Jukebox Jury: Mount Eerie

“One thing you should know about me is I don’t pay attention to music that much,” admits Phil Elverum. “So some of the things you think I might know, I probably won’t.”

What Mount Eerie‘s main member — and the onetime frontman of the Microphones — means to say is he doesn’t keep up with today’s music. While he’s fully aware of, say, Clams Casino because a friend (Nicholas Krgovich) wrote a slice of electro-soul over one of his shadow-boxed beats, Elverum doesn’t seek out new songs. Not when he’s got proven LPs like the ones below to keep him company, from the readymade indie rock of Eric’s Trip and Beat Happening to such left-field selections as Popol Vuh and Sunn O))). All of which can be heard rippling through his two highly recommended 2012 records, Clear Moon and Ocean Roar…

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Jesu, “Friends Are Evil”

I don’t know what this is, but I like it. Hold on; let me turn it a little louder…Is this Harvey Milk — a band I’ve never listened to but I keep feeling like I should?

Well it’s from the same label, so you’re kinda on the right track. It’s Jesu, which is the main guy from Godflesh. I picked it because some of the vocals on Wind’s Poem remind me of him.

Yeah, I’ve never heard anything like this before — people making really dense, heavy music, but singing in a softer way over the top of it. Other than something like My Bloody Valentine, where the vocals are intentionally buried in distortion. I want to make black metal essentially, but I can’t scream…Recording heavy music is tricky for me because I can make it work instrumentally, but something about an instrumental song doesn’t feel quite as real.

Do you have a hard time finding the right balance between the way you sing and the music itself?

Yeah. With black metal, you usually can’t decipher the words, and that’s fine for them, but for me, there’s something I’m really trying to convey. And in order for them to be legible in the mix, you have to put the vocals high up where the intensity starts to suffer.

You must have gotten more confident with these last couple records, though.

I have, but for the most part, when the heavy parts come in, the singing stops. I originally wanted the new records to be more extreme — totally stop/start, where some songs are just singing and some are just music. Like a friend reminded me how in Medieval times, a bard would noodle on his lute for a while, then say a poem, then noodle on his lute some more. Music and words weren’t necessarily intertwined.

In your case, you want to shred, then do your poem?

Exactly.

Eric’s Trip, “New Love”

I can tell from the hiss that this is maybe Eric’s Trip.

You can recognize them simply by the hiss?

Yeah. It’s music that I’ve listened to a million times — so foundational in my mind. This is the first track on Forever Again.

Right.

I think that’s an amazing way to start a record — with a fade-up of rain, then this other sound that’s like scraps from a session tape, and then the song starts. They’re the best.

What do you love about them so much? Or is it hard to put into words, especially since you’ve played with some of them in the past?

Oh no, it’s not hard. I was a teenager when I first heard them. I had never heard anything like this before. I guess Sebadoh would have been in the same ballpark, but I hadn’t heard them yet either. And by this point, they were more of a rock band anyway, with their Sub Pop albums. But um, yeah; I don’t know. Starting an album like that — who would do that? It seems crazy, a mistake that’s so beautiful, mysterious and deep. I remember listening to that so intently as a teenager, like, “Is that a recording of rain? And then a car drives by? Where are they? What world is this?” It’s so rich, taking music so far beyond instruments, in a John Cage sort of way. It made me realize that sloppy homemade things could make up an amazing album.

So before them, you were more of a verse/chorus, verse/chorus sort of guy?

Yeah, or something like Nirvana’s Nevermind, for example — music, not a cassette recording where you can hear people talking in between songs. I stole the idea of starting a song with quiet hiss from this. [The Microphones] record Don’t Wake Me Up starts the same way because of this idea.

You ended up doing your Lost Wisdom album with some members of this band; when did you meet them?

When I was 19, my girlfriend and I drove across Canada because we were fans and wanted to go on a trip anyway. We went to their town and I was just so starstruck being in this random east Canadian town. We happened to see a show — not Eric’s Trip, because they’d broken up, but Elevator to Hell, the band some of them became. I guess I met Julie Doiron through going to her shows every time she came here, and I gradually got on the bills myself. I was an enthusiastic fan that became a friend.

You drove all the way across Canada to see them? That’s quite a drive.

Kinda. It was mostly just to go on a trip, but that was the place I fantasized about the most because I was so into this music.

Is that drive as barren as you’d imagine it being?

Yeah, in a really beautiful way. It was like going on tour, but with no shows.

Burzum, “Lost Wisdom”

[Recognizing the song within seconds] Burzum.

Yep.

Buzum is complicated [laughs]. He’s an asshole, you know? A horrible person — a racist, and I also don’t like that much of his music. I really liked his Belus album because it’s trippy and deep, but I don’t know…I heard about Norwegian black metal by reputation before I heard any of the music. Like most people did probably — hearing about the murders, and the church burnings. It painted this picture of music that was so over the top and evil, but actually hearing Burzum or Mayhem was underwhelming in its evilness.

Because it was so lo-fi and campy?

It’s just so trebly and thin, and the voices sound like whining teenagers rather than demons. It’s corny — a Halloween costume situation—but there’s something beautiful about the earnestness of living that costume. Occasionally with bands like Burzum, there’s true musical transcendence where it gets psychedelic from all the repetition. The thinness has grown on me, too. I understand the idea behind it.

You think there’s an actual reason for it instead of being a matter of having limited means?

I do. I heard Varg [Vikernes] talk about those early albums in an interview once, about how he wanted to use the shittiest possible amplifier — the tiniest practice amp. I think he called it the “crypts sound” or something. Not wanting to sound professional is interesting in an Eric’s Trip kind of way.

Didn’t you name one of your albums after this song?

Lost Wisdom? I didn’t name that record because of this song necessarily. I just thought, “Oh, well, that’s a cool name! I wonder which Burzum song it is? Oh well, I’m not even going to look it up.”

Beat Happening, “Tiger Trap”

So I assume you have a bit of a history with this song.

Yes. A very deep history.

Where shall we start then?

Well, I grew up in Anacortes, Washington, and a member of Beat Happening is also from around here — Bret [Lunsford], the guitar player. When I was a teenager, the one record store in town was owned by Bret. This would have been ’91/’92, when Nirvana was happening and Beat Happening was kinda winding down. We were just starstruck teenagers, seeing Bret in a record store. He opened our world to the idea of underground culture, of recording and making things yourself.

We were into Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains — all these hair bands, basically — and then Beat Happening, but we didn’t see a disparity there. It was just the music we liked. In hindsight, it’s kinda funny that we liked Alice in Chains almost as much as Beat Happening. But yeah, I didn’t like them equally for long. I grew in one direction.

And it didn’t involve Alice in Chains?

No. I saw them at the Seattle [Center] Coliseum and got the idea. Never got to see Beat Happening, though. I tried to book them a few times, but they were slippery.

It must have been an honor to be on K Records.

Totally. I got into that by being in a band with Bret. He invited me to play in [D+], so we got to record with Calvin [Johnson] in Olympia, which was very exciting.

Someone who’s 20 years old now might not know much about K’s importance or history. What’s the best way you could sum up its impact?

I guess I take it for granted that it’s a big deal historically. But that’s the thing about history — it slips away. To sum it up, K is the foundational punk label that redefined what punk is, from D.C. hardcore or whatever to some dude playing an acoustic guitar and bongos. Punk is the method, not the result.

Stereolab, “Brakhage”

This is Stereolab. You’ve got me pegged. This is from Dots and Loops right?

Yeah, it’s the opening track.

They’re one of my favorite bands too. They made me think differently about song structures, but [I was] mostly into the [records] before this. Emperor Tomato Ketchup really hit me. Dots and Loops is the beginning of their transition into lounge-y, math-y stuff. I still like it, although the glitchy sounds were always a little problematic for me because they immediately sound dated; like six months later, they’re completely out of fashion. Whereas an organ drone will always sound amazing.

Is that why you use it so much in your music?

It’s pretty useful.

Stereolab were always looked at as “record-collector rock” because they clearly referenced so many other artists. Did you discover other kinds of music through them?

I didn’t actually. I probably should have explored Neu! or Can, but I just kept hearing those names and never looked them up. On the other hand, I looked up lots of things Sonic Youth referenced, like Stockhausen or Glenn Branca. I got really into experimental music through them.

Popol Vuh, “Aguirre I Lacrima Di Rei”

This is Popol Vuh, off Aguirre, I think. I love them a lot. For the past 10 years or so, they’ve been the most inspiring band to me. When I start recording, I’m usually trying to do this. Not this song in particular — the hugeness. They have a lot of songs that are just jamming electrical guitar solos basically. I usually don’t like that kind of thing, but I like when they do it. My favorite stuff is their Herzog soundtracks, though.

Right; you’re fully aware of how corny some of their music sounds, and yet, the soundtracks are rather awesome.

They actually make me like the corny guitar stuff even more. Sometimes it’s the perfect thing to put on during a long drive — those 10-minute guitar solos. You should try them out the next time you’re driving through Montana.

Do they sound dated to you at all though?

I guess the blues solo guitar jams do, but this kind of thing doesn’t. Maybe if I listened to more ambient music, it would, but this is still new to me.

Did you struggle with what song of theirs you wanted to cover on Ocean Roar?
I didn’t start off wanting to cover one of their songs. I was just listening to ["Engel Der Luft"] and thought one of the melodies was so beautiful and would work well as a chord experiment in a black metal style.

Could you ever see doing an entire record of synth-y textures like this?

Definitely. It’s what’s most exciting to me lately, what I’ve listened to the most — music without singing. Even when I was young, I listened to music in this way, focusing on the atmosphere and vibe more than the words or story. I listen to so many soundtracks because of that.

You do photography on the side too. Couldn’t you fuse your visual work with instrumental songs someday?

Totally. That’s what I thought I was going to be when I grew up.

A filmmaker?

Yeah, I made a lot of movies, but then I got distracted by music. And I still am.

Sunn O))), “Bathory Erzsebet”

You can skip ahead about 10 minutes in this song if you want.

It seems like Sunn to me. Is that right?

Yep.

They’re awesome.

This is the infamous track where they locked Malefic from Xasthur in a coffin [to record the vocal].

From Black One? Yeah, this is the [record] that got me into them. [Laughs] They’re intense. My favorite concert ever was them.

Really? When was that?

It was in like 2008 in Seattle. It was at a rock club, probably one of their smaller shows. It was gross and super hot — just physically painful being there with all the metal dudes. But yeah, the achievement of taking all that noise into other senses…it’s similar to black metal in that, yeah, the robes and the aesthetic has got a lot of corniness to it, but it’s done so well. It’s so beautifully packaged, such a wonderful presentation.

Do you like Xasthur for the same reason — not for his shrieking so much as the tones he goes for?

Some of his stuff is pretty horrible, but the record Subliminal Genocide — which is almost cringe-y to say — is what I imagined black metal would sound like when I first read all of the tabloid-y stuff about murders and church burnings. It sounds suitably evil and so huge. I think he’s the best screamer too; [laughs] his shriek is really good. It’s so distorted coming right out of his mouth.

As if that’s how he speaks right?

Yeah. It’s like he has distortion on his throat. But with the record after Subliminal Genocide, he decided to record more drums, and it just sounds so thin, like he’s in your uncle’s practice space. It doesn’t fit with the music.

Wolves in the Throne Room, “Cleansing”

Is this Tim Hecker?

No, but that’s an interesting comparison.

Oh, gosh, what is this? It’s Wolves in the Throne Room!

Yeah, although I didn’t pick them because you’re into black metal. I picked them because I feel like you’re both heavily influenced by the environments you choose to surround yourselves with. It’s not just about nature, either; it’s something deeper than that.

We’re very much peers. We’re friends, and have played some shows together, although it’s been disappointing in that mostly their fans have come to the shows and they don’t seem to see the link. They’re like, “Oh, this guy isn’t metal. This guy’s just playing a guitar.” But I identify so much with the romantic picture they’re painting of this place. I’ve been trying to think of ways to do something with them that’d make it more obvious, because I really admire what they do and I think it’s mutual. We’ve talked about recording together but…

Do it!

Yeah, I hope so. Their production is usually more exacting than I’m capable of being. When I record bands, it’s usually pretty raw. I can’t send the Pro Tools files, you know? Like they have very calculated fades and everything…I’d love to cover them and bring out something in their aesthetic that’s kinda buried at times, in the lack of legibility to their words.

You mean bring out the deeper things they’re trying to say? Like their views on the environment?

Yes…I love them.

Why have you stayed in the Pacific Northwest for so long? Because it feels like home at this point?

It definitely feels like home. I could see living somewhere else as a novelty, but I’d talk about here a lot and it’d be annoying to everyone around me.

The 13 Best Rolling Stones Songs You Don’t Know

As they branded themselves in a deserved fit of future-pique, the Rolling Stones are the world’s greatest rock ‘n ‘roll band, with singles too numerous to name dominating our hearts and loins from 1962 on. Though that burst of dangerous, sexual charge that impregnated “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” “Jumpin ‘Jack Flash” and others has subsided some 50 years after the fact, the throbbing energy of London’s favorite bad boys will never completely diminish; those first 13 ABKCO titles from 1964-70 are damn-near perfect, even in their flaws.

We know the hits; classic-rock radio has made sure of that. But beyond the big cuts — which are wonderfully collected on numerous compilations, including Hot Rocks, Big Hits and the latest, GRRR — there are many more songs deserving of your undying fandom. Below are 13 favorites, in order of preference, running the gamut from their first recordings to their triumphant Madison Square Garden set collected on Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out.

El Perro Del Mar, Pale Fire

When Swedish singer-songwriter Sarah Assbring last made a record, 2009′s gorgeously sad Love Is Not Pop, she referenced electronic dance music while purposefully not making it. This time around, she undercuts melody to make rhythm as her primary muse, yet nearly every synth pulse and machine rhythm on Pale Fire sounds as though it was recorded somewhere between 1986 and 1991.

The key influence here is Larry Heard, the super-influential but under-recognized Chicago musician who pioneered the heady, jazz-influenced vibes of deep house with Mr. Fingers’ “Can You Feel It,” a record the sound of which all over this one. As you might guess from an album that shares its name with Vladimir Namokov’s classic novel of metafiction, this is house music about house music: The lead single, “Walk on By,” leads with a sample of drag icon Dorian Corey from Paris Is Burning, the landmark 1990 ball culture documentary, and ends with Assbring quoting a line from Massive Attack’s similarly contemplative and fierce 1991 single “Unfinished Sympathy” as her chorus repeats to its fade. However, she mostly avoids house’s characteristic four-to-the-floor kick. When it does appear, there’s another wrinkle: “Love in Vain” bubbles with dub reggae syncopation; the culminating instrumental “Dark Night” avoids snare.

Soundgarden, King Animal (Deluxe Version)

Even after 16 years off the grid, banging out a killer rock record, it turns out, can be just like riding a bike — in Soundgarden’s case, a tricked-out, and exceedingly loud, Harley. When lead singer Chris Cornell cuts loose with “No one knows me/ No one saves me/ No one loves or hates me” in the raucously uptempo “Been Away for Too Long,” there’s no irony there; he sounds like the same tortured underdog who sought to break his “Rusty Cage,” recapturing the coiled rage that always seemed to propel the band beyond the limiting “grunge” tag. No one else can really deliver the Seattle stock-and-trade of sinewy groove-metal (“By Crooked Steps”), quasi-orchestral narcotic fugues (“Bones of Birds”) and phantasmagorical, endlessly unfolding campfire jams (“Black Saturday”), and that’s really why Soundgarden’s long absence has left such a gaping hole in what passes for heartfelt hard rock these days. The restless passion is still there, coursing through Kim Thayil’s sitar-like guitar drones on “A Thousand Days Before” or living in the diamond-hard Sabbath riffs of “Eyelids Mouth.” Best of all, Cornell hasn’t lost his defiant scream; he hits it at will on the floor-shaking “Non-State Actor,” and all suddenly seems right with the world.

A Skeptic’s Guide to the Deftones

If you haven’t given the Deftones a minute of your time in the past 15 years, that’s understandable. Their name is a tremendous liability, still invoking the bored and angsty nu-metal of their debut Adrenalize. That “nu” misspelling does them as much a disservice as the “Def” one — Deftones are truly a new metal band, one that’s always sought to grow with their fanbase, maintaining their brutality while incorporating the influence of shoegaze, electronic pop and IDM into a heady and heavy whole. White Pony is their clear pinnacle, and the latest in the collection is Koi No Yokan, but every one of their records is worth a listen and their discography boasts more than enough examples of a band being at the forefront of artful and melodic metal in the 21st century. These are 10 of them — our Skeptic’s Guide to Deftones.

Crystal Castles, (III)

It’s easy to be cynical about Crystal Castles, to reduce their blank stares and shit-eating sneers to a well-rehearsed caricature of rebellion and pre-apocalyptic rock ‘n’ roll: The Sex Pistols of the Steve Aoki set. But that’s selling their self-assured sound short. Decidedly DIY from the start, it’s as vinegary and vicious as ever on (III), a pressure-cooked LP that melds the mercurial mood swings of singer Alice Glass with Ethan Kath’s volcanic builds, lumbering bass lines, heat-seeking synths and shifty breakdowns that suck the listener into a black hole of absolute despair. That’s the thing about Crystal Castles — the more successful they get, the more miserable they seem to become. And not in a woe-is-me, we-sure-miss-playing-basement-shows sort of way either — their blog-born success ensured they never played basements in the first place. More like a deadly serious document of how far society has fallen, as hinted at in recurring lyrical themes of impurity and oppression, and hammered home by a record sleeve that reprints an award-winning photo of a Yemeni woman holding her tear gas-traumatized son at a street demonstration. Like the most genuine hardcore music of the Reagan era, (III) is a battle cry that can’t be contained, only this time it’s being presented through a web of whiplashed loops and barbed wire beats. Dance music for the end of days, then.

Zadie Smith, NW

The title of Zadie Smith’s fourth novel refers to the neighborhood of North West London, where, for Smith’s characters, the main currency is voice. NW is structured around three voices in particular: Leah Hanwell, her best friend Natalie (née Keisha) Blake and Felix, a young man whose brief section forms the pivot point around which the two women’s stories circle and collide. The daughters of Irish and Jamaican immigrants, respectively, Leah and Natalie leave the neighborhood for college and brief plunges into the world beyond. Leah returns as a social worker and Natalie as an upwardly mobile lawyer, allowing Smith to chronicle a brilliant and nuanced range of spoken language. This also makes listening to the audiobook a particular pleasure, as the readers skillfully voice the dialogue-driven text. As Natalie reflects, listening to her mother gossip ruthlessly, “People were not people, but merely the effect of language. You could conjure them and kill them in a sentence.”

NW‘s central contradictions rest in this succinct proposal, referring not only to the novelists task but to Leah and Natalie themselves, who face their own conjuring acts of self-reinvention and parenthood. Using fragmented chapters and a looping chronology to dilate what might have been a fleeting, faceless headline of neighborhood violence, Smith makes it clear that what’s at stake is the capacity for empathy — her characters’ and our own.

New This Week: Sufjan Stevens, Soundgarden, Deftones & More

A big batch of new releases this week, with something to satisfy nearly every musical taste. If you can’t find something you like between this roundup and Dave Sumner’s soon-coming jazz roundup, chances are you’re not looking hard enough. Here we go!

Crystal Castles, (III): Another hyper-compress blast of deeply danceable bad feelings. Andrew Parks writes:

Crystal Castles remain as vinegary and vicious as ever on (III), a pressure-cooked LP that melds the mercurial mood swings of singer Alice Glass with Ethan Kath’s volcanic builds, lumbering bass lines, heat-seeking synths and shifty breakdowns that suck the listener into a black hole of absolute despair. That’s the thing about Crystal Castles — the more successful they get, the more miserable they seem to become. And not in a woe-is-me, we-sure-miss-playing-basement-shows sort of way either … . Like the most genuine hardcore music of the Reagan era, (III) is a battle cry that can’t be contained, only this time it’s being presented through a web of whiplashed loops and barbed wire beats.

Brian Eno, Lux: As Andrew Parks hilariously puts it in his eMusic review: “Well, it’s abouty goddamn time.” After years of resume-padding work, Eno returns with what Parks dubsMusic For Airports! Part Deux. Here’s more:

The album stretches four wide-span tracks over 76 minimal, slow-moving minutes, which makes sense when you consider they were originally written for an Italian art installation where a sound system randomly played sustained chords, phantom voices and the plink, plop and plunk of a disembodied piano depending on where you walked within the gallery space. Being trapped on the moon or inside the glass cage of a snow globe must feel, and sound, a lot like this.

Sufjan Stevens, Silver & Gold: Sufjan returns with another entry in his lovely, generous series of Christmas-themed seasonal records. Like the other volumes, it’s a mix of quirky takes on carols and originals. Pat Rapa did a Harpers Index-style breakdown of each of the five new volumes here – I wasn’t kidding when I called this series “generous” – to give you the aerial view. Read the whole thing here – it’s worth it – and here’s the synopsis:

. By now, you should know the drill: Every year he gathers some musical friends and stitches together an EP to send out to loved ones. Some of the songs are standards, lovingly rendered. Some are standards, flipped into rock songs or spooky ballads. A lot of Stevens’s holiday tunes are originals, either sincere in their cheer or absurd, moody or baffling. (“Christmas Unicorn” is all of these.) Stevens’s last five holiday EPs are finally collected in the new Silver & Gold: Songs for Christmas Vols. 6-10, a collection that’s as upbeat and earnest as it is completely bonkers.

Clinic, Free Reign: The long-running Liverpudlian noise-rock/post-punk outfit return. Andrew Parks writes:

Now seven albums and nearly 15 years into a career that never quite caught fire here in the States, the main constant in Clinic’s sound is their love of melancholic melodicas and cobweb-encrusted organs. So while the Liverpool-based quartet still slip their surgical masks on every night, their trend-skirting brand of psych-pop revivalism got decidedly slower on their last LP (2010′s aptly-titled Bubblegum) and considerably looser this time around.Free Reign is just that — a dead-eyed journey down a rabbit hole that never seems to end.

Soundgarden, King Animal: These guys were one of my favorite bands once. I’m unsure if this constitutes an embarrassing revelation at the moment or not. I still think both Superunknown and Badmotorfinger are pretty unfuckwithable. Here’s Bill Murphy with his take on their first new studio record since Down on the Upside:

No one else can really deliver the Seattle stock-and-trade of sinewy groove-metal (“By Crooked Steps”), quasi-orchestral narcotic fugues (“Bones of Birds”) and phantasmagorical, endlessly unfolding campfire jams (“Black Saturday”), and that’s really why Soundgarden’s long absence has left such a gaping hole in what passes for heartfelt hard rock these days. The restless passion is still there, coursing through Kim Thayil’s sitar-like guitar drones on “A Thousand Days Before” or living in the diamond-hard Sabbath riffs of “Eyelids Mouth.” Best of all, Cornell hasn’t lost his defiant scream; he hits it at will on the floor-shaking “Non-State Actor,” and all suddenly seems right with the world.

Deftones,Koi No Yokan: The most underrated band! Stay tuned for our Skeptics’ Guide to Deftones, in which we will make the case that its early association with the “nu-metal” moment in pop history has forever done a disservice to one of the best Cure-influenced hard rock bands of the last ten years. Here’s Bill Murphy on their latest:

The music here is actually harder, tighter, tougher and more dynamic than 2010′s Diamond Eyes, which, besides bearing the thumbprint of producer Nick Raskulinecz (Foo Fighters, Rush, Alice in Chains et al), also introduced Quicksand bassist Sergio Vega to the fold. Where Diamond Eyes felt bogged down by a heavy sense of soul-searching, Koi No Yokan is the work of a band that’s stepping into the light again. Raskulinecz’s penchant for sculpting sound is front-and-center, particularly on “Rosemary,” where guitarist Stephen Carpenter cops Floyd-like delays in a tip of the hat to David Gilmour, and in the otherworldly psychscape that opens “Goon Squad.”

The Weeknd, Trilogy: Breakout R&B stars The Weeknd compile their acclaimed first three mixtapes into one massive Trilogy for their official major-label debut. Barry Walters, in this gem of a review, calls the music “30 songs almost solely devoted to conjuring up the hallucinatory sights, sounds and spirit of psychotropic sport-fucking binges, as well as their ensuing physical and emotional fallout,” and only gets on a roll from there:

Over the course of nearly 160 minutes, Abel Tesfaye consumes enough weed, coke, X, booze and cough medicine cocktails to kill a small army while boning enough strippers, pole dancers, groupies and slumming debutantes to breed a new one … If he had ordinary lyrical talents or sang with the machoness his control-fixated mentality implies, or set his tales of conquest and vice to generic beats, the Weeknd would be little more than aural porn. But Tesfaye is a finely detailed storyteller with an eerie, ethereal voice that suggests Michael Jackson’s wounded inner child, and his multi-instrumentalist producers Doc McKinney (formerly half of Esthero) and Illangelo create a suitably soporific netherworld soundtrack that mixes rhythm-box R&B with slo-mo indie-rock, muted metal, and blunted EDM.

How To Destroy Angels EP: Trent Reznor’s suitably creepy How To Destroy Angels project, a collaboration with his wife Mariqueen Mandig, Atticus Ross and Rob Sheridan, merges his industrial past with the more diaphanous soundtrack work of his more recent years. Annie Zaleski writes:

Ominous restraint marks the sparse, folk-inspired “Ice age,” which revolves around a thrumming acoustic guitar loop and Maandig’s unadorned vocals, while the equally spare “The sleep of reason produces monsters” is a mostly-instrumental lullaby with gentle, bubbling keyboards. In contrast, other songs onAn omen are dense and complex. On the despairing “On the wing,” Maandig and Reznor’s murmured vocals share time with muffled piano and fat electronic beats which resemble splotchy raindrops; “Speaking in tongues” grafts sharp, plucked tones to chanting vocals and haywire electronic effects; and “Keep it together” is a brooding number with perforated digital beats Joy Division-esque background guitars.

The Babies, Our House on the Hill: Cassie Ramone of the Vivian Girls and Kevin Morby of the Woods reunite for their plaintive lovely lo-fi indie-pop takes on youth and disappointment. Matthew Fritch writes:

These are songs about youth and struggle and isolation, concepts that would seem to garner little sympathy in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, but take on outsized significance wherever the remaining Duckies of the world live and fight in the decades after twee-pop and zines. With a tempo-swerving electric-guitar strum worthy of the Wedding Present and a cocky desperation inherited from Comet Gain, Morby spends opening track “Alligator” detailing exactly how to short-arm life: no job, no girlfriend and no prospects. Call it artless, or jam your fists deeper into your pockets and walk on with this album at your back.

Holly Herndon, Movement: I love this record. Herndon is an MFA graduate in Electronic Composition who spent her teenage years DJing in Berlin, and Movement, her debut on RVNG, feels likesound installation has taken up camp inside your skull. Good for: dancing, curling up in tight ball underneath desk, both.

Lust For Youth, Growing Seeds: Dark, forensic, deeply minimalist synth jams from SacredBones. Here’s our own J. Edward Keyes with more:

The debut from the Gothenberg act Lust for Youth — essentially the alias of one Hannes Norvide — feels like it’s set deep inside some ice cave in the outer reaches of the uninhabited arctic. The synths are as chilly and rigid as stalactites, and Norvide’s voice — a crude, teenage-Robert Smith holler — bounces up from somewhere deep, dark and unseen. The minimalism is as much a pragmatic matter as an aesthetic one: Norvide recorded the album in his bedroom on borrowed equipment, and the record doesn’t waste time with unnecessary flourishes. The songs are built on fat, steel-cold synth bars and usually consist of little more than a drum track and a single melody line. Sonically, it rivals the primitivism of early minimalists like The Normal, but it feels bleaker and more nihilistic. That such relentlessly despondent sounds were inspired by, to quote Norvide directly, “new love,” feels like some philosophy major’s perverse joke.

Roc Marciano, Reloaded: Roughed-up NYC revivalist rap from a rapper who isn’t so much mourning a lost world in rap as refusing to leave it. Here’s, um, me,with more:

Roc Marciano makes rap that you know well already, even as you’re hearing it for the first time: His music exists to remind what NYC rap sounds like in the idealized bubble of your memory, and he’s frighteningly good at it. He’s so good, in fact, that after awhile you forget that his music is a kind of Civil War reenactment, one in which Swizz Beatz plays General Sherman and the Battle of Five Forks is the moment he started fooling with a Casio. Marciano’s rap world exists before all of that, a vanished kingdom of urban despair, gnarled street slang, and unglamorous night shifts conducted out in front of public housing … The album is so absorbing, and so rigorous in its channeling of her’on-gray-sky gloom of the era it rightfully belongs to, that after awhile, timelines dissolve and you’re just left with Marciano and his ghosts.

Lee Perry, The Sound Doctor: The always-excellent Pressure Sounds label brings us a batch of songs Perry recorded at his legendary studio between 1972 and ’78. Not as dubby as you might expect — this is rather a really terrific batch of sunny reggae songs, solid, bright-eyed and bouncing.

Christina Aguilera, Loutus: You know, I’m just gonna be honest here — I was always kinda pulling for Christina. Of all of the pop stars of her generation, she was by far the best singer, and she seemed to have a canniness and self-possession that others did not. I even kind of quietly admired — if I didn’t exactly enjoy — Bionic, on which she paired with people like Kathleen Hanna, Ladytron and Sia. Well, that album kind of tanked, so Lotus is a bit of a retreat. It sounds fine, if unsurprising.

Green Day, Dos!: Oh, Green Day. Second installment of a planned trilogy from long-running punk band seems like maybe overkill? And there’s a third one coming? The songs are scaled back after the high-rock-opera of their last few outings, there’s just a lot of them. Fanfare dimmed a bit after Billy Joe’s public meltdown, but I still have a soft spot for this band, and they write unbelievably hooky songs. It’s just maybe this time they wrote too many of them.

Guided By Voices, The Bears for Lunch: SPEAKING OF WRITING TOO MANY SONGS. Come on, guys. This is the third GBV record of 2012, proving definitively that maybe there is such a thing as too much of something good. I dunno. Maybe I’m just whining. This sounds like GBV. You’ll be into it.

Punch Brothers, Ahoy!: The Punch Brothers are the new band helmed by Chris Thile of Nickel Creek. The songs here swing from tense and melodic to frenzied boot-stompers perfect for some kind of amphetamine square dance. Also, Thile is kind of a whiz on mandolin.

Ex-Cult, Ex-Cult: More goodies from the great folks at Goner Records! This Memphis band, formerly known as Sex Cult, bring trashy, thrashy rock and roll that occasionally nods toward the kind of locked-groove, dead-eyed punk of early Wire.

9th Wonder and Buckshot, The Solution: These two indie-rap stalwarts keep making their patented brand of Chicken Soup For the Old-School Rap Fan’s Soul. You know what to expect: pillowy soul beats, gruff rhymes.

Jozef Van Wissem & Jim Jarmusch, The Mystery of Heaven: Celebrated director teams up with celebrated lute player. The result is a dark, meditative album where clanging guitar noise provides an eerie backdrop for genuinely beautiful lute melodies from Van Wissem.

9th Wonder & Murs, The Final Adventure: Another one from 9th Wonder! As the title implies, this is his last pairing with California rapper Murs, and that’s a shame — 9th Wonder’s dusky, throwback production style is the perfect complement to Murs’s deep-set, tough-punch delivery.

Sonic Youth, Smart Bar Chicago 1985: Beware — the sound quality on this 1985 set from SY is dodgy at best. It sounds like maybe it was recorded with a small hand-held cassette recorder? But die-hard fans will find much to enjoy in this feral set from the on-hiatus band.

The Rolling Stones, Grrr: This is a hits collection from the Stones with a pair of new songs.

Tyvek, On Triple Beams: Yay, Tyvek! Rowdy, nasty, no-fi garage from these Detroit rubbish-rousers. This is minimal punk at its best — scrappy riffs and hollered vocals and choruses that are more sketches than hooks. What’s not to love?

School of Seven Bells, Put Your Sad Down: Unfortunately-titled new EP from School of Seven Bells is brighter and dancier than they’ve been in the past. I’m getting some Cure Mixed Up-type vibes from this — bubbling percussion, thumping synths and airy, breathy vocals.

Sharon Van Etten, Tramp Deluxe Edition: Expanded version of Van Etten’s masterful breakthrough Tramp gets augmented with demo versions of all of the songs that are sparer and spookier than the finished cuts.

Social Studies, Developer: This band has come along way from the reeling twee-ish sounds of their debut. This one is darker and moodier — almost like The National in tone, but leavened by the yelping vocals of frontwoman Natalia Rogovin. There’s a definite sense of darkness and melancholy at work here that is strangely alluring.

Bobby Bare, Darker Than Light: The first Bobby Bare record in about ten years! His voice sounds as rich and robust as ever, and the arrangements are quiet and restrained — which only foreground’s his big, powerful baritone. This is a mix of standards and newer songs, and it’s sure to satisfy longtime fans.

Gifts from Enola, A Healthy Fear: Fangs-bared assault from these post-punkers that slashes everything in sight. No moody atmospherics here — this is full of slashing guitars and jet-powered propulsion, with dreamy, spacey vocals gliding between the bars like galactic mist.

Bush Tetras, Happy: 1997 album from these post-punkers finally sees the light of day. Despite the fact that it’s 15 uears old, it still sounds nervy and edgy — a testament to the band’s forward thinking. Spindly guitars quiver and shake around Cynthia Sley’s sneering vocals.

Lana Del Rey, Born to Die: The Paradise Edition: Now there’s even more for you to hate! Inexplicably reviled pop sensation’s debut gets appended with a few extra songs. Maybe now that the buzz has died down, people can appreciate these sultry songs in a new light.

Tokyo String Quartet, Brahms: Quintets Op.34 & Op.115: The TSQ retackles these monumental works. Steve Holtje writes:

This is not the first time the Tokyo String Quartet has encountered these monumental works in its 44-year history; in 1987, they recorded a set for RCA with pianist Barry Douglas. The biggest difference in this set’s Piano Quintet is the sound, a vast improvement. Pianist Jon Nakamatsu, for his part, is perhaps a tad more lyrical than Douglas. It’s at least their third time in the studio with the Clarinet Quintet, the most famous being with Richard Stoltzman 19 years ago, and though half the TSQ’s membership has turned over since then, the interpretation hasn’t changed much; it’s become a bit more taut, with no loss in warmth of string tone. Clarinetist Jon Manasse has a bigger and darker sound than Stoltzman, which fits the music perfectly.

Bell Witch, Longing: Punishingly low funeral doom from this Seattle duo. What makes Bell Witch particularly unique is that the only instruments are bass and drums. Bass and drums! So you can imagine how bleak and boomy and doomy this sounds. The perfect soundtrack to the onrushing winter.

Clinic, Free Reign

When Clinic first burst onto the midstream rock scene with Internal Wrangler and Walking with Thee sporting surgical masks, they looked like a bloodthirsty gang of Dr. Giggles understudies who’d formed a garage band. Now seven albums and nearly 15 years into a career that never quite caught fire here in the States, the main constant in Clinic’s sound is their love of melancholic melodicas and cobweb-encrusted organs. So while the Liverpool-based quartet still slip their surgical masks on every night, their trend-skirting brand of psych-pop revivalism got decidedly slower on their last LP (2010′s aptly-titled Bubblegum) and considerably looser this time around. Free Reign is just that — a dead-eyed journey down a rabbit hole that never seems to end. Which means that, yes, three of these songs actually pass the five-minute mark, and the rest of the record is just as richly woven with steam-pressed synths and Kraut-rock-y rhythms, as co-mixed by Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never). No wonder why its lead single (“Miss You”) has a video that looks like a late-’90s screen saver.

Sufjan Stevens, Silver & Gold

Brooklyn indie darling Sufjan Stevens will probably never finish his one-album-for-every-state project (48 to go!), but his holiday-music series seems unstoppable. By now, you should know the drill: Every year he gathers some musical friends and stitches together an EP to send out to loved ones. Some of the songs are standards, lovingly rendered. Some are standards, flipped into rock songs or spooky ballads. A lot of Stevens’s holiday tunes are originals, either sincere in their cheer or absurd, moody or baffling. (“Christmas Unicorn” is all of these.) Stevens’s last five holiday EPs are finally collected in the new Silver & Gold: Songs for Christmas Vols. 6-10, a collection that’s as upbeat and earnest as it is completely bonkers. Read here for a rigorously scientific unwrapping of the highlights of each volume, broken into statistical categories.

The Heartbreaking Beauty of Chet Baker

It’s autumn in New York, and as I always do at this time of year, I pull Chet Baker from the shelf. His “Autumn in New York” — ironically recorded during one of his lengthy European soujourns (Jazz In Paris: Chet Baker Quartet Plays Standards; or the eponymous Autumn In New York, two versions separated only by a shift in modulation) — is imbued with the sound of one leaf falling, its solitary journey begun the moment a stem snaps and detaches, leaving the melody of the wind rustling through branches. Baker’s fragile tone and hollowed features reflect the earth on its way to winter, when all is frozen into silence, the memory of life breathing its last through the bell of a trumpet.

Chet Baker’s name in jazz and popular lore is usually accompanied by the word “tragic,” the sordid circumstances and personal unraveling of his relationships shadowing his career much as a brush-stroke rhythm section would keep time behind his interpretation of song. Yet the voluminous body of work and the reverence which accompanies his artistic output shows that doomed romanticism has its continual appeal; and to Baker’s credit, his music reveals unsparing pain and shattered beauty like no other. At odds with himself, each note seems chosen with a care that he could not lavish on his own being, or those around him: his family, his fellow musicians, his audience.

In some ways it came too easy. With his good looks, his ability to hear music even as he could not read it, and his embodiment of the hip, laid-back sheen of’50s West Coast cool jazz after the frantic be-bop explosion of the late ’40s, he knew how to hold his instrument — which was himself. Later in the decade would come James Dean and Elvis, each broodingly sculptured, each bearing their hallmarks of the ’50s slow boil. Chet seemed star-crossed from the beginning, chosen by Charlie Parker to accompany him on a California visit documented on the 1952 Bird and Chet at the Tradewinds. After this virtual benediction, Chet embarked on a partnership with Gerry Mulligan, and their earliest recordings (The Complete Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker – The Original Sessions 1952-1953) moved away from heated soloing to an emphasis on melody and studied nonchalance. At one of their first recording dates, for Fantasy Records in September of 1952, they cut a version of the “Carioca,” two Mulligan originals shrewdly dedicated to local disc jockeys (“Line for Lyons” and “Bark For Barksdale”), and a standard, “My Funny Valentine,” which centered around Baker’s quiescent delivery. They had not played the Rodgers-Hart composition before, and Chet’s instinct was to stick close to the tune as written, which proved prescient.

His and Mulligan’s personalities were soon at war, neither willing to be a sideman to the other. Still, Chet had found his calling card, and after he established his own Quartet with Russ Freeman on piano for Don Bock’s Pacific Jazz label, he took a chance to record with orchestral accompaniment. The success of Chet Baker with Strings led him even further from jazz’s penchant for deconstruction; in February of 1954, he began to sing. The resulting and deservedly classic 10-inch record was simply titled Chet Baker Sings, and his smoldering way with a ballad, especially “My Funny Valentine,” made him a heartthrob, the jazz equivalent of a teen idol. Helped along by William Claxton’s photographs of a moody Baker in an undershirt clutching his trumpet, the record far outsold its Downbeat demographic. Baker was an anointed star, white and ready for prime-time success. But though suffused in chiaroscuro light by Claxton’s lens and the whispered intimacy of a Neumann microphone, the inner Chet was a roiling mass of contradiction, enhanced by the drug addiction that was considered de rigueur as part of the mid-century jazz lifestyle.

It began falling apart for him almost immediately. Touring incessantly, recording albums of varying qualities, he seemed uncertain whether to devote himself to advancing his jazz credentials or catering to his new audience of adoring femmes. When he met Dick Twardzik in Boston, it seemed as if Chet might be able to have both. The young pianist was a challenging and harmonically complex musician, and Baker took to him instantly, adding him to the quartet he would take to Europe in the fall of 1955. But Twardzik hardly lasted a month on that tour before succumbing to a drug overdose. A few days later, Baker would record the songs that make up Chet Baker in Paris, and set forth on his own horrific descent into a whirlpool of drugs, jail, missed opportunities and wasted lives. Let’s Get Lost, as Bruce Weber’s worshipful film titles it, captures Chet’s junky conniving even as he makes his mournful trumpet bemoan his fates andcomplicity in his own downfall.

There were still more than 30 years yet to come in Baker’s life and discography, and often it’s hard to tell when he was able to rise above his personal travails to connect with his inner muse. There were many collaborations with his peers — outstanding are The Route with Art Pepper, another who wore his track marks on his sleeve; the 1956 Chet Baker and Crew which attempted to inject a bit of East Coast edge with tracks like “Chippyin’;” Chet Baker In New York, surrounding him with New York boppers; and Baby Breeze, a 1965 effort that moved him away from behind-the-beat tempos and gave him a strong instrumental foundation, especially provocative in the vocals. “You’re Mine, You” set him alongside Kenny Burrell’s chordal guitar magic, and he negotiated the emotions with aplomb.

But as decades passed, Chet’s unreliability and sense of scam increased exponentially. He retreated within himself. In the mid ’70s, I went to a small cellar jazz club on West 86th Street called Stryker’s to see him. There, with a bare minimum of notes, hardly breathing through his horn, he made every inflection count, drawing from his tortured soul the mea culpa of his many transgressions.

He lived until 1988, and on My Favourite Songs: The Last Great Concert attests, recorded only two weeks before his death falling from an Amsterdam hotel room, he once again proved his paradox. The concert had been arranged by a North German Broadcasting producer, Kurt Giese, with a hope of celebrating Chet Baker with Strings. Baker hardly showed for rehearsal, and when he did, his erratic performance was met with trepidation. But on the night of April 29, in the city of Hannover, he seemed inspired, in control of his trumpet and his well-worn voice. The version of “My Funny Valentine” is especially poignant, given its place in Baker’s legend, and Chet pours all of his inner contradictions into its unfolding. “Stay, little Valentine, stay…”And though he couldn’t, the bittersweet legacy that he left us remains still — a heart pierced by an arrow, evoking the pain and transcendence of love.

Deftones, Koi No Yokan

Adversity has pretty much been the currency of Deftones’ existence ever since the band catapulted outta Sacramento more than 20 years ago. So it comes as a bit of a surprise that they should name their latest album Koi No Yokan (loosely translated from the Japanese, “love at first sight”). The music here is actually harder, tighter, tougher and more dynamic than 2010′s Diamond Eyes, which, besides bearing the thumbprint of producer Nick Raskulinecz (Foo Fighters, Rush, Alice in Chains et al), also introduced Quicksand bassist Sergio Vega to the fold.

By now, the story of original bassist Chi Cheng is as much a part of the Deftones legacy as his own vital stake in the band’s muscular punk-metal sound. In late 2008, Cheng survived a car wreck that left him in a semi-conscious state; the band shelved the still-unreleased album Eros, citing artistic shortcomings rather than Cheng’s predicament, but it was clear that frontman Chino Moreno and his mates would have to work through their grief before they could move on.

Where Diamond Eyes felt bogged down by a heavy sense of soul-searching, Koi No Yokan is the work of a band that’s stepping into the light again. Raskulinecz’s penchant for sculpting sound is front-and-center, particularly on “Rosemary,” where guitarist Stephen Carpenter cops Floyd-like delays in a tip of the hat to David Gilmour, and in the otherworldly psychscape that opens “Goon Squad.” Meanwhile, “Swerve City” captures the godly, mountain-cleaving exuberance of early Jane’s Addiction, and the single “Leathers” finds Moreno in top, throat-shredding form. Even on a song as quiet and stripped-down as “Entombed,” which has the ring of a dedication to Cheng, Moreno renders the simplest of words with a startling power: “In chains, entombed/ Placed inside, safe and sound/ Shapes and colors are all I see.” If there’s ever a rainbow after the rain, Deftones have found one here.

Roc Marciano, Reloaded

Roc Marciano makes rap that you know well already, even as you’re hearing it for the first time: His music exists to remind what NYC rap sounds like in the idealized bubble of your memory, and he’s frighteningly good at it. He’s so good, in fact, that after awhile you forget that his music is a kind of Civil War reenactment, one in which Swizz Beatz plays General Sherman and the Battle of Five Forks is the moment he started fooling with a Casio. Marciano’s rap world exists before all of that, a vanished kingdom of urban despair, gnarled street slang, and unglamorous night shifts conducted out in front of public housing.

His feel for alliteration, and the way it twists rap lines around themselves like bed sheets, is the greatest joy of Reloaded. “The pad is a blank check/ Embrace death, taste flesh/ While the rhyme on the page is still wet,” he raps on “Flash Gordon.” The 15 songs on Reloaded are ticker-tape processionals of these sorts of rhymes, ones that don’t always privilege sense over sound: “Five drops of olive oil in the wok/ Presidential watch, call it Barack/ Black-face shit, with the invisible locks/ It’ll get you shot, it’s like the Hitchcock plot” (“We Ill”) might not mean anything, but it sounds incredible salted with Marciano’s monotone. His voice is a sullen mutter, the kind of monotone that implies illicit deals conducted in broad daylight in view of police, and his verses are so larded with coded language that his verses are like a mini-encyclopedia of NYC street talk. The album is so absorbing, and so rigorous in its channeling of her’on-gray-sky gloom of the era it rightfully belongs to, that after awhile, timelines dissolve and you’re just left with Marciano and his ghosts.

Zadie Smith, NW

The title of Zadie Smith’s fourth novel refers to the neighborhood of North West London, where, for Smith’s characters, the main currency is voice. NW is structured around three voices in particular: Leah Hanwell, her best friend Natalie (née Keisha) Blake and Felix, a young man whose brief section forms the pivot point around which the two women’s stories circle and collide. The daughters of Irish and Jamaican immigrants, respectively, Leah and Natalie leave the neighborhood for college and brief plunges into the world beyond. Leah returns as a social worker and Natalie as an upwardly mobile lawyer, allowing Smith to chronicle a brilliant and nuanced range of spoken language. This also makes listening to the audiobook a particular pleasure, as the readers skillfully voice the dialogue-driven text. As Natalie reflects, listening to her mother gossip ruthlessly, “People were not people, but merely the effect of language. You could conjure them and kill them in a sentence.”

NW‘s central contradictions rest in this succinct proposal, referring not only to the novelist’s task but to Leah and Natalie themselves, who face their own conjuring acts of self-reinvention and parenthood. Using fragmented chapters and a looping chronology to dilate what might have been a fleeting, faceless headline of neighborhood violence, Smith makes it clear that what’s at stake is the capacity for empathy — her characters’ and our own.

The Babies, Our House On The Hill

Only in the hyper-insular Brooklyn scene and its attendant fantasy-rock blogosphere could the Babies be considered a “supergroup.” The band was formed by Vivian Girls singer/guitarist Cassie Ramone and Woods bassist Kevin Morby, whose combined star wattage make the New Pornographers look likethe Damn Yankees. Their second album, Our House On The Hill, however, feel bigger than the Brooklyn bubble: These are songs about youth and struggle and isolation, concepts that would seem to garner little sympathy in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, but take on outsized significance wherever the remaining Duckies of the world live and fight in the decades after twee-pop and zines.

With a tempo-swerving electric-guitar strum worthy of the Wedding Present and a cocky desperation inherited from Comet Gain, Morby spends opening track “Alligator” detailing exactly how to short-arm life: no job, no girlfriend and no prospects. Morby reaches his peak of self-loathing in “Mess Me Around,” cursing himself out, and the acoustic “That Boy” works through heartache. Morby neither mumbles nor whines his way through these numbers; his voice is front and center, confidently baring feelings. Ramone sings lead on about a quarter of the tracks, and her style is more patented — a Warholian flattening of the ’60s girl-group genre that seems effortless and well-aligned with her work in Vivian Girls. Our House On The Hill belongs to Morby, however, and his acoustic, fingerpicked “Mean” makes plain the no-glibness, no-irony intentions of the Babies when he softly sings, “You’re mean, mean, mean, mean/ And it’s hurting my feelings.” Call it artless, or jam your fists deeper into your pockets and walk on with this album at your back.

Big Bill Broonzy: The Blues Ambassador

Consider Big Bill Broonzy. Here’s a guy who wrote such blues standards as “Key to the Highway.” As a writer-producer-sessions player for ’30s blues A&R man Lester Melrose, he shaped the sound of blues in Chicago before there was a recognized Chicago blues style. He was one of the first bluesmen to be taken in by — and to shape his music for — white audiences, and he opened up the European market for postwar bluesmen. Yet today he’s little more than a footnote in blues history — almost a Zelig-like figure rather than a pioneer. What happened?

That’s the question Bob Riesman tackles in his biography I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy, just published in paperback. He mainly discovers there’s no wholly satisfactory answer, but he unravels a complicated and revealing story along the way. And it’s one that needed to be told, because perhaps this book’s greatest revelation is that Big Bill’s own autobiography Big Bill Blues, William Broonzy’s Story, long billed as the first blues memoir, is in fact almost entirely made up, a grandiose job of self-mythologizing that makes the young Bob Dylan seem like an innocuous little tale-teller. Riesman goes to great lengths to show how, in doing so, Broonzy was consciously playing a sort of black Everyman, using his own stature to consolidate stories that told what life was like for African Americans of that time and place. Given Broonzy’s own propensity for writing songs either covertly or overtly about racial injustice, it’s a hard explanation to shoot down, but it may still leave you wondering.

After arriving in Chicago in the early ’20s, the man born Bradley Lee Conley in Arkansas dabbled in other work before committing to music. Working himself into the Melrose operations by 1929, he eventually became a Willie Dixon figure well before Willie Dixon did. Big Bill helped Melrose distinguish the real talent in Chicago, while writing witty and often ironic songs for those artists and serving as a session guitarist (though he was originally a fiddler) and more or less producing the records. He’d first appeared on disc (“Big Bill Blues” b/w “House Rent Stomp”) in 1928, and as the music evolved, he proved adaptable. He cut definitive hokum records with Tampa Red, Georgia Tom (Dorsey), Jazz Gillum and Washboard Sam (his half-brother). His first records under his own name (mistakenly printed as Broomsley) came out in 1930; his “I Can’t Be Satisfied” gave him his first hit. The so-called “Bluebird beat” (named after the RCA blues subsidiary label) adding trap drums and stand-up bass to blues guitar and/or piano was largely Broonzy’s creation. He worked with the kind of jazzy blues ensembles then developing in the cities, and when piano-guitar duets a la Leroy Carr-Scrapper Blackwell came into vogue, he picked up on those, too. His original, ragtimey guitar evolved into a more assertive, rawer, flat-picking style while retaining the pulsating bounce that had always propelled it. His vocals, notable for their clarity and smoothness, grew more anguished. Though most of his work for Melrose was released on Bluebird, his own records came out on ARC. And once the effects of the Depression had fully lifted, his solo career soared.

From 1934-42, he was one of the most popular country-rooted bluesmen in the nation. When John Hammond, planning his historic, 1938 Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall, learned that Robert Johnson (the Delta bluesman he wanted) had recently died, he turned to Big Bill, who jolted the audience with his sardonic “Just a Dream” (“Dreamed I was in the White House/ Sittin’ in the president’s chair/ Dreamed he’s shakin’ my hand and said/ ‘Bill, I’m so glad you’re here.’”) He scored with traditional material like “C.C. Rider” and he wrote brilliant new stuff like the dirge “Key to the Highway” and the raunchy “I Feel So Good.” He became a sort of blues ambassador; when Muddy Waters first hit town, it was Broonzy who took him in and showed him the ropes, and Muddy later reciprocated with the tribute album Muddy Waters Sings Big Bill. And Broonzy kept on keeping up with the times. His 1945 “Where the Blues Began” and “Martha Blues” (with Big Maceo and Memphis Slim, respectively, on piano) provided a bridge to the postwar Chicago blues combo style.

In 1946, while still cutting records aimed at black fans, Broonzy began playing more for white audiences, and soon fell in with Win Stracke and Studs Terkel, who were creating the postwar Chicago folk movement. Taking a breather from Chicago and the blues circuit in 1950, Big Bill worked as a janitor at Iowa State, where he also performed to students so skillfully that in 1951 a white friend was able to land him his first European tour. While overseas he finally was able to record “Black, Brown and White,” his most enraged song about race relations; he’d been performing it for years but no American label would touch it. Back in the States later that year, he cut perhaps his final straight-up blues gem, the delightful “Hey, Hey.”

He returned to Europe several times, becoming a huge influence on the ’60s wave of British guitarists (Eric Clapton has cut a pair of Broonzy tunes and Ron Wood still swears by Bill’s “Guitar Shuffle,” while Pete Townsend, who wrote an appreciation for the Riesman book, and Ray Davies are among the others who sing his praises). In the USA, he was perhaps the only blues fixture on the folk circuit who didn’t have to be rediscovered. But his relevance to, and influence on, the black audience was waning just as Chicago blues was peaking. To the mass blues audience that followed in the ’60s, Big Bill Broonzy got lost in the shuffle — but there’s no reason he has to stay that way.

How To Destroy Angels, An omen EP_

Although Trent Reznor recently hinted that he’ll be resurrecting Nine Inch Nails in the not-so-distant future, his current focus is How To Destroy Angels, his band with wife Mariqueen Maandig and frequent collaborators Atticus Ross and Rob Sheridan. The group’s 2010 self-titled debut EP felt like an extension of Nine Inch Nails, with its crisp industrial disco, electronic squelching and diffracted digital noise. But the new An omen EP_ merges Reznor’s electronic past with the more nuanced soundtrack work he’s done with Ross.

Ominous restraint marks the sparse, folk-inspired “Ice age,” which revolves around a thrumming acoustic guitar loop and Maandig’s unadorned vocals, while the equally spare “The sleep of reason produces monsters” is a mostly-instrumental lullaby with gentle, bubbling keyboards. In contrast, other songs on An omen are dense and complex. On the despairing “On the wing,” Maandig and Reznor’s murmured vocals share time with muffled piano and fat electronic beats which resemble splotchy raindrops; “Speaking in tongues” grafts sharp, plucked tones to chanting vocals and haywire electronic effects; and “Keep it together” is a brooding number with perforated digital beats Joy Division-esque background guitars.

If An omen has a flaw, it’s lyrics. More often than not, the EP’s topics (existential nihilism), imagery (references to “zeroes and ones”) and even phrasing (“The beginning is the end, it keeps coming around again,” from “The loop closes”) are recycled from Nine Inch Nails. While it’s not like anyone wants to hear Reznor going soft, the lack of thematic progression is disappointing. Still, How To Destroy Angels’ creative evolution mostly negates this weakness — fingers crossed the band’s forthcoming full-length continues this forward momentum.

António Zambujo, Quinto

Although men have long sung the emotionally charged Portuguese music known as fado, ever since the ascent of the genre’s legendary diva Amalia Rodrigues half a century ago the form’s most famous practitioners have been women. Today singers such as Mariza, Ana Moura and Joana Amendoeira are the popular face of fado, cleaving to tradition and forever held up to Amalia, even while expanding the repertoire. Perhaps the lack of public scrutiny given to male fado singers explains why António Zambujo comes off as a comparative risk-taker. On his superb fifth album Quinto, he’s never sounded more comfortable and accomplished pushing against fado’s stylistic strictures.

Zambujo isn’t an iconoclast: At the heart of his music is fado’s indelible blend of acoustic guitar, Portuguese guitar and upright bass, and his singing is distinguished by the expected melancholia. But as much as he flies the flag for fado, he also enlarges its possibilities, complementing his arrangements with masterfully deployed clarinets, and, on a few songs, electric guitar, drums, and trombone. While his phrasing is marked by tear-triggering pathos, his tone is much more delicate than other fado singers.

He’s a huge fan of Chet Baker, and there’s no missing their shared tonal fragility, a quality that gives each performance a sonic vulnerability that perfectly matches the poetic sentiments. Baker was an influence on the development of bossa nova, so it makes sense that Zambujo also adds a bit of that Brazilian music’s pin-drop softness to his delivery. On certain songs, such as the gorgeous “Rua dos Meus Ciúmes,” there’s an unmistakable trace of Caetano Veloso in his singing, and on “Fortuna” and “Mará” he continues to reach outside of his homeland for material, singing non-fado songs by Brazilians Márcio Faraca and Rodrigo Maranhão, respectively. He also gives another nod to Cante Alentejano, the rustic male choral music from his native southern Portugal, on “O Que á Feito Dela?” The cumulative picture paints Zambujo as fado’s most exciting practitioner of any gender.

A Skeptic’s Guide to the Deftones

If you haven’t given the Deftones a minute of your time in the past 15 years, that’s understandable. Their name is a tremendous liability, still invoking the bored and angsty nu-metal of their debut Adrenalize. That “nu” misspelling does them as much a disservice as the “Def” one — Deftones are truly a new metal band, one that’s always sought to grow with their fanbase, maintaining their brutality while incorporating the influence of shoegaze, electronic pop and IDM into a heady and heavy whole. White Pony is their clear pinnacle, and the latest in the collection is Koi No Yokan, but every one of their records is worth a listen and their discography boasts more than enough examples of a band being at the forefront of artful and melodic metal in the 21st century. These are 10 of them — our Skeptic’s Guide to Deftones.

Lust for Youth, Growing Seeds

The debut from the Gothenberg act Lust for Youth — essentially the alias of one Hannes Norvide — feels like it’s set deep inside some ice cave in the outer reaches of the uninhabited arctic. The synths are as chilly and rigid as stalactites, and Norvide’s voice — a crude, teenage-Robert Smith holler — bounces up from somewhere deep, dark and unseen.

The minimalism is as much a pragmatic matter as an aesthetic one: Norvide recorded the album in his bedroom on borrowed equipment, and the record doesn’t waste time with unnecessary flourishes. The songs are built on fat, steel-cold synth bars and usually consist of little more than a drum track and a single melody line. Sonically, it rivals the primitivism of early minimalists like The Normal, but it feels bleaker and more nihilistic. That such relentlessly despondent sounds were inspired by, to quote Norvide directly, “new love,” feels like some philosophy major’s perverse joke.

Growing Seeds refuses to acknowledge the existence of any notes on the Casio above middle C. “Always Changing” chugs robotically, like a runaway train in a Westworld outtake, and “It’s You” sounds like “Blue Monday” played on a Speak & Spell — both using big, blocky notes as blue as the numbers on a digital calculator. Despite its title, “We Got Lust” is almost defiantly sexless — Norvide emotionlessly reading off lyrics like they’re some kind of expressionist haiku as a primitive keyboard jerks and lurches like a Murnau zombie in the foreground. If this is Norvide in love, imagine his idea of a breakup album.