Miguel Zenon & The Rhythm Collective, OYE!! Live in Puerto Rico

On OYE!! Live in Puerto Rico, alto saxophonist, composer and MacArthur Foundation Fellow Miguel Zenon and his quartet (Tony Escapa, electric bassist Aldemar Valentin and percussionist Reynaldo De Jesus) make good on their stated mission, which is to bring greater jazz awareness to their native Puerto Rico. In this recording, they are treated like conquering heroes; the quartet has the rare ability to communicate jazz’s art and relevance to all audiences, and the fervent applause heard on this recording is testament.

Zenon is no stranger to merging jazz and Latin music, as you can hear on recent Marsalis Music recordings such as Esta Plena and Alma Adentro. But OYE!! is first and foremost a live recording, and it’s infused with all the blood, sweat and glory of both a great performance and at times, a street fight. It communicates on a visceral level, each musician improvising and scorching the earth clean with Zenon’s often beautiful, always spirited alto saxophone leading the way.

OYE!! opens with a stomping downbeat accent and a percolating Latin rhythm, leading into the Tito Puente cha cha cha-turned Carlos Santana hit, “Oye Como Va.” Zenon manipulates the song’s familiar melody while The Rhythm Collective cooks the groove with a dry funk charge. The group constantly teases and toys with the song’s changui rhythm, electric bass prowling, drums floating and stinging — playful, but musically serious and powerful. “El Necio” increases the tempo and the melodic fervor, trading between Zenon’s alto excursions and Valentin’s fragrant solo bass, which recalls Jaco Pastorius by way of John Patitucci, his warmth connecting on a gut level. “JOS Nigeria” culls an Afrobeat, Fela-styled vibe, its undulating rhythm also recalling Weather Report’s sweltering “Black Market.” “Double Edge” closes the album in high vamp mode, Escapa and Valentin laying down a scalding rhythm while Zenon sails above the fray.

Though fusion is a bad word even today, OYE!! Live in Puerto Rico is an exemplary fusion of Latin rhythm, rich improvisation and beautiful melody all held aloft by excellent leadership. If jazz had 10 more Miguel Zenons, the idiom would be in much better cultural standing.

Charlie Boyer and the Voyeurs, Clarietta

Charlie Boyer and the Voyeurs may not be the leaders of the much-vaunted new wave of British indie rockers that also features Peace, Palma Violets and Toy, but they are certainly in its vanguard. This seems a tad paradoxical, as they clearly take their musical cue from a very different land and era: the CBGB’s-centric New York 1970s scene that spawned Richard Hell and the Voidoids and Television. Boyer’s nasal whine is likely to prove a polarizing factor, but is employed to deft and dramatic effect on faux-shambolic art-rock essays such as “The Things We Be” and “Clarinet,” which also recall those great lost British guitar-wielding romantics The Libertines. Best of all is “Be Glamorous,” a spindly wham-bam-thank-you-glam streak of ramshackle insouciance worthy of a no-wave Marc Bolan. It is too early to know whether the Voyeurs are destined to justify the extravagant praise that is being ladled their way, but there is much to enjoy on this canny debut.

Mount Kimbie, Cold Spring Fault Less Youth

Mount Kimbie rose up in the UK in the wake of dubstep, though a different kind of dubstep than the big, shuddering, concussive kind that’s now lacing megalithic dance clubs and multiday festivals in the name of EDM. Theirs was a haunted, refined variety that homed in on details and favored negative space, and the logic of it leant to the practice of writing songs (as opposed to just dance tracks), which Mount Kimbie undertook around the same time as fellow post-dubstep compatriot James Blake. Similarities with Blake figured into Mount Kimbie’s 2010 full-length debut Crooks & Lovers, but on their sophomore album (and first for the big electronic label Warp), the duo — Dominic Maker and Kai Campos — arrive upon a Mount Kimbie sound wholly their own. Displaying a remarkable range, Cold Spring Fault Less Youth wanders between atmospheric song forms and pumped-up club tracks, each one unique and ready to blur around its boundaries. “Home Recording” opens on a mellow, melodic note with bits of guitar and horns laid over easygoing vocals and synthesizer chords, supplemented by warm washes of bass. “Break Well” plays a neat trick by switching from ambient drama to a funky fit of jangling-guitar instrumental pop about two-thirds of the way through, and other tracks toggle between smart dance-floor fodder (“Made to Stray”) and delicate forays into slower but still scintillating tempos (“So Many Times, So Many Ways,” “Sullen Ground”). All together, it’s a new kind of electronic mood music with signals of more moods to move through still.

Sparrow & the Workshop, Murderopolis

Glasgow trio Sparrow & the Workshop started well: Their 2010 debut, Crystals Fall was an invigorating reminder of the gothic furies at the heart of the British folk tradition. For its swift follow-up, 2011′s Spitting Daggers, they attempted to strike while the iron was hot, and succeeded only in bringing the hammer down on their collective thumb: The album sounded forced and rushed, with earlier subtlety subsumed by histrionics. Murderopolis, their third, bore the burden of needing to correct one of the worst cases of Second Album Syndrome as has been diagnosed this decade.

Murderopolis finds the balance more or less restored. It does not lack drama — drama, on any album blessed with Jill O’Sullivan’s arresting voice, is a given. “Flower Bombs” is a reminder of how much that first album suggested a reincarnation of Jefferson Airplane; “The Faster You Spin” gets outright metal, and “The Glue That Binds Us” is a kiss-off tune of singular directness and brutality. But Sparrow & the Workshop have rediscovered the merits of their more orthodox folk aspect, as well —¬ opening track “Valley Of Death” recalls the mournful modern country of First Aid Kit. And when they successfully negotiate a path between those extremes, as on the Fairport-Convention-play-The-Cure “Darkness,” they’re extraordinary. Welcome back.

Discover: Burger Records

Hear the sound of Burger Records while you read: Download our free 20-track sampler here, featuring tracks from White Fang, The Go, Jaill and more.

Before you even got inside the sprawling, ramshackle Austin venue known as Hotel Vegas on Saturday, March 16 — the final day of South by Southwest 2013 — it was possible to suffer a crippling case of sensory overload. Taped to the front of the building, which is part bar, part flophouse, part weather-beaten barn, was a billboard-sized piece of paper crammed, end-to-end, with the names of hundreds of bands, all of them written in the same bold, 16-point font and all lined up in tidy, symmetric columns. From two in the afternoon until two in the morning, the club was home to Burger Mania, a celebration of both bands signed to the California label Burger Records as well as bands that orbit loosely within its peculiar universe. If there were 200 bands performing over the course of the afternoon, it’s only because there wasn’t enough time for 400.

This is the world of Burger Records, the California label that’s spent the last six years breathlessly building a dense, comic-book catalog of albums that cross hundreds of genre byways, but are unified in their rickety production, wide-eyed worldview, serrated edges and sugary, sugary centers. That the poster outside the Hotel Vegas resembled nothing so much as an oversized shopping list was appropriate. Skip over any one entry, and you risked omitting a crucial ingredient.

Sean Bohrman and Lee Rickard founded the label in 2007 as a way to satiate their own insatiable musical hunger. Though they’d both been in bands before — most notably, the mucus-covered-Raspberries sugar-punk outfit Thee Makeout Party, they quickly realized their energies were better spent shepherding other bands to stardom rather than pursuing their own. They gained a gaggle of early disciples by manufacturing and selling $6 cassette releases of albums by Ty Segall, King Tuff and others, but the label’s own roster quickly eclipsed those they were distributing. And while there isn’t specifically a “Burger Sound,” all of the bands owe something to both punk and pop, but all of them refract those influences in different ways, some of them veering off into unsettling psych, some into radiant power pop, still others into glittering keyboard pop.

Above all, Burger has managed to generate and sustain something that few other labels manage — the incredible compulsion to purchase. Seeing a table full of Burger releases laid out side by side, with their matching Burger logos, their similar look and feel and their stunningly affordable price tag (at the Hotel Vegas showcase, all of the vinyl LPs were $10), it’s almost impossible to not to reach for your wallet. You want to collect them in the same way a kid wants to blow his allowance on every different kind of candy at the deli. The sensation is the same: You don’t know what exactly you’re going to get when you open the wrapper, but you know it’s going to be sweet and satisfying. And as soon as you’ve gotten through them, you basically want more almost immediately.

Because Burger feels not so much like a record label but some enormous cartoon universe, and all of the bands are its inhabitants, it makes sense that there would need to be some kind of physical manifestation of Burger — which became a reality when Rickard and Bohrman opened the Burger Records store in Fullerton, California in 2009. And while selling records in 2013 can be a grim business, what comes through more than anything else when talking to the duo is their breathless enthusiasm: They cut each other off, finish each other’s sentences, talk over each other and try to outdo each other with superlatives about each Burger artist (or “Burger Star” as Rickard calls them). It becomes apparent that the Burger roster is so brain-breakingly big because Richard and Bohrman couldn’t bear the thought of leaving anyone behind.

eMusic’s editor-in-chief J. Edward Keyes caught up with the duo by phone to talk about ’60s bubblegum, Dick Clark and the merits of The Secret.

On how they met:

Sean Bohrman: I made fun of Lee for having long hair.

Lee Rickard: It was October of ’98, I believe Sean was in costume.

Bohrman: We met and immediately hit it off and started hanging out and smoking weed and going to movies and going to Wendy’s. And all of our friends were in shitty bands, so we were like, “Fuck it, why can’t we be in a shitty band?” So we started The NOiSE!.

Rickard: From the very beginning, Sean and I had a vision. We wanted our logo to have a lowercase “I” and an exclamation point — little subtleties. Just little things. Like repetition — we were like, “If we just put our sticker up [at all these different places], people are gonna know that we’re a band.” So we put stickers everywhere, People were talking about how we put stickers on their silverware and shit.

Bohrman: Well, we didn’t do it, but somebody did. I mean, you make enough stickers, they just get out of your control.

Rickard: Sean went to school in 2000 and I still had two more years of high school, so when he left, I started [the band] Thee Makeout Party. When Sean came home, after he graduated college, he joined. We started Burger to put out our own record, but once the band ended, both of us went crazy and put all of our energy into [growing] Burger. So for the last four years, we’ve just been hustling Burger non-stop.

On how ’50s and ’60s bubblegum pop informed their aesthetic:

Rickard: We love bubblegum music. My thing is cartoon bands — bands that didn’t really exist. I’m all about that. I love the idea of it. Half of them are uncredited, and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, that’s ["Yummy Yummy Yummy" singer] Joey Levine!” you just hear his voice and you know it’s Joey. You start deciphering who’s who. We love pop music and bubblegum music. It’s fun — that’s the part we take to heart: the playfulness, the childlike sense of a good time. Even though we’re stressed out and pulling our hair out trying to work out all the logistics of running multiple businesses, deep down that’s what we’re doing with Burger. We’re trying to create an alternate reality for us to exist in, and bringing in all our favorite records. That’s why we reach out to our idols and see what we can get away with and who we can work with and how much fun we can have. And as far as marketing and branding? [It's all inspired by] bubblegum music. We don’t have any shame in our game. You wanna make a pillowcase? Candy? A record? It doesn’t have to be a record or a tape — it can be anything, as long as it makes you excited. That’s what pop music’s all about.

On their commitment to putting out cassettes:

Rickard: I don’t wanna be pigeonholed into being a cassette label, but because we’ve put out so many cassettes, it overshadows the LPs. We’ve done over 400 cassette tapes. Cassettes are affordable and they’re analog and they sound good. It’s just, “These are cheap enough that we can each put in $100, generate a couple hundred tapes, give the band a box of tapes, and let them go on the road and spread them out like calling cards.” I mean, tapes rule. They’re hand-held, it’s tangible — you can touch and feel and read and get as much artistic enjoyment from your favorite Burger star as you possibly can at that moment. You can listen to the tape and have some art to read. All the first pressings are hand-numbered. I still have to assemble all these tapes in the middle of everything else we’re doing. So actual effort goes into putting the tapes out. We touch and sweat and bleed and Lord knows what else is oozing out of us at any given time.

Bohrman: Seriously! I feel really attached to every release. Just by looking at them, I can tell you who numbered them — things no one else cares about. This is our little world, and we take pride in it.

On the fact that people buy Burger records just because they’re on Burger Records:

Rickard: We’re building a brand you can trust and identify with. “It’s on Burger, so it’s gotta be pretty fucking good.” Or weird. Especially the LPs I feel are top-shelf. You can stand them up next to any other record, and there’s a reason why it’s a Burger record. The cassettes we can be a bit more lax with putting out demos, or things that are a little rough around the edges or long-lost live tapes from bands that don’t exist anymore. I take pride in the tapes, too, in that sense. We’re documenting the teen scene. And they’re gonna cringe in 20 years, but at least right now they have a tape out and they can generate gas money or hamburger money after the show just because they sold a handful of tapes. It gives them a sense of worth and community. I really want it to be a family thing — the Burger family.

On using group tours to build that family:

Bohrman: Dick Clark is a big inspiration. If you want me to talk about Dick Clark for an hour, I will. What I learned from Dick Clark was that he could get all these crazy artists on the same bill, put them on a bus and tour around. Like, the Zombies, the Ronnettes and the Crystals on the same tour. It’s unbelievable — you do some research and you’re like, “How did they get these tours together?”

Rickard: So we were like, “Alright, we’re gonna book a tour and call it Caravan of Stars and take out a bunch of bands that have never been on the road before.” Because another thing we love doing is booking shows. Because you’re making history. You’re predicting the future, and you’re putting time and energy into manifesting your fate. It’s cosmic, but it’s also really practical. You look into the future, you pick a date, you say something’s gonna happen and then you follow through on it. That’s rewarding.

Bohrman: And we put all the Burger money back into the label. That’s how we’ve put out over 50 records and 400 cassettes in less than six years’ time. We’re probably one of the fastest-growing independent labels of all time. If everyone put [all the money they made] back into what they do, who knows what would happen?

Rickard: I wanna be, like, the most artist-friendly label of all time as far as creative control and compensation. I want everyone to be able to eat. I want to eat. And that’s not too far off. We’re gonna be doing it right.

On where Burger will be in 2023:

Rickard: We just opened Burger Outer Space.

Bohrman: We want to be the first person to sell a record on the moon. If there’s an alien that has a band, we want to put that out.

Rickard: Or a time traveler. Either one.

On the true, cosmic inspiration for Burger:

Borhman: Lee’s mom gave him the video of The Secret. Lee watched half of the video, and then he came and explained the half of the video that he watched to me. And then for the next three years, we ran [the business] on an explanation of half of the video of The Secret.

Rickard: The stars are aligned. This is our time and place to make shit happen. Just being aware of our power — I wish I was as spiritual as I am now when I was a teen. I was horny and weird and goofy. But if I had a little more of this cosmic insight, who knows where we’d be right now.

Various Artists, Smithsonian Folkways Classic Series Sampler

The Smithsonian Folkways collection is a musical treasure, a chance to wander down the byways of music not only from America, but all parts of the globe. From Woody Guthrie to Leadbelly to Elizabeth Cotten, the label is like an aural encyclopedia of what Moses Asch once called “people’s music,” the rough-recorded sound of genres being born and history being made. The songs on this sampler provide an opportunity to walk through the label’s right past.

Christian McBride, People Music

When you possess virtuoso technique and a genuine passion for tradition, being conservative doesn’t mean being careful or tepid. That’s the clarion message sent by bassist-leader Christian McBride and his quintet Inside Straight on their second record, People Music.

The populism in the title is reinforced by the crowd-pleasing panache with which the group resurrects the classic bop-ensemble synergy most commonly associated with the Blue Note label in the ’50s and ’60s. There are broad, languid melodies undergirded by percolating rhythms and clean, incisive interplay. There are staccato toe-tappers that invite spirited solos, and a broad canvas is invariably stretched out to accommodate them.

It helps that Warren Wolf is arguably the most exciting and accomplished bop vibraphonist since Bobby Hutcherson, both a striking soloist and team player whose rhythmic and harmonic sensibilities mesh with pianists Peter Martin and (on two tracks) Christian Sands and saxophonist Steve Wilson create a distinctive signature for the group. That said, there is no question that McBride is the leader here. There’s no mistaking his rugged, rubbery pizzicato pulse. Even playing at a breakneck pace, he never substitutes flash for context and conception.

Choice tracks include Wolf’s “Gang Gang,” with its circular groove spiraling out a series of superb solos; McBride’s vibrant and driving “The Movement Revisited,” and a pair of ballads with Wilson on soprano that are paeans to female African-American icons — Wilson’s “Ms. Angelou” for the writer-poet Maya Angelou and McBride’s closing “New Hope’s Angel” for Whitney Houston.

Various Artists, Don Giovanni Records Sampler

For the past decade, Don Giovanni Records has been the voice of the underground rock scene of deeply unglamorous New Brunswick, New Jersey. Dig in to this community-driven indie-rock powerhouse’s catalog with tracks from Screaming Females, Waxahatchee, Shellshag, and more. Read more about the label’s history and roster in this guide to Don Giovanni Records.

R.E.M. Goes Green

In November 1988, R.E.M. released their sixth studio album, Green. The record was an exclamation point at the end of a hectic but successful five years for the Athens, Georgia, quartet. Starting with 1983′s Murmur, R.E.M. released an album a year and was constantly on tour, which led to a steady increase in mainstream popularity and record sales. Their previous album, 1987′s Document, went platinum and spawned a Top 10 single, “The One I Love.”

Despite this positive momentum, Green felt like a career re-launch. Although the record maintained Document‘s vocal forthrightness and bright production, it also showed marked musical growth. You can hear R.E.M. stretching and redefining their sound: Peter Buck traded guitar for mandolin on several tunes, including the gentle “You Are The Everything” and the gnarled folk of “Hairshirt,” while the elegiac “World Leader Pretend” added cello and pedal steel and somber piano. But Green‘s rock-leaning songs also felt like departures, whether aggressive and harsh (the metallic “Orange Crush” and slow-burning “Turn You Inside Out”) or danceable and trifling (the ’60s-inspired bubblegum-punk of “Pop Song 89,” the goofy, gooey hit “Stand”).

With this newfound sonic crispness also came greater lyrical clarity. (The band even printed the lyrics to “World Leader Pretend” in Green‘s liner notes, marking the first time they had ever made such a concession.) Michael Stipe was starting to move away from abstraction and toward more concise wordplay that didn’t hide behind cryptic or obtuse phrases. The record wore its emotions on its sleeve, veering from serious to silly, somber to joyful; its songs encouraged living in the present (“Get Up”) and thinking globally while acting locally (“Stand”), but also addressed the effects of the Vietnam War (“Orange Crush”) and explored the social isolation of a young burn victim (“The Wrong Child”).

Perhaps not coincidentally, Green was also the first R.E.M. album released on a major label. Prior to its release, the group signed with Warner Bros., leaving indie label I.R.S. Records. In a 1989 Rolling Stone cover story, R.E.M. cited subpar international distribution as a major reason for the switch; in David Buckley’s book Fiction: An Alternative Biography, I.R.S. Records’ switch to a U.S. distributor that didn’t view R.E.M. as a priority act, was also cited.

Although they weren’t the first college-rock darling to sign with a major — The Replacements and Hüsker Dü had done so years before — R.E.M. was by far the highest-profile group to make the leap. Even though Warner Bros. was known for being artist-friendly (the band retained creative control, and Buck frequently cited the artistic freedom Van Dyke Parks and Randy Newman had while on the label), it was still a corporate behemoth to most indie fans. Drummer Bill Berry noted in Rolling Stone that some young fans “think of Warner Bros. as literally like a monster, just something that consumes and spits out. I think a lot of kids wonder how we fit.” Indeed, R.E.M. was a down-to-earth band that was often considered a reaction to ’80s music’s excess; they resonated with those who didn’t identify with the mainstream. Moving to a major label — away from the underground — felt like a small betrayal.

The thing is: Green didn’t feel like a major-label album. Despite the accessible pop sheen of “Stand,” the band was clearly aware that the song was a joke — Stipe once told MTV that he “wrote the most inane lyrics that I could possibly write” for it — while “Pop Song ’89″ poked fun at the kind of vapid music often released by, well, major labels. Plus, Green‘s lyrical directness didn’t necessarily make it transparent; Stipe constructed songs that had many layers of meaning and interpretation. “World Leader Pretend” was often associated with the Cold War, though it can also be read as someone struggling to overcome self-sabotage.

Reviews of Green in Trouser Press and Rolling Stone acknowledged the album’s quality, even as both pre-emptively (and pointedly) stressed that the album didn’t show any signs of selling out. Berry felt compelled to bluntly address the accusations. “My response is, like, Guns N’ Roses,” he told Rolling Stone. “Great band, by the way. I love ‘em. But it’s like they’ve got this ‘fuck you,’ ‘rock ‘n’ roll kid’ attitude, and they sell 7 million records. Their first record. And here we are on our sixth record — Document was our fifth full LP, it sells a million records, and ‘R.E.M. has sold out.’ But Guns N’ Roses gets all these accolades. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do. I really don’t.”

In the 25 years since Green‘s release, this same discussion — band signs with major, has to answer for it — happens any time a prominent indie act makes the jump; just ask The Shins, Gaslight Anthem or Death Cab for Cutie. Being on a major is often viewed as a tangible sign of success, an accomplishment that’s easy to grasp because it shows measurable progress. Rarely is it met with the kind of rabid discussion that followed — and still follows — R.E.M.’s decision.

Maybe that’s because these days it’s more difficult to figure out who’s on a major and who isn’t. The ease with which the internet facilitates discovery and sharing eliminates many of the distribution obstacles bands such as R.E.M. once faced, and the egalitarian nature of the digital music platform has lessened the exclusivity once associated with certain record labels; on a glowing screen, an MP3 is an MP3, no matter who released it. Perhaps Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, himself an indie artist, described the shading of the two worlds best: “Indie music likes to think that it’s all grassroots, but it’s really the same as the marketing and everything of major music, just a little bit lighter.”

The idea that indie-sounding music must be on an indie label is also losing currency: Take Oklahoma space cadets Flaming Lips and Grammy-winning indie darlings Arcade Fire. The former has been on Warner Bros. for more than two decades and has grown into a popular live draw. Counter-intuitively, however, the Lips have made some of the least accessible music of its career in recent years — from albums full of ambient electronic and abstract noise to heavy psychedelic and proto-metal signifiers. The Flaming Lips’ recent records are far less “radio-friendly” than Arcade Fire’s music, which has echoes of ’80s alt-goth staples (The Smiths, Echo & The Bunnymen) and superstars such as U2 or Bruce Springsteen. Both bands have found their own way to a similar place: Both are arena-level headliners with a strong sense of artistic independence.

When Death Cab for Cutie signed with major label Atlantic, after 2003′s Transatlanticism, their approach was decidedly philosophical. “We made that very un-indie-rock move of actually succumbing to our ambition as a band, and saying, ‘You know what? I want as many people to hear this band as possible,’” frontman Ben Gibbard told The AV Club in 2005 As a result, Death Cab for Cutie expanded its sound — and fan base — while still retaining full creative control. In the end, the stigma of signing to a major label has all but vanished; career ambition and creative sincerity are rarely thought of as mutually exclusive goals today. For that shift in perspective, we have R.E.M. and its leap of faith with Green to thank.

Various Artists, Burger Records Sampler

Sean Borhman and Lee Rickard founded Burger Records in 2007 as a way to release albums by their own band, Thee Makeout Party, but soon discovered they enjoyed releasing their friends’ records even more. Six years later, Burger stands as a testament to the power of pure, boundless enthusiasm about music. All of the bands on Burger bury pop hooks beneath layers of fuzz, and the label feels like a living document ofbelow-the-radar indie rock. It is a multicolored cartoon universe worth getting lost in.

Various Artists, ATO Records Spring Sampler 2013

Alabama Shakes broke out as one of 2012′s most exhilarating acts; so if you love them as much as we do, check out more from their label, ATO Records. This spring’s sampler has tracks from country up-and-comer Caitlin Rose, My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James, the Fleetwood Mac-channeling Kopecky Family Band, and much more.

Dirty Beaches, Drifters / Love is the Devil

Sometime in the winter of 2012, while traveling between Berlin and his hometown of Montreal, Alex Zhang Hungtai recorded Drifters and Love is the Devil under his Dirty Beaches moniker. This double-LP, Hungtai’s follow up to 2011′s Badlands, is an emotional exorcism and an intensely personal foray into loneliness and isolation. Badlands, which coated rockabilly-affectation in a lo-fi aesthetic, aspired to sound like lost music falling between the sound waves of a shifting AM dial, but the double album Drifters/Love Is the Devil patiently redefines how a Dirty Beaches album can sound. Drifters begins by chipping away at Hungtai’s penchant for sweet, memorable hooks: “Night Walk” pulses along as Hungtai bellows and howls, evoking the Modern Lovers (“with the radio on”), while “Casino Lisboa” stutter-steps around an infectious groove and crashing organ lines.

Love is the Devil, Drifters‘ sister LP, meanwhile is the soundtrack to a travelogue filled with heartbreak and longing. The names of songs are perfect accompaniments to the slow overtures they describe: “Greyhound at Night,” “Alone at the Danube River” and “I Don’t Know How to Find My Way Back to You” are especially moving reflections. Hungtai’s lonely, weary music makes you feel like a permanent tourist, the significance of which must not be lost on him, who, as a child, often moved around from one home to another. Love Is The Devil carries the listener through weary days and nights spent in far-away places, dejected and alone, and the cumulative effect of these two albums is to reposition Hungtai as a post-punk punk descendant and dispirited millennial-generation composer.

Nancy Elizabeth, Dancing

Recorded at night and at home amid a comforting tangle of instruments, Nancy Elizabeth Cunliffe’s third album can be both uncomfortably intimate and coldly distancing. It might have taken shape in her icy Manchester flat, but it feels like the work of somebody wandering wet-haired and wild-eyed around the village perimeter, uncertain whether to throw herself into the pond or curdle the milk with a curse. For all the meticulous layering of vocals, piano, synthesizers and percussion, tracks “Shimmering Song” or “Simon Says Dance” suggest something untrammeled and unpredictable.

If her voice allows her to tap into an age-old folk current, Cunliffe’s use of synthesizers on “All Mouth” and “Mexico” pitches the record into the modern world, underlining its free-floating eeriness. But despite the skin-prickling chill, these are hot-blooded songs. “Oh don’t follow all your fantasies/ Just stay in bed with me/ I’ll tie your tethers tighter if you dare to wriggle free,” she sings on the quiet desperation of “Debt”, collapsing together the PJ Harvey of both Rid Of Me and White Chalk. It’s no wonder that so many songs included the word “heart”: This is a record that feels everything deeply, pulling you along to its compelling beat.

Dead Gaze, Dead Gaze

Thick, candied fuzz cloaks the songs Cole Furlow makes as Dead Gaze, but the Oxford, Mississippi-based musician (a member of the so-called “Cats Purring” collective, which also includes Dent May and Bass Drum of Death) has too much pop in his heart to be confused for just another shrugging lo-fi bro. Dead Gaze’s proper self-titled debut, which mostly cherry-picks the best of Furlow’s various cassette and vinyl releases since 2009, is a great chance to get caught up on his skewed, blown-out brand of angsty tunefulness. Standouts like Nirvana-fueled bummer beater “This Big World” or Shins-with-synths strummer “Glory Days for Sure” would find an audience regardless of production techniques, but Furlow’s affinity for digital-era compression and distortion ensure nothing he does can quite be mistaken for acts that came before. It’s the Sleigh Bells approach to the Loudness Wars — use available technology to crank yourself over the din — only applied to an unassuming tradition of noise-streaked, tender-hearted songwriting that runs back to the Flying Nun label. And Dead Gaze doesn’t just rest on past laurels: Dreamily euphoric homecoming epiphany “I Found the Ending,” arguably the most accomplished song here, is new with this release.

15 Essential Box Sets

Sometimes a simple sampling won’t do — you want to dive in deep and explore every last corner of an artist’s discography, or every forgotten single in a major musical movement. That’s what the box set is made for: It’s a mini-musical history lesson in one compact package. We asked Douglas Wolk to comb through our digital crates, and he emerged with 15 of the best. — eMusic Editorial Staff

New This Week: Laurel Halo, Carter Tutti, Nancy Elizabeth & More

Laurel Halo, Behind the Green Door A more straightforward, beat-driven release than 2012′s Quarantine, this EP still bends Halo’s freeform electronica into all kind of thrilling shapes. Michaelangelo Matos writes:

“The opening track evokes mid-’90s Aphex Twin, while “UHFFO” is phased-dizzy minimalist techno, with everything from the beat to the zapping keyboard duel that livens it up midway in, coated with gauze. The heavily dubbed-out “Sex Mission”, meanwhile, contains zero heavy breathing, unless you count the way the rhythm track heaves – not in a cartoon-porn way, but something more meditative while still evoking arousal.”

Nancy Elizabeth, Dancing Nancy Elizabeth’s third album taps into an age-old folk current, and is both eerie and heartfelt. Victoria Segal says:

“It might have taken shape in her icy Manchester flat, but it feels like the work of somebody wandering wet-haired and wild-eyed around the village perimeter, uncertain whether to throw herself into the pond or curdle the milk with a curse. For all the meticulous layering of vocals, piano, synthesisers and percussion, tracks like “Shimmering Song” or ”Simon Says Dance” suggest something untrammeled and unpredictable.”

Shannon and the Clams, Dreams in the Rat House Oakland’s fiercest contemporary purveyors of scuffed-up early-’60s rock’n'roll jump to the relative big league of the Sub Pop imprint Hardly Art without sacrificing any of their rickety retro charm. Marc Hogan reviews the band’s third album:

“It sticks to the live-sounding, punk-roughed doo-wop, girl group and surf rock throwbacks that made 2011 predecessor Sleep Talk the perfect cheap-beer chaser. It’s a narrow but fertile niche, and this trio goes after it with gusto.”

The Dillinger Escape Plan, One of Us is the Killer The experimental metal band’s fifth album is a frazzled showcase of technical speed-prog, unrelenting post-hardcore and soulful pop. Jon Wiederhorn writes:

“Some will find the Dillinger Escape Plan’s sonic schizophrenia too difficult, but for those with patience and open ears, repeat listens yield hidden rewards, like the syncopated beats that weave expertly through the Faith No More-style euphony of the verses of the title track.”

This is the Kit, Wriggle Out the Restless Sharon Van Etten and The National’s Aaron Dessner are both fans, and Kate Stables’ breathtaking, banjo-plucked folk is certainly deserving of a wider audience. This album is gorgeous, its stripped-back songs of love and longing full of unaffected beauty.

Carter Tutti, Coolicon More propulsive weirdness from Chris Carter and Cosi Fanni Tutti, this single takes its name from the enamel factory lights used by Delia Derbyshire in her music-making.

Baltic Fleet, The Wilds Paul Fleming, touring keyboardist with Echo and the Bunnymen, has just won the prestigious Liverpool GIT Award, which means he’ll open Yoko Ono’s Meltdown Festival in June. This single, from the album Towers, showcases his motorik metal-machine music that conjures cinematic images of the industrial North West.

Visage, Hearts and Knives The band’s first album in 29 years is a pristine polish of their early ’80s sound.

Grim Tower, Anarchic Breezes An album of “detuned acoustic death folk” from Black Mountain’s Stephen McBean and Immad Wasif, who has played with Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Rich and strange, with more than a whiff of patchouli oil about it.

The Baptist Generals, Jackleg Devotional To The Heart  New album from the Texas band – their second, and their first in ten years – expands on their heart-rending, slightly soused, roughed-up folk sound. A wonderful record.

Various Artists, Lennon Bermuda What do you mean, you didn’t know John Lennon was inspired by Bermuda? The book that accompanies this double CD says that Lennon’s trip to Bermuda was one of the most significant moments in his life, and it has the backing of Yoko Ono, so who are we to argue? Thankfully this doesn’t feature steelpan versions of “I Am The Walrus” or “Imagine”; instead famous names including Bryan Ferry, Heather Nova and, er Maxi Priest, cover Lennon songs alongside contributions from local artists with names like Biggie Irie and Tim “The Dealer” Deal. We’re Ber-mused too.

New This Week: Daft Punk, Laurel Halo, Dirty Beaches & More

Daft Punk, Random Access Memories: Heard of these guys? [See our complete coverage here.] Barry Walters says:

Daft Punk get far closer to replicating decidedly non-punk forms of the ’70s and early ’80s — disco, progressive rock, jazz-funk and West Coast studio pop — than most 21st-century musicians have ever dared. Absolutely none of it is what has traditionally been considered cool, and that’s precisely the point: RAM is instead focused on warmth, sunshine, good times, intimacy and sweaty shared body heat. There is solitude and melancholy as well, voiced through vocoders and co-writer Paul Williams, who in the shamelessly grand “Touch” plays the part of a robot who craves the reality of physical sensation. Segueing from gurgling synths to piano pop to disco to choral and symphonic pomp and back again, this multi-part epic holds the album’s theme: Even androids long for life.

Shannon and the Clams, Dreams in the Rat House: The fierce Oakland group moves up to Sub Pop’s Hardly Art imprint for their latest LP. Marc Hogan says:

Shannon and the Clams’ third album sticks to the live-sounding, punk-roughed doo-wop, girl group and surf rock throwbacks that made 2011 predecessor Sleep Talk the perfect cheap-beer chaser. It’s a narrow but fertile niche, and this trio goes after it with devilish bravado. Bass player Shannon Shaw, also of Bay Area kindred spirits Hunx and His Punx, shares lead vocal duties with guitarist Cody Blanchard, and their loose, comfortable rapport — along with the emphatic, conversational drumming of Ian Amberson — helps keep the shag-carpet and wood-paneled consistency from getting too same-y.

Laurel Halo, Behind the Green Door: A straightforwardly beat-driven new EP from Laurel Halo. Michaelangelo Matos says:

Laurel Halo still bends the framework into all kinds of aural shapes: The stalactite-like keyboards of “Throw,” the opening track, evokes mid-’90s Aphex Twin or µ-Ziq, while “UHFFO” is a phased-dizzy minimalist techno, everything from the beat to the zapping keyboard duel that livens it up midway in, coated with gauze. The heavily dubbed-out “Sex Mission,” meanwhile, contains zero heavy breathing, unless you count the way the rhythm track heaves — not in a cartoon-porn way, but something more meditative while still evoking arousal.

G&D, The Lighthouse: The latest from the prolific Georgia Anne Muldrow and Dudley Perkins, this time as G&D. Nate Patrin says:

The Lighthouse, the latest in a fruitful series of collaborations by Muldrow and Perkins, maintains their futurist-vintage outlook on music and philosophy and the places where they intersect. With a title track that pairs righteous-anger calls-to-arms with a breathless, almost blissed-out excitement, The Lighthouse kills its own stress in real time. Even the simplest material has an up-front, get-down musicality that gives a next-level jolt of stargazing eccentricity to boogie funk and skyscraper soul.

JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound, Howl: The self-described “post-punk soul rockers” get heavy on Howl. Hilary Saunders says:

Musically, Howl sounds like a calculated homage to ’70s funk and soul acts. “River” hearkens back to Al Green-style gospel and R&B and closer “These Things” showcases Brooks’s commanding vocal range and dynamics — switching from counter rhythms to falsettos with interjecting grunts in one fierce ballad.

Emerson String Quartet, Journeys: The Emerson String Quartet tackles Schoenberg and Tchaikovsky. Steve Holtje says:

What really links the works is inner turmoil. While the Tchaikovsky is prototypically Romantic and the Schoenberg verges on Post-Romanticism, both use dramatic harmonic restlessness to vividly portray unrest. The players emphasize this while giving the Schoenberg enough richness of tone to remind us of the composer’s continuing debt to Romanticism’s sound and gestures — even as he began to overthrow its harmonic language. There are, separately, better performances of each, but this combination amplifies the virtues heard here.

Dirty Beaches, Drifters/Love Is The Devil – The latest from Alex Zhang Hungtai in his Dirty Beaches guise – this is languorous and bleakly beautiful. Ilya Zinger says:

Sometime in the winter of 2012, while travelling between Berlin and his hometown of Montreal, Alex Zhang Hungtai recorded Drifters and Love is the Devil under his Dirty Beaches moniker. This double LP, Hungtai’s follow up to 2011′s Badlands, is an emotional exorcism and an intensely personal foray into loneliness and isolation.

Pat Metheny, John Zorn’s Book of Angels – The first collaboration between the guitarist Pat Metheny and the saxophonist/composer/contemporary music icon John Zorn. Metheny takes Zorn’s Jewish songs written for what he came to call his Masada Book and explodes them into suites, full of free-ranging style-devouring explorations.

The Baptist Generals, Jackleg Devotional To The Heart- New album from the Texas band – their second, and their first in ten years — expands on their heart-rending, slightly soused, roughed-up folk sound. A wonderful record.

Saturday Looks Good To Me, One Kiss Ends It All – Fifth full-length from long-running Ann Arbor indie-rock outfit mixes their usual blend of retro-rock signifiers with brainy-sugary indie rock wistfulness.

The 1975, IV – I don’t know if this band will ever get it together to release a full-length, but “Sex” remains, as always, a classic, an all-timer jam. Too bad for them they don’t live in a heavy-rotation world where this one song would be enough for them to be famous for a year or two.

Ugly Heroes, S/T – Apollo Brown, Verbal Kent, and Red Pill team up for Ugly Heroes, a low-key hard-knocking and personal soul-rap effort.

Mykki Blanco, Betty Rubble: The Initiation – Stylistically sprawling new mixtape from the talented and confrontational rapper Mykki Blanco.

Gaytheist, Hold Me…But Not So Tight -What to make of a band called Gaytheist? They are from Portland, OR; they play troglodytic punk-metal; they are a lot of fun.

Darius Rucker, True Believers – I’ve always thought that Darius would make sense as a country singer, and here he brings that mellow rich Blowfish baritone to a nice-sounding midtempo stuff that honestly sounds like Hootie given a few nudges to further into Nashville.

Emma-Louise, Vs. Head Vs. Heart – Burbling, 90s-trip-hop-redolent pop. Her voice has a creamy sort of calm to it, shades of Sarah McLachlan.

French Montana, Excuse My French – Bad Boy debut from lazily charismatic New York rapper, who has a way with bored, half-sung hooks and solid production.

Audra McDonald, Go Back Home – The jazz-standard interpreter’s latest; includes Sondheim, Hammerstein, Kander and Ebb, plus newer voices like Michael John LaChiusa and Adam Gwon.

30 Seconds to Mars, Love Lust Faith + Dreams – How did I forget this is Jared Leto’s band? The cover is Damien Hirst, btw. The modern rock band’s fourth effort.

Ke$ha, Crazy Kids – Our Ke$ha love is well-documented around these parts, but this sounds like ’09-era Ke$ha, like she’s taking a step backwards.

Mayer Hawthorne, Her Favorite Song – The appealingly nerdy white-boy soul balladeer returns, sounding more like Sade than I remember this time.

The Dodos, Confidence – New single from The Dodos.

Kate Boy, The Way We Are – Terrific single from Stockholm pop group.

JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound, Howl

For their third record, and their first for Bloodshot Records, the self-described “post-punk soul rockers” JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound get heavy. Much darker thematically than 2011′s rousing Want More, the fittingly titled Howl shows frontman Jayson “JC” Brooks at his most emotionally vulnerable yet, with lyrics detailing the slow progression of broken relationships — from heartbreak to longing to acceptance.

Musically, Howl sounds like a calculated homage to ’70s funk and soul acts. “River” hearkens back to Al Green-style gospel and R&B and closer “These Things” showcases Brooks’s commanding vocal range and dynamics — switching from counter rhythms to falsettos with interjecting grunts in one fierce ballad.

At their weakest, JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound seem like they’re forcing their influences somewhat: The jittery “Before You Die,” which veers closer toward ’70s disco-pop, doesn’t fit musically or lyrically alongside the rest of the more soulful tracks. However, the band’s crackling vitality, as vivid here as in their celebrated live shows, remains consistent through the album. The result is an affecting record, both heartbreaking and invigorating.

Richard Wagner’s Radical Aesthetic

Why are so many Wagner lovers indifferent to all operas but his? Why is there a corps of Wagner groupies that shows up in whatever part of the globe his four-opera epic Der Ring des Nibelungen is performed? Why, in this impatient Twitter-addled time, do thousands submit to slow-moving music dramas that last longer than a New York-to-London flight? Why, 200 years after he was born (on May 22, 1813), does Richard Wagner remain so deeply alive? A narcissistic genius with a nasty streak of anti-Semitism, he still inspires reverence and fury, still gets attacked and defended, and his influence as a musician and showbiz guru remains powerful, even for people who know almost nothing about him. Why?

Wagner’s vision of what art could be was so all-encompassing and radical that we are still digesting his influence. We have the auteur movie; he created the Gesamtkunstwerk, the integrated fusion of theater, music, poetry, art and light, all brought into being by a single imagination — his own. He draped music over serialized drama, so deliberate in its pace that characters could afford to brood and rant, even as the plot ground to a halt; we have Mad Men. There is no contemporary theme — infidelity, ambition, ruthlessness, idealism, betrayal, regret, vindictiveness, loyalty — that he could not pack into a few bars of harmony or a catchy leitmotif.

For all Wagner’s multimedia ambitions, it’s his music that supports the whole apparatus. Directors have jettisoned the big-beard-and-breastplate aesthetic of his original stagings. The alliterative thump of his librettos can cause literary inflammation. The scores, though, have remained sturdy enough to carry whole new worlds of theater: bare-stage productions with singers costumed in dowdy brown, high-tech extravaganzas with 3-D video projected on moving sets, surrealistic dreams with long-taloned gods. Whatever else is happening on stage, those impossibly high-powered voices keep cutting like spotlights through narcotic mists of orchestration. The music is so vivid you hardly need to see anything at all, which is why the purest form of experiencing a Wagner opera might be in total darkness.

Enough voltage surges through those quivering chords to power 200 years’ worth of the avant-garde. A century ago, the harmonic daring in Tristan und Isolde spurred Debussy and Schoenberg to imagine a world without major or minor keys. Film composers who sketch characters in melody (Luke Skywalker’s horn call, or Darth Vader’s ominous march, for example) are recycling Wagner’s technique of leitmotif. The vast expanses and slow churn of his music prefigured the even more leisurely pace of minimalism. So did his insistence on repetitive rhythmic units: Steve Reich quotes the hammering motif from Das Rheingold in the “Hindenburg” movement of his own three-act multimedia opera, Three Tales.

Wagner’s can be at once turbulent and slow. Choirs of horns surf on gusts of fast-moving strings, yet he lingers on each scene. Two characters — Siegfried and his adoptive father Mime, for example — keep trading heated phrases for long enough that the sense of symbolism burns off, and what remains is a pair of deeply human figures, bickering, loving, detesting, challenging. Like a documentary filmmaker interviewing a guarded subject, Wagner uses patience as a weapon, letting the characters’ bravado and weakness emerge note by note. His stateliness is merely the pace of human drama. That’s why it hardly matters whether an opera is about panicky gods and hubristic mortals (as in The Ring), about obsessive lovers (Tristan und Isolde), or about competitors in a local singing contest (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg). Gods, monsters, kings, churls — all get a chance to grumble and bloom.

But it would be wrong to say that Wagner remains modern because deep down his world is so familiar: It’s not. Even as he scattered his influence, seeding aesthetic movements he might well have despised (he did a lot of despising), he also produced a body of work that remains radical, inimitable, unique. The abiding strangeness of his work is its most magnetic aspect. Tristan und Isolde is not just a love story, but a musical ritual, too, liturgy for a religion of desire. What could be more irresistibly weird in our culture of instant gratification than that protracted shudder of anticipation? It’s not the final release that matters, but the hours of aching postponement.

Emerson String Quartet, Journeys

It’s surprising that the Emersons haven’t previously recorded any Schoenberg, considering the ensemble has never shied away from 20th century repertoire, and even moreso that their first choice is not a string quartet, but his 1899 string sextet, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), Op. 4.

It’s paired, in apt — and not quite unprecedented — programming, with Tchaikovsky’s 1890 (revised 1891-92) String Sextet in D minor, Op. 70, Souvenir de Florence. The album title attempts to conceptually link the two works; the Tchaikovsky is a journey because the main theme of the slow movement came during a visit to Florence, while the Schoenberg is a psychological journey.

But what really links the works is inner turmoil. While the Tchaikovsky is prototypically Romantic and the Schoenberg verges on Post-Romanticism, both use dramatic harmonic restlessness to vividly portray unrest. The players (violinist Paul Neubauer and cellist Colin Carr augment the quartet on both works) emphasize this while giving the Schoenberg enough richness of tone to remind us of the composer’s continuing debt to Romanticism’s sound and gestures — even as he began to overthrow its harmonic language. There are, separately, better performances of each, but this combination amplifies the virtues heard here.