The Artwoods: 100 Oxford Street (1964-66)

(Edsel)

There are a lot of bands like this in the '60s -- garage kids with nothing better to do than start a band, or forgotten castaways from the British Invasion, the stuff of Nuggets and Pebbles -- who made that such an exciting, electric time in the true democratic playing field of rock & roll. Surprisingly, a lot of them had more consistent bodies of work than you'd expect; the Creation or the Count Five, for example, were solid rock bands with skills that went beyond their obvious classics. Judging from this compilation that gathers, so far as anyone cares to check, the bulk of their output, the Artwoods aren't such a jewel. They're quite competent, and if you have a taste for this Spencer Davis Group-like blues-rock aesthetic (with a touch of Booker T.) from the time, you're likely to at least bob your head and receive no urge to turn the thing off. But the Artwoods, while very successful in their heyday as a live act, never took off in the studio and it's easy to hear why. Their music in and of itself just isn't all that interesting or distinctive.

The band's primary claim to fame is the presence of singer Art Wood, brother of future Rolling Stone Ron; the unit was among several signed to Decca in a scrambling of sorts to get into the Brit guitar band business after their embarrassing dismissal of the Beatles. Wood's delivery as a vocalist is somewhat similar to Eric Burdon, which is largely why the Artwoods are frequently mentioned in the same breath as the Animals by those who remember them. Wood is less a blues singer, which makes his work here frequently less labored than Burdon's, but he has a more limited emotional range; the same goes for the band, who come off as a frat-rock variant on the Yardbirds. Again, this stuff isn't bad, especially if you love the period, but there isn't much to be said about it.

This compilation offers a lot of the Artwoods' R&B-leaning singles. We get standard rockers, standard ballads, the standard repertoire of blues and American rock cover material -- if a bit less obvious than that of some of their peers. The highlights are scattered around here and there, usually redeeming moments in less than memorable performances: the arrangement on "Sweet Mary" is basic but made to sound enormous with the aid of good, slick production and an excellent solo from guitarist Derek Griffiths (who wrote the liner notes for this early '80s release). The oddball chamber pop of "Oh My Love" is the sole suggestion of real eclecticism, with great piano sound and the instantly classic couplet "When I kiss your eyes / You know that my heart dies." The band reveals a good way with Gene Vincent melodrama on "I Keep Forgettin'" and prove their mettle as backing singers with their interesting, haunting work on "One More Heartache." There's even a weird Kinks thing called "Keep Lookin'" but the disc is largely rounded out by odd instrumentals that undoubtedly made more sense on stage; why bother with this when we can all go listen to the Mar-Keys?

It's hard to turn you away from this. If you are a fan of off-the-beaten-path '60s bands like the Action and the Blues Magoos, you should at least give this a listen, but I can't really encourage you to do so without reservation unless you're a real cultist for the dregs of British Invasion rock. It sure beats Gerry and the Pacemakers, anyway.

East India Youth: Total Strife Forever (2014)

(Stolen Recordings)

RECOMMENDED

Moody and heavy as a broken dark night but often breezily pretty all the same, the debut album from William Doyle, who spins the knobs and records as East India Youth, couldn't be easier to get into. As modern techno goes, it's almost suspiciously immediate, with a good deal of brooding ambiance tempered by bursts and stabs of melody and sensually pleasurable beats 'n' moans. It goes forward at length without really settling into a coherent mood, but despite a boring denouement it never truly falters either.

While there's nothing unique or new about what Doyle's doing here, he will go far as a stylist, capturing complicated and offbeat moments with the verve of Four Tet and the Field, only with more of a sense of audaciousness and adventure than either (lately, anyway). Like James Blake, Doyle's sort of a de facto singer-songwriter dabbling in a world that frequently downplays the importance of songs themselves, but Total Strife Forever has considerably more variance in its grooves than Blake has yet exhibited. The pulsating first part of the title cut will turn your mind inside out with its gorgeous thump, especially on headphones or a great system, but skip down the line a bit and find something like the blown-out "Midnight Koto." It's just as interesting, but it doesn't even sound like the same performer -- a sign, some will say, of an identity problem, but I think it's more like creative restlessness and eclecticism. Part two of "Total Strife Forever" is Eno-like drone but loud, and "III" booms forth with what sounds like a pipe organ at a funeral just when it threatens to recede into the background. There's a lot to hear.

Doyle is a very young Englishman -- just 23 -- and the most endearing moments of his record are those that have him connecting with the peculiar identity and history associated with his age and nationality. On four particular cuts, Strife becomes essentially a pop record, and such a good and unusual one that you start to wish it went all the way. The Beatles are an evident influence on the minimal but melodic twins "Looking for Someone" and "Song for a Granular Piano," but it's Bowie who makes the grand entrance. "Dripping Down" owes a lot to Berlin-period Bowie, up to its operatic "fiiind new love" climax, but its plugged-in, insistent pop also fits with the darkened, drugged club atmosphere that's the main event here. An even stronger catharsis comes at the peak of "Heaven, How Long?" which is written like a Bowie song but sung like one of Martin Gore's Depeche Mode showstoppers, and it fulfills the back end of its open-armed chorus even more completely, sliding back into brutal backbeat and the emotional connection that anyone who sits at the crossroads of electronica and pop pines to reach.

The major impression is not that this is a rock or pop record trying to be something else, but that the entirety coalesces into a disconnected but intriguing collision of sounds that are, more than anything else, pretty. With the ghosts of Eno and the Beatles both in tow, this is simultaneously a solid dance album and a rather terrific rainy-day album. Doyle's gift is that he sees little daylight between the beautiful, distant piano that opens "Glitter Recession" and the glitchy computer sounds that are just as lovingly broken down on "Hinterland." The former is drowned out in the end by oceanic white noise, the latter breaks out into soft, chilled, sinister trance, but both cuts achieve an ideal balance between the skill and curiosity of a great producer's technique and the personal subservience to full-hearted bliss that's just as important on a night in as a night out.

Johnny Cash: With His Hot and Blue Guitar (1957)

(Sun)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

This is a crossroads of two great legacies. It is the first LP not just of Johnny Cash and his most distinctive and unusual backing band, the Tennessee Two, but of Sun Records and therefore Sam Phillips, one of the two or three people most individually responsible for the existence of rock & roll. Cash never fit quite perfectly as a rock & roller, nor do the country or rockabilly labels seem entirely appropriate. For the majority of his career and certainly in his brief period at Sun, during which he cut what would arguably remain his best and most unblemished studio recordings, he'd strike the same curious tone he does on this album -- a murder balladeer expressing sympathy for the blackest hearts, a novelty performer of sly and eccentric humor, a gospel singer, a dark and heavy romantic, and a menacing, sneering badass. He's among the most unique individuals ever to wander into a studio, and he was from the beginning.

With His Hot and Blue Guitar is as much a hodgepodge of material as its art deco cover, its songs mostly the A- and B-sides of singles in addition to some recorded haphazardly in the interest of eventually generating a full album. Some of Cash's best material for Sun -- including the stunning "Hey Porter" and the rockabilly classic "Get Rhythm" -- never made it to a longplayer until after he left for Columbia, and a few songs that are here seem comparatively weak. Yet the record feels like a singular, perfectly shaped piece because of the intriguing starkness of the Tennessee Two. So labeled by Phillips, they consisted solely of bassist Marshall Grant and guitarist Luther Perkins, the latter of whom altered the future of country music with his odd, leap-frog playing style, backing Cash, whose history was something he carried unapologetically. A religious singer by trade, he only reluctantly made the switch to secular music at Phillips' insistence that he wanted something more commercial. He'd never fully embrace the change. He frankly doesn't even do so here -- on the godly "I Was There When It Happened," he fires up with a play and enthusiasm that makes Burt Lancaster's Elmer Gantry seem staid and pallid.

Nor is this rockabilly in the sense of other Sun artists like Elvis Presley -- who hopped, galloped and grinned more in those days -- Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, not one of whom was well-versed enough in backroad American traditionalism to have spent time in the '50s on folkie throwbacks like "Wreck of the Old 97" and "Rock Island Line," which opens the record in a burst of oblique energy. Cash settles in to tell a story and aligns himself perfectly with the release of tension and increase of speed inherent to his narrative, and all the while Perkins and Grant make a noise so minimal and rhythmic it's hard to compare it to much of anything -- but for certain, it bears few marks of any mainstream vision of country music then or now, and has the effect of making Cash's work from this period sound distant, almost hazy.

His voice, of course, plays the central role -- still with the ragged anxiousness and hunger of youth here, he nevertheless already is possessed of a baritone designed to make you sit up and listen. As much as his work can break your heart or even charm you, part of its appeal is how much it commands your respect. On just the succession of four cuts that opens this album, you can hear a versatility that might be easy to miss at a surface glimpse. "I Heard That Lonesome Whistle" puts a rough, masculine spin on the broken Hank Williams, "Country Boy" is downright sensual in its purr and holler, and "If the Good Lord's Willing" has a grit and playfulness that seems inaccessible to most rock or country vocalists. Perkins, Presley and Lewis were all great performers, but none of them could quite put across the range of emotions and tricks in Cash's repertoire.

The songs here that are fully Cash's are largely autobiographical. Though he would grow more assured as a curator of his own material and to a lesser extent as a singer, he was from the earliest moments of his public life an extraordinary songwriter. Significantly, all four of the big hits included here were his own work, gathered up from the difficulty of maintaining a relationship in amidst a life on the road, from his former life in the Service, from aches and pains and wanderings. Not only was he instantly one of the great storytellers in rock & roll, he was one of the most gut-splittingly personal. It says something that the four most surprisingly intimate, confessional songs he'd written by now (and included here) were all major singles.

"So Doggone Lonesome" is witty, self-deprecating and defeatist in the obvious mold of Hank Williams, covered elsewhere on the record. But the breakthrough hit "Cry! Cry! Cry" suggests more about what Cash would achieve in very little time. Adorned by an almost inaudible clopping along from the Two, Cash lays into a lover who's spurned him and engages in catharsis upon what's obviously meant to be the immediate aftermath of a breakup -- a guy saying things when he's not thinking. His grievances are rationalized: she only lives to see the lights uptown with her lecherous Sugar Daddies, it's happened again and again, and when she comes back he'll be gone. The important verse is the last one, in which Cash engages in a human fantasy, a lie on top of a lie; the premise is already that she, not he, is being rejected, and now he thrillingly indulges in the hell-to-pay moment, when the nameless woman comes crawling back and finds nothing except a cold "bye, bye, bye." It's an angry song, but there's a smile in it, a recognition of the adolescent or adult miseries so familiar to most of us in our worst dejected moments. It's crucial both that the song is not explicitly teenage and that it's readymade for a cover version by either gender; it's not about being trashed by a woman, it's about being trashed.

In the same way that "Bye Bye Love" and "Heartbreak Hotel" would speak to almost universal, earth-shaking truths, "Cry! Cry! Cry!" made Cash a star because it is so adaptable and simple, and its reveling in depression is perversely fun. Cash's most enduring pair of songs from this period, however, are far more serious -- and are essentially perfect. "Folsom Prison Blues" would eventually become the definition of Cash's entire aesthetic, of the complicated sympathies arising from a realism about evil and strife tempered by a general belief in humanity and decency, even in its most unforgiving corners. It's essentially a murder ballad, replete with an unusually complex third act about wishing to avoid being reminded of the world outside while acknowledging the reasons for one's imprisonment, remembered by many -- Cash himself included -- as a sort of revision of gun-toting blues braggadio and anticipation of the most violent moments in early '90s gangsta rap, largely for its heartlessly vile but curiously perceptive "I shot a man in Reno / just to watch him die" line. Cash takes John Wayne violence to its obvious conclusion here and recognizes its ugliness, but he also doesn't flinch before the other side: the misspent youth of a bored, wrongheaded moment, the permanent alteration of a life by a single instant of bad judgment, and the fact that even in the villain there beats some sort of a heart. In reality, it's not a celebration of violence, though Cash wouldn't be immune to writing such a thing; it's a profoundly compassionate examination of what it means to do wrong and to then live the agonizing consequences.

As massive and world-expanding as such subjects may be, and as much as it may seem an obvious and even boring statement, it's difficult to make a strong case that "I Walk the Line" is not the greatest song Cash ever wrote. The performance is one thing -- dramatic, calm, reflective, perfectly restrained and almost devastatingly emotional without ever once tipping its hand into sap or pausing for a moment to allow us to truly ponder what it's saying, it is one of the most beautiful recordings of the early rock & roll period. But the lyric bears much responsibility for the song's place in the world. Its complexity is almost unheard of in chart-hit pop love songs of the period, a constantly self-doubting pledge of devotion to a lover, almost explicitly a direct message from the continually touring Cash to his wife Vivian. He chronicles the struggle of fidelity, the wanting to be faithful, the temptation everywhere, and after opening the song at perhaps the highest register he could muster, he's descended by the end of the record to a low, tentative moan even as he sings the same words: "Because you're mine, I walk the line."

Along with the Kinks' "Strangers," it's one of the most realistic and unsentimental songs about marriage ever written -- dark, confused but winning and devoted, more about the romance inherent to that idealistic devotion than by the strict practice thereof. Its wavering, the difficulty of a long history, is included in the words and the performance. On top of being tirelessly romantic and moving, it's just tough -- effortlessly so. Cash would spend the next decades defining himself as an artist of integrity, humor and toughness, but in some ways it could be argued that he had long made his point in a primitive studio on Union Avenue in Memphis, with fire in his eyes, paper behind the strings of his guitar and a dedication he never thought could fall away. Maybe that's pure rock & roll after all, and maybe Phillips -- who was aware he couldn't keep a lid on all this for long -- knew before we did.

Bassekou Kouyaté & Ngoni Ba: I Speak Fula (2010)

(Sub Pop)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I'm still relatively new to Malian music, but Bassekou Kouyaté and his band Ngoni Ba's 2013 record Jama Ko rocked me to my core sufficiently that I have gone back to explore their earlier crossover effort I Speak Fula, a sufficiently accessible album that it ended up being licensed for release on Sub Pop. Though a hot, atmospheric album in its own right, it doesn't do it many favors to cast it in some comparative light against its follow-up. Jama Ko was recorded in the midst of considerable strife, a factor obviously reflected in its intensity and anger. Kouyaté is more openly bidding on this earlier effort for an international audience, and there's a case to be made (as it has been, by Robert Christgau among others) that he and the group slide into mere background pleasantness for much of this record.

The closer one listens, though, the more I Speak Fula's own kind of grace becomes clear, or maybe I just have a taste for these calmer, more florid grooves. What's surprising is that it gradually reveals itself as a much more solemn album, which says a great deal about Kouyaté's sensibility as a bandleader and arranger -- his response to injustice is a cutting, focused but feverishly emotional outpouring that snarls and snipes at its targets, but given time he adds the finesse of a true craftsman to the bleakness. If Jama Ko is punk rock, to use a perhaps gauche western analogy, this is traditionalist rock, but in some ways no less hard or idiosyncratic. With more contemplation and rehearsal likely in play here, the arrangements seem more complete and, unexpectedly, weirder. The songs are typically slower, the drama more protracted and careful, right from the rhythmic but flowery opening cut, which comes on like a red-carpet entrance.

With more time to think and less of a determination to capture a specific, violent and important moment, the band tends to come across as sadder, more troubled, more complicated. The restrained groove and beauty of "Jamana be Diya," for instance, is more melodic than most of the short bursts of vocal anxiety on Jama Ko, but even if its traded vocals are more carefully composed, the final impact is similar -- the musicianship in Ngoni Ba is uniformly impressive, especially Kouyaté's remarkable solos on the ngoni (listen for his show-stopping climax on "Torin Torin"), but they also believe in a subservience to songcraft like any great rock band. Each cut has its own distinct feeling, and each has considerable merit. Again, calling them a rock band sounds facetious and insulting, but this is indeed constructed like a classic American or European pop record -- and several songs are directly evocative, in particular the airtight, locked-in slow-burn of "Falani," which vaguely suggests the Young Rascals' "Groovin'" as much as any other West African record you can name.

The most remarkable song on I Speak Fula (a title highly suggestive of the implied universalism here), is "Musow," which exemplifies (like the later "Ladon") the increasing sophistication of vocalist Amy Sacko (Kouyaté's wife) while clarifying the entire band's allegiances to both Malian traditionalism and the roots rock and folk music of the West. It revolves around a mysterious, almost Middle Eastern hook that immediately edges the performance toward the transcendent, its many rhythmic changes gradually building to a crazed solo that is hard not to describe as some relative of '70s funk, though the chanted "HEYYY" that gives the song its arena-ready climax is tied less to any music than to human community itself. Other songs here are equally addictive and powerful, but none is so surprising. Only "Torin Torin," with its wild stop/start dynamic trading the bare and the beautiful, comes close -- and its harmonic vocals are almost soothing in the end, something that could never describe "Musow" or Jama Ko.

Kouyaté's work has opened a door for me, as I now find myself determined to become more aware of the nuance and power in modern African music, and it also emphasizes the continued grandness and necessity of physical media. I don't normally digress about this here, but it seems necessary: when I wrote the review of Jama Ko linked below this past winter, I was working with a stream on Spotify, a press release and a lot of other people's research and criticism online. As soon as I had the money, I bought the LP, imported from Belgium. It's one of the more expensive pieces of vinyl I've bought in the last few years, but unpacking it revealed just why it was worth the trouble, and why music like this demands to be touched, felt as much as heard. The liner notes explaining the depths of and thought process behind each cut and the gigantic photographs of the band recording the album enhance the experience sufficiently that it feels nearly like a different record, like something cinematic. The picture grows more complete. My thoughts on the record posted here seemed suddenly pale and superficial because of not having yet had this experience, and I suspect the same may be true of I Speak Fula -- which is a less vital record, but no less enjoyable and impressive. I'm going with my gut, but I'm going to argue that if you sample this music and like it at all, that you purchase it in some format wherein the notes and supplemental materials are available to you. It makes a difference, a big one, and genuine renegade art deserves all the support you can give it, now as ever.

[SEE ALSO:]
Jama Ko (2013)

Daft Punk: Discovery (2000)

(Virgin)

RECOMMENDED

Daft Punk's 1997 debut Homework exhausted many listeners, including this one, but its impact -- especially given its relatively late entry into the dance music platform that had been in place by then for over two decades -- was beyond measure. It also exhausted house music, at least from the perspective of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo -- they did everything they could think of. Discovery entered the world eagerly at a time of considerable before-the-storm hedonism, a shot of unapologetic joy that's pointedly unopposed to being stupid. It doesn't feature songs any more than its predecessor so much as just bare, unadorned hooks distilled to their illogically orgasmic essence. It's all cream filling, and thus just as grating as the prior record, just as artistically intriguing, and depending on the moment, just as inspiring of bump-and-grind dancefloor pyrotechnics.

The first two Daft Punk records were both received lukewarmly upon release, but they each gradually grew into significant albums, slowly finding their audiences until they had a decade's worth of moments. That's despite each of them having sizable hits, in this case "One More Time," a curious single indeed. The track marks an immediate reversal from the stark relentlessness of Homework; not merely less beat driven but spending much of its time in a pregnant pause absent of percussion, it consists of what sounds like a distantly sampled introductory splash from a long-forgotten disco record, followed by just a fragment of its chorus. It's the essence of something, deliberately robbed of whatever meaning it may have had, as alien in its fashion as an early Beatles record just making its way Stateside -- but rather than presenting an unsettling, unexpected, unforced pleasure, its sensations seem implanted, almost grotesquely. In an era when pop music was so frequently accused of being overly engineered, Daft Punk went further; "One More Time" is notebook pop, a radio single concocted by HAL 9000.

Its relentless cheeriness does betray a surprisingly broken-feeling nostalgia, something that folks stuck working in the lobby at AMC where it played on a loop for a whole summer or trying to concentrate on their game of checkers at the Tipsy Teapot likely ignored or couldn't even sense. But it nags at you; the autotuned robovoice is as capable as HAL of saying things it doesn't mean: "music's got me feelin' so free," indeed. By and large, Daft Punk's longing to capture a midnight-summertime flood of unjudged bliss translates to something that, considering it's mostly nonverbal, is surprisingly on-the-nose. The entire first half of Discovery is, in a word, annoying.

It's not that the record lacks ideas or is overly bare at any point, an accusation that the simpler, more evenly breathing Random Access Memories would one day face. Like Homework, it comes flooding out with evidence of the personality and fixations of the band, from the "Mother" intro and fussy classical hook of "Aerodynamic" to the obvious Stevie Wonder lift on "Night Vision." Like a lot of cut-and-paste musicians and producers, Daft Punk see the virtue in everything they process and seem to be influenced by everything in all corners of pop culture, which can make them seem alternately offbeat or individualistic and, far more often, an unfiltered mess of junk. There's no mistaking that Discovery is a wavering record, less confident than Homework, which leads in part to its kitchen sink tragedy -- but it loves its kitsch, and as much as it glares backward toward disco liberation, the experience of listening to it resembles some perverse marriage of "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" to the 1910 Fruitgum Co. more than the actual music of Chic, Gloria Gaynor or K.C. & the Sunshine Band (much less their descendants).

These canned Casio hooks, sporadic beats, fun times at grownup Chuck E. Cheese and extended commercials for the ABC Saturday Night Movie have their contrived charm; "Digital Love" is exactly the song its title suggests, and "Harder Better Faster Stronger" is a tricky enough act of goose-stepping manipulation, locating soul in its eerie fascism, that it's little wonder it was destined to become more famous than itself. (Given how much Daft Punk are attached to friendly flourish, it's even more ironic to hear this side by side with Kanye West's masterpiece Yeezus, on which they aided West in upgrading blues braggadio to late last night with uncomfortable, unadorned charisma and menace against blown-out void.) At worst, though, this is either irritating exercise music ("Superheroes") that yearns to be turned off or Sega Genesis scoring ("Crescendolls") than yearns to be turned off or repurposed as the cheap soundtrack to your camcorder-shot vacation tape.

Like so many dance or electronica records, Discovery comes around at last past generic tangents like "High Life" and prog silliness like "Veridis Quo" when it drops the winking self-awareness, the AREN'T WE HAVING A GREAT TIME EVERYBODY??? vibe of fun crammed down one's throat. A record this haphazardly sequenced makes little to no effort to set a mood; it crashes down on the table in the middle of the party then gradually burns out. What's odd is, that's the good part. The turning point is the slow groove "Something About Us," a genuinely crafty ballad in the vein of Sade. This is followed by actual R&B on the tremendous "Face to Face," without question the group's best song up to this point. They're aided here by house producer and vocalist Todd Edwards whose tasteful but exuberant efforts take the cut past its lopped-off "Billie Jean" intro into an emotional realm heretofore unexplored by Daft Punk's often hollow-by-instinct club music.

That's just one facet of the record's refreshingly melancholy back half. "Face to Face" would become a major hit in U.S. clubs, and it's one of three cuts here that suggest how much potential Daft Punk really had. While the doo wop flameout "Too Long" actually justfies (title notwithstanding) its sprawling ten-minute length with a hard beat and arm-waving climax, "Short Circuit" toys much more conservatively with a simple Bernie Worrell / Tom Tom Club meltdown that transforms rapidly from vice to drone in an organic yet completely unexpected manner -- it feels like a piece of music that resolves the conflicts of Daft Punk's divergent pop sensibilitues: their obligation to innovate versus their obligation toward dancing versus their love of great, listenable pop recordings. All Daft Punk's records toy with the weirdness and unceasing revision of identity -- at its best, Discovery is about realizing just how limitless the concept can be.

[SEE ALSO:]
Homework (1997)
Random Access Memories (2013)

Deerhunter: Microcastle (2008)

(4AD)

RECOMMENDED

Bradford Cox is a sadsack, but sometimes we need that. For years I've thought of Halcyon Digest, an album by Deerhunter that I love with all my heart, as something of a fluke. It's almost as confusing to keep up with Cox's various projects and personas as it is with John Darnielle and Stephin Merritt, even if Cox is a bit more of a natural collaborator, so I placed the Atlas Sound record Logos and this infamously leaked New York pseudo-shoegaze album on a sort of continuum. They've always blended together to me, and generally despite putting it on a number of times over the past several years with varying degrees of concentration, it's only in the last few weeks that Microcastle has started to move me. Is it a question of attention span? Mood? The context of Deerhunter eventually putting out an album I actively disliked (Monomania)? Whatever the case, I hear wisps of both the intricate moodiness of Halcyon and the galvanizing beauty of Atlas Sound's Parallax in this, like steps along an evolutionary path. Cox's music always rewards repeated attention, but it's hard to heartily recommend a record so elusive that it literally took me half a decade to appreciate it. All the same, here we are.

Microcastle may or may not be a drug album -- it certainly rewards the same sort of zone-out trance as zoomhead classics like Oar, The Velvet Underground and Nico, Sister Lovers and any number of early Brian Eno touchstones. Shambolic, beautiful, slapdash, it aspires to the buzzing and metallic sheen of old Ride, Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine records -- but Cox is too outsized a personality to make that a convincing analogy. Even in his subtlest, softest gestures he is a figure of full-on melodrama, gesturing theatrically. So Microcastle starts like you'd expect it to end: a hungover encore, a party gone too long.

And then the cooing starts but not from Cox, some combination of come for me comfort me cover me, sweet and broken. Lockett Pundt might evoke Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel on "Agoraphobia" but the band has other ideas. It's a tired comparison any band attracted to the sound of jangle has struggled with, much as the prior generation incessantly dodged Byrds analogies, but R.E.M. is inescapable here. It's a good aspiration for Deerhunter to try and craft an album that subsumes the listener completely, that reveals secrets gradually the way their famed fellow Georgians once did. Like Murmur or New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Microcastle turns out not only to craftily hide its hooks, melodic peaks and cathartic moments, it teases just enough to encourage continued exposure.

It's hard to define why it's therefore less rewarding than the band's next record, except maybe just that the songs aren't as strong or thematically potent. Each individual song, major and minor, is a microcosm of the whole album: pretty and vague, with a hard, dreamlike edge. What it seldom is, with scattered exceptions like the subtly graceful stop-start rhythmic "Little Kids," is playful. At moments you could drown yourself in the desolation of it all, in a manner not dissimilar to the Antlers' oppressive Hospice from a few months down the line. But then, again, there are the secrets: like Big Star's "Daisy Glaze," the title track begins as a barely-there dirge full of late-night angst and a yearning whine from beyond, then suddenly hops into action.

This, too, is a micro-replica of what the album itself does; its midsection is wholly occupied by a beautiful but minimalistic suite of songs that sound like discordant lost demos, troubling in their rambling despair; by the under-two-minutes "Activa," with its eerie swirl of kalimba and tortured vocals, it seems to be lulling us to sleep. Then: at long last rock. The deservedly famous "Nothing Ever Happened," written by the band's rhythm section, is the emotional peak here; its feeling of triumph feels almost quaint against the emotional claustrophobia elsewhere, yet it makes sense. The band would position it in the future as their signature anthem, their "You Made Me Realise," and it's easy to understand why.

"Nothing Ever Happened" also recasts everything that comes afterward; it's here that Deerhunter first hint at the eclecticism that would make Digest such a pleasure. Cox's "Saved by Old Times" and "Twilight at Carbon Lake" bring back Stax memories, with funked-out stutter on the former, last-dance-at-prom romance on the latter. And Pundt's other contribution "Neither of Us, Uncertainly" sounds like someone's arm's-length idea of what this project was initially intended to do: it's a worthy and convincing shoegaze imitation, with even a bit of Pixies. Even if it has none of the sophistication of Cox's songs or even Pundt's own other contributions, it dares to be fun. Hence Microcastle now feels in retrospect like a split of the difference between the best work of Deerhunter, Atlas Sound and Pundt's side project Lotus Plaza. It's satisfying, detailed, intriguing, but it's an unfinished story -- for better and for worse, depending on your headspace right now.

[SEE ALSO:]
Halcyon Digest (2010)
Monomania (2013)

Archers of Loaf: Icky Mettle (1993)

(Alias)

Almost no band looms larger in the Triangle rock scene (and the general Chapel Hill, NC mythos) than Archers of Loaf, who reigned througout the '90s despite endless record company problems as a sort of southern answer to Pavement much as Antietam were the South's Yo La Tengo. Produced like Mitch Easter mush with a metallic grind, catchy and grandiose if you listen closely enough, and strongly reflective of a time when the fabled grit of L7 and Pixies were inescapable, the classic debut album Icky Mettle doesn't make the comparisons hard to understand. Leader Eric Bachmann projects more rock-star confidence than Stephen Malkmus, albeit with a slight croak in his voice (and is a bit less self-aware), but he has the same snarl, verbosity and buried sweetness. The Archers come on with subtlety as a recording unit -- you have to crank the record up high to get a sense of the anger and passion of their stage performances -- but even with such practiced coolness and detachment, it's obvious at even a glance that there's something mildly contrived about this raucousness.

The dual guitar attack of Bachmann and Eric Johnson is the best element of the unit at this point, somewhat glossing over the fairly standard songwriting by boasting better technical strength than most cult bands of the post-grunge years. Some of the solos have a beauty and bright edge to them suggestive of Television (especially Richard Lloyd's contributions) and the Flamin' Groovies. That latter point seems pertinent on the initial single "Wrong," a hook-filled time capsule of 1992 modern rock radio that could be power pop if it were a little hotter on the treble. At 3:41, it's an appreciably crafty construction with the brash rock quiet-loud move during a broken-down bridge straight off a Who or Boston record. The whole song seems like an endless chorus, approached with gusto. Bachmann's lyrical psychodrama gives it an edge and tension but really the object is straight-ahead obnoxious rock & roll. When the power chords casually slip in on other songs, like "Web in Front," it's an almost naked expression of attitude in the classical sense -- the band might never have aspired to major-label stardom but the radio was always on their minds.

"Web in Front" is also the prime reason Icky Mettle got everyone talking about Pavement, already somewhat legendary at the time despite having released just one full-length record; the slapdash ferocity, ringing guitar and the chanted "ALL I EVER WANTED" over a cloud of sludge and snarl are all red herrings to offset the song's sheer earnestly uncool strength and grandness. "Last Word," the cut that sits between these two small landmarks, even has a conventional big metal chorus; the screaming is dull, but the constant chatter keeps things unusual.

Mettle is deliberately produced with a flat enough sound that even the big transformative climaxes here and there take a while to catch on with you. The intimate bass-only quiet of the first minute of "You and Me" helps communicate its drama; not just lyrically (note the "Angie"-like accusation / lament "I been so down lately, you been so low lately, nothing seems to work out for you and me"), it's sophisticated enough to suggest a complete story we can't fully detect. Then the mandolin exotica of "Hate Paste," a wild outlier with the usual business slathered all over it -- versatility fused with apathy, a punk ethic drawn back to the Replacements and earlier.

When we talk about the angst being contrived, we mean "Fat," which feels readymade for the Butch Vig remix with its big bitter "WHAT DO YOU FUCKINNN," and "Plump Line," the verbose and reflective boorishness of which throws in a witty rejoinder like "you got a collection of things cause that's the best you can do" but jinxes it with the oddly smug sketch of an indie rocker, rhymed with "nothing's gonna stop her." We mean the fuzzed-out drama "Learo, You're a Hole" which sounds like a commercial summarizing the concept of "alternative" rock as of this moment. It's surprising it wasn't all over the radio in 1994 until you get to the chorus, which nevertheless seems a pure put-on Frank Black lift. Even when Bachmann is unhinged, it's a programmatic unhinged. Emotion is audible beneath the booming riffage on "Slow Worm." But where else?

These were adults, and the Archers have a following of seasoned popular guitar music lovers -- and yet the music somehow or another feels excessively familiar, excessively worked over. How much of this is merely a result of its being a product of an offbeat, unexpected attitude change that would even more unexpectedly overtake the industry for a time over the next few years? Icky Mettle is an impressively clever record, but it's awfully slight. The Archers are too afraid to imitate Dean Wareham so instead they lightly parody him (on "Toast"). Politics interest them but only enough for the barbed bon mots of "Wrong." And they dig towering riffs and switched-on pop, as who doesn't, but they're determined to bury it. This record is invaluable as a way to escape into those times and a moment when this could all seem new again. But it's also a distant, unfeeling record determined to offset much of its own appeal. The result is it's interesting, but it's hard to feel anything for it. I'm just being honest, it's the least I could do.