Hit me through the void via text message: November 2014 new release rush (part 2 of 3)

******

Braid
No Coast (2014)
(Topshelf)

!! CAUTION !! * On behalf of my generation, I apologize for you young folks who have to put up with this kind of stuff. "Post-hardcore," "emo," whatever you wish to call it, it's a fraud and a sham and anti-evolutionary and the world is worse for its existence -- particularly when it's propagated by old dudes like these. It helps that I never liked this sort of thing and that I can hear how much better some members of the subgenre are at pushing their emotions into well-expressed, helpful territory than others. But I don't blame Braid's punker cult for thinking this is a welcome return to form. Here's why...

***

Old Crow Medicine Show
Remedy (2014)
(ATO)

On behalf of my generation, I apologize for ever encouraging alt-country to exist without taking into account that its now-permanent stasis was inevitable. This isn't a bad album at all, in fact better than this band has been in a while, but I feel that putting faith in a young group's sense of "style," if you can call it that, comes at the expense of appreciating actual good songs. The laziness is played out in the group's jam band-style following; shoulda seen that coming. I don't know if I was ever an alt-c cultist but whatever I was, I sort of regret it now. I did like those records and still do when I hear them, but every time a band like this comes out doing the same tired shtick for years down the line, I realize a lot of that was probably me being a Certain Age at the time.

***

Spoon
They Want My Soul (2014)
(Loma Vista)

RECOMMENDED * Rock's most predictably solid modern band -- a role Britt Daniel and Spoon have filled happily since the '90s -- proudly present more of the ever-engaging, agreeably melodic, pleasantly sorta-rockin' sorta-tricky same. The sole surprise is their departure from Merge Records to semi-major Universal imprint Loma Vista, a home they now share appropriately with the equally airless and hip St. Vincent. Honestly, I've got all their albums and they're fine, but Spoon is the sort of thing you put on when guests are coming (especially if said guests are male) so we can all celebrate our love of the vaguely alternative without fear of anything really idiosyncratic slipping through. That's not as sarcastic as it sounds -- unchallenging communal appeal is not nothing. They're the kind of band, as they are quick to point out, that defines "taste" -- cheering someone for walking out of a Zach Braff movie for that specific reason -- and every tired bro-y division and vague elitism thereby implied. Which, in 2014, makes me slightly uncomfortable. Props for the Ann-Margret cover, though.

***

FKA twigs
LP1 (2014)
(Young Turks)

!!!! AVOID !!!!! * Enough already with this drugged-out fake soul horseshit and the boring-ass fawning over it. (Time Magazine's album of the year, no really. We Did It.) The barely-tolerable "Closer" is as good as this gets musically, and it's unbelievably insipid. Amber: "I just want everbody to stop breathing on me."

***

Reigning Sound
Shattered (2014)
(Merge)

!! CAUTION !! * Just what we need after all that disgusting futurism, some dudes who think it's still the '70s, and accomplish very little with this delusion. Though singer Greg Cartwright occasionally evokes Van Morrison ("Once More") in both sound and fields of interest, it's more often these days he comes off like the guy from Train. This beer-rock would sound all right at the county fair I guess, inevitably with the guy onstage announcing "This one's called 'Baby It's Too Late.' [That one features high drama in the form of Cartwright changing his mind every few seconds about whether he wants to use contractions or not.] This one's called 'North Cackalacky Girl.'" The last song, a bad Otis Redding lampoon, is especially funny in a Blueshammer sort of way. This sort of thing is all indie-rock inbred pedigree.

***

King Creosote
From Scotland with Love (2014)
(Domino)

Wistful folk-jazz from one of Scotland's most prolific singer-songwriters, this documentary soundtrack sounds like what it is -- a commission -- but is also imbued with glory and sadness at its best moments. Creosote has a pleasant voice that (unsurprisingly?) recalls Jim Kerr from Simple Minds. In this context the songs are missing the visual cues that inspired them, but the credible songs rise above this when they're sufficiently forceful, like "For One Night Only." The highlight is the schoolyard chant "Bluebell, Cockleshell 123," plaintive and folky but beautiful, with handclaps like "Iko Iko."

***

Joyce Manor
Never Hungover Again (2014)
(Epitaph)

!! CAUTION !! * Points for economy -- this is nineteen minutes (and ten tracks) of watered-down Weezer, who were only ever good for about that long anyway. The songs might not even be bad if they were sung by someone who wasn't so absolutely anonymous and grating. Otherwise see Braid above; fifteen years and niche status haven't made emo and all its stringent delivery requirements any less dreadful than when I was in high school.

***

Shabazz Palaces
Lese Majesty (2014)
(Sub Pop)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED * Deceptive and seemingly insubstantial at first blush, this utterly sublime performance scores less on ambiance and subtlety than Black Up but ever more on the element of surprise. The boundless pleasure of the unexpected sounds, rhymes and musical interludes in this patchwork of brief suites and briefer songs are designed to hide pop and hint at pleasure that's swifty denied -- only then creating further pleasure yet with its cumulative impact; it's Pink Flag for 2014. Surprisingly, a couple of the songs are stronger on their own than anything in Shabazz's catalog previously. Both "#CAKE" and "Motion Sickness" grab hooks and grooves and actually concentrate on them for longer than a minute, but you won't be sorry there are few examples of same. This is dreamlike bliss, both sultry and aggressive, up until it sends you completely into space at the finale. Ishmael Butler's MCing is fabulous -- invoking Moby Dick allegory and targeting rap as commodity, it's maybe his best writing and MCing ever, including as Butterfly -- but he's really only one sonic factor in this extraordinary concoction of futuristic surrealism, half George Clinton and half Brian Eno. Only one small request: for god's sake, listen to this on actual speakers or headphones, not laptop speakers or earbuds -- let its effects, synths and bottom end wash over you. Background pleasantness this isn't.

***

Mirel Wagner
When the Cellar Children See the Light of Day (2014)
(Sub Pop)

!! CAUTION !! * This ghostly folk that barely moves has its charms, astoundingly standstill and morose as it is (and with a closing track that's essentially a musical suicide note, natch), but the only song that sounds like a finished thought is "The Devil's Tongue"; the rest are reptitive and halting in a manner that will start to gripe you quickly. We try not to harp on this, but the lyrics are noticeably bad; Wagner was born in Ethiopia and raised in Finland, so English could easily be her third language, which makes it hard to fault her. Then you remember Kristian Matsson, Josephine Olausson, etc.

***

James Yorkston
Cellardyke Recording and Wassailing Society (2014)
(Domino)

!! CAUTION !! * There wasn't enough attention in poetry, still not enough money in music, but at least it's a vehicle he can use to lecture us in his shapeless, wordy tirades.

***

Ty Segall
Manipulator (2014)
(Drag City)

Like Jack White or Queens of the Stone Age only about 33% less self-aware, Segall does stoned out rawk & roll with in-name-only aspirations to garage. He ain't punk cause he's alternately too folky and too heavy; his riffs (dig "The Hand") and guitar solos are killer but not in that perverse J Mascis sense. He's a baby, but his talent far outsizes him. Wanna know the big difference between Segall and Ariel Pink? It's that Segall can write a song like "Mister Main" but treat it so seriously you barely notice how ridiculous it is, especially after beer number four. Wank for the kids is still wank, and I honestly never want to hear it again, but for this kind of thing it sure as fuck beats the Black Keys or Reigning Sound.

***

The Bug
Angels & Devils (2014)
(Ninja Tune)

Creepy crawly ambient music with all-star annoyances like Gonjasufi and (god help me) Death Grips contributing, this is trippy and semi-agreeable but also weirdly aggro for something with such a benign overall sound. It's like if you put out Music for Airports and gave it the song titles from the Replacements' Stink. The ever-dependable Grips' contribution is entitled "Fuck a Bitch," because of course it is.

***



Aphex Twin
Syro (2014)
(Warp)

!! CAUTION !! * Boring as hell. Illuminati must've got to him.

***

Perfume Genius
Too Bright (2014)
(Matador)

Sure, Mike Hadreas still sings like a goddamned angel and Put Your Back N 2 It was mostly noodling ballads as well, but it also coalesced into four or five very solid and complete songs, including one out and out masterpiece ("Hood"). Well, Too Bright boasts its own near-masterpiece, the shimmering and multilayered "Fool," but otherwise it's pretty much all noodling. And that might not be so bad, except you just keep expecting him to blow you away again.

***

Mr. Twin Sister (2014)
(s/r)

RECOMMENDED * I was a big supporter pre-name change (in case you missed the memo, this band used to be merely Twin Sister), but Domino let them go when next to no one bought the lovely In Heaven; the band focused on what they still loved about performing and came up with a weirder, more surreal swirl of disco, Grace Jones and offbeat keyboard swirl. It might be the most assertive sophomore album in indie rock history, but it isn't a whole lot sharper or deeper than someone like Tennis or (pre-awful) Youth Lagoon. If the currency here is excitement at the sheer wonder of chemistry and creation, I'll still side with the record they now kinda-sorta dismiss; its pep and uncompromised simplicity got to me, which is another way of saying the songs were better. If we must, though -- the atmospheres ("Sensitive," "Twelve Angels," "Crime Scene") are all fine, the electronics and beats consistent, and "Rude Boy" is almost as good as "Gene Ciampi." Madonna-circa-Erotica pastiche "In the House of Yes" makes provocation of innocent ideas and quirks, the opposite of what In Heaven did but noble all the same.

***

Hiss Golden Messenger
Lateness of Dancers (2014)
(Merge)

Tear-in beer whatever folk rock, sounds kinda like the Wallflowers. Title track is OK. Getting bent out of shape about it won't help make the world a better place and would make me look like an asshole, so I won't. See, listening to insipid music isn't the only way to prove you're mature. Oops.

***

Interpol
El Pintor (2014)
(Matador)

RECOMMENDED * Paul Banks wants to know: "Am I more soulful?" Sure, to some extent, and a little goofier too; really, after the last two records I'm surprised you'd bother asking. Anyway, yes, there's some cooing falsetto on "Tidal Wave" and "My Desire" has a yearning, a slight pathetic whine, that causes that impressively simple tune to present something like believable emotion. It's also perhaps the most relentless earworm in this stunted band's weird catalog. It comes just after the classically disaffected "All the Rage Back Home," thus at least opening an Interpol album well for the first time in a decade. It's not just Banks' gradually subsiding smugness that tells the tale, either; all through their best release (nearly unquestionably) since ANTICS, Interpol demonstrate a looseness that's proven elusive to them till now. Like class of 2000 alienated brethren the Strokes, their new work speaks well of their resignation to become a functional aging unit -- but much as Room on Fire gave better diminishing returns than ANTICS, the new one, attractive and delightful as it is (neither attribute applied to Our Love to Admire or Interpol), has neither the songs nor the wit of Comedown Machine. Without Carlos D, they lose their jock appeal (which isn't really a debit) and phase out vague aspirations toward surf rock in favor of vague aspirations toward late '70s Beach Boys (which is).

***

Vessel
Punish, Honey (2014)
(Tri Angle)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED * An unexpectedly engrossing -- and heavy -- collection of programmed, apocalyptic percussive electronics that nevertheless weave around you with their complex rhythms and abrasive grooves. Considering how little this music adheres to any conventional sense of "beat" or even a snatch of tunefulness, it's amazing how accessible it is -- it's one of the best ambient records I've heard in a long time. And while it easily rewards headphone-level concentration, it's also surprisingly relaxing at the right volume, which is the last thing you'd expect for an album that owes so much to industrial techno.

***

Cities Aviv
Come to Life (2014)
(Young One)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED * Gavin Mays a.k.a. Cities Aviv hails from Memphis but is part of no geographic or theoretical scene ("cloud rap" or "Tumblr rap" would lump him in with the likes of Childish Gambino and Chance the Rapper, neither of whom deserve the association), at least none that I'm aware of; musically, his strikingly atmospheric work is singular and unique and barely any conventional or familiar kind of hip hop. Rather it's a stirring mixture of keyboard atmospheres, stoner rap, aggressive post-punk and general aloof weirdness. His proper debut album uses a range of producers; ideas and songs segue into one another, some quick and some hypnotically drawn out but all fully formed and compelling (even the interludes and oddball gags, the kind of stuff that drags down noble records like Frank Ocean's Channel Orange), so that the album falls together as a complete creation linked by Mays' droning but alert delivery, which you can liken to a megaphone he's yelling into from a safe distance, a delightful mixture of the committed and the laconic. But Come to Life delivers big-time because of its layered, unorthodox arrangements. Consistently surprising and unexpected, Cities Aviv one-ups and decries the apathy of the lazy drugged-out R&B subgenre by simultaneously tripping us up and entrancing us. The results are positive, emotional, funky, practically every good thing a witty and inventive musician ought to be. And they are not something we've heard a million times before, within or outside of hip hop. If anything, hip hop as we know it is incidental to what he's doing.

***

Gerard Way
Hesitant Alien (2014)
(Reprise)

Looks like a Gary Numan album and is even titled like one, but nah, this is just the guy from My Chemical Romance passing along his glam fantasy on a major. Not much to see here but it's tolerably angsty. Good drum sound.

***

Lucinda Williams
Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone (2014)
(Highway 20)

RECOMMENDED * I admire Williams a hell of a lot but have never connected with her work like I wanted to. While I'm familiar with her most celebrated album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, I find I come far closer to being shattered and moved by the first few songs on this much more exhaustive double-set. Perhaps it's just an indication that I've changed but there's something gorgeously engaging in the Neil Young-like slapdash arrangements, and (especially) in Williams' increasingly frayed, slurred vocals. One friend who loves her says every moment is perfect, but longtime supporter Robert Christgau argues that the songs are longer than they need to be, resulting in a record that rambles long after it's made its point. Not having a dog in the fight, I admit that either disc is more than enough of this for me at a given time. But I'm glad they're both there anyway -- and there's something to be said for indulgent sadness. If you're unsure of where to dip in, try "Burning Bridges," "Protection" or "Something Wicked This Way Comes."

***

Caribou
Our Love (2014)
(Merge)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED * Swim was a particular kind of drifting and atonal that got under my skin in the wrong way, but with the vague EDM aspirations and the In Rainbows-like shameless romanticism of Dan Snaith's follow-up, he's located my heart. Owen Pallett's involvement probably doesn't hurt. "Silver" deconstructs hi-NRG until it's an indescribably lovely paean to passion and need that cushions the ears and body. "Back Home" is an irresistibly snaky melody, lushness surrounded by a tweaking away of harsh tones. All of the songs meld repetition into beauty, and get ample mileage from what initially sound like strange and barely related tangents. The record reveals itself more on every revisit, ultimately unfurling itself so gorgeously I can't help but wonder if I wasn't just giving up on Caribou's earlier work too easily. At any rate, this is available as a bargain-priced half speed master from Merge, which is amazing but would mean nothing if the music weren't sublime. It is -- a curious, deeply original new addiction for anyone who loves the depth of really charged, passionate dance music. So consider this personal advice: buy this one on vinyl.

***

Steve Gunn
Way Out Weather (2014)
(Paradise of Bachelors)

Absolutely harmless singer-songwriter, John Fogerty-ish melodies, very good and interesting guitar playing. Probably worthwhile if you're in the market.

******

clipping.: CLPPNG (2014)

(Sub Pop)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

It doesn't sound promising in theory. An L.A. hip hop collective consisting of a noise artist, a semi-popular synthpop producer and an MC, Daveed Diggs, whom one of them met in high school. As it happens, though, this is terrifying, sophisticated music and constitutes the rare sort of claim that one is hearing the future of an entire genre. clipping. share a label with Shabazz Palaces and combine that group's artful pushing of boundaries with a stronger populist sensibility. They are rap fans, in other words, and don't have Ishmael Butler's impulse to destroy the basis of their work before rebuilding it. That's why this extremely accomplished album has time for a sound collage, rapid-fire MCing over fractured and dead beats and a song that consists entirely of an annoying alarm clock ringing out while Diggs raps over it, but also for fierce and triumphant hooks like those of the instant earworm "Work Work" and the anti-gangsta instructional parable "Or Die."

Diggs would be a voice to relish with or without his bandmates, something clear from the first thirty seconds of this record, and they'd be nothing but another fast-flaccid bloghype without him (though we admire any modern record that closes with a wordless five-minute salute to John Cage), but the blend of their talents creates a truly beguiling sound that's both immediate and startlingly inventive. William Huston and Jonathan Snipes build tracks of almost unbearable tension that sustain, explode or unfurl as Diggs' delivery demands. So when he wants to parody the modern slow-jam on the amusing "Tonight," they go all the way with the cheese; elsewhere, minimalism permeates and not just so that Diggs can take center stage but so that music and words can bounce off each other in a new, dynamic fashion. The fabulous, Biggie-referencing "Dream" is delivered almost entirely in a whisper and a monotone, backed up by chimes and ambient noise that all fall together into an atmospheric dirge. But when Diggs is presenting a harrowing narrative about a reformed criminal found out by an old murderous cohort who exacts painful revenge on "Story 2," they step back and utilize what sounds like a skipping half-formed groove that reaches a Roy Orbison-like tragic crescendo; you only notice it when you tune out Diggs' stunningly nuanced and breakneck delivery, but you appreciate its detail and subtlety once you do. Outside of Kate Tempest's album, it's the most arresting act of hip hop storytelling this year, with an added air of crushing tragedy.

The subject matter favored on CLPPNG runs largely in that direction -- of unchecked bravado and unforseen comeuppance, the stuff of Kubrick and Breaking Bad and also the stuff of hip hop legend. Using a chorus of kids like on "Dominoes" has a big presence in the world's oldest bag of ironic tricks, but in this context it comes across as both resigned and alienating, more Leonard Cohen circa "Last Year's Man" than Kanye West circa "We Don't Care." On "Work Work," Diggs sets up an impossible scenario for his hero then lays out the truth about where inner city badassery ends up: "It really doesn't matter cause you already dead / No obitaries for the most part / Nobody cares, you are not even a costar / Just an extra they read about as a number."

The sounds weave around, always unexpected, often cleverly traumatic, and the pleasures are an astounding mixture of the conventional and the odd. Where do you classify "Body and Blood," the rare murder ballad with a female protagonist? Or "Get Up," which if you can actually stand it does more with less than almost any pop song I can name? This is a musically rich, exciting record. But it's inevitable that Diggs takes up a lot of attention with his wordplay; it might not be that unusual, especially in the post-Heems era, for a rapper in a short span of time to reference Rorschach tests, Andrew Dice Clay, Cypress Hill's "How I Could Just Kill a Man," hipsters rocking Jeezy tees, and the Beach Boys and their record label. But the impression is made by the barbed and complex wordplay that surrounds these offbeat moments. Not one of them is there just for the hell of it. In "Dream", a conjuring of placid peace a la Neil Young: "Wouldn't it be nice to beach boy for a year or six / turn harmony to [C]apitol / trade the bricks for sand dollars"; in "Summertime," well, just watch:

So he keep it rollin' like that dice game
Homies talk shit, Andrew Dice Clay
Homies take shifts watching vice playing nice like they ain't narcs
Roll a seven, guns spark, dogs bark, dial nine-eleven

That's one of Diggs' calmer moments, actually; he keeps himself mostly in a stark monotone throughout the record, but he can frequently spit with Busta Rhymes-like speed, weaving dark miniature tales of urban pain, of the agony imposed on a minority by capitalism. "Living in the ghetto cause the rent is cheap / and the cost of living is the life you living / and the life you living is the nicest given / that you ice the living / that they cry for more of that good poison / that hood oil, that cash cow need cash now [...] / don't you think, or don't you think about it? / Stop all the thinking, instincts is how you kill a giant." Diggs' voice coyly suggests he sees the lie in this, confirmed later on in "Ends": "Eyes closed, hands up / don't look and don't say nothing / yeah, you getting got but they don't know that / you ain't got nothing, broke robbing the broke / and there's broken pieces of sanity on the floor / scattered for sure, jigsaw in the brain / Rorschach is for psychos / ain't nobody crazy in here, this is where logic is vital." In other words: the outside-imposed bliss, robbing and eating itself, of a corned-off oblivion -- that's the Lifestyle.

Such clear-eyed journalism is Diggs' specialty. Aside from "Story 2," his strongest illustration is in the closing verse of "Inside Out," which sardonically describes the aftermath of a murder-on-the-outside, everybody-inside violent crime:

Orange cones and yellow tape
Palm trees swayin', passers by all look the other way
Nobody speak to police this or any other day
They comb the streets, knock door to door asking for mother's sake
Trying to catch another break
Body on the pavement 'bout 10 steps from the front porch
Photographer snappin' pics to go with the coroner's report
Of the seven exit wounds, three in the skull, four in the torso
Blood spread dry, red black red snapback even more so
Lays three paces to the south
The direction of the wind
New deputy pissed picking up shell casings again
Finds one in the browning grass by the sagging four foot high chain link fence
Drops it in a bag marked 'Evidence'
Here come that Caprice again
Rolling too slow up the street; men sit four deep in
They seats and slow up by the scene, bandanas hide they faces
But all they heads are shakin'
They nod in unison and hit the corner without breakin'

Diggs puts all of that across in forty seconds. The other two members of clipping. bring the track home with their tricky, willfully strange industrial backdrop -- which seems flippant against the subject matter, most likely on purpose -- and this union is seamless. It remains such when his unfiltered insights unfold against the sound of a glitchy MP3 or a malfunctioning radio. If CLPPNG is a triumph of bizarre, innovative sounds made accessible -- more accessible than Death Grips, Shabazz Palaces, even the abrasive recordings of the Bomb Squad circa It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, and probably even Yeezus -- it's because it's also a triumph of word-based imagery. And it's a phenomenal, smart performance as strange and exciting as the freshest hip hop of any era. clipping. is the real deal, further evidence that American hip hop, over and below ground and a-little-of-both, is brighter and faster-moving than ever.

Leonard Cohen: Popular Problems (2014)

(Columbia)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Anything Leonard Cohen does at this point, following his return to touring, is a victory lap; 2012's lovely, ethereal Old Ideas would have made the perfect swansong to his recording career. Instead, he's followed it unexpectedly with a leaner record -- nine songs, under forty minutes -- that continues the triumph. Arranged and recorded (and even illustrated) similarly to Old Ideas, it marks several significant changes all the same, thus keeping the landscape wide open for a singer-songwriter who easily could have retired years ago now, but who seems deep down to hold the view that he's nowhere near finished. His peer and labelmate Bob Dylan still writes and records good music, but it's honestly hard to argue that Cohen is not currently still at his artistic peak. And that's astounding.

The time on the road has put Cohen's voice back in its raspiest mode, which actually makes his singing more idiosyncratic and compelling, and the lyrics he's chosen to develop into songs are meaner ("Did I ever love you? / Does it really matter?") and funnier ("There's torture and there's killing / and there's all my bad reviews"), the two parts of his personality most freely left behind by the Cult of "Hallelujah" and, hence, by the crowd-pleasing Ideas. Patrick Leonard's production is well in keeping with Cohen's musical eccentricities of the '80s and '90s; the pair wrap Cohen's incongruous vocals and those of his female cohorts around pseudo-country Muzak with canned, synthetic horns and strings. As on I'm Your Man and The Future, that oddly earnest appropriation of superficial modernity is a fascinating contrast to the songs themselves, and improves their communicative powers with its oblique beauty.

The best example of this is the gorgeous "Did I Ever Love You," which makes wildly unexpected use of programmed drums in a sort of clop-clopping raveup. But the melody is as classic and unadorned a feat as some forgotten gospel number; like "Nightingale" or "Going Home," it sings out with such refreshing directness as to invite an outpouring. Cohen's songwriting has always been best at its simplest, from "Stranger Song" to "I Can't Forget," and songs like that one, "My Oh My" and "You Got Me Singing" approach the simple power of a mere confession in their intimacy, all harshly honest -- their optimism never untempered by the burdens of aging, death and cynicism -- but elegiac.

Lyrically, Cohen's fixations are the same as ever (sex, God, death, war) but he expresses them like someone aware that he doesn't have all the time in the world and thus wishes not to stall on making his points, and conversely someone aware that he has yet to learn all that he needs to know. At 80, his clear-eyed maturity and grace are still staggering -- has he ever so plainly stated his philosophy as on the uncomfortable and witty "Almost Like the Blues"? Besides Yoko Ono, can you imagine any octagenarian but Cohen writing a song about sex as frank and funny as the instant-classic "Slow"? Can anyone else write a song that sounds simultaneously like a chronicle of a hiding war criminal and a paean to a broken marriage ("Nevermind")? And does anyone else make a sound like he and his team (not his band; he only uses them onstage) do on "A Street," the album's probable peak? That sound of him muttering away his lovely stanzas -- "You put on a uniform to fight the Civil War / You looked so good I didn't care what side you're fighting for" -- so perfectly controlled in tandem with his "angels" calling back every phrase?

No. It's his niche, it's unique, and it's the niche of someone who's still adaptable and vital half a century after he began this particular conversation. Collectively, it's enough to make a blackened heart open; enough to think of something ridiculous like the immortality of a true artist, of the passage of time itself losing its power and meaning. Or as the man himself puts it: "YOu got me wishing our little love would last / You got me thinking like those people of the past."

The New Pornographers: Brill Bruisers (2014)

(Matador)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

They used to call the New Pornographers a supergroup, a label that never really fit; the members record on their own, but with the exception of Neko Case, none can probably pack a house like the New Porns show I saw in 2010, a fairly understandable distinction for a band so driven on the abstract power of the great pop hook. On the band's first three albums they were a dazzling monument to power pop divorced of its gender and label-based constraints; there was shouted-out joy to spare on them. This came both from the smart, varied writing and from the precision and enthusiasm of the performances; despite the convoluted genesis of the band, one could sense a connection being constantly forged both among themselves and with the audience. What makes this more impressive is that same connection isn't nearly so palpable on Carl Newman's own solo records, which are much more academic exercises in record-collector rock, on Neko Case's, typically passionate but tired, or on Dan Bejar's, so often revolving around the sheer oddity of his persona and sometimes brilliantly barbed lyricism. But together, the band's magic is elevated; their sound is defined by the miracle of the true, devoted collective.

With 2007's Challengers, the focus changed. A.C. Newman's songs were still often phenomenal (to be occasionally upstaged by design by Bejar), but they seemed to be ideas in search of a home, and taken together they sounded unfocused and listless. That went double for the ironically titled Together; several of the tracks ("Crash Years"; "Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk") were as good as anything they'd ever released but they did not come across so forcefully, and they seemed less a band than a collision of talent -- a vehicle for Newman's ideas, with periodic guest appearances. As a force they seemed spent, only there was some lingering beauty in there that was, after a while, hard to shake. Pull up Spotify and make a quick playlist of your favorite 2000-2005 New Pornographers tunes and throw in a few from Challengers and Together and my guess is those later cuts will suddenly seem stronger and more vital than you ever realized, especially if you can ignore their overly busy arrangements. Easiest conclusion is that those albums introduced an emotional variance -- the title track of Challengers is a monumentally romantic moment; Bejar's "Myriad Harbor" the kind of song that reminds you why you care about pop music, but both are darker and more methodical than any of the band's previous work -- that wasn't necessarily a perfect fit with their delivery. Together tried to balance this by interspersing upbeat music between the acoustic exercises, but that just made everything seem half-hearted.

It would be fun to report that Brill Bruisers, the out-of-nowhere bullseye that reasserts not just the New Pornographers as a magical force but the song-based indie rock band in general as a worthwhile and elastic endeavor, finds a way to balance Newman's warring instincts -- for a song like "Valkyrie in the Roller Disco," such a revelation on its own when I hear it now, to be integrated with the classic pop bliss and an arrangement that would take it all home, not to be saddled with a bunch of other songs that seem at first blush to be merely driving at the same unstated, unfulfilled thing. Alas, it'd be a lie. Newman himself asserts that the sound of Challengers and Together resulted from a prolonged difficult period in his life, that now he is happy without reservation. Thus Brill Bruisers is the sound of thrilled, bombed-out pleasure because that's where its primary force's headspace currently is.

Yet there is more than that happening here. First is that the New Pornographers sound fully unified again, as though every sound one of them makes is a universally agreed-upon choice of what needed to happen next. On the XTC-like "Wide Eyes," a midtempo folk song that would likely have been presented far more quietly on the last two LPs, the band sounds like, well, a band. They also sound like their hooks no longer serve to hide something deeper -- when Case and Kathryn Calder belt out the sensitive, reassuring "I still see hope for you" on the wonderfully unexpected bridge, it's the exception that proves their rule: beauty lives alongside the canny choruses and boundless sense of pleasure. But for the most part, Brill Bruisers is significant -- as befitting its title -- because it is completely a celebration of the magic of pop songwriting.

It's about the joy of creating something like "Backstairs," a muscular and menacing piece of retro bliss with unexpected twists that uses guitars as texture, synths and voices as a beacon, stop-start dynamics as a currency of audible unison. And despite feeling like the biggest and most thrilling surprise of 2014, the album's major leap forward is kind of obvious when you think about it: since the last time the New Pornographers recorded an album this loud and fevered, Newman has become a more manic and inspired writer. His songs don't throttle and crash constantly anymore, they wind and twirl and bend like "Ticket to Ride" or something. And if the New Pornographers' mood lives or dies by his own whims, he as learned to communicate to them all the more strongly; everyone seems in sync with him here.

The reliance on synths is also new, and carries us through the majority of these songs, but it's a good fit for this band. Though they don't aspire to dance music like comparable explorations of keyboards in power pop -- Blondie's Parallel Lines or the later work of the Apples in Stereo -- they favorably call to mind the best and most relentless earworms of the Cars. The way those beeps and trills bring forth neon dreams and urgent Saturday nights is vividly reminscent of the band that took new wave to the mainstream, and if you're wondering how these probing and mysterious compositions could evoke Ric Ocasek, remember that he put stuff like "I'm in Touch with Your World" and "Moving in Stereo" on his band's big radio-hit-filled LP debut. The new show-stopper "Dancehall Domine" is almost an architectural monument to the idea of the Hit, to the chemical reactions of a band inducing shake-it-up happiness in all of the crowded-out "oh oh oh"s and the huge sound driven by the group's incredibly tight performing and singing. "Hi-Rise" operates similarly, its hooks bubbling under a brilliant melody whose chief secret is nothing more than mere wordless catchiness; it sounds like an undersea level in a video game. It sounds drunk. It sounds glorious. Ditto the tower of vocals, the synths, the "babababaBA" on the midtempo but celebratory opening title.

However, Newman continues to write lyrics and they continue to be inscrutable -- not in a willfully abstract but human and witty manner like Stephen Malkmus or even Bejar but in a manner that suggests he's talking in code about something very specific that he doesn't want us all to know. As the New Pornographers have evolved, this tendency has become more noticeable and slightly unnerving, but on this outing he learns a trick from his bandmate Bejar and forms hooks not just around melody lines, bridges and choruses but around phrases -- the kind that stick in your mind, thus causing the song itself to follow. The words strung together above the elaborate bed of sound "Fantasy Fools" sound like a grand burying of profundity. The lyrics are often too odd to be simple sonic wallpaper, but their strangeness now seems part of the band's grand mystery rather than an oblique distraction. Newman cedes vocals to his partners more than usual this time, and in turn it's not just that Neko Case and Kathryn Calder provide relief from his pretensions as that his own use of repetition humanizes them. It's one more way in which he establishes an illusion whereby he's part of a greater whole, not the mad wizard behind it all, however true the latter really is.

Cars, Blondie, and Records memories notwithstanding, most of these songs could be no one except the New Pornographers, even as they stretch far beyond the sonic bounds of Twin Cinema and its two predecessors. (Its propulsion and trajectory make it frankly feel as if the two albums since 2005 didn't even really happen, or were just breaks in a longer story.) It's difficult to choose one highlight but "Champions of Red Wine" is everything wonderful about this band in 3:40, Case leading an upbeat, driving synthpop creation with lovely Newman backing vocals and a hint of unstated melancholy seldom so lovingly articulated in their work -- another advancement. That extends to the Calder-driven, Magnetic Fields-like "Another Drug Deal of the Heart" that gets its sublimity across in less than two minutes and manages urgency for all its sound of resigned desperation. And "Marching Orders" is classic fun, another Case lead whose rhythm lives up to its title and that demands the million-dollar question: "They say we can't make this stuff up, but what else could we make?" And talking of catchphrases, Newman and the band's reassuring cry out into the night of "you tell me where to be, I'll be there" culminates the mastery of Brill Bruisers -- as much a haunting and personal straightforward celebration as "Challengers," it's also musically as curious and mindbending as the Porns' best work from the beginning, "Mass Romantic" all the way to "Bleeding Heart Show."

Bejar's interludes seem as detached from Newman's general narrative as ever; "Born with a Sound" does have a splendid moment when he steps aside to let Amber Webber sing the bridge, cementing an internal cooperation, but his other two songs are vastly more interesting in general. "War on the East Coast" is most in keeping with the album's overriding sound, new wave with a monster chorus that sounds younger, higher but somehow of a piece with his soft-rock experiment Kaputt. "Spidyr" is more typical of Bejar's work but does inherit subtle dance music textures and boasts one of the record's weirdest moments, a sudden harmonica solo. Like so much else about the New Pornographers' work, Bejar seems to just belong, illogical as it may be -- and somehow, his incongruity gives the group a tension it might not possess otherwise.

It's very hard to stop listening to this album, to pick it apart and determine what makes it tick, to define its perfection so drolly, and certainly to choose which of its extraordinary songs is best and brightest. It simply piles one wonderful song atop another, one hook or chorus or bridge atop the last. Back in 2004 when I discovered Mass Romantic and Electric Version, I felt for the first time like I really believed in something a new band was doing and felt giddy about their existence -- Brill Bruisers not only brings that feeling back, it does it with bodies and minds that are all the more weathered and surly. It is an awakening.

Terror of the infinite: November 2014 new release rush (part 1 of 3)

SOHN
Tremors (2014)
(4AD)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED * Christopher Taylor's debut full-length under this moniker is lovingly produced R&B with impassioned vocals and a pillow of sound that's both intriguingly unsettled and extremely pleasurable to the ear, even on first contact. Artists like Taylor and Lyla Foy, despite being mostly tsk-tsked at by the hoary indie rock blogosphere, represent the bedroom pop of the early part of this decade actually coming to fruition at last. Both artists explored the limits of the bedroom and chillwave concepts and moved on to higher-fidelity factions with what they'd learned, a path not dissimilar to what modern luminaries Merrill Garbus and John Darnielle did. Despite being a professionally recorded album with a presumably decent budget (given Taylor's track record working with bigger successes like Rhye), Tremors inherits the sense of emotional immersion that gives private demos their strange resonance in the first place. Unlike many of his peers, Taylor is also a superb singer and meticulously generates beautiful electronic backing for his complex songs, which are mostly quite subtle (excluding the tower-of-song chorus of "Artifice") but consistently striking and intelligent. It's an album that bears the mark of ambient music with its floating, ethereal qualities -- the pulsating "Lessons" is a bit like Music for Films with a catchy vocal melody laid over -- while also suggesting the stripped-back R&B of James Blake and How to Dress Well but, unlike those artists, actually bringing the songs and grooves home. That's because they're written and recorded as complete creations, but also because Taylor is simply a better, more guttural and expressive singer than almost anyone in the indie-R&B subfield right now; only Rhye's Milosh and Perfume Genius' Mike Hadreas come to mind as stronger. It's easy to glance at Tremors and think you've heard it all before, but as with Foy's equally brilliant debut on Sub Pop, I feel it's a shame to overlook something that's such a work of refined craft and emotion even if it's not brazenly original. Besides, "The Wheel," "Bloodflows," "Fool," the erotically charged slowjam "Veto" and the stunning ear-bender "Lights" are the honest-to-god next level; they're as good as anything issued in this blue-eyed lonely-highway idiom, and it's hard to see how anyone could argue that the drab smartass Ariel Pink has more to show us. For one thing, Taylor seems to give a fuck.

***

Ben Watt
Hendra (2014)
(Caroline)

Watt was half of the increasingly underappreciated Everything But the Girl. Though he and Tracey Thorn still appear to be happily married, they haven't released new music together since the magnificent Temperamental in 1999. While both have stayed busy, this is Watt's first solo album since prior to EBTG's formation. Those who know the duo primarily for their full-on embrace of dance music and urban loneliness will be surprised by how low-key this is -- it's a very calm singer-songwriter record in the vein of Richard Thompson and Loudon Wainwright. Then again, Thorn and Watt became known to begin with for their gentle, frothy pseudo-lounge music so for long-timers it's not as much of a stretch. Like his wife (both are outstanding prose writers as well) Watt writes good, incisive lyrics but his vocals don't have the character or bite of those luminaries (or Thorn's), though he does vaguely resemble Thompson at times. Not surprisingly, the album is strongest when it picks up the pace a little (as on the sharp, guitar-driven Lindsey Buckingham-like "Nathaniel"); generally it can most politely be characterized as a middling, folky exercise you don't necessarily have the urge to turn off. Too happy that Watt is making music again to get too upset about it being a bit dull.

***

Old 97's
Most Messed Up (2014)
(ATO)

RECOMMENDED * Thank goodness they got the rotten listlessness of the Grand Theatre records out of their system. But formerly one of the best bands in America, they now seem content to rest on the laurels of what's Expected. They roar and blast their way through twelve quick, raucous riff twangers, but the biggest clue to Rhett Miller's psychology these days comes at the very beginning, on the cynical, biting "Longer Than You've Been Alive," like Pet Shop Boys' "Young Offender" only pissed and pissed off. It's about being a washed-up (?) rock star on the road and making a career of it. The rest of the songs are about gettin' laid and gettin' drunk -- so in other words, Miller's primary interest at this point seems to be to pander to the people who go to Old 97's shows chiefly to get drunk and sling their beers in the faces of nearby introverts. (I digress.) These are the same people who thought that the band was selling out to Elektra when Miller's songs started to get stronger and stronger and the band's style became harder and harder to pinpoint. Only Murry Hammond still delivers the kind of murky power pop that made Fight Songs and Satellite Rides so valuable; the rest of the time, the band tries desperately to fit what they now perceive as being their "place." The songs are raw raunch & roll, but they're also really damned obvious, sometimes annoyingly so. Still, doing what's expected of you can deliver, and the acid in Miller's tongue can give this a pleasing New Adventures in Hi-Fi vibe at its best. Is it their best record in years? Sure. Is it their best since Elektra? Hell no -- I'll still take Blame It on Gravity, their last swipe at genre-loose fearlessness -- but it's certainly a step in the right direction for which I honestly thought it was too late.

***

Lykke Li
I Never Learn (2014)
(Atlantic)

It's great to have Jewel back, dunno why she's traveling under an alias. But for real, this concept album about post-breakup stasis was purportedly influenced by Pacific Ocean Blue and Astral Weeks but ends up sounding more like Nico before the morning shot. It's less vivid and engaging than Lykke Li's previous work because it's necessarily so morose, while still being written and structured like a conventional pop record -- "Gunshot" is like a very tired "Paper Planes" -- and driven, like Wounded Rhymes, by big drive-by statements like "Love Me Like I'm Not Made of Stone" (see: "Sadness Is a Blessing"). What has changed is that the pain in Li's voice is very much audible, so even if the music isn't particularly interesting your heart does go out to her. The tortured torch songs all run together except the big, floridly arranged "Heart of Steel" -- but even there, what we're hearing is the virtue of Wounded Rhymes extended more than any revealing, newly personal intimacy.

***

The Roots
...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin (2014)
(Def Jam)

RECOMMENDED * More power to one of the best and most consistent bands in the world for being able to do whatever the hell they want these days, and have a label willing to release it, but this diehard still misses Black Thought actually being given the chance to rap and ?uestlove writing rather than just producing. The concept is a tackling of hip hop bravado, street violence and self-destruction versus mainstream perception of same; it's tragic, dark, satiric, cerebral, and some would say just a little too easy. Musically, the Roots continue to push boundaries, which isn't what we'd once have expected from a Tonight Show house band, but like undun before it, it's muchly in the vein of their subtle, artistically adventurous adaptation of Langston Hughes' "Ask Your Mama," which they performed at Carnegie Hall in 2009. That's well and good, but is it shallow of me to miss a great band's pop sensibility? It is shallow, actually, and kind of cynical -- we always hope for great bands to reach the level of success where they can release an incongruous half-hour of intricate, close listen-rewarding high art with musique concrete interpolations from Michel Chion, and then when one actually survives at that level we snarl at it. So in essence, this is a record whose existence I love more than I love or even like the actual results, and I accept the hypocrisy inherent to that. But my goodness, the closer -- "Tomorrow," sung by R&B obscurity Raheem DeVaughn -- is wonderful, a beautiful and possibly sardonic ode to finding your angel with hopping pop bliss and a melody so simple and perfect you can't believe no one already wrote it. That's how we know this album isn't just a busy band being obtuse; they are still doing something special, we just haven't necessarily caught up.

***

Toumani Diabaté / Sidiki Diabaté
Toumani & Sidiki (2014)
(Nonesuch)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED * The Malian hip hop drummer Sidiki Diabaté is also a third-generation master of the kora, a 21-string harp associated with West Africa. This collaborative album made with his father Toumani, one of the most celebrated kora players on the continent, wonderfully captures the collision both performers enjoy exploring of Malian musical traditionalism and American jazz and blues. Fully instrumental and creating a rhythmic, melodic cushion of lively improvisation, it benefits from the palpable camaraderie between father and son. The results are offbeat and magical, with numerous striking grooves and enough depth and variance to make it a rich listen from start to finish. For pure musicality, it's hard to imagine a more immediate or accessible African album, and it rewards both background listening and careful attention.

***

Sharon Van Etten
Are We There (2014)
(Jagjaguwar)

!! CAUTION !! * Having seen a few mesmerizing videos of Van Etten performing completely alone, it's astounding how dull her music becomes when weighted down with full performances and layers of studio slickness. Less is more, and on this record she just sounds like a hundred other airy singer-songwriters.

***

Owen Pallett
In Conflict (2014)
(Domino)

RECOMMENDED * Pallett's had a busy few years, arranging strings for Arcade Fire and helping them out with the score of the Oscar-nominated film From Agnes with Love. He's learned some things about big powerful impression-making from his fellow Canadians -- check "The Riverbed" -- and is now practically a de facto extra member of the band, an informal distinction once handed to one Brian Eno during his association with Talking Heads. And who should be here offering musical and vocal -- but surprisingly, not production -- input on Pallett's follow-up to Heartland but one Brian Eno? Seconds into In Conflict, we're reminded of what made Heartland such an indelibly appealing pop moment: Pallett's voice is godly, capable of generating almost involuntary emotional and physical reactions. He refines Heartland by shedding some of its frivolity and amping up the menace ("Song for Five and Six" is terrifying till it turns to disco; it's likely a yawn-inducing analogy, but "The Passions" is unmistakably his "The Overload") and making very clear what a virtuoso he is at crafting melodic tension and drama. Opener "I Am Not Afraid" is just about perfect, starting with the woozy morbidity of its words ("I'm never having children"... "I haven't had a smoke in years") but Eno's involvement is clearer on the title cut, the delectable prettiness of which is offset by Pallett's muscular, passionate singing. It's even catchy, and leaves you wanting more even at 4:14. Eno remains as startling a wizard with the synthesizer as ever, helping Pallett achieve his Björk dreams. Being a pop nut, I like it when he sounds like OMD ("The Secret Heaven") more than when his florid arrangements get so exhausting they resemble prog ("Chorale"), and Pallett's sensibility still gets tiresome to me at around the halfway point just like last time. Just as often, Pallett's orchestrations are enough to leave you wide-eyed and breathless, like on the intense and lovely "On a Path," and his vocals are consistently staggering. Spending time away and coming back, I hear the ferocity and sensuality on "Infernal Fantasy" and can appreciate the little things in "Soldiers Rock," like a prettied-up Clash song, but it's just too overwhelming in a sitting. Maximalism suits Pallett's voice, but he could reach farther with less of it.

***

Ben Frost
Aurora (2014)
(Mute)

High-drama ambient menace in search of film accompaniment. Weirdly unsettling.

***

Hundred Waters
The Moon Rang Like a Bell (2014)
(OWSLA)

Singer and flautist Nicole Miglis sounds like Björk at times (best example is the opening minute or so of "Down from the Rafters"), which is the major distinction of this politely spacey stuff from Gainesville. It's a pretty and clever record, clearly recorded by passionate pop devotees, but excessively long-winded and not really engaging at all. Exceptions: the admirably exotic Cocteau Twins vagueness of "[Animal]" and the sense of conflict, contrast and variance on the otherwise typical "Xtalk." Unlike most of these songs, those sound complete rather than just wispy and half-formed.

***

Sleaford Mods
Divide and Exit (2014)
(Harbinger Sound)

!!!!! AVOID !!!!! * This goofball -- Sleaford Mods' jubilant asshat punk rapper Jason Williamson -- is 44 years old, and expresses himself about as well as a perpetually dumped adolescent moron who listens to lots of Henry Rollins spoken word CDs and thinks everything he says (which is also everything he thinks) is hee-larious. Actual no-shit sentence from Wikipedia: "Sleaford Mods songs have been described as embittered rants about such topics as unemployment, criticism of modern working life, criticism of celebrities and pop culture, capitalism and society in general." Just repeat after me: 44 years old. Key lyric: "I just wanked in your toilet." 44.

***

Bob Mould
Beauty & Ruin (2014)
(Merge)

RECOMMENDED * Remember that Simpsons where Marge gives Homer an extra birthday cake just so he can ruin it? Marge = Merge Records; Homer = Bob Mould. He's hip, he's cool, he's 54, but he's got an excuse, and it's fun to hear him fuck off on this decent guitar rock to which he's fully earned the right. Mould's history makes it especially weird that "Low Season" sounds like "Wonderwall" only grunge. The rest is nothing you don't expect, but plenty charming -- the best being the slow ones, the best slow one being "Let the Beauty Be."

***

Fucked Up
Glass Boys (2014)
(Matador)

More guttural puffery. These are nice kids and they are telling another crafty high-concept story, this about how much Damian Abraham is coming to resemble the lead character of Vampire Weekend's "Giving Up the Gun." Succinctly: punk lives a longer time than it ever expects to, which has been true since before it had a name. Abraham's style is anathema to me; J. Mascis and the guy from the Tragically Hip (no, really) help out. Despite believing in my heart that I love punk rock I still can't hear the music in this (and I try, and I like Abraham very much as a person so far as I can tell). Maybe you can.

***

Parquet Courts
Sunbathing Animal (2014)
(What's Your Rupture?)

!! CAUTION !! * I hate to sound like the people who whined about how Turn on the Bright Lights was redundant so long as the master tapes of Unknown Pleasures existed, and I know I'm not saying anything that other people haven't already worn themselves out stating and rebuking, but I'm a grouch and I don't care and jesus fucking hell, go listen to Pavement. This band is smarter than they sound initially but I can't hear past their decision not to fuss with their sound more.

***

Lee Fields
Emma Jean (2014)
(Truth & Soul)

RECOMMENDED * Compared to classic soul revivalists like Sharon Jones, Fields is quite idiosyncratic and sounds like this stuff still matters to him like he's a twentysomething rock & roller. Known around my way for being a Wilson, NC native who explodes on stage, known nationally for being so similar in stature and voice to James Brown that the producers of Get on Up hired him for some overdubbing, he's a terrific singer and writer and as much of a throwback as this is, the music is creatively arranged and original. The first half of this album is ridiculously strong, one show-stopper after another, enough to make you think crazy things like there's nothing wrong with doing new things in an old context, but then again, the record eventually winds around to sounding like a wonderful nostalgia festival. Which is great -- see Charles Bradley's Victim of Love to compare -- but Fields is so adept at operating as a full-fire working artist in a classic form that you wonder how close he came to pushing it all the way. Excellent words too, typically about the minutiae that passes between couples on the harder nights.

***

First Aid Kit
Stay Gold (2014)
(Columbia)

RECOMMENDED * Sweden's half-invisible U.S.-derived folk revival goes on with these sisters whose twanging, melodic work with slight elements of dream-pop is a bit overly lush but provides some endearing vocals that show a touch of European baroque... and some outstanding songs, with personal and self-aware lyrics that cut deep. Check out the spectacularly driving "Heaven Knows," the sardonic and lost-soul beautiful "Waitress Song," the wistful title cut -- these two are in their early twenties but exhibit range and confessional maturity that goes beyond the stylistic surface of imitation you initially hear. I long for rawer production -- at times this sounds like a modern Nashville record -- but I can't object to much else.

***


The Antlers
Familiars (2014)
(Anti-)

RECOMMENDED * Soul dirge.

***

Lone
Reality Testing (2014)
(R+S)

I am sure I'm not the first to think "lo-NRG," so we'll skip that joke. "Begin to Begin" is pleasant blip bloop. "Jaded" sounds, as Amber pointed out, like "The Boy Is Mine." The rest is excessively polite as techno, not disagreeable as rainy background.

***

White Lung
Deep Fantasy (2014)
(Domino)

Who let you past security!? No, really, not-bad Canadian punk whose only sin is just coming off kinda tired. Singer Mish Way has a terrific, throaty rock & roll voice; guitarist Kenneth William is too metal for me, and in turn the record is heavier -- in performance and production -- than I prefer the hard stuff to be, but you know me.

***

A Sunny Day in Glasgow
Sea When Absent (2014)
(Lefse)

!! CAUTION !! * Annie Fredrickson is so overly practiced as a singer that she sounds like a sampler someone is tapping to generate notes. Philly's premier pseudo-shoegazers are led by guitarist and writer Ben Daniels, who runs the thing as a sort of ego extension that implies he's studied Fred Thomas' career extensively. The band has the twee thing down, at times recalling the candy-tooth pat prettiness of Polyphonic Spree or the Wondermints, but with Cocteau-ish aspirations. The songs are too weak to hold up the noodling or the production, and it's awkwardly clear how much of a drudge the thing was to put together. At best it sounds like Architecture in Helsinki without any sense of rhythm; at worst, Michelle Branch.

***

Brian Eno & Karl Hyde
High Life (2014)
(Warp)

RECOMMENDED * This collaboration has yielded more pop-like material than Eno's put his name on in some time, immersed in the marketplace with the rejuvenative help of Underworld's Hyde. "Cells & Bells" even has the diembodied vocals and alien pulse of a "Julie With..." but the jamming interplay of Hyde's guitar with the curious polyrhythms and Eno's signature faint-gloss keyboard effects is as often formless and annoying as crafty. Honestly Eno's Fripp collabs always put me off a little too, and while this record sounds like it could have basically existed in the same form 34 years ago, it's somewhat to its detriment that it relies so much on bare exercises in musicianship. Still a worthwhile extension from the old guard.

***

Trey Songz
Trigga (2014)
(Atlantic)

!! CAUTION !! * "Cake," a song about a woman's vagina that uses the title as in "eat it too" and also in a lot of talk about what's "on the menu," is what we call an overextended metaphor. At 4:45, it wears out every permutation of itself short of making some joke about Cake, the wanky '90s alternative band. "Foreign" is about having sex with a woman from a country that is not the United States; it includes a pun about going "down under" (according to Urban Dictionary, that means "Australia," a continent south of the Equator) and speculates that her amorous interests in him may in fact be a ploy to get a "vis." "Na Na" grabs the hook from "Fu-Gee-La" and takes it exactly nowhere. "Touchin, Lovin" grabs the hook from "Fuck You Tonight" but makes that "touch you tonight," among other things, and has Nicki Minaj briefly giving this drab nonsense a slight kick in the teeth. "Disrespectful" postulates that infedelity makes a lot of people pretty upset and features a backing choir of turkeys reinforcing this conclusion. "Foreign Remix" -- since when are we allowed to include both a track and its remix on the same record? -- has Justin Bieber because Trey couldn't afford any better Justin. There's a song called "SmartPhones." Trey Songz turned 30 this past month; happy birthday.

***

Strand of Oaks
Heal (2014)
(Dead Oceans)

!!!!! AVOID !!!!! * Oh my god, no way this isn't a joke. This is Jack Black, right? (I didn't say it was funny.) Over a Bryan Adams riff: "I found my dad's old tape machine / That's where the magic began." (That happened in Indiana, as Johnny Cougar would hasten to add.) Inspired to record this after a car wreck -- dude really digs singing about himself, as bros generally do -- he nevertheless announces that everything good has been made, which begs the question of why he must bother us with this garbage.

***

Manic Street Preachers
Futurology (2014)
(Columbia)

Keeping the faith with vaguely expired-sounding arena histrionics. Really dull, but that's kind of expected, right? File it between Brothers in Arms and that last Suede album.

***

[Heavy contributions from Amber Morris, who sat in on my last run through these albums, throughout this post.]

Kate Tempest: Everybody Down (2014)

(Big Dada)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

"Hip-hop was real to me. It was alive. It didn’t feel like I was appropriating a culture from America. The only thing that was weird was being a girl, I suppose, but I’ve kind of made my peace with that.”

Kate Tempest, who turns 29 tomorrow, is a poet, rapper and playwright who doesn't care much for being broken down in that manner. For our purposes, then, she is a rapper from South London and, as far as that goes, one of the best MCs to surface in the last ten years. Her first proper album is an explosive narrative about three young lives intertwining in the same chaotic London she's always known, the gutter flirting with the posh and vice versa, strife and hopelessness a way of life, ways out a mythical thing. A high school dropout whose written work is already being studied in some UK schools for its interpolation of mythology (shades of John Darnielle), she always really wanted to be a rapper. Her inspirations were the MCs whose work wove elaborate narratives into monstrous, hook-filled records: Slick Rick, Dana Dane, Kendrick Lamar, Wu-Tang Clan. Knowing those records intimately, taking their lessons to heart and building a body of work on her own compassionate drive to explore other people's lives, she performs with passion and dedication that can leave you thoroughly breathless. That's before you even notice how astoundingly fucking smart her lyrics are.

This needs to be emphasized before we go much further. If you pay no attention whatsoever to the lyrics of Everybody Down, which is an intricately structured concept album, it still sounds immediately like something destined to become a landmark. Tempest's delivery is nuanced, witty, fast and emotionally wrenching but it's also beat and groove-driven like the best of her influences. She and producer Dan Carey, typically associated with indie rock that gives no clue as to the genius he displays and participates in here, designed the album with this in mind and thus avoid one of the pratfalls of concept records since the dawn of time: the "story" never overwhelms the music, and the results are songs first, episodes second. Even good kid, m.A.A.d city, the deserved tentpole of modern LPs in this domain, didn't achieve this so beautifully. Every time Tempest's wordy, busy lyrics start to get complicated, she and Carey swoop in with a killer, body-shaking chorus to drum up asses on the dance floor. Several songs, perhaps even most, on the record are so phenomenally crafted and pleasurable as music -- "Circles," "The Beigeness" and the astonishing "Lonely Daze" for a start -- one can scarcely believe they're inextricably part of a complicated whole. Carey's backing tracks are consistently robust and beat-driven but well matched to the heady staging of Tempest's magnificent drama.

But listen to this album enough -- which you will want to, often -- and curiosity about the lyrics will eventually win you over, and with rapt attention you'll find a remarkable story unraveling further with each song. Tempest only really knew Yeats and Blake before she sat down to start writing poetry, but her work proves that such matters are irrelevant to true creativity. Wise and warm beyond the scope of most of us in our twenties, she is an intimidatingly wise wordsmith and documentarian of human character and frailty. She doesn't simply relate her rapt audience marvelously to the plight of the bored-with-life barista Becky who takes a job as a "masseuse," leading to jealousy between her and the fellow overqualified blue-collar worker Pete whose alienation and shyness seem at first to be a perfect fit with her own. Rather, Tempest lets us feel both Becky's confidence and sense of justification for the work she's doing but also Pete's agony over his wondering if he's justified in his suspicion that she is actually a sex worker -- and, on another layer, exploring this without demonizing either of them. Like it or not, that's difficult as hell and extremely admirable.

Meanwhile Pete's brother Harry, who carries a torch for Becky after meeting her at a video shoot, pulls off a big but messy drug heist, and love, impulse and disappointment come rushing forth in a fast-paced climactic rage. What's more telling than the intracices of the plot -- which are rife with suggested back stories that Tempest plans to expand into a novel -- are the many details, the wisps of understanding and familiarity that ring as true as some tossed-off moment of casual affection in a Frank Borzage movie. She captures awkward conversations, little moments of fear and desperation, and observations that carry sardonic humor but also a vitality that's staggering to behold. It's so important to experience every moment and every twist of Everybody Down for yourself, but witness the way Tempest documents this moment so vividly as if she were capturing it on film:

He's got nice eyes
Shame about his issues, though
The party pushes on
Her cynicism's getting vicious
Show nothing, keep smiling
She catches the eye of her mates
They're dancing by the bar
They're in a state
Nod for "save me"
They understand, dance over
Put their arms around her shoulders
"Becky, we're bored, let's go"
His mouth slows to a stop
She smiles at him
"Yeah, it was nice getting to know ya"

That comes toward the end of the blisteringly powerful, impression-making opener "Marshall Law"; as usual, Tempest elegantly describes both sides of a conversation, in this case a pensive encounter between introverts at a party, one of whom is so excited to be asked about his life that he just talks too much and spends much of the rest of the album regretting it. The details stack up into truth; on "Lonely Daze," a guy strikes Becky's fancy because he's "the first customer to close the door behind him / for that alone she likes him." On "Theme from Becky," there is that shatteringly real moment when irrationl jealousy and the resulting caps on freedom start to pull the young lovers apart: "When he's holding her hand it feels less like her hand / and more like his hand." And the entirety of "Stink" delves into the play-by-play of a quarrel so real and evenly accounted you can feel as though you lived through it.

And maybe you did; that's how fucking great Tempest is. Not since John Darnielle has someone so successfully wrung pop lyrics from what amounts to thoroughly crafted, imaginative literature. Tempest, of course, knows these people and this world, but it cannot be charged for even a millisecond that she is failing to think outside of herself. In fact she is doing so with such consistency and joy that you're left breathless at the probing curiosity she exhibits about people, their lives, their histories, their personal tragedies. In a pop music universe where the music press openly celebrates an aging singer-songwriter for writing a song about his first few blowjobs and the time he hung out backstage with the guy from Death Cab, Tempest's skill level and selflessness are hard to fathom, as is the vibrant, novelistic story she chooses to tell, with any luck her first of many in this format.

The thing is that anybody who has ever tried to write any work of fiction knows it is fucking hard. Anybody who's tried to rap knows that the harebrained pricks who still crow about how hip hop requires no "talent" are full of rat shit. Anybody who tries to do both at once is practically running a perpetual risk of humiliation and deserves automatic respect for giving it a shot. When someone like Tempest -- someone who doesn't fit with any "scene" she's entered and is an outlier as a twentysomething white British woman performing hip hop -- creates something like Everybody Down and does so with such confidence, good judgment and performance aplomb, it's a miracle not because she's some miraculous genius any more than Orson Welles was when, at 26, he summed up and satirized the entire culture of his time with Citizen Kane. It's that you know this was an insanely hard album to create and that every second of it was worked over and thought about, and when you listen to it you are experiencing the fruits of a lot of creative labor. It is a work of art that reflects a massive amount of intelligence, good taste and -- most of all -- caring.

Tempest sounds nervous in interviews about the limelight that the music world places upon bloghypes, and moreover about being pegged as any one thing; she is always, it seems, looking to move on to something she hasn't tried yet and is alarmed at the idea of being boxed in. That restlessness will serve her well for a long life wowing the rest of us. This has been an exciting, scary year for her. But from within the U.S., it seems that Everybody Down wasn't appreciated nearly enough -- none of the country's big music publications even addressed it on their year-end lists thus far, filled with glorified Tom Petty cover bands and the aforementioned oversharing, unhinged ranters; hardly anyone even bothered to review it, the only American journalist showing any real enthusiasm having been the reliably savvy Sady Doyle. This is criminal and deeply disillusioning to some of us, but it may be that Tempest prefers things this way -- it's not unlikely that she was relieved when she lost the 2014 Mercury Prize to Young Fathers (whose album is at least good) -- since so far, the relative anonymity of the circles in which she travels have allowed her to explore her artistry and invention as freely and constantly as she likes, thank you very much. We hope with all our hearts that Tempest continues recording and makes a dozen more albums like this one, or unlike this one. But that may indeed not be enough for her. For someone as brilliant as she clearly is, those of us waving the flag are happy to just follow wherever we're led.

But if this blog is any sort of a platform (nope) or is still being read by anyone (yep), I beg you: listen to this one, and listen to it carefully. I doubt I've ever been more convicted about anything in this space.