Killer Mike: R.A.P. Music (2012)

(Williams Street)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

You can be forgiven if you put a new rap record on in 2012 and feel like you've entered a time warp when you hear this rapid-fire old school shit against a super-angry rant about Reagan; the only evidence, in fact, on the current apocalyptic single bearing the former president's name that this isn't the Iran Contra era is a (not very kind) reference to Barack Obama and the rather classic closing line: "I'm glad Reagan dead." Well, then. It's naive incendiary politics but how great and strange is it to hear such rage directed against matters that predate Mantronix? Killer Mike blows his horn about his literacy even as he makes conspiratorial accusations, though I doubt anyone would question that he's right about how we live in a world of a white-tinted single party system -- the right and the extreme right, naturally -- but that's dangerous talk right now in these last weeks of the danger of a Romney administration. As he puts it, "If I say anymore / They might be at my door." Cute. But we love rock stars with a thirst for awareness and education (lord, how I hate the word "consciousness") that's far outpaced by their imagination, the ones who can't keep their mouths shut; that's basically John Lennon, right? Lennon would've dug this record.

It's also strange to think of an album by a genre mainstay like Killer Mike as a breakthrough, but this really does burst out and forth like nothing he's done before; he comes out swinging from the first seconds of "Big Beast" on this immediately striking and intense record, the intensity of which never flags. That will come as a relief to those who feel hip hop albums have nearly universal pacing issues these days. If you're unfamiliar, you're unlikely not to respond to Mike if your tastes are centered at all on the bare touchstones of classicist rap music; Mike's professorial and aggressive like KRS-1 and he comes on with his brutal poetry and harsh messages in the best way, with just the right tinge of the celebratory. I mean, there's a lot of shouting and cackling and anger, but there's also the high school poetry class idiosyncrasy of his readings on "Anywhere But Here," which is a good measure of how convincingly Mike reaches for eternal youth here despite his mining of the past, and then there are these things like "Go!" which is two minutes of the most blistering insanity I've heard in any context lately. It sticks out but fits somehow, and that's how consistently surprising and odd R.A.P. Music is -- it pronounces but immediately evens out its own eccentricities.

The relentlessness of Mike's flow is complemented, maybe contrasted, here by the brilliant production of El-P, who honestly seems to put more effort into this than he does into his own work -- he matches Mike's rooted, throwback intensity and integrity with some of the most outlandish and backward-looking production of recent pop music, much less hip hop. Like Mike himself, El-P's work here manages to render itself both immersive and nostalgic, as though naturally and effortlessly engineered for the most massive possible appeal within those for whom this music is a biblical thing, which includes the artist himself if we're to trust the erudite appreciation of rap on the title cut. Dig the retro atmospheres of "Anywhere But Here," the almost Chromatics-like soft rock of the massive "Willie Burke Sherwood," the Atari shit synthpop of "Don't Die," the stomping, blurting funk of "Southern Fried." And even those don't match the cleverness of the urban paranoia on "Untitled," which is as salient a match of words to music as hip hop's produced in some time. Dammit, the thing's even good when it's kind of a little annoying, as on the Rick Rubin circa 1986 pastiche "JoJo's Chillin'."

You can't stress enough how much everything just comes together on this release. Mike and El-P run this thing like a killer MC/DJ combo, knowing just when to slice through all the aggression with some occasional smooth-as-hell groove that seems completely out of time, out of tune with everything we're hearing these days. You feel like you're floating in some posthumously invented era of the artists' own creation, a hip hop dream of sorts. "I don't trust the church of the government / Democrat, Republican." Yeah. This is the sound of an assured, accomplished veteran flaunting his skills a la Sign o' the Times. Mike gives a shit, he's coming on like a motherfucker and you'd better listen.

The Andrews Sisters: Best Of (1937-50)

(MCA)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

One of the easier pop music myths to dispel is that which holds that the Andrews Sister's immaculate appeal is purely generational. We might mistake it as such due to the automatic nostalgic mistiness their harmonies generate, but that's a function of the music itself rather than its era -- like Vera Lynn's aching wartime schmaltz on the other side of the Atlantic, their work is designed as timeless sentimentalism, to create a longing for home tempered by wit and a coy youthfulness. Everything about the feelings conjured up in "I'll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time" or "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me)" (recently used to devastating effect in The Master) is there through the will and desire of Maxene, LaVerne, Patty, and their arranger Vic Schoen.

But even if the sisters' body of work was explicitly tied to the exhaustive amounts of work they did during the War, much of it volunteered as a tribute to servicemen, the world they define is still one in which we live. No event of the last century continues to define our lives like the Second World War, and when we hear these songs now, even complete frivolities like "Say Si Si" and "Yes, My Darling Daughter," it stirs something immediate that isn't hindered by time even if it captures something about that time.

Between the '20s and their first serious breakup in the '50s, the Andrews Sisters recorded upward of 400 songs for Decca. By the time of LaVerne's death in 1967, that number had ballooned to close to 700. A heavy proportion of those first 400 are brilliant -- I can't speak with absolute authority but the couple hundred I've heard are consistently wonderful. This Best Of disc, a double-set put out by MCA eons ago, is as pleasant a place to start as any, and it carries some of the most crucial, innovative, and historically vital sides they issued, but the deeper problem here is how much material of the Andrews Sisters is next to impossible to track down. My own collection consists of this plus a few other wayward compilations and a slipshod library of discs, records, downloaded tracks, and other odds and ends. A boxed set is desperately needed.

As it is, though, you won't go wrong with any collection you pick up, as you'll consistently be warmed up by the adventurous and influential harmonizing, by Patty's seductive asides, by the general air of yearning, sentiment, and sensuality that's really like nothing else in our cultural annals; certainly material like "Daddy," "Rum and Coca Cola," and "Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh!" would've had a difficult time surviving the puritanical, Patti Page-heavy pop charts just ten years hence. (This set is missing the spectacular "Strip Polka," but it's not hard to find.) And of course you should demand that any Andrews Sisters CD you seek out contains the invaluables -- "Bei Mir Bist Du Schön," "Apple Tree," and of course "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," which brings us to the matter of just how startling this music can be.

The Andrews Sisters dabbled in jump blues, of course, as exemplified by "Bugle Boy," and that's exciting in itself -- but they also have songs dating from as early as 1939 that are virtually indistinguishable from rock & roll. Others did too, but no one with success on a level with the Andrews Sisters; the breathless "Well All Right" would sizzle in any era with its tremendously assured beat and winking, shouty, joyous refrain. The odyssey of the finest piano player in Texas, "Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar" is practically a manifesto; the rhythm he beats puts the cats in a trance. At one point in the Glenn Miller-arranged "Rum and Coca Cola," there's this moment when Patty is about to take over for her solo and drops everything for just a moment to get taken over by the rhythm then wink into the microphone with a sharp, direct, completely out-of-time "ah! You vex me, you vex me." That's everything. And it's mutual.

Beach House: Bloom (2012)

(Sub Pop)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

2010's Teen Dream crystallized Beach House's music into a perfect morsel of drone and sweetness, so the natural reaction of many fans to the terrific followup, Bloom, will be an accusation that it's "more of the same." Admittedly, this is quite true. The duo's sound is carried no further aside from a slight emphasis upon rhythm and electronics over shoegazing dream-pop -- but if songs are your thing, you're likely to find this their most immersive, moving effort to date.

The warm, dramatic "Myth" and gorgeously twisting "Lazuli," just to start, further Beach House's long-festering noise into the stuff of disco dreams -- in the proud and towering tradition of Cocteau Twins, they redefine escapist synth-filled forms as moments to live in and savor atop a secluded dance floor. Victoria Legrand's uniquely lilting, heavy voice, more transcendent than ever on "Wishes" and "New Year," provides the reassuring groundwork for this absorbing popcraft. Perhaps Bloom is just homing in on big ideas until they're more broadly accessible, but it has a flavor of confident, engagingly effortless beauty.

[Submitted to MT but unpublished. This record is close to a masterpiece and one of only a handful of truly exciting albums out this year. But you probably knew that already.]

Prince: Purple Rain (1984)

(Warner Bros.)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

Movie stardom is nothing, and boiling radio fever was familiar by now, but it's unmistakable that something's changed in Prince during the opening moments of Purple Rain. In stark, funeral echo, he makes what at first seems a mildly subversive announcement about being gathered here today to get through this thing called life, an "electric word" -- but after a few moments of playing along with the schtik we realize he's on some sort of a cuckoo rant involving "the afterworld," the "shrink" in "Beverly Hills" ("you know the one"), and a "world of neverending happiness." Prince being Prince is a concept familiar to us now, but in 1984 the seductiveness of his purposeful but abstract lunacy was fresh as cold water; it's pure chutzpah as performer, entertainer, and outsized personality that brings the entire world into his corner during the course of the next-to-shapeless party anthem "Let's Go Crazy." Not that his band, the Revolution, aren't a big part of the success of his records from this period, but it was sheer audacity on his part that transformed a terrific R&B singer into a cult of personality, a force of nature. The only conceivable comparison is imagining the Beatles attempting to make "She Loves You" and "Revolution 9" the same song.

Let's be clear: Prince made better albums before and after Purple Rain -- at the very least, 1999 and Sign o' the Times have a sprawl and heft to which it never aspires. But the alarming self-assurance of "Let's Go Crazy" indicates that which is proven over the eight cuts that follow: this is the peak of Prince as a pop performer, specifically the man who can justify a claim to having owned popular music throughout the '80s. The biggest share of the universe's attention belonged quite deservedly to Michael Jackson and Madonna, sure, but you had to search far and wide to find people who were passionate about music and weren't excited about Prince. He was like the Beatles in the '60s, Neil Young and Stevie Wonder in the '70s, Kanye West in the '00s -- critically, commercially, artistically, there was no touching him. And if we can get behind any one of his records as a manifesto, it's this one, hampered initially by its relation to a turgid and silly rock & roll movie but now easily standing out as a shining beacon of the best and most forward-thinking pockets of its era.

One measure of Purple Rain's success is that it's not tied into its era at all -- if anything, it still feels ahead of our time. We discover a Prince who's mostly shed the Minneapolis sound he helped to invent, instead building from the more left-field, experimental music he delivered on Dirty Mind and parts of 1999. Whereas songs like "Automatic" and "Let's Pretend We're Married" married their funk to a brooding, deliberate pace as they gathered mood and energy, the songs of Purple Rain are bursts of (mostly) brief enthusiasm that deliver ideas and retract them with invisible rapidity. It's possible, of course, to draw a line from his earliest radio hits, "Soft and Wet" or "I Wanna Be Your Lover" or "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad," to something like "I Would Die 4 U," which has some shred of tradition in its grooves. And yet it perversely sounds like nothing that came before, shedding all but its ghostly electronic rhythm section and a lonely, frantic vocal, in addition to a clipped, awkward, repetitive verse/chorus that eventually explodes into an even more bizarrely frenzied instrumental bridge. It's all over before you know it, before you even have time to process it, but it's immensely pleasurable. It feels perfect, carved in stone, and immediately familiar. But who else but Prince could do it? Who could duplicate it now?

In sum total, this feels like the most innovative straight pop record since the '60s. Prince goes for broke on it, shooting for the broadest possible contingent and courting a mainstream rock audience by both simplifying and building atop the soul music principles that were once his foundation. It's a careful practice of shedding and growth, and we don't hear much of it now because the concept of "mainstream" has changed so much, but there was a time when it was possible to become stranger, more unique, while building a larger fanbase and in fact infiltrating the top tier of the Billboard 200. For the rest of the decade, Prince's singles would remain uncompromising, off-putting, surreal -- and intensely popular. We have no one capable of such madness now. It's a wonder we ever did.

Like those early Beatles singles, it all has the subliminally affecting energy of an alien missive of some sort, inspiring shrieking disbelief and pleasure that some could (and did, almost immediately) call sinister and vile. The urgency of "Take Me with U" is pure pop only slightly mussed up by its sly string gags and supernatural catchiness, but where Prince proves his prowess over the formation of abstract ideas into pop and over the pop audience itself is on the elaborate tangents that mark material like "Computer Blue," a truly otherworldly creation that captures all the spoken-word innuendo, oddball jamming, and sensual infectiousness into less than half the length of "Automatic," and caps it all off with backmasking a la "Rain." It then segues into "Darling Nikki," a witty and terrifying concoction that responds to no heretofore known standard of either R&B or pop but hasn't the shade of experimentation or noodling. Rather, it creates its own landscape and runs brazenly on top of it, Prince appropriately giddy and impassioned over the story of the girl "masturbating with a magazine" who had "so many devices" in her apartment and left a note in the morning about calling "whenever you wanna grind." It sent people into a tizzy, including Congress, who couldn't admit how it related to them so they started putting stickers on all our CDs instead.

The irony, of course, is that Purple Rain is now in the National Recording Registry; Tipper Gore and Prince in their present incarnations are absent of influence or importance, but these songs ring out and last. Their elevation of batshit songforms continues to provoke in wildly different ways, a few decades removed. "When Doves Cry" still soars on the radio and still sounds brand new, its bass-free, suspiciously invigorating anxiety and anguish continuing the capture the imagination of untold numbers daily, whether listeners get to hear the version that descends into sinister, chant-like bellowing and electronic mystery or not. The massive excellence of something that pushes forward as much as "The Beautiful Ones," a show-stopping showcase for this masterful writer and instrumentalist, displays the aptitude of Prince to mask his ingenuity with torch-song expertise. Like the whole record, it's the best of everything.

In the film Purple Rain, the title song serves as an emotional climax, meant to signify the Prince character's stripping away of disdain for the world beyond himself. On the record, it comes across as a deliberate outlier; it's every bit the standard ballad "The Beautiful Ones" is not, yet it became a signature and a classic because Prince's mannered appropriation of the conventions therein is marked by such disarming sincerity, in context at least, that it's akin to learning about the depths in the heart of an intellectual giant. This is the point when Prince strips away all of the business and surrealism and goofing around and he'll use that angelic, versatile voice of his and guitar-hero his heart out in an eight-minute potboiler made for radio, for making out, for every kind of international utility you can picture. And he recites his lyrics about regret and causing pain and, oh, all the same stuff singer-songwriter dudes always sing about regretting -- like it's just you and him. And, you know, a few million other people, all transfixed and adoring, all in the palm of his hand for several years to come. Not an infinite number of years, mind you, but enough.

[SEE ALSO:]
Dirty Mind (1980)
Controversy (1981)
1999 (1982)

The Tallest Man on Earth: There's No Leaving Now (2012)

(Dead Oceans)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Read my Metro Times review.

I like what Kristian Matsson is doing with his life. So far, past album number one, he has refused to go for broke with his obvious abilities; instead his records have become more deliberate, more subtle, and more brooding. That's my kind of singer-songwriter. His other records were ideal for long drives in the spring and summer. This one is designed for moping at home. Keep it in mind this autumn.

[SEE ALSO:]
Sometimes the Blues Is Just a Passing Bird EP (2010)

Hank Locklin: RCA Country Legends (1956-68)

(RCA)

RECOMMENDED

Though he's outpaced in influence and long-lasting mass appeal by a hefty handful of his peers, Hank Williams down to Patsy Cline and beyond, this sweet-natured, melancholy tenor passionately embodied the pure heart of country music at its artistic peak. The genre's most rabid cultists regularly name his early RCA recordings as among the basest pleasures of the period, a zenith of stark and direct expression from a real entertainer of the old sort. His time playing before audiences ranged from the 1930s to the late '70s, though he'd spend his last few decades in seclusion before passing in 2003. As a result, he captures so much of a certain American dream, the ideal of the high school dropout chasing something for love and somehow succeeding, across transformative decades.

Lockin's voice is naturally chirpy and cheery, which can be off-putting at first for those used to spinning the AM dial to hear the barely-contained desperation of someone like Williams, or the deadpan misery and irony of a Johnny Cash, but the smallness and classical sweetness of the singing is what makes a tearful tune like "Livin' Alone" feel sincerely heartfelt rather than just generic, and what sets alight the tired musical and lyrical conceits of "Geisha Girl."  Locklin tended to ignore trends, which is one reason his work has aged well (though perversely, also a reason it hasn't survived particularly well into subsequent generations), so the proto-rockabilly shades of "Why Baby Why" serve mostly to prove how much teenage music of the period owed to ideas that had floated around radio for at least a generation. The most brilliant of the rockabilly singers always went for the jugular, intending to bruise, a hit-and-run, and with the possible exception of Gene Vincent, you'll never find anything in their catalogs that offers up a vocal as sophisticated as that of Locklin on "Why Baby Why," on which he exercises the remarkable collision of the gentle and the operatic.

That knowing humanity was by design, however, and Locklin has a tightly controlled voice that suggests the Depression as his period of entrance into the performing world; as a result he seldom loses himself outright. When he soars, as on "It's a Little More Like Heaven," it's because he means to. On this entire, brief compilation, the pleasures are consistent; fans maintain that not only is this only the beginning, but that it's actually the bottom tier of Locklin's output -- it's often argued that he's never enjoyed the cachet of a true legend in America as he does overseas, particularly in England and Germany, where his most esoteric work is lovingly gathered and collected and studied. This disc only scratches the surface, presumably, of understanding Locklin -- but these are indeed the songs that brought him his greatest period of fame Stateside, so they must operate as a firm starting point.

Besides, even in just sixteen tracks, this collection exposes an excellent primer not just on Locklin's own vocal range but on the varied utility a singular voice, even an ostensibly limited if gifted one, can have in popular music -- the contrast on the two best tunes here, the mournful "Please Help Me, I'm Falling," a true country classic, and the jubliant and gigantic "We're Gonna Go Fishin'," one of the most unpretentiously joyous singles of the early '60s, is just as gratifying and fascinating as the more-than-competent read on the future standard "Send Me the Pillow That You Dream On," which paid the bills and sent Locklin into a permanent radio oblivion for years to come. Overseas importance notwithstanding, that's a fine enough legacy, isn't it? Turn your AM dial just the right way and you can still hear the late Locklin wailing out into the ether about his longing for you, livin' alone and wanting to dream on that pillow too. There's apparently far more to his legacy, but you know, even if there wasn't...

Hot Chip: In Our Heads (2012)

(Domino)

RECOMMENDED

Read my Metro Times review.

Read some more, less organized thoughts.

One of the biggest surprises of the year is that that's not a "highly recommended" tag up there.

[SEE ALSO:]
Made in the Dark (2008)
One Life Stand (2010)