Oneohtrix Point Never: R Plus Seven (2013)

(Warp)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

There's something comfortingly old-fashioned about Daniel Lopatin, and not merely because his new album evokes "Revolution 9," old MIDI keyboards, Art of Noise and (on "Inside World") Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Even though his breakthrough records Returnal and Replica arrived in sync with -- and seemed of a piece with -- the peak of lo-fi bedroom music, his work as Oneohtrix Point Never suggests a kind of invention that's somehow younger, less labored, and more magical: kids playing around with VHS dubs for the hell of it, getting a kick out of the humorous trickiness of it all and the sensation of making things whoosh around before they bite, even as they always move with a purpose. R Plus Seven, a formidable achievement and his best record to date, feels like the fruit of one feverishly creative late night, even as we know such an image has been painstakingly cultivated in a real actual recording studio.

R marks Lopatin's move to prestigious Warp Records, and while it doesn't entirely leave behind the alienating drones of yore, it makes no secret of its sense of absurd fun in all its musique concrete aspirations. This is not straightforward ambient or electronic music, nor is it an act of ear-teasing aural experimentation like Nicolas Jaar's Space Is Only Noise; it's more like a movement of sorts, of teasing and usually engrossing waves of sound bumping against each other as often as they build or merge. The quintessential track is probably the second, "Americans," with its callback to the electronic tongs and heavy kalimba of early '90s worldbeat coalescing into both menace and beauty. The siren sounds and half-voice restlessness have a structure of their own, and they eventually build into a fussy but beautiful Kate Bush-like crescendo. The entire bizarre creation is bright, fragmented, and surprisingly sweet.

One reason Lopatin maintains attention for the full breadth of these forty-three minutes: the songs, already full of eternally shapeshifting life, don't go on for long -- not for Oneohtrix is the idea of a mere trance, a wander off into nowhere. At least not anymore. "He She" tampers with MIDI voices teasingly and fascinatingly for all of a minute and a half. All of R Plus Seven is structured with a sense of brevity, and with the fortifying and careful distribution (occasionally denial?) of pleasure. Beatless and busy, it's cerebral music for sure, but it's also a complete and disciplined thought.

The other reason is that the album is just intensely pleasing and -- the operative word here -- playful. It keeps consistency in all of its surprise and variance, and even betrays a bit of a sense of journey: each half begins quietly, "Boring Angel" with low-rumbling organ followed by sparkly foolishness straight out of the Trumpy-in-Pod People playbook, "Along" with ambient hiss that wakes up slowly, grouchily before finding beauty in its plod, and in the choral pad that provides Lopatin with much of his evident giddiness here. Nothing here qualifies as dance music but some songs come miraculously close given their total absence of obvious rhythm: "Zebra," with its knockout syncopation, and its more focused and relentless twin "Problem Areas" each offer a bath of sound that strikes up an impressive intensity. You can very nearly visualize Lopatin's own pleasure at what he is achieving within the framework and limitations he's set for himself. In this tiny niche, he is our maestro.

Again, it's hard to classify R Plus Seven. "Ambient avant garde music," while terribly reductive, is a decent enough descriptor, but a case could be made that declaring it such could unfairly limit its audience, which seems naturally to go far beyond the class of music fan that would typically leave time aside for either ambient or experimental electronic music. This is the kind of music that immeasurably rewards concentration, and not in an abstract sense. The final two songs gather all of these fragments of chaos into a calmed, emotional peak that are, particularly "Chrome Country," umembarrassed by their gentle beauty. These songs are gloriously pretty without being fussy or overwrought. It's possible to listen to this collection of goofoffs and weird noises and be, yeah, moved. No kidding.

[SEE ALSO:]
Replica (2011) [oh god don't read that please]

Baths: Obsidian (2013)

(Anticon)

RECOMMENDED

Well this is just so darned purtee, y'all. It's never purtier or moodier or sillier than its final track, "Inter," a delicate and swoony slice of desperately expressive frivolity -- wordless cooing defines it -- that will either give you enough laughs to last the rest of the week or will sort of endear itself to you. As usual, Will Wiesenfeld knows his place -- and he knows his audience well enough now that, in its small fashion, record number two is kind of masterful.

"Inter" is merely the apex of what these frilly, cushy songs are driving at. They're catchy at times but usually are subservient to Wiesenfeld's idea of beauty. Several critics talk about this being darker than his first record, Cerulean, but that is a matter of inching degrees at best. He sings about God and failure, and his songs are a little better defined now, but Obsidian is marked more than anything by how pleasant it is, and how ferociously vital and well-crafted it obviously is underneath its immediate appeal. "Phaeda" and "No Past Lives," just to touch the tip of the iceberg, are immaculate and layered productions -- even with the most superficial instant appreciation of them, one never suspects they lack substance or passion. That's something a lot of bedroom pop folks from Wiesenfeld's generation miss.

I sampled Baths' first record a couple of years ago but put it away without comment. Listening quickly again before writing this, I think without question that Obsidian is a far more interesting album. Its predecessor seemed unprofessional and insubstantial by comparison, and while a certain scrappiness may have been important for some of his fans, Wiesenfeld is much more at home in this environment. With an infinite sonic palette and an irresistible taste for the sumptuous, he's able to put together the rare modern album that boasts both subtlety and ornate heaviness. Great for zoning, not for sleeping.

One-sentence reviews #12

The curse of consensus.

Four Tet
Beautiful Rewind (2013)
(Text)

!! CAUTION !! - Never understood the criticism that Four Tet is too repetitive, but admittedly here he's clearly having more fun than anyone who actually listens to this thing, but sure, definitely no "last minute rick rubin," if that's a facet of the modern poplife that deeply troubles you (!?).

***

Dirty Beaches
Drifters / Love Is the Devil (2013)
(Zoo Music)

!!!!! AVOID !!!!! - Mumbly grunty garbage, distinguishable from the Black Keys only because it's dirgy instead of dingy -- the kind of stuff appealing to the sensibility of complains about lead singers having distinctive personalities, I guess.

***


Darkside
Psychic (2013)
(Matador)

Want to support Jaar but can't see much to love in this Cinemax porn soundtrack music.

***

Queens of the Stone Age
...Like Clockwork (2013)
(Matador)

!! CAUTION !! - Just so we're clear, I don't think it's sacrilege for a band to try and blow itself up to memories of Led Zep or the Doors, I just think it's a waste of time cause those bands bloooowwwww dude

Daft Punk: Random Access Memories (2013)

(Columbia)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Disco is my language, more than house or drum'n'bass or any modern branch of electronica ever could be, which is the easiest explanation of why Random Access Memories converted me wholly to Daft Punk after a decade-plus of apathy. Informed by several fans of the duo who hated it that this was nonsense, I put it away for a while and came back but it's all still there: the shimmering sound of a lost adolescence coming back in bright lights. It's not that I didn't like Homework or Discovery -- both have their good points -- but they never meant anything to me, not like this does.

Not like the wistful groove of "Get Lucky" and its almost desperate good-time funk, not like the slow meltdown of "Game of Love" and "Instant Crush." It seems as if Daft Punk are yearning for something here, to call back to a feeling, and their recording in the wake of that noble-enough nostalgia produces something all the more remarkable for the impossibility of reaching the orgasmic heights it wants. The incapability of recapturing memories renders this poignant, flawed, beautiful -- for me, possibly the most emotionally affecting dance record since Bilingual.

As you'd expect in a record that throws out much of their sound and most if not all of their previous working methods in favor of pop structure and an infatuation with the sound of the radio and club in the '70s and '80s -- especially in the U.S., especially in L.A. -- Daft Punk have a lot of help here. The great Nile Rodgers appears. So, improbably, does Paul Williams on "Touch," a song so bizarre that it's tempting to regard it as a bid for attention, but so what if it is. Pharrell Williams shows up twice, on the interestingly relaxed but hooky single "Lose Yourself to Dance" and then on the aforementioned, really wonderful "Get Lucky," an urgent recording that desperately clings to its every moment of vital, passionate, sparkling pop. Previous Daft guest star Todd Edwards contributes to a surprisingly airy soft-rock slash Whispers vamp called "Fragments of Time," which should seal any lingering sense that Ariel Pink has the best handle on this material. And finally, Panda Bear, because Panda Bear must always show up on everyone else's records since his own are so, y'know, daft. He has a beautiful voice and it's beautiful here.

Random wanders off at times. We needed neither the tiresome Chuck E. Cheese soundcheck "Contact" nor the silly "Beyond," and nine minutes of "Giorgio by Moroder" is a bit much. But everything else is luminous in its willful kitsch and consistent surprise. It's not quite in a class with the first three Chemical Brothers albums, even if it compensates for its inconsistency with the titanic power of its many climaxes, but it makes me nearly as giddy as those used to. I listen to this and I feel great, even as it makes me scarily conscious of how much time has passed, in the world and in my own life, since these sounds were the way of the world. That's probably the idea.

[SEE ALSO:]
Homework (1997)

Kelela: Cut 4 Me (2013)

(Fade to Mind)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

There's not always a good reason why someone has only (thus far) scored big with the underground. Most hard info about this tremendously interesting L.A. singer-songwriter comes from just a couple of parroting sources in the bubble of online indie-oriented writing. Which is fine, but doesn't give enough credit to the excellent collection of stark, sensual R&B with which she has made her formidable entrance. It's available for free online and will immediately endear itself to you.

Kelela belongs in the class of modern soul performers like Miguel and the Weeknd who betray a strong resemblance in sonics and performance style to modern rock, mainstream and otherwise. A couple of key comparisons she calls to mind are the xx and Everything But the Girl, but this is not to argue that she belongs outside the R&B idiom, even if most of her press so far has come from the likes of Pitchfork and the Fader. It seems more likely that -- as much as the minimalism of production on Cut 4 Me seems naturally to limit her appeal -- she's simply one step ahead of where the inventive fringe of mainstream R&B is headed in a couple of years. With so much cutting-edge material currently showcasing a druggy ambiance, she strips everything back to its essence with the help of a crew of varied producers like Morri$ and fellow L.A. denizen Kingdom.

The show here is Kelela's range and confidence, but the producers do a remarkable job of helping make this such an instantly invigorating and addictive mixtape. Opener "Guns & Synths" means its title literally, but its ping-ponging acidic layers are downright ordinary when compared to the confrontational, nearly abstract rhythms of "Enemy" or the boldly strange and massive "Keep It Cool." The latter feels like half a song, but is played and produced with such maddened enthusiasm that it's magic. Yet the sense of immersion is at its greatest on "Floor Show," the memorably weird and romantic melody and hooks of which ("till the end till the end of time") make it surprisingly easy to drop, free of resistance, into its intriguing hybrid of proggish soul and rock. It's maximalist in the writing, not in the sound, which is important to those violently opposed to proggish anything.

Besides, Kelela's excellence as a singer is beyond question whether you care much for the drift of these songs or not. No matter how much of a stunt the track is, she is reliably sprawled out and adventurous in a most sumptuous sense, unflinching before all weirdness. Kicking drum machine imbued with oddly placed sax and ghostly hip hop chanting on "Go All Night"? Bird sounds and off-putting effects on the stirringly intimate and beautiful "A Lie"? No more a challenge than the skewed but radio-ready anthem of the title track and its crazy-ish synths under a voice and groove that go up and down and back again then wander off. So often, Kelela herself provides the hook, the melding together of everything. She can be filtered and manipulated to within an inch of her sonic life on the near-perfect "Something Else" or overdubbed into complex oblivion on "Cherry Coffee" but still she is the noise we wander into and don't wish to leave.

Cut 4 Me is one of the best mixtapes I've ever heard, often close to indistinguishable from a proper album except, I suppose, in the manner that some of the songs don't quite end, extrapolating and repeating themselves instead -- which depending on your mood, may just as well be a benefit. The shaky vulnerability running like blood through this arid, faultless atmosphere has the cohesion and depth of a remarkable, out-of-nowhere debut, which makes me all the more eager to see what happens when that true debut comes.

Fantasia: Side Effects of You (2013)

(RCA)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The calculation of Fantasia's Side Effects of You is not cynical, but a testament that this brilliant singer is acutely aware of the audience to whom she is singing, nearly a decade after she rose to fame. Like so many artists who essentially came of age under a microscope with a spotlight attached, Fantasia has begun to court what some A&R executive years ago decided was an "adult" audience, except she's good at it -- that is to say, this record, her fifth, is what's known as "tasteful." What a pity that this is so often a debit. Side Effects may lack the freshness of the best and sprightliest R&B of our time, but it's about as well-crafted and pleasurable an album as money can buy in 2013.

The superficial key to the record's appeal is that Fantasia's eclectic performance style and the production by Harmony Samuels (who handles all but one cut) dabble heartily in the trends, radio-friendly and otherwise, of the present period but also feels, as does Fantasia, a kinship with the now-classic '90s hits of Mary J. Blige, Babyface, Toni Braxton, TLC and even En Vogue (whose best song, "Don't Let Go (Love)," is specifically referenced on "End of Me"). The result has an almost casually broad appeal, best indicated in the album's very first moments: through a cloud of modernist white noise emerges a perfect integration of atmospheric, vaguely paranoid R&B with Samuels' actual banger and Fantasia's florid invocation of her influences. Extrapolating a bit, even the mainstream pop-embracing single "Without Me" has a stretched and skewed hook, eschewing its natural sweetness for the stark sound of an unforgiving club floor.

The more interesting way of putting this -- and its actual impact on the music -- is that it as a whole is a glittery and glamorous affair but also chilled, almost methodical. Fantasia and her producer never stop aiming for the massiveness of beat; even the slow-jams that coat over half the album are designed to slam rather brutally, and suggestively. If you know even a little about Fantasia as a person, you can sense why she's attracted to the kind of tension that makes her mask a disturbing anthem of escape and getaway like "If I Was a Bird" with pretty little keyboard trills and doublespeak. She receives no writing credit on the bold, heroic, amply romantic "Lighthouse" but it contains one of my favorite lines in any pop song this year: "I'll always be the same for you / I'll never ever change for you," which when you really think about it is a challenge to conventional sexual politics as fueled by wordplay as the Kinks' "Lola" or Smokey Robinson's "Whatever Makes You Happy. That speaks somewhat to a theme. Fantasia also doesn't seem to have handled any of the music or lyrics for the title cut, which is probably a credit to her as it stretches its prescription-drug metaphor to its absolute unintentionally amusing limit, but that's where she and the epic sweep and rawness of her voice come in: she makes the thing mean something, desperation, loss, the sensation of being entirely alone. When she sings of taking three pills a day to help her smile, it strikes you to the core even if she's only kind of going there.

That's still dark shit, although not really dark shit by the standards of pop music if you spend much time with it, and it's hardly Phil Spector -- it takes no pleasure in its pain except as a means to escape into the rich emotion of a towering vocal. Side Effects touches on lighter matters, like the sonic nostalgia of "In Deep" and the excellent "Lose to Win" (which picks up the "Adorn" torch for early '80s non-Minneapolis R&B appropriation), but its undaunted strikes against misogyny mark a strong contrast against, say, Blurred Lines or even Big Boi's albums. Or even the work of Janelle Monae, who for all her brilliance tends not to hit these matters head-on or with quite Fantasia's determined fierceness. The mere presence of "Girl Talk," nothing more than a skit that consists of Fantasia chatting with a few friends, places the bro-filled attitudes of the average pop record in stark relief by mere virtue of having women talking about making sure their dudes understand how important their careers are. Of course, they're still talking about dudes, but the point stands. And all this can finally erupt in the total apocalypse of feeling on "End of Me." Her confidence absolute, she dismisses with demons with aplomb and grace in a genre that unfairly tends not to be taken seriously on such points.

The fast ones here have an impeccable relentlessness well suited to Fantasia's nuanced, cooled-down vocals. Within a minute she's righteously announcing herself as lady, woman, mother, daughter with no cutting down of any named role, and an expectation that every part of herself is to be accepted, loved, desired when relevant. Big KRIT -- remember when we were really excited about him? -- shows up but seems beside the point. The story is, again, Fantasia's ownership and control of her own desire, especially on the drilling, invasively snappy electro "Change Your Mind" and the terrific "Get It Right," which sees her exercising some splendid Mary Wells-style raspiness.

Nevertheless, the album never quite betters its second track, "Ain't All Bad," a relentless circa-1997 groove and the rare great song that keeps getting greater, nastier, goofier but not dumber ("never eva eva eva let you go oh oh oh oh oh"). Yeah, yeah, a great production that splices a chopped-up, tricky verse with a sweet and silky chorus, but its cabaret bassline and theatricality are pure schlock in the best way -- as divinely impressive as when Fantasia is just belting out grievances in the show-stopping manner of Fiona Apple. The final effect is all pop-hypnotic, just fabulous. Fantasia's not sold that many records or garnered a spectacular level of post-Idol attention outside R&B-devoted circles, but she's wearing the crown of a massive star and it suits her well. She's major whether we're listening or not.

Omar Souleyman: Wenu Wenu (2013)

(Ribbon Music)

RECOMMENDED

47 year-old Syrian dabke singer Souleyman has exercised in an unbroken tradition of poetic party music -- derived from traditional Middle Eastern songforms -- for decades, and one can be forgiven if it seems as though the fascination by various alt-rock luminaries with his work (Damon Albarn, Björk, and now Four Tet) carries the tiniest hint of cynicism. After hearing this record, I sampled a few of the hundreds of bootleg recordings of Souleyman enthusiastically belting at weddings and thought of how the last thing his sophisticated, exuberant music needs is to be appropriated as mere flavor for someone's rock festival or, worse yet, rock record or indie label.

Happily, Four Tet, acting as producer for Wenu Wenu, captures Souleyman without compromise and without covering up or smoothing out his almost confrontationally celebratory repertoire of spiritually exhilarating, bombastic gulps, yelps and wails. Souleyman is always as subservient to melody as any pop singer -- which perhaps anticipates his popularity in the West -- but he has ferociously commanding and virtuosic way with a tune. Speeding up, slowing down, guttural and sweet in rapid succession, he seems often to be singing both above and below the melody but engaging with it beautifully. I can't comment with great intelligence upon the lyrics, sung in at least three languages, but despite the fact that all seven of these cuts are rapid-fire body music, Souleyman's voice in and of itself expresses a spectacular range of emotional thought, accessible and challenging at once.

Four Tet's own records are hit and miss, especially lately, so much as when Beck took on Charlotte Gainsbourg's IRM back in 2010, it must be said that it's a relief he subsumes his own preference toward slick repetition and sonic gimmickry in favor of helping to craft a record that's truly stylistically adventurous, in and outside the context of nonwestern music courting an American audience. The legacy of Wenu Wenu as a part of what's likely to become a massive recorded legacy is just how well it captures the sophistication and courageous weirdness of Souleyman's vocal interactions with the brilliant keyboardist Rizan Sa'id, whose work here is sufficiently staggering that there are times he seems to deserve the role of session leader more than Souleyman himself. As traditionalist as this music is, the layering Kieran Hebden parses out without interfering with the band interplay and the wiry, playful, sometimes even menacing keyboard lines of Sa'id spin it into something that seems quite new, and entirely unique.