MUSIC 2011:  A DECIDEDLY SELECTIVE SURVEY

Steven Greenfield

August 1, 2012

GENERAL COMMENTS

   
    I have been finding it hard to muster enthusiasm for the records that came out in 2011.  A number of the most talked-about albums of the year, such as PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake, the Jay-Z/Kanye West collaboration Watch the Throne, Shabazz Palaces’ Black Up, Real Estate’s Days, Bon Iver’s self-titled release, St. Vincent’s Strange Mercy, or Merrill Garbus/Tune-Yards’ Whokill, do not appear in this survey, either because they are not to my taste (more a question of genre) or because I simply could not buy the critical hype after sampling them.

    It is unlikely to signal the start or continuation of a secular trend, since creativity collectively in the pop music world tends to wax and wane unpredictably, but 2011 was about the weakest year I have seen since I started doing this survey a decade or so ago.  (It has existed in blog form only since the 2007 survey.)  I found myself assigning most grades in a fairly narrow range, from B+ to B-, and in my system, an album that earns a B- probably will not be listened to much subsequently.  Even my album of the year (see below) is not one I recommend completely without reservations.  A handful of acts that I like came out with new recordings, but some were overly ambitious (Tori Amos, Kate Bush) and some were at the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of artistic reach (Justice, Radiohead).  A much larger number of my perennial favorites took the year off from releasing material.  A few interesting things were called to my attention that existed only in MP3 format, but I have decided that this is a survey of compact discs, and perhaps LPs, until such formats truly go the way of the dinosaur.

    It is pure speculation to try to link the general quality of the year’s popular music to the weakness of the recording industry, but such speculating can be fun.  Album sales actually increased slightly in 2011 in terms of volume, for the first time since 2004, but revenues fell nonetheless, and the music biz remains in intensive care as large numbers of young people continue to steal tunes through illegal downloads.  Things are even worse for retrograde individuals like me who still prefer to shop in an actual store, for actual, tactile recorded items.  I find myself for once with West Coast envy because people there at least have Amoeba Music for a superstore.  Borders went out of business this past year, and Barnes and Noble has reduced the space it allots to compact discs (even classical ones, traditionally its strength) to pitifully small bins.  J&R Music World is still going strong here in New York, but if J&R does not have something, I end up having to rely on Amazon.com.  And Amazon is more part of the problem than of the solution; together with Apple’s iTunes store, it has done more than any legitimate entity to drive bricks-and-mortar establishments out of business.  This is where it is easy for me to start sounding like a ranting oldster, castigating the younger set for their utter lack of acoustic discrimination in accepting MP3s, with their inferior sound quality, as valid substitutes for true recordings and chastising Americans generally for using the Internet, with its legalized sales tax evasion (perhaps about to change as states are desperate for revenue), for convenience rather than getting off their duffs and actually wandering around a retail establishment.  Eventually, music file technology will improve to the point where it is faithful to recordings, and there will be no need to continue cluttering our houses and apartments with plastic jewel boxes and cardboard sleeves.  But we are not there yet.

    The central tragedy of the year in music, I suppose, was the sudden death of Amy Winehouse in London, at the ripe age of 27, although I was never a fan of her retro-soul.  For me, the loss that hit hardest happened less than two weeks into the year.  On January 14, Trish Keenan of the Birmingham (U.K.)-based Broadcast died of pneumonia at just 42 years of age, cutting short a promising career with one of the more intriguing electronica groups I have come across in recent times.  Her partner, James Cargill, may try to keep the project going on his own (there are no other current members), but it will not be the same without her voice.  Gil Scott-Heron also died in 2011, among others too numerous to mention here.

    Katy Perry and Lady Gaga continued to sell boatloads of records despite no evidence of actual talent, and the nation remained stupefyingly transfixed by what one Facebook commenter aptly termed the “karaoke” shows on TV:  American Idol, The Voice, America’s Got Talent, and their ilk, as much for the antics of the celebrity judges as for the lesser lights being pushed in front of audiences.  The song of the year has got to have been Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” although the spirited “Party Rock Anthem” by LMFAO, consisting of a son and grandson of Berry Gordy (they are uncle and nephew to each other), came in a close second.

"The Badwagon" at Celebrate Brooklyn! June 2011 - photo courtesy of SW Curran.

    Because of my computer crashing at the beginning of spring 2011 and because I am coming to this survey late once again, after memories blur, I do not have much to say about live music highlights for the year.  What stood out at Celebrate Brooklyn! over the summer was a jazz double bill.  The first half combined the forces of Jason Moran’s Bandwagon with those of Ethan Iverson and the Bad Plus to form a sextet provisionally called “The Badwagon.”  The second half featured Roy Hargrove’s quintet.  In November, Melissa and I had a chance to see Robyn Hitchcock play a set at the Bell House in Gowanus, Brooklyn, which was phenomenal; Hitchcock is not only an ingenious songwriter but a natural entertainer.

    Outside of the mainstream pop category, Benin’s (Le Tout-Puissant) Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou, an old-time ensemble that is still funky, issued a fabulous recording, Cotonou Club, that was a labor of love for French journalist/producer Elodie Maillot, and Mali’s Tinariwen added to its strong catalog with Tassili.  Lila Downs successfully mixed her own compositions with her inspirations in Mexican folk songs and standards for Pecados y Milagros.  The jazz world hosted impressive new recordings from the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, pianist Richie Beirach in Tokyo, alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón mining the Puerto Rican songbook, and pianists Brad Mehldau and Kevin Hays teaming up to perform the music of Patrick Zimmerli.  Joel Rubin (clarinet) and Uri Caine (Hammond organ and Fender-Rhodes piano) issued a jazz-inflected klezmer recording, Azoy Tsu Tsveyt, as part of the Radical Jewish Culture series on Tzadik.  Tyshawn Sorey’s Oblique - I, widely praised by critics, was too forbiddingly atonal for me to warm up to, however.

    In my inclusion of sample tracks, I tried wherever possible to use what the artist or the label made available on YouTube, which means that the sample track is not necessarily the one I think best represents the performer.  Only in cases where there was no official video produced did I link to those that other people put on the site (and in those cases, it usually is my favorite track).

    I want to thank, as usual, Steve Holtje and Luis Rueda for their suggestions about what was worth paying attention to in 2011 and my darling Melissa for bearing with me all the time it took to get this survey finished.

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

    1.  Battles, Gloss Drop
    2.  Cant, Dreams Come True
    3.  M83, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
    4.  Gang Gang Dance, Eye Contact
    5.  Frente Cumbiero, Frente Cumbiero Meets Mad Professor
    6.  TV on the Radio, Nine Types of Light
    7.  Tim Hecker, Ravedeath, 1972
    8.  Asobi Seksu, Fluorescence
    9.  Oneohtrix Point Never, Replica
   10. La Vida Bohème, Nuestra

ROCK/POP ALBUM OF THE YEAR

BATTLES, Gloss Drop (Warp Records)—This record attracted remarkably little publicity considering its quality and in light of how radically distinct it is from just about everything else being put forward as new music.  I know well that many listeners might find Battles’ sound a little intimidating, mechanical and with a repetitiveness of musical phrases that tests one’s patience.  Then again, the same could be said of Kraftwerk.  As with some of the more abstract electronica in this survey—a category into which Battles does not comfortably fit; its sound is too rock oriented—even when motifs are being run through seemingly endless iterations, there are subtle changes happening in the arrangements behind it.  Adding to the potential for audience alienation, there are no soul-rending, meaningful lyrics (what lyrics are offered are sometimes unintelligible) for listeners to latch onto.  Battles is both the same as and different from the band that put out its well-regarded debut album, Mirrored (see the 2007 music survey).  It suffered a crisis when Tyondai Braxton left the group midway through the recording of Gloss Drop to focus on his solo career, leaving it a trio.  In some respects, the band lost its heart and soul with his departure, even though guitarist/keyboard player Ian Williams, not Braxton, was the band’s founder.  In other ways, it might be stronger without him; stripped of his cartoonishly sped-up vocals, Battles does not sound as off-puttingly bizarre.  This is far from saying that the reduced core of Battles never sounds cartoonish; its sense of playfulness pops up from time to time—just listen to the wobbly bagatelle “Toddler” for evidence.  But in place of Braxton, the band on the current record relies on a motley assortment of guest vocalists for the four tracks (out of twelve) that have sung parts.  Of these, the strongest (and best cut on the CD) is “Ice Cream,” with the Chilean performer/DJ Matías Aguayo (see the 2009 music survey) singing in his typically airy manner and practically stepping on the rests as he repeats each phrase.  The high-pitched guitar of Williams and its flouncy syncopations give the song levity, while Dave Konopka’s bass supplies the kick-ass power.  “My Machine” dredges up Gary Numan (remember him?) for an ominous, industrial composition with sci-fi flavorings.  Numan’s voice sounds anguished as he delivers an antimelodic theme whose doominess is heightened by spooky synthesizer and guitar chords.  John Stanier’s drumming is muscular and prominently situated here.  “Sweetie & Shag” is the slightest of these songs, taking a New Wave approach in its perky bass line and in the off-color (sometimes off-pitch) postpunk vocals of Kazu Makino (of Blonde Redhead); to these elements, Battles adds its own weirdness with keyboards that  deliberately clash with the melody or supply vertiginous chromaticism as an accent.  Another native of Japan, Yamantaka Eye (born Tetsuro Yamatsuka), supplies the hortatory shouts—he does not truly sing—around which the final track, “Sundome,” was constructed.  Named, according to Konopka, for a Jordanian basketball league, “Sundome,” the longest piece on the record, is a remarkable achievement in the way it incorporates Yamantaka Eye’s prerecorded nonsense words into a song that sounds quasi-Jamaican at the outset:  think conch-shell horns, idle shouts, and shuddering, reggae-spiced keyboards.  Eventually, the song develops some Japanese-style pentatonics but in Battles’ characteristically methodical way, studiously worked over again and again, evolving into a clangorous symphony built around the replication of a single harmonic phrase.  “White Electric,” the last of the purely instrumental tracks, plays around with rapid-fire sixteenth notes that morph into triplets like those in Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Men’s Desiring,” varying the rhythmic framing and orchestrations and taking on a pronounced progressive rock tincture, until, a minute from the end, all the noise drops out in favor of a simple, staccato, jocular keyboard line that sounds like a prelude to “Sundome,” which follows it immediately.  The opening track, “Africastle,” perhaps named with Ghana’s slave-trading Cape Coast Castle in mind, has an introductory section full of foreboding, effectively combining shimmery tremolos with spiky picked high notes.  The sense of dramatic tension drops considerably when the other instrumentation kicks in, and following a section toward the end in which one particular three-descending-note phrase is chewed over obsessively, the composition ends incongruously with some lightheartedly plinky keyboards and high-pitched mewling/whistling that could have been imported directly from Braxton’s Central Market CD (again, see the 2009 music survey), suggesting his residual influence.  “Futura” has a stark grandeur in its two-note ground bass sequence that recalls Antibalas—minus the sax and horns.  The rest is variations playing off of this sequence, growing more complex and convoluted as the song proceeds.  Three times in the second half these variations flower into a full-blown theme for an interval; the second of these is all the more odd for being in major-mode contrast to everything else.  “Inchworm” is one of the most high-spirited numbers on the album, together with the more hectic “Wall Street” that follows it, chugging along percussively as it puts one cheery riff through its paces, over a fluttery synth cushion and with sleigh bells as ornamentation.  “Wall Street” differs in that more prog-rock-tinged gravitas accrues to it as the song progresses, and it ends with a whimper rather than a bang; the party’s over.  For Williams, Konopka, and Stanier, the wizards of experimental rock who constitute Battles, though, the party may just be beginning.  Gloss Drop was remixed by various artists as Dross Glop in 2012.        A

Sample song  “Ice Cream (featuring Matías Aguayo)”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAbc5yhbBFQ&ob=av2e

    And the rest . . .

TORI AMOS, Night of Hunters (Deutsche Grammophon/ Decca Records)—The most ambitious project Tori Amos has taken on to date, Night of Hunters is all at once beautiful, baffling, inventive, derivative, pretentious, and shot through with problems.  The audacity of the concept recording cannot be laid solely, or even primarily, at Amos’s door; she was approached by Deutsche Grammophon producers, looking for crossover gold, to come up with a song cycle based on classical themes.  As someone who grew up on the progressive rock of groups like Yes, I am entirely comfortable with pop music’s appropriation of classical idioms, if handled deftly.  By that standard, Night of Hunters yields mixed results.  For certain songs, Amos leaves the source material nearly untouched, to the point at which it is a stretch to say that “Battle of Trees”—almost entirely Erik Satie’s “Gnossienne No. 1,” its initial expression played on what sounds like prepared piano strings—was written by her.  She puts words to Satie’s austere theme and extends it just slightly in a couple of places.  The tale the words relate of doing battle with vowels and consonants amid forest groves is abstruse, and the effect is to bloat the song in a way I imagine Satie would have heartily disapproved of, even were he disposed to adaptations of his work.  For other songs, Amos alternates her own original melodic ideas with the classical works that served as the wellspring.  “Star Whisperer,” the longest track on the disc, is all Franz Schubert’s Andantino movement from his Piano Sonata in A Major 959 for the first three minutes or so, before Amos introduces a new, unrelated theme, singing one verse before engaging in an extended piano improvisation on the Schubert melody that ultimately leads back to the companion verse for the Amos theme; still, Schubert wins out for the concluding verses.  “Edge of the Moon,” like “Star Whisperer,” has two discrete parts:  the first is the “Siciliano” from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Flute Sonata; the second, after a pause, is pure inventive bliss from the songwriter, multitracking her voice to form a beaming, spirited chorus.  “Your Ghost” begins with a tune from Amos that bears a relationship to Robert Schumann’s “Ghost Variations; after a couple of minutes, it settles into direct quotation of the Schumann theme, with only the sketchiest of codas to bring the song to a close.  At still other times, she succeeds in creating a genuine synthesis between her own muse and the score that served as touchstone, never more so than on the album’s lone instrumental, “Seven Sisters,” a neat reconception of Bach’s Prelude in C Minor that showcases an undulant clarinet solo of her devising.  On occasion, Amos takes pieces of a classical source to use as scaffolding:  on the opening “Shattering Sea,” for instance, she uses Charles-Valentin Alkan’s “Song of the Madwoman on the Sea-Shore” as an intermittently heard ground bass supporting a pulse-racingly agitated, heavily syncopated principal theme that is all her own.  Whereas the succeeding song, “Snowblind,” distills just the one stately theme, ending in a minor-mode descent, from Enrique Granados’s “Añoranza” into its melody, discarding the modulations and fleet-fingered runs that make up the rest of the Spanish piece.  If the incorporation of Modest Mussorgsky, Frédéric Chopin, and Claude Debussy into the pop sphere can seem exploitative or lily-gilding, the principal weakness of the concept album is the overarching story.  There is, apparently, a back story, involving a couple whose relationship is disintegrating and, in the course of the breakup, time travel between the contemporary and ancient, Old and New worlds.  Wikipedia has more space to describe it in full:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_Hunters, under the heading “Concept.”  But there is no way anyone simply listening to the record or following the words could possibly know any of this, such as that the “cactus practice” referred to in the song of that name refers to a peyote ceremony.  Amos’s lyrics have always been simultaneously evocative and obscurantist, never more so than in this cycle.  We are introduced to “Anabelle” in the second song without any hint as to her identity or significance, or how she relates to “tori” (spelled lower-case).  There is genuine poetry amid the lyrics, as when Anabelle and tori match wits in “The Chase.”  But how does one build a tower “from Ulster to Munster” (“Battle of Trees”)?  How does “Job’s Coffin,” the most songful tune on the record and the only one not directly owing to a classical counterpart, fit in with the rest of the narrative arc, such as it is?  What does it mean when Amos talks in “Edge of the Moon” about “the Lucy inside of my soul”?  Santa Lucia?  Australopithecus?  Peanuts comics?  Perhaps she alone knows.  But it is frustrating.  Once one has read the back story, certain things make more sense, yet it should not take special study aids to be able to piece together a relationship among songs in a supposed cycle.  Amos does manage to stamp her own distinct musical personality on the song cycle, notwithstanding the variable success in her approach to her classical inspirations—and she does so with radically different instrumentation than we are accustomed to, aside from the anchor of her skilled pianistic technique.  There is no percussion, and all the instruments are acoustic.  In place of guitars, the Apollon Musagète String Quartet performs, along with a woodwind chorus of flute, oboe/English horn, clarinet, bassoon, and contrabassoon.  If the voices that sing in concert with Amos on certain songs sound eerily like her own, that is because they are close relatives:  her preteen daughter, Natashya Hawley, as Anabelle, and her niece, Kelsey Dobyns, as the Fire Muse on the title track.        B+/B

Sample song  “Carry”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gzKwOcCOYA&feature=artistob&playnext=1&list=TLzINqv-ib8hg

ASOBI SEKSU, Fluorescence (Polyvinyl Records)—Over the past several years, James Hanna, Asobi Seksu’s guitarist and primary songwriter, has been shifting the band’s sound away from the fuzztones and clanging guitars of the shoegaze style, toward the more streamlined dream pop, from which shoegazing is said to have derived.  Fluorescence, the band’s fifth album, while hardly incisive or revelatory, has all the pleasure that can be extracted from concision and elegant simplicity of composition.  Even with the change in instrumental approach, there continues to be something taffy-like about Asobi Seksu’s music, its pliable consonance and light, ultra-sweet soprano of Yuki Chikudate to the fore.  At its worst, Fluorescence is simply innocuous; at other times, it lulls the listener into complacency only to add a twist or a fresh layer.  The most complicated and experimental, as well as the longest, number is “Leave the Drummer Out There.”  It sets out a pleasant, fairly basic theme, but two minutes into the song, it slows down to a delectable set of classically inspired keyboard arpeggios (played by Chikudate), which are then spiced with an almost bluesy chorale from the singer that plays off the original melody.  Following a section of staccato, monotonal guitar and drum attacks, Chikudate brings in one last variant on the theme, as the instruments slowly accelerate.  This is not the only track to display a progressive rock influence:  the opener, “Coming Up,” eventually broadens from its singsong primary theme with harmonies sung by Hanna that smack of the 1970 Moody Blues single “Question,” then throws in another loop with the instrumental syncopations of its bridge section.  “Trails” and “Perfectly Crystal” have more intricate, if not terribly adventurous, melodies; “Trails” reaches a particularly satisfying climax, as Chikudate’s high voice glides down the scale toward tonal resolution, while “Perfectly Crystal” soars effortlessly on a cushion of air characteristic of the most cunningly devised dream pop.  “Deep Weird Sleep” is a restless flight of fancy, a two-minute instrumental that stays within tightly defined parameters of chord structure but becomes unexpectedly noisy and rambunctious amid those bounds.  “Trance Out” has an insistent, New Wave bounciness to its brisk pop, though any sense of spareness vanishes when the keyboard section kicks in.  The song comes to an abrupt halt, to be followed by the pensive concluding number, “Pink Light,” whose buzzy, remorseful strings strike closest of anything on the disc to the old shoegazing Asobi Seksu.  Hanna, whose voice is fairly characterless, takes the lead vocal on “Counterglow,” one of the duller and more earthbound tunes.  The keyboard harmony of “Sighs” is too close to Mel Tormé’s “The Christmas Song” (1944; think Nat King Cole singing “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire . . .”) for my liking.  Fluorescence glows brightly for the most part; it is not quite a match for the band’s Citrus (2006; see my Top 100 Albums of the Decade at no. 57) but superior to Hush (see the 2009 music survey).        A-

Sample song  “Trails”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0L4PEDqnbE

BURAKA SOM SISTEMA, Komba (Enchufada/Rough Trade Distribution)—Portugal’s Buraka Som Sistema (from Buraca, a parish in Amadora, a satellite city of Lisbon, plus “sound system”) makes electronic dance music that is at its best mind-bending and horizon-expanding; at its worst, it might as well have been generated entirely by a computer program.  Alas, Komba, named after an Angolan funeral ceremony, tilts toward the latter.  Having played a big part in bringing Angolan kuduro (upbeat dance music based originally on Caribbean styles like zouk and soca) to international attention—at least for clubgoers who pay heed to what they are dancing to—Buraka Som Sistema filtered it through the more familiar club genres techno and house music.  Too often on Komba, I feel as though the African rhythmic elements, incantations, and other trappings are merely an excuse to dress up interchangeable dancefloor beats with a taste of the exotic.  Again and again, one hears a single tone that is syncopated and contrasted with one a half-step higher, or modulated a step downward—it is for this sort of compositional “creativity” that MTV Europe awards are given out?  “Tira o Pé” (Take the Foot Off) begins with a tantalizing percussion snippet to which African chanting is added, however, this is quickly and egregiously dissolved into videogame-quality sound effects and a leaden beat, sacrificing the one thing that could make the track stand out—all in the service of the boogie-ing masses.  “Hypnotized” far from what its title would suggest, is the most irritating and headache-inducing cut on the record, ceaselessly pounding home the vapid phrase, “I’m like, hypnotized,” together with a few asides that are sometimes hard to follow.  I do, however, enjoy the CD booklet’s explanation that “vocal samples [were] chopped and screwed from weird and unsuccessful vocal recordings from the past!”  The techno-flavored single “(We Stay) Up All Night” is a prime instance of a track that sounds robotic and prefabricated.  The disc’s other cut released as a single, “Hangover (Bababa),” is head-shakingly silly and infectious on one level, mind-numbingly repetitious on another.  “Macumba,” featuring Mixhell, a Brazilian husband-wife producer duo of Igor Cavalera (former Sepultura drummer) and Laima Leyton that likes to use live percussion, serves as an instrumental pendant to “Hangover,” taking that song’s rhythmic pattern and barely varying tonal cycling and shaking it up in interesting ways, with medical instrument monitoring tones, vaguely heard chanting, police whistles, synthesizer triplet breaks.  When it recommits to the original rhythm, it has the intensity of a dentist’s drill.  Of the various guest performers Buraka Som Sistema invites, the one that was familiar to me already is Colombia’s Bomba Estéreo (see the 2009 music survey); the Colombian group leads the final track, “Burakaton,” whose endlessly reiterated chant “sube el volumen” (raise the volume) quickly becomes tiresome.  The opening track, “Eskeleto” (Skeleton), is spellbinding, although it sets up the schematic of syncopated half-step intervals that much of the rest of the album follows slavishly.  The song quickly transports the listener into another world, tolling minor-mode chord resolutions as a woman’s voice (credited as “Nair”—uncertain if this is Petra Nayr, who appears elsewhere on the disc) chants, “Alo? Alo?” as if on the other end of a long-distance line, bringing bad tidings.  The song’s midsection is a third-world-themed Dickensian mini-biography by the grime rapper Afrikan Boy (Olushola Ajose), a Nigerian-born Londoner.  The track ends as the music drops away and a voice narrates how the komba funeral ceremony unfolds.  The song “Komba,” which follows immediately from there, is by contrast colorless.  For the album’s best track, “Candonga,” Buraka achieves a true synthesis of African source material and production effects from the “metropole” crew in Lisbon.  The song’s theme is never taken terribly far, but at least it is a genuine melodic cell, and this is set to a rhythm that is galloping most of the time but pauses at intervals to float suspended.  In addition, there are hiccups, bits of chatter, vocal asides in which the singer Petra Nayr sounds uncannily like Zuco 103’s Lílian Vieira, electronic zaps, background snatches of traditional African strings, and what sounds like a jittery melodica.        B

Sample song  “Hangover (Bababa)”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOMe-8Tf1Y0

KATE BUSH, 50 Words for Snow (Fish People/ Anti)—In spite of the glow from its burnished sonorities that offset its boreal imagery and wintry themes, Kate Bush’s latest is a challenge to warm up to.  50 Words for Snow, her first studio record since 2005’s double disc Aerial, released on her own Fish People label, is a delicate skein, with exquisite tonal colors, that is unwound at such a tentative pace as to tax the patience of the most easygoing listener, notwithstanding her skill in setting moods and conjuring dreamlike atmospheres.  The seven long songs, spreading across more than sixty-five minutes, are impressionistic rather than intricately structured; you are fully aware, in listening, that Bush is an experienced movie soundtrack composer.  Choruses, such as there are, are often spoken rather than sung, or sung in a way that is emotive but antimelodic.  Verses are deeply cushioned in space, as by a fresh snowpack.  All but two tracks make use of guest male vocalists, starting with Bush’s own son, Albert “Bertie” McIntosh, who was on the cusp of teenagerhood at the time of recording.  I generally find it self-indulgent when artists rope in their own children for performances, and indeed a touch of preciousness creeps into the mother-son duet on “Snowflake”; still, Bertie serves her purposes as well as would any boy soprano.  “Lake Tahoe” features Stefan Roberts and Michael Wood singing countertenor, and “Wild Man” has Andy Fairweather Low doing a chorus in an elevated register.  Bush explained in a radio interview that she had wanted to experiment with contrasting high male voices with her own lower one (not that her voice is particularly low), an intriguing concept that is troweled on only lightly.  In this context, it is ironic to note that, apart from the actor Stephen Fry, who has a speaking role in the title song, the album’s most deeply masculine voice belongs to none other than Elton John, paired with Bush on that echoey, colloidal suspension titled “Snowed In at Wheeler Street.”  The falling snow backdrop is consistent enough to make this a concept album of sorts, yet the final song, “Among Angels,” drops the whiteout tableau entirely and thus seems like an alien appendage (except that it is suitably slow in tempo and development).  Another constant for Bush throughout her three-decade-plus career is the sense of theatricality that pervades her music, veering toward purple prose in the war stories lyrics of “Snowed In at Wheeler Street” and spilling into melodrama in “Lake Tahoe,” which is nonetheless chilling in its retelling of a ghost tale in which a drowned woman returns home calling after her dog, Snowflake.  Although Bush’s voice is still in fine form, her entrance on “Lake Tahoe” is uncharacteristically raspy.  “Misty,” the longest song, weaves a weird but spellbinding fantasy of a nocturnal conjugal visit from a snowman; by morning, he has dissolved, and the sheets are wet.  Here, as elsewhere, the story outdoes the actual music, which relies on a sequence on modulating piano arpeggiations with occasional touches of daring chromaticism, over which Bush sings a nearly tuneless theme, distended like a humpback whale’s song.  The song that is easiest for the listener to get a handle on is “Wild Man,” whose theme could be rendered tongue in cheek as “Sympathy for the Yeti.”  The only track with a metronomic, if relaxed, beat as well as quasi-Asian guitar tunings, it is an unalloyed pleasure on a record that moves glacially or hesitantly elsewhere.  “50 Words for Snow” is a bit silly but in an inspired way:  Fry steps into the role of “Professor Joseph Yupik,” who is challenged by Bush (singing the chorus) to come up with the fifty synonyms for frozen precipitation and pulls off some doozies like “crème bouffant,” “whippoccino,” “slipperella,” and “mistraldespair,” among others that are merely bizarre or pedestrian.  The title track is the only one aside from “Wild Man” with a real sense of rhythmic motion to it.  At age fifty-three, Kate Bush has lost none of her daring; 50 Words for Snow is boldly original, uncompromising in its fidelity to an ambitious vision, to the point where the music itself is too frequently a casualty.         B+

Sample song  “Wild Man” ( version edited/shortened for radio):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3BzjfAjug4&feature=artistob&playnext=1&list=TLm_Wdm5HQPt8

CANT, Dreams Come True (Terrible Records)—Chris Taylor is familiar to those who keep current with the Brooklyn indie scene as the bassist for Grizzly Bear.  CANT is his solo project, on the record label he co-founded, and the debut is impressive.  Dreams Come True is a livelier, more active record than Grizzly Bear’s The Yellow House (2006) yet is unassuming in its way.  Taylor, showing off an ample stylistic range and capably smooth tenor voice, succeeds in what he sets out to do—and this in spite of the album’s taking a powder following the first song.  “Too Late, Too Far,” the opener, has a rolling/shuffling beat and a funky vibe that plays against its sense of dramatic tension and foreboding, fed by what sounds like a mournful, tribal/rain forest piccolo.  “Believe,” “The Edge,” and “BANG,” which follow “Too Late, Too Far” in sequence, are disappointingly inert but not at all tough to listen to.  The first two of these shoot for a certain soulfulness, woozy in the case of “Believe,” more conventionally mellow with a squishy bass for “The Edge,” except that the latter lapses into a dull, arrow-straight, pulsing rhythm halfway through that destroys the mood.  “BANG” is fairly soporific, like early-career Oasis on sedatives, until its final minute, when it briefly acquires an incongruously thrumming bass undercurrent before drifting out the same quiet way it entered the world.  After the brief instrumental break that is “(brokencollar)”—a few tantalizingly poignant chords and arpeggios from a tinny piano with the reverb pedal firmly depressed—Dreams Come True gets a kickstart with the dreamy “She Found a Way Out,” which is mannered bluesy/folksy in the style of Stephen Malkmus with his current band, the Jicks.  Like “BANG,” it becomes a very different song halfway through with the addition of a ricocheting drumbeat, rumbly bass chords, and wailing synthesizer overtones.  The shifty, moody “Answer,” closest in spirit to “Too Late, Too Far,” is at times slinky in its film noir sensibility; eventually, its dance beat becomes almost bombastic, surrounded by clangorous trappings.  This leads naturally into the title track, the noisiest and most electronics-heavy piece on the disc, with a punchy rhythm pattern pounded out by drums and bass, lots of screechy or squeaky resonances, and a verse that is growled breathily rather than sung.  The charms of “Dreams Come True” are purely rhythmic and timbral, yet it sets up a rambunctious contrast with the rest of the album’s material.  “Rises Silent” is yet another multifaceted number, dark in feel yet hyperactive in its jump-shifts, its aspirated, subdued vocals again in blues-tinged Malkmus mode, while chiming notes in the ether recall the Brothers Johnson’s rendition of “Strawberry Letter 23” (1977) by Shuggie Otis.  The final hundred seconds of the piece are again distinct:  a cycling set of piano chords (to which the final song, “Bericht” [Report], becomes a pendant) to accompany Taylor’s drowsy, downcast chorale, overdubbing his own voice, which concludes matters by migrating toward the sense of dreamy yearning that is Damon Albarn’s habitual turf.  CANT relies on the keyboards/synthesizers of George Lewis Jr., who records as Twin Shadow, throughout, as well as several other drummers for selected tracks and Aaron Parks on piano for “Rises Silent” and “Bericht.”        A/A-

Sample song  “Too Late, Too Far”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEuHXM8VNjc

DAVILA 666, Tan Bajo (In the Red Records)—When I listen to an album like this one, I have to be conscious of the distinction between how I feel about the genre and how the musicians perform within that genre, taken on its own terms. Davila 666 is commonly categorized as garage rock, not a style that thrills me, but even within that particular idiom, the band plays it safe and typically opts for the obvious over what might constitute a genuine departure from standard-issue.  These Spanish-speaking rockers admit to a larger following on the mainland than in their native Puerto Rico, and Tan Bajo (So Low), their second disc, is dedicated to the late garage/punk rocker Jay Reatard, who had been an early champion of theirs.  Garage rock it may be, but comparisons to other Latin pop acts of recent and earlier vintage are justifiable—if not inevitable—because Davila 666’s own music invites them.  It is more than a matter of the Apples in Stereo-style high-pitched vocals that lend the album a fizzier, more bubbly quality than one generally encounters emanating from the garage these days.  Some of the songs such as “Yo Sería Otro” (I Would Be Another) or “¡Diablo!” hark back to Cuba’s Los Zafiros of the 1960s, who themselves modeled their sound on that of the Platters and other doo-wop groups.  The retro stylings of Mexico’s Café Tacuba naturally spring to mind as well, and Davila 666 itself has characterized its music as “Menudo on drugs,” an association that seems best avoided.  Even on the more straightforward garage material, though, there is a self-conscious striving toward recapturing a raw sound from the 1960s and early 1970s.  Davila 666 is talented at finding melodic hooks, but the music is too timid to venture beyond its rudimentary three-chord sequences.  As such, the band serves more as a curator of a bygone style than as a true revivalist in the sense of bringing new life to that style via a fresh perspective—other than the novelty of presenting it to a Spanish-language audience.  In songs like “Obsesionao” (Obsessed), “Robacuna” (Cradle Robber), “Esa Nena Nunca Regresó” (That Girl Never Returned), and “Noche de Terror,” Davila 666 gets remarkable mileage from monotonal verses, or, in the case of “Patitas” (Little Paws), the chorus.  There are a few distinctive touches:  the saxophone squeals that introduce both the fuzzy-toned “Robacuna” and the mock-gothic “Noche de Terror” (in the latter simulating the sound of combustible material going up in flame); the aspirated zombie sounds that conclude “Noche de Terror”; the swingy railroad blues of “Los Cruces” (The Crossings), announced with a mournful train whistle; or the ghostly, minute-long appropriation of a bolero by one Ernesto Berríos, set to gently hooting horns, that forms the title track, leading off the record with something radically different from what follows.  The album employs the irritating device of hiding some thirty-five seconds of music (an uncredited, candy-themed fragment of a song) after five minutes of silence that succeed the final song, the blankly undistinguished “De Verdad” (Really)—hardly worth waiting around for.    B/B-

Sample song  “Obsesionao”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzmuqN2jEHs&feature=related

ESBEN AND THE WITCH, Violet Cries (Matador Records)—Exhibit A:  An indie rock trio from Brighton, England, dabbling in the realms of myth, Goth, and metal, with potential unrealized on its debut album.  Esben and the Witch, named after a Danish fairy tale, eschews ordinary song structure but does so in a way that is boring:  instead of verse-chorus alternation, many of its songs are all verse, with an unvarying relentlessness.  This is not to say that Esben and the Witch is dull (remember that potential); the band is very good at atmospherics and setting a scene.  Once it has done so, however, it seems not to know what to do next.  The result is simultaneously tantalizingly rich in conception and maddeningly static.  That the band’s sense of proportion is eccentric is evident from the very first song, “Argyria,” which consists largely of a massive buildup in volume and textural density.  A buildup to what, though?  The singing at last makes its entrance four minutes into the song as a gentle, mystic lay with echoey overdubs, accompanied by a single guitar, that simply peters out.  That is fine on its own, but what is the point of the protracted, overblown crescendo leading up to it?  “Marching Song” and “Chorea” both hit with some force because of the steely determination with which the band intensifies them as they go along.  Their studied direness takes inspiration from the Jefferson Airplane.  Yet “Marching Song” cycles tediously through the same pattern of notes.  “Chorea,” describing the effects of a congenital nervous disorder, is not quite as monomaniacal; it contains a break midway through, after which things get more subdued (relatively).  But the vocals are remarkably tuneless, and “Chorea” is not the only song for which this is true; the same goes for “Light Streams,” the verse section of “Hexagons IV,” and certain passages of the disjointed “Eumenides” (the final minute and a half of this song is incongruously kicked up into dance tempo).  The sung part in “Swans” at first is so shapeless that it seems to belong to a different song entirely from its delicate guitar complement; ultimately, they are better reconciled.  The most rounded songs are those that attempt to introduce at least some semblance of a chorus:  “Hexagons IV,” “Warpath,” and the more inconsequential “Marine Fields Glow.”  The plaintive “run fast, my friend” refrain of “Hexagons IV” makes compelling a song that would otherwise be entirely colorless.  “Warpath” is the most kinetic tune on the record, with all the Wagnerian heavy drama and anthemic choruses that would make any metal band proud; note that the official band video of the song, linked to below, cuts off its final minute.  I complain frequently in this forum about bands that cannot write decent lyrics; for Esben and the Witch, by contrast, lyrics are the primary selling point.  They are literate and genuinely poetic.  Rachel Davies sings in a suitably doomy voice, with shadings of Grace Slick (naturally) and Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine (see the 2009 music survey), as well as Camille Dalmais, who has sung with Nouvelle Vague.  Davies also plays drums, while Daniel Copeman plays guitar and fiddles with the electronics, and Thomas Fisher alternates between guitar, bass, and keyboards.  Although I have plenty of reservations about Violet Cries, some of whose material has previously been released, this band has enough native talent to make it worth watching in coming years.    B+/B

Sample song  “Warpath”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0nGE686qZU

FEIST, Metals (Cherrytree/ Interscope Records/Polydor)—Following Feist’s success with the single “1234” from her previous album, The Reminder (see the 2007 music survey), one had to wonder if she would be lured by the prospect of widespread popular acclaim (and the attendant commercial endorsements) or would choose to stay in the rarefied environs of indie pop (in the true sense, not the marketing sense), making records of exquisite taste heard primarily in hip coffee shops.  With Metals, she is moving in another direction, eschewing not just commercialism but also anything that could be considered twee or partake of jazz-pop diva-hood.  The new album bears the imprint of fellow Canadian producers/songwriters/musicians Chilly Gonzales (Jason Beck) and Mocky (Dominic Salole), with whom Feist has worked on her previous recordings; they co-wrote several of the (mostly weaker) tracks on Metals.  It is much more Western (perhaps reflecting Feist’s Alberta upbringing or the fact that the disc was recorded in Big Sur, California), folk-inspired, and rougher in texture than her previous efforts.  Although there are clangorous or intricately layered ensemble passages that feature electronic instruments, the guiding spirit is spare and acoustic.  There are, alas, stretches of dullness that bring down the album’s quality.  Its single, “How Come You Never Go There,” has a catchy soulfulness but is too circumscribed—verse, chorus, and bridge practically indistinguishable, all resting within a fixed note progression—to be appreciated on anything but the most casual level.  More soul-stirring is the song that follows it, “A Commotion,” powered by chugging strings and percussion accenting the first, fourth, and seventh eighth-notes for a sense of syncopation, but it is also, if not quite monochromatic, then painted in broad streaks with a palette of just a few related colors.  These two flawed gems—together with the rangy and sensual “The Bad in Each Other,” a duet with Bry Webb, and the understated “Caught a Long Wind,” with its exquisitely delicate, music box opening, an interplay between guitar, wind chimes, and bells—are the best of what the album’s first half has to offer.  The intensity really picks up with “Anti-Pioneer,” following a snooze through “The Circle Married the Line” and “Bittersweet Melodies.”  “Anti-Pioneer,” a blues-tinged ballad in 6/8 meter, is deceptively low-key, rousing itself only for a brief ensemble crescendo about three-quarters of the way through, but theatrical tension and a sultry fervency of conviction are maintained throughout, thanks to the songwriting but also to the suppleness of Feist’s voice, which can change hue and timbre radically within a single phrase.  After “Anti-Pioneer” comes “Undiscovered First,” which, beginning as a blues-folk melody set to a gentle march beat, builds through a flinty, rallying chorus section to a thrilling choral climax backed by uncharacteristically stomping percussion before dying off to a faint echo.  “Comfort Me” centers on the disturbing confession “When you comfort me/It doesn’t bring me comfort actually.”  As in “Undiscovered First,” what begins softly, as a reckoning with a dysfunctional relationship set to acoustic guitar and voice, suddenly adds choral heft and a big beat halfway through, reverting to the original only in its closing measures.  “Comfort Me,” “Undiscovered First,” and “Anti-Pioneer” are as good as anything to have issued from Feist’s songwriting pen; had the rest of the record measured up to that standard, it would have been one of the year’s treasures.        B+

Sample song  “How Come You Never Go There”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2uVRMBD5RY&feature=artistob&playnext=1&list=TLl3DJAC354HM

FRENTE CUMBIERO, Frente Cumbiero Meets Mad Professor (Vampi Soul)—If you like this record (and I do, for the most part), you get to hear it twice, once in its unadulterated cumbia form and a second time as a cumbia-dub mix.  Bass guitarist, player of the guacharaca (scraper), and songwriter Mario Galeano Toro is the Colombian world traveler behind Frente Cumbiero (Cumbia Front), one of a number of neo-cumbia outfits that have arisen in Colombia in recent years, taking their cue from performers in Mexico and Argentina who were already updating one of Colombia’s most popular native genres.  (Some of those groups participated in the making of this record, including Monareta’s Andrés Martínez on guitar, Bomba Estéreo’s Liliana Saumet on vocals, and several members of the reggae/ska group Alerta Kamarada.)  The first half of the record, the seven “original” tracks, mixed in Buenos Aires, consist of five instrumentals and two numbers with vocals.  Given the light, playful nature of the voiceless compositions, the rapping of Shaun Turner on the third track, “Ariwacumbé,” named for producer Joe Ariwa, seems like an intrusion.  The song begins promisingly with a seductive combination of muted trombone (José Miguel Vega) and accordion (Javier Morales) leading to a thundering staccato monotone attack from the rest of the band, but once Turner enters, singing in English about the “gypsy rock/nonstop cumbia/hip-hop . . .” the rest of the band, aside from a few brass and accordion flourishes, relaxes into the most generic sort of cumbia accompaniment.  It manages to be both boring and annoying!  “Analógica,” the longest track on the disc, features three different singers, of which Javier Fonseca of Alerta Kamarada possesses that grating, Rufus Wainwright sort of male alto voice that makes me want to cover my ears.  He is followed by Kiño, toasting in an earthy tenor.  Liliana Saumet’s low, tremulous, more appealing voice is interwoven with the others at intervals, but mostly what one hears is Fonseca, unfortunately.  If these voices fail to entertain, then the song becomes a pile of tedium since the musicians are doing little except keeping the rhythm going in the background.  The instrumentals are what makes Frente Cumbiero Meets Mad Professor truly enjoyable, starting with “Chucusteady.”  This tune, and several others as well like “La Bocachico,” titled after an Amazon river fish or a Colombian town of the same name, showcases a klezmer-like, note-bending clarinetist, Marco Fajardo, in a captivating dialogue with the baritone sax and brass players.  Though the cumbia beat never varies, the winds and horns take solos in between ensemble reiterations of the primary melody, in jazz fashion.  “Bestiales 77” is a frenetic, percussive, infectious piece whose pacing and accordion-led melody resemble some of the signature musical styles of northeastern Brazil, a long way from Colombia but perhaps similar in its ranching and country music-and-dancing culture.  The only piece that is heard just once is “Gaita del Profesor Loco” (Hurdy-Gurdy of the Mad Professor), another jaunty klezmer-esque offering.  “Cumbietíope” (Ethiopian Cumbia) is fascinating in its own right:  according to an interview with Galeano Toro in the website/magazine iCrates, Colombians were exposed in the 1970s to Mulatu Astatke (see the 2009 music survey) and his “Ethio-jazz” take on Cuban music in the song “I Faram,” which achieved popularity after being retitled in Spanish, “El Guaguancó de los Elefantes.”  Cumbietíope” incorporates into its rousing, brass-dominant primary melody the pentatonics of Ethiopian music as a subtheme for a taste of the exotic.  The dub versions of the originals, mixed in London by Joe Ariwa and the Mad Professor (the Guyanese-born Neil Joseph Stephen Fraser), are moderately interesting for a different perspective on the music, laid-back and shimmery with reverb, as the producers pick out various elements to highlight.  On “Chucusteady,” for example, the characteristic clarinet is kept out of the mix until late in the song.  “Ariwacumbé” is actually better without the hip-hop presence, bringing to the surface instead a trombone solo that got buried in the original, but the listener gets yet another chance to hear the rapping in the album’s final track and third rendition of the song, “Ariwacumbé Shaunvox,” which adds a few reggae-tinted choruses from Turner.  Dub “Analógica,” which has only echoey snatches of the vocals, is likewise improved by the transformation.  Incidentally, the back cover of the CD mixes up the order of the dub versions:  on the record, “La Bocachico” precedes “Ariwacumbé,” the opposite of the sequencing on the record’s first half.    A-

Sample song  “Chucusteady”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZVwHq1jVXs

GANG GANG DANCE, Eye Contact (4AD)—The first full-length release since Saint Dymphna (see the 2008 music survey), Eye Contact shares with M83 (see below) a certain exuberance, reveling in maximalism of electronic sound and unconcerned with restraint.  Gang Gang Dance is more experimental than Anthony Gonzalez of M83, less interested in sonic beauty for its own sake and more in a collective effort toward something that is phantasmagoric but not intimidatingly so.  Eye Contact is unafraid to be weird, and it is indeed weird in various places.  “MindKilla,” for instance, shoehorns its own variant on the lullaby “Hush, Little Baby” into a jumpy, edgy dance number; undoubtedly vigorous, the song seems to pursue strangeness for its own sake, without regard for actual artistry.  At the summit of the bizarre is Lizzi Bougatsos’s somewhat annoying kewpie-doll voice, processed through various filters.  “Chinese High” begins with a recording of a woman reciting something in Chinese (perhaps just counting?) followed by a laugh, vocally manipulated in several ways, before leaving off in favor of what turns out to be a fairly innocuous, bouncy tune, in which Bougatsos’s vocal stylings bear at least some passing resemblance to those of an Asian pop singer from your grandfather’s era.  Far less unusual, “Romance Layers” hands the microphone over to Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, whose George Michael-esque androgynous vocals are well matched to this gauzy, moderate-tempo pop confection, like a mille-feuille spiced with quasi-pentatonic harmonics.   The true glory of Eye Contact is in the symphonic electronic swirl it summons up in the longer and more involved numbers, from the majestic, eleven-minute opener, “Glass Jar,” through “Adult Goth” and “Sacer” to the modal harmonics and simulacrum of Middle Eastern instrumentation on the closing “Thru and Thru.”  These compositions all have the power to stir and a sweep that supersedes their baroqueries.  “Glass Jar” takes its sweet old time developing.  The first few minutes have a gentle pulse amid dreamy keyboard phrases and cymbal rolls; there is an intensification of the primary harmonic sequence about three and a half minutes in, played on what sounds like a harmonium, accompanied by drum attacks.  All this is prelude:  the rhythm becomes steady only in the piece’s seventh minute, soon after which Bougatsos’s voice weaves a wistful gossamer melody, more fragmentary than whole.  The band brings in one last alien element—steel pans—in the intervals between verses.  It all adds up to a heady brew, exhilaratingly inventive.  By contrast, “Adult Goth” lays its cards on the table all at once; Bougatsos’s singing is a layer of exotica and intrigue above a stately processional of ground bass and billowing synthesizer arpeggios, richly consonant and complex and bearing the stamp of progressive rock acts of a generation ago.  “Sacer,” another song with deliberate pacing and strong compositional logic, might have worked better as an instrumental; the lyrics are negligible, at least up to the bubbly “I’m so high” section, striking me as needless ornament.  Bougatsos’s enunciations are horrendous, beyond the consideration that her voice is usually swaddled in a sonically dense mix, which makes it all the more irritating that just three songs (“MindKilla,” “Sacer” and “Thru and Thru”) have printed English lyrics in the CD booklet.  There are three songs on the disc with the symbol for infinity in the title; these are brief interludes but each very different from the others:  “∞” is a sensitively delicate setting of the singing of the late “Big George” Bougatsos (a cousin, brother, or uncle of Lizzi?) in Greek, while “∞ ∞” is a clever little rhythm and keyboard downtempo groove with bits of vocal sampling interspersed.  “∞ ∞ ∞” is not really an independent piece at all, merely a transition between “Sacer” and “Thru and Thru.”  I am not sure what cosmic significance to attach to the album’s beginning with a voice announcing, “I can hear everything; it’s everything time” and ending with another voice urging, “Live forever!”  But it does reinforce the spiritual kinship with M83’s disc.        A-

Sample song  “MindKilla”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2R7k1_kOqvk

TIM HECKER, Ravedeath, 1972 (Kranky Records)—A WFMU listener on the station’s comments board described hearing Tim Hecker’s Ravedeath, 1972 performed live in a London church as “Strange/boring/exhilarating/painful/soothing in equal measures,” which seems apropos.  There are times when my mind wanders because there is not enough happening in this ambient electronica to keep it focused.  Hecker, a Canadian now living in Montreal, who recorded previously as Jetone, bends toward minimalism yet not necessarily austerity:  his layering of sounds can build to produce genuine drama, if nothing so crassly dynamic as a climactic moment.  The instrumentation is listed on the CD jacket as “computer, pipe organ, synthesizer, piano, microphone and guitar amp feedback.”  The album is full of sustained notes, held for the equivalent of several measures (there is no meter to speak of) before changing; the tones resonate, ripple, and undulate while other things go on in the background:  plinking piano, high-pitched whirring, low rumbles or drones, percussive sound effects.  “Piano Drop,” the opening piece, named for an annual ritual in Cambridge, Mass., dating back to 1972 in which MIT students push a piano off the roof of a dormitory, far from being ambient, buffets the ears with loud fuzzy tones full of foreboding that are made choppy through an audio engineering technique called a rhythmic gate or “trancegate.”  Other than a bit of bass pedal effect, this is all that takes place in “Piano Drop.”  The three-part second composition, “In the Fog,” employs the same technique in its third movement to different effect:  the rapid-eye-movement opening and closing of the sound gate creates a fierce vibrato that strives against a cycling note pattern from the organ that gives the piece some tonal color.  The first section of “In the Fog” contrasts stark piano strokes with a cushion of fluctuating synthesizer sustain, while the second “drops” the piano and intensifies the synth pulsing and background grinding noises.  “No Drums is an oddly named song since none of the album’s entries contain percussion, yet it has the disc’s most pronounced pulsations to underscore its own repeating six-note cycle.  “Hatred of Music,” a two-part composition, processes a screechy synthesizer tone pattern through various effects in its first movement, gradually swelling in volume and becoming thicker in texture, then dying away.  The second movement keeps the synthesizer sound on a more even keel so that piano noodling in the background can be heard clearly.  “Analog Paralysis, 1978” and “Studio Suicide, 1980” are two tracks in which nothing terribly interesting is going on; the former ends with a repetitive metallic squeak like that of a guitar pick sliding across strings.  “In the Air,” the record’s concluding triptych, resembles the three-part “In the Fog” in that the second movement is the most active and densely stratified.  Notably, throughout the first and second movements there are keyboard notes and chord changes that, out of thin air, establish striking, even piercing implied harmonies.  A bit remote and chilly for my liking, with an ascetic’s refusal to engage on easy terms, Ravedeath, 1972 is nonetheless well conceived and executed.        A-

Sample song  “Hatred of Music I”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUpA8R01d50

JUSTICE, Audio, Video, Disco (Ed Banger Records/Elektra Entertainment)—Attempting to recapture past glories may be futile, but the duo that make up Justice, Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay, might have been well advised to try harder.  Audio, Video, Disco starts off as if aiming to do just that:  “Horsepower,” an instrumental that kicks off the disc, revisits the quasi-industrial electronica/house music that made Justice’s debut album, † (see the 2007 music survey), such a visceral pleasure, music at the cutting edge that literally sounded that way, guitars like a circular saw slicing through steel ingots.  Already, though, there are differences between “Horsepower” and anything on †.  The song starts off slow, with a doomy Goth intro that seems to be one of the band’s signatures.  But, wait, what is this?  It is followed by a progressive guitar lick, classical in inspiration with yowling, canned arpeggios at the ready, before turning on the dancefloor rhythmic grinding.  Is this 1974?  Perhaps 1982?  At times, Justice seems to be aiming for the schlockiest elements of prog rock as it went into creative eclipse, to near universal scorn from critics.  “Civilization,” the first song with words, might not seem out of place on the debut record of the supergroup Asia, melodic but blunt-edged, galumphing, and overeager to please, like a Labrador retriever.  “Canon,” following a set-piece, half-minute, madrigalesque keyboard introduction, shamelessly recycles riffs from the Edgar Winter Group’s 1973 classic “Frankenstein,” even as it plows methodically through Baroque figurations like a set of études, all set to a dance beat à la Switched-on Bach (1968).  “Brianvision” (named for whom?) is marinated in fat, antique-car-horn-grade keyboard chords, sprinkled with glittery effects in the fashion of late-career Electric Light Orchestra.  Justice dabbled in these sorts of timbres on its first record but never more than momentarily.  The title track, closing out the track list, begins as another Bachian keyboard invention before switching to a pounding keyboard theme with a driving beat that would be more convincing if not matched with such a wispy, humdrum melody, for which de Rosnay sings the three words of the title repeatedly.  The song effectively contains a hidden track, an entirely unrelated piece, ceremoniously slow and grave in the spirit of the recorder-led introduction to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” (1971).  This begins a minute or so after “Audio, Video, Disco” peters out.  “New Lands,” the last song with more than a simple chorus for lyrics, has a buttery, Steve Winwood falsetto suavity to it, sung by Morgan Phalen (he also sings on “On’n’On”), but the song’s lengthy instrumental bridge revs up the beats per minute, then piles up shimmery chords; we are back in Asia territory.  What keeps the work of these two Frenchmen from congealing into a giant cheeseball is their sheer talent for composition.  Like their compatriots Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel of Air (see the 2009 music survey), Augé and de Rosnay are crafty tunesmiths who know how to hit their marks, even if the larger creative project seems vainglorious.  The track of choice on Audio, Video, Disco is “Ohio,” which the duo’s manager, Pedro Winter (“Busy P,” no apparent relation to Edgar), calls a David Crosby homage.  It does indeed begin in folky mode, with a cappella harmonies furnished by Vincenzi Vendetta.  Although the keyboards eventually overwhelm the vocal performance, this is the one song on the record capable of touching the soul directly.  The idea of a contemporary interpretation of the progressive music of the seventies and early eighties appears better in concept than in execution; Justice may simply not be the right group to pull it off.  It only remains to be seen whether the pair revert to their original formula the next time round.        B+

Sample song  “Audio, Video, Disco”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqBhgEQ4LT0&ob=av2e

JENS LEKMAN, An Argument with Myself (Secretly Canadian)—The latest in a long line of EPs by the droll Swedish singer/songwriter, An Argument with Myself seems to point up Lekman’s weaknesses as a composer as much as it does his strengths as a storyteller and poet of urban life.  From a musical standpoint, nothing exciting is taking place in these five short songs.  They do at least vary stylistically among themselves, but they also sound slapped together from pre-existing sources rather than forged in the fires of a talented notesmith.  The title track, opening the EP, is a witty, boulevardier tale of split personalities at war in the singer’s mind, as he wanders around Melbourne, Australia, where much of the disc was recorded.  Pleasantly upbeat, its guitar accompaniment has a quasi-West African lilt to it, but the song develops little in the way of character.  A sampling of Rachel Sweet’s “It’s So Different Here” (1978) is well buried in one of the break sections.  “Waiting for Kirsten” is a combination of starstruck tribute to Kirsten Dunst, autobiographical outline, and portrait of Gothenburg today, where Lekman makes his home (and where Dunst’s visit on a filming prompted this tune); the ballad is readily hummable, but its virtues do not extend beyond that.  “A Promise” is the longest and oddest song, a rambling open letter to an ill and overworked friend pledging relief in the form of a trip to Chile; the blankly undistinguished tune incorporates bits of Latin percussion and strings in way that feels tacked on instead of integral.  “New Directions” begins with a trumpet fanfare and incorporates saxophone and brass syncopated patterns as well as the light soprano vocals of Ulrika Mild and a rhythm guitar sequence that smacks of Naked Eyes’ “Promises Promises” (1983); in narrative terms, its jumble of Google Maps-type directions might be the least satisfying, yet, compositionally, it is the most daring.  The EP ends with “So This Guy at My Office,” which is based on a melody by Bill Wells (Lekman’s co-writer on the piece), “Half Seas Over.”  Its entertaining tale of aggrieved paranoia and its reggae-inspired beat share a great deal with They Might Be Giants’ “Hearing Aid,” from Flood (1990), yet the song changes tone halfway through as it becomes clear that the initial narrator is actually the singer’s romantic partner; once the perspective changes from her to the singer himself, it ends as a mellowly insipid tale of conjugal devotion.  Brevity may be the soul of wit, but An Argument with Myself is a disappointingly slight effort from Lekman.    B

Sample song  “An Argument with Myself”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSfnu2sm9go

LYKKE LI, Wounded Rhymes (LL Recordings/ Atlantic Records)—On first hearing Wounded Rhymes, my thought was, I have a sense of why people flock to iTunes and other purveyors of MP3s:  When one song stands head and shoulders above the rest, why bother with the full album?  This is does not entirely do justice to Li’s record, which has some other good songs, as became clear through more focused listening, with the remainder merely inoffensive.  But “Silent My Song,” which the Swedish singer performed on the late-night television circuit, helping to expand her audience beyond a hipster/cult following, remains in a class by itself.  Its dirgelike pacing, with groaning bass chords for emphasis, accentuates the starkness of Li’s unmodulated voice in the verse portion, slightly softened and redeemed by the choral arrangement that constitutes the song’s refrain and tonal resolution.  In its icy grandeur and its baroque imagery suggestive of sadomasochistic acts, it evokes the music of fellow Swedes The Knife.  Not even formally released as a single, it is a ringing way to close out what otherwise might be considered a lightweight sophomore offering from the young native of Ystad, near Sweden’s southern tip.  “I Follow Rivers,” which was issued as a single and reached no. 1 in Belgium, is mellifluously catchy, with a buoyant beat that features some tuned percussion that could easily be mistaken for the mbira thumb piano of central and southern Africa.  “Get Some,” the record’s initial single, offers a big, barreling urban-jungle drumbeat to support a verse that is essentially a modulating dual-tone phrase (the chorus is better rounded), as Li announces, “I’m your prostitute/you gon’ get some.”  Who could resist an invitation like that?  OK, quite a few could, which is beside the point; the song is hardly great art but its sticky sultriness is enjoyable for as long as the ride lasts.  “Youth Knows No Pain,” the opening tune, harks back to the psychedelia of the late sixties, especially in its Doors-directed, acid rock organ groove, played by Björn Yttling, of Peter Bjorn and John fame (see the 2007 and 2009 music surveys), who also produced the disc.  Of all the tracks on the disc, this is the one that plows the same furrow as the Black Angels’ Phosphene Dream (see the 2010 music survey).  Li’s voice in these numbers is a little too strident to be truly expressive; a lack of subtlety is one of her shortcomings as a singer.  “Sadness Is a Blessing,” the weakest of the four songs put forth as singles, springs from the same rhythmic/accompaniment raw materials as the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack” (1964), minus its progenitor’s dynamism or melodrama; it amounts to a self-pitying bleat for sympathy.  But it does lend its words to the album’s title, with the opening verse, “My wounded rhymes make silent cries tonight.”  “Unrequited Love” and “I Know Places” are sparer songs, in folk ballad mode.  “Unrequited Love,” while it burbles in lamentation every bit as much as “Sadness Is a Blessing,” is particularly effective in its setting of Li’s voice, supplemented by her girl-group chorus for periodic emphasis, almost a cappella against Yttling’s electric guitar arpeggios.  The soothing, almost soporific “I Know Places” is beefed up by a seemingly unrelated two-minute instrumental section appended to the finale, throbbing keyboard whole tones and gently keening guitars.  Perhaps my initial impression of the ten-track Wounded Rhymes as “Snow White and the nine dwarfs” was not so far off base after all.        B+

Sample song  “Get Some”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TTPGAy5H_E&feature=fvwrel

LITTLE DRAGON, Ritual Union (Peacefrog Holdings)—Little Dragon first came to my attention with a guest appearance on the Gorillaz record Plastic Beach (see the 2010 music survey).  At that point, I was not even aware that there was a full band (from Gothenburg, like Jens Lekman—see above) behind the eponymous singer, Yukimi “Little Dragon” Nagano, who earned her nickname because of the tirades she supposedly used to indulge in while recording.  Ritual Union, the Swedish band’s third album, sits at the synthpop end of the electronica spectrum, with a grounding in downtempo breakbeats and the neo-soul sensibility that is transmitted through Nagano’s voice.  She is a capable singer; at times, though, her mannerisms veer too close to sobbing for my liking.  The record bears at least superficial similarities to the output of Goldfrapp (see the 2010 music survey) but is actually less venturesome.  That said, Little Dragon does well enough within the confines of its own vision, producing dance pop with a sense of impetus and, at its best, as in the single “Nightlight,” an elegant economy of construction.  “Ritual Union,” the opening song, is a peculiarly European hybrid:  immaculately clinical, repetitive, Kraftwerk-inspired instrumentation, paired with vocals that reach back to African-American sources, rather than the robotic, bloodless type of chanting preferred by Kraftwerk.  Tunes such as this one, and “Little Man” and “Please Turn,” for that matter, sound a little too prefab, like (much as it pains me to stoop to national stereotyping) the Ikea furniture of electronic music, although “Please Turn” develops some harmonic depth at its climax.  “Shuffle a Dream” has a stretchy, limber assertiveness, a bouncy beat, and a Michael Jackson-esque R&B vocal approach.  “Precious” takes on more of a techno edge, with its broad, flat synthesizer phrases ending in swoops or flashy filigree, ultimately consolidating and intensifying into Giorgio Moroder-style oscillating rapid bass figurations.  “Crystalfilm” is one of the more reflective songs, yet, for all its pulsing and plaintive singing, it has a hollow core, musically speaking a mere trifle.  Little Dragon is at its most interesting in its trippier numbers, where off-color keyboard washes combine with high whistling pitch sequences, processed vocals, and other electronic ornamentation; “Brush the Heat” is the consummate expression of this more experimental side; its mournful, swoony sustained chords could have been ripped straight off of Pizzicato Five’s This Year’s Girl (1991).  The six-minute-long “When I Go Out” is cushioned by a gently shuffling breakbeat pattern augmented by bits of brushed cymbal and deeper drum sounds; Nagano’s voice is engineered to sound as though emerging from catacombs, perhaps, but her verse takes a back seat to the shimmery keyboards and steady percussion.  This ends abruptly, and the track’s static final twenty-two seconds serve as an intro to the final number, “Seconds,” a tepid exercise in clockwork precision.  For those interested in the lyrics, the snaky way these are printed on the inset, with cursive lines crossing each other, is bound to baffle and frustrate even the most devoted.        B+

Sample song  “Crystalfilm”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDVrTYW2l84

M83, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming (Mute Records)—The double-disc set Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming is sumptuous synthpop yet still leaves one wanting more.  More ambitious than Anthony Gonzalez’s previous recording as M83, Saturdays = Youth (see the 2008 music survey), it is also at times less sure-footed.  Both records indulge in the naïveté of youthful, unbridled passion; the dreamy romanticism that is so much part of the fabric of the earlier album becomes the central organizing principle of the current one.  In spite of Gonzalez’s lately having moved from the south of France to Los Angeles (good for career advancement but rarely a boon to creativity) and having taken inspiration from visiting the Joshua Tree National Park, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming strikes me as a particularly “European” record, at least in terms of its vocal treatments, which do not shy from being a little cheesy in a way that so much Europop can be, from Air to Focus to Jan Hammer.  Gonzalez’s own vocals (he does most of the real singing here, as opposed to the scatting and other vocal arrangements) actually are more in the mode of Tunde Adebimpe, the lead singer of TV on the Radio (see below), in their agonized, almost sobbing tone.  Absent from the twin disc is the ultra-light, virginally pure soprano of Morgan Kibby, whose singing graced the 2008 disc; she appears on the new one but in a role limited to backing vocals and whispered monologues, unfortunately.  Instead, Gonzalez employs the lower and sturdier voice of Zola Jesus (see below), as well as Medicine’s Brad Laney and Amy White of Lindsley Road (formerly of West Indian Girl), while choral work comes from an assemblage known for the purposes of this record as the “Purple Mixed Adult Choir,” along with the “Shakespeare Bridge Children’s Choir.”  (Other musicians perform uncredited—and, apparently, unpaid—as the “Orphans String and Brass Orchestra.”)  Spoken parts are also distributed to Chelsea Alden, Lydie Benzakin, and Zelly Boo Meldal-Johnsen, the young daughter of Gonzalez’s producer and co-writer/co-performer (on guitars and synthesizers) Justin Meldal-Johnsen.  The material on the album could have fit onto a single disc—the two together are barely longer than Tori Amos’s Night of Hunters (see above)—even if the “hidden” track, “Mirrors,” were included.  But Gonzalez wanted them as paired discs, with each of the eleven tracks on the first having a counterpart on the second, although the companionship is not always evident.  The first pairing, for instance, of the “Intro” with “My Tears Are Becoming a Sea” contrasts a mood of adrenaline-rush resolve in the former with a calmer, more passive attitude in the latter; what they have in common are Gonzalez’s overwrought vocals and fairly static, sustained synthesizer tones, which are particularly brash on the “Intro.”  It is hard to discern any relationship between “Raconte-moi une Histoire” (Tell Me a Story), a kids’ tale about a magic frog that alters perception and reality, and the wordless, if not voiceless, “Year One, One UFO,” with its guitar tremolos and eventually pounding guitar and rolling percussion attacks.  “Raconte-moi une Histoire” is cute but a touch irritating at first since the music is nothing more than a relentlessly repeating keyboard note pair in dotted rhythm (short-long, short-long, short-long, later adopted for an Expedia TV commercial) and some snappy percussion beneath the narration of Zelly Boo Meldal-Johnsen.  But the glory of this album is in its orchestrations, as Gonzalez and Meldal-Johnsen père build an elaborate strings and choral mesh around the dual-note pulse once Meldal-Johnsen fille finishes her part.  All of seven years old (I have reason to believe) when this recording was made, Zelly Boo has a remarkable presence and flair for dramatic narration.  A more straightforward pairing is dancefloor-friendly “Midnight City,” the album’s first single, bouncy in its oddly high-pitched hum at the chorus, with the ebulliently jangly and energetic “New Map,” which features a New Wave–style monotone bass thrum and, toward the close, a swingy harmonic arrangement for multiple flutes.  As bold and breezy a departure as anything Broken Social Scene might conceive in that band’s uptempo moments, “New Map” is one of the record’s triumphs.  “Reunion,” another bright, high-volume number from the first disc, suffers from a colorless, half-shouted verse, but, again, the orchestrations of the shoegaze-heavy chorus redeem the piece; Kibby voices the breathy monologue midsection.  Its corresponding song from Disc 2, “OK Pal,” is more resplendent, even gaudy, in its extroversion, as if TV on the Radio’s Adebimpe had fronted the late-career Electric Light Orchestra; falsetto scatting and a euphoric synthesizer vamp serve as the icing on the cake.  This time, cute little redheaded actress Chelsea Alden delivers the monologue in a barely inflected half whisper.  Of the two compositions named for cultural figures, “Steve McQueen” from the second disc is a platter of delicacies, by turns swirly and cosmic, noisily percussive and insistently pulsing with whorls of falsetto whooping capping the chorus, or broad themed and consonant with cycling arpeggios; “Claudia Lewis,” after the poet and children’s author, is slower and looser limbed, even as its lyric relates a tale of interstellar loneliness and yearning, once more embellished with choral whoops and cut through with the alien (in a different sense) sound of the slap bass, à la Seinfeld theme.  The short instrumentals “Train to Pluton” and “Fountains” are plausibly twinned as reveries, the one combining the sound of passing train cars with ethereally twinkly keyboards and the other with sighing falsetto doubling a consonantly placid, repeating synthesizer thematic sequence.  Because song lyrics are generally mawkish (there is some genuine poetry to “Echoes of Mine,” the only lyric in French, voiced by the aged Benzakin) or dopey (“I killed all the rainbows, and the species”), the instrumental or quasi-instrumental chamber pieces such as the limpid, reverberant “Where the Boats Go” or its more searing mate, “Another Wave from You,” or the spectral recorder choir of “When Will You Come Home?” are the bagatelles in the package.  The dullest pairing is “Wait”/”Splendor”:  “Wait” begins with some gentle acoustic strumming, then builds to a raucous lament that is the essence of sentimentality congealed; “Splendor” starts with descending piano chords that introduce an insipid theme taken up by the children’s chorus, which is stirred to life now and again by cinematic drumrolls.  Both closing tracks are suitably benedictory, with the “Outro” from Disc 2 being more convoluted than the beatific “Soon, My Friend” from Disc 1.  The interlude track, the sequestered  “Mirror,” strident and driven by a battery of percussion in a quasi-samba beat, is anything but soothing, though fresh harmonies revealed about three-quarters of the way through relieve it of its unidimensionality.  One ought to be able to download this track, which is not on either disc, from the M83 website, but doing so with the secret code is far more baffling than it really needs to be; nonetheless, “Mirror” is readily accessible on YouTube.        A-

Sample song  “Midnight City”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX3k_QDnzHE

MASTODON, The Hunter (Reprise Records)—I was never much of a fan of heavy metal, but I readily acknowledge its kinship with the progressive rock groups I grew up listening to:  both draw inspiration from science fiction and fantasy worlds (and, increasingly these days, cross-pollinating with videogames), and both appeal primarily to white males in the fifteen-to-thirty-five demographic.  In the metal world, the bombast is right at the surface, with little effort made to cloak it artfully, and the drumbeats are almost always huge.  I admit to having The Hunter in the survey in part because I wanted representation from at least one metal band, and I could not abide the screaming vocals of the group most talked about in 2011, Liturgy.  Mastodon, from Atlanta (with two of its members originally from Victor, N.Y., just southeast of Rochester, where I spent my teen years), does some caterwauling of its own, primarily on “Blasteroid,”but at this stage of their careers, the members are largely non-screamers.  The band has toured with some prog-rock outfits and has worked with Cedric Bixler-Zavala of the neo-progressive group The Mars Volta.  There are times when the guitar solos approach the intensity of The Mars Volta’s, and on “Thickening,” there are riffs very similar to those of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” (1981).  Mastodon has been characterized as sludge metal, but the sound on The Hunter is not especially sludgy; Mike Elizondo’s production favors greater clarity of tone.  The album won plenty of plaudits among fans of metal; to my ears, it is competent if hardly revelatory.  “Curl of the Burl,” the leading single, has ample crunching guitar chords and a touch of Middle Eastern modality, but the main melody is rudimentary and unambitious, and much the same could be said for “Spectrelight,” whose only point of real interest is a couple of brief intervals of aggressive syncopation.  The ponderous, blaring arpeggios that introduce “Stargasm” (perhaps the most creative thing about the band is its song titling) promise more than the hoarsely shouted verse section and humdrum chorus can follow up with.  The title track lays out a mystical guitar lick for an intro and then spoils the atmosphere with an oddly mewling chorus that gives a nod to a lyric from the end of the Beatles’ Abbey Road (1969) medley; the second-longest cut on the disc, it is also the most tedious.  The lyric of “Thickening” makes for a creepy sort of valentine; the line about “nipple pink and cold/filled up with mother’s milk” is oddly clinical, and one has to wonder about the implications of the final line, “Hoping you’ll be the last” (murder victim?).  The sung portion of the tune is like a rude interruption of an entertainingly restless rock guitar fantasia, part Rush and part King Crimson in inspiration.  “Creature Lives” begins with zoomy synthesizers (from guest performer Dave Palmer; the band itself has no keyboard player), whizzy beeping and whirly noises, and the sound of sinister laughter, an introduction that owes a great deal to Dark Side of the Moon (1973)-era Pink Floyd, then devolves into an eighth-grade-composition-caliber chorale, a ballad of sympathy for the fallen swamp creature.  “All the Heavy Lifting,” even if its chorus has “retread” written all over it, serves as an archetype of the genre, with its ominously reverberant half- and whole-note chords thundering at the outset and the close; it has a brief section of nice guitar-etude-type exercises leading into its ragged-edged bridge.  The Viking-Visigoth-harsh opener, “Black Tongue,” charging along on its rolling melody and packing a powerful guitar improvisation into its bridge section, also pays dividends for metal-heads.  Mastodon does manage to save the best for last:  “The Sparrow,” a surprisingly poppy, honeyed, five-and-a-half-minute composition with only the sparest lyric (four words, repeated several times) and rumbling undertones suggestive of Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979) that shows the band is capable of writing appealing guitar tunes and not simply ear-splitting attacks.        B/B-

Sample song  “Curl of the Burl”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAihDAJX8Ow

THE MEN, Leave Home (Sacred Bones Records)—If there were an antonym to “easy listening,” it would describe the music of Brooklyn’s The Men; instead, we will have to settle for terms like noise rock and postpunk.  The band’s music is hard on delicate eardrums but not “hard” in the sense of being complicated; in fact, the threesome (four members are listed on the back of the CD jacket, but Rich Samis does not appear to participate in any way) are kings of taking one mildly good, not terribly original idea and wringing the life out of it.  The band’s sound is not lacking in craft, but it is devoid of subtlety.  Nick Chiericozzi, Chris Hansell, and Mark Perro take turns on lead vocals, but little effort is made to shape tones (i.e., sing); rather, lyrics are mostly shouted, which suits the music’s sledgehammer effects.  The songs least likely to offend are, unsurprisingly, the two instrumentals, “Lotus” (a song of unrelenting, pneumatic drill guitar chords in patterns that are nearly unvarying) and especially “Shittin’ with the Shah,” which does not make use of Middle Eastern modes but does employ shimmery, undulating guitar tonal bending for a veneer of exoticism; its single theme is ratcheted up several notches in tempo and given a slight new harmonic dimension two-thirds of the way through for variety’s sake.  The two most assaultive tracks are the third and fourth, “Think” and “L.A.D.O.C.H.” (what that stands for is a mystery), both shouted by Hansell until he is hoarse and practically coughing up epiglottis.  “L.A.D.O.C.H.” is the band’s take on doom metal, slow and blaring, with huge drumbeats and ominously tolling bass, while “Think” is more along the lines of thrash punk—angry, buzzing, and bracingly swift, pausing at intervals for stop-time passages and ending in a mini-cascade of feedback effects.  The most fully formed song is “Bataille,” yet, even this, with its machine-gun guitar attacks and exhortative “singing,” has a harsh edge and is content to rest on one small germ of a musical concept rather than develop it or contrast it with something else.  The most interesting passage on the record actually comes at the very beginning:  the first three minutes of “If You Leave . . .” treat the listener to swooping guitars, bent notes and high-pitched drones in an experimental way, before the primitivist theme kicks in.        B-

Sample song  “Bataille”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26psxrhO1hQ

MY MORNING JACKET, Circuital (ATO Records)—Probably the most conventional entry in this year’s music survey—that in itself is not a drawback—Circuital suffers from its own conventionality.  The sixth studio album from My Morning Jacket shows off a few neat turns while mostly just gliding by on the path of least resistance.  The band is at times classified as Southern rock, but, apart from its origins in Louisville, a city that is at best borderline Southern, the only hint of that is a handful of shorthand biblical references, to Satan, Christ, Lucifer.  The opening song, “Victory Dance,” written in response to the experience of lead singer Jim James (or “Yim Yames”) with Lasik eye surgery, is the album’s strongest:  the triumphalism of its Viking-horn fanfares is shaded with cautionary portents, and although the song structure remains pretty basic, it builds to a stirring climax.  It has the force of compactness that is lacking from the looser title track that follows it.  The main flaw, however, of “Circuital,” the longest song on the disc, is not its prolixity; beginning promisingly with a verse of Thom Yorke-ian wistfulness sung over staccato electric guitar arpeggios, followed by a surprise sunburst of acoustic guitar, it fails to lift off because of a flatly unadventurous chorus that keeps it dull and constrained.  A number of tracks carry a self-consciously retro sound, from “Day Is Coming,” with its Motown-derived, dreamy la-la-la choruses and falsetto grace notes, to “Slow Slow Tune,” a superficial, paint-by-numbers bar blues replete with ritualistically wailing guitar.  “Movin’ Away,” the final track, presents the outline of a country waltz, twanged up by Carl Broemel’s pedal steel guitar, but the predictability of its melody vitiates its impact.  The song “Wonderful (The Way I Feel)” was written to be movie music for a Muppets production (since scrapped, the contribution from Jim James and the boys, if not the film itself) and comes across as such; its folky, sappy, lazy contentedness makes for easily the record’s most insipid track.  Interestingly, “Outta My System” was also intended to be in the film, and yet, that catchy number’s subject matter seems outré for Disney; the narrator recollects youthful indiscretions like smoking illicit substances and stealing cars and concludes that he is better off for having committed them so as to move beyond that phase once and for all.  Like “Victory Dance,” “Outta My System” builds steadily to a nice peak of catharsis.  “Holdin’ On to Black Metal,” sung falsetto by James (with a chorus uncredited on the CD jacket or insert) and bearing a guitar sequence similar to that of Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart” (1983)—but the Yes tune is tighter and snappier—is the third-best song on Circuital, a midtempo number with lively horn accents and a false ending that is followed by a powerful bridge of musical suspended animation before the main theme snaps back into place.  The tune dwells on the theme of whether one needs to let go of certain youthful passions in order to move ahead in life.  The record’s lyrics are at times clunky, but James’s voice is easily understood, which is a good thing, given that the lyrics booklet, such as it is, is a reproduction of his (presumably) handwritten notes, full of scratch-outs, transpositions, and amusing pen doodles.  Let us declare Circuital a three of ten batting average, good for a Louisville Slugger, not so much for a pop album.        B/B-

Sample song  “Circuital”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohE3Dm9H0_g&list=UUortLSBRIYfjGDcEHjkIN-A&index=8&feature=plcp

NEON INDIAN, Era Extraña (Mom + Pop Music)—I have, for the most part, looked askance at the one-man-band phenomenon that new technology has made possible, feeling that these projects, without the ego check provided by other contributors, give in too readily to indulgence.  Some do it better than others, viz. M83 (see above) or Oneohtrix Point Never (see below), but many amount to musical self-gratification.  Alan Palomo’s Neon Indian is not entirely his own; he did have fellow Dallas-area guitarist Joshua McWhirter, who co-wrote “The Blindside Kiss,” play on several tracks, and he had production assistance and mixing from the redoubtable Dave Fridmann, most closely associated with the Flaming Lips.  The remainder is, aside from the occasional guest drummer or guitarist, all Palomo.  It amounts to inoffensive electropop, dishearteningly banal, with clipped or stillborn musical phrases flowing through all too familiar channels, as typified by the tediously repetitive “Fallout.”  Not as bad as Caribou or Cloud Cult (see the 2007 music survey for each), Neon Indian is also less interesting than Beirut’s debut record (when Beirut was Zach Condon, all alone in his room somewhere; again, see the 2007 music survey).  The best thing on Era Extraña (a title that can mean either “strange era” or “it/she was strange”), Neon Indian’s sophomore album, is the opening of “Heart Release,” one of three brief instrumentals beginning with the word “heart” on the record.  It has a gauzy, stratospheric sound heard at a remove like something off a disc by British bands like Boards of Canada or the Delays (especially, in the latter instance, those softly squealing guitar exclamations), but Palomo soon ruins the effect by splicing in a much more solid rhythm guitar pattern.  Its spiritual twin, “Heart Attack,” has much the same character, with videogame-style swoops and zaps undercutting the ambience.  Palomo spent some time in Finland writing the music, but other than these instrumental preludes/postludes, nothing reflects the chill of northerly sonorities.  The “bonus” single, “Arcade Blues,” incorporating punchy vocal sampling as a rhythmic element, is the best written song on the album, though even its melodic development is far too tentative to be fully convincing.  On “The Blindside Kiss,” Palomo’s voice—generally a breathy, sort of sexless tenor—is filtered through grime to sound more gruff, in the way of Blank Dogs’ Mike Sniper (see the 2009 music survey).  “Polish Girl” has a bright, percolating intro/accompaniment, though this is soon let down by the plodding verse and chorus.  “Future Sick” is indeed futuristic, in a sort of synthetic rubbery way, with a generous dose of cosmic synthesizer noodlings constituting an extended bridge.  The Mexican-born Palomo (from Monterrey originally) is young, just twenty-three, so perhaps more sophisticated and fully formed music awaits from him.  But I will not be holding my breath.        B-

Sample song  “Polish Girl”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Q_JwOqko4

ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER, Replica (Software Recording Company/ Mexican Summer)—The natural comparison for Replica in this survey is Tim Hecker’s (see above) Ravedeath, 1972.  Both records are abstract electronica, ambient, drone-laden, with plenty of low-fi fuzziness.  Whereas Hecker’s work is more uncompromising, doomy, and distant, that of Daniel Lopatin, who records as Oneohtrix Point Never, is warmer and more “user-friendly.”  Both are highly repetitive, but the music undergoes evolution through reiteration in each case.  Oneohtrix Point Never tends toward a cleaner, less murky sound than either Hecker or Oureboros (see below), and its layering is not as complex, besides which Lopatin’s love of dreamy consonances and angelic vocal samplings might lead some listeners to dismiss the work as pretty soundtrack fare.  But that would be to sell short the record, which (for what it is worth) was highly regarded by Pitchfork, Stereogum, and the New York Times’s Jon Pareles.  Lopatin makes use primarily of a Roland synthesizer, freely incorporating external sound samples and arranging everything via multitracking software.  The electronic processing of the voices (taken from 1980s television commercials) yields eerie distortions akin to those of Burial (see the 2007 music survey), as in “Child Soldier” or in the waning seconds of “Remember,” following several minutes of a reverberant, deep choral hum worthy of Brian Eno.  With the quick-cutting “Nassau,” the flitting from theme to theme (in reality, distinct treatments of a continuous idea) as if going through a sonic doorway into a different chamber puts Oneohtrix Point Never into territory well mined by the group Broadcast (see the 2009 music survey).  At other times, the blurry timbres and harmonic dourness—as on the opening song, “Andro,” or the title track—summon up Boards of Canada’s The Campfire Headphase (2005).  “Andro” finishes with a half-minute-long, seemingly unrelated paroxysm of percussion.  For “Replica,” the same four-note piano sequence is heard ad infinitum, while the background maundering becomes ever buzzier, until the song is abruptly cut off just as it begins yet another piano cycle.  “Sleep Dealer” features a recurring panting/sighing expulsion of air, juxtaposed with electronic bleeps, throbbing bouts of percussion, half-heard voices, and a playful melodic phrase at intervals.  “Submersible” is the most cinematic composition; one can visualize the titular object prowling the seas through this bathypelagic tone poem, preternaturally calm amid all the whooshing.  Both “Up” and “Child Soldier” are sharply percussive, though the latter achieves the effect not via a drum machine but the staccato repetition of children’s voices saying something that sounds like “take, take, take” in syncopated rhythms spiked with martial arts cries.  At the end, the voices drop out, yielding to a sober synthesizer conclusion emulating chamber strings in unison.  “Up,” for its part, gradually downscales the percussion in order to play up its own synth drone, keyboard improvisations, and high-pitched voices rehearsing descending half-scales.        A-

Sample song  “Replica”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiwi7d0f91Y&ob=av2e

OUREBOROS, Dreaming in Earth, Dissolving in Light (Ant-Zen Act260)—Not to be confused with the metal band Ouroboros, Canada’s Oureboros (from Dundas, Ontario, near Hamilton) is a new act specializing in ambient electronica.  I cannot tell you much about the two guys who form the group, Rich Oddie and someone who likes to go by “T-Non,” apart from their association with other electronica/low-fi/noise outfits (Tropism/Tropizm, Orphx, etc.) that are just as penumbral.  Dreaming in Earth, Dissolving in Light, their debut, whose name splices the titles of the second and third tracks, is a little too minimalist for my tastes.  There just is not sufficient dynamism in these twelve tracks to create much drama or engage the listener.  Tones are sustained, oscillated, pulsated, or simply repeated implacably.  Yet, there is more happening here than might be evident to the casual listener; these guys, hardly amateurs, have carefully designed and “orchestrated” their soundscapes.  The album has no regular meter to it, but the long-tone sequences dictate their own rhythms, while the percussive effects welling up from below are sometimes insistently out of phase with those rhythms.  Overtones on certain tracks put a bit more flesh on the bones of these compositions, allowing one to discern the sketchy outline of musical themes in the likes of “Dissolving in Light” (the only track to feature a live instrument, the violin of Paul Hogeterp) and the throbbing “Black Water.”  The opener, “Portent,” is in effect a long, low rumble with a smidgen of higher harmonics for effect.  Oureboros goes light on the industrial noise, allowing for a varied sound palette, from tinselly timbres that evoke the 1970s collaborations between Brian Eno and Robert Fripp (on “Dreaming in Earth”) to Mellotrons to clatter to screechy whorls of sound (“Double Mercury”).  The moody “At Twilight” features crisp percussive strokes at beat-slipping intervals that set the stage for an obsessively brooding, burbling tone cluster (and its higher-pitch reverberation) heard over and over.  Single-minded tracks like this one and the echoey “The Descent” are striking in their way but are also one-trick ponies.  “Circle of Dust” starts with woodpecker-like vibrations and then processes tonal blasts through vibrato and warping, while “Separation” takes one thrummed note and its counterpart fifth as a grounding for zoomy effects and bursts of drilling intensity.  “Waveworn” is a spectral, moaning piece whose most salient effect is a shuffling procession of clanking steps like those of Jacob Marley’s ghost in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.   The final cut, “Point of Disintegration,” cycles through wailing guitar white-noise effects like something from King Crimson or The Mars Volta in its first half—the loudest and most kinetic passage on the disc—before settling down into more metallic clanking and bass hums to end the album on a quieter note.    A-/B+

Sample song  “At Twilight”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1muOV5yvzxU

THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART, Belong (Slumberland Records/ Collective Sounds)—Those who enjoy the sort of fizzy, insubstantial pop purveyed by the Apples in Stereo ought to like The Pains of Being Pure at Heart as well.  The band’s lead singer, Kip Berman, even has the same breathy, buzzy, genderless quality of voice as Rob Schneider of the Apples.  The band’s name, which came from an unpublished children’s story, suggests an emo group, but such is not the case.  Nor is there much in the way of Brooklyn hipster irony at work in the music or the dreamy, earnest lyrics.  The foursome (fivesome when touring) are at times categorized as noise pop, but do not expect anything remotely like Sleigh Bells (see the 2010 music survey); The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s candy-coated approach is easier on the eardrums (but Sleigh Bells is a far more convincing act).  At times, the reverberant guitar tolling of shoegaze takes over, as in “Heart in Your Heartbreak” (one of two singles released, together with the title track), “The Body,” and “My Terrible Friend.”  Berman and his mates, ever complaisant, churn out competent, accessible pop music with retro, sixties-era hankerings, working within a severely limited range and deploying the most elemental of phrases and song structures.  If I come down hard on the band in my grading, it is because it has produced the musical analogue of a featureless landscape with Belong:  a record with no interesting twists, byways, or surprises, nothing sophisticated, nothing to exhilarate the soul.  The very names of women invoked in the songs manifest a certain poverty of imagination:  there is an Anne, another (Queen) Anne, an Ana, and one Justine for variety’s sake.  The Pains of Being Pure at Heart will not have you running screaming from the room but might just induce drowsiness, so do not play the album while operating heavy machinery like food processors or space heaters.    B/B-

Sample song  “Heart in Your Heartbreak”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2syY0U-eY0

RADIOHEAD, The King of Limbs (Ticker Tape/XL/TBD Records)—Since Hail to the Thief (2003), Radiohead’s sound has become more attenuated and has reverted to the introspection that characterized Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001).  The King of Limbs, mystically titled (one theory is that it is a reference to a thousand-year-old oak in a Wiltshire forest), is not quite as single-mindedly withdrawn as its predecessor from four years ago, In Rainbows (see the 2007 music survey), and it is decidedly less phlegmatic, as most of the eight tracks have a decided sense of motion.  Still, it is a tossup as to whether either of these two albums rivals Amnesiac as the Oxfordshire boys’ slightest to date.  This characterization is relative, of course.  Having established itself as the most significant rock band of the past two decades, Radiohead even in coasting mode creates more of a wind rush than most bands playing their hearts out.  The King of Limbs at times resembles session outtakes rather than a project the band has been fashioning, on and off, for four years.  The most inwardly directed songs, “Morning Mr Magpie” and “Give Up the Ghost,” albeit very different from each other, could each sit comfortably on lead singer Thom Yorke’s solo album from 2006, The Eraser.  Though the former has a fast, jittery tempo and the latter is a gauzy chorale dubbing Yorke’s falsetto laments over his natural voice, they share a sense of enervation, and neither is developed beyond a single musical kernel, remaining compulsively monochromatic in mood.  Opting for a more openly tuneful approach than is customary, the closing number, “Separator,” takes a long time to flesh out harmonically the primordially bland melody it proffers.  The song marks time for three minutes before rounding into something sophisticated enough to convey emotional resonance.  The only wordless track on the disc, “Feral,” is at once the most experimental and least consequential cut; it is all Phil Selway’s drumming and vocal overdubs, with a deep synth ground bass as background.  The band is more surefooted in the opener, “Bloom,” a “prototypical” Radiohead song introducing an edgy drum pattern and a fluttery piano sequence that is looped without pause and truncated as it recedes to the background when Yorke’s warbly tenor enters with the main theme, rising open-endedly.  There is a prolonged bridge section of humming followed by incongruously triumphal washes of synthesizer, and then we get one more verse from the singer before the instrumental ensemble takes over to bring the proceedings to an end.  “Little by Little,” one of the two most self-contained tunes on the record (the other is the ruminative piano and flugelhorn ballad “Codex”), has a sepia-toned, old-timey folksiness akin to Hail to the Thief’s “A Punchup at a Wedding.”  A few daringly placed accidentals unsettle the verse; the chorus creeps tentatively down the chromatic scale repeatedly.  But the album’s centerpiece is “Lotus Flower,” a five-minute composition that can stand with anything Radiohead has done.  Richly textured, yet simple enough in theme to be accessible, “Lotus Flower” unfolds to the interplay between its cool, downtempo bass line and Yorke’s cryptic vocal yearnings, ranging from self-effacing in the verse section to alternately grandiose and pointedly critical in the chorus, which rises to a tormented falsetto.  I would love to see a return to meatier material by Radiohead, but then, the band has never been about meeting its fans’ expectations.  There is some good in that; otherwise, we might have had The Bends II, III, IV, and V and never any OK Computer (1997), the group’s magnum opus.        A-/B+

Sample song  “Lotus Flower”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfOa1a8hYP8

RAINBOW ARABIA, Boys and Diamonds (Kompakt)—Well executed if not terribly adventurous, Boys and Diamonds wears its orientalism like an array of sequins, glamming up its dance electropop with jungle beats and faint traces of Middle Eastern and East Asian influences.  The first full-length release from the Los Angeles husband-wife duo of Danny Preston (formerly a keyboard player for the obscure bands Future Pigeon and Whisky Biscuit) and Tiffany Preston, following two EPs, Boys and Diamonds is perhaps intended as more conventional than the band’s initial forays, which I have not heard.  Comparisons to Gang Gang Dance (see above), an outfit with which Rainbow Arabia has toured, are apt, especially since Tiffany Preston’s voice is closely matched to that of Gang Gang Dance’s Lizzi Bougatsos, but the New York band has a decidedly more avant-garde edge to it.  At times over the course of the Boys and Diamonds disc, one might recollect 1980s New Wave or synthpop acts like the Cocteau Twins (without their textural density), Naked Eyes (the “beeping” guitars of Rainbow Arabia’s “Blind” echo those of “Promises, Promises” from 1983), Talk Talk (particularly the hit dance remix of “It’s My Life” from 1984/85), or even Peter Godwin’s “Baby’s in the Mountains” (1983).  Tiffany Preston’s sung lyrics are not always distinguishable amid the sonic mix, but melodic kernels tend toward the spare and unvarying, and chord changes follow predictable channels.  For instance, in “Without You,” the keyboard harmony at one stage is a simple half-scale, up and down three intervals, and at another, it nearly replicates that of the Rita Coolidge cover version of Jackie Wilson’s “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher,” while the percussion pattern mimics that of Men Without Hats’ “Safety Dance” (1983).  But the Prestons do know how to synthesize a catchy hook and maximize its value.  The dreamy, cinematic aspect of their songwriting comes through best in the quasi-instrumental “Papai,” its soaring long-toned keyboard theme contrasted against an earthy bass sequence; later, more mournful chords are spiked by Preston’s plaintive chant of “you were the liar” and some skittering tuned percussion.  Another moment of transcendence comes in the wordless chorus of “Sayer” (in the verse portion, even the processed vocal manipulation tricks cannot save the singer from sounding off pitch when they are not being used):  Tiffany’s high sustained tones against a keyboard arpeggiation whose harmonics create the illusion of temporal slippage make for sublime listening, if only for a brief passage.  “Jungle Bear” pairs an insipidly benign melody with an appealingly clunky, “caveman”-like percussion sequence.  “Hai” begins with a percolating beat but goes on to fool around with skipped beats and stuttering tempos, making it the album’s most experimental track even though the sung theme stays obsessively with the same pattern of tonal resolution throughout.  The final track is an accelerated-tempo rendition of “Sequenced,” a monomaniacal techno number by the Swedish musician Axel Willner, who performs as The Field, spiced with wailing banshee vocals.  As Matthew Richardson observed on Prefixmag.com, the Rainbow Arabia take on the tune, with its intensified keyboard ground bass, adds a Giorgio Moroder element to the recipe.        B+/B

Sample song  “Without You”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r6amYnItng

LOS RAKAS, Chancletas y Camisetas Bordada (Soy Raka LLC)—Two Panamanian cousins in their early mid-twenties who grew up in Oakland put out a couple of mixtapes, catch the attention of the Latin Alternative Music Conference (LAMC) and certain sectors of the blogosphere, and subsequently self-release an EP-length disc that brings further publicity on National Public Radio’s website, in The Fader, and in other publications.  And the EP, while it has some interesting touches, is not even all that wonderful.  How does this happen?  The cousins, who call themselves Raka Rich (or Rico) and Raka Dun (pronounced “Doon”)—the slang term “raka” is unspecified but assumed to be a guy from the ’hood in Panama City—took elements of Panamanian music such as plena (imported from Puerto Rico) as well as dancehall and reggae, which have a pan-Caribbean following, and merged them with the Bay Area hip-hop they heard around them as teenagers trying to fit in.  Chancletas y Camisetas Bordada, which translates as Flip-Flops and Hand-Stitched Tank Tops, can sound, at its dopier moments, like a demented version of the Colombian cumbia/dub electronica outfit Sidestepper (see the 2008 music survey, in the Latin section), and there is no shortage of such moments on a disc that lasts barely twenty minutes.  In particular, the song “Panty Wanty” consists largely of a plea to a girl(friend) to “take off your panties,” and the follow-up, “Borracho,” centers on the refrain “un, dos, tres, cuatro, todo el mundo está borracho” (one, two, three, four, everyone is drunk).  Songs like this are heavy on the bass, in dancehall style.  In songs with more engaging lyrics, such as the opening “Vengo de Panamá” (I Come from Panama) and “Tá Lista” (She’s Ready), these are rapped so swiftly and with enough slang to throw even many Spanish speakers, and the self-released disc comes with no printed lyrics to help out, to say nothing of credits.  One of the cousins’ grandmothers is sampled chanting a folk melody on “La Chola” (The American Indian Woman), set to a rapid-cycling beat with chekeres (shakers).  It is the most fascinating track on the record, even though it lasts less than a minute; it sounds like something from a Cuban traditional/rhythmic group like Conjunto Céspedes or los Muñequitos de Matanzas.  Another, far younger female singer, possibly Mala Rodriguez, joins the group on several songs.  “Vengo de Panamá” begins with a stark lute-like instrument, possibly the four-stringed cuatro but sounding Japanese in its spare setting—besides that, there is little instrumentation other than a repeating high-pitched, mournful electronic keyboard sequence.  In its matter-of-fact, up-from-the-streets autobiographical rapping, the song resembles last year’s Calle 13 reggaetón disc, Entran los que Quieran (see the 2010 music survey).  “Tá Lista,” reiterating the same, somber melodic cell throughout, switches briefly over to English, but some of the imagery—when not engaging in the usual tough-guy posing—is Mexican, and indeed the accompanying video (see below) appears to have been shot at a Mexican fair in a Bay Area park.  “Cueria,” the fastest-paced song, is full of cinematic tough talk and sirens going off, yet the vocals are veering toward falsetto range as the duo unnaturally accentuate the ending of lines; it is the straightest dance-electronic track on the EP.  “Camisetas Bordá” is another dunderheaded identity song focused on the typical Panamanian tank tops the duo wears.  The dub-heavy “Soy Raka” is included as a “bonus track” (without it, the disc would last barely nineteen minutes); it features either a child or someone’s voice altered in pitch, in sync with one of the cousins, singing “I have my pistol and my gold teeth.”  The track is fairly mindless yet at least preserves a sense of humor, with its bubbling human beatbox and its abrupt stops and restarts.    B/B-

Sample song  “Tá Lista”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rglS-aTRnYE&feature=relmfu

SBTRKT, SBTRKT (Young Turks)—Smooth, polished, not particularly probing or incisive, the electronica of SBTRKT (“subtract”), the alias of Londoner Aaron Jerome, who likes to perform hidden behind a ceremonial mask, gleams.  There is a certain lounge coolness to Jerome’s sound, but for the most part, it is too active and intense to be background music.  This is electronica whose vocals are pitched toward neo-soul, particularly on the tracks sung by Jerome’s frequent collaborator, Sampha (Sampha Sisay), which make up more than half of the disc.  Sampha’s smooth, slightly grainy tenor, pleading at times, matter of fact at others, jumps easily into falsetto register.  When he sings about “the ghoulish entities/They come floatin’ through the walls ... like the ghost of Christmas past” in “Trials of the Past,” it conjures a snatch of dialogue from the sci-fi television series Dr. Who; the London working-class/ethnic-minority-cosmopolitan accent matches those in the series as well.  Several other singers put in appearances, including Jessie Ware, who is in terms of vocal timbre and style a feminine counterpart to Sampha (both Ware and Sampha are Young Turks label mates of SBTRKT), and Roses Gabor, whose vivaciously accentuated and rhythmically precise singing on “Pharaohs” mirrors that of Eska Mtungwazi, who has worked with Zero 7 (see the 2009 music survey) and Matthew Herbert (see the 2008 music survey), among others.  But the album’s choice cut is the collaboration with Little Dragon (see above), “Wildfire.”  Yukimi “Little Dragon” Nagano may not be the equal of either Ware or Gabor as a singer, yet “Wildfire,” co-written with Nagano’s Swedish band, is easily the album’s funkiest track, suffused with a throbbing, pudgy ostinato bass line to complement Nagano’s feverishly lustful and bluish melody and to contrast with the synthesizers’ high squeals at the pauses.  The brisk dispatch and potent energy bursts that distinguish “Pharaohs,” itself tinged with funk, yield that song secondary honors.  Of the four tunes featuring Sampha on lead vocals, the best is “Trials of the Past”; its chamber eeriness gives it an immediacy missing from the others.  Ware’s showpiece, “Right Thing to Do,” has a trip-hop vibe, its shuddering bass line cutting against the grain of the melody, even while providing a foundation for it.  The four quasi-“instrumentals” (if sequencers, samplers, computer software, and drum machines can be called instruments) actually shine more brightly, as Jerome’s creativity comes to the fore when he does not have to defer to a lead singer.  “Heatwave,” the opening track, is, notwithstanding its name, the coolest and spaciest, graced by smooth backing vocals from Sampha and punctuated by fractured drum patterns.  “Sanctuary” has a futuristic sheen and industrial energy common to the music of Tom Jenkinson’s Squarepusher (see the 2010 music survey).  By contrast, “Ready Set Loop” and “Go Bang,” toward the close of the disc, owe more to Kieran Hebden’s Four Tet (again, see the 2010 music survey), in the silvered tintinnabulations of the latter and the sweeping sonic updrafts of the former, capped at intervals with the briefest of vocal samples lasting for the duration of the accompanying handclap.        A-/B+

Sample song  “Wildfire”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdUINbi4wSY

SPANK ROCK, Everything Is Boring & Everyone Is a F---ing Liar (Bad Blood Records)—Hip-hop’s thirty-year run has been far longer and far more pervasive than I ever would have anticipated.  While I have often wished it would simply fade away, the genre has now been around enough time that the search for novelty has led to hybridizations, such as reggaetón, that sometimes yield interesting results, as with last year’s Calle 13 album, Entran los que Quieran (see the 2010 music survey).  Spank Rock’s Everything Is Boring & Everyone Is a F---ing Liar possesses, as the title suggests, a certain hipster irony, which, along with its electronica, techno, dubstep, punk, and other influences, gives the record an appeal beyond the usual audiences for such fare.  By turns annoying and amusing, the new release is loud and vulgar; nonetheless, the attitude is more tongue in cheek than one of aggression, as it slyly name-checks references.  Spank Rock began as a duo between Baltimore native Naeem Juwan (MC Spank Rock) and Alex Epton (XXXChange), but the latter’s departure left Juwan to solo.  (XXXChange had a big role in producing the album nonetheless.)  The funniest thing on the record by far is the ninety-three-second spoken complaint by Hennessy Youngman (a.k.a. Jayson Musson) that serves as a lead-in to “Race Riot,” in which he admits relief that the Spank Rock record has “dropped” because women asking him about it killed off his libido, to phrase it far more politely than he does.  “Race Riot” itself falls among the grating tracks on the CD, its vigorous horn chorus monotone accompanied by a rap whose “chorus” is “shake it till my dick turn racist.”  In fact, whereas some people are characterized as anal-retentive, Spank Rock is more in the way of penis-obsessive:  the word “dick” pops up in several different songs that are equally irritating, such as “Nasty” “and “Turn It Off.”  “Nasty” solicits the distinctive and boisterous New Orleans “sissy bouncer” (cross-dressing rapper) Big Freedia (see the Galactic entry from the 2010 music survey) to embellish the latter portion of the song, as well as someone named Tyette (an actual female), sampled saying, “You nasty!” again and again.  The rap titled “Birfday” grates in its own way, although it is leavened by humor, while the drum ’n’ bass–heavy “Cool Shit” is just stupefyingly pointless.  On the plus side, “#1 Hit,” equipped with a military drumbeat and comically spluttering bass synth sequence that is like an air bladder being squeezed, takes a cockeyed look at the promotion industry, summoning a refrain whose falsetto line makes for a nice TV on the Radio (see below) facsimile.  “Car Song” is the most appealing track on the disc, borrowing Santigold (Santi White; see the 2008 music survey under “Santogold”), who sings the refrain in a grainy but sexy voice; set to a brisk tempo, the fleshed-out melody (the only one on the disc—sorry!) more than counterbalances the staccato rapping of the verse.  Other songs like “The Dance” and “Hot Potato” have a bouncy, rubber-room energy that owes something to the punk/hardcore genre.  There is an inventiveness and variety that lifts the record above the commonplace:  for example, “Baby” is like a dub-tinged parody of a Prince song, full of agonized yelps and falsetto leaps; “DTF DADT” (not sure what that stands for), not one of the standout tracks, melds techno and grunge, with squeals and blips, off-color bass, and grimy fuzztone production.  The final song on the disc, Energy,” also its initial single, “is grounded on a riff by the German progressive rock group Can, from its song “Vitamin C” (1972), over which Juwan sings an anguished, hoarse-voiced descending-scale phrase, making the “rock” in Spank Rock stand for something.    B+/B

Sample song  “#1 Hit”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xj5GPxKHmM

MIA DOI TODD, Cosmic Ocean Ship (City Zen Records)—Pretty sounds, to be sure, yet Cosmic Ocean Ship, as my first exposure to the Los Angeles performer Mia Doi Todd, leads me to seek more out of her songwriting.  Todd has an impressive pedigree—the daughter of a sculptor, Michael Todd, and the first Asian-American female judge in the United States, Kathryn Doi Todd—and background.  An East Asian studies major at Yale, she has lived in Japan, studied butoh dance there, and traveled the Earth, and she has collaborated with interesting musicians, from Flying Lotus (see Album of the Year from the 2010 music survey) to the Swedish singer-songwriter José González.  Todd’s songs on Cosmic Ocean Ship are studied and eclectic and reflect her worldliness.  The record has a Latin American bent—four of the ten songs, including the only two she did not write, have Latin themes or wellsprings—and she does well by verses in Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.  Doubtless, she was aiming for a folk-oriented simplicity on the recording, and she succeeded to a fault.  Here is the thing about including on the album a song like Baden Powell and Vinícius de Moraes’s “Canto de Iemanjá”:  the composition by the Brazilian masters of the 1960s, intended to incorporate Yoruban traditional chants (Iemanjá, oy Yemaya, is the deity of the oceans, motherhood, and the protector of children) into the Brazilian canon, has an emotional depth and multilayered intricacy that shows up the one-dimensionality of Todd’s own pieces.  Her songs forms never develop past the A-B-A format, which might be sufficient except that it is often more A-A'-A, where A' is a timid variant on the initial theme.  At times, there is not even a subtheme at all but the mild intensification of the sole theme that comes from adding another instrument, such as percussion or keyboards, midstream.  The lyrics are impressionistic, but when they are mere word-pictures strung together, as in the opening “Paraty,” about the colonial Brazilian seaside town and tourist magnet southwest of Rio de Janeiro, no greater meaning is discernible.  When they cohere more, they are too often expressing commonplaces.  Todd’s voice is lovely, a bit husky and warbly in the lower register, light and pure in the soprano range.  On “Canto de Iemanjá,” Gaby Hernandez supplies the contrasting voice, meshing with Todd’s to create a sublime duet.  The Brazilian-inspired “Paraty” is at least engaging and merits repeated listening; the same cannot be said for the lovely, limpid, vacuous four tracks that follow it on the playlist.  Thoughts of Norah Jones—a singer whose considerable talents have too often been wasted on dull material—continually spring to mind listening to these tunes, except that the globetrotting Todd has better taste in choosing her sources and inspiration.  The best of Todd’s own songs by far is “La Habana” (Havana), from whose lyric the album title derives, because, although it, too, seems underdeveloped, its plaintive melody and countertheme are wrenchingly beautiful, like something out of a songbook put together for the late Brazilian singing legend Elis Regina.  “La Habana” consequently stirs the soul in a way that the more lightweight numbers fail to do.  “The Rising Tide” and “All My City,” toward the end of the disc, are saddled with the same flaws of stagnation as the earlier tracks, but, perhaps because their minor-mode themes carry more resonance than, say, “My Baby Lives in Paris” or “Skipping Stones,” they display a chiaroscuro effect that deepens them slightly.  The final piece, Violeta Parra’s sober, plain-spun “Gracias a la Vida” (Thanks to Life), has been covered previously by Joan Baez and Mercedes Sosa.  Parra was a Chilean folk singer/songwriter who died in 1967, shy of her fiftieth birthday.  Her song is given the sparest of settings, for the most part just voice and acoustic guitar, with a touch of bass percussion and a dreamy keyboard overlay in the bridge section.  There are some gleaming nuggets on Cosmic Ocean Ship, and the remainder of the disc is as suave and easy to listen to as anything from Bebel Gilberto, but it could perhaps have amounted to much more.    B+

Sample song  “Canto de Iemanjá”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x-G3NQce7s

TV ON THE RADIO, Nine Types of Light (Interscope Records/Universal Music Distribution) —Less verbose than TV on Radio’s previous release, Dear Science (see the 2008 music survey), Nine Types of Light is more satisfying on every level.  I did not love this record—I still feel that nothing this band has done since Return to Cookie Mountain (2006) has rivaled the daring experimentalism of “I Was a Lover” from that album—but I will not spare admiration for it, giving its creators credit for continuing to try formulating novel sounds.  None of the songs on the new release are outstanding, but several are pretty good, and the rest, for the most part, have a rough-hewn cool that wears well on repeated listening.  The chief flaw in Nine Types of Light is the sheer unmusicality of the verse portions of a number of songs, such as “Caffeinated Consciousness.”  “No Future Shock” is all about the rhythm, at the expense of any real tune, an exhortation rather than a singing performance; at least it is a funky rhythm, embellished by a four-man guest horn section.  “New Cannonball Blues” suffers from the same drawback of a sketchy theme subordinated to a slower, heavy beat yet still succeeds in conveying an attitude of soulfulness, with some deft syncopations from lead singer Tunde Adebimpe.  “Repetition” is a robotic patter song that is all too similar to the material from Dear Science, with a nonevent of a bridge that leads to more vehemence as the chorus, true to the song title, is repeated in sprechstimme to the end.  Even “Second Song” (illogically the first song in the track list), perhaps the best the disc has to offer, starts with verse that is more recited than sung, before the tune warms up, wrapped in the velour of Adebimpe’s falsetto funkiness.  Like “No Future Shock,” “Second Song” climaxes in a rousing horn chorus, the trumpet of Todd Simon and the tenor sax of Antibalas veteran Stuart Bogie, who also contributed to the two immediate predecessor albums by TV on the Radio.  “Killer Crane,” the longest track on the record, initially has a fairly bare-bones (by TV on the Radio standards) arrangement, with a chorus accompanied by naked strings tuned to sound like a Japanese shamisen, both sampled and live woodwinds, and plenty of softly shimmering sustained keyboards.  At the start there is a beat like that of a car’s turn signal, but this is quickly switched off and does not recur.  The gentlest and most contemplative tune of the lot, it has the simple but intricate elegance of a scroll painting.  “Forgotten,” in a swaying 6/8 meter, has in its unison string chorus something of the bleakness of the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin” (1967), although this is just one aspect of a multifaceted, well-sculpted tune that has more cushy falsetto choruses, some whistling, and subdued horns that create a nice study in shifting moods over the course of just three and a half minutes.  Both “Keep Your Heart” and “You” are soul-tinged ballads that sail past with ease, leaving a picturesque wake behind without truly stirring up anything from the depths.  “Will Do” was released as the record’s first single; it is an agreeable but unremarkable tune, and the “deluxe” version of the CD contains two remixes.  The first, by the U.K. house D.J./producer Switch (Dave Taylor), who has worked with M.I.A. and also on the Major Lazer CD Guns Don't Kill People . . . Lazers Do (see the 2009 music survey), has deep bass thrums contrasted against crystalline bell sounds extrapolated from the introductory portion of the original.  Toward the end, Switch goes heavy on the zapping sounds one might hear in a videogame arcade.  The second remix, a bouncy dancehall  variant from Brooklyn’s XXXChange (Alex Epton; see the Spank Rock entry above), I think of as the “T-Pain version” because it ends with an Auto-Tuning of Adebimpe’s voice for a melodica-like effect that is characteristic of that rapper.  Tragically, TV on the Radio’s bassist, Gerard Smith, died of lung cancer nine days after the album release; the band is still in the process of finding a permanent replacement.        A-

Sample song  “Second Song”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwYM2t22h_E&feature=channel&list=UL

LA VIDA BOHÈME, Nuestra (Nacional Records/RED Distribution) —From the very start of “Radio Capital,” the Caracas band’s first single from Nuestra, its debut LP, the resemblance to Interpol (see the 2007 and 2010 music surveys) is arresting:  the jangly guitars, the dance-inducing percussion (wood block and drums) patterns, the frenetic urgency impelling the music.  The major difference is the Spanish-language vocals.  This is not to say that the entire record sounds like Interpol, or the Rapture, or Radio 4, or other postpunk revival bands, though certainly “Danz,” “Calle Barcelona” (Barcelona Street), “Huxley,” and “Nicaragua” (following a slow intro) do.  That is all to the good since variety keeps the listener engaged.  I must say that, following the visceral thrill of “Radio Capital,” nothing else on the disc reaches the same level of exhilaration.  Nonetheless, it is a fairly impressive debut, if somewhat derivative as quite a few “alt-Latin” acts are, for a band that might turn out to be Venezuela’s most successful since Los Amigos Invisibles.  Henry D’Arthenay, the lead singer (and guitarist), does not have a tremendous voice, but for this kind of music he does not need to; there is almost always plenty of noise around him, muscular drumming or reverberant guitars. “Radio Capital” may use Interpol as a template, but the band looks further back for inspiration, its “Gabba gabba hey” chorus a tribute to the Ramones.  “Nicaragua,” the second-best track, spends a minute as a mournful ballad with scratchy guitar strings as background before launching into something far faster and more agitated, sweeping the listener up in its pulse-accelerating exigency.  It is an odd feature of this song that the voice cuts out midway, following a line about how “your tomb will always be singing,” leaving the final two minutes for the guitars to rip it up (except for one quiet section), ending in tremendous reverb that is sped up and then spills over into the closing piece, the title track. “Nuestra,” the last tune, has very little singing (yelling, actually) and is mostly feedback paired with a descending chromatic scale sequence and a booming beat.  A few songs are more in the shoegaze vein:  “Flamingo” has those characteristic chiming guitars throughout, as does “El Zar” (The Czar), and “I.P.O.S.T.E.L” dabbles in them in its first minute, before turning to a more steady-state and percussive guitar sound.  “Flamingo” is not helped by an insipid main melody that I imagine being like a James Murphy (of LCD Soundsystem fame) theme left only half sketched out, nor by the insistent repetition of “tú eres mi calma” (you are my calm [something not in evidence from the vehemence with which the phrase is expressed]) toward the close.  “I.P.O.S.T.E.L” (I have no idea what that is supposed to stand for), which appeared previously on an EP, begins charmingly with an accompaniment of drums and a sonic emulation of vibraphones or marimba.  It is a song with a little bit of everything:  guitars that alternately ring out, pound down, or thrash about with guile and agility; D’Arthenay’s voice at first disembodied and then in heroic mode; the mellow vibes and breakbeat percussion that crop up at times.  Following the subtle-to-forceful gamut of “I.P.O.S.T.E.L,” “El Sentimiento Ha Muerto” (The Feeling Has Died), with its sputtering electric guitar, is much cruder, a blunderbuss of a song with half-shouted lyrics and sinister laughs and electronic zapping effects at the bridge.  “El Buen Salvaje” (The Good Savage), full of bone-rattling triplets and massive beats, throws a curveball with a melodious subtheme that is cheerily whistled.  The song was adopted by EA Sports for its FIFA 12 soccer videogame.  “El Cigarro” is like “Flamingo” in that the effect of its thunderous, action-flick guitar riffs and sonic whorls is dissipated by a stodgy vocal theme.  “Huxley” is a well-conceived and -executed, midtempo postpunk number; if its sung theme, too, is a touch bland, the relentlessness and grim determination of its guitar countermelody are compelling as it drives toward its logical conclusion.  There are far worse things than sounding like Interpol, after all.        A-

Sample song  “Radio Capital”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9gb9SsO_O8

WARM GHOST, Narrows (Partisan Records)—Narrows feels longer than its forty or so minutes, its artfully contoured electropop skirting the edges of tedium.  The compositions of Paul Duncan, at the heart of Warm Ghost, do not lack for interesting textures, settings, and progressions, but on the full-length debut album, success eludes him when it comes to synthesizing these elements.  The record is not helped by Duncan’s lyrics, which are by turns baffling or pompous and are generally overstuffed, though some lovely imagery shows up like streaks of rare minerals in a hunk of schist.  For Narrows, Duncan’s writing and performing partner was the guitarist/synth player/programmer Oliver Chapoy; on the Uncut Diamond EP that preceded it, he had the help of Daniel Lewis.  Warm Ghost’s sound is ethereal, somewhat smudgy, and tending toward the gravely melodramatic.  The closest counterpart to it in this survey is Neon Indian (see above); Duncan shares Alan Palomo’s (of Neon Indian) chillwave sensibilities and tendency to noodle fecklessly, although his music is more complex and less predictable.  At times, Warm Ghost seems to yearn for the English New Romantic bands of the 1980s like Spandau Ballet, Naked Eyes, or Soft Cell.  Even Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark ought to be brought into the conversation since Duncan’s disaffected but latently romantic vocals approximate those of OMD’s Andy McCluskey, although OMD managed to achieve far more with less clutter.  The song on Narrows that most neatly realizes its ambitions is “Splay of Road,” its simple splashes of melody and attenuated drum machine pattern evoking Vangelis’s famed Chariots of Fire (1981) theme song.  “Ply 7,” the record’s only instrumental, also shows the virtues of an economical simplicity, as it deftly superimposes fanfare-like synth chords and a smattering of electronic effects on its throbbing beat, ending with snatches of vaguely overheard conversation and a mechanical whirring sound.  On songs such as “I Will Return” and “Inside and Out,” the wordiness of the lyrics tends to get in the way of the 1980s-redolent (Thompson Twins, anyone?  Howard Jones?) pop melodies, the intriguingly blurry/fuzzy sonorities, the bouncy rhythmic patterns and synthesizer arpeggios, and the pulsing beats.  “Once One” pairs a blank, colorless sung theme with repeated airless arpeggiations and a periodic rhythmic pounding that is the song’s most memorable characteristic.  The laconic “Mariana,” the stagnant and melodically pallid “An Absolute Light” (like an OMD song appended to the end of a record as an afterthought), and “Myths on Rotting Ships,” which draws what energy it can from summoning an ever-expanding host of accompanying blared sustained chords and other percussive and instrumental filigree in support of a fundamentally hollow theme, all miss the mark.  The music of Warm Ghost has enough that is distinctive to have caught my ear initially; to keep it engaged, however, is going to take more refinement.  The most striking thing about The Narrows in fact is its topographical cover artwork, courtesy of Kristi Sword.        B

Sample song  “I Will Return”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmoUB86DIuE

WILD FLAG, Wild Flag (Merge Records)—The genesis of this band is actually more interesting than the finished product.  All four members come to the project with credentials from the indie rock scene:  Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss were two-thirds of the Sleater-Kinney lineup from the mid-1990s forward.  Weiss has also drummed with Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks (see the 2008 music survey).  Mary Timony fronted Helium and before that played in a band called Autoclave.  Keyboard player Rebecca Cole had been the drummer in a band known as the Minders for a dozen years.  Brownstein and Timony also played together previously as the Spells, for a brief time more than a decade ago.  Because Timony bases herself in her hometown of Washington, D.C., while the others are West Coasters (Brownstein is currently starring with Fred Armisen in the quirky IFC television series Portlandia), the band is bicoastal.  The group’s debut, self-titled record starts off strong with the single “Romance” and then loses its spark.  “Romance,” a feisty, compact rocker, is about how love can unsettle a person, yet its tone is effusively affirmative.  It is easily the prizewinner of the record.  Bookending the disc is a nice midtempo number, “Black Tiles,” ringingly loud with a big drumbeat and the guitars dabbling in Middle Eastern modal harmonies, as it puzzles its way through games and deceptions in search of life’s larger meaning.  Timony and Brownstein’s guitar interplay builds to a stirring conclusion.  The remainder of the disc strives to maintain an attitude of postpunk rambunctiousness yet mostly does so in a peculiarly tame way.  Among the sparse highlights to be gleaned from the interior tracks are the vocal harmonies, set above gentle electric keyboard figurations and then rougher guitar accompaniment, that come toward the end of the otherwise unremarkable “Glass Tambourine.”  It is striking how the backing vocalists—Weiss and Cole both take part—are better singers than either of the frontwomen, Brownstein and Timony.  I especially dislike Brownstein’s vocal mannerisms—seldom content to deliver a song straight, she is constantly contorting her voice into something between a gulp and a yelp, like a New Wave diva reincarnated.  “Something Came Over Me” offers a blessedly more sedate vocal line, nicely harmonized by the backup corps.  This is set to an insistently baleful three-chord pattern—it gets a little tiresome but serves its purpose as the tune’s emotional grounding.  “Boom” appropriately packs an explosive charge, but Brownstein’s singing is as irritating here as anywhere on the disc.  The brisk, businesslike tempo of “Future Crimes,” the album’s other single, militates against the distress the song intends to convey.  “Endless Talk” is a blues-tinged rock wailer with a plangent “96 Tears”-type keyboard filigree.  “Racehorse,” the longest song on the album, is also the least effectual, burdened with a labored metaphor, yet its drawn-out coda allows for some more muscular exchanges between the guitarists.    B/B-

Sample song  “Romance”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J8n9R8rnB8&ob=av2e

ZOLA JESUS, Conatus (Sacred Bones Records)—Proving that a record can be pretentious without being bloated, Conatus nonetheless offers ample seductive charms.  Nika Roza Danilova’s interest in philosophy shows in both the performing name she chose (in part to offend those easily given to offense) and in the title of the album.  “Conatus” is a philosophical concept dating back to the ancient Greeks, one whose meaning has been fluid over time but essentially describes an entity’s (human or otherwise) striving for self-preservation and self-improvement.  Her metaphysical bent is not reflected, though, in the song lyrics, which are impressionistic and fragmentary, also solipsistic (in this there is some relation to the conatus) and occasionally trite.  The skimpy CD booklet does not offer the lyrics—or much information of any kind (one does get to learn who Danilova’s stylist and makeup artist were for the cover and interior photos)—and Danilova’s pronunciation of them, far from crisp, offers little help, leaving me to rely on websites like songlyrics.com.  I am not sure why I should be disappointed to discover that a twenty-two-year-old performer cannot summon sophisticated poetry in her verses, but I am all the same, given the expectations and critics’ enthusiasm for this record.  Leaving aside reservations about the “libretto,” the music has a dark, Goth appeal that is only enhanced by Danilova’s natural flair for drama.  Her deep pipes and heroic affect invite comparison to—at the risk of offending the indie fan legions—Amy Lee and Evanescence, if considerably less hokey.  More than anyone else, however, Danilova’s singing suggests Stevie Nicks, an unusually grave Nicks, in her lower register only.  Her songwriting is richly atmospheric and can summon considerable emotional power, yet even in this respect my enthusiasm is tempered.  The album’s centerpiece, “Vessel,” is moving but not all that it could be.  Just when you are expecting a third reiteration of the chorus, she chooses instead to allow the song to peter out.  One might laud Danilova/Zola Jesus for subverting the listener’s assumptions, but to me it robs the piece of its force, especially considering how monochromatic the verse section is.  The doomy mood is established at the disc’s outset, with the minute-long, wordless (but not voiceless) “Swords,” full of portentous chords, and continues straight into “Avalanche,” a chorale of sorts for multitracked voice and synthesizer, ponderously freighted with sliding downhill metaphors.  What is arresting about the sound is the preponderance of synths and the complete absence of guitar; the only strings are acoustic ones of the sort you would find in a symphony orchestra.  Songs carry odd titles like “Hikikomori” (a Japanese term referring to adolescents who withdraw socially), “Ixode” (which seems to refer to a genus of ticks), “Seekir,” and, best of all, “Lick the Palm of the Burning Handshake.”  “Seekir” nicely overlaps a regretful, Fleetwood Mac-tinted verse/chorus with a resounding, wordless lament for harmonic accompaniment, relieving some of the heaviness of the vocals by juxtaposing them with a danceable beat.  In the face of the grim keyboards and dire violins and cellos, “In Your Nature” and “Shivers” practically offer comic relief with a much sunnier disposition, in spite of words that speak of going to war (“Shivers”) and declare, “you’ll never win” (“In Your Nature”).  “In Your Nature” in particular has a redemptive-sounding chorus with some piercing harmonies and a big, rumbustious drumbeat from Nick Johnson, who plays on several other tracks as well.  The echoey, reflective “Skin” is the only song to feature acoustic piano instead of electronic keyboards.  “Collapse,” a buzzy, throbbing number, rises above a puzzlingly ambiguous lyric about how “it hurts to let you in” (so the narrator will no longer do so?  Or will continue?) to provide a fitting conclusion to the record, as its keyboard chords offer tonal resolution again and again.  On her third Zola Jesus recording, Danilova may be underfulfilling her potential, but that potential makes it worth continuing to follow her progress.        A-/B+

Sample song  “Vessel”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYWHi0Ug7pQ


AFRICAN

BOMBINO, Agadez (Cumbancha/Zero Gravity Films)—This disc, a follow-up of sorts to Group Bombino’s Guitars from Agadez, Vol. 2 on Sublime Frequencies, was a darling of NPR’s world music critics.  My own praise is more stinting.  Bombino (Omara Moctar, or, more formally, Goumour Almoctar) possesses a grainy, milky, somewhat pinched tenor voice that is uninviting, and this detracts from appreciation of his guitar work.  Now in his early thirties, Bombino grew up in Agadez, an important trans-Saharan trading center in northern Niger, in the zone where the scrubby Sahel gives way to desert farther north.  As a Tuareg, he was forced to flee his native country twice during Tuareg rebellions against the central government.  While in exile, he learned guitar and picked up influences ranging from Western guitar idols to Mali’s Ali Farka Touré and the fellow Tuareg group Tinariwen (see below).  Agadez was recorded at the behest of American filmmaker Ron Wyman, who made Bombino the subject of a film, Agadez, The Music and the Rebellion.  The album was begun at Wyman’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, studio and completed in Agadez, with the help of a couple of colleagues on guitar and drums and a handful of African and American session musicians.  The album’s first and final tracks, “Ahoulaguine Akaline” (I Greet My Country) and “Tebsakh Dalet” (A Green Acacia), plus “Tenere” (The Desert, My Home) in the middle of the track list, are traditional Tuareg melodies arranged by Bombino.  The remainder, his own compositions, can be divided into those that themselves sound fairly traditional (“Tigrawahi Tikma,” “Azamane,” and “Assalam Felawan” [Peace to You]) and those with a more modern cast.  The modern ones are the most mesmerizing.  A couple of the longer ones can be considered jams.  “Iyat Idounia Ayasahen” (Another Life) begins with a solo guitar and some ululations, then launches into a subtly powerful theme with rock cred, a nod to one of Bombino’s heroes, Jimi Hendrix.  The final five to six minutes of this nine-minute track, the longest on the album, are the jam, and while it has a decent groove, it is too unvarying and could have stood trimming.  “Tar Hani” (My Love) knows a good riff when it latches onto one at the start and does not let go through the course of six and a half minutes.  Bombino’s pleading voice during the sung portions of this jam (there are two reprises) is convincingly urgent but too bawling for my liking.  At least the jam makes room for some real, if not especially adventurous, guitar soloing.  “Adounia” (Life) is the closest in spirit to the assouf style of “desert blues” that characterizes Tinariwen, its trancelike chanting backed by a motoric element of graceful triplets in the percussion with handclaps on the downbeat and enhanced by dreamy guitar improvisation at the bridge.  Among the three songs taken from folk sources, “Tebsakh Dalet” is given a sprightly, vigorous arrangement, but, again, Bombino’s grainy voice and long tones make for an unfortunate combination.  “Tenere” is likewise spirited (and briskly paced) but hews monotonously to the short theme established at its outset.  “Ahoulaguine Akaline” awakens the listener with its chiming guitars and boomy percussion, making for a pleasant opening piece, even though its bridge section is distinguishable from the rest only by the fact of the guitarist taking a break from singing.  The songs Bombino wrote himself in a traditionalist vein seem denatured, once removed from the vitality of the culture that gave them rise.  “Azamane” (My Brothers United) has a recurring percussion stroke like a distant pile driver, and “Tigrawahi Tikma” (Bring Us Together) has an unctuously honeyed theme, but while these songs may strike some as hypnotic in their endless repetition of melodic cells, my attention strays.  One of the loveliest aspects of the CD is its cover photography, introducing fans not just to the musicians with their jaunty scarves but to a part of the world that gets little Western media exposure:  the tough, thorny landscape, the low mud- or brick-walled compounds as far as the eye can see, and the Grand Mosque of Agadez, dominated by its odd, spiky conical tower.        B+

Sample song  “Tebsakh Dalet” (solo acoustic guitar live version):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tneOdum6f68

(LE TOUT- PUISSANT) ORCHESTRE POLY-RYTHMO DE COTONOU, Cotonou Club (Sons d’Ailleurs/Strut Records)—The “All-Powerful” Poly-Rythmo Orchestra has been a fixture in Benin’s largest city and commercial capital, Cotonou, since the late 1960s.  But the band, and, indeed, the very concept of live big-band performance, seemed to have fallen on hard times in Benin when a young French journalist, Elodie Maillot, went to Cotonou for a reporting stint for Radio France Internationale and took the opportunity to interview its members in 2007.  This led eventually to the pressing of the Cotonou Club disc, on a new label, Sons d’Ailleurs (Sounds from Elsewhere).  A number of the band members, including the founder, Mélomé Clément, are now in their sixties.  But, like Brazil’s Trio Mocotó, another relatively recent rediscovery by an enterprising label, the old guys can still bring down the house.  This is evident from the very first number, “Ne Te Fâche Pas” (Don’t Take Offense).  Written by the late drummer Léopold Yéhouessi from the perspective of a man trying to sweet-talk back his mate following a series of affairs, it is funky in a suave, understated way, with a rolling, liquid arrangement of horns and guitars to back the earnest tenor of Vincent Ahéhéhinnou.  In their younger days, band members listened to African-American icons like James Brown and Wilson Pickett, as well as performing alongside the legendary Fela Anikulapo Kuti, from Nigeria.  In addition to American funk and soul and Afrobeat/highlife, Congolese rumba is a ubiquitous influence.  But the “polyrhythms” that give the band its identity are firmly domestic in origin, springing from Beninese voodoo rituals.  These are distilled to their essence in the reflective midtempo number “Tegbé”—skewered by acerbic saxophone choruses and given an extra dimension via a dreamy guitar bridge—which was written by the band’s bassist, Gustave Bentho.  “Von Vo Nono,” written by a famed Beninese singer, Gnonnas Pedro, who joined the New York/West Africa salsa project Africando in 2003, a year or two before his death, is a stark, moody tune that achieved widespread popularity across the continent.  With its portentous singing style and combination of cool guitars and craggy horn outbursts, it is not far off the music of Antibalas (see the 2010 music survey).  Poly-Rythmo’s slow-burn majesty reaches fever pitch in Clément’s “Holonon,” another tale of women with men who do not deserve them.  Delivering a concentrated dose of funk with syncopations, wah-wah pedals, and one curdling screech midway through, it is my favorite track.  “Ocè,” from another deceased member, William Amoussou (a.k.a. Jimmy Pop), is, like “Tegbé,” fueled by voodoo rhythms.  Fairly repetitive in its first half as the song contemplates social injustice, it allows the chorus to take over and become exhortatory, after which it ends with an oh-so-cool bass groove, resolving the tune as the voodoo drummers play on.  “Koumi Dédé” is the most pronounced Congolese rumba–tinged piece on the record, with a distinctly Cuban-style piano vamp to go along with its wah-wah guitars, as it relates a story about the efficacy and hazards of getting around town by motor-scooter taxi, or zemidjan.  There are three tracks that feature guest performers.  “Gbeti Madjro” was written by Clément back at the beginning of the band’s career and became a hit in part through getting play on Voice of America broadcasts.  Here, he sings it as a duet with Benin’s biggest star, the husky-voiced Angélique Kidjo.  It is a short but intense and fiercely paced tune, with waves of attacks that nearly overlap each other, and concludes with the mystical chanting of a witch doctor (féticheur).  “C’est lui ou c’est moi—Mariage” (It’s Him or It’s Me—Marriage) pairs Ahéhéhinnou with Mali’s Fatoumata Diawara for a battle-of-the-sexes joust in which the man demands a clear choice about with whom the woman is going to spend time.  It starts off with just Diawara, a cappella with handclaps, before her sparring partner enters, bringing on the funky guitars in train.  More lukewarm and measured than “Gbeti Madjro,” it nonetheless has the passion of its competing convictions.  The record’s producer, Maillot, along with Jérémy Tordjman, wanted for a final number to get the band together with two of its more prominent Western admirers, guitarist/keyboard player Nick McCarthy and drummer Paul Thomson of the Scottish band Franz Ferdinand.  Poly-Rythmo was apparently less keen on the idea, and it does sound like one with the potential to go badly wrong.  But after some time together in a Parisian studio trying to meld their very distinct sensibilities, they came up with “Lion Is Burning,” which, although it sounds like nothing else on the disc, is at least bouncy and energetic.  The funkiness of the horns and guitars of the Beninese are sublimated, if not blunted, at times by the Scots rockers, but the piece holds up well to aural scrutiny, mixing in the slide guitar of Karsten Hopchapfel and a bit of samba-style street percussion toward the close.  The CD booklet provides extensive background and documentation—it is sobering to see more than once performers mentioned as having disappeared or gone missing.  My one qualm is that it is not clear from the notes whether any of the songs written by current band members were composed for this recording; in fact, other than “Gbeti Madjro,” there is no clue as to when any of the songs were written.    A

Sample song  “Gbeti Madjro” (this is a different version from the one on the record, from a time when the band members were far younger, but listen to that James Brown–inspired yowl!):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX21YIMBbPI

TINARIWEN, Tassili (Wedge/Anti)—It was inevitable, given Tinariwen’s growing following abroad, that its members (or their producers) would be tempted to join forces with Western performers for a bit of cross-cultural dialogue.  Tassili, named for the national park in the Algerian Sahara where the album was recorded, is not primarily about that dialogue, however; it is very much a Tinariwen disc, and the band’s unique sound more or less survives its encounter with Westerners intact.  The instance in which this is least true is “Tenere Taqhim Tossam” (Jealous Desert; song translations from the original Tamashek are provided in the booklet).  This midtempo song starts off in customary fashion, but before long the presence of Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone of TV on the Radio (see above, in the mainstream pop/rock section) overwhelms the sound, with Adebimpe’s denatured falsetto, English-language chorus not so much gilding the lily as painting it beige or hospital green.  (Adebimpe himself is West African by birth, but Nigerian, not Malian, and his upbringing was decidedly American.)  Adebimpe or Malone, or both in the case of “Walla Illa,” appear on several other tracks but in backing roles as vocalists or guitarist (Malone).  On “Walla Illa,” Adebimpe’s falsetto harmonies are soothing and blend well into the song’s ruminative pastoral ballad form, and the same can be said for “Imidiwan win Sahara” (My Friends from the Sahara), which is the most melodically banal of the faster-paced tunes on the record.  The TV on the Radio guys actually traveled to the middle of the Sahara to record with Tinariwen; the other Westerners appearing on the record were had their tracks dubbed in subsequently.  Nels Cline, the jazz and rock guitarist who is a member of Wilco, plays on the opening track, “Imidiwan Ma Tenam” (What Have You Got to Say, My Friends?), which is classic Tinariwen, played in the assouf style—which draws on indigenous melodies and rhythms of northern Mali but uses nontraditional instruments, namely, electric guitars, for that “desert blues” sound—taken at a cantering pace, with handclaps, spirited choruses, and searing electronic overtones to create a viscerally thrilling tableau.  The trumpet of Gregory Davis and the saxes of Roger Lewis, both of New Orleans’s Dirty Dozen Brass Band, playing long, grainy or slurred supporting tones with the occasional run or squeal, are a welcome enhancement on “Ya Messinagh” (Oh, Lord), a quiet, deceptively peaceable but piercing number that spins art out of the pain of recognizing unpleasant truths.  Matching or exceeding “Ya Messinagh” in raw emotional power is “Djeredjere” (At Rock Bottom), setting the lamentations of a no-hoper against the spareness of a guitar, a rhythm guitar, and clipped percussion.  Indeed, the circumstances of the album’s production (northern Mali, undergoing another of its periodic bouts of instability and separatism, of which the secession-sympathetic Tinariwen often sings, was considered too dangerous to travel in, particularly for foreigners in the production crew, so everything was moved across the border to Algeria), well away from any recording studio militated against sophisticated production and emphasized simplicity and directness.  This reaches its starkest on “Tameyawt,” just a scratchy guitar and a voice full of longing.  Unlike on previous Tinariwen recordings, there are no ululations punctuating Tassili, in fact, no women’s voices at all.  The record company’s video clip of the mellow, campfire-simple “Iswegh Attay” (I Drank Some Tea; see below) cuts off before the song’s “outro,” its most striking feature, isolating the guitar and voice of  Aroune ag Alhabib—possibly the brother of Tinariwen’s co-founder Ibrahim ag Alhabib—recorded as if at a remove from the microphones.  The guitar chords of “Tiliaden Osamnat” (The Girls Are Jealous) bear some similarities to those in the famous intro to the Doobie Brothers’ “Long Train Runnin’” (1973), though played in a far less spiky and agitated manner.  Tassili marks another triumph for the unofficial Tuareg ambassadors of contemporary music.    A/A-

Sample song  “Iswegh Attay”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P0oO8nphMY&list=UUZ3wH-v5zOcq4ZZWI58TGKA&index=3&feature=plcp


LATIN

LILA DOWNS, Pecados y Milagros (Sony Music Entertainment México)—For her seventh studio record, Mexican/American singer Lila Downs chose to shuffle the deck and intersperse her own work with Mexican standards, folk tunes, and other songs less well known.  Additionally, she commissioned a set of devotional paintings, retablos or ex votos, to match each of the fourteen songs on the disc, plus a fifteenth that did not make it onto the CD, “Jarabe Ejuteco.”  These paintings are reproduced in the CD jacket, together with the inspirational verse that accompanies them (often taken from earlier writings rather than the artist’s own words).  Not quite as stylistically broad ranging as her selections on La Cantina: “Entre Copa y Copa ...” (2006), the Mexican source material on Pecados y Milagros (Sins and Miracles) is heavy on the slow weepies.  The best known of all is Tomás Méndez’s “Cucurrucucú Paloma” (1954), sung originally by the iconic Pedro Infante and since covered by a host of big names, including Lola Beltrán, Harry Belafonte, Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, Joan Baez, Julio Iglesias, Rocío Dúrcal, Nana Mouskouri, Luis Miguel, and Caetano Veloso.  The Huapango mariachi ballad, with its quasi-falsettos, nicely showcases Downs’s expressive vocal range, from coquettish to all but sobbing, from mimicking the cooing of a pigeon to belting out sustained tones, all in a three-minute span.  The song that precedes “Cucurrucucú Paloma” on the track list, “Vámonos,” has the oompah rhythm imported from Central Europe that characterizes numerous rancheras, but here a bass guitar substitutes for the lower brass, while a tenor sax, played by Paul Cohen (Downs’s husband), and accordion accompany the singer.  “Vámonos” was written by José Alfredo Jiménez, a much-loved, self-taught singer of rancheras from Guanajuato state who died in 1973.  The most traditional piece on the album is the folk tune “Xochipitzahua,” or “Xochipitzahuatl,” meaning “Little Flower” in the Nahuatl language, dedicated to Mexico’s “patroness,” the Virgin of Guadalupe.  Lasting barely a minute and leading directly into “Palomo del Comalito” (Dove of the Cooking Pan), it is notable because Downs, naturally an alto, sings it in a fairly high soprano register, initially in a mincing, almost cartoonish manner but later in a more full-bodied way, accompanied by the harp of Celso Duarte.  “Dios Nunca Muere” (God Never Dies), a decorous nineteenth-century waltz by the violinist Macedonio Alcalá, with varying sets of lyrics (here Downs, bringing back her high register for certain passages, uses those of Julián Maqueo), is full of lamentation and suffering.  Having come to be known as the anthem of Downs’s native Oaxaca, it touches on the plight of that southern state’s abundant poor, driven to seek opportunity further north.  The brass/woodwind arrangements starting two-thirds of the way through “Dios Nunca Muere,” by Miguel Peña and Juan Carlos Allende, played by the Tierra Mojada band from San Andrés Huayapam, are in some ways typical of a Mexican brass band, but there are some klezmer-like flourishes in the higher winds.  “Tu Cárcel” (Your Jail Cell) is by the heartthrob singer/songwriter Marco Antonio Solís, formerly one of the leaders of the band Los Bukis.  Downs does some heavy emoting, via sobs at the outset and sighs midway through, that at times threatens to overpower the song’s delicately spread schmaltz.  “Fallaste Corazón” (Your Heart Failed You), by the late Cuco Sánchez of Tamaulipas state in the northeast, is given similar treatment, with some showily sustained long tones, particularly on the words “maldito corazón” (damned heart); likewise for Juan Zaizar’s “Cruz de Olvido” (Cross of Forgetting).  The stately processional that is the final song, “Misa Oaxaqueña” (Oaxacan Mass), written in a folkloric-religious vein by Timoteo Cruz Santos in 1979, brings back the Tierra Mojada brass players.  Beginning with church bells and conversation, its choral arrangement glides down the steps toward home, lofted by a habanera rhythm.  The six songs that Downs and Cohen composed together are typically faster and livelier than those borrowed from elsewhere in Mexican culture.  “Mezcalito,” the disc’s opening track, celebrates the country’s second-most famous distilled beverage with heavy-footed but rapid triplets in the accordion and brass, pausing only for a sultry bridge led by Cohen’s tenor sax.  “La Reyna del Inframundo” (Queen of the Underworld) has the rhythm of a corrido, from northern Mexico, a high-stepping and accordion-driven polka.  Its introduction, however, sneaks in yet another klezmer tinge before “going straight.”  Both “Palomo de Comalito” and “Zapata Se Queda” (Zapata Remains) have an anthemic feel similar to a number of songs on Una Sangre/One Blood (2004; number 22 on my list of the Top 100 albums of the decade).  “Palomo de Comalito,” swept up in colorful Amerindian pageantry (yet with a wailing rock guitar bridge), compares grains of corn to gold, a “miracle” that banishes tears and suffering; the video for the song (see below) perhaps romanticizes dire poverty a bit much.  “Zapata Se Queda” takes the form of a cumbia, with instrumentation, particularly the bagpipe-like gaita, played by Marco Vinicio Oyaga of Colombia, that is distinctly Andean in sensibility.  A more widely known Colombian, Totó la Momposina, duets with Downs on this track, concerning the memory of the famed Mexican revolutionary serving as inspiration to steady one’s path in life, yet Totó’s charisma could have been deployed to greater effect.  “Pecadora” (Sinner), furiously polka-paced, is a hectic, Hebraic-sounding romp suitable for a bar mitzvah band (an odd thing to say about a record dripping with Catholic imagery, but there is the influence of Downs’s Jewish husband) that is not improved by the rapping of Argentina’s Illya Kuryaki and the Valderramas (Dante Spinetta and Emmanuel Horvilleur).  My least favorite song is “Solamente Un Día” (Only One Day), which comes off as a colorless attempt to replicate a Juan Luis Guerra-type bachata.  Yet these are minor flaws on another splendid gem of an album from Lila Downs.    A/A-

Sample song  “Palomo del Comalito” (Dove of the Cooking Pan), with “Xochipitzahua” as prelude:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o6QUwsadP8


JAZZ

AMBROSE AKINMUSIRE, When the Heart Emerges Glistening (Blue Note Records)—The range of sounds that emanate from Ambrose Akinmusire’s trumpet is impressive.  Certainly he is capable of a full-bodied clarion call but often chooses a more attenuated or subdued tone; his instrument’s voice is at times breathy/buzzy, gritty, or strangulated.  Although I do not think he uses a plunger at any point on this record, there are passages where the contortion of his embouchure seems to approximate that sound, or the sound of a clarinet mouthpiece played without the rest of the instrument (which, I know from experience, can be varied by sticking a finger in the hole at the opposite end).  Akinmusire did a tour of Europe with Steve Coleman’s Five Elements straight out of high school in Berkeley, California.  Following studies at the Manhattan School of Music and USC, he gained wider attention in 2007, when he won both the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition and the Carmine Caruso International Jazz Trumpet Solo Competition.  In particular, he impressed Bruce Lundvall, the president of Blue Note Records, which led to When the Heart Emerges Glistening, his major-label debut.  (He has one other record out, on the Fresh Sound label, as bandleader.)  His quintet features another up-and-comer, pianist Gerald Clayton, along with Walter Smith III on tenor saxophone, Harish Raghavan on bass, and Justin Brown on drums.  The album, almost entirely original compositions, has a “modernistic”—to use a word favored by Jason Moran for one of his own album titles—contemporary feel to it. The standout “Confessions to My Unborn Daughter” begins the record with almost a minute of trumpet runs miked at low volume before the coolly remonstrative main theme kicks in as a trumpet/piano duet, eventually joined by Smith’s sax.  This leads to a sax solo that is easygoing at first but becomes more woolly and tempestuous as he keeps at it; Akinmusire responds with a wide-ranging improvisation of his own that bleats and flirts with atonality, even while keeping in contact with the contours of the tune.  The studied moodiness of the ensemble piece “Henya,” with its gently cycling bass line, is handled with exquisite subtlety by the group.  The title of “With Love” suggests something mushy, but the composition is another artfully doleful statement.  Led into a cul-de-sac by its unimaginative tenor sax solo, it snaps back on course as Clayton gets his turn tickling the ivories, followed crisply by the bandleader himself, and the song’s denouement feels like a well-earned pleasure.  “Tear-Stained Suicide Manifesto” is a wrenching three-way conversation—fraught beyond over-the-top—between trumpet, sax, and piano that gives the central spotlight to Moran, one of Akinmusire’s mentors, playing the Rhodes electric piano.  Moran co-produced the record and also sits in with the band on “Henya.”  In “The Walls of Lechuguilla,” named for a cave in Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, the band leaves behind the splenetic for the frenetic.  Akinmusire channels Dave Douglas or Avishai Cohen with his muffled tones, drilling phrases repeatedly, while Clayton sketches in some harmonic coloration (later, it is the saxophonist and the pianist engaging in the same interplay).  At what amounts to a chorus section, the trumpeter races up and down figurations, pulling the rest of the band along with him, stepping on the ends of phrases in a vehement rush for an exit from the subterranean chamber.  A contrastingly urbane tenor is offered with the 1939 standard “What’s New” by Bob Haggart, which Akinmusire included as a lambent tribute to one of his heroes, the hard-bop trumpeter Clifford Brown.  “My Name Is Oscar” is more a piece of political theater than music, a chance for Justin Brown to solo as Akinmusire recites words and phrases that make reference to a case in which a transit police officer shot dead an unarmed African-American named Oscar Grant in his home city of Oakland several years back.  The album contains two bagatelles, an interlude and a postlude, that are dedicated to Akinmusire’s mother, Cora Campbell.  Both involve just the bandleader and Clayton.  On “Ayneh (Cora)” (“ayneh” means “mirror” in Farsi and is also the reverse of “Henya”), Akinmusire plays the celesta for a particularly delicate keyboard exchange, whereas on “Ayneh (Campbell),” he is back on trumpet.        A

Sample song  “Confessions to My Unborn Daughter”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QZ5chS_by8

RICHIE BEIRACH, Impressions of Tokyo: Ancient City of the Future (Outnote Records/Outhere Music)—Active since the mid-1960s (he was a contemporary of Keith Jarrett at Berklee College of Music), Richie Beirach has played piano with Stan Getz, Chet Baker, and as part of Dave Liebman’s Lookout Farm and Quest ensembles.  He began releasing solo performances on disc in 1976.  His long-standing interest in classical music shows forth on Impressions of Tokyo.  The record is, appropriately, impressionistic and spare a good portion of the time, and in these pieces one might hear echoes of Erik Satie or other experimental modernists; in his earlier work, for example, he has explored the music of the Catalan composer Federico Mompou (see below, in the classical section).  Though the titles of the short compositions (all but one coming in at less than five minutes’ duration) reference things that Beirach observed around him in Japan, plus a few dedications to fellow musicians and cultural icons, there is no self-conscious effort to mimic Japanese idioms, no pentatonic scales.  One could only suggest that the restraint exhibited by many of these pieces corresponds to the simplicity of a Japanese “zen” garden, tatami mat, or botanical watercolor.  The disc is organized as a set of twelve “haiku” (thirteen if one counts the wispy introductory fragment, “Tokyo Lights at Night”), plus three other songs, “Ancient City of the Future,” “Lament for Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” and “Eyes of the Heart.”  Of the three haiku that are homages in memoriam to musicians, two have Japanese subjects, the composer Toru Takemitsu and Masahiko Togashi, a jazz drummer.  “Takemitsu-san” is one of the more complex inventions on the disc, perhaps reflective of the various stages that composer’s career went through:  beginning starkly, amid fugitive shadows, it broadens into a heartstring-tugging melody, then develops into a lively, freewheeling interpretation of that melody before settling back into a recapitulation.  “Baker-san,” a tribute to the late trumpeter Baker, is one of the splendid miniatures on the album, moody and volatile, with a central burst of intensity in improvisation.  These two, along with “Ancient City of the Future,” are among the few here that get a genuinely “jazzy” treatment.  “Rock Garden” is another exquisite gem, in a purely expressionistic classical mode.  In a couple of pieces, notably “Cherry Blossom Time,” Beirach plucks and strums the piano strings directly, in addition to playing the keys; these pieces could be performed live only with assistance (or with pauses).  “Bullet Train” the most kinetic composition on the record, begins and ends with an almost Schubertian, dramatic bass rumbling; in between, the pianist races up and down the keyboard and executes deep, lightning-quick glissandos.  “Kabuki” also dabbles in such glissandos in its middle passages, even sneaking in a bit of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” belying its dour opening and closing sections.  “Lament for Hiroshima and Nagasaki” and “Tragedy in Sendai” are appropriately baleful, the former more in a classical/pops idiom than jazz, the latter more furtive and fulminatory.  “Japanese Playground,” at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, is the disc’s most uncomplicatedly sunny offering.  “Shibumi,” the final haiku and longest composition, named for a hard-to-translate Japanese term referring to a certain quality of cultivated understatement, is elegiac, even cinematic in a studiedly expressive fashion.  There are instances in which the music waxes purply florid, and others in which its austerity makes it easy to write off, and this is one of the least jazzlike jazz records out there.  But Beirach knows what he is doing and will spring a surprise just when you think you have him figured out.        A-

Sample song  [None available]

BILL FRISELL, All We Are Saying . . .  (Savoy Jazz)—Beatles and jazz lovers unite!  Actually, although Bill Frisell, a guitarist whose work spans genres from rock to folk to country, cut his teeth on jazz, and this recording is on a jazz label, his tribute to the music of John Lennon is jazz only in a marginal sense.  The sixteen songs presented—half of them Beatles chestnuts, the other half tunes that Lennon did on his own or with the Plastic Ono Band—are largely played straight up, with no improvisation, merely a few flourishes at the beginning and end of tracks for the musicians to stretch their creative muscles.  The lineup that Frisell assembled for All We Are Saying . . . comprises Greg Leisz on steel guitars, Jenny Scheinman on violin, Tony Scherr on double bass, and Kenny Wollesen on drums.  This ensemble imparts a distinct character to what was originally rock ’n’ roll:  in songs where the shimmery, weepy pedal steel guitar predominates, the music takes on a country/folk cast; where the violin is heard more, it approaches the chamber/bluegrass sepia tones of the Tin Hat Trio.  Because the music is largely about the guitars, in certain songs Scheinman’s violin fades into the background, which is a pity given her stature as one of the jazz/avant-garde world’s most ubiquitous fiddlers.  She does carry the melody, though, on “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” “Julia,” “Love,” and for one verse of “In My Life,” which is the only Beatles song here not widely co-credited to Paul McCartney.  The Beatles numbers skew toward the more complex compositions of their latter stages, with only “Please Please Me” (1963) from the early years, plus two from the midcareer Rubber Soul (1965).  The Lennon solos, which are not entirely among his best known (several were unfamiliar to me), include three from John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970), two from Double Fantasy (1980, released three weeks before Lennon’s assassination outside the Dakota, a few blocks from where I now live), one each from Imagine (1971) and Walls and Bridges (1974), plus “Give Peace a Chance,” a single that was issued in 1969, before the Beatles broke apart.  The last of these is the most radically transformed on the album, converting a sloganeering protest refrain into something the Chicago instrumental postrock group Tortoise might have reimagined, all sustained, reverberant tones with soft drum and cymbal rolls.  The least altered of all is the bluesy, proto-grunge “Come Together” from Abbey Road (1969), while “Imagine” has been covered so many times that it is hard for any interpretation to shed new light on it.  I am not sure this album needed to be recorded; it is sort of a busman’s holiday for hip musicians rather than something that lets us see John Lennon’s music from an unaccustomed perspective.  But there are certainly worse things than listening to talented players exercising their chops on music they grew up with and love to the core.        B+

Sample song  “Across the Universe”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4zfcezGg0s

BRAD MEHLDAU/ KEVIN HAYS, Modern Music (composed and arranged by PATRICK ZIMMERLI) (Nonesuch Records)—The jazz section of this year’s survey is full of unusual combinations, none more so than a set of two-piano arrangements of original music and selections from the classical and jazz repertory.  Brad Mehldau is a pianist whose career I have followed closely; Kevin Hays and Patrick Zimmerli were unfamiliar to me.  All three are Connecticut natives of similar age (early to mid-forties).  Zimmerli is a jazz saxophonist who has worked with a number of jazz musicians, but he has made his name primarily as an author of modern classical compositions.  Hays is a jazz pianist with interests and temperament compatible with Mehldau’s intellectual style.  Zimmerli’s original intent for Modern Music was to include more classical material, from Henryk Górecki and Arvo Pärt (see below, in the classical section), and less of his own stuff.  In the end, only excerpts from two American minimalists, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, made the cut, together with one jazz standard, Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman.”  Zimmerli composed several new pieces to go along with a title track of his own devising and also borrowed one piece each from the two pianists’ earlier work.  This is not a bad thing; I respect the composer/arranger’s judgment when it comes to the winnowing process, and I enjoy Zimmerli’s effervescent writing style, light-fingered and yet with a tensile strength.  “Crazy Quilt” is airy, with the limpid keyboard tones of an Isaac Albéniz or Enrique Granados, but it swings hard its genial theme, before the two pianists bring it to a close with a punchy coda.  Hays and Mehldau have to have innate trust and knowledge of the other’s playing to pull off the duo improvisations.  “Modern Music” demands at times that the performers improvise with one hand even as the other hand plays the score.  Somewhat Reichian itself in its repeated and interlocking figurations in 6/4 time, it takes a couple of breathers to contemplate its idée fixe from different angles.  Aggressive syncopations characterize “Generatrix”; once more, Zimmerli and his pianists create something rapturous and electric out of the most rudimentary of thematic materials.  In this context, Mehldau’s own “Unrequited” can seem overly cerebral and, ironically, more the work of a classical modernist, with its Wagnerian chromaticism unhinging it from any tonal center.  Even so, the piece has more to offer than Hays’s neo-Romantic (with an opening segment that channels Modest Mussorgsky) “Elegia.”  In the process of denaturing the searing “Lonely Woman,” Zimmerli’s arrangement has transformed it into something wondrous in its own right, with stunning tone colors at the beginning and end, a thrumming bass register monotone in the center—above which an intricately patterned yet free-flowing improvisation takes shape—and barely a nod to Coleman’s original saxophone theme.  The extract from Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians uses the composer’s cycle of eleven chords, each pounded out insistently in a barrage of staccato before moving on to the next, as a template for Hays and Mehldau to engage in a series of variations and embellishments that cleverly complexify the schematic without violating its fundamentally minimalist spirit.  By contrast, the excerpt from Glass’s String Quartet No. 5, which transcribes the opening of the sedate fourth movement of that composition, is pretty but staid, tightly bound as it is to its source.    A/A-

Sample song  “Crazy Quilt”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3-UKJWLj7A

JOEL RUBIN/URI CAINE, Azoy Tsu Tsveyt (Tzadik)—Clarinet and organ/piano make for an odd pairing, whether in the context of jazz or klezmer.  Joel Rubin bends notes as freely as any klezmer clarinetist, whereas Uri Caine’s accompaniment on the Hammond or Fender Rhodes has a distinctly 1970s astral, laid-back groove, reminiscent of that era’s Irakere, from Cuba, led by the great Chucho Valdés.  Rubin and Caine are both fifty-something Jewish musicians, recording here on John Zorn’s Jewish-oriented Tzadik label, and both studied under noted classical masters, Richard Stoltzman and Kalmen Opperman (Rubin) and George Crumb (Caine).  Beyond that, they have taken somewhat different paths.  Rubin is a leading scholar as well as performer of klezmer and Eastern European Jewish traditional music, whereas Caine’s recordings, while touching on klezmer, have ranged from the Goldberg Variations to a collaboration with Christian McBride and Ahmir Thompson (“Questlove” of the Roots) to a project with Zach Danziger blending fusion with drum ’n’ bass beats.  Azoy Tsu Tsveyt intermingles traditional Jewish music—sometimes liturgical, sometimes folk—with compositions by current or deceased klezmer artists, using arrangements by Rubin, except in the case of “Bessarabian Thing” (Caine).  “The Pianist,” which Rubin wrote for the Roman Polanski film of the same name (2002) but was not used on its soundtrack, is largely not about the keyboard; except for a couple of improvisational flourishes over the course of thirteen and a half minutes (the longest track on the record), Caine is limited to a supporting role.  Rubin’s opening tune has some of the mockingly sardonic quality of some of Dmitri Shostakovich’s outbursts but leavened with a certain sweetness; his secondary theme is both more playful and closer to the music used in portions of the Jewish liturgy, with some phrases winding down in modal, Hebraic fashion.  Following the second organ improvisation, Rubin picks up a new theme, lively and far less weepy than the first and bearing some kinship to the melody used in Jewish services for “Yismechu B’malchutecha” (They Shall Rejoice in Your Kingdom).  “Kiever” and “Ah Zoy” are the album’s only selections that do not credit “traditional” in part.  “Kiever” was written by Dave Tarras, a legendary klezmer clarinetist of the twentieth century; it is sprightly yet tinged with the mournful quality one typically finds in Eastern European melodies.  Rubin moves adroitly between registers on the clarinet, while Caine gets his moment in the sun with a cool-toned intro that is stylistically light years from klezmer—at least for the first thirty seconds!  The slower and piercingly melodramatic “Ah Zoy” sprang from the pen of Opperman, Rubin’s mentor, who died a couple of years back.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, in terms of sources, from those two are the wholly traditional “Nign for Sabbath and Holidays” (a “nign” or “nigun” is a tune or melody), whose grace notes and trills ornament another spiritually penetrating lament that one can easily imagine being chanted at Friday night services.  “Bessarabian Thing” also nods to tradition solely as its wellspring, but the tune is unfamiliar; this brief song, a head-spinning whirl of motion in Caine’s hands (with Rubin entirely absent), is all about the keyboardist’s arrangement, which races through phrases and syncopations with barely a pause and sneaks in a low-pitched, twangy thrum toward the end.  The other three pieces hybridize vintage klezmer with the work of living practitioners, all of them younger than I am.  “Ahavas Oylam/Eternal Love,” from the violinist Steven Greenman, has a somber, meterless, minute-long introduction, after which it launches into a much brighter-hued processional theme.  But this lasts only a couple of minutes before breaking back down into the despondent slough from which it arose.  The abrupt changes in mood, quirky as they seem, are not alien to klezmer performance.  “Yiddish Soldier” is a long composition that pairs a popular World War I klezmer song with a somewhat more contemporary theme composed by another violinist, Alicia Svigals, a former and founding member of the Klezmatics, that is a good match for the older tune in terms of key and wounded tone.  Again, the introduction from Caine’s organ is out of left field, cosmically inspired by 1970s jazz and fusion.  Michael Winograd, one of Rubin’s (much) younger counterparts on klezmer clarinet, wrote “New Khosidls” (a “khosidl” is a Hasidic-inspired dance).  It is more lighthearted than most of the record; perhaps because of this, it is also less affecting, a dainty tune that leisurely stretches out over six minutes, after which it picks up speed and a new theme entirely to close out the album with a burst of energy (and, finally, a banging of keys as Caine splays across the Fender Rhodes).  Part of Tzadik’s Radical Jewish Culture series, Azoy Tsu Tsveyt is anything but radical, honoring a genre by not straying far from its distinguishing characteristics.  Even so, those incongruous organ jazz solo bits will stay with you long afterward.    A/A-

Sample song  “The Pianist”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ_tz70Eu8g

TYSHAWN SOREY, Oblique – I (Pi Recordings)—After a number of prominent professional critics sprinkled superlatives on this recording, I expected to appreciate it more than I do.  In fact, its uncompromising atonality makes it a long slog (its ten tracks stretch out to more than 76 minutes in toto), and I frequently found myself growing restless as the music’s forbidding thorniness and conceptual complexities provide the listener with few safe harbors.  Tyshawn Sorey is a young drummer who has played with various bandleaders, some more mainstream than others but with a definite tilt toward avant jazz.  I first heard him play as part of an ensemble known as Paradoxical Frog, with German-born saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and pianist Kris Davis, at John Zorn’s performance space The Stone in the East Village a couple of years back.  Sorey credits Anthony Braxton as a mentor and inspiration, and my response to his highly cerebral compositional methods is consistent with my general frustration/incomprehension toward Braxton’s work (see the 2009 music survey).  Not entirely, though; I do like the second half of Oblique - I (roughly tracks seven to ten) more than the first.  Sorey wrote his 41 Compositions between 2002 and 2006, and the album contains ten of those, each numbered rather than titled.  His band is a quintet, with Loren Stillman on alto sax, Todd Neufeld on guitars, John Escreet on piano and electric piano, and Chris Tordini on the upright bass.  Neufeld and Escreet drop out of the ensemble for one piece each, and “Eighteen” is a braying, meterless sax solo.  The most enjoyable piece on the disc is “Fifteen,” the penultimate offering, in part because of its syncopated keyboard pattern at the opening and because Escreet’s long solo part, though as atonal as anything on the disc, is more engaging than Stillman’s frequently grating work elsewhere, but also because of the intrigue generated by the two minutes of deep quiet in the midsection.  After the ensemble picks up again, there is a tempestuous contest between pianist and saxophonist for supremacy; for the most part, Escreet has the final word, reverting to his syncopations at the close.  “Thirty-Six,” the final number (literally), features a lot of subdued interplay between Escreet on the Fender Rhodes and Sorey; it is the album’s most sublime track.  Even Stillman adapts to the prevailing mood of “cool.”  “Twenty-Five,” involving the entire group more thoroughly, is less eventful but very much of the same quiet, restrained nature as “Thirty-Six.”  Much of “Thirty-Five” is also gentle and mellow in character but by no means all of it over the course of its eleven minutes.  At the other end of the scale, “Twenty” and “Forty,” the most unruly compositions, are particularly hard to digest.  “Seventeen” showcases some jagged soloing from Neufeld, here on the acoustic guitar (electric elsewhere), along with some Keith Jarrett–style vocalizing, whether by Neufeld or someone else, I am not sure.  There are times when Neufeld’s rangy, sliding-chord solos put me in mind of Mary Halvorson (see the 2010 music survey).  In the final analysis, Oblique - I is not as bristling as Braxton; it offers some things for the viscera as well as the brain.  But not a whole lot.        B+/B

Sample song  “Forty” (live version):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9shligasuF0

STARLICKER, Double Demon (Delmark Records)—The six tracks on this fairly short disc bear comparison to some of the work of ensembles fronted by Dave Douglas, in that they are trumpet-led avant jazz with a distinctly “postrock” flavoring.  A Chicago-centered trio formed by cornetist Rob Mazurek, Starlicker drew ample praise from Ben Ratliff of the New York Times.  My response is more tempered.  The group’s debut disc opens impressively with the title track, which is conventional enough in that it sketches out a theme and then works through a series of interpretations.  But the improvisation here is strictly a team effort, which demands a tight-knit ensemble and players who are constantly aware of where the others are going.  The cornet-vibraphone-percussion combination is a strange one, certainly.  Moreover, the way Jason Adasiewicz approaches his instrument—Mazurek has spoken in interviews about “hitting hard” being part of his philosophy—might change your ideas about how a vibraphone should be played; no “mellow vibes” here!  Mazurek’s own playing style is similar to Douglas’s, with less of a premium put on technique or tonal purity than on expression of knotty and sometimes dissonant concepts.  The group’s drummer is John Herndon, a founding member of the Chicago postrock instrumental band Tortoise.  “Orange Blossom” starts in with a pleasant, tight little chiming pattern in the vibes; when Mazurek and Herndon enter, they are rambunctiously playing against the grain.  This countervailing attack comes to an abrupt halt with a pause in the music, after which the cornetist puts forth an atypically lyrical melody that carries the rest of the way through.  “Andromeda” gets stuck in a loop—a pattern of a dozen or so notes from the cornet that repeat ad infinitum—after Mazurek initially lays out an atonal theme that is quickly forgotten.  But what stands out about “Andromeda” is the rolling, rocking syncopation from Herndon’s drum kit that begins the composition and is revived after a break midway through.  “Vodou Cinque” and “Triple Hex” are much more freeform pieces.  Each starts with a lengthy meterless section dominated by the vibraphone.  For “Vodou Cinque,” Mazurek interlaces a muttering, muted cornet, while the portion of “Triple Hex” just past the intro resounds with drum volleys mixed with harsh brass trills.  Even though each song picks up a regular rhythm eventually and builds momentum (in “Vodou Cinque” the plunger falls away in favor of more elephantine bellows), the overall effect is still murky and amorphous.  “Skull Cave” fails to deliver much kick as a closer; its primary tune is nondescript, and the improvisations are far from venturesome.  Starlicker has a unique sound quality, for which we have been given the aural equivalent of an amuse-bouche with Double Demon.  Mazurek’s compositions for it may just need more time to gel.        B+

Sample song  “Vodou Cinque”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWGE29d-uV8

CRAIG TABORN, Avenging Angel (ECM Records)—Like Richie Beirach’s record (see above), Craig Taborn’s is a solo piano outing.  Also like Beirach’s, it is most un-jazzlike, striving instead for a rigor of classical modernist asceticism.  But whereas Beirach’s compositions convey moods and imagery in the form of miniatures, Taborn’s feel like nonevents, even in the capable hands of Manfred Eicher, ECM’s founder and producer.  The pianist simply does not offer much to engage the listener, and the result is what feels all too frequently sterile or like purely intellectual exercises.  The album’s thirteen tracks roughly alternate between those that are spare to the point of evanescence and those that feature industrious passagework.  The more active compositions show an admirable, if flashy, technique, but to what end?  They are like dark, featureless caverns that lead to other dark, featureless caverns, a spelunker’s delight but no one else’s.  The title track seeks to rise above this compulsive burrowing, with what I would guess is a fiendishly difficult polyphony in which one hand repeats an irregular, syncopated rhythmic pattern while the other bangs out chords or rapid sequences of eighth notes and tied notes played freely and swingingly.  But mostly what one gets is an amplification of volume and intensity, not anything resembling a climax or cadence.  “Gift Horse/Over the Water” follows much the same course across its tumultuous seven and a half minutes.  Some of the keyboard scrambles (listen to “Spirit Hard Knock” and “Neither-Nor” in succession) bring to mind the work of Franz Hummel in his short-lived duo “maximal music” with the Georgian-born violinist Liana Issakadze, minus Hummel’s evident humor.  As for the more static, reflective compositions, I find it unenlightening hearing the pianist obsessively work over a single figuration in one hand while bracing it with chords played by the other.  The pattern is set with the opening song, “The Broad Day King”:  one hand chimes the same monotone sequence like a tocsin as the other probes a set of atonal chord progressions.  Where Taborn chooses to moderate the atonality, as in “True Life Near” or “Forgetful,” some beautiful sounds emerge from his keyboard.  Yet, because too much of Avenging Angel is either a blank slate or channels furious energies as remorselessly as waves crashing against rocks, this lengthy recording feels longer still.        B/B-

Sample song  “This Voice Says So”:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTOaAcwk4ls

MIGUEL ZENÓN, Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook (Marsalis Music/ Redeye)—The follow-up to Esta Plena (see the 2009 music survey) and 2005’s Jíbaro, to form a trilogy dedicated to several different genres of Puerto Rican music (country/mountain folk, plena, bolero), Alma Adentro (Inner Soul) reinterprets the bolero, the classic ballad song form originating in nineteenth-century Cuba.  The album’s ten tracks comprise two each from five Puerto Rican composers spanning eras from the 1920s to the 1970s.  Taking his alchemy one step further, Miguel Zenón asked Guillermo Klein, the Argentine pianist/composer with whom he regularly collaborates, to orchestrate each piece for a horn/woodwind ensemble, on top of Zenón’s own jazz quartet arrangements.  Although I prefer Klein’s own original work (as in the phenomenal Filtros—see the 2008 music survey) to his settings of other songwriters (Domador de Huellas: The Music of “Cuchi” Leguizamón—see the 2010 music survey), his genius for creating unusual sonorities glints like a garment’s interwoven metallic threads throughout the disc; certain passages sound more like a classical chamber ensemble than like jazz.  Tempos are generally easygoing in bolero, yet Alma Adentro’s selections alternate between fast and slow.  Being unfamiliar with the original compositions means that my attempts at criticism are half-blind (or half-deaf).  In truth, though, several of them hold little appeal for me, even as reconstituted by Zenón and Klein.  The most exciting cuts on the record are the concluding “Tiemblas” (Tremors) by Tite Curet Alonso—the youngest composer represented, although he, like the others, has passed away—a man best known as a salsa songwriter, and Sylvia Rexach’s “Olas y Arenas” (Waves and Sands).  “Tiemblas” is striking for its having not so much a walking as a running bass (played by Hans Glawischnig), laying the groundwork for a dreamy, breezy theme expostulated by Zenón’s alto saxophone, with some judicious wind ensemble embellishments, to piano accompaniment (Luis Perdomo), for which one can sit back and imagine Curet Alonso trying to perfect a salsa/bolero fusion.  “Olas y Arenas” is introduced with a (completely original by Zenón?) quasi-serialist, gracefully undulating piano line, whose spirit carries on to some degree in Luis Perdomo’s solo turn.  The rhythmic and harmonic dynamism of these interpolations turn the song’s core melody, poignant but serenely uncomplicated, on its ear, culminating in a two-minute freewheeling solo by the bandleader before his final iteration of the melody.  “Silencio,” a song by Rafael Hernández, is juiced up by a saxophone jaleo (a syncopated riff) that appears at the beginning and end of the piece, as well as other thrusting syncopations that power the piece’s concluding section.  The same composer’s “Perfume de Gardenias” is bookended by a saxophone cadenza, while to support the main theme, the drummer Henry Cole alternates between a martial rhythm and a more characteristically relaxed “Latin” one, even as the vamping of Glawischnig’s bass evokes the smoky tropical clubs of yesteryear.  Hernández was a central figure in Puerto Rican music in the twentieth century and the founder of the Trio Borinquen.  Bobby Capó’s “Juguete” (Toy), as bright and shiny as its title would suggest, is given a loose-limbed swing, to which just a touch of contemporary anxiety is added via a subtheme Zenón integrates from the very start.  Incidentally, Capó played the starring role of Rafael Hernández in a 1969 biopic, El Jibarito Rafael.  “Perdón” (Sorry) by Pedro Flores, given a veneer of hip modernism in its piano vamps, contains an arresting stop-time passage about a minute from the end, a mock-solemn chorale for the French horns and lower winds that is over almost as soon as it begins.  (Flores was a friend and rival of Hernández and a fellow member of his trio for several years.)  The lesser of the slow ballads, laying on the schmaltz with a broad spreading knife, bring down the album’s grade, although these are handled with great delicacy when called for (viz. the sultry lilt of Flores’s “Amor”).    A-

Sample song  “Olas y Arenas” (Waves and Sands, live version, quartet only):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCOwpLlrNTs&feature=channel&list=UL

CLASSICAL

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

PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD (piano), The Liszt Project (Deutsche Grammophon)—Pierre-Laurent Aimard last appeared in the music survey in 2008, with his Hommage à Messaien, marking the centennial of the birth of the eccentric French composer Olivier Messiaen.  Now Aimard has issued a double-disc set to commemorate the bicentennial of Franz Liszt.  But he was not interested in a compendium of the greatest piano works.  Rather, he chose to explore Liszt’s influence on contemporary composers (in the case of Wagner) and those that came after him.  The two discs thus alternate between Liszt piano pieces and those of others.  The second disc is more schematically organized than the first, with conscious twinning of compositions:  Liszt and Bartók, Liszt and Marco Stroppa (the only living composer selected), Liszt and Ravel, Liszt and Messaien.  Also, Aimard mentioned in an interview contained in the slim CD booklet that he was seeking on Disc 2 to move from darkness into the light.  Liszt’s “Aux Cyprès de la Villa Este I (Thrénodie),” from Années de Pèlerinage [Years of Pilgrimage] III (1883)—all the Liszt pieces on Disc 2 are from this suite except for the last one, “Vallée d’Obermann,” which is from Années de Pèlerinage I (1855)—which initiates the disc, is not so much dusky as full of chiaroscuro contrasts and alarmingly tempestuous in its midsection, a suitable match for Bartók’s funereal, occasionally agitated  “Nénie” from his Four Dirges (1910).  By the time we get to the two offerings based on fountains, Liszt’s “Les Jeux d’Eau à la Villa Este” and Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau, which was directly inspired by the former, the atmosphere is obviously a good deal brighter.  The pairing of the last two compositions, Messaien’s “Le Traquet Stapazin” (The Black-Eared Wheatear), from Catalogue d’Oiseaux II (1958), and Liszt’s “Vallée d’Obermann,” is less obvious, except insofar as both composers are dealing in their own way with themes relating to nature.  The Messaien piece is typical of his bird-catalogue songs, full of twittering outbursts in the right hand but ranging as well all over the keyboard.    “Vallée d’Obermann,” has a broad, Romantic compass and is swept up in personal struggle, far from the detached observer mode that marks the Messaien.  The other pair on the disc also have bird themes:  Liszt’s “St. Francois d’Assise: La Prédication aux Oiseaux” (St. Francis Preaching to the Birds) and Stroppa’s “Tangata Manu” (Birdman) from Miniature Estrose I (Strange Miniatures) (1995/2001).  The choices Aimard made for the first disc were more oblique and abstract, taking piano sonatas by Richard Wagner, Alban Berg, and Alexander Scriabin to illustrate their affinities with the Hungarian composer in terms of dramatic sweep, harmonic juxtaposition, and texture and tone color (yes, I am cribbing this from the CD booklet).  The three shorter, late Liszt works bracketing these sonatas, La Lugubre Gondola (1882/83), which took on the mantle of an elegy for the death of Wagner, Nuages Gris (Gray Clouds) (1881), and Unstern! Sinistre (Star-Crossed! Sinister) (also 1881), are all brooding and unsettling in their own way, both in terms of mood and tonal stability.  His B Minor Piano Sonata (1854), dedicated to Robert Schumann, closes out the first disc.  In four movements that run together as one, it is more conventionally Romantic than the later works but is also highly variable in terms of tempos (the final movement alone has four  tempo markings, ranging from Presto to Lento Assai), themes (there are five of them, given names like “Faustian” and “Mephisto”), and intensity.  Aimard handles this and all else with the steady assurance of one who is an accomplished scholar as well as a great performer.


CLAUDE DEBUSSY, Orchestral Works, Vol. 7 (Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano; Première Rapsodie for Orchestra with Principal Clarinet, Paul Meyer, clarinet; Rapsodie for Saxophone and Orchestra, Alexandre Doisy, saxophone; Deux Danses for Harp and Strings, Emmanuel Ceysson, harp; Orchestre National de Lyon, conducted by Jun Märkl) (Naxos)—By the time the budget label Naxos reached Volume 7 of its series of the complete orchestral works by Claude Debussy (it is actually the ninth and final disc in the series), it was beginning to summon up oddities and some of the French Impressionist master’s overlooked works, in particular the Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra, although this set also includes the celebrated “Danse Sacrée” and “Danse Profane” for harp and orchestral strings.  These two dances, written originally in 1904 for a Pleyel instrument called the chromatic harp (no pedals, separate strings for each chromatic note) but now typically played on a conventional harp as it is here, are among my favorite classical compositions of all time, miniatures that exert a specific gravity, as light-footed and delicate as they are.  The “Danse Sacrée” is like one of Giovanni Batista Tiepolo’s celestial ceiling paintings of clouds and cherubs, while the “Danse Profane” is a quick-moving waltz with frequent pauses, mystical and imbued with tremendous charm.  The Fantaisie, written in 1889-90, when Debussy had already won the Prix de Rome for composition but had not yet scored a major success, is in two movements, although the second is sometimes considered two movements linked without pause, making for in essence a three-movement concerto.  As distinctly Debussy-esque as some of the sonorities are in this piece (the link to Impressionism in the visual arts comes through in its smudgy tonal palette, revolutionary in its quiet way), what strikes me (and I am hardly the first to draw this comparison, though I came to it independently) about its splashy pianistic virtuosity, chromatic and tinged with melancholy, and its brash, bustling, ravishing orchestral accompaniment is the way it foreshadows the keyboard concertos of Sergei Rachmaninoff, who favored a much more extroverted compositional style than we are accustomed to from Debussy.  The composer continued to tinker with this piece throughout his life, and the 1968 revised score used by Jun Märkl and his pianist, the well-traveled soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, incorporates Debussy’s numerous amendments.  The clarinet rhapsody and the saxophone rhapsody had their genesis in very different circumstances but share with each other that they are not virtuoso showpieces for the soloist.  The clarinet piece, from 1910, is a modest, dreamy fantasy, conceived as a Paris Conservatory exercise, broad-themed at times, fleeting and fugitive at others, and ending with a flourish of almost blinding brightness.  The saxophone rhapsody had something of a tortured history:  it was commissioned by Elise Hall, a wealthy Bostonian who had taken up the instrument herself, in 1895, but Debussy, lacking in familiarity with the instrument, which had only been around for half a century, did not get down to writing for nearly a decade after.  He worked on the piece from 1903 to 1905 and picked it up again in 1911.  He outlined the orchestration but never completed it; that work was undertaken by Jean Roger-Ducasse shortly after his death.  The composer conceived of an alternate title for the work, the Rapsodie Orientale, and it also has been known as the Rapsodie Mauresque or Rapsodie Arabe, in reference to its Moorish associations and musical arabesques, though Jonathon Blum at Western Kentucky University has asserted that the melodic material comes primarily from Debussy’s studies of plainchant and the cries of street vendors.  It is noteworthy how frequently the soloist’s role is sublimated into the orchestral mix, as merely the lead player among many.

CHARLES IVES, Four Sonatas (Hilary Hahn, violin; Valentina Lisitsa, piano) (Deutsche Grammophon)— What makes Charles Ives’s music quintessentially American also makes it tricky for current-day listeners.  Taking a hallowed European art form such as the violin sonata, he sneaks in various popular songs and hymns as themes that would be readily recognizable by audiences of his time.  However, quite a few of these are not tunes that someone listening today would likely pick up on, which is not to say these pieces go unappreciated without that knowledge—even the casual listener can tell when there is something “folksy” going on.  There are exceptions, naturally, in particular in the second sonata’s middle movement (“In the Barn”), where one is greeted by the “Sailor’s Hornpipe,” a ditty that everyone knows, not least from watching Gilligan’s Island and the Popeye cartoons, and is later treated to a bit of “Turkey in the Straw,” among other songs.  Ives’s four violin sonatas, all in three movements, each have this element, but it is not equally sprinkled among them.  The first sonata, dating from the first decade of the twentieth century, is the most traditional in its language, with some interesting modern harmonic twists and a bittersweetly lyrical Largo Cantabile second movement, but it brings in field songs and tunes from camp meetings that would play a larger role in the third and fourth sonatas.  The third, from the World War I era, is the longest and most elaborate and seeks to recreate the religious fervor of the New England camp meeting revivals Ives was familiar with.  This carries over into the fourth, which is the only one to bear a title, “Children’s Day at the Camp Meeting.”  Intended for performance by Ives’s young nephew, the fourth is far shorter and lighter than the others.  In fact, the entire sonata is barely longer than the final movement of the third (which is not even the third’s longest).  Indeed, I might be inclined to characterize the fourth as “lightweight” if not for the pining second movement Largo, which incongruously concludes with a song fragment that sounds a little like the Washington Redskins’ fight song, “Hail to the Redskins.”  The final movement’s little tune gives the odd impression of running out before it has quite finished, leaving the audience hanging.  The third sonata’s lengthy opening movement is in four parts, characterized as hymn verses with “refrain,” and four separate tempo indications.  The scampering middle movement Allegro is particular fun for the pianist.  The third movement resolves into a compellingly honeyed chorus at the end.  The second sonata is the only one in which movements bear names instead of tempo markings.  “Autumn” begins slow and austere but becomes quicker and more driven in its central passages and ends singingly.  The aforementioned, quick-change “In the Barn” was, like its counterpart from middle of the third sonata, intended to evoke ragtime.  “The Revival” quotes one of those long-forgotten hymns, “Nettleton.”  Hilary Hahn, one of classical music’s most successful and marketable stars, still dewy with youth but frequently bold in her programming choices, here pairs with the Ukraine-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa, her accustomed partner for duo sonatas, and the two are clearly comfortable making music together.

FEDERICO MOMPOU, Silent Music: Música Callada; “Secreto” (Jenny Lin, piano) (Steinway & Sons)—The Catalan composer Federico Mompou’s late-career masterwork, Música Callada (Silent Music), was composed between 1959 and 1967 in four volumes, twenty-eight short movements in all.  The composition’s title springs from a line in the religious poetry of San Juan de la Cruz, from The Spiritual Canticle of 1577, written as a paraphrase of the Song of Solomon while the poet was imprisoned.  Música Callada was not premiered until seven years after its completion, by Alicia de Larrocha, and, indeed, Mompou’s work generally has been appreciated more since his death in 1987.  Seen by contemporaries as a throwback of sorts, an heir to the French Impressionist composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and particularly Erik Satie—his music showed no interest in the prevailing experimental ideas of his day, yet he developed his own harmonic language that eschewed key signatures.  Música Callada demands patience and concentration to listen to straight through from beginning to end.  It is, appropriately, quiet music, and it takes its time unfolding.  Notes have definite values in terms of duration, but the compositional score is unbarred, meaning that there are no real tempos to speak of.  The music’s spareness and lack of thematic development has led it to be characterized as minimalist; in that, it admits to kinship with Satie, but it lacks the gnomic essence and playfulness of Satie’s miniatures.  A certain sobriety pervades Música Callada, with movements bearing titles like “afflicted and full of pain,” “plaintive,” and “severe,” when they are not simply described as “slow” or “tranquil.”  Appended to the performance of  Música Callada by Jenny Lin, a Taiwan-born pianist who grew up in Austria and is active in championing the music of living composers, is the “Secreto” movement from Mompou’s much earlier suite Impresiones Íntimas (1911-14).  I enjoy the “Secreto,” however brief, more than the main work on the disc; it sounds more “Spanish” (even though it was took shape while Mompou was living in Paris, whereas Música Callada  was composed in Barcelona) and a little courtly—perhaps it is simply a matter of the grace notes.

ARVO PÄRT, Piano Music (Ralph van Raat, piano; Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic, conducted by JoAnn Falletta) (Naxos)—One of the composers who was in the vanguard of making peace with tonality following a period of absorption in Serialism, Arvo Pärt found himself, from the 1970s onward, increasingly drawn to early music and the Baroque as well as the musical traditions of the Russian Orthodox church.  This CD from Naxos features a young Dutch pianist and musicologist, Ralph van Raat.  Although a single disc cannot pretend to comprehensiveness when it comes to the career of a major composer in his late seventies, it does draw upon compositions from several different eras of his career:  the beginning stages, when he was emerging from the shadow of the great Russian composers of his youth, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, and beginning to experiment with twelve-tone methods; the mid-1970s, just after his retreat and reconciliation with tonal structures, Baroque forms, and minimalism; and recent years.  This last phase incorporates the Lamentate: Homage to Anish Kapoor and His Sculpture ‘Marsyas,’ for Piano and Orchestra (2002), the one orchestral work on the album, which takes up its entire second half.  Consisting of ten mostly short movements, it was commissioned by the Tate Modern gallery in London.  In it, Pärt takes the enormous Kapoor sculpture, meant to merge body and sky, as a pretext to muse on mortality and suffering.  The composition unveils a range of moods.  Following the aggressive sharpness of the first two movements, the sense of stridency vanishes, with the exception of the short movements marked Stridendo (Creaking, or Chirping) and Risolutamente (Resolutely).  The ending of the first movement, marked Minacciando (Menacing), sounds uncannily like the orchestral portamento at the end of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” (1966).  Much of the remainder contains hovering, haunting orchestral overtones and pregnant pauses, anticipatory in the way of movie soundtracks.  The music can be quietly heartrending, as in the Lamentabile movement, or tentatively reassuring, as in the final movement.  The first two offerings on the disc, the Zwei Sonatinen für Klavier (Two Piano Sonatinas), are the Estonian composer’s first, written during his time at the Tallinn Conservatory.  They are followed by the Partita from the same time period (1958-59) and then three works dedicated to women, the Variatonen zur Gesundung von Arinuschka (Variations on Arinuschka’s Recovery, 1977), Für Alina (1976), and Für Anna Maria (2006).  The Partita, which is generally atonal and moderately dissonant like the busier sonatinas, presents a dour outlook until the striding final Ostinato movement.  The Variations and Für Alina both sound pretty Minimalist in nature, but in each, Pärt is working with two independent melodic lines that sometimes reinforce each other and at other times clash.  Whereas Für Alina is slow and full of silences, Für Anna Maria, written three decades later, is a lovely music-box miniature, lasting barely more than a minute.  Van Raat, one of whose teachers was Pierre-Laurent Aimard (see above), plays with subtlety and sensitivity where called for but also holds his own in concert with the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic in the Lamentate.

ALEXANDRE THARAUD (piano), Alexandre Tharaud Plays Scarlatti (Virgin Classics/EMI Records)—Hard to believe, but Domenico Scarlatti composed between five hundred and six hundred harpsichord sonatas over the course of his long career (born in the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach, 1685, he outlived Bach by seven years).  Most of these (presumably) were composed during the second half of his career, when he took up residence in the Spanish court in Madrid as music tutor to the Portugal-born Princess Maria Barbara, who later became queen of Spain.  Alexandre Tharaud, a French pianist of note, sorted through this vast inventory and chose eighteen for this disc, taking care to have representation from those sonatas influenced by flamenco and Spanish folk music, such as the opener in F Minor K. 239 and the Sonata in C Major K. 420, as well as some that are lyrical (the Sonata in C Major K. 132, at seven and a half minutes the longest on the record, the Sonata in D Minor K. 32, or the Sonata in F Minor K. 481), some designed to display dexterity at the keyboard (the Sonata in C Major K. 72 or the lightning-fast Sonata in D Major K. 29), and some, like the Sonata in D Minor K. 64 or the Sonata in D Major K. 430, based on court dances.  All the sonatas are single-movement compositions, though they vary in length.  Incredibly, the Sonata in G Major K. 431, in the form of a gigue, lasts just forty-four seconds.  There are never more than one or two themes expressed in any one of these, yet, within those parameters Scarlatti summons richness by employing various techniques and devices, including slurred note clusters that evoke the strumming of a guitar or staccato repeated figures that emulate castanets, unusual modulations, and at times striking dissonances.  The Sonata in D Minor K. 141 is intense and filled with jittery tremolos, while the Sonata in A Minor K. 3 burns through several emphatically struck glissandos.  The Sonata in A Major K. 208, though written in a major key, manages to wring a good deal of minor-mode anguish in its four-plus minutes.  Tharaud recorded these sonatas in an acoustically well regarded music hall called L’Heure Bleue in the Jura Mountains town of La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.