Julia Holter: Ekstasis (2012)

(Rvng)

!! CAUTION !!

Good lord, man.

Alexi Murdoch: Four Songs EP (2002)

(s/r)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Ten years later, this self-issued (on CDBaby!), twenty-minute curio remains Alexi Murdoch's most striking release. Despite its modest origins, it accompanies Murdoch's staunchly traditionalist singing and melodies with surprisingly complete and intelligent arrangements that know precisely when to stop and breathe; the same can't really be said for the polished precision of his subsequent work, as shown clearly by the comparative weakness heard in three of these songs when later rerecorded for a larger audience.

It's somewhat overstated at this point, but still inescapable, that Murdoch is in the Nick Drake mold. Really, he sounds uncannily like Drake at times, to the point that we might think of him as a considerably more well-adjusted version of same. Perhaps the major difference, which has turned on or off his primary audience of pseudo-bohemian art-folkies and people who really loved Away We Go, is what a coy showman he is. Though its populace runs on a parallel to, you know, the real one, this is still essentially populist music in the sense that it gives precisely what one wants when putting it on. There are moments, certainly in my life and I'm sure in many, when nothing sounds more right than these hazy, cloudy, relentlessly pretty and rugged anthems-of-quiet. It's hard to explain how deep this can burrow into you, and not many singer-songwriters of any period could achieve that quite this succinctly.

So as I'm sure I've posited before, all this time-stopping, introspective intensity is very likely a put-on because Murdoch knows it works, but that doesn't change that last bit: it works, and he's great at it. This brief record is masterfully paced, to boot, not just in the dive-and-wallow-and-emerge run of the songs but within each of them. There's something mildly magic to the way that the tension of "Blue Mind" never quite breaks, that each half climaxes with a carefully arranged catharsis in which something warm and persuasive and familiar breaks out of everything. At the end there's that humming whispering final act of "Song for You," but my single favorite moment in all of Murdoch's recorded output is that open-armed, humbled, breathlessly direct and resigned "my salvation lies in your love" chorus on this original recording of "Orange Sky." It feels right and true to me, an undramatic evocation of exactly what it says, and it gets me every time.

[SEE ALSO:]
Time without Consequence (2006)

The Men: Open Your Heart (2012)

(Sacred Bones)

RECOMMENDED

Open Your Heart, the second record by poorly named Brooklyn punks the Men (surely more than one of us remembers the shitty modern rock band of the same name with a radio staple or two from what doesn't seem like a long time ago?), is one of the more exciting and enjoyable rock albums making the rounds at the moment. What's intriguing about it, though, is how expansive it is without reaching far beyond a simple guitar-band setup with slightly outsized college-rock ambitions. Most telling is that with a couple of exceptions, the tunes are far more engaging and pronounced when heard together -- emphasized by the seguing between songs, an increasing rarity in the iTunes age -- than when shuffled around with other material. "Ex-Dreams" skirted right past me when it was sent to me as a promo early this year; as the closing track of this dizzying album, though, the grunging goes somewhere because it's not one of the directions already laid out. Its instructive Sonic Youth melody is more impressive when you consider the ground covered on the rest of the LP.

"Punk" really isn't the half of it -- yet it's all of it. With bedroom laptoppery constantly mining pop's past, now it's the guitar band's turn to appropriate the well-worn and well-loved excesses of Wire (thrashy "Cube"), early My Bloody Valentine ("Please Don't Go Away"), Joy Division ("Oscillation"), Burma and the Buzzcocks ("Open Your Heart"), and the Replacements ("Candy"). Yet everything here identifiably belongs together, pieces of the same band's tangent. The result is a record of pleasing throwback eclecticism that sometimes reaches wonderful heights, all with a certain cozy consistency.

It also sometimes crosses over into what sounds like an unwillingness to focus -- the crass, metallic aggression of "Turn It Around" is just faintly turned around to reveal the glam "Animal," and there's nothing indulgent or excessive but the veering off into other directions gives the faster, more "expected" material a hint of boredom and restlessness, especially when such tracks are mostly clumped together at the beginning and end. Because the instant "Country Song" starts, with its stunning distortion binge contemplatively hunkering down to give you something you'd like to fucking live in, it's whiplash -- culminating in the catharsis of the seven-minute "Oscillation," intense and drowning and eventually gathering itself into an impenetrable roar. Then suddenly, it's off to the anguished drama and oooooohs of "Please Don't Go Away." It's a funhouse restlessness, and it gives the Men an air of mystery that's both ingratiating and frustrating.

No one would really care, for instance, if just any Brooklyn punk band (lord knows there are enough of 'em!) put "Cube" and "Ex-Dreams" and "Animal" all on an album together of songs that were written and recorded in that brash aesthetic. But it feels like a point is being belabored when roughly half the songs on Open Your Heart read in that context and each of the five others is off in its own separate facility and sensibility. That strange imbalance is the only thing that makes this hard to love, and perhaps it's deliberate.

At its best, this is a thrilling album. It shares its title with a song on which the eponymous sentiment seems fully appropriate, a lilting and triumphant love-song melody triumphantly sung and played as a prodding anthem, strongly suggestive of Hüsker Dü (the apocalyptic bridge in particular) -- except these Men are still shouting, begging for acceptance. If they didn't find it already, surely you'll be seduced by "Candy," the best of their gleeful experiments by a considerable margin. The voice is Paul Westerberg, easy, but the writing is all sulking hard-drinking Stones, a Let It Bleed-like, gorgeous countrified anthem so assured and mature and uncompromisingly abrasive it makes you stop in your tracks, and fully recontextualizes all that's around it. Effortless, too, as if made by people who didn't care how it sounded -- it just seems to snap into place.

Of course, being a band that exists, the Men have also heard of the Velvet Underground, and given that the glorious can't-say-enough-about-it "Candy" is such an outlier, the true measure of the Men's (any band's) success is how good their VU moment is. The psyched out "Presence" owes a debt to the 13th Floor Elevators and Galaxie 500 as well, all disaffected drone like a guy pretending not to feel worshipful of the sounds his guitar can generate; the measure of its excellence is how you keep expecting it to break into "Here She Comes Now."

It's hard to say yet if the Men will find a way to either harness the sprawl in a more controlled and ultimately satisfying manner or if they'll simply keep tinkering with song-to-song makeovers like these, but the world can easily be theirs if they want it. Open Your Heart is an arresting document of a gifted, powerful young band at that perfect moment of feeling invincible and infinite -- and willing, naturally, to try just about anything.

John Coltrane: Ballads (1962)

(Impulse!)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

Like most who've fallen under the Coltrane spell, I believe Giant Steps and A Love Supreme to be the essential works of one of the 20th century's major creative forces. After that, I diverge from the norm unequivocally. For one thing, I believe his "free jazz" peripheral items like Om to be among the most beautiful music he ever recorded, and that Africa/Brass is easily as innovative and influential as A Love Supreme. And then there's Ballads, one of the biggest sources of controversy among Coltrane scholars. The common accusation is that he didn't want to record it at all, that it was a concession to Impulse! and a reactionary move against criticism of his hard bop records (and Africa/Brass). Believed it be laid down quickly in a slapdash manner, it's seen more than anything as a step backward -- an album of standards that includes no music actually written by Coltrane himself. I don't really know or care how much of this is true; I wouldn't put it past even an idiosyncratic record label to worry itself sick over an artist's direction. It's my firm feeling, however, that there are nearly no more intense pleasures available to us as music listeners than Ballads.

And more to the point, I would put it past Coltrane to not care about something he recorded. I don't honestly believe that he was capable of getting drawn into such apathy -- not to paint him as saintly, but this is simple mathematics: terribly young at the time he died (40), he never had time to screw up or to become the jaded business-worn figure, prolific though he may have been. The serious reason I think the "all standards" controversy is bunk, though, is the nature of jazz itself as formed in the hands of people like Coltrane. Clearly, these standards are a mere launching pad for a collection of ideas by a fascinating and robust quartet. It's fair enough to suggest that those ideas are necessarily less vibrant and prescient than those typically explored by Coltrane's various units, but it's nevertheless a stirring feat to hear his fully developed musicianship in service of material that in so many hands would seem tired and basic, witness the very use of the term "standard." If you don't accept that logic, which you really should, fine, think of this as a vacation with John Coltrane to the French Riviera or something. That's no less beautiful than the act of turning jazz on its head with every packed-in note, it's just something else, some other mood this extraordinarily gifted individual was able to give off.

Ballads is the sharpest and most confident of Coltrane's romances, with warmth enough in its introspection to make a listener feel lifted and embraced. It's not simply a performance of songs, it's a definitive recasting of them as golden seduction. The seduction wastes no time; the gentle swaying of "Say It" is instantly tempered by the sophisticated playing of Coltrane as well as McCoy Tyner's hopping, charged piano. Convention gets turned around just slightly throughout both sides of the record; "What's New," for instance, is almost a straight read but with just a touch of the giddily arrhythmic. "I Wish I Knew," by contrast, might add nothing more than that extra sense of yearning to the sax, but it's so much more powerful than such a simple word as "yearning" can get across.

That's because the playing here is so deeply felt, as always, but amazingly just as much so on distant items like these worn-down songs. Coltrane plays both tenor and soprano here, as on My Favorite Things and Africa/Brass, and charges into the emotional center of each track as a vocalist typically would. The entire band does superlative work here, though, supposedly basing their recorded arrangements and performances on only a limited knowledge of the songs and a painfully brief rehearsal for each cut. That's hard to believe considering the intricacy of, to start with, "You Don't Know What Love Is" and "All or Nothing at All." The latter has Elvin Jones starkly pound out a drum introduction with a building, cascading rhythm suggestive of later, wilder freedoms. The song that develops is gloriously illusory, like a mutated bossa nova, a thing so vague that it somehow can't be reached, but as the chaos mounts it features as well the most lyrical sax line on the record -- until tune and sense are slowly and sensually lost.

It's "You Don't Know What Love Is," however, that most conveniently defines the tremendous artistry and immediate appeal of the Ballads aesthetic. Another galvanizing introduction washes over us with drummer Jones pulsing inward -- a wet and disorganized pathway into total bliss -- until stabbing, angular single notes and an abrasive arrangement contrast on the verses with the sax flowing outward -- all growing clearer and more traditional as the clock ticks, until it seems to fall together tantalizingly just before it ends. It's an arresting performance, but most importantly one that's both engagingly strange and gut-level beautiful. That keen sense of the immediate in even the most unexpected setting actually points the way ahead to A Love Supreme.

Like nearly all of Coltrane's work, Ballads is designed to reward careful listening, even if its central conceit and pretense seems to be the crafting of dinner music. Dinner music, great as it may be, seldom shimmers like this, and it's hard to ignore or escape the knowledge that these songs are impossibly elevated beyond their origins. They may be worthy of their status or not, they probably are, but it's Coltrane's actions and violence upon them that matter. Even at the album's most conventional, it's still nocturnal joy ("It's Easy to Remember") with a pulse-pounding undercurrent of frayed, serious, messed-up love and sex. The most beautiful, involving, and (why not) danceable of these songs is "Too Young to Go Steady," the band unbelievably tight with its arrangement's consistent pressing onward, backdropping the sheer and absolutely knowing nature of Coltrane's sax playing. When this crisp, indomitable Ballads whispers off into the night with its lonely crystalline sound, you feel you've heard much more than a simple Coltrane album of jazz-standard covers. But hell, that would be enough anyway, I'm pretty sure.

[SEE ALSO:]
Giant Steps (1960)
A Love Supreme (1964)

Perfume Genius: Put Your Back N 2 It (2012)

(Matador)

RECOMMENDED

Mike Hadreas' song "Hood" is, no words minced, a masterpiece. Released as the single from his second album as Perfume Genius, it sparkles out clearly as a raw moment of entirely unguarded expression -- from its bare-minimum, haunted "you'd never call me baby if you knew the truth" hook to the unfiltered catharsis of its piano explosion, the thing is an act of emotional terrorism. In exactly two minutes it moves, crushes, and challenges, a seemingly one-on-one communique on which we're invited to listen in. You wish it wouldn't end so quickly, and yet it's perfect that it does, and invites the kind of repeated-listening obsession you can't believe you're subjecting yourself to.

The side effect of "Hood" is it makes everything else on this entirely pleasant and often touching record sound slightly drab, purely a consequence of its everything-falling-together-in-proportion perfection. If you enjoy the key track, there's little doubt that you'll find some things to appreciate on the LP despite the far-outlying nature of its peak. The stark, stunning intimacy appears throughout the record, with excellent use of minimalist sounds like the terminally sad plinking piano on "AWOL Marine," the subdued string arrangement on the dramatic "17," the intricate and whispery dreampop of "Floating Spit."

But despite the command Hadreas exhibits in his best moments -- he knows his way around a classicist piano ballad for sure, as "Hood" and "Take Me Home" prove most immediately -- many of the peripheral songs here have a tendency to sort of float away unnoticed, and paying extra-careful attention doesn't seem to help much. A chunk of the tunes just aren't quite "there" yet, but of course when they connect, they soar. The second best cut is likely "Dark Parts," which brings in some faint pop propulsion but succeeds greatly on the basis of its aching lyric ("I will take the dark part of your heart into my heart," a flooring, deep-rooted sentiment that becomes all the more so when you discover he wrote the song for his mother), but the complex subtlety of the melody on the busy "Floating Spit" points a bright way forward as well. It's easy to guess that this is only the beginning, and Hadreas will be gradually developing into the capable and assured artist he already sometimes hints at being.

Hadreas' voice -- sometimes passing from "lovely" into "moony" -- will remind many of Sufjan Stevens, something amplified by their similar tastes for an almost painful-to-us vulnerability and a regular surrender to pure prettiness that Hadreas seems to be working actually a bit too hard to temper. ("All Waters" is a dirge, "Put Your Back N 2 It" is not nearly so exciting as its title implies, and if you're anything like me you spend "Sister Song" wishing he'd break into a spirited rendition of the Magnetic Fields' "Drive On, Driver.") What makes the record a bit of a task to listen to is not his musical tastes but the sometimes harrowing suggestion of a complex and tortured history -- put in your time and it rewards you, but in the dramatic funeral wheeze baroque "No Tear," the wounds are plain and deep. The record's like a hymnal for perceived sin, lush but subversive, brief (32:13) and confessional. Caught in the right mindset, it's also downright heavenly.

But there is fun to be had here; as stunning as that video for "Hood" is, featuring Hadreas locked in loving embrace with porn actor Aprad Miklos, it's also quite playful. The uneasily direct and soulful Millay poetry reading "Dirge" isn't one, and the hushed, shaky waltz "Normal Song" offers a bit of release and hope: "Take my hand when you are scared," he sings, and it's the quiet fruition of the redemption longed for on "Hood" -- yet it's "Hood" we come back to. Can't help wondering what that means.

L7: Smell the Magic (1990)

(Sub Pop)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The riot grrl movement was one of the cultural miracles of the early '90s, and what a pity that my suburban backwards southern modern rock station utterly ignored it (Garbage and Hole were as close as it came, and that's not much consolation); it seems almost unfair to play up or praise L7, one of the best bands of the decade, on the basis of their refusal to cooperate with rockist gender roles, but it's equally uncouth to ignore that element. You know what made this music special and empowering? It wasn't some reductive "women can scream and rock too" pandering to radio formats, L7 was empowering and heroic because they didn't give a fuck. It wasn't that they busted open gender roles and rewrote "the rules" or whatever, it was they refused to accept that those things even began to matter. They laughed in the face of the idea of pinning them down as "female music," of "female music" being a thing at all, which it isn't. But is it nevertheless fair for a privileged white male to say he finds this music galvanizing and glorious in some part as a result of that specific refusal to adhere to "tradition"? I certainly hope so, and I have to imagine it has some considerable role in explaining why I love this band's records despite never being (and still not being) a fan of metal, trash, "hard rock," virtually any harder-edged guitar-driven material. This, though. This speaks to me.

My affinity, for years now, has always been to L7's subsequent commercial semi-breakthrough Bricks Are Heavy, but that's mostly because I hadn't spent much time with their earlier work until recently. This second album, which was originally an EP but was later repackaged with additional tracks and now may as well be considered a stopgap between L7 and Bricks, is a gem. It's reasonable, of course, to be curious about why the sort of person who can't stand obvious markers like Zeppelin and Sabbath would love this, and no, it's not because it's "female music." It's the songs, man. Songs. They are almost painfully sharp and melodic, such a strong strengthening of their prior work, full of towering, leery menace that's also totally pop. So L7 appropriates the classic rock tropes without compromise, but also redefines them -- gleefully.

Donita Sparks, Suzi Gardner, and Jennifer Finch trade lead vocals back and forth but it's Gardner who makes the outlandish and throttling initial impression with her spitting out and screeching of "Shove," a splendidly nonchalant and totally assured anthem that captures that feeling of nightclub electricity in a tiny room like few recorded pop songs can. The aggression sets the stage beautifully, and it's not a stretch to imagine this all as a blistering live recording, on a scarring night to remember. "Fast and Frightening" has that nocturnal, dark mercilessness, Sparks letting loose whoppers like "straight girls wish they were dykes" and the magnificent manifesto "got so much clit she don't need no balls." But the hardness is deceptive; what it really reaches back to is rockabilly, especially Eddie Cochran and Dale Hawkins.

You really don't have to listen hard to note such clear-cut yet appealingly realized influences, quite apart from the towering guitar funk exercise "(Right On) Thru" and the outstanding garage rock "Deathwish"; and god bless them, in our 2012 context, for not being wholly indebted to Lesley Gore and the Ronettes as is now the parlance of so much surf-punk and hardcore, led by men or women. Nothing against those wonderful artists, of course, but it's so much more interesting to hear a band with a classicist rock & roll sound that's interested in riffing on the Monkees ("Packin' a Rod," sneering joy) or Paul Revere & the Raiders by way of the Ramones ("Just Like Me," boasting an unforgettable riff). There's even a place for British new wave, so unfairly disdained by most of the U.S. indie-rock underground of the period, on the methodical and bottom-heavy "Broomstick."

At its best, Smell the Magic causes a streaming out of hyperbole. The total headfuck "Till the Wheels Fall Off" drives on and on intensely, the sort of thing that generated the rock standby adjective "face-melting"; and the tormenting earworm "American Society," aside from anticipating the hit "Pretend We're Dead" with its riff, peaks with an honestly glorious refrain. And that one was originally an outtake!

Sweltering and exhausting, this is a stunning leap beyond L7's debut, and you know it's gotten under your skin by how fast it seems to skitter by -- at a mere thirty minutes, it feels much shorter. For me, this is so much more vital than anything produced by the concurrent grunge movement, and though my teenage self was happy with all the Pearl Jam and Hole and Live and Garbage on the radio, I have this perpetual feeling that I missed the actual '90s and the broadening of thoughts and horizons it might have given me because I wasn't turned on to L7 at the time. The same goes for bands like Luna and Pavement, but who knows -- if I'd been aware of L7 in my formative years, maybe it would have had such an effect on me that I would have a taste for classic rock and metal in my twenties! It's an outlying possibility, but this record is such a consistent and addictive pleasure I can actually imagine it happening. You never know, right?

[SEE ALSO:]
L7 (1988)

Lambchop: Mr. M (2012)

(Merge)

RECOMMENDED

To open with a bit of honesty: I'm not altogether familiar with Lambchop outside of their peripheral involvement with other bands and the chapter about them in Our Noise. The only record I've heard by them prior to this one is 1996's How I Quit Smoking. One of the stories that sticks out for me from the book is how cathartically emotional the band's concert appearances are reported to be, especially in Europe where they enjoy considerably more celebration than stateside. Spending time with their new record, Kurt Wagner's hushed and grieving tribute to the late Vic Chesnutt, I can easily understand why so many are reduced to tears when seeing them. But my lack of context prevents this from being a more comprehensive review; I'm inspired certainly to catch up on Lambchop and then one hopes I will be able to speak about Mr. M more articulately. For now: it's involving, lilting, immersive, and it's working for me more than all but a handful of the records released thus far in this dismal year.

Disarming as the profane "If Not I'll Die" is with its dreamy Wizard of Oz strings, it gathers us into the meditative slow burn of the album's particularly strong first half. Songs like "2B2" and "Gone Tomorrow" screw darkly into a moment, minor-key moods with quiet monetum, a sad and spirited reluctance to snap out of it. The latter is particularly beautiful, its gentle shuffling jam slowly building to a stunning slight lift from "Ceremony" at the climax. The theme of obsessively slowed-down dance music happily carries through to the immersive "Mr. Met" with its crawling bass riff, but Wagner and company interestingly seem to lose themselves most of all on a pair of instrumentals. "Gar" is unabashedly sweet with calm piano and Bowie-like harmonies that seems to beg for some oblique entrance to a '70s rock playlist alongside Eno and Rundgren; and "Betty's Overture" is a score without a film, lovably suggestive of Beautiful Music.

Mr. M fades out slowly, harping on the phenomenon of nearly melody-free prettiness on "Nice Without Mercy" and only very occasionally starting to drag. The romantic simplicity is always tempered by sadness, and occasionally the chilly cynicism of something like the catchy manifesto "The Good Life (Is Wasted)." Wagner's vocals weave quietly in and out of band performances that are routinely impressive but seldom call excessive attention unto themselves. Without any setting up whatsoever, you get the sense that this is a band worthy of a particularly fiery sort of passion -- and more of us should be following them.