Atlas Sound: Parallax (2011)

(4AD)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

There isn't much background to Bradford Cox's creation of his third solo album under the Atlas Sound name that can really link itself to the way it finally falls upon you. You read stories about a nervous breakdown, about his lonesome lack of a social life and much of anything to excite him outside of his music, and all the same when the "Karma Police"-like breakdown of "Amplifiers" and the apocalyptic ending of "Terra Incognita" wash over with their white noise and feedback, it's not a feeling of arid alienation that visits; it's a love of that noise, and even directly, Cox must interrupt the aural-sex malfunction with either the lovable broken-toyshop trills of "Te Amo" or the hissing acoustic sadness of "Flagstaff." Either way, something warm and sweet and strange.

It's hard to get your arms around Parallax when it's not playing because it's like grappling for wisps of some lovely dream. Cox attained something akin to this sense of gravity and loveliness on last year's Halcyon Digest by his band Deerhunter, an introspective and deeply conflicted valentine to the past and to our interpretations and ideas of it. Honestly though, as cradled as we may have felt by the revelatory distance and maturity on that record, Atlas Sound goes so very much farther here -- it's like witnessing a gifted younger sibling who can draw well suddenly grow into a master painter in just over a year. Halcyon Digest might be precedent to this in some thematic way, but it can more accurately be described as a stepping stone.

To be frank, if Deerhunter's most recent record was like witnessing some telling series of lovely or haunting details out of the corner of your eye, Parallax is like viewing it through a veil of tears. It's just as fixated on memory, but as an emotional tool rather than a theme; here lies its triumph. After just one listen, its melodies and riffs and chords linger as if they've always existed; heard again, they seem iconic and relentlessly pretty and, above all, familiar. Witness the instantly iconic opening riff of "My Angel Is Broken," which you can hardly believe isn't some Pixies or Jesus & Mary Chain classic you've momentarily forgotten. The grand contradiction of Cox's new music is shared with no less grand a legend than the Beach Boys -- a bold, gentle romanticism clashing with the pure celebration of solitude. Cox loves being alone, creating and remembering, but he also condemns it and longs for something to fill in the distance between himself and the rest of the world; you can hear that longing in even the celebratory moments, even in the bellowing, watery slowdance of "Amplifiers."

That track, early on the album, toys and teases subtly much like Deerhunter -- its major clues to the Parallax modus operandi are its more broadly playful and sensual elements. Cox's growth as a musician here can be measured largely by his directness. It seems hardly imaginable that he ever before would have permitted the adorably kitschy "Te Amo," the open-armed unstrained beauty of "Mona Lisa," both as blissful and unpretentious as modern pop gets, completely unfettered by any of the art-prog leanings that once characterized his day-job band. He previously made a name as a stylist, but all of that is shed in favor of something remarkably cathartic and personal even as it allows by far his most accessible, selfless material thus far. Even if "Lightsworks" puts on the sharp doo wop guise and "Terra Incognita" blows through a ba ba ba ba ba '60s routine, both routunes are in service of something wistful, stark, and peaceful.

Cox's use of his own uneven psychology to produce divinely assured, heavenly popcraft has of course plenty of precedent, but part of the appeal of Parallax is what feels like an absence of grand design -- it seems an honest and clear-headed capturing of an incredibly fertile mood, following the artist through the ups and downs of a long night. You can only vaguely hear the hard work that must have produced it, the momentum and determination clearest on opener "The Shakes." The one thing that isn't really surprising about the project is that the most all-around startling creations may be those in which Cox wallows in the death and darkness that seems to consume him these days, a wunderkind entering adulthood -- the neon drunkenness of "Modern Aquatic Nightsongs" is as strikingly real as it is breathtakingly sad, and the cavernous delicacy of "Doldrums" is the most appealingly emotive shapeless confection of the year.

But you can't shoehorn a thesis statement into this -- it's too achingly real, and too passionate. Above all else, this is underlined by the vocals, which are eerily grand despite the bedroom compression, distortion and glitchy editing that deliberately challenges their reign over the music. Cox's voice reaches moments of cascading perfection that recall the best moments of John Lennon's final year of recording ("Mona Lisa") or a warped Tom Verlaine as his most smitten and frantic ("My Angel Is Broken"). Cox so perfectly captures a lost, blissful loneliness on the title track that you can't help hearing some doubt beind his impassioned "I'll pretend you were the only one" on "Te Amo," sung like an announcement from on high, like he's a titan with nothing to lose in his own weird world.

These songs are remarkable on their own, but in truth they only function at their fullest when heard together, an increasing rarity in the indieverse that renders Parallax one of the small handful of LPs that justify the album as a genuine artform. Yes, you can marvel at how "Parallax" itself wrings so much nervous energy out of its glorious hook, and the otherworldly beauty of "Doldrums" or the Luna-like open-hearted sweet pop of "Mona Lisa" can leap out at you unexpectedly regardless, but the album as a complete piece casts a hypnotic spell that renders all of the above maximally pleasurable, even masterful.

But if you have to pare this grand romance and deeply felt confessional to a microcosm, make it "Praying Man," Bradford Cox in a wonderful nutshell -- the uncivilized simplicity, the guitar relentlessness, the unexpected harmonica, and above all, the sha la la la la la. You could make a convincing argument that sha la la la la la la is what we've been missing in rock & roll, in indie music, in our lives. Here it is, and plenty of it.

A$AP Rocky: LiveLoveA$AP (2011)

(RCA)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Those demanding to know why RCA paid $3 million to sign this guy are asking the question in the wrong way. Properly, it is: does A$AP Rocky use the opportunity of this coyly released free mixtape to prove exactly why he was worth that paycheck? The answer is yeah, absolutely and unequivocally. Rocky's debut tape is the most convincing act of self-proof by a young man since The College Dropout seven years ago. More than just promising, it's the most immediately striking and appealing mixtape to surface in many, many years.

One key is length; at just fifty-four minutes, you're actually left itching to spend a little more time with Rocky and the various well-chosen guests and members of his A$AP crew that come out for these sessions. The headliner's personality -- melodramatic, promiscuous, preening, but utterly young and charming -- is consistently appealing, through his various guises of swagger and sorrow all well-presented by his easy, silky flow. Which itself is deceptively simple; at the drop of a hat, on "Trilla" and "Peso" and "Out of This World," he can pull out the stops and go rapid fire full-force on us, suggesting he is keeping a lot of his tricks to himself as of yet.

But Rocky's endlessly smooth, eclectic taste in beats and producers is overall the element that puts LiveLoveA$AP on a level with the best hip hop records of the last few years. You get a full and mixed serving of hooks and strangeness here; not one song fails to stand out memorably from the rest in some fashion. The vibe of a carefree party with an undercurrent of sharp, steely-eyed conviction is brilliantly held up by the broad array of production ideas, from almost unbearably tight driving Southern funk on the magnificent "Trilla" to street jazz on Spaceghost Purrp's immediately succeeding "Keep It G" to clever, popcrafty syncopation on "Kissin' Pink" (and that's three songs in a row right in the middle!) to the urbane, carefully mounted menace and minimalism of Clams Casino's five cuts.

The impression we get, whether from the naked shout-outs to Naughty by Nature or the unveiled emotional pleas and storytelling of "Demons," "Houston Old Head" and "Leaf" or even the unabashed but clever weed rap of "Roll One Up" and the Slum Village throwback "Get Lit," is that all of this matters like hell to A$AP Rocky, which makes sense for a Harlem boy who decided to go full-bore on a rap career after his brother was killed in his neighborhood. ("He would make me feel secure," Rocky told the Fader recently, "and if it wasn't for him being able to get that confidence out of me, I wouldn't have had the balls to discover I had a talent.") Even when he's just talking about the joys of laying women and smoking up and being "pretty," a not at all insignificant choice of self-qualifier in the age of "no homo," his passion for his work is consistently audible. It's this dedication that seems to have made LiveLoveA$AP feel like so much more than a mixtape, feel like something that actively should not be available to us for free, and that makes me all the more excited for A$AP Rocky's future.

Oneohtrix Point Never: Replica (2011)

(Software)

RECOMMENDED

People used to call Eno's stuff "dinner music." On this Thanksgiving day, I'm greatly entertained by the vision of disorganization fetishist and Eno/Fripp disciple Daniel Lopatin soundtracking some dysfunctional family's holiday dinner. It wouldn't be a Fanny and Alexander thing with all the bad feelings under the surface and a lot of kinship and pleasantry, it would be people trying desperately not to explode in anger at one another so as to make the afternoon awkward for everyone else.

I picture it like this: Violet's estranged sister Patty has moved back to Arkansas after fifteen years away. After a lot of discussion with her husband, Violet has tentatively decided that it will make sense to do the gracious thing and invite Patty over for turkey and like that. She doesn't really expect Patty to show up or even to pay much attention to the mailed invite, computer printed on brown card stock. Years ago, Patty damaged her relationship with the rest of the family by committing a series of botched robberies while hard up for cash and attempting to use the living rooms of her siblings and parents as hiding places during the long but not long enough wait for the police to track her down. Not coincidentally, this was less than a year after Violet's current husband ceased to be Patty's lover of five years, Patty herself having cribbed the affections of Henry from another friend of hers in college.

Violet is expecting to keep her favorite holiday music going on the computer speakers, mounted just outside the kitchen, during the early food preparation but when Patty shows up, she appears to be mildly drugged up (so typical of her) and exchanges in a series of stilted, awkward conversations with everyone except Violet. No small-talk, no "thank you for inviting me to dinner," nothing! Patty, it turns out, is a big fan of the harder ambient shit like Tim Hecker and also frontier glitchy R&B act How to Dress Well. She's also brought the acclaimed new Oneohtrix Point Never album on her iPod Touch and attempts to engage teenage guests Roger and Alex in conversation about it, but they are into stuff like Arcade Fire and don't know what she's talking about. She responds to this grave injustice by unplugging Violet's computer speakers from her laptop and replacing it with her iPod Touch and letting Replica play in its entirety, while insisting to everyone with an increasingly crazed expression that this music is "disgusting" and "sleazy." When she excuses herself to smoke a cigarette, young niece Regina quietly adjusts the volume downward.

During track seven, "Submersible," dinner is served. Patty almost knocks over the chair she's elected to sit in, the one of course beside Henry. She asks Henry an awful lot of questions about how he's doing, and her enthusiasm in this activity only seems to increase when Violet lays down the turkey centerpiece and takes her position at the head of the table. Everyone says grace but the whole time, Patty and Violet gaze steely-eyed at one another, a laser glare you could put a knife through, their mutual disdain made finally explicit. No one else sees this and it's never mentioned. But it escapes the notice of no one that the after-dinner conversations, usually so languid and humorous and appreciative at Violet's all-encompassing Thanksgiving dinners, are cold and detached that night with long stretches of dead air. It's so unpleasant that someone other than Patty -- Violet, actually -- hits "repeat" on the iPod Touch when Replica finishes.

"The music is... interesting, isn't it?" she'd say, shaking her glass of scotch.

"Interesting?" Patty would wrinkle her nose. "It's not 'interesting,' sis. It's good. It's serious."

"Serious. Hmm. Yeah, I like it okay. I mean, I don't like it as well as the Christmas music but I guess it's kind of early for Christmas music."

"It is. Way too early."

"Yes."

"Mm."

"Doesn't really get you into the spirit though, does it?"

"The spirit?"

"The holiday spirit."

"Oh. No."

"No."

"Oh, well."

The sisters take little notice of the fact that this discussion has, if nothing else, gotten them to speak to one another.

The guests file out in silence eventually, the night ending as oddly and memorably as it began. Violet wonders if she can get away with not inviting Patty next year. The last song that plays is "Up," cut off somewhere in the middle just while it's getting really chaotic.

I'm sorry, it's late.

Nicolas Jaar: Don't Break My Love EP (2011)

(Clown & Sunset)

Mysterious Chilean producer Jaar's extraordinary record Space Is Only Noise was one of 2011's biggest game-changers, an instantly influential turning upside-down of lounge and techno with elements of organic African jazz and musique concrète; full of misleading tricks and audaciously sensual hooks, the album is a must for anyone who missed it, regardless of how you generally feel about electronic music. I continue to feel, as I did in the spring, that its far-reaching effects on the sound of our era of ambient and otherworldly dance music will last longer than those of James Blake's more celebrated debut LP.

This brief digital-only followup EP, just two songs across eleven minutes, is more meandering and vague than anything on the full-length, chopped-up shimmer and snatches of vocals that work well enough as ambience but fail to reward apt attention the way Space did. The title cut is a tense slow burn that slowly gives way to a semblance of the lushness Jaar's earlier music explored; the b-side "Why Don't You Save Me" is less methodical but still oddly unmoving, veering close to annoyance in its glitchy insistence.

If I may spoil a future review, I am enjoying Jaar's guitar-addled side project Darkside much more than this, which feels to me like a half-formed stopgap. But if you liked Space Is Only Noise as much as I did, this does make a peaceful enough supplement.

[SEE ALSO:]
Space Is Only Noise (2011)

Drake: Take Care (2011)

(Cash Money)

!!!!! AVOID !!!!!

I try not to rag on whatever's currently popular (#1 album in the country right this second), because chances are I'm just not in the target bracket and I'm not built to fully understand, but seriously FUCK YOU if you honestly think this is 1/10 as good as 808's and Heartbreak. Do you really believe a word this generic Degrassi motherfucker says? Really? Really?? The best cut is just a straight lift of a remix of Gil Scott-Heron's cover of the Bobby "Blue" Bland chestnut "I'll Take Care of You" from last year; buy Scott-Heron's last album or Jamie xx's remix album of same instead of this shit and you won't miss a goddamn thing. Not real hip hop.

Beastie Boys: Hot Sauce Committee Part Two (2011)

(Capitol)

RECOMMENDED

There've been harsh words in this space recently toward stalwarts Paul Simon and R.E.M.; it's not an intentional motif, but what does it take for an aging, past-peak band to win me over? Well, the quickest possible way is probably to rhyme "Excedrin" with "Tippi Hedren," as the Beastie Boys do on their deliriously fun eighth album (counting The Mix-Up). I'm not even what you would call a Beastie Boys fan, really; they show up on my lists of crucial artists primarily because of Paul's Boutique and, I suppose, a smattering of their hit singles. Paul's stands far enough above the rest of their output that I confess I don't really listen to the rest of their albums often at all.

One of the issues I have with the Beasties is that I've never been fully convinced of the validity to any of their incarnations -- as a hardcore band, I think they're laughable. As rappers, I think they're engaging but scarcely deserving of the mantle of hip hop luminaries that seems to have been elevated for them. And going further back to the machismo-spoofing joke that was their original motif, well, I'll get in trouble here but while I am fully convinced it was a joke, I'm not entirely sure the group and Rick Rubin particularly wanted their massive growing throngs of fans at the time to realize it was. The Dust Brothers were the outside force that transformed such commercial calculation into something human and head-spinning, and it must be said that even Paul's Boutique, brilliant as it is, isn't on a level with 3 Feet High and Rising or the first two Tribe albums -- and yet it curiously seems to be mentioned far more often. Couldn't possibly have anything to do with gasp race, could it?

But something's happened to this band over the years that's led me to admire, if not their music, certainly their integrity and compassion. No one who saw the 1998 Video Music Awards in which the Beasties were given some silly lifetime achievement trophy will forget the moment when MCA, apropos of nothing about the group's "career" or "videos," threw a passionate plea against stereotyping of Muslims as terrorists across the MTV airwaves. Upon winning an award for "Intergalactic" a year later, Ad-Rock took to the podium to thrash his peers for the look-the-other-way attitude toward the sexual assaults that had taken place at Woodstock earlier that summer.

You don't necessarily hear things like this in their music. It's still silly and aloof, for the most part; only the 1998 record Hello Nasty really suggested much deep-down emotion or activism. On Hot Sauce Committee, however, one thing you do hear is cancer. MCA was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor in one of his salivary glands in 2009, the chief reason this record wasn't finished or issued two years ago. He beat it fairly easily, as far as the public knows, and maybe it's my imagination, but I feel I can hear a beautiful weakening in his husky voice on this album -- a defiance and determination against mortality that makes all of his verses strangely affecting. That alone would make Hot Sauce Committee enough of a curiosity to be worth hearing.

But luckily, the thing don't stop -- it's lighthearted, goofy dance music that's both well-produced and impressively ill in its oldschool persuasions. The crunchy, scratch-funk sonics suit the group well and are appreciably quaint. Even if no one else in the mainstream seems to be aspiring to the traditional Grandmaster Flash sound these days, that music is as relevant as ever and the Beasties are willing to mine it with their ample skill, even if they continue to suffer from limited imagination. So there's nothing new here but if you really object to insistent earworms like "Nonstop Disco Powerpack," the towering "Crazy Ass Shit," and the convincingly pop radio-friendly "Don't Play No Game That I Can't Win," you think too damn much, man.

The whole album is consistent, fun from beginning to end, without any pacing lags or slow moments like those that have marred nearly all of the Beastie Boys' LPs since Check Your Head or so. It contains no breakout pop skull-smashing moments -- even the deathly boring To the 5 Boroughs had the delightful "Ch-Check It Out" -- so I can't really call it their best work since Paul's Boutique, but it's certainly their first record in twenty-odd years that doesn't feel padded out, coming in at a delightfully conservative forty-four minutes. It's enough of a party that you might even turn the record over and start over when it's done.

Real Estate: Days (2011)

(Domino)

RECOMMENDED

This ceaselessly friendly, backward looking '80s-styled New Jersey band crafts music that is as instantly appealing as it is impenetrably slight. Credit where credit's due, though: this is certainly one of the slickest guitar albums in recent memory, and Real Estate stands alongside bands like Local Natives and the Morning Benders in the crafting of almost supernaturally pleasant pop that's laconic and relaxing but never obnoxiously so. Days takes you back to the days when "chilled out" was an uncomplicated virtue.

As songwriters, Martin Courtney and his bandmates don't craft much that bubbles to the surface of their frothy jangle-pop basics. But while it's on, the stuff is undeniable, largely because of Courtney's hypnotically dreamy vocals. There is just as much filler on Days as on the band's 2009 debut, meandering instrumentals and aloof soft-rock shoegaze both, but everything's so flawlessly pretty it's hard to care too much while it's on. The issue is that nothing here leaves enough of an impression to merit an addiction, the same exact problem that kept me from completely embracing the band the first time around. But there's a case to be made that you don't always need memorable songcraft to warrant dogged devotion to a band. I, for one, used to fall asleep watching The Alternative on VH1 Classic when it dawned on me that college rock had its own pale formulas just like everything else. If irresistibly chiming guitars are enough to keep you coming back, this might be the album you've been waiting for; if you need something more, this will likely pass quickly but enjoyably through your digestive tract.

Still, as "Green Aisles" shows, there is something to Real Estate that they haven't quite yet figured out how to tap into: this ethereal and ghostly R.E.M. imitation conjures up such appealingly hazy, emotional imagery and nearly approaches the room-spinning perfection of a lot of the best '80s jangle pop. Repeat listens really get this one under your skin, and the subtly gorgeous underpinnings of material like "Younger Than Yesterday" slowly come into view, calling to mind the acoustic-vocal sorcery of Great Lake Swimmers or Smiley Smile. With time, this young band may prove to be in the noblest of traditions. As it is, they are masters of dreamlike atmosphere if nothing else.