Games, Games

Games make a specific brand of starry-eyed power pop full of young people searching for kicks and living for tonight. Evoking catchy tunesmiths like the Raspberries and Big Star, as well as modern-day hook mavens like The Busy Signals and Gentleman Jesse (Games features former members of each of the latter, in fact), their debut album is delightfully shameless and eminently enjoyable.

Tracks like “It’s Just Impossible” and “Why Can’t We Go Back” are amped-up ravers, as regretful of the past as they are reveling in their present. The aptly-titled first track “Listen” pairs lyrics about lemonade and cotton candy over crunchy guitars. The delusions-of-grandeur storyline of “You Want it All” is given an unselfconscious swing that matches its overly self-confident subject. A thrilling and consistent batch of two-to-three-minute garage exultations, Games takes only a single break during its crisp, 26-minute run time, and that’s for token slow jam and penultimate foot-dragger, “When the Time.” Luckily, “Take a Dare” sweeps in to save the day. “Why don’t we end it all in a fiery crash?” frontman Jeremy Thompson suggests. But this music is too finely polished for that.

eMusic Members’ Top 10 Albums of 2012

We asked, you answered. And the results were as varied and eclectic as we’ve come to expect from eMusic members. Here are the results of our Member Poll for the Best Albums of 2012, along with some of your comments.

eMusic’s #1 Album of 2012: Cold Specks’ I Predict a Graceful Expulsion

In concerts over the course of the last year Al Spx, the woman who writes, records and performs as Cold Specks, has been starting sets with an a cappella rendition of the old Elizabeth Cotten reel “Shake Sugaree.” It’s a sly, spooky little song, one where a lightness of melody distracts from a dark meaning. The song was written by Cotten, but the recorded version is sung by her great-granddaughter Brenda Evans, whose wide-eyed, angelic delivery adds to its peculiar tension. The lyrics to the song are so spare they almost defy literal meaning: You can read them on the page, but synthesizing them into a coherent story proves difficult. (A Google search reveals thousands of frustrated message board threads attempting to do just that.) The only clue to its meaning is found in its mournful chorus, which the song cycles back to again and again and again: “Everything I have is down in pawn.”

That state of destitution is the starting point for I Predict a Graceful Expulsion, Spx’s stark, stunning debut and eMusic’s Best Album of 2012. Like “Sugaree,” it’s also sung by a lost child, one who has moved from a place of great abundance to a place of great need. And, like Cotten, Spx also writes in sense imagery that has volumes of emotional resonance, but resists all attempts at literal parsing. Its few moments of clear meaning come suddenly — illuminated by lightning-flashes before disappearing once again into darkness. Despite this — or, perhaps because of it — Expulsion is, by a good distance, the year’s richest and most enveloping record.

Musically, it’s almost ruthlessly spare. Most of the songs are barren as skeletons — just waltzing acoustic guitar and the occasional solemn piano — and all of them benefit from Spx’s bruised, pleading voice. Interviewers never tire of pointing out to Spx that she once termed her music “doom soul,” but they consistently miss the other label she gave it, Gothic Gospel. That’s no accident: Though she’s not especially forthcoming with the details, Spx comes from a deeply religious family. Al Spx is not her real name — it’s a pseudonym she came up with to keep them from finding out about her music. While it’s hard to accurately assess the particular brand of Christianity that her parents practice, suffice it to say it’s severe enough that their daughter would rather come up with an alias than have them know that she’s a singer. Spx has said in interviews that one of the album’s themes is “loss of faith”; many of the lyrics on the record are Bible verses, but nearly all of them are wrested — almost angrily — from context.

In “Holland,” which flutters like dry wheat in a hot breeze, Spx sings, “We are many, we are many,” which makes it seem like it’s an anthem of solidarity until you realize she’s quoting the demon-possessed man of Mark Chapter 5, whose infernal inhabitants answered with that sentence when Christ asked what their name was before He cast them into a herd of swine. She quotes Scripture again in the song’s transcendent finale, asking: “Oh death, where is thy sting?” but she sings it not as it appears in the Bible, as a mocking question, but as someone waiting to physically learn the answer (the next line is, “Does it feed on eager limbs?”). “Hector” opens with the lines, “I’ve walked behind you/ assumed power in the dead of night.” When asked, Spx has said that Hector is the name of a demon. The song crests with Spx singing, “Lower it down, kill all my faith.” One of the albums most potent lyrics comes in “Blank Maps,” where Spx defiantly declares, “I am a goddamn believer” — both proclaiming and renouncing faith in a single breath.

At first blush, that line seems sarcastic, a way for Spx to distance herself from her heritage, blasphemy being the greatest among the sins. But with each listen, it becomes clear such a callow interpretation is wrong. There’s a defiance in Spx’s voice as she delivers it, a set-jawed, leaning-into-the-wind kind of obstinacy that feels too resolute and too deeply-felt to just be a middle finger to the Most High. And it starts to become clear that she’s getting at something else — at the belief that comes after belief, at the understanding that passes peace, at the thing you do when everything you have is down in pawn.

All of that comes racing to the fore in “Elephant Head,” which arrives deep in the album’s second half. Spx has downplayed the song’s meaning (at a concert at Mercury Lounge in New York she dismissed any subtext by saying its title was “just a name my brother used to call me”), and initially its lyrics seem to follow the album’s pattern of mystic riddling. But something alarming happens about a minute and a half in. After spending the bulk of the record speaking in parables, Spx suddenly forgoes her complicated lyrical Esperanto and delivers, in clear, direct language, what might be the album’s summary statement: “It’s a strange year, and it appears that I am stuck.” It’s a bracing moment of candor, deepened by the fact that Spx follows that naked expression of despair with the rejoinder that gives the record its title: “But I predict a graceful expulsion.” And in that split-second, the lens suddenly twists into focus: In those two lines, Spx skillfully spins a deft, clever appropriation of the religious theory of salvation. Christians see pain as a virtue because it provides a passage to heaven, and so they endure it in the hopes of reaping an eternal reward; Spx — a “goddamn believer” — is singing about something bolder and scarier: the bravery and determination that comes in the absence of faith, without the promise of reward. She’s singing about the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. And when you unlock that riddle, you fall suddenly into the song’s deep, beautiful message.

It’s a song that says heaven is here right now and it’s for anyone who can push through death and can keep on pushing until they can hear the harps. It’s a song for anyone bold enough and brave enough to stare full-on into the darkness and see only the celebration on the other side — someone, as Spx beautifully puts it, “Who’ll dance around martyrs and sing at caskets.” It’s a heathen’s spiritual and, like all spirituals, it carries a bullheaded message of redemption in the face of insurmountable odds. It says that life is difficult and that it can be defeating, and that sometimes, bad things happen and then keep on happening; that the meaning can be difficult to decode and the blows too brutal to absorb. But it also says that There’s A Great Day Coming. And it may be hard-won, and it may be so far off that it seems like just a twinkle in the distance; and it may feel like fantasy, and your resolve may buckle, and it may take every ounce of courage and strength and belief you have to envision your escape. But this one thing is certain: You will get out.

eMusic’s #1 Album of 2012: Cold Specks’ I Predict a Graceful Expulsion

In concerts over the course of the last year Al Spx, the woman who writes, records and performs as Cold Specks, has been starting sets with an a cappella rendition of the old Elizabeth Cotten reel “Shake Sugaree.” It’s a sly, spooky little song, one where a lightness of melody distracts from a dark meaning. The song was written by Cotten, but the recorded version is sung by her great-granddaughter Brenda Evans, whose wide-eyed, angelic delivery adds to its peculiar tension. The lyrics to the song are so spare they almost defy literal meaning: You can read them on the page, but synthesizing them into a coherent story proves difficult. (A Google search reveals thousands of frustrated message board threads attempting to do just that.) The only clue to its meaning is found in its mournful chorus, which the song cycles back to again and again and again: “Everything I have is down in pawn.”

That state of destitution is the starting point for I Predict a Graceful Expulsion, Spx’s stark, stunning debut and eMusic’s Best Album of 2012. Like “Sugaree,” it’s also sung by a lost child, one who has moved from a place of great abundance to a place of great need. And, like Cotten, Spx also writes in sense imagery that has volumes of emotional resonance, but resists all attempts at literal parsing. Its few moments of clear meaning come suddenly — illuminated by lightning-flashes before disappearing once again into darkness. Despite this — or, perhaps because of it — Expulsion is, by a good distance, the year’s richest and most enveloping record.

Musically, it’s almost ruthlessly spare. Most of the songs are barren as skeletons — just waltzing acoustic guitar and the occasional solemn piano — and all of them benefit from Spx’s bruised, pleading voice. Interviewers never tire of pointing out to Spx that she once termed her music “doom soul,” but they consistently miss the other label she gave it, Gothic Gospel. That’s no accident: Though she’s not especially forthcoming with the details, Spx comes from a deeply religious family. Al Spx is not her real name — it’s a pseudonym she came up with to keep them from finding out about her music. While it’s hard to accurately assess the particular brand of Christianity that her parents practice, suffice it to say it’s severe enough that their daughter would rather come up with an alias than have them know that she’s a singer. Spx has said in interviews that one of the album’s themes is “loss of faith”; many of the lyrics on the record are Bible verses, but nearly all of them are wrested — almost angrily — from context.

In “Holland,” which flutters like dry wheat in a hot breeze, Spx sings, “We are many, we are many,” which makes it seem like it’s an anthem of solidarity until you realize she’s quoting the demon-possessed man of Mark Chapter 5, whose infernal inhabitants answered with that sentence when Christ asked what their name was before He cast them into a herd of swine. She quotes Scripture again in the song’s transcendent finale, asking: “Oh death, where is thy sting?” but she sings it not as it appears in the Bible, as a mocking question, but as someone waiting to physically learn the answer (the next line is, “Does it feed on eager limbs?”). “Hector” opens with the lines, “I’ve walked behind you/ assumed power in the dead of night.” When asked, Spx has said that Hector is the name of a demon. The song crests with Spx singing, “Lower it down, kill all my faith.” One of the albums most potent lyrics comes in “Blank Maps,” where Spx defiantly declares, “I am a goddamn believer” — both proclaiming and renouncing faith in a single breath.

At first blush, that line seems sarcastic, a way for Spx to distance herself from her heritage, blasphemy being the greatest among the sins. But with each listen, it becomes clear such a callow interpretation is wrong. There’s a defiance in Spx’s voice as she delivers it, a set-jawed, leaning-into-the-wind kind of obstinacy that feels too resolute and too deeply-felt to just be a middle finger to the Most High. And it starts to become clear that she’s getting at something else — at the belief that comes after belief, at the understanding that passes peace, at the thing you do when everything you have is down in pawn.

All of that comes racing to the fore in “Elephant Head,” which arrives deep in the album’s second half. Spx has downplayed the song’s meaning (at a concert at Mercury Lounge in New York she dismissed any subtext by saying its title was “just a name my brother used to call me”), and initially its lyrics seem to follow the album’s pattern of mystic riddling. But something alarming happens about a minute and a half in. After spending the bulk of the record speaking in parables, Spx suddenly forgoes her complicated lyrical Esperanto and delivers, in clear, direct language, what might be the album’s summary statement: “It’s a strange year, and it appears that I am stuck.” It’s a bracing moment of candor, deepened by the fact that Spx follows that naked expression of despair with the rejoinder that gives the record its title: “But I predict a graceful expulsion.” And in that split-second, the lens suddenly twists into focus; the vapor crystallizes. In those two lines, Spx skillfully spins a deft, clever appropriation of the religious theory of salvation. Christians see pain as a virtue because it provides a passage to heaven, and so they endure it in the hopes of reaping an eternal reward; Spx — a “goddamn believer” — is singing about something bolder and scarier: the bravery and determination that comes in the absence of faith, without the promise of reward. She’s singing about the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. And when you unlock that riddle, you fall suddenly into the song’s deep, beautiful message.

It’s a song that says heaven is here right now and it’s for anyone who can push through death and can keep on pushing until they can hear the harps. It’s a song for anyone bold enough and brave enough to stare full-on into the darkness and see only the celebration on the other side — someone, as Spx beautifully puts it, “Who’ll dance around martyrs and sing at caskets.” It’s a heathen’s spiritual and, like all spirituals, it carries a bullheaded message of redemption in the face of insurmountable odds. It says that life is difficult and that it can be defeating, and that sometimes, bad things happen and then keep on happening; that the meaning can be difficult to decode and the blows too brutal to absorb. But it also says that There’s A Great Day Coming. And it may be hard-won, and it may be so far off that it seems like just a twinkle in the distance; and it may feel like fantasy, and your resolve may buckle, and it may take every ounce of courage and strength and belief you have to envision your escape. But this one thing is certain: You will get out.

eMusic Members’ Top 10 Albums of 2012

We asked, you answered. And the results were as varied and eclectic as we’ve come to expect from eMusic members. Here are the results of our Member Poll for the Best Albums of 2012, along with some of your comments.

Public Service Broadcasting, The War Room EP

Usually, there’s no greater turn off than music that feels patriotic, which is the reason why Muse’s official anthem for the Olympics was so alarming (okay, one of the reasons). But The War Room EP by experimental electronic duo Public Service Broadcasting evoked a spirit of national pride and resilience that chimed in perfectly with the bunting-decked mood of London 2012, while also being genuinely innovative. Granted rare access to the British Film Institute’s archive of wartime propaganda, J Willgoose Esq and Wrigglesworth — the Brylcreemed moustaches are implicit — layered 1940s radio broadcasts over sample-heavy music that flows hypnotically from Krautrock to expansive, energetic post-rock. The concept initially seems like the equivalent of a “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster, but these tracks become more moving and evocative with every listen. The picture of the Blitz on “London Can Take It,” in particular, is soul-stirring stuff.

Mike Cooley, The Fool on Every Corner

For more than 15 years now, Mike Cooley has played the quiet Drive-By Trucker. Onstage, he’s usually overshadowed by his co-singer/co-songwriter Patterson Hood, who plays the part of Southern rock visionary with impressive stamina. More often than not, Cooley simply stands stage right, laying down solid boogie-rock riffs and occasionally taking lead vocal. Yet much of the Truckers’ mythos rests on the contrast between the two songwriters and, more specifically, on the contrast between Hood’s artfully plainspoken lyrics and Cooley’s slyly impressionistic rebel poetry.

Incredibly, The Fool on Every Corner is only Cooley’s first album under his own name (Hood, by comparison, has three). Recorded during a recent solo tour, the set places his songs in a stark acoustic setting, with Cooley and his guitar accompanied only by the catcalls of the lively audience. “Cottonseed” and “Shut Your Mouth and Get Your Ass on the Plane” showcase his rustic tenor as well as his devil-may-care picking, the former a Truckers hallmark but the latter something new. Barebones versions of “Loaded Gun in the Closet” and “Cottonseed” reveal fully imagined lives rather than easy Southern archetypes, and Cooley adds new verses and new dimensions to “Three Dimes Down.” Away from the rock-and-roll drama of the Truckers’ three-guitar attack, these hard-bitten songs lose only a bit of their power but absolutely none of their purpose.

Win 30 albums from [PIAS]!

One of our very favourite labels, [PIAS] Recordings, is celebrating its 30^th anniversary. The Belgian-born, London-based imprint has spent three decades as a quiet hero of independent music, releasing albums by artists as diverse as Grace Jones, Muse, Mogwai, Crystal Castles and The Darkness, as well as partnering with smaller labels such as Fatcat, Wall Of Sound and Laurent Garnier’s F Communications to champion the best new music across Europe.

To celebrate the anniversary, we have teamed up with [PIAS] for a very special prize draw to give away 30 albums that have become modern classics. Five lucky winners will be able to download all 30 [PIAS] titles below, absolutely free!

To enter, click here. The closing date is January 4, 2013 and winners will be notified on January 8, 2013.

[PIAS] Recordings 30th anniversary albums:

Agnes Obel, Philharmonics

Amp Fiddler, The Waltz Of A Ghetto Fly

Crystal Castles, Crystal Castles

Dinosaur Jr, Beyond

DJ Format, Music For The Mature B-Boy

Drive By Truckers, The Big To-Do

Front 242, Front By Front

Grace Jones, Hurricane

I Am Kloot, Natural History

Joan As Police Woman, Real Life

Laurent Garnier, Unreasonable Behaviour

Les  Rhythmes Digitales, Darkdancer

Meat Beat Manifesto, Satyricon

Mogwai, Happy Songs For Happy People

New Fast Automatic Daffodils, Pigeonhole

Other Lives, Tamer Animals

Propellerheads, Decksanddrumsandrockandroll

Reindeer Section, Y’All Get Scared Now, Ya Hear!

Reverend and The Makers, The State of Things

Röyksopp, Melody A.M.

Seasick Steve, You Can’t Teach An Old Dog New Tricks

Sigur Rós, Ágætis Byrjun

Soulwax, Much Against Everyone’s Advice

St Germain, Boulevard

The Bees, Sunshine Hit Me

The Middle East, I Want That You Are Always Happy

The Wiseguys, The Antidote

Tiga, Sexor

Vitalic, OK Cowboy

The Young Gods, T.V. Sky

Jah Wobble & Keith Levene, Yin & Yang

During the couple dozen years since they played together as part of Public Image Ltd’s original, best lineup, bassist Jah Wobble (John Wardle) and guitarist Keith Levene have pursued somewhat different career paths. Where Wobble followed his bliss through adventurous electronic, folk and internationalist projects, Levene stumbled down the heroin highway, by Wobble’s account, until cleaning up and joining his former bad-boy bandmate for the early-2012 “Metal Boxin Dub” tour. (John Lydon, meanwhile, has been working the reality-show circuit and selling Country Life butter.) Now in their mid 50s, Wobble and Levene cast a collective gaze back upon the psychedelic and progressive music of their youth, albeit with a corrosive aggro slant.

With Wobble clearly in charge, Yin & Yang at its best packs a driving dub-rock wallop reminiscent of Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare’s best onstage moments with Black Uhuru. But the manic laugher heard early in the self-reflexive title track (“Fucking yin and fucking yang/ Soft little whisper, big fucking bang”) hints at the same prankish inclinations that inspired the duo’s 7/8 take on George Harrison’s “Within You Without You” (PiL covers the Beatles!) and that are as dubious as Lydon imitator Johnny Rotter’s appearance in “Understand.” Trumpeter Sean Corby adds punchy verve to “Fluid,” which, like “Strut” and “Back on the Block,” has an improvised immediacy perfect for Wobble’s overdriven, rattling bass and Levene’s glorious rusty-metal, nails-on-chalkboard sound. Only a fool would write these cats off today; the ghost of electricity howls in their fat and furious geezer grooves.

Buddy Miller and Jim Lauderdale, Buddy and Jim

Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Jim Lauderdale’s meet-up with his old friend (and Sirius radio co-host) Buddy Miller feels like a subtle realignment after the cosmic-country tilt of his three preceding albums — deep, sly and masterful collaborations with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. Buddy and Jim, by contrast, is a solid collection rooted in classic country balladry and rockabilly rambunctiousness. Miller, who produced the album with vintage flair, foregrounds the duo’s grainy close harmonies. If they sound like resigned barroom buddies in the timely, uptempo “I Lost My Job of Loving You,” they’re several breakups closer to self-immolation in “Forever and a Day” and wife Julie Miller’s “It Hurts Me” (“when you bring me to tears and you think no one hears…”).

Economical soloing by fiddler Stuart Duncan and steel guitarist Russ Pahl adds color and verve to the Cajun-rock standard “South in New Orleans” and “The Train That Carried My Gal From Town,” an oft-recorded choogler from the ’20s; nor does the concise-to-a-fault Miller waste a single note himself while soloing in B&J’s cover of Joe Tex’s “I Want to Do Everything for You” — you only wish there were more of him. Unlike T-Bone Burnett, Miller burnishes the past without overly fetishizing it, which works particularly well on a perfect pair of weirdo rockabilly numbers, Lauderdale’s “Vampire Girl” and Jimmy McCracklin’s 1959 dance-craze attempt, “The Wobble.” Buddy and Jim turn out to be just a couple of country gentlemen having a ball while keeping it down-to-earth.

Caroline de Margerie, American Lady: The Life of Susan Mary Alsop

Nancy Mitford modeled a character on her, but it was as a comically priggish American. As revealed in Caroline de Margerie’s bonbon of a biography American Lady: The Life of Susan Mary Alsop, however, Susan Mary Alsop was far from the typical American in post-World War II France. Married to an American diplomat, Susan Mary was enjoying an affair with the British ambassador — one that didn’t impede her friendship with his wife. Later, she would return to America and marry political columnist Joseph Alsop, despite knowing that he was gay.

De Margerie stresses her gifts as a hostess, intermingling different strata of first Parisian and then Georgetown society, and her book is similar. Susan Mary’s great skill was as an observer, not in making history, and de Margerie’s great skill is in combining the boldfaced names amongst which Susan Mary moved into an entertaining look at the second half of the 20th century. The result is frothy fun, light on interviews and quotes and heavy on the authorial voice. American Lady isn’t exactly scholarly, but for those interested in anecdotes about the Kennedy White House or newly liberated Paris, it’s a gossipy treat.

JK Flesh / Prurient, Worship is the Cleansing of the Imagination

One of the most forward-thinking, restless and prolific figures in metal, Justin K. Broadrick has been on the cusp of grindcore (Napalm Death), industrial noise (Final) and industrial metal (Godflesh) for 30 years. Not content to settle with metal, he has also explored ambient electronica (Techno Animal), post-rock (Jesu) and off-kilter beats and raps (Curse of the Golden Vampire, The Blood of Heroes). Judging by his career arc, he seems to have started out as a hardcore noise junkie before mellowing out and delving into hazier, less violent soundscapes.

Lately, however, Broadrick, seems to yearn for a return to his roots. He reformed Godflesh in 2010, and earlier this year he released the debut instrumental album by JK Flesh, Posthuman, which bludgeoned like Godflesh and burned like machine-shop sparks. Now, for the last ever release on Hydra Head Records, Broadrick has teamed with dissonant electronic artist Prurient for the 30-plus minute split EP Worship is the Cleansing of the Imagination.

Broadrick’s three acoustic tracks are the most abrasive and corrosive songs he has issued in years — reminiscent, at times, of Godflesh minus the swarming guitars. “Fear of Fear” combines sluggish, crushing drum machine with booming, overdriven bass and vocals so severely manipulated they sound like that agonized roar of angry poltergeists. Around the midway point, the tempo quickens into a short-lived dubstep break, but Skrillex this is not. It’s only dance music for those who relish rolling in broken glass.

“Deceiver” is even more bass-heavy, backed by a skittering beat that swoops in and out and a bed of haunting electronics. Finally, there’s the “Obedient Automaton,” which integrates computerized helicopters, straightforward electronic drums, bowel-shaking samples and more screaming keys. If these songs are any indication, Godflesh will have a menacing digital makeover when it resurfaces with new material and/or JK Flesh will lead Broadrick into places most electronic metal artists fear to tread.

Prurient, also, isn’t frightened by the unknown, and while its music is less structured that that of JK Flesh, it’s even more masochistic. The brainchild of noise-music veteran Ian Dominick Fernow, Prurient creates apocalyptic walls of volume layered with squalling distortion, pulsing rhythms and punishing electronic embellishments. The highlight here is “I Understand You,” which contrasts the sound of a sadistic dentist drilling teeth with a subdued echoing keyboard melody that rings like elevator music for the damned.

2012 in Review: Five Rules for Staying in the Alt-Rock Canon

There’s a quietly telling scene in Young Adult, last year’s Charlize Theron vehicle about a woman pining for her lost youth. Theron’s character Mavis Gary plays an old boyfriend’s mixtape: “The Concept,” by Teenage Fanclub, is her favorite song. It’s also the movie’s unofficial theme song, and the band is in the privileged position of standing in for, and embodying, early-’90s nostalgia. Teenage Fanclub still show up on cool bar jukeboxes and on college radio stations’ playlists, get name-checked in interviews and play to decent crowds. In other words, they’re safely part of the alternative rock canon — in the company of My Bloody Valentine, Pavement, Dinosaur Jr., Mazzy Star, Guided By Voices, Built to Spill, Pixies and other bands whose audiences keep renewing themselves.

In another universe, though, Teenage Fanclub might not have been the band for the part, and “The Concept” not the song Theron listens to. Plenty of other bands had the same things going for them, but have been (more or less) lost to time. For instance: the North Carolina-based group the Connells. Like Teenage Fanclub, the Connells were a reliable, likeable power-pop band with multiple songwriters; they were all over college radio around the same time as Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque, and had a sizeable European hit with “’74-’75.” But if you bring their name up now, you’ll likely get only blank looks. And for every Teenage Fanclub whose 20-year-old records are enduring favorites, there are three or four more bands who also seemed like a big deal in the early ’90s, and who settled instead into obscurity. Have you heard anyone talking much lately about Sky Cries Mary or the Cranes or King Missile or Magnapop or Buffalo Tom? Exactly.

As 2012 draws to a close and publications across the web are busy crowning a new batch of future classics (and there are 100 of them right here on eMusic), we thought it was a good time to ask: What separates the Teenage Fanclubs from the Connells of the world? How do you become one and avoid becoming the other? We’ve come up with a handful of simple rules. Up-and-coming bands, pay attention: This is how you survive.

1. Having records in print beats a legend every time.

The brutal, precise trio Bitch Magnet made a handful of terrific records between 1988-90 that pointed, directly or indirectly, to a whole generation of arty but tough bands, from Gastr Del Sol to Oneida. Then they broke up, their discography fell out of print, and they fell out of the conversation. Now their albums have finally been reissued (have a listen to Umber‘s “Navajo Ace,” for starters), and they toured in 2012, but they’re still far too little-known among people who didn’t hear them the first time around. It’s possible to imagine what might have happened to their reputation if their music had been continuously in circulation. Bitch Magnet’s career arc might have been something a little more like Sunny Day Real Estate’s: a cult item, not particularly pop-focused, that inspires a subsequent wave of artists and gradually gains admirers as the aesthetic they anticipated catches on.

2. Burning bridges is a bad long-term idea.

Butthole Surfers were a hugely popular touring band for a good chunk of the ’80s and the early ’90s, and when they had an actual commercial radio hit with “Pepper” in 1996, it looked like their profile was about to get much bigger. Instead, they had well-publicized fallings-out with various labels, their manager, and others; they haven’t managed to complete a new studio album since 2001. So where are Butthole Surfers in 2012? That doesn’t seem to be a question many people are asking.

3. Side projects never hurt anyone.

Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore joked in SPIN a few years ago that if they’d broken up after Daydream Nation or Dirty, then reunited after 15 years, “you’d be interviewing me at the Chateau Marmont as I’m waiting for my limousine.” Well, maybe — but they stayed together, letting the spotlight shine in turn on all three of their very different songwriters. They may (or may not) be defunct now, but they’ve spent the last couple of decades releasing a never-ending string of side projects, collaborations, solo records and official bootlegs, every one of which added to the gravitational force of Sonic Youth proper as a cultural institution.

4. Don’t use a band name unless all the crucial members are present.

Very few bands with sub-cultural cachet have been able to get away with replacing their lead singer. Black Flag pulled it off, but only because guitarist Greg Ginn was clearly their star until their fourth singer Henry Rollins arrived. But nobody wants to hear Bad Brains without H.R. (fortunately, he sings on this year’s Into the Future), or the Misfits without Glenn Danzig. Gene Loves Jezebel were once in roughly the same alternative-rock tier as the Cure and Depeche Mode; now the identical twin brothers who once fronted the band each lead their own Gene Loves Jezebel, and the group’s name is practically a punch line.

By contrast, one of the most satisfying reunions of 2012 was the Afghan Whigs. They’d broken up more than a decade ago, but the new version wasn’t just singer Greg Dulli with a pickup band: He hadn’t used the band’s name until he could reconvene its classic lineup with bassist John Curley and guitarist Rick McCollum.

5. Nostalgia is poison.

Performing an old album in its entirety may be a worthwhile idea for a band that’s been constantly active in the meantime (Sonic Youth’s return to Daydream Nation), or that only does it once (as with many of the bands who’ve played the “Don’t Look Back” concert series). Otherwise, it can also be an admission that their best ideas are far behind them, as with the Lemonheads’ 2008-12 tours rehashing their 1992 album It’s a Shame About Ray.

Swans, conversely, have 30 years’ worth of music behind them, most of which they barely touch in performance. Their live shows in support of this year’s titanic album The Seer included several as-yet-unrecorded songs, and only one older song. (“Last time we did two or three, and I began to feel a little inauthentic about it halfway through the tour, so we started dropping them,” frontman Michael Gira told Pitchfork.) The Lemonheads had two gold albums and a string of modern-rock hits; Swans have never had anything like that level of mainstream success. But guess which band’s whole career seems more vital in 2012?

It’s possible to imagine the mixtape Mavis Gary’s boyfriend made her in that alternate-universe Young Adult —the one where the song she listens to over and over is, perhaps, the Connells’ “Stone Cold Yesterday.” It might also have had Bettie Serveert’s “Palomine” on it, or the Chills’ “Effloresce and Deliquesce,” or Basehead’s “2000 BC,” or Soho’s “Hippychick,” or Urge Overkill’s “Ticket to L.A.” Some of us who lived through the era of those songs are nostalgic for them, too. Still, “The Concept” and “Achin’ to Be” and “Feel the Pain” — the songs that actually are in Young Adult, and that we now understand as the representatives of that era — mean more, and maybe even sound better, in 2012, because the bands who created them never gave their listeners an excuse to forget them.

Big Boi, Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors

“If ya’ll don’t know me by now, ya’ll ain’t never gonna know me,” Big Boi sighs at the opening of his bold new album Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors. Dude’s got a point: While most everyone remains fixated on when, and if, the Atlanta MC will ever reunite with his erstwhile, Gillette razor-hawking Outkast partner, Andre 3000, Big Boi continues to quietly prove himself one of the game’s fiercest and most inventive artists on his own. 2010′s brilliant Sir Luscious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty — labeled as the MC’s first official solo effort, although 2003′s Speakerboxx essentially accomplished this — solidified his status as a fully independent artist. Now his latest finds the man fully emancipated and free to explore his wildest ambitions.

On Vicious Lies there’s no genre, collaborator or experiment too out-there for Daddy Fat Sax. What’s more impressive though, is that (nearly) all of it works. Whether he’s chopping it up with underrated indie-pop duo Phantogram on the electro drugged-out funk groove “CPU,” letting Wavves’ Nathan Williams go punk-apocalyptic on “Shoes For Running,” or unspooling Xanax-popping depression rap alongside Kid Cudi during “She Hates Me,” it’s Big Boi’s willingness to go for broke that sells this sometimes overstuffed album. Of course, it’s the man’s inimitable rhyme schemes — swift, off-kilter, full of word-whiplash (“because time and time again I gotta turn around and tell ‘em/ my cerebellum get way deeper than these other fellas”) — and the memorable turns from top-notch peers, A$AP Rocky, T.I., Ludacris, Killer Mike, and more that help lend this boundary-pushing project a needed measure of cohesion.

Randy Weston, Saga

The pianist Randy Weston is an enormous man with an equally enormous piano sound that he tempers with lots of musical space, combining compositional elements of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk with attractive melodic lines, simple vamps and long, percussive grooves. It’s a formula that works for him. With substantial tunes like “Loose Wig,” “Tangier Bay” and “Saucer Eyes,” his material is promising ground for improvisation. Much like Ellington, Weston likes to feature specific soloists on specific numbers, by doing so essentially creating “portraits” of people and places. Saga primarily focuses on piano with bass, drums and percussion (Alex Blake, Billy Higgins and Neil Clarke). But probably the album’s most persuasive voice comes from Billy Harper, a powerhouse tenor saxophonist who infuses “The Beauty of it All” and “Saucer Eyes” with his customary fire. On the latter tune, alto saxophonist Talib Kibwe adds a tart and trenchant solo, an effective foil for the tenor.

Having lived in Morocco for a lengthy period of time, Weston’s method for compositional and improvisational development is as much informed by his years in North Africa as by American jazz. He takes his time, staying with simple chords, allowing a piece to move slowly across the landscape. You’re not aware of how deep the groove Weston establishes is until you notice that you’ve settled into it. This is evident on a piece like “Jahjuka,” which, although nearly a ballad, has an insinuating conga line. The groove is more overt on “Uncle Neemo,” where Blake and Higgins lock into a low-key but irrefutable propulsion that eventually segues into a tap dance of a drum solo. Weston is also a nonpareil blues pianist, and hearing trombonist Benny Powell vocalize his way through “F.E.W. Blues” is an album highpoint. Saga is mature jazz. There’s no flag waving, no overt technical displays. But it burns with a subtle fire that is very compelling on its own terms.

Paul Lytton and Nate Wooley, The Nows

European avant-garde drumming is much different than its US idiomatic counterpart. This partially explains why American players, accustomed to hearing drummers who largely restrict themselves to the conventional sticks-on-drumhead, pulse-based approach, have so seldom chosen to collaborate with European-born players. The best of the European percussionists tend to regard what they do more holistically; there’s more ornamentation, a lighter touch, and more focus on a second-by-second response than on steadiness. Setting up a groove — even a disjointed one — isn’t a vital concern.

Paul Lytton has a trebly, quicksilver approach that values filigree and response in about equal measure. He’s a quiet drummer, but a dynamic one. In trumpeter Nate Wooley, an American approximately 30 years his junior, Lytton has found an extroverted partner. Nevertheless, these are decidedly two-way conversations; Lytton is present throughout the dialogue, as he is on the trio tracks with reed player Ken Vandermark and electronics/vocal improviser Ikue Mori.

The Nows consists of two albums, eight lengthy pieces in total, none of it exactly easy going. Both Lytton and Wooley take what would ordinarily be considered “extended” parts of their instruments’ vocabulary as simply standard language for them. There is, however, logic to everything they play: “The Ripple Effect” works, if abstractly, off of nearly countable time, and Vandermark’s sax maintains a pretty conventional ostinato. Wooley’s toolbox of sounds isn’t so much different than Bubber Miley’s would have been in Duke Ellington’s late-’20s band; the big difference is context. A performance like “Abstractions and Replication” couldn’t have existed until recently, however, at least in part due to the technological demands that Ikue Mori’s electronics require. But even this intellectually taxing material is now making it presence felt in the work of groundbreakers like Tyshawn Sorey, Craig Taborn and Ingrid Laubrock. The best way to approach The Nows might be to hear it in terms of a totality of atmosphere, a living, breathing forest of small sounds, where every gesture has meaning and nothing goes unobserved.

Don Carter, Music for Swingin’ Bowlers

During the 1950s, in a cultural era nearly impossible to explain, professional bowling was a very popular televised activity. All manner of bowling shows with creative names like “Let’s Go Bowling” and “Make That Spare” made their appearances on the three networks. Names like Buddy Bowmar, Carmen Salvino and Dick Weber were nearly as well known with the public as Mickey Mantle or Floyd Patterson. The most well-known bowler was a sprawling, ungainly Midwesterner named Don Carter. How popular was he, you ask? Popular enough to have an album featuring a cover that deserves to be seen, and tunes that would be, if not for the fact that there’s nothing ironic about them, quintessential lounge music. Even though it’s likely that Mr. Carter’s participation in this project consisted of nothing more than having his picture taken holding a bowling ball, he would have approved of what he heard on the album bearing his name. But I like to picture his having been there in the studio, leisurely smoking a Camel as the boys sight read through a snappy arrangement of “One O’clock Jump,” a mentholated “Mr. Lucky Bossa Nova,” and the mandatory concession to a current popular dance craze, “Raunchy Twist.” It’s easy to imagine Don lining up his roll to the beat of “Green Eyes Cha-Cha.” It would be interesting to know who wrote Music for Swingin’ Bowlers‘ glossy arrangements. I doubt the budget would have allowed for Nelson Riddle or Henry Mancini, but whoever took their places knew his business.

Music for Swingin’ Bowlers might have be a cash-in quickie, but the orchestrations are all imaginative (within their idiomatic limitations), fully realized and flawlessly executed by a good-sized band featuring crack soloists. Listeners have to allow themselves a little bit of era readjustment to completely appreciate the album’s charms. I’d suggest buying colorful bowling shirts, popping a couple of TV dinners into the oven (no microwaving allowed), and grabbing some 7-Ups and a big bag of potato chips while you wait for those dinners. You might also want to occasionally get up to bop around the room in time to the music. Like bowling, it’d be good exercise.

Jukebox Jury: Big Boi

Inside his own Stankonia Studios on November 27, Big Boi sat on a stool onstage, nodding furiously to “Descending” — the ambient conclusion to second solo album Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors. Suddenly, one of his band members picked up and started playing his electric guitar. A drum beat started, then another joined in. Big Boi jumped up from his stool, grabbed the microphone and launched into his verse off Stankonia‘s explosive “B.O.B.”

As he entered his solo career, Big Boi faced daunting expectations as created by OutKast. It didn’t help that 2010′s Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty faced delays and major-label constraints that prevented Andre 3000, of all people, from making an official album appearance. In comparison, and despite its slew of unexpected collaborations — from newcomers Phantogram to a posthumous Pimp C verse —his follow-up Vicious Lies arrived without a hitch, mostly. (Longtime fans: The Kate Bush collaboration is still in the works.)

If anything, Vicious Lies reiterates that Big Boi can stand on his own as a rap auteur. Before he previewed the album, eMusic’s Christina Lee used a playlist as a springboard to talk with Big Boi about his solo career thus far, his opinions on rap regionalism and moments that inspired Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors.

Michael Jackson, “Don’t Stop Until You Get Enough”

Michael Jackson debuted as a solo artist with this song. What would you say is the biggest pro and con to operating solo?

The biggest pro to being solo is just having total creative control. I guess the biggest con is the heavy writing load, just writing all those songs. It’s like, to be a songwriter and producer, to produce and write all of the records — that’s a ton of work. But, as it goes, if you want the pro, you gotta have the con. If you want total creative control, you have to do more work like that.

Who are your primary sources of feedback?

Definitely my children, because they listen to everything. My producers around the studio. I’ve got a crew of producers and artists who all work together, so — boom, boom, boom. All the guys that work around the studio have really good ears, and I trust their ears.

Little Dragon, “Ritual Union”

You first heard Little Dragon several years ago. How did their music make you feel?

The first time I heard their music, actually, ‘Dre played it for me at his house a couple of years ago. It was just refreshing. It just sounded like something that you had never heard before. Just — her voice, man. It was dope to hear different grooves and not hear the same cadences and melodies, a whole other different dimension of what our music is today. That’s what drew me to their music, definitely.

You performed “Mama Told Me” with Little Dragon at Austin City Limits. How did that feel?

I felt right at home. I’ve been performing with a band since the OutKast days. I still perform with the same band that me and ‘Dre used from day one, with a couple of pieces — guitars, the drums. So I just felt right at home, know what I’m saying? I was right in my living room. It was nothing different from what I’ve been doing, but it was just different bodies, you know?

Killer Mike, “Southern Fried”

Killer Mike worked with a New York producer, to create his version of Dungeon Family music. You worked with a ton of collaborators, from all over. Do you think regionalism in rap still matters?

Not really. It just depends. I make global music, so for me it’s all about expanding and breaking boundaries and just going further than your immediate surroundings. When you make music, you make music for the world, and not just for the people on your street or the people who’s on your zip code, because you want as many people to dig it as possible. You don’t just cater to one region. My whole take on music is just, whatever strikes me, I use it. It can come from outer space, and it don’t even matter, know what I’m saying? Really, you gotta get past the county lines and state lines and just really expand your whole horizon, if you want people to really know who you are.

I meant to ask this earlier, but what I’ve heard of Vicious Lies so far reminded me of these ’80s takes on funk. What brought on that electrofunk sound?

Speaking of which, the nickname for this album is The Nigga Thrilla. The electrofunk actually came about from touring the world with these different bands, to Glastonbury, Camp Bisco, Bonnaroo and Counterpoint, just experiencing different crowds. I’ve been touring for almost 20 years now, so to be out there with crowds with 50-, 80-, 100,000 people at a time, is just a different element. You have people from all walks of life just coming together for one groove, and so that’s what it’s all about.

Frank Ocean, “Pyramids”

That’s “Pyramids,” right? Aw, I love that. I go to the four-and-a-half minute mark. I like the beginning part, it’s dope, but when it gets to that 4:30 mark, that’s my jam. The video was super dope too; it was just really in a different world, in a whole other dimension, and it matched the sounds — the 808s, and just how he’s singing. That’s my favorite song on the whole album [Channel ORANGE]. People said that this song is long as a motherfucker, but at the same time, it morphs into something else. The song is supposed to be an adventure.

Frank Ocean’s a great example of someone who’s clearly thought about how to release music online, on his own terms. Has the internet changed the way you’ve consumed music?

Definitely. Being in the digital age is like, people are all, “Gimme more. Gimme more. Gimme more,” so you gotta keep feeding that machine. Music travels the world at the push of a button right now, know what I’m saying? I can record a brand new song right now, right here and release it to the world just like that, so that’s a cool thing to be able to do as an artist. After this record right here I’m looking at free agency, so I can make a song every day and sell it if I want to do so. That’s what dope. It took me a minute to get into the transition, to get in touch with what was happening. But now that I’m into it, I can see how fast-paced it is.

I just watch different music blogs, sites or whatever. There’s a new song from a different artist every day. Some songs catch, and some songs get sucked right in that vacuum. Shoop! Gone into space. So, you gotta put your best foot forward every time you come out with new music. My whole thing is quality over quantity, so when it’s time to hear you, it’s gonna be an event. It’s gonna be a treat, and it’s not like you’re doing songs just to throw it out there, just to be over-saturating the market. I don’t agree with that.

UGK feat. OutKast, “Int’l Players Anthem”

“So, I typed a text —”

Exactly.

There’s a posthumous Pimp C verse in Vicious Lies. Where did that come from?

I was working on this lil’ album, and it was a verse that I actually had left over from the last record. It was a song with me, Pimp C and Future, and it just didn’t mesh well. So Organized Noize, who actually produced the song, added to the verse to “Gossip.” The song matched up perfectly with it, and just to bring in Big K.R.I.T. — who was an up-and-comer and in the same vein as that UGK, OutKast sound, all those new-school elements — as well as what me and Bun B are doing, it was just a cool record. It was a treat for the fans, definitely.

What was working with UGK like?

Everything that we ever did with them was some real cool shit. Pimp C and Bun B — me and ‘Dre grew up listening to them, and so to be able to work with them, when we got into the game, was definitely an honor. Pimp C was just one of the greatest, and he was just a great guy, a real guy. He spoke from the heart and spoke the truth, know what I’m saying? A lot of people can’t handle that truth, but I’m all about the truth.

Kate Bush, “Babooshka”

That’s “Babooshka.”

Has your perception of her music changed at all, from your teenaged years to adulthood?

Not at all. Actually, ever since I’ve been in contact with her on the telephone, I love her even more now. She’s so down to earth, and the music is incredible, you know what I’m saying? It’s just like a hidden gem to those who really love music and stories, the production and the writing. She and Bob Marley tie for first place for my all-time favorite, ever.

When Kate Bush arrived, critics often noted how they felt they needed an encyclopedia to dissect her stories. This was pre-Rap Genius, when people had to —

They had to decipher what she was saying. She used a lot of symbolism in her lyrics too, so you just gotta listen to it. It’s super dope. I just listen and try to figure it out, but my uncle’s been into her for a long time. He told me what most of the stories meant, when he first gave me her music, so I kind of got a head start on it. I would just listen to it and be like, “Damn, that shit is deep.” “The Man with the Child in His Eyes,” “Breathing,” stuff like that, you know? She’s deep, man.

Julia Holter, Ekstasis (Expanded)

Julia Holter makes music for an ever-changing carnival of the mind. One moment she’s cooing dreamily, like a woman lost in the clouds of her own imagining, and the next she’s thinking her way through incisive lyrics about the cerebral ’60s art-film Last Year at Marienbad. Some of her sounds come across as childlike and lost, others are clearly and thoroughly composed. She demonstrates incredible range, often in the space of a single time-defying song. It makes for an impressive mix of moods, one that Holter first revealed on Tragedy, her striking debut from late 2010 that wowed most of those who heard it. Just a few months later comes Ekstasis, another album made up of its own distinctive charms. “Marienbad” opens in a stately fashion, striking out into in an expectant expanse between the Beach Boys at their most elegant and the smeary psychedelic surplus of bands like Broadcast. Somehow, even as it invokes allusions to styles from distant pasts, Ekstasis sounds contemporary and new. Parts played on what sounds like lutes and harpsichords mingle with ethereal electronics, and Holter’s affecting voice – small but resourceful in the way it wanders – makes for a sense of immediacy that rewards full attention in the here and now.

2012 in Review: The R&B Auteurs

At the beginning of December, the song perched atop the Billboard’s Top Hip-Hop/R&B Songs chart didn’t sound very much like an R&B song at all. It was Rihanna’s hulking, sulking “Diamonds,” the lead single from the Barbadian diva’s seventh album Unapologetic, and it veered so close to goth-pop that Zola Jesus covered it. The song exploded into the top spot after some behind-the-scenes changes: positions on that chart, once based solely on radio airplay by stations within the format, are now calculated using sales and streaming data, as well as airplay from all radio stations — including those that don’t specialize in R&B. Suddenly Ri-Ri’s dark, M83-recalling single was a totem for the decline in R&B’s influence on the pop landscape and the genre-busting possibilities the style once held. The R&B lights who did manage to break into the Hot 100′s Top 10 did so by adapting to the dance-heavy pop landscape: Usher threw down an electronically smoothed-out club come-on in “Scream”; Chris Brown went the pop-cyborg route with “Turn Up The Music” and “Don’t Wake Me Up”; and Ne-Yo’s “Let Me Love You” melded his supple voice with skyscraper beats and a self-esteem-boosting message.

Yet despite this lessening of big-tent influence, R&B had a particularly strong year creatively. Perhaps the rush of records came from artists’ acceptance that a pop crossover was not only difficult and distant, it was maybe not even desired. The result was records that felt freer to experiment and dig in aesthetically. Miguel’s second album, Kaleidoscope Dream, is by far the best example: It pushes the genre’s aesthetic boundaries as far as they can go while being mindful of the fact that the music is still also known as “soul.” The singer’s 2010 debut, All I Want Is You, was a slow burner, with woozy love songs like the title track and “Sure Thing” eventually gaining a place on R&B radio. On Dream, Miguel shot higher, melting together funk, rock, pop, soul, hyper-personal lyrics and even a little bit of Jason Mraz-style acoustic goofiness (listen to “Do You” and Mraz’s unkillable “I’m Yours” back-to-back) in a way that was as idiosyncratic as it was thrilling; “Adorn” used Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” and Gregory Abbott’s “Shake You Down” as a springboard for a 21st-century plea for love, while the hollowed-out, glassy-eyed “The Thrill” summed up the dark side of the YOLO philosophy with a swaggering guitar riff and an ominously encroaching backing choir.

Along with Frank Ocean, whose similarly intimate and unified Channel ORANGE came out this year, Miguel received overwhelming amount of critical adulation. The two of them virtually own the Grammys: Ocean received six nominations, Miguel five. But they were far from the only R&B artists successfully playing with genre boundaries. Elle Varner’s Perfectly Imperfect, was a confident, intricately-crafted debut that allowed Varner’s bubbly personality ample space to effervesce into moments of sheer bliss. The love-intoxicated “Refill” winds itself around a hoedown-ready fiddle line; the saucy “Sound Proof Room” is a sexually confident promise of mutual pleasure; she even goes into coffeehouse mode on “Damn Good Friends,” where she uses an acoustic-guitar bed to plead her case to a pal for whom she has romantic feelings. Former Diddy-Dirty Money singer Dawn Richard continued the forward-thinking legacy of that group on her Armor On and White Out EPs, which wrapped futuristic (and, as on the pounding-yet-sweet “Miles,” retro-futuristic) trappings in her tender voice. And Canadian singer-songwriter Melanie Fiona’s The MF Life placed retrofied tracks like the back-patting Motown pastiche “Watch Me Work” and string-aided “Wrong Side of a Love Song” side-by-side with the moody, narcotic “4 AM.” Working in the shade of larger artists, these records nonetheless worked with pop-R&B materials to produce hyper-personal, uniquely stamped projects.

For all the slippery, boundary-striking music being made, there were still plenty of artists who paid homage to the endlessly-renewable resource of the genre’s past. Luke James’s octave-leaping “I Want You” updated the love-song-as-gospel template, the singer’s falsetto reaching Maxwellian heights as he joyously proclaimed his devotion. Anita Baker released her first single in seven years, “Lately,” in the spring; the song picks up almost exactly where her earlier hits like “Sweet Love” and “Giving You the Best That I Got” left off. And then there was R. Kelly’s Write Me Back, the sequel to his 2010 throwback album Love Letter; this time, the Pied Piper updated his touchstones slightly, channeling Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder and the greats of ’70s Philadelphia soul. Kelly also garnered headlines with new chapters of his Trapped in the Closet saga, the twisty hip-hopera that had been dormant for five years. Not only did the plot developments multiply like soap bubbles, Kelly engaged in a little bit of retroism of his own, using Trapped‘s signature melody as a jumping-off point for homages to Michael Jackson and ’70s blaxploitation music.

Such homages could be seen as callbacks to an era when flipping the dial could result in a surprise bounty of soul; in contrast, 2012 was when longtime New York radio rivals Kiss-FM and WBLS merged into a single station in order to make room for an outlet of ESPN Radio. But this narrowing of the radio market didn’t stop artists from releasing trial-balloon singles. James parlayed his chart success (and soaring voice) into an opening slot for Beyoncé during her comeback stint in Atlantic City. Ciara, whose last album came out in 2010, released a smattering of singles that culminated in the sprawling “Sorry.”

One R&B artist who remained a mainstay on Top 40 radio (despite taking a hit in album sales) was Ne-Yo, who supplied vocal assists for the likes of Pitbull and Calvin Harris; his clean tenor helped ubiquitous tracks like “Give Me Everything” slice through top-40 radio’s clutter of big beats. But Ne-Yo’s real strength has always been his plainspoken, sturdy, and utterly hummable songwriting. R.E.D. represents his Solomonic attempt to split the difference; during interviews leading up to the album’s release, he was frank about wanting to please all his fanbases with the album. (“If there’s six R&B records [on the album], then there’s six pop records so that everybody can come to the same damn concert and stay for the whole damn show,” he told Angie Martinez of the New York radio station Hot 97.)

The flip side of the airy “Let Me Love You” is the regret-soaked “Should Be You,” a brooding Quiet Storm track that reunites him with his frequent foil Fabolous; there’s even a country crossover attempt, the feather-light, Tim McGraw-assisted “She Is.” The end result is almost the polar opposite of Kaleidoscope Dream — Ne-Yo sees the fracturing of the landscape ahead, and his dancing-all-over-the-map record is his own, nimble response. While R&B as a genre had the ground shifting underneath it in one way or another, the best records embraced the exhilaration that comes from uncertainty.