Yo La Tengo: Stupid Things EP (2012)

(Matador)

RECOMMENDED

Though we've since heard more, this was the first taster of new material in a slightly appalling three years from the ordinarily prolific Yo La Tengo, a trio that we here at The Only Engine are not shy about proclaiming pretty much the best band in the world. In the meantime, with the exception of the Chris Knox cover "Colored," there'd been no one-off EP or scattered track. They've hardly, of course, been dormant -- their Spin the Wheel tour in 2011 quickly became infamous and controversial in a manner to which few other 27 year-old bands can claim access. Few people can logically claim this to be an artistically placid band, which is interesting when you consider where, say, the Rolling Stones sat after a comparable amount of time.

"Stupid Things" is a track from the forthcoming album Fade, but presented in a different mix; it's a gentle, driving, echoing oddity that signals a departure of sorts, not just because the band is working with a new producer, John McEntire, after nearly two decades with Roger Moutenot at the helm. The mix here is a sensual, enveloping thing that sounds familiar but wholly new and vaguely experimental, in common with the last album's first released cut "Here to Fall." The striking thing here is the lush, gorgeous string arrangement -- it's hard to get it out of your head, especially laid against that pressing, obsessive beat.

The only problem with this so-called EP is that it really doesn't deserve to be billed as such, coming across more as a glorified 12" or even 10" single, boasting simply three versions of the same cut. What's here is excellent, though. As bold an introduction as "Saturday" was to the muted glories of And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, "Stupid Things" is a honey of a track. It's joined here by a bizarre and not wholly successful remix that's nearly impossible to recognize, which, fine, have your fun. But the reason you should pay a few bucks and pick this up is the twelve-minute instrumental demo of the song that never intensifies or flags but remains beautiful and crucial, a hypnotic extended jam that doubles as a fascinating glimpse into the band's impenetrable process. I frankly wouldn't mind if they did this for every song they put out.

We try not to be straight up shills for the bands we like at this blog, but if you go to Matador's web store, you can pick this up in lovely 12" format for quite cheap. Aaaand not that we're suggesting we know anything about the quality of the subsequent album, but... buy that too.

[SEE ALSO:]
Popular Songs (2009)

Dum Dum Girls: End of Daze EP (2012)

(Sub Pop)

Feels drab to me, whether it's an "expansion" of this band's sound or not -- it consists of leftover tracks that were too slow and draggy for the album, with the result that the EP itself is, yes, slow and draggy. It opens up with a slightly industrial grinder called "Mine Tonight" which is a not uncomfortable shift away from one sort of traditionalism to another; in slow-dance mode, in "eulogy" mode even, it works.

But cast it and the rest of this passable entertainment in the shadow of the shimmery surf-soul of "I Got Nothing" and, well, you... eh, too easy. It's not even that "I Got Nothing" is a particularly grand song overall, as much its tuneful radio-ready chorus frankly soars to Shadow Morton levels, but it's such an impassioned and danceable creation that it does few favors to End of Daze overall, which comes out as a kind of quickened dirge that might have been more immersively dreary without it... yet also far less memorable.

All of the above is with the caveat that the EP bears the mark of an eager eclecticism, and hence will work well for those tuned into its aesthetic. Don't let the numb ones among us spoil it for you, maybe?

Also recommended in 2012

This informally gathers albums I liked but didn't have time to review at length, or covered elsewhere on the web. Depending on what sort of stuff you're into, each of these could well be a jewel waiting for your attention.



- Willis Earl Beal: Acousmatic Sorcery (XL)
Reviewed at Metro Times.

- Horse Feathers: Cynic's New Year (Kill Rock Stars)
Reviewed at Metro Times.

- WhoMadeWho: Brighter (Kompakt)
Reviewed at Metro Times.

- Yeasayer: Fragrant World (Secretly Canadian)
Review submitted to MT but unpublished: "Sensuality" isn't a word typically associated with indie rock these days, which is what makes the grown-up funk of Yeasayer's third album so exciting, druggy and lyrically oblique as it may be. With strange synth loops hovering above bass-heavy, adventurous arrangements from the Sign o' the Times school, cuts like "Henrietta" (about Henrietta Lacks, whose cancerous cells were infamously cultured in the 1950s) and "No Bones" have little trouble advancing these Brooklynites from the somewhat tempered pop of predecessor Odd Blood. As before, the vocals are arguably more full-bodied than the music, with Chris Keating's shiver and swagger lighting up songs that would otherwise get wrapped up in prog-fettered busyness. That's the only serious problem with Fragrant World, though it's a sizable one: Yeasayer can't curb their desire to stuff the experimental kitchen sink into each song, leaving us to enjoy the moments that don't get bogged down. Thankfully, only the slogging finale "Glass of the Microscope" fails outright, and when the band's varied ideas snap into place, as on the irresistible groove "Longevity," we get as lost as they do.

- Bonde do Rolê: Tropical/Bacanal (Mad Decent)
As dumb and liberating as anything on top 40, it's halfway between the B-52's and the fucking Baha Men or something -- a giddy, breezy listen in small doses, though.

- Ice Choir: Afar (Frenchkiss)
This (an offshoot of Pains of Being Pure of Heart, of all things) is close to a "highly recommended," but that's the OMD fan in me talking; if you thought Cut Copy convincingly duplicated mid-'80s synthpop, your head will explode when you hear this. It hits a sort of musical uncanny valley, by which I mean it provides such a negligible twist on what it's imitating that it doesn't contribute much... which is why it's a one-off, but it's fun anyway.

- Antibalas (Daptone)
Third-hand, well-recorded Afrobeat will piss off purists; whatevs, the songs are great.

- Lord Huron: Lonesome Dreams (PIAS)
Strongly informed by The Shepherd's Dog and the folk rock boom of the 2000s in general, this is an atmospheric series of pastoral selections that fogs up and meanders a lot but is never anything less than enjoyable. Better its harmless, robust prettiness than the robotically disaffected New Order-without-personality dance music that's made so many waves in indie circles this year.

The xx: Coexist (2012)

(Young Turks)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

There seems to be some mild eccentricity to the way I'm hearing this, as there was for Radiohead's The King of Limbs and its blatant but blatantly ignored tributes to dance-floor boffing; it all rests on what seems to me a pervasive and incorrect notion that pop music knows of only one way in which to be sensual. Bosh to that -- is anything sexier than the high-pitched weirdness of Mickey & Sylvia's "Love Is Strange" or Brian Wilson's androgynous role-playing on "Don't Worry Baby"? Forget the lyrics for a moment. For me there's something deeply, woundingly lovely about the very same elements of Coexist that have led so many to declare it a crashing, sparse bore -- the glitchy little beats that Jamie xx pops in and then forgets about, his array of half-formed distant sounds, and that almost uncomfortably intimate way that Oliver Sim and Romy Croft's voices meld together and cancel one another out. I swear I'm not hearing this simply because I fell hard for this album while sitting in an upstairs study room next to my betrothed. Am I?

Coexist calls back strongly to a few key trip-hop influences without actually copping to any of their musical totems; it isn't Everything But the Girl, it just runs with Tracey Thorn's ideas of how to express loneliness, emotional need and empathy in both lyrics and vocals while stripping the music down to its core. Only at one moment does this come across as something like a dance record, and that's a brief interlude in "Swept Away" which fades off quickly after a gradual transformation. But for all the aural minimalism, everything here rests on tension and soulfully big ideas -- that whole questionmark of young love (always young, because that's all there really is, right?), its obsessions and twistings and the simple questions of trying to live: the ones about how "we will be us," but how do you do that? Can you talk through all of it? Is life ever too short? Is a family formed by anything but compromise, and how much do you talk of it before it's time to give up? Can you depend on the idea that we'll always at least try for a while before we give up?

On a record that lives and dies by its songwriting, the personal-experience sourcing of these thoughts are everything, and Jamie xx senses this, evidenced by the brilliance of his unshowy precision here, which absorbs everything he's taken away from his whirlwind career since 2009. A nocturnal, wintry still overtakes these songs, but they remain distinctive because there are no distractions whatever. From "Angels" onward, it all seems to emanate from one's own skull and/or body -- it's aware of its drama but so carefully expresses it, "being as in love with you as I am," because it senses the actual universal importance of its themes. It's all a big romantic slowdance about how fucked up we are but maybe it will be okay? It will if we sing about it, right?

Hard to pick out highlights, harder still to avoid singling other bands out to make points that don't really need to be made (like how this is "soft rock" far more challenging and dangerous than you-know-who's). Hard still to get over the dually sympathetic agonizing of the two central voices -- Jamie Smith makes it all sonically agreeable but it's still a resonant contrast that drives a barely-sensed narrative, wisps swinging along like "we used to be closer than this" but told mostly with less explicitness. The story is all left turns and emotive transitions; it's not verbal, nor is love, but it's concerned in some way with the reconciliation of rationality with romance -- a struggle we all have to consider even if we can't conquer it. The hushed, heartfelt singing goes a long way. Jamie's like a sympathetic third wheel, just providing a stage, but he's what gives the thing its teeth.

Maybe you have to be a bit of a freakshow to think of this as the dance music of cold nights and wet streets, but it doesn't seem perverse or overly revealing to me to cast all this as an exploration of the sexuality of smallness. There's little about "Fiction" or "Missing" that's grand, but they both feel major. Croft's voice wails out wordlessly on the latter somewhere behind Sim's begging. Smith cuts off all the lights and preps during a pregnant moment for a stunning return, and then "my heart is beating in a different way." True love, right? The ringing guitars on "Fiction" are like a gravestone for the last few years and all their nostalgia-baiting within the genre subset to which this band belongs, ably contrasted by the Trent Reznor pounding on the verses, twice over when you notice the feverishly sincere romance and its vague suggestions of club hedonism call back to, of all things, U2 in the Pop period -- that band's final years as an interesting and artistically adventurous outlet -- sans bombast. Don't laugh, it's a more salient comparison than the more superficially obvious St. Etienne, who this year have no use for minimal, careful, sub-pop anything if they ever did.

I feel like maybe I'm overstressing Jamie xx's contribution here, but whereas his bandmates are what addict me to this and keep me coming back to it, it's Smith who makes it tick. His use of silence, for instance, is mindbendingly smart, and the oddball rhythms and sonic hidden-room fuckery are as surprising as they are easy to seep into. Point being, he gives the others room. By "Tides," which has an actual beat, the close listener is surely seduced. It comes together slowly as a harmonized anthem of sorts, a cry of "some things have lost their meaning" underscoring its depth of wanting. Bliss and loss are both inarticulate here, as they should be. I mean, "you don't answer when I call / I would've given you it all"? Fine, that's art, license, whatever. "Out of sight, out of mind / It doesn't mean you're not mine"? That's such a home run it hurts.

So there's the big secret, to romance in Hollywood and rock & roll and everywhere -- we need it because it's a comfort, even when it's the "real" thing, not the imagined thing, but the warm body that tells us the truth and sometimes -- hey, I said sometimes -- the truth is exactly what we need to hear, and that's young, old, middle-aged love, etc., in and out of study rooms and bedrooms and your lover's softly lit apartment, everywhere.

And that is the story of the LP record in 2012.

Brian Eno: Lux (2012)

(Warp)

RECOMMENDED

BREAKING !!!: Person who invented ambient music is good at it -- stay tuned for full story

So, yeah, this is exactly what you expect it to be; even the cover art is sort of a brightened-up museum version of Discreet Music, and so it is that this collection of pieces Eno installed in museums and, yes, airports is ideal for setting a mood and commanding a kind of relaxed background conversation. It plays things safer than Music for Airports or Apollo but shows no less taste and intelligence, and has quite the capacity for sapping tension and urgency away in favor of a coolheaded calm. Throughout the eighty minutes, separated into four quadrants, the tones seldom travel above or below a few repeated notes, so the trickery and fascination is all in the nature and pattern of that repetition, and much of those pleasures are subsconscious.

There's not a lot else to say about this -- if you like Eno's ambient work at all, for heaven's sake don't waste time picking it up, as it's certainly a return to form in such respects -- but I must quickly add that I once underestimated how much I appreciated Eno for giving his pure ambient creations names like "1/2" and "Lux 3" and "Inland Sea" instead of, say, "List of tallest buildings in the Inland Empire, Mark I: A Tale of Debt Arbitration" or "United States House of Representatives elections, 1898 (Wight Pusher Seaplane)."

[SEE ALSO:]
Drums Between the Bells [w/ Rick Holland] (2011)

Andrew Bird: Hands of Glory (2012)

(Mom + Pop)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

This collection of loose, almost haphazardly recorded throwaways is accidentally-on-purpose the strongest and most immediate music the ever-reliable Bird has released in many years, and that's coming from someone who loved Noble Beast. This is also, somewhat remarkably, his second full-length album of 2012 after Break It Yourself; that album was a weighty, ambitious and cerebral affair, especially in comparison to this spontaneous series of eight covers, self-covers, riffs on rustic tradition, and weird country-music jokes. Bird is a fine composer and musician in a classic sense, but to hear him cutting loose and having fun to this extent is a revelation on par with his giddy Bowl of Fire days.

Hands retains the full-band sonics of Break It Yourself but strips the acoustics down until the record gains the genuine acoustic minimalism of an old 78; opener "Three White Horses" is one of his best-ever tunes and could've sprung forth from the actual past or the past as painstakingly duplicated by Daptone or by the Asylum Street Spankers -- only with less effort, thus greater significance. Bird gives no regard to cohesion in moving on to the wild spiritual "When That Helicopter Comes" or the relentless fiddle goofoff "Railroad Bill." The second half sustains a mood more carefully, but only slightly, with Townes Van Zandt's "If I Needed You" treated to an emotional reading by Bird so sincere it's rather shocking in the context of his career, and the extended "Beyond the Valley of the White Horses" ambling prettily into the runoff groove with greater ease and charm than the analogous "Holes in the Ocean Floor" on the previous record, which was at least a minute shorter and felt longer.

Stripped of his indie leanings and the baroque fixation that began to take hold circa Weather Systems, Bird proves himself little more or less than an enthusiastic talent whose penchant for chameleon-like playing, singing, and writing is just an element of who he is. His relaxation and freedom to experiment betray a robust confidence that make Hands of Glory something much more than any given artist's collection of live-in-the-studio jams. It's a delight, a must for anyone who's ever been impressed by him, and I'll take this unlabored joy over the poky meanderings of certain other solo genre-busters any day.

[SEE ALSO:]
Noble Beast (2009)
Break It Yourself (2012)
Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire: Thrills (1998)

Kendrick Lamar: good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012)

(Interscope)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED [re-graded A+ in 2019]

Lamar is not kidding by labeling this "a short film." This is the sharpest narrative about troubled childhood and adolescence in LP form maybe ever, but certainly since the Mountain Goats' The Sunset Tree, and its hallmarks are cinematic: City of God, The 400 Blows, Breathless, Double Indemnity (the lust element), and Shoot the Piano Player, troubled people, usually young people, in troubled places, sometimes thrust upon them and sometimes of their own making. Lamar's narrative of swiping the keys to Mom's van and scampering out the door -- before she can demand an explanation -- in order to follow a pretty girl and get suddenly mixed up in a violent underworld is so vivid and personal that by the end of it all, in its wispy detail and carefully explored and evolving mood, you deeply wish it were a film. As it stands, there's little doubt it's the most emotionally affecting album of the year, and it's so clearly the best hip hop record since Kanye West's very different and completely outrageous My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy that it seems trite to even bother saying so.

It's a lot to grab hold of, largely because it's an album in the classic sense -- that is, like Loveless or 3 Feet High and Rising or Here, My Dear, it's far, far more than merely a collection of songs, and it stretches the boundaries of what a rock & roll album is and what it can do, how it can touch us. More than that, it doesn't even boast any songs that are particularly grand or distinctive out of context -- the hit "Swimming Pools (Drank)," for example, carries none of its power and scariness on the radio -- but listen to the thing in sequence and there's not a dud to be found, at least until a slight fizzling of power on the two closing tracks. We've known for years, anyway, that sad albums with this much that's dark and downbeat are seldom producers of great dance club tracks. Isn't that why Pet Shop Boys lost their entire American audience with Behavior? Whatever -- for those open to an experience that's fragmented, nonlinear, and naturally paced with a strong sense of journey, here is your album, all beautiful and ambitious. It effortlessly fuses the mainstream and the underground contingents of hip hop (Lamar now a Dre-endorsed hitmaker but not so long ago an indie-rap fixture) while retaining a wit and good-hearted intelligence that may not always survive such a transformative period.

Lamar's style remains paranoid, nervous, but here more reflective than before; one of his strongest and most distinctive capabilities is of playing roles as various aspects of himself, changing his voice nearly unrecognizably at times in tracking a transformation from precocious kid to wizened adult -- "the music of being young and dumb," as he puts it early on. His lyrics are perceptive ("I love so much I love when love hurts"), but the richly varied yet texture-consistent music requires little aid in telling his gripping story. So it is that "Sherane" opens the album in minimal, conversational and intimate fashion, the spell broken briefly by a humorous voicemail message that turns out to have great significance for the record's narrative and jets us into the Outkast-derived "Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe," the perfect example of Lamar's tricky syncopation and semi-sarcasm, broken by the periodic line that's as profound as anything you'll hear in pop music for a while yet. "I am a sinner who's probably gonna sin again," he announces, effortlessly setting up a spiritual undercurrent that will peak in an hour or so.

You wouldn't have to look far to find a variation on "Backseat Freestyle," fucking the world for 72 hours, that's entirely sincere in its eagerness and overconfidence, but Lamar puts on this distinctly adolescent air like a costume, generating a vocal that comes from an entirely different place than all else so far. Soon enough, on "The Art of Peer Pressure," he's clarifying his duplicity and conflict: "I'm a peacemaker, but I'm with the homies right now." As intensity gains -- the capturing of a city, nocturnal and desperate -- he narrates a first criminal offense with choking poetry, "circling death." The record could consist of little beyond those few minutes and still be a landmark.

But there's more. More, like "Money Trees" and its sweet abrasion, the chilled braggart "dream[ing] of livin' life like rappers do," the smoothless of a groove backdroped by the darkness of a terrifying lyric like "The one in front of the gun lives forever." More like the slow-jam of conflicted wants and fucked-up love ("a lot for me to take in") "Poetic Justice," and more like the '70s-infected Roots revision "Good Kid" and its goofy choral melodrama. Then the nightmare starts. The midsection of good kid, m.A.A.d city is a chronicle of gang violence as it falls upon a kid caught in a whirlwind -- gritty but unflinching, honest but as poetic and surreal as something only vaguely remembered. The first fifteen seconds of "m.A.A.d City" itself are as wild and commanding as anything here, and they spill out into the horrorshow insistence of the ugliest of this record's songs, addressing the permanence of violence: "You killed my cousin back in '94, fuck your truce." Yet again, Lamar tracks the contrast of the adolescent steeped in a culture and the bigness of the world around him -- his voice begins to crack as the skeletons in the closet come out, as Schoolboy Q lends him some harsh lessons about the street. And then, the hit.

"Swimming Pools" makes sense here, and it does play somewhat on its context as a prior radio success -- its starkness and rumblings of the conscience become a feverishly teenaged vision of young love and young damage, the trippiness of the extended portions fully earned, the devastating cut-through-the-bullshit tone of "All I have in life is my new appetite for failure" hardly Hot 97 bait, and then when the shots fire, it seems the perfect aural resignation, the signal that we can never crank up the van and really go home again, not to the place we left. "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst" is such an evocative title it's a pity it actually refers to two separate recordings, but steep yourself in their sincerity all the same: "Promise that you will sing about me" is a deep enough signal of fear and depression without the more on-the-nose "my mind is really distorted," but listen carefully. Lamar sings as a woman here, as a bent and human older man looking back there, and his barely scripted, barely restrained "I'll never fade away I'll never fade away" seem the waning call of the boy looking to reconnect, to get out, to escape. The song itself (songs, rather) evolves with Lamar's increasingly dark mood, from lite jazz to Danny Elfman schlock, until being "tired of running" from desperation down through the years leads us to the only redemption he sees as possible.

That's the available redemption. Who knows if it will enrich him, will free him, will liberate this kid. Let's hope it does, or did if this is reality. But there's a sense that the damage is done, especially on that last, horrible, moving message from the boy's parents, and especially again when we revisit the almost prepubescent kid on the Morning Of, trotting out the door telling his mom he'll be back in fifteen minutes. Rewind, fast forward, you can't change anything. Kendrick Lamar is a famous rapper who's recorded a genuinely great album now that may prove a masterpiece; others who've lived this tale or something like it, if by no means all of them, remain in permanent shadows. Lamar hasn't just presented a narrative that may or may not be but certainly feels strikingly personable and real; he's told a collective story that falls not on generational or societal lines but on the lines of adolescence itself -- and, inevitably, on race and class and Compton and America's treatment of, even awareness of, its own. Like one group put it when Lamar was four years old, "How will I make it? I won't, that's how." Little has changed. Will it ever?