Tomahawk, Oddfellows

Of all the side projects and solo pursuits Mike Patton has indulged in over the past decade, Tomahawk’s fourth album is the closest he’s ever come to releasing another Faith No More record. Not espresso-huffing covers of Italian pop songs (Mondo Cane), or a sparring session with world-renowned turntablists (General Patton vs. The X-Ecutioners), or a faithful nod to Native American music (Tomahawk’s last album, Anonymous) — a Faith No More record. Meaning: 13 songs that are experimental and enjoyable. Or as guitarist Duane Denison recently told SPIN, “This is not [a] sausage party in the church basement…No, this is meant to be played in huge clubs with alcohol and drugs and dancing girls and all those good things.” Amen. Having bassist Trevor Dunn back at Patton’s side (see also: Mr. Bungle, Fantômas) certainly doesn’t hurt matters, especially when the Hulk-smash beats of Battles drummer John Stanier are in the cleanup hitter position. True to Denison’s promise, this record’s all about the riffs and meaty hooks, however, from the ghostly apparitions and full-bodied choruses of “Stone Letter” and “White Hats/Black Hats” to the knuckle-dragging dynamics of “Choke Neck” and “I.O.U.” If you think Patton lost the plot somewhere around WTF duets of Peeping Tom — Norah Jones, Kool Keith and Massive Attack on one album? Sure! — Oddfellows is the record where Patton redeems himself and reminds us what he’s always been: one hell of a frontman.

Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba, Jama Ko

Plug in, crank up the volume and play the blues. It’s a simple idea that has worked for guitar greats from Muddy Waters and B.B. King onward. Malian musician Bassekou Kouyate plays the blues, but his take on the formula is rather different. His blues rise out of the Sahara, and his weapon is the ngoni, the West African lute that he calls the “Malian banjo.”

Jama Ko, his third outing with the band Ngoni Ba, was recorded against the backdrop of a military coup in Mali’s capital, Bamako, and civil unrest in the north of the country, where Islamists are trying to silence musicians. Small wonder, then, that it’s an album with a desperate edge — Kouyate using his songs to plead for peace and tolerance, and pouring every ounce of passion into his playing.

There is a driving urgency to “Ne Me Fatigue Pas” (literally “Don’t Wear Me Out”), a track that sounds as raw and gutbucket as anything to have come out of the south side of Chicago. Kouyate releases his frustrations in a breathtaking solo that spirals in intensity, distorted and utterly electrifying.

Indeed, at times Ngoni Ba sound like an African Led Zeppelin, particularly on “Mali Koori,” where Kouyate explodes like Jimmy Page, bending and sliding notes on the ngoni in a way no one has done before. It’s the band’s Dazed And Confused, a glistening slab of rocking blues that works up a heavy sweat.

The loose-limbed jam “Poye 2″ eases the pace, and connects the blues from both sides of the Atlantic by featuring US musician Taj Mahal. When they first played together on Mahal’s 1999 album with Toumani Diabate, Kulanjan, Mahal was the roots veteran and Kouyate the upstart still earning his spurs. This time they’re equals, trading vocal and instrumental lines with the ease of old friends.

Jama Ko is an album that establishes the ngoni on the international stage and Kouyate as its master. The fact that his music should resonate so easily in Western ears is the icing on the cake.

The Ruby Suns, Christopher

The artistic evolution of Ryan McPhun — now the Ruby Suns’ sole member — mirrors the recent stylistic progression of indie-pop itself. On his 2005 debut, this Ventura-born, Auckland-honed, but currently Oslo-based multi-instrumentalist fashioned a low-fi approximation of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Then he moved into Afrobeat mode with 2008′s acclaimed Sea Lion, and plugged into synths on 2010′s chillwave-y Fight Softly. Now on his latest offering he beefs up his beats with the mixing help of Beach House producer Chris Coady, who hones McPhun’s largely self-made jams much like Flaming Lips knob-twiddler Dave Fridmann polished fellow one-man-band Tame Impala. Inspired by this wayfaring musician’s new Scandinavian home, Christopher is essentially a psychedelic DIY impression of a Robyn album.

It starts appropriately with “Desert of Pop,” which details McPhun’s autobiographical adventures in discovering the Swedish singer’s chart-topping dance music, drunkenly meeting her backstage, and then seeing her show. Its mixture of elation with sadness — particularly the way the chorus emphases the line “makes me want to cry,” as if tears are the inevitable outcome of all desire — is, of course, so very Robyn, a singer who revels in conflicting yet extreme emotions. Despite his latest infatuation, McPhun hasn’t completely forsaken chiming guitars: They figure prominently on two of Christopher‘s most detailed and reflective songs, “In Real Life” and “Heart Attack.” McPhun’s introspective impression of club pop is otherwise heavy on synths and hand-played drums, but combined with his complicated chords and soft, Arthur Russell-esque croon the nuanced result feels more like a culmination than yet another departure.

The Ruby Suns, Christopher

The artistic evolution of Ryan McPhun — now the Ruby Suns’ sole member — mirrors the recent stylistic progression of indie-pop itself. On his 2005 debut, this Ventura-born, Auckland-honed, but currently Oslo-based multi-instrumentalist fashioned a low-fi approximation of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Then he moved into Afrobeat mode with 2008′s acclaimed Sea Lion, and plugged into synths on 2010′s chillwave-y Fight Softly. Now on his latest Sub Pop offering he beefs up his beats with the mixing help of Beach House producer Chris Coady, who hones McPhun’s largely self-made jams much like Flaming Lips knob-twiddler Dave Fridmann polished fellow one-man-band Tame Impala. Inspired by this wayfaring musician’s new Scandinavian home, Christopher is essentially a psychedelic DIY impression of a Robyn album.

It starts appropriately with “Desert of Pop,” which details McPhun’s autobiographical adventures in discovering the Swedish singer’s chart-topping dance music, drunkenly meeting her backstage, and then seeing her show. Its mixture of elation with sadness — particularly the way the chorus emphases the line “makes me want to cry,” as if tears are the inevitable outcome of all desire — is, of course, so very Robyn, a singer who revels in conflicting yet extreme emotions. Despite his latest infatuation, McPhun hasn’t completely forsaken chiming guitars: They figure prominently on two of Christopher‘s most detailed and reflective songs, “In Real Life” and “Heart Attack.” McPhun’s introspective impression of club pop is otherwise heavy on synths and hand-played drums, but combined with his complicated chords and soft, Arthur Russell-esque croon the nuanced result feels more like a culmination than yet another departure.

Interview: Kris Kristofferson

All country singers should have a chance to go out like Kris Kristofferson. Throughout his last few albums, he has explored what it means to come to the end of a long road, with a sober understanding that he has more past behind him than future ahead of him. His latest, the ominously titled yet curiously celebratory Feeling Mortal, plays like a man’s last words, full of humor and gratitude and wisdom. Produced by Don Was to capture the new grain in the singer’s voice, the record is solemn but not joyless or fearful. “Life is a song for the dying to sing, and it’s got to have feeling to mean anything,” Kristofferson asserts on the “Bread for the Body,” one of the album’s rowdiest tunes.

Kristofferson certainly has a lot to look back on. Born in Texas midway through the Great Depression, he was a football star in college, a Rhodes Scholar, an Army helicopter pilot and a janitor at Columbia Studios in Nashville. When the industry finally took note of the mop-pusher’s talents, he penned hits for Johnny Cash, Ray Price, Sammi Smith and — perhaps most famously — Janis Joplin. As an actor, he worked with some of the greatest filmmakers of the ’70s, including Peckinpah, Scorsese and Friedkin. He brings all those experiences to bear on Feeling Mortal, but Kristofferson, speaking from his home in California, said he was most grateful for very different things: his large family, his long marriage (“she does all the work and I sit around watching television,” he chuckles), and a good song every now and then.

This album sounds like a thematic extension of the last two, which also deal with old age and mortality. Did you think of them as being connected?

Actually, no. I usually I think every album that I’ve done has been autobiographical, like a scrapbook — what I’m going through at the time. And I guess that’s probably why these seem similar, because I’m just growing older. I don’t feel bad about it, but it’s the way things look now.

So you couldn’t have written this album at any other point in your life.

Probably. Well, I know I never would have written a couple of the songs, like “Feeling Mortal.” I wouldn’t have written that one. There are a few in there that are older from back when I was first attracted to writing country songs. “My Heart Was the Last One to Know.” I can’t even think of which ones I got on there now…”Stairway to the Bottom.”

What made you gravitate toward “My Heart Was the Last to Know” for this album?

I really don’t know. I did about 20 songs with Don and the musicians, and then we selected half of them. I thought it was just a great song and wanted to include it. This is a reflective time of my life, so I’m more apt to be looking back at some of the old songs. Some of them almost feel like new songs to me because I haven’t thought of them in a long time.

The tone of the album is definitely reflective, but it’s also very contented. Especially the title track, which could have been very morbid but actually sounds very thankful.

I’m glad you feel that way, because that’s the way I feel. I feel gratitude. I don’t feel any anxiety about being at this end of the road, you know. I feel very blessed to have all these experiences behind me and to be living with family that I love. Lisa and I are very happy. She does all the work and I watch television.

There are some very affecting tributes to people like “Mama Stewart” and “Ramblin’ Jack.” How did those two people end up on the album?

Mama Stewart was Rita Coolidge’s grandmother, and she was pretty remarkable. I felt like I had a good description of her, especially her attitude toward her blindness and the fact that she got her site back after she was in her ’90s. And just like it says in the song, she didn’t seem at all surprised. God was doing her right. What was the other song?

“Ramblin’ Jack.”

That song reminds me of when I wrote “The Pilgrim.” A lot of people said it seemed like I was writing about Jack, but I was writing about myself, you know. But I was probably writing about what I recognized in Jack, and what I was saying in “The Pilgrim” applied to a whole bunch of us — the people I respected who were doing the same thing I was, which was gathering songs. More than anything else that was what was important. It didn’t matter whether you were rich or successful or whatever. The songs existed by themselves and serious songwriters who I related to — who I identified myself through — felt the same way.

“Feeling Mortal” seems to be very concerned with the comforts and thrills of music. You sing about that on “Bread for the Body” and “You Don’t Tell Me What to Do.”

Like I said, I’ve always written about what I was going through at the time. That’s why looking back on my albums is like looking back over a scrapbook of my life. At my age, I reflect more on how lucky I am that I got to make this my life — to be creative, to be making pieces of art that work and that other people can identify with. Ever since I put my life in that direction, I’ve never regretted it. I’ve never ever thought I’d made a wrong move, and it just keeps getting better. I got eight kids who love each other and laugh all the time. I’ve been married for 30 years and it gets better every day. I feel very fortunate that this is my life.

There have certainly been some changes in your voice over the years. It sounds a bit lower, for one thing. Has that changed how you write songs?

I don’t know anything about that. I’ve never had a very approachable voice. I know when I first went to Nashville, they wouldn’t even let me sing my own demos. But people tolerate it now. And I know at least I ain’t a great vocalist. People I like to listen to, like Hank Williams and Ray Charles, they’re great voices. Merle Haggard. Willie Nelson. I just feel grateful that I’m able to work with those people and we respect each other. I know the very first album that I made, I felt it was overproduced. I wasn’t used to recording and I was just working with people who recorded that way in Nashville. But I was just grateful to be able to make a record, and I do appreciate that since I’ve been working with Don anyway, it’s been more aimed at being compatible with my way of singing. I’ll never be a great vocalist, but I can interpret my own songs.

How does it feel to live with some of these songs for so much of your life? Do songs like “Sunday Morning Coming Down” or “For the Good Times” take on new significance over time?

For some reason, when I’m performing the songs, luckily I go into them and I feel the same as I did when I wrote them. “Bobby McGee” always feels the same to me. I feel the same mixture of sadness and gratitude. It’s I think that’s one of the beauties of songs for me, is that you feel them. I don’t know if that’s by virtue of the music or the words or a combination of both. But you experience what you were experiencing when you were writing them back then. Even “Help Me Make It through the Night,” I can feel just like I did when I wrote that.

So they’re almost like time machines.

Yes. You put your finger on it right there. It is a time machine. You go back in time. I’m not still getting up and having a beer for breakfast on a Sunday morning, but I can go back there every time I sing the song. But that’s what songs should do for you. They should affect you spiritually, physically and emotionally

You’ve always been quick to recognize and support other songwriters, most famously John Prine. Are there any current songwriters that have impressed you lately?

There are songwriters, and I’m afraid that I can’t say who they are. One thing that has happened to my brain as I’ve gotten older is that my memory has gotten so bad that I can’t remember names at all. I’ve been told it’s a result of football and boxing. So far it hasn’t upset me any, though. I’m thinking of about three different writers and I can’t begin to tell you their names. I don’t listen to the radio at all, and I really don’t listen to much music anymore either. I haven’t really listened to a lot of music ever since I started working on the road singing my own songs, which usually fill up my head. But I am glad I ran into people like John Prine. I’m going to see him pretty soon. He’s coming out to where I live in Maui and we’re going to sing a couple of songs together. Or we just did. [Laughs.] I’m sorry. Oh boy. Well, there you go.

The History of Apple Pie, Out of View

On their debut album Out of View, London quintet The History of Apple Pie blend the most precious of indie-pop impulses with the messiest squalling noise-rock has to offer. Vocalist Stephanie Min’s feathery vocals float high in the mix, leaving her teen-romance lyrics (“We’re having so much fun in the light of the sun/ You’re so cool”) faintly discernible above the thick clouds of My Bloody Valentine-style glide guitar that threaten to overwhelm them. It’s that constant give-and-take between pop and art-rock chaos that keeps Out of View interesting: A gruff chord or two always cuts the cotton candy at just the right moment, like when the full-on breakdown interrupts the strawberry lemonade-flavored workout “I Want More.” On “Mallory,” the daydreaming verses and the yearning melody are tossed about by an underlayer of sneering riffs and distorted noise. No one side ever wins out over the other for long and the seesawing can give you a powerful sugar buzz.

Local Natives, Hummingbird

If Local Natives’ howling 2009 cover of the Talking Heads’ itchy, self-conscious “Warning Sign” wasn’t clue enough, there is plenty of anxiety lurking beneath this LA quartet’s smooth exterior. On Hummingbird, which improves on its predecessor in every way, the band’s hootenanny harmonies are dialed down and the production values increased, all to heighten an uneasy emotional core. Though Taylor Long’s mile-wide tenor earns comparisons to Band of Horses’ Ben Bridwell, and there’s a resemblance to the National’s button-down production sheen, what sets Local Natives apart is a sui generis approach to eerie scene-setting. “Black Spot” summarizes this approach: opening with a solo piano that sounds like a shivering ghost playing “Chopsticks,” the song deliberately builds toward an aching crescendo. On late-album highlight “Colombia,” Long reacts to the death of a family member with a heartbreaking and rare combination of grief and self-doubt: “Every night I ask myself/ Am I giving enough?” Primary among Long’s able assistants is the band’s drummer Matt Frazier. He unsettles Long’s anguish on the opening track “You & I” with a knees-and-elbows approach similar to the National’s Bryan Devendorf, and on “Wooly Mammoth” and “Breakers” he creates the effect of ocean waves crashing onto a beachfront. This is the crux of Hummingbird‘s rare achievement: when moments of terror become something sublime.

How Elmore James Invented Metal

Elmore James is often demeaned as a one-trick pony — or, in his case, a one lick pony. That would be the swooping, stinging slide guitar figure he played on “Dust My Broom,” his first record, in 1951. He got it from Robert Johnson’s 1936 “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” and Johnson himself had adapted it from Kokomo Arnold’s “Sagefield Woman Blues.” But the lick is still known universally as “the Elmore James riff,” and you’ll recognize it as soon as you hear it; it’s that distinct, and that powerful. It so defined postwar slide that labels pretty much made him repeat it over and over. He used it on “Dust My Blues,” “Wild About You Baby,” “Please Find My Baby,” “I Believe, “I’m Worried,” “Fine Little Mama,” “My Kinda Woman,” “Blues Before Sunrise” and three subsequent versions of “Dust My Broom” that he cut — and those are just the songs that come immediately to mind. Yet I’m still exhilarated, recharged, by that sound every time I hear it. If you’re not, I understand. But there are a few more things about Elmore James you should know.

Like: He’s an electric guitar pioneer, and had one of the first electric blues bands in the Mississippi Delta and in Chicago. Many said the Broomdusters rocked harder than Muddy’s or Wolf’s bands. A radio repairman by trade, James tinkered with his pickups, wiring and amps to become the first set-’em-on-11 electric guitarist; his explosive sound, screaming with sustained tones, was feral, distorted and densely textured. Near the end, he’d slam his fretboard with his hand, and wrestle what came to be called power chords, out of his instrument. Whether they knew it or not, “heavy” guitarists right up to contemporaries like Dimebag Darrell are as indebted to James as are Hound Dog Taylor, Homesick James, J.B. Hutto and other Chicago slide guitarists who rode the wave he created, as well as non-Chicago bluesmen like B.B. King. A parade of blues-rockers including Eric Clapton, Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer of early Fleetwood Mac, Brian Jones of the Stones, Duane Allman, Canned Heat, Johnny Winter, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Mike Bloomfield with Paul Butterfield, George Thorogood, Jimi Hendrix and others revived James’s songs and did their best to emulate his lick. His voice was nearly as earth-shaking as his guitar, loud and anguished and pushing at the edges of his upper range until it threatened to break up like a radio signal lost in the ether; the original, old-school dictionary definition of “funk” was the noun “panic,” and that’s what Elmore’s voice sounded like. And James was also no slouch as a songwriter, from the simple eloquence of his overhaul of Tampa Red’s “It Hurts Me Too” to the raw imagery of “Bleeding Heart” to the carnal knowledge of “Shake Your Moneymaker.”

Born near Richland, Mississippi, in 1918, Elmore was a youthful running buddy of both Robert Johnson and Sonny Boy Williamson II. By the late ’30s, he already had a band, including drummer, working Delta jook joints; only Robert Lockwood Jr. could make the same claim. Around 1940, Elmore took up electric guitar, and by the time he began recording — with Williamson II, in 1952 — his version of “Dust My Broom” was notorious across the Delta. When James finally cut it with Sonny Boy II blowing harp, the electrified slide created a sensation. Elmore quickly signed with the Bihari Brothers’ family of L.A. labels — most releases were on Flair, though they’re known today as his Modern sides, after the parent company — and moved to Chicago to form the Broomdusters. The band featured piano pounder Johnny Jones and the braying tones of tenor sax man J.T. Brown (the chief soloist besides James), as well as bassist Homesick James (who sometimes added a second guitar) and drummer Odie Payne. The Biharis milked the “Dust My Broom” lick for all it was worth, but all through the ’50s there was apparently a huge gap between the Broomdusters live — reckless but tight, verging on rock — and the singles James cut. Still, it’s hard to argue with diverse and devastating fare like the breakneck “Hawaiian Boogie,” the swamp-tinged “Sho ‘Nuff I Do,” the scorching “Please Find My Baby,” the bopping “Strange Kinda Feeling,” or the slow blues “Sunny Land,” among the most memorable Modern tracks gathered on albums like Let’s Cut It: The Very Best of Elmore James, Best of the Modern Years and Blues Kingpins.

James recorded irregularly during most of the ’50s, largely because his heart condition led him to periodically flee Chicago and the music business for the more restful life back in Mississippi. The seven sides he cut for Chief and the nine for Chess don’t all appear on eMusic, though highlights are scattered across various compilations. These include the mellow, Dixielandish “Madison Blues” on Up Jumped Elmore, the jumping “Cry for Me Baby” on The Blues of Elmore James and “Country Boogie (Tool Bag Boogie)” and “Whose Muddy Shoes” on Elmore James Sings the Blues. But Elmore’s finest body of work is the 50 sides cut over five sessions between 1959-63 for New York entrepreneur Bobby Robinson’s Fire/Fury/Enjoy, which are scattered across Shake Your Moneymaker, The Sky Is Crying, Standing at the Crossroads and others.

Robinson was the only real producer James ever had, and together they reached back for new versions of old favorites — both their muscular versions of “Dust My Broom” make the original sound positively quaint — while also fashioning some of the most hellacious postwar blues ever. Robinson cut James with the Broomdusters, in quartets, and with studio bands containing full horn sections; Elmore played slide on some and ultra-modern lead on others. The very first session yielded “The Sky is Crying,” which quickly joined “Dust My Broom” and “It Hurts Me Too” as EJ calling cards. If “Something Inside Me” isn’t his most gut-wrenching slow blues ever, then “I Need You” is. “Done Somebody Wrong” rides jackhammer riffing, while the off-kilter “Bobby’s Rock” floats on Duane Eddyish guitar. “One Way Out” is frantic. The remake of Robert Johnson’s “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” manages to sound simultaneously archaic and right up to date. But at his best, Elmore James, whose heart ailments killed him three months after his final Robinson sessions, always sounded both archaic and right up to date. He wore his Delta roots on his sleeve, and he was forever trying to wrench new sounds out of his guitar.

Interview: Kris Kristofferson

All country singers should have a chance to go out like Kris Kristofferson. Throughout his last few albums, he has explored what it means to come to the end of a long road, with a sober understanding that he has more past behind him than future ahead of him. His latest, the ominously titled yet curiously celebratory Feeling Mortal, plays like a man’s last words, full of humor and gratitude and wisdom. Produced by Don Was to capture the new grain in the singer’s voice, the record is solemn but not joyless or fearful. “Life is a song for the dying to sing, and it’s got to have feeling to mean anything,” Kristofferson asserts on the “Bready for the Body,” one of the album’s rowdiest tunes.

Kristofferson certainly has a lot to look back on. Born in Texas midway through the Great Depression, he was a football star in college, a Rhodes Scholar, an Army helicopter pilot and a janitor at Columbia Studios in Nashville. When the industry finally took note of the mop-pusher’s talents, he penned hits for Johnny Cash, Ray Price, Sammi Smith and — perhaps most famously — Janis Joplin. As an actor, he worked with some of the greatest filmmakers of the ’70s, including Peckinpah, Scorsese and Friedkin. He brings all those experiences to bear on Feeling Mortal, but Kristofferson, speaking from his home in California, said he was most grateful for very different things: his large family, his long marriage (“she does all the work and I sit around watching television,” he chuckles), and a good song every now and then.

This album sounds like a thematic extension of the last two, which also deal with old age and mortality. Did you think of them as being connected?

Actually, no. I usually I think every album that I’ve done has been autobiographical, like a scrapbook — what I’m going through at the time. And I guess that’s probably why these seem similar, because I’m just growing older. I don’t feel bad about it, but it’s the way things look now.

So you couldn’t have written this album at any other point in your life.

Probably. Well, I know I never would have written a couple of the songs, like “Feeling Mortal.” I wouldn’t have written that one. There are a few in there that are older from back when I was first attracted to writing country songs. “My Heart Was the Last One to Know.” I can’t even think of which ones I got on there now…”Stairway to the Bottom.”

What made you gravitate toward “My Heart Was the Last to Know” for this album?

I really don’t know. I did about 20 songs with Don and the musicians, and then we selected half of them. I thought it was just a great song and wanted to include it. This is a reflective time of my life, so I’m more apt to be looking back at some of the old songs. Some of them almost feel like new songs to me because I haven’t thought of them in a long time.

The tone of the album is definitely reflective, but it’s also very contented. Especially the title track, which could have been very morbid but actually sounds very thankful.

I’m glad you feel that way, because that’s the way I feel. I feel gratitude. I don’t feel any anxiety about being at this end of the road, you know. I feel very blessed to have all these experiences behind me and to be living with family that I love. Lisa and I are very happy. She does all the work and I watch television.

There are some very affecting tributes to people like “Mama Stewart” and “Ramblin’ Jack.” How did those two people end up on the album?

Mama Stewart was Rita Coolidge’s grandmother, and she was pretty remarkable. I felt like I had a good description of her, especially her attitude toward her blindness and the fact that she got her site back after she was in her ’90s. And just like it says in the song, she didn’t seem at all surprised. God was doing her right. What was the other song?

“Ramblin’ Jack.”

That song reminds me of when I wrote “The Pilgrim.” A lot of people said it seemed like I was writing about Jack, but I was writing about myself, you know. But I was probably writing about what I recognized in Jack, and what I was saying in “The Pilgrim” applied to a whole bunch of us — the people I respected who were doing the same thing I was, which was gathering songs. More than anything else that was what was important. It didn’t matter whether you were rich or successful or whatever. The songs existed by themselves and serious songwriters who I related to — who I identified myself through — felt the same way.

“Feeling Mortal” seems to be very concerned with the comforts and thrills of music. You sing about that on “Bread for the Body” and “You Don’t Tell Me What to Do.”

Like I said, I’ve always written about what I was going through at the time. That’s why looking back on my albums is like looking back over a scrapbook of my life. At my age, I reflect more on how lucky I am that I got to make this my life — to be creative, to be making pieces of art that work and that other people can identify with. Ever since I put my life in that direction, I’ve never regretted it. I’ve never ever thought I’d made a wrong move, and it just keeps getting better. I got eight kids who love each other and laugh all the time. I’ve been married for 30 years and it gets better every day. I feel very fortunate that this is my life.

There have certainly been some changes in your voice over the years. It sounds a bit lower, for one thing. Has that changed how you write songs?

I don’t know anything about that. I’ve never had a very approachable voice. I know when I first went to Nashville, they wouldn’t even let me sing my own demos. But people tolerate it now. And I know at least I ain’t a great vocalist. People I like to listen to, like Hank Williams and Ray Charles, they’re great voices. Merle Haggard. Willie Nelson. I just feel grateful that I’m able to work with those people and we respect each other. I know the very first album that I made, I felt it was overproduced. I wasn’t used to recording and I was just working with people who recorded that way in Nashville. But I was just grateful to be able to make a record, and I do appreciate that since I’ve been working with Don anyway, it’s been more aimed at being compatible with my way of singing. I’ll never be a great vocalist, but I can interpret my own songs.

How does it feel to live with some of these songs for so much of your life? Do songs like “Sunday Morning Coming Down” or “For the Good Times” take on new significance over time?

For some reason, when I’m performing the songs, luckily I go into them and I feel the same as I did when I wrote them. “Bobby McGee” always feels the same to me. I feel the same mixture of sadness and gratitude. It’s I think that’s one of the beauties of songs for me, is that you feel them. I don’t know if that’s by virtue of the music or the words or a combination of both. But you experience what you were experiencing when you were writing them back then. Even “Help Me Make It through the Night,” I can feel just like I did when I wrote that.

So they’re almost like time machines.

Yes. You put your finger on it right there. It is a time machine. You go back in time. I’m not still getting up and having a beer for breakfast on a Sunday morning, but I can go back there every time I sing the song. But that’s what songs should do for you. They should affect you spiritually, physically and emotionally

You’ve always been quick to recognize and support other songwriters, most famously John Prine. Are there any current songwriters that have impressed you lately?

There are songwriters, and I’m afraid that I can’t say who they are. One thing that has happened to my brain as I’ve gotten older is that my memory has gotten so bad that I can’t remember names at all. I’ve been told it’s a result of football and boxing. So far it hasn’t upset me any, though. I’m thinking of about three different writers and I can’t begin to tell you their names. I don’t listen to the radio at all, and I really don’t listen to much music anymore either. I haven’t really listened to a lot of music ever since I started working on the road singing my own songs, which usually fill up my head. But I am glad I ran into people like John Prine. I’m going to see him pretty soon. He’s coming out to where I live in Maui and we’re going to sing a couple of songs together. Or we just did. [Laughs.] I’m sorry. Oh boy. Well, there you go.

Various Artists, Reason To Believe: The Songs Of Tim Hardin

Since Tim Hardin died in 1980, not quite a week past his 39th birthday, his spectre has haunted the fringes of alternative rock ‘n’ roll. Hardin wasn’t exactly a marginal figure in his lifetime:¬ His “If I Was A Carpenter” was covered by Rod Stewart, The Four Tops, Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond and Robert Plant, among dozens of others, and the title track of this tribute album has been sung by a chorus including Cher, Bobby Darin, Glen Campbell and Marianne Faithful. But Hardin was never nearly as famous as his most famous songs, and has become one of those figures around whose works an evangelical cult has developed — in his case, quite rightly.

Some of the artists on Reason To Believe have previous form as Hardinistas. Okkervil River appropriated “Black Sheep Boy” as the title of their 2005 album; here they render “It’ll Never Happen” as a meandering torch ballad. Mark Lanegan covered “Shiloh Town” on his 1999 covers album I’ll Take Care Of You; here he contributes a gruff, rugged take on “Red Balloon.” “Shiloh Town,” meanwhile is picked up by Gavin Clark, who invests it with gothic portent not a million miles removed from Lanegan’s version.

A few contributors are drawn to the epic possibilities of Hardin’s terse balladry. Phoenix Foundation’s “Don’t Make Promises You Can’t Keep,” Pinkunoizu’s “I Can’t Slow Down,” Smoke Fairies’ Jefferson Airplane-ish attempt on “If I Were A Carpenter” are all accomplished essays in dazed psychedelia. The most daunting challenge of all — the title track — is accepted by The Sand Band, who meet it with understated aplomb, delivering a lo-fi country reading, laden with wan, what’s-the-point world-weariness, of which its author would surely have approved.

Who Are…FIDLAR

The name FIDLAR is an acronym for a truism West Coast skate-punks quote immediately before executing some astonishingly dumbass feat of derring-do: “fuck it, dog, life’s a risk.” The L.A. quartet are literally second-generation punk rockers — brothers Elvis and Max Kuehn’s father is T.S.O.L. keyboardist Greg Kuehn. And for a band that makes a big deal of being hedonistic slackers (song titles: “Cheap Beer,” “Wake Bake Skate”), they’re amazingly productive. Over the past three years or so, they’ve been responsible for a steady stream of two-minute pop-punk blowouts in the forms of YouTube videos, EPs and live shows. They played more than 100 gigs last year alone, and they’re gearing up to spend most of 2013 on the road.

Shortly before the release of FIDLAR’s self-titled debut album, eMusic’s Douglas Wolk talked to bassist Brandon Schwartzel about the perils of playing more than a dozen songs in a single show, the state of the L.A. punk scene, their audience’s dangerous stunts, and their surprising connection to nu-metal band Trapt.

On the house and studio Schwartzel shares with singer/guitarist Zac Carper:

Me and Zac were both living in our cars, and we were trying to find a place where we could have a studio or make noise. Then we found this place on Craigslist that doubled as an apartment and a studio, so it worked out perfectly. We found out later that Trapt actually built the studio. They had left some gear here, like this big 412 guitar cabinet that had a giant T on it — some of the guys from Trapt actually came by and picked up their stuff.

On a live FIDLAR show’s typical audience:

We try to get the crowd into it as much as possible — loud, energetic, probably pretty drunk. There was this one house party where we were playing in the back yard, and all of a sudden we hear everyone go “whooooaaaa” — and this guy had jumped off the roof of the house we were playing into the crowd. He stagedived off the roof. There’s actually an awesome picture of this guy flying in the air. The crowd totally caught him, it’s all good…We love that shit.

On the band’s infamous “found footage” music videos:

Those we just do on iMovie — we get stoned and make a video. That’s something we’ve done since we started the band: record a song, post it online, make a video for it. The good-looking ones, like “Cheap Beer” and “No Wave,” are by our friend Ryan, who’s actually Zac’s brother-in-law. He’s kind of like our fifth member — he’s been very involved from the beginning. The CCR thing [the video for "Gimme Something," which is synched up with old performance footage of Creedence Clearwater Revival] — that was Ryan. He just did that for fun, too. It’s amazing.

On what it means to be an L.A. band:

One of the reasons we started is that there was such an indie take-themselves-too-seriously scene in Silverlake, where Zac and I were living at the time. We said, “There’s no fucking rock bands any more that just play and have fun.” And then we started finding bands in L.A. that were similar, and now there’s a cool, garage-y, DIY scene — all the Burger Records bands, there’s this band called the Shrine that we play with a bunch, this band Pangaea… The older L.A. bands we feel connected to are the ’70s and ’80s punk bands: Fear, Black Flag, Circle Jerks. X is a band we all love a lot.

On the making of the album:

We did it all at our house. It was set up as a studio, but there wasn’t any gear. So we found some shitty stuff, and borrowed some stuff — a lot of the production was us trying to make the most interesting thing possible with what we had. We’re all super into recording — Zac and Elvis met at a studio where they were both working. The album sounds pretty straightforward, but if you really listen to it, there’s a lot of weird shit and background textures. I really like the sound of “Gimmie Something” — we had all of our friends do group vocals and yell. Elvis played the guitar solo slightly out of tune, but I think it turned out really cool.

On the biggest risk FIDLAR have ever taken as a band:

I think, for us, it was just signing to a label. That was a pretty long process. We started the band as completely DIY, and we never thought about making a record — we just thought, “Let’s make songs and put ‘em out and give everything away for free.” When the idea of signing with [Mom + Pop Music] came up, we thought: Is it going to change anything? That was definitely something that we discussed quite a bit. But they gave us 100 percent creative control — we can do whatever we want and they will put it out.

On getting used to playing headlining shows:

Physically, with how we play, we could probably play for, like, an hour before we all passed out. We kind of give it our all when we play. It gets pretty exhausting. It’s tough now, because we’re used to playing 12 songs, which is half an hour for us, and now we’re playing like 17 songs. We gotta start jamming more. Or have 10 minutes of feedback.

The Joyous Rage of Joyce DiDonato

Baroque opera is a primeval emotional landscape populated by terrifying creatures: venomous queens, apoplectic gods, obsessive enemies, suicidal lovers. It is not where you would expect to find a cheery, Kansas-bred mezzo-soprano like Joyce DiDonato. Yet there she is, marching through this territory of extremes, handling its volatile wildlife with aplomb, making murderous emotions safe for human contact.

Have you ever felt the kind of sensual anger that sometimes invades your limbs and fills you with the curdled milk of human self-righteousness? That’s the kind of joyous rage that DiDonato funnels into the aria “Crude furie” (from Handel’s Serse), which summons “ruthless furies from the barbarous abyss.” The album of Handel arias is called Furore, and in it she delights in the physical pleasure of indignation, using it to power not just the high scorcher of a note on “seno” (“breast”), but a whole range of quivering subtleties.

DiDonato has said that the world needs opera — and opera needs Handel — precisely because of those outsized ladies who strut and screech and dominate and implore, multiplying ordinary human emotions to Imax scale and dispensing with petty fretting and miniature woes. These are characters who suffer exquisitely. Real pain is not beautiful or fun to witness, but opera can transfigure it into a spectacularly entertaining conflagration. For that to happen, the singer has to perform two contradictory tricks: abandon herself utterly to the cascade of dangerous emotions, and maintain total control. DiDonato is one of very few singers who can keep those opposites in unwavering equilibrium.

Unthinking musicians often make baroque arias sound lugubrious and repetitive, because on paper they are. But 18th-century composers trusted interpreters to understand that on the stage as in real life, saying something again means saying it more intensely. If the page reads “Are you? Are you? Are you?” the singer must make it: “Are you? Are you? ARE YOU?” — and not just by getting louder. For a sense of how a great singer regulates the flow of energy, listen to the opening of “Addio, Roma,” from Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea: a quick, pale dab of voice brushed across an “Ah.” As DiDonato’s timbre comes into focus, so does the character’s crushing despair. It takes no more than a syllable to open a fragile soul.

DiDonato returns to that opera in her most recent — and most spectacular — recording, Drama Queens. She begins the empress Octavia’s aria “Disprezzata regina” (“Scorned Sovereign”) with an intimate moan and gradually ramps up the indignation into a full-throated feminist cry: “Se la natura e ‘l ciel libere ci produce/ Il matrimonio ci incatena serve” (“If nature and the heavens make us women free/ Marriage chains us in slavery.”

If DiDonato confined herself to the baroque era, or if she were merely a connoisseur of misery, that would have been enough for a fine career. But she strides into other centuries, and other styles, with enormous charm, and that makes her a star. In her collection of Rossini arias, she floats from silken scales to gossamer trills, rising to each high note on a helium cloud, before shivering back down. She’s also professional without being pretentious. You can hear her sense of humor and natural lack of fakery in the “Villanelle” that opens Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été. As that work’s summer nights more languorous and more heavily scented in “Le spectre de la rose,” DiDonato unfurls yet another aspect of her musicality, a wistful tenderness carried on the warm breeze of her voice.

Charm and melancholy merge in her recital album Diva, Divo, in which she hops back and forth between male and female roles. In “Nacqui all’affanno,” the final aria of Rossini’s Cenerentola, the ever-ebullient Cinderella recalls her life of drudgery and chortles over her good fortune at having found her prince. After some draping some filigree around the stage, she stands back for a moment and lets the orchestra gallop for a while before lighting the fireworks of“Non più mesta.” When she arrives at that moment, bleakness is banished and joy takes over for as long as Joyce DiDonato keeps flinging luminous notes into the air.

Patricia Barber, Smash

One gets the impression that Chicago vocalist/piano player/poet Patricia Barber doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Inscrutable, quixotic, yet as clear-headed as the ’50s-era Beats she resembles, Barber is also demanding of herself, her trio and her audience. On her Concord debut, Barber consistently challenges herself and her listeners. Smash, perhaps to an even greater degree that some of her Premonition or Blue Note recordings, mines the realms of the unexpected, while Barber continues to explore genres beyond jazz. Throughout Smash, electric guitars burr, funk drums swing driving beats, and Barber coos her familiar sharp-edged poetry, but then suddenly goes silent — and seemingly off a cliff — practically at a whim.

Smash traces the moments that accompany a love affair turned sour, but as the title implies, it doesn’t do so quietly — it bucks and brays, asks “why?” From the opening, rolling rhythms of “Code Cool,” Barber’s music is deliberate, transparent, pointed and always close to flashpoint. “I’m like Michelangelo’s David, tested and worn,” she sings. After the calming piano interlude, “Romanesque,” Barber sings, “This is the sound of blood on the road” in the title track, her vocal segueing into a dramatic, sky-strafing Hendrix-worthy solo from guitarist John Kregor. But even as Smash runs the gamut of emotions, Barber retains her trademark vocal cool, letting the music — and a fantastic new band — express her catharsis. Barber sings “Scream when Sunday finally comes” as a kind of hymnal of release in “Scream,” then recalls the motionlessness of Joni Mitchell’s Blue in “The Swim.” Smash closes with the relative tranquility of “Missing,” Barber hoping for a lover to reappear, but ultimately accepting fate in any guise that comes her way.

Who Is…Carletta Sue Kay

You could write off Carletta Sue Kay — aka San Francisco singer-songwriter Randy Walker — as a novelty act, but you’d be so wrong. Sure, he’s a big, middle-aged gay guy in hideous drag. But as CSK’s 2012 debut Incongruent proves, he’s also got an incredible vocal delivery, and his writing talent is guaranteed to slay you. He writes shrewdly and wittily about what it means to be a woman the way your favorite male novelist writes about femininity; he just does it in a cheap wig.

eMusic’s Barry Walters caught up with the singer in a Castro desert shop. Walker was — as he always is when not performing — dressed as a man, talking a mile a minute, alternately very vulnerable and very loud. Here’s a fraction of what he said about himself.

On the birth of Carletta:

My former band was Mon Cousin Belge, which is French for My Belgian Cousin, and the character I did, Emil, which was a fake cousin of mine, spoke no English and was addicted to plastic surgery. So when that band disbanded, I had all these songs I’d written over the years that I thought should be sung by a girl and I wanted to keep with the theme. I have an actual, very crazy cousin, whose name is Carletta Sue Kay, so I just took her name. She’s a drug addict and I was a drug addict at one point; she and I used to do crazy cross-country trips. She was involved in some pretty bad legal situations a few years back and was in prison. I think about her a lot. You know what it is? It’s her death wish, her don’t-give-a-fuck-about-herself, self-hating attitude. Which I, as an adult, am trying desperately to get better about. But to add to all the sadness, she’s super-funny. She found out about my band on MySpace, and wrote me, like, “What the fuck is this shit?” I’ve been begging her to come to a show to introduce me. [Practically yelling] She’s never seen Carletta!

On the overlap between Randy Walker and Carletta Sue Kay:

I call it a persona, but when I get on stage it’s just me with a bad wig and an ugly dress. The voice of Carletta is not my authentic singing voice. I’m affecting a “female” voice, but some of the some of the more soulful songs don’t play out like that. They’re all written in higher keys and I have a naturally high register. I’ve been doing Carletta for five years, so her character definitely comes into the songwriting now. I don’t know if its gender-based ideology that I have in my head, but the songs tend to be written from a female perspective. I hide behind Carletta — the anonymity is awesome. It’s in and out, though; I guess the character inhabits the songs, and the songs are what tell the story of Carletta. They tend to be sad and poppy; it’s my new genre: I call it soppy.

On theatricality:

I went to the University of Redlands and my first major was theatre. I put myself through college doing professional light opera company, musicals with tons of ’60s and ’70s has-been TV and movie stars, and lots of original Broadway cast people — Jo Anne Worley, Ruth Buzzi, Donald O’Connor, Bebe Neuwirth. I’m always referred to as theatrical, no matter what I do. I don’t really see myself that way, but I guess when I get on stage I tend to get vocally a little dramatic. I’m not gonna get up there and just sing a song. I’m gonna do my best to do with my songs the things with which they’re intended. I want them to mean something to people. Not all are sad; some are a little sassy and bitchy.

On performing for audiences who’ve never heard Carletta before:

That’s the best. First they’re like, “Oh, God, a drag queen.” Then I watch them turn. I get off on that. My favorite was when we opened for [satirical country songwriter] Kinky Friedman a couple years ago; it was a really conservative Jewish audience. And this lady after the show, she had to be 90 if she was a day, she comes up to me, grabs my arm, and says [in a voice reminiscent of Kyle's mom on South Park], “I hope you’re happy with yourself.” I was like, “What?” [More Kyle's mom voice:] “You made me cry the entire time. You are fabulous. I know because I’m a singer myself.”

On Carletta’s transgender quality:

I have transgender friends who haven’t commented on it. I think if they listen to my music and watch my performance, they’d know that I’m not taking the piss. I have an actual trans-identified person in my band: The bass player, piano player, and singer is a guy named Sonny, an FTM, female-to-male. Everyone loves Sonny, and Sonny totally digs it; he’s a super-charming and fantastic person. I’ve worn everything from high-end couture to thrift shop finds to making my own outfits. I have a friend who works for Vogue Italia and gets me really good clothes from Milan. I’ve gotten to this point that I have more Carletta clothes than my own clothes. I think I’m becoming a tranny. I kinda like it! It’s comfortable and fun. [As a man] I wear boring clothes. Some of my dresses tend to be short shirts, but I always wear stockings. I don’t wanna show my hairy-assed legs onstage.

On Walker’s musical influences:

Lots of country and folk — Tom T. Hall, Hank Williams, Conway Twitty, George Jones, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn. I have a song called “My Mother Thinks She’s Loretta Lynn.” She had the big, black hair that she dyed like Loretta Lynn; she dressed like Loretta Lynn. I was raised in a Pentecostal church, so there was lots of gospel music. Tim Hardin, Townes Van Zandt, Merle Haggard. I’m a big Antony Hegarty fan. Iris Dement, I love her. She’s from my mother’s hometown in Arkansas.

On the very recent death of his mom:

Last week, my sister and I drove from San Luis Obispo to where she lives, on the outskirts of Arizona and California. My mom was in abject pain. She’s rambling incoherently, completely out of it, but randomly, out of nowhere she starts singing “Coat of Many Colors,” the Dolly Parton song. She knows all the lyrics; she sings it in tune. She was doing that for me — that’s been my song forever. It was miraculous, and then she went right back out of it. She had come home to die. That was the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever gone through — still going through. My mother was a good, beautiful, sweet, loving, kind woman. Everyone loved my mother. What the fuck did she do to deserve such a horror?

On working with Magnetic Fields leader Stephin Merritt:

Oh, her? No, I’m kidding, he’s awesome. He’s super-droll, but if you don’t appreciate that, you’re gonna think he’s a dick. If you do get that, he’s super-fun. He’s just always on. A year or two ago, I was at the Eagle [an SF leather bar] and there he was. He writes in gay bars, and prefers a goofy, dumb disco beat in the background. I don’t know how he does that, but he’s so brilliant with melody. Anyway, I gave him my demos for [Incongruent] and a couple months later, I did a show at the Parkside; it’s a dump, I was so depressed. I took the bus home and checked my emails. I’ve memorized what he wrote: “Hi, this is Stephin Merritt from the Magnetic Fields. I enjoy your singing very much. Would you be interested in recording with the Magnetic Fields?” What? Who is fucking with me? I didn’t respond to it for two days. Claudia, the pianist in the band and also his manager, she contacted me, and a month later I was at Tiny Telephone, John Vanderslice’s studio. We recorded background vocals for seven songs. Daniel Handler, the Lemony Snicket writer, was there. He and Stephin, they’re constantly back and forth, really funny. Now I’m on a Magnetic Fields record [2012's Love at the Bottom of the Sea], which is so cool.

On the next album and other side projects:

We’re working on a brand-new record tentatively called Monsters. It’s about ghosts and séances and dead people, some of it actual evil people, some of it a spin on B-movie characters — a lady falls in love with the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I sing sometimes with my friend Wymond [Miles], he’s the guitarist of the Fresh & Onlys. I’m trying to get his fingers in [the album] because he’s got a real sense of the dark. We call him The Count. I also did a song with Sonny Smith [of Sonny and the Sunsets]. It’s about fucking space aliens.

Lisa Batiashvili, Johannes Brahms / Clara Schumann

It’s not easy to make a new Brahms Violin Concerto recording stand out amid the dozens of competitors, but Batiashvili succeeds here. For one, she plays the rarely heard cadenza by Ferruccio Busoni, and she has juxtaposed the Brahms with the even more rarely heard Three Romances for Violin and Piano, Op. 22 by the great (but unconsummated) love of Brahms’s life, Clara Schumann.

The performance of the Brahms is excellent, technically flawless but with enough tempo adjustments to satisfy even the tempestuous composer, making for a highly expressive, Romantic-with-a-capital-R interpretation even as she and Thielemann come in on the quicker end of the spectrum in the slow movement (while avoiding the extremes of Heifetz).

As for Busoni’s cadenza, there’s a reason it’s rarely heard. Its modernism is mildly shocking though hardly scandalous. The opportunity to hear the Schumann pieces played by a violinist of Batiashvili’s class is more of an attraction. Accompanied by pianist Alice Sara Ott, Batiashvili imbues it with all the emotion bestowed on the Brahms, and more, making it clear that these nearly forgotten miniatures are little masterpieces. There’s enough pent-up emotion flowing through these pieces to easily contradict the received image of Clara the primly stern professional widow, and to make this a must-own for violin fans.

FIDLAR, FIDLAR

Los Angeles punks FIDLAR kick off their debut album with “Cheap Beer,” an out-of-control drunk driver of a song, all agitated shouts and irresponsible tempo. It’s about cheap beer. You know this because the chorus goes “I drink/ cheap beer/ so what/ fuck you.” Clearly, you should not look to a band whose name is an acronym for Fuck It Dog Life’s A Risk for subtlety. But even though they seem built for cheap thrills, there’s actually more subtlety in their songwriting than meets the eye.

The members of FIDLAR have all spent time working in recording studios and they bring that expertise to bear here, hitting a happy medium between the feral rush of gnarled garage rockers like The Black Lips and the hooks-first polish of early Green Day. A mid-tempo song is as anathema to them as import lager, but there are enough moments of pop craft here to make these songs appealing to someone other than self-styled punk lifers. “5 to 9″ takes Dick Dale’s guitar tone and Beach Boys harmonies on an all day bender and “Gimmie Something” drops in some insinuating, Peter Buck-style arpeggio guitars. If you slowed down “Max Can’t Surf” it would sound like a Buddy Holly ballad, albeit with lyrics about smoking too much damn weed.

All of this sophisticated craft is in service of delivering a worldview that feels like a 15-year-old’s idea of what a badass is. FIDLAR would you like you to believe that all they do is shoot guns, drink and score whatever there is to be scored. (Representative lyric: “I just wanna get really high/ smoke weed until I die”) They’re so earnest about being a bunch of messed-up hooligans that they end up coming off as adorable. Not since Paul Westerberg drank beer for breakfast has punk been menaced by such cuddly thugs.

Various Artists – Stones Throw Records, Stones Throw and Leaving Records Present: Dual Form

As anyone who follows their beat head scene will tell you — including even casual fans of loop leaders like Flying Lotus and Madlib — L.A.’s had something in its bong water for a while now. And lurking on the very fringes of it all over the past couple years has been Leaving Records, the tape-dubbing imprint of producer Matthewdavid and art director Jesselisa Moretti. While they’re best known for a well-curated run of limited cassettes and CD-Rs (including a couple that were painstakingly packaged in hand-painted floppy disks), the label was also responsible for the original vinyl pressings of Julia Holter’s breakthrough album Tragedy.

They know their proverbial shit, in other words, which makes Dual Form a no-brainer if you’re even remotely into the warped, increasingly blurred lines between pop/psych/ambient/WTF music. The beginning of a no-doubt-beautiful relationship with Stones Throw, Dual Form is a carefully sequenced compilation that gathers previously unreleased cuts from a wide range of artists that have little in common beyond a tendency to leave your brain feeling like a pack of melted crayons. Some standouts, then: Holter shares a spellbound cover of Arthur Russell (“You & Me Both”), Sun Araw loses himself in a web of vaporized vocals and desecrated dub nods, and the appropriately named Run DMT drone on like a bath salt-snorting version of the Velvet Underground. And then there’s the many truly underground selections that feel like a survey of a world you’d otherwise not be privy to. A sampler on the right side of insane, really.

Both Fan and Not

Both Flesh and Not rounds up a mélange of David Foster Wallace’s essays — sports reportage, surveys of contemporary authors, movie and book reviews, grammar pointers, and cultural criticism — never published in book form during his lifetime. Wallace committed suicide in 2008, and who can say what he would have chosen to include in this collection had he been alive to edit it. But what we have been given is by turns hypersmart and hypertender, infuriating and inspiring, allowing Wallace’s energizing, rigorous, and formally wide-open perspective to remain in the conversation about the future of American literature.

The book opens with the gorgeous title essay, about tennis phenomenon Roger Federer. “Federer Both Flesh and Not,” originally published in 2006 in The New York Times’ sports magazine and by now almost canonical, showcases Wallace’s most agile and compelling moves as a prose stylist, philosopher and innovator of the essay form (those infectious footnotes!), along with his novelist’s eye (and ear) for human vulnerability and pleasingly down-to-earth colloquialisms.

In the penultimate essay, “Deciderization 2007 — a Special Report,” Wallace presents a visionary piece of literary criticism under the guise of an introduction for The Best American Essays 2007. Ever the meta-critic, Wallace uses this intro as an opportunity to reflect on the editing process, take the temperature of his cultural moment, and pose difficult questions. Here and in other essays (“Overlooked: Five Direly Underappreciated U.S. Novels >1960,” for example), Wallace argues passionately for new writing that displays intellectual breadth, emotional vitality, and formal risk. He is especially preoccupied with “the connections between literary aesthetics and moral values.” In other words, he asks how and why we consider certain types of writing good or beautiful or literary, and what this says about our shared ethics.

These questions become useful when navigating some of the collection’s problematic moments. After the title essay, the collection moves through the remaining pieces in chronological order, starting in 1988, and the backward jump proffers some jarring claims. There is, for example, the deeply vexing “Back in New Fire,” from 1996, in which Wallace argues that since the AIDS epidemic arose from nature, it is therefore neither good nor bad. Instead, he argues, “the specter of heterosexual AIDS” might be seen as a cautious opportunity to reinvest sex with its proper gravitas by erecting new and exciting “erotic impediments” (aka safe sex practices). His framework leaves out the political dimensions of the travesty, the inadequate federal and public response to the marginalized communities most affected by the crisis — it’s akin to calling Hurricane Katrina a natural disaster that ought to be cautiously celebrated for its potential to reawaken people in, say, Rhode Island to the awesome power of weather.

Other prickly ethical/aesthetic moments occur more quietly. In “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” from 1988, tucked away in his roll call of promising new talent Wallace mentions only three female authors, and their brief, collective cameo occurs under the banner of “bitchy humor.” It’s a fairly reductive and belittling lens, though in context (it seems) the phrase is meant to be a compliment. Overall, the piece parses well the problems of a TV-saturated culture, yet here and throughout, moments like this grate.

Perhaps these criticisms are, after all, of a piece with Wallace’s own provocation to think. As he writes: “But of course you’ll see how hard the reader is required to think about all this.” And this is where the collection’s central pleasures reside. In “Twenty-Four Word Notes” (a total pleasure read for grammar and usage geeks), Wallace tries on multiple positions in the great post-modern language debates, limning words as “both symbols for real things and real things themselves.” Another way to pose this dilemma is as follows: Does language reflect the world, or does language (at least in part) make it? Wallace plays the spectrum, proposing an ambitious, expansive role for prose in general, and fiction in particular, as innovative, evolving art forms. This constant evolution is bound to be dotted with missteps alongside the revelations, and as Wallace’s work is full of revelation, so, too, is it our job as readers to engage with his mistakes. “We are heirs to a gorgeous chaos,” he writes, listing a rowdy proliferation of literary forms and conveying his broad vision of fiction’s potential energy. In the end, it’s this expansiveness of vision that makes the tour through Wallace’s own gorgeous chaos well worth it.

TORRES, TORRES

The debut album by this woman who calls herself Torres (real name: Mackenzie Scott) was recorded in a creaky old Nashville house that happens to be owned by Tony Joe White, he who gave the world “Polk Salad Annie.” But that may have just been a lucky coincidence. These songs feel as if they were bound to come crawling out of Scott’s body no matter what she did or where she was, a strange litter of scowling, writhing fuzzballs just dead set on getting born. Dominated by the wavery tones of her Gibson 355 electric, the songs explore the fragile architecture of human relationships, often finding Scott standing amid a steaming pile of rubble, wondering not about what caused the house to fall but what to do, now, with all the shattered pieces left behind. “Everything hurts, but it’s fine, it’s fine,” she sings — almost seethes — on “Honey,” the album’s lead single, a languid meditation on stasis and confession that builds up slow around a ground-out guitar line and crests in waves of pummeling drums, frayed vocals, frayed everything. Though lit up with distortion and drum-machine pulses, Torres is easily imaginable as a stripped-down acoustic affair, and in some ways might be better as such; “Come to Terms” finds Scott unplugged and fingerpicking, allowing lines like “just because the two of us will both grow old in time/ don’t mean we should go old together” the time and space to make their full devastation known.

New This Week: The Joy Formidable, Foxygen & More

Foxygen, We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic - You are probably going “Whoo boy” at the band name and album title of this one — or you probably are if you are anything like us here in the editorial dept., where “Whither art thou Foxygen!? has become a common theme — but trust us, this one is excellent. Warped, mischievous, note-perfect 60s-rock pastiche, the soundtrack to a Wes Anderson remake of Lord Of the Flies. Here’s Ryan Reed with more:

We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic is equal parts “so obnoxious, it’s excellent” and “so excellent, it’s obnoxious,” functioning as a warped retro-rock mixtape, blurring the line between parody and tribute. Like their fellow musical provocateurs MGMT, Foxygen clearly don’t take their grab-bag revisionist approach too seriously: With their bratty vocal stylings, goofy genre juxtapositions, and fondness for surreal wordplay, their songs carry an off-hand, tongue-in-cheek charm, even if the eclectic complexity of the arrangements suggests they’ve studied the vinyl of their ’70s forefathers with religious zeal.

The Joy Formidable, Wolf’s Law – New record from Welsh rock group conjures an even bigger roar. Kevin O’Donnell writes:

“I had a reason but the reason went away,” Ritzy Bryan, frontwoman of Welsh rock group Joy Formidable, sings on “Bats,” amid dense cluster-bombs of distorted riffs and clanging drums. “We keep hanging on, we keep hanging on, we keep hanging on…” It’s a deeply poignant moment for Bryan, and one of the most striking on her band’s terrific, noisy follow-up to their breakout debut The Big Roar.

Nightlands, Oak Island – Lovely pastoral psychedelia, shades of Beach Boys and Grizzly Bear. Laura Studarus says:

Dave Hartley’s second album under the Nightlands moniker opens with a reverb-drenched invitation for the listener to join him in “a place I used to go when I was only 17.” Like a Where the Wild Things Are-styled manifest destiny, the thesis weaves itself through Oak Island‘s 10 tracks. Hartley, also of Philadelphia’s War On Drugs, constructs his escapist fantasy out of multi-layered vocals, Afro-rhythm beats, analog synths and a ghostly brass section.

Ra Ra Riot, Beta Love – Strings are out, synths are in for this durable band of buttoned-down indie rockers. Kevin O’Donnell writes:

When Ra Ra Riot broke out with their debut album The Rhumb Line in 2008, they fashioned themselves as a brainy, bright-eyed chamber-pop group, freshly armed with university B.A.s and carefully curated record collections featuring heroes like Talking Heads and Kate Bush. My, have things changed. After releasing 2010′s somewhat underwhelming Chris Walla-produced The Orchard, the group is down to a quintet (cellist Alexandra Lawn has left) and they’ve overhauled their sound from sweet, string-soaked rock into electronic-pop explorations on Beta Love.

Toro Y Moi, Anything In Return – The crown prince of chillwave leaves the sandbox behind. Bill Murphy has more:

To this point, Chaz Bundick, aka Toro Y Moi, has worn most of his influences on his sleeve — tapping deeply, for instance, into the Beach Boys’ labyrinthine Pet Sounds and the J Dilla school of hip-hop deconstruction. His 2010 debut Causers of This was a promising suite of quasi-psychedelic dream-pop sketches, while the follow-up Underneath the Pine continued the thread with left turns into quirky Casiotone electropop and French hip-house.Anything in Return radically expands the scope, oscillating between minimalist techno (“Rose Quartz”) and trippy guitar-fueled soul (“Studies”) in smooth and effortless leaps, with lyrics that take a hard look at relationships, break-ups and breaking away.

Widowspeak, Almanac – Brooklyn indie-pop duo get darker, smokier, and more ambitious on their latest. Alex Naidus writes:

Almanac, the second album from Brooklyn’s Widowspeak, features full, traditional rock-band instrumentation, but at the core, the band remains a duo: Vocalist Molly Hamilton’s commanding coo and guitarist Robert Earl Thomas’s sinewy, layered playing comprise the weathered beacon around which the twangy sweep of their sound eddies. The style from their self-titled debut — lush, sultry, laced with a strangely dark touch of ’50s nostalgia — remains largely intact on Almanac. The first time around, though, the pair took a more stripped down approach, whereas Almanac steps forward confidently with a fuller sound and more ambitious arrangements.

Mountains, Centralia – Enormous slabs of mind-melting drone. Andy Beta tells us what to expect:

Despite nearly a decade spent in the industrial confines of their North Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, the sound that Mountains — a duo comprised of Koen Holtkamp and Brendan Anderegg — evoke is positively bucolic. And while the name itself suggests something dominant and looming, across five albums, Mountains favor the smaller sensations of nature walks: gurgling brooks, cricket crescendos. At times, it approaches the aural equivalent of magic hour light on wheat. Centralia balances the finger-picking and field-recording roots of their debut with the analog components that throbbed on their last album, Air Museum, adding a few new timbres to their palette.

Torres, Torres - Rangy, powerful, loosely arranged folk-rock reminiscent of early Cat Power and Songs:Ohia at sparer moments, and EMA and PJ Harvey at other, more full-throated ones. A new artist, a woman from Nashville named Mackenzie Scott, with a heart-quickening voice and a take-no-prisoners emotional intensity. Highly recommended.

Buck Owens, Honky Tonk Man – A long-lost covers album by a country legend sees the light of day! Stephen Deusner tells the story:

Originally recorded for the notoriously corny hillbilly sketch comedy series Hee Haw, the covers on the new Buck Owens comp Honky Tonk Man represent nearly 50 years of country music, from Jimmie Rodgers’s 1928 hit “In the Jailhouse Now” through “Rednecks, White Socks and Blue Ribbon Hit,” a hit for Johnny Russell in 1973. Owens pioneered the Bakersfield Sound, which amplified the primarily acoustic genre of country music, andHonky Tonk Man shows just how wide ranging that sound was, how easily it could adapt to various other strains of country music.

Henry Wagons, Expecting Company – Former cow-punker skews more spaghetti western on this EP. Peter Blacktock says:

If your introduction to Australian artist Henry Wagons came via his eponymously named alt-country ensemble Wagons, his solo debut may come as a bit of a surprise. A seven-song EP consisting mostly of duets,“Expecting Company?” represents a distinct departure from his former band’s aesthetic. Eschewing cowpunk, Henry steers more toward spaghetti-western territory, recalling the moods and textures of Ennio Morricone soundtrack fare or perhaps Canadian band the Sadies. These darker, jazzier turns help to spotlight Henry’s voice, a rich baritone that drips with personality.

Camper Van Beethoven, La Costa Perdida – The reunited, beloved college-rock oddballs keep finding new ways weird. Thankfully, there are no David Lowery-penned odes to Emily White on this one. Annie Zaleski had this to say:

During the ’80s, Camper Van Beethoven were violin-toting college-rock oddballs who dabbled in everything from ska and world music to fractured country and psych-pop. The David Lowery-led group took most of the ’90s off after a bitter breakup, but when the band reunited in 1999, its music was as gloriously askew as ever. Thematically, La Costa Perdida — Camper Van Beethoven’s first album since New Roman Times — is steeped in the cultural history, weirdo aesthetic and laid-back vibe of Northern California.

Bad Religion, True North – Punk lifers’ sixteenth album. You know what to expect. Andrew Parks lays it down:

If you’ve ever heard any Bad Religion songs, you’ve heard ‘em all. And that’s really saying something, considering they’ve been around for 16 records and three decades. Here’s the thing, though: Bad Religion’s basic formula — the breakneck tempos of hardcore, cut with call-and-response choruses, hummable melodies, and lots of “hey”s, “whoah”s and “oh”s — has stuck around since the Reagan administration because it works. Like most punk worth its weight in back patches, keeping it simple (stupid) has proven its worth with the L.A. vets time and time again. That said, the group’s latest has its standout selections, from the juvenile but jubilant “Fuck You” to the crowd-riling “My Head is Full of Ghosts.”

Blockheads, This World Is Dead – Brutally succinct, cinder-block-meets-face grindcore. Jon Wiederhorn writes:

It’s amazing how much expression and emotion certain grindcore bands can pack in the timespan of a couple television commercials. Take Blockheads, a French quartet whose fifth full-length, The World is Dead, compresses 25 songs into a mere 40 minutes. Though they’re not as well known as many of their younger peers, Blockheads have been together since 1989 and have pursued a single-minded path to demolition that rivals the careers of peers such as Napalm Death, Nasum and Blood Duster.

FaltyDL, Hardcourage – Dubstep scene leader veers a little left, into minimal techno territory. Here’s Nate Patrin with more:

Anyone going into FaltyDL’s new album Hardcourage expecting a continuation of the old-school dubstep and UK-garage inflections of You Stand Uncertain could be in for a shock. In less than two years since he released that previous album, Drew Lustman has pared down the elaborate drum programming and aimed an already airy sound even further into the territory of minimal and tech house.

Nosaj Thing, Home – L.A. beat-scene producer Jason Chung returns with sensual, tactile, pared-down productions:

Jason Chung is among the lower-profile producers to emerge from Los Angeles’s late-’00s abstract beat scene, but that doesn’t make him invisible. His production work as Nosaj Thing — including his 2009 breakout debut Drift — suggests a lot by doing a little, making ambient minimalism that warmly swoons its way into propulsive rhythmic shape. Home takes that austerity one step further: Beats are built off shuffling clicks, chords float like jellyfish, and bass is more nudged than dropped.

The Traditional Fools, S/T – One of two Ty Segall reissues hitting today. This one is from one of Ty’s many, many projects, and it skews skuzzier and more Black Lips. Austin L. Ray writes:

“Oooooohhhhhhhhhaaaaaahhhh!” go the very first lyrics here, and you’d be forgiven for assuming an early Black Lips record snuck its way into the rotation. Spiritual brethren for sure, The Traditional Fools enjoy piling on shouted vocals (“T.L. Defender”), surf riffage (“Shredstick”) and inspired covers (Red Kross’ “Kill Someone You Hate,” Thee Headcoatees’ “Davy Crockett”). They also keep it brief, rarely bothering to top the two-minute mark on any song. As far as dive-bar party rock goes, you can hardly do much better.

Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin, Reverse Shark Attack – And here’s the other! This one finds Mikal Cronin playing the “with him always is Garth” to Ty’s Wayne. Austin L. Ray got this one for us, too, and here’s what he thinks:

Reverse Shark Attack, a 2009 vinyl-only release getting resuscitated by In the Red this year, is the product of Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin, who have been partners in rabble-rousin’ for about as long as either have been making music. In their respective (prolific) discographies, they have captured, perfected and riffed on what it means to be a garage rocker in the aughts, and this sorta-early gem catches them in fine, pre-notoriety form.

Pillowfight, S/T – Trip-hop from Dan The Automator and Emily Wells. Barry Walters tells us:

Dan the Automator and his new collaborator Emily Wells, an Amarillo-born singer-songwriter, are both trained violinists who’ve been combining street beats, classical chops and conventional song structures either on their own or, in Dan’s case, with Handsome Boy Modeling School, Gorillaz and other genre-bending studio projects. With turntable wizardry from kindred soul Kid Koala and background vocals from Oakland MC Lateef the Truthspeaker, the pair align forces on an album that recalls trip-hop’s melodramatic ’90s heyday via Portishead and DJ Shadow.

Arbouretum, Coming Out of the Fog – Long-running Thrill Jockey act tip further into full-on stoner-rock beast mode for their latest. Laura Studarus had this say:

Arboretum’s fifth full-length sees the Baltimore-based quartet painting their desert doom tunes black. Drawing from a wellspring of nature-based imagery, and sludgy walls of rock guitar, the band has created another wide-sweeping meditation on damnation and redemption.

Barbara Hannigan, DUTILLEUX: Correspondances – Spectral, gorgeous, and haunting pieces from the French composer Henri Dutillieux, shaped by the alert hand of Esa-Pekka Salonen under the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, with rapt solos from soprano Barbara Hannigan and cellist Anssi Karturen.

Alexander Tharaud, Amour – The concert pianist who stars in the latest Michael Haneke film Amour also provides the wonderful, elegiac soundtrack. Seth Colter-Walls reviewed the record for us, and also spoke with the charming Tharaud about his unlikely turn as a leading man. Colter-Walls writes:

In the film, Tharaud offers a more-than-serviceable turn as a famed international piano recitalist, a surprising move that only confirms the musician’s range as an artist. You can hear the same range in this soundtrack — from his stark reading of two iconic Schubert Impromptus to the controlled surges of energy present on the three bagatelles by Beethoven (his first official recordings of that composer’s writing for piano). And while Tharaud recorded all of Schubert’s “Moments Musicaux” for another label in 2000, the third of the series has greater clarity in this new version.

Adam Ant, Adam Ant is The BlueBlack Hussar Marrying The Gunner’s Daughter: I’m going to be honest and say I’m kind of interested to hear this. Adam Ant has the reputation of a one-hit wonder in the US, but that feels unjust to me. The odd bits of press I’ve read about him in the years since his ’80s New Wave breakout have revealed him to be consistently fascinating. This guitar-driven record, produced by Morrissey’s guitarist Boz Boorer, seems to bear that out. eMusic’s Andrew Perry says:

Mostly recorded with Morrissey’s long-serving sidekick Boz Boorer, its 17 tracks largely spurn the tribal pummel of Adam’s early-’80s hits. Now, as then, this inveterate fan of David Bowie and Roxy Music loves a good makeover, and clearly relishes making his grand re-entrance with “Cool Zombie,” a swampy Tennessee blues which nobody might remotely have expected of him…Elsewhere, Adam rekindles the energy of his punk roots, venting his anger over his treatment by the medical profession on unreconstructed blasts like “Shrink,” while “Stay In The Game” evokes the sleazy post-punk rock of his pre-fame Dirk Wears White Sox era. In the (partial) title track, there’s even a strong whiff of electro — overall, it’s a fabulously varied bill of fare.

The Night Marchers, Allez Allez: Your first indication that this is going to be awesome is the fact that it’s on Swami records, home of Hot Snakes. The second indication is that this band actually is Hot Snakes. More or less. John Reis, and Jason Sinclair are joined by Thomas Kitsos on bass for a batch of songs that (somewhat) power-down the in-the-read freakout the Snakes were known for, sticking mostly with a bunch of bruising rockers that display a clear fondness for melody while still retaining plenty of ragged edges. Recommended

Guided By Voices, Down By the Racetrack EP: Oh, come on, guys. I intellectually acknowledge that I should be psyched about how much music the newly reconstituted GBV are putting out, but this is getting a bit crazy. Anyway. I digress. This is a new EP, which actually sounds a bit nastier and more experimental than the group has been in a while. Lots of hiss and static and deliberately obtuse songwriting (“Standing in a Puddle of Flesh,” a sandblasted bit of drunk stumbling with a piano, is pretty excellent).

Hilly Eye, Reasons to Live: Hilly Eye is the great Amy Klein, aka Amy Andronicus, aka Amy the former guitar player in Titus Andronicus. Amy is a terrific writer and was a magnetic presence onstage with Titus, to the point where I almost have no interest in seeing them now that she’s out of the band. This is her first outing as Hilly Eye, and it’s pretty dreamy. Amy’s voice is pushed far in the backrgound and buried in echo, and the guitars are spindly as skeleton’s fingers, clawing and splaying. The songs are mostly wintry and slow-moving, brittle indie for brittle moods.

Gary Allan, Set You Free: Gary Allan has been making records for 17 years now, all of them full of carefully-crafted commercial country that deftly undermine the assertion that the genre is too high-gloss to be interesting. Allan’s voice is warm and rich, and it provides a nice contrast to the sterling production. There’s a couple of missteps (the reggae-tinged “No Worries” is certainly one), but overall this is airtight, unabashedly tuneful country.

Daniel Romano, Come Cry With Me: Those looking for a more traditional take on country music should check out the latest from Daniel Romano. Romano is the co-owner of You’ve Changed Records, the label that put out that Weather Station record we loved so much. As the fantastic cover implies, what you’ll find here is old-style country done right. Think Townes Van Zandt or Hank Williams Sr and you’re on the right track. The instrumentation is pretty spare — acoustic guitar, drums and the occasional lap steel, leaving plenty of room for Romano’s great, twangy voice to cry out a heartbreaking melody. Recommended

The Growlers, Hung at Heart: The Growlers are a California band who have termed their music “Beach Goth,” which means that term is going to be showing up in every piece of writing about them for the nest 20 years. I appreciate their sense of humor — though the description is not that far off. The Growlers kind of sound like The Coral, if The Coral were a good band. Reverb-drenched sea shanties and surf songs make this one sound like it’s bubbling up from Davey Jones’ locker.

Speck Mountain, Badwater: Chicago psych band centered around the core of Marie-Claire Balabanian and Karl Briedrick deliver more shimmering songs that put Balabanian’s mellow alto in the center of a tangle of twangy, echoing guitars.

Alpine Decline, Night of the Long Knives: Pretty great outing from West Coast duo that casts a gauzy sheet across sturdy, guitar-based indie rock, giving the music here a strange, illusory feel. There are some nods toward shoegaze — the guitars on “Alligator” are particularly filmy — but this mostly sounds like prime Archers of Loaf rehearsing deep in a damp cave.

Föllakzoid, II: There are a few things here that are worth knowing. First, and most importantly, this is out on Sacred Bones, so already you know it’s great. Second, Föllakzoid are a psych band from Chile, which is mostly just interesting trivia. There’s nothing particularly Chilean about the sound of the songs here, they are instead just the latest in a long line of Chilean psych bands, though their take is dronier and doomier and krautier. There’s a sense of dread in these songs that is almost palpable. Like everything on Sacred Bones, it’s Highly Recommended.

Petra Haden, Petra Haden Goes to the Movies: Famed experimentalist Petra Haden recreates famous film scores using only her voice. The results are as weird as you might expect. It sounds kind of alien and ambient — her voice is heavily treated in spots to sound like instruments, in other spots it’s just her doot-dooing away.

Rotten Sound, Species at War EP: Alright! New EP from grind punishers Rotten Sound delivers everything you might expect and then some. Cranial-drill riffing, acid-in-the-face vocals and percussion that sounds like 58 amplified coronaries happening at once. God bless these guys. Or Satan. Or whoever. Recommended

Paroxsihzem, s/t: Canadian brutalists deliver sub-basement death metal. Deep, dark, barely-audible growls get smothered by riff after searing riff. It’s the sound of an avalanche — sudden and pulverizing.

Hellige, s/t: Creepy as hell. This is an Argentinian group that combines black metal riffing and howling with doom metal’s inhumanly slow crawl. The result feels like a long, meticulous, agonizing torture session — pincer-like guitars doing their foulest for 10 minutes at a time.

Head of the Demon, s/t: Here’s more slow-moving doominess, but unlike Hellige, the gunk is scraped out of the corners and the vocals are cool and crooning. They’re from Sweden, which accounts for some of the melodicism, I suppose.