Top 10: Windmill, Shocking Pinks
Tu Fawning
Secession
Polyvinyl
Release Date: July 8
For those with patience and an ear for thought-provoking, slightly abstract music, this is an album worth jumping on. Throughout its eight tracks, this EP is a battlefield where sweetly sung lyrics are pitted against feedback, ethereal choruses meet fractured guitar chords, and everything, from pianos to vocals, sound slightly off-key. Sound messy? I dare you to throw this one on the stereo and not fall in love with its pleasantly disorienting feel.
Karl Hector + The Malcouns
Sahara Swing
Now Again
Release Date: July 9
Karl Hector isn’t exactly a household name, having appeared on one lone 7″ back in 1996, but with this album, he has stepped out of obscurity and teamed up with Poets of Rhythm producer/guitarist Jay Whitefield for 19 tracks of what a press release has labeled “Afrodelic Kraut Funk.” What that term roughly translates to is a mash-up of tribal rhythms, James Brown-style guitars, brazen horns, and funk-driven keyboards. The album very much feels like an improv jazz set, with all the energy and risk taking involved with that particular style of music.
Bruce Haack
Haackula
The Omni Recording Corporation
Release Date: June 17
Outsider electronica artist Bruce Haack is an obscure name, even a couple decades after his death and nearly forty years after his first (and only) major-label release, The Electric Lucifer. Using homemade electronics and circuit-bent Casios, Haack cut an album a year for most of the ’70s, including Haackula–perhaps his most dark recording session. This disc features two enthralling bonus tracks as well. “Party Machine” is an unexpected collaboration with a young, pre-Def-Jam Russell Simmons and “Icarus” is a 32-minute soundscape worth the sticker price itself. Wyatt Williams
The Roller
The Roller
Monofonus Press
Release Date: June 17
I had this urge to rock out to some proper doom-metal the other day, and lucky for me, this one came through the mail. The Roller is a four-piece from Austin, Texas, and these are some seriously pissed off dudes. While an army of shredding guitars and pounding drums assault your ears, vocalist Mike Morowitz roars into the mic with such vehemence it’s a little bit scary. Meanwhile, author Rebecca Bengal has penned a story to go along with the album, and it’s equally bleak, with abandoned landscapes and animal carcasses. Nice.
Keak Da Sneak
Deified
Koch
Release Date: Out Now
An average day at the XLR8R Yay Area office:
10 a.m.: Online Editor Jennifer Marston opens promo package for Keak Da Sneak’s Deified and wonders what The Prodigy is doing on the disc. Turns out it isn’t that Prodigy.
Noon: Keak drops by to talk hyphy etymology with Managing Editor Ken Taylor. An argument over correct pronunciation of “Yadadamean?” escalates into accusations about whether Keak really was the first person to rap ‘hyphy.’
2 p.m: Rich-Media Editor Bryant Rutledge gets blunted in the bathroom, spends the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out if the “That Go” remix on Deified is actually a different song than the “Whisper Song.” He eventually decides it doesn’t matter.
4 p.m.: Trunk Bois show up to race photographer Chris Woodcock on scraper bikes. Woodcock loses.
5 p.m.: Publisher Andrew Smith calls it a day, ghost rides the Audi whip home to Potrero Hill while bumping “That Go” remix featuring Prodigy. No one has the heart to tell him that it isn’t that Prodigy. Wyatt Williams
Radiohead
The Best Of
Capitol
Release Date: Out Now
Talk about a time warp. I think the last time I listened to “Karma Police,” I was driving my beat-up Nissan to tenth grade. Not surprisingly, the tracks on this disc (and the gazillions of others the label probably wanted to include) have more than held up over time, and the selection is a fairly comprehensive look at how the band’s sound evolved and changed over time, from the power chord driven numbers in the early ’90s to the more abstract compositions in recent years. Kudos to Capitol for including “Idioteque,” which is possibly the best song I’ve ever seen performed live.
Shocking Pinks
Shocking Pinks
DFA
Release Date: Out Now
While we’re on the subject of going back in time, I stumbled on this one while going through my iTunes recently and threw it on for a listen. Still as captivating as it was in 2007, when it was released, Shocking Pinks is a perfect example of how indie rock can be experimented and tweaked to sound original again. Rather than sticking to the traditional guitar/drums/bass setup, Nick Harte incorporates laptop-generated sounds, tambourines, and ambient choruses into the tracks, which lead to unexpected twists and surprises and in the musical structure of the album.
Nisennenmondai
Neji/Tori
Smalltown Supersound
Release Date: July 29
Mastering the art of noise-rock is tricky business, and more often than not, attempts at this kind of music sound akin to a garbage truck tipping over at four in the morning when you’re trying to sleep. Not so with this Japanese trio, who will be introduced to the world outside their homeland for the first time with this release. Armed with screeching guitars, frantic drum solos, and enough feedback to blow a set of desktop speakers, Nisennenmondai–which happens to consist of three petite ladies–shows the rest of us how to properly manipulate a set of instruments. Added bonus: Kim Hiorthøy did the cover art, which is as much a collage of ordered chaos as the album itself.
Windmill
Puddle City Racing Lights
Friendly Fire
Release Date: July 15
Puddle City Racing Lights is the debut album from Matthew Thomas Dillon, a U.K. musician whose career has risen quickly since his stage debut in 2005. Here, Dillon has created an album of poignant tracks weighted in minor chords, rolling piano notes, and strings, but he’s no scratchy throated, broken-hearted singer. Rather, his voice is extremely high-pitched and a little off-key, which creates an interesting juxtaposition with the music and keeps the album from being thrown into the pile of mundane songwriting.
All India Radio
Fall
Minty Fresh
Release Date:
This is probably my favorite one for the week. All India Radio has taken dream-pop to the next level with some mind-numbingly gorgeous songs that use pianos, strings, and organs to their fullest potential and sit somewhere between the realms of Portishead and Boards of Canada. This is also the band’s first album with its new singer Leona Prue, whose voice pulls the listener into a trance-like state from almost the first note she utters.
C.R.A.C. “Buy Me Lunch”
The SoCal duo of Blu and Ta’Raach, otherwise known as C.R.A.C., favor hip-hop comprised of leftfield beats and distorted soul, and, if asked, will tell you there really is no genre you can pin their debut album, The Piece Talks into. “Buy Me Lunch,” the album’s lead single, features vocalist Noni Lamar and features a strange amalgamation of the MCs shouting “revolution” over some lighthearted acoustic guitars. A couple swear words and some references to AKs ensure some grit stays in the mix as well.
The Lake
Fuck Buttons Tour with Mogwai
They may only have a couple releases under their belts, but as Fuck Buttons, Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power have proven themselves masters of the live setting since the band’s inception in 2004. In their native U.K., the duo’s shows garner something of a cult following, and with initial praise for the band’s debut album, Street Horrrsing, being mostly positive, the same is likely to happen Stateside.
We can put that theory to the test at the end of July, when these two knob-tweaking experimentalists embark on a North American tour with Mogwai, whose John Cummings recorded Street Horrrsing.
07/19 Chicago, IL: Pitchfork Music Festival
07/20 Brooklyn, NY: McCarren Park Pool
09/04 Seattle, WA: Showbox Sodo*
09/05 Victoria, BC: Element Nightclub*
0906 Vancouver, BC: Commodore Ballroom*
09/08 San Francisco, CA: The Grand Ballroom @ Regency Center*
09/09 Los Angeles, CA: Wiltern*
09/10 Tucson, AZ: Rialto Theater*
09/12 Austin, TX: Stubbs BBQ*
09/13 Dallas, TX: Granada Theater*
09/15 Atlanta, GA: Variety Playhouse*
09/16 Richmond, VA: The National*
09/17 Washington, DC: 9:30 Club*
09/19 Philadelphia, PA: Starlight Ballroom*
09/20 Monticello, NY: Kutshers County Resort*
09/22 Boston, MA: Wilbur Theater*
09/23 Montreal, QC: Metropolis*
09/25 Pontiac, MI: Crofoot Ballroom*
09/26 Chicago, IL: Congress Theater*
09/27 Minneapolis, MN: First Avenue*
* w/ Mogwai
Fulgeance “The Revenge Of The Nerd”
Mike Slott gave us the inaugural track in Dublin-based imprint All City’s 7 x 7 Beatstrumental series, and the self-proclaimed schizophrenic producer Fulgeance delivers the next. The 28-year old beatmaker and showman delivers a rough hip-hop number here that calls to mind the work of Dabrye, Prefuse 73, and Ammoncontact.
The Notwist: Let’s Twist Again
Starting as a punk/metal act in the late ’80s, Munich-based The Notwist has shapeshifted their way to this summer’s The Devil, You + Me. A blissfully heady extension of 2002’s Neon Golden, Devil again sublimely melds indie-rock sensibilities with an experimental spirit. What results from Markus Acher’s mellow voice, Michael Acher’s bass, and Martin Gretschmann’s programming is a kind of easy listening that nevertheless gets fans endlessly riled.
Taking the stage at Prague’s Palác Akropolis for the opening show of the Devil tour in April, The Notwist appeased the anxious crowd with an exuberant performance. The cave-like theater’s dim lighting matched a harder-edged musical vibe, as songs bordering on industrial followed those like “Where in This World,” which rumbled with bass and horn arrangements. “Day 7” and “Pilot” got the most raucous reactions, from lip-synching to drunken body-slamming. Their encore, “Good Lies,” kept fans screaming, but all good things must come to an end–and they did, as Gretschmann hoisted up his laptop, which read (in typically humble style)“We’re sorry, but we have to go.”
XLR8R: How’ve you kept busy in the six years since Neon Golden?
Martin Gretschmann: I did some [music for the solo project] Console, and film music for our friend Joerg Adolph, which partly ended up on the Console album Mono. I started a club [Rote Sonne] in Munich with some friends. And I have been quite busy with DJing (as Acid Pauli). The others did records and toured with Lali Puna, Ms. John Soda, and Tied & Tickled Trio. And the three of us formed this 13&God band with Themselves from S.F.
Was there a point that you officially broke up?
No. We never broke up or even thought about doing so. We just did what we always do in between the Notwist records. We take care of all the others’ bands.
What prompted your decision to begin working together again?
It was clear that we wanted to make a new album after we made the other records with the other bands.
Was there a prevailing mood when making Devil?
Well, quite a lot of very positive and very negative things happened in the past years. Friends got injured in accidents or suffered from diseases. All of this made its way into the music and the lyrics. But this happened unconsciously. We didn’t really have a clue at the beginning of how it would sound in the end.
What is the biggest difference audiences might notice about your tour this time around?
We play some new songs. We have a new drummer, Andreas Haberl. And for the first time in our history, we have someone on tour who will take care of the lights.
Various Playing Around
Where is the heart of house these days? Is it the drum, as many an overused sample (or any drummer) will tell you? Is it the melody, carried by a voice, a sample, or a synth? London’s Jesse Rose would likely answer that it is instead the pulse of the bass, the bump that has carried dance music from Detroit techno to German minimalism to today’s pan-global house hybrids, if the steady, propulsive basslines that pervade most of Playing Around are any indication.
Rose’s Made to Play label is only a dozen vinyl releases old, but its tracks have found homes in DJ crates far and wide, not least of all Rose’s own as an ascendant festival DJ and remixer, and all have exemplified the “fidget house” tag. Originally coined as a joke between Rose and Dave Taylor (a.k.a. Switch), “fidget house” describes this music perfectly: choppy, herky-jerky vocal samples and goofy left turns into sound effects and breakdowns, all smoothed out with consistent, thunderous bass for the bins. While the label’s strictly limited 12-inches are a secretive DJ’s dream, it means the home listener has been left in the dark regarding the buzz around this label and the fidget house style.
Playing Around rectifies that with a disc of 13 tracks, hand-harvested and assembled by Rose from Made to Play’s vinyl releases, and a second disc continuously mixed (from largely the same selections) by the label’s rising star Oliver $. The glitch/micro-sample bag of tricks rarely empties for the label’s more inventive producers as they use spoken bits, alien noises, or reconfigured musical snippets to layer over the strictly 4/4 beats (choppy and funky as they may be). Izit’s “Heavy What” appears in two almost unrecognizable versions: “Our Version” relies on a killer gnarled bass hook, while “Honky Version” grafts on cut-and-paste banjos and harmonizing cowboys, weaving into Herbert-esque territory. This is where Playing Around reveals the strengths and limitations of fidget house: On headphones, seven minutes of a single beat and even the lushest bassline can wear thin, but the consistently inventive samples and surprisingly placed breakdowns keep the momentum going at all times, and a sense of humor lifts the best tracks into the transcendent, the cheesy, or a cheesy transcendence, recalling the shameless mix of tough and vulnerable that characterized its jacking Chicago house predecessors. As well, fixations with old hip-hop and even drum & bass crop up at unpredictable times (Buckley’s “Block Party” steals a goofy skit from Digital Underground’s ancient “Doowutchyalike”) to keep the well from running dry.
The downside of fidget house is that much of it relies on midtempo beats with glitchy variations and unexpected samples; when those touches are lacking and a track turns toward the minimal, it can get cold and dull. Oddly it’s the Jesse Rose and Oliver $ collaboration, “Wake Up,” smack in the middle of the Rose’s selections disc, that suffers the worst, throwing off a blasé vibe (even stranger, it works fine early in the slow build of Oliver’s mixed set). But one track later Rose and Sinden’s “Me Mobile” perks things up again with a fizzy bassline and a sprightly swing. It’s hard to say exactly why house needed another tag to further splice the current state of the genre, but somehow it fits: Somewhere in the middle of a triangle formed by minimal/experimental house, traditional Chicago jack, and treble-heavy hard-rock house à la Justice sits the Made to Play crew, playing around with processed vox in their hands and traditional bass in their hearts.
Presto State of the Art
While producer Presto’s State of the Art doesn’t break any new ground, it does well in maintaining hip-hop’s foundation, recreating the golden-tinged sound from the days of old. There are some tired samples (like Valerie Simpson’s “Silly Wasn’t I” on “Higher”), but the beatsmith flips them well, crafting some jazzy and laidback gems. Presto’s guest list includes veterans such as CL Smooth and Fatlip, along with new-schoolers Blu, Raashan Ahmad, Lowd, and T Weaponz. The lead single, “Conquer Mentally,” features Sadat X, O.C., and Large Professor, but when you reach the Large Pro remix at the end of the disc, you’re reminded of the difference between “old school-inspired” and that authentic golden-age sound.
The Grouch Show You the World
Meticulously crafted, Show You the World is The Grouch’s first solo release in five years, serving food for thought over a platter of tight production. Though “Clones” deals in trite topical matter, its medley of congas, horns, strings, and keys will put a twist in your hip. The same goes for the funky “Hot Air Balloons.” Sticking to his simple-man mantra, he attacks corporate chains on “Mom and Pop Killer” and pretentious pseudo-elitists on “Artsy,” rapping, “You ain’t artsier than me/’cause you got sideburns and a vintage tee.” However, his and Murs’ post-hyphy construction “The Bay to L.A.” comes a little too late. If you thought the Legends were slipping, Show You the World will fix your screwface.
