Tim Hecker – Love Streams

★★★★☆

Released April 8th, 2016 on 4AD Records

My first exposure to Tim Hecker was Ravedeath, 1972, a 2011 ambient album that had a deep undercurrent of resigned acceptance flowing through it. Mortality, the daily grind, the frustrating minutiae of relationships: all of this and more has happened before and will happen again is the meaning it all throbbed with. His followup, 2013’s Virgins, made a profound abstraction out of something as mundane as acoustic instruments played in a room full of natural reverb. Here lies the connection to the basic primitive human it seemed to tell us, the heart of what it means to “make music”. Love Streams takes a different tactic: instead of focusing on the ancient process of engaging with a physical acoustic instrument, Hecker spends the album exploring the possibilities inherent in the human voice itself.

This is an ambient album in its truest sense. The synths and other instrumentation that make up the bedrock are blurred and smeared until they become impossible to separate. The vocal work – supplied by the Icelandic Choir Ensemble – sounds as though it’s echoing through the original caves of the species. When Hecker’s pieces lock into a temporary groove it is something out of the deep history, some vital bit of pop bliss from beyond the veil of civilization. It’s inspirations are a bit closer in terms of relative history; these are examples of 15th Century choral music brought forward into the digital era, baroque music deconstructed and built back up into strange new forms. At times – such as on “Music Of The Air” – Hecker’s manipulation makes an eerie approximation of Auto-Tune on choral voices; at others, the sublime “Castrati Stack” especially, he lights the whole thing on fire and lets the synths corrode and burn in the foreground. That’s the balance that gets struck throughout Love Streams: the ancient and the modern, tussling together in such a tight embrace that it becomes difficult to tell the two apart.

https://open.spotify.com/album/2pBUtv4ttij9RVMW45WGVF

Japanese Breakfast – Psychopomp

★★★★☆

Released April 1st, 2016 on Yellow K Records

The dream of the Nineties is alive in more places than just Portland these days. With every second kid out there wearing a flannel overshirt and a fitted cap, and every second band trading in post-Dinosaur Jr. guitar crunch, one can be forgiven for thinking that they were reliving their memories of 1992. Unlike their fuzz-pedal worshipping contemporaries – Bully, Speedy Ortiz, Joanna Gruesome, the Crutchfield sisters – Japanese Breakfast takes their cues from a more esoteric place. Psychopomp is a little bit Isn’t Anything-era My Bloody Valentine, with the airy charm of vintage Asobi Seksu and a bit of the more out-there moments of Guided By Voices. “In Heaven” is a shoegaze paradise; “Everybody Wants To Love You” is a chug-along lo-fi anthem. “Jane Cum” and “Triple 7” are the highlights, soaring numbers that focus their attention on the impassioned vocals of Michelle Zauner.

Zauner is the real show here. The songs on Psychopomp are reworks of some lo-fi stuff she worked on when her old band, Little Big Leagues, was still active. She and collaborator Ned Eisenberg rebuilt them into something both strongly reminiscent of the shoegaze/dream-pop days of the late Eighties and early Nineties while retaining a vibrant mysteriousness that sets the music apart from the merely derivative. The fact that it breezes by in a scant 25 minutes only adds to it; unlike a lot of her contemporaries, Zauner knows when to call it a day. The quick runtime means that each of the songs on Pyschopomp stands out on its own as a strong contender, and lets the strengths of each song shine through, something that might have been lost in a much longer work. It’s wistful and heavy, pure indie pop at its finest.

And The Rest…

RJD2

Dame Fortune

★★☆

03/25/2016 on R.J.’s Electrical Connections Records

Self-produced hip hop albums can get quite self-indulgent, and Dame Fortune is no exception. The producer’s long-standing talent is there, but only in fits and doses.

The Thermals

We Disappear

★★★

03/25/2016 on Saddle Creek Records

The Portland supergroup’s strongest album in quite some time. It’s not The Body, The Blood, The Machine, but then again what is? Solid, fist-in-the-air power-pop that often edges into punk.

The Range

Potential

★★★☆

03/25/2016 on Domino Records

A deeply human record, all the more so for its electronic starting point. Brooklyn producer James Hinton used samples gleaned from YouTube for the vocals on this record, which is something I do that I didn’t realize was actually legitimate. Off to the DAW I go.

Open Mike Eagle

Hella Personal Film Festival

★★★☆

03/25/2016 on Mello Music Group Records

Like his fellow Milo on the (now-defunct) Hellfyre Club label, Open Mike Eagle twists words, scratches out lyrics, courts controversy, and lives in the interstitial zone of the black middle class in America. Like Milo, he lets his desire for alt-hip hop vibes and out-there production overshadow the songs at times.

Bob Mould

Patch The Sky

★★★☆

03/25/2016 on Merge Records

Another record from a man who seemingly just can’t stop recording them, former Husker Du and Sugar frontman Bob Mould may not be Robert Pollard but he’s close. Patch The Sky is one of the best albums he’s ever released, a stripped-down collection of power-guitar songs that bring to mind what his legendary punk band might have sounded like had they allowed it to age gracefully.

White Denim

Stiff

★★★☆

03/25/2016 on Downtown Records

Solid white-boy funk and soul, Stiff is a breezy, poppy album that sounds like it’s the 1970s that have come around again, and not the 1990s. It’s the sort of album that invites you to have a great ol’ time, and then helps you get there.

Plague Vendor

Bloodsweat

★★★★

03/25/2016 on Epitaph Records

An abrasive, jittery album that is secretly formed of big hooks and a lot of punk rock swagger. Like a serrated switchblade, it’ll stab right into your gut and then stay there.

Cobalt – Slow Forever

★★★★☆

Released March 25th, 2016 on Profound Lore Records

It has to be hard for a band when an integral member – an icon of the band itself – melts down in public and turns out to be a massive asshole. Scott Stapp falling asleep in the middle of a show, Wes Scantlin accusing an audience member of stealing his house, Phil Anselmo drunkenly bellowing “white power” and give the Hitler salute: embarrassing moments that neatly divide a band in decline from a defunct band. Cobalt knows that pain all too well.

The band made a name for themselves with their own take on the scaffolding of black metal, and singer Phil McSorley’s rugged military-inspired lyrics. Then McSorley decided to go on a misogynist, homophobic rant on the Facebook page of another band, and band lynchpin Eric Wunder tossed him by the wayside. Seven years after their last album, the genre classic Gin, the band announced a return with Charlie Fell of Chicago’s Lord Mantis on the mic. The result is utterly galvanizing, one of the finest metal releases I’ve heard in years. Listening to it for me was akin to the first time I heard “Blood & Thunder” kick off Leviathan – a burning need to bang my head, and a sense that this was something altogether more special than another collection of burly riffs. “Hunt The Buffalo” is as effective an opener as “Blood & Thunder”, but “Elephant Graveyard” is heavier than anything Mastodon ever came out with, and “Ruiner” might just be cleverer. Charlie Fell brings a range that even his time in Lord Mantis didn’t prepare anyone for; his work on “Cold Breaker” seems to constantly shift, sharply yowling and then bellowing like a mammoth.

It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who once opined that there were no second acts in American life. Wunder and Cobalt, though, have managed exactly that, rising from the toxic ashes of their past and making a new name for themselves as a solid, well-rounded All-American Metal Band. This new second act Cobalt is better than McSorley’s military black metal Cobalt ever was: grimy, bluesy, and crushingly heavy in all the right places. Even better: no soaring sing-along choruses. See, Killswitch? This is how you make metal.

And The Rest…

Underworld

Barbara Barbara We Face A Shining Future

★★★☆

03/18/2016 on Astralwerks Records

As far as latter-day albums from Nineties electronic heroes go, it’s not Random Access Memories, but neither is it The Day Is My Enemy. Drum n bass superstar High Contrast adds just the right touch of modernity to Underworld’s familiarity.

Damien Jurado

Visions Of Us On The Land

★★★★

03/18/2016 on Secretly Canadian

Visions is a journey record, both inward and outward, and it’s arid psychedelic vistas will bring you into the mystic and keep you there, contemplating your own inner desire.

Richmond Fontaine

You Can’t Go Back If There’s Nothing To Go Back To

★★★☆

03/18/2016 on Fluff & Gravy Records

While it’s not Fontaine’s finest alt-country moment (you have to go back seven years to find that), it does make for an enjoyable, wistful, somewhat overlong record. Solid Americana that doesn’t overstep it’s own ambitions.

Young Thug

I’m Up

★★★☆

02/05/2016 on 300 Entertainment Records

In between all the off-the-wall, smoked-out singalongs there’s a strange sadness lurking, as though being the most prolific nutjob in hip hop that isn’t a Based God isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Young Thug

Slime Season 3

★★★★

03/25/2016 on 300 Entertainment Records

For someone who hasn’t even put out a proper debut yet, there sure is a lot of Young Thug on the market, and it keeps getting better, too. Slime Season 3 is a perfect example of the progression of an artist who is learning to take their gift for crafting bangers with oddly affecting choruses and turn them to a more wide-screen audience.

The Body

One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache

★★★★

03/25/2016 on Neurot Records

A collaboration with Full Of Hell that will leave you shuddering, weeping, and likely deaf. This is what dancefloors sound like in the Abyss.

Amon Amarth

Jomsviking

★★★★

03/25/2016 on Metal Blade Records

You’d think that after ten albums of muscular Viking metal that the luster would fade, but here we are. The titan’s latest album is a concept about a warrior looking to get the girl, after he gutted the girl’s fiance. Just bang your head.

School Of Seven Bells – SVIIB

★★★★

Released February 26th, 2016 on Vagrant Records

School Of Seven Bells were never one of the bands pushed by indie radio that really ever appealed to me. They came off as the nadir of the cross-pollination of shoegaze and dream pop, an amalgamation of the worst parts of both that hung around like the miasma of a bad dream for just long enough to get obnoxious. I didn’t expect much when I sat down with SVIIB, their fourth (and now final) album.

As it turns out, it’s leaps and bounds beyond their earlier material, a record that takes in the best moments of Eighties alt-pop while still remaining aloof and individual. It’s slick, but dreamy; the drums hit hard but the melodies remain slippery. It seems like a celebration and in a way it is. During the process of recording (in 2013), one half of the duo, Benjamin Curtis, passed away from lymphoma. Alejandra Dehaza took what they had, polished it up with some help, and released this one last School Of Seven Bells album. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had just walked away from the project after her creative partner died, but the fact that she stuck to it and released such a stellar final album is a bit inspiring in its own way. It’s a hell of a way to go out, and at the very least it leaves me with fond memories of a group that I previously had no such memories of.

And the rest…

Cavern of Anti-Matter

Void Beats/Invocation Trex

★★★

02/19/2016 on Duophonic Records

Electronic music may be a big festival draw now but it’s origins lie in open synth work layered over Krautrock-inspired motorik beats. Cavern of Anti-Matter take their chosen genre back to its retro moment, conjuring up images of later Kraftwerk or E2-E4.

Wild Nothing

Life Of Pause

★★★☆

02/19/2016 on Bella Union Records

As usual, Wild Nothing’s latest record conjures up a daydream of the Eighties, a snatch of John Hughes remembered at the moment of death. Like most Wild Nothings records, the single is the best part, but there are some real moments of strength and revelation found throughout.

Africaine 808

Basar

★★★★

02/19/2016 on Golf Channel Records

A seamless blend of West African heart, German efficiency, and the classic thump of the Roland TR-808 drum machine. Harder to pin down than your average hip hop record, and a good sight more freeing.

Steve Mason

Meet The Humans

★★★☆

02/26/2016 on Domino Records

Overly sensitive without being eye-rollingly weepy, Meet The Humans dances all over the pop-rock map in search of Mason’s heart, and hits far more often than it misses.

Emma Pollock

In Search Of Harperfield

★★★

02/26/2016 on Chemikal Underground Records

Country-folkie with a nice enough turn of phrase and a decent sense of navigation around a plaintive melody, still not much to really write home about. A record you can take home to mama, but not a record you can really take out and party with.

Winter Roundup 2016

Well, after being sick for most of the last two months I find myself behind on a lot of listening. So here we’ll wrap up all of the albums I’ve listened to in the last two weeks and hopefully we can move on from there. There may be a second part, there’s still a long list to go after this.

Shearwater – Jet Plane And Oxbow

(01/22/2016 on Sub Pop Records)

★★★☆

Krautrock rhythms and big guitars let the band’s ninth album transcend where they’ve been and point to big promises as to where they’re going.

Rihanna – Anti

(01/28/2016 on Roc Nation)

★★★★

It’s always fun to watch an established pop artist push herself forwards, even if it’s just in increments. Plus, making Drake put in work is always a good idea.

Black Tusk – Pillars Of Ash

(01/29/2016 on Relapse Records)

★

THERE’S NOTHING HERE THAT HASN’T BEEN DONE! IT’S JUST HARDCORE WITH SOME SLUDGE AND DEATH FLOURISHES! PLUS THE VOCALIST KEEPS SHOUTING! SHOUTING! SHOUTING! I SWEAR BIOHAZARD WAS MORE ENTERTAINING! SHOUTING!

Kevin Gates – Islah

(01/29/2016 on Atlantic Records)

★★★★

Bizarrely good, like a steak sandwich prepared in the back of a grimy diner whose walls are dripping with sludge. Kevin Gates is a weird guy, a fan-kicker, has lame gun tats on his hands, and doesn’t believe in vaccinations. Still, Islah overflows with hypnotic flow and oddly great hooks – “Hard For” being the most out-there of them all.

Milk Teeth – Vile Child

(01/29/2016 on Hopeless Records)

★★☆

Derivative as hell, it still works when the female vocalist comes on and the band approximates the sort of 90s hard rock that Speedy Ortiz has been repackaging. Then when the guy comes on and tries his hand at Husker Du it all falls apart.

Dream Theater – The Astonishing

(01/29/2016 on Roadrunner Records)

★☆

There are days that I swear the word “pretentious” was invented to describe Dream Theater.

Cross Record – Wabi Sabi

(01/29/2016 on Ba Da Bing Records)

★★★★

Art rock that walks a fine line between gorgeously dreamy and blackly despairing, Wabi Sabi is a record that soaks up dream pop and New Wave influences in equal measure.

Bloc Party – Hymns

(01/29/2016 on BMG Records)

☆

So many of the most hyped-up bands from the early 00s became the poster children for the concept of diminishing returns. Interpol, The Killers, The Strokes, and of course Bloc Party. Hymns is the nadir of Bloc Party’s career, an utterly boring collection of electro-washed power balladry that requires serious endurance to make it through.

Josephine Foster – No More Lamps In The Morning

(02/05/2016 on Fire Records)

★★★★

A live re-recording of older songs, No More Lamps In The Morning brings out the sheer power in Foster’s songs. The first comparison will always be Joni Mitchell, but like Joanna Newsom there’s something deeper and older at work here, something that crackles with early radio signals and speaks of cleaner air and bygone days.

Junior Boys – Big Black Coat

(02/05/2016 on City Slang Records)

★★★☆

Sleek electronic songs that are more subdued than some of their contemporaries but are also more subtle, and more affecting.

Nonkeen – The Gamble

(02/05/2016 on R & S Records)

★★★☆

Complicated and wild, bouncing from solemn, rainy-day contemplation to the sort of drum-led freakouts that made Starless And Bible Black such a treat. Call it electro-prog if you have to call it something.

Pinegrove – Cardinal

(02/12/2016 on Run For Cover Records)

★★★☆

New Jersey has grown its own peculiar brand of punk rock over the past decade, one where howling black-hearted hardcore stands shoulder to shoulder with reedy folk-country Americana. Pinegrove is a key example of this sound, combining youthful energy and a folk-punk yelp with a more studied and mature rootsy depth.

Radiation City – Synesthetica

(02/12/2016 on Polyvinyl Records)

★★

Reverb-laden dream pop with Eighties influences that doesn’t manage to do, well, much of anything.

Ra Ra Riot – Need Your Light

(02/19/2016 on Barsuk Records)

★★★☆

After a regrettable detour into electronic music, Ra Ra Riot has returned with the sort of brightly coloured, anthemic pop rock they were best known for. It all goes downhill from the first song but “Water” is such a great song that you’d hardly notice.

Brood Ma – Daze

(02/19/2016 on Tri Angle Records)

★★★★

An electronic record that is rooted more in disquieting industrial-tinged dread-making than it is in creating dancefloor bliss. An amalgamation of dark vision and darker sounds.

Wolfmother – Victorious

(02/19/2016 on Universal Records)

★★☆

When they stick to the rote Sabbath worship my fist can at least pump into the air. When they delve into messy balladry that smells of cheese and bad Uriah Heep, however, I’m left feeling limp.

Matmos – Ultimate Care II

(02/19/2016 on Thrill Jockey Records)

★★★

If you’ve ever wanted to hear a Whirlpool Ultimate Care II washing machine used as the main instrument on an album, look no further.

AFX – orphaned deejay selek 2006-2008

AFX – orphaned deejay selek 2006-2008 (EP)

★★★☆

Honestly, the breakbeats on “oberheim blacet1b” were enough to convince me. Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments Pt 2 was a rather mediocre collection of the usual abrasive art-noise; orphaned deejay selek is more abrasive art-noise, but it’s abrasive art-noise that you can sort of dance to. Richard D James has always been at his sharpest when he’s welded himself to a beat, although his bizarrely mutant ideas of what constitutes a “beat” tend to stretch definitions beyond all recognition. AFX is, of course, the particular artist label that brought the bouncing acid-rave of the Analogue Bubblebath series as well as the searing style of drill n bass on Hangable Auto Bulb, so the fact that it approaches the neighbourhood of club-readiness is probably not all that surprising.

The man promised that he had over a decade of music simmering, waiting to be released, and the third installment in that promise is as good as anything he’s ever released under the AFX moniker. It’s further proof that he never fell off, but just went away for a while; now he’s back, and the acid flows freer than ever.

Liturgy – The Ark Work

★☆

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix is a Brooklyn musician who has an academic-level philosophy outlining his vision of transcendental black metal, which involves a lot of overthinking that seemed galvanizing when it was paired with an album like Aesthetica and a lot less so when you consider it in context with The Ark Work. Aesthetica was an album that was as polarizing in the black metal community as Sunbather would be a couple of years after it. It was stylistically American black metal – the hoar-frost vocals, the blastbeats, the fuzzed-out atmospherics – but it switched out the immature Satanism and borderline-and-beyond anti-Semitism of Norwegian black metal for something more philosophically in line with peace and love, or something to that effect. While Hunt-Hendrix and Liturgy weren’t the first to mark a change in the narrative of black metal – credit for that goes primarily to the Cascadian scene and the nature-worshipping Wolves In The Throne Room – they were the first to take it so seriously that their ideas were presented at an academic conference. It was a powerful album that drove a rather punk-inflected, politically reactionary kind of music towards a more progressive, more intelligent end.

The Ark Work doesn’t continue this narrative. Hunt-Hendrix had professed a desire to move beyond black metal into more electronic areas, but this album is something else entirely. Just exactly what is unclear. It’s not quite brutal enough to be black metal, although there are blurred blastbeats throughout the album. It’s not quite an electronic blend, unless we’re all content with calling cheap, thrift-store MIDI presets “electronic” now. There’s faded, screamed vocals, but there’s no power in them. There’s rapped sections, but they come off as uncomfortably cheesy more than anything else. There’s glitch sections, but they sound half-formed; rather than being a cohesive part of a statement of art, they sound as though the songs were merely rendered on an old refurbished desktop and no one could be bothered to fix them.

What the hell is the point of all of this? This just feels like a bad joke from a trust-funded musical tourist. I can’t imagine anyone hearing the master tapes full of synth cheese, lazily shouted vocals, and badly manipulated sections and thinking that it was anything that anyone should seriously release. “Reign Array” has some old spark of life to it, but the fact that the stinking corpse of “Vitriol” comes right after it outlines almost every problem this album has. Here’s hoping Deafheaven doesn’t disappoint this badly.

Dan Deacon – Glass Riffer

★★★

I don’t know if I’ve ever actually used this phrase before, but Glass Riffer is a hot mess.

It’s so cluttered. Every single bit of sonic real estate is developed. The arrangements are massive. Every moment seems intricately orchestrated for maximum payoff. Tracks like “Sheathed Wings” and “Learning To Relax” seem to blast out of the speakers like the blossoming of a nuclear fireball. This is an incessant, throbbing album that comes off like the epic start of every party ever.

And this is Dan Deacon supposedly stripping down and simplifying things.

While this sort of exuberant energy has its perks, 43 minutes of it can get tiring. Not helping matters is the second-last track, “Take It To The Max”, which rides an insistently annoying figure for far too long and ruins the end of the album. When he reins in these obnoxious tendencies the results are pure gold, like on the first single “Feel The Lightning”; Deacon, however, doesn’t always seem to be able to rein it in. Still, despite its “stripped down” nature, it’s every bit as full and satisfying as America or Spiderman of the Rings.

Young Ejecta – The Planet

★★☆

Sometime around 2009 the synthesizer became arguably the most important instrument in independent music. Sure, synths have been big in hip hop and electronic music since time out of mind, but the rock and roll underground continued its guitar obsession long after most other genres had melded it back into an overall symphony of sounds. Then chillwave came along, bringing with it any number of artists who felt more comfortable with samplers and synths than they did with the traditional guitar/bass/drum setup. Washed Out, Neon Indian, CHVCHES, Chairlift, et al. brought the experimental ideas of synth-rock out of the 1980s and into the modern age, having washed off most of the cheese first.

Young Ejecta is actually the project of one of the members of Neon Indian – Leanne Macomber – and Joel Ford, who used to spend time in a duo with Daniel “Oneohtrix Point Never” Lopatin. So, suffice to say that it arrives with an impressive pedigree. Sadly, said pedigree doesn’t really translate out to impressive music. The Planet, a “mini-album” that stretches out to nearly half an hour, doesn’t present anything new, vital, or exciting. It’s quite honestly as close to generic Teens (what the fuck are we calling this decade, anyway?) synth rock as you can get. It’s all very *nice*, and that’s its major stumbling block. It’s pretty, the production is clean and gets you to nod your head in the appropriate places, it’s perfectly acceptable background music for doing whatever you do during the day, and that’s it. Nothing more. It’s boring. Neon Indian had some experimental quirks, but The Planet plays it safe. Chairlift and CHVCHES bust out maximalist melodic hooks, but there’s nothing of the sort on *The Planet*; in fact, there’s very little that’s memorable here at all, from a melodic standpoint. It’s the synth-rock equivalent of a Theory of a Deadman album: staid, by-the-numbers post-chillwave that doesn’t do much beyond try to catch the ear of people who’ve heard it all before and don’t want anything else.

Ghost Culture – Ghost Culture

★★★☆

Signed to a record deal on the basis of one single track (“How”), London electronic producer James Greenwood delivers on the hype and has released a debut album that croons darkly like vintage Depeche Mode and has a bottom end capable of filling most any dancefloor you can name. This is house music for people who grew up on Eighties synth ballads and Bat Cave goth-retro sounds, which means it fills a specific niche in my heart. “How”, strangely enough, is not that floor-filler; it’s a sighing, burbling kind of track that builds into an eventual shuddering peak. Greenwood’s vocals are oddly reminiscent of Strokes leader Julian Casablancas, if Casablancas put his voice through filters and grew up on a steady diet of Dave Gahan. This is dark disco, not the party music that Todd Terje spent last year spinning, but music capable of soundtracking a certain kind of party – the distinction is subtle, but it’s there.