Rogers Sisters – The Invisible Deck (Too Pure/Beggars)
Screaming sonic love from the wilds of Williamburg, topped off with beguiling yet powerful feminine vocals (plus one guy). The band’s corruscating guitar riffs and stomping beats alternately suggest garage rock, grunge, and psychedelia, always infused with a sense of energetic forward movement drawn from the artier areas of punk. The group’s growing musically, and their sound is fuller and more developed now, but without losing any of the qualities that made them so compulsively listenable in the first place. A March 7 release.
Mogwai – Mr. Beast (Matador)
It took three years, but Scotland’s Mogwai has finally followed up on the success of 2003’s Happy Songs for Happy People with another hard-hitting slab of dark, pulsating angst. Sometimes it rocks, sometimes it’s more electronic (now matched with pedal steel guitar!), and there are more vocals than on previous albums, but it’s always brooding and intense. Initially there’s a limited-edition version with a bonus DVD. Mr. Beast is also available on vinyl. Another March 7 release.
Neko Case – Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (Anti)
The New Pornographers chanteuse has a cool sound on her new disc. Country is still the main stylistic reference (and even a bit of gospel), with shimmering reverb giving the production a sense of vast spaces and angelic distance. Case switches from sly seduction to impassioned belting, and the music shifts subtly among related styles to keep things varied. Yet another March 7 release.
Film School – Film School (Beggars Banquet)
This wonderfully textured music takes me back to the early 1990s, when (mostly English) bands such as Swervedriver, Slowdive, and Kitchens of Distinction erected brooding, monumental mid-tempo song-sculptures built from multi-layered, effects-drenched guitars chiming, droning, spattering, and most of all soaring. And, in fact, when I play this disc at Sound Fix, customers often assume the band’s English. But our customers will get an up-close look and listen at Film School’s in-store performance Sunday March 12 at 4 PM. Come by and hear them in person; I’ve heard their sound is even better “live.”
Tricky – Maxinquaye (Island)
This Massive Attack associate could only have emerged from the British melting pot, commingling a broad variety of influences into a hazy, insinuating sound unconcerned with macho displays. In fact, Tricky’s voice is a secondary presence, with most of his lyrics declaimed by an uncredited array of females, mostly Martina Topley-Bird but also Polly Jean Harvey. The slowed-down sample of a tiny snippet of the opening keyboard riff of Marvin Gaye’s “Heard It Through the Grapevine” is just one of the many small musical touches that show a debt to Public Enemy’s method of constructing a track without any intent to capture PE’s sound—the low-key, seductive rhythms are those of dub, ambient trance, and trip-hop, and the lyrics are casually uninsistent, even on a cover of PE’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos.” Tricky’s meanings remain suspended, unresolved, like the recurrent clicking sound on “Strugglin’” that’s probably a gun, but could be a camera—defense, or documentation? (no gunshot ever follows). A decade later, this remains one of the most intriguing albums of the ‘90s.
Husker Du – The Living End (Warner Bros.)
These 1987 live recordings from the trio’s final tour capture its furious hurricane of sound, less precise than its studio work but far more intense (and mostly well-balanced). Taking songs from every one of the group’s seven albums, it also acts as a superb retrospective.
Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On (Motown)
What’s Going On (1971) was the first entirely political album on Motown. The self-produced album sounded completely new, moving away from pop-song structures into a loose, flowing sound that was big and spacious. In an unusual complement to that feeling, Gaye layered his vocals so that the different phrases overlapped. In the extreme examples of this, he spoke and sang each line, a new twist on an old church technique. The different tracks also flowed into each other; in a way, the album is one big song. Nonetheless, as singles the title track, “Mercy Mercy Me,” and “Inner City Blues” were Top 10 hits that spoke to the confusion and tumult of the times and remains topical today.
Firesign Theatre – Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers (Columbia Legacy)
Their 1970 album is the Firesign Theatre’s acknowledged masterpiece. Under the constant stream of comedy nuggets zinging religious broadcasts, news reports, the corporatization of government, and advertising catchphrases is a clever multi-temporal plot featuring George Leroy Tirebiter, who’s sitting up all night switching television channels in a vaguely futuristic world. Tirebiter seems to be captured both as a youth and as an old man looking back on his movie career, most notably as a maker of Porgy and Mudhead films, and a court martial of a Lt. Tirebiter in a war movie that parallels a trial of Porgy in a subplot suggesting an alternate world. The ending explains nothing but offers touching nostalgia for lost youth.
Talking Heads – The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads (Sire)
The high-strung David Byrne comes across most endearingly outside the studio. On this compilation, expanded into a two-CD set a few years back, the ‘77/’79 gigs present the apotheosis of nerd-punk; ‘80-’81 give us the acme of new-wave funk. A must-own.
Contortions – Buy (ZE)
The funkiest band in the No Wave movement of late-’70s New York was also the most grating. The group had incarnations under several monickers, but Contortions is the purest and most focused. Other No Wavers, such as DNA, might be more genuinely dissonant, but leader James Chance’s squealing, squawking alto sax blasts are guaranteed to get under your skin the most, not to mention Pat Place’s corruscating slide guitar and Adele Bertai’s vicious, off-kilter organ stabs. The latest reissue has three bonus tracks, including their notorious live version of “Jailhouse Rock.”
