Bad Religion, True North

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.” Things even get slow and sensitive during “Hello Cruel World,” but that’s not what you’re here for, is it? You’re here to pretend it’s the main stage of the Warped Tour in the mid ’90s again. And that’s exactly how you’ll feel once yet another frantic Bad Religion record grinds to an abrupt halt.

New This Week: Adam Ant, Ty Segall & More

Adam Ant, Adam Ant Is the BlueBlack Hussar In Marrying the Gunner’s Daughter This bold, bracing comeback album from the swashbuckling punk survivor sees him merrily exorcising the demons of his past, mental health issues and all. Andrew Perry reviews:

“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… Overall, it’s a fabulously varied bill of fare.”

FaltyDL, Hardcourage NYC producer Drew Lustman follows up his dubstep album You Stand Uncertain with an album of dreamy electronic music, soaked in sadness – blubstep, in other words. Nate Patrin gets out his hanky:

“Lustman has pared down the elaborate drum programming and aimed an already airy sound even further into the territory of minimal and tech house. Hardcourage is at its best when it lets the 4/4 pulse run free, like it does through the glitch soul vocal-driven “Straight & Arrow” or the bucolically high-strung closer “Bells”.”

Kris Kristofferson, Feeling Mortal Recorded with Don Was – who produced 2009′s stripped-back Closer to the Bone – this sees Kristofferson in contemplative mode, crafting a set of vintage-sounding songs around the weightier themes of love, life and death. Andy Beta reviews:

“While the music is somber on “You Don’t Tell Me What To Do”, Kristofferson still has some kick left: “Losing myself in the soul of a song / And the fight for the right to be righteously wrong.” In such tough, stubborn lines, the man remains defiant to the end.”

Nosaj Thing, Home Producer Jason Chung emerged from the Los Angeles’ late-’00s abstract beat scene with his 2009 breakout debut Drift. The follow-up offers more deeply immersive, minimal ambience, brilliantly suggesting a lot with very little. Nate Patrin writes:

“The entry-level reference points gravitate towards Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin’s ambient works, but cuts like the title track and “Distance” are tumultuous and intimate enough to suggest kinship with some of contemporary R&B’s more introspective corners.”

Nightlands, Oak Island Dave Hartley of Philadelphia’s War On Drugs creates an extravagant fantasy world with his second album, full of ghostly sounds and through-the-wardrobe lyrical twists and turns. Laura Studarus dives in:

“As with fellow sound-quilt constructionists Here We Go Magic and Grizzly Bear circa Yellow House, Hartley’s pop-leaning inclinations are often shrouded in bedroom recording softness… Oak Island is both an untamed beast and an inviting fantasy world worth inhabiting.”

Ty Segall & Mikal Cronin, Reverse Shark Attack Segall might be alarmingly prolific, but this isn’t another new studio album; it’s a 2009 recording with his garage-rock partner Mikal Cronin, only available on vinyl until now. Austin L. Ray reviews:

“”Ramona” and “Doctor Doctor are delightfully overdriven punk rock taken to wall-punching extremes… 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 gem catches them in fine, pre-notoriety form.”

Ulrich Schnauss, A Long Way To Fall Schnauss has called this album “a celebration of the synthesizer,” and there’s more than a touch of Jean-Michel Jarre about these wonderful, orchestrated compositions. We’re sure a lightshow awaits.

Widowspeak, Almanac As previously reported on eMusic, Widowspeak’s Almanac is deeply indebted to the tumbleweed tropes of Appalachian folk music and the untouchable cannon of Neil Young. Alex Naidus reviews the Brooklyn duo’s anticipated second album:

“Vocalist Molly Hamilton has a hushed, vaporous vocal delivery which has led to frequent, not unfair comparisons to Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star. Her voice is lovely and affecting, but her underappreciated gift is her sense of controlled power: in “Devil Knows”, she flips with easy from airy and meandering to dark and smoky.”

Mountains, Centralia

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. The acoustic and electric mingle on the horizon-wide opener “Sand,” the duo’s delicate drones and washes cresting before carefully removing every layer so as to reveal a gorgeous core of bowed cello. The ruminative steel-string figures of “Identical Ship” are swarmed by sputtering alien pulses and then an elegant piano line arises, all of it arising and passing away in three luminous minutes.

Mountains are at their finest when they have ample space to move about in. So it all builds toward the album’s shimmering 20-minute centerpiece, “Propeller.” Starting from a Dream Machine-like flicker of organ, Holtkamp and Anderegg allow the track to accrue innumerable drones until this masterstroke attains lift-off, their white noise turning golden. Low-key closers “Liana” and “Living Lens” let you down gently, a fitting end to a cinematic double album, and Mountains’ most immersive to date.

Who Are…Foxygen

One minute their tunes are as delicate as a drawing by Matisse, the next as nightmarish as something by Munch. They feature a singer with a lovely, clear tenor, and their songs reference Ray Davies, Brian Wilson and hallucinogens with equal fervor. They’re Foxygen and they’ve just made one of the most melodic and uncategorizable records of the year. We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors Of Peace And Magic is a half-hour acid trip that sports sumptuous tunes, profound ideas and images that might just change your life. Happily, it induces neither flashbacks nor chromosome damage. In one song, vocalist Sam France brays like Bob Dylan backed by The Hawks. In another, the duo channels the aural beauty of the Beach Boys. The album’s closer proves them capable of being brilliantly Beatlesque.

eMusic’s Peter Gerstenzang spoke with these two affable music geeks on the eve of their upcoming tour about the sort of music they grew up loving, drugs they may (or may not) have taken and how they tried to assemble an album that takes you from the unsettling to the hopeful-in just a little more than 30 minutes.

On how to bring about their stated goal of world peace:

Sam France: I think if one country would fucking stop killing — if they just made one “no killing” rule…It may sound crazy, but if we could do something like that, if people just started thinking differently, basically, about killing…That needs to stop before anything else. Secondly, maybe we should stop killing animals, not kill the earth. But also, like, more abstract things. Which is kind of what our album is about. Abstract images that maybe you could contemplate. People need to use their imagination.

Jonathan Rado: Sensory overload is a problem. Then again, lots of people talk about our band as being sensory overload, so I don’t know. But maybe we could get rid of iPhones. I mean, I really do love my iPhone, but I think the world would be more peaceful if everyone weren’t completely glued to them. Short of that, they should buy our album. And all of (producer/mentor) Richard Swift’s albums. People need to listen to Foxygen. But Swift first.

On the fact that the album was given to them by “cosmic beings”:

France:Rado and I live together. I had all these conspiracy theories in my head, and I was telling him about them all the time. I would be just freaking out. But then I thought of this album title and these song ideas just came to us suddenly — like, cosmic beings gave them to us, and we wrote everything quickly. That’s also because we were excited to record with Swift. It all just came out of excitement, so we didn’t really think about this album much. It was very intuitive, very cosmic. Everything was just spur-of-the moment.

On the virtues of speedy recording:

Rado: We did it in nine days! We did it so fast because Sam and I have worked together for so long. Our instinct is to put a million things, a million overdubs on everything, but we’ve worked together for so long we can do that fast. Not over-thinking things is a plus — a lot of the stuff was first takes. There’s a part on “San Francisco,” where the guitar screws up and it keeps going and it fixes itself. You want to talk about how to fix the world? People need to go back to not overthinking.

On Bob Dylan’s influence on “No Destruction”:

Rado: We love Blonde On Blonde. Al Kooper on organ! The most amazing non-organist organist ever. That’s what makes those mid-’60s Dylan records: those ignorant, ignorant choices, played by people who were not playing their [usual] instruments. Kooper was a really good guitarist who was playing organ.

On Shuggie Otis:

France: Rado turned me onto [Shuggie Otis]. We were listening to him when we were writing this stuff. We had some hooks that sounded like him. We thought [the tune] was just a demo and that we’d change the title, but it sounded like Shuggie, so we just kept it.

Rado: I just hope he hears the record!

On the apocalyptic “Oh No”:

France: Yeah, it’s this sort of John Lennon-y thing we wrote. I think we liked the idea of having it as the last song on the album. It’s like this weirdly negative end to this mostly positive album. It’s like, “What the fuck is going on?”

Rado: I think though, that’s why we tagged on that choirboy ending.

France: I picture it as taking place on a Middle School stage — a boys’ choir, a Christmas tree, a piano.

On whether or not they’re “21st Century Ambassadors Of Peace and Magic”:

France: The title really means, “We all are.” It’s not necessarily The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. But, we are. You are.

Rado: I agree with Sam. It’s an optimistic title. It’s an optimistic record. There are, maybe, dark and scary moments. But overall? It’s optimistic.

Blockheads, This World is Dead

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.

On The World is Dead, Blockheads’ first album in six years, the band displays the hunger and vitality of youngsters with energy and anger to burn. From the commanding blastbeat salvos of the album opener “Already Slaves,” Blockheads attack with the volume of a jet fighter and the velocity of a NASCAR engine, yet extremism isn’t the ony way they make an impact.Each track makes it way through well-structured intros and outros and even mid-paced midsections that squeeze diversity between the ceaseless pummeling. The anomaly is the album closer “Trail of the Dead,” a trudging seven-minute doom metal song that reveal unseen dimensions beneath the otherwise relentless barrage.

Pillowfight, Pillowfight

Hip-hop and violins — those that haven’t been sampled or scratched in — now have a new chapter in their short history together. 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.

It’s hard — particularly at first — not to hear Wells’s raspy, singsong delivery and not think of Macy Gray, even if her lyrics detailing the lives of losers and their equally dysfunctional lovers do boast their own gritty appeal. But there’s so much rich, undulating stuff going on behind her that the instrumentation ultimately wins this Pillowfight: Gothic organ riffs, funky cold machine beats, syncopated live percussion, Spaghetti Western guitars, brass horn blasts and several varieties of strings all comingle in a smooth and savvy collision of low and high art. Like all trip-hop joints, Pillowfight is heavy on mid-tempo languor and shadowy ambiance, and that’s as it should be. Although it may not have much to do with the rest of the disc, album highlight “Get Down” circumvents both of those attributes to evoke the ’90s rock-funk jams of Luscious Jackson. In doing so, it does exactly what it commands.

Buck Owens, Honky Tonk Man: Buck Sings Country Classics

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, and Honky Tonk Man shows just how wide ranging that sound was, how easily it could adapt to various other strains of country music. It helps that the Buckaroos (who pre-recorded their tracks and mimed playing along with Owens on Hee Haw) were one of the tightest country bands of their time, lending a jumpy momentum to Stonewall Jackson’s “I Washed My Hands in Muddy Water” and a surprising rhythmic sophistication to Charley Pride’s “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone.” Owens recorded his vocals as mere reference tracks for the musicians and mixers, but he doesn’t hold back, attacking these songs with the same interpretive sensitivity he brought to his proper recordings. Ultimately, Honky Tonk Man is the rare archival collection that serves as an apt introduction to Owens and his brand of electrified country music.

The Joy Formidable, Wolf’s Law

“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. Over the last 10 years, Bryan has endured no shortage of personal strife: Her parents have been embroiled in a long, drawn-out divorce, which, she has said, caused her to grow estranged from them. What’s more, her grandfather passed away while they were recording in an isolated cabin in Maine.
Not surprisingly, Bryan channels her personal turmoil all over Wolf’s Law, which refers to a 19th-century medicinal law about an animal’s uncanny ability to adapt to injury. The album features raucous anthems that mix My Bloody Valentine-style amp death with Bryan’s assured, loud-and-clear howling.

While nothing matches the epic reach of their six-minute breakout “Whirring,” Joy Formidable show a breathless energy over 50 minutes, particularly on “Maw Maw Song,” which veers from a Led Zep-style stomp into a steady, pulsing jam worthy of Neu!. As Joy Formidable prove, sometimes the best way to deal with the awful shit in your life is to strap on a guitar and crank up the noise.

Foxygen, We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic

Midway through “Oh Yeah,” a psych-funk goof from Foxygen’s debut LP, the band launches into stoned hokey-pokey: “Put your left hand out and shake it all about,” yelp Jonathan Rado and Sam France, “It’s arms and legs, bacon and eggs.” The song shambles its way through a noisy dual guitar solo, chipmunk R&B falsettos, and a proggy instrumental climax, punctuated by a squealed “You’re freakin’ me out!” Talk about an understatement.

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.

Silliness sometimes overpowers style. “Bowling Trophies” is a blues-rock throwaway marred by studio hiss — just for the hell of sounding dated; on the drunken blues-rock title-track, France can’t decide whether to imitate Mick Jagger or Jim Morrison. Nonetheless, their highlights drop jaws: The flowery, faux-British psych-pop of “San Francisco” would come off as a Syd Barrett send-up, were it not so damn lush. “Shuggie” is the biggest revelation, a funky strut through trippy mellotrons, abrupt tempo changes, and “Age of Aquarius” group chants. In Foxygen’s restless hands, musical stupidity is savored like a fine wine.

Toro Y Moi, Anything in Return

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.

It is clearer than ever that Bundick has moved decisively beyond the chillwave sound he helped define. Granular electronic beats, bubbly synths, stacked samples and Bundick’s mellifluous, double-tracked vocals continue to drive the narrative, but the songs are suffused with a sense of pulling up roots for parts unfamiliar (“We could be there now/ And I’d rather drive it through the night,” he sings in the album’s high-flying opener “Harm in Change”) — a restlessness that shows itself in the Rundgren-ish production values of the aptly titled “So Many Details” or the layered harmonies and space-funk feel of “Never Matter,” which conjures Dream Weaver-era Gary Wright in all his overwrought glory. It’s very nearly a concept album with travel as its theme — created, after all, in Bundick’s new Bay Area home following a cross-country move from his native South Carolina — but more than that, it’s a coming-out party for a mature songsmith who sounds eager to stretch beyond his comfort zone.

Alexandre Tharaud, Soundtrack “Amour”

Mere months after Le Boeuf sur le toit, the young French pianist Alexandre Tharaud’s strut through the jazz-classical repertoire of the “Swinging Paris” cabaret scene of the 1920s, comes something entirely different in mood: a heavy and serious program that serves as the soundtrack to the Michael Haneke film about late-stage love, Amour.

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.

That clarity extends to the soundtrack’s standouts, both here and in the film: The two Impromptus, specifically the first and third. Murray Perahia may have suggested a greater number of moods in his recording of Impromptu No. 1, but Tharaud’s weighty consideration here is reliably gripping. When playing the No. 3 in G Minor, meanwhile, Tharaud doesn’t overdose on the dreaminess of the initial theme like some pianists; there’s a darkness that he allows to creep in, but the beauty is still there even if it isn’t at the forefront. In that way, it’s a fitting complement to Haneke’s film, which hints at the qualities of a decades-long love story by emphasizing some of its bleakest hours.

Tharaud’s half hour of piano recordings for the film are so excellent that the closing snippets of dialog taken from the final edit feel tacked on and unnecessary (even if you speak French). While it could be of minor interest to have Tharaud’s big scene immortalized as audio, where he really speaks, naturally, is in his playing.

Camper Van Beethoven, La Costa Perdida

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. In 2002, they released an elaborate, song-for-song re-do of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk; two years later came the prog-driven New Roman Times, a concept album with a politically-charged storyline referencing aliens, terrorism and a Texas vs. California civil war.

Thematically, La Costa Perdida — Camper Van Beethoven’s first album since New Roman Times — is more cohesive: It’s steeped in the cultural history, weirdo aesthetic and laid-back vibe of Northern California. This local flavor especially permeates La Costa Perdida: “You Got To Roll” is a smoldering psych-freak guitar jam on which Lowery shrieks, “Let’s make love — before we die!” right before he exclaims, “Too high, too high!” The title track, meanwhile, is a Norteño-influenced, oompah waltz, and “Northern California Girls” is a loping alt-country sprawl with Jonathan Segel’s evocative violin and plush vocal harmonies courtesy of guests such as the Futurebirds. On the twang-darkened moodpiece “Come Down the Coast,” you can also hear shadows of the Beach Boys’ heavy-lidded 1973 psych-pop opus Holland, which Lowery has cited as an influence.

But what stands out most on La Costa Perdida is Camper Van Beethoven’s songwriting. The band’s approach is no less diverse — the giddy, two-minute ska high-step “Peaches In The Summertime” comes several songs after the Flaming Lips-esque “Too High For The Love-In” — but it’s also focused, with little of the self-indulgence which often made New Roman Times sluggish. And for a band known for its wicked humor, La Costa Perdida is often strikingly sincere; for example, the album-closing “A Love For All Time” is a syrupy homage to picture-perfect beach noir music that sounds like Pulp on a tropical island. It’s an unexpectedly vulnerable way to end an album full of warped California pop, but it’s also indicative of how Camper Van Beethoven has cobbled together a fine career by doing nothing but tossing curveballs.

Widowspeak, Almanac

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.

Album opener “Perennials” swells and dips with Hamilton’s lilting, breathy melody and Thomas’s sparkling guitar textures, his buoyant lead line riding cascading, tumbling toms. On “Dyed in the Wool,” the album’s rollicking spirit peeks through — it’s a sturdy, Southwestern-tinged desert rocker with quivering, sustained organ and almost fanciful, slip-sliding guitar riffs. Hamilton has a hushed, vaporous vocal delivery which has led to frequent, not unfair, comparisons to Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star. Her voice is lovely and affecting, but her underappreciated gift as a vocalist is her sense of controlled power: In “Devil Knows,” the strummy, two-chord verse kicks into a surprisingly raw, stomping chunky-chorded chorus, and Hamilton flips with ease from airy and meandering to dark and smoky. It’s that contrast — warm, rich playing and lush production on songs with a lurking enigmatic, dark alley mysteriousness — that make Almanac such a beguiling, rewarding listen.

Arbouretum, Coming Out of the Fog

Arbouretum’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.

Frontman Dave Heumann doesn’t just sing — he emotes, his guttural baritone rasping over every syllable of Coming Out of the Fog‘s eight tracks. His sincere and direct vocal approach matches the album’s everyman appeal. Variations on this theme are offered. “The Promise” showcases quick-fingered Hendrix-style guitar lines and heavy syncopation. At heart, “The White Bird” is a folk tune, complete with slide guitar and whispered refrains. Likewise, “Oceans Don’t Sing” has a classic Americana vibe, stomping through the same dusty landscape where Calexico has staked their claim. But all the tonal shifts, murky refrains, and blunt-force poetics can’t hide the meat-and-potatoes rock band that Arboretum has become.

Don Rich, Don Rich Sings George Jones

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Don Rich played lead guitar in Buck Owens’s backing band the Buckaroos, laying down licks on huge hits like “Tiger by the Tail” (which he co-wrote) and “Act Naturally.” His rich tone and impeccable timing helped define the Bakersfield sound, which introduced electric guitar to the largely acoustic genre. In the early ’70s, Rich recorded an album of George Jones covers, with Owens producing in his new Bakersfield studio. For reasons that we’ll never know, however, the album was shelved; Rich died in a motorcycle accident in 1974, and Don Rich Sings George Jones collected dust for 40 years.

Now that the album is finally getting a proper release, it’s clear that Rich was never going to usurp either Owens or Jones. But his voice is robust and expressive, imbuing ballads like “She Thinks I Still Care” with heavy melancholy and skillfully maneuvering the tricky curves of rambunctious numbers like “Love Bug” and “White Lightning.” Rich excels at the latter actually, primarily because those barreling tunes give him more opportunity to show off his dazzling chops. In fact, between this release and Omnivore’s other Owens reissues (including Honky Tonk Man and Live at the White House), Rich emerges as one of the most inventive, most influential, and most unsung guitar players in country music.

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 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.

The Traditional Fools, The Traditional Fools

It makes a weird kind of sense that In the Red is re-releasing the lone studio record from The Traditional Fools. After all, one of the San Francisco trio’s members, Ty Segall, has another album out at the same time on In the Red, that one a re-release of his 2009 collaboration with fellow garage-punk wunderkind Mikal Cronin. Two great tastes that taste great together, as it were — or at least complement each other, despite being recorded a year apart. For the Segall completists — bless their tortured, penniless souls — it’s nice that these titles are now easier than ever to purchase.

“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.

Adam Ant, Adam Ant Is The BlueBlack Hussar In Marrying The Gunner’s Daughter

A swashbuckling stalwart of the post-punk era, Adam Ant has suffered unimaginable trials in the 17 years since his last album, 1995′s Strip. Arrested and later sectioned after an altercation in North London, his life-long struggles with mental health have become agonizingly public — too much so, one imagined, for a viable comeback. But this ever-colorful and inventive artist was not to be so easily silenced.

Having spent the last three years reminding live audiences of his unrivalled onstage magnetism, Adam’s studio relaunch is every bit as epic as its pseudo-cinematic title. The loose concept behind Adam Ant Is… is to tell of the further adventures of his “Prince Charming” cavalryman character. This, for the most part, is a fiction which doesn’t intrude on the more serious matter of exorcising the many demons he’s acquired in real life.

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 (it’s a throwback, apparently, to his times of marital retreat in the mountains near Nashville, in the mid 1990s).

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.

On “Vince Taylor,” our hero pays tribute to the wayward British ’50s rock ‘n’ roller responsible for “Brand New Cadillac” (as covered by The Clash), who died in obscurity amid psychiatric problems and drug abuse. When Adam archly croons, “I nearly done a Vince Taylor,” it’s only partly for laughs. Just imagine if he hadn’t made it through to serve up this hilarious, rollicking slice of Ant-ness in 2013. That, really and truly, would be our loss.

Ron Miles, Bill Frisell, Brian Blade, Quiver

Guitarist Bill Frisell has collaborated with dozens of musicians, but nobody seems to match his simultaneously vigilant and easygoing sensibility as profoundly as trumpeter-composer Ron Miles. A decade after their gently captivating duets on Heaven, this trio sequel, with the inspired complement of Brian Blade on drums, nestles against the contours of your imagination the way handsewn moccasins coddle your feet — with a cozy, utilitarian simplicity.

It’s hard to overstate the intimacy of the interplay between trumpet and guitar here. It creates the assumption that Miles and Frisell share similar senses of humor, pathos and justice, and that they move through life at the same pace, with a particular appreciation for patience and modesty. Blade — whose long stint in a quartet led by the capacious intellect of Wayne Shorter has honed his skill at punctuation perhaps better than any current drummer — signals and shades the pauses and endings of the trio’s interplay in a manner that heightens their emphasis and purpose, a crucial role when the stylists are as subtle as Miles and Frisell can be.

As with Heaven, Miles bookends the song list with originals, and places his revamped covers of vintage tunes in the middle. “Queen B” might be the quintessential Ron Miles song — a tender yet tensile mixture of Americana and jazz that is resolutely restrained and yet utterly compelling for its entire 6:25. The trio takes “There Ain’t No Sweet Man That’s Worth the Salt of My Tears,” which was played for jaunty goofs in the flapper era of the 1920s, and injects its swing with some morphine blues and lamentation. Duke Ellington’s similarly caffeinated 1920′s track, “Doin’ The Vroom Vroom,” is slowed differently, with wind beneath its sails that billows the melody. In between them is a Miles original, “Just Married,” that has the catchy innocence of an updated pop tune from a bygone period. The cheap way to evoke all of this, especially for a guitarist and a trumpeter, is with twang and blare. But the trio trust that the musical arrows in their quiver will be more exacting and penetrating than that. And their aim is true.

Nosaj Thing, Home

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 entry-level reference points gravitate towards Boards of Canada a la The Campfire Headphase and Aphex Twin’s ambient works, small doses of hypnotic and meditative melody that glow a little too brightly to feel strictly mechanical. But cuts like the title track and “Distance” are tumultuous and intimate enough to suggest kinship with some off contemporary R&B’s more introspective corners. And with two indie-world guest spots — Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino hauntingly bobbing in the waves of “Eclipse/Blue,” and the distant, wistful Toro y Moi feature “Try” — Chung proves to be a fantastic collaborator capable of drawing out the eeriest qualities in a singer.