MUSIC 2010:  A DECIDEDLY SELECTIVE SURVEY

Steven Greenfield

November 7, 2011

GENERAL COMMENTS

    First off, my apologies to those who actually look forward to this survey annually for its late appearance.  This is largely a result of a meltdown of my hard drive back in late March; naturally, I did not have proper backup prepared and lost just about all the work I had been doing up to that point.  My brother-in-law, Ariel Bensoussan, rescued my computer, installing a new hard drive, but to this point he has not managed to resuscitate the data from the old hard drive.

    This calamity forced a change in tack.  I continued with the music survey to the end but then had to face the prospect of going back and “re-reviewing” everything that had been lost.  To get through this, I limited myself the second time round to a single listen per album.  Thus, most of the reviews this year are in a rougher, more shoot-from-the-hip style.  This includes everything in the rock/pop category except for the Dungen, which was salvaged as an e-mail attachment, and the Chancha via Circuito and the Brazilian Guitar Fuzz Bananas, each of which was originally reviewed as a Latin record and then “kicked upstairs” into mainstream pop.  Also written on the fly were all three in the miscellaneous category and the Gilberto Santa Rosa and Juan Luis Guerra reviews.  (It was just after writing the Guerra review that my computer died.)

     My thanks go out to Ariel for salvaging my computer as well as to Steve Holtje and Luis Rueda for their own suggestions about what was useful to listen to, and to Melissa for being supportive throughout this long, drawn-out process.


    Outside the hipster havens, in the larger world of junk-celebrity culture, the Four Horse-persons of the Apocalypse were tragically ubiquitous:  Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and Miley Cyrus.  All of them combined have about as much talent as exists in a single brain cell of a Thom Yorke or in a fingernail shaving of a Brian Burton (Danger Mouse), but there you have it:  the music business is no fairer than life itself, and fame is ever more fleeting.  The song that dominated the airwaves, at least here in the vicinity of the Big Apple, was Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind,” with Alicia Keys singing the melody.  Though released in late 2009, it found its way into everyone’s consciousness (in part because of its adaptation by TV commercials, to say nothing of public address systems at stadiums and arenas) in 2010.  The lyrics are a bit awkward, but the song struck a chord all the same, and it hardly hurts that Keys is a tremendously appealing vocalist.

Amy Millan and Evan Cranley of Stars

    Among the most memorable moments of the year in music presented in a live setting was the show at Terminal 5 in Hell’s Kitchen by Stars (see below)—its high point a stripped-down acoustic version of “Ageless Beauty,” with Amy Millan singing accompanied by her partner, Evan Cranley, on guitar.  It was also great fun seeing Metric at Celebrate Brooklyn! in Prospect Park, and a languid hint of the Sahara’s torridness emanated from Central Park Summerstage as we sweated through a muggy summer Saturday afternoon with Mali’s Tinariwen.

    The year 2010 witnessed some old favorites coming back with records that were worthwhile if not at the level of their best ever, as well as a sprinkling of intriguing newcomers amid the disappointments.  For those who do not read past the introduction, I will quickly proselytize for various records that either were retrospectives (and thus not eligible for Album of the Year) or in categories other than mainstream pop/rock.  Among the revivals, two from Latin America stand out:  Brazilian Guitar Fuzz Bananas redirects early 1970s psychedelia from the U.K. and United States via São Paulo and Rio into unexpected channels, while The Roots of Chicha 2 continues an earlier exploration of chicha, which is essentially Peruvian cumbia.  As fun, if more throwaway, was the rediscovery by Sublime Frequencies of the sixties Indonesian girl group Dara Puspita on Dara Puspita 1966-1968.  Finally, King Crimson’s own issuance of a double-record from a pair of Tokyo appearances from the THRAK era, Live in Japan 1995, is fabulous as a reminder of how great the progressive band was, even in its third incarnation.

    Hard to classify yet outstanding is the self-titled Heliocentrics’ pairing with Lloyd Miller, benefiting from the old jazzman/musicologist Miller’s keen ear and extensive study of traditional music from distinct regions across Asia.  Straight jazz records that earn high marks in the survey are the Benoît Delbecq Trio’s The Sixth Jump, Jason Moran’s Ten, the Mary Halvorson Quintet’s parameter-fracturing Saturn Sings, and Henry Threadgill/Zooid’s This Brings Us to, Volume II.  Blurring the boundaries between modern classical composition and indie cool is the all-female ensemble Victoire’s spellbinding Cathedral City.  Likewise at home in both the classical and popular realms is the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhansson, whose And in the Endless Pause There Came the Sound of Bees is soundtrack music but particularly majestic and at times gripping soundtrack music, as much in the spirit of Vangelis or fellow Icelanders Sigur Rós as Philip Glass.  Afrocubism is producer Nick Gold’s concept, brigning together Eliades Ochoa and other Cuban musicians with some of Mali’s best, showing how even “Afro-Cuban” music can be revivified by contact with the Old World (many of whose musicians absorbed Cuban forms in their youth).  From Puerto Rico, Calle 13, for Entren los que Quieran, invigorates reggaetón with the spirit of Vico C’s Latin hip-hop, both imbuing it with a strong sense of class conflict/resentment and leavening it with humor.  And from the Dominican Republic, Rita Indiana y los Misterios put out an impressive debut, cinematic in its intensity and furious pacing, a hybrid of merengue, reggae, techno, and other genres.

    In the “noise rock” genre, Sleigh Bells issued a convincing debut with Treats.  Galactic, a New Orleans funk-rock outfit that had not been much heard from in recent years, came back in a big way with Ya-ka-may, assisted by a host of Crescent City collaborators.  The fact that four of my top five records for the year were electronica, however, speaks for how that genre continues to develop and serve as a medium of some of the most creative minds in popular music today.

    My list of the Top Ten (of the pops) for the year follows.  For the second time in three years, I am copping out by having a tie for Album of the Year:

    1.  (tie) Crystal Castles, Crystal Castles [II]
    1.  (tie) Flying Lotus, Cosmogramma
    3.  Chancha via Circuito, Río Arriba
    4.  Sleigh Bells, Treats
    5.  Four Tet, There Is Love in You
    6.  Galactic, Ya-ka-may
    7.  Stars, The Five Ghosts
    8.  Dungen, Skit I Allt
    9.  Broken Social Scene, Forgiveness Rock Record
    10. LCD Soundsystem, This Is Happening

    ROCK/POP ALBUMS OF THE YEAR

CRYSTAL CASTLES, Crystal Castles [II] (Fiction/Universal Motown Records)—One of the genuine revelations of 2010 (I had not heard the band’s debut, also self-titled, from 2008) was this Toronto-based electronica duo of Ethan Kath (producer, keyboards) and Alice Glass (vocals), whose real names and identities are kept close to the vest.  Crystal Castles’ second release is a breathtaking electronica/dream pop CD, fresh and innovative throughout, a record that is as viscerally affecting as it is formally daring.  “Celestica,” the CD’s prime cut, floats majestically on a cushion of air, evoking the 1990s trip-hop of the UK band Olive, as well as the experimental synthpop of California’s Xiu Xiu.  If much of the album conjures restless dreams or even nightmares, “Celestica” is a benign admixture of bliss and wonderment.  Punky little lead singer Glass’s squealing-pig vocal mannerisms on “Doe Deer” are hard to tolerate, but that song is blessedly brief, and she is far calmer and more conventional on the rest of the album (well, mostly; on “Baptism” she is still shouting, though in a way that grates far less).  With “Pap Smear,” she comes as close as she ever is likely to toward being a dancefloor diva; even here, however, her voice is kept at some remove from the listener, behind scrims of electronic machinery.  “Baptism” has the kind of percolating keyboards that first burst onto the scene with the song “Popcorn” (composed by Gershon Kingsley in 1969; made popular in the 1972 rendition by Hot Butter), paired with blurred synthesizer tones and Glass’s desperate-sounding voice.  “Empathy” expertly combines a keyboard riff distorted by signal-to-noise howl with drum machines, chubby synth tones, and Glass’s voice textured two different ways, more strained in the verse section, sweeter and more accessible in the chorus.  Kath uses a chip from an old Atari gaming system, according to RealPlayer, to produce the glitches in the song “Birds.”  The purely instrumental “Intimate” (which is anything but intimate) takes a single descending scale and monkeys around with the rhythmic patterns used to express it, adding the thumping beat that is nearly ubiquitous on this CD to back it up.  “Year of Silence,” a collaboration with Sigur Rós that samples its “Inní Mér Syngur Vitleysingur” [Within Me a Lunatic Sings] (2008), showcases the vocals of that Icelandic band’s lead singer, Jónsi (Jón Þór Birgisson), in an intricate overlay, supported by a booming house beat—a rather noisy year of silence, apparently.  (Portions of the CD were recorded in a church in Iceland.)  The other Scandinavian co-production, of a sort, involves the Swedish folk/dream pop singer Stina Nordestam, on “Violent Dreams” and “Vietnam.”  Both songs are said to sample Nordestam’s “I See You Again,” though the voice is processed beyond recognition, in the manner of the UK dubstep/electronica producer who calls himself Burial.  “Violent Dreams” is actually one of the album’s quietest songs, a chamber piece like a Baroque chorale.  “Vietnam” samples a different portion of Nordestam’s original, giving her voice similar rough treatment while setting it first to a machine gun rhythm and then a dance beat, ultimately returning to the former.  Crystal Castles also covers eighties New Wave band Platinum Blonde’s “Not in Love” (1985) with Alvin and the Chipmunks vocals and a relentless dance propulsiveness; it sounds like the Cure, gassed by a mixture of helium and nitrous oxide.  (In fact, a remix of the cover, issued as a single, did feature the voice of the Cure’s Robert Smith.)  The final track, “I Am Made of Chalk,” begins with a lot of noise, then slows dramatically to a repeating sequence of held keyboard tones, over which feral garbled sounds, sometimes resembling catfights, other times, snatches of vaguely remembered cartoons, play out.  Crystal Castles [II] is a fascinating journey, one of those ear-opening recordings that restores my faith that new and interesting music is still being developed in an era of ever greater homogenization.    A

Sample song  “Celestica”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsxNUl1IHnE

FLYING LOTUS, Cosmogramma (Warp Records)—Steven Ellison, a.k.a. Flying Lotus, has, with the help of several collaborators, assembled a consciousness-expanding, mind-blowing electronica suite for Cosmogramma that rivals Crystal Castles for the year’s best in pop.  Ellison’s musical pedigree is distinguished; he is the great-nephew of Alice Coltrane, John Coltrane’s wife, and in fact the title of the record came from one of Alice Coltrane’s ashram lectures he heard as a child; he misinterpreted the term “cosmic drama” as “cosmogramma.”  His third full-length recording as Flying Lotus, Cosmogramma does indeed explore the deep-space realms of electronic music.  It is both forward- and backward-looking in that it makes use of cutting edge technology/software while aiming to recreate a certain ethos from the 1970s, when electronic and computer-generated music was a novelty and “space funk” as exemplified by Parliament/Funkadelic or the Galactic Force Band was opening up its own niche.  The prototypical Flying Lotus track in this mode is “Computer Face/Pure Being,” full of vibrato-heavy synth chords not unlike those of Squarepusher (see below).  But there is plenty of sonic variety on Cosmogramma’s seventeen tracks (the division into tracks is itself a bit arbitrary; songs can change character sharply within a track, and there is some overlap, as when the introduction to “Do the Astral Plane” begins well before “Mmmhmm” ends), along with the bent notes and zippy special effects.   “Intro/A Cosmic Drama” is orchestral and exotic in timbre, with harp glissandos from Rebekah Raff.  “Zodiac Shit” and “Recoiled” recall the sound of Broadcast in their fugitive nature, rapid shift in moods, and sense of warped fantasy.  Incidentally, both Broadcast and Squarepusher are signed to Warp Records, Ellison’s label.  Ellison, based in the Los Angeles area, devised all the music himself with the exception of three co-authored tracks.  “Mmmhmm” was written with Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner, who has played bass with the Southern California band Suicidal Tendencies in recent years.  A mellow seventies vibe courses through “Mmmhmm,” a sort of laid-back cosmic soul tribute with falsetto lyrics sung by Thundercat himself.  Ellison liked this piece enough to allow it to linger; it is the only track on the album that lasts longer than four minutes.  “Satelllliiiiiiteee,” if not as laid back a composition as “Mmmhmm” is every bit as interplanetary.  “Table Tennis” was fashioned in tandem with another Southern California artist, the singer Laura Darlington, who is part of a husband-and-wife psychedelic duo known as the Long Lost.  It incorporates the sound of a ping-pong ball being batted back and forth, while Darlington sings a breathy, off-color theme that is a cross between Stereolab and the trip-hop of Olive; for the final half-minute, the ping-pong sound is gone, replaced by a lovely acoustic guitar theme.  “And the World Laughs with You” brings on board Thom Yorke of Radiohead, who helped write it and sings on it, for a tune that sounds moodily like something from Yorke’s solo album, The Eraser (2006), with mournful echoes taking over toward the end.  The percussive “Arkestry,” with its flights of tenor sax from Ellison’s cousin Ravi Coltrane, is a bow to the late Sun Ra and his Arkestra; this piece shifts moods suddenly, as do a number of the selections on the disc, two-thirds of the way through, to something far more orchestral.  Coltrane returns later (as does the harpist, Raff, who is ever-present on the album) for a similarly percussive piece, “German Haircut.”  “Dance of the Pseudo Nymph” is a bouncy computer-generated piece with soulful background chorus and handclaps as well as videogame-type effects.  “Galaxy in Janaki” appropriately swirls in a rich spectrograph of light and colors that brings the record to an emphatic conclusion, even as the music appears to be reaching toward the stars for more.    A

Sample song  “MmmHmm”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uCyv05SG1g&feature=fvsr

    And the rest . . .

ALOE BLAAC, Good Things (Stones Throw Records)—Neo-soul singer Aloe Blaac, who was born Egbert Nathaniel Dawkins III, gained a certain measure of attention with Good Things, his second full-length record.  “I Need a Dollar,” the record’s big hit, catchy if not terribly original, was picked up as a theme by the HBO show How to Make It in America.  The same type of hardscrabble, blues-tinged vulnerability that characterizes “I Need a Dollar” also drives the lesser hit “Loving You Is Killing Me.”  On his debut, Blaac performed a number of songs in Spanish (he is of Panamanian origin), including a Spanish-language cover of John Legend’s “Ordinary People,” but the current record betrays nothing of his Latin heritage.  It is more an homage to an older generation of soul, sung in Blaac’s smooth, clear tenor and sprinkled with allusions, from the Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion (That’s What the World Is Today” (1970) on “Life So Hard” to “For What It’s Worth” (1967) from the Buffalo Springfield on “Loving You Is Killing Me.”  “Hey Brother” makes use of sforzando attacks in the horn section and a Shaft-style wah-wah guitar pedal for a seventies funk sensibility.  The retro-soul facsimile reaches its apogee with “You Make Me Smile,” a track very much in the tradition of Bill Withers’s classic “Lean on Me” from 1972.  “Mama Hold My Hand” likewise rests on simple keyboard scales; in musical terms, it is hardly revelatory, yet it tells a heart-tugging story of the evolving relationship between a man and his mother, as the scales of dependency shift from one generation to the other.  To be sure, not everything on the disc is backward looking:  “If I,” a languid soul spinner, is one of the most affecting and inventive selections here.  The album is not consistent enough to garner top marks; there are several indifferent tracks (“Green Lights,” “Take Me Back,” and the title track) and a couple of misfires.  “Miss Fortune” is a ploddingly flat morality tale about greed and thinking that one can “change” someone else for the better, with a reggae-style one-drop beat in portions of the verse section.  “Femme Fatale” has an oddly concordant refrain that mars the atmosphere of intrigue and danger.  The strangest inclusion on the disc is its finale, “Politician (Reprise),” not in musical terms—it is an appealingly late-Beatlesque trumpet fanfare with an undercurrent of wailing guitar—but in its not being a reprise of anything, at least not from this album or its predecessor, although the instrumental certainly sounds like it could be one.    A-/B+

Sample song  “Loving You Is Killing Me”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yJuyaVcL2I

ANTIBALAS AFROBEAT ORCHESTRA, Who Is This America? (Ropeadope Records)—This is a special edition reissue of Antibalas’s 2004 release of the same name, containing the bonus track “Money Talks” at the end.  Antibalas’s long jams, modeled after the Afrobeat of the late Fela Kuti of Nigeria, show off the musicianship of its tremendous horn, guitar, and percussion players, even while taxing the listener’s patience with their unvarying patterns and political jeremiads.  The leftist, colored-is-beautiful lyrics are no doubt sincere but blunt.  The identity questions raised in the title track, “Who Is This America Dem Speak of Today?” for example, are far more gracefully expressed by the Los Angeles band Ozomatli (see below) in its song “(Who Discovered) America?” from the 2004 record Street Signs.  “Indictment,” with its spiky and emphatic horn attacks, is marred by the section in which names of people and institutions to be indicted, topped by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, are hoarsely shouted out.  “Big Man,” tediously repetitive in its bass pattern (it picks up life only when Stuart Bogie’s tenor sax enters with a solo improvisation), is a simpleton’s primer of how capitalism works while at the same time pointing to a serious problem in Africa with patronage politics.  “Sister,” the longest track at nearly twenty minutes, is framed as a long-winded apology, coming through as a rote exercise in feminist sensitivity training for males, but what is most unfortunate is that, while the verse plays out, there is absolutely nothing of musical interest going on.  “Obanla’e,” by far the shortest track at 1:39, is Cuban in inspiration, its percussion and traditional Yoruba call-and-response vocals, arranged by Ernesto Abreu, akin to the music of Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, evoking the ritual incantations of santería.  The sung section of “Elephant,” also in part a traditional chant arranged by Abreu, likewise employs a lead singer (Abreu himself; on the rest of the record the lead vocalist is listed in the CD booklet as Amayo, though he is referred to elsewhere as Duke Amayo) and a response chorus, singing in a mixture of Spanish and Yoruba.  Given the lyrics’ obtuseness, it should not surprise that the best pieces on the record are the purely instrumental (though polemically titled) “Pay Back Africa,” with its stark Jamaican beats (at the outset and the close) and horn charts—a song whose saxophone-brass coloration is as deep and rich as Blue Mountain coffee—and the bonus track, a funk groove led by the saxes and contested by a trumpet/trombone chorus.  Though there are certainly enjoyable passages elsewhere and sections that beckon listeners to get up and move their midsections, nothing else on the disc approaches the flinty grandeur of “Beaten Metal” or “I.C.E.” from Antibalas’s 2007 recording Security.    B/B-

Sample song  “Pay Back Africa”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi8P0JIqo2Q

ARCADE FIRE, The Suburbs (Merge Records)—A certain critical backlash was inevitable after the media adulation that accompanied Arcade Fire’s long-anticipated second release, Neon Bible, in 2007.  Preliminary word of mouth suggested that The Suburbs is not the equal of its two predecessors from the Montreal-based band, though some critics swooned over it all the same.  So how does it stack up?  It is not the type of record that will set the music world aflame, the way Arcade Fire’s first two recordings did; it is simply too laconic, reflecting the essence of its central theme.  As such, it is missing the emotional urgency of Funeral (2004) or Neon Bible; there just seems to be far less at stake in these songs.  Bandleader Win Butler told NME that the record is “neither a love letter to, nor an indictment of, the suburbs—it is a letter from the suburbs.”  The problem is that it cannot seem to decide whether it wants to settle for simplicity, a poetic rendering of snippets of memory from Win and Will Butler’s upbringing in the Houston suburbs, or to try for some more grandiose statement.  And while it does manage to avoid polemics and steer clear of the usual clichés about suburban life, it is hard to say just what the album is expressing on the subject that might have deeper meaning, that might resonate beyond recalling the pervasive adolescent sense of boredom, anticipation, and rebelliousness.  Win Butler continues to sing in Bruce Springsteen mode, as he did on Neon Bible, in particular on the opening (title) track.  That song pulls off a certain grandeur, at a clip-clop pace, artistically magnifying the struggles and concerns of ordinary people in everyday life as in a Springsteen song or a Diego Rivera mural, with an expectant refrain—“Sometimes I can’t believe it/I’m moving past the feeling”—that is blank yet evocative of someone outgrowing the bounds of the place where he was raised.  “The Suburbs” is a credible curtain raiser, yet many of the songs to follow are fundamentally hollow.  “Ready to Start” has a rousing energy that is dispersed in too many directions to have much impact.  “Month of May” likewise is an energetic, straight-ahead rocker that is nonetheless vacuous, both lyrically and in terms of its use of by-the-book chord progressions.  “City with No Children” is not a bad piece but could have been more adventurous musically, delimited as it is by its reverberant, empty fifths.  Sometimes portions of songs suggest allusions that may or may not be intended (given that Win Butler is nearly a generation younger than I am, it is hard to know what he grew up with):  The chord pattern at the end of “Half Light I”  echoes Neil Diamond’s “Song Sung Blue” (1972).  The la-la chorus of “Wasted Hours” matches that of the “Johnny Rotten, Rotten Johnny” bit in Neil Young’s “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” from 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps.  Byrds-style guitar arpeggiation animates “Suburban War,” sped up and intensified toward the conclusion.  The song’s verse “now the music divides us into tribes” rings true for those of us who grew up in the ’burbs.  While the album does not seem to be leading anywhere specific, it manages to reach a suitably emotional climax with “Sprawl II (Mountains beyond Mountains),” a majestically anthemic yet springy composition whose lyrics successfully invoke furtive romances and feelings of being misfits and outcasts set against a sterile environment—something the rest of the record never quite manages to accomplish—as Régine Chassagne sings about how “dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains.”  The short final track, “The Suburbs (continued),” is a nice touch, climbing down from the high-strung peaks of “Sprawl II,” a wistful, quiet reprise of the opening song’s refrain, sung in duet between Win Butler and Chassagne, with the added thought, “If I could have it back/All the time that we wasted/I’d only waste it again.”    A-/B+

Sample song  “The Suburbs”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Euj9f3gdyM&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

THE BLACK ANGELS, Phosphene Dream (Blue Horizon Records)—It is one thing to take inspiration from 1960s psychedelia; slavish adulation is another thing entirely.  This might be what passes for cutting edge in Austin, where the Black Angels hail from, but to my ear, the band is hopelessly derivative.  Its name comes from the Velvet Underground’s “The Black Angel’s Death Song” (1967).  The album cover is designed to induce vertigo, in a sixties, pop art kind of way.  Songs like “Sunday Afternoon” and “River of Blood,” the former more contained and conventional, the latter wild and disjointed, are much like the work of a tribute band, too in awe of the masters to dare venturing anything original.  “Telephone,” a slight reworking of the “you don’t return my calls” trope, presents itself to the listener as a cross between the Doors in one of their more energetic moments (those groovy organ syncopations as the bass line) and the Kinks or T. Rex, perhaps. “Bad Vibrations,” the opening song, notwithstanding its Beach Boys reference, partakes of the doomy ponderousness of Jefferson Airplane; it is little more than a descending scale in the guitar, combined with a sustained organ tremolo, though the final section is taken at a faster speed.  The lamest piece on the disc is “Entrance Song,” a particularly vapid addition to the “drivin’ down the highway too fast” thematic subset of rock and country, whose “chorus” consists simply of repeating the song title.  Thrilling stuff!  “Yellow Elevator #2” is a title that conjures Moby Grape or the Strawberry Alarm Clock, though the true reference is more likely the 13th Floor Elevators, a late-sixties Austin psychedelic band led by Roky Erickson, who has appeared on the same bill with the Black Angels.  With its recurring ritardando “seeing through golden light” section, the song is attempting something more ambitious than most on the record, and the result is more engaging.  “True Believers,” a song that appears to express skepticism about religion—the lyrics throughout are irritatingly obscurantist but are here somewhat coherent—is the most interesting track, its quasi-Middle Eastern and Indian modes generated via a harmonium and guitars played sitar-style.  According to RealPlayer’s notes, guitarist Christian Bland is a preacher’s son, while bassist Nate Ryan was born on a cult compound, so the song’s jaundiced eye toward belief appears to come from personal experience.  All indicators suggest that the Black Angels need to step out of the shadow of their idols in order truly to make a mark.    B-

Sample song  “Telephone”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk8ef1OPNs4

BROKEN BELLS, Broken Bells (Columbia Records/Sony Music Entertainment)—Broken Bells is a new project involving a collaboration between Danger Mouse (a.k.a. Brian Burton), who is also one half of Gnarls Barkley, and James Mercer, guitarist and lead vocalist of the Shins.  Danger Mouse handles the drums and keyboards, while Mercer sings and plays lead guitar as well as most of the bass tracks.  “The High Road,” the first single and the opening track, is an ingratiating slice of straight-ahead rock with a combination of keyboard electronics and acoustic guitar/unmediated solo singing that gives it a downtempo vibe akin to Zero 7; the song ends with a trio section of sorts, surrounding the lyric “It’s too late to change your mind/You let loss be your guide.”  “Your Head Is on Fire” is something of a throwback to breathy sixties pop groups, while Mercer’s falsetto on “The Ghost Inside” helps give that number a TV on the Radio quality.  “Trap Doors” is yet another pop song that is allowed to relax into the pleasures of simplicity.  The album does not lack entirely for ambition—the final two tracks shoot for something more complex:  “Mongrel Heart” scores with a tune darker than most here, featuring an elaborate bridge with a dramatic, Iberian-style trumpet line from Christopher J. Tedesco; “The Mall & Misery” is not pulled off quite as deftly, yet there is still something appealing in its combination of bleak keyboards and jagged, clang-y Gang of Four-style guitar figurations.  Not all the material is as distinguished, but, in all, this is an easygoing, well-crafted pop record by two veterans who, coming from different backgrounds, have melded their contributions into something genuinely new and who are sage enough not to reach for more than they can grasp.    A-

Sample song  “The High Road”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWBG1j_flrg&ob=av2e

BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE, Forgiveness Rock Record (Arts & Crafts)—Can it really be five years since the last Broken Social Scene recording?  Considering that Canada’s BSS is less a group than a floating collective of musicians, it is understandable that many were busy with other projects.  Broken Social Scene is best known for fostering the careers of three women singers:  Leslie Feist (who goes by Feist professionally as a solo artist), Emily Haines (the frontwoman of Metric), and Amy Millan (of Stars; see below), all of whom make appearances on this album, if generally in subsidiary roles.  Other prominent Canadian musicians who contribute are Jimmy Shaw of Metric, Stars’s Evan Cranley, and Jason Collett.  Some critics worry that Broken Social Scene has become too much an instrument of its co-founder Kevin Drew, implying that the music would benefit from a more truly collaborative process drawing on the strengths of other members like Andrew Whiteman, Charles Spearin, and Justin Peroff.  Still, Forgiveness Rock Record is every bit as eclectic—from the quiet folk of “Highway Slipper Jam” to the Caribbean brashness of “Art House Director,” from the smooth pop of “All in All” to the hair-metal wooliness of “Water in Hell”—and experimental as each of its predecessors and therefore does not disappoint, if it is ultimately too uneven to rank with the best.  (The opening “World Sick,” as well as “Forced to Love” and “Romance to the Grave,” are among the record’s lesser efforts.)  “Chase Scene” is an entertainingly kinetic caricature of a movie soundtrack.  “Texico Bitches,” a singsong piece that eventually ditches its elemental guitar arpeggios in favor of thicker textures, is a throwback to the quirky, easygoing pop of Broken Social Scene’s magnum opus, You Forgot It in People (2003), which I ranked as the third-best album of the decade (see the previous post on this blog).  “All to All” is an airy piece with a throbbing beat that introduces a new lead vocalist (Drew does most of the singing) for the group, Lisa Lobsinger, a delicate, breathy chanteuse from Calgary; in the “all to all, ultimatum” chorus of the song, she evokes girl groups of the 1940s like the Andrews Sisters.  “Art House Director” gets its kick from a lively horn section:  Evan Cranley on trombone, Spearin and Bryden Baird on trumpets, and Leon Kingstone on tenor sax.  “Ungrateful Little Father” is emblematic of Broken Social Scene:  an appealingly original, well-structured composition, its distressed keys a kind of modern-day electronic glass harmonica, married to a bizarre lyric (what follows “ungrateful little” in the song is not “father” but a more Oedipal term not used in polite company), with an extended instrumental coda of sustained keyboard tones and electronic blips.  “Meet Me in the Basement” is a punchy, straight-ahead rock instrumental; in temperament, its vocal counterpart is “Water in Hell,” sung by BSS co-founder Brendan Canning, although “Water in Hell” plays around with changes in tempo and tenor, including a fast, country-ish bit.  “Sentimental X’s,” one of the less consequential tracks on the record, is notable primarily because the three leading BSS alumnae singers are all featured, with Haines taking the foreground.  Its follow-up, “Sweetest Kill,” another song with an oddly jarring lyric, sung by Drew toward the androgynous top of his range, aims for poignancy but falls short:  compositional laziness never takes it beyond the embellishment of one all too easy tonal resolution.  The disc ends with a strange little tribute to autoeroticism, “Me and My Hand,” a short, slow breathlessly mock-rapturous solo by Drew, accompanying himself on guitar with string and synthesizer sustain as backing.        A-

Sample song  “All to All”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VuoC6qNozI&feature=relmfu

THE BUDOS BAND, III (Daptone Records)—Staten Island’s Budos Band is typically characterized as Afrobeat, like their cohorts Antibalas (see above), though the band prefers “Afro-soul.”  But the purely instrumental music is all about the joy of the big band sound, whether playing around with Ethiopian pentatonics in the mysterious and dark “Black Venom” or “Nature’s Wrath” or just jamming away, as on “Unbroken, Unshaven” (is the title some kind of inside joke?).  The material on the Budos Band’s third full-length release is interchangeable with that of its first two discs; these guys consistently serve up, if nothing truly spectacular, pleasurable listening, with touches of sixties cool and seventies funk.  Not bad for a bunch of white guys from the outer boroughs!  Jared Tankel’s gritty baritone sax is frequently front and center, though the two trumpeters, Andrew Greene and David Guy, also get plenty of room to blow.  (One of the two has an especially flashy and elephantine star turn during “Crimson Skies.”)  On “Nature’s Wrath,” flutist Daisy Sugarman, one of the players who seems to be with the group only part of the time, gets a too rare chance to solo.   The guitarists supply the funk grooves, and the electric organ adds a touch of the spooky/Goth.  Rhythmically, there is little exploration going on:  the percussionists do not have much to do other than keep a steady beat.  Occasionally, a song is cut oddly:  “River Serpentine” is faded out just as the band seems about to venture into new thematic territory.  The songs are all written by the band members, with the exception of the final one, “Reppirt Yad,” which is, as its name suggests, a clever turning on its head of the Beatles’ “Day Tripper” (1965), giving it the same kind of exotic, quasi-minor-mode pentatonics as the rest of the record.  Incidentally, this track also has the only bits of vocalization on the entire disc.        A-

Sample song  “Unbroken, Unshaven”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdTo6FGUvHA

CHANCHA VIA CIRCUITO, Río Arriba (ZZK Records/Ultrapop)—Pedro Canale, a young Argentine producer, specializes in something called “digital cumbia” and sometimes “cumbia-dub.”  One should approach the term “cumbia” with a degree of skepticism; yes, much of the music carries a heavy-footed beat the way cumbia does, yet the further away from cumbia’s Colombian origins, the looser the meaning applied to it.  Adopting the nickname of the train, La Chancha (“the Pig”), he takes to commute from the outskirts to the Buenos Aires club, Zizek, where he regularly works, Canale has concocted a fascinating brew that is essentially club beats mixed with Andean mysticism and spirituality (think pan flute bands and Simon & Garfunkel’s “El Condor Pasa”) and “cumbia,” with side excursions into folk/folkloric music and hip-hop.  With the exception of the sixth track, “La Revancha de Chancha” (Chancha’s Revenge), the five that include singing were taken from older sources and remixed by Canale, whereas the six purely instrumental tracks are all original.  The opening song, “Quimey Neuquén,” is sung by an old Argentine folkie by the name of José Larralde with a vibrato-rich baritone voice; Canale’s contribution in the remix seems to be framing the tune with woodblock-heavy, clip-clop percussion.  Written originally by Marcel Berbel and Milton Aguilar, the song is poetic, full of nature imagery—sun and shadow, rivers coursing over stones.  The album title, Río Arriba (Upstream), comes from a verse in “Quimey Neuquén” (“quimey” appears to mean “good” in one of the Andean languages; Neuquén is an Andean province in northern Patagonia).  “Pintar el Sol” (originally “Tengo que Pintar el Sol”—I Must Paint the Sun) is an echoey, doleful duet by Miriam García and Alicia Solans, who were appearing as guest performers on the 1992 recording América en Cueros (Naked America) by Leda Valladares, a singer even more venerable than Larralde (she was born in 1919, though she is now retired from performance).  Again, Canale’s approach is to place booming, galumphing percussion, quasi-cinematic in the manner of the jazz saxophonist Kenny Garrett on “African Exchange Student” (1990), around the voices.  “Ze Bula” began life as a kuduro (a mixture of Caribbean genres from soca and calypso to dancehall, African beats, and Western club-style production effects) from Angola, sung a cappella by a group called Figura, and found a wider audience as a remix EP containing six different versions, including the one by Chancha via Circuito.  To Figura’s chattery, hip-hop vocals, Canale adds doomy synth chords and reverb, as well as (naturally) laying on thick the drum pattern sequence.  It is hard to tell if there is any actual sampling on “Caracol” (Snail), the concluding song.  The piece was originally done by a fellow Zizek/ZZK Records artist who calls himself Tremor and characterizes his music as “electro-folk.”  When “Caracol” gets the Chancha treatment, it becomes an ethereal, folky tune with overtones of mysticism, à la Espers (see the 2009 music survey), using a light, ukulele-like guitar and an appealingly dulcet “downtempo” singer who goes by the name Wenceslada, grounded by a drum pattern that is muscular and steady but, for once, not overwhelming.  For the one “original” song with words, “La Revancha de Chancha,” Canale brought in the duo Fauna (Federico Rodríguez, who died in November, and Cristian del Negro) for dancehall-style toasting of the lyrics; the mix sounds much like one of Richard Blair’s Caribbean-South American electronic sound experiments with his Colombian group, Sidestepper.  “Cumbión de las Aves” (Big Cumbia of the Birds), the first of the instrumental numbers, arrives on a beat best described as metal being hammered in a smithy; it draws its Andean flavor from the instrumentation used:  Manuel Quintans plays quena, an indigenous flute with a weeping tone, for the primary and secondary themes, and charango, a small lute used in the Andes, for accompaniment and tremolo effects—even so, the brief charango solo that ends the piece gives it a new dimension, heightening its mystique.  The title track, with an ostinato that combines shakers and a shuffling drum pattern, is also very Andean in flavor, sampling a group, Bolivia Manta, that is dedicated to preserving the musical and other cultural traditions of the indigenous peoples of the Andes (since I have not heard Bolivia Manta, it is impossible to know just what was sampled) and layering in “jungle” bird and wild animal noises.  “Amelia” takes on an Andean coloring as well, owing to the cry—somewhere between a semi-shrill woodwind and a woman’s lamentation—that is its sole melodic element; underneath, the bass tones and synthesizer washes again sound cinematic, making the listener feel as though experiencing a movie about smuggling across the mountains, perhaps.  The other three instrumentals are more purely electronic:  “Prima” (Cousin), with its percolating sounds, buzzes, and stop/starts, accelerations, and other tempo manipulations; “Puente” (Bridge), sampling crowd and train noises (the most unyieldingly repetitive piece on the disc); and “Deportes” (Sports), infiltrating sounds evoking a racquetball or squash court.  Even if the electronic “digital cumbia” is not to your liking, you may find yourself captivated by the magic and distinctive beauty of the Andean world that Río Arriba opens up to listeners.        A

Sample song  “Cumbión de las Aves”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTTLsyE4jkY

DARA PUSPITA, Dara Puspita 1966-1968 (Sublime Frequencies)— This retrospective of the music of a leading Indonesian girl group from the 1960s was put out by the West Coast label Sublime Frequencies, which specializes in off-the-beaten-track recordings from Asia and Africa.  It was compiled from the four LPs that Dara Puspita issued on two Indonesian labels from 1966 to 1968 before going on an extensive touring circuit and then disbanding.  Although it would be easy to dismiss Dara Puspita (Flower Girls) as Beatles-wannabe fluff, under the political repressiveness of the Maoist-leaning Sukarno dictatorship of the early/mid-sixties, to perform such Western-inspired music was actually considered subversive and daring.  Following the overthrow of Sukarno in September 1965, more space was allowed for such external influences.  The derivativeness of the music, much of which was written by the band members themselves, shows up in songs like “Pantai Pataya” (Pattaya Beach), which apes the verse and chord pattern of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” (1958).  Other songs unabashedly appropriate familiar rock guitar riffs or evoke the Byrds (“Pesta Pak Lurah”—Mr. Lurah’s Party), the Beach Boys, or other sixties bands.  “Mari-Mari,” the best-known of a number of songs from Titiek Puspa, a female contemporary in Indonesia, incorporates the famous riff from the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” (1965).  Titiek Puspa’s “Mengapa” (Why?) is strongly reminiscent of Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s “Up on the Roof” (1962), a song performed by the Drifters.  Although the compilation’s first track, “Pip Pip Yeah,” takes its title from a bit in the refrain of the Beatles’ “Drive My Car” (1965), most of the song is not particularly Beatles-like, its folksy take echoing more Mike Hawker and Ivor Raymonde’s “I Only Want to Be with You,” which Dusty Springfield recorded in 1963.  The song that actually “borrows” guitar charts from the “Day Tripper”/“Ticket to Ride” era of the Beatles’ catalog is Lihat Adikku” (See My Little Brother/Sister).  The one song that is marked as a full cover of a Western band is “Mabuk Laut” (Seasick), attributed to the Ventures, though it is so obscure that I cannot locate the song in that California surf band’s extensive discography.  A couple of songs are listed as traditional, notably “Puyaili,” indicated as a Thai folk song, though it is rendered similarly to the rest.  “Ali Baba” hardly sounds like the traditional Arabic tune on which it is said to be based.  The songs, never much longer than three minutes and frequently shorter, are trifles, throwaway numbers, yet they are performed with such spirited earnestness that the listener cannot help but get swept up in the lighthearted fun.  Lyrics are generally in Bahasa Indonesia, with the exception of the English-language “Believe Me,” written by Yok Koeswoyo of Koes Bersaudara (the Koes Brothers), who were essentially the boy-band counterpart to Dara Puspita.  While the liner notes are informative, they are not flawless; in particular, the track listing is slightly out of order for the final eight tracks.    A-/B+

Sample song  “Pip Pip Yeah”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T9MVRxnJzA

DUNGEN, Skit I Allt (Subliminal Sounds/Mexican Summer)— Among bands with recurring appearances in the music survey, the usual lament is that such-and-such is not as good as it used to be, but Sweden’s Dungen bucks the trend with Skit I Allt.  Notwithstanding the devil-may-care title (which translates as “F**k it all”), a lot of creativity went into this peculiar yet subtle recording.  Much of it is mellow, with flute, acoustic guitar, piano, but there is also some scorching electric guitar and feedback, particularly in “Högdalstoppen,” which is named for a landfill site in the Stockholm suburb of Högdalen that is now used for recreation like skiing and mountain biking (thanks to artist/blogger Karin Hagen of Sweden for providing this information).  Neo-progressive in spirit, the music of Gustav Ejstes (the songwriter and central figure in Dungen) owes as much to psychedelic rock and folk from an earlier generation.  It is as if the Byrds had been transplanted to Stockholm and were singing in Swedish, which Dungen does exclusively.  But it is not that simple, either.  Ejstes’s melodies are situated well outside the pop mainstream:  it is not that they are dissonant or atonal—hardly so—but that they defy consonance by veering in directions, and choosing chord combinations, that the ear does not expect.  So, even when the music’s general tenor is as soothing as “soft rock,” it is still weirdly unsettling.  The slipperiness of key signatures can be heard in just about any selection from Skit I Allt but is most pronounced in those songs with sung verses (seven of the ten tracks).  This is especially the case for “Soda” (the most unfocused of the compositions), the title track, and the two at the close of the disc, “Nästa Sommar” (Next Summer) and “Marken Låg Stilla” (The Ground Lay Still).  Somewhat more melodically conventional are “Min Enda Vän” (My Only Friend) and “Barnen Undrar” (The Children Are Wondering); in fact, while nothing on this record has quite the piercing poignancy of “Sätt att Se” (Ways to See), from the previous record, 4 (see the 2008 music survey), “Barnen Undrar” is the most compatible with the material from that album, with its Santana-style note-bending on the electric guitar by Reine Fiske and plangent piano harmonies.  Ejstes’s voice, a grainy tenor, though unctuous and at times thin, serves well enough in this context.  On “Brallor” (Pants) he teams up with Anna Järvinen, who has a lovely, creamy soprano and who contributed to a couple of tracks from the 2008 record as well.  “Brallor,” punctuated by spiky bass notes, is yet another tune seemingly lacking a tonal center, but Järvinen is game, and the pairing of the two voices is handled well.  I actually think the three instrumental tracks are the most inventive.  The aforementioned “Högdalstoppen” starts with an off-center piano intro, then a grime-toned guitar picks up the theme, eventually launching into free improvisation in concert with drummer Johan Holmegard, who is as busy on this track as he ever is.  There is a brief “Revolution 9” episode in the middle, when the action stops, sound becomes blurry, and a bit of laughter is overdubbed; after the momentum resumes, the guitars really start howling, until collapsing into white noise.  “Blandband” (Mixtape) and the opening “Vara Snabb” (Being Quick) both feature the dour flute of Ejstes.  “Blandband” begins with a cheery, quasi-pentatonic piano bar theme and handclaps that could not contrast more starkly with the sober, restless flute and guitar countertheme (the flute is multitracked to sound like a woodwind chorus), with organ undertones accentuating the severity.  The simpler flute line of “Vara Snabb” is similar in tone and mood to that of King Crimson’s “I Talk to the Wind” (1969), if the overall effect is less doomy because of the charged nature of the backing guitar and percussion; it is a heavier, grittier “Colour My World” (Chicago, 1970), minus the vocal track.     A-

Sample song  “Högdalstoppen”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao2tdWmSZ8w

FOUR TET, There Is Love in You (Domino Records)—Notwithstanding its Hallmark-card-quality mushy yet impersonal title, Kieran Hebden’s atmospheric electronica, which he records under the moniker Four Tet, is exquisite.  There Is Love in You is largely about incorporating the human voice into abstract electronica, although any “singing” on the record is limited to recurring brief phrases, when there are audible words at all.  The most ethereal tune is “This Unfolds,” which develops slowly, starting as gentle guitar arpeggios oddly juxtaposed with a plodding drumbeat and a bit of horn accompaniment; eventually, a silvery principal theme arises in the synthesizers, even as the other instruments continue their majestic march.  There is nothing complicated or particularly ingenious about the theme itself, but the various elements that envelop it and keep the mind from wandering as it plays on endless repeat coalesce beautifully.  The opening song “Angel Echoes” uses a looped vocal that is mildly anguished, a cry of woundedness of the sort the artist who records as Burial would sample, minus the processed distortion, while the arpeggiated background strumming is like something out of Trespass-era (1970) Genesis.  “Love Cry,” the longest track at nine minutes, is a sequence of spectral, telecom-like tones, to which is introduced a cantering dance beat and, eventually, a female voice sampled singing the title over and over, with variants that are in this instance just too limited to avoid monotony.  “Circling” is a rapid-fire cycling of broken chords in 12/4 meter, over which other electronic effects are gently sprinkled; the presence of the human voice is so subtle that it is barely apparent until the closing chords.  “Sing” is a perky keyboard theme with a heavy beat and no actual singing of words but some high-pitched sighing and well-tuned moaning, suffused with a mournful yet mystical quality à la Sigur Rós; the composition shifts to a purer disco beat in its final minute.  “Plastic People,” a backhanded tribute to the rebel 1970s Czech band Plastic People of the Universe, has a dark, Blade Runner sensibility to it, summoning mental images of ranks of pseudo-humanity packed away in sheets of glistening plastic; its theme is another simple one, drawing its depth from what is layered on top of it, with just a rumor of vocals buried well down in the background.  The song ends with the sounds of a baby cooing and banging on a toy keyboard.  (I do wish the sparsely uninformative sleeve that comes inside the CD jacket had contained more in the way of credits for the sound effects and vocals.)  “She Just Likes to Fight,” the concluding tune, is actually the sunniest and most benign on the album; lacking the sense of intrigue of prior tracks, it seems weirdly declawed, pleasant but, after the experience we have just sat through, inconsequential.  While nothing on There Is Love in You is as arresting as “Smile around the Face,” from Four Tet’s 2005 record Everything Ecstatic, it stands as a testament to Hebden’s craft and his prominence as one of the most appealing electronica composer-performers today.    A/A-

Sample song  “Sing” (live version):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWBDzHqXZqk

GALACTIC, Ya-ka-may (Anti/Epitaph)— Just the New Orleans funk/jam band’s second release since 2003’s uneven but worthwhile Ruckus, Ya-ka-may (named for a “Nawlins” soup of Chinese origin that involves a mixture of leftover meat, scallions, a hard-boiled egg, and noodles) showcases a wide variety of local talent collaborating on nearly every track, illustrating that music in the Crescent City goes well beyond Dixieland jazz and the blues.  The disc opens with “Friends of Science,” a bit from the band, barely a minute long, overlaid with a very funny, uncredited sampling from Morgus the Magnificent, a New Orleans “mad scientist” TV personality.  The best track on a generally strong release is “Boe Money,” a composition co-written with Corey “Boe Money” Henry, trombonist for the city’s Rebirth Brass Band, that is an exuberant funk number richly saturated with the Rebirth Brass horns and a cheering chorus in place of vocals.  The other collaboration with Henry, “Cineramascope,” which also brings in Trombone Shorty for “dueling trombones,” is very nearly as good:  a vibrant and thoroughly enjoyable melding of brass and funk.  The Rebirth Brass Band returns to punctuate Glen (misspelled as “Glenn” on the CD cover) David Andrews’s soulful (if overly melodramatic), gospel-inflected singing on “You Don’t Know” with horn ensemble bursts.  “Liquor Pang” is a blurry gem of a hangover song, a howling blues that wallows deliciously in misfortune and regret, recruiting Josh Cohen and Ryan Scully from the possibly disbanded, Tom Waits-influenced funk-rock outfit Morning 40 Federation for its growly vocals.  “Heart of Steel” is a deep, slow blues groove that is sung by the legendary Irma Thomas, in a manner that is deliberately flat on the chorus’s higher notes.  Another slow, mysterious blues tune that works well is “Dark Water,” with jazz vocalist John Boutté on lead.  Walter “Wolfman” Washington’s star turn on “Speaks His Mind” is a blues so understated that one might be inclined to overlook it, but it will gnaw its way into your consciousness if you give it the chance.  On “Wild Man,” not one of the album’s standouts, Big Chief Bo Dollis, the “Mardi Gras Indian” chief of the funk group Wild Magnolias, takes the microphone; he will not win any awards for enunciation, but his drawling tenor lends itself to bluesy funk.  “Bacchus,” an unremarkable composition, fails to make the best use of Allen Toussaint’s strengths in rhythm and blues.  Of the “bounce” (hip-hop) numbers, the winner by a long shot is “Double It,” on which Galactic teams up with Big Freedia, one of several “sissy” (cross-dressing) rappers enlisted for the disc.  This track possesses a big funky beat and otherworldly treble whine from Rich Vogel’s keyboard that puts me in mind of Washington, D.C.’s “go-go” rap scene from the 1980s.  By contrast, “Katey vs. Nobby” is really hard to sit through, a showdown between two “sissy bounce” specialists, Katey Redd and Sissy Nobby, with its loud, obnoxious “booty gonna drop” chorus.  Although, I have to say, Katey Redd’s imperious demand for a “medium Sprite” early in the song made me laugh.  Another sissy bounce number that is nearly as unpalatable is Cheeky Blakk’s “Do It Again” (revisited at the end of the record); the syncopated chorus of “hey, motherfu**er” is like a battering ram against the ear; worse, you will likely be repeating it the rest of the day, even if you quickly forget the rest.  Skipping over these jarring tracks, Ya-ka-may is a sumptuous feast of New Orleans musical culture seamlessly interwoven with Galactic’s characteristic funk-rock sound.  As entertaining as the band itself are the liner notes for the CD, written by the great, unjustifiably neglected country-Western/pan-Latin hybrid musician and bandleader Ned Sublette, known best for his Cowboy Rumba (1999).        A/A-

Sample song  “Heart of Steel” (featuring Irma Thomas):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVWDyzZCKNg

GOLDFRAPP, Head First (Mute Records)—While I will admit to a certain appreciation for the breathy/sexy Xanadu-era Olivia Newton-John, to which the new Goldfrapp has drawn critical comparisons, I am not sure it was crying out for revival.  To my way of thinking, electronica without experimentation is merely dance pop.  To be sure, it is well-executed dance pop; Alison Goldfrapp is an appealing chanteuse and (presumably) electric stage presence, and her partner, Will Gregory, is a talented keyboard/synth player.  “Rocket,” the opening track and first single from the album, is cheerful in a vapid sort of way, though with undertones of anxiety; it is an upbeat, singalong number with a wispy and evanescent vapor trail and some sexually ambiguous phallic imagery (see the video clip link below).  “I Wanna Life” is another ingratiatingly glittery, pumping, Andrew Lloyd Webber-midcareer-style confection that makes allusion in its verse section to Johnny Mathis and Deniece Williams’s “Too Much, Too Little, Too Late” (1978).  Of the eighties-style retro tracks (just about everything on the disc, in other words), my favorite is “Alive” because of its borderline-cheesy, sparkly arrangements that recall those of late-stage Electric Light Orchestra (a band that was also a major contributor to Xanadu); there is also a special sensuousness to the singer’s opening bit about putting on her jeans (“it feels good they’re a little tight”).  Dispiritingly, the title track sags under the burden of a particularly limp chorus; this is one of those songs you will want to fast-forward past because it just is not worth anyone’s time.  “Believer” and “Shiny and Warm” also are freighted with no-account choruses.  I know that Gregory and Goldfrapp were consciously recreating a sound that by its nature smacks of the bubblegum dispenser, yet the unadventurousness of these refrains is a letdown—surely, the duo could have found cleverer ways to honor the glory days of platforms and big hair and spangled suits.  The slower-paced, throbbing “Hunt” successfully creates an aura of intrigue with obsidian tones—it comes closest on the disc, with one exception, to Alison Goldfrapp’s trip-hop origins, yet it is hardly what one would call deep and penetrating.  In fact, the most inspired and trippiest-hoppiest composition on the record is the closing “Voicething,” wordless but hardly voiceless in its echoey, artificial pop chamber chorus.  The various ways in which “Voicething” loops Alison Goldfrapp’s voice to create contrasting, overlapping textures makes for fascinating listening, a trait in which Head First is sadly deficient.        B

Sample song  “Rocket”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJppnG1tflU

GORILLAZ, Plastic Beach (EMI/Virgin Records)—Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s cartoon-character band’s first studio album since Demon Days (the winner of my Album of the Year award for 2005) lands with a thud.  Albarn, the leader of Blur (a group that has been on hiatus in recent years while Albarn pursues his Gorillaz project), has always welcomed outsider contributions for Gorillaz releases, but Plastic Beach is all about the collaborations.  The concept record has an overarching environmental theme, yet Albarn succeeds in managing to avoid preachiness over the course of it.  What he does not succeed at, for the most part, is creating compelling music.  The majority of the collaborators are from the world of hip-hop; the results are largely infelicitous.  The most enjoyable cut on the record is also its most cartoonish:  “Superfast Jellyfish,” taking in the cerebral hip-hop stylings of De La Soul, as well as the voice of Gruff Rhys (of the Welsh band Super Furry Animals), begins as a fake advertisement for breakfast cereal, complete with chorus, offering an unrelentingly snarky perspective on commercialism.  The first single from the disc, “Stylo,” co-written with Mos Def, is by contrast dull, possessing little to recommend it beyond its pumping bass beat, despite Bobby Womack’s game attempt to inject urgency into his vocals.  Even so, it is still better than the other collaboration with Mos Def, “Sweepstakes,” which combines mechanistic rapping with a truly uninspired, lazy refrain; the best development in this too-long track is the introduction of a brass chorus with the drums toward the close, giving it something of a ska flavor.  Womack gets more opportunity to stretch his soulful pipes on the slower “Cloud of Unknowing,” which also brings back the symphony orchestra first heard in the introductory track, but to what effect?  This is soundtrack music, a little mawkish and at the same time not strong or directed enough to stand on its own merits compositionally.  “White Flag” has a decidedly Japanese sound at the outset and again at the close, with bamboo flute and Asian drums but also some Mideastern harmonies; this Oriental reverie is rudely interrupted by the grime rapping of the U.K.’s Bashy & Kano, to a power-bass groove.  “Rhinestone Eyes,” the first track on the album that is “pure” Gorillaz, is devalued by a rote, uminaginative verse section that is somewhat redeemed by a moving minor-key chorus.  “Broken,” another song that is performed by Gorillaz alone, sounds like Blur manqué, replete with Albarn’s wistful singing and electronic pitch fading.  “Empire Ants,” which introduces the Japanese-Swedish singer/songwriter Yukimi “Little Dragon” Nagano, starts out as a gentle tune that would fit comfortably on Blur’s last studio album, Think Tank, the winner of my 2003 Album of the Year award; it turns up the volume jarringly and symphonically in its latter half, when Nagano’s part kicks in.  I have certain reservations about her rather husky voice, which here sounds plaintive.  “To Binge,” Gorillaz’s other collaboration with “Little Dragon,” has a Hawaiian slack-key guitar feel to it, as well as an echo of the old carnivalesque British music hall tradition, as similarly can be heard on the closing track of Blur’s magnum opus Parklife (1994), “Lot 105”; it is an agreeable tune but far from captivating.  Adding to the positive side of the ledger, “Glitter Freeze” brings in the inimitable Mark E. Smith (of the Fall) just to utter a few choice phrases and for laughter on what is otherwise a swoop-toned, big-beat electronic instrumental piece, nearly as entertaining as “Superfast Jellyfish.”  Unfortunately, the album’s bright spots are outweighed by the truly dismal:  “Some Kind of Nature” is a cipher of a song, suggesting that Lou Reed’s best years are well behind him; his tuneless vocals are also oddly affectless and subdued.  On “Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach,” Snoop Dogg sounds like a first-grader just learning how to sound out the words he is reading, as he spews out clichéd tropes and facile rhymes.  Video clips (see the link provided below), as well as the CD cover and insert art, display Hewlett’s role in bringing the band to life.        B/B-

Sample song  “Stylo”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhPaWIeULKk

GRINDERMAN, Grinderman 2 (Anti/Epitaph)— Nick Cave’s alter ego to the Bad Seeds, Grinderman debuted in 2007 with Grinderman, a notweworthy release.  Its follow-up, Grinderman 2, is more ambitious and less successful, replacing the sardonic humor of the first album with a sodden attempt to take itself more seriously.  Grinderman 2’s hard edge is laced with psychedelic imagery, accentuated by the drawings in the CD booklet, which seem greatly influenced by those from Carl Jung’s Red Book.  The album’s acid-trip otherworldliness manifests itself in the woozy refrain to “Heathen Child,” its first single, and picks up with the intro to the following song, “When My Baby Comes,” which is unusual in that it has a male singer, Cave, adopting the perspective of a female narrator.  Although critics have characterized the album as more adventurous than its predecessor, this is not always the case.  The opening tune, “Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man,” never strays far from a single chord pattern in the guitar, and the same can be said for the more absorbing “Worm Tamer,” which follows it on the track list.  At its most grandiose doominess, Grinderman 2 mimics the Doors’ pretentious indulgences, while at its simplest (the simple song “What I Know”), it is more like one of Bruce Springsteen’s quieter moods.  The best songs are “Worm Tamer,” with its driving syncopations; “Evil,” a fine example of the neo-psychedelia to which the band aspires with a churningly caustic refrain and a harshly keening overtone; and “When My Baby Comes,” a slow, tough number about a woman made pregnant through a gang rape.  I do not care for the acidulous blues of “Kitchenette,” on which Cave veers into an off-key falsetto, while “Bellringer Blues” is another number that stakes all on one simple chord change and is as a result not terribly interesting or worth revisiting.  “Palaces of Montezuma” is remarkably benign, a flower-child companion to the haunted sounds of the rest of the record, dressed up in dense and wild imagery.  The clever lyrics, suitably enough, often venture into the realm of myth and fantasy but are occasionally brought crashing to earth by pop culture references to the likes of Steve McQueen and Oprah Winfrey.  The original Grinderman had a real power in its simplicity, as well as a sly cunning that is absent from Grinderman 2; it also had some unforgettable song titles, like “Electric Alice,” “Depth Charge Ethel,” and, most of all, “No Pussy Blues.”    B+/B

Sample song  “Evil”:  http://www.youtube.com/user/herecomethewolfman?blend=23&ob=5#p/u/0/2dZGNFEseB0

HOT CHIP,  One Life Stand (EMI Records/ Astralwerks)— Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard, the founding members of the U.K. dance-electronica quintet Hot Chip, have an enviable facility with pop composition, but too often on One Life Stand, the band’s fourth studio release, it settles comfortably into glibness.  The new album lacks the warmth of The Warning (2006) or the cleverness of Made in the Dark (see the 2008 music survey) while having sanded off the edges of both its immediate predecessors’ quirks.  “Thieves in the Night” and “Hand Me Down Your Love,” the first two tracks, both have a smooth surface appeal that is enhanced by Taylor’s supple lead vocals, yet, even by the standards of Hot Chip’s generally featherweight ready-to-dance music, these come across as undistinguished.  “I Feel Better” introduces the dreaded Auto-Tune (why bother?), following an orchestral opening; the tune itself is not particularly interesting, but the syncopated rhythms and triplet figures underneath it are.  On the title track, the group demonstrates its talent for catchy hooks, as the chorus adds a whole new harmonic dimension to what had been a fairly mundane theme, giving the song a delectable richness and depth.  Other than “One Life Stand,” the dance track with the most penetrating appeal is “We Have Love,” its mushy title notwithstanding.  “Slush” aims for the soul with a slow-rocking 6/8 tune backed by Al Doyle or Taylor himself singing ascending and descending fifths; it is graced with a touch of steel pans from guest performer Fimber Bravo toward the end.  The steel pans return for “Keep It Quiet,” another heartfelt and subtly effective tune.  “Alley Cats,” the first song from the album that the band took on tour, is one of the least successful; Goddard and Taylor occasionally stumble through the tricky harmonics of an unusually subdued vocal, and what is intended as a pensive number comes off as ponderous instead.  The final track, “Take It In,” strives for a sublimity in its closing choral harmony between Taylor and Goddard that feels unearned because the rest of the song leading up to it is so mechanistic.    B

Sample song  “One Life Stand”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk-A-I-T2NU&feature=related

INTERPOL, Interpol (Matador Records)—Interpol’s self-titled fourth album came as a disappointment, following up Our Love to Admire (2007), which I admired, apparently more than a lot of professional critics did.  The newer release sounds like a band that has run out of energy or ideas, at least for the time being, and maybe this has something to do with bassist Carlos Dengler’s decision to leave the group after the recording was completed.  Interpol’s material simply lacks the urgency, the excitement, the high drama of cuts like “The Heinrich Maneuver” or “Mammoth” from Our Love to Admire.  The song that comes closest to recapturing that vitality is the slow-paced “Lights.”  Its theme is a simple one, but its intensification through the song’s course, capped off by the “That’s why I hold you dear” refrain, sung in Paul Banks’s inimitably intense, trembly, clenched-throat voice, offers up the visceral thrill missing from most of the album.  Interpol bunched the strongest numbers together in the middle of the record; “Lights” is followed by the big single, “Barricade,” with its klaxon guitar pattern and its alarming “full speed, half-blind” chorus.  The song has a charge to it but is only mildly interesting in the last analysis.  “Always Malaise (The Man I Am),” which comes after “Barricade,” is diffuse and easily ignored until it rallies to find focus in its refrain, which has an intriguingly slippery chromaticism.  “Safe Without,” the next song beyond “Always Malaise,” in some ways plays most like an outtake from Our Love to Admire but is simply too repetitive to pass muster.  “All of the Ways,” like “Always Malaise,” is notable primarily for a catchy refrain that rescues the song from its hollow, reverberant core.  The last three songs on the album, with “All of the Ways” in the middle, segue smoothly from one to another.  The first three come and go without making much of an impression.  It really does seem, unfortunately, as if Interpol were composed largely of tracks not strong enough to make the cut on previous records.        B

Sample song  “Lights”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSx2OSuEzDI

KING CRIMSON, The Collectable King Crimson: Volume Five—Live in Japan 1995 (Discipline Global Mobile)—This two-disc live set from Japan is taken from the legendary progressive rock band’s tour for the album THRAK, which won my Album of the Year honors for 1995.  As such, it contains primarily material from that record (particularly on Disc 1), though the two-disc format, plus the fact that the contents were drawn from two consecutive nights of appearances at Tokyo’s Nakano Sun Plaza in October 1995, leaves plenty of room for earlier classics, as well as a bit of improvisation that kicks off both discs.  The band was using its “double trio” format:  Adrian Belew on vocals and guitar; Tony Levin on stick guitar and bass; and Bill Bruford on drums, on the one side; on the other, Robert Fripp on guitar; Trey Gunn on “touch guitar,” or Warr guitar, analogous to the stick guitar; and Pat Mastelotto on percussion.  The impetus for the band’s own label, Discipline Global Mobile, to release the double disc was the profusion of pirated copies of the concerts in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia.  The band’s fidelity to its studio recordings is remarkable, but maybe that in itself is not so remarkable given that these are musicians at the pinnacle of their profession, who even back in 1995 had been playing together for years.  The natural Japanese reserve or politesse might explain why the applause at the end of tracks frequently sounds scattered and restrained (never the case, however, on Cheap Trick’s At Budokan from 1978); perhaps it is simply a matter of the type of aging hipsters who show up at a King Crimson concert in place of screaming teens.  Of the improvisations, “Circular Improv,” leading off the first CD, is a snippet of Fripp’s Radiophonics soundscapes.  A much longer sampling is appended to the end of the second disc, the oddly positioned “Tokyo Prelude,” which is twelve and a half minutes of keening, swooping, processed sounds and choral tones pitched fairly high; this is likely to test the patience of even the most dedicated fan.  The duet “Improv: Two Sticks” at the outset of Disc 2 is mellow and similar to what I have heard of Tony Levin’s solo material; it leads directly into “Elephant Talk.”  Some tantalizing improvisation takes place in the middle of “THRAK” as well, a “concert” in the true sense of striving between strings, synthesizer soundscapes, and drums; a quiet section toward the end of the improv harkens back to some of the band’s earliest material from the late sixties/early seventies, predating all of the current members except Fripp—long silences broken only by percussive flurries.  Of the material not from THRAK, “Red” (from the phenomenal album of the same name, 1974) and “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part II” have been King Crimson concert staples for many years, and the band jazzes up the closing of the latter particularly, followed by the lengthiest applause on the record as the audience pleads for encores.  The 1981 record Discipline, which was the debut for King Crimson, mark II, following the band’s mid-1970s breakup, lends its entire four-song Side 1 (from the days when the LP was still king) to the two Tokyo concerts, including the one song with a Japanese title, “Matte Kudasai” (Please Wait for Me), as well as “Elephant Talk” and the composition on which Fripp first experimented with out-of-phase guitars, “Frame by Frame.”  “Three of a Perfect Pair” is the title track from the 1984 album that was the last of three from Crimson, mark II.  (Mark III began with THRAK.)  There is one composition on the second disc that is not original to the band:  Swiss jazz drummer Pierre Favre’s “Prism,” rendered here as a percussion duet.  This is followed, appropriately enough, by “Talking Drum” from Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, segueing into “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part II,” as it does on the original 1973 record.  The biggest visceral thrills come from Belew’s spirited revival of “Elephant Talk” and the band’s pounding “Coda Marine 475,” which in effect is the climax to the song “VROOOM” from THRAK.  For King Crimson aficionados, the twin-disc live set is of course essential listening; for those not familiar with the band’s music, particularly those who appreciate live performances, it serves as a good representative sampling from three different incarnations of a storied rock group.    [NOT RATED]

Sample song  “VROOOM VROOOM”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSWmyCn7Yr4

LCD SOUNDSYSTEM, This Is Happening (DFA/Virgin Records)—This turned out to be LCD Soundsystem’s swansong; the band announced shortly past its release that it was splitting up after three acclaimed records.  James Murphy’s dance/electronica assemblage hit a high note with 2007’s Sound of Silver; This Is Happening is another solid record that does not quite reach the same pinnacle.  Nothing on the new album is as pulse accelerating and snarkily entertaining as “North American Scum” or as elating in its perfect construction as “Someone Great” from the previous record, though “One Touch” gives them a good run.  The opening “Dance Yrself Clean” starts off quietly, with minimal instrumentation backing Murphy’s singing of a simple theme; the loud keyboards and drums kick in after the three-minute mark, but the song, after cycling through low and high volume one more time, ends as softly as it began.  “Drunk Girls” is an appropriately rollicking tune, with characteristically sardonic lyrics from Murphy to mark the age of The Jersey Shore.  Murphy’s deadpan delivery of his acidic verse on “Drunk Girls” bears a kinship to the Dead Milkmen’s on “The Girl with the Strong Arm” (1995).  “One Touch” mixes up an electronic cocktail of throbbing strokes, glockenspiel, and repeating keyboard sequences, orchestrated beautifully, that just about recaptures the glories of Sound of Silver; its in-your-face lyrics include the dismissive line “People who need people are just people who need people.”  Nearly as sweet an electronic composition is “I Can Change”; it never develops much beyond basic chord intervals, but again it draws power from its rich arrangements and Murphy’s approach as a singer, veering tipsily between heart-on-sleeve earnestness and wounding sarcasm (“Love is a curse shoved in a hearse/Love is an open book to a verse of your bad poetry [and this is coming from me]”).  “All I Want” is more guitar-driven, with a David Bowie glam-rock sensibility and the throwaway refrain “All I want is your pity/And all I want are your bitter tears.”  “You Wanted a Hit” is another long, slow-developing number, sketching out an elemental keyboard theme for some time before the vocals enter; a brief section of grinding guitars à la Gang of Four in the middle recalls Murphy’s punk origins.  The album loses some momentum toward the end.  “Pow Pow” is loudly ruminating and wordy—taking the time for a small dig at Village Voice nightlife columnist Michael Musto—more a rap than a true song, with a minimal refrain.  The monotone keyboard part, rising to a new note at the end of the line, that dominates “Somebody’s Calling Me” is straight out of the Joe Walsh songbook (“Rocky Mountain Way,” from 1973).  “Home,” the final composition, is LCD Soundsystem on autopilot, still listenable but hardly revelatory; perhaps by the time he got around to it, Murphy had decided it was time for a new format.    A-

Sample song  “Drunk Girls”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY7-0W0celo&feature=fvst

MGMT, Congratulations (Columbia Records/Sony Music Entertainment)— A “C” for Comgratulations?  Yes!  MGMT has gained a huge popular following, but its second major-label release is an example of a band’s ambition far exceeding its skill.  Congratulations is all over the map, sprawling, undisciplined, unfocused.  Take a song like “Flash Delirium” as an example:  it appears to be several clashing themes clumsily welded together.  The abrupt transition in “Someone’s Missing” from an air of mystery to a triumphal tone is inexplicable.  There are times when the music, composed by Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden, former art students at Wesleyan University, seems to have been stretched like a flimsy covering to fit the scaffolding of VanWyngarden’s lyrics.  Songs are kept short, with the exception of the twelve-minute-plus “Siberian Breaks,” which is a catalogue of Goldwasser and VanWyngarden’s artistic overreach and self-indulgence, suffering from multiple-personality disorder and crying out for some critiquing from seasoned musicians prior to its being committed to disc.  Parts of “Siberian Breaks” are lovely in and of themselves, but the whole is considerably less than the sum of those parts.  MGMT is at its best when it keeps things simple, as on the neo-surf opener “It’s Working” or the contemplative “I Found a Whistle,” songs that find a theme and stay with it long enough for it to develop.  There are two tribute pieces, “Song for Dan Treacy,” honoring the singer-songwriter who leads the English band Television Personalities, and “Brian Eno.”  Eno was reported to be flattered by the homage.  Although “Brian Eno”—striving a little too hard with fake English accents, spelling out Eno’s full seven names, and British-y prog-rock keyboards—is one of the better tracks on an album of misfires, it pales in comparison with anything performed by its object of veneration.  “Lady Dada’s Nightmare,” the one instrumental, benefits from being freed from the constraints of pretentious and unmanageable lyrics.  The title track, closing out the record, manages to avoid the jump-cutting that mars most of the disc, yet it is a fittingly limp conclusion, with a twee falsetto vocal theme from VanWyngarden dressing up what is essentially just a descending scale on acoustic guitar.  Meant to express the band’s ambivalence about its new best-seller status, the song strikes a false note and leaves the listener impatient to move on to something more rewarding.    C

Sample song  “It’s Working”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyaDTiXH3R4&feature=related

OZOMATLI, Fire Away (Downtown Music)—Less cheesy than Don’t Mess with the Dragon (2007), the band’s previous release, Fire Away nonetheless fails to measure up to the brilliant promise of Street Signs, Ozomatli’s spot-on 2004 recording, which I ranked no. 17 on my list of best pop albums of the decade (see the previous blog entry).  “Are You Ready,” the promising opening track of the unsteady Fire Away, radiates exuberance in its chiming strings and manic vocals, the band’s cultural omnivorousness sampling an appetizer from the Good Hope Tsalanang Cultural Group Gumboot Dancers, originating from a South African orphanage for children of AIDS victims visited by the band on a recent African tour.  Beyond this bit of African-Latin fusion, though, much of the record has a decidedly retro sensibility.  “45” features doo-wop-style vocals from lead singer Justin Poree with an odd little hip-hop break in the middle of the song.  “Elysian Persuasion,” one of the more winning numbers, is nonetheless a peculiar throwback, its tune like a mix of “Superstition” (1972) by Stevie Wonder and “Tell Me Something Good” (1974) by Rufus and Chaka Khan and a couple of other half-remembered seventies songs, with a lame dose of rapping awkwardly inserted in the middle; another strange element is the abrupt ending, with a one-time chorus, “The sun came out,” that departs radically from the mood and tenor of the song.  “Gay Vatos [Dudes] in Love,” topically like a Mexican version of Brokeback Mountain, is a broad-themed ballad, appealing if not terribly original sounding.  “It’s Only Time” is a beatifically consonant slow romantic number but again has a “we’ve heard this somewhere before” quality to it, and much the same can be said for “Love Comes Down.”  “Nadas for Free,” rapped throughout and sprinkled with Mexican Spanish slang, is plain embarrassing.  “Malagasy Shock,” a charged-up, horn-driven descarga (jam), had its origin in an incident in which guitarist Raul Pacheco was nearly electrocuted onstage on tour in Madagascar.  The album ends with a short tune, “Caballito” (Little Horse; the term has other meanings that are context-specific), that is purely in the Mexican banda style, with cowboy cries, effusive trumpet and sax embellishments, and rapid-fire oompah lower brass serving as the rhythm section in support of the singing of Will “Wil-Dog” Abers.    B

Sample song  “Elysian Persuasion” (live version):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSjh5gDFXhM

RA RA RIOT, The Orchard (Barsuk Records)—Sporting both a violinist and a cellist, Ra Ra Riot presents an unusual lineup for an indie band.  At the first notes one hears on the disc, the string intro to the title track, one thinks of the Electric Light Orchestra but seldom thereafter; bands like Arcade Fire (see above) and Fanfarlo have also made use of classical strings, but, to my ear, those bands had a clearer picture of how they wanted to deploy their string forces.  Ra Ra Riot, with its origins in the collegiate rock scene at Syracuse University, presents a sound that is intriguing on the surface, but the compositions all too rarely coalesce into something that has the spark of artistic urgency.  Too often, the performance comes across as moony or lamenting in a characteristically navel-gazing way (ah, today’s twenty-somethings, so like those of yesteryear).  These unfortunate tendencies are magnified by Wes Miles’s high tenor, capable but cloying, frequently leaping into falsetto range.  The last two songs on the record, “Kansai” and “Keep It Quiet,” have strands of promising material, but the former is too disjointed in structure, while the latter, a slow, contemplative piece, leans too heavily on one simple chord change, repeated over and over.  “Boy,” the uptempo first single from the disc, has a new wave-ish stuttering bass line, yet the intention is not to sound like new wave revival but rather like sensitive, evanescent pop.  “You’re Too Dramatic,” the second single, never develops beyond its stunted refrain.  Other songs have a certain made-by-committee quality; they are the Styrofoam packing peanuts in the box.  One has to wonder whether the song “Massachusetts,” another of the faster-paced numbers, was written in light of the tragic death of the band’s original drummer, John Ryan Pike, presumed drowned off Fairhaven, Mass., in 2007.  Since that time, the band’s drumming situation has been unstable; Gabriel Duquette handled the percussion on this record, yet he was not billed as a band member or featured in its videos.  “You and I Know,” written and (presumably) sung by cellist Alexandra Lawn, is the most compelling piece on the record; it sounds like a Stevie Nicks solo effort, an effect enhanced by the trembly, Nicks-like quality of Lawn’s voice, but it also has focus and a genuine emotional pull missing from most of this wan record.  Most of the tracks were mixed by Chris Walla of Death Cab for Cutie, but “Do You Remember” was mixed by Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend.    B-

Sample song  “Boy”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKGfQCOyCCA&feature=relmfu

LES SAVY FAV, Root for Ruin (Frenchkiss Records)—Like MGMT (see above), Les Savy Fav is a band formed by onetime art students, this lot hailing from the Rhode Island School of Design.  Yet, Root for Ruin is a remarkably artless record.  The band is trying to revive the glories of punk/hardcore, and its energy is undeniable.  But the opening track, “Appetites,” constitutes assault and battery on the eardrums, and a similarly hectoring spirit pervades “Excess Energies” and “Calm Down.”  It is not so much the sheer volume as the relentless exhortatory style and monotone “composition” of such songs that makes them hard to appreciate.  Bandleader Tim Harrington does more shouting than singing of lyrics.  The slower numbers, set at midtempo, can be more contemplative, as in the case of “Sleepless in Silverlake,” the band’s impressionistic take on roaming the streets of Los Angeles looking for something elusive, or as in the relationships-are-complicated ruminations of “Lips n’ Stuff.”  Or these more unhurried tracks can be ineffectual entirely (“High and Unhinged,” “Dear Crutches”).  Even “Sleepless in Silverlake,” however, leans too heavily on a single descending interval, repeated ad infinitum, and the song’s refrain, such as it is, is lazily underwritten.  The band is capable of writing a clever couplet, such as “My body is a book/and you’ve been thumbing every page” (in “Lips n’ Stuff”), or evocative verse (“I spend my time with degenerates and creeps/while you catch zzz’s neath clean white sheets,” from “Dirty Knails”) at times.  The most arty song sits at the middle of the track list:  “Poltergeist,” which references the 1982 Steven Spielberg movie of the same name, has relatively sparse lyrics but an intriguingly drug-addled, woozy guitar drone.  “Clear Spirits,” the final song on the record, reclaims those keening guitars to fashion an appealing, dare I say poignant, refrain, even if the verse portion is spit out in the same mechanically tuneless manner as most.        C+

Sample song  “Sleepless in Silverlake”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weYE_wi-Guc

SCHOOL OF SEVEN BELLS, Disconnect from Desire (Vagrant Records)—Disconnect from your heightened expectations if you really liked the debut record from School of Seven Bells, Alpinisms (2008), as I did.  (I placed it at No. 21 in my top 100 of the decade; see the most recent older post on this blog.)  That record was magical, a dream pop confection approaching perfection in its conception and execution, from the trio formed by guitarist Benjamin Curtis, formerly of Secret Machines, and the vocal/instrumental duo of the twins Alejandra and Claudia Deheza, who had been in a band called On!Air!Library!  Sadly, the band’s sophomore effort is a gentle letdown, not a bad record but lacking the standout originality and creative spark of the first.  The building blocks are much the same:  lyrics, derived from Alejandra Deheza’s dreams, that mix fantasy with inner psychic exploration; motoric, propulsive rhythms; deeply consonant themes, backed by droning, shimmery, or pulsating keyboards, that wash over the listener.  Although nothing on the record elevates itself above the generally uniform quality of the songwriting, the album reaches a lull of sorts in the middle, with the slower numbers “I L U” and “Joviann” sandwiching “Babelonia.”  Too many empty arpeggiations, too many easy resolutions, and the ear begins to, well, disconnect from desire!  The breezier songs at the beginning of the record, as well as “Camarilla” and “Bye Bye Bye” toward the end, are closer to the band’s natural sweet spot.  “The Wait,” a slower, contemplative number bounded by its major triad on guitar, would be a suitably benedictory closer to the record but for the unsettling lyric that the wait is “a cradle in which you’re lulled from time to time/soundly spun into an insensate lie.”  The uncertainty over the direction that School of Seven Bells will take from here was compounded by the announcement last October that Claudia Deheza was leaving the band for “personal reasons,” taking away one of its hallmarks, the twins’ mellifluous vocal duet.    B

Sample song  “Windstorm”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYBigw9c_vc

SIA, We Are Born (Jive Records/Sony Music Entertainment)—Because I was so taken with Sia Furler’s subtly expressive work with Zero 7 on that electronica duo’s wonderful record The Garden (2006), I was setting myself up for a letdown with her fifth solo recording, We Are Born.  Many of the tracks on the new release, all of them co-written by the Adelaide-born chanteuse (and niece of Men at Work’s Colin Hay) except for Madonna’s “Oh Father,” are dancefloor-ready and upbeat musically, if not necessarily lyrically.  While there are some worthwhile and affecting tunes, there is also a fair sampling of jejune songwriting or paint-by-numbers pop.  Songs like “Clap Your Hands” or “Bring Night” are peppy but might as well be the output of a random dance-pop generator.  The opening track, “The Fight,” is at once a well-conceived and well-executed pop song and not strikingly original in any sense.  The soulful ballad “Be Good to Me” has a touching vulnerability in its wounded plaintiveness, and “I’m in Here” has a theatrically expressive quality, but even these sound vaguely familiar, as if filched from someone else’s songbook.  The one song that actually is from someone else’s songbook, “Oh Father” is a surprisingly wrenching piece that implies paternal abuse, even as the liberated daughter tries to understand why the father behaved as he did.  Here Sia shows off her strengths as a singer; the trembly clarity yet determined resolve she embodies in narrating Madonna’s song is thoroughly convincing.  “Cloud,” one of the slower numbers, is also one of the more musically intriguing, notwithstanding the refrain’s stridency—at least it is playing around with tone colors and shifting moods in ways that engage the ear.  “Big Girl Little Girl,” co-written with Henry Binns of Zero 7, reaches toward Tori Amos territory, with quick shifts between vocal registers and an abrupt slowdown at the finish, as the other instruments drop out, leaving just voice and piano.  Still, the song never quite nails the quirkiness of Amos’s inventive pop.  “Stop Trying” strikes closest to the yearning sophistication of Zero 7’s work, though it also broadens out into a big-time dance number before long.  The CD contains a bonus track that is a simplified piano/vocal version of “I’m in Here” (but with a celestial chorus as embellishment).  I would have to say, on the evidence of We Are Born, that Sia is best as a collaborator on other people’s material, less inspiring when working from her own.        B+/B

Sample song  “I’m in Here” (piano/vocal version):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Owr4U55WpDs&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

SLEIGH BELLS, Treats (Mom + Pop Music)—This is cheerleader music (as suggested by the CD cover illustration), but I mean that in a good way.  Sleigh Bells’ noise pop is a sonic onslaught:  videogame explosions of big beats, lead-footed syncopation, and punky, robotically disaffected vocals, yet tempered with a sweetness throughout.  Savvy media marketers have picked up on the group’s vibe; the guitar-and-vocal riff that punctuates “Infinity Guitars” has been used for at least one TV commercial (leaving out the portion of the song where the volume essentially doubles).  What makes this impressive is the considerable compositional skill of Derek E. Miller, the songwriter/multi-instrumentalist/producer; after collaborating on the M.I.A. album Maya (2010), he had a clear idea of what he wanted Treats to sound like—aggressive and in your face but still listener friendly—and he pulls it off deftly.  All he needed was a girl singer (there is a parallel to the above-reviewed Crystal Castles, with Ethan Kath finding Alice Glass to sing, though the tenor of the music is different), and the story of how he found one is amusing:  he was waiting tables in a Williamsburg restaurant called Miss Favela and mentioned to two customers, a mother and daughter, that he was working on a music experiment, at which point the mother volunteered the daughter, Alexis Krauss, who had previously been in a teen pop band called Rubyblue.  Although Krauss spends much of the record in exhortatory mode rather than in genuine singing, her voice is just right for the music.  Moreover, when she does sing, she is very good; if vocal expressiveness and subtlety is not what Sleigh Bells is about, still, her tone is pure and not excessively sugary.  Treats is structured to have three relatively quieter, less booming numbers at its midpoint, surrounded by four more bombastic pieces on each side.  No track exceeds 3:49 in length, and the entire album lasts just thirty-two minutes.  The first three tracks (“Tell ’em,” “Kids,” and “Riot Rhythm”) are all of a piece, with pounding beats and shouted lyrics, yet somehow being bludgeoned by them feels strangely pleasant.  These are followed by the punk-influenced “Infinity Guitars,” after which the album’s sonic barrage takes a pause.  “Run the Heart” counts as a ballad for these guys, more dreamy in its texture and setting, with hummed ruminations and gauzy lyrics, though the concluding, “You take a heart/I can take out you” is hardly warm and fuzzy.  “Rachel” continues in like manner, with a 1950s-style pleading pop melody sung in anodyne fashion over cycling fuzztone keyboard chords.  “Rill Rill,” which samples the funk guitar progression from Funkadelic’s “Can You Get to That,” is like a ray of gold, its sunny disposition atypical for this intense record; its chimes at the close ring out the more melodic three-song sequence, and the record reverts to its thumping nature with “Crown on the Ground.”  The most mechanical singing of all comes on, naturally, the song “A/B Machines,” which is otherwise about guitar twang and screechy, metallic long tones.  “Straight A’s” is one lethal guitar riff, with distortion, above which Krauss shouts about getting a flawless report card.  The title track, which concludes the record, opens with a buzzy, oscillating-volume guitar sustain similar to that of the Smiths’ famous one in “How Soon Is Now” (1984) before launching into a slow, minor-key theme that borrows the elemental, dire-sounding six-note guitar phrase from M.I.A.’s “Meds and Feds,” which Miller worked on in 2009.        A

Sample song  “Rill Rill”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmFgejWZjtg

SQUAREPUSHER, Squarepusher Presents Shobaleader One d’Demonstrator (Warp Records)—Representing a departure for the English electronica composer Tom Jenkinson, a.k.a. Squarepusher, this record is his first collaboration with a backing band.  The contributing musicians’ identities are closely held; they are hiding behind Residents-like masks and some fascinating pseudonyms (Strobe Nazard, keyboards; Sten t’Mech, guitars; Arg Nution, guitar; Company Laser, drums).  As Shobaleader One, they are performing Jenkinson’s music, but he said in the record label’s own interview that the band members have “got strong ideas of their own and I want to hear that in the final results.”  The final results, however, may be less than the sum of their parts.  One would expect the presence of a band to add new energy, and indeed the tracks on d’Demonstrator are poppier than previous Squarepusher offerings.  Every one, with the exception of the cleverly named final piece, “Maximum Planck,” has vocals of some kind, even if only wordless, buzzy ones.  Jenkinson’s voice is always filtered through a vocoder.  But the effect on songs like “Into the Blue,” “Frisco Wave,” and “Abstract Lover” is to create a weightless, airy, disposable sort of pop.  “Plug Me In,” the first song on the record, is a mellow, lounge-worthy introduction, notwithstanding the deep bass vocal distortion of its “baby, that’s how we roll” lyrics.  As a corrective to this tendency, “Megazine” comes across with an aggressively acidic bass line and a wordless vocal of a nature that hints at gastric distress:  singing as emptying the contents of one’s digestive tract.  The final three tracks go much heavier on the bass, played by Jenkinson himself.  “Endless Night” uses the slap bass technique familiar from the Seinfeld theme on television, while “Cryptic Motion” employs syncopation and heavy beats to synthesize a funkiness not found elsewhere on the record.  “Maximum Planck,” as the only vocal-less number, gives Jenkinson the most room to stretch, compositionally and as a bass player, and is thus most directly linked to earlier Squarepusher material.  The new record certainly has its virtues, tremendous musicianship among them.  But for my tastes, nothing on it creates an electric arc like the neo-prog-rock sequence of “Planet Gear,” “Tensor in Green,” and “The Glass Road” from Squarepusher’s 2008 Just a Souvenir, not even “Laser Rock,” which leans in the same direction.    B+/B

Sample song  “Megazine”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZi5Y7KgzsQ

STARS, The Five Ghosts (Vagrant Records/Soft Revolution Records)—More goth in its sensibility than previous records from Stars (though “The Ghost of Genova Heights” from 2007’s In Our Bedroom after the War touched on the same theme), The Five Ghosts also lets loose to a degree not seen before from a band for which elegant restraint is a hallmark.  Just have a listen to “We Don’t Want Your Body”:  while recognizably a Stars song, particularly in its trade-off of vocals between Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan, it has an unexpected swinginess in the refrain (the verse section from Campbell is merely jaunty), as Millan’s undeniably sexy, soft, breathy soprano protests a lack of interest in hooking up (“Your soul is searching ecstasy/So you could have some sex with me/I don’t want your body”).  The album’s set-piece opening, “Dead Hearts,” begins conversationally between Campbell and Millan, exchanging spectral visions, before moving on to a sumptuously orchestrated, majestic chorus averring that the spirits of those who have passed on are all around us.  The next four songs, ending with the aforementioned “We Don’t Want Your Body,” are all fairly kinetic, none more so than the melodramatic “I Died So I Could Haunt You,” leaping from its measured verse into a vehement, near-monotone, syncopated refrain, more heat than illumination.  “Wasted Daylight” and “Fixed” are uptempo ensemble numbers with movingly breezy refrains but reflecting different moods:  “Wasted Daylight” serenely celebrates postcoital lounging, whereas “Fixed” has an undercurrent of anguish and confusion that belies its singsong melody.  “He Dreams He’s Awake,” the record’s midpoint, is a glittering chamber composition, a quasi-instrumental reverie (just a touch of verse from Campbell, suspended in its intensity, with a bit of chorus toward the end) that trades an initial throbbing beat for shimmery, piquant keyboards.  The album’s second half is not as strong as the first.  “Changes” is the most mundane tune on the disc, sounding too much like a rehash of “True Blue” (1986) by Madonna.  The refrain of “The Passenger” also relies on a riff borrowed from half-remembered rock lore, like something out of Billy Idol, yet lightens it up, piping in that swingy sensation once again to cut against the grain of ominousness.  “The Last Song Ever Written,” doubtless a ponderous title, and “Winter Bones” are slow, thoughtfully reflective numbers, the latter in particular gaining depth and new colors as the song moves toward its (and the record’s) conclusion.  If The Five Ghosts does not quite measure up to what Stars achieved with Set Yourself on Fire (2005) or In Our Bedroom after the War, neither is it far off the mark at all.        A-

Sample song  “Fixed”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jdZdVmEuk

STEREOLAB, Not Music (Duotone Ultra High Frequency Disks/Drag City)—And “ceci n’est pas une pipe.”  Not Music, the eleventh full-length studio album in the long career of the U.K. neo-progressive band Stereolab, can be regarded as outtakes from the sessions for the previous release, Chemical Chords (see the 2008 music survey).  Indeed, two tracks are remixes of songs from that earlier disc, while two others—“Two Finger Symphony” and “Pop Molecules”—directly reference cuts from it.  “Two Finger Symphony” shares little but a title with the “One Finger Symphony” from Chemical Chords; it is a moony pop tune with a heavy emphasis on its repeating three-beat keyboard monotone.  However, “Pop Molecules (Molecular Pop 2)” is in essence a continuation of or sequel to “Pop Molecule” from the 2008 disc, simmering waves of keyboard tones crashing upon each other with periodic modulation in key, more a study in sound than actual composition.  Not Music stands on its own, to be sure, although Stereolab’s music over the years has lost its novelty, the quality of “essential listening” it once had.  Guitarist/composer Tim Gane’s moody chord changes and dusky tonal palette match singer/lyricist Laetitia Sadier’s somber, almost mechanical vocal delivery, whether in pensive numbers like the opening “Everybody’s Weird Except Me” or more jaunty ones like “Supah Jaianto,” named for a 1950s Japanese alien superhero (“Super Giant,” or “Starman”) TV series.  The band gravitates to vintage keyboard sounds, generated by the Farfisa organ and the Moog and VCS 3 synthesizers.  For every intriguing bagatelle like “Leleklato Sugar” (the title is a reference to an obscure Hungarian sci-fi film of 1918), bouncing along on its bass notes, or “Laserblast,” there are pieces that do not move the needle much, e.g., the too simple “Equivalences” or the sprightly-for-sprightliness-sake “Sun Demon.”  “Delugeoisie” is a dreamy, swaying composition in 6/8 time that morphs into a faster instrumental section to close out.  “Aelita,” named after a 1923 Russian novel by Alexei Tolstoy that spawned a Yakov Protazanov film Aelita: Queen of Mars the following year, is a surprisingly heavy-footed, sepia-toned 3/4 tune whose middle section emerges as a lighter, quicker 4/4 without really brightening, evoking a Soviet Constructivist vision of space travel and alien civilizations.  “Silver Sands” from Chemical Chords is sliced up and remixed by Emperor Machine (Andy Meecham) as an extended-play electropop-era tune, cleverly fashioned into several discrete sections with different tempo settings.  This is far more appealing than the woozy, Boards of Canada-style electronica remix by Atlas Sound (Bradford Cox, the lead singer and guitarist of Deerhunter) that renders the snappy “Neon Beanbag” unrecognizable, denaturing it into a repeating two-note guitar sequence and percussion with some whistly frequency modulation (this eventually recedes) threaded into the mix .    B+

Sample song  “Aelita”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC2PKKG5Zy4

SUUNS, Zeroes QC (Secretly Canadian)—Not “secretly Canadian,” as the band’s record label would suggest, Suuns is quite openly Canadian.  The “QC” in the album title presumably refers to Quebec.  This Montreal outfit is a foursome consisting of singer/guitarist Ben Shemie, guitarist and bassist Joseph Yarmush, keyboard player and bassist Max Henry, and drummer Liam O’Neill.  Whether deliberately or not, the guitar-spiked electronica of Zeroes QC emulates some of the early recordings from fellow non-secret Canadians Broken Social Scene (see above), in part because Shemie’s tenor/quasi-falsetto is similar to that of BSS’s Kevin Drew.  But it is also a matter of the free-form, experimental nature of the group’s compositions.  Certainly, Suuns is unafraid of taking risks and being weird:  “Pie IX” (French for Pope Pius IX, for whom a major avenue in Montreal, along which Olympic Stadium is located, is named) consists of a throbbing bass note and drum pattern above which Shemie minces words in such exaggerated baby talk as to be unintelligible.  Right afterward, the instrumental “Marauder” is a quick injection of screechy guitar.  “Sweet Nothing” resembles the electronica of a very different band, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, specifically, its “Radio Waves,” from the great album Dazzle Ships (1983); even here, though, there is a Kevin Drew-ish aspect to the singing.  This is a seven-minute-long song, on a record that in total lasts barely thirty-seven minutes.  By contrast, “Marauder” and the simple-themed “Fear” are each less than two minutes in duration.  The opening track, “Armed for Peace,” starts off as a slow, determined march, its pace ordered by a grimy, sputtering bass pattern on endless repeat, but when the high vocal enters unexpectedly, halfway through the piece, it gives the song an ethereal dimension, even as the ground bass grimly persists.  Like the early Broken Social Scene as well, the band’s debut record has a hit-or-miss quality to it; the closing “Organ Blues,” for example, does not reach the heights of grandeur that the band intended for it, and “PVC” is basically idling in neutral.  Suuns, although the musicians have been playing together for several years, comes across as a band whose stylistic identity is still somewhat fluid, which is both frustrating at times and exciting.  Zeroes QC may be a rather slight effort, but it is also one that shows great promise for what is to come.    A-/B+

Sample song  “Pie IX”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-w_ex0eF1s

TOBACCO, Maniac Meat (Anticon Records)—Black Moth Super Rainbow’s leader, Tom Fec, a.k.a. Tobacco, as a solo artist unsurprisingly shares many of the traits/quirks that his band displayed on Eating Us (see the 2009 music survey), if often with a harder edge here.  Hippy-dippy, electronic-keyboard-heavy psychedelia is set to disco beats or zoomy glissandos (or why not both?) with lots of fuzztones, tonal blittering, or bubbliness percolating.  The singer’s voice is heavily processed, never more so than on the supremely trippy, tempo-bending “Heavy Makeup,” the longest cut on the record at 4:45.  Certain tracks, such as “Six Royal Vipers” and “Stretch Your Face,” or, among the instrumentals, “Nuclear Waste Aerobics,” are very close to the mind-warping yet blissed-out beatitude of Black Moth Super Rainbow in performance.  The primary difference between this record and Eating Us is that songs on Maniac Meat are shorter (there are sixteen of them) and punchier, with more of an acid/metal kick to offerings like “Sweatmother” or “Motorlicker.”  Lyrics are spacy or just bizarre and in every case have a Japanese sparseness to them.  (“Lick the witch/Make a friend tonight/Walls on fire” is the totality of the lyric from “Lick the Witch.”)  The instrumental “Unholy Demon Rhythms” is as close as the album comes to the sort of classic rock groove that used to fuel Laserock planetarium shows.  “New Juices from the Hot Tub Freaks,” another instrumental, veers into Squarepusher territory (see above):  lounge music kicked into a progressive/cosmic gear.  Of the two songs that feature Beck Hansen, “Fresh Hex” has the guest singer spewing out words and phrases in monotone in a manner like that of King Crimson (see above) on “The World’s My Oyster Soup Kitchen Floor Wax Museum” (from The ConstruKction of Light, 2000); on “Grape Aerosmith” Beck’s voice is chopped up and processed.  Reportedly, Fec and Beck collaborated exclusively via e-mail, without ever meeting.  Even if the music does nothing for you, song titles like “Creepy Phone Calls” or “TV All Greasy” are bound to stay with you.  But it does plenty for me; I admire the weird inventiveness and internally consistent logic of the hermetically sealed sonic universe that the media-shy Fec has fashioned.    A-

Sample song  “Motorlicker”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1YoUJh5HOg

[VARIOUS ARTISTS], Brazilian Guitar Fuzz Bananas: Tropicalia Psychedelic Masterpieces, 1967-1976 (Tropicalia In Furs Records/World Psychedelic Funk Classics)—“Masterpieces” is a stretch; Tropicália somewhat less so; even “psychedelic” gives a misleading impression in some instances.  But this retrospective compilation is blissfully entertaining on its own terms, not merely as an exercise in nostalgia.  It is the work of one particular enthusiast, Joel Stones, a Brazil native and East Village record store (Tropicalia in Furs) owner, who spent five years scouring the Brazilian streetscapes looking for rare vinyl singles that fit his concept and resonated with him.  Because he was seeking out vinyl 45s that had never been reissued, there is nothing in the collection from the group most firmly associated in the American mind with Brazilian psych rock of the late 1960s, Os Mutantes, to say nothing of Tropicália artists further removed from the fuzz guitar idiom like Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Jorge Ben, or Tom Zé (see below).  In fact, none of the performers can be considered anything but obscure north of the equator.  In a few cases, however, the songs they are covering (most of the selections are in fact originals) are more readily recognizable.  The record begins with a wild and druggy space journey, full of reverb, whooshing glissando, and signal modulation, that eventually collapses into the Batman theme. Célio Balona’s version, “Tema de Batman,” reminds me, in its urgent exhortations, superhero theme, and general loopiness, of Mundo Livre’s “Super Homem Plus” (Superman Plus, from 2000’s Por Pouco).  It is undoubtedly the freakiest cut on the disc.  By contrast, the Youngsters’ Beatles cover, “I Wanna Be Your Man” (originally from 1963), and Mac Rybell’s gloss on the Rolling Stones’ “The Lantern” (1967) are fairly straightforward, if with a funkier (and, of course, fuzzier) guitar line on “I Wanna Be Your Man.”  The lead singer of Mac Rybell (the group’s name was formed out of band members’ initials) pulls off the Mick Jagger tone and swagger as convincingly as someone who is not a native English speaker can on “The Lantern,” which is from the Stones’ experimental outlier Their Satanic Majesties Request.  The tribute by a band calling itself the Pops, “Son Imaginário de Jimmi Hendrix” (Imaginary Sound of Jimi Hendrix), is an instrumental featuring sludgy guitar funk syncopation and improvisation in the extended bridge, but the main theme sounds unfortunately like the Footloose title song (long before the 1984 movie and its soundtrack appeared).  Of the original songs presented in the collection, the most affecting is Fábio’s “Lindo Sonho Delirante” (Beautiful, Delirious Dream).  The song’s deliberately chosen initials are imprinted boldly at the top of the original record sleeve, a thumb in the eye of the military government of the time.  Fábio, born Juan Zenón Rolón in Paraguay, has the Tom Jones vocal mannerisms down pat and has a female chorus of “yeahs” from a band called the Fevers to back him up.  The instrumentation calls for a “Day Tripper”-type guitar intro, shimmery organ chords, and some bleary horn charts, while Fábio himself vocalizes the percussion part.  Another forceful number is Ton & Sérgio’s “Vou Sair do Cativeiro” (I’m Going to Go Free); nothing is known of the song’s creators, yet its anthemic sweep, choral lamentations, and doleful, buzzy guitar licks stand as a subtle but firm rebuke to the generals’ dictatorship.  Other tracks like “O Carona” (The Hijack) from Tony e Som Colorido, “God Save the Queen” by 14 Bis, “Dia de Chuva” (Rainy Day) by Banda de 7 Léguas, and “Êle Século XX” (This Twentieth Century) by Com Os Falcões Reais are ingratiating, but one gets the sense that these bands were trying so hard to sound like the early Stooges, the Doors, Traffic, or whomever their overseas idols were that, other than the Portuguese lyrics, there was nothing particularly Brazilian about the music they were creating.  Perhaps that is an unfair critique, and yet, Piry’s “Herói Moderno” (Modern Hero) stands out from the crowd precisely because of the immediacy of its sense of place:  this song, with its lilting forró flute line and whimsical lyrics, could have been conceived nowhere else but Brazil.  Of course, that sound also moves it away from psychedelia and fuzz guitars, but Joel Stones still perceives something hallucinogenic in Piry’s cheery tune, augmented by the band A Barca do Sol.  Although the disc’s cover art displays plenty of female imagery, the only song featuring a woman performing is Marisa Rossi’s “Cinturão de Fogo” (Belt of Fire), something of a cross between a go-go dancer’s theme and Grace Slick/Jefferson Airplane.  The liner notes are lovingly detailed (with a few odd mistakes, such as referring to Loyce e os Gnomos as “Loyce e os Gnomes” or titling their song, whose record photograph clearly indicates “Era Uma Nota de 50 Cruzeiros” [It Was a 50-Cruzeiro Bill], as “Era Uma Nota De”), as only a devotee could, in English and Portuguese, even if in most cases only the sketchiest information exists regarding the artists and their records.    A/A-

Sample song  Marisa Rossi, “Cinturão de Fogo”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VD56jntka8

MISCELLANEOUS

KING SUNNY ADÉ, Bábá mo Túndé (Mesa/Bluemoon Recordings/ IndigeDisc)— Nigeria’s leading exponent of jùjú music—a popular style based on Yoruba percussion that blends in Western instruments and influences—internationally, with a career extending back to the late 1960s, King Sunny Adé (born Sunday Adeniyi) has in recent years slowed down the pace of his prolific recording, now that the singer/guitarist is in his mid-sixties.  Bábá mo Túndé (Father, I’m Back), a double-record set, performed with his African Beats big band, is dedicated to Adé’s mother, who died in June 2010.  The music is what I think of as “typically” West African in that its polyrhythms are richly complex, while melodies are lilting and elemental and harmonics barely present at all.  Adé employs a battery of percussionists, from talking drums to the sakara to shekeres, as well as a chorus of a half-dozen or so.  The lengthy songs on Bábá mo Túndé–there are just seven tracks across the two discs—resemble jams.  “Baba Feran Mi” (Father [God] Loves Me), the first track, for example, contains a long middle section that is simply a back-and-forth between Adé’s chanting, embroidering the basic melody, and the percussion corps.  For the final two minutes, even the voice drops out, leaving just the various drums in concert.  “Oro Yi Bale” (This Topic Is Very Heavy) has a far less songful melody, but the improv section from the guitarists, set against shimmery keyboards, is marvelous.  The songs are sung in Yoruba (a passage toward the end of “Oro Yi Bale” and a chorus in the middle of “Baba mo Tunde” are in English), but a synopsis of the lyrics in English is given in the CD booklet.  For “Oro Yi Bale,” the “heavy” topic is the dilemma that a woman’s boyfriend has the money to maintain in far better style than her own husband, who nonetheless gets public credit for pampering her.  “Emi Won N’Ile yi O (Sa Jo Ma L’owo L’owo) (They and I Are Going to Be Successful in This Land), the shortest track, is also the most purely songlike, possessing a tangy-sweet melody and genuine harmonies, as it tells the story of how jùjú became Nigeria’s most popular music.  Damon Bennett’s flute, playing pentatonic figures, lends “Eyi Ma Dun To” (This Is Sweet Enough), the second disc’s final track, a peculiarly Japanese flavor during the passages when it is present; otherwise, the song is very much in the Yoruban spirit of call and response.  Though mellow in nature, “Eyi Ma Dun To” has a particularly raucous choral conclusion.  “Baba mo Tunde,” the title track, which kicks off the second disc, unfolds gradually, with several discrete sections of call and response between the soloist and chorus filling the first half before the guitars offer their own interpretation.  The singer and chorus make a brief return about three-quarters of the way through, and then it is left to the percussion to finish out the piece.  This track is subsequently remixed, in a version about half the length of the original, by the Philadelphia DJ King Britt.  Britt’s version is heavy-handed, very much the work of an American producer, emphasizing the groove and reducing that other king, Sunny Adé, to not much more than a vocal residue.  For all that, the remix has a certain cool to it, notwithstanding its repetitiveness.  The biggest drawback of this album is the long sections in which nothing much is going on, particularly in the half-hour-plus title track, but also in “Baba Feran Mi” and others.  It might not be in the performer’s nature to edit down his long musical ruminations to a sharper focus, but the songs would benefit if he did so.  Adé’s tenor may be thinner and more gravelly than it once was; I have not heard what he sounded like in his prime.    A-/B+

Sample song  “Eyi Ma Dun To”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P25zkMEH9xA

KHAIRA ARBY, Timbuktu Tarab (Clermont Music)—Bringing this Malian singer to American audiences’ attention was a labor of love for Christopher A. Nolan, an architect and “world music” promoter who runs Clermont Records up in the Hudson Valley.  Mali has become a musical superpower of sorts in recent years, as a number of its acts, notably Tinariwen (see the 2009 music survey), have gained a Western following.  For Khaira Arby, the road to stardom was doubtless smoothed by the fact that the late, great Ali Farka Touré was her cousin; however, on her own she won a nationwide singing contest as a schoolgirl, which led to invitations to sing with national ensembles.  Arby, a northerner of mixed Berber and Songhai (Sonrhai) ancestry who makes her home in Timbuktu, has issued several previous recordings, including 2002’s Ya Rassoul, but Timbuktu Tarab (Timbuktu, Our Homeland) is, I believe, her first on an American label.  Her music, like her famed cousin’s, has been described as “desert blues,” but that is a lazy signifier to offer Westerners some aspect of familiarity to latch onto.  In fact, the pentatonic scales and odd timbre of the ngoni (calabash harp-lute) and the traditional West African “violin” give the music, at least when the guitars are not front and center, an otherworldly cast, notably in “Goumou,” “Djaba,” and “Sourgou.”  Arby’s voice is clear and powerful but strikes me as strident and a bit harsh; her tone is largely the same whether the liner notes indicate that she is singing about joyful matters or anguish (“Waidio”) or hardship (“Youba”).  Nonetheless, she is at her fiercest in “Feriene,” a song condemning what is, with excessive diplomatic tact, referred to on the CD jacket as “female excision.”  She sings mostly in the Sonrhai tongue but sometimes in Arabic and sometimes in Tamashek, the language of the Tuaregs.  “Sourgou,” sung in Tamashek, is a rousing, ringing song in praise of the bravery of the Tuaregs.  In “Goumou,” the opening piece, the song’s regular verse eventually dissolves into a free-form section that is fast and scorching.  Likewise, “Delya,” about a dancer’s appreciation for his friends, and “Waidio,” a song in which the singer laments that men must go away to war, accelerate into blistering improvisational sections that are among the record’s most enjoyable passages.  “Dja Cheickna,” another praise tune, is driven primarily by its guitars to peaks of sublime intensity.  In songs that are melodically elemental and repetitive in nature, abrupt rhythmic changes, as we hear in “Tarab,” keep the ear engaged.  When there are no such tricks present, the tedium of the unvarying can set in, as with  “Khaira,” a back-and-forth between the singer in full cry and her backup vocalists, in which she is promising to be the servant spreading happiness to her listeners.  “Salou” and “Tidjani Ascofare,” a praise song for the people of the Tidjan region, are gently loping songs and closer in spirit to the so-called desert blues of Touré.  Toward the end of “Tidjani Ascofare,” the guitars accentuate the off beat, reggae-style.  In “Salou,” a prayer to Allah, the guitars and ngoni are essentially part of the chorus, supplementing and at times replacing it, leaving Arby to carry the main theme on her own.    A-/B+

Sample song  “Sourgou” (live version):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uc2iKgQIIE

LLOYD MILLER AND THE HELIO- CENTRICS, Lloyd Miller/The Heliocentrics (OST) (Strut Records)—An unusual collaboration between generations as well as styles, this fascinating and delightful album was the hardest of any in the survey to classify.  Is it jazz?  It could be considered so, though for the most part it has no swing and little in the way of improvisation.  It ended up in the miscellaneous category because of convenience and because of Lloyd Miller’s keen interest in various types of Asian music.  Miller is an old jazz cat, a multi-instrumentalist who played winds with various bandleaders in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s before moving to Iran for most of the 1970s to study Persian music; in Tehran, he hosted a prime-time musical variety show on television.  The Heliocentrics is a young, London-based ensemble led by drummer Malcolm Catto that is better known for its playing with African artists such as Mulatu Astatke (see the 2009 music survey under Mulatu Astatke).  Their work together here draws on the jazz heritage that is shared by both, but the music primarily follows Miller’s Asian vocation, his intensive study of and experience with Persian and Central Asian, Indian, Chinese, and Southeast Asian music.  “Electricone” starts off with a Mingus-like ground bass figure that continues throughout, but the composition shifts dramatically in mood and mode once Miller’s mournfully exotic wooden flute and “phonofiddle” enter the scene.  “Nava” combines a minor-mode traditional Persian melody with a 5/4 meter and jazz rhythm section; Miller plays the piano, clarinet, oud (Arabic lute), and tar (Persian lute).  “Chahargah” uses Persian modes that sound Hebraic at certain times, its percussion spiked with the tanbura bowl lyre.  “Pari Ru” is an Afghan folk tune in a breezy yet fully traditional 7/8 meter.  “Mandala” has a more Indian sensibility, with its enveloping sitar and twangy Jew’s harp-like morsing.  “Spiritual Jazz,” the longest composition on the record, is moody and contemplative, less heavy on the Eastern instrumentation—Miller does employ the santur, the Persian hammered dulcimer—yet still mysteriously “Oriental” in sound.  “Modality,” in 6/8 time, is a jazz piece that nods toward the modal jazz of John Coltrane’s 1960s ensembles, in which Miller’s clarinet line is modeled on a Turkish archetype.  There are three offerings that draw on Indonesian music.  “Bali Bronze” takes its inspiration from Balinese gamelan music; it is a conversation between a flute with a slightly curdled timbre and vibraphone and gongs that alternates fast and slow sections, gaining intensity before reaching a pause, after which structure is left behind as the music becomes a free-flowing piano, flute, and percussion interplay.  The much briefer “Salendro” also references Balinese music, this time the metallic small group known as the gender wayang; it is a steady and coursing tuned percussion piece, slowing down at the finish line.  “Sunda Sunset,” the album’s final track, was written by Miller in 1964 in the Sundanese style of Javanese music; once again, we hear the keening flute set against Oriental percussion; the initially quiet meditation builds urgency through increases in volume and textural density, keeping the rhythm unchanged, before ultimately fading out.  “Fantasia” comes in two parts:  the first, performed by the Heliocentrics only, gets its Asiatic tinge from the Chinese shawm, an oboe-like double-reed instrument; the second brings in Miller, playing both clarinet and the Chinese sona, or suona, another double-reed wind instrument, for a jazzier and more free-flowing treatment of the subject matter.  This is all breathtaking stuff; far from being musical tourism, the compositions have their own integrity and native originality even as they look toward the East for their muse.  Some comic relief is offered via “Lloyd’s Diatribe,” a piece in which the Heliocentrics jam in the background as Miller rants in old-man fashion about today’s music being “too jumpy and jerky and nervous and weird” and goes on to complain about consumerism and sports and prevailing styles of dress among the young folk.  The liner notes and descriptions are not extensive but are useful in helping the listener understand what is taking place in these songs.        A

Sample song  “Fantasia, Pt. 2”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwIRlghns8E

LATIN

AFROCUBISM, Afrocubism (Nonesuch Records)—Producer Nick Gold, who has recorded a range of Malian musicians with great sensitivity over recent years as well as the famed Buena Vista Social Club (1997) album, brought together leading Cuban and Malian performers for this new project.  From the Cuban side, the central figure was guitarist Eliades Ochoa, a Buena Vista veteran and longtime leader of Santiago de Cuba’s venerable Cuarteto Patria.  From Mali, Gold called in a number of prominent players, the best known of whom is Toumani Diabaté (see the 2008 music survey), a master of the kora, the harp-lute of West Africa made from a calabash.  For the Malians in general, Cuban musical forms were hardly alien:  a number had trained in Havana and returned to Mali to play in bands that featured Cuban repertory, such as the Rail Band and Las Maravillas de Mali (later, the Orchestre National Badema).  Several tracks on Afrocubism are distinctively African:  “Karamo” (The Hunter), “Jarabi” (Passion), “Mariama,” and the praise song “Benséma” (Chance).  There are also a few older Cuban tunes, including “La Culebra” (The Snake), attributed to Beny Moré, “Para Los Pinrares Se Va Montoro” (Montoro’s Going to Los Pinares), co-written by Francisco Repilado—a.k.a. Compay Segundo of the Buena Vista Social Club—and Ñico Saquito’s “Al Vaivén de Mi Carreta” (To the Swaying of My Cart).  The set begins with an instumental piece, “Mali Cuba,” written by Toumani Diabaté that sounds as if it is about to break into the Cuban classic “Guantanamera” at any moment, and this is bookended with an actual interpretation of “Guantanamera” as the closing piece.  “Mali Cuba” features an almost stupefyingly simple repeated sequence of notes played on the balafon (West African xylophone), so the musical interest springs from the solo and duo improvisations—Ochoa on guitar and Diabaté himself on kora playing off the “Guantanamera” theme.  Later, a pair of trumpeters take up the theme, but this is an album largely without brass—it is almost entirely strings and percussion.  The concluding “Guantanamera,” written originally by Joseíto Fernández (and possibly Herminio García Wilson) in 1929 or thereabouts, is, in this rendition, a soft conversation between Ochoa’s guitar, Diabaté’s kora, and the ngoni (West African lute) of Bassekou Kouyate; the primary melody is barely sketched at all and does not even make an appearance until halfway through.  Of the three other instrumental compositions on the disc, the most impressive is “Dakan,” a duet for drums and amplified bass ngoni written by percussionist Baba Sissoko and performed by himself and Kouyate; its rhythmic complexity and counterpoint is a marvel that showcases one of West African music’s prime virtues.  Guitarist Djelimady Tounkara’s instrumental “Djelimady Rumba” is more of a busy ensemble piece, but it is precisely the sort of fusion between Malian and Cuban idioms that Gold was aiming for:  Afro-Cuban music reinterpreted through an African sensibility.  Another wonderful example of the mélange comes with “Nima Diyala” (I Beg You, My Sweetheart):  the lyrics and poetic sensibility are very much West African, but the plangent sung melody sounds Cuban, and in the background the balafon is playing a montuno.  “Jarabi” is my favorite among the African songs; although almost unrelentingly unvarying, its theme is kinetic and tugs at the heartstrings as the singer (Kasse Mady Diabaté) passionately advocates the modern (in a Malian context) notion that lovers should choose each other rather than acquiesce to arranged marriages.  The other African-flavored songs have the repetitiveness of “Jarabi” but not its tidal force of exigency or its piercing melody; thematically, “Benséma” in particular seems an odd choice for this disc in its specificity as a tribute to a bureaucrat, Mali’s Michel Sidibé, the executive director of UNAIDS.  “Karamo” is a praise song of another kind, expressing the importance of the hunter as a provider and protector in tribal societies in Mali; gently lilting in West African fashion, it still carries a very Cuban rhythm section.  Eliades Ochoa’s own compositions here are unremarkable, but the vintage Cuban songs’ sheen is undimmed.  “Al Vaivén de Mi Carreta,” a guajira (country ballad) from eastern Cuba, is soul stirring, the implacable string arrangements serving as a frame within which Ochoa and Kasse Mady Diabaté trade off verses about how difficult it is for rural people in Cuba’s Oriente province to earn a living.  “Para Los Pinares Se Va Montoro” portrays a starkly different mood, ricocheting between fatalism and absurdist imagery, always with humor and a philosophical spirit of questing, and the music’s playfulness matches the lyrics.    A-

Sample song  “Nima Diyala” (live version):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOMxaK4GMyE

CALLE 13, Entren los que Quieran (Sony Music Latin)—The music of San Juan’s Calle 13 is intriguing not only as a diversion but as a divergence from conventional models.  It is commonly categorized as reggaetón, but it ought not to be:  the verses are rapped, but the choruses are sung (sometimes only exhorted in an approximation of singing), and whereas both hip-hop and reggaetón rely heavily on sampling, Calle 13 uses live instrumentation, making the tracks feel like real songs rather than raps.  It is also pointedly political from start to finish, in itself a departure from the partying and sexual themes typically addressed in reggaetón.  The “Intro” is presented orchestrally and chorally to mimic the opening of an awards show on television, with an announcer intoning, “Directly from Puerto Rico, the world’s most important colony and the one place where people pay more attention to the Miss Universe pageant than to education . . .”  Lyrics are deft and hard-hitting, frequently touching on class struggle and the difficulties faced by the less fortunate in society, yet this is no sermon or dry Marxism 101 lecture.  The boasting and showmanship that marks hip-hop is ever-present, but René Pérez is a legitimate poet of the streets.  Nor is the music humorless, as evidenced by the arrangements of the pieces that bookend the disc:  “Intro” ends with some distinctively tepid clapping (the sound of one hand?), whereas “Outro,” briefly reprising the same mock-pageant theme, is accompanied by lusty boos.  Songs like “El Hormiguero” (The Anthill) doubtless demand greater knowledge of Puerto Rican politics for full appreciation than most mainlanders (yours truly included) possess, but the concept that an army of small drones can overwhelm much larger beings is clear enough.  Pérez models his rapping style on that of Vico C, the Nuyorican hip-hop artist considered by many to be the godfather of Puerto Rican reggaetón.  The music on Entren los que Quieran (Enter, Those who Want to) is written by Pérez's half-brother, Eduardo Cabra, along with Rafa Arcaute, in varying styles, including quasi-Middle Eastern melodies for “Baila de los Pobres” (Dance of the Poor Folk) and “Digo lo que Pienso” (I Say what I'm Thinking),  Western movie soundtrack (complete with whistling and a machine gun, rat-a-tat beat) for “La Bala” (The Bullet), bolero (ballad) for “Latinoamérica,” ukulele (“Muerte en Hawaii” [Death in Hawaii]), and merengue for “Vamo’ a Portarnos Mal” (Let's Misbehave).  “Calma Pueblo” (Stay Calm, People), the first song following the “Intro,” lands with the force of a heavy-metal manifesto, its tough-guy posing given dimension by a steady undercurrent of grievance and injustice.  Similarly defiant in tone and implacable in its march forward, like a military cumbia, is “El Hormiguero.”  The album manages to make room for some quieter songs (like Vico C, Pérez can rap fluidly in subdued fashion as well), with ballad-like refrains that take the form of duets between Pérez and his stepsister, Ileana Cabra, on “La Vuelta al Mundo” (A Trip around the World) and “Prepárame la Cena” (Get Dinner Ready for Me).  The symbol-heavy, triplet-happy “Latinoamérica,” imports a dazzling trio of Latin American chanteuses:  Peru’s Susana Baca, Colombia’s Totó la Momposina, and, from Brazil, Maria Rita, to give the song’s chorus an expressive range of color and feeling.  Then there is “Muerte en Hawaii,” a solo for Pérez, which is uncharacteristically sweet and placid in its singsong theme and gentle strumming, at least until a gunshot brings the tune to an abrupt end.  The record sifts in some pan-American musical touches, from the (preprogrammed) lower brass oompahs that are part of the motoric element of “Baile de los Pobres” to the heart-on-sleeve llantos (cries) of Susana Baca in “Latinoamérica.”  Whatever genre provides the cushioning, though, the music is conceived and performed with such a preternaturally sure hand that the ubiquitous rapping is no barrier to enjoyment.    A/A-

Sample song  “Calma Pueblo”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gen4bnZuoQ&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

JUAN LUIS GUERRA, Asondeguerra (EMI/Capitol Latin)—In spite of having won the Latin Grammy for album of the year, Asondeguerra (To the Sound of Guerra) comes off as lacking freshness, as if the merengue star, now into his fifties, were winding down his store of ideas.  “No Aparecen” (They Never Appear), the opening song, is a pleasant enough, slow-trotting merengue that could have appeared on Fogaraté (1995); such are the limits of Guerra’s development, I suppose.  But “La Guagua” (The Bus) is much more in the playful spirit of that record from Guerra’s heyday; its bouncy syncopations and rapped bridge section, punctuated by brass imitating the bus’s horn honking, play off of lyrics that are perhaps metaphorical, suggesting that the Dominican Republic is itself a bus going in reverse gear down the highway.  For “Bachata en Fukuoka,” a pleasantly smooth but creatively blank bachata, Guerra actually tries out a few stock phrases in Japanese.  “Apaga y Vámonos” (Turn Off the Light and Let’s Go) tries a few tricks, crossing up the merengue rhythms at times and throwing in a sprinkling of accidentals to spruce up its sound, although Guerra’s mostly spoken recitation of the chorus sounds as world-weary as the lyrics would indicate (“The same promise, the same CD/The same lie and the same coffee/The same discourse, the same cliché/History repeats itself, what remains for us is faith”).  “Cayo Arena” (Sand Key) is similar in its quasi-yodeling, Dominican country-ish spirit to “La Gallera” (The Cockpit), from the fantastic record Ojalá que Llueva Café (I Hope It Rains Coffee, 1990), yet its yearning escapism is somehow less affecting than its energetic, goofy progenitor.  Guerra switches to salsa mode for “Arregla Los Papeles” (Get Your Papers in Order) with considerable success; this rivals “La Guagua” as the most free-spirited, swingiest song on the record.  “‘Son al Rey’” also borrows from Cuban idioms rather than Dominican, slowing the tempo to express deeply Christian sentiments.  Guerra’s recent religious fervor is something I could do without, yet it is part and parcel of who he is today.  This tendency reaches its worst in “Mi Bendición” (My Blessing), a dreck-encrusted bachata, a love song with religious overtones.  “La Calle” features hunky Colombian pop/metal sensation Juanes for a song that rocks assertively and convincingly, pounding out a one-drop reggae-style beat; it is therefore quite unlike any other on the disc.  Hard for me to see the appeal of Juanes’s hoarse-sounding voice, but perhaps he was having a bad day in the studio.  “Lola’s Mambo,” sung mainly in English and showcasing the jazz-pop trumpeter Chris Botti, is easily the cheesiest tune on the disc, pastiche-work that is a faint echo of full-blooded glory of the mambo’s heyday, enjoyable for the brass pyrotechnics if not for the embarrassingly awful main theme and lyrics.  There is a bonus track, the bachata-inflected English-language pop song “Caribbean Blues,” a dreamy fantasy whose poignancy musically would be enhanced if it ever ventured beyond its sole, ever-cycling chord sequence.    B+/B

Sample song  “La Guagua”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbZSLXkwurg

RITA INDIANA Y LOS MISTERIOS, El Juidero (Premium Latin Music/Sony Music Latin)—For those of us not tightly keyed in to what is happening in “the islands,” Rita Indiana (Hernández) seems to have come out of nowhere fast, yet she has been performing with her band for a couple of years in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere and has written two Spanish-language novels.  She is also said to be writing the screenplay for a movie about the Puerto Rican band Calle 13 (see above).  El Juidero (The Fugitive), however, is the band’s debut album.  In the popular press, much has been made of the singer’s appearance—over six feet tall and wiry, almost painfully drawn-looking, and often dressed in mannish suits—and her status as an “out” lesbian in a culture far from open toward homosexuality.  The album cover is designed like a movie poster, and, indeed, the video for the title track (see the link below), directed by Indiana’s Puerto Rican girlfriend, Noelia Quintero, plays like a short film.  Quintero also directed the video for another single from the record, “La Hora de Volvé” (Time to Return).  All this is window dressing in a music review, however.  The band’s music is usually classified as merengue, and a number of tracks do have the merengue rhythm pattern behind them.  Yet, this is far from conventional merengue—for one thing, you will not find a single horn or saxophone among the band—it is more a merengue-techno-reggae-dancehall hybrid, with the proportions of each varying according to the song in question.  In all, the mixture sounds vibrant and has the potency to deliver a real aural kick.  I am not captivated by Indiana’s fairly pedestrian, at times mewling, alto; she is not a bad singer by any means, and she has a certain vocal charisma to match the songs’ drama, but as deep-voiced Latin songstresses go, she is no Gladys Céspedes (of Grupo Céspedes), Celia Cruz, or Maria Bethânia.  She also sings in Dominican street lingo rather than standard Spanish, making it tougher on her fan base outside her homeland (and Puerto Rico) to follow along, and the printed lyrics (no English translations, sorry) in the CD booklet follow suit.  The songs are frequently furiously paced, driven by that rolling merengue percussion; when they are not, they stretch into deep, dark bass grooves.  All of which is viscerally appealing.  The song that listeners will recognize right away is “Dulces Sueños,” a Spanish-language cover of the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” (1983); the Rita Indiana version begins slowly, with a relaxed, Jamaican-style bass vibe, then the tempo picks up a bit as the merengue percussion kicks in.  It also adds its own original verses, and eventually the chorus changes from “everybody’s looking for something” to “everybody’s dancing mambo.”  Although the producers and performers thought enough of “La Hora de Volvé,” with its cryptic references in English to “monkey magic,” to make it a single, to my ears it is one of the weaker cuts on the record, a merengue-techno fusion that is fast but robotic, without feeling, in spite of its call for expatriate Dominicans to return to the island nation.  This is succeeded by “Equeibol” (Skateboard), the concluding song, which is unnecessarily padded out to fifteen and a half minutes.  Like “Dulces Sueños,” it starts off deliberately paced, then quickly gets much faster, but it essentially finishes its business—including an allusion to Van Morrison’s “Gloria” (1964)—within the first five minutes.  “El Juidero” opens the record, frenetic, insistent, and full of cinematic intrigue, limning the story of someone making a quick getaway to Puerto Rico, presumably following some shady deal gone bad.  Two very different but equally impressive songs treat the subject of poverty:  “Pásame a Bucá” (Pick Me Up) is a song of yearning for release, in order to enjoy time off, voiced by a Dominican domestic laborer in a Puerto Rican household; a midtempo tune, it is set to a throbbing bass pulse and, although contemplative in nature, it becomes most insistent rhythmically at moments of maximum intensity.  “Da Pa Lo Do” (Give to Us Both) is one of those blisteringly paced merengue numbers, danceable only in the St. Vitus fashion; the slang is so thick here that the story is hard to understand, but it seems to be about two hungry young brothers, kids told to make their own way to fill their bellies.  It is followed by “Flores de Fuego” (Fireworks), which, after a deceptively languid introductory stanza, picks up its own galloping merengue rhythm—in place of brasses and woodwinds, the primary instrumental accompaniment is synthesizer keys and chords, contributing to the hybrid/techno sensibility.  Even the spooky, funhouse song “Oigo Voces” (I Hear Voices), combining Afro-Caribbean rhythms known as palos with a slow 6/8 meter, has its vigorously uptempo sections; whether fast or slow, the piece, the most “techno” on the record, is dominated by the organlike synthesizer.  The palo rhythm comes to the forefront in “Guarará,” the song that is closest in nature to Afro-Caribbean percussion-heavy outfits like Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, all incantatory singing and drumming.  The best song of all, though, is “El Blu de Ping Pong” (Ping Pong Blues):  starting from the sound of ping pong balls being batted back and forth (as in “Table Tennis” by Flying Lotus; see above in the mainstream pop section), it burns through its techno-merengue faster than a lit strip of magnesium, notwithstanding a heavy-footed, “Frankenstein” rhythm of the type favored by Toño Rosario, a major merengue star of recent times; it is a thrill ride that draws the listener up into a stratosphere of ecstasy before pulling to an abrupt halt.        A/A-

Sample song  “El Juidero”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBVLvIjBFko

GILBERTO SANTA ROSA, (Irrepetitble) (Sony Music Latin)—The “old lion” (he is actually slightly younger than I am) of salsa from Puerto Rico has put out more than two dozen records since his professional career began in the mid- to late 1980s.  Yet, (Irrepetible) (Unrepeatable, the title said to stem from the immodest notion that Santa Rosa never makes a bad album) exemplifies how salsa as a genre has stagnated over the past two decades, as its fans opt for formulaic salsa romántica, its leading artists cater to that desire rather than try anything daring or unsettling, and bored younger folk gravitate toward the more dynamic reggaetón and its offshoots.  Given the recent dispiriting developments, or lack thereof, it seems an eternity, rather than two decades, has passed since Grupo Niche’s masterpiece Cielo de Tambores (Sky of Drums, 1990) was issued.  The initial concept for Santa Rosa’s new disc was to have every song be a duet, but production constraints limited the number of shared star turns to five (out of ten songs), notably the salsa legend Rubén Blades on “Me Cambiaron las Preguntas” (They Changed the Questions on Me) and the merengue legend Johnny Ventura on “Hay que Dejarse de Vaina” (Leave the Bother Behind).  The album’s first single, “Vivir sin Ti” (Living without You), was greeted with surprising but merited indifference by audiences; the tune serves well enough for the dance floor—the musicianship of Santa Rosa’s backing players is excellent throughout—but ultimately plays it safe.  Much the same could be said for “Aunque Llueva” (Even Though It May Rain) or “Vodka con Limón” (Vodka with Lemon):  these are agreeably breezy tunes that keep people dancing but are ultimately soulless because little inspiration enlivens their composition.  “¿Por Qué No Viene, Por Qué No Llama?” (Why Don’t You Come, Why Won’t You Call?) starts and ends with a neat sound effect, that of a phone connection being dialed up; what comes in between is phoned in, as the cliché goes.  The record’s first collaboration is with the younger Puerto Rican pop singer Encarnita “Kany” García:  “Y Tú, y Yo” (And You, and I), is a treacly ballad not worth a second listen, unless one likes that sort of pap.  “Hay que Dejarse de Vaina,” by far the album’s most appealing cut, gets a jolt of energy from the participation of the deep-voiced Ventura, who at one time served as mayor of Santo Domingo (and with whom I once had the pleasure of shaking hands); it is a bouncy, spirited tune embellished with a bit of whistling and some abrupt rhythmic shifts to catch you off guard.  “Me Cambiaron las Preguntas,” though co-written by Santa Rosa and Rafi Monclova, sounds like one of Rubén Blades’s slower salsa numbers (it helps that Santa Rosa and Blades are tenors of similar enough timbre that it is sometimes hard to distinguish which one is at the microphone), slinky despite the singers’ expressing bafflement at changing circumstances.  (A bit of Blades’s trademark political sentiments creeps in as well, with a lyric that translates as, “There’s a black president in the United States/And even though the progress is evident/We’re still f**ked.”)  “Hoy, por Siempre y para Siempre” (Today, Forever and Always) brings in the Colombian vallenato singer Felipe “Pipe” Peláez, for a song that incorporates a bit of the flavor of vallenato, the signature music of Colombia’s Guajira peninsula, using the violin to approximate the accordion sound; otherwise, though, this slow piece is unremarkable.  The enlistment of the Venezuelan fokloric/salsa band Guaco, from Maracaibo, barely registers on “Ella,” the album’s balladic final song, which is as dull as anything on the disc.    B/B-

Sample song  “Hay que Dejarse de Vaina”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddRue8pBTfQ

[VARIOUS ARTISTS], The Roots of Chicha 2: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru (Barbès Records)—Olivier Conan, who owns the Brooklyn nightspot Barbès and plays the cuatro (a small, four-stringed South American guitar) in his own chicha revival band, Chicha Libre, put together this, the second volume of his exploration of Peruvian chicha.  Musically, chicha (which originally referred to a popular fermented beverage) is a little hard to pin down, but it is principally the Peruvian version of cumbia, which filtered down from Colombia in the mid-1960s.  Most of the selections on The Roots of Chicha 2 fit the cumbia mold, rhythmically speaking, with that characteristic clip-clop pacing and heavy emphasis on the downbeat.  But there are exceptions, like Compay Quinto’s “El Diablo,” which models itself on Cuban music of the 1950s and is like a mambo with different instrumentation.  So what makes this song chicha, or proto-chicha, since the term did not begin to be applied to the music until the late 1970s?  Perhaps it is the “surf-y” electric guitar that embroiders the sung melody and picks it up where the voices leave off.  Later on the disc, a group from the central Andean city of Huanuco called Los Walkers does an instrumental rendition of the torchy Cuban classic “Siboney,” by Ernesto Lecuona, with that same 1960s California-style electric guitar substituting for the vocal line, speeding up the tempo and adding a cumbia beat.  “El Hueleguiso” (The Worker on Strike), by Manzanita y su Conjunto, comes across as an Afro-Cuban descarga, or jam, with a repeating montuno (vamp) played by the Farfisa organ, the percussionists freely whacking away at timbales and cymbals, and guitar improvisations intertwining with the rhythm section.  The same band’s “Agua” is also a free-form jam, with wild and spooky vocal outbursts and a mystical guitar line that sounds at times like Carlos Santana’s ruminations in the solo sections of “Black Magic Woman.”  The third and final selection by Manzanita y su Conjunto, “Paga la Cuenta Sinvergüenza” (Pay the Bill, Shameless One), in which a slouch of a bar habitué is called to account, is rhythmically closer to the cumbia, although lighter and a little faster in tempo than is customary.  It is also the only song on the record that sports a female lead singer, uncredited in the liner notes.  Manzanita (“little apple”), a.k.a. Berardo Hernández, is credited by Conan as one of the two founding fathers of what would become known as the chicha; the other is Enrique Delgado, who led a band called Los Destellos (the Flashes).  Each is represented by three songs on Volume 2; of the other bands, only Los Wemblers de Iquitos gets as many as two of the sixteen overall.  Two of the three by Los Destellos are pure instrumentals.  Also, two of the three (not the same two) have a tinge of the exotic, with Middle Eastern-sounding pentatonics at work in “Cumbia del Desierto” (Desert Cumbia) as the main theme undergoes transformation, whereas “La Pastorcita” (the Little Shepherdess), the one Destellos song here with vocals, is oddly Hebraic (the refrain recalls “dreidel, dreidel, dreidel”), and, in fact, the lead singer’s constricted and rather ceremonial intonation would make this number fit right at home on another compilation of sorts, Mazel Tov, Mis Amigos by Juan Calle and His Latin Lantzmen (see the 2009 music survey).  Los Shapis, a band that came later (starting out in the early 1980s), is said by Conan (I will have to take his word for it) to be more “Andean” in its sound; the band’s “El Aguajal” (The Swamp) carries the cumbia beat but is closer in texture and singing style to the huayno, folkloric music of the Andean regions.  Overt politics are absent from song lyrics, but the lot of the working stiff is honored continually.  “A Trabajar” (To Work), by Chacalón y la Nueva Crema (a group that took its name from the British band Cream), actually contains the line, “If the destiny of all the poor is to work tirelessly, there will be more poverty and bitterness than one can contemplate.”  Los Wemblers’ “La Danza del Petrolero,” in truth one of the less interesting cuts on the disc—the same band’s wordless “Lamento del Yacuruna” is a more compelling example of the Amazonian variety of chicha—pays homage to the oil workers of Iquitos, the frontier capital of the Amazon jungle.  The song “Colegiala” (Schoolgirl) by Los Ilusionistas was adopted by Nestlé for its Nescafé commercials in Europe, according to the liner notes, which are generally excellent.  I wish that Conan had included lyrics, at least in Spanish, and that he had given a better sense of when these songs first appeared since there is quite a spread from the late sixties (proto-chicha cumbia and other forms) to the early eighties (by which time the term chicha was common currency).  Also, a couple of the songs are credited to “D.R.” as composer; I have no idea what that refers to.  As with Brazilian Guitar Fuzz Bananas (see above, in the mainstream pop section), another compilation of South American pop, the use of “psychedelic” in the subtitle has to be taken with a grain of salt, rather than lysergic acid.  But Conan’s labor of love, part two, has done a tremendous service by bringing attention in the northern latitudes to an overlooked genre of lively dance music with heartfelt lyrics that ties in closely with Peruvian working-class culture and recent history.    A/A-

Sample song  Los Wemblers de Iquitos, “Lamento del Yacuruna”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq_bQDH8Ltk

TOM ZÉ, Estudando a Bossa: Nordeste Plaza (Luaka Bop)—Tom Zé, now moving into his mid-seventies, betrays no sign of slowing down as he completes a trilogy of studies of Brazilian popular forms that began with Estudando o Samba in 1975 and continued thirty years later with Estudando o Pagode.  Estudando a Bossa: Nordeste Plaza was released domestically in 2008 but not in the United States until two years later, by David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label.  On it, Tom Zé puts his own stamp on the bossa nova (the “new thing”), a style that became Brazil’s most successful cultural export and whose suave urban sophistication the singer/composer himself began his career rebelling against, as one of the founding spirits of the Tropicália movement that challenged the military dictatorship in the late 1960s.  Bossa nova is firmly associated with Rio de Janeiro, yet, by subtitling his record “Nordeste Plaza” (a derogatory term for a shopping center, West Plaza, in São Paulo—his adopted home city—where poor northeastern Brazilians gather to seek work), the performer is reminding his audience that the music’s roots go beyond Rio:  the underlying rhythms were borrowed from samba; moreover, João Gilberto, the progenitor (along with Antônio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes) of the genre, is originally (like Tom Zé himself) from Bahia state in the Northeast.  As might be expected by those who know Tom Zé’s previous work, he twists bossa nova like taffy to suit his purposes on Estudando a Bossa.  Yet, the essential elements of the form—the soft acoustic strumming, the gentle syncopations, the languid, wistful, breathy singing style—are present throughout, as are both overt references and musical allusions to touchstone songs like “Bim Bom,” “Insensatez,” “Doralice,” “O Pato,” “Corcovado,” and “Desafinado.”  Additionally, there are name checks of a diversity of Brazilian performers, many of them little known outside the country, others who gained an international audience, such as Gilberto, Dorival Caymmi, Elis Regina, and Nara Leão.  For this record, Tom Zé brought in a roster of newer, mostly female singers who are largely unfamiliar on these shores.  Mônica Salmaso, who joins the singer-songwriter on “Barquinho Herói” (Little Hero-Boat), has a fan base abroad, but, for me, the real revelation is Badi Assad, who sings on the final song, “Da: Terra; Para: Humanidade” (From: Earth; For: Humanity).  The younger sister of the guitar duo Sérgio and Odair Assad, she possesses a voice every bit as lovely as that of Bebel Gilberto, the daughter of João Gilberto, yet more plaintive, like a fado singer.  Tom Zé’s own voice, if a bit gravelly, is well suited to the genre, when he chooses to sing straight; often, as a clown prince among performers, he does not, scatting, bawling, or otherwise hamming it up.  The music is bossa nova yet very much his:  the clicks and rhythmic irregularities and interruptions, the harmonic straying and at times open atonality in his guitar figurations, the imported sound effects.  The Tom Zé of Nave Maria (1984) or Jogos de Armar (2000) is fully on display in two numbers in particular:  “Brazil, Capital Buenos Aires” and “Solvador: Bahia de Caymmi.”  These have the crowd noises, the atonal bass guitar rumblings and electric guitar filigree, the chorus of lamentation (also singing in defiance of conventional tonality), yet each also relaxes for a stretch or two into the bossa nova (if only briefly in “Solvador”).  The title “Brazil, Capital Buenos Aires” comes from the song lyric that bossa nova invented Brazil, with the implication that, prior to that day, the country’s capital was in Argentina.  “Sincope Jãobim” (or “Sincope [Syncopation] Joãobim”), melding the names of two of the founders, is another Zé-bossa hybrid but with more emphasis on the “sweet swing,” as the song terms it, of the bossa nova, mellifluously voiced by Andréia Dias; the tune recalls the writers and singers inspired by the “new thing” and its influences on other genres.  “João nos Tribunais” (João in a Court of Law) is a delicately rambling solo—all verse, no chorus—in which Tom Zé allows his voice to become especially grainy, speculating that João Gilberto could have laid claim to being the intellectual father of every samba-canção (song-form samba) that was turned into a bossa nova hit.  “Amor do Rio” (Rio’s Love), done in duet with Zélia Duncan, is a tongue-in-cheek romantic ballad; the “lovers” turn out to be Rio de Janeiro and its counterpart across Guanabara Bay, Niterói, and the hero who brings them together is the engineer who designed the bridge spanning the bay, completed in 1974.  The most delectably tuneful piece on the disc is “Roquenrol Bim-Bom” (Rock ‘n’ Roll Bim-Bom); with echoes of not just “Bim Bom” but also the Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da,” it is very much in the bossa sway yet still spiked with Tom Zé quirkiness.  The first song (following a brief into that ties in to “Brazil, Capital Buenos Aires”), “Rio Arrepio (Badá-Badi)” (Rio Chills), is made of much the same stuff as “Roquenrol Bim-Bom,” all leisurely scatting, more references to long-gone chanteuses and muses, another peculiar geographic romance (“Arpoador must leave Leblon”), with a touch of naughtiness at the end.  This song, like a number of others on the album, was co-written by Arnaldo Antunes, an established songwriter a generation younger than Tom Zé.  Several songs, however, fall short of the usual standard of excellence:  “O Céu Desabou” (The Sky Fell) flails about, so conversational in tone that it never really coheres into a musical idea, while “Filho do Pato” (Son of a Duck) tries a little too hard for cleverness in its own ch-ch-chatty lyrics, distending and overwhelming the melodic core.  “Outro Insensatez, Poe!” (loosely translated as Other Stupid Stuff I Did) is ruined by David Byrne’s English-language verse in the middle of the song, as alien to the music as his contribution to the first Forro in the Dark record several years back.  The CD jacket of the American edition has the lyrics printed in English translation but not, sadly, in the original Portuguese.    A-

Sample song  “Roquenrol Bim-Bom”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsHJdeQF0nU

JAZZ

REGINA CARTER, Reverse Thread (E1 Music)—This record is positioned toward the pop end of the jazz spectrum, although most of the material on it is either African in origin or inspired by African subjects or ideas.  Compositions are fairly short by the standards of the jazz world, and improvisation is given limited space and kept tightly reined to the principal themes.  Further, the music has a listener-friendly approachability, with peppy rhythms and plenty of hooks, that might well lead some serious jazz fans to dismiss it.  As a jazz violinist, Regina Carter is a major figure in a rarefied universe (one thinks of Jenny Scheinman or the late Stéphane Grappelli).  Her purity of tone, her fluency, and her agility are all impeccable; what is missing is the spark of expressiveness, even in pieces arranged to show off her talents, such as “Artistiya” by Mariam Doumbia (of the Malian duo Amadou and Mariam).  Maybe she is self-effacing by nature or wanted to demonstrate that, even on an album that bears her name and on which she carries most of the melodies—either solo or in conjunction with other strings or accordion—she is a true ensemble player; in any case, I do not perceive much stamp of personality on her playing, as skillful as it is.  By contrast, her two accordion players, Will Holshouser and Gary Versace, who alternate, play with tremendous verve.  And the improvisations of the young-ish kora (the West African harp-lute) master Yacouba Sissoko, from Mali, are mesmerizing, a high point of the disc, whether playing shimmering filigree free-form or swingy figurations.  Carter uses much the same lineup of musicians for each song:  violin, accordion, bass (electric or acoustic), and percussion, with most tracks also inviting in either guitarist Adam Rogers or Sissoko’s kora.  Reverse Thread begins and ends with adaptations of songs of the Abayudaya, a tiny community in Uganda that converted to Judaism about a century ago.  “Hiwumbe Awumba,” the opener, has a breezy, singsong nature; no matter how the arranger (Xavier Davis) and the improvisers (namely, Rogers on guitar) try to dress it up in Western sophistication, it remains an innocuous little country ditty.  “Mwana Talitambula,” the final piece, is in essence a subtle set of variations, serene and elemental, on a phrase consisting of a paired sequence of about half a dozen notes each in which both sequences share the same first-half pattern.  The other traditional songs on the record are the sprightly “Zerapiky” (based on a theme of the Masikoro people of southwestern Madagascar)—arranged by Holshouser so that the accordion and violin trade off themes; Carter’s solo at one point begins to climb into “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” (Charlie Daniels, 1979) territory (the devil’s own part) but does not linger there—and the overly honeyed, mellow “Juru Nani/God Be with You,” which includes a writing credit for the Malian string player Bassekou Kouyate (see also the Afrocubism entry above, in the Latin section).  “Kothbiro,” following a beautiful solo intro from Sissoko, is a composition of starkly elegant simplicity, written by the Kenyan multi-instrumentalist/singer Ayub Ogada along with James Achieng; having been chosen for a couple of film scores, this piece possesses a timeless quality that elevates it above the rest.  Carter’s own “Day Dreaming on the Niger,” co-written with Reginald Washington, is too bland to make a strong case for her compositional skills.  One song that clearly stands apart because of its Latin pedigree is trombonist Papo Vázquez’s “Un Aguinaldo pa Regina” (A Christmas Present for Regina); though the composer’s musical roots are in Cuba and Puerto Rico, the piece has a tango-like slinkiness, particularly at the intro and the closing, and features an extended guitar solo.  The accordion sounds like an Argentine bandoneón throughout the record but nowhere more so than here.  Mariam Doumbia’s “Artistiya” shines a light on the much-remarked connections between Malian musical traditions and American blues and roots music, even as it revels in its loose-limbed swing; Carter’s improvisation pays homage to Aaron Copland’s “Hoedown,” from the ballet Rodeo (1942).    B+

Sample song  “Kothbiro”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiRO_G4rXNQ

AVISHAI COHEN, Introducing Triveni (Anzic Records)—Half original compositions and half covers, Introducing Triveni is a less engaging listen than Avishai Cohen’s previous release, Flood (2008), which starkly conjured a world recovering from a global inundation.  Triveni, the trumpeter’s current lineup, enlists fellow Israeli-expatriate New Yorker Omer Avital on bass and Nasheet Waits, who is also Jason Moran’s (see below) regular drummer.  Of the four Cohen-penned songs, only the concluding “October 25th” musters a comparable intensity of feeling, though to very different effect from the primordial, biblically implacable Flood.  “October 25th” begins with a mod-ish swing, easygoing yet tightly contained within the parameters of its singing theme, then changes mood and pace abruptly midway, becoming a rambunctious, blowing jam, full of wild trumpet runs supported by Waits and ending with a repeated attack sequence that must have been murder on the muscles around Cohen’s lips.  “Ferrara Napoly” takes nearly thirteen minutes to express what it might have done in three, its trumpet improvisations (notwithstanding a quick reference to “When I Fall in Love”) and long bass solo doing little to bring new perspective to the stately but antiseptic theme.  “Amenu,” which in Hebrew means “our people,” is a dark, almost sullen little number for muted trumpet that saves its best harmonic subtext for last; it is one of two tracks on which Cohen uses the plunger, the other being Duke Ellington’s frequently interpreted “Mood Indigo.”  By contrast, “One Man’s Idea,” the opener, is a cheery and busy but throwaway piece, with plenty of abrupt rhythmic shifts and a theme that sounds curtailed rather than allowed full expression.  Among the songs from bygone artists, the most interesting choice is John Coltrane’s craggy, severe “Wise One,” from Crescent (1964), transcribed for trumpet—minus the samba section in the middle of the original that lightens the tone but plus a lavish helping of horn soloing that always pays deference to its source material.  The Triveni version begins with a stupefying two and a half minutes of drum solo by Waits.  The most refreshing selection, however, is Don Cherry’s “Art Deco,” from the album of the same name, late in Cherry’s career (1988).  A sprightly piece, Cohen approaches it in the playful, anarchic yet virtuosic spirit in which it was devised by the late cornetist.  It also contains Avital’s most elaborate improvisation, his reward for all the walking bass he needed to work through in order to get there.  Cohen’s “Mood Indigo” rendition hams it up a little while staying largely reverent to the master.  Cole Porter’s “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home to” is played so arrow-straight, though, that one might wonder why Cohen even bothered including that ubiquitous standard.        B+

Sample song  “Art Deco”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKYPME_0gCI&feature=related

STEVE COLEMAN AND FIVE ELEMENTS, Harvesting Semblances and Affinities (Pi Recordings)— This recording is one I find hard to enjoy.  Not that the music is bad by any means.  And I appreciate that Steve Coleman has been generous in making some of his music available for free to listeners.  But the scatting of Jen Shyu, a vocalist whom Coleman has worked with on two previous discs, detracts from my appreciation of Harvesting Semblances and Affinities.  Shyu actually is a capable singer, yet her presence as part of Five Elements seems intrusive rather than integral to the music.  Moreover, her ubiquity means that her part cannot be filtered out.  Further, I am unmoved by the mystical-spiritual guiding concept of the album, the idea that various times, phases, or seasons have their own particular “energy” that the music attempts to recreate.  (If the particular time really is that critical, then somebody made a mistake with the liner notes:  either the middle song should be “060707-2319 [Middle of Water]” instead of “060706-2319 [Middle of Water]” or the notes should make reference to July 6, 2006, instead of July 7.)  The best offering on the disc is the one Coleman did not pen himself:  Danish composer Per Nørgård’s “Flos ut Rosa Floruit,” setting an anonymous thirteenth-century Latin spiritual text, is a self-contained, bittersweet chorale for voice and horns, its several stop-start sections punctuated by the bass.  (Here, Shyu’s voice is far less an alien incursion, and she handles a tough vocal line admirably.)  “060706-2319 (Middle of Water),” the longest track on the disc at fourteen minutes, is on the other hand disjointed, unfocused, a lot of busywork to little effect in terms of artistic expression.  The two compositions with “Attila” in their titles do not bear any particular relation to each other musically speaking.  The short “Attila 04 (Closing Ritual)” is jittery, with Coleman’s alto sax and the brass players chasing each other up and down runs, whereas “Attila 02 (Dawning Ritual)” is aggressive in its syncopations as well as in setting Coleman-esque patterns of alternatives to conventional tonality.  The emphatic syncopations continue from “Attila 02” into “Beba”—a song Coleman says is about physical appetites and their associated “carnal energies”—together with some jagged rhythms, a bit of the funk in the drumming, and some off-color tones from the trumpet as a signature motif.  “Clouds” ought to be as changeable as the title might indicate but in fact maintains a brooding tone throughout—even Shyu is relatively subdued—not a bad thing, though, as this is dished up with grace and subtlety.  Coleman gets excellent ensemble and solo work from his Five Elements partners, particularly Jon Finlayson on trumpet and Tim Albright on trombone, with Tyshawn Sorey sure-handedly guiding the group through the rhythmic irregularities and sudden changes.        B

Sample song  “060706-2319 (Middle of Water)”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km3u7OmWrwE

BENOÎT DELBECQ TRIO, The Sixth Jump (Songlines Recordings)—The music on this splendid disc is stereotypically European jazz in that it is cool and cerebral and owes as much to classical modernism and African/Afro-Caribbean polyrhythms as it does to the jazz piano masters Benoît Delbecq appreciated or studied with, such as Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor, Mal Waldron.  The Sixth Jump is one of two records Delbecq put out in 2010; the other was a solo piano venture, Circles and Calligrams.  The French pianist’s ensemble is not your standard piano jazz trio:  the rhythmic partners, particularly Jean-Jacques Avenel on bass, are active collaborators and nearly co-equal with the bandleader.  Delbecq is known in jazz circles for his use of prepared piano, but that is less in evidence here, perhaps on “Piano Page,” one of three compositions remixed by his colleague Steve Argüelles, and on “AKA,” plus the blocky percussive sounds toward the end of “Pointe de la Courte Dune/Bass Page”; otherwise, the ol’ Bösendorfer remains unencumbered (he does have a “piano technician,” Philippe Bailleul, to prepare the strings).  The modernist influence is openly acknowledged in “Letter to György L.,” an homage to György Ligeti that lays out a starkly simple, heart-rending, meterless theme first in the bass, then in the piano.  “Piano Page” is pure modernism, leaving jazz to one side; it is Delbecq alone, remixed to overdub his own playing, overlapping and with clashing rhythms, sometimes playing simple quasi-serial arpeggios, other times with the notes doubled—all the while, the left hand is playing a three-note bass figuration that attempts a tonic-dominant “resolution” of sorts.  “Le Même Jour” (The Same Day) proceeds in a similarly modernist vein, if less layered and complex, with a bit of African-sounding percussion in the background for effect.  In other pieces, like “Ando,” “Barragán,” and “Yompa,” active African or Caribbean rhythms are paired with an astringent piano line from Delbecq.  The piano/bass harmonies in “Barragán” recall those of Vince Guaraldi’s “Peanuts” theme at times, but the atonal principal piano line is light years from Charlie Brown television specials.  “Yompa” hurtles along in its 3/4 meter, with nimble fingerwork from Avenel.  The other two remixes are for the other band members but combined with an independent piano line.  “Poursuite/Drum Page” has a distinctive percussion pattern yet does not give the drummer, Émile Biayenda, a great deal of leeway to stretch; it ends with a brief snare/cymbal solo.  “Pointe de la Courte Dune/Bass Page,” on the other hand, combines another Delbecq sequence of atonal steps (again with that three-note bass “resolution”) with both plucking and broad bowing technique from Avenel—deep, resonant, ponderous.  The album title, The Sixth Jump (in French, “Le Sixième Saut,” the name of the bass-driven, quietly fitful ninth track), evokes quantum mechanics, but listening to the trio, while hardly undemanding, is far less mentally taxing.        A

Sample song  None readily available, but Songlines did provide this sampler of the making of the disc:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei524eXGwMc

MARY HALVORSON QUINTET, Saturn Sings (Firehouse 12)—For Mary Halvorson’s second album as a bandleader, she expanded her lineup to a quintet from a trio, by adding trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson (who also plays with Steve Coleman and Five Elements; see above) and alto saxophonist Jon Irabagon to her rhythm section of John Hébert (bass) and Ches Smith (drums).  Her electric guitar consequently spends less time front and center, giving the horns their due.  Halvorson is a pliable and versatile guitarist; she can certainly deliver a line “straight” yet seems to revel in playing any which way but; she loves tonal distortion and bending of notes as well as cadenza-like whooshes of rapid-fire notes, often blurred and atonal, in the midst of a piece.  All ten compositions are hers (she orders the ones she writes for her own band like opus numbers), but the CD jacket notes that three of them were inspired by other jazz artists:  “Leak over Six Five” (Anthony Braxton), “Crack in Sky” (Tomas Fujiwara), and “Cold Mirrors” (Yusef Lateef).  “Leak over Six Five” (titles are often obscure in meaning) uses Finlayson’s trumpet to carry the primary theme, rather than Braxton’s instrument, the alto sax, but midway through there is some ear-opening interplay between Irabagon and Halvorson; the bandleader’s boing-y, skittering improvisations become almost cartoonish.  The piece has a glowering tone but is less abstract than what I have heard from Braxton himself.  “Crack in Sky” is deliberately paced and as mellow and consonant as the record gets, full of long tones, opening and closing (following a lengthy bass solo) with the sax, trumpet, and guitar engaged in a rare harmonic convergence.  I am not familiar with what the drummer Tomas Fujiwara has done, but he is, like Braxton, someone with whom Halvorson has worked.  “Cold Mirrors,” the Lateef tribute, is slower still, as well as sparer and more rarefied, just the guitar playing stark sequences of individual notes, almost serialist in nature, as limpid as a puddle of mercury, against light rhythmic accompaniment from Smith and Hébert.  “Sequential Tears in It” is likewise spare, slack, and darkly moody.  The song that is closest in spirit to rock, Halvorson’s first love, is “Sea Seizure,” another trio arrangement, which whacks the listener straight off with grimy chord repeats before the guitarist veers off into her characteristically twisted, temperamental, note-warping solo work; Smith works energetically to keep pace, seeming to relish the opportunity to bang out muscular rhythms on the drums like Bill Bruford or John Bonham.  A touch of progressive rock guitar is slipped into “Moon Traps in Seven Rings”—a 1970s art rock title if I ever heard one—about seven minutes in, just before the recapitulation of the main theme—a little section of classically informed arpeggiation, tremolos, and reverb stretching toward the cosmos.  The remainder of the piece cheerfully juxtaposes a tunefully sober melody with tempestuous upheavals of improvisation, including an extended drum solo.  Irabagon takes a furiously intense saxophone solo near the end of “Crescent White Singe,” scorching and squealing his way through blustery cycles of quick-tongued patterns.  “Mile High Like,” the peppiest number on the disc, has a little of everything in under five minutes:  Latin percussion, Herb Alpert-style trumpeting, broad triplet figurations, and some wild sparring between Halvorson and Finlayson in a duo improv section.        A/A-

Sample song  “Crack in Sky”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D96pVixGXw0&feature=related

KEITH JARRETT/ CHARLIE HADEN, Jasmine (ECM Records)—This recording, made in 2007 but not released until 2010, came out of a documentary that was being made about Charlie Haden, the bassist half of this piano-bass duo.  Haden and Jarrett had collaborated from the late 1960s through the end of the 1970s, so this is their first joint project in a good three decades.  Jarrett’s fan base is solid enough to allow him to do whatever he wants, and what he wants these days is obsessively to work over standards, striving for perfection in sound and expressiveness.  I last reviewed his Standards Trio, featuring Jack DeJohnette (drums) and Gary Peacock (bass), on My Foolish Heart: Live at Montreux (see the 2007 music survey).  Romantic standards the compositions on Jasmine may be, but, being from an earlier era, they were largely unfamiliar to me:  I thought “For All We Know” was a Carpenters song (different song, same title).  The one piece I was well acquainted with was “No Moon at All” (1948), written by David A. Mann, because it appeared on the Brad Mehldau Trio’s Day Is Done disc (2005).  Jarrett plays it jauntily, with lots of grace notes.  The most poignant composition on the record is Gordon Jenkins’s “Goodbye” (1935), which was the signoff tune used by the Benny Goodman Orchestra on its radio program.  The Jarrett-Haden rendition is more expository and correspondingly less improvisational than most of the long-form tunes on the disc, but the chromaticism is wrenching.  The shorter tune “One Day I’ll Fly Away,” by Joe Sample, of more recent vintage (1980) but based on a much older source—one of Franz Schubert’s Impromptus—is also touching in a dreamy, minor-key pathos kind of way.  Jarrett, despite his protestations that the Steinway model he used was not in great shape, takes great pains to produce an even, limpid tone, and he and Haden are clearly comfortable from many years of having worked with each other.  The pianist even manages to keep to a minimum his habitual humming and other vocal outbursts, except on Johnny Green’s “Body and Soul” (1930; ranked the No. 1 standard of all time by JazzStandards.com), where it becomes seriously annoying and distracts from the loose lines and graceful swing of his keyboard work.  Haden is given freedom for solos on each song; it is my impression that his improvisations are fairly tame, though there are obvious limitations to how freely a double-bass player can range.  My takeaway from this album is that it is likely to appeal primarily to an older generation, to which Jarrett and Haden themselves now belong, of jazz fans, those for whom these songs were part of the collective memory.  For me, standards like “For All We Know” (this version was written by J. Fred Coots and Samuel M. Lewis in 1934), “Where Can I Go without You” (Peggy Lee and Victor Young, 1953), and Cy Coleman’s “I’m Gonna Laugh You Right Out of My Life” (1955) are urbane, genial, and verging on the dull.  It has little to do with the performance, which is sensitively and expertly handled, but with the dowdiness of the material.    B+

Sample song  “Goodbye”:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cx6_3iGTEI

GUILLERMO KLEIN, Domador de Huellas: Music of “Cuchi” Leguizamón (Limbo Music/Sunnyside Records)—I am a huge fan of pianist Guillermo Klein, not so much of this record.  It focuses on a twentieth-century Argentine songwriter, Gustavo “Cuchi” Leguizamón, who was obscure even to most Argentines, Klein included, excepting that some of his folkloric pieces ended up in the repertory of popular singers like Mercedes Sosa.  Leguizamón hailed from Salta, in the country’s extreme northwest, an area that in some respects has more in common culturally with Bolivia, Peru, and northern Chile than with Buenos Aires.  This is reflected in his music, which took local song forms and dances like the carnavalito and the chacarera, as well as the zamba, the national folk dance of Argentina (which has nothing to do with the homophonous Brazilian samba), and dressed them up with European modernist harmonic techniques and approaches, doing for northern Argentina something akin to what Heitor Villa-Lobos had done for Brazilian indigenous music.  On Domador de Huellas (The Footprint Tamer), all of the music save for the opening title track by Klein is credited to Leguizamón, but it is hard for the newcomer to his music to know just where the source material left off and where Klein and his bandmates fashioned something entirely their own.  For example, “Chacarera del Zorro” (The Fox’s Chacarera) begins with several sung verses (about forty seconds’ worth), then shoots off into what sounds like a purely improvisatory flight of fancy, with a new theme introduced by the trumpeters (Richard Nant and Juan Cruz de Urquiza) interspersed with some heavy piano syncopation from Klein himself.  The biggest shortcoming of Domador de Huellas is that the sung portions, presumably Leguizamón’s most direct contribution, seem not merely tuneless but artless as well.  This might have something to do with the quality of the singing:  Klein’s voice has little depth or expressive range, and he would be better off leaving the vocals to others.  In certain instances, he does just that, yet the guest vocalists are, with the exception of Carme Canela (a singer based, like Klein, in Barcelona) on “Cartas de Amor que Se Queman” (Love Letters that Burn), little improvement.  It is hard to imagine “La Pomeña” (Woman of La Poma [village]), in Liliana Herrero’s tormented, deep-throated interpretation, being the kind of song that would inspire performances by Sosa or María Volonté.  Leguizamón’s songs are melodically elusive, fragile things that wilt when placed in the wrong environment.  The saving grace is that, while most of the tracks have at least a smidgen of sung verse, only “La Pomeña,” “Cartas de Amor que Se Queman,” “Mulánima” (Spirit of the Mule), and, following a four-minute intro, “Serenata del 900,” are songs in any conventional sense, at least as presented here.  (Note that even songs that are purely instrumental on Domador de Huellas are credited on the CD jacket as having lyrics, mostly either Leguizamón’s own or settings of verse by his close friend, the poet Manuel Castilla.)  There are some fetching moments in the ensemble work:  the rapid keyboard passages, backed by bass, that start off “Coplas del Regreso” (Verses of the Return), the mellow but piercing tenor sax (Gustavo Musso) and piano duet that constitutes “Zamba del Carnaval,” or the Gershwin-esque harmonics at the outset of “Maturana.”  There is some magic in the spiky interplay among the clarinet and trumpets, hovering over a plushy bed of fingerwork on the piano and rangy bass, in the lead-in to “Serenata del 900” (and when Herrero enters, she is not as bad as on “La Pomeña,” though just as raspy).  On an album of mostly slow numbers (zambas are slow by nature), “Carnavalito del Duende”  (The Goblin’s Dance) is the only tune with real verve and movement, allowing the horn players to stretch their chops for a change.  Though the rhythm is mostly regular, Klein plays around a bit with tempo warping, in a throwback to his excellent previous album, Filtros (see the 2008 music survey).  No surprise, then, that “Carnavalito del Duende” is easily my favorite cut on the record.  But Domador de Huellas also has far too much passagework that seems routine and fails to stir the soul, no matter how many times I listen.  That, combined with the oddly misshapen vocal settings, means that one is better served finding more representative work by Klein and his band elsewhere, unless one happens to be a big Leguizamón fan.  Incidentally, the CD digipak says that a digital booklet is embedded in the disc, but my computer could not locate it, at least not using RealPlayer.    B

Sample song  “Coplas del Regreso” (live version):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlZgwD6JNA4

CHARLES LLOYD QUARTET, Mirror (ECM Records)—An older jazz cat teams up with a young-blood supporting cast; so it has been for tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd in recent years.  Mirror is the second album with his current quartet—Jason Moran (see also below) on piano, Reuben Rogers on bass, and Eric Harland on drums—following 2008’s Rabo de Nube.  Lloyd made his mark in the 1960s, first playing with drummer Chico Hamilton, then as part of the Cannonball Adderley Sextet.  Subsequently, in the 1970s, he played with a couple of pop groups, the Beach Boys and Celebration, before returning to the jazz scene in the 1980s and associating with younger players such as Geri Allen and Brad Mehldau.  The pop sideline is represented here by a rendition of “Caroline, No,” a mawkish little number that appeared on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966) record; the jazz version reflects the limitations of the feeble source material, but at least the absence of Brian Wilson’s voice is a virtue.  The album’s twelve tracks fall into three categories of four songs each:  originals, updatings of traditional tunes, and assorted others, including two Thelonious Monk standards, one by Jule Styne (“I Fall in Love Too Easily,” written for the 1945 film Anchors Aweigh, with lyrics by Sammy Cahn), and the aforementioned Brian Wilson/Tony Asher ditty.  Lloyd’s own shambling, sprawling compositions—odd juxtapositions of dreamy piano figurations with free-range honking on “Being and Becoming, Road to Dakshineswar with Sangeeta,” for example—on Mirror leave me indifferent, with the exception of the title track, a genial, tightly focused composition with an easygoing swing and a lovely solo section from the versatile and fluid pianist Moran.  I could live happily without the Transcendental Meditation musings offered by Lloyd, a practitioner, in a voice oddly reminiscent of an unusually drowsy Garrison Keillor, that make up the bulk of “Tagi,” the final song; the remainder of the nine-minute composition is merely atmospherics for the piano and sax, with periodic “ohms” from Rogers’s double-bass.  The traditional pieces are largely material that Lloyd has worked over previously; since I do not have the earlier records, I have no point of comparison.  But the saxophonist is at his best with the ensemble on “Go Down Moses,” the nineteenth-century Negro spiritual:  the rhythm section and piano create an ambience of tension and intrigue, and Lloyd uses dynamics and tight embasure control to great dramatic effect; this is also one of the few songs that makes space for a bass solo.  The other spiritual on the disc, John Rosamond Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the “Negro national anthem” setting the poem of his brother James W. Johnson, is used as a thematic template for a rambunctious session of unbridled improvising by Moran and Lloyd in the spirit of free jazz.  “La Llorona” (The Weeping Woman), a Latin American folk song based on popular legend, is appropriately plangent—I do not often like the grainy texture that Lloyd sometimes chooses to adopt in his blowing, but here it suits—while the seventeenth-century Scottish lay “The Water Is Wide” allows Rogers to stretch his fingers, laying forth the primary harmonic pattern at the outset and engaging in an ambitious improvisation that explores timbres and methods of plucking the strings.  Lloyd’s arrangement of the Scottish song is remarkably (major-mode) benign considering its themes of disappointment and world-weariness (the lyrics are of course absent here).  Of the two Monk compositions, “Monk’s Mood” is handled with reverential tenderness by both pianist and saxophonist, whereas “Ruby, My Dear” moves a modest degree toward stridency of tone, with blaring runs from Lloyd as the theme is developed.    B+

Sample song  “Go Down Moses”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySv8FNMHrxw&playnext=1&list=PL4E566941126D2701

JASON MORAN, Ten (Blue Note Records/EMI)—Jason Moran shows once again why he is one of the most entertainingly inventive and dynamic musicians in today’s jazz world.  Not really an avant-gardist, he still finds ways of pushing back the frontiers of the genre, together with his established rhythm section of Tarus Mateen on bass and Nasheet Waits on percussion (they are known collectively as the Bandwagon, though that word does not appear on the disc’s labeling).  The critically acclaimed Ten marks the tenth anniversary (more or less) of Moran’s signing with the Blue Note label.  Mostly his own compositions, plus one from his bassist, it also draws from diverse sources:  Thelonious Monk, Leonard Bernstein, Conlon Nancarrow, and Moran’s own piano teacher at the Manhattan School of Music, the late Jaki Byard.  “RFK in the Land of Apartheid” is soundtrack music (from a film about Robert F. Kennedy’s 1966 visit to South Africa) and communicates as such, the repeating motif from the double bass conveying a sense of movement, action, and intrigue, while the piano part (when it is not doubling the bass) sketches out embellishments that never coalesce into a full-fledged melody.  “Feedback Pt. 2” and “Pas de Deux – Lines Ballet” are more experimental in nature; the former incorporates electronic pulsing like a chorus of frogs, with an impressionistic efflorescence of pianism that briefly rises to dramatic intensity, while the latter is suitably minimalist and moody, heavy on the sustain pedal.  “Blue Blocks” and “Gangsterism over 10 Years” are also clever, sinewy compositions with hints of the blues and stride piano influence and plenty of flashy keyboard runs in the improv sections.  As for the last of the original compositions on the disc, yes, it is a touch obnoxious to incorporate your own kids’ babbling into a piece (the very short “Old Babies”), but that is entirely forgivable on a record this good.  On the Byard tune, “To Bob Vatel of Paris,” Moran attempts a postmodern deconstruction of a droll, boulevardier number with rolling chords, and the results are impressive.  (The uncredited track hidden within “Old Babies,” the final track, sounds like a musical bookend to this song.)  In contrast, Thelonious Monk’s “Crepuscule with Nellie” (1957), written for the artist’s wife, is faithful to the melody almost to a fault, rubbing out the eccentricities of Monk’s phrasing and accidental chords.  Bernstein’s rangy “Big Stuff,” from the 1944 ballet Fancy Free, is treated decorously at first, but halfway through, the pianist takes off on it, interspersing ever more grace notes into the theme until it becomes a blur of pianistic pyrotechnics, before settling back down to the basics.  Nancarrow, every bit as eccentric as Monk, is represented by his “Study No. 6 for Player Piano,” which Moran performs twice, sandwiched around “Pas de Deux – Lines Ballet.”  Both versions sacrifice, perhaps necessarily (it might require two or three pianists), the essential peculiarity of the original, which is the simultaneous presentation of several piano lines whose time signatures clash.  Rather, one of the Nancarrow lines is used as a template for swing and dreamy improvisation.  The first version from Moran is faster and has a steady pulse from Waits on the drums; the second is all rubato, with just a dusting of sticks and brushes from Waits and tremulous accentuations by Mateen.    A

Sample song  “Gangsterism over 10 Years”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqrYz6NRiBs

HENRY THREADGILL/ ZOOID, This Brings Us to, Volume II (Pi Recordings) —Long at the forefront of avant jazz, as a founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in Chicago and a member/ bandleader of Air, Very Very Circus, and other ensembles, Henry Threadgill’s recorded output slowed considerably as he moved into his sixties.  Zooid, formed around the beginning of the new millennium, was originally a sextet, but for the This Brings Us to series, the cello dropped out, leaving five musicians.  It is certainly an unconventional lineup for jazz; in fact, for pieces on which Threadgill plays flute, if one were to swap out Jose Davila’s tuba/trombone for an electric keyboard, the group’s instrumentation would resemble Jethro Tull more than any jazz combo.  Threadgill may be the leader, but for long stretches at a time, the dominant player is Liberty Ellman on guitar.  I do not have Volume I for comparison, but each of the five long-form tracks on This Brings Us to, Volume II, nominally composed by Threadgill, appears to have no inherent structure and gives the impression that the band members are making it up on the fly.  That said, there is a thematic unity to the record, at least in terms of tone; everything, even “Extremely Sweet William,” is dusky hued and eschews recognizable melody.  The first three tracks (“Lying Eyes,” “This Brings Us to,” “Extremely Sweet William”) begin with the lead guitarist, Ellman, soloing atonally, with other instrumentalists joining in later; the first, third, and fourth (“Polymorph”) tracks build in intensity toward the close.  The languorous title track never musters momentum, while “It Never Moved,” the final piece, maintains about a constant density of activity throughout.  Threadgill delights in the odd sonorities of trombone/guitar duos (found only on “Lying Eyes”), tuba/guitar, tuba/flute, and he loves Davila’s tuba, particularly at the sputtering, growly lower end of its bass range, enough to give it the last word on “This Brings Us to” and “It Never Moved.”  Where Threadgill plays alto sax, he favors fat, somewhat sour tones.  “Polymorph,” the longest piece, also seems the idlest, the most akin to sheer noodling around, until it gathers force in its final few minutes.  But the dark-amber mood and unconstrained approach are largely the same throughout, so if you have a taste for this kind of formlessly free, almost rambling, and defiantly tuneless concertizing by a small group of talented players, you will enjoy This Brings Us to, Volume II.  I did, for the most part, find it engaging as well as intriguing.        A/A-

Sample song  None readily available; this excerpt from a live concert in Bologna in May 2010 is the closest I could come:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it05HY6IyUM

CLASSICAL

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

THOMAS ADÈS, Tevot (Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Simon Rattle); Violin Concerto ‘Concentric Paths’ (Anthony Marwood, violin; Chamber Orchestra of Europe, conducted by Thomas Adès); Three Studies from Couperin (Chamber Orchestra of Europe, conducted by Thomas Adès); Overture, Waltz and Finale from Powder Her Face (National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, conducted by Paul Daniel) (EMI Classics)—The principal compositions on this disc are the the single-movement orchestral piece Tevot, which means “arks” in Hebrew but can also refer to musical bars, and the Violin Concerto.  Both were written while the English composer was still in his thirties.  Tevot (2007), both majestically craggy and mystical, is a landmark work of shifting moods and contrasts.  At the very outset, the orchestra goes from nearly silent to full-on blare, whereas, past the halfway point, there are some genuinely lyrical passages in the winds and strings, which become a kind of variations on a theme.  The three-movement violin concerto, ‘Concentric Paths’ (2005), has been described by Adès himself as a triptych, with the middle, slow movement the primary element.  The first movement, “Rings,” is fast, agitated, and cyclical, full of restless harmonics with short half-lives.  “Paths,” the longer second movement, is every bit as anxiety inducing, as vibrato-heavy sustained notes bowed by the soloist, Anthony Marwood, are met by sudden orchestral blasts or temperamental bass growls, but it ends quietly.  This movement is also cyclical, in a much more extended and roundabout way than the first.  The final movement, “Rounds,” taken at a more moderate tempo than the first, is harmonically stable yet very much still restless and unsettled as the violinist takes it through its cycles.  As for the works that fill out the disc, the Three Studies from Couperin (2006) are orchestral embellishments—more than mere arrangements—of some of the eighteenth-century French master François Couperin’s short compositions for harpsichord, sliding down the mood scale from the initial “Les Amusements” to the third piece’s “soul in pain,” magnified by the presence of lower brass and strings beyond what the original instrument had the power to express.  The final set is a suite arrangement from Adès’s opera Powder Her Face (2007).  It is emotionally broader and less subtle than the other compositions on the disc.  The overture has a theatrical swagger to it; the waltz is more delicate and lacy; the finale is furtive, fugitive—briefly sounding as if it is about to break into a marimba band number—and more than a little unsettling.

CARL PHILIPP EMANUEL BACH, Keyboard Sonatas (Danny Driver, piano; Hyperion Records)—Johann Sebastian Bach’s second son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, practiced his art during a transitional period, as the high Baroque style became ossified and the more daring composers chafed at its conventions and found ways to subvert expectations, even while honoring the forms in which they were schooled.  C. P. E. Bach’s music, with its surprises of rhythmic variation and phrasing, its abrupt halts and pauses, and its shifting moods, pulled away from the mechanistic tendencies of the Baroque toward something more idiosyncratic and individually expressive.  The musicologist who wrote the liner notes for this disc, Leta Miller, makes a case that the younger Bach was so far ahead of his time that he was anticipating the Romantic era of the nineteenth century, which might be a stretch.  The composer also lived through a transition in instrumentation.  These five sonatas, all three-movement works arranged as fast-slow-fast, were composed during the 1740s, as the fortepiano—an instrument whose dynamic range gave it certain advantages over its predecessors, the harpsichord and clavichord—was being introduced.  Danny Driver, a young British pianist, performs the sonatas with fluidity and a delicacy that acknowledges the nature of the keyboards for which they were originally written, never diverting attention away from the music to himself at the bench.

JÓHANN JÓHANNSSON, And in the Endless Pause There Came the Sound of Bees (with Michaela Srumova, soprano, and the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Miriam Nemcova; Type Recordings)—The album title is reminiscent of those concocted by Jóhann Jóhannsson’s fellow Icelanders Sigur Rós, and the similarities do not end there.  Both Sigur Rós’s compositions and this record have a glacially implacable majesty to them, and in places where the music swells and rallies, notably in the “Rainwater” movement and in the “End Theme,” it attains a symphonic grandeur—grandiosity, even—to match that of the Icelandic pop band.  Jóhannsson is a composer specializing in electronic music; as such, his work crosses over to the popular side.  This disc in particular suggests “movie soundtrack” because, in fact, it is one, setting Marc Craste’s cutesy 2009 animated film Varmints.  It is pretty music—lots of tinkly piano arpeggios, shimmering washes of sustained sound, heavenly choruses, the stock in trade of high-toned soundtrack music, with the occasional sound effect like seagull cries or crashing thunder—and even when the mood turns more somber or disturbing, it is never too alarming.  It brings to mind Philip Glass’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982) soundtrack, or Vangelis’s The City (1990), since a number of the images in the film and corresponding titles on the soundtrack are urban in nature.  I spent time while listening contemplating the fine boundary between art and schlock.  Jóhannsson’s hands are too skilled to allow spillover into the latter, but the music veers mighty close to the precipice.  Taken as classical music, it is not especially interesting, richly consonant and eschewing experimentalism.  Taken as pop/electronica, it is moody, serene, at times moving.  I like some of the effects such as the chapel organ underlying “Siren Song” or the growling, cycling bass sustain that cushions the doleful cello in “Escape.”  There are thirteen tracks in all, some of them quite short, none longer than about six minutes, for an album whose overall length is more like that of a pop record than what one typically finds in classical recording.

DMITRY SHOSTA- KOVICH, 24 Preludes and Fugues, op. 87 (Alexander Melnikov, piano; Harmonia Mundi)—What is most striking about the twenty-four preludes and fugues of opus 87, from 1950-51, is the diversity among them.  Shostakovich may have been inspired by hearing a performance of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier by the pianist Tatiana Nikolaeva, but a number of the pieces are distinctly un-Bach-like, in a variety of ways, such as the very modern-sounding Prelude and Fugue 19 or the poignantly expressive, Rachmaninoff-esque Prelude 23.  A number do, however, adopt Baroque techniques like counterpoint or forms such as the invention, toccata, or passacaglia.  Like its mighty forebear by Bach, the work cycles through all twenty-four major and minor keys, with one prelude and fugue for each, arranged according to the circle of fifths.  Some are strident or sardonic (in particular, Prelude 15), others solemn and quiet or studied, others playful like the eleventh prelude and fugue, while some like Fugue 7 sing their way through arpeggiation.  Some make considerable technical demands on the pianist, as in Prelude 21.  Some sound, to my ear, very Russian, as in the agitated Prelude 8, while others do not—the limpid Prelude 5 could have been penned by Isaac Albéniz.  Prelude 14, the longest of the preludes, starts with an alarmingly sinister trill and continues in that vein of tension throughout.  The final fugue, Fugue 24, said by the performer in his liner notes to be relatively empty of ideas, is certainly declarative in a way fitting of the closing piece of a cycle, despite Shostakovich’s insistence that each prelude/fugue could stand on its own.  The shortest prelude lasts just 55 seconds, while the longest fugue goes on for nearly nine minutes.  Alexander Melnikov, young as he is, has a tremendous feel for this music, having studied it intensively, and plays with supple adaptability and skill throughout.  The two-CD set comes with a bonus DVD, a short film by Christian Leblé that takes the form of a conversation between the pianist and Andreas Staier, the interviewer, with images taken from the stunning Great Hall of Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Conservatory.   Somewhat awkwardly, the twenty-fourth prelude and fugue were placed on the flip side of the DVD disc; there would have been room for them on the second disc by moving the thirteenth prelude and fugue to the first disc, but Shostakovich clearly intended Prelude and Fugue 12 to mark an intermediate climax, followed by a restart with the thirteenth, so in terms of structure it made sense to end the first disc following the twelfth fugue.

VICTOIRE, Cathedral City (New Amsterdam Records)—Missy Mazzoli, a young composer who has been garnering increased recognition both critically and by the public (I myself have seen her music performed by the ensemble Eighth Blackbird in a swank Chelsea gallery), formed the all-female ensemble Victoire a couple of years back.  Cathedral City, the group’s debut, made the New York Times top ten list for classical recordings in 2010.  It is easy to see why:  The music is listener-friendly without being undemanding, and it is pitched well away from the rigors of academic modernism and toward those who take for granted that rock is the vernacular of our day.  As such, it has a hip, “indie” sensibility that appeals to a younger but informed audience.  The disc is structured like a pop record:  there are eight songs, with pop-compatible titles, all between five and seven minutes or so long, with no discrete movements within any of them.  The instrumentation is certainly unorthodox for classical.  Both Mazzoli and Lorna Krier play keyboards, while Eleonore Oppenheim switches between the classical double bass and electric bass.  Olivia de Prato is the violinist, and Eileen Mack plays clarinet.  There are several guest vocalists—mainly speaking or chanting wordlessly—and Bryce Dessner plays electric guitar on the drone-reverberant “A Song for Mick Kelly,” ending with some most un-classical white noise.  (Mick Kelly is a female character in Carson McCullers’s first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, whose aspirations toward being a composer are thwarted by circumstance.)  Drum machines are employed on tracks three (the title track) and seven (“A Song for Arthur Russell,” dedicated to the late cellist/composer whose musical omnivorousness, spanning the classical and pop music worlds, mirrored Mazzoli’s).  The music’s consistently sober and sepia-toned nature, with gentle pulses and string arpeggiations and faintly luminous keyboard tones, is strikingly akin to that of the Tin Hat Trio, were that trio to add a woodwind player, while the samplings of voices and announcements could bring to mind anything from the Replacements to Stereolab to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.  So, is this just a classical musician taking a break to indulge in popular/electronic idioms?  Best not to expend energy on categorization and simply appreciate the music for its own subtle qualities.

JOHN ZORN, What Thou Wilt (Tzadik)—This is a collection of compositions from the past decade or so from the pen of John Zorn, who spans so many genres and plays so many instruments as to defy description.  The three works presented here, however, sit comfortably in the realm of avant-garde classical.  Contes de Fées (Fairy Tales, from 1999), written upon the death of Zorn’s mother, takes the form of a violin concerto.  At times, the piece evokes for me King Crimson’s “Providence,” from the band’s 1969 debut album—angst-filled violin outbursts that subside as quickly as they began, punctuated by percussive strokes and stealthy or uneasy orchestral rumblings—only noisier.  Given Zorn’s forays into rock, this is not surprising.  About two minutes from the ending, there is a brief orchestral eruption, followed by a quiet coda.  Stephanie Nussbaum is the fine soloist.  .^. . (fay çe que vouldras) (Do What Thou Wilt, from 2005) is a solo piano piece that sounds at times as if it involves additional strings because the performer is actually standing and manipulating the wires and hammers inside the instrument.  The longest piece on a fairly short (by classical standards) disc, at more than twenty minutes, it is both mystical and temperamental.  It contains some softly plinking passages or glissandos generated inside the instrument’s sound box, some doomy trills in the lower register, and a good deal of atonal fast runs, while elsewhere, what Zorn calls “tone clusters” I would describe as furious banging.  Stephen Drury, for whom the work was written, plays apparently from memory, which is quite a feat.  The composition’s title, including the three dots in a masonic triangular pattern, references both the novels of François Rabelais and the twentieth-century English mystic Aleister Crowley.  777 (nothing is true, everything is permitted) (2007) is an unusual “cello trio”—actually written for three cellists and dedicated to Fred Sherry, who here is joined by Mike Nicolas and Erik Friedlander to perform the piece.  It is structured as seventy-seven bars of music, with a seven-bar coda.  Further, it uses irregular meters yet with successive bars repeatedly adding up to seven beats in various combinations—a little gimmicky but a valid organizing principle.  The parenthetical reference in the title is attributed to various thinkers and writers over the centuries.  The shortest composition on the disc, 777 (nothing is true, everything is permitted) shares some characteristics with the string-led Contes de Fées, without the quiet passages; it is intensely busy throughout, as well as uncompromisingly atonal, and it presents tremendous technical difficulties for the players, not the least of which is coordination among the three of them (though, apart from the composer, who would notice the difference?).