (see below).    B+/B

Sample song  “Para”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM_Euc5saPI

CRYSTAL CASTLES, Crystal Castles (III) (Polydor/Universal Music)—My unabashed love for Ethan Kath’s compositional brilliance notwithstanding, I have reservations about the way this record was produced, particularly the balances in certain songs.  In the opener, “Plague,” and in “Wrath of God,” particularly, as well as in certain passages elsewhere, vocalist Alice Glass is overwhelmed by the mix, sounding sufficiently remote that her words have little impact, even if one is reading them in the CD booklet simultaneously with the music (the only way to decipher them).  This undermines the album’s intended dystopian themes.  Glass’s approach to singing is another thorny issue.  Still a wild child and a punk at twenty-four (at the time of the recording), she attacks some of these numbers with characteristic gusto, a battle cry that falls short of screeching but is plenty shrill nonetheless.  Her style attracts a devoted following; one fan on YouTube commented, “Everything about Alice Glass is beautiful.  She’s gorgeous and insane and fucking raging.”  Well, maybe, but this aging listener often wishes she would tone down the wildcat antics in service of real expressivity.  On Crystal Castles’ previous record, which tied for Album of the Year honors in 2010 with Flying Lotus (see below), I found one song (“Doe Deer”) particularly objectionable because of Glass’s singing, but the remainder was more measured, and tempered by guest artists.  In truth, for much of Crystal Castles (III), Glass, who is more than capable as a singer, is not at fever pitch but rather sounds breathy, at times enervated but more often incongruously girl-group dreamy.  Kath on occasion manipulates her vocal pitch lower to yield a more androgynous sound.  The record was done with “no computers” (not that today’s synthesizers lack for processing power) and with a single take for each track.  III is more dance-oriented than was Crystal Castles (II) and, with its grim, haunted, nightmarish nature, is more thematically unified as well.  Those traits do not make it a better album, though it is still forceful, convincing, even beautiful in a hair-raising sort of way.  The sense of Goth drama is set in the very first song, “Plague,” via its ponderous trio sequence of rising chords, as Glass’s murky lyrics clinically and chillingly present the Yersinia pestis bacillus as narrator, seeking its way into virgin cells.  “Plague,” one of the few tracks not set to dance beat, is also the only song long enough to have a true bridge, even if it amounts to just a few subdued long tones.  The moody “Mercenary” makes effective use of blurred chords, languidly syncopated, to foster a film noir ambience.  The darkness and chilly isolation throughout the record evoke the music of Sweden’s The Knife, while the strange and unexpected tone colors in spots would make the Cocteau Twins proud.  “Insulin,” the shortest song on the disc, is also far the noisiest, its bluntly distorted vocals and chords processed via oscillation, the aural equivalent of sandpaper on the fingers.  “Telepath,” the album’s lone instrumental, likewise uses noise gates for oscillating volume, in a dance of dour determination.  The disc de-emphasizes the videogame-derived effects used on prior recordings, yet keyboard-generated filigree still is a major element of the soundscape.  In the songs “Kerosene” and “Pale Flesh,” they are more striking than the attenuated, susurrous melodies themselves, while the funereal yet dance-friendly “Transgender” is characterized by creepy pitch fluctuations.  Just when one might think that the record, despite its Joy Division moroseness, is getting too poppy for its own good, as on “Sad Eyes” or “Violent Youth,” comes the culmination, “Child I Will Hurt You.”  A glittering, wintry confection of arpeggios, chimes, and choral sighs, it comes across as surprisingly benign, masking the sinister nature of its lyrics, like legends of Father Frost or Japan’s Yuki-onna, beguiling with beauty while delivering icy death to the wayward.  On this album, amid its baleful ethos, coloristic and timbral experimentation, and lesser flaws, it serves as a magical capstone.    A/A-

Sample song  “Plague”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx2lJIOTBjs

DEBO BAND, Debo Band (Sub Pop Records)—Ethiopian music has seen a revival in recent years in the West, in particular, the music of Mulatu Astatke (see the 2009 music survey).  And now it is the turn of the Ethiopian diaspora, in the form of Boston’s Debo Band.  (“Debo” is Amharic for “collective effort.”)  Its debut, self-titled record is inevitably a hybrid, but then so was the “Ethio-jazz” developed by Astatke and his contemporaries that flourished in Addis Ababa in the late 1960s and early 1970s before the coup that overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie shut down most forms of cultural expression.  Debo is centered on wind player Danny Mekonnen, an ethnomusicologist and refugee at a young age from the strife in the Horn of Africa who grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, and Paris, Texas, and the band features another Ethiopian- or Eritrean-American, Bruck Tesfaye, on vocals.  The other nine band members, though, are Boston-area musicians who come from other musical and ethnic traditions, from folk to klezmer.  I considered classifying this record as miscellaneous (“world music”), but because it is conceived as a modern-day reimagining of “golden age” and traditional Ethiopian music, with primarily Western players and instruments, I kept in the mainstream pop category.  Debo has an energetic, at times funky, horn sound (Mekonnen on tenor and baritone saxophone, Gabriel Birnbaum on tenor sax, Danilo Henriquez on trumpet, David Harris on trombone), but one element that sets it apart is the dueling violins, one electric (Jonah Rapino) and one conventional (Kaethe Hostetter).  You hear these two in concert on the first tune, the traditional “Akale Wube,” as rearranged by Ethiopian clarinetist/saxophonist Getachew Mekuria.  Still, the stridently declarative horn charts are what predominate in this piece, making it sound closer to a very different musical tradition, the Afrobeat of Antibalas (see above) or the Budos Band (see the 2010 music survey), than anything else on the disc.  One hears the peculiar pentatonic scales of classical Ethiopian music (along with improv sections for muted trumpet and for electric guitar) in “Ney Ney Weleba,” a song by the golden-age singer Alemayehu Eshete intended for dancing at weddings (“Asha Gedawo” is another wedding staple, sped up by the band to a feverish pace), but even more so in “Yefeker Wegagene.”  The latter, a number by Sahle Degago taken at ballad tempo, has a quasi-“Oriental” flavor in its pentatonics.  It was originally performed by a prominent female singer, Bezunesh Bekele (not to be confused with the marathon runner of the same name), who sang with Ethiopia’s Imperial Bodyguard Band.  Another striking tune is the traditional “Medinanna Zelesegna,” which is very Middle Eastern in its sensibility, a reminder of how much history and culture has been shared between East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant.  This song is in essence a rhythmless incantation set to droning strings, expressing “both secular and sacred praises,” according to the liner notes, mystical and deeply affecting.  The song that follows it on the record, “Habesha,” is the best of Debo’s original compositions, by violinist Rapino, which conveys the thrill an Ethiopian or Eritrean abroad feels when catching sight of a diaspora counterpart of the opposite sex on the street.  In it, the horns and strings/guitar do a delicate, wiry dance of triplets around each other, building to a furious horn climax, underscored by wailing, quavery guitar notes climbing up the scale, that ends in sheer blaring before abruptly cutting off.  A quieter section follows before a recapitulation of the buildup and the final blare.  The one song I really do not care for is the closer, “DC Flower,” which segues directly from the grainy, sobbing sax tones that conclude “Ambassel.”  This final piece is one of those nondescript, mongrelized “world music” blank cartridges, penned by the band’s drummer, Adam Clark, lacking in creative spark of any kind and distinguished only by its use of the embilta, an indigenous large bamboo flute.        A/A-

Sample song  “Asha Gedawo”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T6cGZrf2nQ&list=PLE7D5DA8780135D64

DIIV, Oshin (Captured Tracks Records)—Not a set of Roman numerals with an obscure significance, DIIV was originally “Dive,” taken from the name of a Nirvana song, and is pronounced that way.  The band began as a solo project by Zachary Cole Smith, who sings and does all the songwriting, but by the time the debut record Oshin (Ocean) was in production, Cole Smith had accumulated a full band around him:  Andrew Bailey on lead guitar, Devin Ruben Perez on bass, and Colby Hewitt on drums.  Though the group pays its respects to Nirvana, “krautrock” (Kraftwerk and its spiritual brethren), and Malian “desert blues” guitar masters, it is fundamentally a shoegaze purveyor.  DIIV’s entry on the scene created some buzz in hipster circles in its home base of Brooklyn and beyond (Pitchfork and Stereogum both listed Oshin in their top fifty of the year).  I guess I am not hearing what they are.  This is not an unpleasant recording to listen to, but as shoegazers go, it is an unremarkable effort.  The murkiness of the sung lyrics and the general lack of affect put me in mind of Blank Dogs, Mike Nigro’s postpunk solo venture, which not coincidentally is now signed to the same label as DIIV.  There are just a few tracks that distinguish themselves somewhat from the sea (ocean) of pulsing guitar chords.  “Doused” is one of the more vigorous songs, kicking off with a vintage New Wave–style burbling bass line, followed by a guitar sequence initially echoing U2’s “I Will Follow” (1980), yet the melody that follows is less colorful than the early U2, not to mention far more detached in attitude.  All the melodies on Oshin are in fact rudimentary, and, with all the chiming, naturally, rhythms are unvarying.  “Air Conditioning” is also more energetic and muscular than most of the album’s selections, though it is in service of a simple tune that is too unvarying to spark much interest.  It is also the longest song, at four and a half minutes, on a record full of short takes.  The title track, even more so than “Doused,” mimics the ringing guitars of “I Will Follow” (particularly the live U2 version); otherwise, it is a midtempo number that verges on the psychedelic, with a bleak, rather pallid tune and choral section that nonetheless builds to a genuine emotional climax that is all too rare on this disc.  Of the two instumentals called “(Druun),” Part II is by far the more kinetic and charged-up composition, effectively pairing Bailey’s guitar shimmers with some lively drumming from Hewitt.  Songs such as “Past Lives” and “Sometime” are breezy but devoid of anything resembling compositional sophistication or development.  “How Long Have You Known?” is especially vacuous.  The expectant chord sequence that propels “Wait” finds inspiration in, of all places, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s “If You Leave” (1986), that English group’s biggest hit, from the soundtrack of Pretty in Pink.  The final song, “Home,” is another underachiever, though it does stand out in one respect, bringing keyboards front and center.  The breathy “Earthboy” is the only song with a bit of an instrumental coda, reverb-heavy, appended.  All of this adds up to whatever is the sum of DIIV’s deficiencies as a band.    B

Sample song  “Doused”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI79GPXAICM

EFTERKLANG, Piramida (4AD)—Bands releasing their fourth record ought not to sound as if in the throes of an identity crisis, but that is how Piramida comes off.  The orchestral arrangements, slow tempos, falsetto vocals (at times), and bleak ambience evoke fellow Scandinavians Sigur Rós (see below), while attempts to warm things up with horns, low brass, and baritone sax suggest a feint toward Gomez or even Antibalas (see above).  “Told to Be Fine,” the weakest song on the album, is essentially a denatured variant on what Radiohead has been playing around with on that band’s most recent discs.  The unfortunate net effect is a sound like one of the lesser chillwave outfits, such as Neon Indian or Warm Ghost (see the 2011 music survey for each).  Listening to Efterklang (the name means “reverberation” in Danish) on this record is an experience akin to eating Jello; some find it pleasurable, whereas I could go a long time in between samplings.  The Danish group (from Copenhagen, with its own studio in Berlin) knows something about creating unusual and memorable sonorities; that much is evident from the very first strains one hears on “Hollow Mountain.”  But as soon as Casper Clausen’s cool falsetto, embedded in an echoey choral layer, enters the picture, the mystique is banished.  “Hollow Mountain” and several other tracks, such as “Apples,” “The Living Layer,” and “Black Summer,” demonstrate considerable compositional skill and point to a potential that simply is not realized, even in these songs themselves, much less the rest of the record.  “Black Summer,” the longest cut on the disc, uses its horns and tuned percussion to create a moody sense of tension that, again, the vocal part detracts from—to a lesser degree than in “Hollow Mountain” since the instrumental arrangements keep a strong presence throughout the piece’s long development.  Dotted-note rhythms are central to both “Hollow Mountain” and “Black Summer.”  “Apples” is a gentle, focused ballad with an emphasis on Mads Brauer’s lilting keyboard chord patterns and arpeggios.  “The Living Layer” has a more futuristic sound to its keyboard cyclings, adding instruments to build to a crescendo just before fading away.  “The Ghost,” too, has a couple of moments in which the layering of chorus and horns yields something magical, but it is not enough to redeem a blanched melody.  Piramida is named for an abandoned mining facility on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, well beyond the Arctic Circle, founded by the Swedes as Pyramiden and later taken over by a Russian company.  Some of the music was recorded on site, and the CD booklet is full of starkly barren yet beautiful photos of the ghost mining town and its boreal surroundings—clearly, the album’s best feature.    B/B-

Sample song  “Hollow Mountain”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwgs5R97X4M

FLYING LOTUS, Until the Quiet Comes (Warp Records)—Trippy, soulful, nerdy, gossamer, earthy, amusing, Until the Quiet Comes is another treat for the ears, following up on Cosmogramma, which shared 2010 Album of the Year honors.  Similar to its predecessor (particularly in using several of the same guest performers) and yet different, the record is an eighteen-course tasting menu, with many tracks fragmentary in nature and just one staying around beyond the four-minute mark.  As on Cosmogramma, the very notion of “track” is fluid—songs sometimes bleed together, and a theme from the following track might be introduced before the current one is quite finished.  A great deal of behind-the-scenes work by Flying Lotus, a.k.a. Steven Ellison, went into the production of the album’s dreamscapes, using sequencers, synthesizers, drum machines, classic electric keyboards like the Fender Rhodes and the Wurlitzer, laptops, signal processors, etc.  The intrinsic chill of the electronica is mitigated by the warmth of the human voices on those tracks that have vocals, with an exception carved out for Thom Yorke, whose singing epitomizes alienation.  The choice selection involving a member of Radiohead (compositionally), however, is not the Yorke collaboration, “Electric Candyman,” which is dusky in tone yet fairly benign, but the song that follows it, “Hunger,” based on a soundtrack by Jonny Greenwood.  Its string arrangements, by Miguel Atwood Ferguson, are like a medieval lay repurposed for the Battlestar Galactica generation; these are preceded, though, by a soup of suspended notes and foreboding verses from Niki Randa that are appropriately haunting.  The best of the instrumental numbers are “The Nightcaller” and “Putty Boy Strut.”  The former indulges Flying Lotus’s taste for vintage early 1970s computer-generated funk/soul; about two-thirds of the way through, there is a break, which is followed by a repeating, blurred funk bass groove from his frequent partner, Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner.  “Putty Boy Strut” is as jocund as its name suggests, a stretchy, broadly declarative little piece with a helium-pitched, highly artificial keyboard sound to generate the melody, a metronomic percussion pattern, and wisps of breathy, androgynous vocalization, which broaden out into fuller, yearning expressivity by a recognizably female voice, accompanied by a lavish string setting, toward the end.  This follows up on another zippy, buzzy, elastic tune, the slower-paced “Sultan’s Request.”  Thundercat himself sings the short, echoey vocal on “DMT” that again recalls the mellow, cosmic, psychedelia-tinged soul of the early seventies.  Erykah Badu’s voice is not showcased to best advantage on the brisk, tom-tom-paced “See Thru to U,” getting drowned in the mix until, just before the end, she takes a quavery solo turn as the percussion pauses briefly.  Laura Darlington, another fellow Los Angeleno and frequent collaborator, sings the dreamy vocal on the downtempo “Phantasm,” the most open melody on the disc, amid mechanical clicks and languorous glissandi.  “Me Yesterday/Corded,” the longest track, begins rhythmlessly, with a bit of electronically processed steel pans, soon joined by a strained falsetto with words hard to pick out, amid bright electronic blips and bass thrums.  The second half of the song is warmer and far more expansive/enveloping, if somewhat repetitive, with a regular meter.  Markers of trip-hop style show up in “Getting There,” another reflective, blue-tinged vocal from Randa, and on the instrumental “Heave(n),” with its slipped beats and off-color chords.  A walking bass (Thundercat) features in “Tiny Tortures” and “Only If You Wanna,” but the latter is far more jazzlike in idiom than the swift, straight-ahead “Tiny Tortures.”  I would not venture to say that Until the Quiet Comes is as engaging as was Cosmogramma, yet, as a rapid and restless succession of vivid, carbuncular reveries, it still leaves a lasting imprint.    A

Sample song  “Putty Boy Strut”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuQGfk9Gmgo

GALACTIC, Carnivale Electricos (Galactic Funk Recordings/Anti-)—This New Orleans funk/jazz jam band is starting to make a career out of musical celebrations of its hometown.  This is the second, possibly the third (I do not have the 2007 From the Corner to the Block), record in a row that showcases different aspects of the Crescent City’s musical heritage and vitality (see the 2010 music survey for a review of Ya-ka-may), this time with a focus on Carnival festivities.  Once again, the wry, terrific Ned Sublette, a musician and scholar in his own right, has provided the liner notes (there are no printed lyrics, though the vocal enunciations are mostly pretty clear).  It is perhaps inevitable, when a record becomes a variety hour, that certain tracks are electrifying, as promised by the album title, while others leave me cold or indifferent.  On balance, though, the mix is beguiling.  As a nod to Carnival traditions beyond New Orleans, there are two short (pretty much everything on this disc is short) Brazilian tunes, “Magalenha” and “O Côco da Galinha.”  The former is a forró composition by Carlinhos Brown, performed in conjunction with Casa Samba, a New Orleans-based samba school.  The latter was co-written by the band and Brazilian samba singer/composer Moyseis Marques.  Neither one is among the more impressive tracks presented.  “Magalenha” uses a noisy clave beat (three against two) more commonly associated with Cuba than Brazil, and, with the exception of the brief choral chant, the words are spoken, reggaetón-style.  “O Côco da Galinha” is somewhat mellower and has a delicious trumpet solo at its midsection, but the nearly monotone sung line is about as inert as can be.  Since I have never been a fan of that New Orleans staple, the Neville Brothers, “Out in the Street,” which spotlights Cyril Neville and his nephew (Aaron Neville’s son), Ivan, strikes me as run-of-the-mill R&B (though well-sung run-of-the-mill R&B).  Also, given my aversion to hip-hop, the album’s pairing of the New Orleans rappers Mystikal (Michael Lawrence Tyler) and Mannie Fresh (Byron O. Thomas) makes “Move Fast” the one cut I am inclined to skip over, repeatedly.  I have to admit that some of the rap lyrics are funny, though, when not engaging in gross-out humor.  (Sample:  “Jumpin’ on your couch with my black boots on/Humpin’ on your spouse with my black boots gone.”)  Nor is Galactic’s revival of the rather dowdy “Carnival Time” a favorite of mine, though I do like it better than “Out in the Street” (and it has some great horn charts).  Still, it is a New Orleans Mardi Gras classic, from 1960, and it features as singer the man who wrote it and is thoroughly identified with it, Al Johnson, so due respect must be paid.  “Hey Na Na” leans toward blues-tinged rock, rousing though not particularly original, with the band’s forces augmented by the singers David Shaw of the Revivalists and Maggie Koerner (a New Orleans “import” from upstate Shreveport).  Ever on the up and up, “Karate” is fabulous, a gloriously blaring big band/rock instrumental hybrid that enlists the services of the remarkably professional-sounding KIPP Renaissance High School Marching Band, with a piercing stinger at the end that the trumpeter nearly nails.  Another brass-heavy instrumental, with more intrigue and suspense and less flamboyance (though plenty of sax wailing), “Attack,” appears later on the disc.  Even the very short numbers, the Latin-tinged “JuLou” and the roadhouse harmonica blues and tin-pan percussion of “Guero Bounce,” are enticing and leave the listener regretting their evanescence.  The terrific “Voyage Ton Flag,” which briefly samples the zydeco accordion and voice of the late Clifton Chenier, the “Zydeco King,” makes wonderful use of the deep bass funk grooves that characterized Galactic in an earlier incarnation, such as on the intriguing disc Ruckus in 2003.  The record is bookended by two fantastic pieces.  The opener, “Ha Di Ka,” puts the “Mardi Gras Indian chief” Juan Pardo, who takes his name from a sixteenth-century Spanish explorer, and his Golden Comanche “tribe” front and center.  It is as rollickingly funky as any song that came out in 2012, guaranteed to have you up out of your seat, with thrilling low horn rumblings and groovy organ vamps, plus a splendidly liquid piano solo.  “Ash Wednesday Sunrise,” the closer, is appropriately a sobering-up piece, introducing a mellow melody via Hammond organ and handclaps, but of course it spices this up with raucous and free-floating horn and organ improvisations.  While Carnivale Electricos is splendid, bracing entertainment, I have to wonder about what is happening to the identity of those behind it.  Is Galactic becoming merely the backing band for a series of local star performers?  The Roots, to take an example, have continued to release original albums to keep themselves fresh and avoid being known merely as Jimmy Fallon’s studio band.  Galactic today may be, in the words of Maceo Parker about his own live act, “Five percent jazz; 95 percent funky stuff.”  Yet, it seems far removed from the band that put out Ruckus, a recording that was (apart from a bit of sampling) all its own.    A/A-

Sample song  “Hey Na Na”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Smb8ahl3A10

GOAT, World Music (Rocket Recordings)—One of the year’s most praiseworthy pop releases was put out by a new Swedish band that cultivates an air of mystery and occult legend.  Like Black Moth Super Rainbow (see above), band members wear masks in concert.  Little seems to be known about the performers or Goat “tribe”; even an interview conducted on the blog Frontier Psychiatrist by Peter Lillis with a band member referring to himself as “Fluffan” is more opaque than revelatory.  Another blog, the Quietus, cornered a member who gave his actual name, Christian Johansson, for a somewhat more illuminating talk about the music and the band.  Johansson is one of three “core” members (other musicians were added in Gothenburg, where the group is based) that say they hail from Korpilombolo, a remote village in Sweden’s northernmost county.  The band promotes the idea that the spirit of its music harkens back to pre-Christian “voodoo” rituals from the ancestral Arctic homeland.  In fact, Goat’s music is, as the album title suggests, cosmopolitan, incorporating influences from Africa, Turkey, drone, black metal, krautrock, and, above all, a strong predilection for acid music ranging the spectrum from folk to psychedelic rock.  Comparisons have been drawn to Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain (1971) and early psychedelic bands like 13th Floor Elevators and Os Mutantes, as well as Cream—the love of wah-wah guitar pedals puts me in mind of Cream’s “White Room” (1968).  The first and last tracks borrow directly from the Malian guitarist/singer Boubacar Traoré.  His “Diarabi,” a plaintive song for voice and guitar whose melody manifests the infusion of Arabic modes, is transformed by Goat into a guitar instrumental that gets steadily noisier, adding heavy percussion and feedback and playing up the Middle Eastern modal psych aspect of the tune.  This reappears in the final two minutes of the closing number, “Det Som Aldrig Förändras” (which seems to translate as “That Which Never Changes”), a drony instrumental that is the longest track on the disc.  With a relaxed groove but a theme that is constricted by having less variation than a Doors organ solo, “Det Som Aldrig Förändras” sets up the listener for some aural relief in the changeover to the “Diarabi” tune.  Now done as a full-blown ensemble piece, “Diarabi” redux is pure combustion, glowing fiercely until it collapses into throbbing white noise.  All of the songs bookended by “Diarabi” have vocals, and one thing that detracts from Goat’s sound overall is that its female vocalist, who has a husky but powerful voice, shouts her lyrics (often in English but sometimes hard to follow, and no lyrics sheet is offered) too often.  “Goatman,” which existed as a seven-inch single before the album came out, is typical of the band’s sound, combining “tribal” percussion and what could pass for a spare African melody, sung vociferously, with mind-blowing fuzz guitars that seem to have been delivered fresh from 1969.  The song begins with a narrator relating a Creole saying meant to illustrate the interdependence of human beings, particularly in poor places.  Of the two other tracks with the band’s name in the title, “Goathead” follows the same template, in more exaggerated fashion, as the singer yells herself hoarse and the guitars froth to a wailing crescendo, yet this is followed by an extended, quiet, contemplative passage for solo acoustic guitar that takes us just about to the song’s end.  “Goatlord” (thank goodness they are not all similarly named) has a more conventional, Western melody, foreboding in tone, and is more along the lines of psychedelic folk, concluding with a noisy, spacy, melodica-like drone.  “Disco Fever” and “Let It Bleed” (both carrying names of earlier records, by the Sylvers and the Rolling Stones, respectively) are the funkiest and most dynamic on the record, the former entirely because of its repeating rhythm guitar pattern and perambulating organ; its melodic kernel is at a sixth-grade level of sophistication.  “Let It Bleed” is another quasi-African tune and is also the only one on which one hears a saxophone, jittery and braying.  “Golden Dawn,” possibly named for a right-wing Greek political movement and introduced by what sounds like a Hindu or Buddhist homily, is driven by a stretchy bass syncopation and features some vigorous skeleton-bone keyboards and torchy guitar solos.  Yes, the vocals can be grating at times, but the Afro-acidic hybrid that World Music has concocted succeeds in creating the spellbinding effect the “tribe” intended.    A/A-

Sample song  “Run to Your Mama” (live version):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SyPyBHJmiI

GRIZZLY BEAR, Shields (Warp Records)—If only the heat Grizzly Bear generates in its final song on Shields, “Sun in Your Eyes,” extended to the entirety of the disc, it would be a strong contender for Album of the Year.  Instead, it is a tasteful, intricately composed record that engages the mind but is, for certain stretches, particularly the arid pairing of “Yet Again” and “The Hunt,” spiritually inert.  I do not have the album’s immediate predecessor, the highly regarded Veckatimest (2009), but I do have the one that came before it, The Yellow House (2006), and on that one, to an even greater degree, the concluding song, “Colorado,” stood out as being by far the liveliest and most stirring.  The band describes Shields as a more collaborative effort between its four members than previous records, lyrically denser as well.  It was recorded mainly in the same Cape Cod location that produced The Yellow House, though a couple of the earlier tracks (“Sleeping Ute” and “Yet Again”) came out of prior sessions in the artists’ haven of Marfa, Texas.  The production was done by the band’s bassist, Chris Taylor, whose solo effort as CANT (Dreams Come True) was runner-up for Album of the Year in my 2011 music survey.  There is certainly an attempt to create a heightened sense of drama, as compared with The Yellow House, particularly in “Sleeping Ute,” “What’s Wrong?” and “Half Gate.”  The first of these, kicking off the album, is, along with “Sun in Your Eyes,” the most complex composition here.  A little too ambitious in its reach, it shifts rhythms continually and moods multiple times; some sections are dense with synths and percussion, while the last portion, following a pause, is set for little more than voice and acoustic guitar strummed Spanish-style.  The ending is tentative in terms of lack of tonal resolution, matching vocalist Edward Droste’s singing, “And I can’t help myself.”  The pleading “What’s Wrong?” is a more conventional midtempo number with a gauzy shimmer to it, yet the final reiteration of the chorus is followed by two minutes of instrumental coda, arranged for piano, bass clarinet, and trumpet, with a bit of strings and light drum and cymbals.  As with “Sleeping Ute,” there is no sense of finality as the track finishes up.  “Half Gate” makes good use of dynamic contrast to accentuate the song’s atypical (for this band) intensity, together with the urgency of Droste’s voice and the rapid-fire strumming pattern.  These songs are challenging; more ingratiating are the simpler entries like “Speak in Rounds,” “A Simple Answer,” and “Gun-Shy.”  “Speak in Rounds” (paired with a far slower, more electronically pitched pendant, “Adelma”) is vigorous, another fast-strummed piece with the expressive directness of a Gomez tune.  The cantering piano romp that is “A Simple Answer” devolves into a much more undulatory colloidal suspension as it winds down.  All of this is nice enough but seems like mere prelude in the presence of “Sun in Your Eyes.”  Beginning with a quiet, unadorned verse passage, piano and voice, offered from the perspective of a concerned observer, it billows quickly into a majestically plaintive, fully orchestrated chorus overflowing with emotion stored up from the rest of the record.  We witness this breathtaking unfurling three times in the course of seven minutes, twice as naturally following verses, the third as a recapitulation following a softer bridge section and false ending.  This landmark composition is a testament to what Grizzly Bear is capable of at its best.  The album illustrations, incidentally, are taken from the artist Richard Diebenkorn.    A-

Sample song  “Gun-Shy”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIyGBQW_9Pc

CALVIN HARRIS, 18 Months (RocNation/Columbia Records)—Scotland native Calvin Harris, a D.J., producer, and songwriter, has shown a droll side on previous recordings, but on 18 Months he is mostly firing blanks, with electronic ditties that are fine for dancing at the club or around your room but show no particular compositional skill or daring.  I would be remiss for failing to mention that a number of songs from this record were huge hits.  Harris, whose real name is Adam Richard Wiles, assembled an all-star cast of collaborators for the record, some of whom stamp the tracks with their personalities to a much greater degree than others.  In fact, the problem with big-deal North American rhythm and blues singers like Rihanna and Kelis on a recording like this is that they deliver their vocals without any particular inflection, much less emotional subtlety.  “We Found Love,” which originated as a Rihanna single in conjunction with Harris in 2011, was named by Billboard’s Fred Bronson as No. 3 on his list of “Top 50 ‘Love’ Songs of All Time,” just in time for Valentine’s Day 2013.  This is a bizarre selection; the song is far too peppy and declarative to be in any way seductive, and it hits you over the head endlessly with the same syncopated keyboard rhythm and handclaps.  (Heavy syncopation is also the primary rhythmic element in the otherwise undistinguished “Thinking about You,” showcasing the Jordanian-born singer Ayah Marar.)  At least “Bounce,” the single that features Kelis (of “Milkshake” fame), has an insouciant swinginess to it (as well as a vertiginous rising tonal pattern modulation at the break).  At the opposite end of the spectrum, Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine emotes excessively, as is her wont, on “Sweet Nothing,” at the expense of tone; it is remarkable that a tune sung with such intensity can be this boring.  A happy medium of sorts is reached through England’s Ellie Goulding; her pleading vocal on “I Need Your Love” has more character than the song surrounding it, like a ruby in a tinfoil setting.  The four tracks done with male singers/performers are more distinctive than the five with women at the mike, with the exception of the bland “We’ll Be Coming Back,” with Example (a.k.a. Elliot John Gleave, or “e.g.”).  Because I generally do not like hip-hop, I am almost reluctant to say that the most convincing song on the album spotlights the U.K. rapper Tinie Tempah (Patrick Chukwuemeka Okogwu).  “Drinking from the Bottle” begins with a strangely inflected (rising on the final syllable, as if questioning) rap, but the sung chorus that follows has an urgency and power that is missing from most of the rest (Florence Welch’s histrionics notwithstanding).  The one other song whose chorus has a truly tidal force is “Let’s Go”; I am underwhelmed by American R&B singer Ne-Yo (Shaffer Chimere Smith) and his adenoidal vocals, but when the power chords surge, all he needs to do is exhort in tune anyway.  “Here 2 China,” the shortest of the sung tracks, is a noisy nightmare-scape of techno-influenced fat beats and spiky reverb, accentuated by the grime rap of Dizzee Rascal (Dylan Kwabena Mills).  Not surprisingly, the track on which Harris teams up with Netherlands D.J. Nicky Romero (born Nick Rotteveel), “Iron” is house music that is big on production effects, in particular, a gritty, motoric sputtering outburst, what the website Earmilk termed “dirty Dutch noise.”  Harris himself sings on “Iron” as well as on his own “Feel So Close,” which is a wispy, stunted vocal melody succeeded by a big, chiming synth arpeggio and thumping beat.  He is not bad as a singer, aiming for and achieving a certain blue-eyed soulfulness.  The four primarily instrumental tracks from Harris are largely inconsequential filler—“Awooga” starts with some intricate chiaroscuro before launching into a trite theme accompanied by lots of swoopy videogame effects—with the exception of the old-school funk/futurism of “School,” which makes for a satisfying interlude between “Sweet Nothing” and “Here 2 China.”  The disc could profitably have used a good bit more of that.    B/B-

Sample song  “Bounce” (featuring Kelis):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooZwmeUfuXg

TIM HECKER/DANIEL LOPATIN, Instrumental Tourist (Software/Kemado Records)—Two specialists in purely “instrumental” ambient electronica combine forces on this sterling, if low-key, recording.  Both were represented in the 2011 music survey (Lopatin recording under the name Oneohtrix Point Never), and both scored well there.  The two composers’ sensibilities are different:  Hecker’s vision is more uncompromisingly abstract, whereas Lopatin’s is not as minimalist and more listener friendly.  Hecker is however, flexible enough to have collaborated with other musicians previously.  Notwithstanding their different approaches, on Instrumental Tourist it is not necessarily a cinch to determine where one’s contribution leaves off and the other’s takes precedence.  Perhaps because the album was recorded on Lopatin’s label (though mixed by Hecker), it reflects his style more, but I think it is inevitable that when a philosophy of asceticism collides with a more luxuriant (or at least less spare) one, the sense of monkishness recedes.  Even so, when the music comes at you in muffled sound waves of repetition (viz., “Whole Earth Tascam”), as foreboding as a tsunami alert, that is Hecker at work.  The opening track, “Uptown Psychedelia,” has the same suspended-in-gelatin feel as the intro to Pink Floyd’s “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond” (1975), minus the steady crescendo—it is all long notes (no time signature, of course), with higher synthesizer notes forming the rudiments of a theme on top of jabbing strings, explosive rumbles, and outcrops of white noise.  (“Ritual for Consumption” later on the disc is designed along similar lines.)  “Scenes from a French Zoo,” which follows, ventures a more full-bodied, if still fragmentary, melody, like a church organ trying out something from the Renaissance or early Baroque, austere yet affecting in a funereal way.  Next comes “Vaccination (for Thomas Mann),” more Lopatin-esque still, bringing in washes of choral voices cycling through a note pattern that appears to be fixed at first but becomes untethered over the course of the piece.  “Intrusions” buffets the listener straight away with loud fuzzbombs, but at the halfway point a searing synthesizer motif takes charge; this ultimately dissipates in a zipper-course of electric speaker hum.  “Racist Drone,” the most humorously titled composition, features jagged koto ornamentation from Lopatin, a simulation of vibrato-heavy flute, and some tropical bird shrieks.  Despite its sonic lushness and variety, though, there is a Japanese-inspired craggy starkness to the piece.  Continuing with the Japanese theme, “Grey Geisha” centers on a vaguely serene, mournful theme given voice by a facsimile of a mountain flute.  It is far from certain that Hecker and Lopatin will work together again, but these ambient soundscapes are at least as good as anything either has done on his own.    A/A-

Sample song  “Intrusions”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ARhSFAe8TA

JULIA HOLTER, Ekstasis (RVNG International)—A new favorite of some WFMU disc jockeys, Los Angeles’s Julia Holter made her way onto the alternative scene with Tragedy, her 2011 debut, followed up by the current release.  Ekstasis, from the Greek word for the feeling of standing outside oneself or beyond self-control, could usefully have been edited down somewhat from its fifty-seven-minute length.  “Our Sorrows” and “Boy in the Moon” each go longer than they need to.  After “Our Sorrows” winds up its development section, it ends with a couple of minutes of tuneful sighing/moaning, Holter’s version of plainchant (according to the credits, she is adapting a raga of Ali Akbar Khan); she is best when she is not trying to be Hildegard of Bingen.  “Boy in the Moon” is eight-plus minutes of astral sustained tones over which she sings a few rudimentary verses in an unusually broad, flat voice (especially given that she is singing about “baby salt, baby tears”), which is a long way to carry a very sketchy set of ideas.  “This Is Ekstasis,” the final number, has a split personality; the song’s first half consists of breathy, truncated vocal phrases with piano accompaniment that slowly round into a languid, moody theme as much spoken as sung.  This peters out in a trail of solo saxophone improvisation (Casey Anderson) midway through, but it is soon supplanted by anxious choral voices and bells that introduce a faster and slinkier tune, entirely unrelated to what came before, except that it, too, ends with saxophone soloing (together with a string bass).  Holter can be a little too twee, as with the mincing, chanson-style vocals of “Moni, Mon Amie”; she is best when not trying to be St. Vincent or Tori Amos.  The songs that lift Ekstasis above the quotidian are “Marienbad,” “Für Felix,” “Four Gardens,” and the pair called “Goddess Eyes.”  The quasi-oriental “Four Gardens,” with its Indian drone, is a genuine original, closer in spirit to a Ravel chamber fantasy about Asia than to anything one would encounter in conventional pop; there is a miraculous bridge section in which the vocals stray into an unearthly chirpy chorale, rhythmically and harmonically tied to the main melody, that is eventually doubled by the bass clarinet (Max Kaplan).  “Marienbad,” the opening track, begins with another Ravelian sequence before easing off into a series of undulating triplet organ arpeggios to take the edge off its ethereal, ghostly vocal line.  In the song’s middle passages, the vocals become rhythmically echoey and repetitious in a way that evokes Juana Molina (see the 2008 music survey), although not as monomaniacal as Molina; this section breaks off after a minute or so to allow the music to proceed to its airy conclusion, with Holter’s voice approximating a trumpet fanfare.  For reasons known only to Holter, “Goddess Eyes II” appears before “Goddess Eyes I” on the track list; the latter is a more staccato and abbreviated reprise (fewer embellishments and variations) of the former, one of the simplest and most straightforward tunes on the album.  “Für Felix” is another Asian-inflected little number, taut and springy, with an astringent bass line and a primal but memorable melody.  The literary references to Frank O’Hara, Virginia Woolf, etc., appearing as inspiration in the booklet credits are a little pompous; nonetheless, Julia Holter’s talent for composition, honed at the California Institute of the Arts, and atmosphere make this a rewarding effort and make her an artist worth following.        A-

Sample song  “Marienbad”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QukVgY8I_nA

HOT CHIP, In Our Heads (Domino Records)—For nearly a decade, Hot Chip has been money in the bank, delivering ingratiating synthpop dance tracks one after another.  Even so, in the most recent years, the group seems to be losing its way.  Not in the sense of neglecting its strong suit—Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard still have the knack for catchy hooks—but in the realm of distinctiveness that made its second and third albums such a guilty pleasure.  In Our Heads betrays the same flaws as Hot Chip’s previous release, One Life Stand (see the 2010 music survey):  the pressures of commercial expectations appear to have led to an assembly-line efficiency.  The songwriter/vocal tandem of Taylor and Goddard still manages to scale a few modest heights in the record’s opener, “Motion Sickness”—tightly composed and springy, bouncing off its keyboard bass thrum to cooing falsettos and high whorls of synthetic sound—as well as in “Flutes” and “Let Me Be Him.”  “Flutes,” which is devoid of wind instruments of any sort, and “Let Me Be Him” are two of the longest tracks Hot Chip has ever produced, clocking in at more than seven minutes apiece.  This allows them space to breathe and develop in interesting ways.  “Flutes,” the album’s first single, derives its power primarily from a pathos-filled verse and the poignancy of its cyclical chorus but proceeds from children’s chanting at the outset through shimmering keyboards to a singsong coda.  “Let Me Be Him” has a less engaging refrain but does a masterful job of laying on the arrangements, starting with a “Heart of Glass”–style beat and moving on to wordless, stentorian choral harmonies, birdsong, sampled playground voices, and twangy electric guitar from frequent guest player Rob Smoughton.  “Night and Day” is the sort of humorous little romp that pops up on Hot Chip records from time to time and enlivens its discs.  “How Do You Do?” “These Chains,” and, to a certain degree, “Ends of the Earth” are agreeable “ready-mades” that seem interchangeable with a lot of prior Hot Chip silicon wafers.  Of the two slow numbers, “Look at Where We Are” is more affecting than the tendentious “Now There Is Nothing.”  The uniformity of production rubs out attempts to spice things up with tropical flavors; one has to listen closely to hear any effect of the steel pans on the subpar “Don’t Deny Your Heart” or the marimba (Oliver Lowe) on “Flutes” and “Now There Is Nothing.”  Meantime, Lizzi Bougatsos of Gang Gang Dance is there to lend reassurance on the midtempo closer, “Always Been Your Love,” but her presence is largely wasted in a song that fails to leave much of an impression, a severe comedown after the starry exuberance of “Let Me Be Him.”  Hot Chip may want to reconceive its formula if it wants to stay fresh and relevant.    B+

Sample song  “Flutes”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99z1_IMJNl8

METRIC, Synthetica (Metric Music International/Mom + Pop Music)—Because Metric’s appeal transcends that of many “indie” outfits, enabling the band to headline at festivals and to fill arenas comfortably, it has aroused suspicion or at most lukewarm acceptance in some critical circles.  It deserves better.  Synthetica, a record that contrives to explore what is real versus what is artificial and what one really perceives when gazing long and hard at the mirror, lacks the profundity that the band was seeking.  But if the lyrics are more a jumble of clever lines and at times evocative imagery than anything revelatory, the music (itself not particularly revelatory) rocks sure-handedly.  The threesome of James Shaw (guitar and synthesizer), Joshua Winstead (bass), and Jules Scott-Key (drums) backing Emily Haines (who doubles on guitar and synths at various times) produces a big sound but one that comes in many guises:  buzzy and reverberatory in the opener, “Artificial Nocturne,” or in “Dreams So Real,” tricked out with a punchy beat (said to be derived from glam rocker Gary Glitter) and screechy overtone in “Youth without Youth,” full of plaintive tremolos like a Greek bouzouki in “Speed the Collapse,” powered by a New Wave–style motoric bass in “Breathing Underwater” or “Lost Kitten,” thrumming with energy and touched up with cycling keyboard harmonics in the title track.  Each of the first eight songs is strong enough to be single-worthy in its own right.  “Youth without Youth” and “Breathing Underwater” actually were released as singles, while fans were given a sneak preview of “Speed the Collapse” (which repeats the line “Fate don’t fail me now” from “Artificial Nocturne”) as well.  Haines, whose natural voice falls in the middle of the female range, spends more time in her upper register than we are accustomed to, on the choruses of “Breathing Underwater” and “Nothing but Time” but especially throughout “Lost Kitten,” the lightest and most playful song on a rather heavy-footed disc.  Playing the kittenish role is not likely something that comes easily to the earnest and level-headed Haines, yet she pulls it off with verve and gusto in the singsong “Lost Kitten.”  Although the record tails off toward the finish—“Clone” is, perhaps appropriately, the least distinctive track, and Lou Reed’s tuneless choral interjections as a guest singer do not add much to “The Wanderlust”—it is a gentle dip rather than one that reveals serious flaws.  Mildly annoying but in line with the album’s theme of reflection, the titles and lyrics (not the credits, however) are printed in mirror image, with a square piece of foil provided to assist in readability.    A/A-

Sample song  “Breathing Underwater”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZuLsz4yPPM

MICACHU AND THE SHAPES, Never (Rough Trade Records)—Treading water is one way to avoid the dreaded sophomore slump.  On the one hand, the issues I had with the debut album from Micachu (Mica Levi), Jewellery (see the 2009 music survey) set a low bar for Never.  On the other, those same issues characterize the new release as well.  It differs from its predecessor primarily in having fewer vacuum cleaner–type industrial noises.  It also presents Wesley Gonzalez as guest singer for one verse of “Nothing.”  Few could doubt Micachu’s inventiveness:  she does not hew to any mold; she devises some of her own instruments; her formal training in music allows her to transform the rudiments of pop hooks into sonically and texturally intriguing collages.  For the most part, however, the songs remain sketchy rather than fleshed out, more like an architect’s blueprints than something fit to inhabit (or even build).  The choice is deliberate; the consequences, for this listener, are that the “wait and see if things evolve next time” attitude I had in response to Jewellery stands firm, though with patience beginning to erode.  “Heaven” is atypical in that it features an exuberant rock groove from the start, yet it is also typical of the disc in that it offers little else besides.  On a track like “Slick,” in contravention of the song title, Micachu seems to be out to subvert all sense of tunefulness, first by concocting the most drab sort of “melody” imaginable, as much spoken as sung (as is the case on most of the album), second by introducing tonal slipperiness into the “chorus.”  “Top Floor,” the briefest track, clocking in at forty-seven seconds, is a hooty little chorale set to the somber, most likely synthesized, tones of low flutes or panpipes.  “Low Dogg” blossoms from an unpromising pulsing monotone into one of the more conventionally melodic refrains on the disc.  At times, songs do manage to suggest certain precursors; the vigorously strummed intro to “Waste” beckons toward Paul Simon’s “Late in the Evening” (1980); “Fall” has the sort of moody, warped-tone, film noir sensibility (but none of the humor) of the early They Might Be Giants demo tape “Fake Out in Buenos Aires” (1985), with a series of short drum rolls for effect.  “Fall” tails off about a half minute before the track ends, replaced after a momentary silence by a throbbing orchestral interlude that begins and ends with the sound of vinyl being tormented by a record-player needle (or hand at the speed control).  This sets up the transition to “Nothing,” which starts with a sound like celestial yowling cats before giving way (almost—the high-pitched sounds never quite disappear entirely) to a gently lumbering 6/8 guitar riff that accompanies another of the more tuneful and fully formed songs on the disc, an indication of where Micachu could go if she chose.  Like Micachu herself, Gonzalez can carry a tune but is hardly memorable as a vocalist.   The song titles suggest a touch of nihilism, while the lyrics range from blank to baffling, with an occasional clever turn of phrase.  Micachu and her partners (Raisa Khan on keyboards and drummer Marc Pell) may at some point in their careers decide that gut-punching, one-note numbers with names like “Nowhere” or “Never” no longer satisfy even themselves, at which stage we can perhaps look forward to the morphing of their glittery fragments into compositions with real power.    B+/B

Sample song  “Low Dogg”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFjGfksalho

NADA SURF, The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy (Barsuk Records)—My persistent reaction to The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy (a line from the album’s opening song, “Clear Eye Clouded Mind”) is impatience, an urge to move through it so as to put something more interesting and gratifying on the CD player.  It is not a bad record by any means, tuneful in its way, expressive, evidencing considerable care taken in its compositional craft.  Still, nothing on the disc impelled me to go back and listen repeatedly (though I did, of course) or offered the stimulus of the truly novel.  Nada Surf has been kicking around New York for a couple of decades now.  An unassuming band formed by a pair of former prep school pals, Matthew Caws (guitarist and lead singer) and Daniel Lorca (bassist), later joined by drummer Ira Elliot and, for this record, by Guided by Voices guitarist Doug Gillard, Nada Surf has been described as “power pop” by my friend Steve Holtje, who chose this album as the year’s best on the CultureCatch website (as did CultureCatch’s founder, Dusty Wright, a.k.a. Mark Petracca).  But the sound does not strike me particularly powerful; this is a guitar-dominant band (notwithstanding the fact that four different people play keyboards on the album) with a jangly yet not edgy, Byrds-inspired (minus the arpeggios, for the most part) sound.  To my ears, Nada Surf is more akin to the Apples in Stereo, with some of the helium let out the balloon, or the fizz out of the bottle, whichever metaphor seems best.  No song on The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy stands out in particular, nor is any unlistenable.  “When I Was Young,” the longest song on the disc, overstays its welcome, starting as a nice set of acoustic arpeggiations before attempting to become something weightier, achieving only musical prolixity.  The succeeding song, “Jules and Jim,” suffers to a lesser extent from the same bloat; it would appear that longer-form compositions are not the band’s forte, whereas shorter and more self-contained tracks like “The Moon Is Calling” acquit themselves well.  “Clear Eye Clouded Mind” and “No Snow on the Mountain” summon the most volume and potency (the former to more appealing effect), while “Waiting for Something” has a jingle-like vibe that might well lend itself to a sitcom theme song.  “Let the Fight Do the Fighting” breaks the mold with a richly contemplative opening and some subdued trumpet playing (from Martin Wenk) at the bridge, though its wishy-washy chorus lets it down.  Lyrics, if occasionally unwieldy, are literate and more ambitious than the music.  The best quip comes from the final song, “The Future”:  “The future has long lines/The future is a screen/And I cannot believe/The future’s happening to me.”    B+/B

Sample song  “Waiting for Something”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10oh5Knqixo

ONDATRÓPICA, Ondatrópica (Soundway Records)—Part sound archive, part modernistic, with a gloss of cosmopolitanism, Ondatrópica is the joint project of Will Holland, a Colombia-based Englishman, and Mario Galeano, the creative light behind Colombia’s Frente Cumbiero.  Holland, who records as Quantic at times, also produced the Los Míticos del Ritmo album (see below, in the Latin section).  For the self-titled recording, Holland and Galeano gathered a selection of musicians they felt had made particularly outstanding contributions to Colombian “tropical music” (primarily cumbia but also salsa, gaita, and other Caribbean genres) in the past and combined their forces with those of several younger performers on the scene today.  The album was recorded using analog techniques, generally doing a single take for each track with minimal overdubbing, over two and a half weeks at Discos Fuentes in Medellín, a hallowed recording studio that had fallen on harder times in recent years.  The results of these sessions can seem preserved in amber; despite the tremendous musicianship, it feels like roaming over well-explored ground.  More often, though, the songs achieve the sort of dialectic between what now passes for the traditional—music from the 1950s through the 1970s—and contemporary accents and arrangements that made Frente Cumbiero’s disc Frente Cumbiero Meets Mad Professor (see the 2011 music survey) so entertaining.  At its most effusive, it lets shine starbursts such as “Locomotora Borracha” (Drunk Locomotive), a little cumbia whose sober trumpet theme is overwhelmed by the infectiousness of its chugging rhythmic accompaniment.  “Remando” (Rowing), like “Locomotora Borracha” written by Galeano and meant to evoke the Afro-Colombian sound of the 1970s, combines a deep cumbia groove with some heavy syncopations in the horns, interspersed with fluid piano vamps, and just a touch of timbales soloing by Fruko (Julio Ernesto Estrada), one of the pioneering Colombian salseros of that era.  I have not been won over by the rapping of Chile’s Ana Tijoux (here called “Anita”), one of the album’s younger generation, yet the song for which she composed the lyrics, “Suena” (Sound), has an irresistibly kicky rhythm, pushed along by the accordion of Holland, who wrote the tune in the style of sabanero cumbias of the 1960s, with a very different emphasis from the standard, clomping cumbia beat.  “Cumbia Espacial,” the only selection with “cumbia” in its title, is a gorgeously serene, piano-centered instrumental, penned by Juancho Vargas, one of Ondatrópica’s elder statesmen, who is said to have left the hospital to play piano on the track that same day.  Some of the band’s efforts to break the mold end up as slightly cheesy:  “Libya,” an attempt to marry cumbia with Middle Eastern sonorities, featuring the crumhorn-like caña de millo (a flute of indigenous origin) to carry the modal melody, is amusing in an off-color way, and there is no doubt the band enjoyed its drunken take on Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” here titled “I Ron [Rum] Man,” but it hardly ranks among the world’s great cover versions.  On the other hand, “Ska Fuentes” pulls off a coup by aligning Latin horns (led by Jorge Gaviria’s trumpet), guitars, and percussion with ska’s unremitting beats.  In a different idiom, “Punkero Sonidero” achieves a similar melding of familiar and alien, tightly wound, with occasional forays by the synth bass into the cosmos.  Far stranger is “3 Reyes de la Terapía” (Three Kings of Therapy).  Written for a trio of marímbula (Galeano), accordion (Holland), and human beat-box (Juan Carlos Puello, a.k.a. Chongo, a youngster who also uses some actual percussion), it is an astonishing sonic mélange, stark and foreboding.  Though it barely moves off its initial sound framework, at one point Holland’s accordion introduces an actual melody, eerie and remote.  The ensemble puts me in mind of the “Andean” sound of Chancha via Circuito (Pedro Canale; see the 2010 music survey).  Of the three songs with “trópica” as the adjectival modifier, sitting in the middle of the track list, the best is the fleet, zippy “Gaita Trópica,” which brings back the caña de millo (Pedro Ramayá) to play against the clarinets, trumpets, and accordion.  “Bomba Trópica” and “Descarga Trópica” (Tropical Jam) are fine for listening to the seasoned instrumentalists like Alfredo Linares (“el Inca del piano”) do their thing but are hardly original sounding, with the latter in particular harking back to bands like Cuba’s Irakere.  “Curro Fuentes,” an homage to the brother of the founder of the label Discos Fuentes, who started his own label, Discos Curro, is the closest to the “classic” cumbia of La Sonora Dinamita, with Michi Sarmiento’s lead vocal perhaps self-consciously modeled on that of La Sonora Dinamita’s Lucho Argaín.  (La Sonora Dinamita was reconstituted by Fruko in the mid-seventies, more than a decade after it disintegrated.)  The final piece, “Swing de Gillian,” dedicated to Holland’s mother, is so different from everything else on the disc, with its mellow woodwinds and its alto sax playing the same arpeggiated sequence over and over, that it feels as though it ought to be featured on one of those Sesame Street bits about “one of these things is not like the other; one of these things just doesn’t belong.”        A/A-

Sample song  “Suena”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pH85RmWwOo

EL PERRO DEL MAR, Pale Fire (The Control Group)—This record is pitched toward the cool, and my response to it is likewise cool.  Pale Fire is not devoid of intelligent songwriting from Gothenburg’s Sarah Assbring, who records as El Perro del Mar (the Seadog), yet the fire may be too pale.  I am not familiar with El Perro del Mar’s previous work, but this album favors relaxed tempos, deep bass notes, and limpid tones.  The most energized tracks (not necessarily the most uptempo but the least lethargic ones) are the best on offer.  “Hold Off the Dark” shares the moroseness that characterizes the disc throughout, yet it also offers an ambiguous hint of hope (“When there’s no future ... We can make a better past/We can run away from the day”) as it canters along delicately on baleful piano chords.  “Walk on By” has no direct relation the Burt Bacharach/Hal David song from 1964 popularized by Dionne Warwick, but it borrows that song’s sensibility, with a sensual shuffle and a resolute breeziness that is worn as a flimsy covering for brokenheartedness.  A gently percolating dance beat propels “To the Beat of a Dying World,” which prescribes movement as a way to stave off haunting loneliness.  “I Carry the Fire” shoots for, with some success, a modal, Middle Eastern mysticism in its own dance rhythms.  Less impressive is the awkwardly titled “Home Is to Feel Like That,” which has plenty of momentum, in an ambling sort of way, but grows tiresome fast in the obsessive two-chord alternation backing its tissue-thin, mewling melody.  “Love in Vain” takes up a Caribbean-style bass groove, yet, in spite of lines like “I admit the sunlight,” this is a joyless tune, which is not to say that there is anything profound about its protestations.  At its worst, Assbring’s compositions come to resemble the more vapid sort of lounge music played in chic bars in happening urban neighborhoods.  Not as dark as The Knife, not as intense as Lykke Li (to mention two other Swedish acts), El Perro del Mar’s refinement and control are sublime when songs hit the mark.  When they do not, listening is a nonevent.    B+/B

Sample song  “Hold Off the Dawn”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3lsTEDKcXY

PRINCE RAMA, Top 10 Hits of the End of the World (Paw Tracks)—Listening to Top 10 Hits of the End of the World is, for this observer, like not getting a joke that numerous others find funny.  Someone thought this was a good idea, enough to make a recording on Paw Tracks, which is the label started by Animal Collective (see above).  The concept is fine:  have a sister duo, Taraka and Nimai Larson, who are sort of semi-reformed hippie chicks, impersonate ten invented “deceased” pop bands in a variety of genres.  My qualms are with the execution.  It certainly is possible for a duo to make themselves sound like all sorts of bands.  They Might Be Giants has made a career of it.  But the ten “hits” on this album sound too much alike, in spite of the Larson sisters’ attempts to vary tempos and, to some degree, timbre and textures.  It does not help that the record’s production sounds muddy, obscuring some of the lyrics and other fine points of instrumentation (guitars, synths, drum machine).   It would have helped if the sisters had spent more time developing back stories for their fake bands; that might have exercised their imaginations enough to come up with a more distinctive musical signature for each.  Instead, it seems that Taraka Larson has been devoting her energies to developing a long, woolly “manifesto” about art and the “Now Age,” which I did not have the patience or interest to read through.  Then there is the fundamental problem that a parody of a cheesy act has to be clever enough to avoid the selfsame mediocrity of its “source.”  Top 10 Hits of the End of the World does not pass the smell test.  Even the Indo-pop-inspired numbers, Rage Peace’s “So Destroyed” and the repetitious “Radhamadhava” by Goloka, are cut from the same (cheese)cloth as the lumbering dance tunes, proto-metal fantasies, and psychedelic divagations elsewhere on the disc.  Hyparxia’s breathy/dreamy midtempo “Welcome to the Now Age” serves as a billboard sketching of the Larsons’ own metaphysical musings.  In fact, the funniest aspect of the record is the set of photos inside the CD booklet, where the sisters dress up as the various groups, from metallic-niqab- and abaya-clad doomsters for Guns of Dubai’s “Blade of Austerity” to Adidas tank-top-outfitted, Richard Simmons-esque workout queens for “Exercise Ecstasy by the Metaphysixxx to a sort of Deerhoof/Deerhunter spoof (?) with antlers and fantasy Bronze Age furry and fringed garments for Black Elk Speaks, “Fire Sacrifice” (whose gentle acid rock is actually the subtlest and most sophisticated composition on display).  It surprised me to learn that these two Brooklyn hipsters had already put out six other recordings as Prince Rama.  With any luck, they will ultimately redeploy their talents elsewhere, perhaps in costume design.        B

Sample song  “So Destroyed”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5nISrIVsNs

ROBERT GLASPER EXPERIMENT, Black Radio (Blue Note Records)—This is being marketed as a jazz record, but it is not.  The giveaway is its having won a Grammy award for “Best R&B Album.”  Robert Glasper is a jazz pianist—an excellent one, at that—and Blue Note is a jazz label—a renowned one.  Glasper has said that, in effect, he is getting bored with jazz and that it needs a wakeup call.  He is hardly the first to ask questions about jazz’s relevance in an age when young people, and African-Americans in particular, are turning in droves to other kinds of music.  Moreover, jazz has a long tradition of incorporating popular music.  What the Robert Glasper Experiment is doing with Black Radio, however, is not a blending of “what the kids are listening to” into jazz; it is a substitution of rhythm and blues and hip-hop for jazz, and it is meretricious to treat the record as some sort of statement about the new direction of jazz music.  Apart from bits of keyboard improvising by Glasper, particularly in “Ah Yeah” and “Why Do We Try,” it is hard to find any jazz elements to this disc.  So, taken as basically an R&B record, how does it stand up?  Not all that well.  Glasper has recruited some capable singers (Bilal [Bilal Sayeed Oliver], the deep-piped Lalah Hathaway, Ledisi [Ledisi Young]) to perform a mixture of original and cover songs, but a lot of the new material is flavorless mush.  I do enjoy Ledisi’s collaboration with Glasper, “Gonna Be Alright (F.T.B.),” which has a comfortably warm, expansive sensibility, with Ledisi’s reassuring voice caressed by the bandleader’s playing, alternating between acoustic piano and the Rhodes electric.  As with a number of tracks, this one ends early, to be followed by a segue of sorts, in this case a set of keyboard chords above which a conversation takes place concerning the future of jazz and the expectation of audiences and performers, featuring such memorable platitudes as, “The best thing we can do is be honest.”  The most intriguing cover is of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991; yes, “Black Radio” plays “white” music as well, evidently) that ends the record, a seven-and-a-half minute, heavily sedated version with vocoder-muted lyrics (and eventually some moody harmonies from Lalah Hathaway) that is a fascinating reimaging of the grunge original.  The most disappointing is Erykah Badu (also featured on the Flying Lotus record; see above) interpreting Mongo Santamaria’s 1959 standard “Afro Blue.”  Her version, largely switched over from minor to major mode and fooling around with the rhythms in a way that divorces the song from its clave origins, drains “Afro Blue” of all its majesty and mystery.  Though I have certain reservations about Dianne Reeves’s voice, her version of the same song on the album I Remember (1991) is far truer to the original.  Black Radio also showcases Hathaway in a sensuous if gaudily arranged (mellow saxes at the bridge) rendition of Sade’s “Cherish the Day” (1993) and Bilal taking a stab at David Bowie’s 1969 ballad “Letter to Hermione,” an insipid tune that remains fairly inert here, the delicate tracery of its instrumentation unable to rescue it. Glasper teams up with MeShell Ndegeocello for the breathy but almost lifelessly anemic “The Consequences of Jealousy.”  My knowledge of the genre is admittedly shallow, but it strikes me that songs such as “Ah Yeah” (featuring Musiq Soulchild, born Taalib Johnson, and Chrisette Michele [Payne]) and Stokely Williams’s “Why Do We Try” represent a “new school” R&B that self-consciously tries to resurrect the essence of the old masters while lacking the artistic gravitas or sway to pull it off.  The tracks I regard as the worst, predictably, are the hip-hop selections.  I can think of a wide spectrum of better ways to spend my time than listening to Lupe Fiasco or Yasiin Bey (the artist formerly known as Mos Def) rapping, even if Lupe Fiasco’s track is mitigated by a neo-soul chorus from Bilal (and ends with a snippet of a child’s babbling).  The “Mic Check” at the end of the album’s opening track is just irritating.  Sadly, there is little that is experimental about the Robert Glasper Experiment, no matter how much he might like to think there is.  For those who actually agree with the Grammy voters, the good news is that a second volume of Black Radio comes out in 2013.    B/B-

Sample song  “Cherish the Day” (live version, featuring Lalah Hathaway):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYJ-xyeyhlc

SAINT ETIENNE, Words and Music by Saint Etienne (Heavenly Recording/Universal Music)—Back in the 1990s, I got hooked on Saint Etienne’s debut record, Foxbase Alpha (1991); uneven as it was, it had a great deal of heart and became a signature sound of a certain era in London, just before “Cool Britannia” set in.  So I tend to regard the trio’s first original release in seven years as a return of old friends.  They are verging on middle age now, and Words and Music by Saint Etienne, shot through with nostalgia, even begins to contemplate mortality in the song “Twenty-Five Years.”  The lyrics are actually more affecting than the music itself.  Words and Music is a powerful statement of the emotional impact of music on the lives of Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, who are both keyboard players as well as onetime music journalists, and lead singer Sarah Cracknell, in spite of the music’s rarely venturing beyond the conventions of dance pop.  Having been at it for two decades now, St. Etienne’s members know how to put together a lively hook and some enveloping arrangements, even if little in terms of composition is truly memorable.  Several guitarists sit in as guests, so that most tracks do have guitar despite none of the core band members being guitarists; interestingly, though, neither of the two songs released as singles, “Tonight” and “I’ve Got Your Music,” features any guitar at all.  (Nor does the brief, a cappella “Record Doctor.”)  “Tonight,” a bouncy if anodyne disco number conveying the anticipation surrounding going a concert by pop heroes, opts for a battery of strings in its intro and bridge sections and closing strains.  The precedence of the words over the music is established in the very first song, “Over the Border,” which is mostly a running narrative about growing up with music as more than merely the soundtrack of life—rather, its lifeblood—spoken by Cracknell over acoustic guitar and long-tone keyboard accompaniment.  The song does have a sung refrain, an ingratiating if unremarkable tune, but the real fun is all the name-checking of bands, vintage labels, and hit factories/studios that goes on in between choruses.  As with so much modern pop, the music owes a considerable debt to American rhythm and blues but, as well, in keeping with the nostalgia theme, to the candy-striped, light but heart-tugging compositions of Michel Legrand for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) or of Burt Bacharach.  “Answer Song” is broad-themed in this manner; to a certain extent, so is the closing track, “Haunted Jukebox,” which some critics have likened to the Carpenters, although it puts me in mind of David Gates and Bread, “Make It with You” (1970).  “I Threw It All Away,” a song of regret over life choices, is set at a gliding waltz tempo, and the centrality of the recorder (played by Leo Chadburn) gives the song a folk/medieval feel very different from anything else on the album.  Another song about shaking one’s head over the foolish decisions of youth, “When I Was Seventeen,” is a deceptively breezy composition whose tune is the winningest and most poignant on the disc, though the odd computer-generated monologue inserted by producer Ian Catt in the middle detracts from the mood.  Cracknell’s creamy, expressive voice has served the band well from the start.  Words and Music is no masterwork, but there is a distinct guilty-pleasure aspect to its journey back to a time in our lives when music mattered more than anything.  The cover art is a lovely fantasy street map, depicting urban thoroughfares and byways with names reflecting popular culture.  Finally, I will note that, although “I’ve Got Your Music” is one of the more throwaway dance tracks on the disc, I adore the video for it (see the link below), in which various ordinary people proudly hold up copies of their favorite LPs, many of which are genuinely memorable.        B+

Sample song  “I’ve Got Your Music”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MQmsHPwLvU

SANTIGOLD, Master of My Make-Believe (Downtown/Atlantic Records)—The sophomore album from Santigold (Santi White) charts nearly as much of a lateral movement as a progression from her solo debut, Santogold (see the 2008 music survey).  She is still on the upward segment of her career trajectory, to be sure, striving to realize her true potential as a songwriter and performer (as on the debut), not always displaying mastery of what she is offering on Master of My Make-Believe.  Her voracious appetite in music is reflected by her collaborators, from Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio to Naeem Juwan (a.k.a. Spank Rock) to the DJs/producers Diplo (Thomas Wesley Pentz) and Switch (David Taylor), who have worked with M.I.A., to the techno/kuduro band Buraka Som Sistema from Portugal.  The album was partly recorded in Jamaica, a logical choice for a singer whose early career was steeped in ska, reggae, and dub.  The song that features Karen O is the opener, “Go!” which had its premiere in 2011; fortunately, her presence is limited to a few husky “hey hey heys”—I have developed a firm distaste for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.  Though the West Indian influences are clear from the get-go, “Go!” also has an oddly Eastern European tinge in its guitar accompaniment, which was actually cribbed from an obscure early eighties Europop band called Visitors and their song “Joyo Can You Hear Me.”  In any case, the sense of Russian intrigue goes along with Santigold’s lyric about how “[they] storm my winter palace.”  That “Fiddler on the Roof”–like quality re-emerges on the more rhythmically emphatic “Freak Like Me.”  “God from the Machine” is a stirring anthem of self-encouragement that successfully melds rock drumming, the gurgling bass guitar harmonics of the New Wave, and declarative verse with Caribbean bass intervals and ethereal vocal overtones.  Santigold’s talents reach a sublime peak in the subdued, midtempo number “The Riot’s Gone,” co-written with Greg Kurstin, Switch, and Nick Zinner.  In its resigned yearning for release from struggle, it carries an emotional weight (not to mention compositional sophistication) that has little equal among her songs to date.  “Pirate in the Water” is the disc’s most strongly reggae-flavored tune, effective in managing to be laid-back even while throbbing with foreboding.  “Disparate Youth” retains the Caribbean vibe in its keyboard long notes and deep bass accentuating the off beat, yet it offsets the languidness with a sober, straight-ahead verse spiked by an Interpol-worthy, jagged, monophone guitar attack after each line.  These songs represent the cream of Master of My Make-Believe.  “The Keepers,” also co-written with Kurstin (and John Hill), is an identity chant that sounds like the successor to Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America” (1982) but with a darker refrain, “We’re the keepers/While we sleep in America/Our house is burning down.”  “Big Mouth,” the closing song, could have fit in comfortably on Buraka Som Sistema’s album Komba (see the 2011 music survey).  It is interesting from a percussive/rhythmic and production standpoint (Buraka’s contribution), but the verse and refrain (Santigold’s) are perfunctory.  “Fame,” “Freak Like Me,” and “Look at These Hoes” are tedious or inconsequential and would best have been excised in favor of better-conceived material.  It is fun to take a gander at Santigold’s video on YouTube on how the album cover was created (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQvCwOxY3jQ&list=UUai-drGTTaIIvJ6OTnn5ixw&index=11) as a window into her creative mind.        A-

Sample song  “Disparate Youth”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIMMZQJ1H6E&list=SPE268F59F888C76C5

SCHOOL OF SEVEN BELLS, Ghostory (Vagrant Records/Ghostly International)—Two years ago, I wondered whether this dream pop outfit would survive following the departure of one of its three members, Claudia Deheza.  Survive it did, however, as a two-person group pairing Deheza’s twin, Alejandra (vocals and guitar), with Benjamin Curtis (guitar and synthesizers/production), formerly of Secret Machines.  With Ghostory, the two have managed to rebound from the sophomore slump of Disconnect from Desire (see the 2010 music survey), though the new record is a far cry from the peaks of their majestic debut, Alpinisms (see the 2008 music survey).  According to Ghostly International’s blurb for the disc, Ghostory is about “a young girl named Lafaye and the ghosts that surround her life.”  One would never be able to deduce this simply by scanning the lyrics, though the third song is called “Lafaye.”  Alejandra Deheza, whose dreams have vividly and cryptically furnished the raw material for the texts and stories of songs on prior records as well, speaks of how each person’s hurts, betrayals, and heartbreaks assume the form of ghosts that remain with that individual throughout life.  That might prepare one for a downer of an experience, yet what characterizes Ghostory, besides its luminous soundscapes and graceful flow, is how uplifting the music ultimately is.  Deheza’s lyrics, though hardly profound (for one thing, for a “young girl,” Lafaye seems to have had tremendous experience with love already), are intensely emotional.  As for the musical composition, which the band describes as having been done more collaboratively than in the past, the album has a soft, squishy center.  But no chocolate-covered cherry this, the songs “Reappear” and “Show Me Love” are the most like Disconnect from Desire and flirt with tedium.  “Reappear” is a set of cycling, limpid whole-note tones, full of reverb, pretty but vacant, opening with the album’s most obtuse lyric:  “You know it’s time/To find the will/To reappear/Back into your life.”  “Show Me Love” begins with an oscillating triad of guitar chords, with vibrato à la “How Soon Is Now” (1984) by the Smiths.  The song, moderate in tempo, eventually builds in some nice textural density and harmonics yet never really musters momentum; it stays stuck in low gear.  Of the slow numbers, “Love Play” has the most poetic lyric, which helps to paper over what is, in the final analysis, not an inventive tune.  School of Seven Bells really is all about the swifter, more fluid tracks, kicking off with “The Night,” whose virtues lie more with its brisk and vigorous tempo and bass groove than with any compositional genius.  Likewise, “Low Times” derives what power it has from its relentless, prosecutorial propulsion, plus the fraught, quavery tone of Deheza’s voice as Lafaye accuses a partner of being a predator, rather than from its limited melodic range.  The record hits its full stride with the sequence of its final three songs, “Scavenger,” “White Wind,” and “When You Sing.”  In these tunes, the sound just about crosses over from dream pop to power pop, which is impressive for a duo (with the help of a drummer, Christopher Colley, who plays on these and three other tracks), a testament to what modern production can do.  Both “Scavenger” and “White Wind” are airtight compositions, with swingy rock rhythms; in the latter, Curtis uses a bass part that ricochets across an octave interval to anchor the refrain.  It is with “When You Sing,” however, the longest track, that School of Seven Bells replicates the “ice cream castles in the air,” to take Joni Mitchell’s words in “Both Sides Now” (1969), that made Alpinisms such a tantalizing dream pop confection.  Starting with ninety seconds’ worth of a bank of sustained tones with overlays of feedback and other effects, it then springs from the gate with a breezy melody that, by itself, does not amount to all that much but gains intensity through sheer volume and its multiple layers of sound and Deheza’s harmonizing with herself.  Doubtless, in live performance, it would have been more exciting to see her sing harmonies with her twin, yet, in the studio, the multiple tracking achieves the same result.  There is no true climax, but the driving beat hurtles the song forward right up until the final note, when all production drops out except for Deheza’s dual-tracked voice.    A-/B+

Sample song  “The Night”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNtxC81bKbk&list=UU4gg5MYPpJ4zATVEBnh3bsw

SIGUR RÓS, Valtari (Parlophone/XL Recordings)—No band, not even Radiohead, wears the label “postrock” as comfortably as Iceland’s Sigur Rós.  For Valtari (“Roller”), the group evinces less interest in the sounds of rock music than ever.  Even by the standards of Sigur Rós (“Victory Rose,” named after the lead singer’s little sister), this is a sedate album.  With less going on in the music than in previous outings, the band is flirting with stagnation at intervals yet manages to veer away from the precipice, in no small part because of sheer, sweeping beauty.  Jón Þór Birgisson, or “Jónsi,” as he is known familiarly, sings verses in Icelandic (or perhaps at times the band’s made-up, nonsense language Vonlenska [“Hopelandic”]) on the initial track and each of the four succeeding it, while the final three are effectively instrumentals.  The first two songs, “Ég Anda” (I Breathe) and “Ekki Múkk” (Not a Sound), are underwhelming, relatively inconsequential mood setters.  Thus, it is not until “Varúð” (Caution) that Valtari hits its stride.  Beginning with delectably crepuscular keyboard chords, “Varúð” builds on Jónsi’s wispy solo, accompanied by what sounds like a boys’ choir (it is actually women singing), subtly searing its way into your soul with rising volume and intensity generated through layering of chiming synthesizers and the addition of a pounding drumbeat.  Eventually, it all gets cut back abruptly to just some ruefully rough-grained long tones and that ethereal choir.  “Rembihnútur” (Tight Knot), although the shortest song on the record at five minutes, takes its time developing, cycling through chords tracked over sustained notes.  Jónsi, for once, is not singing falsetto but is as breathy and elfin as ever, laying out a tentative verse that blossoms into a warmly beckoning chorus; when this is pared back at the end, all that remains is the percussion, which brings to mind snowshoes or crampons crunching across snow and ice.  The final sung tune, “Dauðalogn” (Dead Calm), is replete with northerly choral sonorities from start to finish, provided by the English ensemble The Sixteen, led by Harry Christophers.  The melody that Jónsi chants against the chorus’s background, moving between normal and falsetto registers, strikes me as only sketchily composed and unambitious, yet the arrangements are so rich and well executed that this is easily overlooked.  This song moves directly into “Varðeldur” (Campfire), which serves as its instrumental coda, in the same key and similarly ceremonial tempos.  In fact, though, “Varðeldur” is a variant on “Lúppulagið,” from the live album Inni (2011).  On the voiceless title track, the album reaches the apogee of its tenebrous, feather-light, spellbinding mystique, all silvered strings and chilly, distant tintinnabulations, supported by yet another stratum of dronelike sustained notes, varying at a leisurely pace—an absolutely sublime aural experience.  “Fjögur Píanó” (Four Pianos), the concluding composition, is another coda of sorts, a simple nine-note keyboard pattern—three groups of three, the first descending, the next two ascending in overlapping sequences—played ad infinitum on pianos with a great deal of rubato and many grace notes, so that it almost starts to sound out of phase with itself, in Steve Reich fashion.  String sounds gradually enter the picture, ultimately taking over from the keyboards.  In the end, it is a trifle but not without its fascinations.  No New Age wallpaper this; the music of Valtari is deeply atmospheric and rewards the patient listener.        A/A-

Sample song  “Varúð”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf1h2PMPCAo

SLEIGH BELLS, Reign of Terror (Mom + Pop Music)—The album title is Reign of Terror, yet it is several degrees of magnitude tamer than the noise pop band’s debut, Treats (see the 2010 music survey).  The new one makes a gesture toward being more melodic and songlike, which is doubtless the result of it being more of a collaborative writing effort between the two band members, multi-instrumentalist Derek Miller and singer Alexis Krauss, with her background in pop.  Treats was largely Miller’s doing.  On Reign of Terror, Krauss is in “cheerleader mode” only on “True Shred Guitar” and “Crush.”  “True Shred Guitar,” the opener, is not so much a song as what the title suggests, with Krauss exhorting a live audience (or facsimile thereof) into a frenzy as Miller “shreds.”  “Crush” is a throwback to Treats, with big, booming beats and guitar chords, a quintessentially girl-group-throwback breathy chorus, and Krauss leaping right out of that chorus to shout “make you or break you!” and “baby please!” as if auditioning for pom-poms, an emblazoned tight sweater, a flouncy skirt, and saddle shoes.  “Leader of the Pack,” is not the 1964 classic by the Shangri-Las but an original; it, too, is a reversion to past form, that is, pure noise rock, with the ever-present motif of an insistently bleating single guitar note amid the bells and pounding drumbeats.  Reign of Terror is also more guitar-centric than Treats, which played around with loops and sampling to a greater degree; often, the newer disc abruptly interrupts the flow so that Miller can exercise his chops briefly with pneumatic drill–quality strumming—the final cut, “D.O.A.,” is little but this sort of industrial-strength drilling to accompany Krauss’s tissue-thin verse/chorus.  “Comeback Kid” is raw intensity in its exhortative verse portions, yet the dreamy two-line chorus yields an appealingly striking contrast.  “Demons” is the most manic and monochromatic song on the record; still, the overall effect conjured is appropriately hellish, in a punk metal vein.  The most fully realized melody (ranging well beyond the three-chord, or fewer, setup of most of the tunes) and sophisticated harmonics belong to “You Lost Me”; cushioned by an atypically plush electric guitar accompaniment and reverberant with swooning overtones, it is the album’s gem.  (There is a certain irony in the line “What a way to die in 1985” since young Ms. Krauss was merely a gleam in her parents’ eyes, as the saying goes, at that time.)  Some of that sophistication carries over into the cyclical and more repetitious “Never Say Die,” which follows.  Among the quieter songs (which would also include “You Lost Me” and “Never Say Die”—everything is relative on a noise pop disc), “Born to Lose,” “End of the Line,” and “Road to Hell” incorporate more rounded tunes and choruses than we are used to hearing from Sleigh Bells, but these come at the sacrifice of kinetic energy and the kick-ass spirit that drove the band’s freshman effort.  It could well be that some of the power of Treats came from its novelty effect.  Expectations are different this time around, and, although nothing on the disc is bad, particularly, Reign of Terror does not quite measure up.  In a wry aside, the liner notes, after specifying that Miller exclusively plays Jackson guitars, disclose that “Alexis Krauss exclusively eats strawberry Pop Tarts.”  Not much of a diet!        B+

Sample song  “Comeback Kid”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiwcUdX7XMw

REGINA SPEKTOR, What We Saw from the Cheap Seats (Sire Records/Warner Brothers Records)—What happens when the muse is fleeting, but you need to try to pin it down to fulfill the demands of a recording contract?  One of the most dispiriting pop records of the year is what this pursuit yields.  I adore Regina Spektor and her past work, but What We Saw from the Cheap Seats is a lackluster, misguided effort.  On this album, the singer/songwriter is largely making studio versions of songs previously played live, in addition to recycling “Ne Me Quitte Pas” from the 2002 album Songs (from before I was aware of Spektor) as “Don’t Leave Me (Ne Me Quitte Pas).”  She recorded the record in 2011 in Los Angeles with guitarist Mike Elizondo and other musicians.  When she had need of a male backing singer (on “Don’t Leave Me” and “Patron Saint”), she used her new husband, the ex–Moldy Peaches guitarist Jack Dishel, for that purpose (his presence is faint).  The story-songs presented on this disc, with one notable exception, lack the sense of enchantment that animated previous Spektor records, and the more personal/confessional tunes are for the most part punchless and unaffecting.  At worst, one gets “Oh Marcello,” which plays around with movie/television mafia gangster tropes that raise hackles among many Italians and Italian-Americans.  Not only does it cross over into the twee, it also attempts a bizarre grafting of the 1964 hit “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” by Bennie Benjamin, Sol Marcus, and Gloria Caldwell, first performed by Nina Simone but more widely known in its cover version by the Animals a year later.  At best, there is “All the Rowboats,” which alone successfully recaptures the cleverness and imagination that made Regina Spektor such a standout talent, in a tune that envisions old master artworks as museum prisoners trying to escape their frames but doomed to serve “maximum sentences/It’s their own fault/For being timeless.”  The most substantial and fully realized ballad is “Firewood,” a pretty waltz that urges living in the moment so as not to have regrets later.  “How” is also tuneful, in a sort of bluesy way, and strives to convey the ache that follows a breakup.  But a line like “How can I ever know why some stay, others go” is hardly penetratingly reflective and reveals a fundamental hollowness at the song’s core.  “Open,” the last of the longer-form, ruminative ballads, has a peculiar feature—in the final verse, Spektor for some reason accentuates the words with a repeated gasp/intake like that of a drowning person fighting for breath.  “The Party,” a fairly inconsequential song, appears to have both a trumpet part (John Daversa) and the singer herself vocally mimicking a muted trumpet toward the close.  Both the initial song (“Small Town Moon”) and the final one (“Jessica”) speak of getting older.  “Jessica,” the lightweight closer, which is the only track Spektor had never performed before, contains the telling line, “I can’t write a song for you/I’m out of melodies.”  Perhaps the artist just needed to recharge her batteries, as she gets accustomed to a different kind of life.  Or perhaps Spektor needs to rethink her approach entirely, to ask herself why all the musical storytelling (even “All the Rowboats”) sounds like Russian or Teutonic operettas in miniature, or what can be done to make those songs aiming straight for the heart more powerful and relatable through the truths of lived experience.    B

Sample song  “All the Rowboats”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CZ8ossU4pc&feature=c4-overview-vl&list=PL45FE615740733CF8

STARS, The North (Soft Revolution Records/ATO Records)—Like a hardy perennial, Stars keeps poking up through the snows of Canada with a new record every couple of years; unlike a perennial, the band does not go in for repeating itself, even if there is a distinctive Stars sound.  The North is at least obliquely a tribute to the group’s homeland, with CD jacket and booklet photography of sites in Montreal, where it is based, and Toronto, where the members all grew up.  But the boreal sensibility does not extend far beyond the title track (“It’s so cold in this country/October to May”).  For the most part, these are non-location-specific indie tunes, stories of romance and setbacks and tough lessons learned through experience, pulling off the trick of seeming both earthy and transcendent.  Torquil Campbell’s lyrics can be quirky and occasionally strike a false note, particularly when reaching for toughness or bravado, yet in general the words’ sensitivity matches the gentility of the music.  Amy Millan, who trades off lead vocals with Campbell, told the Montreal Gazette that The North was intended as “playful, joyful and hopeful,” a bit peculiar considering that it contains songs with the titles “Do You Want to Die Together?” and “A Song Is a Weapon.”  It is a grittier record, more consistent in tone than its predecessor, The Five Ghosts (see the 2010 music survey), which alternated between spectral longings and swingy bouts of ecstasy.  Nothing on The North is as rapturous as “Ageless Beauty” (from the 2005 Set Yourself on Fire) or In Our Bedroom after the War’s “Take Me to the Riot” (see the 2007 music survey).  But the ensemble of tunes is strong, reaching a peak of characteristic sublimity with the song “Progress.”  Sung by Millan, it represents the genuine leap of hope she referenced in the Gazette feature, its “shades of grey” transformed to silver as she intones, “You could be the one to kill mundane.”  The song’s soft, unassuming verse and wintry imagery likewise metamorphose into a soaring chorus radiating warmth and expectation.  The contrast set up by the following tune, “The 400,” is stark.  Here, Campbell sings of sundered souls (the title’s meaning is obscure but could represent the distance between Toronto and Montreal, or New York and Montreal, or New York and Toronto), with quiet desperation at the chorus, “It has to go right this time” (Millan on harmonies), amid reverberant piano chords, searing, grainy electric guitar tremolo hum, and a touch of harp from guest player Robin Best.  “A Song Is a Weapon,” following a hard-boiled verse and preliminary refrain set to Byrds-era guitar chiming, steers its wired energy toward the calmly voiced but alarming conclusion, “I’ve got one shot to kill you with a song,” set off by pizzicato strings.  “Do You Want to Die Together?” is naturally the most hyperbolic, heart-on-sleeve number, another tune in which a gossamer verse, a singsong dialogue between Campbell and Millan set to a 6/8 meter, morphs into a much more heavy-footed chorus.  This is the only selection in which the guitars actually wail at the bridge section (to be repeated at the song’s end).  “Do You Want to Die Together?” segues into the luminous, reflective “Lights Changing Colour” (Amy Millan always seems to get the prettiest tunes to sing solo).  The title song mildly if bleakly relates the tale of a mysterious disappearance, a man’s wanderlust carrying him well away from his domestic situation, with no report to those back home, Campbell warbling the chorus with an air of dreamy resignation.  The volubly titled “Hold On When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give It” spins a humdrum, advice-column (except for the line about “Take the weakest thing in you/And then beat the bastards with it”) verse portion from Campbell into an appealingly free-swinging chorus in which he reassuringly answers Millan’s high, silvered plaint, “What do I do when I get lonely?”  The opening track, “The Theory of Relativity,” is typically Stars in another way, a buzzy, broadly expository song that somehow knits together school days memories with a sense of “if the world is going to pot, we two are going to rise above it by holding tight to each other,” a notion of love as an epic feat of triumph.  Because Stars is a band that exercises tight control in its songwriting as a rule, I can readily forgive Torquil Campbell’s occasional flight of grandiosity.    A/A-

Sample song  “Hold On When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give It”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaRQV9vcIRs

TAMARYN, Tender New Signs (Kemado Records/Mexican Summer)—Musicians whose stock in trade is the shoegaze genre revel in the muddiness of the sound they create; still, I wish this record were not engineered to be quite so murky.  The words, while not indecipherable, are tough to pick out, and the label’s sketchy credits info provides no help whatsoever.  Tamaryn is both a person (Tamaryn Brown, a New Zealand expatriate who lived in New York for a number of years and now bases herself in San Francisco) and a band (she collaborates with a Californian named Rex John Shelverton, who plays some of the instruments, gets co-writing credit, and produces the sound).  Tender New Signs is the second full-length release.  It has the distinctive shoegaze elements of chiming guitars, distortion, and muddled sound, yet the music also makes a nod toward goth rock and dream pop.  At times, I am reminded as I listen of the Cocteau Twins; it is clear from her interviews that Tamaryn looks back to the late 1970s and 1980s for musical and stylistic inspiration.  Pretty much every song on Tender New Signs has something to keep the ear engaged, even if the songs’ textural similarity overall leads to a certain monotony after listening straight through.  One song, however, stands out from the rest:  “The Garden” is one of the year’s best singles.  No less forbidding than the others on the disc, it manages to summon sufficient melodic warmth through its blurry guitar chords in dotted-note rhythms to thaw things out, proceeding with stately if drowsy majesty as Tamaryn unspools a baffling, contradictory verse about things growing in a garden where nothing can grow.  “Transcendent Blue” is the most deliberately paced number on the album; contemplative and full of echo-chamber effects, it succeeds in fostering an aura of mystique by the time it reaches its bridge, though this is quickly washed away.  “Violet’s in a Pool,” the closing track, is an exercise in woozy, drawn-out arpeggiation, with the guitars becoming more screechy toward the finish.  “I’m Gone,” the opener (and first single from the album), offering a tentative scrap of melodious guitar accompaniment to pair with an almost antimelodic, keening sung verse, is not as distinctive but still pleasurable enough.  Which pretty well describes the entire record, distilled through the sonic sludge.        A-

Sample song  “The Garden”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsG9I40eVJU

TAME IMPALA, Lonerism (Modular Recordings/Fontana Distribution)—Few bands do the fuzz-toned psychedelia thing as adroitly as Tame Impala does on Lonerism.  The “group” is almost entirely Kevin Parker, of Perth, Australia, although he has a sometime composing partner in Jay Watson, who also helps out at times on guitar, keyboards, or percussion, as well as Dominic Simper (who plays guitars and drums).  The record was produced by Dave Fridmann of Flaming Lips.  Dealing with themes of social isolation, it manages to be impressively original while sounding like a throwback to the late 1960s/early 1970s.  Parker acknowledges a debt to Todd Rundgren, in particular, his A Wizard, a True Star (1973).  Some of the tracks may carry on a bit too long, but Parker is careful in most instances to keep mixing up the settings and arrangements enough to prevent sonic sedimentation.  “Elephant,” the first single released, stands a little way apart from the others as the most playful, hitting its trundling stride (with periodic pauses) straight off.  In a peculiar way, its bass ostinato is a more relaxed, slightly slower variation on that of Heart’s “Barracuda” (1977).  The rest of the record is more like “Nothing that Has Happened So Far Has Been Anything We Could Control,” a remonstrative title for a laid-back, synth-heavy number whose melody and countertheme are like sunshine burning through haze.  The anxiety expressed in the lyric of “Apocalypse Dreams,” the album’s second single, is belied by its warm tonal coloration; the suffusion of bliss in its long instrumental passages supersede the rising interrogative phrases that accompany the verse early on.  In spite of its title, “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” moves ahead at a stately pace; its verse section is as prosaic as they come, yet the chorus is so catchy (that sense of inevitability in shaping a melody that the best tunesmiths can create) that you might be humming it hours later.  Both “Keep on Lying” and the closing song, “Sun’s Coming Up,” make extensive use of ambient sounds, particularly snatches of others’ conversations in the former.  “Sun’s Coming Up” is in two parts:  the first is a fairly simple sung theme set to piano accompaniment in slow waltz tempo; the second is entirely instrumental, leaning heavily on the guitar’s wah-wah pedal and other bubbly distortion and rippling effects.  From the shimmery opener, “Be Above It,” fairly panting its simple refrain; to the insistent guitar riff, heavy beat, and jet engine–like flanging vocal modifications of “Mind Mischief”; to the plangent, breast-beating midtempo number “Why Won’t They Talk to Me?” Parker and Tame Impala repeatedly strike the right chord, staying true to the band’s vision and pulling off one of the more convincing albums of the year.        A/A-

Sample song  “Elephant”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnKUD_OztRE


AFRICAN

JANKA NABAY AND THE BUBU GANG, En Yay Sah (Luaka Bop)—After the early promise of the lively “Feba” (Look-Alike), En Yay Sah (I’m Scared) fades into a funk of mind-numbing repetitiveness that it never truly manages to escape.  Ahmed Janka Nabay is a native of Sierra Leone, a singer who adapted a traditional witchcraft and religious ceremonial music known as bubu for modern audiences.  In its original form, bubu is performed using bamboo canes and metal pipes as wind instruments; Janka Nabay kept the fleet, clipped rhythms but substituted mainly electronic instruments from Western pop bands to back his singing.  In fact, the Bubu Gang are all Westerners, Brooklynites from various indie groups, mainly the Skeletons but also Chairlift, Starring, and Highlife, with the exception of the backing vocalist, Boushra al-Saadi, who comes from just outside Damascus but also lives in New York these days.  (Janka Nabay himself makes his home in the Washington, D.C., area.)  The brisk pace throughout the album keeps things energetic; still, if speed in itself were a virtue, we might as well be listening to jackhammers or dentist’s drills.  “Feba,” a breezy, pulsating pop gem sung in call-and-response fashion between Janka Nabay and Saadi, offers enough variation, despite a truncated chorus that is little more than an extension of the verse, to feel like a genuine song rather than a dance exercise, and “Kill Me with Bongo” (Kill Me with Bluff) has a certain subtle intricacy to its rhythmic quasi-syncopations and moody harmonic elements that keeps the ear focused.  At the opposite extreme, “Somebody” is six and a half minutes of pure tedium, a track that sets up a single rhythmic/harmonic cell and keeps it up obsessively, with only minor embellishments, even as Janka Nabay speech-sings bluntly and artlessly about needing someone to love.  If he were in possession of a seductive voice, he might have managed to pull this off.  In fact, his singing is nothing special; Saadi’s b-vocals are far more appealing.  The final song, “Rotin” (In the Mountains), is an appeal to the president of Sierra Leone, Ernest Koroma, though what he is appealing for, aside from more native support for his music (and that the children of his country be better looked after), is not entirely clear.  This is a tune that arrives with freshness and alacrity but, because of its rigidly unvarying nature, ultimately seems longer than its three-minute duration.  “Ro-Lungi” (Airport City), another persistently monotonous selection, appears to tell an autobiographical story of “the bubu boy” escaping repression at home, only to find himself exploited by audiences abroad.  Songs are sung in Temne, one of the principal indigenous languages of Sierra Leone, as well as Arabic, English, and Krio (a pidgin English), or a combination of these.  Whatever potential Janka Nabay and his backing band have as performers, En Yay Sah, in spite of some critical rapture surrounding its release, undershoots it by a considerable measure.        B

Sample song  “Feba”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwYqdlMLgqM&list=PL60D2652CD8C76D5D

JAOJOBY, Mila Anao (Buda Musique)—The “King of Salegy,” Eusèbe Jaojoby earned the title by being one of the originators of that sound, emanating from the clubs and festivals of northern Madagascar.  He has been performing since the 1970s and has a string of albums to his credit.  Recent records have incorporated his family members into the act; his wife, Claudine Zafinera, sings backing and some lead vocals, and two of his sons, Elie and Jackson, play lead and bass guitar, while a third son, Anderson, also backs the singer as part of his chorus.  Salegy is an electrified version of traditional ritual music from ethnic groups located on Madagascar’s northwestern coast.  Bearing some similarities to West African highlife, salegy songs, sped-up “trance” music in 6/8 time, typically include a middle break, called a folaka, that is largely instrumental (though not a “bridge” in the Western sense since no new theme is introduced), accompanied by syncopated handclaps, vocal exhortations, whistles, and ululations.  Mila Anao (In Need of You) makes an impressive entrance with “Manantany” (the name of a tribal prime minister), which sets the tone with a fleet 6/8 meter and alacritous syncopations.  I cannot say that I am enraptured by Jaojoby’s somewhat constricted tenor, yet the interplay he has with his chorus on this tune is lively and engaging.  The follow-up song, “Zaho Z’Araiky Fo” (I Alone), taken at a slightly slower tempo in the same meter, is one of two songs to give prominence to the accordion, along with “Mangala Vaiavy” (Find Yourself a Woman), for a gusto-filled, quasi-zydeco performance.  “Resinao Zaho Niany” (You Will Conquer Me Today) ratchets back up the speed one notch (almost to the pace of “Manantany”) for a number that features Elie Lucas Jaojoby’s wailing electric guitar, channeling his inner rock god—again, there are some ear-bending syncopation patterns in the improvisatory section toward the end.  The title song, which comes fourth on the track list, more balladlike and sappier (honeyed, Kenny G–style saxophone filigree is never a good idea), represents a loss of momentum that is never fully recouped.  “Ti Hisoma” (Wanting to Have Fun), which starts off a little like a Juan Luis Guerra pop tune from the Dominican Republic (“Mangala Vaiavy” is set in this sort of country romantic Latin ballad style as well, maybe not so odd given the influences of Congolese soukous and French chanson), is interesting primarily for its abrupt rhythmic switch midway, from a cantering 4/4 to rapid-fire triplet figurations.  “Prezida” (President) vociferously lays out a political platform, what Jaojoby would do if president (primarily, combat ecological degradation), although he is reported to have sworn off politics, a treacherous topic in Madagascar, years ago.  The song’s stridency would be easier to take if it were in service of a more artful composition.  “Lohatona” (Spring) and “Niova” (Things Have Changed) are sung mainly by Zafinera; strangely, she is not credited for this in the CD booklet.  Of the two, the plangent “Niova,” with its moaning chorus and merengue-like jittery saxophone accents, is the more affecting, though Elie Jaojoby is let loose again with his electric on the shorter “Lohatona.”  The prancing  instrumental accompaniment framing “Mamirano” (Sweet) and the way the chorus resolves is weirdly like something out of a 1950s Catskills revue, even if the song’s folaka section is worlds away from that.  Two songs are recycled from earlier in Jaojoby’s career, “Maniny Ny Aminay” (Nostalgia for Home) and “Tsaiky Joby” (Black Child).  “Maniny Ny Aminay” is sung in a declarative, broadly swoony style evocative of the late Jackson do Pandeiro from Brazil, who popularized the hit “Chiclete com Banana.”  “Tsaiky Joby” leans heavily on a descending-scale three-note pattern (it complexifies this later on) but contains some beautifully piercing vocal harmonies in a sort of blue-tinged rapture about the beauty of black youth.  Songs are sung in the Malagasy language, a Malayo-Polynesian tongue, except for “Mangala Vaiavy,” which despite its Malagasy title is in French, and part of “Maniny Ny Aminay” is in French as well.  The CD booklet does not have lyrics but does contain a summation of each song’s theme in English and French.    B+

Sample song  “Prezida” (President; live version):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZM9JLHb73A

SIERRA LEONE’S REFUGEE ALL STARS, Radio Salone (Cumbancha)—Of the two Sierra Leone/Brooklyn combinations in this survey (see the Janka Nabay and the Bubu Gang entry above), Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars are more cosmopolitan in their musical interests and far more readily accessible to listeners, in no small part because Western ears are already attuned to the sound of reggae, which suffuses a number of the sixteen tracks on Radio Salone.  To be sure, there is plenty of repetitiveness on this record, just as there is on the Janka Nabay disc and even on the Congolese Staff Benda Bilili disc (see below).  Yet, it is not nearly as obsessive, nor is it as pervasive, making for a more gratifying set of songs all round.  What is remarkable about this record is how high spirited it is, given its members’ personal histories.  Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars are not a gimmick or a concept put together by Western producers, though they have obviously had Western help at every stage, from donated equipment to the priceless exposure of a documentary film to organizing tours and recording sessions.  They were genuine refugees from the horrors that civil war and ethnic strife visited on Sierra Leone in the 1990s, moving from camp to camp in neighboring Guinea, and quite a few of them have suffered wrenching losses along the way.  Ultimately, two of the founding members, guitarist Francis John Langba and bassist Idrissa Mallam Bangura, died prior to the making of the new disc.  Radio Salone is the band’s third recording; “Salone” is local Krio (Creole) for “Sierra Leone,” and the album is supposed to recreate the experience of listening to the radio in the pre–civil war days and having influences from the rest of Africa and beyond filter into the consciousness.  Victor Axelrod, who has worked with Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Antibalas (see above, in the mainstream pop section), and Amy Winehouse, among others, produced this record, inviting the band to Brooklyn to record.  The most delightfully singable—and amusing—number is “Big Fat Dog,” a calypso-tinged brief tale of hunger, want, and obsolescence but sung by bandleader and co-founder Reuben Koroma with such relentlessly raucous high spirits that one has to smile or even laugh with it.  However, the most fascinating tracks are the four brief “Goombay Interludes,” every fourth song on the album.  Little more than snippets (the first two last a bit longer than two minutes; the others are shorter), they are the most traditional cuts, just chanting and percussion, with one lead voice and a chorus in response, the booming drums infectious and irresistible—the most “African” pieces and yet not entirely so because the goombay rhythms, although originating in an African drum, came back overseas from the Bahamas, Bermuda, and Jamaica.  Interlude number two, “Papa Franco,” is a tribute to the late co-founder, Langba.  Jamaica’s long musical reach is amply displayed in tracks like “Reggae Sounds the Message” and “Work It Brighter,” not only in their reggae beats but also the biblical imagery in their lyrics.  Even the cheerily anodyne “Remake the World Again carries a partially masked reggae rhythm.  “Toman Teti M’Ba Akala” (How Would They Know that You Have Money?), sung in an African language, perhaps Temne, is pure dub reggae, with deep, sustained bass, languid beats, and choral chanting.  A number of other songs leave the Caribbean behind to celebrate purely African genres like highlife (“Gbara Case” and “Yesu Gorbu,” or “At Jesus’s Feet”—these are naturally exuberant, and the needle-stuck-in-groove repetition is mitigated by careful improvisation) or its offshoot, Afrobeat (“Mother in Law”), or soukous, as on the Latin-tinged “Mampama,” with its quick-footwork, syncopated 3/8 rhythms.  “Kali” and “Man Muyu,” the two longest tracks, are more jamlike, sometimes testing one’s patience but not tremendously so.  Ahmed Janka Nabay sings on “Man Muyu,” which he also co-wrote.  The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation named Radio Salone its world music album of the year, with considerable justification.    A-

Sample song  “Big Fat Dog”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nhn1jmGocY

STAFF BENDA BILILI, Bouger le Monde! (Crammed Discs)—There is little that could be more heartwarming than the story of a band made up of paraplegics and street kids, hailing from a teeming third-world city, overcoming unimaginable obstacles and making its mark on the global music scene.  Staff Benda Bilili, from Kinshasa, is precisely that:  a group founded by a handful of wheelchair-bound musicians who used to play near the city zoo, primarily Ricky Likabu Makodu and Coco Yakala Ngambali, both of whom sing lead vocals; Ngambali also plays guitar.  They took under their wing a number of able-bodied but desperately poor young buskers.  The star of the newer generation is Roger Landu, who invented his own instrument, a one-stringed lute he calls a satongé, devised out of a tin can for a resonator, a guitar string, and a piece of wood to hold the string in tension.  It is the satongé, heard throughout the record as a solo instrument, emitting a screech like that of the electric guitar accompaniment from Eric Clapton and Duane Allman in “Layla” (1970), that gives Staff Benda Bilili its characteristic sound.  The music is based in soukous, or Congolese rumba, and yet, hardly anything remains of the original Cuban animating spirit.  As a matter of opinion, the eleven tracks put forth on Bouger le Monde! (Making the World Move!) illustrate that songs can be lively and exuberant, with intricate and well-executed rhythms and percussion, and yet still be largely devoid of creative interest.  Staff Benda Bilili, like any number of West/Central African ensembles, relies on very simple, consonant, generally major-mode melodic figurations, with nearly no development throughout the course of a tune, and these are songs averaging between four and five minutes in duration.  The sense of repetitiveness is accentuated by the bare-bones harmonics, which tend to be laid out similarly in each song.  “Kuluna/Gangs,” a song about street gangs sung from a first-person perspective, and “Ne Me Quitte Pas” (Don’t Leave Me) have a driving sense of urgency missing from most of this laid-back record, but, aside from a pair of wildly electric solos from Landu, they are as stubbornly unchanging as any on the disc.  “Djambula” (Too Many Problems), the piece that follows “Kuluna,” is uncharacteristically dark in mood and tone, making it the subtlest composition on offer.  The guitar part that opens “Apandjokwetu” (This Is Our Place) is, not for the only time on this record, vaguely reminiscent of the Electric Light Orchestra instrumental “Fire on High” (1975).  The band has ten members, but because one hears only guitars, voices, and percussion, aside from the unique sound of the satongé, it does not have the sound of a big band at all.  Songs are ordered on the record to alternate fast and slow numbers, more or less.  They are sung in Lingala, or sometimes in French, and, while direct English translations are not available, the CD booklet does include a synopsis of each song’s meaning.   Call and response, a time-honored tradition in African music, is a device the band resorts to frequently.  For some, the bright sunniness of the music and the delicate yet vigorous dance rhythms will be enough; for me, it takes more than an occasional modulation, an intensification of a chorus through adding voices, or the stray improvisatory embroidery of a vocal solo to relieve the tediousness of music that remains relentlessly stuck in the same gear from beginning to end.    B/B-

Sample song  “Osali Mabe”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwxLu2O_hE0


LATIN

LOS MÍTICOS DEL RITMO, Los Míticos del Ritmo (Soundway Records)—Will Holland’s second outfit to appear in this survey (see the Ondatrópica entry in the mainstream pop section above), Los Míticos del Ritmo is the only one I placed in the Latin category because, despite having three tracks that cover pop/rock or reggae, it is more traditional than any other “Latin” record reviewed here.  Whereas Ondatrópica is very long, Los Míticos del Ritmo (The Mythics of Rhythm) is short, less than half the length of the former, with eleven tracks, only one of which exceeds four minutes.  A lukewarm collection of cumbias, with one Colombian-style merengue track thrown in, Los Míticos del Ritmo was meant by Holland, a U.K. expatriate in Colombia who sometimes records as “Quantic,” to sound like “a lost cumbia classic.”  Like the Ondatrópica disc, this one was recorded using analog equipment, but with more in the way of overdubbing via four-track tape.  It was produced in Holland’s own Sonido del Valle studio in Cali with a half dozen Colombian musicians.  Half the instrumental numbers (there is only the occasional vocal exhortation or whoop, no lyrics on the album) were composed by Holland himself, with the others taken from the realms of Colombian cumbia and vallenato, as well as reggae and American pop music.  I am not sure the world needed cumbia versions of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” and Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” but they are both here, along with the Abyssinians’ classic “Satta Massagana” (from 1969) and two cumbias:  the late singer Gildardo Montoya’s “Fabiola” and Emiro Caicedo’s “Samaria,” originally written for his group Los Alegres del Valle.  On songs where the saxophone or clarinet of Wilfredo Peña is absent (“Cumbia Comejen,” “Samaria,” “Fabiola”), Holland’s accordion carries the melodies by itself—the other players are all part of the rhythm section, several percussionists and upright bassist Fernando Silva.  The guacharaca, a tubelike instrument scraped by a fork implement shaped like an Afro comb, is important enough to the music to be listed separately from the other percussion.  As was the case on the recent Frente Cumbiero record (see the 2011 music survey), the clarinet parts can sound strangely like klezmer, particularly on the two Anglo/American covers.  In fact, “Otro Muerde el Polvo” deprives “Another One Bites the Dust” of any sense of menace, turning it instead into a bar mitzvah reception piece.  The most arresting selection, however, is the interpretation of the Abyssinians’ tune, here titled “Satta Massa Cumbia.”  Set to a plodding cumbia beat, its hymnal sobriety, like something the Budos Band (see the 2010 music survey) might come up with, is accentuated by the reverb added to the accordion line at the conclusion of phrases.  “Fabiola” alternates between two different cumbia rhythms, one quite deliberate in its pacing, the other light-footed and playful, with a modest drum solo interspersed.  The brief “Samaria,” with its freewheeling accordion and cowboy yelps, is more in the vallenato style of coastal Colombia.  “La Libanesa” (The Lebanese Girl), one of Holland’s own compositions, more successfully melds cumbia and Middle Eastern idioms than his “Libya” on the Ondatrópica recording, with the dual-tracked clarinet and sax approaching the sounds of the Arabic ney and shawm, along with gypsy-esque handclaps.  “Cumbia Comejen” lays out a spirited if minor-mode theme, making ample use of both upper and lower registers of the accordion.  The other Holland tracks (“Willy’s Merengue,” “Cumbia de Mochilla,” “Noche de Tamborito”) strike me as a little too eager to please in their attempt to recreate a folkish sound of yesteryear.        B+

Sample song  “Satta Massa Cumbia”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKF7YP0QzOU


JAZZ

RAVI COLTRANE, Spirit Fiction (Blue Note Records)—When you are the son of one of the giants of jazz, that is a tough legacy to hold up.  Ravi Coltrane (who is also a second cousin to Steven Ellison—see the Flying Lotus review in the mainstream pop/rock section), born a couple of years before his father’s untimely death, has wisely not allowed that to weigh heavily on him, even as he chose to pursue the same instrument and idiom as Trane.  He worked as a sideman for a number of years before stepping into the role of bandleader with Moving Pictures in 1998.  For Spirit Fiction, he is working with two different lineups, one his quintet, consisting of Ralph Alessi on trumpet; Geri Allen, piano; James Genus, bass; and Eric Harland, drums.  The alternate setup, a quartet, features a different pianist, Luis Perdomo, and rhythm section (Drew Gress, bass, and E. J. Strickland, percussion).  Fellow saxophonist Joe Lovano, a ubiquitous presence on the New York jazz scene, produced the record for Blue Note and joins Coltrane for the two tracks that are not original to this recording:  Ornette Coleman’s vivacious “Check Out Time” and Paul Motian’s appropriately spectral, almost classically modernist “Fantasm.”  Although there appear to be some missed entrances among the jagged attacks by the trumpeter and the two saxophonists in the Coleman, they are faithful to both the song’s punchy verve and its more disorderly free-time midsection.  Otherwise, Coltrane and Alessi play nicely off each other in the three compositions written by the trumpeter:  “Klepto,” “Who Wants Ice Cream,” and “Yellow Cat.”  The first of these is genial if a bit wayward yet has a hard, postbop edge to its spiky rhythms.  “Yellow Cat” has a relaxed, slouchy cool, as serenity ultimately prevails over restless interpretations veering away from tonality.  “Roads Cross,” the opening piece, and “Cross Roads” are clearly related tracks, written by Coltrane with his quartet bandmates, along with the brief title track, as a pair of duos whose tracks were mixed in the studio.  Both are furtive in nature, with the saxophonist’s tentative probing in the former answered by the more aggressively atonal skittering keyboard runs from Perdomo.  Before long, Coltrane’s soprano sax picks up sufficient momentum and heft to become a true counterweight to the piano line.  In “Cross Roads,” it is Perdomo’s piano part that begins more sketchily while the soprano sax asserts itself in bursts of energy throughout.  “Spirit Fiction,” in its brief span, is hushed, with a Latin-tinged percussiveness as its spine, but the saxophone solo takes flight in multiple directions.  “The Change, My Girl,” Coltrane’s own composition, is an appealingly tender ballad with a blue, lachrymose coloration to it, a respite from some of the more cerebral concepts on the album.  “Spring & Hudson” (after an intersection in New York’s SoHo), is essentially a two-minute-plus improvisation by the saxophonist, with accompaniment from Strickland.    A/A-

Sample song  “The Change, My Girl”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apKIMbhW9vY&list=AL94UKMTqg-9Cm5Q0GWl8lyGctKJv3-va-

VIJAY IYER TRIO, Accelerando (ACT Music)—The music of Vijay Iyer rewards concentration.  His compositions are not forbiddingly inaccessible, though they are certainly cerebral and at times dry and schematic.  Raised in the suburbs of Rochester, N.Y. (as was I), he pursued degrees in mathematics and physics at Yale University, eventually receiving an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in technology and the arts focused on musical cognition.  As evidence that his pieces can summon plenty of passion, listen to the gradual buildup in momentum to a frothy finish in “Optimism,” one of five original tracks on Accelerando, an album devoted to exploration of music based on dance rhythms—music in motion.  “Optimism” navigates its way from the formidably abstract to a more diatonically friendly cycling, with the pianist heightening the intensity by doubling the notes in the coda.  The title track is percussive, full of dire arpeggios, and highly conceptual; it began life as an experiment to see how Karole Armitage’s dancers would adjust to a steadily increasing pace.  The album’s scene setter, “Bode,” is a stark, bare-bones theme backed by an ominous rumble in both the bass clef of the piano and in the rhythm section of Stephan Crumb (bass) and Marcus Gilmore (drums).  “Actions Speak” is packed so full of busy keyboard runs that it barely pauses for breath or contemplation (Gilmore is given space for an extended drum solo), more technically impressive than affecting.  Of the album’s borrowed tracks, three come from the jazz world and the other three from pop/disco or electronica.  The most eager to please among the jazz numbers is Duke Ellington’s “The Village of the Virgins,” written for his 1970 ballet The River.  Played straight up at first as a piano chorale, it starts to swing broadly midway through and then quiets down again, bringing the album to a benign conclusion.  Herbie Nichols’s thorny “Wildflower” is portrayed as restless and roiling.  On “Little Pocket Size Demons” (1993) by the avant garde saxophonist/flutist Henry Threadgill, the bassist takes a brief turn in the spotlight with some otherworldly (or underworldly) bowing.  This is a piece whose unruly atonalities and playful turns Iyer gamely takes on with a side order of relish.  On the pop side, “MmmHmm,” a cosmically mellow tune from Flying Lotus (see above, in the mainstream pop section) and his frequent collaborator, Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner, is blissfully serene until the fluid soloing starts, at which point Crump becomes once more Iyer’s active partner.  Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature” (from his 1982 megaseller Thriller), actually written by Steve Porcaro of Toto, is drawn out and dissected in various ways, elasticizing its rhythms in the lengthy middle section before returning to the familiar chorus.  It is also given a false ending, followed by a sumptuous little interplay between bassist and pianist that keeps a harmonic liaison to the original while otherwise wandering far afield for a couple of minutes.  “Star of the Story” by Heatwave, a U.K./American/German disco band of the late 1970s better known for the hits “Boogie Nights” (1976) and “Groove Line” (from the same album as “Star of the Story” in 1978), is in this instance a prettified version of what, to me, is a tepid song, considering the band name.  On a record devoted to movement, this was a fairly inert choice, yet Iyer’s eclecticism otherwise serves him well, as it has done throughout his career.    A/A-

Sample song  “Optimism”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y43jgWvF8rU

GUILLERMO KLEIN/LOS GUACHOS, Carrera (Sunnyside Records)—Since their fantastic Filtros (see the 2008 music survey) set such high expectations, I have been more reserved about what Guillermo Klein y los Guachos have been doing.  In 2010, they put out a record (see the 2010 music survey) devoted to the music of Cuchi Leguizamón, an Argentine songwriter in the folkloric vein, familiar to Argentines like Klein but little known beyond the Southern Cone.  With Carrera (Career), Klein returns to his own songwriting, with results that prompt more respect than enthusiasm and sometimes simply leave me cold.  As is customary, Klein likes to sing as well as play the piano, although he is hardly a gifted vocalist; moreover, he challenges himself at times by stretching his vocal facilities to the limit, particularly in “Moreira.”  “Globos,” the second song on the disc, is the most palatable of the vocal selections, though it is also the first track to introduce the peculiar orchestral sonorities Klein often favors; in that instance, he stays within his vocal comfort zone and is nicely complemented by his alto saxophonist/flautist Miguel Zenón (see the 2011 music survey for Zenón’s own disc as bandleader) singing harmony.  For the title song, which concludes the album, he moves into a higher than normal range, to disagreeable effect; this is perhaps the weakest song of all.  Unsurprisingly, the instrumental compositions are the most enjoyable.  Klein’s style is sober, urbane, harmonically sophisticated, and this comes through clearly on the disc’s choice cuts, “Burrito Hill” and “ArteSano” (Sane Art or Healthy Art, a wordplay on “artisan”).  There is less playing around with rhythmic slippage on Carrera than there was on Filtros, yet one can still hear it surreptitiously at work in a couple of places.  Of the ten tracks, seven feature one of the eight non-rhythm-section players in los Guachos other than Klein himself—only trumpeter Richard Nant, who composed “Niños” (Children), does not get a solo turn.  The most striking interpretation on the disc is Klein’s orchestration of the Argentine classical composer Alberto Ginastera’s Piano Sonata No. 1, opus 22, first movement.  He exaggerates the percussiveness and dynamics of Ginastera’s opening movement, assigning its sharp accents to the horns and really digging into the syncopations expressively.  Klein also essays a song by a tango composer of the first half of the twentieth century, Juan Carlos Cobián, and his lyricist, Enrique Cadícamo, “Los Mareados” (The Dizzy People, or the Doped Ones), here just titled “Mareados”; he sings it with passion, but a stronger vocalist would have done proper justice to the piece.  “Burrito Hill” begins with subtle interplay between guitarist Ben Monder and the pianist/bandleader, while trombonist Sandro Tomasi’s solo is so understated, one hardly notices it.  “ArteSano” also stands out for its graceful ensemble work, bound together by an intricate composition of shifting moods.  Nant’s “Niños,” for which Diego Urcola takes the trumpet solo (not much more adventurous than the brief one in the Andrea True Connection’s “More, More, More” [1976]), is appropriately playful, energetic and tightly wound with syncopation.  “Mariana” is in romantic ballad vein, more consonant than we are accustomed to hearing from Klein, pretty but far from indelible.        B+

Sample song  “Burrito Hill”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=663IgxFCbMI

DAVE LIEBMAN AND LEWIS PORTER (WITH MARC RIBOT, BRAD JONES, CHAD TAYLOR), Surreality (Enja/Yellowbird Records)—My first exposure to saxophonist Dave Liebman came only recently, when he performed at one of the two marathon sessions that marked the closing of the Jazz Galllery’s original location on Hudson Street in Lower Manhattan.  The thought running through my head at the time was, “The old guy can blow!”  Clearly, I was underestimating “the old guy,” who not long ago received a Jazz Masters lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts and who has played with the likes of Miles Davis, Chick Corea, Elvin Jones, and others, not to mention Pierre Boulez’s Ensemble InterContemporain.  This last association underlines his commitment to the vanguard of artistic creation and interpretation; in jazz these days, it can often seem as if the older generation numbers the genuine radicals among its ranks, while younger players are either swayed by historicism (viz., Wynton Marsalis) or chase pop dreams (see the Robert Glasper review in the mainstream pop/rock section above).  This is not to say that Surreality is way out there—it is an eminently listenable disc.  But it does feature selections by Ornette Coleman/Pat Metheny and free jazz pioneer Albert Ayler, and Liebman’s own compositions do not play it safe.  For this record, Liebman teams up with Lewis Porter, who is a jazz pianist but perhaps better known as a musicologist and who helped Liebman write his autobiography a year or so ago.  The inclusion of electric guitarist Marc Ribot in the ensemble gives certain passages more of a rock sensibility; his inimitable presence on the splendid, spacy first track, “Olivier” (written by Porter and dedicated to Olivier Messiaen), echoes his playing on Dave Douglas’s masterwork Freak In (2003), which is like a jazz tribute to acid rock.  The opening strains of Liebman’s arrangement of John Coltrane’s “Alabama,” which rounds out the record, evoke those of Santana’s  version of “Black Magic Woman” from 1970.  “Alabama” is all about the deep, sustained grooves, a dirge in memory of the victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham in 1963.  The band members mesh together two Ayler compositions, “Omega Is the Alpha” and “Ghosts,” that I suppose lie toward the tamer end of the late saxophonist’s repertory but serve as a basis for a fiesta of gloriously blurry, noisy improvisation midstream.  Porter’s Yamaha Motif electric piano (also used for “Olivier”) lends a futuristic feel to the proceedings.  “Trigonometry,” a bright, snappy tune by Coleman and Metheny, is treated less as a touchstone than a flimsy front and back cover for a rush of freeform improvising, all in good fun.  Liebman’s own “Get Me Back to the Apple” sneaks in a brief Thelonious Monk allusion.  The only truly new material on the disc is the title track by Liebman and the two group improvisations, “Untitled Free Ballad” 1 and 2.  “Surreality” is the most modernistic piece on the album, full of dissonant stretches and kicky rhythmic slippages, as Liebman’s sax honks and squeals like nowhere else, concluding with a sort of stop-time set of blaring traffic-noise bursts.  The quieter, contemplative, quasi-classical “free ballads” are not uninteresting in their own right but represent a dip in the band’s collective energy.    A

Sample song  [none available]
 

MEDESKI MARTIN & WOOD, Live: Free Magic (Indirecto Records)—Spliced from three separate East Coast concert outings, Free Magic is a set of five long-form jams, slow developing and generally taking inspiration from the blues, though there are certainly passages of spirited noise as well.  It is debatable whether this is Medeski Martin & Wood at the trio’s absolute best; sometimes, the drawn-out numbers seem like a bit too much of a good thing.  Yet, it makes for an entertaining session all the same.  John Medeski, the group’s keyboard specialist, plays the piano, the prepared piano (a technique in which the piano strings or hammers or dampers are weighted down with foreign objects), the “struti box” (shruti box), the melodica, and something called a “mylotica” (I have no idea what that is).  One hears all or almost all of these in the opening segment of the first song, “Doppler.”  The prepared piano can sound like an African thumb piano or like a toy instrument, and something else yields a theremin-like soprano wail, while the struti box provides the drone underlying all.  The melodica weaves a curlicue of melody throughout the proceedings.  About four and a half minutes in, bassist Chris Wood begins repeating a three-note rising-scale sequence.  Medeski, switching to conventional piano, then fashions a swinging, bluesy melody and variations on top of this ground bass.  “Blues for Another Day” begins with four minutes of rampaging pianistic anarchy, while the trio’s percussionist, Billy Martin, keeps pace frantically.  When it ends, Medeski commences with a broad bar-room blues theme, first taken slowly in stop-time and then gaining impulse and a regular beat.  He clearly enjoys alternating between stride piano, saloon-style showiness, and intervals that recall the chaos of the opening, yet not so much so as to hesitate about leaving it far behind when it comes time for an extended solo, furiously chatty on the keys.  “Free Magic/Ballade in C Minor, ‘Vergessene Seelen’ [Forgotten Souls]” is, after all that expenditure of energy, a respite, mostly a quiet, ghostly dialogue between prepared piano and percussion, reminiscent of King Crimson’s “Providence” (1974 and also given its name from an East Coast concert appearance), if one were to substitute a violin for the amplified standing bass and prepared piano.  Two-thirds of the way through, as it transitions from “Free Magic” to the Ballade, it picks up doleful wisps of melody and a coherent bass repeating pattern in minor mode for the first time, riding that pattern through to the finish.  For “Where’s Sly,” Medeski limns a slinky theme, again born of the blues, and pours his soul into his riffing off that theme, building to some thunderous left-hand figurations.  Following a final keyboard flourish, the second half of the track is taken up with an absurdly long (seven and a half minutes) percussion solo, in which Martin basically hits everything within reach (which is quite a variety), particularly in the final minute, when he really churns up a lather.  At one subdued point, one can actually hear an audience member shout an obsequy, “Thank you, Billy!”  The final piece, “Nostalgia in Times Square/Angel Race,” is the only one not original to the group.  It is billed as a blending of a Charles Mingus tune with one by Sun Ra, although the listener primarily hears Mingus’s playful “Nostalgia in Times Square.”  This features Wood early on, even if Medeski predominates later on; other than “Doppler,” which the bassist wrote himself, this is the only selection where he really gets to solo.        A-

Sample song  “Free Magic/Ballade in C Minor, ‘Vergessene Seelen’”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moZqoNSvluk

KURT ROSENWINKEL, Star of Jupiter (WOMMusic)—Quite a few critics effusively praised this double-record set by Philadelphia-born guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel and his quartet (Aaron Parks, keyboards; Eric Revis, bass; Justin Faulkner, drums).  I am still scratching my head as to why.  Rosenwinkel may be a masterly guitarist, but he is dissipating his talents on material (that he composed himself) shooting for a cool, celestial/electronic jazz vibe but too often ending up closer to Lite FM.  Although a number of the dozen tracks on Star of Jupiter are recognizably jazz, they fall toward the pop end of the spectrum, and several seem more like jazzy pop, à la Chuck Mangione or the later George Benson.  At their low points, I am inclined to think that Rosenwinkel’s compositions combine the worst aspects of Jan Garbarek (see the 2009 music survey) and Lee Ritenour.  At its best, it introduces some interesting harmonic ideas, particularly in “Heavenly Bodies” (whose fadeout is entirely too protracted) and “Déjà Vu,” yet all in the service of pedestrian primary melodies.  Because a piece is poppy does not automatically make it bad, either.  “Kurt I” is a tight-knit song with the most consequentially ingratiating tune on the album.  “Gamma Band,” the opening composition, comes at the listener with clipped, 5/4 rhythms and a chattering piano line, but the main “theme,” if it can be called that, a repeated series of three rising long tones sung by Rosenwinkel himself, surrounded by instrumental pyrotechnics, is the sort of thing one might expect to hear at a Jan Hammer concert.  Acres of the twin discs are taken up with innocuously agreeable melodies encrusted in mellow settings.  The guitarist, in Keith Jarrett mold, likes to double his part by humming the tune as he plays.  Some of the boppier tunes on which he does this, such as “Homage A’Mitch” or “A Shifting Design” (two of several tracks that I believe predated the record itself), are like an instrumentalized take on Ella Fitzgerald.  “A Shifting Design” is the most rhythmically knotty and intricate composition of all, and when it hits a “straightaway,” a walking bass that is more of a running bass from Revis keeps it motoring along.  The second disc is a slight improvement over the first, yet neither one is music for the ages.  I hope that Rosenwinkel, now embarking on middle age, does not permanently cast aside experimentation in favor of musical pleasantries and slouching; we shall see.    B-

Sample song  “Kurt I”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1R5K4riubE

YOSVANY TERRY, Today’s Opinion (Criss Cross Jazz)—Here is today’s opinion on Today’s Opinion:  while there are a number of stimulatingly novel aspects for the listener, far too much sounds routine or ho-hum.  I get a sense that Terry is a better composer than improviser; the opening ensemble themes show potential, yet his solos are fairly pedestrian, and the same can be said for those of his trumpeter, Michael Rodriguez.  (The piano solos from Osmany Paredes are the best.)  A native of Camagüey, Cuba, who has worked with the legendary Chucho Valdés among others and who has been residing in New York for more than a decade, Terry is attempting a new jazz approach to Afro-Cuban music; the risk is in denaturing it by taking away its soul.  The best tracks are the opener, “Summer Relief,” and those toward the end of the track list.  “Summer Relief” is sprightly (even the horn solos in this instance) and has all the variety of a suite, including some chanting at the outset and more toward the close by the group’s Latin percussionist, Pedro Martinez.  (No other track here has vocals.)  “Contrapuntístico,” its name notwithstanding, does not feature counterpoint (perhaps, given the record’s title, it simply refers to a counterargument).  As the second track on the album, it is the first to display run-of-the-mill soloing work, and this takes up the bulk of the performance.  Its most striking passage is about two-thirds of the way through:  a set of dramatic, stop-time, rocklike piano chord offsets that leads me to speculate on whether Terry listens to old Emerson, Lake & Palmer discs in his spare time, which eventually guide the composition back to its primary theme.  “Inner Speech” begins with an inspired, slinky melody but, again, loses altitude when the solos fail to soar.  The slowest and most contemplative number, “Returning Home” is a dark-hued ballad whose mood is broken by Terry’s mewling soprano sax solo.  “Suzanne” is the only title on the disc not written by Terry, rather by his brother, Yunior, the band’s bassist, along with the mysterious “Marcio B.A,” whom I would assume is Brazilian.  It has telltale Brazilian elements:  a chugging, light bossa nova beat and, toward the end, the characteristic squeak of cuíca friction drums.  The last minute and a half or so changes the texture of the piece entirely, as it returns to the set of tightly wound syncopations that introduced the central theme.  A Japanese spareness characterizes the scene setting of “Another Vision of Oji,” beginning with a lengthy bass solo from Yunior Terry, followed by cymbal washes.  It is far more successful than “Returning Home” at maintaining a brooding aura throughout since the horns’ improvisatory ventures deepen the spell rather than detract.  The final track, “Son Contemporáneo,” is the most overtly Latin and consequently a great deal of fun.  It spotlights Gonzalo Rubalcaba as guest keyboard player, and he does not disappoint, contrasting rapid triplet sequences against cinematic chords like those in “Contrapuntístico” at the outset and using some whizzy electronic filigree in a couple of passages that puts the “contemporary” in “contemporary son.”  He also performs some daringly modernistic soloing in concert with Rodriguez’s trumpet, while Yosvany Terry switches from the sax to the chekeres (gourd shakers).  Funny thing—I had always viewed Rubalcaba’s own music as a little dull; on this album he becomes the life of the party.    B+/B

Sample song  “Summer Relief”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVsqnsefjq4

DAVID VIRELLES, Continuum (Pi Recordings)—The jazz analogue to a visit to a botánica, one of those Spanish Caribbean spiritual shops selling herbal remedies and charms, Continuum may well appeal to those with a deeper interest in santería  and abakuá, an Afro-Cuban secret fraternal order, than I can muster.  Virelles, a young Cuban émigré pianist who pursued his postsecondary and musical education in Toronto before coming to New York, sees his “continuum” as taking in the visual as well as the aural arts; thus, the painter Alberto Lescay, who was commissioned to produce twenty paintings relating to the project, is listed on the album cover as part of the group.  Virelles favors abstraction in his composition and a spare, clean modernism; Larry Blumenfeld in the Wall Street Journal compared his work to that of Cecil Taylor.  This fits in well with the mission of his record label, which produces a fair amount of challenging and boundary-defying music and bills itself as “dedicated to the innovative,” though not always with felicitous results, as with Tyshawn Sorey’s Oblique-I (see the 2011 music survey).  The dozen songs on Continuum fall into three categories, with some overlapping:  incantation-related poetry; piano ruminations with light percussion accompaniment or keyboard tone poems; and heavily percussive numbers.  The last of these are generally the most satisfying.  “The Executioner,” “Royalty,” “A Celebration, Circa 1836,” and “Mañongo Pabio” use a variety of Caribbean and African percussion and are rhythmically compelling, even if, as in the case of “A Celebration, Circa 1836,” the pattern never varies.  In that tune, for a time, the piano line is completely independent of the percussion, as if their presence in the same studio were incidental.  For “Royalty,” the percussion is suitably stately, and one can readily envision an African kingly ceremony.  By contrast, the muted parabolic waves of the Wurlitzer organ used for “Mañongo Pabio” make it the most spacy and least traditional-sounding piece on the disc.  “The Executioner,” one of the longer tracks, is by turns churning and clomping (in the latter instance, the rhythm is meted out by bassist Ben Street), which tends to cut the astringency of Virelles’s own antimelodic outbursts.  The piece quiets down midstream to allow a few drum flourishes from Andrew Cyrille.  Toward the end, it picks up its own incantation; these are all voiced by percussionist Román Díaz.  The other incantatory pieces do not amount to a lot musically, perhaps more in dramatic terms.  Díaz intermixes several African tongues with his Spanish; when the latter shades into the former, that is where my comprehension stops.  On “Our Birthright,” the album’s longest selection, he makes repeated references to “María la O” and asks, “Who is she?”  (Presumably, a syncretistic figure merging the iconic Virgin Mary figure “María de la O” with an African orisha counterpart.)  The early musical ensemble sections of “Our Birthright” more or less follow orderly chord progressions, with some background noise, while the later ones are the most harshly dissonant and chaotic on the record, adding as guests the trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson and woodwind players Román Filiú and Mark Turner.  By contrast, “One,” which opens the album,” and “To Know,” which closes it, are little more than the recitation, ornamented by bits of piano or pump organ and percussion (bells, maracas, gongs, etc.).  It is hard to know what to make of the rumination-type songs such as “El Brujo [The Sorcerer] and the Pyramid,” “Short Story for Piano,” or “Threefold.”  Often, they are composed of lovely little cells that are put together in a determinedly atonal, impressionistic manner, yet they are also as wispy as tissue paper, with long sections of deep quietude.  “Spectral” is like a tone poem suspended in gelatin amid tart fruits, with quavering pump organ and noisy percussive accents.        B

Sample song  “One”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZZPsDPeQF4

DAVID S. WARE/PLANETARY UNKNOWN, Live at Jazzfestival Saalfelden 2011 (AUM Fidelity)—David S. Ware’s final recording (barring posthumous discoveries)—the saxophonist died in October 2012 after battling kidney failure for years (my friend Steve Holtje was one of those who offered to donate a kidney following an appeal from the musician)—is the apotheosis of free jazz.  Recorded live in the summer of 2011 at Jazzfestival Saalfelden, in the Austrian Alps not far from Salzburg, it features his Planetary Unknown lineup:  his longtime keyboard partner Cooper-Moore (a.k.a. Gene Ashton) and a rhythm section of William Parker on bass and Muhammad Ali on drums.  Most listeners who are not already fans are bound to find the material—three long pieces each given the title “Precessional”—raucous and cacophonous, and they would not be entirely wrong in that judgment.  There are no melodies to embellish, though there are clear sections of soloing.  Ware produces a range of sounds from his horn, none of which have anything to do with the sort of smooth crooning that a pop “jazz” performer like Kenny G. specializes in.  Meanwhile, Cooper-Moore races up and down the keyboard in anarchic fashion.  The opening minutes of the first composition, “Precessional 1” (which lasts more than half an hour), are particularly aggressive:  Ware’s bleating, squealing, and honking figurations on the tenor sax and Cooper-Moore’s skittering flourishes seem to be working at cross-purposes, except rhythmically, though it eventually becomes evident that the two are in fact listening and responding to each other.  About sixteen minutes into the first track, Ware takes a breather in favor of an extended display of atonal virtuosity by Cooper-Moore, followed by a shorter bass solo from Parker.  Toward the end of this interval, the soundstage actually becomes quiet for a time.  When Ware returns for his own solo, about ten minutes before the conclusion, it is with a fat, sour tone like a carton of milk gone bad.  The ensemble returns for more of what characterized the first half of the piece, and it then ends with Ware cycling through a particularly shrill set of notes that is sustained for more than a minute—apparently, his health problems were not getting in the way of his mastery of circular breathing technique.  “Precessional 2” begins immediately upon the ending of the first number, and, although it offers much the same fare, it is actually a little more restrained in nature; Cooper-Moore’s playing in particular is less iconoclastic, if little less dissonant.  About halfway through, one can hear one of the band members chanting and caterwauling (whoever it is, he is not credited on the CD cover)—this goes on for a solid couple of minutes during the improvisatory section.  The final “Precessional” is both the shortest (at fourteen and a half minutes) and the easiest on the ears.  It begins, strikingly, with a lengthy bass solo by Parker, who is a bandleader in his own right.  His strained, muted tone is produced by bowing the strings close to the bridge of the instrument, I presume, and there is one passage especially that is evocative of the synthesized cello introduction to King Crimson’s song “Fallen Angel” (1974).  “Precessional 3” then becomes a protracted dialogue between Parker and Ware.  Even this piece waxes noisy but only for a spell.  The European audience laps it up, together with their plastic cups of Ottakringer Zwickl or Erzbergbräu or whatever, which I have no doubt enhance the experience.  I cannot envision listening to this disc for pleasure; at the same time, I have at least some sense of its artistic merit, as the last testament of a performer who was uncompromising right up to the end.    B+

Sample song  “Precessional 3”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSUC5ZahSNI


CLASSICAL

As always, I will comment on the classical records without assigning grades.

JOHN ADAMS, Harmonielehre; Short Ride in a Fast Machine (San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas) (SFS Media)—Recorded live at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall in 2010 and 2011, these two compositions from the mid-1980s display John Adams, one of America’s foremost composers of recent times (and a longtime Bay Area resident), at the cusp of turning away from the minimalism and the mind-numbing repetitiveness that was of the moment and toward a sort of neo-Romanticism.  Not that there was a clean break.  Harmonielehre, which is in essence a forty-plus-minute, three-movement symphony and was named after Arnold Schoenberg’s treatise (“A Theory of Harmony” in English), has its passages of repeating figurations in the strings, particularly in the obsessive third movement, “Meister Eckhardt and Quackie.”  The first movement, which is untitled, begins with a booming ensemble before settling into a lengthy middle section featuring a copious diet of cycling string patterns but also some truly lovely melodic elements in the violins and brass.  Following an interval of suspension, the full orchestra rebounds to double and triple forte in an intense supernova blaze constituted mostly by chattering monotone syncopations.  The central movement, “The Anfortas Wound,” named after a king of Celtic/medieval mythology whose wounds would not heal, is appropriately a quiet outpouring of pain that builds to an anguished trumpet cry two-thirds of the way in, more broadly lyrical than the other movements yet also the most untethered to tonality.  “Meister Eckhardt and Quackie” (“Quackie” was what the composer called his then infant daughter) starts off songfully, as a kind of candy-coated child’s fantasy world before becoming mired in mechanistic proceedings.  “Short Ride in a Fast Machine” lasts just five minutes, a series of staccato attacks in trumpets and percussion, with woodblock, cymbal, and flares of piccolo, holding tight to a single pitch and only occasionally modulating it.  This yields ultimately to an arcing figuration before thunderous drums bring the piece to a conclusion.

DEREK BERMEL, Canzonas Americanas (Alarm Will Sound, conducted by Alan Pierson, with Luciana Souza [soprano for Canzonas Americanas], Kiera Duffy [soprano for “At the End of the World”], Timothy Jones [baritone for Natural Selection]) (Cantaloupe Music)—The hip New York ensemble Alarm Will Sound performs a selection of music written for small-group ensemble by Derek Bermel, a youngish clarinetist and composer and New York native.  Because Bermel studied with Louis Andriessen and Henri Dutilleux as well as William Bolcom and has also traveled to examine firsthand traditional music forms from Bulgaria, Israel, Brazil, and Ghana, this disc represents the considerable range of his experiences.  The titular composition, a suite of four movements commissioned by Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is mostly Latin American in inspiration, although the broad first movement smacks of the Americana folk music of Aaron Copland or Ferde Grofé.  The fourth movement, “Itaparica,” is a lilting song about an island in Bahia state, Brazil, whose lyric was written by Bermel himself (other songs on the disc were set to the poetry of others).  It is sung (in English) by the well-known Brazilian chanteuse Luciana Souza.  “At the End of the World” sets a short, postapocalytic poem by the novelist Nicole Krauss, dramatic but fairly unadorned, somber and contemplative.  My least favorite selection is the four-movement Natural Selection, set to three poems by Wendy S. Walters and one by Naomi Shihab Nye and sung by the baritone Timothy Jones.  With the exception of “Spider Love,” the musical settings seem a most flimsy drapery over the wirework of the darkly humorous texts.  “Hot Zone” adopts scampering, syncopated, weirdly quasi-Celtic Ghanaian rhythms and an orchestral simulation of the West African, marimba-like gyil, while the violinsts periodically chant the names of Bermel’s gyil teachers.  Of the purely orchestral numbers, “Three Rivers,” the longest single-movement piece here, begins with a film-noir slinkiness to its syncopations before busying itself with more postmodernist concerns.  “Continental Divide,” from 1996, is the oldest work presented as well as the most assertively modernist, atonal and rhythmically slippery, challenging the orchestra on multiple levels.

BROOKLYN RIDER, Seven Steps (In a Circle Records)—The majority of this disc from a young, Brooklyn-based string quartet consists of Beethoven’s idiosyncratic, highly changeable String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp Minor (1826), said to be the composer’s favorite among his later quartets.  But it is preceded by two other compositions, the first, Seven Steps, by Brooklyn Rider collaboratively itself.  It takes inspiration in part from the Beethoven quartet itself, which has seven movements.  The transitions between the seven parts of Seven Steps are less clear-cut, but it is a brooding piece, full of slow-building anguish, with discrete episodes of fiercer intensity.  Toward the end, though, it resolves, at least partially, to something more serene.  The other offering on the disc is Christopher Tignor’s Together into This Unknowable Night.  Tignor is a software engineer and electronic music tinkerer who also leads his own modern classical ensemble, Slow Six.  At times, particularly early on, this piece seems more like an electronica concoction that happens to have a string quartet playing long tones in the foreground (Tignor himself provides the electronic effects backing them up).  But in fact there is more to it than that; as it calls forth more urgency, with the string players shedding the lugubriousness of the initial sections, it achieves some measure of emotional resonance.  The final bars return to quiet, mystery, and a sense of distancing.  After all this, it is quite a turn to Beethoven and the Viennese school, but Brooklyn Rider (Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen, violins; Nicholas Cords, viola; Eric Jacobsen, cello) shows that it is equally adept with music from the high classical period as with contemporary fare.

MARIO CASTELNUOVO-TEDESCO, Guitar Concerto no. 1 in D Major (Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano and Trento, conducted by Luigi Azzolini); Quintet (for Guitar and String Quartet) (String Quartet of the Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano and Trento); Romancero Gitano (Coro Polifonico Castelbarco of Avio) (Giulio Tampalini, guitar on all three compositions) (Concerto Classics/MusicMedia)—Regarded as one of the greatest composers for guitar of the twentieth century, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco is known as well for his Hollywood film scores, produced after he emigrated from Florence to Beverly Hills, California, in 1939.  (He was a mentor to Henry Mancini, John Williams, and a host of other film composers.)  Shortly before leaving Italy, which was becoming ever more unfriendly to merchant families of Jewish heritage like his, he composed his first guitar concerto, at the behest of Andrés Segovia.  It is a pastoral, sun-kissed composition:  at a time of great trouble, it looked back toward a simpler and idealized Italy of the Renaissance era, complementing the soloist with a spare orchestral arrangement.  The guitar’s solo parts, though, sound classically Spanish, in the vein of Joaquín Rodrigo; it should be noted that Castelnuovo-Tedesco did not himself play the guitar.  The quintet adding guitar to a classic string quartet is an unusual combination, though Luigi Boccherini used it a number of times in the eighteenth century.  In four movements, the piece was again composed at the prompting of Segovia, in 1950, more than a decade after Castelnuovo-Tedesco had decamped for southern California.  It may well be a lighter-weight work than the concerto, yet it does successfully pull off a concerto-type dialogue between the guitars and the orchestral strings supporting it.  The finale, a melody made up of rapid triplet figurations, is even more playful than the scherzo that precedes it, leaving the tensions set up by the opening movement little more than a distant memory.  The Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Romance) is a choral setting with guitar accompaniment of a series of poems by Federico García Lorca.  These poems were actually taken from a volume called Poema del Cante Jondo (Poem of Deep Song, a reference to a flamenco vocal style), not the volume Romancero Gitano; this appears simply to have been an oversight on the composer’s part.  Like the quintet, this was written in California, in 1951.  In spite of its Spanish source and gypsy inspiration, it mostly avoids direct allusions to Iberian musical traditions, instead using the content of the poems themselves to set the tone for the mixed choir:  pugnacious in “Puñal” (Fist), ceremonial in “Procesión.”  The exceptions are the third- and next-to-last movements, “Memento” and “Baile” (Dance).  The final movement, “Crótalo,” is supposed to evoke the titular instrument, a type of castanet, though I have troubling hearing it as such.  These three compositions were put together by the Italian label Concerto, using vocal and orchestral musicians from the northeastern Italian region of Trentino–Alto Adige (formerly South Tyrol), together with guitarist Giulio Tampalini, who plays with fluidness and sensitivity to his partners in all settings.

MANUEL DE FALLA, Nights in the Gardens of Spain; The Three-Cornered Hat; Homenajes (BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Juanjo Mena, with Raquel Lojendio, soprano [The Three-Cornered Hat], Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, piano [Nights in the Gardens of Spain]) (Chandos Records)—The Three-Cornered Hat is one of Manuel de Falla’s two best-known compositions, along with El Amor Brujo.  A ballet suite written between 1917 and 1919, it is based on a nineteenth-century novel by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón.  The ballet was staged with originally with the help of Serge Diaghilev, with choreography by Leonid Massine and sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso.  I had already owned an abridged version of the work, but this was my first hearing of the entire composition, with such intriguing details as the brief allusion to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in the first Interlude.  Although my older set excises segments of the suite, including all of the soprano’s parts, here voiced by Canary Islands native Raquel Lojendio, it strikes me that the abridged version, conducted by Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra, is more spirited and explosive than the one presented on the disc here.  Conductor Juanjo Mena is Spanish, yet the BBC Philharmonic maintains a certain gentility that draws down the fire of the more dramatic passages, though the climax of the final dance is plenty passionate.  My older disc set also contains just the third movement of Nights in the Gardens of Spain, titled “En los Jardines de la Sierra de Córdoba” (In the Gardens of the Sierra de Córdoba), conducted by Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos.  The three-movement work for piano and orchestra, not so much of a showpiece for the piano soloist as to be deemed a concerto, is episodic, impressionistic (de Falla acknowledged a debt to Claude Debussy), pictorial, with the first and third movements titled after specific locations (the first, “En el Generalife,” refers to the summer palace of the Alhambra in Granada).  There are some Moorish touches, particularly in the second movement, the “Danza Lejana” (Distant Dance).  Homenajes is the least familiar selection on the album.  Composed in 1938–39 as one of his last works, after de Falla fled the fallout of the Spanish Civil War to settle in Argentina, it is in five movements with four tributes bridged by an extremely brief fanfare interlude.  Two of the tributes are orchestral reworkings of earlier compositions, “à Claude Debussy” and “à Paul Dukas.”  The latter is surprisingly gloomy as an homage to someone remembered primarily for the whimsical Sorcerer’s Apprentice.  Even the Debussy tribute carries a certain grim determination with it.  The first movement is a short, upbeat fanfare written to mark the seventieth birthday of the conductor Enrique Fernández Arbós, while the final one, “Pedrelliana,” more studied and stately in nature, is dedicated to the musicologist and scholar Felipe Pedrell, who encouraged de Falla to pursue composition at a young age.

ESA-PEKKA SALONEN, Out of Nowhere (Violin Concerto; Nyx) (Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, with Leila Josefowicz, violin, in the Concerto) (Deutsche Grammophon)—Esa-Pekka Salonen is first and foremost a conductor, the leader of the London Philharmonia Orchestra and until a few years ago the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  He has achieved some acclaim as a composer in his own right, though, and can be said to be part of a “Finnish wave” that includes Magnus Lindberg, Kaija Saariaho, and Einojuhani Rautavaara.  He wrote the Violin Concerto (2009) specifically with Leila Josefowicz in mind; she performs it here with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra.  She readily surmounts its technical difficulties, especially in the first movement’s frantic and persistent gyrations.  The CD booklet describes the second movement, “Pulse I,” as “a shuddering underworld of muffled timbres to a timpani beat.”  By contrast, “Pulse II” is jittery and agitated, with big percussive outbursts, and later horns and woodwinds, punctuating the soloist’s Saint Vitus’ dance.  The final movement, “Adieu,” gives the violinist more breathing space as it wrestles with its own moroseness over a span of twelve minutes, grimly overcoming it with a blast of horns and a cymbal crash halfway through, only to lapse back into violin solipsism.  Nyx is an orchestral composition named for the Greek goddess of the night.  More accessible than the concerto, it is a fantastical journey through dark realms, with spectral clarinet solos, swirling string passages, tempestuous crescendos.  It becomes a veritable tantrum two-thirds of the way into the piece, but this yields soon enough to whirling flute patterns and brass entreaties.  The orchestra rouses itself for one final, throbbingly intense climax that then dies away abruptly.