Iron & Wine, Ghost on Ghost

The seven studio LPs and EPs Sam Beam has made as Iron & Wine have unfolded like a game of musical telephone, each pivoting away from their predecessor so deftly, so seamlessly, that — despite the fact that we started out, a decade ago, with whiskery bedroom folk — we now find ourselves in jazz-fusiony, kinda-sorta Bee Gees-y territory. And somehow, that doesn’t seem like too abrupt or terrible of a thing.

Tracing the genealogy of Ghost on Ghost, the new record, its plaid polyester vibe even begins to seem a little bit inevitable. Beam’s layering up of anything besides tickled guitar and hushed vocals began two releases in, on 2004′s Our Endless Numbered Days, with some pitter-pat drums; The Shepherd’s Dog, in 2007, introduced a reinforced backbone of percussion, strings and layered vocals not always his own; in 2011 Kiss Each Other Clean brought both noodlier song structures and more distorted instrumentals while aiming not only for radio-friendliness but a certain early ’70s rock/pop pedigree.

“Caught in the Briars” opens the latest permutation with a bright acoustic guitar tangle, scoops up drums and horns and rattly percussion and clatters away into an uncertain darkness out of which “The Desert Babbler” descends, turning and twinkling like a mirrorball.Throughout the album, Beam’s six-string — once the constant companion to his dusky croon — is almost completely edged out by swooning strings, gooey bass and come-hither piano. And horns! This isn’t the first time Iron & Wine has employed a brass section, but it’s put to especially great, greasy use here, skronking and blaring, sometimes — like on “Lovers’ Revolution” — stealing the spotlight altogether.

Lyrically, the songs are largely word-collages cut from a comfortingly standard Beam stock — children, lovers, sinners, semi-apocalyptic landscapes, oblique references to various states, unusual vegetation, cats, birds of various species. Meaning tends to be cumulative and floats somewhere in the ether, best apprehended at a slightly-angled remove. For instance: while making out, fully-clothed, on a weird old couch in someone’s mom’s basement, in either 1974 or 2013, a personally untested scenario that nevertheless seems to be the ideal context for the record’s maximum appreciation. Have fun, kids. Beam sure is.

Shuggie Otis, Inspiration Information/Wings of Love

It’s one of the high crimes in music industry history that no one would put out Shuggie Otis’s stellar recordings for a staggering 39 years. That shameful scenario ends with the re-release of Otis’s overlooked “final” solo album from 1974, Inspiration Information, housed in a two-fer package with a riveting collection of songs the singer/guitarist cut in anonymity his home studio in L.A. between 1977 and 2000. The set also includes four strong songs left off Otis’s ’74 album.

The artist, 59, enjoyed his widest exposure in 1977 for writing the funky, Top 5 Brothers Johnson hit “Strawberry Letter 23.”Though the indie label Luaka Bop re-released Inspiration Information 12 years ago, Otis couldn’t convince any label to put out the amazing recordings he’d created since. As these dusted-off — and belatedly introduced — recordings prove, Otis’s solo approach to funk utterly rethought the genre. He made it float instead of stomp, abstracting the sound through the kaleidoscope of psychedelia. Otis’s songs employ the firm bass lines and grinding beat of funk, only to re-weigh them with the slippery gait of his guitar work and the impeccable grace of his melodies.

A song like “Aht Uh Mi Hed” has a bass line as mysterious as dub, matched to a melody as elegant as Bacharach. “XL 30″ references ’70s fusion but with keyboard textures that, somehow, sound as modern as the latest from the world of EDM.

Otis’s fluid guitar work creates its own storyline in the songs. It’s as fleet as the filigrees of Wes Montgomery. His later recordings, on the more aggressive Wings of Love album, let his solos linger longer. The title track lasts more than 11 minutes; six others top the five-minute mark. Together, these tracks create a unique legacy, with a sound as grounded as James Brown, as trippy as Pink Floyd and as beautiful as any pop star could hope for.

Fall Out Boy, Save Rock and Roll

Eight years ago, most pop-punk bands would have swallowed their pride and bubblegum to trade places with Fall Out Boy. But ever since 2008′s Folie à Deux, an expansive, swaggering disc rightly acclaimed by critics but received by many fans with a distaste ordinarily reserved for post-Green Album Weezer, even FOB hasn’t shown much interest in being FOB: Singer/tune-writer Patrick Stump reinvented himself as an R&B crooner with 2011′s even sharper Soul Punk, which, of course, really brought out the haters; guitarist Joe Trohman and drummer Andy Hurley went metal with the Damned Things, whose 2010 album Ironiclast completely bombed; lyricist/bassist Pete Wentz lost a guitarist and a singer before his electronic Black Cards could even release an album.

So Fall Out Boy are back with a chip on their shoulders and mixed messages in their music: They’re pissed at the folks who wouldn’t accept deviations from their original sound, yet suddenly they’re out to rescue it, as if they’re now the sole emo survivors. “How’d it get to be only me?/ Like I’m the last damn kid still kicking that still believes,” Stump sings in the final, title track featuring an Elton John as strikingly solemn as Courtney Love is very much herself in the preceding “Rat a Tat.”

As those cameos suggest, Save Rock and Roll ain’t no back-to-basics album. It starts out with an orchestral flourish on the galloping and flat-out fantastic “Phoenix,” and on the way to its piano-lead and even more symphonic finale, there’s white-knuckled relentlessness: Buzzsaw guitars blare while the zinger-packed songs — now credited to the entire band — pile on the hooks. A proven master at bridging the pop/rock gap, producer Butch Walker pumps even the most delicate filigree to stadium-sized proportions. Fall Out Boy has always been dramatic, but here they sometimes lapse into desperation, as if what they’re truly intent on saving is their fanbase.

Major Lazer, Free The Universe

On their debut album, Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do, Diplo and Switch of Major Lazer took Jamaican dancehall as a starting point and had a blast messing with its DNA. On the party-starter “Pon De Floor,” they all but created a new genre, fusing dancehall, military drum tattoos and hip-hop into a crazed floorfiller that was sampled by everyone from Beyonce to Nicola Roberts. The big change with Free The Universe is the absence of Dave “Switch” Taylor, Diplo’s long-time collaborator. Diplo has said, “In terms of actually making records and finishing them, Switch doesn’t do that. He just can’t finish songs.” So Diplo called for help. And, boy, did he get it.

On Free The Universe something strange has happened. What seemed like an off-the-wall dancehall collaboration in 2009 has turned into something far poppier, featuring an unlikely line-up of guests including Shaggy, Wyclef, Peaches, Ezra Koening of Vampire Weekend and even Bruno Mars. Yet it still has that oddball edge that follows Diplo’s productions around like a lost puppy. The album’s real turn-up is the brilliant “Get Free,” featuring Amber Coffman of Dirty Projectors — exhilarating pop that has the faintest whiff of the Art Of Noise about it.

On “Jah No Partial,” chart parvenus Flux Pavilion adds grimy drops to the boombastic dancehall. Peaches and Timberlee come on like a demented Shampoo on “Scare Me.” There is a brush with EDM on “Sweat,” where Dutch house don Laidback Luke creates a caustic soundbed for Ms Dynamite to deliver a minimalist sermon. And there are some killer rumpshakers in “Wind Up” and the brilliant paean to the shapelier derrière “Bubble Butt.”

Diplo has long been an innovator in his production work for the likes of Santigold and Azealia Banks, but here he brings that pop sensibility back to his own eccentric rhythmic dalliances. Ground control to Major Lazer: Check ignition. Blast off.

The Thermals, Desperate Ground

On, 2010′s Personal Life, Portland trio the Thermals jettisoned the political angst that motivated their early material in favor of a more autobiographical subject matter. Frontman Hutch Harris sang about matters of the heart rather than matters of state, as if to suggest that each provoked the same outrage. Taking one step further, their follow-up couches the personal within the political: Desperate Ground, their first album for Saddle Creek and their sixth overall, is among their most rousing and most animated. This is the sound of a band girding for a hard fight: “The sword at my side will allow me to be the last thing my enemies see,” sings Harris on the punk-triumphal standout “The Sword at My Side.”

The Thermals have strategized and streamlined their attack, pummeling through these songs as a three-person rhythm section: Harris playing furious rhythm guitar, Kathy Foster adding dexterous melodies on bass, and drummer Westin Glass pounding away like they’ll face the firing squad if any song exceeds three-and-a-half-minute mark. That strategy can be repetitive across 10 tracks, but it never becomes tedious, thanks to the jittery hooks and blunt impact of “Faces Stay with Me” and “I Go Alone.” The Thermals sound reinvigorated, but rather than smite their enemies, they rally to remind themselves why they keep waging their own personal battle of the band.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Mosquito

Ten seconds into Mosquito, during the eerie churn of “Sacrilege,” Karen O lets loose with one of her iconic vocal tics — a spine-chilling shriek — as the groove beneath gradually swells from spiky funk to Southern gospel rave-up. It’s exactly the kind of titillating art-rock bombast we’ve come to expect from the New York trio — but in the context of the band’simpressionistic fourth album, it’s also the lone “fuck yeah” moment, the sole easy fix among a series of hazy abstractions.

There are hardly any explosions on Mosquito — very little catharsis, very little that “rocks” in even the broadest sense. The music is sparse and jagged, full of loopy percussion and rigid electronic pulses, with ghostly guitars decaying gently into the ether. Karen O sings from the fringes of her songs instead of commanding them, delivering repetitive mantras in a hushed croak. Mosquito, unlike the band’s first three albums, takes some time to simmer before it eventually clicks. But it does, eventually, click: “Under the Earth” is a clear standout — twitchy electro-pop with bass tones that boom like elephant cries; “Always” is saturated with sensual tension, Karen O’s voice wandering nimbly through ethereal synth mist. But the real breakthrough is “Wedding Song,” which harkens back to the emotional grandeur of early gem “Maps,” referencing the singer’s recent marriage and closing the album with a blissful serenade. “In flames I sleep soundly with angels around me,” she sings, dragging out each syllable over dewy piano chords and a kick-drum heartbeat. “I lay at your feet; you’re the breath that I breathe.” It’s an unexpected — but breathtaking — moment of clarity.

Interview: Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats

It’s perhaps fitting that as the freshest sounding British guitar band of 2013, Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats, have crept surreptitiously from obscurity in Cambridge — a rock backwater whose hipster notoriety extends no further than having housed Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett during his reclusive retirement.

Hatched in near-total isolation, this remarkable combo, who sound very approximately like Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper and Slade all at once, have made all the more impact. Word began to spread of their amazing entrail-splattered riffola on the doom metal scene in late 2011, after initial pressings of their second album, Blood Lust, sold out immediately, and began to change hands on eBay for an astonishing £700.

But Uncle Acid’s music is fully deserving of such pecuniary folly. Raunchy and demented, yet deceptively crafted to the point of mastery in their tunes and harmonies, Blood Lust and its newly released sequel Mind Control would already be massive hits in a better world. In hell, they probably already are.

Yet, even as their renown spreads, Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats remain shrouded in mystery. Via their new label, Rise Above, eMusic’s Andrew Perry was merely forwarded a mobile number, and a time to call it. Who knew what lurked in the shadows at the end of the telephonic corridor…

Hi there, is that Uncle Acid?

Haha, yeah.

Nobody seems to know if that’s how you want to be addressed, or…

You can call me Kevin if you want.

Kevin, your music has been blowing our minds. When my buddy Todd first put me onto you, I couldn’t quite understand why you’d make music so melodically rich, yet only release it in such tiny quantities. But then obviously its extreme collectability has helped spread a buzz about the band. Was that your master plan?

No, not at all, we didn’t think anybody wanted our stuff, that was the problem, so we just printed as much as we could afford — really small runs, because we could only afford to get booklets printed up in batches of 50 or 25. I thought, have we really got much of a fanbase beyond that?

So that’s how we started, and it built up and up, and we started pressing more CDs, and then it just got to where we couldn’t keep up with it anymore, so luckily at that point, Lee [Dorrian, of Napalm Death] stepped in and Rise Above [Dorrian's label] took over, and they’ve helped push us further. So we didn’t plan it to be like that, we just weren’t aware what kind of audience we had, or might have, so we just did what we thought we could sell, which was not very much.

Have you emerged from a thriving doom-metal subculture in Cambridge?

No, we happened in isolation. There’s not really a music scene in Cambridge. It’s an academic place, there are no real music venues for bands to play. It was a struggle to get any musicians involved, so we started just as a three-piece, then we tried doing a bit of gigging, but it didn’t sound very good with just the three of us, so we decided that we’d just be a studio band, and do albums, but now we’ve got a new line-up, we’re more focused now. Everyone else is in London, and I’m the only one that lives in Cambridge, so it’s a little bit different, but it’s the same idea. We’re still outsiders, wherever we choose to reside.

Your sound is so evocative of vintage Black Sabbath and turn-of-the-1970s heavy rock, it almost seems like an implicit criticism of contemporary metal. Correct?

Yeah, most of our influences are from the ’60s, ’70s and maybe early ’80s, and that’s pretty much it. That’s what we absorb, and it just comes out as whatever. One of the things we took from [Black Sabbath] is the idea of having the riff, and the heaviness, but having a really good melody on top, which is what a lot of the modern metal bands seem to have lost. We’re bringing back melodies. I love Electric Wizard and Blood Ceremony and bands like that, but I don’t really think we have a lot in common with them. I think there’s something else to our sound, we’re not as heavy as that. The Beatles are a big influence on us also, so… How can you compare to that, you know?

You yourself play the same Les Paul Junior guitar as Johnny Thunders. Is he a hero?

I love him. He’s one of my biggest influences, even though you probably can’t hear it in the music. I’m a big fan so I had to get the same guitar as him. It’s just got a very distinct sound to it. It’s just a really raw, rock ‘n’ roll sound.

We heard that your second album, Blood Lust, was supposed to be based on an imaginary horror B-movie. Confirm or deny!

Yeah! The story is supposed to be a long-lost horror film from the early ’70s. The plot follows a Witchfinder General kind of guy, who goes around torturing women — that’s how he gets his thrills. He kills people all around the country, and at the end he meets the Devil. It’s not a great story [unrepentant laugh], but it was kind of good thinking of a B-movie, and what would happen in a really terrible B-movie, which I would love to watch, and basing an album around that. That’s the kind of crap that I watch, rubbish like that with no real plotline.

Are you properly into the occult? Or are you just adopting the language of metal with all the Satanic stuff?

With us, it’s more about the film side. The occult thing, that doesn’t have anything to do with it. This is just thinking of things like B-movies, or old Hammer Horror films, and just trying to recreate that vibe in the form of music, rather than anything that these occult bands are doing. We’re not taking it too seriously.

Not with a name like Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats…

Exactly!

I’m guessing the new record, Mind Control, is a similar imaginary movie, but one about the Manson Family?

That was the starting point for the concept, which obviously was to do with mind control, and the story narrative is some guy who starts a super-cult out in the desert, and they steal motorcycles, and he’s got all these girls around, and they do drugs — it’s kind of Charles Manson meets Jim Jones — and obviously, there has to be a big murder spree at the end. So it’s more the American exploitation films of the early ’70s. I find writing lyrics hard, so to make things easier for myself, I come up with these stories.

Have you got rooms full of this nonsense at home on VHS?

I do really enjoy terrible movies. Rubbish films are an escape as well, it gets you away from all the bullshit.

Some of Mind Control has a mellower vibe. Was the idea to let some light into the sound this time?

The idea was to mix it up a little, and maybe not give people what they want or expect, which would maybe be Blood Lust Pt 2, because that did so well.

The production is still, um, fairly murky.

Part of that was due to the fact that we didn’t really have any budget to start with. The new record, we got to use more expensive valve mics, but it still sounds raw because there’s not really anything else done with it. It’s us live in the studio, then we just balanced it all in the mix, and that was it. There are no fancy effects on it. Part of our whole thing is small valve amps that don’t really work properly. We just tried to keep it as loud as possible.

New This Week: Flaming Lips, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Iron & Wine & More

A lot of big names this week! Starting with:

The Flaming Lips, The Terror: Darker things lurk in the cheery public persona the Flaming Lips have offered in the last decade. Dan Hyman says of their latest:

While the Oklahoma-based psych rockers have been moving aggressively in a bleaker direction since 2009′s trippy Embryonic, The Terror may well be their most dour and disturbing display to date. It’s a challenging listen, but an undeniably cohesive one, with each track fusing onto the next.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Mosquito: Karen O and co.’s fourth LP is sparse, jagged and impressionistic. Says Ryan Reed:

Mosquito, unlike the band’s first three albums, takes some time to simmer before it eventually clicks. But it does, eventually, click: “Under the Earth” is a clear standout — twitchy electro-pop with bass tones that boom like elephant cries; “Always” is saturated with sensual tension, Karen O’s voice wandering nimbly through ethereal synth mist. But the real breakthrough is “Wedding Song,” which harkens back to the emotional grandeur of early gem “Maps,” referencing the singer’s recent marriage and closing the album with a blissful serenade.

Shuggie Otis, Inspiration Information/Wings of Love: A lengthy collection of dusted-off recordings from a shoulda-been soul superstar. Jim Farber says:

Shuggie Otis enjoyed his widest exposure in 1977 for writing the funky, Top 5 Brothers Johnson hit “Strawberry Letter 23.” Though the indie label Luaka Bop re-released Inspiration Information 12 years ago, Otis couldn’t convince any label to put out the amazing recordings he’d created since. As these dusted-off — and belatedly introduced — recordings prove, Otis’s solo approach to funk utterly rethought the genre. He made it float instead of stomp, abstracting the sound through the kaleidoscope of psychedelia.

Iron & Wine, Ghost on Ghost: Sam Beam’s new LP goes into jazz-fusion, Bee Gees-y territory. Rachael Maddux on why that’s not too terrible of a thing:

Tracing the genealogy of Ghost on Ghost, its plaid polyester vibe even begins to seem a little bit inevitable. Beam’s layering up of anything besides tickled guitar and hushed vocals began two releases in, on 2004′s Our Endless Numbered Days, with some pitter-pat drums; The Shepherd’s Dog, in 2007, introduced a reinforced backbone of percussion, strings and layered vocals not always his own; in 2011 Kiss Each Other Clean brought both noodlier song structures and more distorted instrumentals while aiming not only for radio-friendliness but a certain early ’70s rock/pop pedigree.

 

Major Lazer, Free The Universe: Without Switch gone, Diplo called on some friends to help make the new Major Lazer record. Bill Brewster says:

On Free The Universe something strange has happened. What seemed like an off-the-wall dancehall collaboration in 2009 has turned into something far poppier, featuring an unlikely line-up of guests including Shaggy, Wyclef, Peaches, Ezra Koening of Vampire Weekend and even Bruno Mars. Yet it still has that oddball edge that follows Diplo’s productions around like a lost puppy.

Ghostface Killah & Adrian Younge, Twelve Reasons to Die: Ghostface teams up with the killer funk-soul revue live band Nate Patrin says:

Though his persona draws from comics, true crime and 42nd Street double features, it can still be pretty easy to see Ghostface Killah as simply a skilled amplification of an actual person. That’s why Twelve Reasons to Die, his collaboration with soundtrack composer and psychedelic-soul maestro Adrian Younge, is such a unique addition to his catalog: It’s an elaborate, conceptual attempt to give the Tony Starks-turned-Ghostface identity a fantastical origin story, set two years before his birth and drenched in a sound that uncannily evokes both Ghost’s fictional and real-life come-up years.

 

Fall Out Boy, Save Rock and Roll: The pop-punk superstars reunite, but this isn’t back to basics. Says Barry Walters:

It starts out with an orchestral flourish on the galloping and flat-out fantastic “Phoenix,” and on the way to its piano-lead and even more symphonic finale, there’s white-knuckled relentlessness: Buzzsaw guitars blare while the zinger-packed songs — now credited to the entire band — pile on the hooks. A proven master at bridging the pop/rock gap, producer Butch Walker pumps even the most delicate filigree to stadium-sized proportions. Fall Out Boy has always been dramatic, but here they sometimes lapse into desperation, as if what they’re truly intent on saving is their fanbase.

The Thermals, Desperate Ground: The Thermals’ Saddle Creek debut is their most rousing and most animated. Stephen Deusner says:

This is the sound of a band girding for a hard fight: “The sword at my side will allow me to be the last thing my enemies see,” sings frontman Hutch Harris on the punk-triumphal standout “The Sword at My Side.” The Thermals have strategized and streamlined their attack, pummeling through these songs as a three-person rhythm section: Harris playing furious rhythm guitar, Kathy Foster adding dexterous melodies on bass, and drummer Westin Glass pounding away like they’ll face the firing squad if any song exceeds three-and-a-half-minute mark. The Thermals sound reinvigorated, but rather than smite their enemies, they rally to remind themselves why they keep waging their own personal battle of the band.

Steve Earle & The Dukes (& Duchesses), The Low Highway: This set could almost be a retrospective of Steve Earle’s three-decades-and-counting career. Holly George-Warren says:

Earle’s oeuvre encompasses country, folk, rock, bluegrass and protest music, and his superb new album represents all these facets with a loose-limbed assurance. Back in the saddle is Earle’s road band, the Dukes, amended to include “the Duchesses,” featuring vocalist Allison Moorer (a solo artist and Earle’s wife) and violinist/vocalist Eleanor Whitmore (comprising half of recording artists the Mastersons, along with Dukes guitarist Chris Masterson). This family affair also boasts Earle’s co-producer Ray Kennedy, for the first time since 2004′s Grammy-winning The Revolution Starts Now.

 

Various Artists, Way To Blue – The Songs Of Nick Drake:Way To Blue isn’t your typical tribute album, with a few well-known acts and plenty of new names. Peter Blackstock says:

Exquisite arrangements and recording techniques result in a live album that doesn’t sound like a live album; it doesn’t sound like a tribute album either, since the tracks weren’t gathered from disparate studio sessions. It also differs from typical tributes in that the big names aren’t the primary draw. There are a few well-known acts — Lisa Hannigan takes “Black-Eyed Dog” into uncharted territory with eerie harmonium tones, Robyn Hitchcock is well-suited to the lyrically offbeat “Parasite,” and Teddy Thompson approaches the hypnotic lure of Drake’s voice on “River Man” — but newer names make the most memorable impressions.

Born Ruffians, Birthmarks: Canadian indie rockers sound like a whole new band on their latest LP. Ryan Reed says:

Birthmarks is an effusive U-turn: radiating confidence and chemistry where 2010′s Say It so often sagged. “Needle” opens with a startling statement of purpose: Gleaming choral harmonies give way to a springy bass/kick-drum pulse, as frontman Luke Lalonde wraps his chipper croon over shards of staccato guitar. Instead of relying on clumsy lyrical metaphors, as they often did on Say It (see: the awkward puns of “Sole Brother”), Lalonde’s words now pack an emotional sting.

Ghost B.C., Infestissumam: Too Satanic for commercial radio, Jon Wiederhorn says Ghost B.C.’s Infestissumam is “more illuminating than 100 burning Bibles:

Despite its bleak atmosphere and epic structures, the album is ultimately more classic rock (think Blue Oyster Cult and Jethro Tull) and proggy pop (early Genesis and Marillion) than metal. There’s no question it’s far more accessible than Opus Eponymous, featuring only a few riffs that could really quality as headbanger-worthy. That said, there’s plenty here that’s thoughtful, provocative and heavy, and the way Ghost B.C. combine influences throughout Infestissumam is uncanny.

The Haxan Cloak, Excavation: The Haxan Cloak’s Bobby Krlic dwells on the dark side, but Sharon O’Connell argues that his dark and chilly aesthetic goes deeper. She says:

There are echoes of Burial’s cavernous dub and Demdike Stare’s haunted techno in Excavation, but its magnificently maleficent, post-dubstep soundscapes have more in common with musique concrete, Expressionist cinema soundtracks and medieval monastic cantos than so-called witch house or drone metal. Krlic’s sounds are again rooted in acoustics (cello, violin, guitar, vocals) and field recordings, but this time they’ve been heavily processed — magnified, stretched, dissembled, reconstituted and rearranged — to produce nine micro-symphonies of stark beauty and extraordinary menace.

Houses, A Quiet Darkness  - An incredible concept to this one; this concept record tells the story of a husband and wife attempting to reunite in the wake of a nuclear apocalypse. Dream-pop with nothing but bad dreams.

The Aluminum  Group, Plano – Low-key lovely, late-80s-to-early-90s indie-pop from Chicago on Minty Fresh. Will remind you of The Clientele, who they predate.

Art Brut, Top of the Pops – Compilation of B-sides, unreleased and best-of by the some of the best stand-up-comedy indie rock that the early ’00s saw.

Barn Owl, V – Pitch-dark doom-dub – enveloping clouds of ambient synths and acres of implied space. A good companion, sonically and spiritually, to that Haxan Cloak record.

Dead  Can Dance, In Concert – Live album from the beloved, and recently returned, classical/indie folk outfit.

John Parish, Screenplay – Frequent PJ Harvey collaborator brings together all of his soundtrack work.

Major Lazer, Free The Universe – Features-heavy part from Diplo’s Major Lazer alias, featuring Amber Coffman, Ezra Koenig, Beenie Man, Shaggy, Bruno Mars, Tyga, and many many more.

Elvis Depressedly, Holo Pleasures – Elliott Smith melodies, tin-can synth-pop casios, and dream-pop haze.

Various Artists, The Cumbia Beat Vol. 2 – The always-great Vampisoul returns with another platter of shrewdly sourced cumbia, this time from Peru. Grooves for days here.

Zomes, Time Was – Zoning, meditative drone-rock, based on organ, guitar fuzz, and cooing vocals.

The Shouting Matches, Grownass Man – This is Justin Vernon (aka Bon Iver)’s latest side project, and it is straight-ahead blues rock.

A bunch of Daniel Barenboim recordings showed up today from Warner Classics – The world-famous pianist and conductor’s shrewd and expansive takes on a treasure trove of repertoire. Here are a few highlights.

Brahms : Symphony n° 2 / Tragic Overture Op.81

Mozart : Piano Concertos Nos 11, 14 & 15

Brahms : 4 Ballades op.10 & Piano Sonata op.5 in F minor – Elatus

Bach, JS : Goldberg Variations & Beethoven: Diabelli Variations

SINGLES/EPs

Cannibal Ox, Gotham – The legendary New York duo return after untold years with that classic sharp, druggy haze they do so well.

The Blank Tapes, Holy Roller – Strummy, jangling garage-pop single.

Egyptian Hip-Hop, Tobago – Warm, sensual Balearic synth-pop, shades of Cut Copy.

Guided By Voices, Noble Insect – Three-song morsel from the reunited GBV. Title track here sounds pretty good.

Jimmy Eat World, I Will Steal You Back – Emo has been in the slow process of coming back/not coming back for the last three or four years; if it ever does have its moment in the spotlight again, I want these guys to get a little more shine. New single.

Ghostface Killah & Adrian Younge, Twelve Reasons to Die

Though his persona draws from comics, true crime and 42nd Street double features, it can still be pretty easy to see Ghostface Killah as simply a skilled amplification of an actual person. An actual person with of the most unmistakably intense voices and storytelling instincts known to hip-hop, sure, sure, but as much the man who grew up picking roaches out of the cereal box as he is the Wally Champ with the massive eagle gauntlet and Marvel-via-Shaw Brothers mythos. That’s why Twelve Reasons to Die, his collaboration with soundtrack composer and psychedelic-soul maestro Adrian Younge, is such a unique addition to his catalog: it’s an elaborate, conceptual attempt to give the Tony Starks-turned-Ghostface identity a fantastical origin story, set two years before his birth and drenched in a sound that uncannily evokes both Ghost’s fictional and real-life come-up years.

The plot’s over-the-top in the best way possible. Tony Starks, former enforcer for the DeLuca crime family, is set up and killed after going into business for himself in 1968. The method of execution becomes the means for revenge: he’s melted alive in boiling vinyl and his remains are pressed into a dozen LPs that, when played, resurrect him into Ghostface Killah and sets him on a path of bloody payback. The music-as-immortality metaphor’s both obvious and effective, especially in tandem with Younge’s compositions, which draw from many of the same inspirations the RZA used for his early production blueprint (Morricone, Stax, Hi Records), then faithfully but uniquely filters them through live-band instrumentation, complete with Younge’s own penchant for grimy organ riffs. Thanks to the unifying theme — and a no-bullshit focus that runs through power, love, betrayal, payback, and legend with his top-form panache — Ghost sounds more riveting than he has at any point since Fishscale, a presence that’s larger than afterlife.

Steve Earle & The Dukes (& Duchesses), The Low Highway

Except for the fact that it contains 12 brand-new songs, The Low Highway could almost be a retrospective of Steve Earle’s three-decades-and-counting career. His oeuvre encompasses country, folk, rock, bluegrass and protest music, and his superb new album represents all these facets with a loose-limbed assurance. Back in the saddle is Earle’s road band, the Dukes (who get an LP credit for the first time since 1987), amended to include “the Duchesses,” featuring vocalist Allison Moorer (a solo artist and Earle’s wife) and violinist/vocalist Eleanor Whitmore (comprising half of recording artists the Mastersons, along with Dukes guitarist Chris Masterson). Rounding out the rockin’ Dukes are drummer Will Rigby (the dBs) and bassist Kelley Looney. This family affair also boasts Earle’s co-producer Ray Kennedy, for the first time since 2004′s Grammy-winning The Revolution Starts Now.

Perhaps these reunions account for the pervasive swing in both the crunchy rock of “Calico County” and the chiming Merseybeat of “21st Century Blues.” Even the Lennon-y loneliness of “Invisible,” the gentle ache of the father-son ballad “Remember Me,” and the creeping menace of “Burnin’ It Down” carry an undercurrent of satisfaction, further evidence of a man still in his sweet spot.

The Haxan Cloak, Excavation

It may be glib to assume that London-based producer Bobby Krlic dwells exclusively on the dark side, but given the evidence it’s hardly unreasonable. His alias references a 1922 Scandinavian docudrama about witchcraft and inquisition, and his 2011 self-titled debut album aligned him with avant-black-metal/doom acts like Mayhem and Sunn O))). And the sleeve of his gloomily titled follow-up depicts a single length of rope coiled into a noose.

However, The Haxan Cloak’s thrillingly dark and chilly aesthetic goes far deeper than the kind of parent-bothering occult primer these details might suggest. There are echoes of Burial’s cavernous dub and Demdike Stare’s haunted techno in Excavation, but its magnificently maleficent, post-dubstep soundscapes have more in common with musique concrete, Expressionist cinema soundtracks and medieval monastic cantos than so-called witch house or drone metal.

Krlic’s sounds are again rooted in acoustics (cello, violin, guitar, vocals) and field recordings, but this time they’ve been heavily processed — magnified, stretched, dissembled, reconstituted and rearranged — to produce nine micro-symphonies of stark beauty and extraordinary menace. Whether suggesting the dull throb of an old nuclear power plant, the spooked echo inside an abandoned iron foundry or the howl of an Arctic wind at a remote scientific station, they evoke a compressed anxiety that seeps into every note, causing the likes of “Dieu” to heave and quiver before it dies away and underlining the fact that despite its title, epic closer “The Drop” is concerned with something rather more ominous than build-and-break patterns.

Various Artists, Way To Blue – The Songs Of Nick Drake

As Nick Drake’s producer in the early 1970s, Joe Boyd helped the legendary English singer-songwriter create albums that were remarkably consistent in sound and mood. A similar cohesiveness arises on Way To Blue, largely because the recordings came from a series of live concerts Boyd produced in the UK, Australia and Italy. Exquisite arrangements and recording techniques result in a live album that doesn’t sound like a live album; it doesn’t sound like a tribute album either, since the tracks weren’t gathered from disparate studio sessions. It also differs from typical tributes in that the big names aren’t the primary draw. There are a few well-known acts — Lisa Hannigan takes “Black-Eyed Dog” into uncharted territory with eerie harmonium tones, Robyn Hitchcock is well-suited to the lyrically offbeat “Parasite,” and Teddy Thompson approaches the hypnotic lure of Drake’s voice on “River Man” — but newer names make the most memorable impressions. Thompson’s closing duet with soulful Kansas City singer Krystle Warren is magical, and Hannigan’s voice finds a compelling counterpoint in Zoe Randell of the Australian duo Luluc. Indeed, it’s Luluc that shines brightest on Way To Blue, delving so deeply into the dark heart of Drake’s “Things Behind The Sun” and “Fly” that it feels like they were written for Randell to sing.

Major Lazer, Free The Universe

On their debut album, Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do, Diplo and Switch of Major Lazer took Jamaican dancehall as a starting point and had a blast messing with its DNA. On the party-starter “Pon De Floor,” they all but created a new genre, fusing dancehall, military drum tattoos and hip-hop into a crazed floorfiller that was sampled by everyone from Beyonce to Nicola Roberts. The big change with Free The Universe is the absence of Dave “Switch” Taylor, Diplo’s long-time collaborator. Diplo has said, “In terms of actually making records and finishing them, Switch doesn’t do that. He just can’t finish songs.” So Diplo called for help. And, boy, did he get it.

On Free The Universe something strange has happened. What seemed like an off-the-wall dancehall collaboration in 2009 has turned into something far poppier, featuring an array of guests including Shaggy, Wyclef, Peaches, Ezra Koening of Vampire Weekend and even Bruno Mars. Yet it still has that oddball edge that follows Diplo’s productions around like a lost puppy. The album’s real turn-up is the brilliant “Get Free,” featuring Amber Coffman of Dirty Projectors — exhilarating pop that has the faintest whiff of the Art Of Noise about it.

On “Jah No Partial,” chart parvenus Flux Pavilion adds grimey drops to the boombastic dancehall. Peaches and Timberlee come on like a demented Shampoo on “Scare Me.” There is a brush with EDM on “Sweat,” where Dutch house don Laidback Luke creates a caustic soundbed for Ms Dynamite to deliver a minimalist sermon. And there are some killer rumpshakers in “Wind Up” and the brilliant paean to the shapelier derrière “Bubble Butt.”

Diplo has long been an innovator in his production work for the likes of Santigold and Azealia Banks, but here he brings that pop sensibility back to his own eccentric rhythmic dalliances. Ground control to Major Lazer: Check ignition. Blast off.

Red Baraat: An All-American Immigration Saga

Describing New York’s Red Baraat dhol ‘n’ brass band is like those blind guys and the elephant, only in reverse: What you hear depends on what touches you. South Asians will immediately recognize Bollywood hits like “Dum Maro Dum” and “Mast Kalendar,” devotional music like “Samaro Mantra” and “Aarthi, and the joyous party vibe of the baraat, a bridegroom’s wedding procession. Dancers in Virginia and Washington, D.C., will hear a go-go influence right off the bat, especially once sousaphonist John Altieri starts rapping. New Orleaneans will feel right at home once the brass kicks in, jazzbos will feel the swing, and Brazilians think it sounds like samba.

When the loud and proud nonet toured the UK for the first time in early 2013, however, founding dhol drummer Sunny Jain says “they thought it was a punk-rock band,” adding, “I’d never heard that one before.”

Formed in 2009, Red Baraat is the happy multicultural outcome of an all-American immigration saga. Sunny Jain was born in 1975 and raised in Rochester, New York. Originally from Pakistan’s Punjab region, his parents were devout Jains, adherents of the Indian religion noted for its commitment to nonviolence. Sunny was raised a strict vegetarian and prayed at pujas, Jain religious ceremonies, where he learned South Asian bhajan, or devotional songs. Outside the house he played ball with his American friends; inside he played “table tabla” with his uncles and father, an amateur harmonium player and Ravi Shankar fan, jamming out to vintage Bollywood hits and bhajan.

Jain’s two worlds didn’t entwine until he began writing jazz tunes while studying drums and composition at Rutgers. Frustrated by the music’s 32-bar AABA form, he yearned to return to the sounds he heard growing up. “They hold a place in my heart,” he says. “I began studying all the Tin Pan Alley standards when I was 10 years old. But when I started writing, I wanted to explore my standards.” As a bandleader, the drummer released three jazz albums — As Is (re-released as Mango Festival), Avaaz and Taboo — that inventively blend Eastern and Western styles no less distinctively than slightly older desi groundbreakers, and sometime-colleagues, Vijay Iyer, Rudresh Mahanthappa, and Rez Abbasi. Jain, however, was becoming increasingly ambivalent about the jazz scene; he missed the fellow feeling that connects musicians and audience in a communal moment.

Red Baraat was assembled as the wedding band for Jain’s own ceremony. A few years earlier, he’d pick up the double-head dhol drum, a sticks-struck staple of Punjab’s bhangra beats, and fell in love with it. Playing the dhol in drummer Kenny Wolleson’s Himalayas marching band rejuvenated Jain’s love of performance, and he realized that no one to date had combined Indian music, jazz, and electronic music with dhol. “I wanted to do something that reminded me of being a five-year-old in India watching my uncle getting married, when this brass band ensued, a dhol player showed up, and this cacophonous sound started happpening.”

Jain conceived Red Baraat as “another egg in the basket,” just one project among many. But it took on a life of its own. “I only wanted drums and horns, no electrified instruments,” though Altieri occasionally triggers electronic effects. “I wanted to take to the streets with a big boisterous sound.” Red Baraat joined a robust local brass-band cohort that included Slavic Soul Party!, Brooklyn Qawwali Party and Frank London’s Klezmer Brass All Stars. “I wanted a group where I could just play dhol and not drum set. But it’s taken over my life to the point where I hardly ever play drum set nowadays. I knew it was going to be unique, but I didn’t think it would take off like it did.”

Red Baraat’s new Shruggy Ji takes the energy of 2010′s Chaal Baby and 2011′s live Bootleg Bhangra and focuses it in a slightly new direction. As Jain explains, after the India Partition of 1947, “the eastern side gravitated to a rhythm called chaal, which you can hear all over Shruggy Ji. But the western side, and I’m simplifying here, went more to the faster-paced dhamaal, which you hear in ‘Dama Dam Must Qatandar,’ a three-centuries-old Sufi song. The Sufi dhol approach is much more intense.” Jain has been studying that approach on YouTube, picking up licks from the astounding “godfather” of Sufi dhol drumming, Pappu Saeen. “He’ll put the drum strap around his head and start swinging around, playing the most intense stuff and twirling for minutes. It’s ridiculous. I can do it for about 20 seconds before I fall down.”

Interview: The Flaming Lips

The Flaming Lips have never shied away from life’s unavoidable existential dramas — Death, Love, Depression, The Afterlife (or lack thereof). But The Lips have never made “depressing” music: Steven Drozd, the band’s multi-instrumentalist and chief sonic architect, has a flair for melodic, rainbow-hued arrangements, and Wayne Coyne, their outsized frontman, plays the role of psychedelic jester, particularly on stage, where he crowd-surfs on inflatable bubbles, pours fake blood on his face, and preaches his deep ruminations to a cult-like fan-base in his cracked warble.

The Terror, the band’s 13th studio album, is a bleak — often morbid — change of pace, filled with repetitive synthesizer textures, ghostly choral voices, and dark lyrical mantras. Inspired by a dread of mortality and deep personal turmoil (Coyne’s recent divorce, Drozd’s brief heroin relapse), the duo recorded the album mostly alone, working quickly and spontaneously instead of layering the songs with overdubs. eMusic’s Ryan Reed spoke with Wayne Coyne about the album’s intimate recording process and complicated themes.

In an interview with Pitchfork, Steven Drozd said: “The Terror is this internal feeling you get that you and everyone you love is going to die. Everything in your life might be good, but there’s still this notion…that there’s more pain and suffering to come down the road.” It’s interesting to compare that quote to “Do You Realize,” which basically says the same thing but puts it in a beautiful, uplifting sense.

I think that’s what optimism is, in the end. You go, “We can’t bear this,” or you go, “We’ll find a way.” Sometimes music tells us so much about how we feel, and I think that’s why we like music so much — because it fills in. We utterly know what it means while it’s playing, but the minute it stops, it’s like, “I don’t know anymore.”I don’t think one way of thinking has to negate another way of thinking. I’m certainly not “Do You Realize.”

It’s a dramatic song, and I think it’s most powerful when it’s used at these dramatic moments. Most people I’ve talked to that have used it have done so at weddings and funerals, even the birth of their children. They see it as the sound of this big moment, where this other sound — this sound that we’re doing on The Terror — it’s this moment that’s with you all the time. It feels depressing and triumphant at the same time. A triumph isn’t “Hey, this is the greatest thing! We’re gonna live!” A triumph is saying, “We’ll just get through this.” We don’t have to make it any more sparkly than that.

When I read about the album’s dark themes, I expected the music to be depressing. And it is in a way, but there’s also a comfort in the sadness. There’s a bleakness to it, but it’s also really beautiful at the same time.

When we were making it, a lot of it reminded us of church music. We don’t go to church now, but when you were young, you’d sit there and try your best, not knowing what the fucking words were, to sing along with these simple mantras that people would sing in church. And it wouldn’t be about a singular singer. I think that’s what a lot of this music feels like as well. It’s not coming from a point of “I’m the singer.” I call it “the voices from beyond.” There are only a couple of songs in which you can hear me trying to sound like to sound like me. It’s just melody and words that are in the cloud of the sound of the song anyway. For me, it’s not meant to be this big statement by this big character.

So from what I’ve read in other interviews, Steven’s dark period was what really set the tone for the album. But I also know you were going through some heavy shit during that time. What was it for you that sparked this mood and the idea of The Terror?

We’ve always hinted at this type of music. But the main difference is: Even five or six years ago, if we were having a semi-big production going on, like some of these songs are, with drums and overdubs and a lot of voices being recorded — in the early stages of a lot of our records, we start early on with really primitive demos. But now we don’t do that anymore. A lot of times we’re just recording, and we’re not really doing a demo of a song. We’re just creating it right there. There isn’t gonna be a second version or a third version — it just is what we create.

And now we can do that without anybody being there. So you really are, in a sense, kind of a painter in a dark corner, painting whatever you want and not always thinking anybody has to see it. It used to be, no matter what we would do, we were surrounded by people who were helping us record — engineers, technicians and producers, and everybody is in there listening to everything you do, and sometimes openly judging us, sometimes not. But you’re not doing it in isolation of your own creation, and I think that’s the main difference.

I think we’ve always been able to do expressionistic, internal music, but it’s very hard to do that sometimes. In the past, we’ve never been alone making it. When you get musicians together, they want to do music. They want to say, “You play that, and I’ll play this.” This wasn’t music like that. It’s simple, repetitive…a lot of it’s even out of tune and out of rhythm with itself — it just happens to be something we liked. If Steven liked it, and I liked it, that’s all that mattered. We don’t care if it’s good or bad. If we’re happy with it, let’s go. So I think that’s really powerful and great luck — this kind of music that we’re drawn to is this cold, distant, unsettled thing.

I’m really curious how you guys were able to sustain this mood throughout the album. Is it a situation where you guys started to capture this mood so you noticed that pattern and said, “Let’s shape the record in this way”? Or did a lot of it just happen subconsciously?

That’s a narrow path to walk. Part of it is you want to stay in this color palette. Not to simplify it, but you have Picasso’s Blue Period, or whatever, they’re all reaching for the same thing. But that can also be limiting because you can start cutting off possibilities, and we don’t like to do that either because sometimes you think, “Oh, it couldn’t possibly be this,” but then you hear it and you say, “Well, it’s absolutely that.”

We really struggled with the song, “Butterfly…How Long it Takes to Die.” We struggled with that one in the beginning, because it felt too snappy. It’s well played, but I think it’s the only song on the record that has this little moment of funk in it. With Embryonic, we were doing that all over the place — being very clumsy and funky and primitive. And this wasn’t doing that. For whatever reason, we were on another trip. And when we were confronted with that song, we thought, “What do we do?” And we just rejected it for the longest time. And I didn’t think about [the lyrics] very much, I just said cosmic shit that you think of with the music. Then we re-looked at it, and we thought, “Why don’t we make it more like what the lyrics are talking about and see if we can make another version of this bleak, un-chromatic landscape.” I think it works — over the last three or four songs, you really feel like you’re no longer looking for the answer. To me, it sort of feels like you’ve found the answer. And sometimes with really distinct rhythms, that’s kind of what it’s saying. You know which path you’re on. Earlier in the record, we begin with a rhythm that isn’t very solid, but kind of dissolves into almost-rhythmless rhythms. They’re rhythms, but they don’t really push forward with a lot of confidence, and none of it rushes ahead. And by the end of the album, we kind of get something back. We know something different. That’s how it feels to me — I don’t know if it really is true, but that’s how it feels to me as a piece of music.

“Try to Explain” is absolutely beautiful, and it epitomizes everything I love about the album. That could be one of my favorite Lips melodies.

It does that thing we talked about, almost being a “voice from beyond.” It never seemed as though it was a singular person singing it. Even though I’m singing it, it’s almost like music that’s always existed, and someone sang it somewhere in time. And I think when we do music like that, where there is no character involved, it allows you to be vulnerable and say things that you probably wouldn’t say if you were being you. You wouldn’t say something so crushing. When that big crescendo of all those harmony voices break into that line, “Try to explain why you’ve changed,” it’s unbearable. It’s as though nature has been split open or something — that’s why I sang that line. It just sounded like that to me. That crescendo really was an accident; we stumbled upon these harmonies just willy-nilly. Steven did one or two, and I did a third one or something, and it really became emotional. We added the lyrics — the music always carried the message, but we just added the lyrics like, “Of course, this is what the music was saying.”

The song is just enough sad, and it’s just enough powerful, but it doesn’t last very long. Sometimes that’s the hardest thing to do in music because you want to do it again and again and make it bigger — but if you leave just below the hottest temperature, it’s almost like you can have it forever, because you can handle it. The temptation with dumb artists and musicians like us is that you want to go all the way. If it’s big, make it bigger; if it’s loud, make it louder. But if you’re lucky, you don’t do that.When that happens, it can be pretty powerful.

I think the biggest anguish and pain people have is when they can’t find the answer. Your mind can’t stop searching, and it keeps you looking and keeps you wondering. And that’s really where your psychic pain is: Knowing the answer may be painful, but I think your imagination is something your worst enemy. Your mind sometimes goes to the worst possible place, and before you know it, you’re living in some unlivable hell. Most people I’ve talked to, without knowing it, have all pointed to that song and said, “I know what you’re talking about there. I can relate to that. There’s something about that piercing thing.” It’ s not demanding an answer— it’s longing for one. It’s crying out for something, saying, “I just wanna know!” It’s powerful, but I don’t know if I have any answers. Sometimes I know I’m singing something that’s trying to channel your subconscious. That’s a hokey thing to say, but for me, it’s not always, “There’s this thing happening in your life, so you sing about it.” Sometimes it’s just there.

The Flaming Lips, The Terror

Hidden within the cheery, let’s-release-music-in-a-gummy-bear-and-ride-through-life-in-a-metaphorical-plastic-bubble public persona that has come to define The Flaming Lips over the past decade, darker things have been lurking: angst, anxiety, a deep fear of the unknown. And while the Oklahoma-based psych rockers have been moving aggressively in a bleaker direction since 2009′s trippy Embryonic, The Terror may well be their most dour and disturbing display to date.

The post-apocalyptic haze of distortion, martial drum beats and stuttering, Morse-code keyboards that hangs over The Terror was created largely while multi-instrumentalist Stephen Drozd was in the throes of substance withdrawal, regularly isolating himself from his bandmates during the Heady Fwends sessions. Coyne’s normally-tender vocals are reduced here to a damaged coo at best — “I believe you/ I believe,” he croaks on the extra-terrestrial ballad, “Try to Explain,” a straightforwardly melodic moment on an album with little of it.

The Terror is a challenging listen, then, but an undeniably cohesive one. Each track fuses onto the next, as when a droning, distant siren call at the tail-end of the thawing title track clasps onto the shrill strings that introduce the mechanized mayhem of album standout “You Are Alone.” The Lips, notorious for risk-taking, miss a few times here: “You Lust,” a 13-minute whirring riot structured around a repetitive organ riff, drags on into mind-numbing spoken-word invectives for many minutes too long. But otherwise, The Terror is a colorful jaunt into the heart of darkness, a distress call from under the Big Top.

Jace Clayton, The Julius Eastman Memorial Depot

In his performances as DJ/rupture, Jace Clayton has been part of that experimental breed of DJ/producers who draw on the sounds of the classical avant-garde. But while names like Edgard Varese, Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen have become hip in DJ culture, Clayton has turned to one of music’s true outliers, the gay African-American composer Julius Eastman. (Both his sexual orientation and race figure prominently in his titles.) The Julius Eastman Memorial Depot is neither a mash-up nor a straight remix. It is a recasting and reimagining of two of Eastman’s most important and defining works, “Evil Nigger” and “Gay Guerrilla,” both originally for four pianos but arranged here for two pianos and live electronics. And it is a remarkable, heartfelt tribute to a man who was a fixture on the New York “downtown” scene in the ’70s and ’80s, performing with Meredith Monk and singing the lead role in Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs For a Mad King before succumbing to alcohol and drug addiction, homelessness and death at the age of 49.

“Evil Nigger, Part 1″ is almost pretty, with the layered chiming of its minimalist pianos; Part 2 abruptly switches to a more obviously electronic sound; Part 3 takes on a darker, dramatic hue as the music descends to the bass end of the keyboards, heaving and rolling in waves of increasingly dense sound that almost sounds like a kind of broadband drone. The final part announces itself with the sounds of glitch electronica, while the piano textures thin out, creating a sense both of space and of expectation that something will soon come rushing in to fill it. Shards of gamelan-like piano, impossibly rapid trills and tolling chords hover around the edges of the mix, until a brief explosion of massive piano sounds takes over. It ends as ambiguously as one of Bela Bartok’s nachtmusik (“night music”) pieces, with the half-remembered echoes of those earlier trills in a haunted electroacoustic haze.

“Gay Guerrilla,” in five parts, begins with the steady pulse of the pianos; Clayton’s electronics are subtle but telling, often hard to distinguish from the pianos themselves. In Part 2, a web of shifting electronic drones grows out of the patter of almost bell-like tones in the upper registers of the keyboards. When the pianos return, in a gently galloping rhythm, the result is perhaps the most conventionally beautiful music here. “Conventionally” being a relative term, of course. Part 3 begins to build up rhythmic counterpoint that sounds reminiscent of Steve Reich’s work, but no sooner does that happen then the sound of a turntable dying brings the music to a grinding halt — at which point we hear Martin Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” (This appropriation appears in Eastman’s original version of the piece.) Echoes of that tune flit through the thick piano textures of Part 4; and Part 5, with its endlessly ascending pianos, has a more reflective, even valedictory cast.

The album concludes with a Jace Clayton original, a short song that takes the wry humor of Eastman’s own work and turns it on the usual “equal-opportunity employment” speech, turning it into a pensive contemplation of a man who was driven to despair in part by a lack of employment opportunities.

Various Artists, Fool’s Gold Presents: Loosies

Loosies, from the Brooklyn-based indie record Fool’s Gold, is a selection of self-proclaimed “High Grade Menthol Raps From Fool’s Gold Friend’s & Fam.” The 22-song compilation boasts a mix of Fool’s Gold artists, ranging from Grande Marshall & A-Trak to up-and-coming rappers Troy Ave and Problem. Most notably, Fool’s Gold signee Danny Brown throws in his AraabMuzik-produced track, “Molly Ringwald.” Over a Harlem Shake-inducing, hard-hitting trap beat, he blesses us with typical vulgar Dannyisms on the order of “Your ho pussy like coat hair, I’ll never hang my coat there,” punctuated by the manic “STYLE!” adlibs that are always integral to a Danny track. The song is a little over two minutes but will definitely induce high-octane fist pumping and convulsions on the dance floor, like that one rave you went to in the ’90s that you’ve yet to tell your parents about.

The best part of Loosies is its potential to appeal to a wide variety of audiences, meshing younger, lesser-known artists with older, more established acts. A-Trak shows up with the “Piss Test” remix featuring Juicy J, Jim Jones, the Flatbush Zombies and more. The song is the perfect club banger — a cry of protest for teenagers who had to put the blunt down to get that summer job. Freeway delivers “Dedicated,” which doesn’t stray too far away from the sound he previously explored on tracks like the Just Blaze-produced “What We Do.” There’s also Troy Ave, whose “Vikings” sounds like something 50 Cent would’ve dropped years ago without sounding dated or derivative.

Loosies also offers an array of new faces, like New Orleans-bred Chase N Cashe, who uses his self-produced track “This & That” to alert everyone that he’s “the new hip-hop loudmouth.” Newcomers World’s Fair contributes the fast-paced “Tip Jar” with a catchy hook (“Who gotta dolla dolla? Who got a dolla?”) and raps like, “Only one Metro Card so we gotta double up” that areguaranteed to get stuck in anyone’s head. Gita, the only girl on the compilation, holds her own on “Let That” with a beat that sounds straight out of Tron: Legacy.

Much to Fool’s Gold’s credit, for an album featuring so many different rappers and personalities, Loosies flows extremely well. The compilation maintains its cohesiveness partly because of its beats, which live up to the label’s credo of “bridging the worlds between hip-hop and electronic music.” On Loosies, they do just that, without offering clear-cut-distinctions between the two, and the lack of restraint allows rappers to tap into their wildest, no-holds-barred concepts and topics.

Who Is…Hiss Golden Messenger

It feels odd to ask “Who is…?” of a guy who has been making music for nearly 20 years, but veteran Michael Taylor is just now finding his largest audience with Hiss Golden Messenger. It’s actually his third band, following the short-lived punk group Ex-Ignota and the longer-lived San Francisco alt-country act The Court & Spark. When the latter broke up in 2007 — after four albums and nearly a decade of near-constant touring — Taylor settled down in Durham, North Carolina, where he started a family, pursued a degree in folklore, and made music more as a hobby than as a priority.

Over several albums — a few self-released, a few more via North Carolina indie label Paradise of Bachelors — Hiss Golden Messenger has alternated between an austere solo acoustic project for Taylor and a full band featuring Scott Hirsh on guitar and Terry Lonergan on drums. For Haw, the fourth and arguably best release under the HGM moniker, they added members of Lambchop, Megafaun and the Black Twig Pickers to the line-up.

Whether alone or with friends, however, the primary elements of Hiss Golden Messenger remain constant: Taylor’s voice, which sounds both genial and mysterious, and his lyrics, which examine thorny issues of faith, fidelity, and family. Stephen M. Deusner caught up with Taylor to discuss North Carolina, the South, and that strange little word “haw.”

On growing up in a musical family:

My father is a musician. When he was growing up during the early to mid ’60s, the folk revival was a really big part of what was going on in the country. He went to high school with Steve Martin, who, besides being a comedian, is a huge fan of bluegrass. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and Jackson Browne also went to that school. So he had an interest folk music, and that was how I heard a lot of the music that ended up being the points of entry into traditional folk and country. It’s not that far from the Byrds to Merle Haggard to Doc Watson to The Anthology of American Folk Music.

On moving to North Carolina:

I draw a lot of inspiration from Southern music. It’s one of the big reasons why we ended up here. I felt like I needed to live in the South to understand the music that I love so well. I think about region as very specific places, like there was a time when people could hear a song and they could tell what county is was from. I don’t think my music works the same way, but there’s certainly a sense of place in Hiss Golden Messenger records. I feel very connected to this place. This is my home. We bought a house here. Our son was born here. Our daughter will be born in July and she’ll be a North Carolina native. I’m proud to live here and make music here.

On being a non-Southerner playing Southern music:

I would never refer to myself as a Southerner. That is reserved for people who are born and raised here. I do have a deep appreciation for what the South has given to American culture. I’m certainly using Southern instrumentation and song forms in my music, but I’m not discussing Southern issues or concerns as much as I’m talking about what is going on in my heart and in my head.

On the word “Haw”:

I think of this record as a very dark record, certainly the darkest that I’ve made. And I thought there was something a little comical about calling it Haw, if you think of haw as laughter. It’s the name of a river in this region that I live very close to. There’s Hee Haw, too, which was a great show. It perpetuated a lot of stereotypes that people certainly disagreed with, but on the other hand, it presented a lot of incredible music. It’s a complicated show.

On Hiss Golden Messenger as a solo vs. band project:

I don’t write with a band. I write by myself. There are a lot of parts of Hiss Golden Messenger that are very solitary. When I started Hiss Golden Messenger in earnest, I was pretty isolated out here and I was concerned with writing these internal narratives and puzzling out personal issues I was dealing with. So Hiss Golden Messenger is me and whoever is playing me. If I’m playing with a band, then Scott Hirsch is going to be there. He recorded Haw, he mixed it, he played bass and a bunch of other stuff on there. And Terry Lonergan is really crucial to the full band records we make.

On confronting spiritual issues in song:

I was talking to someone about this last weekend and was flipping through some notebooks. I always have multiple notebooks with me, and as I was trying to sum up the record with a concise thesis, I flipped to a page that read, “I will not pray in fear.” This record is me trying to understand my inner life, my spiritual place in the world. Is faith rooted in fear or is it rooted in peace? I have a lot of questions, but I don’t have any answers to them. It can be frustrating. And I’m not convinced that my ideas of faith and spirituality are getting any clearer they older I get. In fact, I think they’re getting hazier. Let me say, I’m not a churchgoing person. I think the Bible is a great book and also incredibly flawed. I don’t know what my idea of God is. That’s what these records are about.

On re-recording old songs for new albums:

I’ve recorded a bunch of my songs a couple of times. [Haw features a new version of "The Serpent Is Kind (Compared to Man)," which originally appeared on 2010's Bad Debt.] There’s a long history in traditional music of people re-recording songs, but it’s not something that happens so much in the independent music world. I don’t like the idea of a recording of a song being static. These things should live. Certainly the ideas being presented in these songs are worth revisiting over and over again, because a lot of times the words just come through me and I don’t even fully understand them. So it’s good to go back and sing them again, although some of them can be very painful to record and talk to people about. But I think it’s a good pain.

On being part of North Carolina’s music scene:

People have been very kind and welcoming to me here, although I feel like I’m still sort of an outlier — for purely logistical reasons, though. For a multitude of reasons, I’m not out and about very much. But there is a brotherhood — or sisterhood — of musicians in this region that feels very special and very different from other places I’ve lived. For how small of a place it is, there’s a very high ratio of really incredible bands: Megafaun, Mount Moriah, Mountain Goats, Spider Bags, It’s endless. I’m very close with Phil and Brad Cook [of Megafaun]. Phil played on most of Haw. The entire cultural scene here is just really vibrant, from food to writing to music to visual art. It’s a beautiful place to be. To put it this way, my wife and I just bought a house, and I hired Ash Bowie of Polvo to do the electrical work.

Six Degrees of James Blake’s Overgrown

It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five other albums we've deemed related in some way. In some cases these connections are obvious, in others they are tenuous. But, most important to you, all of the records are highly, highly recommended.