Smart and full of filth and joy: November 2014 new release rush (part 3 of 3)

Flying Lotus
You're Dead! (2014)
(Warp)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED * Steven Ellion's previous two major releases were alternately irritating, insubstantial and brilliant -- and one hopes that his pronounced move toward accessibility this time out doesn't have people crying foul. Because this absorbing cycle of
electronic avant jazz at last bridges the gap between his innovations and his musicality, and that's no small thing; one can hear how much harder this was to put together, not that he was ever any damn slouch in the first place. So when vague memories of trip hop fade into the vague now of trap into free jazz into Kendrick Lamar, you can sit back and let yourself get played. Its playful textures call back to Prince, George Clinton, even Stevie Wonder's "Contusion" as much as his non-pop influences. More than some knob-twiddling exercise, this is profoundly beautiful and strange -- and it's a celebration, as assertive as ever but now with the entirety of the world seemingly invited.

***

Iceage
Plowing into the Field of Love (2014)
(Matador)

God, indie rock is confusing these days. For a good five minutes into this I was thinking "wow, this is really different from that OMD revivalist stuff they were doing" then I realized that was Ice Choir, not Iceage. (PSA: Cold Cave are also a different thing.) Iceage are the punks from Denmark, and this is their third album. I didn't hear the second one. This one seems a bit harder, more elaborately produced. It's also oddly pleasant, by which I mean that on one of my listens I literally fell asleep with headphones on and was never outright disturbed by Elias Bender Rønnenfelt's growl. (Not because it's boring, I was just tired.) That's possibly a compliment, perhaps not, depends how you look at things.

***

Vashti Bunyan
Heartleap (2014)
(Fat Cat)

RECOMMENDED * My rabbit has requested that I declare this "the album of the year." She likes it very much and flopped attentively on the floor during non-headphones playback. Bunyan is the 69 year-old obtuse, whispery folk singer briefly put on a pedestal by the likes of Animal Collective and Devendra Banhart this past decade. Now that indie isn't folky anymore she's got nothing to prove, so on her third album in five decades she sounds appealingly unforced and relaxed, and her music is beautiful and emotive if light as a feather and somewhat stagnant (the mood is unwavering). As others have pointed out, Bunyan's lyrics are exceptionally good but they read better than they sing.

***

A Winged Victory for the Sullen
Atomos (2014)
(Kranky)

RECOMMENDED * Partially orchestral ambient, like Owen Pallett without the singing. As you will inevitably guess upon hearing it, it was written and designed as scoring -- for a modern dance piece -- and this colors it as a slightly incomplete experience. But it's still lovely: dramatic yet soothing. It peaks when encouraging you to waltz for a bit.

***

Tinashe
Aquarius (2014)
(RCA)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED * I'm a great fan of Janet Jackson -- actually think she released a greater quantity of solid LPs than her brother -- and this began reminding me of her work early on, in part vocally but moreover in the choice of material and mood of bone-dark sensuality. That peaked, of course, when the terrific "How Many Times" sampled the great Control cut "Funny How Time Flies." There are also the interludes in which Tinashe, just like Jackson in the old days, strips everything away to talk to her audience for a moment -- or drops song ideas that seem to me too good to be thusly sidelined ("Indigo Child"). Still, Tinashe is very much a star of the now, myriad producers helping her contrast bangers and softness and gradually pick up the pace ("2 On"), climax ("Feels Like Vegas") and release ("Bated Breath"; "Wildfire"). As a singer, Tinashe is compelling and assured, cutting through the vast atmospheres with which she's saddled (the first few cuts are a bit druggy), but it may be her lyrics that stick with you the longest -- the empowered "Thug Cry" for one thing, but the Smokey Robinson-like mindbending sexual politics of "Pretend" for some kind of splendidly kinky and/or desperately sad peak: "Let's pretend we never met / A good excuse to play forget / Let's pretend you never lied / So I can give it up all night." Maybe it's the Velvet Rope fan in me talking but I can't stop listening to this one.

***

Ex Hex
Rips (2014)
(Merge)

RECOMMENDED * Wonderful, strangely reassuring guitar playing on this debut album by the latest project of Mary Timony, formerly of Helium and the short-lived supergroup Wild Flag. Timony's playing is lyrical and engaging, well-suited to the backward-looking garage pop songwriting, which is otherwise a bit pedestrian. The standouts are the opening and closing cuts, which boast strong melodies and solos, and the driving raveup "War Paint." Everything else is decent, it just doesn't soar and sounds at times like an exercise. You expect punk bands to be a bit derivative, and nobody minds an interpolation of the "Sweet Jane" chords unless they're just too sour to talk to about music, but "Radio On" begs the question: why not just cover "Roadrunner"?

***

Vince Staples
Hell Can Wait EP (2014)
(Def Jam)

I'd be interested to know why Stapes' post-mixtape debut is so short -- 24 minutes, free of filler but making little of an impression except the fantastic "65 Hunnid," one of the top hooks of the year. The production, handled mostly by Canadian producer Hagler, is engaging enough but it still feels like we barely know Staples, his delivery solid but undistinguished.

***

Pharmakon
Bestial Burden (2014)
(Sacred Bones)

Much respect for Margaret Chardiet, who goes out and does this belligerent screamy kookiness live like all the most confrontational bits of Warhol's EPI in one person. But I wanna let something like this into my placid rabbit-owning day to day life like I want a cyst in my gut, which not coincidentally is what inspired this album. The noise audience will love it. Meanwhile, for this to be declared potential crossover into mainstream-indie listening ears is hilarious to me; it's performance art, and if the far more accessible p.a. of Yoko Ono (to whom the title cut seems almost an homage) in the '70s was never accepted wholesale by the rock audience, surely this can't be. But she is clearly interesting and well-engaged in the art of aural fury, desperation and bleak wordless storytelling, so good luck to her. (And major thanks to her for letting this run under a half-hour.)

***

Scott Walker & Sunn O)))
Soused (2014)
(4AD)

Heavy. Dumb. Arty. Funny. Ridiculous. Stagnant. Unlistenable. But it certainly beats how Brian Wilson is spending his winter years.

***

Mark Lanegan Band
Phantom Radio (2014)
(Vagrant)

!! CAUTION !! * At last, courtesy of one of our nationally treasured grunge holdovers, the fusion of wanky blooze rock and mid-'90s trip hop I still am not sure I needed.

***

Run the Jewels 2 (2014)
(Mass Appeal)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED * Enough attention has been afforded this that I won't be telling you anything you don't know -- it's hard and strong and an incredibly confident transition from first album to second, with both Killer Mike and El-P running along unstoppably and bringing hardcore rap into a comfortable maturity. They repesent a sort of utopian ideal that, in practice, has never been more depressingly out of our reach. "One black, one white, we shoot to kill." But not just the postracial protest, not just the smashing of that specific power dynamic. It's also that they feel it's important to justify their lusting after a woman who gives good head on the Akinyele tribute "Love Again" by giving a verse up to Gangsta Boo, who wants you to put her clit in your mouth all day. El-P's excellent production is almost beside the point; you feel the likes of Afrika Bambaataa and Run-DMC being channeled for an army of kids to whom these are new, enlightened lessons. Yet it's also a party record, a menacing record, a challenge. Mike's flow still eclipses El-P's, but the gesture of this continued collaboration and its impact relies upon El's steadiness all the same. These two deserve their suddenly immense popularity completely.

***

The Twilight Sad
Nobody Wants to Be Here and Nobody Wants to Leave (2014)
(Fat Cat)

This band's brand of minor-key maudlin pub rock has long been sort of Scotland's answer to the National (or, uh, Depeche Mode). On their new album they relax from the sustaining of tension and essentially deliver sadfaced arena rock like Suede or Elbow only drunker, more desperate. I sort of like the drab singalong "It Never Was the Same," a triumph of fist-pumping apathy. Otherwise you can get the story from the song titles -- "Drown So I Can Watch," "Pills I Swallow," "Leave the House." Goth adults doing their best to uphold the image.

***

Arca
Xen (2014)
(Mute)

One of the architects of the increasingly mainstream into-the-void sound of modern electronics, the Venezuelan producer Alejandro Ghersi, releases a proper solo debut that functions as a kind of demo reel for his talents. Beats are chopped up and fall to pieces, half-formed melodic ideas are pushed forward by the sporadically used organic instruments. It's ominous and invasive but strangely calming -- not just formless, unemotional noise. Its appeal is very limited, but Ghersi undoubtedly meant it that way.

***


Gruff Rhys
American Interior (2014)
(Turnstile)

Dad rock from the ex-Super Furry Animals guy.

***


Hookworms
The Hum (2014)
(Domino)

RECOMMENDED * Decent when they rock, better when they drone. The suite from "v" to "Off Screen" to "vi" occupies nearly a third of the album and almost wholly justifies its existence.

***

Damien Rice
My Favourite Faded Fantasy (2014)
(Warner Bros.)

!! CAUTION !! * People complain that Justin Timberlake's stuff goes on and on. This guy's songs run in excess of nine minutes, and he's just faux-crooning over spare acoustic guitar and strings. Indulgent boyish dross (produced by Rick Rubin!), neither beautiful nor dark nor twisted.

***

Marianne Faithfull
Give My Love to London (2014)
(Dramatico)

RECOMMENDED * The cover material is predictably, flamboyantly weird, taking on the Everlys' "Price of Love" and Nick Cave's "Late Victorian Holocaust" with vampiric zeal, but everything snaps into focus toward the end when Leonard Cohen's "Going Home" appears. That song is only three years old and yet it sounds like a standard is being renewed and unveiled. You can say she's mostly proving what an immediate and enduring classic Cohen's song already is, but she delivers it masterfully. Her artful decadence on this storm of demented cabaret trumps Stevie Nicks' and, for me, Scott Walker's. Key lyric: "My god, how you disgust me."

***

Ásgeir
In the Silence (2014)
(One Little Indian)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED * Not sure if classifying this as a new album is even technically allowed; it's really just an act of translation from Ásgeir Trausti's 2012 debut album Dýrð í dauðaþögn, which was a big hit in his native Iceland but wasn't heard much over on our end. The new English language lyrics are by John Grant from Midlake, but I seriously doubt the words are what make this so endearing. Which brings us to this: I don't know if this qualifies as an interesting record if you're not just subconsciously turned on by defiantly old-fashioned baroque folk-pop, flawlessly sung by the velvet-voiced Trausti. Chances are I'd have responded exactly the same way to the original version. Between this and my infatuation with Lyla Foy's album, maybe I'm more fixated on melody than I realize. Anyway, a good test is whether the Bacharach trumpet on "King and Cross" takes your breath away or just annoys you. Me, I feel like I need this.

***

Andy Stott
Faith in Strangers (2014)
(Modern Love)

RECOMMENDED * A big improvement on Luxury Problems explicitly because Stott plays on his strengths here. No longer irritatingly noodling, he commits to a collection of cavernous grooves, smoothly propulsive beats and eerie vocals. That last part is the weak link -- I personally have little faith in piano teachers -- but it doesn't keep this from being a mostly enchanting set.

***

TV on the Radio
Seeds (2014)
(Harvest)

RECOMMENDED * In which our misguided faith in guitar bands is tested once again. Tunde Adebimpe's voice is still sufficiently compelling and nuanced to let us overlook the hooky goofy vapid stuff like "Happy Idiot" (well, kinda) and the dull, momentum-ceasing moments like "Love Stained." Harder to understand are the weak easy-listening modern rawkisms, especially the painfully straight-ahead riffage of "Winter" and "Lazerray." After four strong albums, it's a pity that the entire second half of this one is so overgrown with the kind of standard-issue stuff that never used to bring them down. Perhaps it's overcorrection? Gerard Smith died just after Nine Types of Light was released, assigning to that record a solemnity for which it was suited but not necessarily built. They have the right, three years hence, to get happy and yet it's hard to say if their energies are fully in it. "I know it's best to say goodbye, but I can't seem to move away." Attractions besides the neato lenticular cover: the muscular Byrds of "Could You," the R&B hook on "Test Pilot," the Beach Boy soul of "Quartz." Disappointing, but forgivable; evidence implies they are as great as ever live.

***

Ariel Pink
pom pom (2014)
(4AD)

!!!!! AVOID !!!!! * Gr8 joke, prick. This moron -- who desperately needs to go away -- dares you to take his unthinking, flat fake psychedelia seriously, smirks and laughs at you for listening to it, takes it to the bank with the rest of the nice white guys. In The Guardian, Alexis Paradis said it best: "Suffice to say that if you’re the kind of person who thinks the one thing rock music is lacking in 2014 is people singing in self-consciously funny voices, then pom pom is very much the album for you. [...] It sounds like pop music made by someone who feels pop music is beneath him." Fucking preach it.

***

Clark (2014)
(Warp)

RECOMMENDED * Euophoric, escapist body music, rich and textured, if only occasionally reaching an exhilarating peak (the first minute of "Beacon," the last of "Unfurla"). It has the sense of discovery of the earliest techno records, or even of you that time you played with loops in Audacity. Critics talk about the foreboding or apocalyptic nature of this music; nah, sans the goosestepping it's too slight for that, just intense and fun drum'n'bass / IDM mixed with classic Detroit, though it does get rather moony and florid at the end.

***

Chatham County Line
Tightrope (2014)
(Yep Roc)

The slow retreat into bluegrass adult contemporary. Nothing negative to report vocally or lyrically, though -- "Girl She Used to Be" sounds at first like a groan-worthy "Caroline, No" revision but really is an incisive ballad about Alzheimer's, and a heartbreaking one.

***

Laura Cantrell
No Way There from Here (2014)
(Thrift Shop)

RECOMMENDED * Another favorite from my alt-country cultist years returns after a nearly decade-long absence. Her new material mostly drifts along in a midtempo Americana puddle but she still has one of the strongest voices -- both as a singer and a lyricist -- in modern pop-ish music. Her songs are all about everyday struggle, especially the struggles of women coming to terms with the quiet life, the loud one, the in-between. As a soon-to-be-married person, the domestic trifecta of "Can't Wait" - "Barely Said a Thing" - "Washday Blues" resonates like you wouldn't believe, with wit and clear-headed maturity but also perfectly expressed emotion. Slowly the other songs start to assert: "Driving Down Your Street" reminds me of what made Cantrell so endearing to me in the first place, her stunning vocals, and Cantrell didn't write "Beg or Borrow Days," a Jennifer O'Connor song, but it is an anthem of purpose and independence for the ages, and the perfect mission statement for a renewed career.

***

Azealia Banks
Broke with Expensive Taste (2014)
(Caroline)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED * Remember when Paul McCartney talked about Let It Be feeling like an old album before it ever came out? Three and a half years after Banks first lit up the hype machine with "212," her constantly delayed debut album has a lot to answer for -- and it's just about worth the trouble. It's front-loaded as hell; tracks one through ten are unstoppable, glorious, brilliant, the album of the year. Banks has a versatile, dramatic delivery to rival any bigger star's and her dizzying array of voices and characters is breathtaking, as is her collaborative power with an army of excellent producers who come armed with an endless number of disparate influences and trends upon which to build (some have decried this as making the record uneven, but to quickly bring this back to the Beatles, there's a reason the White Album is my fave). The most exciting stuff is her work with Lil Internet, which takes Banks into a zone of Yeezus-like abrasion while maintaining her breadth of speed, style, humor and sensuality. The second half of the record is quite good as well, of course, though "Chasing Time" is by far her weakest single... and when the record inexplicably stops dead in its tracks for a variation on Ariel Pink's Kim Fowley collab "Nude Beach a-Go-Go" I finally understand why some Janelle Monae fans got so pissed off about Of Montreal vomiting up pseudo-funk outta nowhere toward the end of ArchAndroid.

***

The Underachievers
Cellar Door: Terminus ut Exordium (2014)
(Brainfeeder)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED * Judge this not by its hideous cover, the worst packaging for a release this good since Suckers' Candy Salad. These weedy Brooklynites -- part of the Beast Coast collective, and associated with major tastemaker Flying Lotus -- are psychedelic hip hop in anything but the classic sense; in fact, given the material you'd think that they're trying to prove a point about the possibilities of one's work ethic while under the influence. Not for Issa Gold and AK the despondent slackerdom of Curren$y or the pillowy sonics of PM Dawn. This is intensely focused, hard (as hard as RTJ2 despite the vast gulf in production styles), spiritual and conscious but relentless. Unless my eyes deceive me, no producer works on any two numbers, which on a record that flows this well is incredible. One assumes it's because these two, after two mixtapes of practice, know how to hold back and intrigue with their enigmatic, sophisticated rhymes and the floating, dreamlike production behind them. Lyrics are everything here -- both MCs e-nun-ci-ate to make sure you don't miss anything -- but from the staggering fusion of power and chill on "Chrysalis" to the perfectly named "Ethereal" to the soulful closer "Amorphous" (which slightly resembles William DeVaughn's "Be Thankful for What You Got"), they command and justify attention without once stopping for breath. Did we mention it's really smart? "I lead the impoverished cause they struggle the hardest / And I came from the same place, stuck in the darkness."

***

Oneohtrix Point Never
Commissions I EP (2014)
(Warp)

RECOMMENDED * This is weird, but I probably listened to nothing as often in the last month or two as the first two absolutely lovely ambient pieces on this twenty-minute, three-track collection. ("I Only Have Eyes for You" is decent but breaks the spell a bit, and runs 7:20 without getting much better.) It's an extension of R Plus Seven but far more peaceful, and "Music for Steamed Rocks" and "Meet Your Creator" have a beguiling airlessness about them that I appreciate in moments when I need to focus. So very rock & roll, right?

***

Terry Malts
Insides EP (2014)
(Slumberland)

RECOMMENDED * "Let You In" is heartfelt, has a neat melody, sounds like their first album, is gone in under two minutes. "Grumpiest Old Men" isn't as funny as its title but still funny; someone other than the bass player sings it. "Don't" is post-hardcore, sounds like their second album. The key lyric of "Hidden Bay" is "Baby I'm a fool / a fool / a fool / Baby I'm a fool / a fool / a fool / but baby you're so cool / so cool / so cool / baby you're so cool / so cool / so cool / baby you're so cool"; it's also gone in under two minutes. You could do a lot worse.

******

I have the flu. But you haven't heard the last of me. Next up: seemingly good records I didn't have time to listen to more than once or twice. Then, at long last, my favorites for the year AD 2014.

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.