Interview: Cody ChesnuTT

Ten years is an eternity in the music business. So it might seem that any artist that chooses to reintroduce himself a decade on, with an album that sounds radically different from the one that made his name, is either reckless or delusional. But singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Cody ChesnuTT is neither. He’s simply intent on letting his career play out in its own time, no hustle and no hype.

The Atlanta, Georgia, native first made a splash back in 2002 with his debut LP, The Headphone Masterpiece.Entirely home-recorded, it was a raw, sprawling, lo-fi mix of contemporary hip-hop, ’60s psychedelic pop and ’70s soul and R&B that had many proclaiming ChesnuTT “the new Prince.” A reworking by The Roots of his track “The Seed” that same year blasted him further into the cult stratosphere, but then — 2010′s “Black Skin No Value” EP aside — silence.

Now, he’s back with Landing On A Hundred, an uplifting set of brass-blasted, socially conscious R&B and retro soul songs cast in the mould of Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and Al Green, that apply a little socio-political topspin to ChesnuTT’s personal tales.

eMusic’s Sharon O’Connell caught up with ChesnuTT to talk about being a father and keeping his faith.

What have you been doing for the past decade?

I was just trying to get some life under my belt, really. I have two children now — nine and three — and getting to know my older son first was a whole new experience. I wanted to get a better understanding of what that whole process was about, and really take it in, without missing any of those special moments.

Were you worried about being totally forgotten, after all these years?

I wanted to challenge the notion that you have to put your family aside to go out there and remain musically relevant. I believe if the material is strong enough and there’s a sincere component to it, then it will find its place again within the audience, so that’s the approach I took. I just wanted to live — although I didn’t know it was going to take 10 years! But my son’s first day at school was more important than being off somewhere, banging away on a guitar.

Landing On A Hundred has a classic, ’70s soul vibe — why were you drawn to that?

When you listen to those old-school records, they feel a certain way, and it’s that feeling that enables you to digest the lyrical content. I wanted to recreate that feeling so that as a listener, you’re in that space and can focus on what’s happening lyrically and sonically. I think that’s why people still go back and buy those records, even if they’re in their 20s and 30s — because of the comfort they provide. They fall around you like an old garment.

Why did you opt to record the rhythm section and horns at Royal Studios in Memphis?

Really, we were just looking for the studio that had the best rates for analog tape! But when we walked into the place, we were all just overwhelmed by it, and it kind of centered everybody. Everybody aligned themselves with the vibe in the room and just went for it. The engineer was Boo Mitchell, son of Willie Mitchell, who produced and arranged all those classic soul guys. There’s an old radio mic with the number nine written on it — it’s the one Al Green always used, so it’s on “Let’s Stay Together” and “Love and Happiness” — so it was highly complimentary of Boo to even think that my voice was worth capturing in that way. It was very inspiring.

What was your main aim in making Landing On A Hundred?

I wanted to make something that transcended religion and ideology. I wanted a record that just said, “This is humanity” and was open enough so that it resonated with me.

Was the process cathartic, or were you simply creating characters?

All of it was cathartic. And a strong percentage of it is autobiographical. I didn’t feel compelled to make people think that I was the same guy from The Headphone Masterpiece. I was in the frame of mind where I thought I could really speak about all the things that are important to me now, so the songs have a coherency. I was looking for something that fed me in a genuine way again and so I had to sort out real issues — things that I lived every day — and find a way to bring that to the songs.

The subject matter of “Everybody’s Brother” is quite heavy. How autobiographical is it?

I have never smoked crack in my life, but I have two uncles who have been battling with it for more than a decade. That’s why I titled it “Everybody’s Brother,” because everybody can relate to one of these characters, or may know somebody who has had that experience. I’ve seen people swindle and be dishonest, in my community and elsewhere. The womanizing? That is me — hands down. I’m not proud of it, and I hurt too many people in the process. But it was my own selfishness and clouded thinking at the time.

What’s with the soldier’s helmet you wear onstage?

At this point in time, I’m fighting for things that are really important to me, so it’s symbolic of a soldier, fighting on the frontline. Fighting for light in a dark space…

Interview: The Coup’s Boots Riley

It’s never easy to walk the precarious line between art and activism, but Boots Riley, frontman and lead conceptualist for The Coup, has kept his balance with a mixture of swagger, charisma, wit — and just a touch of wry humor. His home base of Oakland and the Bay Area’s radical history provide a wealth of inspiration; from Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party to Sly and the Family Stone, Riley channels a bygone era of soul power, right down to his impeccably coiffed Afro and mutton chop sideburns, that has molded him into one of hip-hop’s funkiest cult heroes.

Interestingly, Sorry to Bother You, The Coup’s sixth album, largely eschews the sensuous funk tropes of 2006′s Pick A Bigger Weapon, leaning instead toward uptempo immediacy (“The Magic Clap”), punkish attitude (“You Are Not A Riot”) and raw, unvarnished grooves (“The Guillotine”). Riley himself sounds focused and driven — “Hypnotic, the noose is slip-knotted in a fourth-quarter audit and pumped through the carotid,” he spits in “The Gods of Science,” which features guitar demon Vernon Reid — but he also brings a street romantic’s flair to “My Murder, My Love” (with Jolie Holland and Joe Henry) and the prostitute’s lament “Violet.” Ruthlessly topical without ever sounding didactic, Riley can call out entitled rich kids in “Your Parents’ Cocaine” or the harsh economics of “Strange Arithmetic” and still get you to move to the message. In hip-hop of any stripe, that’s saying something.

What got you going to make this album?

Well, I’m someone that, while accused of doing funk and loving Parliament-Funkadelic and Sly and all them, there’s only so many times you can listen to those albums. I don’t care what genre you’re in — if you’re really into music, you’re gonna wear something out. So I’m always looking for new forms and new things. And there are some things that I’ve listened to probably since before I started making records, but I just didn’t think that I should put into my music, because I was young and thought there were certain expectations for my sound, as opposed to letting it all flow through. I think with this album, I just let all of my influences be laid out there musically.

Do you feel like you’ve grown sharper as a lyricist?

I think I let myself lose a lot of conventions that were shackling me. Early on, I got labeled with the title of “lyricist.” And that’s an honor, but it’s also limiting, because the idea of “lyricism” in hip-hop, quote-unquote, has to do with being witty and being clever, even if what you’re saying is not heartfelt. Sometimes what’s witty and clever only has one emotional note, which is that you’re disconnected. So I wanted to write lyrics that I felt were connected to my emotions. There are still different things that are funny and humorous, but it’s not just a punch line for the sake of having one. And in that way, I think I let some of the influences that are more akin to literature and poetry come through. I’ve done that a little in the past — for instance, with “Me & Jesus the Pimp” [from 1998's Steal This Album], there’s a lot of literary tools and tricks used in that, but it’s to tell a story, so it’s somewhat expected. This time, I just took a lot more influence from poets I like — whether it’s Leonard Cohen or Michael Ondaatje or Pablo Neruda — with the idea of choosing words that add a texture that make you think about that situation in a different light.

At the same time, I do hip-hop, and that’s what I’m comfortable in, so I needed to do it in a way that I’m sure I can master. As long as I’m emotionally true and talking about everything that is connected to whatever the topic is, and letting myself be open, it’s all gonna come out in the wash. So I wanted to do that.

Tell us about “You Are Not a Riot,” which is subtitled “An RSVP from David Siqueiros to Andy Warhol.”

That got sparked by a conversation I overheard that got me angry. It was about some artist, I don’t remember who it was, but I wrote it right then, putting myself in another character’s position. That’s the easy way out, right?

David Siqueiros was a Mexican muralist who was actually part of the Mexican revolution. In later years, people might have thought he was kind of crazy, with some of the allegations he would throw around. For instance, when he was one of the hosts of the Venice Biennale in the ’50s, he accused the Latin American artists who were coming with all of this abstract stuff of being CIA agents. He was like, “Look, in a time when there’s revolutions going on all over the world, why you gonna come with this shit? How disconnected could you be from the world to want to do this?” And it turned out that there may have been some truth to what he was saying.

Anyway, the idea was to talk about art that tries to assume a rebellious aesthetic without actually being, in content, rebellious. The reason for that is people are attracted to the rebellious aesthetic. Why? Because we all know that the world is fucked up, and we all want something that’s different. And sometimes artists play on that rebellious aesthetic, while selling you all the core values of the system — selling you the idea that you don’t need to be rebellious. And a good symbol of that, to me, was Andy Warhol. Aesthetically, what he was doing in art was a little bit different. However, what it sold was art without passion. And in order to sell that, you had to sell this disconnectedness with the world, and he talked about that.

So with that conversation, I had the idea of Andy Warhol inviting David Siqueiros to a party. What would he say? I wrote it in eight minutes, maybe, and went into the studio and it just started, “You are not a riot,” with the bass line, and that was it.

You launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to buy a new tour bus. How does social media fit into what you do as an artist?

It’s really the same old thing. It’s been around for a long time. Before the internet, there was mail order, and before that, you had catalogs that people ordered from. So that existed to a certain extent. But this is getting people to pre-order, basically. By the time I started the campaign, we had one song, “The Magic Clap,” out there, so it’s good that people had faith in the album.

I think it’s definitely very helpful to artists to be able to connect directly with their audience. In our case, if this many people had bought the album later on, with the money coming in incrementally, we wouldn’t have been able to get this bus. On top of that, getting the bus will allow us to tour more regularly, which also allows us to connect with organizations and communities during the daytime. When we go in a van, everything is the same — we’re travelling all day, we go to the venue, hit the late-night place to eat and then the motel, and it all ends up feeling very similar. But this way, we can connect with organizations and hopefully help them publicize what they’re doing.

Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Oakland just marked their first anniversaries, and we’re gearing up for another election in November. Where are we now, in your opinion, and where are we headed?

To use what’s now a cliché, I think the conversation has changed. We’re heading towards a militant, radical labor movement. The Chicago teachers’ strike is a good example — a very militant strike that was able to get community support because it put out a bit of the bigger picture. And that’s not even a classic labor issue — there’s gonna be labor issues around production and services. A new tactic has been put on the table.

People understand that even if the struggle isn’t related to their particular job, they still feel connected to it. So there’s a new atmosphere of radical direct action coming up, and it’ll be around labor and material wealth. You even see the conversations about getting folks to vote in a different way. Voting is the very least of political activities that anyone can do. If someone just says, “I voted,” that doesn’t mean you did shit. Not only do we see that it doesn’t change much, but we see that there’s something more that needs to be done in order to change the world.

13 Satanic Folk Songs

By definition, folk music is music by and for the people. The songs are more about the simplicity of the melodies than the complexity of the arrangements and the lyrics often relate tales of struggle and protest. But while most folk heroes have passed down an oral tradition of peace and a strong sense of community, there have also been more transgressive and rebellious musicians that have fueled their anger with confrontational, subversive and blasphemous songs. In the 1920s, Samuel J. Wishbone recorded what might be the first Satanic folk song, “The Devil Made a Man out of Me,” which includes the line, “He doesn’t mind your cursin’ or sacrificing virgins/ Oh, the Devil made a man out of me,” and ends with cheers that turn into volleys of screams accompanied by the sounds of crackling flames and gunshots.

As dramatic as Wishbone’s ode to the Prince of Darkness was, the first well documented devil music came from American blues singer Robert Johnson, who, according to legend, was an unskilled musician who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for talent and fame. In the years that followed, he became a sensation, but died of mysterious causes at age 27.

The dark (but not explicitly Satanic) songs of Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits inspired a wave of British ’80s martial folk bands, which incorporated elements of early industrial music with acoustic folk strumming, militant beats and lyrics about death, the apocalypse and the devil.

With black candles positioned in a pentagram around our speakers, eMusic delved into the history of evil, politically incorrect and murderous music to assemble the 13 best Satanic folk songs.

New This Week: Gary Clark, Jr., Kendrick Lamar, Bat for Lashes & More

[Listen to a radio program featuring selections from this week's New Arrivals here.]

Kendrick Lamar, good kid, m.A.A.d. city:
PICK OF THE WEEK. Interscope debut from the most promising new rapper in ages lives up to and exceeds his potential. A shockingly fantastic record, better than everything, to be frank, that I’ve personally heard this year. Jordan Sargent tells it:

good kid, m.A.A.d. city is, to be clear, a striking achievement. Yet the truest strength of the album is that it still hits even once you’ve untangled its various knots. The complex narrative is a leap in ambition for Lamar, but in doing so he’s retained the elements of his writing that made him famous in the first place. On his last album, Section.80, he showed a keen eye for observing, analyzing and understanding those close to him, and it’s from that place this record grows.

Bat for Lashes, The Haunted Man: New one from Natasha Khan explores heartache, war and hauntings. It’s a little more stripped back than her last two efforts — fewer swirling synths, more piano and percussion, and Khan’s voice is more front-and-center. I talked to her about that in this interview. Of the record, Barry Walters says:

Over and over again, Khan sings of lovers traumatized by the past, and how those ghosts haunt the present. In the album’s most immediate track “All Your Gold,” Khan sings of “a good man” that she struggles to trust with a heart that a previous lover turned black. She often adopts a motherly protector role, as on the percussive “Rest Your Head,” but she also battles with her own demons: In the slow-burning title track, she aims to heal a wounded soul, but admits, “Yes, your ghosts have got me too.”

Gary Clark, Jr., Blak and Blu – Burgeoning blues-guitar hero’s breakout moment arrives. Bill Murphy writes:

True guitar heroes don’t come along often. So when one threatens to break into the pantheon, it tends to get some notice. Clark carries with him all the charisma and mystique of a young “savior of the blues,” as he’s been touted, but his musical vision is much more complex.

Parquet Courts, Light Up Gold: Lemme just start by saying that this is one of my FAVORITE RECORDS OF 2012. Man oh man. The shorthand I’ve been using on this is “Jonathan Richman fronting Wire,” but that doesn’t even quite capture it. Throttling indie rock topped with wiseass vocals and some of the smartest, funniest lyrics I’ve heard in a long, long time. If you are not, after 10 minutes, repeating the opening song’s vocal hook — “Forget about it!” — to anyone who will listen, then I just don’t understand you as a person. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. FORGET ABOUT IT!

Diamond Rings, Free Dimensional – Glam-pop singer sheds the glitter and goes for the gold. Marissa Muller writes:

Now that the glitter has settled, Diamond Rings (aka Canadian artist and musician Johnny O’Regan) takes an understated approach on sophomore album Free Dimensional. His debut Special Affectations mostly chronicled O’Regan’s metamorphosis from the frontman to the D’Ubervilles, into Johnny O, strutting glam pop singer. Free Dimensional completes the transition, with O. stepping out from behind the behind rainbow eye makeup and lo-fi production. The more spacious arrangements are aided by producer Damian Taylor (Björk, the Killers, Robyn), who help Diamond Rings achieve a sleeker, futuristic sound, with overt nods to Grace Jones in the dancefloor ringer “Hand Over My Heart,” Annie Lennox in the minimal thumper “I’m Just Me,” and David Bowie in the propulsive singalong “Runaway Love.”

Of Montreal, Daughter of Cloud: Rarities compilation from these kooks gathers up a bunch of odds and ends from the Hissing Fauna era that never turned up anywhere else. Fun!

U.S. Girls, GEM – Lo-fi scruff-pop gets new-wave upgrade. Annie Zaleski writes:

The music created by U.S. Girls (the recording moniker of Meghan Remy) has always used a very specific palette of sounds: muffled vocals, sludgy static, droning keyboards and hollow drums.But save for a few exceptions—such as her loopy, theatrical take on the Brandy/Monica classic ’90s jam “The Boy is Mine”—Remy’s unsettled noise sculptures haven’t typically boastedmuch defined direction or structural clarity. GEM, U.S. Girls’ fourth album, changes that: Although Remy again worked with long-time collaborator Slim Twig, the record boasts higher production values and focused arrangements. “Rosemary” feels like an outtake from Gary Numan’s The Pleasure Principle, what with its alien analog synths and Remy’s wavering trills, while “Work From Home” is full of brittle, hypnotizing plinking keyboards.

And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, Lost Songs: Rambunctious Texans are back with another batch of dense and domineering rock songs. This one sounds a little more straightfoward than the epic concept albums of the past, a lot more hard-driving punk, a lot fewer Epic Suites.

The Doors, Live at the Bowl ’68: The Doors live at the Bowl in ’68.

Pig Destroyer, Book Burner – Brutal, visceral extreme metal band continue to hone their attack on the satisfyingly bludgeoning new Book Burner. Jon Wiederhorn writes:

Like other extreme acts, Pig Destroyer write songs about murder, insanity and mayhem, but there’s something grimier and more disconcerting about their tunes than your average Cannibal Corpse gorefest. With the release of 2004′s Terrifyer, the band was already rising above the constraints of traditional grindcore, incorporating industrial sound bites, death-groove riffs, doomy atmospherics and math-metal tempo changes into their schizophrenic songs. Brutally misanthropic, their songs grimly reflects the rage, intensity and social disconnect of minds on the edge.

The Secret, Agnus Dei – Savage, enveloping Italian thrash metal. Here’s Beverly Bryan with more:

Over the course of their career, Italian metal quartet The Secret has been slowly knotting together their black metal, hardcore, grind and crust influences into their own unique, blackened thrash. This process, nearly complete on 2010′s awesomely monolithic Solve et Coagula, hits its peak on fourth album Agnus Dei, an instrument of pure, cleansing punishment. The album is bathed in deep, enveloping bass frequencies, from which emerge guitarist Michael Bertoldini’s icy, strafing leads, evoking bitter, icy downpours surrounded by a pelting hail of blast beats. In more subdued sections, droners such as “Heretic Temple” come on thick and resinous enough to choke. The monotony reaches its magnificent zenith on thirteen minutes of swarming noise called “Seven Billion Graves.”

P.O.S., We Don’t Even Live Here – Indie-rap firebrand releases his best record yet. Editor’s Pick. Nate Patrin writes:

P.O.S.’s career has involved so many collaborations and side projects that, by now, even his solo records feel like collective efforts that tap into the resources of a trusted group. His status as a member of indie-rap braintrust Doomtree, slow-jam supergroup Gayngs and noise cabal Marijuana Deathsquads haven’t just provided him with different stylistic guises and cohorts to bounce ideas off — as you can hear on We Don’t Even Live Here, it’s given him an artistic community to fight for and represent. If there’s one thread that runs through We Don’t Even Live Here, his fourth and best solo record, it’s the idea that this kind of solidarity is a good excuse to get some real pushback. Andrew Dawson, whose experience behind the boards on a grip of Kanye records rubs off on this record’s anthemic sheen while making sure to keep it grimy enough to cause a fire hazard.

Oren Ambarchi, Connected: I’m pretty into this dude. Kind of atmospheric, guitar-based experimental music. Lots of shadow and moodiness, and songs that gradually build to create a sense of dread.

Oh No & Chris Keys, Ashes: My brother’s name is Chris Keyes, and he is a producer, so seeing this record has made me chuckle every time. This is not my brother, it is another producer named Chris Keys, and he’s teamed with the versatile rapper Oh No for more of that boom-bap style hip-hop we all love so much.

Darling Farah, Body Remixed: Handful of remixes from the lovely, moody Darling Farah record that came out earlier in the year. This is a little glitchier and more minimal than that one, but still great.

The Sword, Apocryphyon: You know the drill: ballsy, NWOBHM-inspired metal with lots of busy fretwork, ten-ton riffing and only the tiniest bit of irony.

Vinnie Paz, God of the Serengeti: Big, swoopy soundtrack-style hip-hop — lots of strings, lots of gusto, lots of bravado — plus Paz’s huff ‘n’ puff delivery.

Father Finger, Father Finger: A new one from one of my favorite labels, Not Not Fun. You know the drill: super blippy, Commodore 64-style electronic music, icy and primitive. God bless these kids.

GRMLN, Explore: This is some lush, lo-key indie rock. Glimmering, latticework guitars, far-off, reverbed vocals, and songs whose gorgeous melodies reveal themselves slowly and gradually. Beautiful!

JC Satan, Faraway Land: I, no joke, discovered this band randomly on BandCamp the other day, and now the record is in the store. PROPHETIC. I really like this: super doomy and Swansy at points, ragged and punky at others, the whole thing is a big, rampaging wall of sound. RECOMMENDED

Dave Sumner’s Jazz Picks
Small drop this week, but some fine albums to choose from.This week’s Pick of the Week is almost certain to make my final Top Ten of 2012.Several live performances made it onto today’s column, which really shouldn’t be all that surprising since the best of Jazz often shines through in a live setting.Let’s begin…

Peggy Lee Band, Invitation:On past recordings, cellist Lee has an intoxicating pattern of songs that alternate between moments of sublime beauty and sharp dissonance.Her newest release hits both extremes, but finds resting spots for both with the confines of each track.The result is a blend of soft and harsh sounds, passages that soar and others that careen.Inventive and beautiful, and clearly unafraid to take risks.Easily, my Pick of the Week, and will likely rate pretty high on my Best of 2012 list.Just great music.

Frank Kimbrough Trio, Live at Kitano:Pianist Kimbrough is one of those musicians whose album sound perfectly nice and tasteful and elegant, but seem to lack an emotional oomph… until that moment when you sit up in your chair with the sudden realization of the music’s subtle, yet effective punch.With Jay Anderson on bass and Matt Wilson on drums, this live recording doesn’t stray from that pattern.Kimbrough finds the perfect send-off by ending the album with the lovely “Hymn.”

Joe Hertenstein, Future Drone:Free improv session with Hertenstein on drums, Joe Irabagon on tenor sax, and Achim Tang on bass.Bursts of sound, shrieks and squeals, music focused on interchange of ideas between musicians.If you’re looking for pretty melodies, look elsewhere.If you want something with a wild electrical charge, this’ll be for you.

Tim Lapthorn, Transport:Mix of solo piano, piano trio, and trio w/strings.Pianist Lapthorn has a cerebral sound to his compositions, music that simmers provocatively without ever threatening to reach a boil, which leads to some nice tension.Addition of the Navarra String Quartet a nice touch.

Ratchet Orchestra, Hemlock:A 30-piece big band, the Ratchet Orchestra tries to have it both ways… they possess the pop-music sensibilities of a traditional big band but also many of the free form improvisational techniques of the avant-garde schools of music.It all ends up sounding like big band music performed in an industrial blender.The cool thing of it is, once the novelty of the sound fades, the ingenuity of the music shines through.Nifty stuff.Find of the Week.

John Tchicai, Dell, Westergaard, Lillinger, featuring John Tchicai:Saxophonist Tchicai was one of the members of the New Sound jazz movement in the sixties, along with other greats like Don Cherry, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, and others who made a nice home for themselves on the Impulse label.Tchicai displays that he hasn’t lost any of that intensity, and shows he’s also no less deft in wielding it.Half of the album’s hour long play time originates from a duo performance between Tchicai and vibes man Christopher Dell at a 2010 tribute to Johnny Dyani, and the other half recorded not long after with bass and drums.Tchicai can still throw out sheets of flame, but the stronger moments on this album are when he keeps things at a slow burn.Complex, yet very accessible and easy to enjoy.

Matt Brubeck, Twotet/Duextet:This recording originally came out in 2007, not sure if it’s been on eMusic previously.A duo recording by cellist Matt Brubeck and pianist David Braid.Brubeck has lent his cello to plenty of jazz performances and a decent set of indie and rock acts to boot.Braid is one of jazz’s under-sung artists, releasing a series of excellent live recordings and also a nice one with orchestra.Peaceful, elegant tunes.If you’re a sucker for cello albums, you can’t go wrong here.

Bill Laswell, Means of Deliverance:Laswell has left his mark as producer and bassist on countless classic recordings by a diverse set of musicians ranging from Brian Eno to Herbie Hancock to Iggy Pop.He’s also cast his net out wide to more diverse musics, and sparked some interesting collaborations.Intriguingly, this recording has him performing solo on a Warwick Alien fretless four-string acoustic bass guitar, and sounding more along the lines of the spooky Americana one would expect from a Bill Frisell recording.This music, it’s quite hypnotic, pretty even.

Irene Schweizer, Many and One Direction:Piano solo album from the free improv Schweizer.This is an older recording, from back in ’96.Not sure if it’s been on eMusic previously, but I know that several of you who read this column are into the Intakt Records label releases, so consider this your heads-up.

The Secret, Agnus Dei

Through the course of their career, Italian metal quartet The Secret has been slowly knotting together their black metal, hardcore, grind and crust into their own unique, blackened thrash. This process, nearly complete on 2010′s awesomely monolithic Solve et Coagula, hits its peak on fourth album Agnus Dei, an instrument of pure, cleansing punishment. The album is bathed in deep, enveloping bass frequencies, from which emerge guitarist Michael Bertoldini’s icy, strafing leads, evoking bitter, icy downpours surrounded by a pelting hail of blast beats. In more subdued sections, droners such as “Heretic Temple” come on thick and resinous enough to choke. The monotony reaches its magnificent zenith on thirteen minutes of swarming noise called “Seven Billion Graves.”

Agnus Dei‘s most thrilling moments are also its most unpredictable. Highlights like the title track and “The Bottomless Pit” are panicky and unbalanced, swirling somewhere between Mayhem and Converge. Still, even the most chaotic of these songs shares the same elements, drawn from extreme music’s most unquiet corners, hardened by time and pressure into something fresh and even beautiful.

Stars, The North

The wistful Canadian indie-pop band Stars built its fanbase smushing dance music and indie pop into an endearingly awkward embrace. Set Yourself On Fire, their 2005 high mark, found the perfect midpoint between the squirm and the hip-shake. The North, the band’s sixth full-length studio album, carries right along in this tradition. Beats range from pitter-pattering to hammering, while jangling guitars share space with synths. And the band’s two singers, Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan, take turns singing lead when they’re not delivering lyrics in conversational rounds.

The album on the whole has a vaguely retro bent. Awash in reverb and shot through gently with Millan’s cooing vocals, the hazy “Through the Mines” sounds like vintage Mazzy Star. “Lights Changing Colour” could’ve been an old Cocteau Twins demo, while a rave-up called “Hold On When You Get Love And Let Go When You Get It” has the soaring, synthetic thrill of Cut Copy at its best.

And yet it’s the kicker, “Walls,” that takes fullest advantage of Campbell and Millan’s boy-girl interplay. Campbell has the kind of delightfully fey accent that turns “party” into “pahty,” and Millan sings in a breathy coo that can melt a record clerk’s heart, and together they come off as an indie-rock answer to Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, singing back and forth. Him: “I had a secret.” Her: “Yeah but I knew it, love.” Him: “And we were children.” Her: “We danced to ‘Hand in Glove.’” On it goes, with a chirping keyboard and a beat that won’t sit still and a relationship drama unfolding before your ears.

Diamond Rings, Free Dimensional

Now that the glitter has settled, Diamond Rings (aka Canadian artist and musician Johnny O’Regan) takes an understated approach on sophomore album Free Dimensional. His debut Special Affectations mostly chronicled O’Regan’s metamorphosis from the frontman to the D’Ubervilles, into Johnny O, strutting glam pop singer. Free Dimensional completes the transition, with O. stepping out from behind the behind rainbow eye makeup andlo-fi production. The more spacious arrangements are aided by producer Damian Taylor (Björk, the Killers, Robyn), who help Diamond Rings achieve a sleeker, futuristic sound, with overt nods to Grace Jones in the dancefloor ringer “Hand Over My Heart,” Annie Lennox in the minimal thumper “I’m Just Me,” and David Bowie in the propulsive singalong “Runaway Love.” O’s lyrics are more confident too, with self-declarations like “I know when to trust my vision/ I know when to show my pride” in opener “Everything Speaks” and unabashed romantic statements like “We’re never going to care what they say/ we don’t need a label” in Balearic gem “All the Time.” True to its title, Free Dimensional is just that, free: of affectations as well as inhibitions.

Gary Clark Jr., Blak and Blu (Deluxe Version)

True guitar heroes don’t come along often. So when one threatens to break into the pantheon, it tends to get some notice. Gary Clark Jr. grew up in his native Austin steeped in the blues; he started playing the local bar circuit at 15 (this was back in 1999), befriending Stevie Ray Vaughan’s older brother Jimmie and gradually making a name for himself as a kid with a brash, ballsy sound and a soulful singing voice to back it up. When Eric Clapton extended Clark a personal invitation to perform at the Crossroads Guitar Festival in 2010, the grapevine buzzed expectantly.

Now 28, Clark carries with him all the charisma and mystique of a young “savior of the blues,” as he’s been touted, but his musical vision is much more complex. For every reference to Elmore James or T-Bone Walker (especially on the rootsy, all-acoustic “Next Door Neighbor Blues”), he can unleash a snakebite wah-wah solo that recalls Jimi Hendrix (“When My Train Pulls In”) or dial it back to croon like D’Angelo on the title song, which undulates with hip-hop and G-funk thanks to producer/bassist Mike Elizondo. He can play straight Berry-meets-Beatles rock ‘n’ roll (“Travis County”), bang out a horn-fueled soul revue (“Ain’t Messin’ Around”) or fearlessly update his own heroes (Hendrix’s “Third Stone from the Sun,” a song that Clark and his touring band usually fold into the blues-stomping standard “If You Love Me Like You Say,” as he does here). Whatever the direction, Clark provides the glue that makes it all work.

As the current trend in rock and soul revivalism dictates, it’s one thing to cop a sound, and another to sound original doing it. Clark might wear his influences on his sleeve, but he’s paid dues to get to where he is. You can hear it in “Numb,” the album’s sludge-rock centerpiece. “Well, I’m numb/ Heck woman, I can’t feel a thing!” he shouts, world-weary enough for a bluesman twice his age. He punctuates the sentiment with a ferocious, paint-peeling guitar solo. Whether or not Clark will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Hendrix, Clapton, Vaughan or Van Halen is up to history, but for now, he’s giving his contemporaries — Jack White and the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach among them — something serious to think about.

New This Week: The D.O.T., Pig Destroyer & More

The D.O.T., And That Mike Skinner’s collaboration with Rob Harvey of The Music may be an unlikely one, particularly give that Skinner said he quit music to make movies, but on tracks like the sweet-but-barbed “Like You Used To”, it brings out the best in both of them. Andrew Mueller reviews:

“The best of And That makes a virtue of Skinner and Harvey’s incongruity…  “Goes Off” is rather too redolent of the sort of thing inexplicably played at deafening volume in London shoe shops [but] there’s enough that’s good here to prompt hope that there’s more where And That came from.”

Pig Destroyer, Book Burner The grindcore kings’ fifth album, one of the most anticipated metal releases of the year, is an unparalleled aural assault, writes Jon Weiderhorn:

“Pig Destroyer attack with pinpoint precision, plowing through 19 cuts in just under 33 minutes and mapping out when to pummel, trudge and lacerate. Adam Jarvis and guitarist and producer Scott Hull (ex-Anal Cunt) both boast the ability to turn sick, horrific and off-kilter clamor into coherent, memorable compositions.”

Egyptian Hip Hop, Good Don’t Sleep The Manchester band’s long-awaited debut is a brilliant, wired mix of day-glo pop and luminous noise (but not Egyptian hip-hop).

Main Attrakionz, Bossalinis & Fooliyones Cloud rap’s first essential album comes from the Californian duo of Squadda B and Mondre M.A.N.  Ben Beaumont-Thomas writes:

“This is a kind of 21^st-century G-funk: Grey Goose may have replaced Tanqueray as the liquor of choice, but this evokes the California of pre-fame Snoop, full of casual sex, cheap thrills and, yes, clouds of weed smoke.”

Alt-J, An Awesome Wave (Deluxe Edition) The business-class upgrade of Alt-J’s Mercury-nominated debut includes live and acoustic versions of tracks, plus remixes from Tom Vek and Ghostpoet.

U.S. Girls, Gem Meghan Remy, aka U.S. Girls, ditches lo-fi songwriting for a brighter, bigger sound on her fourth album. Annie Zaleski writes:

““Down in the Boondocks” is kitschy, retro-flavored tropical pop, while the piano-based “North On 45” and glammy squeal “Jack” resembles David Bowie circa Hunky Dory.”

Stars, The North The sixth album from the Canadian band sees co-vocalists Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan duet like indie’s answer to Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. Nick Marino writes:

“Campbell has the kind of delightfully fey accent that turns “party” into “pahty” and Millan sings in a breathy coo that can melt a record clerk’s heart.”

13 Satanic Folk Songs

By definition, folk music is music by and for the people. The songs are more about the simplicity of the melodies than the complexity of the arrangements and the lyrics often relate tales of struggle and protest. But while most folk heroes have passed down an oral tradition of peace and a strong sense of community, there have also been more transgressive and rebellious musicians that have fueled their anger with confrontational, subversive and blasphemous songs. In the 1920s, Samuel J. Wishbone recorded what might be the first Satanic folk song, “The Devil Made a Man out of Me,” which includes the line, “He doesn’t mind your cursin’ or sacrificing virgins/ Oh, the Devil made a man out of me,” and ends with cheers that turn into volleys of screams accompanied by the sounds of crackling flames and gunshots.

As dramatic as Wishbone’s ode to the Prince of Darkness was, the first well documented devil music came from American blues singer Robert Johnson, who, according to legend, was an unskilled musician who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for talent and fame. In the years that followed, he became a sensation, but died of mysterious causes at age 27.

The dark (but not explicitly Satanic) songs of Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits inspired a wave of British ’80s martial folk bands, which incorporated elements of early industrial music with acoustic folk strumming, militant beats and lyrics about death, the apocalypse and the devil.

With black candles positioned in a pentagram around our speakers, eMusic delved into the history of evil, politically incorrect and murderous music to assemble the 13 best Satanic folk songs.

U.S. Girls, GEM

The music created by U.S. Girls (the recording moniker of Meghan Remy) has always used a very specific palette of sounds: muffled vocals, sludgy static, droning keyboards and hollow drums.But save for a few exceptions — such as her loopy, theatrical take on the Brandy/Monica classic ’90s jam “The Boy is Mine” — Remy’s unsettled noise sculptures haven’t typically boastedmuch defined direction or structural clarity. GEM, U.S. Girls’ fourth album, changes that: Although Remy again worked with long-time collaborator Slim Twig, the record boasts higher production values and focused arrangements. “Rosemary” feels like an outtake from Gary Numan’s The Pleasure Principle, what with its alien analog synths and Remy’s wavering trills, while “Work From Home” is full of brittle, hypnotizing plinking keyboards.

This fidelity boost coincides with a boost in songwriting quality. “Down in the Boondocks” is kitschy, retro-flavored tropical pop, while the piano-based “North On 45″ and glammy squeal “Jack” resembles David Bowie circa Hunky Dory. Even the instrumental “He Who” — on which mourning piano and a spare drum machine trade melancholic barbs — and the murky, ambient atmospherics of “Another Color” are painstakingly detailed.

If anything, though, GEM reflects Remy’s confidence as a vocalist. On many songs, her voice — which resembles Zola Jesus without the operatic tendencies — is pushed to the forefront and is distortion-free, producing some memorable highlights; for instance, on “Work From Home,” Remy hollers at the top of her range like a ’60s soul belter. While in the past much of U.S. Girls’ charm came from its lo-fi tendencies and DIY attitude, GEM‘s brighter sound is a welcome step forward.

New This Week: Gary Clark, Jr., Kendrick Lamar, Bat for Lashes & More

[Listen to a radio program featuring selections from this week's New Arrivals here.]

Kendrick Lamar, good kid, m.A.A.d. city:
PICK OF THE WEEK. Interscope debut from the most promising new rapper in ages lives up to and exceeds his potential. A shockingly fantastic record, better than everything, to be frank, that I’ve personally heard this year. Jordan Sargent tells it:

good kid, m.A.A.d. city is, to be clear, a striking achievement. Yet the truest strength of the album is that it still hits even once you’ve untangled its various knots. The complex narrative is a leap in ambition for Lamar, but in doing so he’s retained the elements of his writing that made him famous in the first place. On his last album, Section.80, he showed a keen eye for observing, analyzing and understanding those close to him, and it’s from that place this record grows.

Bat for Lashes, The Haunted Man: New one from Natasha Khan explores heartache, war and hauntings. It’s a little more stripped back than her last two efforts — fewer swirling synths, more piano and percussion, and Khan’s voice is more front-and-center. I talked to her about that in this interview. Of the record, Barry Walters says:

Over and over again, Khan sings of lovers traumatized by the past, and how those ghosts haunt the present. In the album’s most immediate track “All Your Gold,” Khan sings of “a good man” that she struggles to trust with a heart that a previous lover turned black. She often adopts a motherly protector role, as on the percussive “Rest Your Head,” but she also battles with her own demons: In the slow-burning title track, she aims to heal a wounded soul, but admits, “Yes, your ghosts have got me too.”

Gary Clark, Jr., Blak and Blu – Burgeoning blues-guitar hero’s breakout moment arrives. Bill Murphy writes:

True guitar heroes don’t come along often. So when one threatens to break into the pantheon, it tends to get some notice. Clark carries with him all the charisma and mystique of a young “savior of the blues,” as he’s been touted, but his musical vision is much more complex.

Parquet Courts, Light Up Gold: Lemme just start by saying that this is one of my FAVORITE RECORDS OF 2012. Man oh man. The shorthand I’ve been using on this is “Jonathan Richman fronting Wire,” but that doesn’t even quite capture it. Throttling indie rock topped with wiseass vocals and some of the smartest, funniest lyrics I’ve heard in a long, long time. If you are not, after 10 minutes, repeating the opening song’s vocal hook — “Forget about it!” — to anyone who will listen, then I just don’t understand you as a person. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. FORGET ABOUT IT!

Diamond Rings, Free Dimensional – Glam-pop singer sheds the glitter and goes for the gold. Marissa Muller writes:

Now that the glitter has settled, Diamond Rings (aka Canadian artist and musician Johnny O’Regan) takes an understated approach on sophomore album Free Dimensional. His debut Special Affectations mostly chronicled O’Regan’s metamorphosis from the frontman to the D’Ubervilles, into Johnny O, strutting glam pop singer. Free Dimensional completes the transition, with O. stepping out from behind the behind rainbow eye makeup and lo-fi production. The more spacious arrangements are aided by producer Damian Taylor (Björk, the Killers, Robyn), who help Diamond Rings achieve a sleeker, futuristic sound, with overt nods to Grace Jones in the dancefloor ringer “Hand Over My Heart,” Annie Lennox in the minimal thumper “I’m Just Me,” and David Bowie in the propulsive singalong “Runaway Love.”

Of Montreal, Daughter of Cloud: Rarities compilation from these kooks gathers up a bunch of odds and ends from the Hissing Fauna era that never turned up anywhere else. Fun!

U.S. Girls, GEM – Lo-fi scruff-pop gets new-wave upgrade. Annie Zaleski writes:

The music created by U.S. Girls (the recording moniker of Meghan Remy) has always used a very specific palette of sounds: muffled vocals, sludgy static, droning keyboards and hollow drums.But save for a few exceptions—such as her loopy, theatrical take on the Brandy/Monica classic ’90s jam “The Boy is Mine”—Remy’s unsettled noise sculptures haven’t typically boastedmuch defined direction or structural clarity. GEM, U.S. Girls’ fourth album, changes that: Although Remy again worked with long-time collaborator Slim Twig, the record boasts higher production values and focused arrangements. “Rosemary” feels like an outtake from Gary Numan’s The Pleasure Principle, what with its alien analog synths and Remy’s wavering trills, while “Work From Home” is full of brittle, hypnotizing plinking keyboards.

And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead, Lost Songs: Rambunctious Texans are back with another batch of dense and domineering rock songs. This one sounds a little more straightfoward than the epic concept albums of the past, a lot more hard-driving punk, a lot fewer Epic Suites.

The Doors, Live at the Bowl ’68: The Doors live at the Bowl in ’68.

Pig Destroyer, Book Burner – Brutal, visceral extreme metal band continue to hone their attack on the satisfyingly bludgeoning new Book Burner. Jon Wiederhorn writes:

Like other extreme acts, Pig Destroyer write songs about murder, insanity and mayhem, but there’s something grimier and more disconcerting about their tunes than your average Cannibal Corpse gorefest. With the release of 2004′s Terrifyer, the band was already rising above the constraints of traditional grindcore, incorporating industrial sound bites, death-groove riffs, doomy atmospherics and math-metal tempo changes into their schizophrenic songs. Brutally misanthropic, their songs grimly reflects the rage, intensity and social disconnect of minds on the edge.

The Secret, Agnus Dei – Savage, enveloping Italian thrash metal. Here’s Beverly Bryan with more:

Over the course of their career, Italian metal quartet The Secret has been slowly knotting together their black metal, hardcore, grind and crust influences into their own unique, blackened thrash. This process, nearly complete on 2010′s awesomely monolithic Solve et Coagula, hits its peak on fourth album Agnus Dei, an instrument of pure, cleansing punishment. The album is bathed in deep, enveloping bass frequencies, from which emerge guitarist Michael Bertoldini’s icy, strafing leads, evoking bitter, icy downpours surrounded by a pelting hail of blast beats. In more subdued sections, droners such as “Heretic Temple” come on thick and resinous enough to choke. The monotony reaches its magnificent zenith on thirteen minutes of swarming noise called “Seven Billion Graves.”

P.O.S., We Don’t Even Live Here – Indie-rap firebrand releases his best record yet. Editor’s Pick. Nate Patrin writes:

P.O.S.’s career has involved so many collaborations and side projects that, by now, even his solo records feel like collective efforts that tap into the resources of a trusted group. His status as a member of indie-rap braintrust Doomtree, slow-jam supergroup Gayngs and noise cabal Marijuana Deathsquads haven’t just provided him with different stylistic guises and cohorts to bounce ideas off — as you can hear on We Don’t Even Live Here, it’s given him an artistic community to fight for and represent. If there’s one thread that runs through We Don’t Even Live Here, his fourth and best solo record, it’s the idea that this kind of solidarity is a good excuse to get some real pushback. Andrew Dawson, whose experience behind the boards on a grip of Kanye records rubs off on this record’s anthemic sheen while making sure to keep it grimy enough to cause a fire hazard.

Oren Ambarchi, Connected: I’m pretty into this dude. Kind of atmospheric, guitar-based experimental music. Lots of shadow and moodiness, and songs that gradually build to create a sense of dread.

Oh No & Chris Keys, Ashes: My brother’s name is Chris Keyes, and he is a producer, so seeing this record has made me chuckle every time. This is not my brother, it is another producer named Chris Keys, and he’s teamed with the versatile rapper Oh No for more of that boom-bap style hip-hop we all love so much.

Darling Farah, Body Remixed: Handful of remixes from the lovely, moody Darling Farah record that came out earlier in the year. This is a little glitchier and more minimal than that one, but still great.

The Sword, Apocryphyon: You know the drill: ballsy, NWOBHM-inspired metal with lots of busy fretwork, ten-ton riffing and only the tiniest bit of irony.

Vinnie Paz, God of the Serengeti: Big, swoopy soundtrack-style hip-hop — lots of strings, lots of gusto, lots of bravado — plus Paz’s huff ‘n’ puff delivery.

Father Finger, Father Finger: A new one from one of my favorite labels, Not Not Fun. You know the drill: super blippy, Commodore 64-style electronic music, icy and primitive. God bless these kids.

GRMLN, Explore: This is some lush, lo-key indie rock. Glimmering, latticework guitars, far-off, reverbed vocals, and songs whose gorgeous melodies reveal themselves slowly and gradually. Beautiful!

JC Satan, Faraway Land: I, no joke, discovered this band randomly on BandCamp the other day, and now the record is in the store. PROPHETIC. I really like this: super doomy and Swansy at points, ragged and punky at others, the whole thing is a big, rampaging wall of sound. RECOMMENDED

Interview: Bat For Lashes

Two Suns, the second record Natasha Khan made as Bat for Lashes, ended in death. In “The Big Sleep,” Khan — assisted by Scott Walker, at his ghoulish best — sang from the perspective of a dying drag queen, watching the Big Light blink out from her dressing room floor. It was the perfect distillation of everything Khan does best, combining High Drama with aching tragedy to chilling effect. As it turns out, concluding the record in that way — with the passing of a heavily-costumed, aggressively theatrical performer — was appropriate: When I meet Khan in the garden at the Bowery Hotel to discuss The Haunted Man, the aspect of the record she’s most emphatic about is its rawness. “I had really pushed myself to explore different production techniques — it was all very full and layered and complex, she explains.” And this time, I felt a really natural need to pull away from that and strip it all back. I wanted the vocal to be much louder in the mix.”

Accordingly, the subject matter on The Haunted Man is more immediate and, consequently, more wrenching, its songs giving equal weight to the impact of war and the fallout from collapsing relationships. The chief difference is that this time, Khan mostly plays the consoler, supporting wounded friends and encouraging the defeated. The album’s cover art is an extension of that theme: It depicts Khan, naked, carrying a man across her shoulders, conveying a sense of both strength and vulnerability all at once. As she sings to the doubting protagonist in elegiac first single “Laura,” “You’re more than a superstar.” It’s the kind of deep empathy and passionate support that can only come from a survivor.

I know probably everyone is asking you this, but it’s been three years since Two Suns. I was just kind of wondering what you’ve been up to.

Well, I needed to take a year to get over touring and the craziness that my life had become. And so I did lots of normal things like gardening, lots of cooking. And I was writing lots of songs, but they were kind of frustrating, because I wasn’t really ready yet. I guess I was trying to just live my life a little bit. So I did lots of art — I took up a life drawing class, I did an Illustration for Children’s Books course for a week, I made a film script with a friend, I made a couple of dance films.

What was the script about?

It was for a teenage kids’ film. I’ve put it to the side, but it’s something I’d like to take up again — it was just to give myself something to do. I worked with a screenwriter friend, and I just found that discipline really interesting. It’s all dialogue and action — which is what music is, really. I think by doing those things you keep the cogs oiled and the channels open. And I was also watching lots of films and reading lots of books, and slowly the themes of the record started to come forward.

You worked with Beck a bit on this record, is that right?

Very early in the process. I was feeling quite lonely, and I’d worked with Beck before, so I thought, “Maybe I’ll just take 10 songs out to him.” I just think he’s really playful, and he still has that childlike inquisitiveness — he’s just eccentric and funny and wonderful.

So we just did a really early session, and I think maybe a couple of songs survived — “Marilyn” and “Oh Yeah” were two of them. But the point was just to go out there and play and have fun and collaborate. I was telling him about all the filmic references [on the record] and he was like, “We can put them on while we’re playing.” And so we had films projected — we were watching, like, Purple Rain and Under the Cherry Moon, and he played Anna Karina films and Through a Glass Darkly. And we went for a walk to the sea every day — it was just really a nice “open the cupboards and let the air in.” I was just bouncing ideas off of someone to try to understand the palette of what I wanted to do.

I read an interview where you said that it was after you wrote what ended up being the title track that you started to unlock what the record was going to be about.

Yeah, both “The Haunted Man” and “Lilies” were the two songs that I wrote when I wasn’t really sure [where the record was going]. I had about 30 or 40 songs to choose from, but once I wrote those two, I felt like I finally had both the dark and the light aspects of the record, thematically. For me, “The Haunted Man” is about all the things I want to let go of — the burden and the weight of ancestral patterns that have come down through generations and caused strain, whereas “Lilies” is about being in that dead space where you might have let go of those things, but now you’re waiting for the next thing to happen. At the very end, there’s the “Thank God I’m alive” bit, and it’s really joyous and elated, and that was important to me. I think it’s really hard to get that sentiment across in music — people feel intimidated by pure joy and happiness, as opposed to the dark, you know, “I want to die” kind of thing.

You did some interesting things in the studio when you were recording the song “The Haunted Man” from what I understand.

We were fiddling around with these crazy synths from the ’50s and ’60s that were completely unpredictable. So that sound you hear at the beginning of the song [makes wooshing noise] is this weird electronic pulse that we looped. And some really personal, traumatic thing had just happened to me, so I played the chords and wrote that first bit. I had that first verse. And then I came up with the end part, which was all those female voices layered, and I thought, “Well, what connects the beginning, which is really personal, to the end, where I’m almost holding out my hand, like I’m on a hill in Sound of Music.” Of course, it’s the sound of the men coming back from war. And so I just wrote those lyrics for the men to sing. We recorded it in the mountains, but then we projected the vocals across a canyon and recorded the natural reverb, the echo that came back, to give this huge spatial sound.

You mention the notion of ancestry and English history — did you hear PJ Harvey’s last record, which dealt with a lot of the same things?

Yeah, I’d actually already written “The Haunted Man” when I heard PJ Harvey’s record, and I thought “That’s so cool.” It’s really felt like, in the last couple of years, this weird portal opened, and there were a lot of people talking about their ancestors, and soldiers in war and England’s history. When I heard Polly’s record, I was like, “That is awesome.” And then also, my family’s been doing a family tree thing for a while and we found lots of pictures of my Victorian great, great grandma, and we were going back generations and looking for connections. You know, the Islamic side of my family, people talk about how women have to cover up their ankles and their wrists and they can’t show anything — but literally 100 years ago in England women couldn’t show their ankles. They couldn’t let their hair down, they wore black, we had witch burnings. Society and man’s suspicion of women’s emotions and intuition is something that goes through all cultures. It’s not just an Islamic thing, it was a Victorian thing and an English thing. Christianity is very suspicious of women, slipping them into either the virgin or the whore.

I feel like, on this record, you’re very much playingthe role of the supporter, of the encourager, the “shoulder to cry on,” which is very different from the last two records.

I feel like the first album is the child in me, the second is the lost and vulnerable woman, and this one is the more maternal, strong, nurturing aspects of my personality. I think I’m just peeling back more and more layers and getting closer to the center of who I am, and I feel like until I had explored all of those aspects, it was going to be impossible for me to integrate them. I feel like this record is my last archetypal, sort of “Way of Being a Woman” record.

Have you known any haunted men?

Of course. I mean, I guess when I was thinking about England and my family, in the last 150 years we’ve had two world wars. My granddad fought in a war. How did that affect his relationship with my grandmother? And how did that trickle down to us? I just think as a country we have an awful lot of repressed sadness and trauma that trickles down. And so the haunted man for me is a universal thing, but it also deals with the idea of being haunted by someone else, or haunted by your own preconceptions about things.

Those opening lines are crushing. (“I couldn’t sleep last night/ because I tried to forget you”)

I think there’s a lot on this album that deals with vulnerability. Love can only really thrive if you’re completely honest. I think emotional honesty doesn’t frighten people, I think it’s the drama and repression of real feelings that frightens people. I think if you can be like, “Look, I’m fucking needy as hell and I’m freaking out right now, what can we do about that” — that’s honest communication. And it’s tricky to find someone else who wants to do that with you, because it’s terrifying.

Well, because if you do that, and it’s not reciprocated or the person leaves, you’re sort of worse off than you were before.

And that’s really putting yourself on the line. And [the song] “The Haunted Man” is about something falling apart that felt that real. That sheer shell shock, the disappointment, feeling alone and not knowing what to do. I think for me, there’s an endless feeling of “I’m gonna stick by you and nurture you, and we’re gonna get through this,” even when you’re speaking really different languages.

I feel like you start to explore those issues a little right out of the gate with the album cover. Can you talk a little bit about how that came about?

As I started writing and recording, this much more raw direct intimate aspect was coming through. In the past I guess I’d been wanting to shroud myself in protection using things like layered reverb or even with objects — makeup and totems and visual symbols. And I just wanted to strip all of that away. At the same time, I felt like there was this trend of “faux-mysticism” happening in pop music that I’d become disenchanted with. You know, “Oh, stick a feather in it and even though I’m the most disgusting person ever, I’m suddenly really hippie.” I’d just grown really comfortable in my own belief, in my own skin and with my own connection to beautiful and magical things. And so the best way for me to show that was to work with [the photographer] Ryan McGinley, who celebrates rawness, wildness, natural bodies. He reminds me of Robert Mapplethorpe in that way. I didn’t feel vulnerable on the cover, I felt really empowered. I think I would have felt more vulnerable if I had lip gloss and fake tan and my boobs out, which we see all the time — those really sexualized, pornographic imagery. For me, this was beautiful. I just thought, “If I take all of this external stuff away, will I still be able to communicate strength?” And I think I can.

Pig Destroyer, Book Burner

Like other extreme acts, Pig Destroyer write songs about murder, insanity and mayhem, but there’s something grimier and more disconcerting about their tunes than your average Cannibal Corpse gorefest. With the release of 2004′s Terrifyer, the band was already rising above the constraints of traditional grindcore, incorporating industrial sound bites, death-groove riffs, doomy atmospherics and math-metal tempo changes into their schizophrenic songs. Brutally misanthropic, their songs grimly reflect the rage, intensity and social disconnect of minds on the edge. Book Burner is no different: “The Bug” begins with a dissonant audio collage, over which a demented voice declares, “I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse” and from there evolves through cacophonous blast beats, propulsive riffs, and pained moans. Equally nightmare-inducing is the opening track, “Sis,” where vocalist J.R. Hayes (ex-Agoraphobic Nosebleed) roars, “My sister’s dangerous/ She climbs the barbed wire fence/ Changes clothes in the back seat/ Medical gown to red jeans.” There is nothing “pretty” about their music, but visceral savagery has its own allure.

Book Burner delivers all flesh and no fat; Pig Destroyer attack with pinpoint precision, plowing through 19 cuts in just under 33 minutes and mapping out when to pummel, trudge and lacerate. The tag team of acrobatic drummer Adam Jarvis (who also plays in Misery Index) and guitarist and producer Scott Hull (ex-Anal Cunt) both boast the ability to turn sick, horrific and off-kilter clamor into coherent, memorable compositions.

Bat For Lashes, The Haunted Man

As suggested by its striking cover art, The Haunted Man is the moment where Natasha Khan, aka Bat For Lashes, proves she’s strong enough to stand naked, both figuratively and literally. Her third, gentlest and most ballad-oriented effort yet is lightly adorned with autoharp, electronically estranged guitars, gossamer keys and symphonic orchestration that never upstage her whole-hearted vocals. As co-producer, Khan favors an incorporeal approach, placing phantasmic textures before hooks. She makes room for beats, but they are typically halting, stopping and starting again as if to reinforce the album’s underlying theme of building up and letting go — sometimes at the same time — of intimate yet unstable connections.

Over and over again, Khan sings of lovers traumatized by the past, and how those ghosts haunt the present. In the album’s most immediate track “All Your Gold,” Khan sings of “a good man” that she struggles to trust with a heart that a previous lover turned black. She often adopts a motherly protector role, as on the percussive “Rest Your Head,” but she also battles with her own demons: In the slow-burning title track, she aims to heal a wounded soul, but admits, “Yes, your ghosts have got me too.” Khan may be the most self-contained and confessional of the current crop of female sing-songwriters, yet she resists over-sharing. Instead, she balances empathy and aching sincerity with understatedly nervy arrangements that favor mystery over familiarity. What might come off as austere in others simply seems natural for Khan.

Kendrick Lamar, good kid, m.A.A.d city

The connective tissue of Kendrick Lamar’s major-label debut is a series of not-quite skits — prayers, voicemails, front-seat conversation — that string together an album that reveals itself as a long day in his adolescence. This isn’t exactly a new trick in rap, but it’s rare that found sound is so immersive, and so effective at absorbing the listener. Then again, the Compton rapper subtitled the album “a short film by Kendrick Lamar,” so maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that good kid, m.A.A.d city is purely cinematic in scope and execution.

It is, to be clear, a striking achievement. Yet the truest strength of the album is that it still hits even once you’ve untangled its various knots. The complex narrative is a leap in ambition for Lamar, but in doing so he’s retained the elements of his writing that made him famous in the first place. On his last album, Section.80, he showed a keen eye for observing, analyzing and understanding those close to him, and it’s from that place this record grows.

The story isn’t the only thing that stuns. Despite being raised in L.A. rap’s epicenter and mentored for years by Dr. Dre, good kid sounds like it was stewed in the South. Its sonic bedrock is the same muted, plaintive future-funk that bathed the Alabama group G-Side’s Starshipz & Rockets — a sound shaped for, and by, dark nights and deep thoughts.

In totality, the album awakens the spirits of Outkast’s legendary Aquemini — no small praise, indeed. That is rarified air in hip-hop, but Kendrick Lamar, out from the jumble of a new class of rap stars, now finds himself in very different company.

P.O.S., We Don’t Even Live Here

P.O.S.’s career has involved so many collaborations and side projects that, by now, even his solo records feel like collective efforts that tap into the resources of a trusted group. His status as a member of indie-rap braintrust Doomtree, slow-jam supergroup Gayngs and noise cabal Marijuana Deathsquads haven’t just provided him with different stylistic guises and cohorts to bounce ideas off — as you can hear on We Don’t Even Live Here, it’s given him an artistic community to fight for and represent. If there’s one thread that runs through We Don’t Even Live Here, his fourth and best solo record, it’s the idea that this kind of solidarity is a good excuse to get some real pushback.

There’s no shortage of the charismatic punk-rap firebrand talk that’s illuminated his work for years. But whether he’s trashing your flashy possessions (“Fuck Your Stuff”) or taking over entire city blocks (“Arrow to the Action/Fire in the Hole”), he does it on behalf of a “we” that draws in an implied “you.” Lines like “we can take all that pressure, ’cause we don’t want nothin’ at all/except for maybe some more of us” (“Lockpicks, Knives, Bricks and Bats”) are delivered with the kind of measured calculation that makes him sound like he’s plotting the best way to make you useful in his fight — or the quickest route to shove you out of the way if you aren’t. The subtle sonic shift from Never Better‘s moshpit to Live Here‘s dance floor clicks, too, thanks to producer/mixing engineer (and former high school classmate) Andrew Dawson, whose experience behind the boards on a grip of Kanye records rubs off on this record’s anthemic sheen while making sure to keep it grimy enough to cause a fire hazard.

Bat For Lashes, The Haunted Man

As suggested by its striking cover art, The Haunted Man is the moment where Natasha Khan, aka Bat For Lashes, proves she’s strong enough to stand naked, both figuratively and literally. Her third, gentlest and most ballad-oriented effort yet is lightly adorned with autoharp, electronically estranged guitars, gossamer keys and symphonic orchestration that never upstage her whole-hearted vocals As co-producer, Khan favors an incorporeal approach, placing phantasmic textures before hooks. She makes room for beats, but they are typically halting, stopping and starting again as if to reinforce the album’s underlying theme of building up and letting go — sometimes at the same time — of intimate yet unstable connections.

Over and over again, Khan sings of lovers traumatized by the past, and how those ghosts haunt the present. In the album’s most immediate track “All Your Gold,” Khan sings of “a good man” that she struggles to trust with a heart that a previous lover turned black. She often adopts a motherly protector role, as on the percussive “Rest Your Head,” but she also battles with her own demons: In the slow-burning title track, she aims to heal a wounded soul, but admits, “Yes, your ghosts have got me too.” Khan may be the most self-contained and confessional of the current crop of female sing-songwriters, yet she resists over-sharing. Instead, she balances empathy and aching sincerity with understatedly nervy arrangements that favor mystery over familiarity. What might come off as austere in others simply seems natural for Khan.

Interview: Bat For Lashes

Two Suns, the second record Natasha Khan made as Bat for Lashes, ended in death. In “The Big Sleep,” Khan — assisted by Scott Walker, at his ghoulish best — sang from the perspective of a dying drag queen, watching the Big Light blink out from her dressing room floor. It was the perfect distillation of everything Khan does best, combining High Drama with aching tragedy to chilling effect. As it turns out, concluding the record in that way — with the passing of a heavily-costumed, aggressively theatrical performer — was appropriate: When I meet Khan in the garden at the Bowery Hotel to discuss The Haunted Man, the aspect of the record she’s most emphatic about is its rawness. “I had really pushed myself to explore different production techniques — it was all very full and layered and complex, she explains.” And this time, I felt a really natural need to pull away from that and strip it all back. I wanted the vocal to be much louder in the mix.”

Accordingly, the subject matter on The Haunted Man is more immediate and, consequently, more wrenching, its songs giving equal weight to the impact of war and the fallout from collapsing relationships. The chief difference is that this time, Khan mostly plays the consoler, supporting wounded friends and encouraging the defeated. The album’s cover art is an extension of that theme: It depicts Khan, naked, carrying a man across her shoulders, conveying a sense of both strength and vulnerability all at once. As she sings to the doubting protagonist in elegiac first single “Laura,” “You’re more than a superstar.” It’s the kind of deep empathy and passionate support that can only come from a survivor.

I know probably everyone is asking you this, but it’s been three years since Two Suns. I was just kind of wondering what you’ve been up to.

Well, I needed to take a year to get over touring and the craziness that my life had become. And so I did lots of normal things like gardening, lots of cooking. And I was writing lots of songs, but they were kind of frustrating, because I wasn’t really ready yet. I guess I was trying to just live my life a little bit. So I did lots of art — I took up a life drawing class, I did an Illustration for Children’s Books course for a week, I made a film script with a friend, I made a couple of dance films.

What was the script about?

It was for a teenage kids’ film. I’ve put it to the side, but it’s something I’d like to take up again — it was just to give myself something to do. I worked with a screenwriter friend, and I just found that discipline really interesting. It’s all dialogue and action — which is what music is, really. I think by doing those things you keep the cogs oiled and the channels open. And I was also watching lots of films and reading lots of books, and slowly the themes of the record started to come forward.

You worked with Beck a bit on this record, is that right?

Very early in the process. I was feeling quite lonely, and I’d worked with Beck before, so I thought, “Maybe I’ll just take 10 songs out to him.” I just think he’s really playful, and he still has that childlike inquisitiveness — he’s just eccentric and funny and wonderful.

So we just did a really early session, and I think maybe a couple of songs survived — “Marilyn” and “Oh Yeah” were two of them. But the point was just to go out there and play and have fun and collaborate. I was telling him about all the filmic references [on the record] and he was like, “We can put them on while we’re playing.” And so we had films projected — we were watching, like, Purple Rain and Under the Cherry Moon, and he played Anna Karina films and Through a Glass Darkly. And we went for a walk to the sea every day — it was just really a nice “open the cupboards and let the air in.” I was just bouncing ideas off of someone to try to understand the palette of what I wanted to do.

I read an interview where you said that it was after you wrote what ended up being the title track that you started to unlock what the record was going to be about.

Yeah, both “The Haunted Man” and “Lilies” were the two songs that I wrote when I wasn’t really sure [where the record was going]. I had about 30 or 40 songs to choose from, but once I wrote those two, I felt like I finally had both the dark and the light aspects of the record, thematically. For me, “The Haunted Man” is about all the things I want to let go of — the burden and the weight of ancestral patterns that have come down through generations and caused strain, whereas “Lilies” is about being in that dead space where you might have let go of those things, but now you’re waiting for the next thing to happen. At the very end, there’s the “Thank God I’m alive” bit, and it’s really joyous and elated, and that was important to me. I think it’s really hard to get that sentiment across in music — people feel intimidated by pure joy and happiness, as opposed to the dark, you know, “I want to die” kind of thing.

You did some interesting things in the studio when you were recording the song “The Haunted Man” from what I understand.

We were fiddling around with these crazy synths from the ’50s and ’60s that were completely unpredictable. So that sound you hear at the beginning of the song [makes wooshing noise] is this weird electronic pulse that we looped. And some really personal, traumatic thing had just happened to me, so I played the chords and wrote that first bit. I had that first verse. And then I came up with the end part, which was all those female voices layered, and I thought, “Well, what connects the beginning, which is really personal, to the end, where I’m almost holding out my hand, like I’m on a hill in Sound of Music.” Of course, it’s the sound of the men coming back from war. And so I just wrote those lyrics for the men to sing. We recorded it in the mountains, but then we projected the vocals across a canyon and recorded the natural reverb, the echo that came back, to give this huge spatial sound.

You mention the notion of ancestry and English history — did you hear PJ Harvey’s last record, which dealt with a lot of the same things?

Yeah, I’d actually already written “The Haunted Man” when I heard PJ Harvey’s record, and I thought “That’s so cool.” It’s really felt like, in the last couple of years, this weird portal opened, and there were a lot of people talking about their ancestors, and soldiers in war and England’s history. When I heard Polly’s record, I was like, “That is awesome.” And then also, my family’s been doing a family tree thing for a while and we found lots of pictures of my Victorian great, great grandma, and we were going back generations and looking for connections. You know, the Islamic side of my family, people talk about how women have to cover up their ankles and their wrists and they can’t show anything — but literally 100 years ago in England women couldn’t show their ankles. They couldn’t let their hair down, they wore black, we had witch burnings. Society and man’s suspicion of women’s emotions and intuition is something that goes through all cultures. It’s not just an Islamic thing, it was a Victorian thing and an English thing. Christianity is very suspicious of women, slipping them into either the virgin or the whore.

It doesn’t scan as pornographic at all. And, you know, the dichotomy that stands out to me is that you are really exposed, and yet —

— I’m carrying someone —

And I feel like that’s something that comes up throughout this record. You’re very much playingthe role of the supporter, of the encourager, the “shoulder to cry on,” which is very different from the last two records.

I feel like the first album is the child in me, the second is the lost and vulnerable woman, and this one is the more maternal, strong, nurturing aspects of my personality. I think I’m just peeling back more and more layers and getting closer to the center of who I am, and I feel like until I had explored all of those aspects, it was going to be impossible for me to integrate them. I feel like this record is my last archetypal, sort of “Way of Being a Woman” record.

Have you known any haunted men?

Of course. I mean, I guess when I was thinking about England and my family, in the last 150 years we’ve had two world wars. My granddad fought in a war. How did that affect his relationship with my grandmother? And how did that trickle down to us? I just think as a country we have an awful lot of repressed sadness and trauma that trickles down. And so the haunted man for me is a universal thing, but it also deals with the idea of being haunted by someone else, or haunted by your own preconceptions about things.

Those opening lines are crushing. (“I couldn’t sleep last night/ because I tried to forget you”)

I think there’s a lot on this album that deals with vulnerability. Love can only really thrive if you’re completely honest. I think emotional honesty doesn’t frighten people, I think it’s the drama and repression of real feelings that frightens people. I think if you can be like, “Look, I’m fucking needy as hell and I’m freaking out right now, what can we do about that” — that’s honest communication. And it’s tricky to find someone else who wants to do that with you, because it’s terrifying.

Well, because if you do that, and it’s not reciprocated or the person leaves, you’re sort of worse off than you were before.

And that’s really putting yourself on the line. And [the song] “The Haunted Man” is about something falling apart that felt that real. That sheer shell shock, the disappointment, feeling alone and not knowing what to do. I think for me, there’s an endless feeling of “I’m gonna stick by you and nurture you, and we’re gonna get through this,” even when you’re speaking really different languages.

I feel like you start to explore those issues a little right out of the gate with the album cover. Can you talk a little bit about how that came about?

As I started writing and recording, this much more raw direct intimate aspect was coming through. In the past I guess I’d been wanting to shroud myself in protection using things like layered reverb or even with objects — makeup and totems and visual symbols. And I just wanted to strip all of that away. At the same time, I felt like there was this trend of “faux-mysticism” happening in pop music that I’d become disenchanted with. You know, “Oh, stick a feather in it and even though I’m the most disgusting person ever, I’m suddenly really hippie.” I’d just grown really comfortable in my own belief, in my own skin and with my own connection to beautiful and magical things. And so the best way for me to show that was to work with [the photographer] Ryan McGinley, who celebrates rawness, wildness, natural bodies. He reminds me of Robert Mapplethorpe in that way. I didn’t feel vulnerable on the cover, I felt really empowered. I think I would have felt more vulnerable if I had lip gloss and fake tan and my boobs out, which we see all the time — those really sexualized, pornographic imagery. For me, this was beautiful. I just thought, “If I take all of this external stuff away, will I still be able to communicate strength?” And I think I can.

Pig Destroyer, Book Burner

Like other extreme acts, Pig Destroyer write songs about murder, insanity and mayhem, but there’s something grimier and more disconcerting about their tunes than your average Cannibal Corpse gorefest. With the release of 2004′s Terrifyer, the band was already rising above the constraints of traditional grindcore, incorporating industrial sound bites, death-groove riffs, doomy atmospherics and math-metal tempo changes into their schizophrenic songs. Brutally misanthropic, their songs grimly reflects the rage, intensity and social disconnect of minds on the edge. Book Burner is no different: “The Bug” begins with a dissonant audio collage, over which a demented voice declares, “I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse” and from there evolves through cacophonous blast beats, propulsive riffs, and pained moans. Equally nightmare-inducing is the opening track, “Sis,” where vocalist J.R. Hayes (ex-Agoraphobic Nosebleed) roars, “My sister’s dangerous/ She climbs the barbed wire fence/ Changes clothes in the back seat/ Medical gown to red jeans.” There is nothing “pretty” about their music, but visceral savagery has its own allure.

Book Burner delivers all flesh and no fat; Pig Destroyer attack with pinpoint precision, plowing through 19 cuts in just under 33 minutes and mapping out when to pummel, trudge and lacerate. The tag team of acrobatic drummer Adam Jarvis (who also plays in Misery Index) and guitarist and producer Scott Hull (ex-Anal Cunt) both boast the ability to turn sick, horrific and off-kilter clamor into coherent, memorable compositions.