September releases
Read my review here.
By collaborating with World’s End Girlfriend (Japanese electronica artist Katsuhiko Maeda), MONO has reached a whole new sound. Using a string quartet, piano, and ghostly chorus with Minimalist repetition/slow development, a massive single piece gradually unfolds, darkly, mysteriously, tension building. The guitars of MONO are absent at times, a background presence at others, until finally drums and guitar are more prominent and then finally climax in an ecstatic – but still controlled – release. Then there’s a decrescendo, followed by the entrance of piano gradually joined by strings and voices in a new thematic segment that’s more jittery and nervous. In the next section, the tread is again more stately, and long-held saxophone notes enter the texture and another giant climax is eventually achieved and then ebbs away into silence. Though there are separate tracks, it’s all one continuous 74-minute piece that’s truly hypnotic.
A lot of the Audika reissues have concentrated on Russell’s more avant-garde work, but this time out the focus is firmly on his imaginative dance-oriented productions. Lots of 25-year-old dance tracks would sound dated, but not these: even in this genre, he was ahead of his time. And the sound! This is the opposite of such whispering zephyrs as World of Echo; the bass on the first version of the title track could seemingly blow your window out, and if you cranked it on a tricked-out car stereo and drove through the ‘hood, it would be as pumpin’ as anything else out there. The more Russell we hear, the higher he moves up on the Underappreciated ‘80s Genius chart.
Now that TVOTR’s on a major label, theoretically a larger audience will be exposed to Brooklyn’s latest gift to the world of music, and what a fine album they’ll be learning from. Return to Cookie Mountain finds the band’s musical and lyric visions uncompromised but further refined, and drawing on such a wide range of genres as to be uncategorizable. Conceptually, it’s reminiscent of David Bowie (who is one of the vocalists on “Province”) if his career were condensed into a single album, in the sense that pop and experimental music, bits of prog-rock and R&B, are fuzzily interwoven in a sum greater than the parts. This is a real live band, but the operating aesthetic sounds akin to laptop electronica, as though the goal with each track is to create a sonic sculpture through the accumulation of interesting, seductive, and evocative timbres, with the vocals given equality rather than primacy in the mix. The new American version of the album adds an El-P remix of “Hours” and two new songs.
YLT has sounded relatively restrained on its last couple of full-lengths, but right out of the box on this one they’re kicking ass and taking names with a ten-minute track full of Ira Kaplan’s gloriously noisy guitar. It’s not all like that; another thing that distinguishes this disc from its immediate predecessors is the huge amount of stylistic variety on display, from skronk to pop, from psychedelia to quiet drones, from a horn-decorated track that’s almost soul-like to pretty folk-rock. They’re back with their first new material in three years, and they’re still great. Get it!
The prolific Jason Molina continues his plan to make as many Neil Young albums as Neil has (well, that’s what it sounds like!) with another compelling album chock-full of scorching guitar solos and melancholy singing. The volume’s often lower here than on the previous MagElCo releases; a number of tracks are just Molina singing and playing acoustic guitar or piano, but even many of the band tracks are quite intimate. That doesn’t lessen the intensity, though, on another well-written, emotionally powerful release from the man who gave us all those great Songs: Ohia albums.
After getting rowdy for two albums, BPB returns to the melancholic moan that made him famous. This time, though, the backing’s a little fancier, with a string quartet making many tracks absolutely gorgeous. And the backing vocals of Dawn McCarthy (also credited with arrangements) are so crucial that at times she’s nearly a duet partner, her cool pure voice the perfect complement to Will Oldham’s cracked charm. With Oldham’s songwriting as eccentrically evocative as always, this ranks among his finest albums under the Bonnie “Prince” Billy monicker.
The guitarist of Low has made an instrumental album with no other musicians involved – no prizes for having figured that out. Look for my review going up soon.
Bern will never fit into the country mainstream, but he’s too country for many rock fans. Back in the ‘70s, there was more of a market for his kind of intelligent songwriting (then, he’d have been pegged as the “New Dylan” like Loudon Wainwright was; now I’d called him the new Townes Van Zandt or John Prine – for the elaborate, witty lyrics – or the new Jules Shear – especially vocally, but also melodically). This time out his writing’s mostly personal, which nicely balances the all-political previous disc, but there’s still an awareness of society and its problems that finds expression on the title track and the eight-minute “Past Belief.” On other tracks, he delineates the lives of people struggling to get by or to understand their lives and their place in the world. As he puts it in “Feel Like a Man,” “Who needs answers / One good question would be a relief.”
Goth Christian music mixing medieval organ and country banjo – you don’t hear that every day! Yup, David Eugene Edwards (16 Horsepower) is back with his Wovenhand project. His lyrics are poetic enough that non-believers can enjoy them, and when he uses words of St. Ambrose (340-397 A.D.), he intones them darkly enough that they sound as fraught as a Lycia dirge. There’s enough acoustic plucking, harmonium, and eccentric touches that freak-folkers will be gleefully chanting “one of us.”
