music survey 2018

                              MUSIC 2018:  A DECIDEDLY SELECTIVE SURVEY
                                                            Steven Greenfield

                                                            December 31, 2019
   
    Once more, I cut it close to the wire just to remain one year behind schedule—I let things go too long and then realized I had a ton to do in the final few days of the calendar year.  For the third year running, however, I did manage to review all the pop/rock records I had accumulated.  Once more, I regret having to forgo the jazz, the classical, and anything that did not fall conveniently into any genre.

    My thanks as always go to Steve Holtje and to Luis Rueda for their suggestions about what was worth paying attention to in 2018, and to my partner, Melissa, for her boundless patience and support.  Thanks as well to my brother, Douglas, for supplying several of the entries that appear below.

    The list of the best of 2018 is winnowed what seems an ever smaller pool of potential qualifiers, which says something very sad about the state of popular music today.  Despite that, about the same number of albums appeared in the survey in 2018 as in 2017.  Metric won the big prize with Art of Doubt, demonstrating that the Canadian band still has the rock cojones, even as its members move through their mid-forties.

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

1.    Metric, Art of Doubt
2.    Gang Gang Dance, Kazuashita
3.    Gwenno, Le Kov
4.    Low, Double Negative
5.    The Limiñanas, Shadow People
6.    Chancha via Circuito, Bienaventuranza
7.    Khruangbin, Con Todo el Mundo
8.    Oneohtrix Point Never, Age of
9.    Spirit of the Beehive, Hypnic Jerks
10.  Thom Yorke, Suspiria: Music for the Luca Guadagnino Film



    ROCK/POP ALBUM OF THE YEAR

METRIC, Art of Doubt (Metric Music International/ BMG)—Each time I go through a year’s output and lament the state of popular music, something arrives to restore my faith in rock.  For 2018, Metric’s Art of Doubt was the record that did it for me.  The first album for the Canadian band (though based in Toronto, not a single member was born in Canada) since Pagans in Vegas, which I did not review, three years earlier, it demonstrates that neither the creeping approach of middle age nor fairly widespread popularity has dulled its edge.  Its title notwithstanding, Art of Doubt rocks loudly and with the easy confidence of a band that has been together with the same lineup for almost two decades, even as the lyrics themselves often probe difficult questions about, well, love and fame and identity and belief and spiritual integrity.  This is a lengthy album, twelve tracks spanning nearly an hour in total.  It gets a little quieter and more introspective toward the close.  But it starts off strong with a straight-ahead rocker, “Dark Saturday,” the guitars of James Shaw (lead) and Joshua Winstead (bass) driving the action.  “Love You Back,” a more moderate tempo piece but still with some drilling guitar accompaniment, puts lead singer Emily Haines in the spotlight, showcasing what is still one of the sexiest female voices in the business.  “Now or Never Now” has a bouncy keyboard theme grounded in basic intervals that puts one in mind of Sound of Silver era (see the 2007 music survey) LCD Soundsystem, minus the disco trappings.  The title track has Haines letting loose with yelps, as a smooth verse section is violently thrust into a churningly fraught, double-layered chorus.  As grand statements on glamour and facades that hide an uglier reality go, “Dressed to Suppress” overreaches, but even if Haines is trying a bit too hard, the spectacle is still entertaining.  The album’s furious pace eases at the two-thirds point, as “Seven Rules” is gently reflective, a dreamy respite.  “Holding On” begins as a light stroll, with some stretchy rhythmic alteration, but the chorus amps up the volume via chiming guitars.  “Anticipate,” another softer composition, is also rhythmically shifty and is the only one on the record led by the synthesizers (played by Haines), with the guitars muted.  The album ends with a suitably soothing piece, “No Light on the Horizon,” moving through stages of self-recrimination to expressing gratitude toward the kindness shown by another.  I have always been a fan of Metric’s work, and it is heartwarming to see the band still at the top of its game.    A

Sample song  “Now or Never Now”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC8MfulGMXE

               And the rest . . .

 BEACH HOUSE, 7 (Sub Pop Records)—Is it wrong to claim that I miss the Beach House of three years ago, the era of Depression Cherry (see the 2015 music survey)?  That record was hardly phenomenal, but it was better than 7, which is, as logic would have it, the seventh full-length recording from the Baltimore duo of Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand.  The group decided not to engage a producer in the conventional sense, although it did work with Peter Kember (“Sonic Boom”) on tracks.  This might have been a mistake; to me, the sound is muddier than it needed to be.  But that is clearly just one issue.  According to the press release the band wrote for the Sub Pop label, the record is about “the beauty that arises in dealing with darkness,” a concept that has decidedly political overtones in the current climate.  In that same release, Beach House mentioned women’s roles in society and the pressures on them as inspiration.  It is hard to divine any of this from the impressionistic, fragmented lyrics, however, particularly since Legrand’s voice does not always prevail over the electronics.  Dream pop is by its nature blurry and fuzzy around the edges, not to mention surreal and frequently not easy to parse.  But a number of songs are in the mode of late-stage Arcade Fire, too lacking in the spark of vitality needed to ignite the hearth of deep feeling, too obscure for resonance.  The album’s best sequence comes with “Lemon Glow,” one of the singles issued, followed by “L’Inconnue” (The Unknown Girl).  The former has some pep in its step, and its candy-colored imagery does not distract from the spiritual discomfort the singer expresses, building in intensity toward the close.  The latter begins with Legrand making a small choir from the multitracking of her own voice.  With its verse partly in French, it takes on the air of a Gallic nursery rhyme, yet, in the spirit of the best nursery rhymes, things are never as innocent as they seem on the surface.  Although the concluding verse about “Little girl/You could be loved” is about as deflatingly passive voiced as certain Hallmark greeting cards, otherwise, the spooky aura is maintained throughout.  “Dive” begins slowly, almost rhythmless, but acquires a drilling bass and percussion midway through, shocking a limp body to resuscitation.  The ruminative “Black Car” is the best of the slower numbers, elegant in the simplicity of its arrangements.  I also enjoy the melancholy piano theme that opens “Last Ride,” the final song, and continues as an undercurrent through most of it.  “Girl of the Year” is meant to be a grand statement about the ugly side of glamour, dressed up in chiming synthesizer chords.  It is far too spare, though, to be affecting as such, and the same can be said for the “Last Ride” verses.  There are some salvageable parts of this hulk of a recording, though they are not always sustained, but getting at them requires wading through puddles of glop.        B+/B

Sample song  “L’Inconnue [The Unknown Girl]”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMn6lsiVXes

LES BIG BYRD, Iran Iraq Ikea (PNKSLM Recordings)—Coming at you like a European version of the Flaming Lips, with nods to certain other familiar bands as well, Iran Iraq Ikea (a memorable title but less cleverly named than the debut, They Worshipped Cats) sits toward the pop end of the psychedelic rock spectrum.  The second full-length disc from this Stockholm foursome wins out because it does not try to do too much.  The longer tracks, lasting six or seven minutes each, overstay a bit, as they are fairly unvarying, but in this context, that is not a serious drawback.  Notwithstanding titles such as “A Little More Numb,” “I Fucked Up I Was a Child,” and “I’ve X-ed Myself from Your World,” the record is far too radiant to bother much with alienation or remorse.  The tone is set right from the outset with “Geräusche” (German for “noises”), a soaring tune with a warm, simple melody.  The lyrics to “A Little More Numb” might be somewhat sobering—experience can be a cruel teacher, particularly where heartbreak is concerned—but all those singingly bright major chords pouring out at the listener take the sting out of regret.  “I Tried So Hard” is mostly instrumental, clattering guitars worthy of Gang of Four on endless repeat, yet, again, any frustration evinced in the sketchy sung theme (there is no real chorus) is blown away by sheer energy output.  The ungrammatical “I Fucked Up I Was a Child” starts off slower but cannot resist kicking it up a gear once past the intro, and one more time the chords are exclusively major mode.  One might reasonably ask what makes this record psychedelia with such a simplified tonal palette.  Well, there are a few songs that mix it up a bit.  The two-minute, quasi-instrumental acoustic guitar and synths rumination “I’ve X-ed Myself from Your World” is akin to one of the slower numbers on Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979), say, “Hey You.”  The gently acerbic and mystical acoustic guitar and percussion track “Pink Freud” (a meme that has been around on T-shirts, for example, for years) could just about serve as an outtake from the Crosby, Stills & Nash classic “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” (1969).  Meanwhile, the expressive piano figurations and heart-on-sleeve vocal delivery of “Mannen Utanför” (Man Outside), the only selection actually sung in Swedish, bear an uncanny resemblance to Arcade Fire, if Win Butler were fluent in Scandinavian tongues.  The weakest offering on the album is “Eon,” simply too bland a tune to hold up well.  Despite lyrics that one reviewer characterized as “subversive,” Iran Iraq Ikea is hardly profound, yet, like a wall painted as a sunburst of yellows and oranges, it serves as a good pick-me-up.    A-/B+

Sample song  “A Little More Numb”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DuRsMCpkoo

BLACK MOTH SUPER RAINBOW, Panic Blooms (Rad Cult Records)—Did the world need another Black Moth Super Rainbow record?  Probably not.  Did it get one?  Of course.  So, six years after the release of Cobra Juicy (see the 2018 music survey), here comes Panic Blooms.  The title notwithstanding, this is no nail-biting, sweat-soaked excursion into anxiety’s kingdom, although, with lines like “Feels even better than depression,” it may well be the most nihilistic record the Pittsburgh band has ever issued.  Rather, as with all of Black Moth Super Rainbow’s output, it is logy, an excursion into the land of the lotus eaters.  Flower children born a generation or two too late, Tobacco, the Seven Fields of Aphelion, Iffernaut, and the rest, like many of us, might have experienced a dimming of their worldview with Trump occupying the White House, which would explain the general negative vibe of this record, even though there is nothing overtly political on it.  Instead, there is “good sh*t,” “bad sh*t,” and “evil sh*t,” and there are “Bad Fuckin Times” (the song from which the line above about depression comes).  As Tobacco intones morosely at one point, “The aerosol, it’s ruining my weather.”  There are synthesizers and more synthesizers (the CD jacket has no real credits, but apparently there is a second keyboards player, Pony Diver, apart from the Seven Fields of Aphelion), drumming that might as well come from a machine, and of course Tobacco’s fuzzy, vocoder-distorted singing.  If you feel that you have heard some of these chord progressions before, you are doubtless correct, and yet, the psychedelia that BMSR traffics in allows for nearly infinite variations on swoony or warped tones (listen to the opening of “New Breeze” for a typical example) and decaying phrases.  Besides, recycling is environmentally sound!  A couple of tracks make use of the sort of blurry, mournful sonorities favored by Boards of Canada in years gone by, including the title track, which opens the playlist, “Bad Fuckin Times,” “Permanent Hole,” and the brief instrumental “One More Ear.”  The longest songs are presented near the beginning and toward the end of the disc, with some of the tracks in between little more than vignettes, with scanty wording or no words at all.  The most leisurely paced of all is the loopy “Backwash,” whose video (see the link below) is bizarre but has little to do with the actual song lyrics, as is often the case these days.  Perhaps oddest of all, the final song, “Mr No One,” appears to gesture toward conventional pop melody.  There is menacing sun/black sun imagery that would suffice to fill a Soundgarden arena and enough decaying or proliferating vegetation that Robyn Hitchcock would be proud.  Incidentally, Black Moth Super Rainbow issued a remix of this record, with a couple of additional tracks, titled Panic Fades, in 2019.  There is nothing on Panic Blooms quite as engaging as, say, “Born on a Day the Sun Didn’t Rise” (from Eating Us; see the 2009 music survey), but I still get a kick out of Black Moth Super Rainbow.    A-/B+

Sample song  “Backwash”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sM49BfJnYI

BLOOD ORANGE, Negro Swan (Domino Recording Co.)—Another Devonté Hynes release; same old complaints (see the 2016 music survey for the review of his previous release, Freetown Sound) about how, as Blood Orange, he is adulterating his considerable natural talents for songwriting by incorporating a lot of extraneous or alien material into the music’s weave.  The album, according to the artist himself in a press release, is about depression among blacks, confusion about sexual identity (which, for many, is of course a completely separate issue), and finding ways to emerge through self-knowledge and self-acceptance.  The problem is that Hynes is not willing to let the songs speak for themselves; rather, they are freighted with pretension, primarily in the form of repeated spoken interventions from the transgender activist Janet Mock.  Mock’s Oprah-esque little homilies, intrusive, navel-gazing, and self-satisfied, ruin everything they touch—including the video clip below, although her speech at the beginning is not actually part of the song cited; it was incorporated from the previous track (“Family”) into the official video—and they touch five of the sixteen tracks in all.  While Mock’s pop psychology is like fingernails scraping a chalkboard, it is not all that is hard to take on Negro Swan.  The two songs that feature high-profile figures from the hip-hop world, “Chewing Gum” and “Hope,” are bad and embarrassingly bad, respectively.  The latter is both blessed and cursed; the breathy, sexy sung vocal from Tei Shi (Valerie Teicher), who wrote her own part, is fantastic; Mikey Freedom Hart’s piano ruminations (also written by himself) are also engaging.  By themselves, vocal and piano would make for an affecting piece.  Unfortunately, we are also subjected to the listless rapping and puerile confessions of one Mr. Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs, which are an indelible inkblot.  “Chewing Gum” is spoiled by a dopey rap from A$AP Rocky (Rakim Mayers) and Project Pat (Patrick Houston), not that there was all that much to mar in the first place; this is one song where Hynes’s vocals come across as more mewling than plaintive.  The most amusing bits of the track are the dialogue snippets at the outset and the brief section at the end, which is chopped and screwed, Houston-style (Houston, Texas, not Patrick Houston).  Hynes’s own rapping fares little better:  “Jewelry” begins with Mock attempting to embody fabulousness over a louche groove, but the artist’s dreamy/soulful refrains eventually yield to a section in which, in a sort of odd dialogue with an unknown basso voice that could be just his own, digitally altered, he repeatedly blurts out the line, “Niggah, I’m feelin’ myself,” hardly a moment of artistic sublimity.  Leaning more in the direction of gospel, “Holy Will” is hard to sit through for a different reason:  the grating falsetto spiritual of Ian Isiah, which overwhelms the presence of two more appealing female backing vocalists, Caroline Polachek (formerly of Chairlift) and Eva Tolkin.  So, with all these unappetizing selections, why do I keep coming back to Blood Orange?  The answer can be found in “Charcoal Baby.”  This tune is what unfolds when Hynes leaves his songs alone to breathe freely, and here, he is genuinely stretching the bounds of today’s rhythm and blues, with a slow number that is poignant and harmonically daring.  Shades of this genius for song composition and arrangement pop up as well for “Dagenham Dream” (though this song never develops past its sole expository phrase) and the pensive “Runnin’,” both of which unfortunately end with Mock pontificating.  Other songs (“Saint,” “Nappy Wonder,” “Minetta Creek”) are awash in 1970s R&B nostalgia, which, in the skilled hands of Hynes, is not a bad thing.  “Orlando,” the opener, with its electric keyboards redolent of seventies R&B, is another ambling, amiable throwback, at least until the sampled cry of “Shoot, baby, shoot!” sends it in a different direction.  “Out of Your League,” toward the end of the disc, is a tight little vocal duo between Hynes and Steve Lacy, a producer, singer/songwriter, and instrumentalist from the R&B band The Internet.  The closing song, “Smoke,” is an ineffectual ninety seconds of intro, followed by a touchingly serene and uplifting coda, with Hynes joining chorus with another couple of appealing female vocalists, punctuated by rhythmically precise guitar picking.  Dev Hynes has what it takes to make a truly great record if he trusts in himself and goes easy on the bells and whistles; alas, Negro Swan is far from that.    B/B-

Sample song  “Charcoal Baby”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIlauccaH88

BODEGA, Endless Scroll (What’s Your Rupture?)—Having risen from the ashes of the similarly named Bodega Bay, this Brooklyn band made a splash at SXSW in Austin and more so with the release of its debut record, produced by Parquet Courts’ (see below) Austin Brown.  The postpunk resemblance to Parquet Courts is clear from the outset.  The sound is minimalist, electrically charged, and gritty, designed to mirror the real-life experience of dwelling in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood in 2018 as it slowly undergoes gentrification.  Bodega’s social commentary might be a little too scattershot and opaque to hit the bullseye—a few too many inside references like “pizza core,” which the band, according to an interview in the now sadly defunct Village Voice, uses to describe the sort of group that writes songs while consuming pizza and light beer, with predictable outcomes—still, the band is at its best when it IS being punchy and political.  Never more so than on the opener, “How Did This Happen?!” (or just “?!” on the CD label), which, in a sort of rock-rap, implicates the listener in indifference to protest rallies and allowing oneself to be distracted by consumerism and other mundane thoughts from what really matters.  Not as sneering or lacerating as postpunk icons like the Fall or Gang of Four but still effective enough.  “Name Escape” pokes fun at musical acts and hipster types that, by all trying to be “different” in largely the same way, end up utterly unmemorable.  “Truth Is Not Punishment” is a rollicking closer that—at least I believe—looks at the costs of striving for honesty and artistic integrity, in terms of anxiety meds, alcohol, painkillers, etc., and to what degree we voluntarily lock ourselves in cells of suffering.  “Jack in Titanic,” with its klaxon guitar overtones and action-figure imagery, is a wry number about the impossibility of living up to the masculine cinematic ideal, while “I Am Not a Cinephile” is an earnest yet playful forty-nine seconds of pretension puncturing.  The band’s target audience can readily relate to “Can’t Knock the Hustle” and “Bookmarks,” laments about how difficult it is to get by in a place as expensive as New York and how alienating life on the job can be.  These songs work because they have attitude, directness, and verve that mask their three-chord nature.  Because Bodega features both a male and a female lead, it is tempting to make a B-52’s comparison, particularly on lighter tracks like “Gyrate,” which is simply urging listeners to move their butts on the dancefloor.  Ben Hozie does not sound like Fred Schneider at all, but there is a definite Kate Pierson quality to Nikki Belfiglio’s delivery.  Endless Scroll incorporates Siri-like computer voices to say things like, “I use my computer for everything” and “I touch myself while staring at your chat text box,” even while tossing off allusions to Woody Guthrie, the Smiths, and Pink Floyd.  On songs that slow down to relate more personal experiences like moving out after a breakup (“Boxes for the Move”) or losing a friend to suicide or an accident (“Charlie”), the band fails to distinguish itself, thus succumbing to precisely that generic quality it critiques in other bands in “Name Escape.”  On these tracks, the limitations of Bodega’s songwriting abilities become all too evident:  “Charlie” is the same sequence of musical phrases over and over, with just a limp, short bridge inserted between verses; “Boxes for the Move” has a Dylanesque tuneless patter for verse and just the barest hint of melody in the “chorus.”  An exception can be made for “Williamsburg Bridge,” which describes a chance romantic encounter midway on the span linking Manhattan to North Brooklyn that leads to something more complicated.  Even though its melodic core is as simplistic as any on the disc, nonetheless this nearly four-minute song (the longest on the record) starts with a cool psychedelic bass guitar line drinking from a well of inspiration shared by groups as diverse as Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground and the Limiñanas (see below), and it ends with some guitar white noise, expanding the band’s narrow range and sonic palette.  “Warhol” is taken at a moderate tempo, but its lyrics seem strained, as if by the time the band members got around to it, they were suffering from creative exhaustion.  Endless Scroll is packaged with a live disc, Witness Scroll, which has fewer tracks but is actually slightly longer, mainly because “Truth Is Not Punishment,” the show closer, goes on for nearly ten minutes of largely pointless embellishment, delving into Chuck Berry’s classic “No Particular Place to Go” (1964), along for the ride.  Recorded at venues called Poetry Club and The Lexington, the live record comprises eight songs from the studio recording (seven if you count “Endlessly Scrolling” as something different, but it is just cobbled-together Siri-speak plus computer-screen blips and bleeps) plus two that do not appear on the first disc.  Of these two, “No Vanguard Revival” (or “Mo Vanguard Revival”) is little more than a placeholder, described by Hozie as a “genre exercise.”  “Stalin Glaze” is more interesting, a throbbing, yowling excursion into shoegaze fuzz guitars.  The sound on the live record is unsurprisingly even rawer than the studio version, yet there is also a little more scope for experimentation:  the long guitar intro to “Can’t Knock the Hustle,” for instance, emulates Robert Fripp’s guitar wailing from King Crimson’s second incarnation, circa 1981.  By the time we reach “Jack in Titanic,” the next-to-last song, the band is starting to sound a little tired, a danger sign for an outfit that depends on sheer energy to keep listeners riveted.  I have my doubts about the shelf life of these sketchy tunes, their ability to bear up to repeated listening, but the shot of adrenaline is at least initially exhilarating.    A-/B+

Sample song  “How Did This Happen?!”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKAzK41-YHM

CHANCHA VIA CIRCUITO, Bienaventuranza (Wonderwheel Recordings)—Following a somewhat deflating outing with Amansara (see the 2014 music survey), Pedro Canale (“Chancha via Circuito”) manages to recapture some (not all) of the magic of his outstanding (see the 2010 music survey) Río Arriba.  Once again, we are hearing both traditional and more modern Andean music filtered through the electronic production in which Chancha via Circuito specializes.  Canale brings back a couple of artists he has worked with before:  the Buenos Aires singer Miriam García and the Colombian/Canadian songstress Lido Pimienta.  Other performers are lesser known (another Buenos Aires native, Heidi Lewandowski, who goes by the moniker Kaleema; another Argentine who is both actor and singer, Gianluca Zonzini [“Gianluz”]; and the Ecuadorean Amazonian singer Mateo Kingman) or completely unknown (Manu Ranks???).  That the strongest entries on Bienaventuranza (which means “beatitude” or “blessedness”) are those written by others suggest that Canale’s strong suit is indeed his arranging and production rather than composition.  Even so, “Ilaló” and “Barú,” near the beginning of the disc, are strong, and those are his creations entirely.  The composition that opens the record, “Los Pastores” (The Shepherds), is by William Centellas, a Bolivian composer and player of the charango, an Andean string instrument featured here, who died about a decade ago.  It has a simplicity and sincerity that is its chief strength.  “La Victoria” (Victory), written by Victoria Fabrice and Lido Pimienta and showcasing the latter on vocals, backed by Manu Ranks’s Caribbean toasting, has a playful spirit and quasi-Asian pentatonics.  “Ilaló” opens with a stop-time incantation from Kingman before the electronics and beat kick in; I could live without the monotone rap in the middle of the song.  But the arrangements carry forward the rural South American mystique of Canale’s earlier productions.  “Barú” is full of jungle sounds and human cries, providing the bedding beneath a mournful flute theme.  The haunting flute lines of “Sierra” and “Indios Tilcara” (the latter co-written with Federico Estévez) will naturally conjure for American listeners Simon and Garfunkel’s famous adaptation of the Peruvian zarzuela song “El Cóndor Pasa” (1970).   García’s traditional/indigenous vocal in “Nadie Lo Riega” (No One Waters It) is paired with handclaps, big drumbeats, and a periodic swipe of bass tones.  The least convincing track is the one on which Gianluz sings, “Niño Hermoso” (Beautiful Boy).  It is not that he sings poorly; it is just a boring piece.  The tune delivered by Kaleema, “Kawa Kawa,” despite some intriguing percussion and ululations throughout, is likewise pretty limp.  In all, though, there is more than enough in the way of exotic delights and electronic wizardry that one would be well advised to keep attuned to what Chancha via Circuito puts out there.        A/A-

Sample song  “Ilaló” (featuring Mateo Kingman):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALO40b-qIdQ

NENEH CHERRY, Broken Politics (Smalltown Supersound)—Nearly thirty years have passed since Neneh Cherry broke through, winning legions of fans with her debut, Raw Like Sushi (1989).  Back then, she was fresh, sexy, and brimming with in-your-face attitude.  Now, of course, she is middle aged (as are all of us in her cohort) and striving for ways to stay relevant in a pop culture that always wants to move on to the next shiny object (Zoë Kravitz, anyone?).  In interviews, Cherry has spoken out against ageist perceptions and assumptions, and she has always been resistant to the music industry’s attempts to place her in a genre box.  That might help explain why she has yielded just five solo records in the course of three decades—that and the fact of her and her husband/creative partner Cameron McVey raising several children and involving themselves in numerous side projects over the years.  Though much of the energy in the best-known songs from her early days was generated through rapping, she regards herself as a singer first.  Her voice these days is a supple instrument with considerable power, but do not expect unadulterated beauty from it, as thickly textured and a bit plummy as it is.  Broken Politics laments the current state of the world, yet, it is not a particularly political record, the title notwithstanding—too personal and autobiographical for that.  In fact, the lyrics are all too often the album’s weakest link.  It is hard to know how much of them to attribute to Cherry and how much to McVey (or other collaborators).  But in “Deep Vein Thrombosis,” for example, the emotional distress caused by life’s hard knocks is metaphorized by the titular condition, which, medically speaking, may in fact cause no pain at all before a crisis occurs.  Aside from that, this song (and others) leans on clichés and strains to pun (“Like a female dog’s got a name/Life’s a bitch”).  The song wanders and even so strives hard to end up conveying not much that is meaningful.  Offerings like this are the Styrofoam packing peanuts of the music world, and too many of the more ruminative tunes on the disc fall victim to the same ailment, lyrically confounding, compositionally adrift.  The all-star on the Broken Politics team is the album’s producer, Kieran Hebden, alias Four Tet.  He has wrapped these songs in layers of exquisite arrangements, like the most delectable puff pastry around fillings of uneven quality, cushioning but never overwhelming them.  I wish the jacket of the CD had more information on the orchestration used in its making, but it does sound as if Hebden selected traditional African instruments like the kora and the djembe, with the former prevalent through much of the record.  Not to come down too hard on the Cherry/McVey creative partnership; a couple of the tracks are as dynamic and engaging as anything from Cherry’s wilder youth.  “Natural Skin Deep,” if one can set aside the circumlocutious lyric, which (a slight nod to racial politics aside) boils down to “love me as I am,” is a gloriously fun tune that floats on a buffer of percussion, including steel pans, throbbing synths, and space-age electronic zaps, punctuated periodically by the sour blast of an air horn.  Cherry comes off as relaxed and fully in the groove.  The bridge is a sample from Ornette Coleman’s “Growing Up” (1969), a song on which, not coincidentally, the singer’s stepfather, Don Cherry, played cornet.  Less rambunctious but no less affecting is “Kong,” whose chromatic chord shifts are as sonorous as those one might find in a Kate Bush or Brian Eno composition.  Among the more reflective tunes, the best is “Slow Release.”  Set up initially as a sober, tightly contained dialogue between flute and talking drum (djembe?), with Cherry’s restless vocal seeking tension release above them, it gains an added dimension with a reverberant keyboard line that enters three and a half minutes in—the ensemble is beautifully arranged.  “Faster than the Truth,” a subdued musing on the famous aphorism that “a lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” (commonly attributed to Mark Twain but going back at least as far as Jonathan Swift), employs a snare drumbeat that is practically a dead ringer for that in Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” (1975).  The album includes a couple of quiet, minute-long interludes.  Call me ageist, but—although I have some appreciation for what the mature Neneh Cherry is presenting—I am still fixated on “So Here I Come” from all those years ago.    B+

Sample song  “Natural Skin Deep”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBUCfn5aj4Y

BUCK CURRAN, Morning Haikus, Afternoon Ragas (ESP-Disk)—Pretty sounds abound, yet Morning Haikus, Afternoon Ragas is fundamentally hollow.  The record is composed largely of solo acoustic guitar ruminations, set at slow tempos, with similar carillon effects (that old-chime-y feeling).  The first seven tracks are all of this nature, before things start to vary more.  Though the album’s homogeneity is a drawback, even so, the offerings that abruptly depart from the norm—the one song that is actually sung (and is a cover), “Dirt Floor,” and the one song to invite a guest instrumentalist, “Bhairavi Rovelli”—seem out of place here.  “Dirt Floor,” sung by Curran’s new-ish wife, the Italian Adele Pappalardo, performing as Adele H, is a folk song written by the late blues/rocker Chris Whitley.  Pappalardo has an easy command of English, and her husky voice is a good fit for the short, earthy tune.  But the song underwhelms, and in any case I gravitate to the vocal stylings of Curran’s former wife, Shanti Deschaine, instead.  In fact, that is one reason why I prefer Curran’s previous solo release (after several albums with Deschaine as the duo Arborea), Immortal Light (see the 2016 music survey).  Deschaine’s presence on that disc helps to … I hesitate to say “humanize,” as in the case of Dani Siciliano on Matthew Herbert’s Scale (2006), but to ground the record in a suffusion of worldly emotions.  The two discs share a pair of songs, “River unto Sea” and “Sea of Polaris.”  Both are presented in a more stripped-down version on Morning Haikus, Afternoon Ragas, much more so in the case of the latter, to its detriment.  “River unto Sea” is shortened somewhat from the version that appeared on Immortal Light.  Both compositions (along with “Song for Liam”) are reprised in alternate versions; since these are qualitatively little different, I am not sure why.  It does help bulk up the album to more than an hour in length.  There is one song named for each of Curran’s children:  “Song for Liam,” the blandly innocuous “Song for Shylah,” and the brief, starker “Francesco Joaquin’s Morning Haiku” (this, the youngest child, is presumably the issue of the second marriage).  Several songs enhance the acoustic guitar with an electronic string resonating device known as the EBow.  Of these, the most affecting is the final track, “Crucible (27 July 2000).”  More than a cascading series of mellifluous chords (that serves as the intro), this tune shows real compositional genius, more driven than the others and spiced with a touch of modal harmonies for intrigue.  “The Sun Also Rises,” incorporating Italian church bells (the album was recorded in Bergamo), uses the EBow to haunting effect; without it, the composition would too much resemble those that precede it on the tracklist, while the more benign “Compane del Sabato Mattino” (as far as I can tell, there is no Italian word compane, although companático means something eaten with bread, “of a Saturday Morning”) engages its note-bending qualities to approximate the country-ish feel of the pedal steel.  The lone electric guitar tune, “Taurus,” is dark-toned and searing, leaving the listener wishing for more.  It might sit oddly with the rest of the material, but “Bhairavi Rovelli” (a bhairavi is a type of raga akin to Phyrgian mode, and Rovelli is the name of the recording studio), with Nicolò Melocchi playing the bansuri flute to Curran’s droning strings, is the record’s standout, exotic, spectral, mystical—it penetrates deep into the ear bones.  Hollow objects can be attractive and enjoyable enough; still, Curran has done better work previously.    B+ 

Sample song  “Song for Liam” (live version):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liv-T5v0RKQ

GANG GANG DANCE, Kazuashita (4AD)—For reasons beyond my ken, Gang Gang Dance records are becoming fewer and further between; it was a seven-year separation between the well-regarded Eye Contact (see the 2011 music survey) and the new one.  That just makes the new arrival more of an event, and the fact that it arrived with little media fanfare is disappointing to me, an indication that tastes are changing, or audiences continue to fragment to the point where relevance itself is irrelevant.  Or the media just prefer to chase the hot new thing or shiny object, and, let us face it, Lizzi Bougatsos and her bandmates in Gang Gang Dance are in their mid-forties now.  As a practical matter, Bougatsos is a Renaissance woman of sorts, writer, actress (she was featured in Russian Doll), visual artist, which necessarily limits her time for performing and making music.  Her chief collaborator in the band, Brian Degraw, is also a visual artist.  Kazuashita means “peace tomorrow” in Japanese, or so AllMusic says.  The album is structured as seven pieces ranging from around three minutes to eight in duration, plus three shorter interludes.  Aside from Bougatsos’s baby-doll soprano, which is definitely an acquired taste, there are snippets of what sound like interviews or testimonials from native Americans, perhaps, or migrants—it is not easy to catch all that is being said.  Moreover, Bougatsos tends to muffle her own sung lyrics, making the verses hard to distinguish.  Still, they matter less than the entrancing psychedelic collage that Gang Gang Dance has confected.  “J-Tree” wraps a beatific theme around stretchy, dotted-note-rhythm major fifths, although the interview toward the end, in which the speaker talks of armed troops and riot gear, is a reminder that life can be far from heavenly.  “Lotus” is surprisingly mellow and relaxed for Gang Gang Dance, upholstered in another lovely melody.  The title track begins quietly and dreamily, with a recitation of various shades of color, before the drums kick in and kineticism takes over.  Though “Kazuashita” is more a classic Gang Gang Dance club track, with danceable beats, big flourishes, and sonic shimmers, plus some soundtrack-ready pianism, neither it nor the following selection, “Young Boy (Marika in Amerika),” is as cunningly devised or as thematically sumptuous.  “Snake Dub” is spectral and tinkly, with a lot of clever electronic effects.  Wistfully winsome in its own way, “Too Much, Too Soon” is touchingly reflective, at least in terms of its tonal palette, not so much its lyric, which is as usual hard to decipher and not really worth the effort trying.  Following a recitation of a snippet of protest poetry by Jack Walls, an artist and former partner of Robert Mapplethorpe, in the final interlude, “Salve on the Sorrow” is (appropriately enough) soothingly benedictory, complete with harp arpeggios, Bougatsos’s characteristic kewpie vocals, and lots of tonic-dominant resolution going on.  Kazuashita might not be the best record that Gang Gang Dance has ever conceived, but neither it is not far off the pace.        A/A-

Sample song  “J-Tree”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZXS8Jpkiac

GOAT GIRL, Goat Girl (Rough Trade Records)—The music store Rough Trade lured me into buying one of its allied label’s acts, the all-female foursome Goat Girl.  In hindsight, I ought to have taken a pass.  The self-titled debut is simply not to my taste.  Lottie Pendlebury (a.k.a. “Clottie Cream”) is more a droner than a true singer, and although the record falls generally under the too-broad “postpunk” rubric, there is a distinct country/folk element to a number of the songs as well, odd for a band from South London (one of two in the survey; see Shame below).  There are nineteen tracks on the disc, most of them naturally fairly short, with uncomplicated structures.  A few are instrumental interludes, and these are actually more intriguing than the full-fledged songs, never a great sign, although an indication that the quartet is capable of stretching itself further creatively.  The end of “A Swamp Dogs Tale,” one of the early interludes, as well as “Dance of Dirty Leftovers” later on the disc, evokes the group Broadcast at its creative peak (see the 2009 music survey) in its furtively shifting nature.  “Burn the Stake” has a Baroque, doomy disposition, with softly wailing guitars matching Pendlebury’s cries, while the song that succeeds it, “Creep,” is strangely lacking in affect, given the repulsion voiced by the lyric toward a disturbing male spied on the train; this is the only song to have violin accompaniment (from Tina Longford, a guest performer).  “Cracker Drool” is the first country-ish number, yet it rocks along ingratiatingly—until reaching its half-time concluding measures.  “Country Sleaze” is the last of this type, slowing the tempo while becoming noisier and attenuating its relationship to tonality.  The note-bending “Slowly Reclines” is the most melodic tune and also the most freighted with tension and release.  The energy really sags after this piece and does not fully recover until “Little Liar,” near the end of the playlist.  Of the two parts of “I Don’t Care,” separated by the delicious pianistic fragment “Hanks Theme” (Rosy Jones, a.k.a. “Rosy Bones,” the keyboardist and drummer, strikes me as the most talented member), I do not much care for part 1, which is as blankly inexpressive as anything on the album; part 2, in its chord progressions, faintly echoes the figurations of the interlude that precedes it and is richer for it.  “Tomorrow,” the final song, is a slow, drunken (but firm in its resolve) waltz of sorts.  Pendlebury might sound raucously like the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser behind the microphone, but with none of the avant-garde experimentalism of that group to propel it, Goat Girl offers far less.    B+/B

Sample song  “Cracker Drool”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSpzsO1RDTM

GORILLAZ, The Now Now (Parlophone/ Warner Brothers)—Remember when Billy Idol, after all his tough-guy posturing, took everyone aback by crooning “Eyes Without a Face”?  Well, The Now Now is Gorillaz, a cartoon band full of grotesque-looking street characters, gone soft.  (Incidentally, I paid so little attention to the cartoon personas that, until I watched the “Tranz” video linked to below, I did not realize that one of them, Noodle, is supposed to be female.)  I have not reviewed a Gorillaz album in eight years, not since the underwhelming Plastic Beach (see the 2010 music survey), although the “band” did release one other in 2017, Humanz.  The new project is Gorillaz at its most muted and serene—as well as its dullest, unfortunately.  There are a handful of reasonably gratifying numbers on The Now Now, with the rest being essentially forgettable.  That there is just one track incorporating hip-hop is something for which I am thankful; predictably, that one (“Hollywood”), featuring Snoop Dogg at the mike and house producer Jamie Principle, is my least favorite of all.  Unusually for Gorillaz, there is just one other song in collaboration with another artist:  laudably, Damon Albarn, the musical creator behind Gorillaz, invited George Benson to play guitar on the opener, “Humility.”  The relative paucity of guests reflects how quickly the record was assembled.  Benson is a legend, yet his contribution to “Humility” makes little impact in what is generally an inoffensive tune.  The best of the album is the song that follows “Humility,” “Tranz,” along with the quasi-instrumental “Lake Zurich” and the closer, “Souk Eye.”  “Tranz” putters along engagingly, enveloping the listener in warm sound in a way that shows the cartoon band at its best.  “Lake Zurich” is burbling electronica, a breezy virtual helicopter tour of northern Switzerland.  Set to a sort of bossa nova beat, “Souk Eye” possesses a tantalizing plaintiveness and about the most fully realized chorus of any song on the disc, though even here Albarn could have done more with it.  “Fire Flies” is a slow piece that musters some pathos, in a very pale shade of blue, however.  On the down side of the ledger, “Kansas” is like not the progressive band of that same name but like late-career Electric Light Orchestra on tranquilizers, and “Idaho” is no better, its pensive lyric undermined by hackneyed melodic construction.  “Magic City” is lackluster, Albarn utterly out of ideas, running on autopilot.  When Gorillaz began, it was fresh and different, a break from Albarn’s previous work with Blur.  That did not last much beyond Demon Days (2005), and it may be time for something else if Albarn wants to reinvent himself yet again.        B

Sample song  “Tranz”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2Q52cVx7Bo

GWENNO, Le Kov (Heavenly Recordings)—The second solo outing from the Welsh/Cornish light soprano Gwenno (Saunders) is every bit as delectable as her first, Y Dydd Olaf (see the 2015 music survey).  In contrast to her debut, which had one song in Cornish and the remainder sung in Welsh, the language of her mother, on Le Kov she sings entirely in Cornish, the language of her father.  Also, the label has seen fit to provide English translations of the lyrics, unlike on the previous record, which is a mixed blessing.  For the lyrics, at least as expressed in English, are pretty vapid.  There is a certain Björk-ish tendency, minus the outlandishness of the Icelandic singer, to strive for artistic profundity but only to reach as far as silliness.  Then again, how seriously could one ever take a record with a song titled “Is There Cheese?”  The answer, in fact, is quite seriously because, words aside, Gwenno and her musical collaborator/producer and husband Rhys Edwards have a keen pop sensibility in multiple idioms, a knowledge of their way around chords, phrasings, shadings, and arrangements worthy of Todd Rundgren.  Among European performers, the pop-friendly Swedish rock group Dungen (again, see the 2015 music survey) is an apt point of reference.  Particularly Rundgren-esque is the bittersweet piano opening to “Hi a Skoellyas Liv a Dhagrow” (She Shed a Flood of Tears), over which the singer breathily voices the verses while humming the harmonic phrases.  “Tir ha Mor” (Land and Sea) is dreamy and breezy but also taut in its construction.  “Daromres y’n Howl” (Traffic in the Sun) triumphs over its nonsensical lyric with swingy and sinuous syncopations evocative of Stereolab from that band’s 1990s peak, and features backing vocals from Gruff Rhys of Wales’s Super Furry Animals.  Even the cheese song glistens ripe within its pop-confection rind.  (Sorry, could not help myself there.)  “Jynn-Amontya” (Computer) asks the provocative question of the machine, “Where do I end?  Where do you begin?” (ah, the Singularity!)  Yet it, as well as “Aremorika,” with its zither filigree, and “Hunros” (A Dream), demonstrates that Saunders/Edwards can compose more pensive tunes to moderate tempos as skillfully as they can the faster ones.  If there is any song that seems a bit lost, as if searching for a reason to be appended to the tracklist, it is the finale, “Koweth Ker” (Dearest Friend).  Its long instrumental coda wind-down cannot rescue a desultory theme from a perceptible dip in inspiration.  A minor blemish in a lovely record that deserved more attention than an English-language-focused pop world was ever likely to provide.    A/A-

Sample song  “Tir ha Mor” (Land and Sea):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rCeygWexyA

HEATERS, Suspended Youth (Beyond Beyond Is Beyond Records)—Proof that creativity can thrive even in a city as conservative as Grand Rapids (home, approximately, to Amway and to a fair number of Christian publishers, as well as being the locus of Betsy DeVos’s college education), Heaters is reaching for the astral plane with Suspended Youth.  This is the band’s fourth full-length album, an impressive spate of productivity for a group that formed only in 2013.  But Heaters underwent a reinvention of sorts in 2017, after frontman Andrew Tamlyn left to pursue another project.  The lead singer is now Nolan Krebs, who also plays bass guitar; he is backed by newcomer and guitarist Ben Taber.  Suspended Youth is streamlined, well-conceived psychedelic rock, though it might have been better served were it a little rougher around the edges.  As smoothly as the sound courses around your speakers, it lacks some of the vital energy that animated the band’s earlier singles, like “Mean Green” or “Levitate Thigh,” from when the original lineup was more oriented to garage/surf rock.  This owes considerably to Krebs’s lack of magnetism as a vocalist.  One might make the case that his spectral singing is a match for the thematic material, but I am unconvinced.  While his dour harmonizing with Taber will not dispel anyone’s nostalgia for Crosby, Stills & Nash, a more apt comparison from that same era (for the band as a whole, not just its singers) would be the Byrds—jangly guitar lines are threaded through song after song but with more exploration of modal harmonics to keep things interesting.  “Highwind” is a delightful exemplar.  In contrast, the pealing guitars that, following a minute’s worth of drone, introduce “Ad Astra,” the leadoff song, are more in the mode of U2, but the band spends little time mining that vein; the tempo is too brisk and the overall tone too restrained to be anthemic.  Heaters is more interested in sinuous guitar harmonies, which are precisely what make the album (and “Ad Astra”) worth listening to.  “Venus” is likewise taken at a rapid clip, buoyed by a puckering bass guitar, yet comes off as more glib.  The impressionistic lyrics do not add much meaning.  The coolest portion of the song is its recovery from the slow section at its center, with the guitarists probing well-conceived byways en route to a recapitulation of the main theme.  Both “Nova Prime” and “Lunar Creep,” at the record’s closing, suffer somewhat from having wan, underdeveloped sung melodies that fail to measure up to their splendiferous orchestrations.  There are no bad songs on Suspended Youth, but the album is frequently too breezy to be fully engaging, coasting on autopilot, and affectless vocals and half-formed refrains do not help the cause.    B+

Sample song  “Venus”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj88VdEPBis

TIM HECKER, Konoyo (Kranky)—Like Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction, a lot of these compositions just refuse to die (away), surging for another go after you have convinced yourself they have finished.  Tim Hecker’s latest twist is that he is “turning Japanese,” for this record, anyway.  Having made a number of visits to the Land of the Rising Sun, some of his long-form electronic compositions here engage a gagaku chamber group, Tokyo Gakuso, consisting of several ceremonial reed instruments plus percussion, recording in a temple outside the capital city.  Kara-Lis Coverdale, a fellow Montreal resident who played keyboards on each of Hecker’s previous two records, Love Streams (see the 2016 music survey) and Virgins (see the 2013 music survey), is back, and the modernist/experimentalist cellist Mariel Roberts performs as well, at least on the final track, “Across to Anoyo.”  Despite the gagaku musicians, the record does not appear overtly Japanese in its sonic explorations because of its extreme distortion of the sounds the traditional instruments make; to the extent that there is such a thing as “typical” when it comes to Tim Hecker, Konoyo, which is Japanese for “the world over here,” or the world of the living, fills the bill:  long-form, abstract, purely instrumental (largely electronic) pieces.  Not as forbiddingly abstract as the artist once was; still, the sprawling nature of these works makes it hard to draw back for a 360° view.  There is considerable electronic manipulation of the Japanese reeds into what sounds like endless wailing (and at times like the song of the humpback whale), particularly on the first (“This Life”) and last tracks.  For listeners not endowed with endless patience, this can be grating.  Particularly on “Across to Anoyo” (anoyo is the world of the deceased), which balloons out to fifteen and a half minutes, it is exasperatingly tedious that all the composition seems to want to say happens by the seventh or eighth minute, and the rest is a perpetual dying away.  “This Life” is more dynamic:  following a hundred seconds or so of wailing, it takes on a spectral melody that lasts several minutes before a regression to long tones, searing and growling.  “In Death Valley” uses extensive noise gating in its opening minutes before settling back into sputtering guitars, more sustained synth tones, and percussion effects that sound like bottles being knocked over.  “A Sodium Codec Haze” presents a bleak landscape, with eerie whistling sounds and a drum that periodically booms like a taiko; the screeching overtones eventually yield way via more distended cries to rippling keyboards.  Scraping metallic sounds and wood block characterize the early passages of “Keyed Out”; those shrill, splintery attacks recur throughout until giving up the ghost a couple of minutes before the end, yielding to the synthesizers.  Like “This Life,” “In Mother Earth Phase” concludes its more kinetic episodes early before subsiding into placid resignation; like “Across to Anoyo,” it takes its good old time ending—as the volume lowers, we hear tonal resolution in all its implied finality happen again and again, as if Hecker were teasing the listener.  Perhaps the protracted coda-fication of these sound collages is a metaphor for the fluidity of the bounds of the realms of the quick and the dead.  In his attempts to commune with the supernatural world beyond, Hecker has presented us with music that is both sublime and hard to take, admirable in ambition and also stultifying, even maddening, in its glacial pacing, its obsessiveness, ultimately its stasis.  A companion album, Anoyo, is due to be released in 2019.    B+

Sample song  “This Life”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90unmGG4eKI

JULIA HOLTER, Aviary (Domino Recording Co.)—When I was a teenager, my father would drag me along to the golf course sometimes.  I never became proficient enough to enjoy the game; once, I swung from the tee and the ball wandered off about 75 yards to the right, an ugly slice.  One of my dad’s playing partners said, “That’s all right; everyone gets a mulligan,” indicating that I should throw out the result and try again.  Aviary could be considered Julia Holter’s mulligan, if one were inclined to be charitable.  Problem is, I did not warm to her previous record, Have You in My Wilderness (see the 2015 music survey), either, suggesting a troubling trend.  All the more disturbing since I thought highly of her second and third studio releases, Ekstasis (see the 2012 music survey) and Loud City Song (see the 2013 music survey).  Holter has always had her arty pretensions, but they were more or less held in check until this time out.  Aviary, a double record, is shudderingly dreadful (if not universally so).  It is also self-indulgent and twee, making her the Miranda July of singer/songwriters.  The album’s conceit, according to an interview Holter did with the U.K. music magazine DIY, concerns how memories influence thought, and the title is taken from Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan, “I found myself in an aviary full of shrieking birds,” the birds standing in for memories in Holter’s mind.  There are times, such as in the prolonged instrumental intro to “Chaitius” (chaitiu is old Occitan for a wretched, miserable person) and the echoey voiceover that follows, when she seems to be trying to replicate the spectral dream pop of English outfits like Broadcast and the Focus Group (see the 2010 music survey and, once more, the 2013 music survey), but North Americans do not generally do well by magic realism.  Moreover, since Holter did not grow up in Europe, fully absorbing its ancient musical traditions into her own musical consciousness, her attempts to introduce troubadour song lyrics and other pseudo-medieval accouterments into her work come across as clumsy shoehorning.  A calculated cacophony, generated by trumpet, harmonium, and bagpipes, takes over certain passages on the record (viz., the opening to “Every Day Is an Emergency”).  Notwithstanding fellow Angeleno composer Tashi Wada’s musical skills, there are times when I want to report Holter’s engagement of his services to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Bagpipes.  You know immediately that this is a different kind of Julia Holter record:  the first song, “Turn the Light On,” is as blaring and demonstrative as her previous work was understated, as she chants loudly in meterless time over a tempestuous churn of strings and rumble of percussion, a kind of vocal/instrumental cadenza right off the bat.  The performance tests her serviceable voice to the limit and finds it wanting in this context, husky and less than full-bodied.  There are passages on the album that are remarkably tuneless—atonal not in a sense that suggests any devising but more random, yet this is hardly aleatoric music; listen to “Underneath the Moon,” the opener of the second disc, to get a sense of what I mean.  When it finally eases into a groove, toward the end, that groove mimics the Jacksons’ “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)” (1979).  Holter intones so matter-of-factly the cutesy phrase “I feel so joy” in “Chaitius” that it approaches self-parody; the song itself is an aimless mishmash of elements lasting a good eight minutes.  In a similar vein, it is hard to see what the two sections of “Every Day Is an Emergency”—the hooty, four-minute instrumental intro and the soft, dreamy voice and piano musings that follow—have to do with each other, except that each aspires to gravitas through its ersatz medievalism/mysticism.  As she has done previously, Holter perversely organized a two-part song on the tracklist so that Part II comes first.  “I Shall Love 2” again reaches toward mockery as the singer breathily announces, in a sort faux-Mediterranean accent (paging Anna Magnani?), “I am in love/What can I do?” borrowing from a troubadour lay, above a cherubic keyboard/vocal whooping vamp that rises almost to a squeak.  The harmonics here dimly recall John Lennon’s iconic “Imagine” (1971).  As the chorus arrives, the song morphs into a sort of 1960s girl-group melodic resolution.  For no apparent reason, a scolding couplet from Dante’s Inferno is sandwiched into the romantic pathos.  Part I has far fewer words (but more bagpipes and drums), is more anthemic in its setting of the “I shall love” theme against a countermelody, and goes down easier.  Holter’s affectations reach an apogee with “Les Jeux to You.”  Two minutes of verveless intro are followed by a jaunty middle section of about the same length that makes one’s skin crawl—think Dan Aykroyd on an old Saturday Night Live episode presenting “Bad Cabaret”—before reverting to the slower initial theme.  She gets in some clever wordplay with “I Would Rather See”:  her lyrics are derived from one of the surviving fragments of Sappho’s poetry as translated by the Canadian poet Anne Carson; reading down the page only the capitalized letters as printed yields, “If Not Winter, Anne Carson,” name-checking the title of Carson’s book about the ancient Sapphic fragments.  If only the music were as cunning; the quiet musings for voice, harmonium, and strings are atmospheric but static in nature.  “Why Sad Song,” the closing song, borrows a melody from a collaboration between guitarist Steve Tibbetts and Nepalese Buddhist nun Choying Drolma but does little with it other than arranging it for strings, keyboards, and drums and adding its own lyric.  “Voce Simul” has at least the germ of an intriguing composition, but it never advances beyond mere ostinato, bouncing fifths in the Nord synthesizer, with string flourishes for color and a bit of muted trumpet for noir mystery.  The incantations above these arrangements are tiresomely insistent, though my ears pricked up when Holter sang the phrase “in a distant mirror”—I wondered if she has read Barbara Tuchman’s magisterial history of the fourteenth century, A Distant Mirror.  There are a few brighter spots on the record, notably, “In Gardens’ Muteness.”  This song is a bit too self-consciously like Hounds of Love–era (1985) Kate Bush, but Holter could not have picked a better muse for this gently reflective, mellifluous piano and voice invention.  “Words I Heard” is also pretty and reassuringly sober, with harmonics that pierce and resonate, though I could live without lyrics like “Fish are martyrs to the kingdom war-dogs” (seriously?).  I generally do not enjoy panning a record, yet this one presents many rich targets to attack; even so, the bad taste it leaves behind has put me off my Julia Holter diet for the time being.    B-/C+

Sample song  “Words I Heard”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIk2CGUTPr0

INTERPOL, Marauder (Matador Records)—One could make a case that Interpol has not made a truly great record since Turn on the Bright Lights (2002), which Melissa and I saw the band perform live in its entirety in Forest Hills a couple of years back.  I would not actually argue that brief:  for one thing, I am not familiar enough with Antics (2004) or El Pintor (2014).  And I genuinely admired Our Love to Admire (see the 2007 music survey), if not so much the self-titled record (see the 2010 music survey).  Certainly, from a musical perspective, losing Carlos Dengler as bassist did not help matters.  Nonetheless, Marauder comes across more like a set of outtakes from a just-released record than like anything fresh.  This is not to say it is bad, simply that nothing on it really stands out.  Interpol still rocks forward, with Paul Banks’s wiry-tense voice leading the way through a thicket of politically edgy lyrics that never quite add up to a coherent societal critique.  For an outfit like Interpol, going through the motions is more entertaining than it would be for many bands, but when one listens to the singles “If You Really Love Nothing” or “The Rover,” the notion that the band is living off past glories and needs to try a new approach to win over new fans (or win back old ones) is inescapable.  The quality of the music on this disc is remarkably consistent:  while there is a handful of slightly weaker entries (“Stay in Touch,” “Surveillance,” “Party’s Over,” “It Probably Matters), the eleven songs, plus two short interludes, provide listener-friendly, rapid-fire, shoegaze-y guitar chords from Daniel Kessler and Banks and those dire-sounding vocals, over lively percussion from Sam Fogarino, plus keyboards from a couple of guest players on about half the tracks, without ever triggering a sense of emotional directness or urgency.  The interludes are both quiet, undulating drones, something of a palate-cleansing reverie every sixth track.  It is not clear why the third single from the album, the only one that comes with its own extended guitar prelude, is titled “Number 10,” other than its position in the tracklist (tenth, naturally).  It is not political in nature, so probably nothing to do with the address of the U.K. prime minister’s office in London.  The album was engineered by Dave Fridmann, best known for his work with the Flaming Lips, in his Tarbox Road Studios in western New York State, and the sound is crisp and clean.  Unfortunately, it takes more than that to make an album that audiences will want to play over and over, and then anticipate more to come.    B+

Sample song  “If You Really Love Nothing”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLk8i2zw2jU

KHRUANGBIN, Con Todo el Mundo (Night Time Stories/Dead Oceans)—“Like Santana on Quaaludes” is how I described Khruangbin to my girlfriend.  The Texas trio, who named themselves after the Thai word for “airplane,” do not easily fit any category.  Still, Con Todo el Mundo (With All the World), their second album (reimagined in 2019 in a dub version titled Hasta el Cielo), is a mellow, largely instrumental record, with Spanish-inspired guitar work (using an electric guitar, however) from lead guitarist Mark Speer, bits of Middle Eastern and Asian exoticism, particularly in “Shades of Man” (shades of the record the Heliocentrics did with Lloyd Miller, an expert on Persian music [see the 2010 music survey]), psychedelic and surf guitar elements, and more than a dash of funk.  In fact, those tracks for which funk does not enter the mix suffer as a result:  “Cómo Te Quiero” (How Much Do I Love You), “A Hymn,” and “Friday Morning” veer close to easy listening.  At the opposite end of the spectrum is the tightly coiled, bass-powered “Evan Finds the Third Room,” which ends with a voice saying “... my menu options have changed.  If you’d like to say hello, press one….”  The vocal parts, where they exist at all, are odd because they have been engineered so softly as to be barely audible (even more of a challenge when they are in Spanish, as in “Cómo Te Quiero”); sung mostly by Laura Lee, who also plays bass guitar, they become mere ornament rather than essential to appreciation of the music.  Largely hummed, they nonetheless have some sass when actual phrases are voiced.  Lee has stated that to have put the vocals front and center would have destroyed the dreamy aura the band was creating.  The hushed psychedelia of the opening track, “Cómo Me Quieres” (How Much Do You Love Me), represents Con Todo el Mundo at its unassuming best.  One might wish for more variety than the loping gait throughout the record offers, but that would also disrupt its ethos.  Too trancelike to be provocative, surprising, or viscerally thrilling, this album still works its magic subtly, to euphoric effect.    A-

Sample song  “Cómo Me Quieres”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHzIl82165g

THE LIMIÑANAS, Shadow People (Because Music)—One tried-and-true method of shaking up your musical act is to work with guest contributors.  For Lionel and Marie Limiñana, however, their formula is so wedded to who they are as recording artists that there is little departure from it, even when a whole host of outsiders comes to lend a hand.  For Shadow People, Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre co-produced and co-mastered the entire disc and played guitars and Mellotron throughout, without a perceptible difference in the sound when measured against previous efforts.  Many of the guests who participate also took part in the duo’s previous record, Malamore (see the 2016 music survey):  Laurent Sales, playing oud and bouzouki, electronic music specialist Pascal Comelade on piano and toy piano, Peter Hook of New Order on backing vocals and bass guitar, Valencia’s Iván Telefunken on lead guitar.  Guillaume Picard does not appear, for which I am thankful since I had an almost anaphylactic reaction to his singing on Malamore, but he did co-write “Pink Flamingos” with Lionel.  “Pink Flamingos” was recorded in Melbourne, Australia, with a local garage band, the Pink Tiles, and Comelade and Helmut Kool both tickled the ivories.  Picard’s brother Renaud sings on a number of tracks; unlike Guillaume’s, his voice does not stand out in a bad way.  Bertrand Belin, a Breton singer and guitarist, enunciates on “Dimanche” (Sunday) and plays synth on “Le Premier Jour” (The First Day).  Finally, Emmanuelle Seignier, Roman Polanski’s no-longer-young (but still vastly younger than he is) wife, an actress and singer in her own right, offers her vocal stylings on the title track.  I sometimes grow exasperated with the Limiñanas for being content to create a riff and then ride it ad nauseam; I do wish these motifs would undergo some genuine musical exposition.  But perhaps because of the proliferation of collaborators, that is an issue on only a few tracks on Shadow People, generally the ones for which Lionel himself, reciting in that smoky voice over the music, bears sole (or almost sole) responsibility:  the “Ouverture,” “Le Premier Jour,” and “Trois Bancs” (Three Benches), which seems to go on endlessly, a remarkable feat on an album this short in overall duration.  The other entries actually feel like genuine songs.  Newcombe’s sinister-sounding voice is familiar to anyone who knows the Brian Jonestown Massacre; he sings the rollicking buzz-drone psychedelic number “Istanbul Is Sleepy” in a near monotone, one of several English-language tunes here.  Seignier acquits herself reasonably well on the flower-power-ish “Shadow People,” dueting with Renaud Picard and backed by the Pink Tiles.  Because I am unfamiliar with Belin, I do not know how much the percussion- and synth-heavy “Dimanche” takes him out of his comfort zone, but, as is Lionel’s custom, all he does is recite the lyrics rather than singing.  “The Gift” is the weakest track, a combination of uninspiring melody (like a warmed-over version of the verse portion of U2’s “40,” from 1983) and Marie’s breathy, tenuous vocal in uncertain English, backed by Hook’s “oh-no-no-no”s.  Beyond the title song, “Pink Flamingos” is the most openly nostalgic for the era of Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape.  The Limiñanas did slightly better with Costa Blanca, which won my album of the year for 2013, but Shadow People’s neo-psychedelic fizz is a heady concoction in its own right.    A/A-

Sample song  “Shadow People” (featuring Emmanuelle Seignier):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWdeZ4l6xtI

LOW, Double Negative (Sub Pop Records)—Who knew that Duluth, Minnesota, had its own small indie music scene?  Low has been around for quite some time, since the early/mid-1990s, and released eleven earlier albums, as well as a bunch of EPs.  But Double Negative was my first exposure to the band, comprising, like the White Stripes (if in no other regard) a husband-and-wife team in which both sing and he (Alan Sparhawk) plays guitar while she (Mimi Parker) is on drums—plus a bassist, Steve Garrington.  The music is slow and low-fi, with plenty of distortion and fuzz.  Although no one has termed the band’s music dubstep, the clipped phrasing and truncations of sound (like a power switch being arbitrarily turned on and off) are spiritual kin to the dubstep of Burial (William Bevan), with the significant difference that Low uses the musicians’ actual voices, not voices filtered beyond recognition.  The heavy production effects, mastered by Bon Iver producer B J Burton, in Bon Iver’s Eau Claire studio, mask what are surprisingly accessible melodies, most insistently in “Always Trying to Work It Out.”  A tune such as this is a ray of sunshine cutting through the sludgy, ponderous anomie that forms this record’s substrate.  While much of the playlist lumbers forward at a trudging pace, the percussion is heavier and more pounding in the songs that almost bookend the album:  “Dancing and Blood” and “Rome (Always in the Dark).”  The latter is so funereal, with such booming, stately drumming, as to call forth the gods of heavy metal.  Yet that is not what the band is after, ultimately.  Rather, it is the chiaroscuro contrast between sung verse and turgid setting that makes Double Negative an impressive achievement, as in “Fly,” where Parker’s aspirational melody struggles mightily for liftoff, like a fledgling albatross, and whether it ever succeeds is a matter of interpretation.  “Tempest” is so opaque as to be a blank slate until it reaches its climaxing chorus, the only thing that lifts it above a cycle of mucky chords; it then merges seamlessly into its pendant song, “Always Up,” in which, again, Parker’s phrasing of “I believe, I believe, I believe” pierces the gloaming.  The songs on the second half of the disc are a little shorter and punchier generally, though “Dancing and Fire” is uncharacteristically languid and limpid, even as its lyric bemoans “the end of hope,” becoming tenser and more reverberant as the tune develops.  Sparhawk spits out the testy lyrics to “Poor Sucker” like a llama that has been provoked by bratty children at the zoo—another muddy piece (making repeated reference to being at the bottom of a lake) set to a chiming pulse.  “Disarray,” the final song, is the least affecting, sounding like a jingle or TV theme awkwardly matched to a strobing beat.  It breaks the spell; even so, that the spell has been cast and maintained through forty-five minutes or so of music is well worth applauding.    A/A-

Sample song  “Always Trying to Work It Out”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m31A4ZGss0

ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER, Age of (Warp Records)—Daniel Lopatin’s most listener-friendly record in, well, forever as Oneohtrix Point Never manages to pull off the neat trick of being both benign and edgy.  As in the case of his most recent solo release, the much more jarring Garden of Delete (see the 2015 music survey), there is a whole conceptual back story (concerning the idea of there being four successive ages of human societal development through history) relating to this record, but familiarizing yourself with that is not necessary to enjoyment of the music.  There are several surprisingly conventional tunes on Age of, “conventional” in the sense of having classic song structure, less so in that Lopatin sings some of them (first time he has done that) in a heavily processed, AutoTuned voice.  Other, gender-bending vocalists contribute as well.  On the weirdly pentatonic vocals of “Same,” a strident piece, Anohni (formerly Antony Hegarty of Antony and the Johnsons) takes the lead part, with a ringingly clear, masculine voice, harmonized by Prurient (Dominick Fernow) in an unnaturally boy-soprano register.  Anohni also harmonizes on the stark, nearly a cappella “Black Snow,” behind the uninflected AutoTuning of Lopatin’s voice.  Even in a gracefully melodic song such as this, Lopatin cannot resist shaking things up rather violently at the bridge.  On “Babylon,” a gently sunny tune for guitar, other strings, and shimmery electronic keyboards, Lopatin’s singing is, at least initially, more unfiltered; Prurient again supplies the backing vocals.  “The Station,” a brooding meditation originally written for Usher (he rejected it), is more claustrophobic and withdrawn but still recognizably a song, the vocal distortions notwithstanding.  Apart from “Still Stuff that Doesn’t Happen,” which to me is the most disjointed and least satisfying selection, with Anohni once more singing, the rest of the record is nearly all instrumental (that is, electronic simulation of instruments for the most part, plus electronic effects, drums, and some keyboards).  The first (title) track and the middle one, “Myriad.industries,” summon (via MIDI) harpsichord, for an effect as though a Baroque master had suddenly been introduced to a whole rack of modern electronic gear and could not resist breaking off mid-phrase to try it out.  “Age of” also incorporates what sounds like antique Japanese strings, perhaps a koto, and this is not the only composition that does; Raycats marinates in Orientalism, even as other instrumentation and vocal sampling dilute the effects.  “Toys 2,” which Lopatin conceived as a sampler of the score of the imaginary (yet inevitable) sequel to the movie Toys, is deliberately cheesy, starting off as if a kazoo group’s satire of the theme song from Titanic (1997), Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” before settling into more sedate (and duller) sustained chords.  “We’ll Take It” is the most aggressively noisy, industrial track, with lots of sounds emanating seemingly straight from an auto-body shop, but it is also the broadest swipe at materialism (the “Age of Bondage” in Lopatin’s schematic), sampling dialogue from a MadTV sketch about a manipulative evangelical car salesman.  The arrangements are suitably diabolically grim.  The closer, “Last Known Image of a Song is subtly beautiful, muffled and tremulous, with languid strings and a whirring that goes in and out of phase, like a film projector on the fritz.  The ugliest thing about Age of is the packaging Warp Records gave it, with the cover of the CD booklet showing the Four Ages of Man in garish fonts on one side and sound charts overshadowing the actual song titles on the other.  Whether or not one takes seriously the conceptual framework around this album, it is easily unyoked from the music, which is an intriguing mishmash that somehow holds its shape.  Oneohtrix Point Never’s best album in years, it demonstrates Lopatin’s desire to do something different every time he returns to the recording studio.    A-

Sample song  “Black Snow”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMQJF-7Y2h0

PARQUET COURTS, Wide Awaaaaake! (Rough Trade Records)—An album that mainly consists of sloganeering and exhortation gets tiresome quickly.  Parquet Courts’ prior records had a certain tensile strength to them, but Wide Awaaaaake! is remarkably flaccid and unmusical.  When a purported rock album seems more akin (in its didacticism, if not necessarily in terms of ideology) to a cadre exercise in reciting key principles of Xi Jinping thought, it is time to go elsewhere for gratification.  The band brought into the project Danger Mouse (Brian Burton), who has a keen pop sensibility, as producer, yet his labors are largely wasted.  Like too much modern art these days, the album spends its time hectoring its audience, far easier than the work of developing metaphor, allusions, imagery, scenarios, etc.  Ending a song (the opener, “Total Football”) with the line “Fuck Tom Brady” may be a feel-good moment for Patriots haters; it is also a non sequitur and hardly a cutting-edge critique.  On the final song, the uncharacteristically playful “Tenderness,” there is a couplet:  “The age of iron, steam and speed/Turned a stroll to a stampede.”  That is genuine poetry; I only wish there were more of that in evidence.  Andrew Savage, the frontman, in an interview with Billboard, talked about incorporating funk and hardcore into the mix; alas, there is little of the former, and the latter should amount to more than hot air.  One exception is the title track, which does add an appealing dash of funk, in the mode of LCD Soundsystem (another socially conscious band), driven by a clattering street beat.  “Violence” uses a slow bass jam worthy of the New Orleans band Galactic (see the 2012 music survey; there are touches of the Crescent City in spots throughout the record, in the setting of the title track video [see below] and in the song “Mardi Gras Beads”) in much the same manner “Residente” (René Pérez) would have (in Spanish, though) in Calle 13’s Multi Viral (see the 2014 music survey) as a platform for spouting a long-winded “stream of conscience” in full throat.  “Almost Had to Start a Fight/In and Out of Patience” is two songs wedged uncomfortably into a single track.  There is real audacity in titling a song “Freebird 2”—it is nothing like its Lynyrd Skynyrd antecedent, which admittedly has become a punch line of sorts over the years, and far less memorable.  “Back to Earth” is more songful than most here and harbors a streak of genuine, blue-ish pathos.  The aforementioned “Tenderness” has a bouncy beat and is more like a saloon singalong.  Otherwise, this album is a dry exercise in consciousness raising and as such, not likely to keep anyone wide awaaaaake.    B-

Sample song  “Wide Awake”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZXS8Jpkiac

SHAME, Songs of Praise (Dead Oceans)—One of those debuts that garnered more critical praise and audience attention than it deserved, Shame’s Songs of Praise is a postpunk record that is not lacking in energy but in verve.  As lead singer Charlie Steen notes in the midtempo “One Rizla,” on which guitars gently weep, “My voice ain’t the best you’ve heard,” which is typically no great drawback in this genre but does not help matters here.  The album has its moments of triumph but fails to sustain them.  “Gold Hole,” an ominous-sounding tune with a heavy drumbeat that is the most musically compelling on the disc, about a mistress compromising herself with a much older man for the sake of the money, hits the mark with the line “But she feels so good in Louis Vuitton.”  Beyond that, however, it has no original observations on this timeless arrangement.  “Friction,” a song about inequality, never rises above the jejune.  “The Lick” is strange—it begins with the male singer relating a trip to the gynecologist and ends, grandiosely, yearning to “bathe me in blood and call it a christening.”  In between, though, atop a relaxed, slinky bass line with a hint of intrigue that is never fulfilled, it makes some snarky remarks on trendiness and tastemaking in pop music.  “Tasteless” is inconsequential, compositionally and lyrically, ending with the “chorus” “I like you better when you’re not around”—such a bald pronouncement that I shake my head, thinking back to how much cleverer the Psychedelic Furs were, three and a half decades ago, with the line (from “Only a Game”) “and I look in your face and I see that I’m here all alone.”  The opener, “Dust on Trial,” itself an oddly titled song, is basically one riff with slight embellishments and verses alternately muttered and shouted.  “Concrete” has a nicely driving bass groove, but the gravelly overlay is far from memorable, something on which its followers could tread without giving it a second thought.  Similarly, “Lampoon” grinds its gears a lot without ever gaining traction.  The album concludes with a creepy, unfocused reminiscence, “Angie,” slower and quieter than the other selections.  What precisely happened to this ill-fated young woman whose “skirt does sing” is never explained, but there is not enough exposition within the song to make the listener care, particularly.  Among the people thanked on the CD jacket are Mica Levi and Billy Bragg; alas, if only some of their creative inspiration would rub off on this South London fivesome.    B

Sample song  “One Rizla”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Mz_K1b5rVk

SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, Hypnic Jerks (Tiny Engines)—Named after a Spanish movie from the 1970s, the Spirit of the Beehive, a Philadelphia-based band, has been around since 2014 or so, when its debut album was released.  But it flew under my radar screen until my brother sent me Hypnic Jerks, the group’s third full-length release.  Whatever the earlier records were like, the new one comes off as a fully realized project.  Spirit of the Beehive, led by Zach Schwartz and Rivka Ravede, both guitarists and singers, has positioned itself as neo-psychedelia, with a fuzzy sound quality and hints of folk and progressive rock.  The band’s harder edge comes through at times, however, a testament to origins in the postpunk movement.  There are passages on this deftly lyrical, understated recording that take inspiration from early Pink Floyd material (viz., the sun-dappled, earthy tunefulness of “Monumental Shame”); a more contemporary comparison would be Australia’s Tame Impala (see the 2012 and 2015 music surveys).  Songs are stitched together by rescued tape recordings and bits of answering machine messages made a generation ago by Ravede’s father that give the album a diaristic framework, what with all the dates that are spewed, as well as a warm, sepia-toned familial ethos.  It is a pity, given the band’s preference for sludgy production values, that the lyrics are not easy to access—they are supposedly at its Bandcamp site, but it is far from obvious how to find them there.  There is not a great deal of variation in timbre or musical style on the record; even in terms of quality of composition, this is a very even-keeled disc.  “Can I Receive the Contact?” begins with long tones like those one might hear in a 1960s cartoon in which the hero is racing to spare the Earth a nuclear apocalypse.  The verse portion is plaintive and sung raucously by Schwartz.  Following a short bridge marked by klaxons, the chorus is hoarsely shouted, as hardcore as this album ever gets.  The delicate arrangements to “Poly Swim” are gauzy and exquisitely polychromatic; if the Spirit of the Beehive has a primary weakness, it is that such delicious effects can mask a ho-hum kernel to the song.  “d.o.u.b.l.e,u.r.o.n.g.” is intriguing for its name and its introductory sequence, taken from a recording in which a grandfather recalls a visit from his three grandsons, who are so excited by their gifts that they barely have time to acknowledge the elders or even eat their food; the actual song portion is less memorable, and the same could be said of the succeeding song, “(Without You) in My Pocket.”  The title track begins with a standout burst of staccato guitar attacks, which are then sublimated into material that is stylistically consistent with the rest of the record, its repeated rhythmic/chordal outcroppings notwithstanding.  The opener, “Nail I Couldn’t Bite,” is mellow without being treacly; it also goes through numerous changes over the course of a dreamy five minutes, moving through a bridge with a few discordant improvisational chords to a sort of trio section to close out.  Similarly, the closer, “It’s Gonna Find You,” has several discrete sections spanning its nearly six minutes.  Just as the listener is wondering if the verse theme is going to undergo any real development beyond sonic distortion, in comes the chorus, midway through, rewarding the wait.  The final couple of minutes see the chords winding down, followed by one last folky dialogue sampling; an adult who has either lost his way or has thought better of wherever he was intending to go, asking a boy to take him back to wherever he came from.  Hypnic Jerks can seem slight and self-effacing (still flies under the radar) on the surface, but its tonal subtleties, its hallucinatory atmosphere, and its conceptual unity demonstrate the considerable creativity that went into its making.    A-

Sample song  “Hypnic Jerks”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ADhXCpanNg

YVES TUMOR, Safe in the Hands of Love (Warp Records)—Amid the harsh blare and sonic murk that make up a goodly portion of this critically acclaimed record, there are streaks of compositional inspiration that justify the buzz, within limits.  Yves Tumor, who is generally acknowledged to be the American Sean Lee Bowie (though he has gone by other aliases, including Rahel Ali, or Rajel Ali), has bounced around the United States and Europe and is currently based in Turin.  In general, I find his vocal qualities underwhelming—the voice is thin and lacking in character, with a certain asperity that brings to mind Marc Ribot, who would probably be the first to admit he is not much of a singer—although in the falsetto range he does manage some soulfulness.  Since he sings most of the material himself, this is a real drawback.  Of his numerous contributors to the disc, precisely none are known to me.  The CD jacket credits seem incomplete:  the third (the percussive, dancefloor-ready but otherwise undistinguished “Honesty”) and ninth (the rhythmically stretchy, somewhat subdued “All the Love We Have Now”) tracks are not (or are barely) mentioned at all, leaving one to assume, mistakenly, that Tumor pulled them off by himself, and, while “Licking an Orchid” assigns vocals to one “James K,” the female backing vocalist is uncredited.  The prime example of aforesaid compositional inspiration hits you from the very beginning of “Noid”:  the woozy, fantastical synthesizer line that acts as an intermittent ostinato is tremendous, like something out of Four Tet’s “Smile around the Face” (2005) era.  The vocals portray the paranoia indicated in the title, ending in repeated calls for 911, but in a bleating manner that is also somehow curiously devoid of feeling.  “Licking an Orchid” is more consistently good.  James K’s singing is only a slight upgrade from Tumor’s, but the ruminative, pleading slow tune captures a noir moodiness that elevates it above all else here.  The short instrumental opener, “Faith in Nothing Except in Salvation,” spiked by Will Artope’s trumpet-note portents, and the occasional elephantine flourish, is a suspenseful scene setter.  What follows it is “Economy of Freedom,” a coproduction with Croatian Amor, an alias for the Copenhagen-based Loke Rahbek.  The instrumental portion of this piece, lasting nearly the first three minutes, with its sighs and cries and electronic zaps and sudden keyboard attacks, is very much in line with what Arca has been doing (see the 2014 and 2015 music surveys), if less shrill.  When the vocals kick in, some of the mystique nurtured by the long intro is dissipated, yet this is Tumor in soul/falsetto mode, so the brooding atmosphere is maintained.  “Lifetime” works, certainly better than the similarly overwrought “Recognizing the Enemy,” because it does not tax Tumor’s limited range, allowing him to vent his agony and longings without veering too far from a single base tone, in a song driven by kinetic urgency.  The noisiest tracks on the record are hardest to take.  The unwieldy title “Hope Is Suffering (Escaping Oblivion and Overcoming Powerlessness)” delivers on its promise of excess, but it is primarily the vehement, gut-wrenching poetry of someone going by the moniker Oxhy, recited in a processed voice that assaults the ears like one of the Cybermen from Doctor Who, that offends.  The baleful industrial drone concocted by Puce Mary (Frederikke Hoffmeier, another Dane) to accompany Oxhy’s outbursts, by contrast, is grippingly effective.  “Let the Lioness in You Flow Freely,” the closer, is little other than excess: loud, hissy percussion, tuneless vocals, the same guitar riff drilled endlessly into your aural cavities.  Furthermore, the seven seconds or so of “Angelfire” by Jan Haflin, from a low-budget schlock horror film Demon Queen (1987), appended to the end of the piece seems utterly gratuitous.  Thus, in most raucous fashion, is Safe in the Hands of Love’s early promise mercilessly snuffed out.    B+/B

Sample song  “Noid”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FU65VaNeLeM

 THOM YORKE, Suspiria: Music for the Luca Guadagnino Film (XL Recordings)—The Radiohead frontman’s first stab at a full-length soundtrack, Suspiria is ambitious, appropriately (for a horror film) haunting, yet also peculiarly vacant at its core.  Thom Yorke wrote the soundtrack before the director, Luca Guadagnino, who was remaking a 1977 Italian horror movie of the same name, actually filmed; thus, Yorke was working from scene descriptions.  It is a compendium, spanning two discs, of pieces that vary widely in length and nature, whose titles must make sense to those familiar with the film but are a mystery to the rest of us.  (Being the furthest thing from a horror flick aficionado, I am unlikely ever to watch it.)  The touchstones are a small collection of songs—actual songs, which range in quality.  Then there are the purely instrumental compositions, for whose performance Yorke was aided by the forces of the London Contemporary Orchestra and Choir, and fragmentary bits and interludes.  Some of the instrumental music has the sort of silvered glissandos and tintinnabulations characteristic of the ambient music Brian Eno and Robert Fripp have collaborated on over the years.  I sometimes found myself annoyed by how often Yorke engages the device of the false ending to extend songs beyond their natural shelf life.  “Suspirium” is the most beautiful, poignant, and full-bodied melody in the set, and also the most Radiohead-like, graced by Yorke’s trademark quavery, enervated warbling of the principal theme.  Its reprise on the second disc is more richly expressive still.  The stage for “Suspirium” is set by “The Hooks,” which introduces a plinking piano pattern of eight notes that jumps an octave and at times throws in an extra note or two for intrigue’s sake.  This motif will be repeated frequently over the course of the soundtrack.  Incorporating background sounds—groans and gasps, squelching noises, opening doors, footsteps, heavy breathing—and cushioned by deep string ensemble tones, it is among the most purely cinematic of Yorke’s compositions.  Of the other genuine songs on Suspiria, the best are “Unmade,” which has a lilting rhythm that belies its somber, heart-piercing melody, and “Open Again,” replete with gentle strumming.  This song does not last long but enough time for Yorke’s voice to assume a grandmotherly tone of reassurance, a fleeting reprieve amid supernatural menace.  An attempt at ersatz medievalism is made in the instrumental chorale fragment “Klemperer Walks” and in the monkish, countertenor-heavy “Sabbath Incantation.”  “The Conjuring of Anke” is another, shorter, vaguely spooky choral flight of fantasy.  One of the most effective of the instrumental tracks is “Olga’s Destruction (Volk Tape)” on the first disc, relentlessly pressing its 5/4, or perhaps 10/8, keyboard arpeggiations and inverting them at times.  It is bookended by the Disc 2 opener, “Volk,” which uses the same synth note sequence and rhythm.  Beginning with a squeal like a braking traincar, it intensifies the mood with special effects like brassy blaring, muscular beats, and further friction-brake shrill tones.  The song that succeeds it, “The Universe Is Indifferent,” starts off more in Western than horror mode, buzzy and tremulous with twangy acoustic guitar.  Keening synths overlay the sung theme, but that theme is too tenuous and sketchy for my liking and does justice neither to its setup nor its meticulously elaborate arrangements.  (For a more fully worked melody with a similar American West sensibility, look to “A Punch-up at a Wedding” from Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief [2003].)  Likewise, “Has Ended” is surprisingly bland, the melody letting down its orchestral substrate.  The longest work on the double album by far, spanning fourteen minutes, is the instrumental “A Choir of One.”  Because it amounts to an extended cycle of sustained instrumental hums plus vocal moans and wailing that never much progresses, it is both vaporously atmospheric and boring, a major lacuna at the heart of the second disc.  Also, when the voices, Yorke’s in particular, are at their most prominent, two-thirds of the way through the piece, I cannot help but think of the “Catspaw” episode of Star Trek, at the outset of which spooky voices melodramatically warn Captain Kirk away from the planet he is visiting; I am confident this is not the effect the composer wanted to have on his listeners.  What follows “A Choir of One” to conclude the record is mostly spectral.  “Voiceless Terror” is not so terrifying—more like a humpback whale’s song filtered through synthesizers, but the climax of the brief “The Room of Compartments” is certainly unsettling, even for those not watching the spectacle of ballet students falling victim to nameless abominations on the big screen.  “The Epilogue” recapitulates the chord sequence from “Suspirium,” ending in an audio hum.  There is much to admire and enjoy on Suspiria, but the soundtrack’s shortcomings make it a less sure-footed venture than Yorke’s earlier solo work, such as The Eraser (2006).    A-/B+

Sample song  “Suspirium”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTZl9KMjbrU