New This Week: Tame Impala, Freelance Whales, & More

Tame Impala, Lonerism – Aussie psych-rock band hits new plateau, channels their inner Stone Roses. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED and PICK OF THE DAY. Caitlin Dewey writes:

Frontman Kevin Parker sings like a latter-day John Lennon, Instagrammed and amplified and fed through subpar speakers. The whole thing builds to a psych-rock anthem so shimmery, so positively prismatic, that it’s easy to forget that Parker prefers downers to stimulants. There lies the weird, cognitive dissonance at the heart of Lonerism: It’s an album about sadness that sounds anything but sad.

Lord Huron, Lonesome Dreams – Wistful, bucolic indie-folk for fans of Grizzly Bear and others like them. Laura Studarus had this to say:

Lonesome Dreams, the debut album by Lord Huron (aka Ben Schneider), is a dreamy, bucolic affair with wanderlust in its veins. With its acoustic guitars, choral vocal arrangements, and delicate layers of looped piano, slide guitar, and orchestral strings, it sounds like the Los Angeles-by-way-of-Michigan musician has visited Grizzly Bear’s Yellow House, but he isn’t prone to stay in one place for long. His rich harmonies are shot through with an undercurrent of restlessness and a lust for adventure that repeatedly breaks the surface.

Old 97s, Too Far To Care – Demos and a remastering surround the rough-and-ready debut from one of the most urgent alt-country albums of the genre on its fifteenth anniversary.

Paws, Cokefloat! – Bratty/sweet punk-pop, in the vein of Yuck and Dino, Jr. Marc Hogan had this to say:

“She wasn’t only just my mother,” Phillip Taylor slurs over rickety, distorted guitar in the opening seconds of PAWS’ Cokefloat!, continuing, “She was my friend, a good friend.” As an introduction to the Glasgow trio’s rowdily impressive debut album, it could hardly be more fitting, showing off both the band’s throwback slacker-rock style and Taylor’s blunt, decidedly un-macho lyrics. But on this 13-track, 42-minute set, what separates PAWS from so many other garage-bound pop-punks printing out Pavement and Sonic Youth guitar tabs is how expertly — and emotively — they assail a relatively wide range of song types.

Freelance Whales, Diluvia – The Whales return for more Freelancing, and it sounds like it did circa Weathervanes: sweet, honey-dipped falsetto, banjos and acoustic guitar strumming, light electronic embellishments.

Ellie Goulding, Halycon -  The woman behind the glimmering, twilit dance-pop tune “Lights” returns with a dusky full-length perfect for rainy driving or bleary 3am apartment dancing.

Converge, All We Love We Leave Behind – The brute-force metallic hardcore lifers pour a careers’ worth of pain and frustration into their eighth album, poignantly titled All We Love We Leave Behind. Jon Wiederhorn, our resident metal expert, says the following:

All We Love We Leave Behind is a revealing glimpse into the kinds of personal frustrations that the band has typically kept behind closed doors. Songs like “Empty on the Inside,” “Sadness Comes Home” and the title track, in which frontman Jacob Bannon laments, “You deserve so much more than I could provide,” vent pain and self-contempt with every verse. Converge have expanded their horizons both lyrically and musically without compromising an iota of intensity, proving in the process that speed isn’t the only path to sonic demolition.

Wanda Jackson, Unfinished Business – The first lady of rockabilly went on a date with Jack White for her last solo record, The Party Ain’t Over. This time, she’s dancing with another young man, Justin Townes Earle. Here’s what Ashley Melzer tells us about the result:

In 2011, Wanda Jackson had a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 29 studio albums to her credit and undoubtedly very little to prove. Even so, the dazzling first lady of rockabilly snagged a date with Jack White, teaming up with him for The Party Ain’t Over, her aptly titled release for his Third Man Records. Just over a year later, Jackson’s back with a new album, Unfinished Business, and a new man at the controls, Americana singer/songwriter Justin Townes Earle. Some people just don’t slow down. The pair delivers a record that favors tenderness and brassy swagger over production tricks or stunt-casting song selections.

Blut Aus Nord, 777: The Cosmosophy – Inscrutable art-metalers Blut Aus Nord deliver the capstone to their mesmerizing trilogy of records that began with 777: Sect(s). Jon Wiederhorn also weighed on this one for us:

Blut Aus Nord never let the listener get too comfortable, shifting through post-metal, prog-rock, doom, industrial, minimalist drone, liturgic and Satanic music styles. On paper, it might seem like a confusing mess, but Blut Aus Nord have the elusive gift to make jarring compositions flow like pop tunes, causing minutes to flow by in what seems like seconds. Often, it seems like the mesmerizing, harrowing and gorgeous washes of sound were jammed out in a single, carefree take. Intensive composition never sounded so spontaneous.

Metz, Metz – Screeching, Jesus Lizard-influenced post-punk riot from a Canadian trio. Evan Minsker says:

On their debut album, Canadian trio METZ has delivered a sound that’s reasonably scarce in 2012: post-hardcore, pre-grunge, noise-addled punk rock. You can hear the influence of the Jesus Lizard in particular everywhere: in Alex Edkins’s strained screams; in Hayden Menzies’s crashing drum assault; in their relentless wave of screeching guitars, in the frenzied pace of “Wet Blanket,” in the sludgy industrial instrumental “Nausea,” and in their grim, dour lyrics.

Kaki King, Glow-The virtuoso acoustic guitarist returns with her first all-instrumental release since her debut. Richard Gehr reports:

On her sixth album, guitar-thwacking virtuoso Kaki King loops back to basics with her first all-instrumental release since Everybody Loves You, her 2002 debut. As an artistic reboot, Glowconfidently recapitulates a decade of development. King augments her basic technical vocabulary – rapid-fire fanning, fingerpicking, fretboard tapping, harmonics scattering, and idiosyncratic tunings – with fresh ideas from classical and international musics, while still honing to her essential sound.

Robert Glasper,  Black Radio Recovered – The iconoclastic jazz producer/pianist Robert Glasper spins out another variation on last year’s landmark Black Radio record, which willfully mixed up modern jazz, mainstream R&B, and bohemian hip-hop into a brilliant tangle worthy of its title.

The Wallflowers, Glad All Over – Jakob continues to prop his ne’er-do-well father’s career with his stalwart brand of rangy, soulful folk rock.

Lang Lang, The Chopin Album – From the “What it says on the box” department, the world’s most famous pianist tackles Chopin. The packaging and the marketing has all the charm of a corporate takeover, but Lang Lang, when he runs it in, is still a dependable performer and a spectacular entertainer.

Letting Up Despite Great Faults, Untogether – Buzzy, iridescent indie-pop, equal parts computer burble and Cure guitars.

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, The Heist – Ultra-earnest and humble blue-collar rapper Macklemore has built up an incredibly devoted fanbase through years of dedicated, old-fashioned underground grinding, and he is popping up on bigger radar scanners these days: XXL Magazine included him in their annual trendspotting new-rapper “Freshman” roundup. He is the kind of rapper who treats every verse like a confessional booth; he’s both endearing and talented.

Mellowhype, Numbers – The stoner-rap department of Odd Future continues to spool out their agreeably dazed, low-stakes, wordplay- heavy hip-hop. Earl is here, and so is  Frank Ocean. From the “OF is quietly surviving its 2010 hype tsunami” department.

KISS, Monster – This is, indeed, an all-new KISS album. It sounds alarmingly like old KISS albums! It actually rocks way, way harder than I expected it to – the chug of the guitars is titanium-grade; Paul Stanley’s howl is in good working condition: and the mud-hog that it the KISS sound rolls forward dependably.

Enslaved, RIITIIR - New one from long-running Norse metal gods demonstrates their now-patented mix of growls and grim howls, mixing murk with melody for an icy metal classic.

Big Boi, “Mama Told me” (single) - One day, I will be able to write the sentence “Big Boi single featuring Kate Bush,” but today is not that day. Until that glorious occasion: this is a single from Big Boi’s hotly anticipated second solo record that blends his whipcrack vocal delivery with bright, blipping production.

The Deftones, “Tempest” - Thundering new single from Deftones’ forthcoming seventh record excels at all the tricks this band has perfected over the last few years, blending a kind of celestial spookiness with grand, thundering riffs.

Dave Sumner’s Jazz Picks

Not a huge drop this week, but several albums that will deserve some attention on year-end Best of 2012 lists.Plenty of choices for straight-ahead jazz fans, though I did get to mention Minimoog twice in this article, so go figure.Several solid candidates for the Find of the Week (for debut artists or historically under-the-radar musicians).Let’s begin…

Jimi Tenor, Mystery of Aether:Mix of jazz and afro-beat, informed by Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders (Thembi-era).A buoyant octet date that makes music that is both complex and joyful.A mistake to take a pass on this one.Pick of the Week.

Jeremie Ternoy Trio, Bill:Very cool album in the New Piano Trio style… use of electronic and effects, brooding melodies, and the infusion of rock-like tempos.This is one of the better ones released lately, and should definitely appeal to people who need an E.S.T. fix on a regular basis.Highly Recommended.

Ivo Neame, Yatra:Lively large ensemble release from UK pianist Neame.Modern jazz, but isn’t afraid to look over his shoulder at Jazz’s past for inspiration.Music doesn’t move in a straight line, but Neame keeps the angles tight and clean.Features some strong names from the new generation of UK jazzers, including fellow Phronesis bandmate, bassits Jasper Hoiby.Recommended.

Jussi Fredriksson, Jazz Wars:Intriguing sextet date that includes piano, guitar, trumpet, bass, drums, and sax.I believe the term nu-jazz gets used for albums like this one that have a bit of modern fusion mixed with post-bop jazz inclinations.Moody and introspective.Has some fire to kick it to life, but the flame is found in bright orange embers.Quite nice.Find of the Week.

Michael Blake, In the Grand Scheme Of Things:Odd but compelling release by tenor saxophonist Blake.With moog, synthesizers, trumpet, electronic effects, drums, and Fender Rhodes.Avant-garde in the Cuong Vu way of mixing jazz and electronics, though Blake has his unique way of drifting on the sea of effects.Marvelous how he slips in and out of avant-garde and straight-ahead post-bop without missing a beat.Something different.

Houston Person, Naturally:Quartet date with Person on sax, Cedar Walton on piano, Lewis Nash on drums, and Billy Drummond on bass.Truly, a super-group of jazz vets.Nothing flashy, just pure jazz.Nice ballads, some up-tempo, plenty of swing and sway.Unfussy and nothing flashy, just straight-ahead goodness.

Abel Cross Neo-Bop Quintet, Abel Cross Neo-Bop Quintet:Nice straight-ahead jazz from a young crop of jazz musicians from the Sydney, Australia scene.Plenty of swing and bop, but a track like “Scattered Showers” great for just kicking back and closing the eyes.Plenty here to like.

Meshell Ndegeocello, Pour une ame Souveraine:This dedication album to the music of Nina Simone works far better than one might assume.Ndegeocello shows some remarkable versatility, whether on her own albums or, say, as a sideman on Daniel Freedman’s Bamako By Bus, and the way she takes ownership of these tunes not only allows her to give them her own voice without losing the spirit of the originals (in most cases), but, more importantly, they’re just plain enjoyable to hear.A couple tracks I might personally drop from my playlist, but an album more than deserving of mention here.

Hanna Paulsberg, Waltz For Lilli:Nice sax led quartet date.Straight-ahead modern.Sax and piano do a fine job working the front of the house together, drums and bass keep the back room running smoothly.Some very catchy melodies throughout.Good stuff.

Jana Herzen, Passion of a Lonely Heart:More folk than jazz, this likable recording matches vocalist-guitarist Herzen with bassist Charnett Moffett.Flickering tunes perfect for the quieter moments of the day.Track “Sodade” has the potential to grow addictive.

Ted Nash, Sidewalk Meeting:Not a new release, but out of print for a decade, and really, a wonderful little album, so I wanted to get a quick mention in here.Saxophonist Nash, with Wycliffe Gordon on trombone and tuba, Matt Wilson on drums, Miri Ben-Ari on violin, and William Schimmel on accordion.A variation of the New Orleans sound, with a little Klezmer thrown in.Whimsical, fun, and light.Confirm to be sure you don’t already own it, and if not, you probably should rectify that right now.

Kaki King, Glow

On her sixth album, guitar-thwacking virtuoso Kaki King loops back to basics with her first all-instrumental release since Everybody Loves You, her 2002 debut. As an artistic reboot, Glow confidently recapitulates a decade of development. King augments her basic technical vocabulary — rapid-fire fanning, fingerpicking, fretboard tapping, harmonics scattering, and idiosyncratic tunings — with fresh ideas from classical and international musics, while still honing to her essential sound. “Streetlight in the Egg” and “No True Masterpiece Will Ever Be Complete” augment tastefully dazzling fretwork with subtle electronics and no-frills percussion — so, yes, it sometimes smacks of Windham Hill for the young and caffeinated. Helping King beyond her comfort zone, string quartet Ethel pours classical gas on the glowing embers of “Great Round Burn” and the dark, dense “Fire Eater,” while King solo invokes Tchaikovsky with lap steel on the spaghetti Eastern “Marche Slav.” Traveling elsewhere, she breaks land speed records on the Celtic-flavored “King Pizel” and lends a Chinese tinge to British Columbia’s “Bowen Island.” Glow captures an artist in anything but still life.

PAWS, Cokefloat!

“She wasn’t only just my mother,” Phillip Taylor slurs over rickety, distorted guitar in the opening seconds of PAWS’ Cokefloat!, continuing, “She was my friend, a good friend.” As an introduction to the Glasgow trio’s rowdily impressive debut album, it could hardly be more fitting, showing off both the band’s throwback slacker-rock style and Taylor’s blunt, decidedly un-macho lyrics. But on this 13-track, 42-minute set, what separates PAWS from so many other garage-bound pop-punks printing out Pavement and Sonic Youth guitar tabs is how expertly — and emotively — they assail a relatively wide range of song types. “Sore Tummy” and “Miss American Bookworm” put bubblegum melodies beneath heavily scuzzed noise-pop and throat-rending screams, like early Foo Fighters but more awkward and relatable. While “Get Bent” comes across as a post-Girls acoustic kiss-off to a distant father, the stylishly chiming “Pony” steps back to critique parent-funded underground scenesters. Best of all is mid-tempo anthem “Homecoming,” which begins as a bully-baiting comeuppance but morphs into a self-actualizing mission statement recalling recent European tour-mates Japandroids: “Thanks for the punches of encouragement/ I’ve turned my world into sing-alongs.” Shout-alongs, even — punchdrunk and easy to love.

Wanda Jackson, Unfinished Business

In 2011, Wanda Jackson had a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 29 studio albums to her credit and undoubtedly very little to prove. Even so, the dazzling first lady of rockabilly snagged a date with Jack White, teaming up with him for The Party Ain’t Over, her aptly titled release for his Third Man Records. Just over a year later, Jackson’s back with a new album, Unfinished Business, and a new man at the controls, Americana singer/songwriter Justin Townes Earle. Some people just don’t slow down.

The pair delivers a record that favors tenderness and brassy swagger over production tricks or stunt-casting song selections.It’s a different party than White’s, who exploited the whimsy in having Jackson get radical — cooing a Jimmy Rodgers tune, sure, but also frisking up to Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good.” He put Jackson in the middle of calypso beats and scratchy guitars and soaked her vocal in reverb. Earle takes a different tack, laying off of the contrast and focusing on the delivery. Unfinished Business has a welcome session feel, like Jackson’s end of the contract required her to simply do what she does best: show up, put voice to old frustrations, and flirt with new exploits.

To that end, Earle gives Jackson space to ramble. Shuffling drums, honkytonk piano, and strutting riffs act as support beams to songs built on the bedrock of Jackson’s voice. The songs succeed in spades. “Tore Down,” an old Freddie King rag, is a gut-punch of blues. “Am I Even a Memory?” pits Jackson with Earle in a country duet of lonesome hearts. The girl-group pop of “Pushover” is a saucy rebuff of a wannabe flame. Jackson even takes on the gospel with Townes Van Zandt’s “Two Hands.” “I ain’t gonna think about trouble anymore,” she swears on the track, leading us along a clapping beat and joyful harmony only to confess the return of “an old weakness coming on strong” on the next number (“Old Weakness”).

Jackson’s wheelhouse is her knack for putting the last word on these old troubles of the spirit. Her conviction doesn’t require fancy footwork, only sure words. “What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome?” she asks on the Earle penned tune and while there’s certainly no answer, listeners can at least take heart that even Wanda Jackson has unfinished business now and then.

Converge, All We Love We Leave Behind

In an era of decreasing album sales, making a living as a long-running band requires extensive touring. And yet, the longer a band has been around, the harder it is for them to drop everything and hit the road. Converge’s eighth album, poignantly titled All We Love We Leave Behind, is a revealing glimpse into the kinds of personal frustrations that the band has typically kept behind closed doors. Songs like “Empty on the Inside,” “Sadness Comes Home” and the title track, in which frontman Jacob Bannon laments, “You deserve so much more than I could provide,” vent pain and self-contempt with every verse.

And yet it’s these very same frustrations that have ironically helped keep the band fresh. Not only do Converge rage as hard as they did in 1994, when they released their first album Halo in a Haystack, they have developed numerous approaches with which to pummel listeners. “Aimless Arrows” contrasts speedy salvos of melodic guitar with hyper-kinetic drumming. The ironically-titled “Tender Abuse” matches death-metal blast beats with feral vocals and guitars that ring like sirens before ending with a half-speed breakdown that would put most metalcore bands to shame. “Trespasses” contrasts double-bass drumming and short, sharp riffs with angular flurries of blues-inflected guitar that sound more like Jesus Lizard. And “Sadness Comes Home” is augmented with Van Halen-style fingertapping that pogos through a kinetic hardcore forest fire. With All We Love We Leave Behind, Converge have expanded their horizons both lyrically and musically without compromising an iota of intensity, proving in the process that speed isn’t the only path to sonic demolition. Twenty-two years into their career, Converge continue to craft sincere, relentless and aggressive metallic hardcore.

Henri Charrière, Papillon

Papillon, Henri Charrière’s bestselling memoir of his incarceration and escape from the French penal colony of Devil’s Island, has seen many iterations: the original French, the English translation, the epic film adaptation starring Steve McQueen, and now the audiobook, gruffly (and affectingly) interpreted by narrator Michael Prichard. Prichard’s Papillon is less of an American exceptionalist than McQueen’s — but not without reason.

Papillon (so nicknamed for the tattoo of a butterfly on his chest) spent 14 years alternately incarcerated and in various states of attempted escape before his success fleeing the Îles du Salut (part of French Guiana) for his eventual home of Venezuela. Those 14 years included several multi-year stints in solitary confinement, illness, attempted murders, and a death-defying cliff-diving episode from an “inescapable” island — think Alcatraz, but with sharks.

Prichard’s Charrière is blunted by these experiences. His focus on escape from the hellish conditions of Devil’s Island transitions from the loftiness of hope to full-fledged monomania. His friendships at the prison — the most notable of which is with the strategically valuable convicted forger Louis Dega — become subservient to his desire to flee, no matter how dangerous the attempt. When in the course of the multiple attempts other men die or, worse, give up, Charrière can only think about the next, even riskier method.

Listening to Papillon, one can’t help but think that the situation has all of the perfect ingredients to make a hero of its main character. Then you realize that it’s all true (if Charrière is to be believed) and it’s not a story about grand themes of salvation or redemption, but mere survival.

Blut Aus Nord, 777: Cosmosophy

Once considered a black metal band with experimental flourishes, French mavericks Blut Aus Nord are now more accurately described as an avant-garde outfit that dabbles in black metal. 777: Cosmosophy is the last of a trilogy of albums the group have released over the past 18 months, beginning with the brutal and corrosive 777: Sect(s) and continuing with the slower, more off-kilter 777: The Desanctification. 777: Cosmosophy is simultaneously the most accessible and adventurous of the three offerings.

Like its predecessors, 777: Cosmosophy isn’t a concept album in the traditional sense. There’s no discernible plot, and the songs don’t necessarily need to run in order to make sense. Alternately haunting, celestial, visceral, melancholy and beautiful, it’s an expedition that meanders, yet never derails. Maybe Blut Aus Nord are trying to say that there are no easy answers to complex questions, and that life can go from euphoric to terrifying with a single cymbal crash. Regardless of their philosophical perspective, 777: Cosmosophy is painstakingly crafted layered with overlapping guitars, variegated vocals, sound effects and recurring motifs that bind the songs together.

Most of the music is mid-paced, rarely bursting into traditional volleys of galloping drums and buzzsaw guitars. Instead, Blut Aus Nord set the mood with syncopated drum machine beats reminiscent of a less caustic Godflesh, washes of guitar that are redolent of Slowdive, and echoing arpeggios reminiscent of country mates Alcest. Throughout, Blut Aus Nord never let the listener get too comfortable, shifting through post-metal, prog-rock, doom, industrial, minimalist drone, liturgic and Satanic music styles.

On paper,it might seem like a confusing mess, but Blut Aus Nord have the elusive gift to make jarring compositions flow like pop tunes, causing minutes to flow by in what seems like seconds. In “Epitome XVII” Blut Aus Nord again teeter between tranquility and turbulence, juxtaposing unearthly black metal growls with a wash of layered, fuzzy guitars. And “Epitome XVIII” introduces a shuffling industrial battle march overlapped with monk chants. The song ends with layered, melodic guitar passages that intersect like vocals in round of “Row Row Row Your Boat.” Often, it seems like the mesmerizing, harrowing and gorgeous washes of sound were jammed out in a single, carefree take. Intensive composition never sounded so spontaneous.

METZ, METZ

On their debut album, Canadian trio METZ has delivered a sound that’s reasonably scarce in 2012: post-hardcore, pre-grunge, noise-addled punk rock. You can hear the influence of the Jesus Lizard in particular everywhere: in Alex Edkins’s strained screams; in Hayden Menzies’s crashing drum assault; in their relentless wave of screeching guitars, in the frenzied pace of “Wet Blanket,” in the sludgy industrial instrumental “Nausea,” and in their grim, dour lyrics. But the sheer volume and force of the music don’t take away from their musicianship — no individual element is covered by fuzz, thanks in part to production work from Graham Walsh (of Holy Fuck) and Alexander Bonenfant (who was behind the boards of the first two Crystal Castles records). The production shows off an intricate variety of textures lurking beneath the noise: On “Get Off,” a chaotic drum barrage toward the end of the track is paired with a wavering high-pitched screech of white noise, bolstering an already-urgent moment. It’s small details like that on METZ that sharpen the band’s anger and attack, elevating them from your average Touch & Go apostles into a seething, unique operation.

Lord Huron, Lonesome Dreams

Lonesome Dreams, the debut album by Lord Huron (aka Ben Schneider), is a dreamy, bucolic affair with wanderlust in its veins. With its acoustic guitars, choral vocal arrangements, and delicate layers of looped piano, slide guitar, and orchestral strings, it sounds like the Los Angeles-by-way-of-Michigan musician has visited Grizzly Bear’s Yellow House, but he isn’t prone to stay in one place for long. His rich harmonies are shot through with an undercurrent of restlessness and a lust for adventure that repeatedly breaks the surface.

Weaving together themes of death, love and movement, Schneider offers up a seductive picture of life lived in a state of constant searching, coming off like Springsteen in reverse — a time of returning to the fields (and mountains, and rivers and deserts) rather than the factory to seek success. Opening volley “Ends of the Earth,” doubles as a mission statement, Schneider musing against the polyrhythmic tide, “What good is living the life you’ve been given, if all you do is stand in one place?”

Heeding his own advance, Schneider carries the listener through the tropical-leaning, steel drum embellished “The Man Who Lives Forever,” to the modern-day cowboy anthem “Setting Sun,” which is heavily indebted to the spaghetti Western composer Ennio Morricone. But it’s the winsome, multi-movement album centerpiece “In the Wild” that truly captures Schneider’s yearnings: Swelling from a minimal voice and guitar refrain into a joyous effusion of full band and strings, it’s nothing short of an escapist’s siren call, pulling the listening out to sea.

ERAAS, ERAAS

Like urban explorers, Brooklyn post-rock duo ERAAS haunt the gloomy husks of krautrock, darkwave, industrial and dreampop, finding pulsing life within them. Their dark and beat-driven self-titled debut draws on well-established subgenres, but feels utterly new: The immaculate production, full of audible space and teeming with intricate layers, is part of the reason, but most of it is due to the duo’s keen command of their style. The result is a clean draught of weird beauty.

The vocals are mostly blurred or submerged, but the rhythmic music itself gibbers and groans volubly, intimating all kinds of fearful and wonderful things. Each track combines the sensuous with the spiritual and the highbrow with the underground in some fresh way: Some tracks, like “Crescent,” toy with dissonance and subtle tonal tension, yet go silky across the ears. Others, like “At Heart,” ride quasi-house beats and post-punk bass lines while somehow evoking sepulchral stillness.It’s so varied that listening can feel like they’re scanning through netherworld radio stations. Ghastly drones resolve into haunted new-wave hooks. Horror-film score movements give way smoothly to tribal folktronica. And it’s all relentlessly pretty and surprising, beguiling expectations at every turn. The musical ideas are complex and abundant but never tedious, so it’s a visitation as satisfying as it is eerie.

Old 97′s, Too Far to Care (Expanded Edition)

’97 was the Old 97s’ year: They released their third album and first for a major label, Too Far to Care, about toiling in a touring band and dating an alcoholic stripper. On “Great Barrier Reef” and “Four Leaf Clover” (a duet with Exene Cervenka), frontman Rhett Miller sounds romantically dangerous, as though his overactive brain can’t trust his heart or his libido. The expanded version includes four bonus tracks, including Miller’s tragic trucker tune “Holy Cross” and Murry Hammond genially honkytonk love song “No Doubt About It.” These rarities are a little more country than punk, but like the rest of the album, they showcase the band’s tight dynamic: Philip Peeples’s steady snare rolls, Ken Bethea’s eloquent guitar licks and Hammond’s sturdy bass lines. Like many alt-country artists (Wilco, Joe Henry), the Old 97′s would eventually leave this dusty Texas sound behind for slick, studio-bound pop, but the livewire dynamic of Too Far to Care still sounds as unnervingly urgent today as it did 15 years ago.

Tame Impala, Lonerism

Aussie psych-rocker outfit Tame Impala’s sophomore effort opens not with a bang, but a whisper — a literal whisper, breathy and insistent, that lazily warps into something else. Fractals of reverb and pedal effect peel off into a glass-eyed haze. Frontman Kevin Parker sings like a latter-day John Lennon, Instagrammed and amplified and fed through subpar speakers. The whole thing builds to a psych-rock anthem so shimmery, so positively prismatic, that it’s easy to forget that Parker prefers downers to stimulants. There lies the weird, cognitive dissonance at the heart of Lonerism: It’s an album about sadness that sounds anything but sad.

In the U.S., at least, that’s a pretty novel concept; we demonize loners and introverts to the point that PhDs give TED talks on the subject. But Lonerism, like Innerspeaker before it, plays more like a celebration of isolation than a confession or defense. Songs like “Elephant” and “Why Won’t They Talk to Me?” are trippy Rorschach blots — full of sun and slow burn if you don’t listen to lyrics, and subsumed by self-pity if you do. “Elephant” seems particularly destined for edgy car commercials or dancey dive bars, with its obstinate one-two baseline and weird organ whorls. It’s too bad Tame Impala draw so much inspiration from loneliness — Lonerism will make them plenty of friends.

Who Are…PAWS

PAWS released an EP early last year that was mastered by Shellac’s Bob Weston, and their scrappily melodic, garage-rock approach wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a vintage episode of MTV’s 120 Minutes. But drummer Josh Swinney quickly rejects the idea the Scottish trio is part of any kind of ’90s revival. “It’s just music that young people are making that’s evolving,” he says. When you consider that similar comparisons have been leveled at some of the acts PAWS have opened for — No Age, Wavves and other bands who’ve been playing since the ’00s — it’s hard not to be receptive to Swinney’s position.

It doesn’t hurt that PAWS’ debut album, Cokefloat!, happens to be an expertly-crafted contribution to Glasgow’s rich indie-rock lineage. Detuned guitars and lacerating feedback might be decades old, but PAWS — like recent European tourmates Japandroids — express their present-day angst with such specific passion that will make even crankiest ’90s-indie-rock curmudgeon feel the urge to pump a PBR-clutching fist.

Before sitting down to a dinner of Thai green curry while on tour in the Netherlands, Swinney talked over the phone with eMusic’s Marc Hogan about unexpected meetings, rock-band skateboarding tricks and the band’s perhaps-surprisingly tangential relationship to ice-cream beverages.

On touring with the Japandroids:

It’s been brilliant. The first gig we played with them was in Switzerland, and it was an absolutely amazing place. And yeah, from then on it’s been really fun. We’ve done two other gigs without them in Europe so far, as well. One in Ghent, in Belgium at the start. And we did one in a gallery in Amsterdam on Saturday night, which was absolutely crazy. It was really good. Everyone was just like moshing — it was mental. It was chaos.

On the other bands they’ve opened for, and fortuitous body art:

We’ve been really lucky to play with loads of different bands that we really like, but I think that one of my favorite bands that we’ve played with was the Babies. The gig they played where I saw them was just amazing. And it was cool playing with Wavves, because I really, really, really loved them before, and then got to actually play with them. And then I found out that the drummer who played with Wavves when we played with them he used to be the drummer for a band called the Mae Shi, and I’ve got a Mae Shi tattoo on my arm. I was like, “Oh my god, you used to be in the Mae Shi!” So I lifted up my arm and showed him. And I had a [Mae Shi song] “Run to Your Grave” tattoo. And he was like, “Oh my god.” He couldn’t believe it. I got that tattoo when I was like 16.

On making the album in a floating recording studio:

We recorded it on a boat that’s mired on the Thames, called the Lightship95, and it’s a recording studio in London. The novelty of being in a studio and being in a boat combined was pretty fun. We had never recorded anything in a studio before so that was really exciting in itself. And then also being on a boat, it was pretty cool. There were times when I was playing the drums and the tide would come in on the Thames, and the boat would start rocking back and forth, so we would record drums while i was rocking.

On the source of the title Cokefloat!:

It’s basically because our friend Jessica [Penfold] did all the artwork for the album, and the comic strip that she drew [for the artwork] was already called Cokefloat!. It just seemed like quite a cool thing to have both these two aspects: music, and a comic strip to look at as well. It’s a nice, succinct, short name; rolls off the tongue…

On the source of the name PAWS:

What happened, basically, is that we were thinking we wanted our band name to do with some sort of creature of something. We were thinking a big Canadian creature, something scary. But then we just somehow stumbled on PAWS. I don’t know why, but it seems to have worked so far.

On cats, which appear often on the band’s Tumblr and on one of its T-shirts:

Philip really likes cats. And I really like cats. But we’re not weird about it or anything like that. I just think they’re cute.

On skateboarding, another theme of the band Tumblr:

Phillip skateboards, not me — I wish I did! The other day, on the first day of tour, he ollied over Brian [King] of Japandroids, who was lying on the ground. We got a video of that, so it should be pretty funny.

On the stories behind the lyrics, described by Phillip as “pretty much a documentation of the past two years”:

It’s just things that have affected him [Phillip], things that he had fun doing or things that made him sad over the course of a period of time, and he just vocalizes it. It’s a good way of expressing your feelings, I guess.

On PAWS’ other influences:

Lots of different things. Kind of a Death Cab [for Cutie] influence, I’d say. I find them to be quite influential. Nirvana, I like. I take a lot from that drumming style, for me personally, just hitting the drum as hard as you possibly can at all times. We all like loads of different stuff. I like old hardcore and stuff like that, and Matt likes lots of country.

The Weird World of One-String Blues

I saw my first diddley bows in 1996, at the rural Delta home outside Lexington, Mississippi, of bluesman Lonnie Pitchford. Pitchford, who died two years later at the age of 43, took me around the side of his house and there, on the wall, was his “guitar,” consisting of one thin wire wrapped tautly around two nails pounded into the side of the wooden building, two to three feet apart. At either end he’d slipped something (I forget what) under the wire. He plucked it a few times running a quarter up and down the strings to create a slide effect, then led me back to his porch, where he had another one-string guitar built on a piece of wood. Again using a coin as the slide, he proceeded to pick out, if memory serves, Robert Johnson’s “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day.” Pitchford, a protégé of Johnson’s son Robert Lockwood Jr., was known as the foremost Johnson interpreter in the Delta, and he gave this song a buzzing staccato hum that sounded like it must have involved more than one string. It was somewhat like the tone he gets on “Johnny Stole an Apple,” available here on eMusic. Lonnie had been playing diddley bow since the age of five; he’d first appeared at the Smithsonian Folk Festival when he was 17 and in concert, mostly at festivals, his act involved building a diddley bow onstage and then playing his set with it.

The diddley bow (also known sometimes as a jitterbug) is a one-string guitar once commonly played by Delta children; more formally, ethnomusicologists call it a “monochord zither.” Its origins are probably in central Africa, though West Coast African cultures also used one-string fiddles or lutes. The leaf stalk of the raffia palm was stretched over a hole in the ground, a tub or a pot; then, a sliver of its fiber was raised slightly on two bridges, but still attached to the stalk at both ends. One child would rhythmically tap this “string” with two sticks as a second slid a cup or something similar along it to alter the pitch and create percussive effects. As the instrument persevered among African Americans in the United States into the 20th century, it became a one-person instrument, usually made from broom or baling wire with bottles serving as bridges at either end. The child played with a stick or his finger, using another bottle or similar object as the slide. If the child played very well, he usually switched to the more complicated six-string guitar as he aged, often using a pocketknife instead of a glass bottle as his slide. The diddley bow thus had a significant effect on the shape and style of the blues; even when no slide is involved and the artist is playing a six-string guitar, the menacing one-string runs of John Lee Hooker (whose “Boogie Chillun” is performed by Pitchford here) or the dazzling one-string solos of B.B. King make that clear. Elmore James is just one major bluesman who professed to have first learned music on a diddley bow as a child.

But almost certainly because the diddley bow was a children’s instrument, the recording industry ignored it even in the 1930s, when folklorists first began noting its use in the South. Though nearly all diddley-bow recordings available on eMusic are by tradition-minded musicians prominent on the latter-day folk and festival circuits, there are exceptions. In 1956, one Willie Joe Duncan, listed as Willie Joe and His Unitar, accompanied Bob “Froggy” Landers on the Specialty single “Cherokee Dance.” The unitar, an electric one-string that judging from photos was about twice as big as Duncan, provided explosive, distorted contrast to Landers’s croaking voice on the dance novelty; the flip side, credited solely to Willie Joe and His Unitar, was a spare instrumental called “Unitar Rock” on which the ax sounded at times more like a Jew’s harp. (Duncan later re-cut a more ornate version of the song with guitarist Rene Hall’s Orchestra under the title “Twitchy.”) But alas, these attempts to make the unitar a “commercial” instrument fell on deaf (or weirded-out) ears. Also in 1956, Detroit street musician One-String Sam (Wilson) recorded “I Need a Hundred Dollars” and “My Baby Ooo” in a Hastings Street record store. Sam used a baby-food jar as his slide, holding it so close to his vocal mike that he created his own echo chamber, which made his sproinging (augmented by scraping) country blues sound even stranger.

More recently, Jesse Mae Hemphill, Compton Jones, Glen Faulkner, Napoleon Jones, Super Chikan, Watermelon Slim and others have recorded with diddley bow (while the Reverend KM Williams features the closely-related cigar-box guitar on his two eMusic albums). Hemphill, whose 1983 stroke ended her playing days, showcases the delicate picking of Jones on “Little Rooster Reel” and the sizzling stylings of Faulkner on “Get Right Church,” but no tracks of her playing a one-string are available here. Faulkner’s banjo-like “One-String Blues” appears on Africa and the Blues, as does Strickland’s droning “Key to the Blues (Jitterbug Version).” But the most hair-raising use of diddley bow in recent years is “Diddley-Bo Jam,” from Okiessippi Blues by Watermelon Slim and Super Chikan. For nearly eight minutes, the two men have it like a pair of fighting cocks, jabbing, dodging and twisting around each other, or one providing a steady backdrop as the other gets further and further gone. You gotta hear it.

And just because I know you’re wondering, Bo Diddley never recorded with a diddley bow. A notoriously wily interview subject, the late Ellas Otha Bates (aka Ellas McDaniel) gave several explanations for the origins of his stage name, and none of them mentioned the one-string guitar. But judging from the design of his own box-shaped guitar as well as his raucous, African-derived single-string excursions, I think it is safe to say that Bo Diddley definitely knew the diddley bow.

John Hiatt, Mystic Pinball

After a long road to renown, John Hiatt knows who he is, and so do we. Mystic Pinball, his 21st album, is strong on his steadfast virtues as both a songwriter and a raconteur. His voice might have a bit more grizzle in its sizzle, his sense of humor can lead toward the macabre and his appreciation of loss profound in its understanding. But his dogged sense of purpose and need to make music remains omnipresent.

His bedrock resilience aside, Hiatt has a way of capturing thoughts and catchphrases to create those revelatory moments that make a song universal. “Perfectly Good Guitar,” his 1993 take on a metaphysical rock ritual, recalls both Abraham’s Biblical dilemma as well as those sacrifices made in the service of art. I was riding around and spinning the radio dial in the year 2000 when “What Do We Do Now?” from his Crossing Muddy Waters came over the airwaves and into my heart.

On Pinball, he captures a similar fatalistic feeling of a relationship-on-the-rails with “I Just Don’t Know What To Say,” then follows it with the heart-on-sleeve “I Know How To Lose You,” and un-amplifies it with the delicate “No Wicked Grin.” There are raucous, Stonesy rompers like “Bite Marks,” which showcases guitarist Doug Lancio and the rhythm section of bassist Patrick O’ Hearn and drummer Kenneth Blevins, gothic tales of revenge and murder in “It All Comes Back Someday” and “Wood Chipper,” and rockin’ field hollers like “We’re Alright Now.” In other words, Mystic Pinball is your typical Hiatt album, meat ‘n taters with a side of blues.

Devin Gray, Dirigo Rataplan

It’s something of a jazz convention that piano-less quartets consisting of two horn players plus a bassist and drummer will always be muscled-up, raucous affairs. That drummer Devin Gray has chosen tenor saxophonist Ellery Eskelin and trumpeter Dave Ballou, two powerhouse improvisers, along with the virtuosic bassist Michael Formanek, as his partners on Dirigo Rataplan might suggest that he’s inclined to conform to the stereotype. He isn’t: Dirigo Rataplan is more about brains than about brawn.

Gray likes to play with lots of pulse, but he’s not vulgar in its execution; on “Quadraphonically,” he manages to construct a deep groove despite utilizing a series of figures that stop and start. Formanek is a master at creating a strong, tensile underpinning, and he does so here. That leaves the horn players free to use lots of space in their solos.

On “Cancel the Cancel,” Gray’s tom-tom figures combine with some propulsive lines from Formanek. Ballou and Eskelin, trading lines back and forth and really communicating with one another. The Charles Ives tribute “Prospect Park in the Dark” actually reminded me of Ornette Coleman’s “The Garden of Souls,” which when I initially heard it reminded me of Ives’s “St.Gauden’s” from “Three Places in New England.” So we’ve come full circle. Dark and meditative, this is an austere, beautiful piece of music. “Okatu” is more aggressive than most of the album’s other material, and it gives both horn players a chance to bear down harder than elsewhere. Bass and drums provide the necessary octane to support them. The second tribute piece, “Thickets,” is dedicated to drummer Gerald Cleaver, who has emerged in the first decade of the century as one of the most significant percussions in jazz (or in new music in general). Not drum-centric, as it turns out, “Thickets” is driven largely by Formanek’s upper register arco bass. Eskelin plays an emotional solo, maneuvering between breathy lower tones and his delicate top register. Ballou uses tiny squeaks and smears, short vocalized passages that effortlessly command the stage. The album concludes with “Katahdin,” a sort of ersatz Second Line drum figure (Ed Blackwell would have loved Gray’s playing here) over which Ballou and then Eskelin play driving solos. Gray shifts rhythmic emphasis to accommodate them while Formanek digs in very hard underneath. It’s a powerful conclusion to a cohesive and compelling recording session.

Debate Season: Lyrical Arguments Go Head to Head, Issue by Issue

With the 2012 presidential-election debates kicking off this week, we’ve all got a lot of Big Issues on our minds: what’s next for our economy, the state of healthcare, same-sex marriage, and countless others. To help prepare, we decided to take a look at how issues like environmental protection, education and war have been fought out in pop songs over the years. We think you’ll find the arguments illuminating.

So Percussion and the Rise of Rhythm

Of all the long-oppressed minorities who can finally enjoy a measure of freedom and contentment, the ones who are most truly grateful to be living now must surely be the percussionists. This is their time. They have burst the shackles of 100-measure rests, learned the meaning of pianissimo, proven that they can do far more than wallop the occasional gong, and earned the right to bang whatever they want to, whenever they choose.

Today’s composers write for percussion, not because they’re hunting new species of music or craving alternatives to traditional ensembles, but because they can plug into a worldwide network of superb and devoted musicians always eager for more repertoire. Ensemble Mainz, Red Fish Blue Fish, Les percussions de Strasbourg, Third Coast Percussion, Steven Schick, Slagwerk Den Haag — these are the genre’s new brand names. In recent years, percussion ensembles have sprung up everywhere, cramming stages with eclectic assortments of noisemakers — vibraphones, geophones, telephones, soda bottles, kitchen sinks, oxygen tanks, two-by-fours, and anything else that will make a sound when you strike, stroke, bow, tap, or destroy it. They may be alienating their neighbors, but these percussionists unbound have also been making recordings and commissioning composers, and generally staking a claim to the musical mainstream.

Just now, the leader of the movement is probably the So Percussion, whose new album with the guitarist Greg McMurray, Where (we) Live features a dramatized ode to Brooklyn. The quartet’s members — Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski and Jason Treuting — are improvisers, composers, producers and musical entrepreneurs. They have teamed up with the DJ and composer Dan Deacon, commissioned pieces from Pulitzer-winners like Steve Reich and David Lang, and developed programs that are more theatrical extravaganzas than mere concerts. The reason for their success is simple: staggering ensemble virtuosity, which allows them to exhale the most complex scores like a single, multi-malleted organism.

So also benefits from a slow but persistent, century-long blooming of percussion. Beethoven foreshadowed that revolution (as he did so many others), with the mighty timpani phrase that interrupts the opening of the second movement of his Ninth Symphony. But true liberation would have to wait another 100 years or more.

What made it possible was the early 20th-century sense that there were few innovations left to squeeze out of harmony and melody and that only rhythm could express the energy of the machine age. Percussion was primitive, industrial, and deafening, and exciting — in a word, modern. George Gershwin accordingly used car horns and sirens in An American in Paris to capture the soundtrack of the postwar (Post-World War I, that is) metropolis. In 1924, an actual American in Paris, George Antheil, unleashed a platoon of pianos, xylophones, electric bells, propellers, sirens, drums and gongs in his Ballet Mécanique to produce a glorious contemporary cacophony. Around the same time, the Parisian in New York, Edgar Varèse composed Amériques, a gleefully assaultive work for an orchestra that included a baker’s dozen extremely busy percussionists. (A 1927 revision scaled that number down to nine.) The ease of crossing the Atlantic, in either direction, seems to have ushered in the golden age of din.

Percussion is not just about noise, of course — it’s about timbre, the complex colors of a sound that give it character, body, and movement. An expert percussionist can extract a dozen different qualities just from the collision between a pencil and a tabletop, and the search for nuances never stops. Though it was something of a discovery in the West, the Indonesian village orchestra, the gamelan, had long capitalized on this palette of percussion. That sonic richness bowled over the Californian composer Lou Harrison, who used the gamelan in many works.

Another California-born composer, John Cage, was intoxicated with the magic of timbre. In the 1940s, he invented what you might call a shoestring gamelan but he called a prepared piano, in which the strings are sown with weather stripping, paper, kitchen utensils, bolts, and rubber stops, all to wring as much variety as possible out of the homogeneous piano. Cage wrote a lot of music for prepared piano, in which he excavated a new kind of expressivity. Even though he transformed the romantic era’s lion of instruments into a tinkly, clanking thing, he still eked plenty of tragedy out of The Perilous Night, a nocturnal landscape of brittle, desert sounds and chilly flutterings of the soul.

Cage, who would have been 100 this year, cemented the percussion ensemble as one of the crucial musical forces of the 20th century. Cage has an enduring reputation as an impish iconoclast, gleefully torching conventions and leaving nothing but 4’33″ seconds of silence in their place. In truth, he sowed his catalog with more deliberately assembled masterpieces like Third Construction and Credo in Us. To build them, Cage developed a radically new rhythmic principle, in which the proportions of tiny phrases are the same as the largest structures, so that even the most irregular and complex works have a powerful internal logic.

Early in the century, percussion had seduced composers with its evocation of thrilling chaos and its many flavors of decibels; now it suggested a way to reclaim order. Steve Reich discovered how much complexity and rigor he could achieve with the sound of many hands clapping. Later, he composed the immense, cathedral-like Drumming for a homogenous collection of instruments. Percussion seems to attract the purist as much the rowdy, sometimes in the same person. Michael Gordon, who has in the past produced works of buzzing orchestral overload, recently composed Timber, an hour- long work of immense complexity for one of the simplest of all ensembles: a collection of store-bought 2x4s. It’s a haunting work, in which percussion has come full circle. The timbres of stick on wood thicken and multiply into a sonic pile so deep that they seem practically electronic — primitive sounds masquerading as high tech.

Elodie Lauten, Piano Works Revisited

The New York music scene that produced Philip Glass and Steve Reich has also been home to a number of idiosyncratic artists who pursued their work outside the glare of the spotlight. Elodie Lauten is one of them. The French-born keyboardist and composer (and daughter of the jazz drummer and bandleader Errol Parker) certainly reflects the Minimalist aesthetic in these pieces from the early 1980s. But Lauten can also be seen as one of the first post-Minimalist composers, and has since broadened the scope of her work to include musical theater, alternate tuning systems and electronics. This collection brings together some of her earliest recorded works, those originally released on the Piano Works album and on its follow-up, Concerto For Piano And Orchestral Memory. The latter title referred to the Fairlight CMI (computer music instrument), an electronic keyboard of the early ’80s that provided the album’s processed “orchestral” sounds.

Roughly the first half of this compilation comes from Lauten’s initial release, Piano Works. These pieces have a deceptively simple surface — the repeating, rhythmic cells of 1970s Minimalism — but underneath, you’ll hear echoes of Erik Satie (in “Cat Counterpoint”), the drones of avant-garde pioneer La Monte Young (in “Revelation”), and the architecture of Baroque music (in “Adamantine Sonata”). The palette expands in the music from the Concerto For Piano And Orchestral Memory to include a small ensemble as well as both processed and “found” sounds. These excerpts are stylistically varied too, from the long, unsettled string harmonies in “Orchestral Memory” to the jazzy “Tempo Di Habanera” to the elegant piano ostinatos and chirpy electronics of “Andante Cantabile.”

Lata Mangeshkar, Evergreen Hits of Lata Mangeshkar

I can visualize her in the recording studio, barefoot in front of the microphone where she has stood so many thousands of times, singing songs that will emanate from the mouths of others. Her voice is a wavering trill, haunting and syllabling in a language I will never understand, and yet speaks to me in a tongue that touches my very soul. This seduction of emotion is the golden articulation of Lata Mangeshkar, the Queen of Indian vocalese.

To be honest, I know nothing of where these songs and the movies in which they starred emanate. I hardly can tell one from another, or highlight them from the vast discography of Mangeshkar, created over more than half a century, which is probably only exceeded in recorded output by her younger sister, Asha Bhosle. The composers, the directors who hired her to voice-over their Bollywood productions, the traditions and subtleties and inner world of these compositions — that’s a mystery to me, as well as it might be to you. Yet the lack of context and musical understanding allows me to concentrate on the purity of her singing, the literal sound of her voice, and the scales and modes it dances about like the scenes it was meant to enhance, dropped from heaven into the cinematic musicals that have become the hallmark of Indian film.

Amid percussion that clatters and strings that swoop, the songs are alternately coy and forthright, a mating dance enacted to provide innuendo and consummation within the chaste romantic interplays of Bollywood — to be suggestive without breaking the bounds of propriety. Instead of a kiss, love scenes rely on the penetrating glance, the intimate gesture, and Mangeshkar’s role is to provide the sutra of kama. “No heroine feels she has arrived until Lataji sings for her,” is an oft-repeated testimonial to her stature, as one listen to “Aap Kahen Aur Ham Na Aaye” will show you why.