Veronica Falls’ Favorite Sophomore Albums

One listen to Veronica Falls’ sophomore album Waiting For Something To Happen and it’s clear that the band knows both their reference points — Johnny Marr jangle, Lush reverb — and what to do with them. Like any indie-pop group worth their rare colored vinyl, Veronica Falls are as much a coalition of amateur underground rock academics as they are a music-making entity. We decided to celebrate the release of Waiting by asking them to talk about their favorite follow-up records of all time.

Erykah Badu, New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)

The 21st century was a fallow one for neo-soul, an appellation that was once shorthand for a new generation of smooth operators among them D’Angelo, Maxwell and Erykah Badu. Aside from her exploratory and open-ended EP Worldwide Underground in 2003, Badu had been quiet, watching a strain of hip-hop-influenced R&B slowly take over the pop charts. When Badu released New AmErykah in 2008, her intentions were made clear amid chiming and handclaps on opening track “The Healer”: “Re-boot, re-fresh, re-start.” Badu revealed herself to be an R&B songstress who was comfortable cooing amid hip-hop’s concusses (check the flute and boom-tick of “Soldier”); her verses are abstract, yet still political. As she told Vibe: “I would call New AmErykah political/analytical/left brain/patriarchal.” But Badu’s idea of being analytical and logical would serve as anyone else’s right brain. Mercurial from moment to moment, the sound palette, crafted by Badu along with Sa-Ra Creative Partners, jazz vibraphonist Roy Ayers, and Madlib, is indulgent yet focused, its funk tightly-coiled (see the Curtis Mayfield-looping squiggles of “Master Teacher”) and its jazzy explorations open-ended. Throughout the album, interludes speak to Badu’s state of mind. Acerbic diatribes lifted from Network about our consumer society are offset by squeaky voices referencing Kemetic goddess Ma’at’s 42 laws. Erykah sounds like she’s been absorbing Parliament Funkadelic, left-wing conspiracy talk radio and Saturday morning cartoons in equal measure, the end result being a beautiful mess of an R&B album that fully embraced what at the end of the Bush Administration surely seemed like the end times.

Interview: Samantha Crain

Samantha Crain doesn’t mess around in the studio. The Shawnee, Oklahoma, native recorded her previous album, 2010′s breakout You (Understood), in just six days. For her latest, Kid Face, she spent a whopping seven days working with producer John Vanderslice at San Francisco’s famed Tiny Telephone studio. That quick approach allows her to capture a particular moment — songs as journal entries, tied to specific dates and events — but it also means her songs never sound overthought. “I really like albums that sound like people went in there, did a couple of takes, and it ended up sounding good,” she explains. “They caught some good moments and they caught some bad moments. I feel like we got that with this album.”

Kid Face is arguably Crain’s most sophisticated album to date, and certainly her most revealing. Featuring spare arrangements that highlight her voice and words, it’s a collection of conversations with herself, songs full of accusations and ruminations on past transgressions and present regrets. Her lyrics are evocative yet evasive, often obscuring as much as they reveal; her vocals bend words into unexpected shapes and sounds, as though each syllable holds endless musical possibilities. In some respect, perhaps her breakneck recording process allows Crain to get her ideas and emotions down on tape while they’re at their rawest and their most exposed.

As she prepares to hit the road to tour behind Kid Face, Crain spoke with eMusic’s Stephen Deusner about being mistaken for a teenager, working with Vanderslice, talking to herself, and writing a song about burying something mysterious behind the old Conoco sign on Anderson Road.

Is there a story behind the album title? Why did that phrase resonate with you?

On a frequent basis most people think I am a teenager, probably because I’m short and I’ve got a round face and I’m generally not that put-together in my appearance. So I get this sneak peek into how people would treat me when they think I’m 17 or 18, and whenever they do find out how old I am, they treat me in a different way. It’s not that they’re treating me bad, but there’s a distinct difference in the way people talk to me before they know how old I am. It’s given me a very interesting second look into people, which is interesting for a songwriter who observes society and writes about it. I thought it was a really good descriptive moniker for myself. I did not give it to myself. My bass player Penny [Hill] and I were joking around one day and giving each other rapper names, and that was what she bestowed upon me. I just got attached to it. As for the song “Kid Face,” it was the first song that I started for the album, but it actually took me the longest. It took me until I was completely done with the whole album to finish the song. I thought it was a good beginning and end point to everything that I had written in between.

What made that song so difficult to write?

Usually I have a very focused subject for a song, but “Kid Face” was all over the place. I had been thinking about a trip I had taken to Mexico a couple of years ago, and I was constantly noticing the differences between the country I was in and the country I was from. At the same time, I was thinking about these differences between the age I look, the age I am and the age I feel. It was a whole lot of thoughts that didn’t have a whole lot to do with each other. I took me a long time to hammer out all those ideas into something that would actually make sense for someone to listen to. It had to seem like it was a cohesive thought process even though there were a lot of thoughts going on.

Compared to your last album, You (Understood), which you’ve described as being about very specific moments with very specific people, Kid Face sounds like it’s more about you.

This is the first album that I’ve written that is completely autobiographical. There’s no fiction dust sprinkled on any of the songs, and that’s something that has taken me a while to get to. Before I was writing songs, I was a fiction writer. I was writing short stories and things like that. I’ve always erred on the side of fiction, because I was a very fanciful kid. I was not super happy with how normal my life was. I always used fiction to cover that up. It’s just taken me getting older and becoming more comfortable with myself to get to the point where I feel like my own life is worth attaching poetics to and turning into songs. I don’t think I wasn’t really doing it on purpose, but the first couple of songs I wrote for the album were autobiographical and very personal, and I got really excited about them, because I hadn’t really been able to access that. It was exciting, like I had entered a new area as a songwriter. That became my focus for the album — staying in that area and making something that would be completely autobiographical.

Several of these new songs sound like conversations with yourself, almost like you’re addressing them to some future version of you.

You’re right. I’m one of those people who talks to myself a lot, to the point of being the crazy person on the bench talking to themselves. That is something that has developed over the past couple of years. I think it might have a lot to do with traveling alone more than I ever have. I used to always travel with a band, but I’ve been doing a lot more solo stuff and traveling alone, so you get to be a little in your own headspace. And you do end up talking to yourself a lot and working things out in your head — figuring out what you believe about certain things and hammering out different ideas. So yeah, I think the shape the songs ended up taking was these solitary conversations with myself. They say you don’t really know what you believe until you’ve said it out loud, and you don’t really know how you feel about what you believe until you’ve said it out loud. I always feel like if you say it out loud, it makes it more comprehensible. So I end up doing that a lot.

Songs like “Ax” and “Taught to Lie” almost sound like you’re trying to persuade yourself of something, or maybe hold yourself accountable.

When you’re traveling to a different town every day for a number of years, when you’re around the same people all the time, you don’t have the basic accountability or the rules that you abide by with the rest of the world. You can choose to take that and use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card, like I did for a while. I did a real disservice to the people around me. I got away with a lot of things, and acted in ways that I’m not proud of. So after a while, you have to create some moral accountability for yourself. You have to create some rules of integrity. If nobody else is around to do it for you — if you don’t have a community to do that — you have to become that community for yourself. And I feel like that’s what “Taught to Lie” is about. It’s about me wanting to be that accountability for myself through singing that song. “Ax” is in that vein as well. It’s really just trying to find out my own way to become a decent human being.

Does that make performing these new songs more intense or emotional for you?

I can’t speak too much to that because I haven’t performed a lot of them too much yet. But there are songs that I have written in the past that have been very personal — there was a song off my album Songs in the Night called “The Dam Song” — that I can sing night after night for years, and it’s still a very affecting experience, just like the first time. So I’m going to go out on a limb and say that with a lot of these songs, I think I’m going to be realizing new things every time I sing them. The meanings are going to change. It’ll be like looking back on an old diary.

Did that change the way you recorded these songs?

I think I was pretty comfortable with these songs. I didn’t feel like I had to cover anything up or everything had to sound perfect or there had to be a cool element to everything. So that helped. Whenever you can get yourself out of that mindset and just focus on making a good record, it creates a mood that I can’t quite explain. Sometimes you can hear the tensions and attitudes on a record, but everything was easygoing and comfortable during the recording process. I think the mood of the album picks up on that.

Did John Vanderslice help set that tone in the studio? How did you end up working with him?

I had sent him a couple of demos and asked him to help with a 7-inch single I did last year. I wanted to record at Chinese Telephone. We really clicked, and at one point I just said, “You’re producing my next record.” He’s a musician in his own right, and I think that’s what makes him such a good producer. He knows how protective and selfish musicians can be with their work, such that by the time you get into the studio and are ready to record a song, you’ve spent so much time with it and you think you know exactly how you want it to sound. John has a good way of working you out of that headspace without making you feel like you’re compromising your vision. He’s really good at making you focus on the album as a whole and not make each song sound so labored over. Because of that, this album has ended up sounding…it’s a very easy album. We recorded it in a week, and I feel like it’s a very natural and easy-sounding album.

That sound seems to reinforce one of the album’s major themes: this compulsion to travel, to always be on the move. It’s most obvious on “Somewhere All the Time,” but seems to inform every song.

I’m asked a lot if traveling so much and being away from home is hard, and I think for many musicians it is. A lot of bands love to write and record, and traveling is the part they have to accept as part of the whole thing. They have to tour. For me, it’s not like that. I’m obsessed with moving around and traveling. It’s just as much an important to me as writing and recording. I’m not sure why that is. It’s just my element. I do think it’s helped me to appreciate where I am from a little more. It gives me a better bird’s-eye view of what’s going on here. I can write my state and my people a little better when I do get back here, because I’ve been so removed from it for a while. It’s like an anthropologist’s point of view. It’s a lot easier to write about things that you aren’t in the middle of all the time. It’s easier to see patterns of human interaction when you are looking at it from the outside.

There’s one place in particular that plays a crucial role on the album — the old Conoco sign on Anderson Road. Did you really bury something there, as you describe on “Taught to Lie”?

Ha. There used to be a box, but I have since moved it. The point of it being there was for someone to find it, and then I didn’t want them to find it anymore. So I moved it.

I imagine there will be some fans digging around that area trying to find it.

Anderson Road is a long-ass road, so it would take anybody a long time to figure out where I was talking about.

Wayne Shorter Quartet, Without A Net

Seven months away from his 80th birthday, the greatest living composer in jazz has released his first record in eight years. Wayne Shorter’s Without A Net features eight live songs from a 2011 European tour with his longstanding quartet, along with a more recent 23-minute, chamber-styled tone poem, also live, with the five-piece Imani Winds abetting the regular ensemble.

It is an event of a record, Shorter’s first for the Blue Note label in 43 years. But Without A Net is distant from such Blue Note classics as Juju and Speak No Evil in more ways than one. His preferred saxophone is now the soprano instead of the tenor, and nearly a half-century after his Blue Note albums stunned listeners with their buffed, lean, hard-bop ingenuity, Without A Net is open-ended but purposeful, alert yet accepting. It reflects the tranquil whir animating Shorter today,an elderly master of musical composition and a longtime follower of the Buddhist faith.

Without A Net contains all the Shorter verities — the harmonic sophistication, the patient song construction, the innovative probing of melodic nooks and crannies, the geometric integrity of his solos. Perhaps because Shorter isn’t fully absorbed in a few listens, I’m most favorably inclined toward his reworking of two older tunes. Without losing its circular motif, “Orbits” is more allusive than the snappy bop version opening Miles Davis’s Miles Smiles in 1967 and the string-laden remake on Shorter’s Alegria in 2003. And “Plaza Real” sheds the overtly Spanish tinge from its original with Weather Report in 1983, transforming into a series of refractions between Shorter’s soprano and his three cohorts that reveals quite a bit about his modern-day conceptions on the straight horn.

Of the originals, “Starry Night” is indebted to the Latin, classical and beautifully elliptical jazz phrasings of pianist Danilo Perez. “S.S. Golden Mean” is a relatively playful number that finds Shorter’s quoting “Night In Tunesia,” and “Zero Gravity” begins as a toe-tapper with Shorter whistling over John Pattituci’s sturdy bass riff before slides into the sort of levitating interplay implied by the album’s title. There is also a 13-minute rendition of the theme song to the movie “Flying Down To Rio,” the first pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers, released in 1933 — the year of Shorter’s birth. It seems this wizened old dog always has a few tricks left in his arsenal, and can operate “without a net” because, at this late stage, he will almost assuredly land gracefully.

Interview: Frightened Rabbit

Scottish group Frightened Rabbit built a devoted fanbase by focusing on the personal — specifically, heartbreak and the aftermath that follows. But on their fourth record, Pedestrian Verse, they’ve zoomed out. Its songs are character studies that focus on loss of faith, mental illness, the longing for home and the strange, bitter comfort that comes with unhappiness. That broad reach is appropriate: Verse is the group’s first record for major label Atlantic, a fact that has caused no small amount of murmuring amongst their followers. Any fears the transition has blunted the group’s effect are misguided. This is easily the group’s most cutting and absorbing work since their 2008 breakthrough The Midnight Organ Fight, containing all of that record’s frantic urgency but tempering it with the wisdom of adulthood.

As the group was preparing for an in-store at a London record shop, eMusic’s editor-in-chief J. Edward Keyes talked with drummer Grant Hutchison about scaling up, staying grounded and learning from your mistakes.

Reading a few interviews with you guys in advance of this record, it seems like every single one of them opens with someone asking you about signing to a major label. Why do you think that idea continues to be such a big deal to people?

Well, I think, we reached a certain level on an independent — we grew up a fanbase ourselves, with help from the label. And I think [as a result] a lot of people feel like we’re they’re secret, and that they don’t really want to share us with the masses — which I guess a lot of people were afraid of happening. So signing to a major, I guess, has been a talking point for that reason. I mean, we felt that Atlantic were the right choice, we felt that their ethos is quite indie for a major label, but at the same time, you’re always kind of waiting for a fight, almost. We were expecting them to swoop in at any point and say, “Where are the singles?” or “We need more hits.” But that moment never came. I mean, we were definitely ready for it — and maybe even tried to pick a fight without them even wanting it.

[Laughs] How did you do that?

Well, it’s been quite a long process from the last record and we, at certain points, got a little bit worried that they were never going to release the album. But really, all they were doing was giving us the time to write what they wanted to be the best Frightened Rabbit record to date. But there were occasions where we did get a bit frustrated and a bit concerned that it was taking too long, and that maybe that was all some sort of plan. But as it turned out they, more than anyone, recognized what we’d done and the fanbase that we’d built up, and they were more aware than anyone of [the danger of] ruining that. They don’t want to be blamed by all of our fans for ruining the band.

The fact that you are on a major, and now potentially have a platform to reach a much larger audience — how did that impact the way you approached this record?

Actually, [the way we approached this] had a lot to do with the last record more than anything, and how that came out — the process of making that record and the outcome not being what we wanted. We looked back at ourselves and what we’d done in the past and thought about how we could improve on that, rather than thinking, “Well, now we’re on a major label, things are gonna have to be different.” We wrote the songs together as a group this time, rather than Scott coming to us with fully-formed songs and saying, “This is it, these are the parts.” That, from the outset, made a big difference.

I want to back up fora second — you said the last record [The Winter of Mixed Drinks] didn’t come out the way you had intended. What were some ways you thought it fell short?

It’s kind of weird, because I feel like we were trying to achieve a major label sound on an indie label — which we now realize was not the right thing to do. We realized with the recording of this record, which is on a major label, that you don’t need to push yourself to achieve that. You don’t have to force it or write in a style you feel is more “major label” or more “mainstream.” It’s really just, this time, we just wrote the record. We wrote the songs we wanted to write. With Winter of Mixed Drinks, we tried to make it sound big, and the way we tried to make it sound big was by adding layer upon layer of guitars and keyboard, because we thought that would give it more strength. We’ve come to realize that there really is no quick fix or easy way to do that — it has to start with the songs.

That’s really tough to do, though. Bands tend to get praised for writing these big, ornate, anthemic songs, but it’s always seemed harder, to me, to exercise restraint and to know how to scale back.

That’s exactly it. We didn’t have that when we recorded the last one. We didn’t work with a producer until we got to the mixing stage, so there wasn’t anyone controlling what we were doing. It was basically just kids in a sweet shop: “Let’s add this and add this and add this!” [Laughs.] And it is more of an art form to know when not to put something in. With the last record [producer] Peter Katis surmised that at the mixing stage. That’s one of his great talents — knowing when to pull back. But I think by the time it got to the mixing stage, it was a little too late. So this time around, from the very beginning, that mindset was there, and Leo Abrahams, who produced it, that’s something he’s very good at as well. He knows how to make the more subtle changes that have a greater impact.

You mentioned earlier that this record was more collaborative than your past records. What were some songs that changed the most as a result of you guys working on them together?

Well, we went away two or three times to write. We went to a couple of different houses just to get away and spend time together. A few days ago, we went back and listened to some early versions of the song “Nitrous Gas,” which started out with this weird Western sort of thing to it. I have no idea where that came from. That one really didn’t have a structure — there was no direction, really. But when we came back to it and stripped it way back, that’s when we realized, “Wow, there’s a beautiful song in here that doesn’t actually need a lot added to it.” We re-did “Woodpile” four or five times from the beginning to the end. “Woodpile,” we actually went a bit too far with trying to make it sparse. When we presented that to the label, they said, “Well, you actually might have taken too much away. You can put a few of those guitars back on.” Because it was collaborative, it took us a while to figure out where we all sat in the writing process. Scott was unsure as to how much he did want to hand over responsibilities. I personally thought, “In theory, it’s nice of Scott to say this, but when it comes to actually doing it, whether or not he’ll actually let go remains to be seen.” But he did, and it was a really great experience for all of us.

You talk about redoing “The Woodpile” four or five times. Is there a point, after you’ve reworked a song so many times, that you can’t even see straight anymore and you begin to lose perspective on it altogether?

The last recording we did of “Woodpile,” we said, “This is the last one. If you don’t like this one, that’s it!” You get to that stage and it gets to be like flogging a dead horse. We knew the right version wasn’t far away — and that’s the point where it almost becomes more frustrating. If you know something’s completely wrong, you can scrap a lot of it. This, though, every time we did another version we were like, “We’re getting closer, but I don’t know what it is that’s going to make this song finally right.”

Did the collaborative process extend to the lyrics, too?

No, we stayed away from the lyrics [laughs]. I mean, we weren’t looking to completely change direction. We weren’t looking to change the sound or the lyrical content, and I think it’s important that there’ll always will be that thread, that spine of it, lyrically, that belongs to Scott, because his lyrics are unlike anyone else’s, and it’s something that people, in the past, have really made a huge difference between us being a band they liked and us being their favorite band. So for us to come in and start trying to write lyrics, it wouldn’t add anything. If anything, it would take away. I think with the last record, Scott masked his lyrics a little bit too much to avoid directly referencing points in his life that might upset people that were involved. The lyrics last time were a bit clumsier, if you like. This time, he made a conscious decision to go back to the kind of honesty that he wrote on Midnight Organ Fight, which I think is a brave decision, but a necessary one, because the lyrics are a lot of the reason that people fell in love with the band. The name of the album alone, Pedestrian Verse, Scott had that written on his notepad from the very beginning, and he saw that as a sort of challenge, almost, to avoid writing lyrics that anyone listening could describe as “pedestrian.” In my opinion, it’s the strongest lyrics that he’s done to date.

One last thing I wanted to ask you: I know you guys spend a lot of time on the road. What are some things you do to help you maintain your sanity?

It’s funny, we’re about to embark tomorrow on tour, actually. I think it’s important to keep in touch with people back home so you’re not completely stranded. Because you are in a bit of a bubble and you’re not really aware of what’s happening in the real world. Phone Mom, I think, is probably the best idea. Mom will always bring you back to reality.

Who Is…Uncanny Valley

Oakland’s Uncanny Valley occupy a corner of the electronic underground that takes place in illegal venues under low-budget conditions, yet their aesthetic is hardly makeshift. Their recording is skillfully well-produced and their minimal compositions are fully realized, while the live show borders on performance art — exploring the line between self and other, body and mind, being and nothingness.

When I saw them live they looked like Victorian ghosts. Dressed in long, flowing gowns and loose-fitting, sheer material, they wrapped themselves up in a massive piece of fabric that acted both as a veil and a net, inviting the crowd into the giant, fort-like cocoon and obliterating the line between performer and audience. It challenged the notion of an atomized, individual comfort zone, creating the possibility for communion. The kids went crazy — as kids tend to do when they are at the dawn of a new counter-cultural moment. It stimulated my curiosity in this scene I knew little about.

I talked with Uncanny Valley via email about Speaking in Prosthetic Tongues, their debut release on Night People, and about the ideas and motivations behind the “No Rave” aesthetic.

On the origins of Uncanny Valley:

Kelsey: I grew up in an idyllic small town on the central coast of California, an only child who spent most of my youth out in the nearby state park, catching frogs and picking fleas off cats while my hippie parents and their friends gutted freshly caught fish and made crass jokes while naked in the hot tub. I made up stories to entertain myself and personified the inanimate objects around me. My father built harps for a living, and my mother was always singing songs while cavorting around in our weird fairytale life. I was infatuated with the relationship between that which is light, and that which is inevitably dark — music and songwriting was my way to exorcise my feelings about these integral parts. I mainly made bedroom music until I started collaborating with Joey and Natalee.

Natalee: When I was about 16, I started going to underground experimental/noise shows in Chicago. I started doing performance art, making psychedelic plays and puppet shows. I wanted to make music but I didn’t even know how to begin. There was a strong male presence in the music scene. Joey and I moved to California around the same time. We became good friends and had messed around with music a bit, and then Kelsey and I became friends and started talking about the minimal wave music. Right before my 21st birthday I bought my first synth, and the three of us started experimenting together, not really certain what the outcome would be.

Joey: I have performed solo for a long time as Joey Casio, making politically-leaning punk house where I sing and rant and bash at electronic hardware. Uncanny Valley is the first time I have collaborated with other people in such an ambitious context. Natalee and Kelsey approached me with an idea, to start a new band that was a bit darker, but still fully synthetic sounding. What came about when we combined our aesthetics and ideas surprised me in a really beautiful way, and really seemed to connect with the people around us.

On how the creative process combines disparate influences into a new sounds:

Natalee: Joey has a lot of experience and knowledge of the technical side of music production. A lot of bands we like from the ’80s were produced by men with female vocals. I refuse to fit that mold, and have demanded that each of us play a balanced and integral role in the writing process. Kelsey may be the primary vocalist, but she also contributes to production and aesthetic decisions.

Joey: Natalee grew up in the Chicago noise scene and believes in the importance of bringing experimental sounds to people’s ears to push boundaries. I’ve been pretty deep in dance music theory for the last few years, examining how certain sounds and rhythms resonate with the human mind. Kelsey is more free-form in her creative process; a lot of lyrics start with her basically speaking in tongues until the words becomes poems.

Kelsey: The creative process with Joey and Natalee is often sporadic and spontaneous. Sometimes we craft enough material for a new tape in one sitting, other times we spend several days working on the skeleton of a song. No one has just one set role — we swim together through the collective conscious.

Joey: When we practice often we’re just putting seeds into the machines; when we play live, something else really special happens. There is a fair amount of improvisation that is difficult to capture. Playing live is an ongoing conversation with an audience.

On creating an oppositional youth culture in 2013:

Joey: Young people today experience music in a much different way than in the past. The internet has allowed memes to emerge divorced from localized subcultures, and this often creates flash-in-the-pan trends that don’t resonate with the same timeless effect that previous sounds had. The way fake genres like “witch house” and “seapunk” get turned into jokes is quick and cruel. “No Rave” can avoid this by being explicitly opposed to the hegemony at large, and by being self-referential and critical to the systems which propagate its existence.

On the emergent No Rave scene:

Joey: No Rave stands in opposition to the anonymous, apathetic, apolitical stance that electronic music so often takes. In the last couple of years, people who were previously involved with punk and noise scenes started making electronic dance music. Not surprisingly, a lot of times it turns out quite weird. I would say groups like Extreme Animals and Eats Tapes are the precursors to this scene. In Oakland, TECHNOC, YRUD and Body Glove have been making sounds I’d call No Rave. A lot of other folks have started to make new music that leans that direction — like Black Jeans and REDREDRED. In other cities, I’d include Ginseng from Iowa City, Sewn Leather, Chrome Windows from Olympia, Diamond Catalog from Portland, Container and Unicorn Hardon from Nashville.

Uncanny Valley went through a big shift toward No Rave on tour. Playing live every night, our set got more free-form and dance music-oriented but also more experimental — leaning toward the weird end of acid house, but adding a personal element with the vocal elements that was always lacking from so much of that music.

Natalee:I am trying to create an electronic music scene that is not male-dominated, trying to encourage and assist women making electronic music. I want to present electronic music in all-ages, all-welcome underground venues and avoid bars/clubs as much as possible. I never have fun in bars.

On a New Age trip to the desert:

Joey: I jokingly referred to Uncanny Valley’s “genre” as “new age body music” for a while. There is a heavy influence of early industrial dance music such as DAF, Front 242 — what’s often called “electronic body music.” But that kind of music is often very tough and hyper-masculine while Uncanny Valley has this other much more dreamy aspect to it. Are we New Age? Perhaps. We listened to a lot of Enya on tour. There have definitely been Tarot readings at band practice.

We have played and met up numerous times with friends out in the desert, and there have been some very amazing experiences. It’s mostly just weirdos meeting up at an abandoned farm with a giant PA and lot of ideas and music making machines. We make up bands for the night and use it as a chance to explore new ideas.

Natalee: Getting out into the elements with a bunch of friends, hiking up a mountain with birds soaring below and then staying up as long as possible, listening to the weirdest sounds resonating in the weirdest ways in the desert air is invigorating. It’s probably not what you think — no one is doing Reiki — but we do like to find obsidian flakes and talk about crystals and stare at the endless stars.

On living in the realm of the unreal:

Kelsey: I’m heavily influenced by the surreal, and the ability to transcend my body through performance. Some of my favorite Uncanny Valley shows have been the ones where I have covered myself entirely in white paint. I then feel like I don’t have to be confined by my humanness. I can make up words and move in a way that takes me elsewhere and away. As someone who doesn’t identify as a person of faith, performance functions as my ritual. Ceremony is of utmost importance to me. I want to honor that. Through performing, I feel that energy is put forth. I’ve been reading and researching female artists and performers extensively the last few years, and I find that their work also helps aid in inspiration — Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Judy Chicago, and Marina Abramovic are among my personal favorites. They make me study the connection between mind and body, and what it means to choose to live in the realms of the unreal; balancing reality and fantasy.

Natalee: One of the most exciting things about playing music is this experience I have of phantom voices singing in between frequencies. We’ll be generating a sound, and I’ll think Kelsey is singing, but I look over and she isn’t even in the same room. I’ve started to hear these voices singing in all kinds of music and sounds. I like to think of them as some kind of ghost voice trying to speak to me or of my own unconscious singing a song to me.

Joey: This is fantasy music. We get lost in it. We make a space and jump though, hopefully taking anyone within earshot with us.I want to make music that makes people have a transcendent experience, to be taken outside the self, to get lost in a crowd and feel good about it — to look to my collaborators and build a ship in the ocean of collective consciousness and invite the water in. The music is already there. When we get lucky, we can tune in.

Christian Howes, Southern Exposure

Southern Exposure is an evocative musical geography tour writ in bold strokes, precise plucks and sublime squeezebox embraces. At the helm of this travelogue is violinist Christian Howes, a classical music prodigy who landed in jail for years as a teenager for selling drugs. Howes is renowned as a genre-busting whirlwind who has credibly covered Jimi Hendrix and handles concertos, bluegrass jams and jazz improvisation with equal facility. His frenetic energy is beautifully restrained here by the theme of the disc — music from throughout the Southern Hemisphere — and by his co-pilot, the French accordionist and Astor Piazzolla protégé, Richard Galliano.

But as the music and the liner notes make abundantly clear, this is no winsome stab at Parisian café music. The first track, “Ta Boa, Santa?” by Brazilian Egberto Gismonti, bounces from jazz shuffle to barn dance to a prancing lilt and on through a spirited bass and drum exchange between Scott Colley and Lewis Nash before Galliano takes an accordion twirl — and we’re halfway through the song. That’s followed with a bittersweet samba by Ivan Lins, Piazzola’s classic “Oblivion,” and into the hard bop of Ray Bryant’s “Cubano Chant,” a staple of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Howes and Galliano each contribute a tango, and there is a compelling duet between them, entitled “Spleen” before the group closes out with a string-laden arrangement of a Howes original.

The secret ingredient of Southern Exposure is the rhythm section. Colley and Nash merit their reputations as top-notch timekeepers who can flex but never really stray from jazz. They are joined by the less-heralded but on this date sterling pianist Josh Nelson, and they collectively keep the two almost congenitally romantic lead instruments from lapsing into too many swoops and swoons. This is sunny but alert music that skirts banality even as it twirls and sashays forth from style to style and culture to culture. Or, put more simply, Southern Exposure is plenty warm enough, but not too cuddly.

Stand-Alone Soundtracks

Though it’s often taken for granted, scoring a film is no easy task. Go too minimal and you risk killing dramatic tension. Too grandiose, and an entire film can become ham-handed. Striking the perfect balance is a feat few have truly mastered. Even harder, though, is constructing a soundtrack that stands on its own — creating a work that’s less a companion piece, more a bona fide, start-to-finish album. The 11 soundtracks in this list, remarkably, do just that. These soundtracks are full of music that’s compelling, engaging and entertaining, whether or not you’ve seen the movie it was designed to accompany.

The Relatives, The Electric Word

Gospel singer Rev. Gean West and his brother Rev. Tommie formed The Relatives in the early ’70s and disbanded by 1980, but their electrifying, innovative gospel-soul hybrid finally saw the light of day when their early singles and unreleased sessions were compiled on 2009′s Don’t Let Me Fall. The lo-fi glory of those recordings is now utterly fulfilled on this very long-time-coming full-on debut, The Electric Word, which augments the Relatives’ familial voices with members of Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears. The added members powerfully facilitate the Relatives’ remarkable ability to blend the Temptations’, Four Tops’ and Isley Brothers’ gnarliest acid-soul experiments with traditional gospel.

Rooted in the sort of a cappella harmonizing heard in “Trouble in My Way” and “I Will Trust the Lord,” the Relatives’ achieve spiritual lift-off in tracks like “Let Your Light Shine,” which blends a rock-hard groove with funky horns and a beatifically needling gospel organ. “Say It Loud (It’s Coming Up Again),” borrows more than a page from Brother Brown’s soul-power sermonizing, as the title hints. And on “Bad Trip,” which oddly equates doping and rent non-payment among its titular infractions, they sneak some dirty P-funk echoes into the church. Throughout, Rev. Gean’s powerful pumice-voiced preaching delivers the word unequivocally throughout on this blast of fresh vintage gospel soul.

Matmos, The Marriage of True Minds

For those who thought the endearingly eggheaded conceptualists in Matmos could not get more cerebral — this is a duo, after all, whose music has been sourced from the sounds of surgery, digitally deconstructed 19th-century battlefield hymns and readings of the serpentine philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein — consider The Marriage of True Minds. The concept intriguing: Willing test subjects submitted to sensory-deprivation techniques, then “listened” as Matmos member Drew Daniel tried to telepathically communicate the concept for the new Matmos album to them. Recordings of the resulting interactions (the spoken ones, of course, but who knows if that’s all?) figure into each of the songs on The Marriage of True Minds, which covers all kinds of strange ground.

How exactly the idea for the album figures into the actual tracks is hard to tell, but it’s clear from the way that “You” wanders mysteriously before bursting open into a full-bodied dance track that Matmos have an increasingly real command over what they’re doing musically. The fidgets and tricks employed in their production work sound looser, more natural and free, and that gives a real sense of play to sounds that have sometimes in the past proven to be otherwise stiff and sterile. On top of all that is an infectious sense of Matmos — in bizarre tracks like “Ross Transcript” (like a trip down a demented radio dial) and “Teen Paranormal” (a surprisingly accomplished and cool night-drive electro vamp) — being as weird as they want to be. And better at it too.

Puscifer, Donkey Punch the Night

For the follow-up to 2011′s quirky but compelling Conditions of my Parole, Maynard James Keenan (Tool, A PerfectCircle) and his revolving door of band mates have assembled a seven-song EP featuring two new tunes and two covers, with remixes of all but Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which opens the release in grand style. The song is faithful to the original and brilliantly executed, from the multi-part vocal harmony to the melancholy piano. Those expecting Keenan to burst into parody mode will be sorely disappointed; even the “Skaramoosh, Skaramoosh, will you do the fandango” section is rendered with the utmost reverence, and the solos channel both the tone and talent of Brian May.

The rest of Donkey Punch is more experimental, but no less serious. “Breathe” begins like a Joy Division pop song, but quickly branches off into a haunted, sedated miasma of trip-hop and electronica urging us to “surrender to the hunger/ don’t forget to breathe.” The remix of the song, by Drumcell, removes some of the bounce from the tune, but keeps it spiraling forward until it climaxes in a supernova of harrowing screams. Unlike Puscifer’s sillier output, Donkey Punch seems like a concerted effort to demonstrate that the group is as gifted, sincere and intoxicating as Tool, A Perfect Circle or Keenan’s Caduceus brand wine. The only tongue-in-cheek moment on Donkey Punch is a cover of metal band Accept’s 1983 anthem “Balls to the Wall,” which converts the forceful, testosterone-pumped original into a vulnerable, etherealnumber that replaces manly chants of “God bless you!” and “Hey!” into wispy tendrils of female vocals. The vocal-free “Silent Servant El Guapo” mix of “Balls” is satire in name only, sounding like Nine Inch Nails grappling with The Orb. With Donkey Punch the Night, Keenan continues to push boundaries of what Puscifer are capable of — which at this point includes just about anything.

Gustavo Dudamel, Mahler: Symphony No. 9

Been wondering whether the hotshot young Venezuelan conductor lives up to the hype? Wonder no more, for to be this distinctive in warhorse repertoire, mostly without resorting to willful exaggerations, is impressive. There’s a languorous fervor in this caught-in-concert reading that recalls Bernstein. Clocking in at two seconds over 86 minutes, it’s generally on the slow side, but there have been slower renditions (Horenstein and Bernstein topped 89 minutes, Giulini 88, Zander 87), and the close of the third movement is extremely sprightly. The L.A. Phil, if not as tonally distinctive as the Vienna Phil, plays with enough richness and precision to more than withstand the scrutiny Dudamel’s attention to detail brings. His only misstep comes near the end of the finale; starting around 21 minutes in, it becomes so slow that the flow is interrupted, making his italicizing emphases seem self-conscious. Also, the ending is so quiet that it’s almost not there, though that was probably less of a problem in the concert hall. Otherwise, this reading is so compelling that it’s easy to hear why the 32-year-old is the newest superstar conductor.

Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking

Let’s get one thing straight: Oliver Burkeman does not want to cheer you up. His book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking is full of exhortations to accept your inevitable death, embrace insecurity and cheer for failure.
This is not your typical stiff-upper-lip stoicism — though Burkeman, a columnist for The Guardian, does come across as excruciatingly British at times. Or perhaps the advice he offers is more accurately described as House-ian (as in Dr. Gregory): The idea of happiness is only comprehensible if there is some significant misery out of which to be lifted.
Burkeman travels to Kenya, Mexico, Texas and Massachusetts to find the root of what he characterizes as the delusion that is happiness. He looks at the self-sustaining business of self-help books (apparently after 18 months, their dissatisfied buyers go out and, well, just buy a new tome), not to mention gurus, retreats, and affirmations. Those who are, like this reviewer, predisposed to see a glass as half-empty (and steadily leaking) will probably smirk and nod along to Burkeman’s received pronunciation; those more optimistically inclined might wonder what kind of chip he’s got on his shoulder.
Ultimately, Burkeman argues for throwing out the existing definition of happiness and starting over…with more muted expectations. Could it be that “the power of negative thinking” is the self-help book to end all self-help books? Well, check back in 18 months.

Beach Fossils, Clash the Truth

Beach Fossils singer/songwriter Dustin Payseur is talking about his generation; he just sounds like a relic from 1980s post-punk England doing it. His friends are doing it, too, to the point where you can argue that a mostly Brooklyn-centric cadre of bands — including Wild Nothing, Frankie Rose and DIIV, among others — has come to own the busy-yet-bare aesthetic borne on heavily reverbed guitars, brittle drums and washed-out vocals.

Beneath the surface, however, Payseur doesn’t seem very interested in the past. He opens Beach Fossils’ second full-length with a pair of songs seemingly directed at his peers: The title track, with its chant of “Nothing real/ Nothing true,” is a call to arms, while “Generational Synthetic” is spent distancing himself from the herd (“I will do it on my own again,” he sings). The disaffection or apathy we associate with vocalists like Payseur — Ride’s Mark Gardener comes to mind — does not apply here. Beach Fossils’ shimmering guitars can seem similarly cool to the touch, but the album is more inclined toward dense, three-minute blasts of melody and rhythm than dreamy splendor. When Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino slides right into a vocal appearance on “In Vertigo” and makes herself at home, it feels like a final act of blurring generational borders.

Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is just the kind of novel you’d expect to come out of San Francisco: a story that combines the bibliophile’s love of a nice, hefty book with the astonishing technology for which the city has become known. Down-on-his-luck web wizard Clay Jannon takes a job at the titular bookstore which, he soon learns, is a front for a library that lends tomes filled with mysterious strings of numbers. Monks have been at work for ages to crack the code in these books, but Clay has a better idea: enlist his tech-savvy friends and let high-powered computers do the math.

Sloan turns this engaging plot into a debate about digital vs. analog, as well as an inquiry into just what our computer-addict brains consider real and virtual these days. Part of the fun of Sloan’s book is how he translates real-world tech phenomena into Penumbra-esque equivalents (Google, for instance, is here run by randomly selected managers who feed their employees via an algorithm). At its heart, the book is full of deadly serious questions about where our technology is taking us and loads of sharp observations about tech culture. One could quibble with the novel’s too-tidy ending and occasional linguistic lapses, but there are more than enough nerdy pleasures to compensate in this thought-provoking, frequently delightful debut. And listening to the audiobook — which allows you to combine the warmth of Ari Fliakos’s bouncy narration with the latest mobile audio technology — is arguably the most appropriate way to experience it.

Eat Skull, III

Over the last half-decade, we’ve seen a handful of bands emerge that embraced cruddy recording fidelity as an aesthetic choice rather than a limitation. Red-lining distortion and sludgy tape hiss didn’t have to get in the way of the songs; rather, for those who’d absorbed the lessons of the Swell Maps, Flying Nun or early Pavement sides, imperfections could become like instruments — almost as integral as the chords or lyrics. In recent years, though, bands like Times New Viking and Psychedelic Horseshit have inched out of the murk. Eat Skull, another member of that lo-fi noise-rock class, have taken almost four years to follow 2009 sophomore set Wild and Inside, and the Portland-born band has used the time to make the biggest step sideways.

III is still garage pop, and no one will mistake Eat Skull for Phoenix anytime soon, but the album’s synth-wielding, psychedelic turn succeeds at moving beyond shoddy recording quality as end in itself. Taking on space-rock anthems and ramshackle dance-punk with equal aplomb, Eat Skull are still perverse enough to punctuate the grotesque “taxidermy eyes” imagery of “Dead Horses” with a swooning “Crimson and Clover”-style breakdown. A pair of campfire-psych tracks mid-album also pays unexpected dividends. It all coheres in the fuzzy drone of the closing track, which offers a choice — between burning bridges and buying “brand new ones” — that’s really no choice at all. Eat Skull came to a fork in the road, and they took it.

Maxmillion Dunbar, House of Woo

Maxmillion Dunbar, a DJ/producer from Washington, D.C., makes sleek, spacious electronic music pitched between the current vogues for the rhythmic action of vintage Chicago house and the heady contemplation of cosmic synthesizer jams. About half of House of Woo plays as certifiable dance music, with upright rhythms that assert themselves with force, while the other half has nary a beat to speak for. Representing the former, “Slave to the Vibe” opens with unbound ’80s keyboard sounds, patiently arrayed in floating fashion, that snap into a formalist grid when the beat kicks in a little more than two minutes in. The way the hi-hat hangs in what sounds like a sweaty expanse of the stratosphere evokes old Chicago house anthems by the likes of Larry Heard (Mr. Fingers, Fingers Inc.), but “Woo” pulls back, quiets down, and drifts into comparatively ambient territory. A few beats still clack and clang, but the background textures creep the fore, and a wandering, thinking-out-loud synth-riff establishes itself in a way that remains present in tracks like “Coins for the Canopy” and “The Figurine (Nod Mix).” The funky dancefloor-filler “Ice Cream Graffiti” goes big and beat-intensive again, but it’s never long before the sound spaces out and spreads in a manner befitting the title of “Loving the Drift.”

Samantha Crain, Kid Face

Singer-songwriter Samantha Crain has always sounded like an old soul, her dusty alto worn down by restless thoughts and free-floating anxiety. On the autobiographical Kid Face, the Oklahoma native sounds even more wizened as she explores loneliness, wanderlust and emotional disruption. Produced by John Vanderslice, Kid Face is a sparse record, laced with stark folk and Americana signifiers:acoustic guitar, wobbly piano, curled pedal steel and keening violin. Shambling banjo, stabs of synthesizer or electric guitar add occasional jolts of urgency to the mix.

But significantly, Crain comes into her own as a lyricist on Kid Face. Besides being a meticulous wordsmith (“I’m going to shows, counting my toes and crying over you” is how she describes one particularly trying breakup), she offers thorough, unflinching self-analysis. Crain uses Kid Face‘s songs to examine her place in the world — and figure out how her actions affect others, for better and for worse. “Churchill” addresses the realization that “my whole life I thought I was an opportunist/ But I’m not”; “Sand Paintings” struggles with overcoming self-sabotaging tendencies; and “Ax” is a call to be kind in the face of negativity. Perhaps most impressive is “Never Going Back,” which describes (hopefully) breaking free from a disastrous affair: “The ending of 10,000 dreams/ My soul has finally been set free from his cool eyes.” The song is devastatingly effective because of its economy, the same trait that also makes Kid Face a wonderful record.

New This Week: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Samantha Crain & More

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Push The Sky Away: First, the real big news. To celebrate their 15th studio album Push The Sky Away, we invited Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds to take control of eMusic’s editorial for a week. And they agreed! Which is awesome. To access the full suite of features surrounding Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds eMusic Takeover, go here and have a blast poking around; you’ll find Andrew Perry’s exclusive interview with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis; a list of Warren Ellis’s handpicked eMusic favorites; an interview with Ed Kuepper, and Sam Adams’ glowing review of the record, which goes a little something like this:

The past, or more specifically its absence, comes up a lot on Push the Sky Away. Warren Ellis’s skittering loops, which recall the atmospheric spread of the soundtrack albums he and Cave have made in recent years, have no beginning and no end, like the woman on “Jubilee Street” who “had a history but she had no past.” Myth and reality jumble in an eternal present, with Robert Johnson on one end and Miley Cyrus on the other … It’s certainly not as self-consciously weighty as Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, or as primal as Cave’s Grinderman albums, but Push the Sky Away‘s free-associative trawl exerts a strange fascination, like a dream you’re not quite sure you had.

Matmos, The Marriage of True Minds: The fearlessly experimental electronic duo tend to follow their own inquisitive minds wherever they lead, and on their ninth record, they have lead Matmos into the exploration of telepathy. Andy Battaglia has more:

For those who thought the endearingly eggheaded conceptualists in Matmos could not get more cerebral — this is a duo, after all, whose music has been sourced from the sounds of surgery, digitally deconstructed 19th-century battlefield hymns and readings of the serpentine philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein — consider The Marriage of True Minds. The concept intriguing: Willing test subjects submitted to sensory-deprivation techniques, then “listened” as Matmos member Drew Daniel tried to telepathically communicate the concept for the new Matmos album to them. Recordings of the resulting interactions (the spoken ones, of course, but who knows if that’s all?) figure into each of the songs on The Marriage of True Minds, which covers all kinds of strange ground.

Beach Fossils, Clash the Truth: Brooklyn’s premiere indie-pop janglers return with their follow-up to their 2009 self-titled breakthrough. Matt Fritch writes:

Beach Fossils singer/songwriter Dustin Payseur is talking about his generation; he just sounds like a relic from 1980s post-punk England doing it. His friends are doing it, too, to the point where you can argue that a mostly Brooklyn-centric cadre of bands — including Wild Nothing, Frankie Rose and DIIV, among others — has come to own the busy-yet-bare aesthetic borne on heavily reverbed guitars, brittle drums and washed-out vocals. Beneath the surface, however, Payseur doesn’t seem very interested in the past. The disaffection or apathy we associate with vocalists like Payseur — Ride’s Mark Gardener comes to mind — does not apply here. Beach Fossils’ shimmering guitars can seem similarly cool to the touch, but the album is more inclined toward dense, three-minute blasts of melody and rhythm than dreamy splendor.

The Relatives, The Electric Word: Long-disbanded gospel-funk group from the 1970s reunites, rains down undimmed righteous funk on the populace fury forty years later, on Yep Roc Records. Mike McGonigal spoke with the Rev. Gean West of the group, and Richard Gehr wrote the review:

Gospel singer Rev. Gean West and his brother Rev. Tommie formed The Relatives in the early ’70s and disbanded by 1980, but their electrifying, innovative gospel-soul hybrid finally saw the light of day when their early singles and unreleased sessions were compiled on 2009′s Don’t Let Me Fall. The lo-fi glory of those recordings is now utterly fulfilled on this very long-time-coming full-on debut, The Electric Word, which augments the Relatives’ familial voices with members of Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears. The added members powerfully facilitate the Relatives’ remarkable ability to blend the Temptations’, Four Tops’ and Isley Brothers’ gnarliest acid-soul experiments with traditional gospel.

Jamie Lidell, Jamie Lidell: Warp’s crown prince of blue-eyed glitch-soul returns with a record that merges the two halves of his recording persona. Andy Battaglia writes:

Jamie Lidell has made a career-long habit of swerving, with periods devoted to out-there electronic futurism and then, by surprise, vintage throwback soul. His self-titled album makes good on the prospects of both, with an expansive, prismatic sound and a heartrending voice that proves decidedly human. More digital than recent Lidell albums, which paid explicit tribute to ’60s soul, it sounds more in line with the ’80s, when the influence of New Wave brought swelling psychodrama into R&B.”

Lady Lamb The Beekeeper, Ripely Pine: Lovely, arresting, left-field folk-rock, with the gnarled edges left exposed. Rachael Maddux gives us more:

On Lady Lamb the Beekeeper’s first record cut in a proper studio, nothing is quite as it seems … songs tend start in one place, end in another, and cycle through sometimes a dozen imaginings of themselves on the way — like “You Are The Apple” which, over seven minutes, slides from a nervous acoustic twitch to a swampy low-slung romp to a billowing, spiking orchestral swoon. The album’s lyrical turf is both elemental and surreal, like a funhouse mirror turned on a dream of an anatomy lab; hearts are eaten like strawberry cake, blood is canned like jam, love is handled like a newborn’s skull.

Samantha Crain, Kid Face: A beautiful folk album from an in-house eMusic fave. Annie Zaleski writes:

Singer-songwriter Samantha Crain has always sounded like an old soul, her dusty alto worn down by restless thoughts and free-floating anxiety. On the autobiographical Kid Face, the Oklahoma native sounds even more wizened as she explores loneliness, wanderlust and emotional disruption. Produced by John Vanderslice, Kid Face is a sparse record, laced with stark folk and Americana signifiers: acoustic guitar, wobbly piano, curled pedal steel and keening violin.

Campfires, Tomorrow, Tomorrow: Shambling, lo-fi taped-together indie pop is generally my favorite kind of music, so it’s no surprise that this Portland band has caught my attention. Lots of fuzz and creaky vocals, pretty primitive instrumentation — recalls the early days of indie rock before people cared about boring details like staying in tune or hiring professional stylists.

Concrete Knives, Be Your Own King: Tense guitar-based indie rock with the right amount of reach and flourish. eMusic’s Andrew Mueller says:

Concrete Knives rigorously observe one of the cardinal rules of the post-punk genre: terseness. The 10 tracks on Be Your Own King are rattled out in a squeak over 34 minutes. Concrete Knives are not, however, humorless minimalists; at heart, they’re a commendably unabashed pop group. Witness the giddy shout-along chorus of “Brand New Start,” which recalls The B-52s, the surging Joy Division bassline that carries “Happy Mondays,” and the raggedly triumphant opening track “Bornholmer,” which boldly posits that Nena’s “99 Luftballoons” is territory worth mining.

Eat Skull, III: Grotty lo-fi stalwarts get a little less lo-fi. Marc Hogan has the review:

III is still garage pop, and no one will mistake Eat Skull for Phoenix anytime soon, but the album’s synth-wielding, psychedelic turn succeeds at moving beyond shoddy recording quality as end in itself. Taking on space-rock anthems and ramshackle dance-punk with equal aplomb, Eat Skull are still perverse enough to punctuate the grotesque “taxidermy eyes” imagery of “Dead Horses” with a swooning “Crimson and Clover”-style breakdown. A pair of campfire-psych tracks mid-album also pays unexpected dividends. It all coheres in the fuzzy drone of the closing track, which offers a choice — between burning bridges and buying “brand new ones” — that’s really no choice at all.

Black Twig Pickers, Rough Carpenters: I really do not have a ton of positive things for the “old-timey” music that’s been making sudden inroads into mainstream culture lately. Suspenders and off-mic shouting do not a hootenanny make, my friends. Would that any fraction of the people who have been going gaga over [REDACTED] would instead discover The Black Twig Pickers. Sawing violins, bristling banjos and loose, swinging tempos, this is the good-time wheat-chewin’ music you’ve been looking for. Recommended

Maxmillion Dunbar, House of Woo: Cerebral dance music, tugging at your brain at your hips at the same time. Andy Battaglia writes:

Maxmillion Dunbar, a DJ/producer from Washington, D.C., makes sleek, spacious electronic music pitched between the current vogues for the rhythmic action of vintage Chicago house and the heady contemplation of cosmic synthesizer jams. About half of House of Woo plays as certifiable dance music, with upright rhythms that assert themselves with force, while the other half has nary a beat to speak for.

Mark Kozelek, Like Rats and Live at Phoenix Public House: Pair of new albums from the erstwhile Red House Painters/Sun Kil Moon frontman. The former takes a pretty dicey concept — acoustic versions of classic metal and punk songs — and manages to execute it without a trace of irony. The latter is simply a Kozelek live performance that’s graceful and tender.

Baptists, Bushcraft: YES. Thoroughly hammering speed metal album from this Vancouver group is full-bore panic attack music, nail-gun guitars and hardcore howling. Almost wolflike in its ferocity. Recommended

Puscifer, Donkey Punch The Night: The goofy side project of Maynard James Keenan gets a little less goofy, but not so serious that they can’t name their album Donkey Punch the Night. Here’s Jon Wiederhorn with more:

Unlike Puscifer’s sillier output, Donkey Punch seems like a concerted effort to demonstrate that the group is as gifted, sincere and intoxicating as Tool, A Perfect Circle or Keenan’s Caduceus brand wine. The only tongue-in-cheek moment on Donkey Punch is a cover of metal band Accept’s 1983 anthem “Balls to the Wall,” which converts the forceful, testosterone-pumped original into a vulnerable, ethereal number that replaces manly chants of “God bless you!” and “Hey!” into wispy tendrils of female vocals … With Donkey Punch the Night, Keenan continues to push boundaries of what Puscifer are capable of — which at this point includes just about anything.

Various Artists, The Crying Princess: 78 Records from Burma and Scattered Melodies: Korean Kayagum Sanjo: GREAT new pair of comps from the fine folks at Sublime Frequencies. Both of these gather up ancient, obscure music from far-flung parts of the world. The music on The Crying Princess dates back as far as 1909, and much of the music is fascinating and melodically unpredictable — almost avant-garde in its reach and approach. The latter is a compilation of “Kayagum Sanjo” music from Korea. “Kayagum Sanjo” translates to mean “Scattered Melodies,” and the music here backs that up. Lots of wobbly, faltering guitar-like melodies and erratic, thumping rhythms. Totally absorbing. Both are Recommended

Country Mice, Hour of the Wolf: Brooklyn band play moderate, moody indie rock. Despite what they name says, there’s not much “country” about this — think an airier Buffalo Tom and you’re on the right track.

EULA, “I Collapse”: New single from eMusic Selects alum EULA is their strongest work yet, a wild tiger of a song that starts rangy and dissonant and explodes during the chorus. Recommended

Botanist, IV: The award for world’s craziest concept album this week doesn’t even go to Matmos. No, that honor is reserved for the black metal weirdo The Botanist; here’s our metal expert Jon Wiederhorn, breaking it down:

IV Mandragora is a concept album about a scientist (the Botanist) who cultivates an army of mandrakes to wage war against mankind. Throughout, The Botanist seems several seeds short of a full garden: A textbook misanthrope, he dwells in his private sanctuary, The Verdant Realm, in the land of Veltheimia and talks to his plants about the day when greenery will again conquer the earth. In keeping with the dark green theme, five of the songs are named after actual flowers, giving The Botanist extra credibility for those who thrall to the work of Carl Linnaeus and Norman Borlaugh. For open-minded black metal fans, IV Mandragora isn’t just different, it’s just about essentially, expressing old themes in an entirely new way.

My Gold Mask, Leave Me Midnight: I really, really, really love this record. Sleek, spooky, pouty, gothy music from this Chicago duo is full of chilly songs and roaring tempos — this is some great, blue-back nightmare pop, alluring and addictive. Recommended

Atlas Genius, When It Was Now: Australian band blends a U2-like flair for grandeur with twitchy guitars and the steady thump of dance music for an album that feels spit-shined and easy to absorb.

Lusine, The Waiting Room: Tranquil synth songs that pair deliberately minimal instrumentation — surges of synth, blipping rhythms — with mannered, laconic vocals.

Godflesh, Hymns Special Edition: Sixth and final Godflesh album gets the reissue treatment. Less industrial than earlier outings, more clawing and feral and nasty.

Endless Boogie, Long Island: They’re back! The latest greasy groover from Endless Boogie is full of everything you’ve come to expect from these dudes: whiskey bar riffs, motorcycle vocals and a general spirit of anarchy. They’re like a lo-fi Steppenwolf, these guys.

LA Phil and Gustavo Dudamel, Mahler 9­: America’s most closely watched conductor and the charismatic new music director of the LA Phil, Gustavo Dudamel, continues to prove himself even in the face of astronomic, unreasonable expectations. Here, a sorrowfully expressive and emotionally immediate reading of Mahler’s unearthly, drawn-out goodbye of a final symphony:

Been wondering whether the hotshot young Venezuelan conductor lives up to the hype? Wonder no more, for to be this distinctive in warhorse repertoire, mostly without resorting to willful exaggerations, is impressive. There’s a languorous fervor in this caught-in-concert reading that recalls Bernstein. This reading is so compelling that it’s easy to hear why the 32-year-old is the newest superstar conductor.

Portal, Vexovoid: New album from these metal weirdos whose lead vocalist looks like this. This is very good — churning and bleak and apocalyptic, amazingly suffocating and Recommended

Pyschic Ills, One Track Mind: Latest from spooky psych folkers continues their pattern of drowsy vocals and free-spirited, open-ended jamming. The results usually end up some place dark and foreboding.

Disperse, Living Mirrors: Typically arty and expansive metal on the Season of Mist label. This Polish group pulls off an unlikely marriage of insistently melodic vocals with truly chaotic, intricate arrangements. Lots of fleet-fingered fretwork and percussive heart attacks while the vocals maintain a steady, keening melodicism.

Useless Eaters, Hypertension: Brash, bratty music from these apostles of Jay Reatard. The Eaters are weirder and less high octane than Jay was, and their songs have the same snarl and bark as vintage Oh Sees. Recommended

Devourment, Conceived in Sewage: Latest flesh-scarrer from these death metal stalwarts, this one is the sound of being buried in a coffin only three feet underground and then having the devil’s horses stampede above you for all eternity. It’s pretty good.

Interview: The Relatives

The Relatives are a Dallas, Texas-based gospel funk act formed by brothers Gean and Tommie West in 1970, after Tommie had begun to write topical material in a gospel vein. Then in his mid 30s, Gean had already spent decades with regional gospel quartets, but yearned to connect with a hipper and younger audience. The Relatives merged a full, heavy funk group with a gospel quartet, resulting in an eight-piece band, like some genius gospel take on P-Funk.

They never achieved much success, and disbanded in 1975—until the release of their early material by Heavy Light in 2009 (on the album Don’t Let Me Fall) brought them out of retirement. They’ve since toured the world, bringing the funk gospel to Australia and France and New York City. Their propulsive new record The Electric Word for Yep Rock is the Relatives’ first proper album, ever, and was produced by Spoon’s Jim Eno with help from guitarist Zach Ernst.

eMusic’s Mike McGonical spoke with the almost-77-year-old Reverend Gean West by phone about singing in church and rediscovering his voice.

You first sang professionally about 55 years ago, with the Sensational Golden Knights, in the late 1950s. And then in the 1960s, you were with the Southernaires out of Shreveport, Louisiana and the Mighty Golden Voices of Dallas, Texas. How did you get started singing?

I’ve been singing since I was five years old! A lady in the community had a little group. There were about five of us; she would take us around. I wasn’t a lead singer at the time; I was in the background as a tenor. As time went on and I grew up a ways, I began to really develop my voice, you know. I remember once the Southernaires went to Odessa, Texas. All the other fellas [singing lead] in the group had real pretty voices, like Sam Cooke’s, while I always had a more of a rough voice. Our manager would stick them pretty voices up all the time to perform. Then right at the end, he would call me out to sing.

In Odessa, he had me standing on the side until finally I sung this song about “Somebody Always Talking ‘Bout Me.” And man the people just went wild. As they used to say, “The church was tore up!” People were screaming all over the place, reacting to my singing. This older woman came up to me after and she said, “I seen that the Lord has his anointing upon you.” After that, I would sing background and lead; I became the main lead singer.

What were people’s reactions to your music, when you first put the Relatives together?

At the time, we were used to performing in the church, so that’s where we tried to take it. We wanted to bring this different sound into the church, you know? After we had rehearsed about a year, we started to test it, to see where it worked. So we got a little church that we used to perform in all the time, and we went in there. The younger generation was amazed! But the older generation was just kind of…looking at us. Later, the minister of the church came out of his office and said “I don’t know what they’re doing, but it sound good to me”!Still, we didn’t do too many churches after that.

After the Relatives broke up, I understand that you had a gospel radio program and that you also ministered? How was that different from leading these groups?

It was a lot easier, to be back home in one town, I will tell you that! But preaching, that’s something I’d done even before I was singing. As a little bitty boy, I used to preach for ‘em — and they would get a kick out of me preaching. This is back when I was three or four years old. I used to hear my dad fussing at my mother before church. So my message was that “My mother was good, but my daddy got the devil in him!”

Did saying that in church get you in trouble at home?

No, no. My daddy got a thrill over it. He was a minister, himself, you see.

After your older music was reissued, what was it like to reunite and perform with the Relatives again?

When all this came up, I didn’t realize I still had a voice! I’d been off for singing for about 15 years or more. When they found me, and we started talking, I got in touch with those that were still able to perform from the Relatives. The night we started rehearsing, I was surprised that I still had the voice to do it with.

One night, after we’d first brought it to the people, I went home and asked the Lord, “Why did you wait till I got old to bring it to me in this manner, in this way?” And a voice told me that, “The reason I want you to do it at your age is I want you to encourage other older people that it’s not over yet! And all they need to do is have the will to get up and they don’t have to just sit in the rocking chair. They just have to have the will. This is what I’m anointing you to do.” So, it’s just…I think it’s more or less a gift from God, my voice.