MUSIC 2015:  A DECIDEDLY SELECTIVE SURVEY
Steven Greenfield

December 31, 2016

   
    As was the case in 2014, I am coming out with this survey so late in the following year (each year, I try to get this out earlier than one full year late, and recently I am failing utterly) that I am not going to take the time to make general comments on the year in popular music, except to say that 2015 strikes me as a relatively weak year.  There were few albums I felt strongly about, but a number I liked reservedly.

    I nearly managed to get through all the pop records I accumulated this year (all with the exception of Bomba Estéreo’s Amanecer and Small Black’s Best Blues), but once again because of time constraints, I was not able to review any of the jazz, classical, Latin, or African recordings I had, for which I am sorry.

    Annoyingly, it is becoming ever more common for albums to be released either in MP3 format only or in MP3 and vinyl only.  While I do own a nice turntable, I am reluctant to accumulate LPs in my tiny apartment.  For this reason, certain records that might have made the 2015 survey, including Thundercat’s The Beyond/Where Giants Roam; The Harrow, Silhouettes; and the fka Twigs E.P. M3LL155X (pronounced “Melissa”) will not appear here.

    My thanks once more go to Steve Holtje and to my brother, Douglas Greenfield, for their suggestions about what was worth paying attention to in 2014, and to my partner, Melissa, for her moral support throughout the time it took to get this survey finished.

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

1.    Panda Bear, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper
2.    John Zorn, Simulacrum
3.    The Maccabees, Marks to Prove It
4.    Foals, What Went Down
5.    Battles, La Di Da Di
6.    Gwenno, Y Dydd Olaf
7.    Joe Satriani, Shockwave Supernova
8.    Pond, Man It Feels Like Space Again
9.    Public Service Broadcasting, The Race for Space
10.    Beach House, Depression Cherry
11.    Dungen, Allas Sak
12.    Floating Points, Elaenia


    ROCK/POP ALBUM OF THE YEAR

PANDA BEAR, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper (Domino Recording)—Let us hope that Panda Bear does not actually meet the Grim Reaper for a long time to come!  Despite the morbid title and recurrence of the topic of the “final journey,” this is an upbeat record from Noah Lennox (Panda Bear), who is also one-quarter of Animal Collective.  It is also, although broadly similar to Animal Collective’s trippy, texturally dense oeuvre, surprisingly sweet and tuneful.  Lennox said in an interview with Dummy magazine that the only two fully realized compositions on Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper are “Tropic of Cancer” and “Lonely Wanderer,” but I believe he is selling himself well short.  The entire record sings out, in ways both entrancing and captivating.  The arrangements, put together in collaboration with the producer (and former Spacemen 3 member) Peter Kember, a.k.a. Sonic Boom, are plush, bubbly, swirly—psychedelic in coloration but never self-consciously so.  Vocals, as is typically the case with Animal Collective, often sound as if emerging from the bottom of well and thus are hard to make out, and Domino Records does not help by offering lyrics, meaning that thematic significance is largely lost on those without the patience to look up verses online.  The two singles issued from the disc, “Mr Noah” and “Boys Latin,” are complementary in style and are each instantly appealing.  The former, beginning with sounds of dogs whining and howling, is characterized by a vocal line that stutters its way down the chromatic scale; Lennox says it is his tribute to Rihanna.  The latter’s echoing vocal is has more of a yodeling quality and also bears some comparison to Sting’s “Rio, Riay, Ria-yo” chant on the title track of Regatta de Blanc (1979).  “Crosswords” is a particularly warm and dreamy melody, with a reverberantly sunny keyboard accompaniment, but it is nearly equaled in suaveness and relaxed posture by its successor, “Butcher Baker Candlestick Maker.”  The sense of ease extends to the pumping, jangly groove backing the fluid melody of “Come to Your Senses,” which marks the album’s midpoint with an extended, effervescent coda.  “Tropic of Cancer,” dealing with the death of Lennox’s father, deftly meshes the harp accompaniment to the pas de deux from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker suite with Panda’s own melody, which seems merely angelically consonant in its reflectiveness at first but acquires an exquisitely poignant shading as he reaches the lines, “And you can’t get back/You won’t come back to it.”  “Lonely Wanderer” has a wispier melody, but it is tightly wound round the support of Debussy’s lovely “Arabesque No. 1” for piano.  This is followed by the bright and bouncy “Principe Real,” whose title reflects Lennox’s choice of Lisbon as his current home and whose vocal is sonically filtered to the point of incomprehensibility.  The album’s finale, “Acid Wash,” which Lennox has categorized as a sea chantey, is a blotto variation on “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” shaving a few notes off the original spiritual’s melody.  Watery sounds slosh throughout this record, even in the brief interludes “Davy Jones’ Locker” and “Shadow of the Colossus,” again appropriate to the nautical heritage of the artist’s new domicile.  In making his peace with the prospect of the grim reaper’s eventual appearance as he approaches middle age (Lennox will not reach age 40 until 2018, but no matter), Panda Bear has given the world a candy-striped sweets shop of delights to marvel over and savor.        A

Sample song  “Mr Noah”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmXIIL2tmR8


    And the rest ...

ARCA, Mutant (Mute Records)—I could readily crib from my own review of Arca’s debut, Xen (see the 2014 music survey) to describe the second release, Mutant:  “strident, brief outbursts of noise ..., it is a kind of cybernetic dystopian fantasy.”  According to the artist himself, Alejandro Ghersi, in an interview with Pitchfork, “Mutant is about sensuality and impulsiveness as escape routes out of rigidity.”  The tracks that leave an indelible impression on this long record (clocking in at slightly more than an hour) are those in which Ghersi summons the concentration to produce a thematic superstructure above the moody electronic assemblages and samplings.  The title song begins unpromisingly with some mechanistic judderings and repeated patterns of explosive noise.  Two minutes in, however, the listener is rewarded with the unfolding of a melody that is both delicate and supple in its expressive pathos.  The follow-up, “Vanity,” is extravagantly louche in its arrangements, and yet the basic theme has a starkness worthy of traditional Japanese music.  “Snakes” uses a panting breathiness to accentuate the fraught nature of its tensile melody, ending in stasis with the banging of massed piano chords, while “Sever” spits out its theme like a harpsichord being played with relish by a particularly vengeful Dracula.  The most ear-caressing melody, although too remote and somber to be described as warm, appears on “Front Load,” accompanied by some of the crisp percussion sampling Ghersi favors.  It is succeeded by the glitteringly icy “Gratitud,” which is presented out of rhythmic time, piercing and echoey, like crystals that form on tree branches, witnessed on a still winter’s morning.  “Soichiro” is tremulous and intense for the most part, but in the middle section, where it is chirpier, the synth notes sound almost like steel pans.  Before long, the searing, throbbing ardor of the original theme reasserts itself.  The compositions in which there is no attempt to embellish the electronic set pieces, though, seem ultimately more vacuous; they catch the ear initially with their unusual collagework but then let go thanks to their obsessive impassiveness.  Aside from bits of the title tune, the only tracks with vocal samplings are “Umbilical” and “En.”  On the former, it sounds like a snatch of song uttered by an Asian teenager in some unfamiliar tongue, and it resembles some of the sampling used by Daniel Lopatin on his Oneohtrix Point Never recordings (but not in the case of this year’s offering; see below); for the latter, it is mere snippets of whispering and monosyllabic exhalations.  “Peonies” has a faraway, distorted keyboard theme, akin to a prepared piano.  As was the case with Xen a year earlier, Mutant shows promise, at least for those with a tolerance for electronic eruptions and sonic deformation, but it is less than it could be.    A-/B+

Sample song  “Vanity”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SYMoTBYT04

COURTNEY BARNETT, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (Milk Records/Mom + Pop Records)—Trying to figure out what it is that makes “Pedestrian at Best,” the leading hit from Courtney Barnett’s debut record, “work” is an exercise leading to appreciation of how a song can be more than the sum of its constituent elements.  As with much of Barnett’s music (to this point in her young career), “Pedestrian at Best” is decidedly unmusical.  There is no real melody.  The artist does no actual singing, except to embellish the end of the catchphrase, “I think you’re a joke, but I don’t find you very funny.”  The bass accompaniment is primarily an insistent two-chord (with dotted-note rhythm pattern) affair.  The tuneless tune is, however, punchy and direct, and easy to pick up on.  Moreover, Barnett has a way with words.  Her speech-singing, stream-of-consciousness verse, and wry humor make her a sort of Aussie lesbian version of Bob Dylan or Lou Reed.  Within her apparently limited range, Barnett has a capable enough voice, but straight singing is for the most part not her style.  She pulls off the same set of tricks as in “Pedestrian at Best,” more or less, in “Elevator Operator” (the opening track), “An Illustration of Loneliness (Sleepless in New York),” “Aqua Profunda!” and “Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party” (another single off the album).  These songs, notwithstanding their neuroses about urban daily living and romantic anxieties, are generally bustling and upbeat, although “An Illustration of Loneliness” slows the tempo to allow more room for longing and contemplation.  “Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party” ends up sounding rather like Patti Smith’s take on Van Morrison’s “Gloria” from 1975.  The short “Aqua Profunda!” about trying to impress a fellow swimmer in the local pool, is the most playful selection.  “Dead Fox” is less convincing, in part because its refrain of “If you can’t see me/I can’t see you” seems to have been imported from elsewhere; it is hard to relate it to the song’s rambling verse, which includes the gem:  “Heading down the Highway Hume/somewhere at the end of June/taxidermied kangaroos are littered on the shoulders/a possum Jackson Pollock is painted on the tar.”  “Small Poppies” is a shambling, 6/8-time barroom blues of self-pity and resentment, whose lyric ends on a disturbing note.  The album takes a small detour into Doors-style acid rock just before the end with the trippy “Kim’s Caravan.”  From a compositional perspective, this is the most shapely and sophisticated number, with another witty lyric about the Great Barrier Reef being “raped beyond belief.”  The problem with each of the longer tunes on the album, “Small Poppies” and “Kim’s Caravan,” is that both substitute instrumental volume and vocal vehemence for actual musical development.  There are other decided flaws on the record; for instance, it is hard to see “Depreston” as more than a boring song about shopping for suburban real estate.  The attempt to introduce broader concerns with the sighting of a Vietnam War photo in the seller’s house is too slight and casual to convey any meaning.  “Debbie Downer” (the only song in history to be named for a Saturday Night Live sketch?) is cliché-riddled and enervated, notwithstanding its playfully retro keyboard ornamentation.  The professional critics adored Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit.  I enjoyed it as well, more than I thought I would, given its genre range slotting somewhere between postpunk and folk, but with reservations.        A-/B+
 
Sample song  “Pedestrian at Best”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-nr1nNC3ds 

BATTLES, La Di Da Di (Warp Records)—With Tyondai Braxton out of the picture and no guest artists on La Di Da Di, the frivolously named third studio album from Battles, the band is for the first time performing purely instrumental compositions.  It would be hard to make a case that the new record represents an advance over the previous two, the breathtaking if also vocally cartoonish Mirrored (2007) and Gloss Drop, which won my Album of the Year honors (see the 2011 music survey) in a year in which there was admittedly no stiff competition.  Here the trio of Ian Williams (guitar/keyboards), Dave Konopka (guitar/bass), and John Stanier spins its wheels in places, but the music of Battles has always involved an insistent repetitiveness.  Sometimes characterized as “math rock” because of its irregular and overlapping rhythmic patterns and jagged attacks and dissonant chords, Battles here seems less interested in either knocking down barriers or fulfilling genre expectations than in simply settling into a groove and ripping it up.  If there is nothing as supercharged as “Atlas” from the debut record (which is now being used in a Rocket Mortgage commercial), the group still pulls off a succession of triumphs (when not on autopilot).  “Summer Simmer” does more than bubbly idly; it really cooks, trying on modal phrases and what sounds like strains of voice modulation, on the way to a pot-stirring climax before ending on some quiet and outré chords.  Its title notwithstanding, “Non-Violence” is far from pacific, showcasing a compellingly springy, tightly wound theme, embellished by the occasional klaxon, played at full volume; at times, the crunching bass notes threaten to consume the melody.  “Tricentennial,” with its lugubrious trills and romping, elephantine ensemble, is closest in spirit to the Looney Tunes hijinks of the debut.  The heavy-footed shuffle and Frankenstein-monster theme of “Megatouch” start out winningly, but soon the song becomes far too absorbed in dissecting its own components; experimental music as literally a set of lab tests.  The opening composition, “The Yabba,” by contrast, seems hulking and monochromatic until near the end, where its textural density and complexity take an impressive quantum jump.  The guitars in “FF Bada” knock about energetically, playing off a synth upbeat.  Between the companion pieces “Dot Net” and “Dot Com,” the former is harder-driving and more obsessive, the latter stretchier and even a bit more “commercial,” as at one juncture it uncharacteristically tries to resolve into a set of conventional-sounding guitar chords before moving on.  It is an interesting choice to use sleigh bells in three different tracks (“The Yabba,” “Tyne Wear,” and “Luu Le,” the closer) since this is not a holiday album and is “festive” only in the most eccentric manner possible.  If La Di Da Di is Battles’ least powerful statement to date, the band is nonetheless soldiering on admirably in its inimitable style.    A-

Sample song  “The Yabba”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkhLzHuUYmo

BEACH HOUSE, Depression Cherry (Sub Pop Records)—Do not be fooled by the first half of the album title; the dream pop it purveys may be wistful at instances but is not a downer.  The prevailing sensation is one of sticky sweetness, more like cherry tonic than an actual cherry.  This is a record of spare arrangements that manage to sound lush, and there is plenty of airiness to waft its full-bodied melodies.  It is not as sophisticated as some of the dream pop we have been exposed to recently, such as School of Seven Bells’ debut album Alpinisms (see the 2008 music survey) or the Sunny Day in Glasgow song “The Things They Do to Me” (see the 2014 music survey), yet its simplicity can be deceiving.  Victoria Legrand, the lead singer and lyricist, has spoken to the media about how she and her counterpart in the band, Alex Scally (guitar, bass pedals, keyboards, backing vocals), were looking for a less “aggressive” sensibility than on their previous record, Bloom (2012).  In particular, they wanted to create space by lessening the role of the drums.  Indeed, one hardly notices the percussion on this languid disc.  The aerogel textures throughout, the pastel tones, the breathy, somewhat androgynous vocals recall for the listener the French band Air (see the 2007 and 2009 music surveys; Legrand herself is a native of France) or a slower, less fizzy Apples in Stereo.  Even the soundtrack (not to mention the imagery) of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) comes to mind, although Michel Legrand, its creator (and, not coincidentally, Victoria’s uncle), is surely a more gifted and sublime composer.  Depression Cherry is best when Scally and Legrand (Victoria, of course) manage to incorporate subtle shadings and unexpected progressions into their sugary melodies.  Fortunately, this happens more often than not on the record.  The dreamy ethos (in dream pop, the dreams rarely seem to be anything but benign) is established right off, in “Levitation” with its quavery organ tones and relaxed pacing.  The high and swooping keyboard motif in “Sparks” reaches back toward (this reference might be fairly obscure) the sepia-toned and salt-tanged nostalgia of Delays, a band from Southampton, England, and their Faded Seaside Glamour (2004).  But “Sparks” also features some rippling electric guitar from Scally and intriguingly off-color sustained tones in the synths.  “PPP” (whose meaning is cryptic) is one of those songs whose secondary theme, expressed on slide guitar with sighing vocals as accompaniment, provides the spice that rescues it from blandness.  “Days of Candy” engages a student chorus, from Pearl River Community College in Poplarville, Mississippi, not far from Bogalusa, Louisiana, where Depression Cherry was recorded.  Once more, the richly saturated chromatics of the harmonic chords rendered by the piano and the choir turn what might otherwise be a spectral hymn with the weight of cotton candy into something much more affecting (at least for brief, bittersweet moments).  “Space Song” is the exception to the rule about mixing darker colors into the palette; it has the simplest and most broadly songful tune, pulling off the trick of sounding effortless and obvious because the logic of its composition is so convincing.  In the album’s shorter compositions like “Beyond Love” and “Wildflower,” the elements that animate the more successful numbers are absent, and the band flirts with a dullness redolent of molasses.  Depression Cherry was one of two records that the Baltimore-based duo issued in 2015; I do not have the other, Thank Your Lucky Stars, which followed in quick succession but attracted less notice.    A-/B+

Sample song  “Sparks”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfITojs_mNg

BLUR, The Magic Whip (Parlophone/ Warner Brothers Records)—The first album by Blur, one of the legendary Britpop bands of the 1990s (together with Oasis and Pulp), in twelve years should have been a major event.  Instead, it was to some extent overlooked by critics, if not by fans, showing how the musical universe has changed since the group’s heyday.  Blur disbanded for about five years following the recording of Think Tank in 2003, after Graham Coxon, the lead guitarist and backing vocalist, withdrew.  He came back in 2008, yet the band toured for several years without producing any new material.   Meanwhile, bandleader Damon Albarn turned his energies toward the cartoon hip-hop group Gorillaz (see the 2010 music survey) and other side projects.  Perhaps the critical neglect was warranted; The Magic Whip is certainly the weakest effort I have heard from this band.  But since I love Blur’s work, that constitutes praising them with faint condemnation.  Think Tank, which also was not as great as their signature albums from the nineties, was still strong enough for me to award it my Album of the Year for 2003.  That album was largely recorded in Morocco and reflects influences from North African mystic and traditional music.  The Magic Whip was recorded in Hong Kong and London, yet there is little evidence of Chinese/East Asian music in these twelve songs.  There are some lesser tracks on the record—“Ice Cream Man,” “Thought I Was a Spaceman,” “My Terracotta Heart”—but nothing that renders it unlistenable.  “There Are Too Many of Us” is a bit clunky, marching in lockstep and too broadly earnest in voicing Albarn’s ecological concerns.  One would expect a song titled “Mirrorball” to glitter and strobe; instead, it is a low-key closer to the album, full of mournful guitar strumming and a lyric full of ache and yearning.  “Pyongyang” is an intriguingly cryptic commentary on the North Korean dynastic dictatorship, a surprisingly lilting and gentle if somber tune.  Meantime, “Go Out,” the first single released, has a ready, understated pop appeal, as does the opener, “Lonesome Street,” also issued as a single.  “New World Towers” glows softly as one of the record’s more contemplative numbers.  “I Broadcast” has a rollicking groove that harks back to albums like the self-titled 1997 release, which gave the band its biggest hit, “Song 2.”  “Ghost Ship” has a relaxed, pale-blues sensibility; the song’s narrator is stranded in Hong Kong and lonelyhearted but does not sound all that upset about the circumstances.  “Ong Ong” is another easygoing Hong Kong–themed tune, with a simple melody that feels as if cribbed from somewhere else.  At this stage in its relatively long career, Blur is as much an institution and a global brand as a band, and that does not lead to the most innovative songwriting, as reflected by the unevenness of The Magic Whip.  Nonetheless, I am delighted to have the album in my collection—and to have the band back after all these years.    B+

Sample song  “Go Out”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp1ks7PTzng

CHVRCHES, Every Open Eye (Goodbye Records/ Glassnote Entertainment Group)—Nearly everything I said about Chvrches’ debut album, The Bones of What You Believe (see the 2013 music survey), applies to the new one as well, except that the novelty has worn off, and there is nothing as instantly catchy and sweetly appealing as “The Mother We Share” from that first foray.  Chvrches’ second L.P. does not demonstrate any artistic development, rather an extension and reapplication of the formula that won the Glasgow electro-pop group a big fan base originally, with more elaborate instrumentation (now that there is more money to throw around).  On Every Open Eye, all is ringingly declarative, brisk to the point of expeditious, as bright hued as candy (even “The Down Side of Me”).  Chvrches sprinkles pop hooks around like confectioner’s sugar on a batch of beignets.  The melodies, if too obvious, are accessible and at times enticing, but no effort is made to complicate them so as to vary the mood away from a ra-ra cheeriness sublimated into steely determination.  Tempos range from dance-friendly walking speed to dance-friendly peppy and accelerated.  Lauren Mayberry’s voice, not the richest, is wonderfully clear and charismatic.  The lyrics she is singing, however, are almost comically vacuous, a string of clichés patched together like a hobo’s jacket, striving for a meaning that utterly escapes them.  The conception of love as a titanic struggle that moves mountains and raises sea levels is an impulse that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German romantic poets would applaud; they would nonetheless be crying into their beer steins and schnitzels at this slipshod effort to follow their example.  (In this, Chvrches can be seen to model itself on the goth band Evanescence, something that the music accentuates in the churchly closing “benediction,” “Afterglow.”)  Further, the self-importance freighting Chvrches’ lyrics is a burden the sprightly music cannot bear.  All the more surprising to note that Mayberry has a journalism degree and has been cogently outspoken on matters such as feminism; even so, the songwriting appears to be a collaborative effort, and it would be unjust to place the blame entirely on her slim shoulders.  I should not belabor the point, but sometimes I cannot help myself.  In “Bury It,” one lyric reads:  “How about I prove I’m right/And raise it overhead.”  Whatever the antecedent to the “it” might be is a mystery.  “Playing Dead” asserts at one point:  “I am chasing the skyline/Much more than you ever will.”  This is the oddest notion of an in-your-face lyric that I have ever seen.  Every Open Eye begins with a couple of well-fashioned, shiny baubles taken at middling tempos; “Never Ending Circles” has a “concentrically” repeating, plodding stride of a beat, whereas “Leave a Trace” plays off agile syncopations.  Following these, the most melodically shapely tune is the contemplative “Down Side of Me.”  Most of the rest substitute vigor for creative verve; this tendency is distilled to pure nothingness in the instrumental bridge (of sorts) that caps “Clearest Blue”—it is a repeating bouncy rhythmic pattern built entirely on a single chord.  To be fair, the eventual re-entry of Mayberry’s vocal provides some contrast; still, no awards for compositional ingenuity here.  Mayberry will occasionally yield the microphone to her bandmate Martin Doherty, normally a synthesizer specialist.  This happens on Every Open Eye only on “High Enough to Carry You Over,” and, as on the prior record, the energy level drops noticeably when it does.    B/B-

Sample song  “Leave a Trace”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Eo84jDIMKI

DUNGEN, Allas Sak (Kemado Records/Mexican Summer)—Slighter than Dungen’s previous disc, Skit I Allt (see the 2010 music survey) or its predecessor, 4 (see the 2008 music survey), the music on Allas Sak (Everyone’s Thing) is still plenty enjoyable, as the foursome’s brand of retro, pop-jazzy Euro rock merits more attention than it gets, at least in this country.  Part of the reason the group flies well under the radar, of course, is that by singing in Swedish it makes no concession to Anglo-Saxon audiences.  I have the translations of the song titles at hand, but the lyrics are a mystery.  For the three songs that are purely instrumental, this is a moot point.  Gustav Ejstes, the band’s songwriter and principal instrumentalist, says he wanted to portray stories springing from his everyday experiences, and judging by the general tone of the album, he lives a pleasant, mellow life.  As on previous records, the sophisticated melodies shift hues swiftly and dexterously and lead in unpredictable directions.  They are slippery and fragile enough that they are hard to recall to mind once the song has ended.  “Franks Kaktus” (needs no translation), the most substantial of the instrumentals, will invariably bring Jethro Tull into the conversation because of its combination of flute with rock guitars and drums and its tinge of psychedelia.  Even so, it is swingier and looser than the music of Tull, not to mention that, during its stop-time section, it is closer in spirit to El Condor Pasa” (1970) of Simon and Garfunkel.  The other instrumental of some heft, “En Dag på Sjön” (A Day on the Lake), is one of the only pieces on the record with a wailing, white-hot guitar line, intertwined with clarion piano accompaniment and lots of cymbal action.  Of the songs on which Ejstes sings, the finale, “Sova” (Sleep) takes the prize, with its stately, heart-tuggingly doleful melody.  It seems to come to a thunderous conclusion mismatched with the song’s delicacy, a progressive rock fiesta of keyboard flourishes and piercing guitar chords, but this is just a prelude to four more minutes of tremulous guitar and synth musings, as the song gradually dies away.  The title track, opening the set, has an agreeably fuzzy warmth to it, and the saxophone of Jonas Kullhammar, the one guest performer on the record, adds texture.  “En Gång om Året” (Once a Year), begins as a gentle piano ballad, but by the close, the guitar line has become dominant, slicing up the keyboards and leaving a smoking contrail behind.  The companion pieces that follow the title song, “Sista Festen” (The Last Feast) and “Sista Gästen” (The Last Guest), are less consequential.  Still, Kullhammar’s bass clarinet in “Sista Gästen,” as well as his baritone sax riffing in “Åkt Dit” (Gone There), sends the listener on a time travel back to early 1970s–vintage Traffic, which is not a shabby comparison by any means.  Five years was a long stretch to wait between Dungen releases, and if Ejstes seems slightly off his game as a result, it does not detract in any significant way from appreciation of Allas Sak.    A-/B+

Sample song  “Franks Kaktus”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jWvIE3UFMg

FLOATING POINTS, Elaenia (Pluto/Luaka Bop)—Too minimalist at long stretches for my taste, the widely acclaimed debut record from English electronic musician (and neuroscientist) Sam Shepherd, recording as Floating Points, falls a little short of its repute.  Shepherd employs an impressive array of electronics, favoring analog synthesizers manufactured in the 1970s and early 1980s (or, in the case of the Buchla 200e, a twenty-first-century re-creation of such), namely, the ARP Odyssey, the Rhodes Chroma, the Buchla 101, and the Oberheim OB8.  (Incidentally, Don Buchla, one of the pioneers of the synthesizer along with Robert Moog, died at the age of 79 in late summer 2016.)  He also plays the piano, the electric piano (Fender Rhodes), and the marimba, and he does a bit of snare drumming and background singing as well.  To top things off, he has live musicians other than himself performing on three of the record’s seven tracks, including at various times a guitarist (Alex Reeve), a bassist (Susumu Mukai), drummers (Leo Taylor or Tom Skinner), a string quartet, and other background vocals.  This does not sound minimalist at all, but their contributions, apart from the percussion, are limited to brief intervals, in what are otherwise spare settings.  The composition that truly excites is the closer, “Peroration Six.”  Even though it consists largely of a repeating pattern of buzzing bass monotone (with a one-pitch uptick at the end of a phrase) and Fender Rhodes/synth chord cycle upon which other elements are inlaid, it has a sense of foreboding and gripping tension that is missing from the rest of the album.  The cycling chord progression also happens to bear a striking resemblance to that of Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place,” the opening track from Kid A (2000), which uses similar electronic keyboards to produce it.  The sound builds steadily in intensity until it is abruptly cut off midstream to conclude the disc.  As for the other pieces on Elaenia:  “Silhouettes (I, II & III)” is the lengthiest composition; semi-abstract and wordless as it may be, one can discern the divisions between the three sections.  The first part has a real feeling of movement to it, which is uncommon on this record, generated by an intertwining of drum tracks, the fleet, ever-cosmic Fender Rhodes, and synthesizers.  Part two is more static and openly melodic, playing up its “heavenly choir” (the only passage on the record that includes voices) and strings; it seems to be self-consciously evoking some of the early pop electronic music of the 1970s.  The final portion appears at first to be all about the agile drumming, but it summons back the chorus and string quartet for the last two-plus minutes.  Aside from the middle section of “Silhouettes,” the warmest song is “For Marmish,” mellow, moody, and ingratiating, almost too pretty in its dreamy Fender Rhodes excursions (particularly in the several stop-time passages) but maintaining focus throughout.  The opening number, “Nespole,” tries to furnish some heat through a gradual rise in volume and activity but still ends up sounding coldly clinical.  The middle tracks, the title number and the diptych “Argenté/Thin Air,” are simply too slight to be engaging.  Shepherd’s earlier compositions, the ones that preceded Elaenia, were reported by some critics to be more involving, and I would like to see him return to a style that does more with his compositional and arranging talents.        A-/B+

Sample song  “Peroration Six”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7nC_93J-fs

FOALS, What Went Down (Transgressive Records/Warner Brothers Records)—Certain records engender more respectful admiration than genuine passion, and it is not always easy to say why that is the case.  What Went Down, the fourth album from the fivesome Foals, perhaps the most famous Oxford band not named Radiohead (supplanting Supergrass), is fluent in its primary idiom, which these days is straightforward “indie” rock with psychedelic shadings, as well as the others it touches upon.  While the band goes in for sheer volume at times, it never does so gratuitously, and this does not crowd out lyricism or rhythmic light-footedness.  Everything on the disc is ingratiating and has a beguiling sheen to it, even the less memorable tracks like “Birch Tree” or “Lonely Hunter.”  Still, the album does not achieve, nor even attempt, transcendence until its final song, “A Knife in the Ocean.”  Even here, Foals does not reach the peaks of intensity of, say, Grizzly Bear at its best (see the 2012 music survey), but the emotional investment required to reach the note-bending searing, refrain of “A Knife in the Ocean” shakes off any sense of complacency.  The song takes its time building to that point, beginning with a tolling of bells before advancing a verse—nearly a cappella at first and then becoming a slow march of sorts as the percussion kicks in—that expresses serenity in the face of potential perils ahead.  Elsewhere on the disc, “Albatross” is swiftly paced and rhythmically crisp; its verse section is pedestrian but is soon left behind so that the tune can reiterate and embroider upon its poignant refrain, riding a good thing hard and straight through to the finish.  “Mountain at My Gates” pulls off a similar trick of amping up not just the volume but the fervor in its chorus; toward the end, it becomes wild and woolly.  “Snake Oil” is another dexterous piece, rhythmically pliable, a yowler that incorporates the grimy guitar chords and other trappings of American roadhouse blues.  The breezy, relentlessly upbeat “Night Swimmers” (not to be confused with the 1993 R.E.M. hit “Nightswimming”) sounds like late-period Talking Heads, from the time when David Byrne’s composition was starting to be heavily influenced by far-fling musical influences from Brazil and Central and West Africa.  By contrast, the plaintive ballad “London Thunder” partakes of the world-weary, restless spirit of Jackson Browne’s dispatches from the road (viz., his 1977 updating of the Maurice Williams doo-wop song “Stay”), all solemn keyboards and shimmery effects.  The title track, opening the set list, plumps for a garage rock/psychedelia sensibility in tribute to Iggy and the Stooges, buzzy-toned, droning, with a throbbing beat and a shouted vocal that portends something sinister (“When I see a man I see a lion/When I see a man I see a liar”).  It all seems to add up to a little less than the sum of its glittering components, more skillful genre facsimile than anything deeply felt, but it is still good enough at what it does for me to consider it one of the year’s better releases.  The deluxe version of the album contains a DVD, which I have not had the opportunity to watch, that includes a half-hour segment on the making of the record, titled “Crème Anglaise,” as well as the video of the title track and “poolside sessions” of “Give It All” and “London Thunder.”        A-

Sample song  “A Knife in the Ocean”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-n4U2KZZVs

FOUR TET, Morning/ Evening (Text Records/ Temporary Residence)— What happens when a matching pair of musical concepts that could profitably keep a listener engaged for eight or nine minutes is instead spun out to forty?  You get Four Tet’s Morning/Evening.  Kieran Hebden, a Brit of Indian extraction who records as Four Tet, became interested in Hindu devotional music following the death of his grandmother a few years back.  However, the Indian music sampled on this album is not devotional but rather taken from a couple of Hindi-language film scores.  The vocalist whose voiced is lifted from the film soundtracks is Lata Mangeshkar (who, unlike Hebden’s grandmother, is still with us in her late eighties).  Hebden wanted to structure Morning/Evening like a set of ragas, melodic modes in Indian music used to express particular moods, states of mind, even times of day or season; hence, morning and evening.  The two companion pieces, “Morning Side” and “Evening Side,” last about twenty minutes each.  The pair do differ in sensibility.  “Morning Side” is the sunnier of the two, containing a complete sung melody from Mangeshkar that will readily win over listeners.  It is, however, spun out to lengths that tax one’s patience, with minimal variation that includes VST synthesizer long-tone accompaniment, looping of the voice, and drum machines that take over the track about two-fifths of the way through for a couple of minutes, before the melody returns, and then again for the final quarter of the song.  “Evening Side” samples a hummed phrase, rising and then descending, by Mangeshkar that is more sighing in nature.  The introductory section is far longer for “Evening Side,” beginning with a drumbeat that in timbre and rhythm calls up that of the opening of Blondie’s disco tune “Heart of Glass” (1978), followed up by droning and swooping keyboard sounds.  It is not until nearly five minutes in that one hears more than a snippet of the vocal line.  As with “Morning Side,” the singing is eventually retired (more quickly on “Evening Side”) in favor of energetic, if artificially generated, percussion, in a brisk, tight, drums-and-cymbals pattern, with some plinking synth chords both preceding and overlapping the beats.  For inspiration, in addition to Indian traditional music, Hebden was looking to electronic composers like Autechre (see the 2013 music survey) and Morton Subotnick and his landmark Silver Apples of the Moon (1967).  But they were more experimentally daring than this is.    B+

Sample song  “Morning Side”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWJV83LyBz8

GRIMES, Art Angels (4AD)—If Grimes, whose actual name, Claire Boucher, is far more appealing than her alias, intended this record to be something of a feminist manifesto, it is serially undercut—by the kewpie-doll voice she uses and by the lack of clarity in many of the lyrics, given the big beats and other production effects with which she surrounds the vocals.  Boucher’s voice is actually supple and versatile, as demonstrated from the outset with the curtailed opener, “Laughing and Not Being Normal,” in which the singing is silvery and more full bodied.  But she seems to prefer a “girly” voice that is more Cyndi Lauper-esque, or like that of Lene Lovich on “Lucky Number” (1978) or Dale Bozzio of Missing Persons on “Destination Unknown” (1982).  She even doubles down by attaching her high-energy girl-power numbers to the most sugary pop imaginable (viz. “Flesh without Blood,” “Belly of the Beat,” “Artangels,” or “World Princess II”).  The result is that Art Angels, the title notwithstanding, presents itself primarily as a dance pop album, more interesting than most in that genre, accessible and also cloying.  Boucher reaches a hypercaffeinated apex with “Kill v. Maim,” a helium-voiced, frantic song in which she inhabits a character who gets into fights and defiantly refuses to behave.  It is all a bit much, and yet also magnetically entertaining.  It is admirable that the artist not only sings and plays all the instruments on the record but was also its producer and sound engineer, although she protests overmuch in media outlets about the lack of technical respect rendered to women in the recording studio.  As for playing all the instruments, this again comes into play on the all-too-short opener—what one might take to be synthesized strings are actually the genuine article.  This orchestral fantasia is abruptly replaced by the snappy folk-rocker “California,” a lament about the Canadian artist’s adopted home state, “You only like me when you think I’m looking sad ... I didn’t think you’d end up treating me so bad.”  Boucher shares the spotlight twice with other female performers.  “Scream,” which lives up to its name (in a shrill way, naturally), features the rapping in Mandarin (its meaning lost on me) of Aristophanes, from Taiwan (real name: Pan Wei Ju), described in some places as “nu-metal,” although it really just boils down to one grungy rhythm guitar line backing the raps, gasps, and shrieks.  “Venus Fly” is another ultra-peppy, booming-percussion-powered, lyrically in-your-face tune performed alongside the genre-spanning and multitalented Janelle Monáe.  Boucher relaxes slightly to catch her breath with “Realiti,” which is offered twice on the CD version of the album, although there is little to distinguish the demo version from the finished one; it comes across as a slightly less thoroughly engineered dance number, more contemplative and a bit slower than most in the track list.  A couple of the songs really do slow the pace (“Easily,” “Life in the Vinyl Dream”) but never for long.  The anime-style cover art adds to the kawaii sensibility of this record:  Boucher could be envisioned as one of those bug-eyed Japanese heroines in schoolgirl outfits with improbable superpowers.  It all kind of works out for her, though the album glories in its own excesses and might well be less inventive than Grimes’s earlier work (which I have not heard).        A-/B+

Sample song  “Kill v. Maim”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2EJMd7ZN7w

GWENNO, Y Dydd Olaf (Heavenly Recordings/ PIAS)—Much of the meaning of this album is lost on most of its listeners, yours truly included, because we do not speak the Celtic tongues of the ancient Britons.  Gwenno Saunders, formerly a singer/keyboard player for a girl group called the Pipettes, is an activist for the Welsh language; thus, potentially alienating, or at least mystifying, a large segment of her audience on her solo debut was a political statement as much as an artistic choice.  Her record company (which reissued an album that was originally released in 2014 under the Welsh label Peski Records) is not helping matters by failing to include a translation of the lyrics with the disc.  But we know that the album title translates as “The Last Day” and was borrowed from that of a 1976 science fiction novel by the writer Owain Owain.  I must take music writer Laura Snapes at her word when she says in a Guardian article that the songs “confront media manipulation, patriarchy and the decline of minority languages.”  The final song, “Amser,” a breathy, soothing yet also aching ballad, is set to verse in Cornish written by the artist’s Cornwall-born father, the poet Tim Saunders.  For what is billed as a protest record, it sure sounds bright and ethereal.  The hooks that Saunders must have absorbed with her former group are prevalent throughout, enmeshed in a gauzy dream pop with hints of psychedelia.  Her airy soprano is lighter and more fragile than that of her better-known Welsh counterpart Charlotte Church, yet it stands up well amid the trancelike, faraway settings that characterize these songs, which are quasi-sacred in a twenty-first-century electronic kind of way, thanks to the production efforts of her husband, Rhys Edwards.  The dream-chamber effects of these arrangements have been compared to the group Broadcast (particularly the radio-dial-tuning intro to the otherwise ordinary “Stwff”; see the 2009 and 2013 music surveys), but Broadcast never had much interest in setting its material to dance beats.  The combination of breezy tempos, plush accompaniment, and aura of mysticism comes together brilliantly in the opening track, “Chwyldro” (Revolution).  That carries on through “Patriachaeth” (Patriarchy), which opens with what sounds like a synthesized chorale of ancient reeds but is swiftly transformed via a new wave–worthy bouncy beat and swirly, kaleidoscopic keyboard scales, ascending and descending.  The instrumental intro to “Sisial y Mor,” named after a North Wales seaside resort community, is like a crystalline cave of wonders, but the sung melody that follows, coursing along to a relaxed rhythm, is the album’s most poignant.  This gives way to a brief instrumental, “Dawns y Blaned Dirion” (The Meek Planet), once more named for a sci-fi work by a Welsh author (Islwyn Ffowc Elis), in which another pearly, cerulean-shimmery keyboard opening yields to the gentlest of guitar themes.  The second half of the record is a little less captivating and lofty.  Its high point is another dancefloor-paced tune, “Fratolish Hiang Perpeshki” (this is a nonsense title), which has a real urgency and succeeds in conjuring the dystopia it intends, despite the song’s soufflé lightness.  I do enjoy the eerie stop-time keyboard glimmerings, whiny overtone effects, and mechanical thuds, like a steam engine coming to a halt (compare the ending of Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting,” from Hounds of Love [1985]), that conclude the title track.  Thanks to my brother for introducing me to this performer, and long may the Baner Cymru (Welsh flag) wave!    A-

Sample song  “Chwyldro”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CldPv3-VHmM

JULIA HOLTER, Have You in My Wilderness (Domino Recording)—Recording artists who have built up an admirable reputation can be excused their missteps.  Or perhaps it is my misstep, though an opinion can never be “wrong,” merely off base.  Many critics loved Have You in My Wilderness; I decidedly did not.  Not only was it disappointing given the expectations Holter had raised through her previous work (see the 2012 and 2013 music surveys); I was bored to the point of wondering how much longer each track had to run.  This is a leisurely paced record; with one exception, everything is either slow or set at a modest walking tempo.  That in itself is not a bad thing, but when songs never gather any momentum, it can prove agonizing.  Holter drew inspiration from various sources, including Western mythos and legends (for “Everytime Boots” and “Vasquez”), Colette (“Lucette Stranded on the Island”), and Christopher Isherwood (“How Long?”).  The Isherwood tribute is overly self-conscious and ostentatious, as Holter adopts the voices of the famous character Sally Bowles and her compatriots.  To me, it sounds as if she were channeling Sabina Sciubba, the lead singer of Brazilian Girls, who does the Cabaret thing far more convincingly simply because she is European (as was Isherwood’s character, before the movie version with Liza Minnelli made her an American) and fully embraces the persona.  But “Lucette Stranded on the Island,” sung in a quavery voice, with tinkly bells, a string chorus, and synthesized harp, is the musical analogue of a Victorian woman being banished to the fainting couch with “the vapors,” all fustily perfumed and constipated.  “Vasquez” purports to tell the story of a bandido, but the verse is all over the map and befuddling, and the music is equally aimless and disjointed.  By contrast, “Everytime Boots,” the one song on the album that moves along briskly, is far more satisfying, taking a devil-may-care posture of jauntiness (pausing for an appealingly dusky-hued instrumental bridge) that injects a sole dose of energy into a fatally languid album.  Two of the tunes on Have You in My Wilderness have been in Holter’s concert repertoire for several years now and are only now appearing on disc, which might explain why they seem not ready for prime time.  “Sea Calls Me Home” is blankly declarative, spiced only by the grainy saxophone of either Danny Meyer or Chris Speed.  “Betsy on the Roof,” to its credit, has a certain plaintiveness that partly rescues it from drift but, clocking in at just over six minutes, is needlessly drawn out.  The opening song, “Feel You,” is, in spite of its torpor and tortured scansion in places, a sophisticated bit of pop songwriting, dreamy and yet, by the standards of this record, unusually coherent.  Holter’s earlier inventiveness on Loud City Song and Ekstasis make this maundering, glacial deposit of a record all the more of a letdown.    B/B-

Sample song  “Everytime Boots”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6_oU3Q7yOU

THE MACCABEES, Marks to Prove It (Fiction Records/Universal Music)—Just as I was becoming hip to this British band, it was on the verge of breaking up.  More’s the pity since there is plenty to like on Marks to Prove It, the Maccabees’ fourth and final studio record.  In some respects, the band rests firmly on traditions of guitar-driven English “lad” bands going back to the Beatles, the Animals, and the Kinks, but there is also a measure of reserve and experimentation with offbeat timbres and textures that recalls Gomez in that band’s heyday in the early years of the new millennium.  Even the lesser songs like “Kamakura,” “Silence,” or “Pioneering Systems” partake of these qualities to some extent.  But they are brought out most fully in midtempo rockers such as “Ribbon Road,” whose mood shifts are on a knife edge such that they might change within a single phrase.  Brisk 6/8 rhythms underlie “Ribbon Road” as well as “Something Like Happiness.”  The latter is intended as an affirmation, brash enough to begin the tune with its heartening chorus; yet, this being the Maccabees, nothing is that simple—it is not “happiness” but “something like ...,” so that the melodic palette is tempered with somber shades.  “River Song” gathers a collection of antique-sounding instruments à la Arcade Fire (perhaps no hurdy-gurdy but something in the zither family providing the burnished string sound underneath?), notably the chorus’s embellishment by an unidentified reed instrument resembling a droneless bagpipe or crumhorn.  “WW1 Portraits” begins softly, with a nearly a cappella setting for the capable lead singer, Orlando Weeks, just a bit of woodblock, triangle, and lute-like strumming.  The song never lets go of the obsessive reiteration of its simple pattern, tugging the tune downward again and again wistfully as it contemplates the century-old photos of the title, but the instrumental and vocal intensity takes a quantum leap before too long.  The trumpet solo that begins the ruminative “Slow Sun” reminds me of the trumpeter Avishai Cohen’s album Flood (see the 2008 music survey under the jazz heading), in particular, the song “Sunrays”—the quiet that predominates once the storms have passed.  The songs that rock out unabashedly are in some ways the simplest and purest.  “Spit It Out,” like “WW1 Portraits,” starts off with one minute–plus of a quiet vocal setting, piano and a bit of sustain, that establishes the accompaniment, another intricate braid of descending intervals.  When the guitars take over, they do so first at minimal volume and then with a full-bodied vengeance, even as Weeks’s warbly tenor approaches a shout.  The opening title track is a busy, buzzy depiction of life in the vicinity of the band’s Elephant & Castle studio and the most obvious throwback to the sixties “British invasion” bands mentioned earlier, melodiously compelling while also permeated with harmonics consisting of interwoven descending-scale figures, something the band obviously loved.  The full reasons the Maccabees decided to end things when the group was reaching a creative zenith are known only to its members, who cited the pressures of fan and critical expectations, the difficulty of trying to survive in expensive London, and the truism that they are all “getting older.”  They have denied us what might have been, but we have not heard the last of them, individually if not all together.        A/A-

Sample song  “Marks to Prove It”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Kt3aN6Ey8w

MUSE, Drones (Warner Brothers Records/Helium-3)—Envision what it would sound like if Queen in Freddie Mercury’s prime had written tunes full of baldly earnest, politically blunt lyrics instead of the mock-operatic whimsy that was the band’s trademark.  You would have something very much like Muse’s Drones, an album with some decent songwriting and great guitar work, largely wasted in the service of beating the listener over the head with its antiwar, anti-drones message.  Whatever one thinks of the morality of conducting drone warfare, there is just no artistry to Matthew Bellamy’s presentation of his case, which amounts to a kind of single-voiced (and single-minded) oratorio cataloguing the horrors of warfare in the most literal-minded way imaginable.  His lyrics come across as if, say, Martin Niemöller or the Dalai Lama had tried his hand at writing operetta.  The song “Psycho,” seething with soldierly aggression, and its barking intro, “[Drill Sergeant],” are completely over the top.  Bellamy does sing sort of like the late, great Mercury, however, and the Queen sensibility rises to the surface repeatedly, in songs like “Mercy” and, especially, “Defector.”  For a change of pace, the busy, intricate guitar intro to “Reapers” is worthy of Eddie Van Halen.  “The Handler” is another tune with another really punchy, kick-ass guitar riff.  Set against a plaintive vocal, it makes for a great song so long as one can ignore the actual lyrics.  This is one of two records in this year’s survey that directly quote John Fitzgerald Kennedy (in “JFK,” which serves as an intro to “Defector”); the other is Public Service Broadcasting’s The Race for Space (see below).  But whereas Public Service Broadcasting skillfully sets Kennedy’s famous Rice University speech resolving to go to the moon, Muse’s treatment of his words regarding the menace of communism is simply to accentuate each phrase with a stab of guitar chords, plus a bit of keyboard upholstery.  “Aftermath” is a much gentler and romantic tune than the others on here, marking the end of conflict, but one has to wonder about its placement, tenth of twelve tracks instead of at the end.  The whistling intro to “The Globalist” is a throwback, however unintentional, to Billy Joel’s “The Stranger” (1977), and later in the piece, just before a slowdown and Rachmaninoff-like piano interlude, there is some more excellent, intense guitar passagework.  Classical music lovers, those who can be induced to listen to rock, will likely be repelled by the appropriation of the “Nimrod” movement from Elgar’s Enigma Variations that takes up most of the second half of “The Globalist” (following that Rachmaninoff-esque bit), although I had a visceral thrill in identifying its presence on first listen.  The same goes for Bellamy’s use of two movements from Palestrina’s mid-sixteenth-century “Pope Marcellus” mass for the final piece, “Drones,” which could be regarded as sacrilege, as the religious setting is used to frame a bluff diatribe and litany of the song narrator’s relatives killed by drones.  A lot of decent—and some indifferent—rock composition was sacrificed on the altar of making a grandiose statement here.  Muse would be well served by either bringing in a better verse writer or by sending Matthew Bellamy back to school for lessons in poetics.    B

Sample song  “JFK/Defector”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzbFxLNpguM

NEW ORDER, Music Complete (Mute Records)—Boredom at the disco!  Judging by the issuance of its first genuinely new material in a decade, the members of the English dance pop band New Order might well have been advised not to bother reviving it for a third incarnation.  There is not a lot to be said for the pompously named Music Complete.  It is generally brisk, faceless, electronic dance music, with trite, tired-sounding lyrics.  Even in moments of earnestness, as on “Unlearn This Hatred,” it is hard to find anything that sounds introspective or comes truly from the heart.  It is most telling that the video for the single “Restless” (see the link below) uses actors who could be Calvin Klein underwear models to illustrate its story, rather than the group itself, whose original members (Bernard Sumner, guitars, lead vocals, synths; Stephen Morris, drums and synths; and Gillian Gilbert, keyboards/synths/backing guitar) range from their mid-fifties to sixtyish.  For this record, the band did ask several outsiders to contribute vocals, including Brandon Flowers of the Killers (on “Superheated”) and La Roux’s Elly Jackson (on “People on the High Line”).  But the standout among these is the legendary Iggy Pop, whose gravelly narration of “Stray Dog” gives it a grounding and a character  absent elsewhere on the disc.  Even though, musically speaking, “Stray Dog” is little more than a pulsing rhythmic accompaniment embroidered by a repeating chord pattern, its dark mood, the high-energy throbbing of the beat, and the grittiness of Iggy’s tale of temptation, romantic surrender, and redemption represent a breathtaking departure from everything else on the album.  The other song that rises above the rest is the single “Tutti Frutti,” featuring a deep-voiced recitation in Italian by the unknown (to me, anyway) Giacomo Cavagna, which is far less central to the tune’s disco-style essence than is Iggy’s.  Its verve and glitter recall New Order’s biggest-ever hit, “Blue Monday” (1983), from the band’s halcyon days, making for an enjoyable listen.  Some of the same elements are preserved in the succeeding song, “People on the High Line,” which has a new wave revival swinginess with more than faint echoes of Naked Eyes’ “Promises, Promises” (also 1983).  Aside from some Giorgio Moroder–style motoric rhythms (à la Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” from 1977) in “Plastic,” there is not a lot more to recommend in this tedious, overly long recording.  New Order has come a long way from its postpunk origins as the successor band to Joy Division, but its trajectory seems to be leading up a lot of blind alleys.        B-

Sample song  “Restless”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c_3Afx9ZGE

ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER, Garden of Delete (Warp Records)—It ought to be said right off the bat:  This is a freakin’ weird album!  For fans of Daniel Lopatin’s earlier work as Oneohtrix Point Never, refined and elegant electronica, Garden of Delete will come as a noisy shock, unless they were already cued in by Lopatin’s prerelease Internet marketing campaign, which invented a whole back story involving an acne-ridden teenage “alien” named Ezra (with that name, perhaps a Jewish alien?) who is a huge fan of a fictional band called Kaoss, which plays in a style (also invented) known as “hypergrunge” or “cyberdrone.”  Concept albums are tricky things to pull off; moreover, they should stand on their own merits, without needing to resort to an elaborate metaficiton, as if consulting a study guide for James Joyce’s Ulysses.  I regarded Alt-J’s This Is All Yours (see the 2014 music survey), for example, as largely a failure, and it is tempting to label this one an artistic misfire as well.  But that would be too simple, for Lopatin is just too good at conjuring unusual sound motifs, collages, even collisions.  Although I do not love this recording, I find at least parts of it bizarrely compelling.  Lopatin drew inspiration for Garden of Delete from the time he spent touring with Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden in 2014.  He told one interviewer that he wanted to “conflate really aggressive music with sugary pop progressions,” and that sums up the album’s style better than any critic could.  This is not the first Oneohtrix Point Never record to incorporate voices or spoken words, but it is the first to have songs with actual lyrics.  The verse is odd enough on its own, but it is voiced via a software device called Chipspeech.  The “computer singing” is then mashed into arrangements so dense that at times it can barely be deciphered (yet there is a printed lyrics page in the CD booklet).  All the same, it is impossible to ignore, registering as coldly inhuman and eerily distorted.  For a record whose primary concern is adolescence and the physical changes and wrenching emotional adjustments that that period of life entails, there is an awful lot of death imagery, particularly in the second half of the track list, which seems incongruous since the intent does not seem to be to focus on suicidal teens.  Because Garden of Delete is both sonic assault and sweet release (sometimes both at once), certain songs rattle around in memory well past first hearing.  Of these, the centerpiece is “Sticky Drama,” Ezra’s romantic fantasies taking shape as a sort of fame-addled oozy ectoplasm.  The main theme is a saccharine yet twisted, profane devotional, evocative of “Bloody Mary” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific (1949).  But that theme, floodlighted as it is by the production, is buffeted on all sides by noise:  drum volleys, muffled shouts, bursts of electric keyboard sforzando chords and other synthesized effects.  It is hard to guess at the meaning of the queerly morbid lyrics to the song “Animals” (are the animals doomed?  Or are we doomed for caging and then eating them?  Or for being indifferent to their welfare?), but what sticks with the listener is the sad resignation given (artificial) voice in the melody.  “Freaky Eyes” is like several songs in one, abruptly switching at the bleep of a microwave oven from baroque organ arpeggios to a brief guitar groove with Alvin and the Chipmunks–pitched vocals to a heavy and slow-footed dirge.  “Mutant Standard” (working over the idea that growing up is a form of mutation) is characterized by repeated drumming attacks over snippets of imported dialogue; these give way momentarily to a keyboard fantasia before the synthesizers duplicate and then transform the percussion pattern.  Although there is sampling from outside sources in several places, it is most striking at the start of “Child of Rage,” where an exchange between a counselor and a troubled kid from a CBS documentary of the same name kicks off the music.  In this, one hears echoes of William Bevan, a.k.a. Burial, who likes to use bits of soap opera conversation to add human warmth to his electronic compositions (see the 2007, 2012, and 2013 music surveys).  If Garden of Delete was designed to resemble a creepy horror film, Lopatin may have succeeded all too well, enough to be thoroughly off-putting.  Nonetheless, it exerts a strange fascination.        B+

Sample song  “Sticky Drama”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td-e4i2BL_Q

POND, Man It Feels Like Space Again (Caroline International)—Kevin Parker’s former band, for which he is still a producer, put out a much more satisfying record in 2015 that did his current band (see the Tame Impala review below).  While Pond, currently a foursome (plus other contributors) from Perth, Australia, is typically characterized as a neo-psychedelia act, its focus has shifted from album to album, and although “trippy” might well describe much of Man It Feels Like Space Again, the psychedelic aspect is downplayed this time out.  The new album is more of a variety act, comprising everything from folk to funk, with leanings toward progressive rock, particularly in the title track, which concludes the disc.  “Heroic Shart” is the most traditionally psychedelic number, fuzztoned and full of reverb, acid-washed tones, and mystical/portentous chord progressions, with a middle section in which nothing much happens as anticipation builds.  A couple of the slower tracks beckon toward the flower-power era.  “Sitting Up on Our Crane” is the more successful of these, benignly blissful with tambourine and the gentlest of drumbeats but also warm and broadly melodic; at the close of the lyric, it name-checks the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson “’cause he’s the man.”  “Holding Out for You” is more overtly in Flaming Lips mode (euphoric, starry-eyed, and falsetto voiced).  While not bad, it feels flaccid in the midst of several more kinetic compositions (“Waiting Around for Grace,” “Elvis’ Flaming Star,” and “Zond” are straight-ahead rockers), and the chorus ultimately delivers little payoff.  “Waiting Around for Grace,” the opening track, starts out in the same idly dreamy mode but promptly turns into a catchy, vaguely retro, guitar-driven rock song, as springy as a wallaby.  Its taut composition notwithstanding, it allows for a prog-rock-tinged flight of fancy from Jamie Terry’s keyboards toward the end.  The momentum it builds does not flag as the track counter moves on to “Elvis’ Flaming Star,” a rollicking, heavy-pumping little tune that pauses only to catch its breath at its bridge.  Apart from being a little bluesier (and thus actually more Elvis-like), “Zond” is quite similar to “Elvis’ Flaming Star.”  The spirit of Sly and the Family Stone is evoked in “Outside Is the Right Side,” whose jangly guitar funk is interspersed with and succeeded by some sun-splashed synth chords that radically alter the song’s feel.  The band’s one gesture toward the folk/blues genre, “Medicine Hat,” is its least fulfilling offering, a sort of paint-by-numbers Dylan whose simple guitar-and-voice arrangement at the outset is ultimately blotted out by an overlay of keening synthesizer and choral sustained tones.  “Man It Feels Like Space Again,” spanning more than eight minutes, is as much a suite as a single song.  Lugubrious at times, it is nonetheless wafted into the ether by the glorious airiness of its unfolding tune.  Like “Waiting Around for Grace,” it features a consciousness-warping opening—and closing; in between, its plaintive theme takes on the stateliness of a march by Emerson, Lake and Palmer or King Crimson even as its melody balloons and soars.  The video made to accompany the song (see the link below) is a kind of Sesame Street dystopia, as muppet-like creatures mount a “violent” coup against their smiling, scrubbed-cheeked, erstwhile human companions.  Nick Allbrook’s voice is not especially impressive, or expressive, but it serves the music well enough.  Lyrics on Man It Feels Like Space Again are not always easy to make out, and Caroline Records would have done everyone a favor by printing them with the disc.    A-

Sample song  “Man It Feels Like Space Again”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNbPg6zKmPI

PUBLIC SERVICE BROAD- CASTING, The Race for Space (Test Card Recordings)—The most civic-spirited band out there (way out there) is back at it, with its first recording since the droll Inform, Educate, Entertain (see the 2013 music survey).  This time, there is a unifying concept, which is to recount and honor the early years of unmanned and manned space flight, in the era of intense rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States.  The band’s founder, “J. Willgoose, Esq.,” decided to focus on nine vignettes from the period spanning the launch of Sputnik in 1957 to the final mission to the lunar surface, Apollo 17, in 1972.  (These are not arranged in strictly chronological order.)  The Race for Space is both more and less than its predecessor.  It has a seriousness of purpose and, naturally, a thematic coherence that the earlier disc did not aim for.  At the same time, the music itself has taken a back seat, for the most part, to a degree that one can characterize most of it as soundtrack accompaniment rather than full-bodied composition.  This is not meant to denigrate the achievement; on the contrary, Willgoose has taken great pains to create sensitive settings for the vintage broadcast recordings that are the heart of this venture.  Nowhere is this better showcased than on “The Other Side,” growing very quiet as tension builds when Apollo 8, the first vessel to achieve lunar orbit, loses contact with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Mission Control in the course of disappearing beyond the far side of the Moon.  When communications are restored as the vessel returns, the music swells along with the sense of triumph and relief.  A similar rousing effect is created by the rhythmic checkoff of the voices from various systems monitors giving status updates in preparation for the first Moon landing in “Go!”  By contrast, the mood is appropriately subdued yet menacing for “Fire in the Cockpit,” commemorating the tragic fire that claimed the lives of three astronauts training at the launchpad at Cape Kennedy in 1967.  The short title track opening the album is a spare choral arrangement directed by Peter Gregson, framing President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1962 speech at Rice University vowing to send a mission to the Moon “and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard.”  The choir returns for the final piece, “Tomorrow,” which picks up the valedictory words of the final team to put together a landing on the Moon.  If there is a misfiring of rockets among the vignettes, it comes with “Valentina,” the track intended to honor the first female astronaut (cosmonaut), Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963.  In a first for Public Service Broadcasting, the band invites guest performers, a British dream pop duo called Smoke Fairies, to sing here.  But because they do nothing more than utter the cosmonaut’s name, and because the melody itself is limp, the listener gets no further enlightenment about this woman or her career.  The grand exception to the music-as-soundtrack approach is “Gagarin,” which creates a spirited, funky tune to honor the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin.  Other tracks such as “Sputnik” and “E.V.A.” (which stands for extravehicular activity) are not much more than dancefloor beats to support the recorded snippets.  It is for this reason that the snippets themselves provide most of the drama and the intrigue, not the music embellishing them.  Even so, there is something to be said for research, study, and curation, in addition to skillful arrangement.  The British public would appear to agree, for this album did well in the U.K. charts.  Much as I like The Race for Space, I hope that Willgoose and his musical partner, Wrigglesworth, will not be quite so self-effacing on future discs.        A-

Sample song  “Gagarin”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY-kAnvOY80

JOE SATRIANI, Shockwave Supernova (Legacy Recordings/Sony Music Entertainment)—A guitar teacher before he was a star performer, Joe Satriani has had a long career, has gone on tour with some of the most famous rock acts in the world, and has been a mega-seller of albums.  Yet, this was my first exposure to him, thanks to my friend Steve Holtje.  Shockwave Supernova plays with the guitar-god iconography without overplaying its hand.  (It is particularly accentuated on the video for the title track—see below—which also runs a risk of burning your retina.)  There are, naturally, plenty of six-string pyrotechnics on display, but they are harnessed to serve the compositions, which are entirely instrumental and all originals by the guitarist.  Satriani is working with a backing band that features a rhythm section of Bryan Beller on bass guitar and Marco Minnemann on drums, for the most part (others play on a few other tracks), and the record’s producer, John Cuniberti, adds percussion of his own on several tracks.  The keyboardist is Mike Keneally (who was, incidentally, born on the same day I was), whose progressive rock leanings can make for an interesting contrast:  power chords from Satriani versus Mellotron-like synths.  In a few of the fifteen tracks on this long (hour-plus) record (viz. “In My Pocket” or “San Francisco Blues”), the melodies seem anodyne or pedestrian, yet slouchy, relaxed tempos are the alternate mode for Satriani, coming off the explosive intensity of the louder and more percussion-heavy pieces.  The latter are the most impressive on Shockwave Supernova, beginning with the coruscating title track, thrumming with bass and pounding beats and spiced by a recurrent modal subtheme.  It is truly Satriani at his best.  “On Peregrine Wings” is another burner, swifter and not quite as reverberant, with some excellent sonic distortion and white noise that resolves appealingly at the bridge.  With eyes closed, listening to this song, it is easy to envision playing a video game in which the player is depicted as riding the back of a swooping raptor.  A degree or two less fierce but strong entries nonetheless include “A Phase I’m Going through” and “Scarborough Stomp.”  At times, the sci-fi-themed titles promise a little more than they can deliver; for example, “Cataclysmic” is a fine composition, but as portentous as the music sounds at certain intervals, it is too melodically ingratiating to be an earth-shattering nightmare.  Strangely, the slow piece “All of My Life,” one of several bluesy tunes, seems to borrow thematically from Led Zeppelin’s “All of My Love,” from that band’s final studio album, In through the Out Door (1979).  Of the more contemplative numbers, “Goodbye Supernova” is the pick of the bunch—its astral serenity, perhaps tinged (or singed) with regret, makes for a sublime closing number.        A-

Sample song  “Shockwave Supernova”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dug-YEIvoe8

SWERVEDRIVER I Wasn’t Born to Lose You (Cobraside Distribution)—For some types of band, the passage of time signifies little; they are going to play things their way regardless of changing musical fashions.  Oxford-based shoegazers Swervedriver issued their first studio album in seventeen years with I Wasn’t Born to Lose You, and it is very much as if the nineties never ended for them.  What stands out about Swervedriver’s composition for guitars is the chiaroscuro of tone it regularly elicits, shifting in and out of the light with the flick of a finger, or several.  If I say that the group favors chords and arrangements that are off-color, in the manner of Steely Dan, I do not mean it in a derogatory sense.  Rather, its members are good at surprising the ear.  For all that, the band’s quasi-psychedelic shoegazing can be too low-key for its own good.  Although Swervedriver is not a jam band like Phish, it does enjoy riding out a righteous groove, to the point of taxing this listener’s patience at times.  This record, although of medium length, could easily have been five to ten minutes shorter without losing anything.  And it is an uneven one:  four tracks hit the mark seemingly effortlessly, while one has its flaws but bears repeated listening; the rest are of little account, including the short song that was released as the primary single, “Setting Sun.”  Best of all is the opener, “Autodidact.”  A sunny, reflective, midtempo number, its primary theme and harmonics glide smoothly and frequently between major and minor modes.  Moreover, in spite of its relaxed feel, which is characteristic of I Wasn’t Born to Lose You throughout, it is sufficiently focused and direct to speak to the soul.  “English Subtitles” is genially mellow, whereas “Red Queen Arms Race” buzzes with frustration and discontent, yet both are warmly melodic, light penetrating through a haze of fuzzy shoegaze electric strings.  The eccentricity of tonal warping reaches a peak with “Lone Star.”  That the tune goes down as smoothly as a Slurpee in spite of its off-kilter chordal progressions (that major/minor toggle engaged to full effect) is a remarkable testament to this band’s originality.  Just as “Lone Star” appears to be fading out, it rallies for one more iteration of its mottled chorus.  “Everso” shares some of the appealing characteristics of these tracks, but it is less concise, and its refrain (a simple repetition of the song title) is almost like an afterthought.  More than any other number, this one (the longest on the disc) could have profited from some tactical trimming; the instrumental section at the close wanders dreamily for about ninety seconds, which is both good and bad.  “Setting Sun” manifests another intriguingly dappled melody but does little beyond its exposition; to my mind, the song is just too static.  Swervedriver at its best filters shoegaze guitar playing through various other styles, from grunge to pyschedelia to hardcore, in way that transcends style, but it is not in top form consistently throughout I Wasn’t Born to Lose You.    A-/B+

Sample song  “Autodidact”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xfB77uFxQk

TAME IMPALA, Currents (Interscope Records)—When did Kevin Parker turn into George Michael?  A lot of people responded positively to what he has done as Tame Impala on Currents, but to me, it is largely a bust.  Mind now, George Michael seems less objectionable in retrospect, compared with how I felt when Wham!’s “Wake Me Up before You Go-Go” (1984) was ubiquitous on the radio.  But after the success of Tame Impala’s Lonerism (see the 2012 music survey), which had a tour de force of neo-psychedelia with “Elephant,” as well as “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards,” it is disheartening to see Parker move in the direction of romantic glam pop.  Currents starts out promisingly, as “Let It Happen” is the most interesting cut on the record (and lasts longest).  It beckons toward dance pop but with a sense of moment and an undercurrent of tension (produced by subtle key changes) that belies the song’s guiding “philosophy” about embracing the messy world around you rather than trying to cloister yourself away from it.  At a couple of points midway through, you might feel for a moment that your player is skipping.  Nothing else on the disc comes close to measuring up to the sweep of “Let It Happen,” although the letdown is gradual, following a brief, throbbing, woozy (note-bending) quasi-instrumental called “Nangs” that is intriguing in its own right and a pleasantly snappy if lightweight pop number, “The Moment.”  Beyond this opening trio, the most effective track is “Past Life,” which is really just a narrative attached to a dreamy, soulful refrain.  The narrative, delivered by a male (Parker himself?) whose distinctly Aussie-accented voice is processed to be “froggy” in the way that a 33 r.p.m. L.P. sounds when played at 16 (yes, my parents had one of those old four-speed turntables), is an entertaining tale of how catching sight of an old flame can stir up feelings long since buried and ends with what could be a fateful phone call to reconnect.  The refrain occasionally steps on the narrative, but the latter is generally comprehensible.  “The Less I Know the Better” is not a great song but at least has a compact, bass-driven energy as it focuses on a lament about romantic betrayal.  “New Person, Same Old Mistakes,” the galumphing final track, tries with some success to recapture some of the colorfully hand-wringing, sighing despondency of “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards,” not to mention simulating some of that song’s musical phrasing.  It is sufficiently long to try some interesting things (modulations, a cloud-nine keyboard bridge that might as well have been imported from another record) but also lingers enough for its basic rhythmic pattern to become overly familiar.  Parker’s countertenor/falsetto wears thin after a time (part of the appeal of “Let It Happen” is that it is sung mostly in a lower range) and sounds particularly ridiculous in “’Cause I’m a Man,” where the pitch undermines the assertion.  I recollect Yo La Tengo’s “Mr. Tough” (2006), offered up by Ira Kaplan in falsetto, but that was for comic effect.  The impact here is more like Tom Jones on helium.  “Yes, I’m Changing” is the album’s nadir, a bland, soggy, Stuart Smalley “Daily Affirmation” of a tune.  But its dreadfulness is nearly matched by the song that follows it, “Eventually,” as well as a couple of others later on the track list.  If this is what Tame Impala is now all about, I am checking myself out of this rehab purgatory and going in pursuit of wilder beests elsewhere.    B/B-

Sample song  “The Less I Know the Better”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBzrzS1Ag_g

VIET CONG, Viet Cong (Jagjaguwar)—Confusingly, this Calgary-based band changed its name to Preoccupations shortly after releasing its (no longer) self-titled debut record, dogged by charges of racism, cultural appropriation, etc.  No matter because Viet Cong is deficient in many respects.  The postpunk band on its debut comes across as a third-tier Gang of Four, except on “Continental Shelf,” the best song here, where it comes across as a second-drawer Interpol.  Nice backing vocals from Julie Fader give that song a harmonic depth that is utterly lacking elsewhere.  (As for the lyric writing, someone should advise the band that “When all is said and done/You’ll be around until you’re gone” is about the least profound opening statement of any song devised in eons.)  The second song is titled “Pointless Experience,” which pretty much sums up how it goes listening to these tracks.  Weirdly, the tortured theme of “Pointless Experience” sounds as if the band borrowed it from fellow Canadians Rush, from three and a half decades ago in “Limelight” (1981).  There is a lot of portentous vocals and pounding drumwork on the album.  The rat-a-tatting intro to “March of Progress” has little to do with the plodding verse section that follows, even from a rhythmic standpoint.  Eventually, the song is jolted to life with a vigorous rephrasing of the final verse.  “Bunker Buster,” the runner-up among the album’s offerings, has a prickly jaggedness to its melody worthy of Gang of Four or the Fall.  The final track, the cheerily titled “Death” (though its guitar playing is churning rather than funereal) contains an obtuse, infuriatingly drawn-out instrumental bridge that bloats the song up to eleven and a half minutes; perhaps the record label told the band that it did not originally have enough material for a full L.P.’s worth.        C

Sample song  “Continental Shelf”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdMz7BUtOvk

JOHN ZORN, Simulacrum (Tzadik)—The incredibly prolific composer (and performer, and record label founder, and club/ performance space impresario) John Zorn has had fingers in many pies (if pies were musical) throughout his long career, spanning four decades.  He is known as a “downtown” creator of experimental modern classical composition, but his interests have always encompassed (it would not do him justice to use the verb “dabble”) jazz, rock (particularly hardcore), and music derived from traditional Jewish and Middle Eastern sources.  Simulacrum is a throwback to the early 1970s, which was Zorn’s college era and his formative years.  Specifically, the record strikes me as an homage to the progressive rock of the era, although it is purely instrumental and has a harder edge, more akin to the prog metal of recent times.  Zorn did the songwriting and arrangements but does not himself play (saxophone, keyboards, or anything else) on the album, leaving that to a trio he “conducts.”  Guitarist Matt Hollenberg came from a band called Cleric (which seems to have produced one record in 2010 and then gone on indefinite hiatus) with which I am unfamiliar.  Drummer Kenny Grohowski worked with Zorn and his Tzadik label on a 2012 release called Abraxas: The Book of Angels, Vol. 19.  The organist, John Medeski, is far better known, as one-third of the jazz/rock trio Medeski Martin & Wood.  As is often the case in progressive rock, compositions have discrete sections set off by abrupt changes in mood and tempo, though none are subtitled in the way of the four parts of “Close to the Edge” (1972) by Yes or the seven sections of Genesis’s “Supper’s Ready” (also 1972).  This is particularly true of the two long-form compositions, “The Illusionist” and “The Divine Comedy,” that bookend the album, but it holds for even the shortest of pieces, “Alterities.”  Hard to know how much space Medeski in particular had for improvising within the longer tracks, but his wild flourishes do infuse a jazz sensibility into the mixture.  It is remarkable how wide a universe of sound can be channeled through an “organ trio” like this one.  Although, given his vast range of interests, nothing is “typical” of Zorn, the antic stop-starts and head-swiveling digressions and changes in direction, disposition, and pace are characteristic of his writing.  There are passages that are becalmed and even openly melodic, but they seldom last, mere interludes between stormier episodes.  A lot of the abrupt transitions, say, from frenzied playing to a Jackson Pollock–like splatter of chromatic stasis, might well put the listener in mind of Larks’ Tongues in Aspic–era (1973) King Crimson.  However, the crunching bass-range chords that drive “Marmaranth” (with Doors-esque organ filigree above) are much more in doom metal mode.  The first half of “Paradigm Shift” is as if the opening theme of “The Illusionist” had been drained of color, contained within a pot, and slowly heated to the point of explosion like kernels of popcorn, before finding more expressive freedom eventually.  “Snakes and Ladders” and “Alterities” start off quieter and more mystical, with repeating modal motifs, yet even they cannot resist the urge toward whipping up a froth of unruly noise.  “The Divine Comedy,” the wooliest and most loosely structured offering, concludes with a false ending, followed by a surprisingly subdued coda of sorts to fade things out.  For all the crate digging in various genre bins, this is a highly original record, if hardly a soothing one (at least, never for long).    A

Sample song  “Marmaranth”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZsz6Rfy9ng