music survey 2016

 MUSIC 2016:  A DECIDEDLY SELECTIVE SURVEY
Steven Greenfield

December 31, 2017
     

  Another year of testing my partner’s patience on New Year’s Eve, as I struggle to wrap things up, a year behind schedule.  But this year, for the first time in three years, I did manage to review all the pop/rock records I had accumulated for 2016, so that is something of an accomplishment, even if I am still forgoing all the jazz, classical, and others.
   

 My thanks once again go to Steve Holtje and to Luis Rueda for their suggestions about what was worth paying attention to in 2016, and to my partner, Melissa, for her unflagging support throughout the time it took to get this survey finished.
    

Bat for Lashes won top honors this year, by an eyelash over Radiohead, for The Bride, a brave and richly cathartic concept album from Britain’s Natasha Khan.
    

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

 

1. Bat for Lashes, The Bride
2. Radiohead, A Moon Shaped Pool
3. Matmos, Ultimate Care II
4. Buck Curran, Immortal Light
5. Tim Hecker, Love Streams
6. Animal Collective, Painting with
7. Sleigh Bells, Jessica Rabbit
8. SPC ECO, Anomalies
9. The Dandy Warhols, Distortland
10. Opeth, Sorceress

    ROCK/POP ALBUM OF THE YEAR

BAT FOR LASHES, The Bride (Parlophone/ Warner Brothers Records)—Hyper-romantic, a little melodramatic—still, you have to hand it to Natasha Khan, whose solo act is Bat for Lashes.  She laid it all out there with this concept album, exposed vulnerabilities we might never have pondered, and pointed a way through the intense pain of loss toward redemption.  The result is breathtakingly beautiful, haunted, spectral, an artistic achievement of the first rank.  The Bride is a song cycle that concerns, naturally, a bride, who is left alone at the altar after her husband-to-be dies in a fiery car crash on the way to the church ceremony.  Utterly distraught, she takes to the road on a “honeymoon” by herself, working her way through the tragedy with the spirit of her dead fiancé guiding her onward, until she is sufficiently healed to be able to love again.  Khan possesses one of the loveliest voices in popular music today, an exquisite and pliable instrument, and she also plays a range of keyboards, as well as mandolin, guitar, harp, the harplike Omnichord, and she handles drum programming as well.  Other musicians play or sing backup on various tracks, and several of them have one co-songwriting credit each.  There is a real sweetness to this record, despite the heavy subject matter, but it never veers into the saccharine.  Open and tender, it also avoids the maudlin as the would-be bride comes to terms with the suddenness and finality of her tragic loss.  The opening song, “I Do,” which has a spare arrangement that nearly leaves Khan alone to accompany herself on the Omnichord, is all sweetness and light, as the bride-to-be imagines how marriage will drive away all her concerns.  But the following song, “Joe’s Dream,” related by the bride through the groom’s words the night before the nuptials, presages the accident to come, full of pathos and set to a beat that mimics a heart’s pounding.  In the third song, “In God’s House,” the bride runs the gamut of emotion from eager anticipation to the sickening realization that something is terribly wrong.  The transition is a little abrupt, but the agony is genuinely conveyed.  The next track, “Honeymooning Alone,” depicts the bride resolving to drive off alone, cans still tied to the fender, past weeping guests.  These first four tracks set the stage for what is to come.  “Honeymooning Alone” is also striking in that it is essentially the greatest Portishead song Portishead never wrote, so similar is it to that band’s moody, tenebrous style, trip-hop breakbeats and all.  Even Khan’s voice here approximates the quavering fragility of Portishead lead singer Beth Gibbons’s.  The song cycle’s reckoning phase begins with a bit of escapism:  “Sunday Love” is more upbeat than any track since the first and the only one set to a regular dance beat.  The next stage of grief is anger, expressed in “Never Forgive the Angels,” slow and contemplative, burning to blackness as the singer recapitulates the accident in her mind.  “Close Encounters” is cinematic in more than just its title:  sonorous like a movie soundtrack, suspended in its long tones and nearly rhythmless apart from the bass drum keeping a beat, it begins to leave reality behind for the supernatural.  With aching poignancy, the would-be bride experiences visions of reuniting with her lover beyond the stars.  “Widow’s Peak” delves further still into fantasy.  This is the one song Khan chooses to narrate (apart from a bit of humming at the end) rather than sing, like the poetry reading in the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin” (1967).  The ghostly background sounds, something out of a dream faintly recalled, put one in mind of the group Broadcast’s gleaming, fantastical miniatures (see the 2009 and 2013 music surveys).  The aura of magic begins to wear a bit thinner after “Land’s End,” as the former bride reaches her mountaintop of self-realization and vows to love again in the songs that follow.  In particular, the final song, “In Your Bed,” seems abruptly different in tone from the rest, tacked onto the rest of the tracklist, as if Khan felt it necessary to end the cycle in a place similar to where it began, with a new coupling.  For fans of Genesis, it is “Afterglow” standing in stark contrast to the rest of Wind and Wuthering (1976).  This quibble hardly takes away from what Khan has accomplished here, however, in bringing us along on this heart-rending, glittering journey of discovery.        A

Sample song  “Sunday Love”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBfZooPrmfo

And the rest . . .

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE, Painting with (Domino Recording)—While not as magnificent as 2009’s Merriweather Post Pavilion (album of the year for that year’s survey), Painting with rebounds from the mildly disappointing Centipede Hz (see the 2012 music survey); Animal Collective’s music is fun again.  The band took a lot of time off between studio albums for life changes and solo projects, most notably Noah Lennox’s Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper (album of the year for 2015).  As was the case with Merriweather Post Pavilion, the new recording was made as a threesome since Deakin (Josh Dibb) did not participate.  Painting with is the Collective’s cleanest-sounding record ever.  In part, this was a conscious choice to ditch the reverb used heavily on earlier albums, but it is more than that—the production, which took shape in the same Los Angeles studio where the Beach Boys recorded Pet Sounds (1966), does away with the muddiness that characterized the band’s sound previously.  Band members told Rolling Stone and DIY that this was their “Ramones” record, and there is that aspect in the sense that songs are relatively short and hopped-up.  But listening to the infectious opening track, “Floridada,” one might well recall the earlier Beach Boys reference.  The voluble lyrics are impressionistic and quasi-nonsensical, par for the course for these guys—you will not encounter anything insightful regarding the Sunshine State here.  Not everything on the track list is similarly inspired:  “Hocus Pocus” is, notwithstanding its opening sampling of a tongue-in-cheek L.A. traffic report and the squishy drone provided by the legendary John Cale, a bit drab, and “Vertical” never really finds its orientation, either.  “Bagels in Kiev” denatures an interesting lyric, bordering on Regina Spektor territory (see below), because the vocal delivery is so uninflected and robotic; additionally, the bridge, meant to be improvisatory, is a dud.  “Lying in the Grass” has a stretchy, quasi-Latin feel to it, with added (synthesized, presumably) woodwind filigree.  Another appealingly burbling number is “On Delay,” with a pumping bass groove.  This is Animal Collective in its element, turning childhood memories and experiences into gentle watercolor washes of tunesmithery.  On around half the tracks, the band resorts to the odd (but not unprecedented) device of alternating vocalists syllable by syllable, Avey Tare (Dave Portner) and Panda Bear (Lennox).  The album terminates with the goofy synthetic-instrumental clockwork mechanisms of “Recycling.”  “Golden Gal” is another song whose lyrics are something of a mystery; surely, there is more to it than a simple tribute to a long-running NBC sitcom (from which it quotes a snarky response at the outset) or to the virtues of “women of a certain age,” as the coy term puts it.  But whatever it really intends to express, it does seem more Bea Arthur than Susan Anton (star of a mostly forgotten sci-fi movie from 1979, Goldengirl).  Musically, it is another comfortably slouchy composition, a touch silly, but that has always been the sly charm of Animal Collective, and still is today.                  A-

Sample song  “Floridada”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuoIvNFUY7I

THE BESNARD LAKES, A Coliseum Complex Museum (Jagjaguwar)—Lead singer and bandleader Jace Lasek’s falsetto takes some getting accustomed to, particularly on the opening song of this album, “The Bray Road Beast.”  Named for a mythical creature (think of a sasquatch or werewolf) allegedly sighted in southern Wisconsin over the years, “The Bray Road Beast” is an awkward opener, too stagnant for its own good.  Montreal-based Besnard Lakes (named for a lake in Saskatchewan) has been criticized for doing little different on A Coliseum Complex Museum from earlier records, but since this is the band’s first time in the survey, I have no baseline for comparison.  I can say that there is a certain muddy majesty to its compositions, beyond the first, combining neo-psychedelia with progressive rock revival.  The band’s core is still the husband-wife team of Lasek (guitars and ancillary percussion) and Olga Goreas (bass guitar and some vocals), with Kevin Laing drumming.  But it has added a couple of newcomers:  Sheenah Ko on keyboards/vibraphone, and guitarist Robbie MacArthur.  A certain tolerance for sonic gloppiness is necessary to appreciate the Besnard Lakes; there is nothing crisp about its sound.  But listen to the kaleidoscopically blurry instrumental lead-in to the chorus of “The Plain Moon” (a play on the French phrase la pleine lune, or the full moon), and you are witnessing this band having its creative moment.  “Tungsten 4 – The Refugee” does not have an especially compelling melody, comparing unfavorably to U2’s “The Refugee” (1983), yet there is a searing guitar bridge midway through.  But “Golden Lion” rings out anthemically with its songful chorus, a sterling (to mix precious metal metaphors) species of the band’s genre.  “Towers Sent Her to Sheets of Sound” lives up to its far-out title, an enjoyable wallow in psychedelic grooviness.  There is not a strong enough artistic conception or the consistency to make A Coliseum Complex Museum more than intermittently brilliant, though.  B+

Sample song  “The Plain Moon”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ01b5Y_hNE

BLOOD ORANGE, Freetown Sound (Domino Recording)—The unrealized potential that dogs Devonté Hynes, the creative force behind Blood Orange, frustrates me.  He is multitalented, as a songwriter, arranger, singer, guitarist, keyboard player, percussionist, and cellist; he has an impressive contact list of fellow artists, as demonstrated on this record; he has written short stories and comics; he even acquits himself well as a dancer, as can be seen in the video for “I Know” (see the link below), where he is paired with a female who is clearly a professional.  Freetown Sound, whose title deceptively seems to promise something relating to West African music (Hynes’s father was born in Sierra Leone), is less than the sum of its parts, and that goes for individual songs as well.  There are passages that are simply sublime.  To take one example, the countermelody in “I Know” adds richness and dimension to what is a soulful but unadventurous slow tune, and in an extended piano interlude, Hynes embroiders arpeggios and other ruminations around that very same countermelody.  The artist seems to want to make a grand statement about African-American life today (Hynes is British but a New York transplant), something along the lines of Robert Glasper’s Black Radio series (see the 2012 music survey), but the various sampled snippets of the culture at the beginning and end of tracks are too short to add up to anything substantive, and the lyrics are similarly unrevealing.  In fact, the snippets often detract/distract from the songs, starting from the close of the very first one, an otherwise woozy a cappella number called “By Ourselves,” where the listener is subjected to the stridency of Atlanta “slam poet” Ashlee Haze’s “For Colored Girls (The Missy Elliot Poem).”  Because we only hear a small portion of the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates speaking at the 2015 Aspen Ideas Festival at the end of “Love Ya,” it is easy to ridicule his memories of his schoolboy dilemmas about what to wear each day; as my friend Fred Schwarz once said, tongue in cheek, “The fate of empires has rested on less.”  And the audio clip from the film Paris Is Burning that closes out “Desirée” is both verbosely inane (“a regular woman, is married to her husband…”) and, at the same time, takes a dismally transactional view of couplehood.  Although there is plenty of soul and even a dash of funk on Freetown Sound, it does not speak well that these clips and samples frequently overshadow the music itself.  As is the case with “I Know,” the breezier “Augustine” suffers from an insipid main theme that is to some degree rescued by its countermelody.  “E.V.P.,” a nu-disco-flavored dance track whose verse is spoken (rapped?) by Hynes in a suavely low voice, features, among others, Debbie Harry of Blondie on vocals.  Its secondary theme is briefly revived in the slow, ethereal closing number, “Better Numb.”  Also sporting a disco beat, and featuring some dreamy Hammond organ chords, is “Desirée.”  This is an excellent component that is dampened by Hynes’s bland and mewling vocal and then completely deflated by that Paris Is Burning bit.  With “Hands Up,” Hynes had a chance to make a real statement about police violence toward blacks but settled instead for a glib if swingy little tune, sung by his frequent collaborator here, Bryndon Cook.  “Hadron Collider” represents the best of what this record has to offer.  Written and performed with Nelly Furtado, it is meditatively blue and starkly poignant in a way unmatched by anything else on the disc, with some marvelously chromatic piano accompaniment.  A far less successful pairing with a Canadian pop songstress is “Better Than Me,” a robotic reverie alternating with a knockoff chorus, on which Hynes shares vocals with Cook and with Carly Rae Jepsen (hers is a breathy quasi-rap at times).  “Thank You,” co-written with Adam Bainbridge and Rodney Franklin, is a subtly smooth and affecting R&B number, with another frequent collaborator, Ava Raiin, singing.  “Squash Squash” is essentially an extended reprise of the slight, stop-time falsetto and sax crooner “With Him,” adding a dance beat.  “Love Ya” is the one cover on the album, a slowed-down version of an Eddy Grant song (“Come On Let Me Love You”) from 1984.  There is some brilliant composition on Freetown Sound, and some tunes will stick in memory, but that just makes me wonder how much better it might have been.    B+/B

Sample song “I Know”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK6R6WfKo0M

CASE/LANG/VEIRS, Case/Lang/Veirs (Anti-)—My views on this record are colored by my general disinterest in either the folk or country/Western genres.  Each of the three women who came together for this critically acclaimed project, initiated by k.d. lang—Neko Case and Laura Veirs are the other two—is a star in her own right, and each has strong associations with the American and Canadian West, particularly the Pacific Northwest.  I was most familiar with the previous work of Case, both from her stints with the New Pornographers and from her solo efforts (see the 2013 music survey).  A certain degree of ego sublimation must happen for three singers accustomed to being the central focus to work together, and that has been pulled off here.  Case and Veirs have somewhat similar voices, although I am partial to Case’s liquid clarity; Lang’s natural range is a little lower, and she is more of a country crooner by disposition, making for a nice contrast.  Although the self-titled album (not certain that the word “debut” is appropriate since this might well be a one-off) is not devoid of electronic instruments, their subtle insertion into the arrangements gives it an acoustic sensibility.  Tucker Martine, Veirs’s husband, produced the record and played percussion on “Why Do We Fight.”  The opener, “Atomic Number,” is easily the best of the bunch, sublimely songful and serene (in a folk vein).  The vocals are shared out, although Case takes the lead when the chorus arrives.  The three jointly wrote this song, along with several other songs.  The album’s one constant is that Veirs has songwriting credit on every track (for four of them, it is all hers), a couple of them done only with Case and four of the fourteen only with Lang.  A couple of other numbers stayed with me, “Greens of June” for its quasi-pentatonic melody and harmonies for a touch of exoticism (on the other hand, a similar setting for “Georgia Stars” appeals far less) and “Behind the Armory,” an elegantly simple confessional sung in concert at the refrain, with just a hint of strings (the credits on the disc jacket seem incomplete) and Rob Burger’s claviola emulating a clarinet choir.  “Honey and Smoke,” with Lang taking lead vocals, is a throwback to sixties girl-group pop, nicely executed if a bit self-conscious in its nodding toward its spiritual predecessors.  “Why Do We Fight,” another Lang-led tune, is world-weary, blue-toned, sensitively expressed if a bit melodramatic, losing focus with the bridge/extension of the chorus.  The other songs, even if I cannot, as a non-follower of “alt-country” or whatever one chooses to call it, muster much enthusiasm for them, taken on their own terms generally succeed in what they set out to accomplish, and all are performed with verve and consummate vocal artistry.  West Coast–themed songs like the breezy but vacuous “Best Kept Secret” or “Down I-5” I could live without, and I found the “Song for Judee,” about a woman who gets into trouble with drug abuse, uninvolving.  Yet those who are fans of folk or rock-inflected country are bound to respond more warmly and discover rewards aplenty here.    B+

Sample song  “Atomic Number”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-81jnVsCQw

CHAIRLIFT, Moth (Columbia Records/Sony Music Entertainment)—I became familiar with Caroline Polachek’s voice from her side work with Blood Orange (see the 2013 music survey) and SBTRKT (see the 2014 music survey).  In the latter, I called her “the lead singer of an obscure Brooklyn band called Chairlift”—well, not so obscure as to have escaped the notice of a major recording label, as it turns out.  Even so, the band has wound up its business after just three full-length recordings, ending with Moth, and a couple of E.P.s, and it likely will not be missed by a great many.  In fact, Polachek and her partner in the group, Patrick Wimberly, are probably best known for sharing songwriting credits on Beyoncé’s “No Angel” from 2013 (although their 2008 song “Bruises” featured in an Apple iPod commercial as well).  Bright toned “indie” pop inflected by rhythm and blues, Chairlift’s music is dominated by a feminine sensibility, unsurprisingly since Polachek wrote nearly all the lyrics on her own.  The best work on Moth actually is the compositions inspired by R&B.  “Moth to the Flame,” notwithstanding a chorus cramped by its restricted range, is tightly constructed and playful in its mock despair.  “Polymorphing,” a relaxed, urbane, devil-may-care shuffle of a tune that could be set against one of Hall & Oates’s early eighties tracks, shows off the range and skill of Polachek’s voice.  “Crying in Public” moves a bit further away from R&B and closer to the terroir cultivated by Feist on her solo records (see the 2007 and 2011 music surveys); recovering from a rather wan verse section, it blossoms into a touching chorus, with its apologetic confession of romantic vulnerability.  The final song, “No Such Thing as Illusion,” is the only one in which Wimberly tries for experimentalism; this does not last longer than the intro, but it does make for an intriguing opening minute or so, as he plays around with dissonant chords and strangely mutated timbres.  The remainder of the song is pensive but far more conventional, multitracking Polachek’s voice around the refrain that echoes the song title, even as she continues (from the previous song, “Unfinished Business,” as well as from “Ch-Ching”) embellishing her lines with brief jumps into the falsetto register, cowboy-yodeling-style.  “Look Up” makes for an exhortative opener, yet its only real color comes from the percussive accompaniment (drum programming at various pitches and marimba), not from the vocal line or guitar accompaniment.  Weirdly, the two songs that were packaged as singles, “Romeo” and “Ch-Ching,” are among the least interesting.  The former is pure energy, no finesse, while the latter is awkwardly robotic, nearly all rhythm (the sampled horns and whistling notwithstanding), wringing dry its one choral line through incessant repetition.  “Ottawa to Osaka” promises a tantalizing journey but is the very definition of “filler”—aimless and scattershot, its little japonais flourishes unconvincing.  With a record like this one leaning so firmly on rhythm and blues, the cynic in me wants to carp about questions of appropriation, wondering whether the hipsters who cotton to it would show the same enthusiasm were Polachek and Wimberly not lily-white (and attractive).  Even though it lies a little outside the range of what I typically favor, I have to admit to enjoying Moth, its mottled bits and blotches notwithstanding, somewhat more than I initially expected.    B+

Sample song  “Polymorphing”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1cYnXYiQvc

CRYING, Beyond the Fleeting Gales (Run for Cover Records)—Bright keyboards, almost blindingly so at times, peppy tempos, treacly melodies—such are the prime components of Crying, an electropop band putting out its first LP after a pair of EPs earlier.  The odd group name might lead one to expect an emo outfit, but such is not the case (although they have toured with Modern Baseball).  I am not sure there is untapped potential among this threesome of recently minted SUNY-Purchase grads; perhaps Beyond the Fleeting Gales is less than it might have been and the band develops into something more interesting over time, but I would not count on it.  The debut record is pleasant enough as an aural sampler (if a bit overly busy at times), but there is nothing groundbreaking on it, showing that just because someone went to an arty school, it does not guarantee artful or cutting-edge music à la Talking Heads.  Lead singer Elaiza Santos is capable if not especially distinctive; Ryan Galloway knows his way around synthesizers.  I have not heard the EPs, but aspects of the group’s earliest music were said to be derived from a Nintendo Game Boy system.  If any of that survived into the LP, it is not obvious to the ear, and maybe just as well.  (The CD jacket has frustratingly minimal information about the production, and the lyrics are presented in the form of a lengthy, hard-to-follow narrative combining medieval fonts with bad poetics.)  There are not huge qualitative differences among the songs, but the band front-loaded the slightly superior material.  The opening “Premonitory Dream” begins as a reflective chorale before pumping up the volume; still, the melody’s reiteration heightens its plaintiveness.  “Wool in the Wash” is a tuneful number with a relaxed swing to it, not trying to do too much.  Of the brasher tunes, the ingratiating and upbeat “Patriot” works best.  “Well and Spring” is the softest and most contemplative song on the record, not quite as tightly focused as it could be but even so appealingly ear-catching at its most introspective intervals.  Laetitia Tamko, a Cameroon-born vocalist who performs as Vagabon, does spoken word (or raps, depending on your interpretation) on “There Was a Door”; as this is one of the noisiest tracks, though, her words are practically buried by electric guitar and keyboards.  They do not sound that much alike, yet, weirdly, the starburst energetics of “Revive” channel Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded” from 1978’s Double Vision.  “Children of the Wind” sounds a little like an Electric Light Orchestra tune from the period when that band had run out of good ideas (say, the late eighties or early nineties) and was on its way to becoming an Atlantic City/Las Vegas institution, although one particular melodic element just about replicates the chorus of “Don’t Cry Out Loud” (1976), popularized by Melissa Manchester in the late seventies.  Too many of the ten tracks strive to wow with flashy keyboard flourishes in support of melodies that simply cannot help but be outshone.    B+/B

Sample song  “Patriot”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlSn-JSCbOI

BUCK CURRAN, Immortal Light (Obsolete Recordings/ESP-Disk)—Ethereal, spiritual, mystical, yet with a pungent earthiness, Buck Curran’s solo disc, trading in psychedelic folk with progressive rock accents, is a throwback to the late 1960s (which is when he was born) or early 1970s.  Curran is one-half of the folk duo Arborea, together with his wife, Shanti Deschaine, whose presence on the “solo” disc is significant and indelible.  Curran and Deschaine met in Norfolk, Virginia, two decades ago, and, after Curran bounced around to various locales—Colorado, Oregon, Ireland—they got hitched and settled in Lewiston, Maine.  Full disclosure here:  my friend Steve Holtje, who brought me this disc, manages the label that put out the vinyl version, ESP-Disk.  Four of the eight tracks have lyrics, which drink deeply from the well of fantasy, with themes of nature, the heavens, and travel across varying seascapes/landscapes (typically by sailboat or on horseback since anything more modern would dispel the ethos).  The one exception is the lone cover, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” (1969), yet even that song deals in celestial signs and visions.  Because I am not a big Creedence Clearwater fan, I do not feel (as some apparently do) that Curran’s version does violence to the original; in fact, his take, quieter and more oracular than the rollicking Creedence song everyone knows, is more appropriate to the song’s apocalyptic prophecies.  “New Moontide” sets the scene, relating a journey of heroes worthy of Strauss or Wagner in Curran’s tenebrous baritone; it is Deschaine’s owlishly sighing backing vocals, though, that give the song its haunting quality rather than anything in the clipped melody.  The line in the refrain about “coming through in waves” nods to Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” from The Wall (1979).  “Seven Gardens to Your Shore” is similarly earnest, questing, and enigmatic, with Curran’s multitracked voice backed by acoustic guitar, a bit of harmonium filigree woven in for atmospherics.  The last two tracks on the disc are harmonium drones.  “Andromeda” is nothing but the drone itself, varied over its six-minute length by different overtones and undertones and changes in volume and resonance.  For “Immortal Light,” the drone takes on a new frequency, with more active overtones, akin to a set of bagpipes.  In this closing number, it is effectively a ground bass supporting the nature-revering lyrics (paying tribute to three elements in separate verses: sun, sea, and earth) sung by Deschaine alone in her soft, lovely soprano.  In between verses, Curran splices plucky, note-bending, sitar-like metaphysical ruminations.  The song goes on longer than it really needs to, consuming a third of the album’s length, as each verse is sung twice, with extended guitar and harmonium breaks.  The instrumental tracks tend to be gentle and serene, often just guitar strumming.  “Wayfaring Summer (Reprise),” a “reprise” because it harks back to the Arborea debut album of the same name from ten years earlier, opens the album with a chord strikingly like the first one of Yes’s “And You and I” (1973) but quickly moves in a folkier direction, with some nice dual tracking counterpoint between Curran’s guitar and banjo.  Both “Sea of Polaris” and “River unto Sea” are driven by chiming arpeggiated figures in the guitar, but they are qualitatively distinct; the latter is more in the spirit of a medieval air or interlude, dreamy and air-cushioned, while the former, with its piquant electric guitar tracking, is closer to a prog-rock ballad in the vein of Steve Hackett’s post-Genesis work.  Immortal Light filters through as one of the year’s pleasant surprises.        A/A-

Sample song  “New Moontide”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukTCApavDPQ

THE DANDY WARHOLS, Distortland (Dine Alone Records/Beat the World Records)—Ever droll and fun to listen to, the Dandy Warhols are also dealing with the dreaded approach of middle age, leading to the uncharacteristically sober, yet still funny, concluding stanza to this record, “The Grow Up Song.”  In it, band leader Courtney Taylor (who still styles himself, with Anglophilic affectation, as “Courtney Taylor-Taylor”) bids farewell, in a spare, nearly a cappella setting, to the hallmarks of a rock’n’roll youth:  all-night hangouts, drugs, drinking to excess, cigarettes, zombie films.  Noting that his friends are now parents, he wraps up with:  “I’ve got to admit/I’m too old for this shit.”  While Distortland, a play on the band’s hometown of Portland, Oregon, does not reach the highs of the Dandys’ classics such as the magnificent Welcome to the Monkey House (2003), it is still a pretty good spin of the aluminum/vinyl.  I am puzzled as to why the vocal tracking sounds muddier than it did on earlier records since the lyrics are critical to appreciation of the band’s act, but maybe this is a consequence of the divorce from Capitol Records a number of years back in favor of a homegrown label.  (The album was recorded in part in “Courtney’s basements”; that he has more than one is a mark of success.)  The group warms up with a couple of moderately swift grooves:  “Search Party” is driven by a buzzy bass riff from Peter Holmström, whereas “Semper Fidelis” is more reverb- and percussion-heavy.  Then it really takes off with the catchy swing of “Pope Reverend Jim,” throbbing with monotone bass, before mellowing out for the following three tracks, highlighted by the midtempo, deceptively easygoing lament “STYGGO” (Some Things You Gotta Get Over).  The energy level picks up again with “You Are Killing Me,” resting on another pumping bass foundation; still, the song’s gripe comes off sounding a little tired, in more than the intended sense of the narrator having his last nerve worked over, as if Taylor had been doing this type of number once too often, and now it is more obligation than genuinely felt.  “All the Girls in London,” adapted from a single that appeared prior to this record, features Matthan Minster of Cage the Elephant on the Farfisa electronic organ, a rollicking bar-blues stomp with a distinctively hepped-up vocal that sounds like a guest artist, though none is credited, so maybe it is just Taylor putting on a performance.  There is actually an uncredited eleventh track on the CD, a chance for keyboard player Zia McCabe to work out a bit of classical training on a tinny-sounding piano.        A-

Sample song  “Catcher in the Rye”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMZVFrM4PMA

DIIV, Is the Is Are (Captured Tracks/Omnian Music Group)—Protoplasmic melodies with bejeweled shoegaze settings:  this describes pretty much everything on Is the Is Are, the follow-up (after a five-year hiatus) to DIIV’s debut, Oshin (see the 2012 music survey).  As such, the new recording represents no advance over its predecessor, which explains its receiving the same grade.  Certainly, part of the reason I am unmoved by DIIV is that I simply do not cotton to lead singer/bandleader Zachary Cole Smith’s wishy-washy tenor.  But, primarily, it is frustrating to bear aural witness to a band that seems to put all its creative energy into atmospherics at the expense of songwriting.  To some degree, this is a matter of expectations; some groups, particularly in electronica and experimental music, are all about the atmospherics and do that very well.  That is not what DIIV set out to achieve.  “Dopamine” typifies the shortcomings of the songs on offer.  Its lone theme is like the first two phrases of something that might have risen to the level of memorable had it then managed to complicate matters in some way.  Instead, it never develops at all, leaving the impression that the composition goes on too long, notwithstanding the piercing clarity of the shoegazing guitars.  “Dust” has a keening guitar riff that eventually transmogrifies into wailing six-string extemporizing, yet it is weighed down by its clunky sung segment—repeating the same musical line a dozen times is no way to construct a song.  “Bent (Roi’s Song),” dedicated to the obscure actor Roi Cydulkin, seems deliberately antimelodic, which again could be an interesting choice in the right hands—but no.  Similarly, with the final cut, the slow-paced “Waste of Breath,” Smith and the band take pride in the tunelessness of it all.  “Blue Boredom (Sky’s Song)” is an empty vessel that serves largely as a way for Smith to show off his girlfriend, the actress/singer/model Sky Ferreira.  Actually, this track is one that will stick in the mind—at least of heterosexual male listeners—because every word Ferreira utters radiates sensuality; she just has that kind of a voice.  DIIV’s formula works best on “Valentine,” which almost manages to complete a musical thought before the pulsing guitars take off from base; the tune therefore is more focused and better balanced in its elements than any other on the disc.  The upbeat opener, “Under the Sun,” might get the nod for runner-up.  “Mire (Grant’s Song)”—written for filmmaker Grant Singer—is one of the more interesting because of, well, the sonic mire—here is a case where the murky arrangements, a Sonic Youth–style grunge, more than compensate for the unremarkable refrain, sung with blank detachment.  DIIV has had its problems with drug abuse:  the original drummer, Colby Hewitt, left the band because of it, although he is still credited for having been present for most of the recording sessions; now it seems that Smith himself is taking a rehab break.  At the risk of sounding like a scold, I would suggest that more clearheaded concentration on the basics of composition might yield unexpected dividends.    B

Sample song  “Dopamine”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_9uS39YHyQ

FRIGHTENED RABBIT, Painting of a Panic Attack (Atlantic Recording/Warner Music Group)—Presumably, no animals were panicked during the making of this record, which was produced by Aaron Dessner of the band the National.  Actually, the title notwithstanding, panic is not the predominant state of mind on Frightened Rabbit’s fifth album, though a quiet desperation characterizes several tracks.  The Glasgow-based band sounds folky in its softer moments, more straightforwardly rocking in its louder ones.  I cannot say how Painting of a Panic Attack compares to earlier Frightened Rabbit discs, which used a different lead guitarist from the current one (Simon Liddell).  I can say that it is a workmanlike effort, with some decent songs that fall short of brilliance.  The one that will most readily light up the brain’s aural circuits is “Get Out,” the first single, on which the vehement chorus really jumps out at the listener, ambushing the serenely fluid verse section.  The other single, “Woke Up Hurting,” is a notch below it in quality, with a similarly rousing (if less fervid) chorus rescuing an indifferent verse.  “I Wish I Was Sober” pounds the percussion, barreling along with remarkable lucidity for a song about being under the influence and regretting it.  Among the more contemplative tracks, the most appealing is “400 Bones,” which has a limpid and prettily affecting piano accompaniment to its solemn vocal.  There is no real refrain to this song, just an intensification of the verse.  The opener, “Death Dream,” is, appropriately, a reverie that evolves into a vocal round through overdubbing as the song progresses in stately fashion.  Although the album title appears in the song’s verse, the aura is more of wonderment rather than alarm or morbidness that “I died in my sleep last night.”  The longest offering, “Lump Street,” has a split personality.  Beginning in minor mode, with a deliberate tempo, dark pulsations, and a mournful falsetto à la Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio, it becomes far less intriguing when, more than halfway through, the tone brightens and the pace quickens.  In fact, one of the issues I have with Painting of a Panic Attack is the way a number of its songs (“Little Drum” and “Break,” for example, and even “400 Bones” and "I Wish I Was Sober") “develop” simply by raising the volume button; it seems like a way of seeking catharsis on the cheap instead of earning that emotional release through sweat equity.  A couple of tracks give the impression that the band was having an off day for creativity during the writing sessions, namely, “Still Want to Be Here” and “Blood under the Bridge.”  Nothing on this album is unlistenable, but tired tracks like these are skippable.  Frightened Rabbit could certainly do with more sophistication and sustained buildup in its songwriting; too often, one gets the impression that it is coasting along, hoping to become the next Arcade Fire.    B+/B

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

GOAT, Requiem (Sub Pop Records)—Three albums into a musical career, Goat’s act, this whole tribal primitivism thing, might be wearing a bit thin.  On Requiem (not sure why it is called that—requiem for whom or what?  Also it seems strange for a band soaked in paganism to use such a Christian term), the characteristic melding of ersatz late-sixties psychedelia and fuzztones with crate digging in the “world music” section of the local record store (remember those?) in Gothenburg receives an especial admixture of West African and Southern African traditions, culminating in the kora playing of Senegalese native Maher Cissoko (well known in Sweden because he married a Swedish singer, and they formed a duo) on “Goodbye.”  The main problem with Requiem is its musical prolixity; on an album extending just past the one-hour mark, a number of songs simply go on far longer than they need to—imagine, say, Phish on acid and transplanted from Vermont across the Atlantic to Dakar and environs.  The record contains one terrific track, “Trouble in the Streets,” a number that are merely enjoyable, a few that leave little imprint, and those stoner jams, particularly anything beginning with “Goat-” (“Goatband,” “Goatfuzz”).  Not bad for a track list, but it falls shy of the standard set by the Swedish group’s ear-opening debut, World Music (see the 2012 music survey).  Other Goat constants are the female lead vocalist’s shouty singing style (an irritant, but one I have learned to live with—at least she yells in tune) and the hooty recorders or pan flutes the band cannot get enough of.  The piping on the second track, “I Sing in Silence” (hardly the case), combined with a syncopated rhythm mirroring that of Jethro Tull’s “Living in the Past” (but in 6/8 time rather than 5/4), does evoke Tull.  The album opens with an incantation, the Malian singer Oumou Sangaré’s “Djôrôlen” (recited by Goat’s vocalist), before the drums, guitars, and those vertical flutes kick in for “Union of Sun and Moon” (also known as “Union of Mind and Soul”), a spirited little march whose cosmic lyric about channeling positive energy is spoken rather than sung.  “Temple Rhythms” is, unsurprisingly, largely percussive, but there is nothing terribly alarming about “Alarms,” the song that succeeds it on the track list, although it does sound vaguely dire, with a buzzy psychedelic ethos.  “Trouble in the Streets,” its title notwithstanding, is a cheerful pop number with a calypso-like lilt (but a battery of African percussion), a note-bending extended bridge, and a rousing not-quite instrumental chorus (more accurate to describe it as the culmination of the verse section).  “Psychedelic Lover” has what sounds like a muezzin’s call to prayer incongruously leading into a song that begins with a promising guitar riff yet goes nowhere from there.  “Try My Robe” pastes a bald Western melody reflecting the Southern African philosophy of ubuntu (humanity expressed through sharing) over a more appealing, African-inspired rhythmic and harmonic motif.  The song that follows it, “It Is Not Me,” though modest in ambition and impact, more successfully blends psychedelic and West African elements.  “Goodbye” builds nicely, with the guitars playing off and embellishing the theme put forth by Cissoko, although it, too, is drawn out to unnecessary length.  The final track, “Ubuntu,” takes the prize for tedium, a miniature philosophy lesson (the various speakers are uncredited on the frustratingly sparse CD jacket), set atop a series of keyboard notes that are merely decorative, with a bit of quietly “vrooming” sound effects and samples of African singing; toward the end, a touch of a psychedelic theme from an earlier Goat record sneaks in briefly.  There is plenty to engage the listener in what Goat has put out here, but the message could have been expressed equally well in about two-thirds the time, and the album might have benefited from more extensive collaboration with African performers.    B+

Sample song  “Union of Mind and Soul”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLeu7YfJGC8

TIM HECKER, Love Streams (4AD)—Each time Tim Hecker puts out a new record (and this was his first in three years), it might be characterized as a divergence from what he has done previously:  Virgins (see the 2013 music survey) used live instruments in addition to electronics; Instrumental Tourist (see the 2012 music survey) was a team effort with another electronica specialist, Daniel Lopatin.  Although Love Streams avails itself of some of the same musicians as did Virgins and was likewise recorded in part at Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavik, it represents another break in the pattern—and a gentle turn toward the conventional.  Leaving behind the stony abstraction of earlier albums, it is warmer (somewhat), more accessible, less fuzzy (also only somewhat) and obscure.  More salient is the use of human voices for the first time (that is to say, voices that are not merely sampled), on five of the eleven tracks.  Notably, Hecker marshaled the forces of the Icelandic Choir Ensemble, a small group under the direction of Owen Roberts, in arrangements by the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannson, for “Castrati Stack” and “Black Phase.”  Elsewhere, he made use of a choir from the Ordos region in China’s Inner Mongolia province.  Hecker told interviewers that he was contemplating “liturgical aesthetics” and “the transcendental voice in the age of auto-tune,” and indeed the choral passages imbibe the spirit of a medieval or Renaissance composer (Josquin des Prez was a particular inspiration), or perhaps a modern inheritor such as Arvo Pärt.   Still, a majority of the compositions are instrumentals, and these, too, are qualitatively different.  “Obsidian Counterpoint,” the opener, does not contain any true counterpoint (nothing in the music is that texturally dense) but takes its character from the woodwind work of Grímur Helgason, flutes that sound in spots like Bolivian/Peruvian pan pipes, punctuated by staccato pops.  “Music of the Air” is the next track and the first to employ voices, wordless, both female and male (uncredited on the album), with the female predominating.  Both “Music of the Air” and “Bijie Dream” change coloring as they fade out, the former with a bit of rippling electric guitar (again, uncredited), the latter with an approximation of Caribbean steel pans.  The two-part “Violet Monumental” is the album’s centerpiece, more static (hence more like Hecker’s earlier material), tonally fixed, and undulating than the rest, with quavery vocals (still wordless, or more precisely no words that can be apprehended) in the first part.  The second part is more intense and, rather than being rigidly anchored to a single tone, instead obsessively cycles through a set of them.  “Up Red Bull Creek” is quietly shimmery and dreamlike.  Between the song title and the evocative but pictorially elusive quality of the music, one could readily imagine Matthew Barney setting one of his arty videos to a recording like this.  “Collapse Sonata” is freest in its deployment of Kara-Lis Coverdale’s synths and other electronic keyboards, beginning as straightforward exposition and then shaking up the rhythmic patterns and moving into experimentation with tone bending and timbral adjustments.  “Castrati Stack,” mournful yet ethereal, is either hypnotic or dully unchanging, depending on your perspective; I find its melding of the Icelandic chorus’s rueful plainchant with the keyboard long tones of Coverdale, whether unprocessed or manipulated, haunting, and the composition is short enough in duration to keep tedium at bay.  The choir is used in a contrasting manner for the finale, “Black Phase,” in which a repeated sequence of descending sung notes, slightly harmonized, offsets stabbing, rippling bass chords, a kind of grim sunset and twilight.  Neither significantly better or worse than Hecker’s earlier output, Love Streams shows an artist making tentative gestures toward the mainstream, even as his restlessness keeps him seeking fresh modes of expression.    A-

Sample song  “Castrati Stack”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIhIlEY-7FY

MICA LEVI AND OLIVER COATES, Remain Calm (Slip)—This wisp of an album, thirteen tracks yet not even totaling 28 minutes in length, is not what I expected from Mica Levi.  She is a minimalist at heart, but Remain Calm (perhaps one day to be remixed as “Remain Clam”?) underplays even minimalism.  Those familiar with her work with Micachu and the Shapes (see the 2009 and 2012 music surveys) would be looking for spiky music served up with a bit of punk attitude and any number of whirring or buzzing sound effects.  But her partner on this recording, Oliver Coates, is a professional cellist and experimental composer (Levi is classically trained as well).  I am not technically inclined when it comes to audio, but this recording was made using a Pioneer CDJ-2000 (a DJ music console with lots of bells and whistles) that hooks up with music software, plus a mixer, while Coates’s cello was electronically connected to a laptop running Ableton Live programming.  It gives the impression at times that the instrument is being strummed like a guitar rather than having its strings plucked.  For all the energy that was put into the production, the pieces are just too slight to be effective.  This is not to say that short compositions are without merit, viz. Beethoven’s Bagatelles or Satie’s Gnossiennes.  The entries on Remain Calm are more like motifs than fully realized concepts.  The opener, “Pre-Barok,” is the most resolutely classical; it is aspirational, taking wing, seemingly inspired by Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending or one of Olivier Messaien’s bird catalogue flights of fancy.  The rest of the album, even the apparent follow-up, the soberly piercing “Barok Main,” is more like Daniel Lopatin’s work as Oneohtrix Point Never (see the 2011, 2013, and 2015 music surveys), which is hardly a disparagement, except that his is more thoroughly conceived as electronica.  In particular, the few pieces that incorporate human voices (one can hear the title being uttered on “Say Goodbye to Everyone” or the word “toes” on “Bless Our Toes”) are in Lopatin mode.  Some of the better ideas—“Dolphins Climb onto Shore for the First Time” or “Dragons in the Mist”—cry out for more exposition and development.  “Dolphins,” though at times it sounds like an orchestra tuning up, shimmers mournfully; when Levi adds tones evoking a muted ship horn, the cellist’s squealing strings stand in for seagulls.  Barely a minute long, “Dragons” sketches its titular image skillfully, with a vague if cartoonish sense of menace.  Remarkably, for an album this brief, it manages to lag in the middle:  the consecutive tracks “I’ll Keep Going” and “Xhill Stepping,” two of the longest (clocking in at more than three and a half minutes each), are stupefaction inducing; the former makes a stab, toward the end, at mood shading by introducing background chord progressions, but it seems poor recompense.  Neither electronica in the truest sense nor modernist classical, Remain Calm rests awkwardly between those poles.        B+

Sample song  “Barok Main”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orZcqC-3RGw

THE LIMIÑANAS, Malamore (Because Music)—Enjoyable yet forgettable; this is how I would characterize Malamore.  The husband-and-wife team of Lionel and Marie Limiñana (she the drummer; he plays all other instruments) won Album of the Year 2013 for Costa Blanca.  Even back then, I criticized a couple of the tracks for going on too long locked in the same holding pattern.  For the newer record, that tendency has become near-universal.  Nearly every song on Malamore (which could be interpreted as “bad love” or, perhaps, using the Russian word for “sea”—more—“bad sea”) sets up what could be described as a “drone-riff” that it then rides with straight to the finish, unchanging except some sparse and subtle add-ons.  The enjoyment comes from the skill with which Lionel and his sometime writing partner and brother Serge construct atmospheric homages to 1960s French pop, pop culture, and psychedelia.  There is an ineffable Gallic “cool” about the Limiñanas, conjuring film images involving black motorcycle jackets and the smoking of Gitanes, that persists.  They have a number of collaborators, notably Peter Hook of Joy Division and New Order, who plays bass and backs Marie on vocals for “Garden of Love,” and the electronic composer/keyboard player Pascal Comelade and the Valencian guitarist Iván Telefunken, both of whom participate in the final track, “The Train Creep A-Loopin,” an instrumental that is the album’s most engaging composition.  It makes use, as does “Kostas,” of “Theme from Shaft” (1971)–style wah-wah bass, buzzing strings, and crystal glasses (credited to “Loopy the Loop”).  The song builds rapidly to a thrilling momentum, and yet, frustratingly, the anticipation is never rewarded the satisfaction of a denouement; the piece simply ends after a steady rise in volume and intensity.  “Kostas,” the other number that seems to pay homage to the late Isaac Hayes, adds a bouzouki, played by Laurent Sales, to its wah-wah and Eastern Mediterranean drone, in the service of a narrative in French from Lionel (he never actually sings on these recordings), seemingly about a Greek bad-ass, the titular character.  The album opens with a brief, sighing intro, “Athen i.a,” followed by another Lionel Francophone narrative, “El Beach,” whose drone is varied by, in succession, a plinking keyboard pattern, Sales’s bouzouki, and what sounds like Middle Eastern chanting.  “Dahlia Rouge” (Red Dahlia) spices up what would otherwise be bland fare with a modal harmonic accent.  Named after a French variant on the 99-cent store, “Prisunic” finds a remarkable number of words to rhyme with the title but is otherwise stupefying in its dogged constancy.  “Garden of Love” abandons the drone for something approaching genuine song, even though Marie barely attempts to shape a musical line out of the lyric; it is pleasant if inert.  Another break from the droning comes with “El Sordo” (The Deaf Man), a cantering country-folk acoustic instrumental ballad.  “Paradise Now” casts a glance toward early-1970s-style Muzak staples; with its brief, breathily aspirational vocal from Marie again (she does not sing at all here), it is actually closest in spirit to something fellow French-Mediterranean artist M83 (see below) would construct.  The worst tracks are those featuring Guillaume Picard; I really loathe his cringing tenor.  At least he actually makes an effort to sing, though, in English on both the dreadful title track, which name-checks Robert Mitchum and Robert Duvall, and “The Dead Are Walking.”  Malamore is, with any luck, a breather before a move toward more ambitious material.  Otherwise, this becomes shopworn fairly fast.    B+

Sample song  “Garden of Love”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLYq5Mjp4eA

LOWTIDE, Lowtide (Lost and Lonesome Recording/ Opposite Number)—Melbourne’s Lowtide has been around since 2008, so it is surprising that its debut LP did not appear on these shores until 2016.  Actually, the record had been released on the Lost and Lonesome Recording label in the band’s native Oceania two years earlier.  Although portions of the debut record are pedestrian, the opening “Whale” is attention-holding for its slow-motion, rich-hued sonorities.  Heavy on the reverb, “Blue Movie” builds to a rewarding climax following an unpromising start.  “Yesterday” similarly reaches a stirring denouement.  And, of the two instrumentals on this brief (about 35 minutes long) record, while “Autumn” is too short to amount to much, “Maxillæ Leaving, Seaward” is gorgeously cinematic, combining acoustic and heavily synthesized elements in a gentle tone portrait.    B+

Sample song  “Wedding Ring”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgIu2UT9JwY

M83, Junk (M83 Recording/Mute Records)—When I first got the Electric Light Orchestra’s double-record set Out of the Blue in 1978 (it actually was issued the previous fall), I recall being disappointed in how different it sounded, with its bright, unabashedly poppy, glittery sheen, from other E.L.O. albums, particularly Face the Music and A New World Record.  Over time, I came to appreciate and even love Out of the Blue, and in fact “Mr. Blue Sky” is one of the band’s great songs.  Possibly the same change of heart could happen with M83’s Junk, which is a departure from previous M83 albums, although the previous release, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming (see the 2011 music survey), was tending in that direction.  Alas, it is unlikely.  The album title seemed all too suitable on first impression.  Anthony Gonzalez, the heart and soul of M83, is too clever a tunesmith to create a record that is all empty calories.  Some of the shiny baubles on Junk actually do have merit, but for long stretches it sogs up like a waffle that has been doused with way too much syrup.  Even the intervention of Beck (Beck Hansen) cannot do much to help; the song he co-wrote and sings lead vocals on, “Time Wind,” has a nice, relaxed groove but is fairly constricted and shapeless melodically.  The nexus between the very different sensibilities of Beck and Gonzalez is provided by Justin Meldal-Johnsen, guitarist/bassist/keyboard player, producer, and sound engineer, who has worked with both in the past as well.  Gonzalez’s most audible partner, however, is the French-Vietnamese singer Mai Lan (Mai Lan Chapiron), who sings lead vocals on four tracks and backing vocals on a fifth.  On closer inspection, the album gets off to a reasonably promising start.  “Do It, Try It,” which Gonzalez sings himself, has an appealingly off-balance, rubber-limbed, quasi-Latin rhythm in the keyboards and bass and a rousing chorus that, the second time around, ultimately explodes into a Wurlitzer-swirl of electronic exuberance.  The first song to introduce Mai Lan’s capable if not distinctive mezzo voice, “Go!” has a rather flat verse section that unfolds and swells via a countdown into another warmly appealing refrain.  “Walkway Blues” is like E.L.O.’s later work (later than Out of Blue) in its reliance on glammed-up, richly melodic choruses to carry what would otherwise be a pedestrian, moody tune sung by Jordan Lawlor, a.k.a. “J. Laser”; the ending, with a faint echo of the choral melody transposed to the keyboards amid whooshes of waves, is a nice touch.  Following a lull, Junk perks up again midway through with “Laser Gun” and “Road Blaster.”  The former begins with Mai Lan rapping a bit to a Carole King–esque vintage piano intro.  The lively chorus eventually devolves into a sort of cheerleading, “Got it all, PAM!  Got everything/Got all I need.”  The latter is memorable primarily for its vigorous submelody played for the most part by Ian Young on the alto sax.  There is more rapping from Mai Lan in “Bibi the Dog,” but this track, with its zoot-suited ethos and Munchkinized vocal manipulations, is just, well, too weirdly French, even for my palate.  It is one of two largely Francophone songs, the other being “Atlantique Sud” (South Atlantic).  As mediocre as both are, “Atlantique Sud” still succeeds in inserting a wrenching twist into its otherwise jejune chorus, keeping it from being pure pap.  The closing song, “Sunday Night 1987,” is dreadfully bland, with a Stevie Wonder, “Isn’t She Lovely” (1976) –style harmonica outro (ugh!) accompanied by soft piano figurations.  “For the Kids” is like a cross between the Captain and Tennille’s “Do It to Me One More Time” (1979) and a ballad from a Muppets movie soundtrack, sung matter-of-factly by Norwegian pop singer Susanne Sundfør, with a narrative monologue midway through spoken by Meldal-Johnsen’s young daughter Zelly (who also made an appearance on Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming as “Zelly Boo”—she was five years younger then, after all).  “Solitude” is more E.L.O.-like than any other tune here, in its heavy use of massed strings and synthesizers, but it lies limply, a platter of overcooked haricots verts, swoony and sentimentalized—again, though, Gonzalez inserts a surprise:  the extended coda of sustained tones is strikingly touching, so the long piece is not completely irredeemable.  There are four short-ish instrumentals on Junk; the first two (the ones without a vocal component in the mix), “Moon Crystal” and “The Wizard,” are nice; the other two are at best inoffensive.  Tangentially, what is it with the flute credit to “Moon Crystal” going to “Grikug the Defiler”?  Are all session musicians someday to end up with monikers that sound borrowed from “Magic: The Gathering”?  The trajectory of Gonzalez’s career is arcing toward his being the next Tim Rice or Andrew Lloyd Webber, I fear.  In that context, it is not at all surprising to learn that he has been selected as the composer/director of Cirque du Soleil’s upcoming (spring 2017) Montreal production, Volta.    B

Sample song  “Go!”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3YZTYXftzg

MATMOS, Ultimate Care II (Thrill Jockey Records)—Sometimes, music can be an act of curation, as overused as that word is these days, more than organic creation.  That still leaves plenty of scope, however, for creativity and judgment in the choosing of elements, their placement and arrangement, and their highlighting and transformation.  The duo that make up the experimental electronic group Matmos—M. C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel—claim that “all sounds on this recording were originally generated by a Whirlpool Ultimate Care II washing machine in the basement of our home in Baltimore.”  (This explains why there is no Matmos record called Ultimate Care I.)  They go on to say that no synthesizers or drum machines were used; rather, they simply manipulated the machine’s noises with samplers, software, and “outboard processing” such as MIDI.  There is more to it than that; some sounds were produced not by the operations of the Whirlpool itself but by the musicians and their friends beating on it with sticks and rubbing objects against it for friction.  (Hope that warranty covers “musicality events”!)  Guests contributing to the record’s sonic essence are Sam Haberman and Max Eilbacher from Horse Lords, Duncan Moore (of Needle Gun), Jason Willett (of Half Japanese), Dan Deacon, and Jon Leidecker.  The record begins and ends with more conventional Whirlpool sounds—first, the emptying of water from the drum as it moves from the rinse to the spin cycle; at the end, the buzzer that goes off when the cycle is complete.  Since much of what a washing machine does involves thumping as it rotates, a good portion of the disc’s sole 38-minute track is percussive in nature, but not all by any means.  Nor is all the percussiveness necessarily what one would expect.  The friction effects yield sounds paralleling the Brazilian cuíca, and, with further manipulation, these can come across as positively elephantine.  There is a brief interval early on when the recording’s timbre uncannily approaches that of an African mbira, or “thumb piano.”  The combination of these ingredients just a few minutes into the “performance” conjures a tribal groove, with a bit of march beat mixed in.  In other places, one can readily summon the Teletype chatter that still forms the backdrop to so many news radio broadcasts, or bits of vintage videogames from the 1980s.  Digital manipulation can pull off all sorts of tricks that I do not remotely understand; even so, it is hard to imagine how some of the keyboard-like tones were produced in the absence of synthesizers.  Indeed, some of the quieter passages on the disc could substitute for the soundtrack of a planetarium show.  There is one juncture, about one-third of the way through, at which the musical setting is crafted almost as an echo of the introduction to the final “movement” of Stereolab’s suite “Refractions in the Plastic Pulse,” from the wonderful Dots and Loops (1997).  About two-thirds in, the reverberant long notes coalesce into a sublime tone poem lasting several magical minutes.  Toward, the end, the guys play around with the buzzer sound and rev up the percussion rambunctiousness one last time before the final buzzer is triggered.  This album clearly will not be to everyone’s taste, and some will find the concept gimmicky.  Yet, with its restless spirit and sheer inventiveness, it is far more stimulating and entertaining than a rote description of its core idea suggests.    A

Sample song  excerpt five from the album’s single track:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukqOGGJqtZM

OPETH, Sorceress (Moderbolaget Records/Nuclear Entertainment)—Allied genres they may be, but migrating from the world of heavy metal to that of progressive rock is more complicated than merely shifting emphasis.  Gothenburg’s Opeth, which has been around for nearly three decades and twelve studio albums, started out as metal, yet the several most recent albums have shown an intensified interest in the progressive genre.  This is not to say that the band’s origins have been left in the dust; in fact, this becomes an issue in some of the more problematic songs on what is otherwise a capable and at times absorbing record.  Opeth’s restlessness makes it hard for the band to settle on an identity, particularly in the title track of Sorceress.  The instrumental intro to this selection, a grimy electric bass and percussion scene setter, has an undeniable if viscous swinginess.  It seems utterly unrelated to crunching chords that accompany the leaden and ponderous sung theme that follows.  Meanwhile, the furtive guitar ruminations that color the quiet space in between the two sets of verse could just about have been lifted from King Crimson’s “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic” (1973).  The song ends abruptly at the next instrumental passage, as if the songwriters did not know where to take it next.  Next up on the playlist is “The Wilde Flowers,” an appealingly doomy prog-metal anthem with a coda that begins sedately enough but ultimately builds to a frenzied conclusion.  Following the heaviness of “Sorceress” and “The Wilde Flowers,” “Will o the Wisp” is Opeth in Cat Stevens mode, acoustic, folky, with a lilting melody embroidered by flute.  Also soft, even dreamy and psychedelic, is “Sorceress 2,” seeming to have little in common with its namesake.  The quasi-instrumental “Seventh Sojourn” displays an infatuation with Middle Eastern and South Asian music, with tabla drums, oud-like guitar, and modal melodies.  The concluding high-pitched vocal section, set to a cycling piano pattern, seems tacked on gratuitously, again bearing no relation to what has come before and dispelling the mood entirely.  “Strange Brew” is the longest and most complicated track on the disc.  The slow opening vocal, against tremulous keyboard chords, resembles nothing more than the verse portion of the Electric Light Orchestra’s “Strange Magic” (1975), sprinkled with a bit of U.K.’s moody “Rendezvous 6:02” (1979).  When this introductory section ends with a gentle guitar theme, the rapid-fire assault of synthesizer (Mellotron!) and drums that takes over is startling.  This leads to a tortured vocal—think Greg Lake at his most anguished, fronting King Crimson or Emerson, Lake & Palmer—and some furious guitar flurries.  The tune begins to bog down and lose its way until there is a return to the quiet intro, which then frames a final vocal that, although hard-edged, hews much more closely to the intro’s melodic parameters.  “Strange Brew” demonstrates that sometimes a little bit of everything turns out to be too much.  A soft piano fugue to open “Em” gives way to a thunderously percussive set of monotone guitar chords accentuating a plaintive and urgent vocal that is ridden for all it is worth; however, when the bandleader and singer Mikael Åkerfeldt switches the melody over to major mode, with a touch of falsetto, suddenly, Opeth is channeling the “supergroup” Asia and its lead singer, the late John Wetton.  The reprise of “Persephone,” as with “Sorceress,” has little to do with the first instance of the song (they bookend the disc) excepting that both are acoustic in nature and use the voice of Pascale Marie Vickery to narrate the brief verse.  Whereas the opening “Persephone” apes a Spanish-style guitar romance, the reprise actually borrows the piano intro from “Em,” which immediately precedes it on the disc.  The band’s creative skills climax with “Chrysalis,” a loud number that most successfully melds progressive and metal influences in the vein of the Mars Volta (see the 2012 music survey), a progressive band with a notably metallic edge, matching that band’s feverish delirium and intensity, although the shrill Hammond organ chords midway through also evoke the Argent classic “Hold Your Head Up” from 1972.  And the song shifts into quiet and contemplative mode as it winds down.  The lyrics on Sorceress are opaque and preposterous, but the Swedes deserve some latitude, as their first language is not English, and even Åkerfeldt himself admitted in an interview that these are secondary to the music.  Guilty of overreach in places, the record hits highs often enough that the listener will want to come back to it.    A-/B+

Sample song  “Sorceress”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhqijfqecvA

PARQUET COURTS, Human Performance (Rough Trade Records)—Having run out of time before being able to review Sunbathing Animal for the 2014 music survey, I am now taking my first crack at Brooklyn’s Parquet Courts.  Although the band’s unvarnished postpunk esthetic lies beyond my habitual zone of gratification, when its members are so moved, they can deliver a stirring song, nicely turned using minimal materials.  Too often, however, they are content to rest on two or three chords and let the lyrics do the rest of the work, not so much a “tune” as the scaffolding for something potentially far more captivating.  One sees this, for example, in “One Man No City”:  same rhythmic guitar riff ad infinitum, words spoken rather than sung (except for the barest feint at the “no city” refrain).  That said, Parquet Courts is skilled at what it does, which has garnered the group a number of admiring reviews.  Dylanesque in its frequent preference for straight recitation of narrative, toneless but keeping company with the beat, the band nods to forebears such as the Gang of Four (these guys are even less concerned with melody, though), the Fall (but without Mark E. Smith’s distinctively irascible personality), and Nick Cave.  For an arty, experimental-robotic song such as “I Was Just Here,” one could even throw in a contemporary, Mica Levi (see above), who usually performs as Micachu and the Shapes (see also the 2012 and 2009 music surveys).  Just add crazy sound effects like a blender or a vacuum cleaner!  Unsurprisingly, I find the more rounded, fully formed songs the most affecting:  the title track, particularly, which impressionistically sketches the post mortem of a relationship in a sublime series of rueful verse stanzas (sung bluffly by Andrew Savage) and a reverberant chorus like something from the Troggs eons ago; as well as the contemplative pale-blues of “Steady on My Mind,” sung even less tunefully by Austin Brown; the sweetness of the simple guitar line makes up for Brown’s deficiencies as a vocalist.  “Berlin Got Blurry” is a weaker tune whose most interesting elements are the New Riders of the Purple Sage–style country/Western guitar intro and the (uncredited) keyboard shading that edges the chorus.  Of the melody-shy numbers, the most successful is the opener, “Dust,” a tightly knit, wiry piece in the spirit of the Fall that benefits from the added guitar of Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy.  Some of the others, such as “Captive of the Sun” or “Two Dead Cops” really go nowhere, though.  The group made a couple of interesting decisions for this record.  One was to append a lengthy (by the standards of a garage-y band like this) coda to “One Man No City,” jangly and quasi-modal à la Limiñanas (see above); alas, it adds little to the song.  Another was the inclusion of “It’s Gonna Happen” as the final entry, seemingly out of place as a wispy number with barely any rhythmic impulsion (a repeated snare roll punctuating every measure is about all there is), the two vocalists, Savage and Brown, singing out of sync at certain intervals, and crepuscular sustained tones in the background.  A strange way to conclude a record that willfully underplays its own strengths.    B+

Sample song  “Human Performance”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D6-8eXlMV4

RADIOHEAD, A Moon Shaped Pool (XL Recordings)—While hardly overlooked in 2016 (Radiohead’s fan base is sufficiently large that the entertaining but mortifying YouTube video for “Burn the Witch”—see below—has generated 32 million views thus far, about a year and a half after its creation), and despite garnering its share of honors and accolades, I still feel as though A Moon Shaped Pool is underappreciated generally.  This might be in part because Radiohead tends to shun publicity.  It is also because of the public’s limited attention span and catlike attraction toward the newest bright and shiny object, as well as the increasing struggle for relevance by rock, or even “postrock,” in our contemporary culture.  In the scheme of Radiohead’s nine studio albums to date, the latest release is not as inward looking as Amnesiac (2001), In Rainbows (see the 2007 music survey), or The King of Limbs (see the 2011 music survey) but certainly ranks higher on the introversion scale than the earlier records or even Hail to the Thief (2003).  Done in collaboration with the London Contemporary Orchestra, a young ensemble whose membership included cellist Oliver Coates (see above, under Mica Levi and Oliver Coates), to arrangements by band member Jonny Greenwood, the album’s sound is as sumptuous as it is furtive and almost unremittingly dark in tone.  While not comparable to the band’s greatest—OK Computer (1997) and The Bends (1995)—and I would agree with those critics who said it could have stood for another rousing composition besides the opener (“Burn the Witch”) and “Ful Stop,” its quiet subtleties mask whole dimensions of feeling and meaning.  The stirring and disturbing “Burn the Witch,” a song about the consequences of not standing up to mob mentality and prejudices, understandably got the lion’s share of attention; the LCO’s players chop at their strings col legno, heightening the urgency.  “Ful Stop” begins life as a brisk instrumental with an insistent synthesizer hum; eventually Thom Yorke’s part kicks in with one of his typically neuralgic, attenuated vocals.  Only at the agitated chorus do we hear the guitars for the first time, pitching harmonies against the ground bass of the synths.  “Identikit” is a midtempo number with a hand-wringing ethos, centered on the “broken hearts/make it rain” refrain, although the LCO’s women’s chorus picking up that refrain following Yorke is an unwelcome embellishment.  Of the slower, more muted compositions, “The Numbers” is exquisite; its harmonic richness, combined with its gradual swell in intensity and orchestration, sates, if hardly soothes, the listener.  As always with Radiohead, Yorke’s lyrics would have greater force if he projected them with more conviction over the arrangements.  Equally spellbinding is “Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief,” its wounded melody unfolding over a glowering, coal-dark, yet breathtakingly original harmonic progression in the keyboards.  “Daydreaming,” which, like “Burn the Witch,” was released as a single, is a gentle tune featuring beautiful arpeggiations that cushion its wiry, fraught vocal.  Even absent the LCO’s support (for most of the tune), there is a symphonic sonority to this song that would translate well to a cinema soundtrack, and the same might be said for “Glass Eyes.”  Not everything on the album is this rewarding, but the ensemble of the track list sets a mood that more than stands up to critical scrutiny and shows that, even if Radiohead’s members are releasing records more infrequently these days, middle age has not dimmed their creative power.    A

Sample song  “Burn the Witch”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI2oS2hoL0k

SANTIGOLD, 99¢ (Atlantic Recording/ Warner Music Group)—My first impression of the mock–bargain bin 99¢ was, “This record is a big mistake.”  Upon subsequent, more careful listening sessions, I revised my opinion to “Some of this record is a big mistake.”  Santi White, who records/performs as Santigold, has certainly put out better work previously (see the 2008 music survey, when she was still “Santogold,” and the 2012 music survey).  White has a talent for melding Anglo-Caribbean rhythms and modes with energetic, new wave–inspired (she once fronted a Philadelphia punk band, Stiffed) pop and hip-hop.  And on the first third of the album, she hits her sweet spot; then, it takes a deep dive and rarely comes up for air.  Despite the record’s title and the satirical boasting intended as a grilling of typical rapper fare, there is no biting social commentary about the commodification of music, or art, or anything else, making for a more lightweight record than it might have been (perhaps suitable for a bargain bin after all).  The opening single, “Can’t Get Enough of Myself,” done in collaboration with the Swedish producer Patrik Berger and his associate Markus Krunegård (whose joint project is titled “B.C”), is a delightful swirl of calypso-flavored electric keyboards and a lilting yet fast, tricky dance meter.  The tune is given additional spice by the saxophones and flute of Martin Perna of Antibalas.  Its tongue-in-cheek lyric seems apropos for a time when Donald Trump’s unrestrained narcissism was propelling him to the top of Republican primary polls.  The follow-up, “Big Boss Big Time Business,” is similarly bumptious, if far more monochromatic, with a thrumming bass characteristic of Jamaican dub and a busy, off-color vocal line.  “Chasing Shadows,” also released as a single, was written with Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend.  A slower number that also echoes reggae in form, it has an appealingly introspective darkness to it.  Even the irritatingly repetitive “Banshee,” with its grating “C’mon!” refrain, has a certain fleet-footed spiritedness.  Beyond these first four songs, however, there is little to recommend among the rest.  The “preposition” songs, “Before the Fire” and “Outside the War,” are not bad.  The latter, also co-written with Batmanglij (and others), has a doomy, dystopian sci-fi chill to go with its shuddering bass, mournful synth long tones, and portentous guitar harmonics; it feels a little like the Doors’ “The End” (1967).  “Before the Fire” was co-written with the hip-hop songwriter Sam Dew and TV on the Radio’s David Andrew Sitek, and one could readily envision this dusky confessional, in all its studied seriousness, appearing on a TV on the Radio record.  The blurry chord changes of “Run the Races” faintly echo those of U2’s War closer “40” (1983); hence, the song has a valedictory sensibility that is belied by its placement next to last, instead of last, on the track list.  The actual closer, “Who I Thought You Were,” is brightly toned and hopped-up rhythmically but utterly disposable, yet its candy-colored theme oddly parallels that of Bruce Springsteen’s far more despairing “Born in the USA” (1984).  “Walking in a Circle” opens with what sounds like a male voice, but since the only outside performer credits are for the guitar and synthesizers, it may be surmised that this is White’s own voice, sonically distorted.  Going beyond the mere duds, this album contains a candidate for the worst song of the decade, “Who Be Lovin’ Me,” in which White trades off the lyric with iLoveMakonnen (Makonnen Sheran), a no-talent singer/rapper from Atlanta originally (apparently, Drake misguidedly saw some potential in him).  His mewling, off-pitch crooning and the whiny, oily, peremptory lyric together could be prescribed as an emetic; incredibly, someone thought this track was strong enough to serve as a single as well.  I paid a good bit more than ninety-nine pennies for 99¢ and am left with buyer’s remorse.    B
 
Sample song  “Can’t Get Enough of Myself”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM71W6eI34w

SLEIGH BELLS, Jessica Rabbit (Torn Clean/Sinderlyn [Omnian Music Group])—With the not at all cartoonish Jessica Rabbit, Sleigh Bells is moving ahead in several different directions at once, even while remaining a leading exponent of noise rock.  The album is mostly set at high volume, but not always, and, stunningly for this duo, subtlety creeps in at some points.  Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss are reaching for true lyricism in certain songs, even when Krauss’s tone is overwrought, as in “I Can Only Stare.”  The somewhat calmer (loud attacks are not absent here) and moodier “Baptism by Fire” as well as “I Can’t Stand You Anymore” and “Torn Clean” are other tunes with songful choruses.  “I Know Not to Count on You” is the most lyrical of all, instrumentally as well as vocally, with Miller even accompanying on acoustic guitar for a change; this one could serve as a movie soundtrack.  That several tracks misfire does not bother me because clearly the band is still extending its creative wings.  “Rule Number One” in particular seems overly busy; cramming several clashing musical styles into one song, it is wildly disjointed.  The machine-gun bursts of “As He,” the final track, also seem divorced from the song’s other devices, which include spoken phrases, a bit of videogame noises, and a lovely passage of sustained tones at the close that I wish had been more central to the composition.  More focused are “The Crucible” and “Throw Me down the Stairs,” but both are huge expenditures of energy and volume considering the slight return on investment.  “Unlimited Dark Paths,” another fraught vocal, is memorable primarily for its odd “F**k all your lips and your cheekbones” line.  “Hyper Dark” beckons toward house music, which is certainly a new turn for Sleigh Bells, while “Loyal for” uses breakbeats in the fashion of trip-hop, in declaring that an allegiance might well be temporary.  The opening song, “It’s Just Us Now,” sits closest to the brash noise rock that Sleigh Bells specialized in on its first three records (see the 2010, 2012, and 2013 music surveys), but even this track cannot resist intervals of open melodiousness.  “Lightning Turns Sawdust Gold” is the most ambitious composition, with a nice turn of musical phrase as its backbone (the piece ends with that motif on acoustic piano); the song may bite off more than it can process but is still pleasurable.  Jessica Rabbit is an unruly mélange (or menagerie), but in the process of stretching their muscles and expanding their horizons, the talented Miller and Krauss could be on the verge of something much bigger.  (Or not.)    A-

Sample song  “I Can Only Stare”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZAJeYzrtUY

SPC ECO, Anomalies (Saint Marie Records)—Unusually, this English band consists of a father-daughter team:  Dean Garcia, who has played with the Eurhythmics and as part of a duo called Curve, on all instruments, and Rose Berlin as vocalist.  Steve Monti plays drums and special effects on certain tracks as well.  The division of labor is that Dad writes the music, while daughter is in charge of the lyrics.  The group, whose odd name is supposed to be pronounced as “space echo,” has been around for several years and has a number of recordings to its credit already, but I was not aware of them until they were called to my attention by Steve Holtje.  Though the band is typically categorized as shoegaze rock, this is not a classic shoegazer album, drawing on allied genres as well.  The overall ethos is one of moodiness and introspection.  Anomalies goes down easy, with accessible chorus hooks, even if the verse composition often seems underdeveloped by comparison (listen to “Bare to Lie” or “All in Time,” for example, and you will most likely agree).  For shoegaze, it is relatively quiet.  Berlin’s lyrics reach for profundity but stumble against their own non-sequiturs and gaps in logic that result in head-scratching for the listener.  The music’s native appeal makes it easy to overlook the words, however.  The seductive opener, “Out of My System,” sets the tone, throbbing and crepuscular, as the narrator tries to purge herself of a collapsed romance.  (At least, that is what I think is happening here.)  “Silent Maybe,” the middle track (of nine), sweeps us along in the wake of its current, with a walking-tempo motoric rhythmic pattern, gentle and compelling, adorned with sumptuous instrumentation.  The following composition, “Think Twice,” strives for the laid-back anomie of Portishead (see the 2008 music survey), but without the breakbeats that characterize that band’s  trip-hop.  Berlin’s creamy mezzo is as breathy as that of Beth Gibbons of Portishead, yet Gibbons’s quavery, febrile intensity is not Berlin’s approach to singing at all.  The end result is less Portishead than downtempo, but that takes away nothing from the song’s visceral tug.  The tempo slows still more for the final number, “Lost in a Crowd,” as steadfastly wan and contemplative as anything on the disc but in its composition making a gesture toward the minimalist experimentalism of other Londoners such as Mica Levi (see above, as well as the 2009 and 2012 music surveys, under “Micachu and the Shapes”) or Matthew Herbert.  Anomalies draws its strength from the atmosphere it develops, hyperromantic yet vaguely dystopian; in fact, it is the songs in which this sweetly sinister fog lifts (“Your Own Way”; “Revived”) that are the least convincing on the record.    A-

Sample song  “Think Twice”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YHoTbC3SXw


REGINA SPEKTOR, Remember Us to Life (Sire Records/Warner Music Group)—The shine is off this once-promising talent, and I am not sure what she can do to restore it.  Remember Us to Life, whose title comes from a Hebrew prayer recited during the Jewish High Holy Days, is marginally better than Regina Spektor’s previous record, What We Saw from the Cheap Seats (see the 2012 music survey).  But it will not win her legions of new young fans, even as she might be alienating some of her early fan base.  It is hard to know what kind of pressures are on her; she has a son now, and a marriage to keep up, and a relationship with a major record company.  She continues to record in Los Angeles studios, despite being based (as far as I can tell) in New York still.  As she does so, she is playing it safe, no longer taking the chances that brought her notice and acclaim early on.  At thirty-six years of age, she is too young to be settling into a cabaret-style career, but that might be where her future lies (hers and Lady Gaga’s).  Her songs are too studied, whether theatrical or contemplative.  Sometimes her lyrics are revelatory but not nearly often enough these days.  Although the compositions do not sound all alike, there is a textural sameness to this album; it is always Spektor accompanying herself on piano (or synthesizer, or, in one instance, celesta), with string arrangements.  There are guitars and percussion for most tracks, yet one could be forgiven for failing to notice their presence.  Spektor’s husband, Jack Dishel, does backing vocals for the opener, the single “Bleeding Heart,” but he registers as faintly as he did in his appearance on the previous record.  “Bleeding Heart” is one of the more winning tracks, convincingly expressing the pain and awkwardness of adolescence and the urge to hide one’s imperfections away from the world at that age.  For reasons I do not understand, Spektor switches the refrain to stridency mode just before the slower-tempo coda.  A handful of other songs command attention.  “Small Bill$” is lively, if histrionic, relating a story about easy money and the reckoning that follows—and is one of the few tracks in which the rock instrumentation actually matters.  “The Trapper and the Furrier” clanks a bit in lamenting inequality and the injustice of fate, as the same two piano chords galumph insistently through the verse sections.  But a poignant melody spices the refrain’s biblical-prophet wonderment, “What a strange, strange world we live in/Where the good are damned and the wicked forgiven.”  She then pushes it even further with a breathless cry of “More, more, more, more!”  Among the pure ballads, “The Light” is the most appealing.  Not particularly daring, it is nonetheless a sensitive, Kate Bush–esque portrayal of the elusiveness of dreams and the frustration of seeing them recede further in the attempt to draw them back.  It used to be that I could count on the bonus tracks on a Spektor disc to supply more intriguing fare than what ends up on the main track list.  Of the three that are offered here, only the first, “New Year,” merits mention.  In fact, it is the best piece on the album, even if not all that memorable from a compositional standpoint, as the singer softly inhabits the persona of an older woman by herself on New Year’s Eve, thinking about all that has happened and all that the renewed lease on life promises.  For me, this little window into a landmark moment in the life of one anonymous soul really does recapture some of the magic that made Spektor’s early work so great.  The conceit of “Grand Hotel” is that below the hotel is an entrance to hell; it is not as provocative as it might sound, although the line about hotel guests “hiding sharp horns under fedoras” is striking.  The other songs on the album are generally not bad but stir little excitement.  “Black and White” and “The Visit” are an unfortunate waste of aluminum (or vinyl, depending on your delivery mode).  I still preserve some hope that Spektor can rip up the nonworking blueprint, perhaps by working with others who are not her husband or L.A. session musicians.    B+/B

Sample song  “Bleeding Heart”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb9J8zkY9O4

TACOCAT, Lost Time (Hardly Art/Sub Pop)—Seattle loves its homegrown Tacocat, judging by the airplay and attention the postpunk band gets on KEXP, and the feeling is mutual, as the third track on Lost Time is actually called “I Love Seattle,” a chalky-sugary little valentine heart that one could readily envision the city tourism bureau adopting.  To me, the cleverest thing about Tacocat is the band name, which, its members will readily point out, is palindromic.  As a mostly female outfit, its lyrics sometimes touch on feminist themes, notably here on “Men Explain Things to Me.”  The social commentary does hit the mark at times, for example, in “The Internet,” where lead singer Emily Nokes refers to comments board/social media trolls as “human mosquito.”  But two things dull the edge of the band’s satirical knife:  one is the group’s general sweetness, conflicting with the more aggressive attitudes it wants to convey; the other is that Nokes, though competent as a singer, lacks the charisma and verve one looks for in a frontwoman.  Her relatively soft-spoken delivery leads to lyrics being lost in the sonic wash.  As West Coast “girl groups” (or “grrrl groups”) go (keeping in mind that Tacocat’s lead guitarist is named Eric Randall), it is both better and worse than the short-lived Wild Flag (see the 2011 music survey), Carrie Brownstein and Mary Timony’s “supergroup,” far less grating but also less punchy.  Melodic sequences and chord changes are fairly obvious and derivative; it would seem that more thought goes into lyrical than compositional development.  The bland singsong quality vitiates a would-be anthem such as “I Hate the Weekend,” a cry of pain voiced in the name of restaurant/bar/store workers looking at the white-collar privileged types who patronize their establishments.  Incidentally, there is a song toward the end of the album called “Night Swimming.”  It is not a cover of the far superior R.E.M. song “Nightswimming” (1993).  Lost Time is a slight record, not even thirty minutes long, if you discount the long silence at the end of the final track, “Leisure Bees,” and, since bees have now been mentioned, the “pop punk” that Tacocat purveys has too much of the honey and too little of the sting.    B

Sample song  “The Internet”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXlBI5di66I