Havok, The Point of No Return EP

Denver thrash purists Havok aren’t impressed by hardcore rhythms, melodic choruses or endless breakdowns. They’re unabashedly devoted to their ’80s thrash heroes, and that dedication shines through loud and clear on their new EP The Point of No Return. The follow-up to last year’s eyebrow-raising full-length Time is Up, it features two mid-paced originals and two covers. The new songs, “Point of No Return” and “Cradle to the Grave,” are among the band’s best. On the former, Havok trample with double-bass drums, tree-sawing guitars, deft power muting and classy melodic frills that bring to mind the youthful spirit of Testament’s “Over the Wall.” “Cradle” is more like a mid-paced cross between Exodus and Anthrax, balancing fast staccato riffs and galloping beats with sustained chords, gang vocals and a 4/4 beat. The two covers, Sepultura’s “Arise” and the Slayer medley “Postmortem/Raising Blood,” sound faithful and reverential. Vocalist David Sanchez even nails the shrill climax of the line “Fatality, reality, await the final call!” Ultimately, The Point of No Return is continued affirmation that Havok are unlike most of their peers who discovered thrash through Metallica and Pantera. Their vocabulary is more expansive, extending beyond “The Big 4″ up to the present day.  At the very least, the EP will leave thrash devotees banging their heads and hungering for a new full-length.

Buzzcocks, Buzzcocks

[To celebrate the release of the first PiL record in 20 years, we handed the keys to eMusic's editorial to punk legend and post-punk pioneer John Lydon. Check out his candid interview; follow along with his head-spinning guided tour of his eMusic favorites; and follow along with his hand-selected Reviews of the Day, all week. -Ed]

John Lydon says

Oh, I love the Buzzcocks. Great fun lyrics, a totally different approach to music, and unfortunately, with everything being lumped under the banner ‘punk’ at that time, it meant a lot of people weren’t really paying respect to things that were a little bit off the beaten track. And the Buzzcocks were definitely off the beaten track.

Vijay Iyer Trio, Accelerando

Let’s not mince words: Accelerando is a source of rippling power and resplendent beauty that deserves to be called a masterpiece. (Except I suspect that Iyer, who recorded this a month before his 40th birthday, might top it on some future project.) As with the acclaimed, chart-topping Historicity in 2009, the pianist leads his trio through a stimulating collection that blends sharp originals and a surprisingly disparate array of cover tunes, from Heatwave to Herbie Nichols to the Thriller track, “Human Nature.” But in the nearly three years between the discs, the trio has been able to turbo-charge the force of their ensemble collective, without sacrificing the depth of their interactions. There are magnificent stretches throughout Accelerando — the rising to crescendo of the last half of “Optimism,” much of Henry Threadgill’s agile and agitated “Little Pocket Sized Demons,” the title track, and Iyer’s “Actions Speak,” among others — where the effect is like a rock power trio along the lines of Cream or The Who, but using the language of jazz, and with a piano instead of a guitar. Iyer’s two-handed chordal phrasings are cavernous, anthemic and intensely personal — he says he wants his music to be visceral, and he succeeds in spades here. Bassist Stephen Crump is a great enabler of intensity — his plucking (especially “Wildflower” and “Little Pocket Sized Demons”) and bowing (“Accelerando”) are brusque and bristling with contagious energy. Masterful drummer Marcus Gilmore keeps time and regulates the current with aplomb and unerringly good judgment. Accelerando feels like a unified magnum opus: The opening “Bode” pleasantly ushers you in, and the closing “The Village of the Virgins” carries the amiable goodwill of a benediction. In between is a wild, wonderful ride.

Mount Eerie, Clear Moon

Phil Elverum almost never writes a song that’s entirely its own thing. His body of work, initially as the Microphones and more recently as Mount Eerie, is full of missing twins, separated partners, self-pastiches and negative space. Clear Moon is itself a twin (he made another album, the forthcoming Ocean Roar, at the same time). It begins with “Through the Trees Pt. 2,” a sequel to a song from 2009′s Wind’s Poem. That’s followed by (different!) songs called “The Place Lives” and “The Place I Live,” both of which appeared in drastically different versions on a recent single. As usual, Elverum’s lyrics draw on a tightly circumscribed vocabulary of phrases and nature images; the closest thing to a conventional song here is “House Shape,” which resolves into My Bloody Valentine-style dream-pop after a couple of minutes of squinty drone-and-beat, as if he’s finally worked out its shape.

But Clear Moon is also just about the darkest recording Elverum has ever made — he’s talked about how he was inspired by Werner Herzog’s soundtrack composers Popol Vuh and black-metal band Burzum. Most of these songs are dominated by menacing, echoing synthesizer drones, punctuated by occasional terrifying shifts, like the blast-beat barrage of drums that crushes the final 30 seconds of “Over Dark Water.” Elverum’s voice is as naked and subdued as ever, and in the context of the slow, thunderous tracks here, it sounds as if he’s pacing helplessly toward a final judgment.

Count Five, Psychotic Reaction

[To celebrate the release of the first PiL record in thirty years, we handed the keys to eMusic's editorial to punk legend and post-punk pioneer John Lydon. Check out his candid interview; follow along with his head-spinning guided tour of his eMusic favorites; and follow along with his hand-selected Reviews of the Day, all week. -Ed]

John Lydon says

This song was close to my heart and mind in the early ’70s, oh yes! There were many of these one-hit groups from the ’60s; we used to call them mod bands. We didn’t quite know where they came from. There were just these crazy records. You know, while Top of the Pops was presenting whatever it was, there was this underground mod scene. The older kids we knew would let us hear them. I was introduced to The Count Five by a friend called Dave Crowe. It was his brother that collected all that stuff, and he didn’t want it, but I did! That’s what real mods were really checking. It wasn’t quite Quadrophenia.

New This Week: The Walkmen, Regina Spektor & More

Here’s what we’ve got this week!

The Walkmen, Heaven: This is today’s big winner. The Walkmen return, bigger and bolder and more assured than ever before. It’s Highly Recommended, and Peter Gerstenzang says:

If you want to know why your smartest, most iconoclastic friends speak in hushed tones about The Walkmen, check out the opening track of their new album Heaven. In five minutes, this band seemingly sums up rock history, referencing doo wop, “The Duke Of Earl,” folk-rock and Lou Reed’s street poetry. All crowned by Hamilton Leithauser’s winsome croon. This might explain all the fuss. Still, Heaven isn’t pastiche, despite betraying its influences. Take “The Witch.” Sure, the organ icily echoes Elvis Costello circa ’78. But here, Leithauser’s brings his very own romantic anomie. “It starts like this,” he sings, “A kiss is just a kiss.” Which introduces the overarching theme of the record: Love, man! Love so right. Love gone wrong.

Regina Spektor, What We Saw From the Cheap Seats: Everyone’s favorite Russian-born piano-playing singer-songwriter returns. Pat Rapa says:

This is not the album where Regina Spektor breaks free of that “quirky” tag. There are too many playful tics (she’s sort of a homeschooled McFerrinite when it comes to puff-cheeked drum sounds) and impish impulses (if anybody can get away with saying “Bronxy Bronx,” it’s her). And “Oh Marcello” — which calls for a Super Mario Italian accent in the verses, then steals the chorus verbatim from “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” — yeah, that one’s particularly insane. But, as we’ve come to expect from the Russian-born, classically trained, Bronxy Bronx piano player, What We Saw From the Cheap Seats is whipsmart and breathtakingly gorgeous.

Sun Kil Moon, Among the Leaves: Onetime Red House Painters frontman is back with another batch of ruminative acoustic numbers. This album is a bit more explicitly self-referential than he’s been before, with some pretty pointed references to past career highlights. Mike Wolf says:

Attention younger folks: All that really happens as you grow older is you learn to roll with everything better. Just listen to the gently undulating “Sunshine in Chicago,” from Sun Kil Moon’s fifth album — Mark Kozelek barely breaks stride or even distinguishes the good and bad from the mundane as he drily lists observations in his fine-grained, road-weary voice: “My band played here a lot in the ’90s when we had/ Lots of female fans…Now I just sign posters for guys in tennis shoes.”

Laurel Halo, Quarantine: This is one of my favorite records of the spring. Guazy, eery, mysterious, this gets the big ol’ Highly Recommended. Here’s Laura Studarus with a rundown:

Halo coaxes a stark beauty out of her cascading ones and zeros, and Quarantine‘s tension and character stem from Halo’s juxtaposition of moments of disquieting minimalism with her all-too-human voice. Prime example: “Thaw,” which begins with a sentimental synth refrain that’s paired with Halo’s Nico-like warble — hesitations, missed notes and all. She loops her vocals on “Years” to create a breathy choir, but for most of the record they’re left unadorned, sitting naked at the front of the mix, the masterpiece-defining chip in an otherwise elegant sculpture.

St. Etienne, Words and Music By…: The spiritual sister to the Allo Darlin’ record? Long-running indiepoppers are back with a record that examines how ones relationship to music changes over the years. Laura Studarus says:

“I didn’t go to church, I didn’t need to,” Saint Etienne vocalist Sarah Cracknell murmurs on “Over the Border,” the first song on Words and Music by Saint Etienne. A beatific spoken-word recollection of how a fascination with Peter Gabriel’s house sparked a lifelong obsession with music, the song ends with a desperate query, “When I was married/ And when I had kids/ Would Mark Bolan still be so important?” The London-based trio teases out the answer to that question over Words and Music‘s 13 songs. It’s a concept that could have easily devolved into a tiresome exercise in nostalgia, but Saint Etienne sidestep navel-gazing, framing their recollections against a glittering patchwork of dance music, Brit-pop and electronic textures. The result is an album about a near-sacred love for music that’s worth falling in love with.

Ladyhawke, Anxiety: Ladyhawke returns after an eternal hiatus with a record that sounds bigger and bolder than its predecessor. Barry Walters says:

Anxiety retains the synths, hooks and beats that link the multi-instrumentalist to fellow ’80s celebrants Little Boots, Annie, Robyn, La Roux, Goldfrapp and Lady Gaga, and she’s even polished her vocal skills. But this time around, her guitars rock a little harder while her influences span decades. The slinky solo snaking through the instrumental break of “Black White & Blue” buzzes like Eno-era Roxy Music even as the keyboards suggest Sparks’ “This Town Isn’t Big Enough for the Both of Us.”

Scissor Sisters, Magic Hour: Onetime disco revivalists branch out into electro and R&B on this new record. Ashley Melzer says:

After spending three records exploring the expanses of disco and pop, the Scissor Sisters are changing their tune, moving the cabaret dramatics that have long informed their music and live show toward a less nostalgic sound. On Magic Hour, instead of wearing ’70s influences on their sparkly sleeves, the Sisters tiptoe toward R&B and electronic music. The shift is in part thanks to co-producers, German electronic producer Alex “Boys Noize” Ridha and Scottish DJ/producer Calvin Harris, whose past work accounts for some of the album’s genre-hopping and synth-heavy breaks.

King Tuff, King Tuff: Bruised-knuckle guitars and pouty vocals are at the fore of this debut from one-time Happy Birthday member King Tuff. This is some great, ragged, super bratty stuff, and if you’re a fan of Ty Segall, Jay Reatard and the like, you’ll like this as well. Recommended

Small Faces, Small Faces: Highly Recommended debut album from classic London modsters apply rock attitude to soul classics and invent an entire genre in the process.

Various Artists, Oh, Michael Look What You’ve Done: Compilation of covers of long-overlooked folk journeyman from the ’60s and ’70s. Peter Blackstock says:

When recent reissues cast new light on early Chapman works such as Rainmaker and Fully Qualified Survivor, fellow artists across generations took note. And so, alongside hauntingly beautiful renditions by some of his contemporaries from the old days — most notably Bridget St. John’s “Rabbit Hills” and Maddy Prior’s “The Prospector” — there are contributions from younger artists who came across Chapman’s work much more recently, including Meg Baird’s mesmerizing take on “No Song to Sing” and Hiss Golden Messenger’s epic exploration of “Fennario.”

Grass Widow, Internal Logic: To get it out of the way right at the gate: this one is Highly Recommended. Dreamy trio vocals glide over rickety guitars, as if Lush decided to moonlight as a Raincoats cover band. The contrast between dreamy vocals and ruthlessly spare instrumentation is irresistible.

Nice Face, Horizon Fires: The great HoZac records is blowing our minds once again, this time with a batch of drone-style heavy lidded garage-psych — doomy rhythms, monster-movie organs and howling vocals. Recommended

Rayon Beach, This Looks Serious: Another soon-to-be HoZac classic, this one a lot louder and more ragged than Nice Face — clattering, rowdy, loose, scuzzy, fun and Recommended

White Lung, Sorry: Keep it nasty with this collection of 900-mile-an-hour ragers from Vacnouver’s White Lung. This thing never slows down — it stays nasty and snarling, lots of big, barbed guitars and nasally vocals. Recommended

Marissa Nadler, The Sister: I have long held a soft spot for Marissa Nadler. I’m a sucker for anything that’s spare and spooky, and Nadler does that better than most. The Sister has got Nadler’s trademark curling-smoke eeriness, which is just as bewitching as ever. Recommended

The Intelligence, Everybody’s Got it Easy But Me: Another barnburner from the Intelligence; split-second guitars, bare-knuckle percussion and dry, conversational vocals.

Cadence Weapon, Hope in Dirt City: Cadence Weapon is Rollie Pemberton, onetime Pitchfork writer and longtime MC. He’s got a great, wry, laid-back delivery and his productions favor old school, crackling boom-bap style with a few flashes of hi-tech futurism.

Dawnbringer, Into the Lair of the Sun God: Philly hard rock/metal band favor the sound of classic metal, pairing rip-roaring guitars with craggy vocals and lean, hooky choruses. So legit it should come packaged in a denim jacket.

Dave Sumner’s Jazz Picks
Small drop this week, but some quality albums that should make it a nice week of music listening.Let’s begin…

Mole, What’s the Meaning?:Quartet of guitar, keys, drums, and bass.Modern jazz that skirts the edges of fusion, but has a sound more aptly comparable to that of electronics-driven jazz like the Esbjorn Svensson Trio.Driving rhythms, dramatic melodies, guitar heat melting keyboard icicles that hang suspended in space.Nice stuff.

Federico Casagrande, The Ancient Battle of the Invisible:Outstanding guitar-led quartet (w/vibes, drums, bass).On guitar, Casagrande likes to ride the crests of waves rather than dive down and swim furiously beneath the water’s surface.Jeff Davis, on vibes, works wonders as Casagrande’s counterpart, keeping a furious pace yet never stepping over anybody’s toes.Plenty of heat, but it’s the serene interludes that make the session.Pick of the Week.

Fulvio Sigurta & Claudio Fillipini, Through the Journey:Beautiful duo recording of trumpet and piano.One pretty tune after the other, unblemished even when they mix it up a bit.Sparse and serene in that ECM sort of way, but none of the nearly-ambient/new age leanings… jazz, with perhaps a modern classical touch here and there.Quiet late nights or rainy afternoons, this is the album you want to be playing through the speakers.Highly Recommended

Chris Greene Quartet, A Group Effort:A friendly smile of an album.Quartet date, with bandleader Greene on sax.Greene plays straight-ahead jazz, but shows some versatility in how the quartet reflects it.Tunes that can show a face of groove and funk, others that show an inkling of rocking out, others that bring Latin motifs… and it all works nice together.Recorded live, some of that edge-of-the-precipice excitement of live shows comes through on this album.“Shore Up” and “Stat” bring a nice meditative vibe to pieces.Recommended.

Pearl Django, Eleven:Gypsy jazz ensemble that’s been around for nearly 20 years, changing cast along the way, and transitioning from solely performing the music of Django Reinhardt to composing their own hot jazz style music and original compositions.Very likable album, and it’s been a few months since I rec’d something like this, so here you are.

A couple more Black Lion Vault releases hit today.A Dollar Brand (aka Abdullah Ibrahim) live trio album from 1965 and Mal Waldron album dated in the early-70’s.

Count Five, Psychotic Reaction

[To celebrate the release of the first PiL record in 20 years, we handed the keys to eMusic's editorial to punk legend and post-punk pioneer John Lydon. Check out his candid interview; follow along with his head-spinning guided tour of his eMusic favorites; and follow along with his hand-selected Reviews of the Day, all week. -Ed]

John Lydon says

This song was close to my heart and mind in the early ’70s, oh yes! There were many of these one-hit groups from the ’60s; we used to call them mod bands. We didn’t quite know where they came from. There were just these crazy records. You know, while Top of the Pops was presenting whatever it was, there was this underground mod scene. The older kids we knew would let us hear them. I was introduced to The Count Five by a friend called Dave Crowe. It was his brother that collected all that stuff, and he didn’t want it, but I did! That’s what real mods were really checking. It wasn’t quite Quadrophenia.

Laurel Halo, Quarantine

There’s something wonderfully unsettling about Laurel Halo’s debut full-length Quarantine. A beat-less electronic album, its 12 tracks bleed into one another, creating a kind of woozy, ambient cloud cover. Hints of pop periodically break through; “Holoday,” in particular, feels like the receding echo of dance music past. But ultimately, song structure is bypassed in favor of a sense of ghostly possibility that echoes both early Dntel and classical composer Steve Reich.

Halo coaxes a stark beauty out of her cascading ones and zeros, and Quarantine‘s tension and character stem from Halo’s juxtaposition of moments of disquieting minimalism with her all-too-human voice. Prime example: “Thaw,” which begins with a sentimental synth refrain that’s paired with Halo’s Nico-like warble — hesitations, missed notes and all. She loops her vocals on “Years” to create a breathy choir, but for most of the record they’re left unadorned, sitting naked at the front of the mix, the masterpiece-defining chip in an otherwise elegant sculpture. Halo’s is a world of supernatural unease, splitting the difference between the ethereal and the haunted.

Scissor Sisters, Magic Hour

After spending three records exploring the expanses of disco and pop, the Scissor Sisters are changing their tune, moving the cabaret dramatics that have long informed their music and live show toward a less nostalgic sound. On Magic Hour, instead of wearing ’70s influences on their sparkly sleeves, the Sisters tiptoe toward R&B and electronic music. The shift is in part thanks to co-producers, German electronic producer Alex “Boys Noize” Ridha and Scottish DJ/producer Calvin Harris, whose past work accounts for some of the album’s genre-hopping and synth-heavy breaks.

There’s also a lineup of unexpected guests: Pharrell Williams and Diplo make songwriting appearances with “Inevitable” and “Year of Living Dangerously,” respectively; hip-hop bombshell Azealia Banks takes a verse on “Shady Love,” an unabashed play for radio charts; and John Legend provides the album’s most obvious hook, “Baby Come Home,” a soul tune amped up with a stomping beat and funky piano riffs.

The band’s appetite for adventure makes for a dizzying array of styles. Anthemic single, “Only the Horses,” lays a sugary pop melody over trancey dancefloor pop. The diversity is arresting but, lest anyone fear the Sisters have abandoned their roots, Ana Matronic’s percussive, Latin flared, drag-ready, “Let’s Have a Kiki” is there to calm. It’s as bitchy and playful as anything they’ve released and, better yet, makes as good an excuse for vogue-ing as any song in recent memory.

Ladyhawke, Anxiety

When a musician joins a movement, she eventually needs to distinguish herself from the pack before its audience moves on. That’s exactly what New Zealand’s Pip Brown aka Ladyhawke does on her long-awaited follow-up to her 2008 debut. Don’t trip: Anxiety retains the synths, hooks and beats that link the multi-instrumentalist to fellow ’80s celebrants Little Boots, Annie, Robyn, La Roux, Goldfrapp and Lady Gaga, and she’s even polished her vocal skills. But this time around, her guitars rock a little harder while her influences span decades. The slinky solo snaking through the instrumental break of “Black White & Blue” buzzes like Eno-era Roxy Music even as the keyboards suggest Sparks’ “This Town Isn’t Big Enough for the Both of Us.” Latter on, her chugging guitars on “Cellophane” suggest the Pixies as the synth riff rips Wings’ “Band on the Run.” Pascal Gabriel, the U.K. producer who helmed half of her debut, sticks around throughout Anxiety, helping it achieve a wholeness its singles-oriented predecessor lacked. As the album’s title suggests, Brown frets a sophomore slump: Both “Anxiety” and “Sunday Drive” long for an escape from her insular, studio-bound existence: “Take me on a ride, show me how to hide the voice in my head,” she pleads in the former. She needn’t have worried.

Saint Etienne, Words and Music by Saint Etienne

“I didn’t go to church, I didn’t need to,” Saint Etienne vocalist Sarah Cracknell murmurs on “Over the Border,” the first song on Words and Music by Saint Etienne. A beatific spoken-word recollection of how a fascination with Peter Gabriel’s house sparked a lifelong obsession with music, the song ends with a desperate query, “When I was married/ And when I had kids/ Would Mark Bolan still be so important?”

The London-based trio teases out the answer to that question over Words and Music‘s 13 songs. It’s a concept that could have easily devolved into a tiresome exercise in nostalgia, but Saint Etienne sidestep navel-gazing, framing their recollections against a glittering patchwork of dance music, Brit-pop and electronic textures. The result is an album about a near-sacred love for music that’s worth falling in love with.

A holdover from the breezy, pasted-together pop of their previous album, 2005′s Tales from Turnpike House, Words and Music skirts kitsch, even when relying heavily on vocoder-warped vocals during Euro-disco ode, “I’ve Got Your Music.” The real call to the dance floor, however, comes in the Tim Powell (Xenomania)-produced single, “Tonight.” A slow-burning anthem served with a side of house beats, the song perfectly captures the fluttering-pulse anticipation leading up to seeing a favorite band live. When Cracknell declares, “This could be my life, this could save my life,” her euphoria mirrored by a synthesizer crescendo, the sentiment feels impossible to deny.

Interview: Simian Mobile Disco

If you’re making a list of side projects that have gone on to become more successful than their original lineups, save room at the top for Simian Mobile Disco. The duo’s James Ford and Jas Shaw used to play in the British indie quartet Simian, appending the droll “Mobile Disco” as a differentiator for their singles, mixtapes and DJ appearances; after the band’s demise, in 2006, Ford and Shaw turned their attentions wholeheartedly to electronic dance music, and Simian Mobile Disco became their primary gig.

Since then, they’ve become fixtures on the indie scene, compared to acts like Hot Chip and LCD Soundsystem, but they’ve also kept a foothold in a more purist corner of the dance music world, DJing techno to crowds in Ibiza and releasing a string of forbidding, instrumental club tracks on their own Delicacies label, which they eventually compiled on an eponymous album. While the duo might best be known for vocal hits like “Hustler” and “Cruel Intentions,” projects like the 2010 mix CD Is Fixed have taken SMD far in the other direction, delving into dark, sweaty machine funk from Bam Bam, Paul Woolford and Clement Meyer. (Full disclosure: they also included one of my own tracks on Is Fixed.)

On their new album, Unpatterns, the duo leaves the basement rave in favor of a warmer, more welcoming sound. A few of the vocal tracks, like “Put Your Hands Together” and “Seraphim,” find common cause with the acid-house revivalism that’s overtaken the dance music scene in 2012; others, like “Cerulean” and “Interference,” wrestle with adapting classic analog gear to more idiosyncratic ends. It’s a surprising record, deeper and more focused than anything they’ve done before. I spoke with Ford and Shaw about making the album, their mercurial tastes, and why mainstream electronic dance music reminds them of Mrs. Doubtfire.

The new album is great — it’s very consistent, sonically, but there’s a lot of stylistic range. What were your intentions going into it?

James Ford: We often don’t really have that many intentions, if you know what I mean. We tend to sort of jam, really, and see what happens. We plug in the machines and play around, and not try and think too much about it. Obviously, in the back of our heads, we knew we wanted to make something a bit more psychedelic and deeper, try and find a balance somewhere in between the Delicacies stuff and some of our older stuff. I suppose we were just messing around to see what would happen.

I read that you recorded it in about three months?

Jas Shaw: It was actually over a longer period than that. We had probably been working on it for over a year, on and off. Over the last summer, we got almost nothing done, because we were flat-out gigging. Toward the end, we had sessions where we’d try things out, and then we locked off three months at the very end to really nail it down. But as James said, because we didn’t go in — we almost never go in — with any particular preconceptions as to what the music’s going to end up like. There’s often quite a long period at the front where we’re just trying out lots of things, which is really fun, but also, because you don’t know what you’re doing, it means you explore lots of stuff which doesn’t necessarily work. So there was definitely a long period of us just trying lots and lots of different things, trying to find out what fit.

Ford: Once we get something going, we can finish it off fairly quickly. So we tend to do quite a lot of tracks, and then, for this record especially, we went through and lived with the tracks for a while, and then picked a tracklist with the ones that we thought fit together with a similar sort of mood or feel or aesthetic. There were ones that were a bit off-piste, a bit more left, a bit more right, if you know what I mean, and these were the ones that seemed to hang together in the middle.

Who were the vocalists you worked with? I didn’t see them credited.

Ford: We didn’t work with anyone, really. I suppose it was a reaction to the amount of vocals we’ve used in the past, especially on Temporary Pleasure. We decided we didn’t really want it to be a featured-vocals type record. So all the vocals are samples. The “Seraphim” one is from this woman called Cilla Black, who I don’t know if she’s famous anywhere apart from England. She’s actually most famous for being on TV — she put out a program called Blind Date, which was kind of a dating show, but she had this amazing, Scott Walkerish, sort of ’60s, quite epic singing career. That sample is from one of her songs. The only one that actually you would have heard of was Jamie Lidell, and that was on the track “Put Your Hands Together.” We did a track with him on Temporary Pleasure, and we actually just went back into the same session and dug out [his vocals]. Because he’s so amazingly talented, he just improvised for a couple of hours, so there’s loads and loads of material we didn’t use on the previous track. We just went back and recycled it, basically!

I like how the album ties in with the current revival of classic house and techno, but it sounds totally different from everything else out there.

Ford: That’s a really good compliment. We really didn’t want to sound retro. And especially, using a lot of the original machines that have been used in the past, it’s a trap you can fall into quite easily. We were really careful to try to make a modern-sounding record at the same time.

You have mentioned early Warp as an influence.

Shaw: For us, Warp records were like a label that — Aphex Twin was probably the most famous of the bunch, but I was into guitars, really indie stuff, then got into Aphex Twin, and then finding out what label he was on, and from that you get into all that stuff. You sort of go back to Detroit and Chicago from that label. Around that time, almost everything that they put out was really, really good. It got to the point where I’d go and I’d listen to everything they put out, in the shop, and even if I didn’t like it, I’d probably buy it, because I’d think, I probably just don’t get it yet. And I’d take it home and listen to it, and nine times out of 10, after a while, I’d be like, “Yep, this is ace.”

Ford: Weirdly, when we were getting Simian, the really old band, together, Simon, the singer, came, and we met up with him, and he mentioned Autechre, and we were like, “Oh, wow, that’s the link between his folky stuff and ours. Now we can do something.” That sort of early techno, 808 State and all that kind of stuff, that’s always been our bedrock. British techno.

It’s such a great moment for British techno right now.

Shaw: The interesting thing about the U.K. scene at the moment is that all of these absurd subdivisions are disappearing. Obviously you’ve got the whangy, nasty dubstep stuff, which has gone off on its own route, but as James said, you can kind of lump it all together under “bass music.” There’s a really nice cross-pollination with bass music and techno, and it seems to be informed by a lot of that early dubstep stuff, like Hyperdub, and the very early stuff that came out on Rephlex. So it links back to more avant-garde music. Dubstep in its broader term obviously includes all that nasty [makes honking sounds] nonsense as well.

Ford: Which is now all “EDM,” apparently!

Shaw: What’s really nice is that for a while, there were all these insane subdivisions, which were kind of arbitrary, really. And at the moment, there’s just a really nice blurring going on.

I hadn’t listened to Attack Decay Sustain Release in a long time, and I had forgotten how deeply analog it is; almost purist, in a way. I feel like people — critics, fans — have never really gotten that aspect of Simian Mobile Disco.

Ford: Weirdly, there’s a track called “Wooden” on that first album — we were just putting together the new live show, and we went back and dug out some of the parts to start playing that track, and did a new version of it, and it actually sounds totally like one of our new tracks. It was quite odd. It made me realize that we were actually doing similar stuff then, to now. I suppose tracks like “Hustler” with cheesy vocals kind of overshadow that stuff.

Or the Justice remix of Simian’s “Never Be Alone,” which set your career on a sort of bizarre trajectory.

Shaw: There was a whole scene that we kind of got lumped into — the new rave thing and all that stuff — which on one level was kind of fun, but you’re putting together, like, LCD Soundsystem and Digitalism. It didn’t fit at all. To a certain extent, I think that’s true of most bands. Most bands are marked by their singles, and often, album tracks are overlooked. It’s just the nature of things.

Ford: I think also, though, to a certain extent, we have been trying to pull away from that for the last few years. We did get lumped into that, which was really good and we had a lot of fun doing it, but since then, especially with what’s happened to dance music in America going towards your Deadmau5 and your Skrillex and stuff, we were just like, “Hang on, no, no, let’s go the other way.” We find it quite tricky to tread our own path and not get sucked into that world.

Your career has moved a bit like a pendulum, in a way, from the sound of the first album to the poppier Temporary Pleasures, then toward some quite forbidding techno with Delicacies, and now back towards something warmer and a little more welcoming. I know that you don’t consider Delicacies to be a “proper” LP, however.

Shaw: I’m coming around to that being an album now, actually. We always were like, “It’s definitely not an album.” And then, speaking to a few people interviewing us, I’m like, “Yeah, you’re right, it is an album.” But honestly, it’s just a reaction. I think, in the back of your head, as a musician, you’re always conscious of not wanting to repeat yourself. And the thing that’s most recent in your head is the most previous album. So you’re like, “OK, we can do anything we like, but not that.” One of the things we’re always conscious of is keeping moving forwards. I like to think it’s not just us swinging between two points, but certainly, we have kept moving in terms of our sound. I think we’ve probably pissed people off and lost fans, because we’ve been so — not massively diverse, but reasonably diverse in terms of our sound. But I feel like, if you carry on doing the same thing, you become boring.

Ford: It’s also because we don’t really have a plan! We sort of just do what we are excited about doing at that particular point in time. And an album really is a snapshot of our mental process, or any band’s mental process, within a six-month period, or whatever. That’s literally been our progression during our journey through electronic music. There’s no other way to explain it. Like Jas says, if we’d had an overarching strategy for world domination, maybe we should have got one sound and stuck to our guns a bit more.

Shaw: But we’d be killing it in the States if we were still pumping that “Hustler” sound. We’d be rinsing is right now!

How has the development of the so-called “EDM” scene in the States affected you guys? You play a lot of festivals, so you must be in contact with a lot of that.

Shaw: It’s horrible.

Ford: Yeah! You know, we’ve seen it coming for a while. Obviously, having been associated with some of the acts that are big in that world, we’ve done some of those gigs, like Ultra [Music Fest]. I think that’s maybe quite a large contributing factor to the pendulum, to be honest. We were like, “Hang on, do we want to be part of this, or do we not?” And we don’t, really.

Shaw: I think that EDM has actually been pretty good for the States. I feel like interesting dance music, and I classify that as the subset outside EDM, has become stronger in opposition. People have been like, “You know what, I don’t want to be a part of that, and we can do our own party,” and I feel like those parties have become more interesting. Everybody’s kind of moaning about it, but it’s always been there! There’s always been popular bad music. I feel like good parties in the States are on the up. Although they’re probably horrifically outstripped by, like, EDM stuff, that’s fine. We don’t have to go to those parties. They can exist without us worrying about them.

There’s a strange misconception that just because music is made with computers, it all has to exist within the same scene.

Shaw: It was the same with the dubstep thing. Because you had Skrillex and stuff that came out on Hyperdub and Hessle Audio both being called dubstep, somehow they had to be the same thing. Once you remove that term, and you call one thing “pop” and you call one thing “bass,” that’s fine. You’re not worried any more.

Ford: Which is why the term “EDM” is probably a really positive thing. It polarizes it, doesn’t it?

Shaw: It’s like when you see a movie and it’s got Robin Williams in it, and you know you shouldn’t go to it. It’s like a warning!

What happened to the Delicacies label? Is that done?

Ford: No, it’s going to continue. We’ve got some stuff we want to put out on it that we made at the same time as this last record, and we want to continue doing new stuff for it. We did a swap with Psycatron where they mixed one of our tracks and we mixed one of theirs, and it came out on Delicacies as a package. We want to keep doing that with different people, basically.

Any plans to work with Beth Ditto on a follow-up to the EP you did together last year?

Shaw: We’d love to do it again. We were hoping to do some more recording with her, but we needed to finish our record and she’s just done one. I think that, time permitting, maybe we’ll get back into that towards the end of the year. She’s amazing and we love her, but she’s really hard to pin down for.

Ford: She’s flaky, basically! She’s so much fun, though. Literally, that EP was one of the most fun recording experiences ever, and we’d love to do it again.

Did you have the songs done when she came in, or was it all done with her?

Ford: No, we did the whole thing with her in, like, five days or something. It just clicked together really easily. She’s a great writer, and she’s really easy to work with, and a lovely, funny person. Any opportunity to do it again, we’ll definitely get in there.

James, are you continuing to do much production for other people, or is Simian Mobile Disco taking all your time?

Ford: At this point, we kind of decided to just focus on this for a bit. I’m at the point where I just want to do one thing at a time. I went through a period a few years back where I was trying to juggle too many things, and it got a bit too much. I do plan to do production again, writing for other people, but at this point I’m just going to do SMD for a while before I move onto the next thing — essentially, do it in chunks as opposed to trying to do 20 things at once.

Sun Kil Moon, Among the Leaves

Attention younger folks: All that really happens as you grow older is you learn to roll with everything better. Just listen to the gently undulating “Sunshine in Chicago,” from Sun Kil Moon’s fifth album — Mark Kozelek barely breaks stride or even distinguishes the good and bad from the mundane as he drily lists observations in his fine-grained, road-weary voice: “My band played here a lot in the ’90s when we had/ Lots of female fans…Now I just sign posters for guys in tennis shoes.” The directness is refreshing, but as those fans would guess, the real magic of this spare, primarily solo record comes when Kozelek reveals deeper shades of emotional drama, both vocally and in his nylon-string-guitar work. “That Bird Has a Broken Wing” balances multi-tracked vocals with incredibly textured string-picking, while the equally nerve-ticking “King Fish,” a full-band tune, puts lambent yet mournful electric guitar in a drowsy waltz with Kozelek’s softly pleading voice.

Mike Reed’s People, Places and Things, Clean On The Corner

Mike Reed’s previous three PP&T outings were purposeful projects honoring Chicago jazz from the late ’50s and released in a two-year splurge. The drummer/composer — a longtime resident of the northern Chicago suburb of Evanston— says in the liner notes that the original plan for Clean on the Corner was to take his time. But three sessions and ten hours later, the disc was done. Perhaps not surprisingly, the best track finds Reed again reaching back for a vintage cover by Chicago composer John Jenkins, entitled “Sharon,” swinging hard-bop true to its original Blue Note release, with guest pianist Craig Taborn joining PP&T’s dual sax attack and Reed’s drumming providing the most obvious 21^st-century update. Taborn also shines on “The Ephemeral Words of Ruth” (as wide-ranging as its title suggests), and longtime Reed cohort and cornetist Josh Berman brings warmth to the “House of Three Smiles” (an adaptation of a song written by another Reed colleague, vibest Jason Adasiewicz) and is the principal soloist on the closer, “Warming Down.”

The core piano-less quartet handles the first four songs, with the opener “The Lady Has A Bomb,” rich in the tradition of AACM Chicago, with altoist Greg Ward and tenor Tim Haldeman both squawking and squeaking an acrid blues that doesn’t lose sight of the melody. After a slightly Monk-ish cover of Roscoe Mitchell’s “Old,” Reed’s “December?” is laden with somber disdain, with the bow of bassist Jason Roebke’s drawing out the long dark of the days while Reed ruefully rustles the jingle bells. Throughout Clean On The Corner, Reed’s continuum of past, present and future remains open to artistry and fresh connections.

Interview: Rachel Dratch

Former SNL cast member Rachel Dratch is best known for her hyperbolic renditions of all-too-familiar real life archetypes (Debbie Downer, the droopy-eye wet blanket who complains about melanomas at Disney World; Denise, the screaming, windbreaker-wearing Red Sox fan). Originally cast as Jenna on 30 Rock, Dratch was ultimately replaced by Jane Krakowski, a bubblier, brighter-eyed blond who producers thought would up ratings. When tabloids got wind of the trade, they had a field day with bombastic headlines and insulting rhetorical questions (“Is Rachel Dratch Too Ugly for Hollywood?”) About the whole fiasco, she remains both brassy and noble: “I had always been pretty sure that comedy was about producing a laugh, not a boner,” she says with cool dismissal in her new memoir’s introduction.

Girl Walks into a Bar… is a stroll through Dratch’s life: the pleasantly uneventful childhood in Lexington, Massachusetts; the grim years at Dartmouth; the exhilarating start of her career at Second City in Chicago. Then the dream-come-true job at SNL, in all its boyfriend-preventing late-night hours, and ever-lasting platonic friendships, and finally her implausible pregnancy at the age of 44. Throughout these chapters — of both book and life — Dratch maintains the wry, chatty demeanor we’ve come to expect from the comedian who swapped funny girl glamour for a kind of gruesome verisimilitude, and carved her own niche in a sector of the entertainment industry historically overrun with men.

 

Your career really began in Chicago at the Second City, but originally you’re from Lexington. I wouldn’t expect you to have cogent theory about this, but why are so many comedians from the Boston area — Mindy Kaling, Louis CK, Mike Birbiglia, Amy Poehler, Steve Carell, Conan O’Brien, and that’s just off the top of my head.

I don’t know what that is. Sometimes I think it’s the large amount of Irish people there, even though a lot of the comedians themselves aren’t even Irish. There’s just that Irish, snappy story telling, you know, always having a quip. It’s a Boston thing that’s always kind of in the air.

In your book you talk about the SNL writing schedule being really good preparation for motherhood — that the late nights train you to not sleep regularly. Do you think improv was also good training?

Huh, that’s interesting. I’ve always been kind of a water sign — [laughs] you know, go with the flow. That’s improv: that you don’t have to be in control of every moment. You have to get used to not having control. Improv is not good for ridged, anal people because it’s not about having a plan for every moment. So I guess that sensibility might help, but that’s what brings people to improv in the first place. We all sort of have that trait going into it.

How did writing your book compare to writing sketches? Were there any unexpected challenges?

In a way it’s easier, in terms of sweating it. At SNL, we never wrote joke-jokes, we would write sketches and scenes, but there’s the pressure that it’s going to be read in front of people right there. You might have a great character, but if you don’t get it into the sketch in the right way or show the character in the funniest way, it might not get picked. The nice thing about writing a book is that it’s just you and yourself; there’s no judge sitting there, which is the necessary part of SNL, having someone there to pick which scenes get on the air. I like being my own judge though. Some days I’d write and on the next day be like, “Oh, no. I can’t use this at all. It’s not as funny as I thought it was yesterday.” I like being in charge of my own destiny. I like the individuality of it.

You’ve lived in NYC for years now. Do you consider yourself a “New York comedian”? Do you even think that’s still a type? Does the city influence your work?

I like living in New York [versus L.A.] because you see all sorts of people right there on the street. I like being on the subway with people of all walks of life, so maybe that helps when you’re trying to come up with characters, though I can’t really say I have any characters based on someone I saw on the subway. I think wherever you are, you see funny things. If you think like a comedian, you’ll find characters and situations no matter where you are.

There’s been so much relentless discussion of your non-Hollywood look, which you address in the book’s introduction. Was that a way of preempting negative critiques?

I don’t want to be a spokesperson. It’s like everything I say, I could also say the opposite. I just told my story of what happened to me. My own brain never would have gone to “Oh, I’m not getting parts because of this.” It was just that was what I kept reading, and those were the kinds of parts I kept getting offered. That’s just what happened to me, so I had to draw my own conclusions. But because I don’t want that to be true, I don’t like giving it voice. Every little thing I say gets picked up and stated as gospel. In the book, I write, “Hollywood sees me as a troll, a woodland creature, or a manly lesbian.” That got picked up and the rest of the sentence got cut off, so everywhere it’s like, “Hollywood sees me as a troll!” I’m not literally a troll or literally an elf! Stuff like that bums be out, so now I’m so reluctant to comment. I guess I just commented for five minutes, but I’m just trying to set the landscape for that part of my book.

King Tuff’s Guitar Heroes

“When I play my Stratocaster, I feel like an innocent kid,” Kyle Thomas sings on monster-rocker “Bad Thing” from his self-titled Sub Pop debut. The 29-year-old songwriter, who moonlights in a variety of bands (Happy Birthday, Witch, Feathers), is following up the excellent-but-decidedly-more-bare-bones Was Dead, the 2007 release that endeared his King Tuff moniker to many a punk-rock message-board lurker.

By contrast, King Tuff is a huge-sounding record, and its epic nature is due in no small part to Thomas’s guitar work, though the modest axe slinger gives most of the credit to producer Bobby Harlow (The Go, Conspiracy of Owls). “I made it in a real studio this time,” Thomas says. “I worked with a producer so it was in other people’s hands, the sound quality of it. I made a lot of demos that sound a lot like the old album because I made them at home on the same machine. I wanted to see what it would be like to record in a studio and take it up a notch.”

“Take it up a notch” he did: From the rollicking country of “Baby Just Break the Rules” to the poppy smoking ode “Alone and Stoned”; from the goofy motivational anthem “Keep On Movin’,” to the ecstatic riffstraganza of “Stranger,” King Tuff runs an impressive stylistic gamut, guitars leading the way throughout. eMusic’s Austin L. Ray thought it only fitting, then, to ring up Thomas to find out which guitarists, past and present, influence his six-stringing.

Regina Spektor, What We Saw From the Cheap Seats (Deluxe Version)

This is not the album where Regina Spektor breaks free of that “quirky” tag. There are too many playful tics (she’s sort of a homeschooled McFerrinite when it comes to puff-cheeked drum sounds) and impish impulses (if anybody can get away with saying “Bronxy Bronx,” it’s her). And “Oh Marcello” — which calls for a Super Mario Italian accent in the verses, then steals the chorus verbatim from “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” — yeah, that one’s particularly insane.

But, as we’ve come to expect from the Russian-born, classically trained, Bronxy Bronx piano player, What We Saw From the Cheap Seats is whipsmart and breathtakingly gorgeous. The tense and trip-hoppish anti-museum manifesto “All the Rowboats,” the blissfully tipsy toe-tapper “The Party,” the amber-tinted wake-up lullaby “Jessica” — so many of these songs are just total knockouts. Even the downers; “Call Them Brothers,” a duet with Jack Dishel of Only Son, is exactly the kind of maudlin you can slowdance to.

Sometimes it’s the unexpectedly plainspoken and barely quirkified moments that really get you. “Today we’re younger than we’re ever gonna be,” she insists on the snowballing pop tantrum “Small Town Moon.” Spektor really knows how to sell you on hope. “Firewood” is the world’s most delicate nut-up-or-shut-up power ballad: “Rise from your cold hospital bed. I tell you you’re not dying/ Everyone knows you’re going to live/So you might as well start trying.” Tough love? Sure, but it’s mostly love. She’s just a soul whose intentions are good.

 

Pablo Moses, Revolutionary Dream

[To celebrate the release of the first PiL record in thirty years, we handed the keys to eMusic's editorial to punk legend and post-punk pioneer John Lydon. Check out his candid interview; follow along with his head-spinning guided tour of his eMusic favorites; and follow along with his hand-selected Reviews of the Day, all week.. -Ed]

John Lydon says

“Brilliant record, and a complete political person, with a definite Cuban Communist lean! The sound is stunning — the minimalism of the guitaring is just genius for me, with those very neat, almost Neil Young-ish inflections every now and then. There’s a hint of country in there, with a strict reggae backbeat. It’s all about sentiment, and how that motivates you inside your head. So for me that is a great piece of singing, because the message is clearly got across. Very inspiring record.

Billy Martin, Shimmy

Primed for summer, Shimmy feels like a soundtrack for a clambake, a series of jazzy organ-and-drum duets that are as fizzy and cool as a lime rickey. Billy Martin is the innovative, inveterate timekeeper for Medeski, Martin and Wood; Blades is a young Bay Area keyboardist who can lay down a groove with froth or sizzle, or, as indicated by his stint with the late blues legend John Lee Hooker, nestle down deep in the cut. Martin and Blades performed a one-off gig at the 2011 Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans that blossomed so fruitfully and organically that the pair subsequently organized a small tour, and then entered the studio for Shimmy.

There are a couple of overt nods to the band led by organist Les McCann and saxophonist Eddie Harris in the 60s. “Mean Greens” covers a Harris tune with that group’s toe-tapping elan–by turns funky and fleet, spongey and syncopated, and low-down and growling. And “Les and Eddie,” penned by Blades, is a kindred spirit to the track “Cold Duck Time” from McCann and Harris’s iconic live album, Swiss Movement. The other cover is an extended take on the traditional clap-along gospel rouser, “Down By the Riverside.”

But the best material is the duo’s jam-inspired originals, from the profound jive of the opener, “Brother Bru,” to the scalding intensity of “Deep in a Fried Pickle,” with Blades doubling on clavinet for a workout that feels like Traffic (the old Stevie Winwood/Dave Mason supergroup) approaching heavy metal. By contrast, “Pick Pocket” is playfully airy and agile; “Toe Thumb” finds Blades syncopating on clavinet like Stevie Wonder on “Higher Ground” while Martin adds a tambourine to the drum licks; and “Give” is an atmospheric near-ballad set off by cymbal washes, bells and some Latin percussion. Fill the ice buckets, stoke the grill and get ready to Shimmy.

Various Artists, Oh Michael, Look What You’ve Done: Friends Play Michael Chapman

Michael Chapman was one of those late ’60s/early ’70s purveyors of English folk who could easily have been missed, even if you were paying attention. Though he recorded a handful of albums for respected indie labels that showcased his jazz-influenced guitar style and left-of-center songwriting, he never reached the renown of contemporaries such as Bert Jansch or Steeleye Span (though the latter band’s Rick Kemp contributes a track here). Still, there were lost treasures to be found in his catalogue, and when recent reissues cast new light on early Chapman works such as Rainmaker and Fully Qualified Survivor, fellow artists across generations took note. And so, alongside hauntingly beautiful renditions by some of his contemporaries from the old days — most notably Bridget St. John’s “Rabbit Hills” and Maddy Prior’s “The Prospector” — there are contributions from younger artists who came across Chapman’s work much more recently, including Meg Baird’s mesmerizing take on “No Song to Sing” and Hiss Golden Messenger’s epic exploration of “Fennario.” Bridging the gap between yesteryear and today are the collection’s two biggest names, Lucinda Williams and Thurston Moore, whose turns on “That Time of Night” and “It Didn’t Work Out,” respectively, are deeply imbued with the kind of personal passion that reveals their connection to Chapman’s muse.