MUSIC 2013: A DECIDEDLY SELECTIVE SURVEY
Steven Greenfield
December 22, 2014
As was the case in 2012 (2013, actually),
I am coming out with this survey so late in the following year that I am not
going to take the time to make general comments on the year in popular music. Suffice it to say that, around 2008, I
witnessed a young female performer from the West Coast, whose name I have long
since forgotten, predict that in five years, the compact disc would be
extinct. While it continues to lose
ground to both digital distribution and streaming (naturally) and, oddly
enough, a revival of LPs, the CD hardly could be declared an endangered species
as 2013 came to a close. Also, whereas
electronica releases have dominated my Album of the Year in recent times, this
year’s choice is very different, drawing on Europop, folk, and psychedelia.
My thanks once more
go to Steve Holtje and Luis Rueda for their suggestions about what was worth
paying attention to in 2013 and to my partner, Melissa, for her moral support
throughout the time it took to get this survey finished.
My list of the Top Twelve
(of the pops) for the year follows:
1.
The Limiñanas, Costa
Blanca
2.
The Focus Group, The
Elektrik Karousel
3.
Sigur Rós, Kveikur
4.
Julia Holter, Loud
City Song
5.
Burial, Rival
Dealer
6.
Tim Hecker, Virgins
7.
Sleigh Bells, Bitter
Rivals
8.
Public Service Broadcasting, Inform, Educate, Entertain
9.
Juana Molina, Wed
21
10.
Broadcast, Berberian
Sound Studio: Original Soundtrack
11.
Autechre, Exai
12.
Polvo, Siberia
ROCK/POP ALBUM
OF THE YEAR
THE LIMIÑANAS, Costa Blanca (Trouble in Mind
Records)—I was introduced to the music of this husband-wife duo from Perpignan,
on the Mediterranean coast of France close to the Spanish border, through the
enthusiasm of several of the WFMU disc jockeys.
Their music trades in psychedelia, garage rock, folk, and vintage
Europop. Though in interviews Lionel
Limiñana downplays any retro tendencies, one does get a strong whiff of sixties
nostalgia, not just in the Limiñanas’ musical touchstones, like Serge
Gainsbourg, but (judging by photos) in their sartorial style and their cultural
references. Costa Blanca, their third release, is a gem whose radiance beguiles
rather than bedazzles the listener. If
any complaint can be directed at its songs, it might be that a few of them
dwell too long on the same pattern, notably “Rosas” and “Votre Coté Yéyé
M’Emmerde” (Your Yéyé Side Annoys Me; yé-yé was a romantic style in early 1960s Mediterranean pop, glamourized by
Gainsbourg), which is a sort of two-chord (two bifurcated chords) wonder with a
fuzz guitar reverb attack at strategic moments.
Moreover, simply enumerating a long list of famous film directors and
actors, as in “Votre Coté Yéyé M’Emmerde,” does not impart profundity. But this does not seriously detract from the
album’s pleasures. Songs are sung, or as
frequently spoken, in English or French, or both, with the exception of one in
Italian (“I Miei Occhi Sono i Tuoi Occhi,” or My Eyes Are Your Eyes). This song, sung by guest singer Paula H.
Satan, affects a Last Year at Marienbad–type
mystique, as suffused with longing as anything on the disc yet atypically
downcast. Indeed, even the simple folky
number “La Mélancolie” (sung by Nadège Figuerola, a vocalist the group has
turned to previously as well) is more wistful than actually melancholic in
tone. A number of the songs relate to
the album’s title, recalling Lionel Limiñana’s childhood trips to the Alicante
region of southeastern Spain, including the scene-setting “Je Me Souviens comme
si J’y Étais” (I Remember as if I Were There, given voice by Lionel and
featuring some Byrds-like chord progressions) and “La Mercedes de Couleur Gris
Métallisé” (The Metallic-Gray Merecedes), spoken by Muriel Margail, a song
whose cruising-speed guitar accompaniment fosters anticipation that is abruptly
cut short by a blared piano chord on the bass end. “Alicante,” an upbeat instrumental, delves a
little deeper into neo-psychedelia, particularly in its Jefferson
Airplane–esque modal harmonies and its bridge section, which is little more
than reverb and fuzz guitars.
Psychedelia also reigns in “Liverpool,” which recounts (in French—Muriel
Margail again) a trip to the Liverpool International Festival of
Psychedelia. The air of nostalgia is as
heady as whatever is being smoked at the festival, and Lionel brings back the
exotic strings to enhance the song’s trippiness. “Bb” is a Stooges-inflected rocker, earnest
and ringingly plaintive, sung in English by Guillaume Picard. Marie Limiñana, the band’s drummer, also
lends her vocals to “My Black Sabbath,” with a lyric that switches off between
English and French; her breathiness reminds me of the Limiñanas’ pop
compatriots Air, but a tang of the exotic is added by Lionel’s use of oud, bouzouki, and sitar. Marie returns to sing “Cold Was the Ground,”
a contemplative tune featuring plucked bouzouki
from Lionel. The song is reprised
instrumentally, with sound effects ranging from woodblock to bells to
wind-rushes to a baleful, Japanese-tinged recorder, in “Barrio Chino,” a
half-minute-long instrumental. A
And the rest . . .
ARCADE FIRE, Reflektor (Merge Records/Sonovox) —I
would have expected the combination of Arcade Fire and James Murphy, the former
leader of LCD Soundsystem, who co-produced this record, to yield something
smarter and more visceral than this. It
may be a case of mismatched styles:
Arcade Fire’s legacy of almost antiquarian folky earnestness and intensity
versus Murphy’s sardonic sensibility and glam, neo-disco beats and
arrangements. What results instead is an
Arcade Fire somewhat removed from the emotional immediacy of previous efforts,
set to danceable rhythms. The album,
twin discs whose 75 minutes of material could have been consolidated onto one,
taken as a whole is a head-scratcher.
Influenced by a trip the bandleaders, Win Butler and Régine Chassagne,
made to Haiti, which is where Chassagne’s parents originally came from, nonetheless,
the Haitian influences (the street-processional rara music in particular) are for the most part not so
evident. (They burst forth in the bridge
section of the otherwise uninspired “Here Comes the Night Time.”) Lyrics, said to be based on Soren
Kierkegaard’s themes of isolation and alienation as well as the Orpheus myth,
are opaque and repetitive. The first
disc is stronger than the second. The
last song of Disc 1, “Joan of Arc” (for a far more satisfying song of the same
title, see Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s majestic 1981 record Architecture and Morality) ends with
half a minute of silence, while the entire second half of the long final song
on Disc 2, “Supersymmetry,” is a quiet blur of cosmic electronic manipulations
that could have been profitably expunged.
That said, this is still Arcade Fire, one of the best bands of the past
decade, and so there are highlights worth pointing to, foremost among them, the
opening (title) track. “Reflektor” has a
loping grace and swinginess to it, sweeping up the listener, and although not
particularly innovative, it does generate more heat and passion than anything
else on the two-disc set. “Flashbulb
Eyes” pops brilliantly with tolling guitars, clattering percussion, marimbas,
and bright sound effects and is gone in a flash, the shortest track on display. “Normal Person” and “You Already Know” are
positioned as if being performed before live audiences, with spoken
introductions. Arcade Fire as a bar band
or garage rock act? It does not really
suit the group. For “Normal Person,”
Butler asks, “Do you like rock ’n’ roll music?
Cause I don’t know if I do.”
Peculiar, if honest! Still, I do
admire the yowling, blues-based guitar riff accompanying the song’s chorus,
which morphs into a deep bass groove at its climax—powerful stuff. The guitars on the facile “We Exist” invite
comparison to the sound of Naked Eyes, from the 1980s, on “Promises, Promises”;
this song also attempts a couple of rousing crescendos, but there is simply
less to work with than on the opener.
From the second disc, “Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice)” and “It’s Never Over
(Hey Orpheus)” are companion pieces of a sort.
(Likewise, “Here Comes the Night Time II” pairs with its mate from the
earlier disc.) The former is too drowsy
to generate much excitement, though the volume spikes momentarily with
jet-engine whooshes about two-thirds of the way through and at the closing. The latter goes down easier, as a swaying,
head-shaking groove. Like “We Exist”
from Disc 1, “Porno” has New Wave–era guitar work, punching through like a
tool-and-die set, pulsating, to accompany a baffling verse about “little boys
with their porno; oh I know they hurt you so.”
“Supersymmetry” was composed as part of a soundtrack to the Spike Jonze
movie Her. Its throbbing synthesizer part recalls
Supertramp’s “The Logical Song” (1979), but it is far mellower and dissolves
ultimately into vaporous keyboard arpeggiations. It sounds tacked onto a disc where it did not
belong to give that disc sufficient length, especially when the false ending is
taken into account. Guilty of
intellectual/cultural overreach, paired with the wrong producer; Arcade Fire
would do better to heed the words of that hoary old sage Bryan Adams and take
it “straight from the heart.” B+
AUTECHRE, Exai (Warp Records)—The world
of electronica is now broad enough that I would classify it via a schematic of
quadrants, with abstract/concrete on one axis and active/languid on the
other. This naturally oversimplifies the
real ecosystem of such groups, but it is helpful as a means of sorting out the songful
(say, Zero 7; see the 2009 music survey; concrete, languid) from the
dance-oriented (Basement Jaxx; concrete, active) and the atmospheric (Brian
Eno; abstract, languid) from the more mechanistic (which brings the discussion
back to Autechre; abstract, active). Exai, so named because it is the
eleventh studio album from the Manchester-area pair (Rob Brown and Sean Booth)
that form Autechre, is a double-record set that lasts a solid two hours. This does seem like too much at times,
particularly given the way the compositions obsessively work over specific
sound patterns. Yet, in all, this double
disc pays dividends for those with the patience to get to know it. Generally, one hears synthesizer drones,
processed and sampled in ever-changing ways, sometimes with what passes for a
subdued (synth) melody sprinkled on top, with all those keyboard layers put
through their paces by busy and noisy drum machines. But the drum machines are no metronomes; they
aggressively reiterate and recombine complex, timbrally textured beats. Only once on the album can a simple, true
rock beat be heard; that powers “Recks on,” on the second disc. “Flep” is nearly all percussion sequences. Synthesizer tones can be as buzzy as a
barber’s electric razor (as on “Irlite [Get 0]”), percolating (“T Ess Xi,”
“VekoS”), twangy or metallic (“Prac-F,” “11 is”), shimmery (“Jatevee C”), or
full of reverb (“Nodezsh”), or a combination of these traits (“spl9”). “Deco Loc” is just about the only piece to
feature sampling of actual human voices, distorted, chopped up, staggered,
melded. The short repeating cycles are
easy enough to grasp; the longer developmental arcs demand more studious
listening. “Song” titles appear more
like the names a tech geek would give to executable subroutines. The longest track on the two-record set,
“Bladelores,” coming at the end of Disc 1, is unfortunately also the most tedious;
just when things appear to get dramatic through a stirring progression of long
tones (a Mellotron-like sound evocative of early Genesis records), these drop
away and blankness triumphs.
“Cloudline,” another ten-minute-plus composition, sitting in the middle
of the second disc, similarly starts off unpromisingly amid ghostly whirling
keyboard figurations and shrill overtones but begins to uncloak a distinctly
tuneful harmonic pattern about a quarter of the way in, after which the
quasi-theme it sketches (never more than fragmentary impressions—the mind has
to do the rest of the work filling in) even allows for a bit of funkiness to
steal in. “Recks on,” with its muscular,
straight-on drumbeat and growling synth bass intro, comes at you like a metal
band’s demo tape, though it is far more experimental in nature,
ultimately. Its ominous long-tone
sequences, combined with bits of mangled speech distortion and that
ever-present drumbeat, make for the most engaging track on offer. The final selection, “YJY UX,” which follows
“Recks on,” is also a gem, showcasing a high-pitched, silvery tone pattern that
is wistfully yearning and mysterious. No
matter what variations Autechre applies in the course of the piece—percussive
outbursts, jagged synth contours, and squelchy bass tones—it always comes back
to that haunting, querying phrase. My
attention may waver in the course of this extended double disc, but
compositions like these make the journey worthwhile. A-
BLOOD ORANGE, Cupid Deluxe (Domino Records)—Several
go-rounds with this chill, nouveau R&B record to see if I would warm up to
it mainly led to the conclusion that I enjoy the first track, “Chamakay.” Frequently, artists and producers put their strongest track up front. The rest of the album, Devonté Hynes’s second
recording as Blood Orange, contains too much assembly-line funk and neo-soul
that sounds as generic as much of what has been issuing from the London scene
(where Hynes was raised, though he now lives in New York) lately. “Chamakay,” which derives from a Guyanese
slang term meaning “young, mischievous girl” according to Hynes, is a tropic-scented,
mauve-hued soul duet between Hynes and Caroline Polachek (the singing half of
the Brooklyn electropop duo Chairlift) whose subtle artistry shows what Blood
Orange is capable of at its best. Other
songs mostly make for smooth listening—mercifully, the two tracks that include
rapping are both short—without yielding any revelatory moments. After “Chamakay,” the most convincing
selection on the CD is a remake: “Always Let U Down” is a laid-back
rearrangement (with funk guitar as filigree) of the bracing rocker “I Can Only
Disappoint U” by Dominic Chad and Paul Draper of the English band Mansun,
featuring Samantha Urbani’s honeyed vocals.
(Urbani hails from yet another Brooklyn band, Friends.) “It Is What It Is” and “Time Will Tell” are
mates: The former begins with a
distinctly unpromising, bland major-key verse section set to marimba
accompaniment that is redeemed by a piercing yet reassuring refrain; the
primarily instrumental section toward the end turns surprisingly dark and
moody. The latter takes the chorus of
“It Is What It Is” and embellishes it affectingly, with Hynes pleading, “Come
to my bedroom! Come to my bedroom!” and
his female partner now the London soul singer Tawiah (Beverly Tawiah) in place
of Urbani in the earlier song. With its
big drumbeat and its unrelenting plaintiveness, it makes for a bittersweet coda,
if a little too unvaryingly reiterative.
The youthful romanticism of the spoken reverie by a French-accented
female mysteriously identified as “Dossier Brochette” that opens “Chosen” is
akin to some of the breathless monologues that punctuate M83’s compositions
(see the 2008 and 2011 music surveys).
The balance of the song is too tame and uneventful for its own good, in
its caressing arrangements and mellow sax from Jason Arce, even as Hynes
summons his inner George Michael. For
“Uncle Ace,” a very good, brisk funk accompaniment is undercut by a funereal
spoken verse and mewling tenor refrain from Hynes. Still, that accompaniment is always there to
carry one along, although, as it begins to modulate toward the end, it, too, is
deflated by a plodding woodwind figuration (Arce’s sax and clarinet). The similarly funk-bedazzled, whiny-chorused
“You’re Not Good Enough” ends oddly with close to a minute of sampling of what
sounds like another band warming up, together with snatches of bar
conversation. “No Right Thing” is an
earnestly imploring number pairing Hynes with David Longstreth of Dirty
Projectors (see the 2009 music survey).
Between the two hip-hop offerings, “High Street,” showcasing the
autobiographical grime rapping of Tottenham’s Skepta (Joseph Junior Adenuga), is by far the
better. Each of these is encrusted in a
rather limp R&B setting; the one for “Clipped On” (rapping by Queens native
Despot [Alec Reinstein]), with its vocal line ending in a bawled “baby!”
unfortunately brings to mind the South
Park episode involving the Jonas Brothers.
That was parody; this is closer to travesty. B+
BOARDS OF CANADA, Tomorrow’s Harvest (Warp Records)—Because
Boards of Canada had not released any music since 2006, and no full-length
record since 2005’s highly regarded The
Campfire Headphase, there was great anticipation surrounding the issuing of
Tomorrow’s Harvest, particularly
among fans of electronica and ambient music.
I reviewed The Campfire Headphase
for the 2005 music survey (which was before I started posting these in blog
form), in which I opined that I would not necessarily want “a shelfful of
Boards of Canada music because the sameness of
contemplative mood and echo chamber arrangements could get to be too much.” If not a shelfful, I now have bookends. Between the two, I would have to say that I
am more firmly devoted to the earlier release, which was less downtempo
oriented (therefore more kinetic) and at the same time more envelopingly
atmospheric. Boards of Canada is at its
best when its music conjures the sun setting slowly into a blanket of haze, its
rich, spectral, northern (the bandmates are Scottish, notwithstanding the name)
sonorities on full display. When it
moves away from these, the spirituality of the brothers Sandison (Mike and
Marcus Eoin) is inclined to express itself in New Age tropes. The archetypal Boards of Canada sonorousness
shows up in particular at the beginning and the end of this disc: “Gemini,” the opener, is blurred and makes
ample use of sound
gating to dice up its bleak, hornlike “moose calls,”
setting a stark tone, while the song that follows it, “Reach for the Dead,”
proceeds magisterially through its sustained chord cycles, layering syncopated
keyboard arpeggiation on top for a sumptuous sonic stew. The ground bass hum of “Reach for the Dead”
is all the more pronounced in the closing number, “Semena Mertvykh” (Seeds of
the Dead, in Russian), where that roiling drone is all there is, apart from
some sinister overtones, but it is terribly effective nonetheless, much in the
same way that the U.K. tune “Alaska,” from U.K.’s self-titled debut album
(1978), is. The shorter entries on Tomorrow’s Harvest—“Telepath,”
“Transmisiones Ferox,” “Collapse,” “Uritual”—excepting “Sundown,” which is
texturally similar to the opening pieces, are negligible. “Telepath” and a couple of other tracks have
sampled human voices on them, which is a departure from the purely instrumental
Campfire Headphase but not by much;
on “Telepath,” a British male voice appears to be conducting a sound check. A number of the other compositions (“Cold
Earth,” “Nothing Is Real,” “New Seeds”) employ a soft-rock beat, something one
might expect from a Carpenters song from the 1970s, only, being wordless, they
seem more vacant and harder to relate to than the late Karen Carpenter. This does not make them unenjoyable, although
many settle stubbornly into a single chord sequence with ornamentation that is
modified oh-so slowly and sparingly. The
Sandisons are cunning enough in designing their soundscapes never to let tedium
or disillusion creep in too far, yet the result is often more Vangelis-like
than perhaps intended. A composition
like “New Seeds,” for instance, almost reaches a point of mind-numbing sameness
when suddenly, two-thirds of the way through, the underlying chord pattern
switches, casting the song into a different chromatic light altogether. “Palace Posy,” one of the more beguiling of
the “non-sonorous” pieces, has a beat/backdrop more akin to that of one of the
British-invasion new wave bands of the early eighties. It, like “New Seeds,” acquires fresh
accompanying chords two-thirds of the way in, though the robotic
chatter/chanting that follows this detracts from the mood cast. Tomorrow’s
Harvest makes for fine listening; it just does not seem as momentous or
ear-bending as its predecessor from eight years earlier. A-/B+
BROADCAST, Berberian Sound Studio: Original Soundtrack (Warp Records)—Monastic,
creepy, beautiful, icy, alarming, and disturbing, Broadcast’s soundtrack to the
2012 Peter Strickland horror film Berberian
Sound Studio (itself a tribute to 1970s Italian horror flicks) is at once a
glittering testament to the unique sound world that this U.K. outfit
can conjure and also something more likely to be appreciated by fans of the
group than by the general listening audience. Taken as a straight-up,
stand-alone listening experience, as pure electronica, it can seem
slight. There is one primary melody, often voiced by a flute, with arpeggiated
keyboard accompaniment that recurs throughout the soundtrack with somewhat
different settings and arrangements. Some tracks consist
of snatches of dialogue (in Italian, from the Italian horror
film-within-a-film) or sound effects. These are occasionally unsettling, as
with the scream punctuating “Malleus Maleficarum,” the witch’s
screechy outburst in “The Fifth Claw,” and the goblin’s aggressively simian
mutterings in “A Goblin.” Taken as primarily incidental music for a film,
the expectations are more properly calibrated. Most tracks are mere
fragments, lasting from as little as six seconds (in an extreme case) to less
than one hundred. Two exceptions, in the middle and at the end, are
compositions lasting more than three minutes each. James Cargill and
Trish Keenan, the members of Broadcast, were commissioned for the soundtrack,
and Cargill completed the work on his own, using a laptop, synthesizers,
harpsichord, flutes, and other instruments and equipment, after Keenan's
untimely death from swine flu in 2011. The record lacks Keenan’s
ethereal vocals that characterize Broadcast’s previous work, and a number of
critics have felt that as a tremendous deficiency here. But perhaps by
its nature the album works best as instrumentals with dialogue and effects interspersed.
The main theme is heard for the first time in “Beautiful Hair,” the third
track, following a different, ominous keyboard theme, “The Equestrian Vortex,”
which is the name of the Italian film-within-a-film. In the recurring
motif’s initial rendition, a synth voices the melody, while a harpsichord does
the accompaniment. For “Malleus Maleficarum,” the first track with
dialogue, an organ replaces the harpsichord. “Monica’s Fall” is the
first in which one hears the director of the film-within-a-film announcing the
scene and take and describing the action (Monica’s defenestration by a witch,
in this case). Nicely executed contrasting themes crop up in “Teresa’s
Song (Sorrow)” (in which one hears strains of a mournful, echo-ey voice that
could well have been Keenan’s), “The North Downs Dimension” (one of the
airier compositions, with an artificial reed chorus and harpsichord ground
bass), “Such Tender Things” (a gentle flute-and-birdsong paean to the
young women victims of the film-within-a-film), “Burnt at the Stake”
(organ tidings of woe that grow in insistency), “The Sacred Marriage” (one of
the only pieces to have a drumbeat), and the companion organ snippets
“Valeria’s Burial” and “Edda’s Burial,” In addition, “Teresa, Lark of
Ascension” offers a circular, claustrophobic hall-of-mirrors theme, sung
wordlessly but with piercing affect by the same voice as in “Teresa’s Song.”
As the most extensive composition on the record, it stays around long
enough to be reinforced by an organ recapitulating the harmonic sequence.
“Found Scalded, Found Drowned” is an appropriately searing little piece, full
of bass whorls and metallic scraping sounds. “Monica (Her Parents Have
Been Informed)” is a somber, brief composition of long tones whose blurry
nature finds kinship to those of Boards of Canada (see above), and “The Gallops”
has much the same serene quality. “The Equestrian Library” is a
scaled-down reprise of the “Equestrian Vortex” theme, and “Collatina, Mark of
Damnation” summons thematic elements from both “The Equestrian Library”
and “Teresa, Lark of Ascension” (with the female voice now multitracked
into a kind of convent choir). Down the home stretch, the reiterations of
the primary motif become especially frequent. But the final composition, “Our
Darkest Sabbath,” offers an intriguing counterpoint, a quasi-inversion of the
motif, as flutes, organ, and high synth tones seem to probe anxiously
(most likely without success) for meaning in all that has come
before. I do not like horror movies at all, and consequently I am
fairly sure I would not enjoy Berberian
Sound Studio, but Broadcast is so skillful that it can make me like even a
chilly, skin-crawling, fright-night soundtrack. A-
BURIAL, Rival Dealer (Hyperdub)—The
dubstep
master William Bevan, who records as Burial, has from the start been a bold
experimenter, even as he manages to infuse his chilly and remote electronica
with considerable human warmth. With his latest EP release, Rival Dealer, the balance may be
shifting toward the latter pole. While surrendering to the music’s
surprisingly enveloping pillowiness, I yet find myself wondering whether
Bevan’s near future involves designing “soundscapes” at shopping malls or
penning a Chariots of Fire–type
soundtrack (not to say that I think Chariots
of Fire is bad; just that trying to ape its style would
be inadvisable). Burial has always incorporated soulful singing and
drama in the work, but usually in small doses, with a lot of distortion and
manipulation of voices. Here, the vocals seem unadulterated, and they are
presented far more broadly. The listener is offered a number of
pop-friendly tunes that persist for several minutes over dubstep beats and
electronic effects, as well as the production chopping and dicing that is
standard operating procedure for Burial. On a record that is thematically
about standing up to bullying, notably of those whose lifestyles fall outside
conventional sexual bounds, there is a fair amount of Stuart Smalley–type
self-affirmation: “This is who I am.” “Don’t be afraid to step into
the unknown.” “You are not alone.” Interestingly, most of the
sampled voices clearly carry American accents. Whereas
Broadcast (see above) crams thirty-nine tracks into a little less than
thirty-eight minutes, Rival Dealer’s
twenty-eight minutes include just three compositions. The first half of
the title track is dominated by a blue soul melody with the
reassuring words, “I’m gonna love you more than anyone,” though the deep bass
and keening harmonics suggest more complications along the way. After a “halftime
break” consisting of some sampled remarks, the third quarter of the song is
pulsing bass groove. It, too, breaks off abruptly, and the final quarter
is slower and more atmospheric, with no drumbeat at all, as a female voice
sings soothing phrases over long synth tones. “Hiders,” the much shorter
middle track, sets out with a keyboard theme that sounds like it could almost
develop into Bob Seger’s “We’ve Got Tonight” (1978). Two and a half
minutes in, a steady drumbeat picks the song up out of the bathos indulged
by a tremulous tenor voice (I think; one can never be entirely certain with
Burial) delivering the fragmented, sketchy melody. That lasts less
than a minute before this composition, too, halts, and the ultimate minute is
mostly quiet, with just snippets of sound effects, distant rolling tones, and
the words “Come down to us” (which appear on all three tracks) and “Take me
away!” The final track, “Come Down to Us,” divides neatly into two distinct
themes. The Top-40 melodiousness of the first is tempered by quasi-Indian
harmonics. The second lacks such exotic textures; it simply washes
the listener in pop benignity, so as to bring the disc to an affirmative close,
I guess. The music ends some ninety seconds before the track does; the
rest is an excerpt from a speech by Lana (Larry) Wachowski, a transgendered
film and television writer/director/producer, at a human rights gala, with a
touch of choral hum toward the close. Bevan does not beat us over the
head with this, but the message comes through loud and clear. In certain
respects, this is the least spellbinding of the Burial offerings that I have
heard. Even as it veers daringly close to mainstream rhythm and blues, though,
it will still haunt your auditory memories for some time afterward. A/A-
NEKO CASE, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight,
the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You (Anti-)—This strange
little record is a collection of misfires, particularly from a standpoint of
the lyrics. That is unfortunate because
I have always felt warmly toward Neko Case’s voice from her work with the New
Pornographers. One can only suspect
that, in composing the verses, she was straining too hard for creativity
(beginning with the album’s interminable title), often landing with a thud. Indie rock with a mild country accent, the
music on The Worse Things Get, the Harder
I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You was composed either solo
by the artist or in association with Paul Rigby, a multi-instrumentalist and
songwriter and arranger in his own right.
The one exception is “Afraid,” from Nico’s (no relation to Neko) 1970
album Desertshore, which is
elementary in melody and spare in its instrumentation, yet its minimalism has a
certain power and integrity that lifts it above Case’s own work. This is also the only track on the record to
feature Marc Ribot, the experimental New York composer and bandleader, on
piano. But collaboration with other
musicians abounds on the disc, with a particular emphasis on the Pacific
Northwest, where Case has based herself throughout her performing life. Fellow instrumentalists who participate
include A. C. “Carl” Newman and Kurt Dahle of the New Pornographers; Jim James,
Carl Broemel, and Bo Koster of My Morning Jacket; guitarist and solo artist M.
Ward; Rachel Flotard of Visqueen; Calexico’s Joey Burns, John Convertino, Jacob
Valenzuela, and Martin Wenk; Steve Berlin of Los Lobos; Mudhoney’s Steve
Turner; the steel guitarist Jon Rauhouse; the bassist Tom Ray; and backing
vocalists Tracyanne Campbell of Camera Obscura and Kelly Hogan. “Night Still Comes,” one of the tunes with
the most pronounced country twang, rocks at a gentle waltz tempo; as such, it
is the most genial, relaxed, and comfy, notwithstanding a lyric about how “I
revenged myself all over myself” (does that refer to cutting?). “Calling Cards” is crafted in the same vein. “Man,” sung from the point of view of the
opposite sex (the following song, “I’m from Nowhere,” also expresses doubts
about wanting to be identified as a “lady” and declares, “I’d gladly wear the
pants into the next century”), is a brisk anthem and forthright to the point of
stridency, but its musical theme will not win any points on originality. The same issue crops up with “Bracing for
Sunday”—lots of energy expended to little effect; this time, the narrator seems
to be a lesbian avenging an incestuous crime against her lover, casually
mentioning of the perpetrator, “He died because I murdered him,” one of the
record’s many startling clunkers of a line.
Even clumsier is the lyric to the a cappella “Nearly Midnight,
Honolulu,” spoiling what might otherwise be a nice tune, reverberant and
qualitatively different from anything else on the album. “City Swans” is the most straight-ahead
rocker, with the biggest sound, showing glints of promise without ever breaking
through into the light of revelation.
“Where Did I Leave That Fire?” begins with sonar samplings, à la Kate
Bush or Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.
It is darker and more inner directed than anything else on offer,
musically more inventive as well; still, the little joke at the end of the song
falls flat and dispels the atmosphere carefully built up. “Ragtime,” the closing song, is an earthy,
overly simple melody that has nothing to do with the genre suggested by the
title, ending in an extended trumpet chorale (Valenzuela and Wenk) that adds
weight more in the sense of ponderousness than emotional impact. Forty-five seconds of silence follow the
music’s final drumburst, after which there is a brief sampling of a sound
somewhere between a yawn and a yawp, made by a dog (I assume); Case’s reaction
is, “That was awesome.” At least that is
funnier than what passes for humor and high-spiritedness elsewhere on this
sadly misconceived record. B-
CHVRCHES, The Bones of What You Believe (Goodbye
Records/Glassnote Entertainment Group)—To say that The Bones of What You Believe is the musical equivalent of eating
PEZ candy comes across as far more disparaging than I intend, yet the metaphor
is hardly inapt. The debut full-length record
from this Scottish electro-pop trio is bright and lively, and its members,
having spent time in other bands, are smart and know how to craft a good pop
hook. I have certainly enjoyed listening
to it, even if its lack of substance makes it something of a guilty pleasure. The sound is synthesizer heavy and guitar
light. Percussion is derived entirely
from sampling, though Lauren Mayberry, the band’s vocalist, has played drums in
the past. Mayberry’s singing has a
self-assuredness and clarity that shines throughout. The opening number and first single, “The
Mother We Share,” is so bouncy, catchy, and winning that it triumphs over a
lyric that makes little sense (is it about sibling rivalry? Then why the line “We’ve come as far as we’re
ever gonna get,” which sounds like a stuck romantic relationship?) and strives
for a meaningfulness it cannot attain.
Indeed, there is a mismatch across the span of the album between the
intended seriousness of the lyrics (which is confounded by their
inscrutability) and the general boppiness of the composition. At times, Chvrches’ tunes sacrifice body and
soul for the sake of briskness. Besides
“The Mother We Share,” “Lies” and “Recover” are songs whose free-and-easy
nature makes one look forward to repeat plays.
Synth and sampler specialist Martin Doherty sings lead on two tracks,
“Under the Tide” and “You Caught the Light,” with a noticeable drop in energy
each time Mayberry abandons the mike, and he and the third team member, Iain
Cook (guitars and synthesizers), furnish backing vocals on the intense,
fulminating-beat, Giorgio Moroder–esque “Science/Visions” and on “By the
Throat.” Two tracks attempt to slow
things down. “Tether” is contemplative,
but the trio’s urge for speed means that the song readily picks up a
walking-speed beat, before exploding into keyboard runs at the end. “You Caught the Light,” the closer, is
qualitatively different from anything else here, more atmospheric, relaxed,
with big washes of electronic keyboard sound.
Still, Doherty’s drippy, rather whiny voice and flat delivery deflate
the song. (On “Under the Tide,” he
merely sounds subdued, which seems appropriate to its title.) Because this is a fairly new band, there is
reason to hope that its next effort will produce something less fizzy and more
impactful, but, for now, revel in the effervescence. B+
DEPECHE MODE, Delta Machine (Columbia Records)—Albums
devoted to psychological introspection are not uncommon. When done well, they are insightful and
moving, as in the case of Peter Gabriel’s penumbral Us from 1992. When done
poorly, one gets something on the order of Delta
Machine, as good an argument as any for the breakup of a band that has been
around since 1980, with three of the four founding members still in place. Depeche Mode has been billed as the most
successful electronica act of all time, and in the early years, at least, it
did demonstrate the knack for catchy pop tunes with political slogans, such as
“Everything Counts” and “People Are People.”
Never as innovative as its U.K. compatriot and precursor Orchestral
Manoeuvres in the Dark, the band traded on its energy and accessibility. Years later, the trio just sounds enervated. Tunes are slow-moving and trite or facile,
lyrics often embarrassing, descending to downright creepiness on “The Child
Inside.” In the strobing “Soft Touch/Raw
Nerve,” lead singer Dave Gahan asks, “Have I hit a raw nerve?” The answer is of course no because there is
nothing probing or penetrating about the psychobabble being dispensed. On occasion, Depeche Mode gets it right
lyrically. “My Little Universe,” with
its Kraftwerk-style clean-room robotics, is fairly basic, no highfalutin
vocabulary or complex concepts, yet it offers a fresh window onto
narcissism. “Alone” also manages,
inconsistently, to rise to the level of poetry.
In a mistake by the label, Columbia Records, that even a half-asleep
proofreader should have caught, the final page of
printed lyrics is missing from the CD jacket, replaced by a repeat of the
penultimate page. Moving on from lyrics
to composition, Depeche Mode does come up with some variety in tempos (midtempo
is about as fast as this generally snail-paced record gets) and styles. It saves the best for last: “Soothe My Soul,” the next-to-last track,
while not wonderfully original, is tight-knit and carries a soulful groove that
makes it more relatable than any other song.
The closer, “Goodbye,” is plodding, with a blaring, theatrical yet
stunted chorus; even so, the bluesy guitar accompaniment to the verse and the
sonic extravagance of the choral arrangement make it more interesting than most
of what the disc presents. The first
number, “Welcome to My World,” takes considerable time building to some drama;
the climax will not knock you on your ear, but in all the song is something of
which Gabriel himself would not be ashamed, from the bass sounds resembling the
emission of air from a rubber bladder to the shadowy, portentous chords at the
conclusion. The purple histrionics of
“Angel,” which follows, are hard to take; even so, the song’s midsection has a
fascinating elasticity as the rhythms become temporarily gelatinous. “Slow,” like “Welcome to My World,” comes
only gradually to a boil but eventually reaches a froth of intensity, its blue come-on
made garish by an attack of wailing, oscillating synthesizer tones. Apart from these features, there is alas
little to recommend Delta Machine. B
THE FOCUS GROUP, The Elektrik Karousel (Ghost Box Records)—A Wunderkammer or collection of funhouse
mirrors, The Elektrik Karousel is
both glittering entertainment and a bit nightmarish and claustrophobic, in the
same way that the song “A Trip to the Fair” (1975) by the English progressive
band Renaissance is. It bears many
similarities to Broadcast and the Focus
Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age (see the 2009 music survey),
if not quite as spellbinding because of the absence (or near absence) of Trish
Keenan’s vocals; Keenan, the singer of Broadcast (see above), died a couple of years back,
though her voice may have been smuggled into a few tracks here—a note on the CD
jacket thanks her for “the sounds you sent.”
Julian House, the London-based Welsh native who is behind the Focus
Group, also collaborated with what remains of Broadcast—i.e., James Cargill—for
this record. A graphic artist by trade,
House has designed the CD jacket to resembling a board game incorporating many
of the song titles. He is partial to
snippets of sampled sound, stock music or “music library music” plus dimly
remembered themes and bits from old television programs from the 1960s and
1970s, drippings of acid folk, and psychedelia. The album is
terrific for those with short attention spans, as there are twenty-nine tracks
in barely forty-six minutes, with only one (“The Magic Pendulum”) exceeding
three minutes by much. There is no
singing per se, although several songs (for example, “Kinky Korner Klub,”
“Bachoo,” and “Oh Want Away”) sample vocals from elsewhere. Psychedelia is a prevalent setting for these
little gems, with their wistful melodies, exotic and bizarre timbres, and
fascinating harmonic chiaroscuro and note warpings, but the styles, tempos, and moods are ever
changing, from swingy or stretchy thematic cells to brittle harpsichord
miniatures to the melodramatic keyboard quivers attending to “Hope Hodgsone,”
like something out of a daytime soap opera.
Subtle touches of color such as the tabla drums in “The Magic Pendulum”
and the clarinet or bass clarinet in “Poppingart” enrich the listening
experience. “Bachoo” gives us a taste of
what would happen if hunting horns were introduced into a Flock of Seagulls tune. These compositions, transitory and delicate
as they are, do not necessarily prosper in longer sequences, which is why “The
Magic Pendulum” flirts with tedium over the course of its six-plus minutes,
particularly the section in which the voices repeatedly moan “oh yeah, oh
yeah.” Where The Elektrik Karousel succeeds most (pretty much throughout the
disc) is in the re-creation of something phantasmagorical, music that reaches
into dark corners of the listener’s consciousness and by that token seems vaguely
familiar yet is played with and transmuted in ways that are bizarre and
delightfully unexpected. The album ends
with “More Night Films,” forty-one seconds of the sound of a film projector
running while snatches of cheesily mellow movie-house organ chords blur in the
background, a shotglass’s worth of humor at the close. People who do not cotton to electronica are
unlikely to find The Elektrik Karousel
appealing, and even those whose tastes run more toward electronic dance music
might consider it a bit precious. But
they are missing out on some of the most trippy, inventive experiments in
contemporary pop music. A
FOREST SWORDS, Engravings (Tri Angle Records)—Beautiful
yet strangely bloodless, Engravings’ unrealized
potential stands out in stark relief.
Matthew Barnes, the Liverpudlian who is Forest Swords, clearly has
considerable compositional skills, although these are in abeyance for long
stretches of the record. The songs never
lack for tunefulness, and some of the generally spare arrangements are deployed
to impressive effect. What this means is
that the electronica and dubstep of Engravings go down as
smoothly as sweetened lemonade on a hot summer day, easy to listen to but far
more lethargic than cathartic. The tone
is set immediately with “Ljoss,” a laid-back piece with a sternly somber main
theme, heavy beat, and lots of Greek-style guitar tremolo in the accompaniment,
together with dubbed-in snatches of a male vocal. “Friend, You Will Never Learn,” the closing
number, likewise has big percussion and snippets of vocals (these are mostly
indecipherable on the album) to add some human warmth to a composition that can
try the listener’s patience with its insistent three-note descending scale pattern. Even so, it does enough with accompanying
elements and overt and implied harmonics over the course of its eight minutes
to muster some real passion, something too rare on this record. The less momentous tracks can seem New Age-y,
like something one might hear off a Vangelis record from the 1970s or 1980s,
flowery wallpaper lovely to look at, its repetitive patterns conveying
artisanship rather than art. At times,
the songs can mimic those of other prominent figures in electronica; for
example, the dubbing and processing of vocals in a number of tracks follow the
likes of Burial (see above), though William Bevan of Burial deploys them with
greater skill to dramatic effect. The
clipped voices forming tight rhythmic cells of “Gathering” or the percussive
volleys of “Onward” are similar to the work of Oneohtrix Point Never (see
below). “Onward” is most tiresome track,
though it rallies in its final ninety seconds with a succession of sustained
synthesizer tones crystallizing into a motif that, together with a rousing
drumbeat, summons intensity. Various
tracks use specific devices to set the mood:
for “Thor’s Stone” it is Japanese instrumentation (more likely a
facsimile thereof), shakuhachi (bamboo flute) and koto (zither); for “The Plumes,” it is Middle
Eastern–style chanting. “Anneka’s
Battle,” featuring the vocals of Anneka, a young singer from Brighton, England,
is the only track in which (in the song’s second half) the vocals can be
understood as words. The songs, together
with their mythic titles, evoke wandering in a sun-dappled, sylvan glade in
some medievalist fantasy world. Their
sonic pulchritude cannot entirely make up for their spiritual emptiness, alas. B+
FOUR TET, Beautiful Rewind (Text Records)—Beautiful
as it is, this has to be considered one of Kieran Hebden’s slightest efforts as
Four Tet. Always a terrific sound
collagist, Hebden here presents what amounts to a series of sketches or
snapshots, nice enough in and of themselves but with too little going on in
them to be engrossing. Having been increasingly
drawn to the hypnotic aspects of house music in recent years, instead, for at least the first part of Beautiful Rewind, he ventures more in the direction of dubstep. “Gong,” with its deep,
repetitive beat and vocal samplings—the male voice a straightforward rap
fragment, the female vaguely Middle Eastern or Indian in its mystique—aspires
to the sonic world of Burial (see above) but because of its inertness lacks the
intrigue and theatrics that make William Bevan’s compositions as Burial so
riveting. “Parallel Jalebi” (“jalebi” is
a sugary fried-dough treat in South Asia) is wispier still, notwithstanding its
insistently drilling rhythms; it consists of little more than a fluttery
soprano voice sampled above those beats.
The vocal samplings, some of the female ones quite lovely, that appear
in every track, are uncredited, with the exception of the babblings of Hebden’s
young daughter, Tallulah, on the shortest track (barely half a minute), “Ever
Never.” This is innocent enough; by
contrast, the longest track, “Aerial,” set to a galloping beat in what is
basically a Latin clave pattern, is mind-numbingly repetitive, its minor
tweaks to the schematic offering little aural relief, except for a bit of drama
introduced in the male, Caribbean-accented voice sample, which sounds as though
it might be cursing (all the vocal sounds are too muffled to be
intelligible). “Our Navigation,”
“Unicorn,” and “Your Body Feels” at least incorporate complete harmonic
cycles. In fact, the cleverly concise
“Unicorn” is the closest Beautiful Rewind
comes to a fully fleshed composition.
Because most of these tunes are set to a dance beat, the more unhurried
“Crush” in the middle of the track list and the three that end it (“Ever
Never,” “Unicorn,” and “Your Body Feels”) are a nice change of pace. Four Tet has produced some terrific
electronic music in recent years. For this outing, he has no lack of ideas at
his fingertips, just choosing to do little with the faint tracery he has
brought to our attention. B+
THE HAXAN CLOAK, Excavation (Tri Angle Records)—Seeking
the darkest recesses of the psyche, Excavation
mostly falls short of plumbing the depths that make the soul shudder. The album, all instrumental electronica,
recorded on the same label as Forest Swords’ Engravings (see above), was highly regarded in some critical
circles; both Pitchfork and Rolling Stone
rated it high among the year’s releases.
To me, though, it is portentous and mostly a nonevent. Through track after track, nothing much
happens amid penumbral atmospherics and Goth trappings. This is a shame because Bobby Krlic, the
young Englishman behind The Haxan Cloak, has training as a genuine musician,
not just as a producer or laptop whiz.
The shining exception to the record’s inertness is its final track,
which is also far and away its longest, at nearly thirteen minutes, “The
Drop.” This is about the only track that
actually evinces some compositional nous rather than appearing to be a string
of sound effects. “The Drop” introduces
a simple but genuine theme, repetitive but with enough harmonic cycling and
variation in sonic overlays to keep the listener plugged in. Over the course of the track’s first half,
the theme dies out, leaving just the harmonic sequence, to which is added a
dull sensation of three consecutive percussion beats preceded by a rest. As the composition proceeds, these three
beats become much more salient and insistent, sounding alarmingly like someone
entombed alive and knocking in desperation to get out. The way this spookiness is brought to the
fore and developed over the song’s final seven minutes is sublime and achieves
everything Krlic set out to do on the remainder of the album. Other tracks have their moments, as in the
percussive and whirring samplings that characterize the opening portion of the
second part of the title track or the doomy auguries (more harmonic cycling) of
“Miste,” eventually collapsing into a single tone reiterated in differing
lengths and textures, finally retreating as a heartbeat that morphs into
industrial pounding. The snatches of
nervous chatter on the otherwise monomaniacal “Dieu” (very British in its
crisp, woodblock-like percussion punctuation) put one in mind of some of
Radiohead’s recent efforts. The palpable
buildup of tension and its resolution on part two of “The Mirror Reflecting”
yield some visceral pleasures. But Krlic
is clearly better at creating a sense of suspense than at delivering a
meaningful payoff. The Haxan Cloak will
have to dig deeper than Excavation
does in order to unearth something worthwhile. B
TIM HECKER, Virgins (Kranky/Paper Bag
Records)—As a departure of sorts for Tim Hecker, the composer uses some actual
“analog” musicians for Virgins,
notably fellow Canadian Kara-Lis Coverdale on keyboards and Iceland’s Grímur
Helgason on woodwinds, primarily bass clarinet.
Several fellow composer/experimenters were involved in the production
and the mixing: the Australian Ben
Frost, who is based in Reykjavik, as engineer and musician (unspecified what he
plays), Seattle’s Paul Moore (presumably contributing some keyboard work), and
another Icelander, Valgeir Sigurðsson, for mixing and keyboards (he also lent a
hand in the production of Sigur Rós’s Kveikur;
see below). Production took place in
Reykjavik, Seattle, and Troy, New York.
The process matters on a record of this sort, which, notwithstanding the
conventional musicians, is high artifice.
I would describe Hecker’s métier as electronic minimalism—there are long
passages in which motifs are reiterated obsessively, while gradually the ground
underneath them is glacially stretched or displaced. There is plenty in the way of overtones,
reverb, distortion, buzzing bass hum.
Qualitatively, Virgins is much
like the “purer” electronica of Hecker’s previous solo release, Ravedeath, 1972 (see the 2011 music
survey), but it also bears similarities to Robert Fripp and Brian Eno’s musical
collaborations from the 1970s. The
label, Paper Bag Records, states that the album is “an effort at doing what
digital music does not do naturally—making music that is out of time, out of
tune and out of phase.” To say “out of
tune” is to overstate the amount of distortion involved; Grímur’s clarinet
engages in some low-key squeaking at one juncture toward the end of “Virginal I,”
and the rest is just electronic manipulation.
The phase shifting, though, is thoroughly in the tradition of Steve
Reich or Fripp. All this can seem remote
or overly cerebral, a clinical study of oscillations or noise gates, yet the chord changes (“underlying hum changes”) that unfold partway
into “Live Room” beneath Coverdale’s plinking the same baleful sequence of
notes over and over generate a powerful charge, marking the album’s emotional
peak. “Virginal II” is almost a mirror
image of “Virginal I,” deploying the same keyboard pattern as the first but
with the accents and timbres having been subtly altered, though once this pattern
dissolves, the resulting thrum is a good bit noisier than the dying gasps of
“Virginal I.” “Black Refraction”
distills the essence of Hecker: the
quietest piece on the disc, it cycles endlessly through a single set of
keyboard tones/chords, which would be terribly dull over the course of its
three and a half minutes except for the ever-changing background effects, which
sometimes reinforce and sometimes seem to be at war (rhythmically, tonally)
with the foreground cycle, ending with some muted percussive attacks that
retard its progression. “Stigmata II”
features a rasping, scraping noise that seems to make reference to the
composition’s title. Some tracks bleed
into others, such as “Prism” into “Virginal I” or “Incense at Abu Ghraib” into
“Amps, Drugs, Harmonium” (“Incense at Abu Ghraib” could be characterized as a
prelude), while others are discrete. I
am not normally an advocate for minimalism—and this record is hard to love
unreservedly—but Tim Hecker continues to find ways to make it convincing. A/A-
ROBYN HITCHCOCK, Love from London (Yep Roc Records)—Having
turned sixty two days before Love from
London was released in March 2013, Robyn Hitchcock could easily rest on his
laurels. Some tendency to do just that
keeps the new solo disc from being one of his more memorable ones, even in
comparison to some of the more recent ones with the Venus 3 backing band, like Olé! Tarantula (2006) or Goodnight Oslo (see the 2009 music
survey), to say nothing of his landmark recordings as a soloist and with the
Egyptians in the 1980s and 1990s.
Hitchcock is simply too good a songwriter and far too creative a mind to
put out a bad or even mediocre record.
But it seems that addressing the subject of love has turned the writing
a bit mushy and stale, like commercial applesauce that has been on the shelf
too long. While he does not recycle
material, one gets a sense, in each genre explored here, that he has visited
these environs before, usually to fresher effect. Even the sound of waves crashing the shore in
the sunshiny “love from London” coda to the final song, “End of Time,” was a
device used to end Hitchcock’s very first solo album, Black Snake Diamond Röle, back in 1981. The whimsicality and the surrealistic imagery
that have characterized his music throughout are not absent on Love from London, simply far less
prominent. He does get in a clever line
in the otherwise featureless “I Love You”:
“Even if I’m wriggling/You know that I’m still hooked.” The roiling, nearly monochromatic bass tones
backing the song, initially supplemented by a screechy descending guitar chord,
as well as the “in some miracle way” extension of the refrain toward the
conclusion, resemble “Antwoman,” from the 1999 record Jewels for Sophia. One
constant on this disc is Jenny Adejayan’s subtle cello accompaniment; she,
along with several other women, contributes vocal harmonies as well. The record starts off promisingly with the
bittersweet, regretful “Harry’s Song,” plangent piano chords serving as nearly
all that supports the sung melody. It
never really hits that high again, though, with the exception of “Fix You,” a
Hitchcock “instant classic” of treble guitar whorls, full of witty lines
(“You’ve got a kidney on a fork/You’ve got a mouth that covers the size of New
York”) that depart from the amorous concerns of most of the record to consider
the sad state of the economy (“They make you redundant and blame you for being
a slacker”). “Devil on a String” begins
with the same chord sequence as the B-52’s’ “Planet Claire” (1979) but does not
linger there, moving quickly from the realm of sci-fi flicks to a jaunty,
blues-inflected meditation on devilish desires.
“My Rain” is a nicely contemplative little perusal of the moods that go
with typically English inclement weather, sung at the baritone end of
Hitchcock’s range. Songs like “Be
Still,” “Death and Love,” and “End of Time” point up the limitations of Love from London: singsong-y verse tunes of the type that
Hitchcock could have composed in his sleep, even if the refrains are a little
more layered and sophisticated. Will he
do more collaborative work with the Venus 3 or others? The disc he is putting out in 2014, The Man Upstairs, is billed as another solo effort. A little shaking up of the usual methods
would not hurt before Hitchcock reaches pensioner age. B+
JULIA HOLTER, Loud City Song (Domino Records)—Having
reached the age of twenty-eight when this album, her third, came out, Julia
Holter is not quite yet all that she could be artistically. Still, her quiet (the “loud” in the record
title must refer to the city rather than the song, unless verbal irony is indulged),
dreamy, art pop is never short of engrossing.
A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, she has been
compared to Laurie Anderson and Kate Bush.
On Loud City Song one hears
those voices, yet the abiding kindred spirit here might be Juana Molina (see
below). For example, “Horns Surrounding
Me” uses the sort of repetitive, shadowy keyboard pattern for accompaniment
that the Argentine Molina favors. Its
insistent “horns” (the saxophone of Chris Speed and trombones of Brian Allen
and Matt Barbier) are less inspired than those Tom Zé deployed to represent São
Paulo traffic in his remake of “Jimi Renda-se” from the early 1970s for Jogos de Armar (2000), but the concept
is similar. All the elements conspire to
create an ethos of reverie that is compelling and utterly convincing. “World,” the opening song, is swoony, meterless,
in no hurry to proceed, mostly a cappella, Holter’s firm but quavery voice
supplemented by a chorus of herself and Ramona Gonzalez, plus occasional string
accompaniment. “He’s Running through My
Eyes,” like “World,” evinces a predilection for medieval plainchant; it is a delicate skein of inventive and touching harmonies for voice
and piano, a modest gem. Holter’s
compositions demand a certain listener patience since a number of them unfold
at very deliberate tempos, if they even have tempos. Her touch is not always sure when she
experiments, however. Neither “In the
Green Wild” nor “City Appearing” lives up to the standard she has set and our
expectations: the former, with its
walking (cantering) bass and quasi-spoken vocal, is self-consciously arty and
monochromatic, with an unambitious development section; the latter, closing out
the disc and meant as a bookend to “World,” is slow to build through breathy
vocal wisps and an ethereally spacy organ line, lumbering to a daringly
dissonant but ultimately unsatisfying climax that sounds sketchy, as if only
half worked through. Minor blemishes,
perhaps, except that these two constitute a quarter of the recording. The album’s apex is “Maxim’s I” (“Maxim’s II”
uses the same lyrics in a different setting, dynamic and varied, pushing the
saxophone dissonance into King Crimson territory, reaching high in terms of art
song but not as affecting). This
composition is anthemic, nostalgic, evocative in its brilliantly shimmery
keyboard accompaniment and lachrymose string arrangements. For all its pomp and high drama, though, it
is still recognizably rock music, in a progressive vein. Midway through the track list is,
unexpectedly, a cover of Barbara Lewis’s 1963 R&B hit “Hello Stranger,”
familiar to me growing up from Yvonne Elliman’s 1977 rendition, in which
Elliman channels her inner Linda Ronstadt.
Holter is not that kind of a belter by nature, though her voice is
plenty supple. Her version is almost suspended in amber, it moves so slowly,
yet the song’s essential soulfulness is not denatured in the process. Weirdly fascinating and indicative of a
performer willing to entertain risks. A/A-
THE IDAN RAICHEL
PROJECT, Quarter to Six (Cumbancha/ Helicon
Music)—My exposure to Israeli music has been limited, but I am not much drawn
to what I have heard since the untimely passing of Ofra Haza more than a decade
ago. Quarter
to Six, my first experience with Idan Raichel, who has become a “world
music” star in recent years, is not about to change my outlook. A collection of generally gentle, insipid
folk tunes, it is with few exceptions unexceptional, a fifty-five-minute
yawnfest. The album title derives from a
passage by the author Yossi Banai, describing a mood that sets in as late
afternoon transitions into evening.
Songs are in varying styles and different languages (mostly Hebrew but
several romance languages, German, and presumably Arabic), yet all were written
by Raichel (one has music co-written by Aviv Geffen), with lyrics in the
foreign-language songs penned by collaborators.
These bits of the exotic are no less susceptible to dullness than any of
the Hebrew ballads; even so, some of the liveliest material is
cosmopolitan. Foremost among them is his
partnership with Mira Awad, an Arab/Bulgarian-Israeli singer, for “Ana Ana wa
Enta Enta” (I Am What I Am), a swift-moving, tightly scripted bauble of Arabic
pop in the fashion of Natacha Atlas, not intricate or complex but getting the
most out of its thematic statement and countermelody. Elegant in its simplicity is “Mon Amour,”
featuring Vieux Farka Touré, son of the late Ali Farka Touré, even if his
guitar and gravelly voice are underplayed.
Less enticing are Raichel’s pairings with Ana Moura, a fado singer, for”Sabe Deus” (God Knows) and with
Colombia’s Marta Gómez for “Detrás de Mi Alma” (Behind My Soul);
undistinguished material cannot be overcome by attractive voices here. “In Stille Nacht” (In a Quiet Night), a
stately piece with bells that builds sturdy momentum, while showcasing the
German countertenor Andreas Scholl, is not bad at all but is so sharply
different from everything else presented that it would seem to belong to a
different album. Of the songs in Hebrew,
the best of the lot are “Ba’Layla” (At Night), a resigned, quizzical number
sung by Idan Haviv to soothing piano arpeggios with soft-rock accompaniment and
a Kenny G.–quality saxophone that manages enough sweep—and the occasional
departure from predictability—to keep the ear attuned, and “Achshav Karov”
(Closer Now), with vocals from Tamir Nachshon, a song whose initial dross
(notwithstanding a nice touch of Middle Eastern flutes from Eyal Sela, the
verse section of this song is inert) is banished by a poignant refrain that
knits together the tune nicely. The
other compositions, although they may introduce us to some talented vocalists,
are run-of-the-mill compositions and easily skippable. Raichel himself sings on only five of the
sixteen tracks; his voice, pleasant enough, is more or less interchangeable
with those of the other male vocalists appearing on the disc. B-
THE KNIFE, Shaking the Habitual (Rabid Records/Mute
Records)—It had been quite some time since Sweden’s brother-sister duo the
Knife had last been heard from: the
well-regarded Silent Shout came out
in 2006 (in my own 2006 music survey, done before I started this blog, I gave
the record an “A”). That album was
creepy, Goth, with peculiar sonorities and plenty of distortion and
manipulation, yet although various songs made political points, they were
understated and far from humorless. In
all, the recording held together almost as well as a concept album. The same cannot be said for Shaking the Habitual, which is all over
the map, extravagantly unrestrained, sometimes strident. Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson may
have become too wedded to their anticapitalist political philosophy for the
good of their art; in any case, if this record is meant to be a political
statement, it is one that all too easily sails over the heads of listeners
because Andersson’s words are so hard to pick up on. I have often criticized groups either for having
run out of ideas or for not having any worth expressing. That is not the case here; the siblings are
still, after a decade and a half, full of ferment and daring, even when the
result goes badly wrong. There are two
compositions on this very long album that I loathe, the second and the
second-to-last. “Fracking Fluid
Injection” takes a single musical notion—echoey voices in a sort of simian
chorus and a scraping metallic instrumental accompaniment of sorts—and
protracts it drearily to almost ten minutes in length. “Full of Fire” is full of crackling energy
and has a danceable beat embellished by barreling synthesizer accompaniment
that can sound space-age, cartoonish, or like the thumb pianos of Congo’s Konono No. 1 (see the 2007 music survey) minus the crude
amplification. But Andersson, who is
really more of a storyteller or speechmaker than singer, croaks the lyric in a
deliberately antimelodic fashion. For
all its charged-up nature, the piece gets bogged down in the sameness of its
texture and its fury, notwithstanding the fact that it is ever changing over
the span of its nine-plus minutes. This
song and several others try maladroitly to combine Andersson’s ghoulish,
trancelike delivery with tribal-sounding rhythms. The album is in that regard the Knife’s
analogue to the Talking Heads’ Remain in
Light (1980). But not all the tracks
fit this schematic; a couple are more like bad kabuki theater or Chinese
opera. Witness “A Cherry on Top” and
“Without You My Life Would Be Boring.”
The former, another long piece, is in essence a three-parter, with
languorous, spooky, maundering “instrumental” (all electronics, of course)
sections taking up the first four minutes and the final two, while the middle
phase has rudiments of melody and words, voiced by Andersson in a
quasi-drunken, histrionic, weirdly androgynous manner, set to what sounds like a Japanese koto and some very low strings plucked sharply. The latter brings back the tribal rhythms and
“thumb pianos,” as well as simulated shakuhachi flute. Andersson’s uncharacteristically high-pitched
pre-chorus is what draws the Beijing or Taiwanese opera comparison. It is certainly over the top; on the other
hand, this is the one song with a distinct sense of dramatic irony. “Stay Out Here,” which is more than ten
minutes’ duration, is the Knife’s answer to house music, done in collaboration
with the Stockholm-based artist/writer Emily Roysdon (lyrics) and Shannon
Funchess, of Brooklyn’s Light Asylum; like house, it is highly repetitive,
drilling the same patterns while mounting only a feeble melody to go with
Roysdon’s words. There are meritorious
numbers and passages that show the Knife’s passion for exploration and sonic contrast. The opener, “A Tooth for an Eye,” features
knockabout, syncopated rhythms agilely executed by tuned percussion, again
resembling the Congotronics of Konono
No. 1, and the song’s temperature gradually rises from cool to molten, along
with the volume and the number of “instruments” involved. The one thing that detracts is Andersson’s
strained voice, rising at times to a raucous yell. Better still is “Raging Lung,” which finds a
sinuous, even a little funky, groove and holds it close. The track is too drawn out (once more); the
second half is entirely instrumental except for a brief spell of whispered
lyrics and full of sibilant sounds and drones, ending with reverberant gongs,
that add little to what has already been established. Here, however, Andersson is more subdued,
keeping the dramatics on a shorter leash. A hornlike synth projection
embellishes and replicates the core of her melody. “Wrap Your Arms Around Me,” with its booming
drumbeat and searing long tones, seems more dire than romantic (and contains,
after managing to rhyme “penetration” and “red carnation,” the oh-so Knife-like
line “Free the unborn child from the castle”), but it is all the same the
warmest and most enveloping of the songs presented. The album is sprinkled with literary
allusions; for example, two brief, noisy instrumental interludes are named
“Oryx” and “Crake,” after a Margaret Atwood novel. It is a relief that each lasts less than a
minute because the experience is a little like listening to someone run fingers
across a chalkboard. The album title
itself alludes to something Michel Foucault said. My version of Shaking the Habitual is a single disc that omits the middle (and
longest) track, “Old Dreams Waiting to Be Realized,” which is the title of a
magazine article by a Swedish feminist writer, Nina Björk. (Apparently, there is another version that is
a double-CD set including the track.)
The CD comes with instructions on how to download the missing track from
the Internet, but my ancient computer could not manage this, and I dislike
these gimmicks in any case. I settled
for listening via YouTube. This
composition, more in the realm of abstract electronica like Tim Hecker (see
above) or Thomas Watkiss (see the 2009 music survey) but less artful because
there is little going on over nineteen minutes except for spectral sustained
tones with intervals of percussion or sampled noise, could easily be skipped or
overlooked without missing much. A
fascinating mélange of wildness, tedium, and dynamism, Shaking the Habitual would seem to point toward a new career
direction as a sort of ghastlier Gang Gang Dance (see the 2008 and 2011 music
surveys). But it may not matter because
the siblings have announced that they are splitting up after the conclusion of
their fall 2014 tour. B+/B
THE LOW FREQUENCY IN
STEREO, Pop Obskura (SPV/Long Branch
Records)—To dub this five-person band from Haugesund, Norway, as “a less
interesting Stereolab” would be harsh, considering that I really do like the
record. Its bright sound is far airier
and more pop oriented than that of the dour Anglo-French band led by Tim Gane
and Laetitia Sadier, and its music is not similarly freighted with political
messaging. Stereolab was out to change
the world, whereas the Low Frequency in Stereo band members are out to enjoy
themselves in it. The opening song on Pop Obskura, “Elevated/Desecrated,” is
remarkably Stereolab-esque, though, in its shimmery, keyboard-dominated sheen
and soldierly female vocals, as it drills robotically and methodically into
one’s ear canals. The older band was
groundbreaking; its Norwegian counterpart, not so much. Pop
Obskura is casually enjoyable if lightweight. Certainly not everything sounds like
Stereolab, either. In fact, comparisons
have been drawn to the Doors (if only because the electric keyboards used at
times recall the Fender Rhodes used in “Riders on the Storm” or Hammond organ
in “L.A. Woman”) as well as surf guitar and other “lo-fi” outfits. The band has been described (on its own
website) as having “one foot in Pompeii and one in space.” The spacy element is evident simply from
various song titles, from “Cybernautic” to “Black Receiver” and “Satellites in
Sight.” There is also a cartoonish
aspect that shows up particularly in “Ionic Nerve Grip,” with spoken words like
speech bubbles from a comic strip that perhaps sounded better in Norwegian
originally than as translated into English (“Now stand still while I hit you!”)
and that make Saturday Night Live’s
“Laser Cats” sketches look literate by contrast. For an “action short,” the music behind
“Ionic Nerve Grip” is remarkably laid-back and dreamlike, with a recurrent,
pumping, squelchy bass. “Satellites in
Sight” is like the B-52s in some respects, minus the neo-punky vocal dramatics,
breezy, full of simple hooks, and pointed toward the heavens. Breeziness characterizes “Cybernautic” as
well, even if its graver tone makes it more of a hybrid between futuristic
pop and Stereolab. It segues nicely into
“Black Receiver,” the noisiest song on the record (not all that much, but
everything is relative) both in terms of its vocals and its guitars,
culminating in a high-pitched refrain (sung by both male and female band
members) that is actually the record’s most gratifying moment. “Black Receiver” is a tight and orderly
little piece, the white noise and the overly mechanistic bridge section
notwithstanding, but it pays obeisance to the punk anarchy of the 1970s from
which it is descended stylistically.
“Colette (Subie Subie)” has a similar lineage, though its DNA has been
crossed with that of Europop of the same era or earlier. The closing tune, the smoothly mellow,
downcast “Secondhand Nation,” is an opportunity for the group’s two women,
Hanne Andersen and Linn Frøkedal, to duet and harmonize. If not Sadier and the dear departed Mary
Hansen of Stereolab, they have lovely voices for pop all the same. I assume that Andersen, one of the founding
members, carries the bulk of the vocals elsewhere. There is one instrumental on the disc, “White
Echo,” a quiet, psychedelic throwback of a piece, full of tremulous keyboards,
a dirgelike guitar riff, and assorted electronic effects and sampling. In terms of recent Norwegian pop, this is not
quite at the level of Datarock’s doubly self-titled debut (reviewed in the 2005
music survey prior to this blog rolling out but summarized in the “Top 100 [Well, 101] Albums of the Decade, 2000–2009”) but still genial and weirdly
cool. A-/B+
MAZZY STAR, Seasons of Your Day (Rhymes of an Hour
Records /Fontana)—At its best, Mazzy Star, a group reactivated after a long
hiatus dating to the mid-1990s, haunts us with the moody, impressionistic
“California”; at its worst, we get tracks like “Flying Low,” which seems to
suggest that guitarist-composer David Roback is obsessed with the theme music
from Breaking Bad. Mazzy Star has been characterized as
“neo-psychedelia” or “dream pop,” but in its current incarnation, judging by this lone release, the band
is more folk rock oriented, with a Southern California country twang. Each of the principals, Roback and
vocalist/lyricist Hope Sandoval, are from Los Angeles originally, and both,
having ranged through a variety of other music projects, have now settled into
middle age. The biggest objection I can
lodge against Seasons of Your Day is
that its vocal melodies are not only spare but spare in a way that is both
unadventurous and tentative. If Sandoval
is responsible for these as well as writing the words to songs, then the finger
points at her. On “California,” however,
the sketchy vocal line, dreamy and plaintive, fits the song perfectly. Sandoval’s singing here is breathy and sexy,
set starkly against the dotted-note rhythms and chords of Roback’s acoustic
guitar. For “I’ve Gotta Stop,” the following
song, however, her voice turns gratingly mewling. The title track, though lacking the raw
emotional power of “California,” is arranged similarly, with a bit of string
embellishment at the cadence, and makes a virtue of simplicity to fashion an appealingly
gentle tune. The other selection (apart
from the slight, motionless “Does Someone Have Your Baby Now?”) with a minimal
setting, voice and acoustic guitar, is the woozy “Spoon,” in which Roback’s
bent notes match Sandoval’s own yodeled tones; a certain parlor quaintness is
introduced with the harpsichord arpeggios that appear at the bridge and return
at the ending. The opening number, “In
the Kingdom,” gets a lot of mileage out of its sequence of descending-scale
organ chords, in concert with Roback’s improvisatory electric guitar musings on
the same sequence, yet Sandoval’s vocal line barely registers; this is a truly
a song that is all about the accompaniment.
“Spoon,” the most ambitious composition on the disc, is once more
focused intently on the acoustic guitar lines, here a potent exchange between
Roback and the late Bert Jansch (who died in 2011, showing that at least some
of the tracks go back quite a way before the release); the guitars sing and
yowl, and in places where they are not in unison, they achieve a sublime
textural depth. Sandoval’s monotonal,
quasi-drone of a vocal might as well not be present at all, except that without
its contrast, the whole would sound like incidental music for a screenplay. “Flying Low” essays a roadhouse-blues-style
grittiness that seems ersatz, or at least unearned (“Got to pay your dues if
you wanna sing the blues” –Ringo Starr).
It rides the same wiry electric guitar riff out to the horizon,
eventually adding some honky-tonk harmonica to the mix, long after Sandoval has
dropped out of the collaboration. “Lay
Myself Down” is the most country-ish tune on the record, in good part because of
the pedal steel arrangements. These
swoony chords give the song some tang; otherwise, it would be fairly colorless. Roback’s playing is impressive throughout Seasons of Your Day, but his songwriting
gets too often into comfortable ruts, and without more help from his partner,
Sandoval, Mazzy Star will not reach its apogee. B+
MOBY, Innocents (Mute Records/Little
Idiot)—Remember when Moby was a super-big deal, around the turn of the
millennium? The fact that his most
recent release, Innocents, was
largely ignored by the critical community would imply that time is starting to
pass by even those from Generation X. (Moby was born Richard Melville Hall, claiming
an ancestral link to Herman Melville, in 1965.)
Is the critical indifference justified?
I would have to say yes. Innocents is certainly not a bad album;
there are only a couple of tracks I actively dislike, and one of these (“Almost
Home”) is largely because I can happily live without Damien Jurado’s throaty countertenor. (The other, “The Lonely Night,” features Mark
Lanegan, formerly of the Pacific Northwest grunge band Screaming Trees, who
sounds like a Tom Waits knockoff.) But
there is nothing that stands out about it, either; nothing that entices further
and closer listening. Its blissful,
benign haze of mellowness may reflect the Southern California environment where
Moby is spending his time these days, and the list of guest performers tilts
toward the West Coast as well. I believe
that place matters, and, although a number of artists in this survey (Julia
Holter, Mazzy Star, Flying Lotus from the 2012 survey) make Southern California
their home, I have long said that moving to L.A. may be good for one’s fame but
is generally bad for creativity. The
giveaway that Moby himself recognizes he may have lost his New York edge is his
snarky comment in the liner notes (which largely consist of a tiresome manifesto,
worthy of Morrissey, about the evils of consuming animal products) that there
are worse things than the “‘vaguely new age Southern California cliché.’ I’m guessing some angry people in cold places
might disagree.” Moby’s own instrumental
or quasi-instrumental tracks on Innocents
do not amount to a lot. The most
promising of these is the opener, “Everything that Rises.” More than anything else on the disc, it
reaches for rich sonorities—and finds them within its grasp. Its sophisticated harmonic layering is
atmospheric and creates a sense of dramatic expectation, expectation that is
not fulfilled because nothing else happens except a semi-fadeout at the end;
the piece is purely a scene setter. “A
Long Time” and “Saints” are both downtempo numbers with indecipherable background vocals (uncredited in the former,
Inyang Bassey in the latter) pitched toward soulfulness. “A Long Time” is the more interesting in
terms of its sheer soundscape, with a chromatic palette leaning toward the
darker shades, yet it is relatively static, with the only sense of development
coming from the addition of a drumbeat.
The somewhat blander “Saints” at least has a sense of motion and
consequence to it. “Going Wrong” is
sheer wallpaper music. Of the tunes Moby
wrote by himself with genuine vocals, “Don’t Love Me” (Inyang Bassey’s deep
pipes again, this time at the forefront) has the most conventional song
structure, but even this number could have benefited from a little more variety
in its elements. Further, its slinky
four-note ground bass in the piano and bluesy melody, though catchy, sound
borrowed from older sources. “The Dogs”
puts Moby himself at the microphone, backed up by Jurado; it is a sober tune
that is stretched to nine and a half minutes to close the album, about four
minutes longer than it needs to be.
Nothing if not “dogged,” it soldiers on rather colorlessly. The two most appealing songs among those with
invited singers are “The Last Day” and “A Case for Shame,” the record’s first
single. “The Last Day” is another chill
tune, with breathily seductive vocals by Skylar Grey (once known as Holly
Brook) and uncredited b-vocals. Relaxed
in its serenity, it might have been a club hit had fate been less fickle. Al Spx (surely not her real name), identified
here by her band name, Cold Specks, imparts “A Case for Shame” with a sleek
neo-soul sheen. Like “Everything that
Rises,” its other strength is the lushness of its arrangements; like “Don’t
Love Me” and “A Long Time,” its chief weakness is its monomaniacal constancy—no
contrasting themes or harmonic changes at all.
Wayne Coyne’s star turn on “The Perfect Life” picks up a great deal from
the starry-eyed idealism of his band, the Flaming Lips; it is a beaming choral
hallelujah but, in the end, fairly innocuous.
It might not be his modus operandi, but if only Moby had put as much
energy and passion into this record as he does into his veganism advocacy, we
would really be hearing something great. B+
JUANA
MOLINA, Wed 21
(Crammed Discs)—A five-year gap between records can often spell trouble; it is
my impression that when artists are at the height of their creative powers,
they usually produce albums in quick succession. Then again, the record business is not what
it used to be. Juana Molina’s Wed 21, her first issue since 2008’s Un Día, which shared the honor for my
Album of the Year, is not as engrossing or all-enveloping as that landmark
release, but this is an awfully tough standard by which to judge a record. The newer disc and the older have plenty of
DNA in common: a certain furtive
quality, aspects of dark fantasy, repeating motivic elements rolling out
quickly. Wed 21 is less trancelike—for one, it has genuine, if weird, lyrics
(in Spanish, except for the “Come with me” line of “Eras”)—and at times is more
conventionally guitar driven than its predecessor. “Eras” (You Were) is an exemplary scene
setter, fugitive yet bopping along playfully on the crest of its 7/4 time
signature. Molina’s affectless voice is
less zombie-like in the context of the masterly chiaroscuro effects she creates
to surround it. Songs such as “Sin Guía,
No” (Without a Guide, No) and “Ay, No Se Ofendan” (Ay, Do Not Be Offended) can
seem unremarkable for long stretches, yet, as they become woolier and more
unrestrained and the intensity picks up, the atmospheric magic that marks
Molina’s compositional genius insinuates its way into the listener’s
consciousness. The title track manages
to weave seamlessly futuristic electronic keyboard harmonics with scatting and
jiving. “Lo Decidí Yo” (I Decided) is
notable for its energetic, tight syncopations and fuzzy, spluttering electronic
intro, which reappears later as accompaniment.
While no one would ever mistake Molina for the post-punk experimentalism
of Micachu and the Shapes (see the 2012 music survey), the surprisingly noisy,
rocking guitar lead-in to “La Rata” (The Rat), preceded by a “Smoke on the
Water”–worthy bass line, sounds like something Mica Levi (Micachu) herself
might have penned. “El Oso de la Guarda”
(The Guardian Bear), the longest track, near the end of the record, has the
same combination of mysticism and rubbery elasticity of beats as the preceding
songs, but it adds an interlude of bright guitar psychedelia and ends with two
minutes of quiet, spooky electronic sustained tones accompanied by creaking
sounds. Wed 21 has enough musical introns over its forty-nine minutes to
break the spell and knock its grade down a bit, but it is still plenty
creative, entertaining, even rollicking at times. A-
ONEOHTRIX
POINT NEVER, R Plus Seven
(Warp Records)—A surprisingly artless recording from a man (Daniel Lopatin) who
has done much better work previously. For
Replica (see the 2011 music survey), it seemed like
there was more of a game plan for each song, whether cinematic or percussive or
playing around with the warping of voices or aiming for weird timbres or deft
quick cuts. On R Plus Seven, by contrast, despite the aim of simulating
soundtracks, elements and passages seem to have been put together at random,
like a blind person attempting collage.
The result is typically underwhelming and surprisingly tedious for a
relatively short record. To be sure,
there are moments when things seem to come together compositionally, but, with
the exception of “Zebra,” which manages to follow through on an idea
consistently, these are brief flashes of enlightenment. What makes “Zebra” more successful than the
other tracks is that harmonic echoes of its opening shivery theme, loud and
assertive, are sustained through the quieter, echoey, slow and midtempo
sections that follow. The album makes
heavy use of short bursts of sampled voices and “FM presets,” as on “Inside
World,” which also contains the only Burial-style (see above) vocal distortion
on the disc, yet only in a tiny dose.
“Still Life” is for the most part as inert as the objects represented in
a painting of that type, but, just past the three-minute mark, it suddenly
whips itself into a glorious frenzy of agitated synthesizer figurations and added
noise effects. Unfortunately, this lasts
barely half a minute before lapsing into a dully consonant cycle of choral
tones. Some of the keyboard work in
“Chrome Country,” the final composition, is interesting, spasms of choppy piano
accompaniment that are abruptly succeeded by a Wurlitzer organ playing
arpeggios like something out of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” by Bach at
half-speed. Even so, these bits of
pianism are cushioned by an innocuous, pillowy melody voiced by mixed chorus
with swoony synth tones for support, like something to which a movie music
composer who really wanted to play it safe would resort. “Along” eventually latches onto one bass
groove that it tries to mine for every last speck of precious metal,
surrounding it with piped-in cheesy puffs of voices and synthesizer. “Cryo” brings us a taste of the cool vibes
and futuristic arrangements and tonal palette that characterize Steven
Ellison’s work as Flying Lotus (see the 2012 music survey)—only a taste, mind
you. The opener, “Boring Angel” (the
title a telltale sign?), comes at the listener in rippling, muscular waves of
synthesizer minced with vocal samplings and a bit of percussion, rising from a
bed of long tones, but, by relentlessly sticking with the same harmonic
progression, it saps its potential. The
ten-second organ flourish at the end of the piece has little to do with what
preceded it. There is a bow to world
music in the use of the Japanese koto
in the short piece “He She,” the only one to deploy genuine humor in its
hippopotamus-like growls and beepy, syncopated bits of chanting, and the kalimba, or thumb piano,
in the busy if not terribly affecting “Americans.” The CD jacket contains what looks like song
lyrics, but there are no actual lyrics here and in fact only one intelligible
word, an interjection of “wait” in “Problem Areas.” Not as rigorous as Tim Hecker, who
collaborated with Lopatin on Instrumental
Tourist (see the 2012 music survey) and who used the same Reykjavik-based
Greenhouse Studios for his own current record (see above), not as eerily
fraught as Burial, not as innovative or experimental as Flying Lotus or
Actress, Oneohtrix Point Never’s R Plus
Seven falls between the stools. B/B-
POLVO,
Siberia
(Merge Records)—The same traits that make Polvo never less than fascinating
listening also give rise to certain reservations. The band’s unconventional tonal progressions
defy its audience’s expectations repeatedly, yet in ways that are subtle and convincing,
never outlandish. That said, there is a
certain “strangled in the crib” aspect to Polvo’s melodies on Siberia, its sixth studio album and
second since the band reunited in 2008 following a decade-long hiatus. The blankness of these themes is not helped
by Ash Bowie’s matter-of-fact, low vocals, more suited to a metal band than one
like Polvo (which has sometimes been characterized as “noise rock”
or “math
rock,”
whatever that is, but really exists outside characterization), or the muddling
of the lyrics at times in the engineering of this disc. Merge Records did not see fit to offer a
lyrics sheet in the CD package. In any
case, the lyrics matter less than what is going on in the music itself. The guitar intro to “Blues Is Loss” foretells
what these quick-change artists plan for the remainder of the song: starting with a sunny, expressive line that
is bent slightly as a nod toward the blues, it then moves toward an
accentuation of the arpeggiated harmony that sounds more like early Genesis
than anything else. This delicate
tracery abruptly collapses into a theme that cannot seem to decide if it wants
to be country blues or more straightforward rock. The latter wins out ultimately, setting the
stage for the wistful fragment of lyric at the song’s core. The final minute changes up the rhythm and
texture, to something more plodding, full of pounding drums and voluminous
electric guitar. “Total Immersion,” the
song that precedes “Blues Is Loss” to start the record, serves up a steadier
portion of sludgy rock, notable for the modal, down-spiraling accompanying
figure. But this is one of the offerings
in which the melody seems truncated, well before it can achieve any kind of
resolution. The same flaw afflicts two
other long-ish numbers, “Anchoress” at the end of the tracklist and “The Water
Wheel” in the middle. This is not to say
that these songs are uninteresting or devoid of skill in the way their ensemble
(textures, harmonics, rhythms, effects) is realized, though “The Water Wheel”
is the most amorphous, unruly composition in the set, just that they could be
still more than they are. The band does
better in this regard in the shorter pieces (“Light, Raking,” “Changed,” “Old
Maps,” and, to a lesser extent, “Some Songs”).
“Old Maps” is the most openly tuneful, though that quality resides more
in the acoustic guitar intro than in the breathy sung theme, which is about as
simple as a medieval lay (but at least sounds completed). The bridge section of “Old Maps” deconstructs
that guitar intro, chopping it into pieces and playing around with the emphases. The chorus of “Light, Raking” is downright
swingy, and the song concludes with some sitar-like tone warping, reflecting a
long-standing interest in Asian music.
Less creative bands would do well to study “Changed,” a small jewel with
a standard drum-and-cymbal beat but a mesmerizingly slippery tonal center. It also shifts suddenly and seamlessly from a
gentle vocal number to arena rock guitar and percussion. The four North Carolina natives who make up
Polvo do not tour much, and by now they all have other jobs and other lives; even
so, when they get together to make music, magic still happens. A-
PUBLIC
SERVICE BROADCASTING, Inform, Educate,
Entertain (Test Card Recordings)—An eclectically
curated amalgam of movie passages, bits of public service announcements,
educational filmstrips, and advertising, Inform,
Educate, Entertain necessarily goes further in realizing its third mission
than the first two. The debut album
(though the group has released a couple of EPs previously) from the London duo
that identify themselves as “J. Willgoose, Esq.” and “Wrigglesworth” is both enjoyable
and instantly forgettable like a dream whose details recede from the moment of
wakening. Its electronica and its
archival nature suggest Kraftwerk at times and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the
Dark (O.M.D.) at others. The sampled
pronouncements are typically relentlessly upbeat, and the gleaming tunes are
fashioned to match, making the disc, in its ironic detachment and unspoken
commentary on the construction of popular music (and film), almost a
meta-recording. Though Willgoose and
Wrigglesworth know their way around pop hooks, the risk is that the listener
focuses on the cinematic/broadcast samplings to the exclusion of the music
itself. In certain tracks, we are
treated to serviceable dance pop, little more.
Even so, the duo are cleverer in their compositional craft than they
show through the veneer of their quasi-automated pop factory ditties. “Spitfire,” “Night Mail,” “The Now
Generation,” and “Everest” all aspire to a swinginess that transcends the
anodyne. “Spitfire” in particular soars
and swoops in a way that recalls O.M.D.’s “Enola Gay” (1980) and similarly
remarks on the beauty and grace of an aircraft with terrifyingly destructive
potency; “Everest” likewise bathes in the euphoria brought on by high
elevations and thin air. “The Now
Generation” begins and ends with a monotone guitar attack worthy of Prince’s
“Kiss” (1986). The song’s dated and
hokey, mod-ish fashion-tip commentary is the funniest by far of the spoken
material dug up from the Prelinger Archives. “Signal 30” is hell-bent, pedal-to-the-metal
rock, as throbbing and energetic as any hardcore
number. And its automotive sounds and
commentaries on driving are amusing in their own right. Both “Theme from PSB” and “ROYGBIV” feature banjo breaks, played by Willgoose. A
few tracks—“Lit Up,” “Late Night Final,” and the sole instrumental,
“Qomolangma” (the Tibetan name for Mount Everest)—slow the tempos. “Lit Up” is a particularly effective
atmospheric piece, as a spellbound narrator describes ships, moored in the dark,
“lit up like fairy lamps,” though the effect wears off as the song’s pace picks
up. “Late Night Final,” summoning the
cries of newspaper vendors from an earlier time, is not as successfully
evocative, its tone too wan, its saxophone choruses from Wrigglesworth too
polished. The spoken-word sample from
the U.K. Central Office of Information’s 1948 short film “What a Life!” used in
“Late Night Final” brings a surprisingly downcast ending to a session otherwise
ruled by tight-lipped cheer. In the end,
though you may recognize that Kraftwerk and O.M.D. were greater artists,
Willgoose and Wrigglesworth have made a wry little pop record that achieves
precisely what it set out to do: inform,
educate, and above all entertain.
Moreover, given Britain’s recent history in which successive Tory and
Labour governments have striven to privatize just about everything under the
sun, there is something noble about an unabashed celebration of public service,
no matter how leavened with hipster irony. A-
PURLING
HISS, Water on Mars
(Drag City)—I will readily admit that the sort of “lo-fi”
pseudo-grunge peddled by Purling Hiss is not what I enjoy listening to, as a
rule. On the other hand, in just about
any genre, if performed well enough, the music is worth a closer look. I wish I could say that that were the case
with Water on Mars generally; there
are too many duds on this short record.
Even so, nuggets of, if not gold, perhaps copper or zinc, are there to
be mined from the dross. Purling Hiss, a
Philadelphia trio consisting of Mike Polizze on guitar and vocals, Kiel Everett
on bass, and Mike Sneeringer on drums, certainly enjoys its feedback
effects. Polizze’s laconic delivery, at
times more reciting than singing, other times barely bothering to shape the
notes, can echo that of Lou Reed (who died toward the end of the year). But on the opening track, “Lolita,” he takes
the opposite tack, with a raucous, full-throated cry, “Lolita, come back to
me!” backed by wailing guitars, reverb, and screechy white noise. Notwithstanding its primitive tunelessness,
the song is done with such conviction as to be an effective showpiece of noise rock. Subtler in nature if just as plangent is “She
Calms Me Down,” appropriately the quietest song on the album and its most
dreamy and seductive, even if the tune is little more than a descending-scale
triad with an S-hook at either end. This
short track features on piano Adam Granduciel (who is also a co-producer of the
record), a former associate of Kurt Vile who now heads up another Philadelphia
outfit, The War on Drugs. “Face Down”
consists of a series of rapidly executed, repeating bass patterns, above which
Polizze yammers on bawlingly about this and that (hard for these ears to catch
all of what he is saying—that is one of the problems with lo-fi, and also with
aging); perhaps the song title suggests
the aftermath of a drunken spree. It is
not much of a song; still, its punky energy—it is like something from yet
another Philadelphia band, the Dead Milkmen, minus that band’s sardonic humor—carries
it through, and Sneeringer’s drumming comes across here beautifully. The title track, atypically, has a
five-minute-long instrumental intro, a genial guitar theme that is milked for
way too long, with lots of caterwauling feedback effects. When the singer finally enters the picture,
he is in full Lou Reed mode, boasting about being able to see the future. It is a spirited, pleasant ditty but counts
as only a minor payoff considering the protracted buildup that preceded
it. The other five songs on the disc are
ciphers, vacuous pieces with obvious-sounding tunes. At its best, Purling Hiss’s garage rock
sensibility matches the Bandcamp description of another of its recordings, “...
songs that stick around like a sedan carpet matted with spilled Pepsi and Pat’s
[the famed Philly steak sandwich emporium] wrappers.” But it cannot seem to maintain that level for
long. B+/B
SHEARWATER,
Fellow Travelers
(Sub Pop Records)—I have mixed feelings about albums consisting of other bands’
songs. If the covering band’s own musical
personality is strong, what it does with “alien” material can be fascinating or
amusing (viz. the Devo version of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction"). Also, when a band covers a variety of others,
as Shearwater does here, it is a chance for exposure to the unfamiliar—for
example, I had never even heard of the Baptist Generals (like Shearwater, a
Texas-based band), whose song “F***ed Up Life” concludes the track list. If the band’s stamp is not particularly
distinctive, though, the listener is bound to be happier with original
material. Having read an Under the Radar
interview with Shearwater’s central figure, Jonathan Meiburg, I am still not
entirely sure what induced him to do this record, apart from making it a sort
of tribute to the groups that Shearwater has toured with over the years. One thing is that is novel is that Meiburg
invited the artists he was covering to participate in the making of the record
(not all accepted the invitation)—only not on their own songs. After going back and listening to the
originals, I would have to say that certain songs, like David Thomas
Broughton’s “Ambiguity,” sound little different, leading to the question, “What
is the point?” All right, so Meiburg
adds a harp and some atmospheric sounds (birds, waves) at the end to what was
in its first incarnation a simple, probing acoustic guitar solo, but that does
not really change things at all. The
same complaint could be lodged against his rendition of Wye Oak’s “Mary Is
Mary,” an earthy, folk-based tune. In
other cases, Shearwater’s approach is radically different but to little effect. In St. Vincent’s “Cheerleader,” Meiburg’s
vocals are far more emphatic, backed by Jesca Hoop, and the main theme has been
altered to more strictly major mode, which actually deprives what is otherwise
an indifferent number of its melodic intricacy.
Similarly, his stentorian, ringing tones and straight delivery destroy
the peculiar subtleties of Clinic’s “Tomorrow,” a quaint piece that takes on a
bluesy aspect, particularly with the blaring harmonica à la Supertramp’s “Take
the Long Way Home,” in the original, though in this case what he replaces it
with contains a certain power of its own.
For Coldplay’s “Hurts Like Heaven,” one of the fleeter and lighter pop
songs I have heard from that U.K. mega-seller, Meiburg does violence to the
song’s spirit; still, the slow-burning long chords and keening overtones that
ultimately overtake the theme lend the song an emotional depth it would
otherwise lack. Far more heat is
generated by Shearwater’s loud arrangement of “Natural One,” another quiet
acoustic song (as first conceived) from Lou Barlow, who was in Dinosaur Jr. and
Sebadoh; the power chords and bells, and the transmogrification of a guitar
figuration introducing a touch of mystique in a straightforward blues-tinged
song into “Peter Gunn”–style enigmatic sultriness, are performed convincingly. Most effective of all is the scorching
recasting of Xiu Xiu’s “I Luv the Valley OH!” taking a song that was already
somewhat exhortative in nature and scaling up the vehemence several orders of
magnitude, with booming drumbeats and clanging, U2-style guitar chords. There is one original song on the disc, “A
Wake for the Minotaur,” a nicely contemplative number on which Meiburg duets
with Sharon Van Etten, who sounds pretty good here. Meiburg himself sings like a (mature)
choirboy, and it is impossible for me not to like someone who has a masters in
geography and an avid interest in ornithology.
He is also a pretty good writer—it is worth taking time to read his
notes and musings about life on the road that substitute for liner notes in the
CD jacket. The primary shortcoming of Fellow Travelers, though, is this: a cover song can easily be too tasteful or
stately for its own good. B+
SIGUR
RÓS, Kveikur
(XL Recordings)—The rockingest album yet by Sigur Rós, now an Icelandic trio
following the farewell of multi-instrumentalist Kjartan Sveinsson in 2012,
taking with him a great deal of musical erudition. Though there are diehards who feel that the
pure essence of Sigur Rós was expressed in the band’s first two albums, Von (1997; I have not heard this one)
and Ágætis Byrjun (1999), and has not
been fully recaptured since, in truth the group has only grown in stature and
confidence over time. By now, every
release feels newsworthy and like a special occasion. Each record is characteristically and
uniquely Sigur Rós—even discounting the Icelandic and “Hopelandic” lyrics, no
other band sounds like it—and at the same time distinct. Even so, Kveikur
(Fuse) is an astonishing departure. Not
only is it loud and rocking hard for the most part, but the melodies are more
open and far more sustained than on previous albums. It is worth noting that Radiohead, a band to
which Sigur Rós is often compared, went in the opposite direction, toward
interiority and quietude over the course of its career. But one album does not make a trend. To a certain extent, the band has sacrificed
subtlety for power, giving rise to the complaint noted above. Kveikur’s
thrum yields a deliberately sludgy sound at times, in contrast to the
crystalline clarity that marked its predecessors; it is less stately, and the
contrasts have been muted or blotted out.
For all that, it is warmer and every bit as stirring—and not only at the
climaxes. From the get-go,
“Brennisteinn” (Brimstone) hits with the cataclysmic impact of thudding bass
chords and strained, wailing synthesizer tones as an introduction to the main
theme sung by Jón Þór Birgisson (“Jónsi”) in his clarion high tenor, elevating
at the lengthy bridge section into the countertenor and falsetto ranges. The return of the chorus following this
passage is potent. The piece then ends
with a couple of minutes of relative quietude amid a horn chorale, though those
screechy synths are ever-present, along with an explosion or two. “Ísjaki” (Iceberg) is compelling in a
different way, insistent and high-strung throughout, with a big drumbeat from
Orri Páll Dýrasson and Jónsi’s vocals staying almost exclusively in the upper
registers. The multitracking of Jónsi’s
voice can sound like a baying canine chorus.
The title song is every bit as forceful as “Brennisteinn,” booming in
its percussion, cacophonous in its caterwauling guitars, Jónsi’s singing run
through various filters; the whole experience is more punchy, even punch-drunk,
than one could ever imagine coming from Sigur Rós but heady and exhilarating. For that matter, the idea of this band as shoegazers
seems exotic, yet the ringing/chiming guitars and buzzy pedal points of
“Stormur” (Storm) and especially “Rafstraumur” (Electric Current) partake of
that genre. If any composition seems to
show Sigur Rós slightly off its game, it would be “Hrafntinna” (Obsidian), which
is ploddingly paced and drifting but still offers some nice vocal harmonies,
finishing with another horn chorale. The
group steps it down toward the end of the disc.
“Bláþráður” (Thin Thread) still has a core of muscular drum volleys and
power guitar but is generally more sedate than what came before it. “Var” (Shelter), the closer, is mostly gentle
and limpid piano chords in a steady cycle, more in line with what the band has
offered in the past. But there are still
strains of restlessness, droning electronic keyboards throughout and bits of
shrill feedback to unsettle the veneer of placidity. Kveikur,
as thunderously unexpected as it is, stands shoulder to shoulder with anything
the Icelanders have recorded. A/A-
SLEIGH
BELLS, Bitter Rivals
(Mom + Pop Music)—Three albums into its career, Sleigh Bells is sticking with
the formula. Fortunately, there are no
signs that it is getting stale. There is
not a whole lot I can say about the band that I have not already said in
reference to Treats (see the 2010
music survey) or Reign of Terror
(2012 music survey).
Guitarist/keyboardist/percussionist/electronics wiz Derek Miller and
singer Alexis Krauss continue to churn out noise rock
par excellence. The music is as bombastic
and in your face as ever, with Miller’s punky, industrial-drill electric
guitars, stomping percussion, and leaden syncopation alternately magnified by
Krauss’s exuberance and high-wire theatrics or sugar-tipped by her unfailing
pop sensibilities. Songs are short (all
between two and a half and three and a half minutes), and the album itself is
so short (twenty-nine and a half minutes) as to seem a rip-off. Krauss has said in interviews (apparently she
talks to the media more than Miller does) that she modeled these songs in part
on the music of Janet Jackson, though what I hear is still early/mid-1960s-era
girl group stuff on steroids. “Tiger Kit”
is supposed to pay tribute to Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” (1989), but this is
much harder to hear in the music than the barnyard animal sounds sampled. In any case, this track, along with “Minnie,”
is among the weaker entries in the playlist.
The tune with the most staying power is “Young Legends,” an elemental
melody delivered with punch and dispatched with an almost too brisk efficiency. “Sugarcane” is again Sleigh Bells in top
form—combining thundering percussiveness and honeyed pop hooks; it almost does
not matter if the lyrics make little sense or if the chorus is simply the word
“beware” sung in modulating patterns. The
title track kicks off the record amid little squeals from Krauss that are practically
doubled by a dog’s whine, but soon it gets down to the business of pounding
your orifices; considering the power that the verse packs, the chorus is a
bit meager. The video for “Bitter
Rivals” (see the link at bottom) was filmed in part at the Unisphere in
Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. Sheer
pounding reaches a pinnacle with the song “Sing Like a Wire.” The last three tracks slow things down
somewhat and even—heaven help us— project a certain finesse, particularly in “24,”
where the guitar part in the verse is more progressive tinged, with thrusting
arpeggiated figures, while the chorus is uncharacteristically harmonically rich
and shifts the emphasis toward the shoegaze
genre. “Love Sick” ends the record with
a contemplative, wounded coda (“The pleasure of your company/Look what it’s
done to me”) in which one can actually hear the percussion for which the group
is named. While full-fledged stardom is
elusive, Sleigh Bells has established at least a grudging measure of indie cred
by doing what it does and doing it well.
“Is it terrifying being the American dream?” the singer asks in “You
Don’t Get Me Twice.” Sleigh Bells’ taste
of popular success has yet to extend, though, to Alexis Krauss’s placement on
Wikipedia’s list of notable people from Manasquan, N.J. (alongside ESPN
commentator Doris Burke and several more obscure athletes). A/A-
SOMEONE
STILL LOVES YOU BORIS YELTSIN, Fly by
Wire (Polyvinyl Records)—About the best thing that can
be said for this all-male pop trio from Springfield, Missouri, is that it
picked a clever, if unwieldy, band name.
Given this CD as a gift by my brother (who was also intrigued by the name),
I was surprised to find out that these guys have been plying the circuit for
just about a decade already and have several studio releases to their name;
they had flown completely under my radar—and doubtless that of many others as
well. This low profile suits the group’s
modest ambitions. Fly by Wire is a short record, barely half an hour in duration, and
the pillowy pop and Philip Dickey’s androgynous vocals inevitably summon the
Apples in Stereo for purposes of comparison, though the Apples are more
self-assured and effervescent in their candy-apple pop sound. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin is a
little more folky/earthy in its approach, however. In fact, on some of the faster-strummed
numbers, “Young Presidents” and “Unearth,” the guys (Will Knauer and newcomer
Jonathan James as well as Dickey) are trying for a sound closer to fellow
Missourians (originally) White Rabbits or even (in the opening strains of
“Young Presidents”) Arcade Fire, two of whose core members are from Texas, several hundred miles to the south-by-southwest. The
opening song’s title, “Harrison Ford,” is hard to figure since the lyrics,
personal and young-love romantic, have nothing to do with the actor. Toward the end of the disc, the band actually
does begin to stretch itself more creatively.
“Bright Leaves” incorporates an organ, played by Roni Dickey (the
singer’s sister), and has more texture and craft to its balladry than the
earlier entries, notwithstanding its brevity and the awkwardness of the lyric
“There’s probably a proverb or parable that’s parallel to you,” which must have
sounded profound to someone. “Nightwater
Girlfriend” is the closest this gentle band comes to power pop, winningly; it
even incorporates a bit of funk—guitar and falsetto vocals for just a few
measures. The final song, the album’s
title track, longer and a little less focused, features tempo changes and a
sprinkling of ambient sounds. These
touches hardly elevate Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin into a noteworthy
up-and-comer, but they give the listener something to latch onto, at least. The rest of the record appears indistinct by
contrast. B/B-
THEY
MIGHT BE GIANTS, Nanobots
(Idlewild Recordings)—With the quality of They Might Be Giants’ (TMBG)
recordings (those aimed at adults, at least) declining steadily through the
1990s and the “aughts,” I had taken a break from the group since 2004’s
mediocre The Spine. The
Spine was best known for its single “Experimental Film,” which had a video
tied in with the creators of the amusing Homestar Runner and Strong Bad
videos. Since then, John Linnell and
John Flansburgh, the founders and core of TMBG, have produced several new
records and several others for children.
I might have ignored Nanobots
as well, except that I got it for free at Barnes & Noble as a bonus for making
other purchases. That said, Nanobots is far from dreadful. The two Johns, as they have moved into middle
age, married, and raised kids, have lost more than a step when it comes to
creative spark and daring. Their first
four albums, in particular, set a standard that might never be equaled by any
“nerd rock” or other outfit. The
creative muse has not truly fled; they are still good storytellers, with
fascinatingly warped imaginations and an unfailing instinct for clever
wordplay. Often the lyrics are the
highlight of the songs; all the more the pity that Idlewild Recordings, the
label, did not see fit to print them, instead giving us a list of Instant Fan
Club members. Linnell and Flansburgh
enunciate well, yet there are times when understanding them over the music can
be tricky. While composition generally
suffers in comparison with the mini-scenarios and the double entendres, the two
Johns are still capable of more: “The
Darlings of Lumberland,” particularly in its variegated, syncopated, and
multi-timbral (with accordion and woodwinds evoking the Middle East)
introduction, is as musically sophisticated as anything the duo has ever
penned. Quite a few tunes do not stay
around as long as “The Darlings of Lumberland” to make an impression. There seems to have been a conscious effort
to revisit the whimsicality of the ultra-short pieces from the early days, such
as “Toddler Hiway” from the self-titled first album (1986), “Minimum Wage” from
Flood (1990), or the various brief
clips that make up “Fingertips” on Apollo
18 (1992). Notably, the sequence
beginning with “Destroy the Past” and ending with “Tick,” at the center of the
tracklist, is “Fingertips”-like shorts, with just two selections out of eight
longer than twenty seconds. Yet, they
lack the dizzying sense of jumping from one radio station to another that
“Fingertips” offered, and just two of them (“Nouns” and “There”) strike me as
inspired. “Secret Steps,” one of the two
longer tracks in this sequence, opens with some typical TMBG banter: “Throw away the thing that tells you not to
throw the thing away/You’ll forget to rue the day you went ahead and threw the
thing away.” “Lost My Mind” is
unmemorable musically, but the two Johns turn a commonplace expression into a
fantasy in which the “lost” mind wanders the earth independently, “terrorizing
villages with intelligent remarks.” The
title track likewise combines a forgettable tune with an amusing science
fiction yarn. “Black Ops,” with its
sinister keyboard tones and heavy drumbeat undercutting the blandly innocuous
melody, is unusually dark by TMBG’s lighthearted norrn. “Icky” is the sort of breezy, swingy,
humorous number (about the sort of person who is “sucking all the oxygen out of
the place”) that restores faith in the relevance of the “adult” TMBG. By contrast, “Tesla” falls flat when compared
to the band’s other big historical/biographical song, “James K. Polk” (which
originally appeared on a 1990 EP), in which the rapid-fire, matter-of-fact
recapitulation of Polk’s career still musters a great deal of wit. “You’re on Fire,” the album’s opener,
possesses a spry energy but otherwise misses the mark in marrying a dull theme
with bizarre imagery about someone with a “combustible head.” Drabness discolors the mildly amusing “Too
Tall Girl” (to my mind, there is no such thing). Nanobots
has some redeeming charms that require picking through chaff to find; when abbreviated
songs like “Replicant” or “Stuff Is Way” feel too long, that is a bad sign. B+/B
TRICKY,
False Idols
(False Idols/!K7 Records)—Like Moby (see above), Tricky (real name, Adrian
Nicholas Matthews Thaws) is a single-monikered, Generation X performer once
greatly acclaimed, now struggling to preserve his relevance in a musical
universe always looking for the Next Big Thing (generally some sweet young
thing, or sassy young thing). And, as
with Moby, Tricky’s latest effort falls short of re-establishing a claim to
greatness. One of the progenitors of the
trip-hop
genre (as MC for the Bristol group Massive Attack in the 1990s), Tricky soon went his
own direction; his 1995 solo venture Maxinquaye
was hugely influential. Tricky has said
that he thinks False Idols is a
better record than Maxinquaye, but,
alas, it is not. It shares its predecessor’s
dark moodiness and even a sense of menace at times, but it is simply too static
to have the same gut-punching impact. False Idols may have similar production
values as Tricky’s earlier work, with crackling, burbling beats and deep bass
thrums, but it lacks the breakbeat
of trip-hop. The most interesting tracks
are the ones where Tricky does something different, notably, “Parenthesis,”
which brings in Peter Silberman and his band, the Antlers. The song begins with Silbeman’s unsettlingly
swoony falsetto a cappella, soon grounded by the bass. There is no true chorus, but as the sung theme
caps off with an “ooh-ooh,” its accompaniment morphs into full-blown rock muscularity. The fact of there being no true chorus,
though, points up the chief weakness of this recording. In song after song (with the prime exception
of the soul-stirring “Nothing Matters,” sung by Nneka-Lucia Egbuna), what
passes for a chorus is so pallid and so indistinguishable from the verse as to
make the whole seem undercooked or incomplete.
I certainly do not believe that a song needs a conventional verse-chorus
structure in order to be worthwhile, yet these tunes cry out for further
development, particularly the initially more promising ones like “If Only I
Knew” or “Tribal Drums.” An offering
like “Does It” exemplifies what is wrong—as a fragment, it is excellent, with
its deep, rumbling beat and Francesca Belmonte’s foreboding vocal line. But an individual motif, no matter how
insistently it is reiterated with minor alterations, is a song component rather
than a song. “If Only I Knew,” written
and sung by Fifi Rong, who returns later on the disc for the innocuous ditty
“Chinese Interlude” (sung in Mandarin, I think), is a delicate tracery of
perplexity and lament that has the makings of a really piercing song but ends
up being just too one-dimensional.
“Tribal Drums,” before the drums even enter the picture, features an
electric keyboard that sounds a little like the clavioline
the Beatles used for “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” (1967). Once more, a tantalizing set-up turns to
letdown when the song fails to progress at all.
Rong and Tricky’s chosen vocalist for most of the numbers, the
Italian-Irish Belmonte, are both good, as is Egbuna. The song “Hey Love” samples a bit from David
Sylvian and Japan’s 1981 hit “Ghosts.”
Further demonstrating that the artist is a musical omnivore, “Valentine”
takes the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart song “My Funny Valentine” (1937),
sampling Chet Baker’s recording of the song, as the backbone for a sketchy
story gruffly rapped by Tricky about a single mother contending with the mean
streets, a tale entirely too flimsy to be affecting.
The album opener, “Somebody’s Sins,” loosely borrows from Van Morrison’s
old band Them and its song “Gloria” (1964), by way of the lyric Patti Smith
added to her cover version, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” Although neither amounts to much more
than glowering atmospherics, this song and the closer “Passion of the Christ,”
which contains the concluding lyric “Too many guns; pray for God to come
quick/He doesn’t come; my God is real sick,” make for nice bookends to False Idols. B+
[VARIOUS
ARTISTS], Brazuca! Samba Rock &
Brazilian Groove from the Golden Years (1966–1978)
(Kindred Spirits)—Paulo Sakae Tahira (a.k.a. D.J. Paulão) put together this
compilation of twelve tracks for the Dutch label Kindred Spirits. The second part of its dual focus is the
source of some confusion. “Brazilian
groove” is never defined, and the term brazuca
is usually taken to refer to Brazilians living abroad or something whose
character is innately Brazilian; it does not pertain to any specific genre of
music. Clearly, not all the
selections on the disc can be categorized as “samba rock,”
though that is the crux of the matter.
The CD’s cover notes, including brief artist bios, could have used a
native English speaker for an editor (among other things, a superscript “x”
somehow replaced all the occurrences of the sequence “fi” in the text of the
bios), but they discuss the rise of the disc jockey and the incorporation of
foreign influences, particularly American funk, soul, blues, and rock, into
indigenous styles from the late 1960s onward, after the bossa nova craze had
peaked and before disco became firmly established. Interestingly, D.J. Paulão chose not to
include anything by the founder of the samba rock movement, Jorge Ben, perhaps
because he is too well known. Nor is
there anything from Trio Mocotó, a group that got its start backing up Ben. In fact, the names presented here are likely
to be familiar only to those whose knowledge of Brazilian music runs fairly
deep. However, there is one song that
many Americans will pick up on immediately, Noriel Vilela’s “16 Toneladas,” the
reason being its recent use in a Heineken television commercial set on the lido
deck of a cruise ship. Vilela, who died
a few years after recording this in 1971, has the sort of basso profundo that
is instantly recognizable, together with the signature blue-toned clarinet
intro/cadence. The song is actually a
rendition of Merle Travis’s country/folk classic “Sixteen Tons” (1946), later
popularized by Tennessee Ernie Ford, the Weavers, and others, but in Vilela’s
treatment, it is more wistful than desperate and set to a gentle pitch-and-roll
samba beat; toward the end, the singer seems about to recite, “I owe my soul to
the company store,” but he reverts to Portuguese after the first two words. Although Paulão would certainly say that all
the numbers are deserving, by my reckoning, the final third of the disc is
weak. Vera Lucia gives us a low-key,
lukewarm “Quem Mandou” (Who Sent), which could also be seen as a homophone for
“Queimando,” or “Burning.” Written by
Antônio Carlos Marques Pinto and José Carlos Figueiredo, a pair known as
Antônio Carlos e Jocafi, in 1971, it is set as a soft samba with street
whistles and a chorus of cuicas,
the weepy-sounding friction drums ubiquitous in Brazilian pop, similar to the
arrangements in “Mais que Doidice” (More than Foolishness), a better-known
seventies-era samba rock by the same songwriters sung originally by the great
Maria Creuza (later Antônio Carlos’s wife).
Silvio Cesar’s “Beco sem Saida” (Dead End) verges into Tom
Jones/Englebert Humperdinck crooner territory (with mixed backing chorus),
definitely the ickiest offering on the record.
Geovana (misspelled here as “Giovana”), whose “Tataruê” (1975) ends the disc,
has a masculine-sounding voice like that of Maria Bethânia. “Tataruê,” said in the notes to be a batuque, a Cape Verdean
form of music/dance (though that is supposed to be in 3/4 or 6/8 time and this is
not), is the most African-influenced song in its percussion and
call-and-response singing, but I have a hard time warming to it. The liveliest tunes come at the beginning of
the playlist, leading up to “16 Toneladas.”
Marisa Rossi was better known as an actress than as a singer in the
1970s, but her version of Antônio Carlos e Jocafi’s “Quem Vem Lá” (Who Goes
There?) (1971) is spunky and vivacious, and the horns, guitar, and vibes
arrangement is fantastic. Arnaud
Rodrigues, also more widely recognized as an actor, likewise brings tremendous
spirit to “Turma de Poie” (1970), exchanging shouts with his backing band in a
lively, jazzy arrangement. “Saltei de
Banda” (Band Leap?) (1972), with another sensational big-band samba arrangement
by Dom Salvador, finds Elza Soares in fine form, even if she resorts to her
little feline yelp too often. Her voice
is closest in spirit to that of the phenom Elis Regina, who died in 1981. From the middle of the disc, Di Melo’s
“Pernalonga” (Long-Legged) (1975) bears the most resemblance to certain genres
of the Brazilian northeast such as frevo. Given that Di Melo (born Roberto de Melo
Santos) is from Pernambuco originally and that Hermeto Pascoal, also a
Northeasterner in origin, arranged the song, this is no surprise. The Golden Boys’ “Segura na Cintura” (Snug at
the Waist) (1975) partakes of the fullness of música popular brasileira, or MPB, veering
far closer to big-band jazz and rock than any of the other acts represented and
showing a deft touch with the swing. “Sou
Negro” (I Am Black) and “Mister Brown” are the two tracks that pay homage to
African-American music. Toni Tornado
(Antônio Viana Gomes) was clearly influenced by both James Brown and the Black
Power movement in his stately paced identity piece, “Sou Negro,” from 1970,
sung in raucous cry, with trebly female backups and a funky horn section. Bebeto released the soulful lament “Mister
Brown,” said in the bio to be an “anti-drug anthem,” in 1973. It is embroidered with funk guitar
throughout. I do not cotton to his weepy
tenor, but his voice carries plenty of urgency.
Although not everything on Brazuca!
is first-rate, it makes for a delightful dip into the glory that was
seventies-era samba rock. A-
[VARIOUS
ARTISTS], Funk Globo: The Sound of Neo
Baile (Mr. Bongo Worldwide)—Promoted as “a new take on
the traditional sounds and aesthetics of Brazil’s Baile Funk (or Funk Carioca)
that challenges the existing order ...” by the record label, Funk Globo: The Sound of Neo Baile
presents fifteen Brazilian performers in a simultaneously raucous and robotic
rotation in which rhythms are royalty.
The presentation is a joint effort of Funk na Caixa (Funk in a Box), an
online “channel” for baile
funk,
and London’s Club Popozuda (a slang term meaning “a woman with a big rear
end”). I had not heard of any of these
artists; in fact, my one exposure to baile
funk has been Bonde do Rolê’s album With
Lasers (see the 2007 music survey), for which I did not much care. I am also a little skeptical of the
description—“traditional” sounds?
“established order?” All this in
the context of a genre whose origins date back less than thirty years. Thus, it is not apparent to me how “neo baile” differs from what has come
before. And because lyrics are in
Brazilian Portuguese, with no translations offered, their meaning remains
opaque. What is certain is the genre’s
heavy debt to hip-hop and house music, as the beats are frequently all there is
to go on and the tracklist is cluttered with M.C.s and D.J.s, remixes and
featured rappers. Unless the listener is
really into house music, intrigued by the way D.J.s and producers expertly
chop, screw, and mix up beats, samples, and special effects—or unless one is
more interested in dancing around the room than sitting and concentrating—it
is mostly an unrewarding aural experience.
On track after track, the one thing to appreciate is the rhythmic
foundation, and its various mutations and permutations, supplied by drum
machines, sometimes electronically looped.
The choice selection is the amusingly titled “Shtusha Kutusha,” by Via
the Robots. This piece has no vocals,
apart from a sampled cry of “yo!” but it has a real melody, provided by a diced-up
fuzzy synthesizer, modulated and augmented by other keyboards expressing a
techno-influenced countertheme, all set to a galloping beat; it is the album’s
one clear winner. Besides this, “No
Balanço da Canoa” (In the Rolling of the Canoe), by Seattle native but Rio de
Janeiro–based Maga Bo, from his 2012 album Quilombo
do Futuro, with uncredited vocals from Rosângela Macedo—though credit is
given to Bumps (Sean Casey, a London disc jockey and founder of Club Popozuda)
for the remix—has a propulsive appeal to it.
The skittering marimba-like intro (returning at the close) recalls the
opening of Gnarls Barkley’s cover of the Violent Femmes’ “Gone Daddy Gone”
(1983; cover version from 2006), while Macedo, who capably sings the chorus,
drones the verse in dancehall
fashion. Bumps returns later to perform
his lively “Bumporzão,” another techno-inflected instrumental with bits of
vocal sampling. “A Patricinha” (The
Snobbish Girl) by Ckrono & Slesh, Florentine bass producers (real
surnames: Rossi and Rondelli), is
somewhat redeemed by its middle section, an elementary keyboard theme that is
nicely harmonized. Deize Tigrona, a
female Rio rapper whose “Injeção” (Injection) earlier provided the foundation
for M.I.A.’s “Bucky Done Gun” (2005), gives husky voice to the “bonus” track,
“Prostituto,” filtered through the sensibilities of tecno
brega (“cheesy techno”) producer Jaloo, from Belém, which
entails a poppy accompaniment constructed from the high-pitched blips of arcade
game consoles. The cadence of Tigrona’s
rapping is nearly identical to that of Joseph Simmons’s in Run-D.M.C.’s “You Be
Illin’” (1986). Elsewhere, the sirens
and street whistles (by now a Brazilian cliché), the Autotuned female voice in
Santos-based MC GI’s “Chega Mais” (Come Closer), the electronic squeals spliced
in by producers, all become enervating heard cumulatively. MC Dede’s androgynous voice is frequently
off-key on “Funk do Povão” (The People’s Funk), while the grainy, adenoidal
chanting/shouting of the incognito “MC Wa” (I could find no information on him)
on Rio D.J. Guto (Gustavo) de Almeida’s “Vai Danada” (Come On, Damn) quickly
wears thin on the ears. La Bombacion’s
“Baile Funk” features French rapper Tecou—since French is naturally spoken very
fast, Francophone hip-hop artists can really blitz through their lines. For those with an appetite for electronics
and production effects, or interested in the history of how hip-hop and dance
music have assumed new forms across the world, this sampler could be
illuminating; others will hear a lot of thumping at unfailingly loud volumes. B
[VARIOUS
ARTISTS], New German Ethnic Music:
Immigrants’ Songs from Germany, Electronically Reworked
(Karaoke Kalk)—An intriguing concept for a record, perhaps more so on paper
than in the execution, New German Ethnic
Music: Immigrants’ Songs from Germany, Electronically Reworked takes the
word “reworked” with a large grain of salt in most instances. This album is more for electronica fans than
for prospectors for global folklore, as well as being ideal for those who enjoy
one artist basically painting red all over another’s work. Of course, leaving a heavy imprint can have
felicitous results, even as minimal retouching can be unsatisfying. The record’s thirteen tracks draw on
generally choral songs from immigrant communities (former gastarbeiter, or guest workers) in Berlin: Turkey, Morocco, Portugal, Poland, Greece,
Serbia, Croatia, Mozambique, Spain, Italy, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba.
Consequently, the source material runs a wide gamut, from North African mystic gnawa
to Dalmatian klapa
choral music to Vietnamese quan
họ to Portuguese fado
to Cuban son. Those who want to hear the originals can seek
out the album Heimatlieder aus
Deutschland (Homeland Songs from Germany) on the Run United label. On the “reworked” disc, the most violence is
done to the Polish and Greek entries.
Little remains of poor Spotkanie’s “Czemużeś Mnie, Matuleńko?” (Dear
Mother, Why Did You Have Me Married?) after Margaret Dygas is done with it, except
for a few ghostly snippets of choral tones.
Taken on its own terms as electronica, it makes for engaging listening,
conveying a sense of the eerie claustrophobia that the original evokes in Dygas,
only she has otherwise tossed away her supposed inspiration like a dried-out
husk. Khan’s remix of Polyphonia’s
“Karavi, Karavaki” (Ship, Little Ship) at least keeps the basic harmonic
progression and rhythm of the source but strips away all else, including the
Turkish-Arabic modal scales that give the choral singing so much of its mystic
power, in favor of a monomaniacal sullenness.
Matías Aguayo (see the 2009 music survey) does a disco-ey, peppy “remix”
of the choral tune “Ay, Linda Amiga” (Oh, Dearest Lady) by Amigas Cantan
(Girlfriends Sing) that is almost entirely Aguayo and very little from the
Spanish-German group, certainly trashing the spirit of its piece, if all in
good fun. Ulrich Schnauss manages to
make the sampled female voices of Donni Sò sound like Jon Anderson of Yes,
which, come to think of it, is not that difficult, on “La Pagliarella” (loosely
translated as “May Song” by the website, it literally means “the girl in the
straw”). At the opposite extreme,
Natalie Beridze’s version of “Cije Je Ono Devojce?” (Whose Sweetheart Is That?)
by the Serbian-German duo of Sandra Stupar and Dusica Gačić does little more
than add a contemporary beat and electric keyboard accompaniment that strikes
me as alien to the devotional spirit of the folk tune. An odder choice is Guido Möbius’s buzzy
“Blood and Bone” remix of the fado
song “Milho Verde” (Green Corn), interlacing bits from “Mississippi Cotton
Picking Delta Town” (1974), sung by Charley Pride. By contrast, Eric D. Clark’s “Señor Sapo’s
R.U.M. Punch” remix of “La Mateodora” (Mama Teodora) is an example of effective
minimalist retouching, as the son
rhythms of Rafael “Felo” Martinez, Ricardo Moreno, and Pedro Abreu blend
convivially with the dance beats laid out by Clark, even though the song’s
origins go all the way back to the sixteenth century and early Spanish
colonization of Cuba. Nice touches in
Murat Tepeli’s “Naflie Gitmiyor Hasreti” remix of “Adalardan Bir Yar Gelir
Bizlere” (The Mistress of the Island Comes to Me) from the BTMK Ensemble und
Chor [Choir] and Symbiz Sound’s version of the Koreanischer Chor Berlin’s “Go
Hyang Yui Bom” (Spring in the Homeland), including a solo bass clarinet in the latter, speak
well for the idea of recasting traditional songs. I am horrified but also fascinated by what
Niobe (a.k.a. Yvonne Cornelius) has done to the Quan Họ Chor Berlin’s “Ba Quan
Mời Trầu” (Three Pennies); this has become my favorite track in spite of its
having ripped the source song to shreds (well, mostly—a brief window toward the
end presents a piece of the original unadulterated before returning to the
weirdness). What is put in its stead,
with its bizarre electronic blips and trills, off-kilter rhythmic attacks, and
high-pitched voices, is splendidly similar to the work of Tyondai Braxton, both
with his old group Battles and in his solo work since. Bound to induce many listeners to hasten to
the “skip” button, this loud, disruptive track is the most inventive on the
album. A-/B+
[VARIOUS
ARTISTS], Sixties Japanese Garage-Psych
Sampler (Bamboo/AEPI)—Because this sampler
consists of acts that were derivative, to a greater or lesser degree, of
contemporary Western garage rock and psychedelia, there are no undiscovered
gems among them. All in fun, though,
with more raw passion than talent on display.
These bands, part of a movement called Group Sounds in Japan, flourished
briefly in the mid- to late 1960s and then reverted to a well-merited obscurity,
even if a few of those involved went on to other bands or careers in film or
television. A few songs are sung in
English; others in Japanese but often with a refrain or tagline in English. There are a couple of cover songs, as these
groups did plenty of covers during their shows in response to audience
demand. Van Morrison’s “Gloria” (1964)
is rendered fairly faithfully by a Keio University student group named the
Fingers, whose attempt to go pro fell sadly flat. “Long Tall Sally” (1956), by Little Richard,
Robert Blackman, and Enotris Johnson, as performed by a band calling itself
Outcast (several years before André 3000 and Big Boi were even born), is
memorable mainly for its shouty delivery of the lyrics and its wildcat
yowl. All of the performers in each band
are male, although the singer of the Tempters, Keizo Hagiwara (who went on to
an acting career as Kenichi Hagiwara), has an androgynous voice. That band’s selection, “Tell Me More,” is the
slowest on the album, a lacuna in the form of a feeble stab at torchy blues. One group not afraid to let loose is the
Bunnys (the animal names for bands—Beavers, Spiders—make me think of a humorous
Isuzu TV commercial from the early nineties or so). Their surf guitar sound, heavily influenced
by the Ventures, is said (in the liner notes) to be tempered with roots music, min’yo, Japanese rural
folk tunes. The songs themselves are
relatively tame, but “Burning, Burning” explodes in a cry acknowledging
bandleader Takeshi “Terry” Terauchi at the bridge and another for good measure
at the close. “Hey! Chance,” the band’s
other entry, begins with a yell announcing the song title; the rest is an
effervescent organ and guitar groove instrumental. The medium-burn psychedelic cooker (with two
double-time sections!) “I’m Just a Mops” by the Mops, done entirely in English,
seems to take hairstyle as a tribal identifier: wear it proud and loud. Also in English throughout, “Please Please
Trina” is by D’Swooners, a Filipino outfit that made a magnesium flash of a
career in Hong Kong and then Japan. The
band comes across, on the evidence of “Please Please Trina,” as the Doors
manqué with a bit of James Brown for vocal emphasis. The opening thirty seconds of the first
number, “Love Is My Life,” by the Golden Cups, seem divorced from the rest of
the song, like pairing the early Beatles with Near Eastern or Israeli pop. “Tunnel to Heaven,” by Dynamite, with its
buzzing, fuzzy bass and primitive vocal harmonies, models itself more on the
Troggs or the Kingsmen. The Carnabeats’
lively “Chu! Chu! Chu!” a wild surf rock pastiche with a zippy guitar solo at
the break, has an interesting verse portion that bends tonality in a peculiarly
Asian way. The cover art takes some
liberties, with an ukiyo-e samurai touting “12 Gloovy Gloups!!” in a cartoon
bubble, while the liner notes’ back panel fabricates a letter from John Lennon
to Paul McCartney, dated on Lennon’s assassination day, exclaiming over the
discovery of this trove of Japanese rock, supposedly in Yoko Ono’s closet. Someone’s idea of a morbid joke. B+/B
LA
VIDA BOHÈME, Será
(Nacional Records/Discos Caracas)—Suffering just a mild case of the sophomore
slump, Será (It Will Be) registers as
disappointing principally in comparison with La Vida Bohème’s thrilling debut, Nuestra (see the 2011 music
survey). It did, for what it is worth,
win a Latin Grammy Award for best rock album toward the end of the year. Not as Interpol-ishly jangly as the debut, Será mines a somewhat different vein. Never less than virile, its creative energies
flag at times, and for a number of tracks, a full appreciation demands
concentration and repeated listening, which is a lot to ask of the casual pop
music fan. Not so with the heroic, if
elegiac, opening song, “Cementerio del Este” (Eastern Cemetery), and its
pendant, “Cementerio del Sur” (Southern Cemetery). The most allegorical of the politically
minded tracks, these two have a poetic economy with words, the idea being that
as long as fighting goes on, the cemeteries keep growing, to the point where
they join together. In fact, “Cementerio
del Este,” following an introduction that has just an unadorned, lute-like
accompaniment to its four-line vocal, is entirely instrumental; its “(Ghost)
Riders in the Sky”–type epic nature (a simple anthem) pulls the listener along
as it sweeps up everything in its path.
The spare setting of the intro returns for “Cementerio del
Sur.” Also scoring high marks in the
instant gratification department are the blisteringly paced, intense “La Sangre
y el Eco” (Blood and Echo) and the uncharacteristically lilting, if insistently
plaintive, “La Vida Mejor” (The Better Life).
Both have driving rhythms and readily singable melodies. “La Vida Mejor” is the only song on this
straight rock album that (briefly) pays obeisance to other forms of Latin
music, with merengue-flavored saxophone jaleo
riffs at the bridge section. Songs that
take longer to insinuate themselves into your dopamine circuits are
“Antes Era Mejor” (It Was Better Before) and “El Futuro Funciona” (The Future
Works). “Antes Era Mejor” has a little
bit of everything: about twelve seconds
of tantalizing but unrelated
introductory material (like a stereo tuned to a different station playing
something from the mambo era), a verse section dressed up in slinky chromatic
harmonies, an unsubtle chorus whose shouty “poco poco” refrain echoes the
“hey-ho” major fifths of the previous song’s (“Angelitos Negros,” or Little
Black Angels) own chorus, some tremulous fuzz guitar passages. For comic effect, toward the end, amid commotion
and whooping, a muted trumpet brings in shades of “Minnie the Moocher” and
Saturday morning cartoons. “El Futuro
Funciona” begins with some abstract trumpet runs, against a twinkling,
tintinnabulating electronic background, that venture into Dave Douglas
territory. The main body of the song is
more exhortatory than enlightening, but this is mere preface to a stirring,
largely instrumental (except for those repeated yells of “Funciona!”)
coda. Like “Cementerio del Este” and a
couple of other tracks, “El Futuro Funciona” has a pendant track, “El Mito del
Progreso” (The Myth of Progress), twenty-one seconds of sampling bits from
across the radio dial. On balladlike
numbers, such as the crepuscular “La Bestia” (The Beast) or the pretty if
facile “Aún” (Even), lead singer Henry D’Arthenay shows his lack of expressive
range; he is a declarative singer, without much nuance. Será
takes more patience to sit through than did Nuestra,
but amid all the fury it finds ways to hit the sweet spot. B+
YO
LA TENGO, Fade
(Matador Records)—As much as the alarmingly titled I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass (2006) made me
belatedly a fan of Yo La Tengo, a Hoboken-based trio that has been around since
shortly after I graduated college in the early/mid-1980s, Fade just as quickly put me off.
Whereas the 2006 release was a catalog of sharply varying musical styles,
cleverly refashioned for the band’s own purposes, the new album is fairly
monochrome and pared down to the basics.
Although certainly in the rock idiom, it has more of a folk sensibility,
described by critics as “direct” and “emotional.” The principal problem is that it is for the
most part melodically ho-hum and uninspired, making the record, beyond its
first song, a snooze-fest. Too many
tracks resort to simple scale progressions or barely move off one central note,
which to me signifies laziness in composition.
“Ohm,” the opener, is its most fully realized song. Even here, the sole thematic idea is not
tremendously original, but the band’s commitment to it is total, and it builds
admirable momentum through the course of its nearly seven minutes. The only offering that comes close to
achieving the same combination of subtlety and heft is “Stupid Things,” in the
middle of the album. “Cornelia and
James,” one of just two songs sung by Georgia Hubley, the band’s drummer, has
an appealingly swoony feel to its bass accompaniment; even so, the vocal line
is too monotone to enchant. “Is That
Enough” and “I’ll Be Around” are pleasant little tunes, not terribly
interesting, though, and the shortcomings of Ira Kaplan (Hubley’s hubbie and
lead guitarist) as frontman on pieces that call for full-bodied, melodic
singing are all too evident. “Paddle
Forward” begins with a touch of screechy reverb and cultivates a fuzzy garage
rock posture yet is vitiated by its own tendency toward restraint. “Two Trains” aims for a soul-searching
moodiness but is not penetrating enough to work on those terms. The orchestration that thickens the mixture
in “Before We Run,” the other song with a Hubley vocal, adds ponderousness
rather than impact; the horns and strings are largely wasted. This record was produced in Chicago by John
McEntire of Tortoise; he also drums on “Ohm” and plays vibraphone on “Two
Trains.” Yo La Tengo is frequently
described as a “mature” band, which is true, but even mature bands can take a
powder sometimes. B
JAZZ
BLACK
HOST, Life in the Sugar Candle Mines
(Northern Spy Records)—Gerald Cleaver, a Detroit-bred drummer who has played
with Roscoe Mitchell (a charter member of the avant-garde collective
Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) among others, set up
this quintet, which debuts with Life in
the Sugar Candle Mines. His partners
are Darius Jones on alto saxophone, Brandon Seabrook on electric guitar,
Cooper-Moore on piano (Cooper-Moore also played on the final David S. Ware
record, Planetary Unknown: Live at
Jazzfestival Saalfelden; see the 2012 music survey), and Pascal
Niggenkemper, bass. The album settles
comfortably in the realm of avant jazz, “out there” but not too far out. Like many of its kind, it has an allergy to
tonality. Its dissonance does not shy
from volume or unruliness but does not indulge in sheer cacophony. The pieces, while not amorphous, are quite
loose structurally: in the opening
number, “Hover,” the principal theme does not make an appearance until five
minutes in. There are no true solos,
although clearly there are passages where the sax, the guitar, or the keyboard
is dominant. The compositions I like
best are the most accessible:
“Test-Sunday,” uniquely on this disc, has a rock-like kinetic propulsion
and percussive force, even as its sax theme remains ruggedly
uncompromising. “Citizen Rose”
showcases the band in a meditative, blue mood; it is meterless, relaxed, and
about as close to songful as this music ever gets. Something similar is attempted in “May Be
Home,” but that is a more distended piece and flags through its own
inertia. “Gromek” is the one composition
where Cleaver put himself front and center, or as close to it as the quintet
format will permit; it begins with powerful drum volleys, and the middle
section becomes a percussion pulsar, like a crowd at a soccer stadium stamping
in unison, beneath Jones’s wailing and Cooper-Moore’s skittering runs. “Ayler Children” (an homage to the late free
jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler) may have a central theme, but it is hard to
tell; if so, it develops at about the pace of a humpback whale’s “song.” “Wrestling” puts a flimsy frame of
percussion, sax mutterings, and squeals, with some electronic effects
(including a sampled voice at one point) around a core that is lifted from Béla
Bartók’s Mikrokosmos No. 108, played
by Seabrook and doubled by Jones. The
other pieces are all originals, written by Cleaver, with the rest of the band
pitching in for “Amsterdam/Frames.” Life in the Sugar Candle Mines is fairly
difficult to absorb in its pursuit of high art, and thus its appeal is bounded
to those who appreciate or at least tolerate jazz that strains or subverts the
conventions of the form. Within those
rarefied parameters, it succeeds admirably, to a certain degree at the expense
of entertainment value. A-/B+
DAVE
DOUGLAS QUINTET, Time Travel
(Greenleaf Music)—One of jazz’s most prolific forces of nature, Dave Douglas
has recorded around forty albums as a bandleader, not to mention the many in
which he is a sideman. He formed his
quintet lineup in 2012 for the album Be
Still, and Time Travel is the
follow-up to that release, consisting of seven Douglas compositions. His collaborators are younger musicians
(Douglas himself turned fifty in 2013):
the acclaimed tenor saxophonist Jon Irabagon, Matt Mitchell on piano (he
also plays with Tim Berne’s Snakeoil; see below), and a rhythm section of Linda
Oh (bass) and Rudy Royston (drums). In
an interview excerpt printed in the liner notes, Douglas says that he and the
band wanted to move away from the conventional theme-solo-theme structure of
jazz toward something more truly collaborative.
It might be the case that the nature of the improvisations on Time Travel is that they involve more
ensemble play than is typical, yet musicians are clearly still taking
solos. In fact, notwithstanding the
album’s sci-fi title, some critics have observed that this is about as
traditional a jazz record as Douglas has ever produced. For “Beware of Doug,” a playful romp whose
back story involves an aging mountain lion that used to wander into the town of Banff
while Douglas was directing a summer jazz workshop there, each player gets a
chance to solo, even though this is the second-shortest song on the disc. The others are not as jocose but still
genial. The one turgid exception is
“Little Feet,” which is supposed to be based on a children’s hymn that is inverted
(indeed, the initial theme sounds like “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word”),
yet the arrangement is fairly dark.
Eventually that theme morphs into something in double-time; the eighth
notes, played straight, sound like a confused processional. The other composition with an animal theme is
“The Pigeon and the Pie.” The closer is
not about squab en croute but derives
from the bandleader’s observation of a magpie dwarfing a nearby pigeon. Douglas’s dreamlike soloing on this piece is
so idiosyncratic that those familiar with him will recognize it straight away, and
Irabagon’s fluency is showcased nicely as well; the tune ends with the two of
them, backed by Mitchell, creating a lovely harmonic cascade that envelops
their wilder outbursts. The opening number,
“Bridge to Nowhere,” is said by David R. Adler, who penned the liner notes,
actually to contain a bridge that goes nowhere, but I do not hear it. Rather, there is a three-bar syncopated,
swinging phrase that sets the tone for the improvs but never really develops
beyond that. The phrase’s cadence
mirrors the way Thelonious Monk’s “Epistrophy” (1942) concludes. The serene “Law of Historical Memory” speaks
to Douglas’s social conscience; it takes its title from Spain’s 2007 law to
deal with the crimes of the Franco dictatorship and reconcile its victims to
society. Pensive and deliberate in its
pacing, it is the most through-composed tune on the record, though soloists
still have their opportunities. The
moody title track has a lot of thrust and parry between the instrumentalists,
pushing back against a theme that is even less developed than the one in
“Bridge to Nowhere.” Douglas’s homage to
his home state, “Garden State” is as busy and fast-paced as a drive on the New
Jersey Turnpike (when traffic is light).
Its quasi-Latin theme does not allow the song’s breeziness to whisk past
it; the middle section features a trade-off of attacks by Douglas and Irabagon,
just prior to the fleet piano solo. For
my taste, nothing can touch Douglas’s remarkable take on acid rock, the album Freak In from 2003, but he never rests
on his laurels and continues to put out solid and entertaining work at a
remarkable clip. A/A-
RUDRESH
MAHANTHAPPA, Gamak
(ACT Music/Vision GmbH & Co.)—Ever one to knock down boundaries between
Western and non-Western music, alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa draws on a
wide spectrum of sources for Gamak,
whose name derives from the term for melodic ornamentation in languages of
southern India. He wrote all the music
himself, but he is working closely with electric guitarist David Fiuczynski,
who has been a fellow member of Jack DeJohnette’s band. The rock influence is clear, especially in
the opener, “Waiting Is Forbidden,” in the closer, “Majesty of the Blues,” and
in the guitar solo of “Lots of Interest.”
Indian forms make their presence felt as well; less evident are the
borrowings from folk, country, Chinese, Indonesian, and African music to which
Mahanthappa attests in the liner notes.
“Waiting Is Forbidden” hits the listener right off with a jittery blast
of sax riffing, to which the guitarist adds a steady blip of treble funk. Mahanthappa dual-tracks his part to allow for
contrasting sax lines once the melody takes hold. The tensile grip slackens during the solo
sections, but the guitar improvisation eventually yields to a
progressive-rock-flavored solo with matching percussion that builds back to the
intensity of the initial attack. At the
end, one of the players is heard commenting, “That was pretty smokin’,” and he
is absolutely right. “Majesty of the
Blues” has little to do with the titular genre; it is a brief number in which
Mahanthappa wails away while guitar and drums behind him supply a heavy metal
thrumming—the whole assemblage is cut off in midstream. “Lots of Interest” initially dabbles in the Carnatic music
of southern India that Mahanthappa performed with Kadri Gopalnath on Kinsmen (see the 2008 music survey)
(again dual-tracking) before shifting to “straight” jazz harmonics. This cut is restless, never staying long in
one place, but that electric solo unleashes the seventies-vintage guitar hero
in Fiuczynski, who is also a member of the rock/punk/jazz outfit Screaming
Headless Torsos. “Abhogi” refers to a raga
in Carnatic music; Mahanthappa in this piece alters his embouchure at first to
make the sax sound more shawm-like
(his solos are played straight), while Fiuczynski’s approach is to adopt a
pronounced twang, with sitar-like note bending.
This is the only selection that lets the drummer and bassist, Dan Weiss
and François Moutin, “solo” together for an extended interval. One hears the Indian modes repeat in the
energetic “We’ll Make More” but not in its successor, the slow, ruminative “Are
There Clouds in India?” which is primarily a spongy cushion for a lot of
fluttery alto runs. “Ballad for Troubled
Times” begins similarly with whipped-up sax figurations but then settles back
into a sedate, meterless tune with plenty of tonal warping, exotic timbres, and
baleful harmonies. Fiuczynski’s soloing
in “Wrathful Wisdom” simulates the mind-twisting psychedelia of the six-string
action on Dave Douglas’s (see above) Freak
In (2003); the composition has a false ending, followed by a brief coda. Mahanthappa continues with Gamak to mine musical material from all
over the globe to extend the frontiers of jazz without resorting to pastiche,
and, in so doing, he is following in the tradition of Dizzy Gillespie, Miles
Davis, Herbie Hancock, and others. A/A-
TOM
MCDERMOTT, Bamboula
(Minky Records)—This record does not sit comfortably in any category; my
placement of it in jazz is almost arbitrary (not entirely since Tom McDermott
is generally regarded as a jazz musician and composer), as it draws from
ragtime, classical, and Latin inspirations as well. Bamboula
is a record that emphasizes New Orleans’s Creole ties to both Latin America and
Europe. Mostly original compositions for
solo piano or piano and other instruments, it also gives us a couple of Scott
Joplin rags and the title track, a short fantasy by the nineteenth-century
Romantic and New Orleans native Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who spent much of his
career (a career cut short by his sudden death at forty) touring in Central and
South America and the Caribbean. While
McDermott is a splendid pianist, with a light and sparkling touch even in
passages of considerable technical difficulty, his composing skills leave me
less enraptured. In much the same way
that New Orleans Dixieland jazz of the Preservation Hall variety has a certain
preserved-in-amber quality, McDermott’s salon ditties offer an antiquated feel,
like macassar oil on the skin. The same habanera
and waltz rhythms, the same cozy and predictable resolutions throughout, this
is crowd-pleasing music, skillfully executed by a talented ensemble, lacking
profundity. It is sufficient testament
that, in the context of this disc, Gottschalk, who is generally regarded as a
minor American composer, comes off looking like a giant of the repertoire. “Bamboula,” based on African rhythms
Gottschalk heard in the public gatherings of slaves in Congo Square in New
Orleans, is a lively, taut delight, arranged here for a mandolin-like Brazilian
bandolim (Henry Lentino),
seven-string guitar (Caio Márcio), piano, trombone (Rick Trolsen), and clarinet
(Evan Christopher). Likewise, the Joplin
numbers, “Heliotrope Bouquet” (co-written with the short-lived St. Louis
pianist Louis Chauvin), played at a leisurely tempo by Márcio, Trolsen, and Christopher,
with McDermott sitting it out, and “The Chrysanthemum,” whose cadences are
reminiscent of “The Entertainer” (1902) and whose arrangements allow generously
for bandolim, trombone, clarinet, and
piano solos, have an integrity stemming from their ingenuity within their own
time period. By contrast, what McDermott
is attempting is tantamount to constructing a modern building using Gothic or
Federalist materials and stylistic details.
“The Big Man,” a habanera dedicated to the contemporary ragtime composer
David Thomas Roberts, shows that McDermott is capable of raising his game; its
sophisticated and haunting harmonies make it the best of the original songs. Likewise, the straying-from-tonality
chromaticism of “Lost in Rio” is striking.
If one can get past the music box staleness of composition that is like
the ghost of Ernesto Lecuona phoning it in from Cuba, the verve of the dance
rhythms, the expert musicianship, and the tropical redolence still make Bamboula a delight, if a slightly guilty
one, to listen to. A-/B+
ERIC
REVIS, City of Asylum
(Clean Feed Records)—The problem with an album that consists largely of pure
improvisations is that, without structure, there is little to which the
listener can latch on. One is left to
wonder during the more aimless passages whether the musicians are playing for
an audience or for their own benefit, whether pyrotechnics trumps substance,
whether the idea that “the main agenda is total acceptance,” in the words of
Ethan Iverson of the Bad Plus in his effusive liner notes, is an abdication of
critical perspective. Eric Revis is a
Los Angeles native, a bassist who played with Betty Carter in the 1990s and
then with Branford Marsalis’s band. Here
he is leading a trio with the veteran drummer Andrew Cyrille and the young-ish,
Vancouver-born pianist Kris Davis, whom I saw perform live at The Stone in the
East Village several years ago as part of the Paradoxical Frog trio. The very concept of a double bass player as
bandleader is interesting: although Charles
Mingus did so prominently, it cannot be an easy thing with an instrument whose
limitations in terms of volume and ability to express complex and intricate
melodies are obvious. Revis is less
extroverted than Mingus was and is more interested in the trio as a partnership
of equals, though the listener naturally hears Davis’s keyboard playing
foremost. She is a fluid and agile
pianist; still, there are times when the blizzard of technique obscures any
musical ideas. When Revis bows his
instrument, as he does on “Egon,” “Sot Avast,” “Harry Partch Laments the Dying
of the Moon ... and Then Laughs,” and the title track, he makes it sound
strained; even when the tone is more refined, it tends to be mournful. The tribute to the eccentric composer Harry
Partch cannot replicate the microtonal material for which Partch was famous, but
it has a buzzy, busy character that is the most humorous collaboration
presented. The longer improvisations are
harder to get a bead on, particularly “Vadim,” “For Bill Traylor” (a memorial
to an Alabama “outsider” artist), and “St. Cyr.” “Egon” is as knotty and abstract an improv
session as any, with Cyrille’s percussion more active and varied than
elsewhere; at times here, Davis’s keyboard sequences punctuated by the bass put
me in mind of the short-lived classical duo known as “maximal music” (Franz Hummel,
piano, and Liana Isakadze, violin) and their improvisational piece,
“Nine.” The only number the trio
performs for which Revis actually wrote a theme beforehand is “Question.” That theme is stretchy and loping,
ingratiating notwithstanding its being as atonal as the improvisatory pieces,
and Revis gives himself an atypically long solo. Two tracks spring from outside sources. Thelonious Monk’s “Gallop’s Gallop” (1955),
one of his lesser-known compositions, has an elusive tune that becomes more fugitive
still in this version, as the trio barely dwells on the straight rendition
before turning it into a decidedly astringent taffy. Keith Jarrett’s “Prayer” (1975) is the sole
tuneful number the disc offers, with only abbreviated and tightly bound elaboration
by the threesome. The most effective
improvisation sessions are the most minimal.
In “Sot Avast” and even more so in “City of Asylum,” which is named for
a Pittsburgh artists’ colony for exiles from their home countries, Revis sets
up a striking ground bass pattern (just five notes in “Sot Avast,” with a
variant that involves eight; nine notes in “City of Asylum”), while Davis plays
spare clusters—in “City of Asylum” even using the two-finger method at
times. Sometimes, less really is more! B+
STEVE
COLEMAN AND FIVE ELEMENTS, Functional
Arrhythmias (Pi Recordings)—The restless mind of
Steve Coleman has led him to conversations with Milford Graves, a veteran free
jazz drummer whom he describes as a “polymath and natural healer.” The germ of Functional Arrhythmias sprouted from these talks, from the notion
that the body, the soul, and music are interconnected. The album’s fourteen tracks attempt to
analogize various biological systems and functions. Coleman refuses to call his music “jazz,”
preferring the term “spontaneous composition.”
Essentially, the songs were constructed from improvisational tracks laid
down by the band members separately for the most part but in some cases working
jointly. The concept is intriguing, and
the execution typically measures up, reinforcing Coleman’s reputation as one of
the most innovative minds working in the New York jazz (pardon the term) scene
today. Coleman, on alto saxophone, and
Jonathan Finlayson (trumpet) have been together long enough to have a sixth
sense about each other’s playing. Thus,
a great deal of Functional Arrhythmias
involves the pair chasing each other all across the chromatic spectrum, in a
manner that is atonal but not jarringly so.
Behind them, on tracks that move along, U.K.-born/bred Anthony Tidd
supplies a funky electric bass as motoric fundament, supplemented by the
drumming of Sean Rickman. On five
numbers, Miles Okazaki joins in on electric guitar. On occasion, the relation between music and
biology is obvious, notably in the pumping action of “Cardiovascular”; the norm
is subtler. A few selections are
abstract to the point of opacity: Apart
from the clip-clop percussion, I find “Cerebrum Crossover” hard to relate to,
and its companion “Cerebellum Lean” compulsively works over the same groove to
the point of distraction, while “Snap-Sis” is mechanistic and constricted in
its tonal palette. These are minor
points of objection in a record that welcomes in the listener from the start
with hard-bop syncopations from the horns and that ultra-cool bass groove that
gives “Sinews” its muscle.
“Medulla-Vagus,” the first piece to bring in the guitar, starts out as a
quiet three-way exchange between Okazaki, Coleman, and Finlayson. Less than halfway through, though, it picks
up its own groove and rides it all the way to the finish line. “Irregular Heartbeats” is not so irregular
rhythmically (tripping midtempo syncopations) but is one of the most resolutely
atonal offerings. The slower numbers
have their own sinuous appeal: the
mysteriously named “Assim-Elim” has a relaxed bass groove and moves away from atonality
in the direction of modal jazz, structurally the simplest improvisation on the
disc, while the equally reposeful “Respiratory Flow” also gestures toward
tonality without embracing it fully. “Lymph
Swag (Dance of the Leukocytes)” sets up a chorale between muted horns and a
guitar with unusually metallic-sounding strings. In the meterless, downcast “Chemical
Intuition,” Finlayson and Coleman are left to bay at each other, with the
percussion and bass offering just ornamentation. Coleman and his bandmates’ sure touch, whether
playing apart or together, and unflagging creativity make Functional Arrhythmias one of the year’s standout releases. A
TIM
BERNE’S SNAKEOIL, Shadow Man
(ECM Records)—For something called Shadow
Man, this record sure is noisy, not all the time but often enough. Tim Berne is an alto saxophonist toiling on
the avant-garde front of the jazz universe and has been doing so for more than
three decades, after studying with Julius Hemphill in the 1970s. Working with the same quartet that produced Snakeoil for ECM in 2012 and
subsequently adopting the name of that album for the group, Berne has given us
an album of thunderous sallies, unearthly squeals, and spectral
near-silences. His compositions, judging
solely by Shadow Man, favor marked
crescendos toward the end, as all four players become active at once. The track list is unbalanced in the sense
that it begins with three relatively short items, including “Psalm” by Paul
Motian, who died a few years back, and then moves on to three of what are
perhaps more typical Berne pieces, lengthy and consisting of multifarious moods
and episodes. “Psalm” is by far the
quietest and most serene offering, a dreamy dialogue between sax and
piano. “Son of Not So Sure,” which kicks
off the album, is my favorite of Berne’s own songs; it starts softly, with
ruminative piano and an eclectic variety of exotic percussion from Ches Smith,
a drummer whose career spans rock (Xiu Xiu) as well as jazz and what lies
between, such as Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog.
Tension and volume build gradually through the course of six minutes,
then are resolved, more or less acerbically, in the final forty seconds with a
winding-down sax and clarinet (Oscar Noriega) duet. “Static,” co-written with guitarist Marc
Ducret (who is not part of Snakeoil), begins with a raucous exchange between Berne
and Noriega, then moves through a hopped-up bass clarinet solo with discordant
piano accompaniment from Matt Mitchell before the sax reasserts itself;
following an extended section in which Berne and Mitchell play off each other,
sounding almost remote, the rhythms become thumpingly syncopated in alliance
with the rising volume to bring things to an end. The longer pieces are wilder and more
unwieldy. At the climaxes of “OC/DC,”
the saxophone’s squeals and the frenetic keyboard runs get to be too much for
my liking, seeming to serve no larger purpose.
“Socket” is less of a freakout, soberer (excepting the determinedly
pounding piano intro and one angry-sounding clarinet-and-piano exchange just
before the theme’s recapitulation) and more workmanlike, even dronelike in its
obsessions. “Cornered (Duck)” is lots
more busywork, unremarkable other than its pugilistic title but reaching a
fever pitch of intensity shortly before bowing out. If the entire album were like these last
three, I would be tempted to describe it as “full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing” (though that is an unduly harsh judgment). Even so, their sheer weight drags down the
disc’s score. B+/B
THE
WAYNE SHORTER QUARTET, Without a Net
(Blue Note Records)—One of jazz’s living legends, having moved from Art
Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the 1950s to Miles Davis’s quintet in the 1960s to
co-founding Weather Report in the 1970s, Wayne Shorter has been working with
this quartet since the turn of the millennium.
The group features Danilo Pérez on piano and a rhythm section of John Patitucci,
bass, and Brian Blade, drums. Now eighty
years old, Shorter makes only the occasional studio recording, and, indeed, Without a Net, his first record for Blue
Note in more than four decades, is not one of those. Rather, it was compiled from several live
performances in 2010 and 2011.
Interestingly, there is nothing in the CD packaging to indicate this,
other than to note that the epic-length “Pegasus” was recorded at Los Angeles’s
Walt Disney Concert Hall in December 2010, but one hears the applause following
most tracks. Most of the material on Without a Net is new or relatively so,
though the opener, “Orbits”—a compact and sprightly set of variations on a
moody theme—goes back to the most recent studio album, 2003’s Alegría.
There is also a lengthy and peculiar treatment of the theme song from
the 1933 Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movie Flying
Down to Rio, in which that theme, which is heard only in brief snatches
after the third minute, is barely used as template for the free-ranging
improvisations, which are fitful, atonal, and by turns tempestuous (perhaps the
turboprop encountered bad weather on the flight south) and surprisingly morose
for such a lighthearted tune. One point
of resistance I have to this album is that Shorter mainly plays the soprano sax
these days, which is my least favorite member of the saxophone family and which
I somehow cannot dissociate from the dreaded Kenny G. Another point of resistance is that it is
just not all that interesting. The
keyboard tone clusters and rainstick
of “Starry Night” are lovely but seem unmoored, and Shorter’s tenor sax, other
than moving from tentative and muffled to unbridled, is equally
directionless. “Plaza Real,” though more
focused, strikes me as stolid and hidebound for a piece that presumably means
to evoke a sunny Spanish or Latin American central square. “Pegasus,” a sprawling, twenty-three-minute
quasi-orchestral suite, is the disc’s centerpiece. Whether written with Disney in mind (Fantasia contains a Pegasus sequence),
this had the potential to be truly awful, as certain third stream
forays are; that it is not is hardly tantamount to saying that I love it. The Imani Winds, a five-piece woodwind and
French horn group, provides the classical basis.
There is an Aaron Copland quality (one of his program compositions) to
the set-piece portions of “Pegasus.”
These are eventually shouldered aside by soprano sax outbursts and
pianistic flights of fancy. Toward the
end of the improvisatory section, the rhythmic pulse gets heavier, with an
irregular pattern frequently on the off beat; following a quick return of the
classical ensemble’s primacy, the Imani Winds’ role is subsumed in the band’s
syncopations to conclude the show. Shorter’s
inquisitive, ever-modulating riff that is the backbone of “Myrrh” sounds like
nothing more than the melody, sung by a boy soprano, of “Where Is Love?” from
the 1960 musical Oliver! Early on in “S.S. Golden Mean,” the
saxophonist makes reference to Dizzy Gillespie, Chano Pozo, and Gil Fuller’s
“Manteca” (1947); still, the best passage is when Pérez breaks out of merely
rhythmically and tonally supporting the soprano sax’s bleats into a
full-blooded Latin vamp. The most
successful pieces on Without a Net
are the final two, both written by the band as a whole; not incidentally, Shorter
plays tenor on both. “Zero Gravity to
the 10th Power” has a dynamism, cohesion, and sense of flow absent elsewhere,
while “(The Notes) Unidentified Flying Objects” is more daringly modernistic
yet still self-contained, with lots of dissonance in the competing sax and
piano runs. This pair provides kick to
revive a record with too many desultory intervals. B
CLASSICAL
As always, I will comment on the classical records
without assigning grades.
EMANUEL
AX (piano), Variations
(Ludwig van Beethoven, Variations and Fugue for Piano in E-Flat Major [“Eroica”
Variations]; Joseph Haydn, Variations in F Minor (Sonata); Robert Schumann,
Symphonic Études) (Sony Classical)—Three sets of variations by some of the most eminent
composers spanning the era from early Classical (or first Viennese School)
period to early Romantic. Beethoven’s
variations (from 1802) are called the “Eroica Variations” because they spring
from a theme used in the finale of his Eroica
Symphony, which actually came to fruition slightly later than the
variations. But this same theme, perhaps
borrowed from Muzio Clementi, had been used by Beethoven in The Creatures of Prometheus (1801) and
elsewhere. The composer begins with the
bass line of the theme, and three variations on that bass element, in the
introduction before moving on to the full theme. Of the fifteen variations, numbers eight and
fourteen veer creatively away from simple alterations of the tune. But variation number fifteen is a species
apart, far longer than the others, more elaborate, and taken at a largo tempo. The finale, following the fifteenth
variation, is written in the form of a fugue and for a time flirts with minor
keys before returning to the home major and one last restatement of the theme. Haydn’s Variations in F Minor (1793) stands
as a single movement with two contrasting themes, one minor and somber and one
major and singing, whose variations are braided around each other in
alternation. The minor disposition wins
out in the end, but not without the major asserting itself for some complexity
of coloration. Schumann’s Symphonic
Études (1834) exists in several editions, adding and cutting different
movements. Emanuel Ax, the longtime
piano great, chooses a fairly inclusive approach, using the Brahms
republication of the posthumous third edition, which restored the cut third and
ninth études, originally excised because they are not true variations on the
theme; Brahms included five variations that had been excluded by Schumann at
the outset. Ax plays all of these
posthumous restorations except the first and third of the “Brahms” variations. Because the Schumann piece is a set of
études, it explores a number of issues relating to piano technique. The initial theme is based on a tune written
by an amateur musician, one Baron von Fricken.
The fifth “Brahms” variation has a sparkling chromaticism that stands
out, and the two études that immediately follow it on this disc (numbers six
and seven) are particularly animated.
The twelfth and final étude, far longer than any movement that came
before it, with plenty of scope for development, is ringingly triumphal in
nature, dispelling any clouds that had built up in earlier études.
BROOKLYN
RIDER, A Walking Fire
(Ljova, Culai; Béla Bartók, String
Quartet No. 2; Colin Jacobsen, Three Miniatures for String Quartet) (Mercury
Classics/Decca Music Group)—If Bartók’s Second String Quartet (1915–17),
sandwiched by two more impressionistic and travelogue-ish compositions from
present-day, thirty-something musicians, contributes gravitas to A Walking Fire, it is also far less
colorful and fun for the casual listener. Notwithstanding the liner notes’ talk of Bartók’s second movement allegro molto capriccioso being influenced by folk music he heard
on a prewar trip to Nigeria, the string quartet comes across
not so much as the reflections of a world traveler as a woebegone lament over a
continent torn apart by World War I. The
static third movement is so glum that the suicide-prone might want to avoid
it. The first movement, said by the
composer to be in sonata form, is merely somberly pensive, in an actively
nail-biting or knuckle-chewing manner, while the second is animated but just as
anguished in its way. The quartet is
less industrious than much of Bartók’s oeuvre but every bit as neuralgic. The first piece on the disc, Culai (2011–12), is a memorial to the
Romanian Gypsy violinist and singer Nicolae Neacşu, nicknamed Culai, who was a
member of the ensemble Taraf de Haidouks and who died in 2002. The composer, Ljova (a.k.a. Lev Zhurbin), was
familiar with Gypsy music from his youth in Moscow and traveled to Taraf de
Haidouks’ home village of Clejani a few years after Culai’s death to study and
sit in with the band. The piece’s five
movements are described by the composer as representing broadly the subject’s itinerant
life. The jaunty syncopations and cello
ostinato of the first (“The Game”) give way to the stately and more openly
melodic second (“The Muse”), followed by a mini-tribute to the singer Romica
Puceanu (“The Song”), the dervish-like tarantella
“Love Potion, Expired,” and finally the slow, ceremonial “Funeral Doina” (a doina
is a meter-free, melismatic, improvisational Romanian folk song expressing
longing or sorrow). Three Miniatures for
String Quartet, by Brooklyn Rider member Colin Jacobsen, was inspired by
collaboration with the Persian-Kurdish composer and kamancheh
player Kayhan Kalhor and by a trip to Iran.
Its three movements recast the Persian tradition of elaborate miniature
paintings. Jacobsen’s compositional
technique can seem rutted at times, though it should be specified that for the second movement (“The
Flowers of Esfahan), he mentions in the liner notes “a place in a mosque where
every sound is echoed exactly seven times.”
Also, whereas the first movement (“Majnun’s Moonshine”) might be said to
suffer from a surfeit of Orientalism, in the second and third, Jacobsen
reasserts his own compositional identity as a New York modernist possessing a
certain familiarity with classical Persian idioms. The third movement, for which the album is
named, builds to a vigorous and passionate conclusion. Brooklyn Rider, whose Seven Steps was covered in the 2012 music survey, is a four-man
quartet whose membership overlaps with that of the floating New York orchestral
ensemble The Knights, which makes frequent appearances at the Naumburg
Bandshell in Central Park for summertime free concerts. It consists of Eric Jacobsen (brother of
Colin), cello, Nicholas Cords, viola, Colin Jacobsen and Johnny Gandelsman,
violins.
GYÖRGY
LIGETI, String Quartets; SAMUEL BARBER, Adagio from String Quartet No. 1
(Keller Quartett) (ECM New Series)—Paul Griffiths, in the liner notes to this
ECM disc, makes the case for a relationship between Samuel Barber’s famed
Adagio (1935–36) and the György Ligeti string quartets. It seems like stretching a point to me, but
what do I know? Barber’s Adagio feels ineffably sad but
is one of the most beautiful compositions ever penned by an American
composer. Ligeti’s first string quartet,
titled Métamorphoses Nocturnes, is
furtive, lamenting, and a bit spooky in nature, with periods of frenetic activity
in the violins’ high register, sometimes creaky and other times buzzing like a
bumblebee, contrasting with passages of deep quietude, glowering held notes
from the cello or near silences. The
latter dominate the final couple of minutes, but even then there is a quick
outburst of tension release. This
manic-depressive quality to a certain extent also permeates the second quartet,
which carries no title but is in five movements, unlike the single-movement
first. Written in 1968, about fifteen
years after the first, it is intended as a set of variations on a unifying
concept. The first (allegro nervoso) movement is turbulent and choppy yet spiked with
intervals of pained, anticipatory inertia.
Tightly wound glumness characterizes the sostenuto movement that follows.
Next comes a movement like a metronome gone haywire, whose effects are
produced through spiky pizzicato. The
fourth movement is marked presto furioso,
brutale, tumultuoso but is more “brutal” than fast, as everything that has
come previously is depicted through a harsh filter. The final movement’s allegro channels all that tense energy through the violins and
allows it to dissipate. The Keller
Quartet, a Hungarian group founded by András Keller in 1987, presumably has a
finely tuned sensibility for the music of its compatriot, Ligeti, who died in
2006; for this disc, it uses two different second violinists, János Pilz and
Zsófia Környei, in the two quartets.
IGOR
STRAVINSKY, Le Sacre du Printemps
(1947 revision); Symphonies of Wind Instruments;
Apollon Musagète (1947 revision) (Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Simon
Rattle) (EMI Classics/EMI Records)—It is hard, listening through ears accustomed to
all the raucous, grating music the most recent century has put forward, to
conceive of the riot that erupted at the premiere of Stravinsky’s ballet score
for Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite
of Spring) at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris one hundred years
ago. Although it is well known, people
are more likely to be familiar with certain parts, especially the pounding
monotone that kicks off the second movement (Les Augures Printaniers, or Augurs
of Spring)—which is not so different in spirit from passages of Manuel de
Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat, which was also
a ballet put on by Sergei Diaghilev, six years after Le Sacre du Printemps—less so the score in its entirety, which
includes plenty of quieter and more mystical moments. Stravinsky, in writing around the theme of a
human sacrifice among the ancients, aimed to strip music of its modern
accoutrements like harmony, counterpoint, and development in favor of an
imagined return to something primal. The intent was to shock, and clearly the
composer succeeded. The disc includes
another ballet presented by Diaghilev, Apollon
Musagète (Apollo, Leader of the Muses), from 1928. By the time Stravinsky wrote this ballet
score, he had cast aside primitivism for neo-Classicism, and Apollon Musagète draws on the tendncies of
various composers and styles from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries,
as Apollo is visited by three muses, those of dance/song (Terpsichore), mime
(Polyhymnia), and poetry (Calliope).
This music is far more courtly than Le
Sacre du Printemps. Still, despite
casting an eye backward, its musical language and restless disposition are
anything but reactionary. The final
movement Apothéose (Apotheosis) manages to reach a throbbing Romantic peak
before pulling back from the brink. In
between the two ballets, EMI has placed the single-movement Symphonies of Wind
Instruments, written in 1920 for about two dozen woodwind and brass instruments
and dedicated to Claude Debussy, who had died a couple of years before. Following the hammer blows of Le Sacre du Printemps, the Symphonies
comes off as mild, managing to be rustic and folkloric and at the same time
modernistic in its ensemble sound. The
three compositions on the disc were recorded live at the Philharmonie in Berlin
on separate occasions between 2007 and 2012.
VÂN-ÁNH
VANESSA VÕ (Đàn tranh zither, Đàn bấu monochord or “gourd lute,” Đan t’rưng bamboo xylophone, Hang steel
idiophone percussion; Kronos Quartet [in “Green River Delta”]; Jimi Nakagawa
[percussion and chanting in “Three-Mountain Pass,” “The Legend,” “Go Hunting”];
Frances Martin [keyboard in “The Legend”]), Three-Mountain
Pass (Innova/American Composers Forum)—It is not
necessary to know anything about Vietnamese traditional music to appreciate the
work of Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ (born Võ Vân Ánh in Hanoi and known popularly in the
United States, to which she emigrated, as Vanessa Vo). On what is likely her first studio recording
(she has several film soundtracks to her credit already, including Daughter from Danang and Bolinao 52), there is only one piece
that is completely “traditional,” the opener, “Vong Co,” played solo on the Đàn
tranh,
or Vietnamese zither. “Vong Co” (Vọng Cỏ
in Vietnamese notation) is taken from caI lương, or southern
Vietnamese folk opera, which is itself a twentieth-century syncretic form that
owes something to Chinese opera, Western classical music, and Vietnamese folk
songs. Vo’s zither arrangement is
exquisite, as the instrument’s natural note-bending tendencies make the tune
weep. Erik Satie’s “Gnossienne No. 3”
(1893) is a familiar miniature rendered otherworldly by an instrument called
the Đàn bấu
monochord, or “gourd lute.” For those
accustomed to hearing it played on piano, this is hard to get used to, or maybe
impossible. “Green River Delta” was
composed by Kim Sinh (born Nguyen Van Sinh in 1930) and arranged by Jacob
Garchik for string quartet and Đàn tranh. For this track, Vo is joined by the Kronos
Quartet, and a vigorous exchange takes place between the Vietnamese and Western
strings. The other four offerings on the
disc are all Vo originals. On two of
them, she sings as well: the title track
and “The Legend.” Her eagerness to
experiment rather than merely replicate the styles and folklore of her native
land is evident in the chosen instrumentation for “Three-Mountain Pass”: she is using a combination of the Đàn t’rưng
bamboo xylophone and the Hang,
a type of resonating steel percussion designed by a pair of Swiss inventors at
the turn of the millennium. She chooses
a quavery, swooping, and deeply emotional approach to the sung lyric, which was
adapted from poetry by the late-eighteenth-/early-nineteenth-century female poet
Hồ Xuân Hương. “The Legend” is mostly
performed on the Đàn tranh; the short
vocal segment is just as expressive but sung in a more unbroken, naturalistic
way. “Mourning” makes use of three
differently tuned Đàn bấu, for an
even more unearthly listening experience than the Satie rendition. The final composition, “Go Hunting,” is for Đàn t’rưng
with percussion accompaniment and is consequently more rustic/primitive, with
passages that seem to alternate between stalking and chasing down the prey,
ending in a mildly emphatic way with the capture, one might well imagine.
