Like their Brooklyn cohorts in Vivian Girls, the Kiwi pop-loving Crystal Stilts invest little in discrete motifs, neat narratives, or relatable emotions, preferring instead fog-machined setpieces of non-specific mope and gloom.
Baltimore is as musically diverse as anywhere else, but in 2008, indie rockers associate the city with colorful, energetic music, from the expatriated Animal Collective to Dan Deacon's Wham City crew. The music of Beach House, the Baltimore-based duo of multi-instrumentalist Alex Scally and vocalist/organist Victoria Legrand, is a shadow narrative running parallel to this trend: Their delicate, lovelorn pop comes in the form of deathly waltzes and dark pastoral dirge s on which Legrand sings about desire, loss, and dreams as if telling a ghost story, splitting the difference between lovely and creepy.
With so many surprises in the arrangements, you might overlook what a strength Li herself is, how well she unifies Youth Novels' scattershot imagination.
As impressive and uniformly gorgeous a record as Rook is, the band's best work is likely still to come.
Will Oldham's latest could be the evil twin of the singer/songwriter's career peak, 1999's I See a Darkness: If that 90s record plumbed the bleakness of life, Lie Down in the Light finds peace in the modest pleasures of friends, family, and music.
There's nothing like a nice surprise from musicians you love. In 1981, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and producer Brian Eno united for one of the most fruitful partnerships of the post-punk era to release My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a groundbreaking record that made prominent use of sampled soundbytes and disembodied voices in place of singing. The album, recorded betwee n sessions for the Talking Heads' essential Remain in Light LP, was released with surprisingly little fanfare, yet pioneered and popularized methods that have since become part of our musical lexicon.
Times New Viking have become better songwriters, but thankfully don't change much of anything from their humble home-recorded beginnings on Rip It Off, their Matador debut.
Kevin Martin, under a dozen-or-so aliases and across numerous genres, has been screwing around with deep bass for well over a decade. 1997's Tapping the Conversation-- a concept album conceived as a surrogate soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation-- was his first release as the Bug, and in retrospect, it sounds like an alternate-universe prototype of dubstep, based on instrumental hip-hop rather than UK garage rhythms. By the time he issued his 2003 follow-up Pressure, he'd already charged headlong into heavy digital ragga, building a repertoire of grimy, distorted beats that mutated dancehall into a glitchy, blown-out commotion.
On The Mixtape About Nothing, Wale emerges fully-formed as a rapper and as a thinker, a lightning-witted, irreverent guy blessed with both an infectious swagger and a sound moral compass.
As I was finishing an interview with Gregg Gillis in July 2006, he casually mentioned his desire to see M. Night Shyamalan's just-released fantasy movie Lady in the Water. Given the film's wretched reviews-- a pitiful 24% on Rotten Tomatoes-- and the train-wreck hype surrounding it, I thought he was kidding. He wasn't; Gillis liked some of Shyamalan's other flicks, so he wanted to check this one out. Simple. And it's this omnivorous, pleasure-seeking attitude toward pop culture that defines his work as Girl Talk. (Luckily, his taste in music is superior to his taste in film.)
On the surface, Scottish trio Frightened Rabbit are like a lot of other bands. You could file them away with other musicians from their Glasgow scene, or other bassist-free groups, or other bands of literal brothers (frontman Scott and drummer Grant Hutchison are siblings). But somehow, despite the fact that their methods are well-worn, their product is one-of-a-kind, as their consistently great second album (in under a y ear, no less!) attests.
The Bad Seeds sound even edgier and more sophisticated on Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, providing a fitting pulpit for their bandleader's ravings.
Black Sea is positively huge while also being much more accessible. You get a sense here of how far Fennesz has come, how far his music reaches, and the unexplored possibilities that still exist.
The Hold Steady weren't the likeliest candidates for success. Pulling together after the demise of the imaginative, verbose, and mostly overlooked indie act Lifter Puller, Craig Finn relocated to New York to start a new band. Holding to his distinctive poet-lost-at-karaoke delivery, Finn-- like the Replacements and Hüsker Dü before him-- began unashamedly mining classic rock radio for inspiration. Surprisingly, it's the latter group you can hear on opening track "Constructive Summer", and not just in its title's resemblance to one of Hüsker Dü's most celebrated songs.
Hip-hop's earliest records often relied on faded, scratchy source material run through entry-level equipment. Even as technology advanced, the grain and the gristle stuck around-- sometimes out of necessity, sometimes as an extra ingredient. Over time, those aged, decaying sounds burrowed their way underground to crop up in pockets of IDM, dubstep, and indie hip-hop, resulting in music, built around texture more than bass or treble, that often sounded ragge d at birth.
It's packed with ideas, some of which work beautifully and some of which are just a joy to hear play out, but most of all, it's still a whole other world of pop music-- an absolutely unique, enchanting, and irreplaceable vision of how the stuff can work.
Bradford Cox spent the summer he was 16 in a children's hospital having multiple surgeries on his chest and back. His condition, Marfan syndrome, has proven difficult to separate from his music. Cox's lost summer hangs over his songs, and his gawky physique has been the dress-draped centerpiece of his band's confrontational live shows. At the same time, he can also be defensive about his appearance, using it to explain why his music's detractors are sometimes as hyperbolic as his most fervent admirers. Thousands of words later, other music critics still ask me what I could possibly like in Cox's work.
Gang Gang Dance's third album, God's Money, remains a revelation three years after its release. Pouring the muffled art-beats of 2004's Revival of the Shittest and the extended space-jams of 2004's Gang Gang Dance into structured songs, the record was starry and dreamy, yet also taut and focused. It made evident what was implicit from the start-- that these four hyperactive talents with underground pedigrees (see the Cranium, SSAB Songs, Angelblood, et. al.) could funnel their ideas into melodic pop without diluting them.
London's Hot Chip follow their breakthrough 2006 LP, The Warning, with the lovable but flawed Made in the Dark.
Santi White used to work in A&R, which gives her put-downs on debut single "Creator" a professional air: "Sit tight I know what you are/ Mad bright but you ain't no star." As Santogold, White is putting her knowledge of star quality into practical effect. At its best, her album's cross-genre confidence is dazzling, combining dub, new wave, and hip-hop to create some of the year's freshest pop. At its worst, it feels annoyingly overthought.
Sounds and ideas repeat constantly, yet Street Horrrsing never feels redundant.
On both record and onstage, the Walkmen have always reached for the rafters-- often at the risk falling on their collective faces or completely overshadowing their moodier material. In the light of their previous powerful singles and go-for-broke performances, the New York band's latest album, You & Me, might seem like a step down. However, it's the first that fully commits to their seductive, eminently soused-sounding late night sulk. If there are people who still consider the Walkmen a singles act-- granted, that will happen when you write a couple of the best rock singles of the decade-- You & Me might finally convince them otherwise.
Whether it's their second release or their 60th (no one's even pretending to be sure), Fucked Up's The Chemistry of Common Life is really easy to get excited about. A lot's been made about how it could possibly revitalize hardcore, although framing it within genre terms tends to lead to the wrong questions: Is it too melodic and instrumentally diverse to qualify as hardcore? Maybe. Is it heavy and chaotic enough to sa tisfy fans of the debut, even while it dramatically broadens their fanbase? Possibly. Can a band as destructive as Fucked Up really carry an entire scene on their sweaty, unshaven backs? Stranger things have happened.
Crystal Castles prefer traveling light. While the hotly-tipped and already hotly-contested Toronto duo's basement party set-up doesn't look like it'll fill up the passenger seat on a tour van, they also like to play fast and loose with their associations. They've remixed at a Hot Chip-like pace for everyone from Bloc Party to Uffie to Klaxons, but they're not a part of your nu-rave genre (really, who is?), or blog house for that matter. Their de but LP partly picks from 7" and 12"s that have been available in some format since 2005, and it's every bit as difficult to pin down.
Air France's No Way Down ... conjures an idyllic world similar to the one on the Avalanches' dazzlingly great Since I Left You, another record that finds wide-eyed delight in sincerity and beauty.
Lindstrøm knows all the right moves to give his own brand of spacey disco an air of transcendence, but the result feels so effortless that his facsimile and the "real thing" become indistinguishable-- a fake so real it's beyond fake.
This is Wayne's moment and he embraces it on his own terms. Instead of hiding his bootleg-bred quirks in anticipation of the big-budget spotlight, he distills the myriad metaphors, convulsing flows, and vein-splitting emotions into a commercially gratifying package that's as weird as it wants to be
DFA introduces Andrew Butler, a compelling new voice in American dance music. His debut album is a self-contained, self-assured set that runs vintage styles through a restless compositional imagination to create something joyfully, startlingly unique.
Bring any baggage you want to this record, and it still returns nothing but warm, airy, low-gimmick pop, peppy, clever, and yes, unpretentious
This is shit-hot thrilling music. But it's also brainy and ambivalent, and more engaging for it.
The resulting 2xCD set captures urgent and imaginative songs that reorganize 4AD haze, off-kilter indie pop, crashing garage-punk, forward-leaning krautrock, and hypnotic Kranky ambience into a singular-sounding call-to-arms.
In Ghost Colours earns its smiles with a combination of ingenuity and easiness that you don't often come by, and for that, even in April, it already feels like a triumph.
No Age follow their 2007 EP compilation, Weirdo Rippers, with an ambitious Sub Pop debut: Nouns is gorgeously thick-- a hazy, delirious expanse that's friendly and warm and, best of all, unpredictable.
Darker and bleaker lyrically than their previous work, Third is a sort of re-debut-- the band's sound after it has excised every possible remnant of trip-hop from it.
For all the album's winding paths and unexpected vistas, Fleet Foxes' harmonies remain the primary draw, and they've written and arranged these songs to showcase their shared vocals.