Goat, World Music

Drawing mightily from the same retro well as the vaunted Tame Impala, Goat came out of nowhere (or, more accurately, Korpilombolo in northern Sweden) with their joyful and frequently uncategorizable World Music. Nominally Afrocentric in its approach — Fela Kuti and the glittery guitars of highlife heroes Bhundu Boys spring to mind — there’s also a distinct German kosmiche attack, leavened with some delicately psychedelic organ figures (as on “Disc Fever,” the album’s funkiest moment), that combine to provide — what else? — a hearty Goat soup.

Beth Orton, Sugaring Season

After a six-year sabbatical, during which she focused on motherhood, Orton comeback album was as relaxed and rich and Harvest-era Neil Young, and one of the finest folk releases of the year. Recorded in Portland with producer Tucker Martine, it draped her spellbinding voice over introspective, mesmeric reveries. “Call Me The Breeze” might have been written with Tom Rowland of Chemical Brothers, but the association is deceptive — this was a richly autumnal album, full of relished melancholy.

Adam Fairhall, The Imaginary Delta

On The Imaginary Delta, pianist and composer Adam Fairhall speaks with a forward-thinking attitude of innovation while channeling the voice of jazz’s past. A traditional rag becomes a futuristic avant-garde deconstruction. The use of effects and turntables enhance, rather than preclude, the expression of a soulful blues. A blowing session doesn’t miss a beat with the incorporation of sampling. Fairhall has united these disparate elements to create a remarkably engaging album of both scope and vision, and is vivid evidence of the strength represented by a new generation of UK jazz musicians.

Mala, Mala in Cuba

As part of a cultural exchange sponsored by a rum brand, Gilles Peterson made a pair of albums showcasing Cuban musicians called Havana Cultura. For the recording of the second in 2011, South London dubstep pioneer Mala joined Peterson in Cuba, taking samples and threading them through his own asymmetric, chest-trembling bass. The result was this lithe, sensual album that seamlessly joins the music of Latin America with rhythms that reflect Mala’s own Caribbean and UK heritage. It was the sound of dubstep taking on the world.

Bill Fay, Life Is People

Life is People is the first new record from Bill Fay since 1972, a British singer-songwriter whose beatific and keenly observed music might remind you of Randy Newman or Wilco. It’s a worthy addition to a small but hallowed canon of material. Wilco have covered him over the years, and he returns the favor with a solemn, still rendition of “Jesus, Etc.” Fay’s voice is ragged, pleading, and gentle, and his music sits in a glowing pool of “Hallelujah” chord changes and restrained, soul-inflected touches. It has a numinous simplicity that feels healing; when he enlists a gospel choir to swell up on the chorus of “Be At Peace With Yourself,” you find that suddenly you are.

Parquet Courts, Light Up Gold

Anyone looking for a shorthand to describe the devil-may-care attitude pervading Light Up Gold, the irresistible debut from Brooklyn band Parquet Courts, will find it 24 seconds into the first song, when Austin Brown first sneers the album’s most indelible hook: “Forget about it!” It’s meant sarcastically — he’s playing the part of a privileged one-percenter looking down his nose through his monocle at the unwashed masses — but it’s a good indication of the jaundiced eye through which Parquet Courts view our troubled times. Like the most beloved cult movies, the thing that makes Light Up Gold so addicting is its infinite quotability. On regional cuisine? “As for Texas: Donuts Only. You cannot find bagels here.” On the value of wisdom? “Socrates died in the fucking gutter.” And on the job market? “The lab is out of white lab coats/ ’cause there are no more slides and microscopes/ But there are still careers in combat, my son.” They drop these bon mots between jagged guitar lines that sound like they were lifted from Wire’s 154 — bent-coathanger leads that teeter on the steep incline between punk and post-punk. But Light Up Gold‘s greatest irony is that its creators aren’t ironic at all. In their interview with Douglas Wolk, they stressed the importance of emotional honesty, and as the album goes on it becomes clear their acrid wit isn’t the result of disaffection but deep-seated alarm. Sarcasm is the scalpel they use to dissect contemporary culture, turning its ambivalence against itself and exposing is rotten core. Insight like that is as rare as a bagel in Texas.

Adrian Sherwood, Survival & Resistance

Adrian Sherwood has spent 30 years unfurling juddering, colon-deep waves of seismic dub, but Survival & Resistance is a very different beast. On this rhapsodic, reflective record, built from the ground up around George Oban’s sublime/subliminal bass, the roots-reggae rhythms are menacing and muted rather than in-your-face as Sherwood expertly guides guest vocalists such as Ghetto Priest through caverns of subterranean dub. The original acid guru Timothy Leary even makes a typically tripped-out cameo from beyond the grave on an understated masterpiece of an album.

Pop Zeus, Pop Zeus

Like a John Singer Sargent trapped beneath a greasy glass frame, Pop Zeus — the project of one Mikey Hodges — smothers opulent hooks in buckets of scuzz. It’s no surprise he nicked the project’s name from a Bob Pollard song; like the Fading Captain himself, Hodges cuts sweetness with sand,nodding lazily towards ’80s jangle pop but ruthlessly chipping off the high-gloss, making what’s left feel as raw and as twitchy as an exposed tendon. But don’t be fooled: The attention to melodic detail — the graceful melodic slopes and canny moments of counterpoint between vocals and guitars make it clear Hodges is no yawning, indifferent de-composer. “Devil’s in the Details” is the album’s dollar-store “Lust For Life,” its rangy guitars and busted-jalopy percussion doing its best impersonation of Pop’s raw thunder. “It doesn’t even matter to me,” Hodges hollers over and over as the song winds down. That he sings it with such conviction is proof that he’s lying.

Jessie Ware, Devotion

In the video for breakout single “Wildest Moments,” UK singer Jessie Ware appears, dressed in white, in front of a blank white backdrop and begins to sing. And that is pretty much all that happens. But the thing is, not much more needs to happen: The song itself is potent, big, “Paper Plane”-style bass drums and Ware’s smoky alto preaching the gospel of two-way love as a path to self-actualization. It’s like that throughout Devotion, Ware’s sneakily seductive debut that fuses the best parts of ’90s R&B with current trends in UK dance. Throughout, the music is deliciously underplayed: cool blankets of synths, percussion that percolates like an 8-bit coffeepot and the occasional filigree of guitar. It makes for a new kind of high-tech lover’s rock, cruising sleek and quiet as a sports car on a city street in the hours just before the sun comes up. Like all the best crushes, it sneaks up on you unexpectedly, and takes a firm, unwavering hold.

This Is Your Life: Chris Carter & Cosey Fanni Tutti

When Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti began collaborating more than 30 years ago, it was as founder members (alongside Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and Genesis P-Orridge) of Throbbing Gristle, the first industrial band whose music and performance art – usually featuring pornography and bucketfuls of fake blood — was the very definition of challenging.

Yet to think of Throbbing Gristle only as “wreckers of civilisation” (as they were branded by Conservative MP Nicholas Fairburn, in a row over public funding of the arts) is a mistake, something clearly seen in the music of Chris and Cosey. After TG’s demise in 1981, the couple moved to a derelict school in the fens of north Norfolk, built a home studio and began producing music that was a long way from the unsettling horror of Throbbing Gristle tracks like “Hamburger Lady,” recently voted one of the scariest songs of all time in a Guardian poll.

Collaboration has always been at the heart of what Chris and Cosey do: They’ve worked with everyone from Robert Wyatt to Current 93, while this year’s acclaimed Transverse album was recorded with Nik Colk Void of Factory Floor, one of the many artists who cite them as an influence.

Their new release, the double album Desertshore / The Final Report, released under the name X-TG, was conceived with former bandmate Christopherson, and finished by Chris and Cosey after his death in November 2010. Desertshore is a reworking of Nico’s 1970 album of the same name, with guest vocals from Blixa Bargeld, Marc Almond and Gaspar Noe. The Final Shore is an album of more abstract electronic sounds.

To mark the end of the Throbbing Gristle mission, Luke Turner talked to Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti about their favorite albums in a toweringly influential catalogue.

Throbbing Gristle, 20 Jazz Funk Greats
The third Throbbing Gristle album from 1979, which matched a deceptive title to deceptively accessible electronic pop songs.

Cosey: This was released in 1979 and by that time people had thought they’d sussed us out, so we wanted to play around a little bit. We did a gig at the Lyceum, and everyone turned up in camouflage. We all went on in white, wearing slacks. “We’ve moved on now.”

Chris: There were so many happy accidents with this album, the way tracks and lyrics and things just came together.

Throbbing Gristle, Heathen Earth – The Live Sound of T.G.
Live album, recorded in the group’s studio in Hackney, East London in 1980.

Chris: I think this is probably the most TG album because it’s an encapsulation of a historical moment in time. Most of it was recorded live, in an hour — that was it. I’d admit that it’s not a fantastic album — there are bits of it that are meandering — but that’s how TG was.

Cosey: We wanted it to be a realistic experience of TG in the studio.

Chris: If someone said could you recommend a TG album I’d probably recommend this as a good starting point.

Cosey Fanni Tutti, Time To Tell
1983 album of electronic music composed to accompany Cosey Fanni Tutti’s “art actions,” also featuring a lecture on her work as a stripper and porn actress.

Cosey: I stopped doing art actions in the early ’80s in order to focus on music, so it was a nice point in my life to get everything together and put it out there, so I could just forget about it for a while. I didn’t want the art world to think that my work should just be kept in this tiny little gallery; it shouldn’t. It’s music, it’s public. And it has a life of its own outside the art world, outside of the music business even, into women’s magazines. Time To Tell was a cut-off point for me. I came to realize that people expected me to be naked. So I kept my clothes on and disappointed them. Tough!

Chris & Cosey, Songs Of Love & Lust
After TG, Chris and Cosey embarked on a series of albums that embraced a lighter synthpop sound. This includes ‘October Love Song’, about their own romance.

Chris: We wanted to confound people’s expectations when Throbbing Gristle split up – we didn’t want to sound like TG MK II or whatever. Martin Gore [of Depeche Mode] said that “October Love Song” was his all time favorite love song.

Cosey: When we recorded it, I was in the front bedroom, and Chris was in the studio in the room behind. We put the mics through, and Chris said, “Just do whatever you want.” I had this vision of him sat in the other room with his headphones on, and it felt like a really intimate situation. So I told him how I felt about him, and that’s how “October Love Song” was written. It’s about how we got together: “Do you remember how I took your hand on the stairs?” It was me whispering in his ear.

CTI, Core
An album of experimental collaborative tracks from 1988, featuring Coil, Robert Wyatt, Lustmord and Boyd Rice.

Chris: Over the years we were always saying to other people, “We have to do something together” and we never did. So we thought right, “Let’s be the hub for it all, and get everyone to give stuff when they can.” I think the only recording we did in the studio was with Lustmord. Robert [Wyatt] did his by sending cassettes — we didn’t have ramps for his wheelchair.

Cosey: I remember getting stuff from Geff and Sleazy [of Coil] for “Core” — that wonderful cello. That was the starting point for that track, and we added to it and sent it back. To think we did it by mail then! I enjoyed that album.

Chris & Cosey, Pagan Tango
Darker, harder, highly sexual album from 1991, with tracks like “Take Control” sounding like Kraftwerk in an S&M dungeon.

Cosey: I like Pagan Tango because it feels dark and dirty. I don’t know why…I’m trying to think what was happening at the time that pissed me off.

Chris: We were doing a lot of live shows, that had some influence on it. You were wearing all your latex, skin-tight stuff. We were very aggressive in that period, I remember…

Cosey: …you remember the bruises.

Chris: We had all those really filthy videos we used to show live.

Cosey: Pagan Tango is the dark side of the sexual urge — gratuitous, primitive. Songs of Love & Lust is quite light by comparison.

Chris Carter, Small Moon
In 1999, Chris & Cosey moved away from pop towards ambient textures.

Chris: I’d accumulated all this analogue gear and there was so much of it, I wanted to sell it all and start again. I must have been having some kind of midlife crisis. Anyway, I thought before I did that, I’d do an album with what I had — and this is that album. I sold everything the year after, and got a lot of money for it, but I regret it now. You sometimes see people selling stuff as “owned by Chris Carter,” which is quite weird. I hadn’t heard this album for probably five or six years until I played it the other day. Some of it was like listening to someone else, I can’t remember how I did it.

Carter Tutti, Feral Vapours Of The Silver Ether
Thoughtful, abstract album from 2007, far removed from the performances by the revived Throbbing Gristle around the same time.

Chris: We did a Chris & Cosey gig in 1999 or 2000, and it was a good gig and sold out, but we came off stage and it was like nothing had happened. It had been too easy. That was the point when we said, “Let’s stop doing Chris & Cosey for now, and do Carter Tutti instead, and release different stuff, like Feral Vapours.”

Cosey: We’d moved on so much that we weren’t those people any more, and it didn’t feel honest to me. Feral Vapours is a very melancholy album.

Chris: I find it really difficult to listen to.

Cosey: We’d lost a lot of people in the five years preceding it. You inhabit a different dimension when you’re dealing with those things, and that’s what Feral Vapours was about. When we finished we said, “If that’s the last album we do, we’ll be really happy.”

Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, Chris Carter, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Desertshore / The Final Report
Double-album, completed after Sleazy died in 2010. The re-imagining of Nico’s Desertshore features guests including Marc Almond, Antony Hegarty and Blixa Bargeld.

Chris: We started the list of vocalists in 2006, right at the beginning of the project. There were some quite bizarre choices on it: Oliver Postgate, Tilda Swinton, but it got whittled down because we had to get practical. And they had to have the right voice.

Cosey: We always saw the album sleeve as white. After Sleazy died, one of his close friends from Thailand came to see us. He looked at the artwork and said, “I love that you’ve got the color white. It’s the color for when someone has died in Thailand.” We didn’t know, and I thought that’s so nice. I wanted it so it’s almost ethereal. You’re thinking, ‘Is there something there?” You’re looking through it for Sleazy, and he’s there.

Ernest Dawkins, Afro Straight

Afro Straight demonstrates once more the rousing creativity that can ensue when a supposed “outside” player tears into some standards. Saxophonist Ernest Dawkins is a past president of the AACM and a torch-bearing purveyor of the sort of musical-cultural-political intersections that make Chicago such admirably rugged jazz terrain. Dawkins is already renowned for blending hard bop with more experimental, “avant-garde” jazz concepts, and this is his first disc mostly devoted to standards, with three tunes apiece from John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter along with two older chestnuts and a couple of minor originals filling out the program.

It cooks with a ferocity that warms the soul. Dawkins retains the rhythm section from his New Horizons Ensemble and adds pianist Willerm Delisfort and a trio of percussionists for a pervasive Latin flavor. But his masterstroke is recruiting fellow Chicago dynamo Corey Wilkes on trumpet, whose celebratory, clarion strut on “United” (written by Shorter for Blakey’s Jazz Messengers) is reminiscent of vintage-’90s Nicholas Payton. Like Dawkins, Wilkes has an affinity for sonic brambles, and it is a treat to hear them flirt with freedom and dissonance while never really losing fidelity to these classic compositions. The two-horn head arrangement on Dizzy Gillespie’s “Woody n’ You” yields to a succinct and spirited Wilkes solo on mute, soon followed by a rendition of the standard “Softly As In A Morning Sunrise,” that gives us Coltrane’s ominous, piano-laden opening, a little wayward murmuring among the horns and then an inspired workout on the familiar melody.

These are less successful moments. Recruiting a B-3 organist for “God Bless the Child” imprisons it in gospel cliché, and the two Dawkins numbers — a 94-second percussion romp on the title track and a takes-your-time amble entitled “Old Man Blues” — pale beside the thoroughgoing creative standard set by the other material. But if you like your hard bop brandished with innovative aggression, the rest of Afro Straight has your number(s).

Alicia Keys, Girl On Fire

On her fifth album Girl On Fire, or at least on its first high-powered two singles, Alicia Keys positions herself as a phoenix of sorts, rising from the ashes of a burned city (“Girl on Fire”) to move forward into a new…something (“New Day”). Despite the overt symbolism — those singles, her new logo and look — Girl on Fire still presents the same Alicia Keys we’ve grown to sometimes tolerate and other times love, one who has melded the piano balladry of her youth to more contemporary, radio-ready fare with help from the most of-the-moment producers and songwriters.

Which isn’t to say that this is Keys’s album of house beats and sawtoothed dubstep drops. She’s a strategic collaborator, one who scoops up songs — like 2010′s “Un-Thinkable,” written by Drake and his right-hand man Noah “40″ Shebib — that simply gives a hip sheen to her timelessness. On Girl on Fire, these are the best tracks: There is “Tears Always Win,” a throwback soul ballad written by Bruno Mars that harnesses the power of Keys’s voice without allowing it steamroll the song. There’s also “One Thing,” a typically low-key Frank Ocean-penned number about longing that would come off as an expert Babyface update even if a fossilized Babyface song didn’t wisp by two songs earlier.

The stunner, though, is “Fire We Make,” a smoldering duet with Maxwell that sounds ripped straight from his last album (which produced two chart-toppers). This is now the deal with Keys, who is R&B’s equivalent of the Killers: You sift each album for the few showstoppers, ditch the rest and keep it moving. Viewed on those terms, Girl on Fire doesn’t disappoint.

Royal Headache, Royal Headache

In the end, it all comes down to Shogun’s voice, a ragged rasp that falls somewhere squarely between young Rod Stewart and sad Otis Redding and infuses every one of the songs on Royal Headache’s roaring debut with a big old battered heart. It’s easy to miss the first few times: The songs whoosh by like vintage funny cars whipping around a red-dirt race track, antic and spitting flames. But look a little closer and it’s clear the driver is crying: On “Girls,” he howls, “Didn’t I tell you over and over I want the key to your heart?” and on “Really in Love,” which kicks and struts like a rough demo from the first Jam record, he asks, “Maybe you think you’re smart…but are you really in love?” It’s as if Shogun got lost en route to a Stax cover-band audition and ended up sitting in on a Buzzcocks tribute instead. His searing yelp and full-body delivery make Royal Headache’s songs feel instantly vital. Call it the Sound of the Young Down Under.

Who Are…Prince Rama

The Larson sisters met third Prince Rama co-founder Michael Collins while living in the world’s large largest Hare Krishna community and attending high school in Achua, Florida. The trio’s self-described “Blink 182 rip-off band” evolved into something much more ambitiously eccentric once Taraka Larson moved to Boston in 2005 to attend the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Prince Rama of Ayodhya (named after the seventh avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu and later shortened) went public in 2007 and released its largely acoustic and rather freak-folky debut, Threshold Dances, in 2008. From there, Rama went on to blend the ecstatic Hare Krishna chants — or bhajans — the trio grew up chanting and dancing to with driving electroclash keyboards and tribal percussion.

Collins left the band in 2011, and the Larsons released Trust Now, their fifth album and first for Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks label, as a duo. Sometimes misperceived as a parody band — thanks in part to performances involving group exorcisms masquerading as VHS workouts, apocalyptic karaoke sessions and lectures inspired by the mysticalart and writings of Paul Laffoley — the constantly shape-shifting Prince Rama turned the insult on its head with Top 10 Hits of the End of the World. Here, the Larsons impersonate 10 different groups — from Middle East rockers Guns of Dubai to lounge act Motel Memory — with as many different sounds, while still retaining Prince Rama’s distinctively witchy brew of cheese and chakras.

eMusic’s international columnist Richard Gehr conversed telepathically with Taraka Larson as Prince Rama toured Europe, opening for Animal Collective, in fall 2012.

On the inspiration for Top 10 Hits of the End of the World:

I became really obsessed with looking up what the No. 1 hit single was on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on various dates the world’s been predicted to end. I don’t know why, exactly. It was like a game to decode. Soon, I started seeing eerie correlations between some of the apocalypses and their corresponding No. 1 hits. For instance, on Harold Camping’s Rapture on May 21, 2011, the hit song was “Til the World Ends” by Britney Spears. I’m really fascinated by how pop music becomes this vehicle for mass consciousness to encode messages of mass destruction. It’s the perfect disguise. So I thought, “Wow, if the world ended this year, what would the No. 1 hit singles be? What would the post-apocalypse Now That’s What I Call Music! compilation sound like?” I wanted to make that album.

On the best apocalypse song ever:

I’m pretty into “Staying Alive.” That was No. 1 on the Billboard charts when the Jonestown Massacre went down.It’s like a disco survival guide.

On favorite bhajans and turning them into weird electropop:

There are so many…I really love “Om Mani Padme Hum” and “Raghupati” a lot. It’s all about finding ones that speak to you, then the mantras themselves tell you how to do the rest.

On how the sisters became a trio again:

Our good friend Chris Burke just started playing bass with us. He’s amazing. We used to play with his old bands Beach Fossils and Kegs of Acid back in the day, and we all get along really well so it just made sense.

On their most memorably horrible gig:

That’s funny because we were just talking about this today in the van. There was this show on our first tour abroad that scarred us for life. We were supposed to play the Green Man Festival in Wales, which at the time would have been our first major show. I mean, we had only been a band for a few measly months and suddenly we were shoved up in front of 4,000 people crowded together under a cold, wet, muddy tent while a storm assailed outside. We were scared to death. We had a 30-minute slot, but we had so many technical difficulties that we ended up only being able to play one song. Our keyboardist at the time wasn’t even turned on, so he got up on the mic and started cursing out the sound dude, who started cursing back. Everyone in the audience just stared at us in baffled horror. A group if 14-year-old British boys started booing. It was the worst vibes ever.

On the most spiritual pop music:

It’s all spiritual pop music. You just have to listen to it through spiritual speakers.

The Congos / Sun Araw / M. Geddes Gengras, Icon Give Thank

After six installments of Johnny Cash’s American series and well-received late-career efforts by Mavis Staples and Jimmy Cliff, there’s very little novel about a weathered pioneer musician teaming up with a younger admirer in the hopes of lending a bit of the old fog-and-polish to their artistic reputation. The results are, broadly speaking, similar: a restrained, tasteful facsimile of the artist’s best work, prim as a pressed suit and comforting as a cup of afternoon tea. Which is what makes the thoroughly batshit, opium-gobbling collaboration between reggae legends The Congos and the Austin musician Sun Araw so irresistible. Rather than focusing on the sound of their legendary Heart of the Congos, Araw set about to recreate the mood: murky, mysterious, vaguely occult and more than a little spooky. Like Heart, the songs still center around glassy-eyed, endlessly-repeated choruses, but on Icon Give Thanks they’re distended and wobbly, strange voices drifting eerily through some narcotic hallucination. And though it can’t rightly be called a resurrection — it’s stranger and spookier than anything the band did in their prime — Icon Give Thanks undeniably feels like the work of the undead, coming back for a final haunting.

Sale: Kill Rock Stars

San Francisco psych-rock trio Grass Widow's second full-length album clocks in at only 26.5 minutes, but its 10 tracks are so densely packed with darting guitar lines, furious drumming and haunting melodies, it feels like a full night's fever dream. Bassist Hannah Lew, guitarist Raven Mahon and drummer Lillian Maring share songwriting and singing responsibilities equally, but the LP's best moments come when their contributions are at odds — their triple vocal lines move in and out of harmony as Lew's thunking bass lines and Mahon's riffs tear past each other like commuters in a busy train station.

The album opens with the vaguely Eastern melody of "Uncertain Memory," which starts spare but quickly bursts into a crisply orchestrated jam as the trio sing one of their trademark opaque lyrics: "Things are happening now." "Strangers Come" bubbles with punk energy, and strings bring an unexpected serenity to the urgent "Give Me Shapes." The album was written in the wake of tragedies, and while the obscure lyrics don't betray the bandmembers' personal struggles, there's a prickliness to Past Times' driving intensity that conjures the dark side of the Sixties' acid scene. "Wake me if you can," Grass Widow sing on "Fried Egg," like they're almost ready to be rescued from the bad trip.

Icon: Michael Gira

If it’s an audience with Michael Gira himself you seek, this is the record. Taken from limited-edition CDs sold to the band’s super-fans, the proceeds of which helped fund the recording of studio albums by Swans and Angels of Light, these songs are nothing but Gira and his guitar, recorded at home with a single stereo microphone. “Just a casual performance in my office at home,” he has explained, noting that many of the songs were recorded immediately after writing them (and originally intended as demos for his collaborators to learn from). Stark and unadorned, they make for quietly harrowing listening, and they really come alive when compared to their eventual realizations by Swans and Angels of Light; listening to the fleshed-out songs and then Gira’s demos feels like tracking a river back to its source high above the tree line, where water courses unbounded over jagged shale.

Freeway, Diamond in the Ruff

I bet there’s dozens of underground rap records that have the title Diamond In The Ruff. After all, does anyone take more pride in having their obvious greatness overlooked than the underground rapper? But since this album comes from Freeway, the title is a little more complicated: After all, “diamond” is the symbol of his former home, Roc-A-Fella Records, and it’s been a full decade since he piped up on “Diamond Is Forever,” the leadoff track from Jay-Z’s Blueprint 2, which was released at that label’s commercial zenith. Freeway is an underground rapper now, but not necessarily by choice.

That subliminal callback symbolizes the awkward position Diamond in the Ruff occupies: In the end, it’s a record that relentlessly caters to those who have stood by Freeway through all of his career decisions — both good and ill-advised. Filed under “ill-advised”? “Dream Big” and “Lil’ Mama,” both of which are built on samples that recall Free At Last highlight “Still Got Love” almost verbatim. All the same, nothing can completely counteract the visceral pleasure of Freeway’s rapping — still delivered with five-alarm urgency, even when he’s griping about skinny jeans and “real hip-hop.” Likewise, there are moments where Free raps over beats other than the typical Just Blaze-derived soul-rap bombast and finds a new context in which he can be effective;“No Doubt” and “True” take their cues from the woozy textures associated with Drake or any number of club-rappers.

But the album is shadowed by a melancholy sense of awareness that Freeway’s current position in the rap game may well be his final one. As such, it’s more about rallying the troops than hitting the recruiting trail. As such, Diamond InThe Ruff is the kind of intermittently pleasing and self-conscious record made by former major-label rappers in painful transition, realizing that branding and presentation is every bit as crucial as craft.

The Hidden Genius of It’s A SpongeBob Christmas

What do jingle bells sound like underwater? It’s A Spongebob Christmas Album answers that Zen-like question and many others. It’s also of the most sophisticated and creative elaborations on Yuletiding you’re likely to find.

Cartoon-based music is often discounted, overshadowed by surreal characters and sound-effects (this despite a long history of amazing orchestrations, like the ones Carl Stallings and Raymond Scott composed for Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies). What’s often overlooked is the fact that the animated medium can encourage both experimentation and avant arrangement like few others.

“We don’t approach them as cartoon songs,” says Andy Paley, who both co-produced and wrote the music for SpongeBob. “A good song is a good song, and it doesn’t matter if a cartoon character sings it.” His more immediate role model might be the timeless melodies sung by Disney characters — “Someday My Prince Will Come” from Snow White stands out — but his approach is enhanced by his love of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson. Paley has worked with both; he was produced by Spector when he was in the Paley Brothers, a ’70s duo with a distinctly pop edge; and later he worked with Wilson on his solo comeback album; he’s also collaborated with such timeless artists as Madonna (on the Dick Tracy soundtrack) and Jerry Lee Lewis. Also, he has a fine taste in novelty records. (Let’s put it this way: he was the first person to play me the Shaggs.)

But Andy’s first love is the glorious soundscapes created by Phil and Brian in their golden era. “Phil’s records are not just about echo,” he explains. “That’s a cliché about him. It’s more the layering of textures.” The same could be said of Brian Wilson, especially the works-in-progress on display in The Smile Sessions. A self-professed Beach Boys “freak,” Paley spent long hours untangling these sounds and learning how to make them; this album reflects that sense of care and obsession.

He first began creating music for SpongeBob with the 2006 song “Best Day Ever,” which focused on that jaunty never-say-squish optimism that is our hero’s stock-in-trade. His lyricist and co-conspirator is Tom Kenny — the music aficionado who voices Mr. Bob — and their teamwork is infectious. All the characters on the famed Nickelodeon series have very specific characters and personalities — the lovable and dimmish bulb Patrick Star(fish), the Krusty Krab that is Eugene Krebs, the ill-tempered Squidward and Sandy Cheeks, a squirrel who lives in an underwater dome — and their distinctive personas give each tune on this album its own spin cycle. That said, it’s not hard to hear these songs outside the realm of Bikini Bottom: the lyrics tend toward the universal, and could be sung by any artist — and hopefully will be in the future.

Different genres provide distinct settings for each track. Sandy does the Cotton-Eyed Joe to “Ho Ho Hoedown,” which not only name-checks Waylon and Willie and Flaco and Sir Doug, but also spotlights Jeremy Wakefield on non-pedal steel, giving the track a western swing flavor not seen since the heyday of Bob Wills and Spade Cooley. “Christmas Is Mine” takes Plankton’s abrasive Napoleon complex and places it against the grain of a pastoral setting reminiscent of the Carpenters, featuring Corky Hale (whose orchestral harp flourishings also decorated records by Billie Holiday and Liberace). “Wet Wet Christmas” is street-corner R&B doowop; “Hot Fruitcake” is nutty as…; Patrick is dazzled by the tinsel and the wrapping in “Pretty Ribbons and Bows,” underscored by a psychedelic garage-rock riff and electric guitar solo played by Jonathan Richman. (Gazing at the tree, he exclaims, “That star on top is blowing my mind!”)

The various elements of the project began to gather under the mistletoe a couple of years back when Paley and Kelly came up with “Don’t Be A Jerk (It’s Christmas).” In that song, SpongeBob hopes to have everyone remember the spirit of the holiday; “Christmas Eve Jitters,” a stomping slice of honky-tonk rockabilly featuring Big Al Anderson from NRBQ, thematically recalls A Christmas Story, that cinematic holiday perennial that embodies the fraught anticipation of the holiday.

The album’s most moving moment — and strongest contender for Christmas standard — is “Snowflakes,” in which a wistful SpongeBob looks out his window to a world covered in crystal-white and sings atop a swirling wonderland that recalls the Brian Wilson of “Wind Chimes” and “Vegetables.” Hale’s harp shimmers and sweeps and Tommy Morgan, who also supplied the bass harmonica on “Good Vibrations,” adds extra resonance. Paley is able to pick from some of the best and most creative studio musicians in the Hollywood area (guitarist James Burton and ex-Wrecking crew member Nino Tempo also appear) and the cumulative effect is far beyond mere cartoon music. Maybe that’s the secret. “Because it’s SpongeBob,” says Andy, “we can make records like this, that are very authentic and sound like they come from another era, to resurrect musical style that shouldn’t be forgotten.”

But the best is saved for last, an in-joke so obscure that even compulsive cognoscenti will throw their hands (or fins) in the air in amazement. Both Phil Spector’s classic A Christmas Gift For You and the Beach Boys’ Christmas Album end with small personal messages directed at the listener. When Dennis Wilson says, “If you’re happening to be listening to this record now,” in his closing remarks on the latter, he stumbles on the word “happening,” pronouncing it “Hap-happening.” When SpongeBob closes out his album, he also adds the extra “hap.” A little extra holiday treat for the true music aficionado.

Solange, True

Sure, Solange is the sister of R&B/pop princess Beyoncé — a fact that will probably never be omitted from her CV. But while her musical means (a soaring soprano; wisely chosen collaborators) are similar to the elder Knowles, the ends are significantly different. Sloughing off her two previous commercial-leaning efforts (including 2008′s Cee-Lo Green/Mark Ronson written Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams), Solange enlisted production help from Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes for her new EP, True. The result is a candy-coated, left-of-center R&B playground.

Over seven songs, Solange coolly wields both a material-girl sheen and a recumbent royal swagger. Even when engaging in the vocal gymnastics of “Bad Girls,” she holds her power with a loose fist, avoiding a lapse into American Idol-style histrionics. “Look Good With Trouble” plays with Solange’s impressive restraint, its sense of late-night seduction created via layers of hypnotic looped vocals and minimal beats. The gloves come off for good-girl-gone-bad “Some Things Never Seem to Fucking Work,” but even here Solange purrs the titular expletive with a dignified Supremes-style grace. However, her star power glows brightest on the crunchy, of Montreal-style freak-fest “Losing You.” Over a slow groove dotted with squealed vocal samples and light funk-guitar flourishes, Solange proves that she doesn’t have to shout to subvert the mold, or break it completely.