Antietam: Rope-a-Dope (1994)

(Homestead)

Sort of overwhelming to come finally around to a close listen to one of your favorite band's favorite bands. Antietam not only has a remarkably similar history to Yo La Tengo, they're pals with the band and share their taste for feedback-drenched folk rock, a cheerily distorted Neil Young. Based on my exposure, this Kentucky band shares not their peers' warmth and humor, nor their love of variety and, well, songs. But Tara Key is an extraordinary guitarist (dig her stunningly lyrical playing on "Pine") whose searing riffs elevate out toward the night sky, even as she tempers it all with her deadpan southern-Nico drawl. (She periodically shares lead vocal duties with bassist Tim Harris and drummer John Madell, who... do their best Dean Wareham.)

Ira Kaplan himself guests on the gleefully circular "Hands Down," which feels strongly informed by the sound of alternative and indie circa 1994 with its toughened fuzz-punk shtick, even if Antietam's love of the simultaneous loud-soft dynamic vastly predates most of the radio-friendly groups that were bringing it to middle America around this time (and the bands that weren't, like L7). Unfortunately, while the remainder of the record is pleasant, this is as distinctive as the songwriting really gets -- unless I'm just not hearing something buried under the quite endearing sludge. It hasn't manifested itself as anything besides background music and inevitably lives in the shadow of YLT and the Clean, a little more rote and conventional than either.

But the band is terrific. They're best heard on the longer cuts, and the moments that stretch into a kind of intense and feverish loudness. The lengthy instrumental passages throughout are focused, weighty, and glorious, like the playful title cut. The florid city-sprawl of "What She Will" is like a blissful nightmare, My Bloody Valentine with meatier, fouler riffs, and the plod of the Madell-led "Leave Home" attains a thrilling, nocturnal melodrama as it progresses. Best of all is grand finale "Silver Solace," a pulsating trancelike straight line over and above which Key works her magic, the band topping itself out for ten minutes until finally she takes over with a her most wounded, cracked vocal line of the entire album in the final minutes.

I'm not really too taken with Rope-a-Dope on the whole but it's hard to deny that moments like this are intensely enjoyable. Perhaps best to abstain from a fully formed opinion on Antietam yet, then. A lot of it is par for the classicist indie rock course, but... maybe that's a good thing??

Broken Social Scene (2005)

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Talking Heads: Fear of Music (1979)

(Sire)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

It seems that most bands have a record which, even without the aid of a discography, is clearly a transitional moment between a pair of seminal efforts. The Beatles have their Help!, Stevie Wonder his Fulfilligness' First Finale, the Replacements their Tim, Radiohead their OK Computer. In many cases the "happy medium" record, blending the virtues of early work and later experimentation, could be argued as the definitive work of an artist and frequently is a fan's common choice for artistic peak. Fear of Music is one such recording, and despite lukewarm critical reception upon release, it has become one of Talking Heads' most renowned albums. In their second set with Brian Eno behind the dials, the Heads begin to run afoul of their original sound, tweaking their work with ambitious production, arrangement, and mystique. Fear of Music is the closest this band would ever come to a concept album, and it lays the cards on the table. Every song is a David Byrne discourse on why something should be feared. Fear of mind, paper, cities, memories, air, heaven, animals, guitars, drugs.

Anything human and warm about Byrne on the previous two records has, in line with the disturbing finish to "The Big Country," been eradicated. He is a paranoid nutcase, tolerant of nothing and resentful, terrified, and skeptical of everything. The results can be funny ("I know the animals are laughing at us!") but are more often scary ("I'll be here all the time / I can never quit"), and what's most distressing is how by the end of it he has begun to almost make sense to us, so accustomed have we become to his barking, cartoonish philosophies. Not many other album in the annals of conventional rock music have become as notorious as this one for its lyrics alone. The opening track, "I Zimbra," is a nonsense poem by dadaist Hugo Ball set to music, and it's the most optimistic thing here. Elsewhere Byrne doubts everyone and everything, and he no longer raises himself as a good example (the playful David of the last album who demanded "Please respect my opinions, they'll be respected someday" is gone). On "Cities" his quest for a new home turns into an epic journey that leaves him barely gripping his sanity. "Do I smell? I smell home cooking / It's only the river! It's only the river!"

Byrne is still more or less himself on the first half, and with the exception of "I Zimbra" and "Cities," so is the band, elevating Talking Heads: 77-style material with slick Eno polish ("Paper" is practically a rewrite of "Tentative Decisions"); they come close to being the first band to create sensuality through punk on "Mind," and hint at their polyrhythmic future on the oddly laid-back, lyrically prophetic "Life During Wartime." "Cities" expands upon the dramatic instrumentation of "Found a Job" in full color, with appropriately creepy sirens signaling the start and finish of the number.

"Memories Can't Wait" marks the breaking point, and even on compact disc it divides this record in half. Standing with "Lady Godiva's Operation" as one of the few truly horrifying pop songs, it casts Byrne's mind as an endless "party" (a very New York theme repeated on "Heaven") and immerses us in it with backward loops and plenty of otherworldly effects that emphasize the thematic displacement. The line "Everything is very quiet" returns us to the warmth of the guitars but we are no less disrupted. It's hard to discern how much sequencing played a role in the execution of the record, but the songs after this point are nowhere close to anything the Heads had done before. Brian Eno goes for full-force pop treatment on the B-movie soundscape of "Air," with Byrne sounding alternately like Willy Wonka and an infuriated politician, explaining the dangers of oxygen. He has similarly potent ideas against most living creatures on "Animals," a stark and angular song matched by another raging diatribe. On paper it's hilarious -- "They like to laugh at people / They're setting a bad example" -- but there's so much conviction behind it that you feel yourself repelled by Byrne's indignation. At the same time, particularly today, you relate to the blind need to blame everything around you for increasing insecurity. In a terrible way, he's not acting abnormally.

"Electric Guitar" is a more precise production, with an amusing tuba line, but the band is dining on themselves, shunning their medium in a satirical sense but with that same curious sincerity. "Never listen to electric guitar," Byrne orders. Far from the working-class ideal of rock & roll, the persona is suspicious of the capabilities of pop music and, breaking all the walls around him where he sits, breaks to us his devastating conclusion: "Someone controls electric guitar." The moment inevitably recalls the climax of John Lennon's young career: "I don't believe in Beatles."

Meanwhile, there's "Heaven," one of the most endearing songs in the Heads' catalog; again a party that never ends, again the challenge and boredom of excess and ultimately the fear that comes from not understanding, which in this case translates to believing every myth handed to you. It's far from a shunning of religious thought, but it is a subtle celebration of humanism, a glimmer of hope amid the tirades. Eno allows Byrne to sing within his range, giving us a performance that's beautiful and moving but still witty and not free of anger and doubt. As usual, what makes this such an outstanding ballad -- one of the finest of its time -- is the refusal to tone down Frantz and Weymouth, who pound their way through it, one of the many reasons the Stop Making Sense performance can't hold a candle.

The song that leaves the threatening final impression, "Drugs," also disturbs more than any other track from Fear of Music, including "Memories Can't Wait." This closing song -- oppressively bare and claustrophobic, sounding unlike any other pop song of its time but still very clearly the work of Brian Eno -- leaves us hopeless. Byrne has searched in every dark corner of the world and has found solace nowhere; the only thing that's apparent to him is insanity, and it's starting to be the only thing that makes any sense. After World War I, the reaction to nonsense was to conquer it with nonsense. When we hear this man railing about the reasons he hates everything he sees, we know we are witnessing something facetious and silly, but we are also witnessing a shred of something real and thought-provoking. Byrne himself claimed decades later that these early lyrics are the window into not so much a disturbed soul as a truly confused and desperate mind. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Fear of Music is how beautifully it fits in with the following album, Remain in Light, which finds the resolution and a bleak dead end. (Speaking in Tongues escapes through the roof.)

He had the answer at the beginning: "Drugs won't change you... religion won't change you." Moreover, Hugo Ball had the answer in "I Zimbra." This opening song was recorded after everything else, and it shows, its surrealism happy and reeling, the leaping arrangement and bizarre vocal treatment capitalizing on an Afrocentric tendency that would pay off on Remain in Light. Eno's importance to the record and to all three of his albums with the Heads can't really be overstated; the recordings fit in as much with his career as with theirs, and no two ways about it: he is their perfect match. He has their sense of adventure, their ambition, their delicacy, and their restraint. He was not tilting the band so much in a specific direction as guiding them along their way. Fear of Music is a wonderful experience because, in every nuance from Harrison, Weymouth, Frantz, and Byrne, plus Eno, we can sense the often bleak but always lively power of each moment, and we can observe the emergence of a musical wisdom that would produce a landmark in pop culture, Remain in Light. On its own terms, Fear is a story that may leave a person drained -- it's not the undeniable masterpiece the other two Eno records are --, but if you can appreciate its nervous humor and the buried fun of it all, it's a trip worth taking constantly.

[Written and originally posted on my old webpage in 2004, when I was 19. Thus: please forgive any sloppiness.]

[SEE ALSO:]
Sand in the Vaseline: Popular Favorites (1975-92)
Bonus Rarities and Outtakes (1975-92)
Talking Heads: 77 (1977)
More Sons About Buildings and Food (1978)

Yo La Tengo: Fade (2013)

(Matador)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

That the quickest Yo La Tengo album in nearly two decades is also the most meditative and subtle pretty much ever is the kind of giddy irony that works for the band that never wants anyone to have any clue of what they're doing next. Way back when I reviewed Popular Songs here, I predicted that the only way the Band That Can Do Anything (and would shortly thereafter prove my point by going on a tour that involved them, among other things, acting out a Judge Judy episode on stage) could really progress at this point was to go full-bore on tightly constructed pop music, because my feeling was that with their 2009 record they'd come as close as they ever had to doing something that was somewhat expected of them. I was partially right, anyway, and correctly surmised that the band's time with longtime producer Roger Moutenot was nearing its end (for the moment), as it happens replaced by John McEntire of Tortoise and the Sea & Cake, but I missed the point. That is that Yo La Tengo's impression of a pop record is still different from anyone else's. The order of the day on their thirteenth (!) album can be summed up thusly: lushness, intimacy, and concision. All three are, in this form at least, new for this band. Presumably I don't have to tell you that Yo La Tengo at this point have a last-band-standing mythology working in their favor, particularly with the symbolic loss last year of Sonic Youth, R.E.M. the year before. In turn I don't have to tell you that a band that formed in 1984 finding new definitions of anything is a rock & roll miracle of a kind. Nor do I have to tell you I think this is pretty much the best band in the world, still, and yet I'm surprising myself by how interesting and surprising I find the new direction they've taken here.

I often wonder what would happen if you could somehow interact with circa-1987 Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan and find out what they'd think of Yo La Tengo now. YLT today seems so far flung from the noisy folk-rock outfit of nearly three decades ago; as is often stated, the Yo La Tengo aesthetic we associate so strongly with the band was affixed to them with the release of Painful, wherein Ira lowered his voice, the guitars acquired a drone, and the songs took a mighty step forward. It was their first Matador album, the first album in which bassist James McNew participated extensively in rehearsals and composition (he's on May I Sing with Me but came aboard midway through the process), and most importantly to us here, their first with Moutenot. The band has played down their break with the longtime producer and I see no reason to doubt their word that there's nothing acrimonious about his absence, but its effect on their music feels more significant than they're letting on. Moutenot oversaw the band's recorded work as they achieved what is, to me at least, a kind of absolute rock band perfection. The run of albums from Electr-o-Pura through I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass is, to my knowledge, unsurpassed as five-in-a-row masterpieces go. Certainly in indie rock, and I'd say in rock music as a whole if I didn't think you people would yell at me.

Replacing Moutenot could just be a symbolic leap out of a slight rut, much as recording Popular Songs in Hoboken instead of Nashville may have been. There are far clearer musical consequences to this choice, however. They were evident as soon as "Before We Run" was issued as the first true preview track ("Stupid Things" had received a 12" release but was an alternate take), awash in arena rock drums, sadly wheezing horns, and a towering arrangement. I wasn't disappointed by Popular Songs, but it felt like the first YLT record since the Matador move that wasn't a radical departure from its predecessor; I was fine with this, actually, because I could've contended with another lifetime of records as well-written and charming as Popular Songs, which stuck with the Beat Your Ass conceit of a mixtape crawl through someone's obscure record collection, a set of songs that sounded so different from one another as to be virtually unrecognizable as the same band. They would balk at this, of course, even though I consider it a virtue they share with just a handful of other artists (the Clash and the Beatles, for starters) -- McNew has said that whenever they're playing together, it sounds to him like Yo La Tengo.

With Fade now before us, we can pick out a few things that point the way forward on Popular Songs -- Richard Evans' string arrangements were a radical addition that provided for a defiantly new dimension in "Here to Fall" and "If It's True"; an increasing fearlessness toward pop bliss, resisting all impulse to drench "I'm on My Way" and "When It's Dark" in any kind of distancing feedback or even so much as a wild guitar solo, permeated not just Popular Songs but portions of Beat Your Ass ("Beanbag Chair," "Mr. Tough"). Most interesting of all is the new resistance to the jumbled pop-shuffle madness that once seemed to drive the sequencing of the band's records. Popular Songs divided itself cleanly between carefully composed tunes on sides one and two, sprawling meditation and fury on three and four. Fade takes an analogous key from the Beach Boys' album Today!: the (sort-of) rockers on side one, the ballads on side two, and hey, a Yo La Tengo album that fits on one slab on vinyl!

The left turn comes instead at the way the band now delivers these sounds, the quietest possible staredown at any sense of stagnation. It's not just the new producer that makes you think of Painful here; there's a deliberate sense of turnaround in the way these songs are written, sung and arranged. Ira says that the band talked him out of a complete change in his vocal style, but the fact that he had an impulse to try such a thing says a great deal; his singing changed completely between May I Sing with Me and Painful, with his nasal scream of "Mushroom Cloud of Hiss" yore never to be heard again. Now he transitions from the speaking-voice mumble and squinty falsetto of "The Crying of Lot G" and "Here to Fall" to a voice that is genuinely, unaffectedly gentle and lilting, even on the fast ones. It's most immediately evident on the sealed-off funk of "Well You Better," which has him bopping along fearlessly until reaching into an upper register for a "please make up your mind" refrain that's frayed with need and desire, emotions he's previously communicated best on nearly spoken word pieces like "My Heart's Reflection" and "Don't Have to Be So Sad."

Kaplan is 56 years old, approximately the same age as Paul McCartney when he recorded, uh, Flaming Pie (remember that one?). But he is stretching himself, perhaps as never before. Hear it again on "Is That Enough" -- the first time he sings the line "If that matters, it's to very few," the warmth that exudes from him is such that you can hear him cracking a smile. "I'll Be Around" is not the Spinners song, which they've now taken to covering on stage, but Kaplan's shyly loving croon is quite possibly his best and most emotional vocal performance ever. Hubley sings three cuts this time out and while "Before We Run" is already proving far stronger live than on record, as she fastens herself to its hooks and valleys, on "Cornelia and Jane" she nearly matches her husband's peak on the prior song, hitting a high note that as of 2000 she wasn't daring to attempt. So can it be that much as Painful was an album about lowering one's head and learning how to sing in a mutter, Fade is about self-exposure?

Either way, the music calls back just as readily to Painful in both its transitional implications and its completeness unto itself. Several YLT albums have featured a consistent enough production style, though few of them have sounded this technically polished, with both And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out and Summer Sun alienating a few fans with their whisper-quiet sonics. Fade is more varied than those records in composition style, but its low background buzz and hum is a close match for Painful's nocturnal squall, lending this the distinction of being the band's most effortlessly cohesive recording since 1993, and that's despite its absurd traversing from anthemic calling-card to Motown soul to Stax funk to indie hiss to krautrock (that's just the first half). After living with the record for several months and now hearing it laid out on LP, the portions that seemed slow or perhaps too ponderously distant have revealed themselves gradually, have snuck up on me, until I see this as not just an immense improvement on Popular (which, again, I loved) but as the most significant change of pace for this band in years.

The songs, only one of which even approaches seven minutes: Opening immediate signature tune "Ohm" bursts out and quite deliberately casts the rest of the album in its shadow; the communal vocals, the twisting melody, and the sense of celebration despite the resigned words being sung -- all gorgeous, and one of the best things they've ever recorded. The catchiness and pop purity of "Is That Enough" and from-the-"Sugarcube"-school "Paddle Forward" are enhanced by familiarity, especially the former, whose ringing guitar, buzzing hook, and wound-up girl-group peppiness compress the adventures of PopSongs into a single delectable cut. "Well You Better" is the point at which McEntire most clearly asserts himself, amping up the organ and the tricky rhythm track and separating them to the point of disorientation, near-claustrophobia, and immensely pleasurable R&B minimalism. Something else new -- the romantically precise guitar line on "Stupid Things" and the same song's viciously persistent beat, all quite noisy and charged but melding beautifully together into a loving quiet storm of aggro-loverboy beats and singing. Their work's never been so beautiful, and then you get to the second half.

As on Painful, side two finds Yo La Tengo fully enveloping themselves in sound, arguably at the expense of distinctive tunes. But that's only how it seems at first. I admit that it was so long before I warmed to "Two Trains" and its strange "big" sound and barely-perceptible rhythm that I may as well say I didn't, but I do now find it an immersive and autumnal and all that sort of introspective stuff. "The Point of It" scores for me on double-tracking and (stunning) lyrics alone, and "Before We Run" has set me agog now with its final minute of dropout-into-horns and "Nowhere Near"-style rebuild, all with a sense of coming up for air. But the key to this half and really to the entire album is in "I'll Be Around" and "Cornelia and Jane." They're both beautiful, as we've mentioned. The delicate guitars of "Around" are like nothing we've heard from this band, signaling a willingness to cop to comfortable pretty just as much as "Mr. Tough" was a surrender to pop impulse. Somewhere in the midst of these two songs, time seems to sort of stop for a bit, and "Cornelia and Jane" has an expansive heaviness to match McNew's "Black Flowers," but what's remarkable is that all its brass and baroque can't even match the lushness Georgia alone provides in her singing.

But the softness of these songs and Fade overall is given much of its power by the album's thematic fixations, which verbally emit that same sense of warmth that's ever-increasingly become a primary reason for the size of this particular band's cult and its devotion. In 2011, Ira Kaplan suffered an apparently major health scare, the nature of which has (quite understandably) never been publicly disclosed. The ordinarily volatile guitarist was forced to spend a few shows sitting down, graciously emailing fans warning them not to expect the typical semi-psychotic strangling of guitars during "I Heard You Looking" and "Blue Line Swinger." There's no way for us to know if this incident had any effect on Fade's lyrics -- it's none of our business, even -- but it's certainly hard to imagine that it didn't. Hubley's "Cornelia & Jane" (possibly named for couple of a streets in Greenwich Village) in particular has the pensive agony of a fretful partner (Kaplan wrote all but one lyric on Fade but hasn't indicated which isn't his, so I could easily be offbase): "Too many sirens, they keep you up at night / Sit back and hold your ears / How will we hold back our tears?" and "How can we hold onto you?"

And gradually, the rest of the words fall into place. Read "Ohm" as philosophy of life, acceptance of death, acknowledgement of the series of moments that's really all we get: "But nothing ever stays the same / Nothing's explained / The higher we go, the longer we fly / 'Cause this is it for all we know / So say goodnight to me / And lose no more time / Resisting the flow." And then "The Point of It," either the sardonic response to being a creatively active band with potential years still ahead of it that's had a paper gravestone of a biography now penned about it, or more importantly, the indicator of this couple and this band's shaky but assured contentment as they come to terms with the fact of aging: "Say that we’re afraid / Say the night is close / Honey, that’s okay / If we’re getting old / If we’re not so strong / If our story’s told / That’s the point of being loved." And as the serious emotional range and depth of all this hits you, all you can think is: they can't be here forever. I can only speak for myself here -- I dunno what I will do without them. But that's not, as the song goes, the point either. The point is we're all getting old, closer to death, closer to our own slow fade, and that's why we wake up in the morning. I'm surprised by how much I suddenly find that I needed to hear that at this point in my life.

[SEE ALSO:]
Popular Songs (2009)
Stupid Things EP (2012)

The B-52's: Party Mix EP (1981)

(Warner Bros.)

An odd and somewhat mysterious sideline between albums two and three of the kings and queens of art-pop diminishing returns. Pro: it emphasizes both what's great about them -- their humor and giddiness, for sure; not sure I ever before noticed how funny "Party Out of Bounds" is -- and does play up the strengths of the songs on Wild Planet. Con: it circumvents and cuts down the tunes on the superior first album, and it's sort of barely a remix record (is "Private Idaho" even different at all?) and as lots of critics pointed out, trying to make naturally danceable music more danceable is a bit of a fool's errand. The B-52's music is too loose and sparse to lend itself well to a process of combing and revision like this.

It's not really the EP's fault that remixing practices in the early '80s, especially for (semi-)mainstream rock bands, weren't what they are now, to say the least. "Lava" is an odd enough choice that fooling around with it yields no ill result, but "Give Me Back My Man" and "Dance This Mess Around" are such perfect constructions in their original form that the Party Mix! dial-downs feel like violations. In the latter case, you get an interesting enough dissection but it just makes you want desperately to listen to the original song. But "Give Me Back My Man" is kind of a disaster here, broadening the song by a full three minutes and repeating its absurd chorus about fish and candy so much that it crosses over into grating and meaningless; it's so labored it sounds like something they'd have put on Cosmic Thing (sorry) and by the end you're perfectly willing to fire shots at the soundsystem.

"52 Girls" suffers less -- I sort of enjoy hearing the guitars expanded and permitted to lord over everything, even though the artificial separation again overemphasizes the lyrics. Lots of questions remain, like why no "Rock Lobster" or "Planet Claire," either of which would make perfect sense in this context. And I understand that I'm handicapped by reviewing this based on the compact disc, paired with the all-original EP Mesopotamia. Evidently the original 12" release is actually a good deal more inventive, stringing the songs into a sort of early megamix format. Warners copped out for the CD version. So who's to blame when the party gets poorly planned? The label, probs.

[SEE ALSO:]
The B-52's (1979)
Wild Planet (1980)

Björk: Volta (2007)

(Atlantic)

RECOMMENDED

Considerably better than I remembered it being, this is undoubtedly Björk-lite -- but whereas I used to define that as meaning that it was less stridently individualistic than her other work, I now regard it as being perhaps her most out-and-out "fun" record. Though I'd fallen casually hard for Selmasongs and Medulla in previous years, it was during the promotion and touring cycle for Volta that I became a devoted fan, resulting perhaps in my sentimental attachment to its warped, colorful grooves. Really, its best function is as a collection of agreeable Björk ideas and concepts that just don't necessarily form a coherent whole -- drop most of its songs somewhere in the middle of Vespertine and you won't notice a severe dip in quality.

You will, however, notice that the ever-restless auteur has discovered and wrapped herself around industrial dance music, the influence of which is the real story here despite Timbaland's far-and-wide ballyhooed involvement. There's a lot of this on the two keynote protest songs -- I guess they're protest songs, I dunno: "Earth Intruders" and "Declare Independence" amount to a kind of defiant nonconformity that's sort of quaint in its simplicity, at least by this artist's standards. It's like she read some Embrace Your Quirk self-help manual. You barely need to hear either song to know where they're headed; the titles say everything. "Intruders," the opener, is anthemic cartoon-army march; "Independence" toys with international affairs in 3D world. It's as direct as Björk's ever been, to the point that she got in hilarious hot water for singing it with political-hotbed dedications around the world, but its giddy pretensions to revolution are hard to look upon as dangerous. "Don't let them do that to you," she chants like she's on a PSA, and six years have failed to dull the ability of the "make your own flag" refrain to make me chuckle. Then again, there is menace and chaos here -- it just feels a little safe.

Not so for the best of the industrial-infected cuts, "Wanderlust," a truly blown-out production mixed awkwardly and brilliantly with a sweet, soaring melody. The most sinister of these songs, though, is also the most plodding -- the Radiohead ("National Anthem")-like Satanic funeral march of "Vertebrae by Vertebrae," to which the stark and rainy "Pneumonia" seems a mere coda. That song-to-song relationship is striking, the sense of prelude and resolution, because Volta as a whole seems so curiously haphazard in terms of design and sequence. Each track seems its own world unto itself with little sense of contrast and larger rhythm working outward. Maybe that's why these songs seem better on your Björk Spotify playlist than they do when heard end-to-end.

We'd better talk about Timbaland, though, and I do love Timbaland; in the vein of his gloriously busy configurations with Missy Elliott, the joyous industrial-pop piece "Innocence" has genuine hooks and a dancefloor abrasiveness that sound like all the best things that "Björk collaborating with Timbaland" might suggest in your imagination. For all his name involvement and all the pop appeal of the song itself, its grit and dirtiness are to be praised; her voice cracks and the arrangement hurls itself out in a fit of the anti-slick. Not that you can tell, but the lyrics are more from the motivational section: "Fear is a powerful drug / Overcome it and you can do anything!"

The non-Timbaland arrangements are, oddly enough, typically riskier and less obvious. Though it's easily argued that African and Asian music had already long been in Björk's orbit and lexicon, Volta does make some advancements here, particularly on the percussive and sensual "Hope" and the frayed lullaby "I See Who You Are." Yet on the whole, the weirdly sunny optimism on these songs is far more a consequence of the ever-growing nuance of Björk's vocals, which are better than ever before here (and would improve yet more on the otherwise merely pleasant Biophilia). Her interaction with the brass -- oh, that's the other thing about Volta: horns, lots and lots of horns -- on "Wanderlust" is nearly as endearing as the double-tracking that renders her joy that much more audible in her performance. And her duet with Antony Hegarty "The Dull Flame of Desire" may have nothing on "I've Seen It All," but it's maybe the most fascinatingly oddball Björk moment of the last decade. This is Hallmark crooning, an artifact of the purest saccharine branches of baroque pop, delivered with almost militaristic precision and sincerity. What? It's a mark of Volta's MO, I suppose (and Björk's career in general), that its strangest and most surprising moment is the one that'd seem most conventional in any other context. But in sum -- you know who you are and whether you need this.

[SEE ALSO:]
Selmasongs (2000)
Biophilia (2011)

Animal Collective: Fall Be Kind EP (2009)

(Domino)

I thought maybe I might find short-form Animal Collective a bit easier to take, but this just makes me feel more alienated. Trimming the musical-chair museum in Merriweather Post Pavilion down to five cuts, it mostly tours the two sparring elements then dominating the band's music -- the wormy, elastic rhythms and bleats and the towering prog-Brian Wilson vocal walls. I can sense how impressive it'd be to the right ears. To these, an Animal Collective EP just means hitting the skip button half as many times. Edging close to giving up on these dudes; just not my scene apparently.

[SEE ALSO]
Sung Tongs (2004)