Fever Ray - "Fever Ray"

Fever Ray - Dry & Dusty (Mute 2009)

Fever Ray - Fever Ray / Mute

Winter Leak Season '09 was just gearing up in late December when this record seeped through the cracks to find its way to an audience that had largely been caught sleeping. Rightfully so, too: Here was an album due in late March that shouldn't have had any fanfare for at least a month or two, yet there it was seeping slowly onto the Internet purporting to showcase the feminine side of The Knife as a solo artist. You remember Olaf and Karin Dreijer Andersson, right? The patron saints of rural forest techno following Mark Pytlik and Philip Sherburne's cooperative end-of-year anointing in '06? Silent Shout sure seems like a long time ago, though maybe not quite as long as Honey is Cool which, let's be honest, you had never heard of even after you purchased Silent Shout on a whim. Man, remember when people bought albums? Ah, the good old days of a better economy. At least I can still afford wireless.

There remains little debate that Silent Shout was a great album with great timing, pitch-shifting its way through a gap in the indie-electro space-time continuum and coyly filling the space between playfully insular techno and house (Ellen Allien & Apparat and Booka Shade's Movements that spring) and the coming nü-rave juggernaut (Justice's Waters of Nazareth EP that summer). Fever Ray is in a different position: Free of the potential paradigm-renovating gravitas that buoyed its spiritual predecessor, Karin has room to move about the forests of her own dark creation.

You can look at this album one of two ways: Either it's a really nice way to sate your appetite for another Knife album, or it's another Knife album incognito. The truth is probably somewhere in between, but its uncanny resemblance to the sonic template Silent Shout set three years ago makes one wonder what kind of contributions Olaf was making. There is a distinctly muted (no pun intended) tone to this album, to be sure: Standouts like "Dry & Dusty" or the first single, "If I Had a Heart," do not colorfully come out of the woodwork in the same way something like "We Share Our Mother's Health" does. There is less of a techno flash to these songs; rather, Fever Ray as an album trudges quietly through the snow with muffled kicks that don't strictly play to 4/4 convention.

More so than any of her other projects, Fever Ray places Karin's distinctive voice at the center of attention. Not a song goes by that you don't notice her charming pronunciations alienated by her favorite technological trick in the pitch-shifter. Even this can't disguise the natural hooks that seem to sneak out from behind the wooded pines. Everywhere one listens, there is always a memorable melody eerily working its way into your eardrums. It can't help itself. It's a Caribbean pop album ("Triangle Walks") covered by insular Scandinavian electronica.

But I'll be damned if this isn't at the sharp end of the first wave of 2009's leaks. Even though it doesn't alter the way we think about what The Knife has accomplished, and even though it says almost nothing about what Olaf is doing on his behalf for that group (Just sayin', O), it's a great listen because it's so free of attached strings. Listen on your headphones, listen in the car, listen anywhere you want: The end result is that you're still listening. It's been a month and I'm still playing it daily. I see no reason for this trend to continue unabated. Maybe I'll even buy it. That was a joke, sort of.

Dälek - "Gutter Tactics"

Dälek - Street Diction (Ipecac 2009)

Dälek - Gutter Tactics / Ipecac

Things were pretty different when we last reviewed New Jersey duo Dälek in early 2007. We were in different cities, we were under a different president, we were still open to the idea of a certain neon-imbued monstrosity that's now completely out of control (Hey there, Elektrobär). Landscapes and soundscapes alike have shifted paradigms; it's a new world out here, and it's probably for the better. Probably.

Of course, some things should stay the same. For the longest time, I thought this about MC Dälek and his trusty cohort Oktopus. Here are two guys who have spent a decade reinventing rap and subverting the typical hip-hop categorization that continues to widen the gulf between champagne poppin' megastars and truth-serum backpackers hellbent on a capital-M Message. Though they did it largely on the atonal template of forerunners such as Cannibal Ox and The Infamous (1995), their lyrical content was still the same: They spoke on a template of ambiguous fear, which was perhaps the best reflection of the political climate they had come of age to. In the era of a born-again Bush, nobody seemed scarier than a group equally nebulous in character and sinister in tone.

While Dälek was always most fascinating because he preferred to submerge his vocals rather than extract them from the mix (in the vein of the Rhymesayers and, later, the gaggle of NoW Coasters), Oktopus weaved dynamic sonic structures in and out of a distinctive triptych of albums: From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griot was demanding without being directly doomy; Absence was utter industrial hopelessness; and Abandoned Language was savvy urban grit that perhaps best encapsulated what the group had always been working on. If their last album wasn't the embodiment of a decade of output, it sounded awfully close.

Given this set-up, it would be expected of me to say that Gutter Tactics was always going to have it tough. Recorded in the waning days of the Bush administration and released the day Obama came to power, Gutter Tactics felt woefully out-of-step the moment it leaked, a relic from a passing era, unfortunately dated. I was unconvinced the moment Jeremiah Wright opened his mouth on "Blessed Are They Who Bash Your Children's Head Against a Rock." Not only is the chosen speech laughably extreme (We bombed Qaddafi's kid without "batting an eye?" I guess he doesn't remember that Qaddafi's daughter was adopted, and oh yeah, the whole Berlin discotheque bombing thing), it sets the stage for an album that feels redundant - this is, in fact, an inferior version of Abandoned Language. Oktopus has a handful of memorable songs on here (the title track of which rips off My Bloody Valentine's "Glider"), but any kind of message this time around has been suffocated by the extraordinary density of the mix. It is the most brutally unrelenting release they have yet committed to tape. In a time when a breath of fresh air is en vogue, Gutter Tactics takes aim at nothing in particular and hurls its bitterness to see what sticks. All of this is a poorer way of describing what Daniel Levin Becker has already emphasized at Dusted.

That said, it's worth noting the rebuttal (even as an afterthought). Dälek may not need to fulfill their former function - that of hip-hop's bleakly prophetic superego - but they are still necessary as a socially conscious warning sign. The issue is that they are no longer a complete group on their own; instead, they are the angry and ambiguous yin to the specific street violence of another hip-hop duo: the Clipse. Where the Thornton brothers insist upon rising above the streets through the pointed fear pervading their dope, blood, money and guns, Dälek assume the role of stormcloud to set the mood. Are they upset over the "death of hip-hop" (whatever that even means anymore)? Are they angry about corrupted youth? Are they raging to rise above it all? Do they even know? I think the answers lie in the Clipse. These two groups are speaking the same street diction in different dialects; they are angry about the same things, but one emphasizes ambiance through maximalist quagmire while the other stares out vacantly from behind minimalist desolation.

Personal, political, professional: Above all else, they are polemical. We'll have to wait a little longer and see when it comes to Till the Casket Drops, but as for Dälek losing their relevance, they still remain as elusive as ever. This album is the first time it feels like that's working against them. I don't know what the answer is when it comes to what they can do next to stay focused, to stay necessary, but the deep blues and greens of Gutter Tactics suggest that the group is cooling off one way or another. Hopefully this spells a withdrawal and reevaluation rather than a retirement.

Telefon Tel Aviv - "Immolate Yourself"

Telefon Tel Aviv - The Birds (Bpitch Control 2009)

Telefon Tel Aviv - Immolate Yourself / Bpitch Control

It's true that I had this review mentally written several days ago, that the words had already formed into complete sentences into whole paragraphs into a general linear train of thought. There was a swoon there for a minute, a genuine burst of unabashed positivity about the whole affair, the hopeful undercurrent that ran through the melodies of "Helen of Troy" or "You Are the Worst Thing in the World" and swung for the fences in grand gestures, bold strokes of synthesizer swathed across your stereo or your headphones or my headphones or whatever. New Orleans to Chicago to Berlin, nothing to Nine Inch Nails to Ellen Allien, a future full of more than support tours for Matthew Dear. They were the big hands, and this was the proof long in coming - the best album of their careers. The best of a very young year.

But that review got trashed, because it sucked. Every review of this album has sucked, I don't know if you noticed. They're all vaguely positive and say no more than, "who knows what might've been." What might have been doesn't matter after listening to "The Birds" - maybe nothing does. Did you ever get a chance to read that Todd Burns review of M83's Dead Cities, Red Seas and Lost Ghosts? This song is like that. RIP, Charlie Cooper. I'm sorry this world and the sounds you gave it weren't enough.

Animal Collective - "Merriweather Post Pavilion"

Animal Collective - Summertime Clothes (Domino 2009)

Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion / Domino

It seems both obvious and appropriate that Animal Collective's ninth album is being released on the day of Barack Obama's inauguration, especially considering the fever pitch of excitement currently surrounding both the Collective and our newly minted 44th president... But something about this release has been bothering me since I was awaken to its immense hype by both Pitchfork and The Chicago Sun-Times after a deep autumnal slumber. It was a vague resentment, an uneasy awareness that for all of the positive press being lobbed like happy hand grenades in its direction, something was off.

I listened anyway. I played it at work, I played it at home, I played it in the background of countless GChats, I played it on the CTA, I suggested it to people, I talked about it with those who had already heard. All of the pieces seemed in place for a praiseworthy post-millennial indie archetype. And after a ton of listens, I reckoned it was a good thing that it had already garnered a 9.6 and kids were hailing it as the album of the year after less than a full week. Part of me wanted - wants - to believe that this is the hope Obama's been relentlessly invoking in a very marginal context: Indie kid stereotypes who used to confine themselves to Built to Spill or The Boy Least Likely To are opening their eyes to an album that draws a direct line to West African tribal music and avant-garde noise records (and not just, y'know, Daft Punk). If a college radio freshman thinks Merriweather Post Pavilion is great, how much greater the chance that they will follow the Paw Tracks to Repo in April and believe in that, too? This is supposed to be what makes the Internet essential: It shrinks this - our, everybody's - world enough to make it relatable for even the most hopeless xenophobic (The best commentary to this end vis-à-vis the Collective has, shockingly, been on Hipster Runoff).

Yet despite those astute observations, the real discomfort I experienced with Merriweather stems from Hua Hsu's feature article for the January/February edition of The Atlantic Monthly. The gist: Hsu explores the elimination of "whiteness" in American culture through a rough timeline that starts with minorities mimicking whites to "fit in" at the top of the 20th century and ends where we are now as a society paying post-racial lip service that, he posits, has reversed itself. Of particular interest is "the identity crisis plaguing well-meaning, well-off white kids in a post-white world:" Hsu says a vacuum has formed where white self-denial is a path both to acceptance and authenticity.

Merriweather Post Pavilion is the soundtrack of that self-denial. All of these songs drown themselves with needlessly dense sonic tricks in a dramatic effort to move away from the pleasant psych-folk of earlier, less ambitious works like Hollinndagain or Sung Tongs. That in itself would not be a problem, except that their bid for post-everythingness is so transparent. There is a deep current of desperation running through songs like "My Girls" and "Brother Sport" that begs for a listener to hear the hip-hop rhythms, the unending samplers, the universal synth sounds, the musical melting pot this thing is supposed to represent. Drop any continent on earth and it wouldn't matter: Stripped of the bells and whistles, this is still an indie-pop album. A very average, white-guy indie-pop album that will reject listeners who came expecting a transcendent experience and got mere assimilation instead. It assimilates with the current indie landscape, an exercise in deception: This sounds like something you would want to like in the interest of furthering minority forms of music, but you don't because it's the same old thing. It's no closer to post-racial harmony than Death Cab for Cutie or, worse, Pavement.

It's only fair at this point to acknowledge the obvious ad hominem argument: The reason I point it out in the first place is because I myself am a white male. It's logical to assume that, because I have a blog and gave a fuck enough about Animal Collective to write about them, I would feel vulnerable. Further, by rejecting the idea that I am a part of this indie kid stereotype, I am instead personifying it. And how many essays have you read indicting the very act of rock criticism as culturally white?

But my discomfort doesn't merely come from identifying with three white guys (it used to be four) or its fans; my discomfort comes from the fact that people are pledging their blind allegiance to this album for what it is not rather than for what it is. The band projects an image of artful dodgers bent on bringing transcontinental hipsterdom right to your hard drive; several have taken the bait, proclaiming Merriweather as a product and paladin of the self-congratulating online community and, by proxy, the new cultural mainstream. It isn't. It is still a sonic defense mechanism meant to shield itself from a lack of culture.

As with most things culture terrorism-related, a word should be spared for Diplo. Great question from a fellow Audiversitarian: "If Animal Collective are racist, what does that make Diplo? Hitler?" Given that he singlehandedly imported baile funk and helped bring new meaning to the worthlessly nebulous "world music" tag in the early aughts, it follows that Diplo should carry the weight of this white rejection as he delves further into DJ Benzi mixtapes or another MIA collaboration in an effort to disguise how much of a pasty white Brit he is. The difference is that Diplo lived these subcultures: He went to Brazil, he went to West Africa, he met the sources, he inhabited the environment to the best of his ability - which isn't to say that going somewhere is a one-up for authenticity (See also: sheltered study abroad students), but AnCo never say in their liner notes that this was culled straight from a coupé decallé cut or open themselves up to Angolan mini-tours. They are armchair globalists, content to rip the sounds of the world from the safety of Williamsburg. They are a reflection of their wired-in, zoned-out audience. Diplo spins real vinyl and plays to the crowds he stole from and has used urumee drums. He engages these cultures on a personal level and never worries about where the references are because they speak for themselves. Animal Collective make no such effort; devoid even of TV on the Radio's soul chants or LCD Soundsystem's winking funk grooves, AnCo dress songs about girls and seasons and hanging out - boring topics that don't even strive for unidentifiable weirdness like, say, food (Strawberry Jam) - in sounds that imply worldliness but demonstrate none and, furthermore, have zero staying power. That's not a testament to influence, that's an insult.

In other words, it's not that this album is bad. It's good, I guess... And that's the whole point: Instead of creating some kind of new beat thriving on kwaito and The Neptunes, Animal Collective disguise nothing as something in their quest for greatness. Like Panda Bear's Person Pitch, this is not especially remarkable on a more annoyingly grand scale. On past efforts, the group ventured well into the freak-folk forests; at least there, they sounded secure in their embrace of 60s British psych and folk. All they seem like they're trying to do now is embrace anything else, but they can't escape (even when their fans can).

So really, are Animal Collective racist? Perhaps not explicitly (or even consciously), but there is a definite anxiety about being a minority that resonates in their music and in their fans. Despite their urge for reinvention, they come off as second-rate pan-ethnic appropriators. If I haven't already, I'll probably contradict myself in a future review. There are more coherent critiques for how boring this is, sharper wit to pierce through the dense reverb that permeates every single song... But I wonder how much enthusiasm people will have for this album in four months, nevermind four years. Is it post-racial? Is it that permanent? Is it four stars, 9.6, 5/5? I guess we'll have to wait and see. It's only been official for a day.

Capillary Action - "So Embarrassing"

Capillary Action - Paperweights (Natural Selection 2008)

Capillary Action - So Embarrassing / Natural Selection

After posting a review on Capsule's Blue a few weeks back, I was contacted by Jonathan Pfeffer regarding the new Capillary Action album you see here. I was sure I had remembered the name, but So Embarrassing was not an album I had heard. "I thought our album would be right up your alley," he said. "We've been touring up a storm behind this record so any press we can garner would be greatly appreciated."

I'm suspicious of groups that ask for any press, but I was willing to give Capillary Action a try because I had remembered missing them when they played Columbia in January of 2006. A quick look around will also show you that Capillary Action has a lot of friends out on the road, and I was fans of a number of these bands. That reputation is at last starting to catch up with them in the press, and with good reason: So Embarrassing is a jarring listen, rarely letting you settle into any kind of comfortable mindframe. There is always something else happening.

"Gambit" sets the tone straight away, and though comparisons have been garnered to Kayo Dot, The Dirty Projectors, Battles, and Xiu Xiu (all of whom are on some level warranted), a Capillary Action listening experience is essentially listening to three groups rolled into one. The first is your Type A technically adept hardcore band. The furious bit that opens "Bloody Nose" is a good example of this, where double bass drumming and a heavy riff rock the middle and very end of the track. These kinds of moments are not quite as dominant on the record as you'd expect considering the whole reason this review exists is Capsule, but Pfeffer is smart enough not to overplay his hand. That metal growl doesn't really suit him anyway.

The second is an orchestra-backed bossa nova group. When I said that double bass drumming and heavy riffage rock the middle of "Bloody Nose," I didn't tell you how jazzy and calm the in-betweens were. The bossa nova really comes out on "Placebo or Panacea," which sounds as tropically relaxed as any song on the album. Horns and strings sound unhinged right at the start, but Pfeffer switches the sound just 22 seconds in and right away you're taken into a Rio nightclub from the 70s. The guitar noodling plays over boisterous brass toward the end, and it kind of sounds like The Mars Volta, but in a good way. Sergio Mendes this definitely ain't. "Badlands" is sort of like that too, very jazzy feeling with those poignant plucks lending sadness to an otherwise emotionally buoyant record.

"Paperweights" is the sound of that third group. That group is, er, Oceansize. Pfeffer's competent vocal abilities secretly hold this album together, but his croon is eerily comparable to the Mancunian band's frontman, Mike Vennart. Maybe it's that element Capillary Action has listed on the MySpace page as "melodramatic popular song," but thinking of some of Oceansize's more operatic moments comes immediately to mind on "The Chaperone." Weird connections aside, Pfeffer does for vocals what many of his friends can not: He tries to sing and succeeds.

So Embarrassing is more than just an Oceansized bossa nova-core record, though. I mean, read any review (positive or negative) and you'll see that everybody has a different angle, everybody hears something different, and it's likely you won't hear the same record the same way in subsequent listens. This is the Achilles Heel of the album, that you can never pin it down... But it's also Capillary Action's greatest asset: By deftly switching between recognizable sounds, the band forms its own. And by marking his own sonic territory, Pfeffer has won half the battle for the attention he deserves. Those 300 shows a year should take care of the other half.

2562 - "Aerial"

2562 - Morvern (Tectonic 2008)

2562 - Aerial / Tectonic

So, so many albums to hear this summer. They just keep coming, endlessly fascinating and frustrating and so many that are so long, so overly long, that it's tough to care about all but a select few. This is one of the latter. 2562, the Hague area code where the man behind it lives. At the moment, it is tough to argue the brilliance of Dave Huismans and his rogue record, a culmination of 12s tracked differently between CD and LP (You get two additional songs in "Walkover" and "Theorem" that do not appear on the CD, but you sacrifice "Channel Two," "Techno Dread," "Enforcers," and "Kameleon") that seem so out of step with the season that it could only be a dubstep record marketed exclusively for dubsteppers.

Too many things are wrong about this album for it to make the same impression on the masses that Burial did last year with Untrue. Even the lineage that led to Aerial seems wrong: Huismans has chosen Tectonic as his debut label, helmed by DJ Pinch of last year's last-second stunner Underwater Dancehall. For an insular scene that has largely kept its crop within South London, here are two guys operating beyond the geographical borders dubstep is so often unfairly planted with. Pinch is even further south and right off the River Severn to the west; Huismans is on the other side of the Channel in the Netherlands. But if there is much that this outsider reputation tells us about the anomaly that Aerial presents (and not just in the music, though we'll get to that in a second), there is also a lot that it isn't telling us, at least not directly: From the Internet's ability to decimate geographical exclusivity to the appeal it has across much of the Lowlands (There's a regular 24/7 dubstep stream from Belgium, for one example; plenty of others are out there to boot), Aerial is a milestone for a genre that seems to continue to evolve almost in spite of itself at times.

It's relatively easy to bang out a quick plate and be done with things, but making a dubstep full-length is tricky and 2562's first step was to keep it instrumental (removing the necessity for a second disc of instrumental's à la Pinch last year). The second major thing you'll notice in cuts like the thumping "Morvern" and the rubbery highlight "Techno Dread" is that Huismans was aiming for the scattershot minimal techno crowd. The feel that this is really just a Bpitch Control release at half-speed is evident, and if Ellen Allien were a dubstep producer, it's very likely she would be generating sounds not unlike those found on Aerial. It doesn't sound like this initially: "Moog Dub" brings an island breeze to the proceedings for a different approach to the sound. It's like you could almost, almost imagine this working at a party. It's also the most dub Huismans ever gets, at least until the digitally afflicted "Basin Dub" just past halfway. The heart of this record beats with the pulse of modern Berlin every bit as much as modern London.

When I first heard about this release a couple of months ago on Dubstepforum, the palpable sense of excitement was for a record that had taken the genre in a new direction and turned last year's cold synth stabs into warmer (if not friendlier) confines for a new year and a new crowd. Ironically, if this had come out last October, we might very well have been talking about 2562 as the record of the year. Closer to the truth is that, at this point, with so many tastemakers working on their tans and enjoying the density of the festival season rather than sitting behind a computer screen waiting for the Next Big Leak to satisfy their chilly isolation and exacerbate their loneliness, Aerial is doomed to the deadlands of underapprecation, destined to be unearthed either long after the excitement has died down or years from now when Huismans has retired from the game a defeated shell of a man who gave it his all and for one astounding record actually had it all right. That's extreme, and I hope it never comes to this... But I'm writing this review a month after the guy from Dusted, and I'm not seeing anyone else aside from Prefix care. It's all wrong. All of it, that is, but the music. In the end, this is what you cannot argue. Better that than some half-bit hack writing on his blog during listmaking season.

Jackson Conti - "Sunjinho"

Jackson Conti - Nao Tem Nada Nao (Mochilla/Kindred Spirits 2008)

Jackson Conti - Sunjinho / Mochilla/Kindred Spirits

Though I've been listening to this record on and off for a few days now, I don't have too much to add beyond what Michael has already said over at Dusted, so if you want a detailed description of the history behind the bossa nova grooves and Conti-driven polyrhythms that dominate this album, head there - but let me add my own unsolicited opinion on this one: When I listen to the tropical sounds and the lighthearted buoyancy of tracks like "Berumba" or the 70s gameshow key interlude that is "Waiting on the Corner," I just think to myself: "Damn, so this is Madlib's muzak."

But in a way, it's also another interesting footnote in Jackson's deep discography. Instead of just outright making a bad album, he made a good bad album. Like, instead of lowballing with a halfhearted Yesterdays New Quintet release that might've disappointed more petulant followers of his work, Otis basically went and made Beat Konducta in the Hotel Lobby. Doesn't sound so bland that way. And you know what? If this is what they wind up playing in the elevators of The Spire in four years, I won't complain... Probably because I won't be paying attention.

Capsule - "Blue"

Capsule - Flowerpower (Robotic Empire 2008)

Capsule - Blue / Robotic Empire

Capsule's Blue officially marks the last time I sleep on a release from Richmond's Robotic Empire. So busy was I worrying over how soon that Nirvana tribute compilation was coming out that I completely passed over arguably the best -core release of the year this side of Board Up the House. Actually, scratch that: Blue doesn't need a qualifier. It's simply one of the best records of the year, straight up. But if you missed it, you're not alone: I only stumbled across it via one of my counterparts over at Indierocket!, and later discovered this album was released on St. Patrick's Day as Robo 073. Keep in mind we're up to Robo 084 already (though a few have not been released).

Nevermind timeliness. I mean, I know I've seen somebody wearing one of those Capsule shirts before, so I guess I haven't been totally out of the loop. The second (but technically first?) full-length for this Miami-based trio is a stunning display of shredding through verses and choruses with lightning-fast playing and all the voltage besides. There's no time wasted on an introduction, the efficient "True Blue" blasting your speakers straight away and leaving a stream of noise two and a quarter minutes long in its wake. The ragged sound of the guitars complements the lo-fi vocals calling to mind any forward-thinking hardcore between about 1996 and 2002 (or the untimely demise of Orchid). Time spent cutting their teeth with the excellent Tunes for Bears to Dance To and likewise esteemable Tyranny of Shaw have helped hone the Capsule aesthetic, which until now had culminated in a cassette for the 'Empire back in 2006.

Indeed, we're nearly three years from their signing, but the wait is worth it: This is one of the tightest, most ruthless records of the year (not to mention the artwork, that thankfully has nothing to do with the band's original name: I Love U). Crazy time signature changes and gritty guitar sounds are fantastic and everything, but part of the reason Blue feels the way it does is - and this has been pointed out elsewhere, but I'll reiterate - is because of the intensity of the low-end. Those downstroke strums resonate well beyond your speakers, through your ribcage, right to the neurons in the gray matter of your brain. This is best exemplified in the outro strumming of "Going Home," an eight-minute closer that comes complete with a hidden bonus track reprising the conclusion of "Cobalt Connection" to stretch things out nearly 17 minutes. Okay, so sure, they know their references well: Pg. 99, Orchid, City of Caterpillar, early Drive Like Jehu, Indian Summer, Hot Cross, the bands they used to be in. But maybe they're also listening to all that Miami bass coming from the high-end cabanas that line the shore. I have no evidence to suggest this, but the thought of Capsule considering Rick Ross on any level is an intriguing game to play.

As I write this, the band is playing one show for the impressive Dudefest '08 down in Bloomington, Indiana. But while their tour schedule may be limited at the moment, the praise for this record and everything this band is doing is not. With good reason: Capsule's Blue says everything a hardcore record should say these days without sounding too glossy or too aimlessly chaotic. The band has a purpose, a direction, a drive. As long as they stay together, it's hard to imagine them making a bad record. For now, Blue stands as the highlight of a strong roster release schedule from Robotic Empire. It's a relief being able to say that three months after the fact rather than three weeks before.

Flying Lotus - "Los Angeles"

Flying Lotus - Golden Diva (Warp 2008)

Flying Lotus - Los Angeles / Warp

It's no secret that as a collective group of people here on Audiversity, we can really only agree on one guy: Otis Jackson Jr. But if Madlib and all his many wondrous incarnations is our intersection, Flying Lotus tags in as his alternate. This relationship has been in chrysalis for a long time: Steven Ellison emerged from beneath anonymous 30-second "Adult Swim" spots when his Plug Research debut 1983 dropped in late '06. Initially, there was more excitement over the music nerdery connect-the-dots in his great-nephew status to Alice Coltrane than there was to the actual Brazilian-influenced beats. Which were, incidentally, formidable.

But if FlyLo was the best representation of a great label in Plug Research, his move to Warp last fall was a calculated stab at building bigger bridges. The Reset EP showed a producer focusing in on a sound he had already established to startling effect. Indeed, there was something intuitively great about the music he was making in the sense that, while ostensibly based on the off-kilter creations of Dilla and Madlib culled from bargain funk bins, Lotus was also incorporating some of that world flavor via Brazil in addition to his natural jazz impulses and a touch of the avant-garde everything.

When Los Angeles leaked in late April, the results of his labors were not necessarily what had been expected. Reset was a modest six tracks that wrapped up tidily in under 20 minutes; Los Angeles is a comparatively bloated work at 17 tracks, but that's not looking at the time, which is just over 43 minutes. All of this silly numbers crunching means that Lotus has sharpened his game in a different way for his sophomore LP. This time around, he has honed in on song length rather than a specific sonic template.

And I'll admit, when I first heard it, I was lost. This was a record I had been so hopeful for showing the future of left-field hip-hop (and all requisite "or whatevers") that at first I did not understand what was going on here. Songs flew by, cursory hearings blurring the lines between "Comet Course" and "Sleepy Dinosaur," the vocal tracks tacked on the end seeming to be too little too late. Where was the development? Where was the progress? Where was that "Massage Situation" moment for every track, the mini epiphanies spread out over a manageable size of songs? Instead of feeling like a fully formed work, Los Angeles felt like the city that it represents: a patchwork quilt of sounds held together by a dense blanket of smog.

But the more I played it, the more I came around. Here's the best part about this album: You likely won't like it on your first listen. Or your second. Probably not even your third. You'll only find a handful of songs you can actually remember on the first go-around, maybe "RobertaFlack (feat. Dolly)" or maybe "Golden Diva." But each successive replay merits a new song you're rediscovering for the first time, until eventually you realize you love all 17 just as you swore you didn't have the capacity to because your iPod is too clogged up with the new Wolf Parade or Fleet Foxes or some damn thing.

While it may be a revelatory work in listening, it's not really a revelation. Instead of perfecting one idea, Ellison has blown open a galaxy of sounds to pursue on future records. In that sense at least, Los Angeles is incomplete: It is not the endpoint of Flying Lotus. This is not his "arrival" per se, because there is still too much development going on. Maybe he'll never arrive or never have a marquee record that everyone can point to and say, "At least he got it all completely right for that."

And you know what? As long as he continues generating beats as disparate, as dirty, as straight-up fucking heavy as the ones he's presented here, he won't need one. I understand that Ellison was upset when this record leaked; I don't blame him for it and the argument of sharing vs. keeping to yourself isn't one I want to get into here. But I will say this: You just witnessed my excitement for this record peak on the eve of its release. All of the enthusiasm for those who waited patiently will be rewarded with his most dramatic album art yet and a killer record from a ceaselessly creative mind. Last fall, Michael said that his Warp debut would require us to start using terms like, "the next phase of instrumental hip-hop has arrived." Well, not quite. Los Angeles is the future, but it's also the past, the present, the solid, the liquid, gas, plasma, atoms and quarks, particles and participles, broken and bent and sent through wormholes to our ears. It's a culmination of everything we know, everything we've ever learned about hip-hop, about funk, about soul. Real soul. It's a reason to keep loving music. Not bad for a mere mortal, anyway.

The Twilight Sad - "Here, It Never Snowed. Afterwards it Did" EP

The Twilight Sad - Mapped By What Surrounded Them (Alternate) (Fat Cat 2008)

The Twilight Sad - "Here, It Never Snowed. Afterwards it Did" EP / Fat Cat

Counting our year-end lists last year, this will mark the fourth time in a year and a half that Glasgow's Twilight Sad have made an appearance on this website. We've covered almost everything they've released, but don't be fooled; the illusion is twofold, because they bring a lot of the same songs back and we're lazy. It's not intentional, it's just that they seem to be making all the right noises without being too intrusive in that Kasabian kind of way. Haha, remember them?

So here's another EP, this one six songs but - surprise! - most of them are reworkings of jigs your 15-year-old white noise-loving self already knows and loves well: "Cold Days From the Birdhouse," "And She Would Darken the Memory," "Another Red Sparowes-esque Song Title But Somehow the Song is Still Listenable," you know, all the hits. Which I guess is understandable, a kind of belated victory lap for a record that had last year's grandstands applauding politely if not painting their bellies to spell out "TWILIGHT SAD" all in a row.

And I'm all for alternate versions of songs as long as there's a legitimate difference (as opposed to recorded versus "live!" which has the added effect of... the crowd). Some of the best work The Smashing Pumpkins ever did was never recorded to take an easy example from my memory, and that would've been the case for this band too had they not actually gone through and utilized ex-Aereogramme bassist and Campbell McNeil or My Latest Novel violinist Laura McFarlane. All of these versions exercise restraint that isn't often found on last year's full-length Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters, which is both refreshing in perspective (ostensibly the band's intention) and pleasing to see that they can be cautious when they want to.

It's not that these versions are better; in fact, most are inferior to the originals given that we came to know The Twilight Sad as a noise band that evolved into a hybrid of Scottish post-folk pioneered by Arab Strap and harrowing jet engine roars courtesy My Bloody Valentine. It's this balance between sheer noise, the adrenaline of sound, and that sad-bastard melody-come-easy touch that made the band so enrapturing. Here, it's James Graham's Scottish burr that grabs most of the attention and it's a lucky thing that he's talented at exploiting his limited range; otherwise we would be praying at this point for the instrumental versions. Not the case here. Graham's rolling Rs and distinctive accent are just one more appealing aspect of the band's sound as a whole. Without him, the songs are still good... But it's just not the same.

I mean, that's the whole point of this EP, innit? Things just aren't the same. Can't say it's a bridge to the sound of the next record or that it's some kind of dramatic change in direction because, frankly, it isn't (and/or "who knows?"). It has the same effect as Glider if that particular EP had come after Loveless rather than a year before. But even Glider has one of the Valentines' greatest moments in the title-track, and I'll be damned if the inebriated guitars that enter 15 seconds into "Mapped By What Surrounded Them" aren't my favorite sound of 2008. If this review were more punctual, I would've just said this: "The guitars on 'Mapped By What Surrounded Them'." Eight words for a six-song EP. One day I'll learn to edit. Go get this in the meantime and see what I'm talking about.

Ueno - "Sui-Gin"

Ueno - 04 - Untitled (Room40 2008)

Ueno - Sui-Gin / Room40

The sound of a precocious kid working out simple melodies has been part of the charm of Japan's increasingly popular duo Tenniscoats (and, to a lesser extent, the Maher Shalal Hash Baz music collective they are a part of). Last year, Saya and Takashi Ueno best used their musical marriage to great effect on two discs: Totemo Aimasho was put out on New Zealand's Room40 and the live disc Tan Tan Therapy for Sweden's Häpna. But while his fidelity may not be in question on the actual marriage side of things, he's definitely been diddling on the music side with a string of solo records devoted to his exploration of the 12-string guitar. Breathing through a Moog Ring Modulator this time, Sui-Gin (or "Mercury") continues in the same lineage.

It's easy to question the validity of a record like this, which is willfully difficult to listen to straight up. But like the hidden brilliance of Snöleoparden from earlier this year, the methods behind the madness reward patient listeners. Admittedly, this is a whole hell of a lot harder to get into: Ueno leaves his four-track recording sessions from Tokyo mostly unaltered in the transition to a full album of nine songs; there are tons of overdubs, but you would never know it listening to how smooth and foreign it sounds. "04 - Untitled" is the best demonstration of what little echo emits from the ring modulator, providing a depth in the scrabble of notes that Ueno is filtering out, but each untitled track runs a similar pattern: Take the bare minimal simplicity of the pop plucks that make Tenniscoats so heralded and reduce them in an almost Imagist way. What Tenniscoats say in 97 words, Ueno says in 56. Or less, as it were.

But then, that's why it's only half of Tenniscoats, right? It wouldn't be a Ueno record if it were accessible even to more experimental listeners. It's true, Sui-Gin is a test of patience to the untrained ear. But it's also a reward to appreciators of the avant-garde looking for a taste of what's on the radios of UFOs buzzing Planet Earth these days. Who's to say Ueno might not very well be a modern Will Smith?

Anja Schneider - "Beyond the Valley"

Anja Schneider - Belize (Mobilee 2008)

Anja Schneider - Beyond the Valley / Mobilee

Originally there was going to be a post before this justifying the exhaustive new Booka Shade record, The Sun and the Neon Light. But I honestly could not listen to that record more than once the whole way through. Have you heard the praises? If not, it's because nobody told Walter Merziger and Arno Kammermeier to just... stop. I can't even believe I remember that "Psychameleon" was the only song worth taking away from that album. For once, their initials seem appropriate.

But if the boys from Hamburg did not bring their best, Berlin's brightest brunettes have more than made up for it this spring. While Bpitch Control boss Ellen Allien was busy tooling with liquid nitrogen for a reductive approach on Sool, Mobilee missus Schneider chose to sweat out her latest with Beyond the Valley, a full-length that capitalizes on the strength of last year's "Belize" single and continually redraws the lines between order and chaos. Each track starts as a disaster and finishes making complete sense. It's like seeing the light over and over.

Or maybe it's just that minimal electro has been pretty weak this year? I hear Beyond the Valley and I think that this is an album that could've had every track as a highlight; clearly Schneider is capable of such brilliance as the Conrad-esque "Mole" and the stunning opener "Safari," but when we look back on this album at the end of the year (or rather, after you've finished hearing it for the second time), we're going to struggle to remember the "lost" tracks that feel like filler on repeated listens. Where is the momentum in "Gimlet"? And despite the trip-hop vocals of "Get Away," nothing about it feels distinctive. It's like Type A minimal techno and it feels lazy for someone of Schneider's obvious talent... even when the percussion takes curious turns with bongos and pitched-out tribal drums.

That said, the concluding tracks regain most of the waywardness of the middle portion and "Little Red Riding Hood" comes alive with spiking synths to complement the subtle, after-hours party favor that "We Fish at Night" provides on your way out. These songs may be highlights, but they fit in with the mood and feel of the album perfectly: Schneider has not made clear what valley we're going beyond, but it is clear that for this album we lie in its heart, and it is dark. No matter how fast that paranoid 4/4 pace may feel, there is no escaping the darkness.

So returning to the point about the "lost" moments that share common ground redundancy with the vast majority of Booka Shade's latest, the fact that these songs stretch out longer than it often feels they should turns out to be a clever psychological ploy on Schneider's part, taking cues from Conrad and dragging it out to make you feel as submerged in these sounds as the front cover depiction: You're immersed in roses, thorns, shrubbery and other industrial foliage on the cover, the music makes you feel like you've lost your way in the sweaty overgrowth as well. Maybe that overgrowth is a new species of plant; maybe it's a crowded club in Berlin. Either way, Schneider has already boldly blazed that path ahead and she's showing you the way through. Follow her long enough on Beyond the Valley and your faith will be rewarded.

The Hold Steady - "Stay Positive"

The Hold Steady - Constructive Summer (Removed by request) (Vagrant 2008)

The Hold Steady - Stay Positive / Vagrant

Because we've recently been on this indefinite hiatus (Remember: 2008, the year we made it safe to blog as a hobby again), I've afforded myself the opportunity to go back and enjoy some older music in addition to some of the fresh stuff coming out without the added burden of writing about it. It would be dishonest to say that I haven't also been indulging the white-boy indie-rock inner me, and a product of this is listening to a lot of Springsteen-sounding records - and that includes Tunnel of Love (1987), which I doubt any member of The War on Drugs has heard. I haven't delved that deep into the last Springsteen-aping sextet to grace the head of the Forkcast (because how far do you really need to go to understand the depth of youthful innocence?), but if there's one band that stands head and shoulders above the rest of this crop, it's Brooklyn's The Hold Steady.

Except that when I gave Stay Positive a listen, I found myself thinking of every friend I had who loved The Hold Steady on Boys and Girls in America, and then thinking that they would love this album a lot more than I am loving it now. I don't know what it was about Boys and Girls that struck me (I think its name was "Chips Ahoy"), but as opposed to the marked step of concise clarity that put their sophomore album a step ahead of Separation Sunday, this album feels like treading water. Or rather, it feels less genuine. There's no enthusiasm when you're running through the motions.

In honor of that, I rediscovered during a move this weekend (which I'll spare you the details of) that I still had my Hold Steady Song Generator™ packed away from '06. I blew off the dust and put some new batteries in it, and look it here: The sucker still works.

"Boys of Summer"

Snow finally melts on these rustic plains
Norfolk Southern calls out all their trains
and my friends hit the tracks to find more booze
convinced like me we've got nothin' to lose

We drank the rock quarry dry every night
My girl kickin' back Jack, man, what a sight
it was to see those trains take off
as i fought a recurring smoker's cough

And my girl never drinks a little too much
And the Twins never win (No!) in the clutch
Woo-oo-woo-hoo-hoo! (x3)

[Guitar/Piano solo, optional backing horns]

Damaged goods in the bottom of the ninth
Bar's closing up but we still got half our pints
and I'm like, hey Joe, here's a decent tip
as each of us takes one long last sip

Moaning, droning, yeah we're watching the game
As another Morneau hit pop flies out the same
You boys of summer keep livin' your dream
as our livers slowly run out of steam, yeah

And my girl never drinks a little too much
And the Twins never win (No!) in the clutch
Woo-oo-woo-hoo-hoo! (x3)

Hey Joe, maybe next year when the White Sox blow it

[Powerful outro strum]

And you know what the saddest part about that is? That thing took about ten minutes to make, and it reads as good as any couplet on Stay Positive. I won't say it's a bad album - of course it's not, because its hooks are catchy and its themes are universal - but it doesn't capture the urgency, the desperation of being in a dead-end small town. It doesn't even capture the resignation that well. It just sounds like resignation. Maybe that's the greatest artistic triumph of this album: Resignation. The title begs for a witticism here, but by now you will have heard enough of them. I'll spare you that, too.

Prolyphic & Reanimator - "The Ugly Truth"

Prolyphic & Reanimator - Dick and Jane (feat. Macromantics) (Removed by request) (Strange Famous 2008)

Prolyphic & Reanimator - The Ugly Truth / Strange Famous

Since there's no use ignoring the elephant in the room, let's get it right out there and say that Strange Famous gives away what kind of record this is, so this review will make no bones about being short and to the point. Sage Francis, the man behind the label, urged Providence-based MC Prolyphic to work with Windy City beatmaker Reanimator over three years ago. The collaboration was so successful that the two became the first members of the Strange Famous label.

Unfortunately, making The Ugly Truth was far less smoothly successful: The reason this album has taken three years to form is largely due to three crashed hard drives of valuable material, re-recordings of vocals, remixings of songs, anything that could quantitatively slow an album down seemed to fall the way of these two cats. It's enough to get anyone incensed.

Prolyphic might have been an edgy character before (which is what initially got him noticed), but he's spittin' mad on this album now. Prolyphic & Reanimator have built one of the most vital indie hip-hop records of the year on a premise of anger that sounds like the inverse of, say, the Clipse: While the brothers Thornton wax caustically disinterested over coked out beats when their albums hit trouble, Prolyphic comes out with furious passion and Reanimator concocts maximal beats honed on past Francis albums like 2002's memorable Personal Journals and last year's Human the Death Dance. "Broken Bottles" and "Born Alone" open up the album with breathless rhymes that barely stop for air.

This dense style is what characterizes so much of independent hip-hop today: By sacrificing futuristic club beats or ridiculously inane Urban Dictionary catchphrases for serious (and often self-serious) floetry with generic bargain bin funk beats, it's easy for artists to fall into the perilous pigeonhole of backpacker. In some ways, The Ugly Truth lands a direct hit for social responsibility and brooding over the state of any inanimate object or concept within a ten-foot radius. "No time for punchlines / That's why I'm bitter," right there in "Survived Another Winter."

But "Survived Another Winter" (and "Artist Goes Pop," for that matter) is also a demonstration of why this record does more than merely lament societal indifference at the plight of the poor. This is also a personal journal of Prolyphic's own, a peek into the psyche of two dudes who have had this record brewing inside them for three years. What would the difference have been had they not lost those hard drives and put this out at the tail-end of the climax over Rhymesayers and Anticon?

That's not for us to answer. All we know for sure is what The Ugly Truth delivers: a solid hip-hop album that pulls no punches during its extended 58-minute run-time. If there was one complaint, it would be that the truth takes so long to get out... But sometimes you've got to delve just that little bit deeper just that little bit longer to get the ugliest bits out. In that light, Prolyphic & Reanimator's debut is a resounding success. It doesn't get much more honest than this.

Have a Nice Life - "Deathconsciousness"

Have a Nice Life - Hunter (Enemies List 2008)

Have a Nice Life - Deathconsciousness / Enemieslist

"The band Have a Nice Life would like to announce that they have recorded the most depressing in the history of music. (Learn More)"

More: It's entirely possible that you may not have heard of Connecticut duo Have a Nice Life, or maybe you've dismissed them because of their absurdly "ironic" band name or the fact that their street team is so dedicated they've made it feel like there were more than 200 copies pressed with the 75-page booklet by their own Enemieslist imprint. But the buzz isn't in all the right places yet, and as I listen to this record, I expect to hear myself asking the same question others are asking who haven't yet heard Deathconsciousness for themselves: What would people want with an 85-minute double disc with "Death of Marat" on the cover for when they could just as easily go for A Place to Bury Strangers or, one better, Swans?

The answer is that this record, though flawed, is still worth hearing for so many reasons. The weak point first: Yes, it is 85 minutes. If you're listening to it straight through and don't really, really love the sound that's displayed from second track "Bloodhail" onward (Opener "A Quick One Before the Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut" sounds more like Mogwai's "Stanley Kubrick" than anything else), then you're not going to be able to survive the journey to the end of the ear-shattering "Earthmover." It's a pretty consistent album all the way through with some slower Gregorian chanting to balance out the overmodulated noise-pop that peeks out from behind all the reverb and darkwave posturing. There are no brave new steps, no swashbuckling gestures, no bold moves that haven't already boldly been moved two decades ago.

But Have a Nice Life are good despite all of that for the same reasons that their New York City counterparts garnered so much acclaim last year: They like it loud, and they really don't care what that does to your headphones when you're listening. Even though the recordings sound for the most part like they were recorded on the floor of a high school gym with mics set in the bleachers, this distance allows the music to cloud over itself in a way that only distracts on the filler songs. It's hardly all killer-no filler, but for a first effort some four years in the making, Deathconsciousness is as gloriously overwrought as its Darklands-aping contemporaries and easily batting in the same cage as The Cure's epic Disintegration.

I don't see much worth in pointing out any particular track; there are a few other places who have spit solid verse on this record that I don't think I can add much to, other than that there is a lot more emotion and aggression behind those echoing vocals and endlessly reverberating guitars - one listen to "Waiting for Black Metal Records to Come in the Mail" will be the selling point on that. Perhaps the Achilles Heel of reviewing a record like this is that once everybody throws out the typical namedrops and makes most obvious mention of the thematic concerns and has established the tone and tendencies, there isn't much more to add beyond individual song descriptions, but who needs that? For me, five paragraphs is enough. Rather than a comprehensive review or a definitive source for information, let this be a supplement to what you think you already know. Let this be the link Enemieslist did not give you. Even though there are no plans to press more of this record, hopefully they will change their minds. One can only imagine how loud Have a Nice Life are in person, too. Does Oliver Ackerman lose sleep over Have a Nice Life at night? (Learn More)

Santogold - "Santogold"

Santogold - Unstoppable (Removed by request) (Downtown 2008)

Santogold - Santogold / Downtown

"Santogold? Isn't that the one that's just like MIA?" Michael quipped as we went over the records we'd be reviewing for the coming weeks. "I'm pretty sure she sounds just like MIA." The sun's glow was fading behind Halas Sports Center and youthful Loyola students were out flinging frisbees, laying in the lush grass, enjoying the wonderfully warm weather. I wasn't in a mood to argue.

Except that Santi White is worth arguing over. Here is a woman who has worked as an A&R rep for Epic, fronted a smartly delivered pop-punk band (in Stiffed), tried to start her own imprint, and is now enjoying her greatest success as an art-damaged diva in waiting. So her sense of style is similarly bright and (dis)tasteful. So she had producer du jour Switch and worldly cohort Diplo doing some tweaks to the final mixes of the songs for her self-titled debut. So she knows a little something about international instrumentation. So "Creator" is uncomfortably close to the Sri Lankan culture assassin Santogold is most often mistaken for.

So what? As Mark Ronson has said, White can actually "sing a song properly." This may sound like a presumptuous declaration, but when you think of MIA, you don't think of her singing because, in fact, there isn't much of it to be found on Arular or Kala. For all of her streetwise hoodies and post-millennial charm, Mathangi Arulpragasm is essentially a one-trick pony. No amount of sampling or collage camouflaging can disguise it.

Santi White comes from a completely different perspective. Armed with a musical background (rather than a visual art background), White is less naive about the music business and about her approach to it. References to her disenchantment with the status quo are littered all over the place (perhaps most prominently on the chorus to "Shove It"), but even when she sounds like she's preaching, you can at least sing along to it. You can sing along to almost anything here.

That's the great bit about this record, for Santogold is a stubbornly bipolar album that never resolves whether it wants to go in a dance club-oriented direction or a rock club-oriented direction. Though it's the fundamental fissure, it's also what makes her music so unpredictably engaging... Because at the heart of it all is one woman with a big enough heart to go in a direction that she wanted to go with the music. It's a disjointed record because Santi White is disjointed; we as people are rarely whole. So many albums are lauded for being uniformly brilliant (and you could list anyone from Led Zeppelin to the Wu-Tang to Kraftwerk to Interpol here), but Santogold falls under the imperfect masterpieces, the records that are great because they have no cohesion at all.

Depending on what you're looking for, on any given day you'll be listening to the instantly affable "Lights Out" or "I'm a Lady." The next day you'll be listening to floor-shaking anthems such as "Creator" or "Unstoppable." Posting just one song does not begin to describe the picture; there is something for everyone here. In that sense at least, Santi White will be unable to avoid comparisons to MIA. The critical difference is that while Maya collects every color of the rainbow to put in the blender of enlightened universality, Santogold splinters the influences with a prism. It's not nearly as challenging, but it's also not nearly as annoying.

Without sounding too self-congratulatory, I'd like to think that we at Audiversity appreciate artists who are challenging the divides of modern subculture (even if we don't like listening to them). It is my hope that by year's end Santogold will have done more than established herself as simply "the one who sounds just like MIA." Honestly, we already have enough of those. Here is something both distinct and familiar. Here is the culmination of one woman's years in pursuit of herself. Here is that woman's self-belief rewarded. As much as Triclops!, I believe in Santogold. That's my argument. What's yours?

Their Teeth Will Be of Lions - "The Color By Numbers! Demo 07"

Their Teeth Will Be of Lions - An Anxious Night Minus Television (Veritas et Aequitas Records 2007)

Their Teeth Will Be of Lions - The Color By Numbers! Demo 07 / Veritas Et Aequitas

For all of the stigma that comes with being well-informed about music (Just ask anyone at my office who's tried to talk with me about music beyond, "Oh, so you listen to, like, rock and hip-hop?"), it does afford you the nice opportunity of connecting with smaller artists on a more personal level. Their Teeth Will Be of Lions now fall under this category. The Michigan act was kind enough to play a ChIRP benefit on April 4th and lead singer Glenn Michael Willis enthusiastically handed over a copy of this three-copy EP. The poor guy had no idea that my night was about to take a dramatic turn for the worse, but that's another story; what's important here is that Their Teeth Will Be of Lions are a promising group going in all sorts of directions, each of them wild with possibility. Kalamazoo funcore? It exists. Here's some proof.

The sextet run through a multitude of styles in just three songs here (though this demo has aged somewhat, the band recently signed to Veritas et Aequitas Records and released a fresh EP with a neat retro cover in Everyone Made it Out Alive... Almost!), but the keyword is energy. This band has buckets full. "It's a lot like watching monkeys. We're random and unpredictable," guitarist Derek Feltner has said. I've watched them, and I've watched monkeys. I don't mean to be a hater here, but monkeys are much less interesting.

The vocals are split between Willis and female foil Jenn Hampshire. Neither are afraid to croon, and they can do so competently, but aside from the astonishing amount of time signature changes packed into the demo's 11 minutes, the real fun is in the erratic yelping that really brings these songs alive. Though they mention Chicago's own Hyper Viper!, I wonder how much the band collectively loves the Northwest's scene between 2001 and 2004...? There are reminders of early Pretty Girls Make Graves, The Gossip, Soiled Doves, and the more melodic moments of The Blood Brothers. Obvious reference points maybe, but why not throw in East Coasters Les Savy Fav to complete the picture? That should be enough namedropping to get the idea. The trick is that this band is just as clever and almost as technically adept as any of the aforementioned.

If you're looking for a flaw (and if you're doing that, well, what happened to 2KGreat? What about that?), it's that this endless exuberance can exhaust the ears over the course of a full-length. Easy for three songs, perfectly suited for a live audience, but a dozen tracks and you'll need a breather. Given that they're six people and the band (which has already run through numerous line-up changes) has only been together for, what, 13 months?, it's understandable that they would be brimming with so many ideas they run out of space and time to put them.

The future of Their Teeth Will be of Lions is unclear. For now, it's all about enjoying the rock n' roll ride, saving up some cash for Hampshire (whose apartment recently burned to the ground no thanks to a kitchen fire), getting out, playing shows, meeting the people. I haven't heard the entirety of the full-length yet, but my guess is that they've already found the solution to an unasked question this EP proposes.

Q: What's the best way to fuck with people when you've already established such a demanding sound?
A: Don't fuck with them at all.

Anyway, think about it.

M83 "Saturdays = Youth"

M83 - Couleurs (Mute 2008)

M83 - Saturdays = Youth / Mute

From the minimalism of Berlin to the maximalism of modern France: M83 (meaning Anthony Gonzalez) has already earned plenty of webspace on this website for his work on last year's Digital Shades, Vol. 1. And certainly, since this album leaked nearly a month ago, a fair amount of press from all corners of the indie world has already been delivered for this album which bears such a phenomenally stupid-yet-totally unsurprising title. I write this not because I felt I needed closure on a group I used to love. I write this not because my kiss-off with Digital Shades last year was supposed to be a literary albatross and nothing I write on M83 in comparison could possibly be as good (though that's probably true).

As much to my surprise as yours, I write this as a personal memo not to close the book on M83. The drift of that lengthy Digital Shades review goes like this:

1. I love Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts. Still.
2. Before the Dawn Heals Us was nice but way too blatant. We already had Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness and it was much, much better the first time.
3. Digital Shades, Vol. 1 was a smart move because it wasn't excess. Gonzalez not counting it as an "official" album was a cause for concern.
4. I have to move to another city and start living as an adult, so I'm going to stop blogging for like four days.

Yet when "Couleurs" was posted in December of '07, I was blindsided. Here was a song that indicated no Taipei 101-style choruses, no repulsive teen melodrama, just the ghostly specter of a song with guitar tones copped straight from A Flock of Seagulls and a melody missing from the "Donnie Darko" soundtrack. And the beat! Well, of course I loved the beat. The brilliantly reductive Jori Hulkkonen remix added further fuel to the fire, and in the space of just three months I had gone from prematurely dismissing an album I'd heard nothing of to eagerly anticipating what had the potential to become one of my favorite records of the year.

Naturally, it was all too good to be true. In case you missed the Pitchfork.tv debut or blew by The Hype Machine (which, as I write this, M83 is currently atop of on the all-important "Most Blogged Artists" and "Most Searched" categories), this album is emphatically not a streamlined rendition of Digital Shades for the dancefloor. Though it starts promisingly with the "Coloring the Void"-esque intro on "You, Appearing," the following "Kim & Jessie" ensures the show rapidly devolves into a John Hughes musical score and we're even further down the hole of adolescence. So why bother, right? What are we doing writing about an album like this when we could just hit up another hiplife compilation?

The reason is that there's an interesting juxtaposition at work on Saturdays = Youth. Even though it seems like Gonzalez is regressing on a mental level when it comes to his lyrics (Maybe the 26-year-old is method acting for the part of a 15-year-old who's trying too hard; if that's true, he should be going out for Oscars instead of Grammys), he's wisened up on the production side of things and the music is maybe his smartest yet... in a roundabout way. He's not trying for the pastoral genius of his first two albums with Nicholas Fromageau, but he's also not shooting for the colossal heights of his first proper solo outing. Thank Ewan Pearson and Ken Thomas for that. Here are two guys who've helmed records by everyone from The Rapture to The Cocteau Twins. If anyone can capture the atmosphere of 80s post-punk records recontextualized for a shoegaze setting, it's them.

So despite the forced-sounding interruptions from Morgan Kibby that are supposed to provide some kind of narrative coherency (The one you'll remember from "Graveyard Girl": "I'll read poetry to the stones. Maybe one day I could be one of them: wise and silent, waiting for someone to love me, waiting for someone to kiss me." That's deep, man. Like, you should put that in the school literary magazine if you don't think it's selling out), and despite Gonzalez's best attempts to sabotage the goodness of his own record, Thomas and Pearson have somehow found a way to make this record not only listenable but enjoyable to those of us who have outgrown the heart-on-sleeve soliloquies of the modern adolescent.

More than the ambient throwback closer "Midnight Souls Still Remain," more than the Jori Hulkkonen remix of "Couleurs," more than the horrendous cover art (which doesn't make any bones about the target audience), the greatest triumph of Saturdays = Youth is that M83 as a unit have made annoying teenagers tolerable for at least one more album. Maybe you'll find more objective opinions about the merits of this record elsewhere. Maybe you'll find more critically astute essays elsewhere, too. But you'll be hard pressed to find a review outside of this one that tries so hard to be both. Hey, if you want to rile a teenager, fight fire with fire. In the dying embers of immaturity, I have found a link to the soul of this record that I intend to keep. Cue the sweeping synthesizers and let the gallery at The Hype Machine stand to applaud.

Ellen Allien - "Sool"

Ellen Allien - Its (Bpitch Control 2008)

Ellen Allien - Sool / Bpitch Control

Though it's common knowledge in the music world that "big" releases crop up on opposite ends of the calendar year (February-April and September-November, respectively), May of 2008 will go down as a significant month for the electronica community. A host of big names are releasing material, and though Booka Shade may beg to differ, Ellen Fraatz stands atop the techno pile as arguably its guiding light and most recognizable face. After Justice, anyway.

What was it about her that had the masses flocking to Berlinette in 2003? Was it the Warp-style IDM beats? Was it Allien's vocal approach, which brought robotic recitation to an all-time low on the cheesiness scale? Was it that it felt like an album rather than a collection of singles? Or was it just the cutesy artwork that misled so many into believing it might be a wayward German indie-pop album? Whatever it was, Allien attracted an unorthodox audience of newfound electroheads that was watching closely when Thrills appeared in 2005. Allien's sublime blend of minimal Berlin, airy trip-hop and streamlined glitch caught fire with another new wave of crowds, but it was her collaboration with Apparat for 2006's Orchestra of Bubbles that sealed the deal. Even when she wasn't in complete control of the soundsystem's thump, her touch was evident (and proof can be found on Apparat's more maximal Walls last year). It was cruel that Orchestra of Bubbles sat in the woodlands while The Knife emerged from the vulpine forests to take all the electro glory come year's end.

Of course, year-end lists are worthless when the calendar year changes and you're only as good as what you've done lately. While kids slowly forget how to spell "Dreijer," Allien's kept sharp through a Fabric mix and Bpitch label compilation Boogybites Vol. 4, but Sool is the true follow-up fans have been waiting for. A decade on from the formation of her label and half a decade on from her worldwide breakthrough, where do we stand?

Fair warning first: This is not exactly Allien's work, just as Berlinette had SmashTV as a silent partner. Riding shotgun for Sool is fellow Berlinette Antye Greie aka AGF, whose production credits on this album bolster an impressive career that's also included work with Vladislav Delay and Craig Armstrong. By manning (womaning?) the boards, AGF has brought out a very different, dramatically darker side that Allien has been hinting at in her post-Orchestra of Bubbles material. No longer the doe-eyed romantic passionate about the straßen of Berlin, Sool screams barebones Berlin microsound. Maybe it was that she did most of the recording for this album during the winter.

Or maybe, as Philip Shelburne recently alluded to, Greie was simply an innocent accomplice caught up in the great sea change of a New Direction for a new Ellen Allien tired of talking the techno-pop talk and ready again to walk the minimal walk. Either way, Sool is fascinating more for what it suggests than for what it delivers outright. As she says in press releases, Sool is "a phantasm, a creation, which reflects the album's atmosphere, and also my person." A fitting description that, because this album lacks form or solid substance on several occasions. It is liquid, it is gas, it is plasma. Even when the 4/4 thump is there, it can feel like it's not.

The secret to this ghostly façade is that the album growls quietly, simmering and sizzling all over the low end. "MM" is a good example to use for this, where hardly anything seems to be happening until you look below the surface and discover a track brimming with sounds moving and changing and shifting and shaping the most receded hairs of your eardrums. Like most of the rest of the album, the first listen is like looking at an ant colony from ten feet; repeated listens are like looking at an ant colony from ten inches.

There are a few exceptions, but comparatively they barely bubble with the showmanship of an orchestra. "Frieda" will be one you may hear for its pop sensibilities, breathy vocals and high chimes lending a feminine familiarity that will bring comfort to those frightened by the chilly android of "Caress." Another standout is the near-beatbox of "Bim," occupying a liminal space somewhere between hallmark minimalism and breathy sex-pop. It's both revoltingly mechanical and alluringly human. Yes, there is life on Sool. It's everywhere. You just have to keep looking.

In our aforementioned Apparat review last year, Michael called Walls refreshing because of "how much it does not sound like the current Berlin scene (or at least my assumption of it). It’s overtly melodic, emotional and sentimental." The irony is that Berlin has been trying desperately to burn that bridge for years now. Everybody - Allien included - has spent albums referencing the ambiguously feared "minimal" tag without actually being minimal. Sool represents an about-face, and maybe it's one of the most fascinating electronic records of the year partly because of how much it does sound like the current Berlin scene (or at least, Michael's assumption of it). Maybe it will scare off those who expected something more explicit - I was unsure the first few times I listened too - but if you sit with Sool long enough, the sketches, drawing and adhering that went into this record emerge in full bloom... And instead of being alienated, you'll be Allienated. Subtle, mysterious, minimal: Sool has everything. You just have to keep looking past the preconceptions full of brightly lit crosses to find it all.