P.S. I Love You, Death Dreams

The Kingston, Ontario, duo P.S. I Love You sound versed less in musical theory than chaos theory. They major in a strain of volatile, dense noise-pop that sounds constantly on the verge of falling in on itself, and Death Dreams, their second full-length, finds them determinedly upping the freneticism. Drummer Benjamin Nelson appears to take his musical cue from Animal from the Muppets but the band’s fulcrum is Paul Saulnier, who layers fuzzy thrash guitar, erratic organ blurts and semi-feral vocals into one reverb-laden noise-ball and fires it out of a canon with the volume knob cranked.

Augmenting the all-consuming air of fertile chaos is the fact that Saulnier is a wilfully obscurantist vocalist, hiccupping and swallowing his words until they are almost entirely unintelligible. “Sentimental Dishes” is yelped not unlike Bryan Ferry on Roxy’s Pyjamarama and appears to be about trying to avoid doing the washing up: on “Don’t Go” — where he claims to be a love freak with a gun in his hand, whatever that means — he approaches something like a hyperventilating meltdown. Yet Death Dreams is strongest when a degree of discipline undercuts the anarchy: the strident “Princess Towers,” which recalls the twitchy urgency of early PiL. Nothing makes chaos go over smooth like a judicious pinch of order.

New This Week: El-P, The Gossip, & More

Here’s what’s new this week:

El-P, Cancer 4 Cure: Just one week after a spectacular collaboration with Killer Mike, El-P returns with his own dystopic masterpiece. Guess what? Highly Recommended. Nate Patrin has more:

El-P’s music has always been a mix of sci-fi futurist grandiosity and old-school rap grime, like watching a chromed-out chromed-out, mile-long spaceship reenact the Licensed to Ill cover. He’s rarely sounded this full-throttle start to finish — the sounds aren’t just pushed to the red but knifepoint immediate. And for all the hints of space-age debris on the margins, El recognizes that 2012 NYC is its own kind of Ridley Scott future. So he stays a master of reality, from the domestic-victim solidarity story of “For My Upstairs Neighbor” (the indelible sing-song chorus: “if you kill him I won’t tell”) to the police-state-ducking “Drones Over BKLYN” to the con-artist psyche-out “The Jig Is Up.”

Gossip, A Joyful Noise: Beth Ditto has one of the best voices in pop music; this is her latest collection of club bangers. Barry Walters says:

At the beginning of the last decade, the Gossip were a garage band similar to pre-stardom White Stripes, if they were from Searcy, Arkansas, by way of Olympia, Washington, and led by an out, proud and queer fat advocate. Not anyone’s recipe for mainstream success. Fast-forward to the present: Gossip have massive European hits behind them; they’ve recorded with Rick Rubin and Simian Mobile Disco alike, and on A Joyful Noise, the threesome team with Xenomania’s Brian Higgins, the U.K. production whiz behind dance-pop hits from Girls Aloud, Sugababes, Danni Minogue, Pet Shop Boys and Cher. It’s a journey that would defy all logic except for the fact that frontwoman Beth Ditto possesses an utterly arresting voice, one that conveys extreme levels of intensity while squarely hitting the notes, and that along the way, she and her bandmates learned how to write proper songs.

Apache Dropout, Apache Dropout (Deluxe Edition – eMusic Exclusive): Our eMusic-only version of Apache Dropout’s 2011 debut, this time with extra live tracks. Evan Minsker says:

The major draw is the inclusion of nine live tracks, which do the band an incredible service. The harmonies have more bark, their guitars are louder and more fuzzed out, and every song feels a little bit bolder. Though the bulk of the material comes from Apache Dropout, boisterous songs like “It’s a Nightmare” and “White Out Man” become more powerful and listenable in a live setting, which keeps things from feeling repetitive. Meanwhile, a poppier track like “Teenager” gets a bit more bite. The deluxe Apache Dropout shows both sides of the band’s personality: slightly more reserved in the studio and slightly more unhinged live. So listen for the hooks, but stay for the screaming.

Garbage, Not Your Kind of People: They’re back! And not a moment too soon! Shirley Manson & Co sneer and stomp through another batch of doomy electro-rock songs. There’s more than a little ’90s nostalgia in the air right now, but Garbage are a band I am glad to have back.

JEFF the Brotherhood, Hypnotic Knights: Warner Bros debut (!) of these scuzz-rock superstars. This band radiates energy and charm, and it sounds like they haven’t cleaned up even the tiniest bit for their major label debut. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Soulsavers, the Light the Dead See: Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode takes lead vocals on this new one from Soulsavers, for an album that is — you guessed it! — moody and dark and emotional. Fans of DM will love.

Royal Thunder, CVI: This record is great. Imagine ’70s Heart covering Master of Reality and you’re on the right track. Bludgeoning riffs, humongous hooks and pour-your-heart-out vocals make for one of the year’s best hard rock records. Highly Recommended

Kimbra, Vows: The woman who gave Gotye what-for in “Somebody That I Used to Know” is back with an album of her own. Kimbra is an unconventional, off-kilter songwriter and Vows is full of a lot of add percussion, weird bursts of sound and Kimbra’s curious voice. Pretty fun, fascinating stuff.

Admiral Fallow, Tree Bursts in Snow: Rowdy Scots are back with more deeply-felt alt rock.

John Mayer, Born and Raised: John Mayer is back after a public meltdown a few years ago that left his career on somewhat shaky ground. This sounds like a batch of mostly dialed back, folky/acoustic songs that combine tastefully restrained playing with earnest singing.

Slash (ft. Myles Kennedy), Apocalyptic Love: Huh. Ex-G’N'R dude teams with the singer fromAlterBridge(!) for a batch of careening ’70s-style rock songs.

Joey Ramone, …ya know?: Another posthumous outing from the late, great Joey Ramone, this one assembled from demos he record before he passed away.

Sonnymoon, Sonnymoon: Glitchy, spacey, bleepy and bloopy.

Exitmusic, Passage: Moody and evocative songs in this band fronted by Jimmy’s wife on Boardwalk Empire. This is pretty high drama, moody, spooky stuff — lots of empty space, echo and chilling vocal delivery.

Dan Sartain, Too Tough to Live: Dan Sartain returns! More great, scuzzy garage rock with greased-back hair, popped collars and sneer-along choruses, as revved-up as a racecar in the summer sun. Recommended

Sissy Spacek, Contratemps: EVERYBODY GET NOISY. Really nasty, gnarly, filthy, noisy split-second songs.

And here are Dave’s Jazz Picks:

Well, it wasn’t a very big drop this week, but that just accentuates the strong albums that are new to the site. A lot of recognizable names, some whose careers date way back on the jazz timeline, and a few who are vanguards of the modern scene. Let’s begin…

Guillermo Klein, Carrera: Pianist and composer Klein has established himself as one of the preeminent artists on the jazz scene. Klein’s modern approach to Latin jazz has advanced it as an artform, and contributes, individually, a unique voice to the subgenre. Nobody else approaches a melody quite like Klein, and it’s a big reason why his tunes are so recognizable no matter if he’s in a duo setting or large ensemble. For Carrera, Klein returns with his Los Guachos large ensemble, which includes major leaguers such as Miguel Zenon, Bill McHenry, Ben Monder, and Taylor Haskins, for a set of tunes that keep more to the quiet side of the room, similar in touch to his collaboration with Aaron Goldberg Bienestan. When the question is asked, who are the modern jazz giants, the new Miles Davises, the new John Coltranes, those who transcend and navigate the jazz art form, Guillermo Klein should be one of the answers to that query. Pick of the Week.

Linda Oh, Initial Here: Bassist Linda Oh achieves a momentum with this album that doesn’t let up ‘til the final note. Her conversant nature on bass reflects the characteristics of her compositions. This is engaging music. Let your guard down, and you’ll miss something. But it’s still a conversation, never becomes a lecture. Some albums are so engaging that it makes for a one-way interface; artist talking at listener. Oh finds a way to keep the interaction between musicians and listener a perpetual exchange of thoughts and ideas, which is why she’s an artist to follow and why her albums don’t sacrifice joyfulness just because they’re thought provoking. Rounding out the quartet are Rudy Royston on drums, Dayna Stephens on tenor, and Fabian Almazan on piano. Jen Shyu does nifty turn on guest vocals. Strongly Recommended.

Tom Harrell, Number Five: One of the top trumpeters on the scene, Harrell has been making modern swing in a number of formats for years now. This recording is his fifth with his current working quintet that includes Wayne Escoffery, Danny Grissett, Ugonna Okegwo and Johnathan Blake. In some ways, it sounds like more of the good stuff, but not entirely: Harrell has a talent of sounding introspective when he’s all fired up. But on Number Five, there are several tunes that have a foggy morning beauty to them that floats more serenely than past recordings might lead one to expect. Current Harrell fans will not be disappointed with the new release, and those who haven’t been induced to pull the trigger on past Harrell albums might want to spend more time lingering over this current offering.

Curtis Fuller, Down Home: Trombonist Fuller keeps on going, and showing no sign of letting up. His name appears in the liner notes of some of the classic jazz albums of all time, including John Coltrane’s Blue Trane, Art Blakey’s Free For All, and Jimmy Smith’s The Sermon!, not to mention several under his own name for Blue Note. This current album has him in a sextet, and burning it up with plenty good ol’ straight-up bop. A classic musician making classic music in the modern day. Recommended.

Larry Willis, This Time the Dream’s On Me: Like Curtis Fuller, another jazz vet who shows no inclination to stop making beautiful music in the current day. This, a solo piano set, drifts nice and easy on the water’s surface. Pianist and piano, long-time friends, working as one. Fans of Larry Willis have reason to celebrate.

Tyson Naylor Trio, Kosmonauten: A piano trio album that suffers from occasional bouts of schizophrenia. Sometimes it’s a catchy hopping bit of Vince Guaraldi, sometimes it’s a prepared piano in a sea of dissonance, sometimes it hears voices in its head that tells it to play melodica, and sometimes a voice drops in that sounds like clarinet. And, somehow, it all works. Nothing boring here, and, thankfully, it doesn’t get so complex as to render it unlistenable. Nifty stuff. Find of the Week.

Barney McAll, Graft: Pianist McAll may not be a household name, but if you have a respectable amount of jazz in your library, there’s a decent chance that his name appears in the liner notes in a few spots. This recording has him in full avant-garde territory, working with a vocal choir, electronics, keys, and compositions that have a vision on exploring the way technology has affected interaction in society. There are moments of lovely pop music buoyancy, others of electro-experimental craziness, and others that hop pleasantly along. An album that is unlikely to reveal itself fully after just a few listens.

Tilman Herpichbohm, Jilman Zilman: Interesting quartet date with drums, bass, and two alto saxes. It’s actually relatively straight-ahead, at times sounding more traditional than modern. Plenty of quirky moments that keep things fun, plenty of tuneful moments that keep things, well, also fun.

Cello4qt, Suite Para Cello y 3djazz (Claude Bolling): Cello-led quartet date, with piano, bass, and drums. And not some chamber-jazz routine either; this is a stab at jazz with cello leading the charge. And it’s pretty successful. I’m a sucker for cello, anyways, but this is a pretty album that has some bounce to it, as well.

Various Artists, The Art of Napping: Soundtrack to the documentary of same name. Peaceful stuff, variety of stringed instruments. Curious and likable.

 

Interview: Cheryl Strayed

Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, a memoir of the author’s solo trek up the West Coast’s Pacific Crest Trail, is not a typical nature narrative. Of course, the conflict of woman versus the outdoors is present, but Strayed had faced more than her fair share of challenges before ever setting foot on the trail. By the age of 26, she’d lost both her mother and her marriage. Unmoored, she’d found her way fromMinnesota toPortland, where a new lover introduced her to heroin. For many, the story would end — or at least take a lengthy plummet — here. Instead, months later, Strayed was clean and hiking solo for 1100 miles up the PCT, from the Mojave Desert to WashingtonState.

Strayed, who many now know as the author of the Rumpus’s Dear Sugar advice column,  spoke with eMusic’s Jess Sauer about solitude, music starvation and the familiar pain of writing.

 

Do you think the transformation you experienced through your journey was inevitable? If you had not hiked the PCT, do you think you’d have had a similar experience elsewhere? Or do you think, if you hadn’t done it, you might never have learned the lessons you learned?

In some ways, I think both things are true. But I would say the truest thing is, yeah, I do think that I would have grown in these ways, I would have had transformations. I think what it is, is that the PCT made that experience deeper, and maybe in some ways, faster. I stepped out of my life and did this thing that was challenging, that forced me to be alone, that forced me to accept things on a really ground level. I had to walk, even though my feet hurt. Things like that. I think it just sped up what I would have inevitably learned and experienced along the trail. But, you know, maybe not. That’s the mystery, isn’t it? You can’t rewind and say, “What would my life be like?” It wasn’t like before I hiked the trail I was an unwise person. I always was a seeker, you know? I would have sought that out, but I do think that the trail gave me a deeper sense of those things.

Have you made any similar trips since then?

Not like that, no. I’ve certainly gone backpacking for a week or two at a time, but nothing on this scale. It’s a pretty big undertaking. A lot of people want to do it, but they can’t quit their job, or they have kids. I have kids now; I couldn’t just do that, you know? But I did it at the right moment.

You wrote journals the entire time you were on this trek. How heavily did you borrow from them, and how much did your voice change between the journals and the memoir?

If you read my journals, you might be able to say, “Oh yeah, that’s Cheryl’s voice.” When I was keeping those journals, first of all, they’re different than the way you craft a story. The way I’d write in my journals, sometimes I’d actually write scenes. I’d meet people, and I’d put what they said as dialogue. But usually, you know, the journal voice is much more like reportage. “I met so-and-so today, we did this, I walked this many miles.” So I drew on the journals for information, but not for the voice. The voice of the book is my writer’s voice, the voice I write with always in everything I write. The journal was helpful for details, like the content of the hobo care package. I’d recorded that in my journal, all of the things that were in there. I would have remembered most of it, but not all of it. For example, that paragraph was probably right there in my journal, and I was able to use it for my book, but most of the time, it was like, “Okay, this is the day, I was here at this place,” and then I crafted the story around that for the book.

You know how some books are written like a journal? I knew I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to do, like, “Day One…”

In the book, a lot of people ask what your mother would think of you hiking. As a mother, would you want your kids to have the same experience?

That’s always hard, because it’s like there’s this one impulse, as a mother, where I don’t want my kids to have to do anything that would be difficult. Like, they can’t ever fall in love, because their hearts will be broken, which is of course ridiculous. My real feeling about my kids is yeah, absolutely. I can’t think of anything that would be better for them to do than hike the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s really a wonderful growth experience at any time in any life. Absolutely I would want for them to do it. I would worry about them, but I would want them to do it.

Do you think you would make them take their cell phones?

Yeah, see, that’s the hard thing about technology. Once the world changes, it’s hard. I don’t know. For example, email is kind of the bane of my life, and I think a lot of people would agree. We’re overrun by too much email, we’re too connected. And yet we can’t disconnect ourselves somehow. To do that would be stepping out of the flow of the culture. Yeah, I would probably have them take their cell phones, but I would also advise them to maybe just turn them on occasionally, because I do think that silence and solitude — you’re not really alone if you’re walking along tweeting. I would be walking out there and I would think about friends, and they would be far away, and there was no contact.

It seems like the asceticism of being on the trail made you so appreciative, for instance when you hitchhiked and the people who picked you up played Stevie Ray Vaughan for you. It seemed like an almost holy experience that wouldn’t exist if you’d had an iPod you could just listen to.

No, it wouldn’t have. That was one of the surprises of the trail. Obviously, I knew I loved music, but I didn’t realize how starved I would be for music, how much it would really pain me. I was always singing songs in my head. It was like kind of getting to listen to the song, I could kind of play it in my head. Then, yeah, when I was in that car, it was on par with someone giving me a meal, you know?

It seems like that solitude was a huge part of what was so instructive about your experience.

Yeah, I think so. I think being alone was really important. It’s hard to hike the trail even with a companion, because you still have to carry your own pack and bear your own struggles. There isn’t anyone to sort of lean on, and that was important to me. I needed to be able to rely on myself, and not to have any other person I was physically bumping up against or being consoled by, or annoyed by, or whatever.

How has the book writing process changed for you since you wrote your first novel, Torch? I know in Dear Sugar, you describe the process of writing your first book as somewhat harrowing, almost like being in labor.

It’s hell. It’s still hell! It hasn’t changed. Writing is hard for me. Every Sugar column I’ve ever written is hard for me to write, and I resist it, and I don’t want to do it. Then I do it, and I think, “Why did I make such a big fuss?” That’s the same case with both Torch and Wild. Having said that, writing Wild was easier in that I had the experience of having done it before. It’s like anything. I have two children, and giving birth to my second child was like, “Okay, I’ve done this before.” Or when you get your heart broken for the second time, and you think, “I don’t think I’m going to survive, but I will, because I did one time before.” When I was writing Wild and I felt despair, I would tell myself, “This is just how it feels to write a book. This is what it is.” You feel lost, and riddled with doubts about whether this book is going to be any good or not, and I was able to say, “This is part of the process” and keep going. When I was writing my first book, it was “Maybe I just suck.” There was more doubt. So it still is every bit as hard, I just have a lot more wisdom and perspective about the experience.

So it doesn’t make it any less painful, but it makes the pain familiar enough that you know it’s not going to be eternal?

Exactly. It doesn’t make it less painful, but it’s a familiar pain. It’s like anything, right? It’s so funny how comparable this is to anything. If you’re a runner, you know it’s going to be hard to run a half marathon or whatever, but if you’ve done it before, you rely on experience to guide you through. Part of experience is just knowing that suffering is part of it, that discomfort is part of it, that doubt is part of it.

It reminds me of when you were on the trail and lost your boots. You made duct tape booties, but knowing that new boots would be in the mail at the next outpost helped you work through the pain. You dealt with the pain this time because there was an end in sight.

Yeah, knowing that those boots were there. Or, at least, assuming that they would be there. You never know, right? Until they’re in hand.

You just need hypothetical boots to goad you on.

Exactly.

Paul McCartney, Ram (Special Edition)

The case against Paul & Linda McCartney's Ram (the couple's lone album made together under their names) is formidable indeed. Robert Christgau's Village Voice review of the 1972 album is a vicious body blow: "The songs are so lightweight they float away even as Paulie layers them down with caprices. If you're going to be eccentric, for goodness sake don't be pretentious about it." Over at Rolling Stone, Jon Landau aimed far below the belt: "Ram represents the nadir in the decomposition of '60s rock thus far." Well…with such critical savaging, one might mistake Linda McCartney for being more despised for ruining a Beatle than even Yoko.

Landau also noted in his dismantling of Ram that "the Beatles were obviously a true group and history is now proving that it was greater than the sum of their parts." So like an ionic bond, wherein opposites attracted and each individual element contributed their strengths and offset weaknesses. And nowhere was that bond stronger — and more volatile — than between Lennon's emotional intensity and McCartney's whimsical melodicism. So as Lennon's songs grew heavier, McCartney could only offset that with more lightheartedness. Splitting off into solo entities, those trajectories continued. So with Lennon's cathartic and scabrous Plastic Ono Band album, bed-ins, and the weighty "Imagine" (not to mention George Harrison's massive All Things Must Pass somewhere in the middle), what could Paul do but become more lightweight and capricious and, yes, pretentious?

As a manifestation of that tendency, Ram is a resounding success, a blueprint visited by everyone from the Flaming Lips to Elephant Six Collective in the decades since. McCartney indulges both R&B rocker roots ("Smile Away," "Eat At Home") and aw-shucks folkiness ("Legs" and "Ram On") with a cast-off theatricality. The multi-part "Uncle Albert/ Admiral Halsey" should be an aural trainwreck: solemn introduction, maudlin orchestration, insufferably jaunty delivery, radio play FX, awkward tempo gear-shift, and kindergarten-friendly transcendent chorus. And yet it succeeded wildly, becoming McCartney's first No. 1 single in the U.S. since the Beatles. Ram and its delights is summed up best by "Monkberry Moon Delight." A tambourine-shaking, bass-sproinging, driving piano ditty featuring Paul at his caterwauling and doot-dooting finest; the lyrics still puzzle. Is it about snorting some hallucinatory substance? Or is it actually a dressing down of his former partner John? Or is it just jabberwocky nonsense? Precisely.

Chaos in Tejas 2012

Every year, Chaos in Tejas rises from the earth to deliver the most skull-crushing array of music available for your summer festival dollar. No taste is left behind — you can go from hearing the sweet, summery anthems of Best Coast to the snarling grindcore of Municipal Waste to the rollicking legendary lo-fi of The Clean. Want a taste of what your in for? Just give a listen to this station, specially curated by Chaos in Tejas festival director Timmy Hefner.

Apache Dropout, Apache Dropout (Deluxe Edition – eMusic Exclusive)

Apache Dropout’s self-titled debut was one of 2011′s most grievously overlooked albums. The Bloomington, Indiana, trio offered 11 songs with howling vocals and infectious hooks, and while they’re often lumped in with other garage punks, their guitar-driven sound owes more to Nuggets than Black Flag. “Teenager,” for example, is organ-driven bubblegum that laments the exquisite pain of adolescence. There’s the bar-band choogling, John Sinclair-namedropping “God Bless You John Kugleberg,” the brief, screaming blues “White Out Man” and the swampy, ominous tracks “It’s a Nightmare,” which ends with a cackling witch.

But this deluxe edition’s major draw is the inclusion of nine live tracks, which do the band an incredible service. The harmonies have more bark, their guitars are louder and more fuzzed out, and every song feels a little bit bolder. Though the bulk of the material comes from Apache Dropout, boisterous songs like “It’s a Nightmare” and “White Out Man” become more powerful and listenable in a live setting, which keeps things from feeling repetitive. Meanwhile, a poppier track like “Teenager” gets a bit more bite. The deluxe Apache Dropout shows both sides of the band’s personality: slightly more reserved in the studio and slightly more unhinged live. So listen for the hooks, but stay for the screaming.

Saint Vitus, Lillie: F-65

Saint Vitus were creating droning, deafening symphonies of gloom in the early ’80s, long before bands like Cathedral, Sleep and Down started turning the cannabis-flavored whiff of Black Sabbath into soundtracks for their own bong-enlightened adventures. And Vitus faced adversity from the moment they released their self-titled record in 1984 on SST, a label dominated by hardcore, post-punk and alternative bands. Singers came and went, including the indomitable Scott “Wino” Weinrich (ex-Obsessed, Shrinebuilder), who fronted Vitus through its best material while holding down crappy day jobs and debilitating addictions.

It’s hard to believe 17 years have passed since the D.C.-based doom metal veterans released their last album, Die Healing, and a full 22 since Wino was at the helm on V. Tack on the fact that the band’s eighth studio record, Lillie: F-65, is Vitus’s first to not feature drummer Armando Acosta, who died of a brain tumor in 2010, and the stage is set for the type of comeback unseen since the late Ronnie James Dio and drummer Vinny Appice rejoined their former Black Sabbath bandmates in Heaven & Hell. Fortunately for Prozac-gobbling headbangers, Vitus don’t disappoint. Not that the members sound at all happy about it.

Lillie: F-65, named after a strong downer the members used to take, is bereft of light or joy — a bleak, barren assemblage of repetitive, down-tuned riffs and despairing lyrics about addiction, environmental destruction and the apocalypse. Only “The Bleeding Ground” arises from a state of catatonia to burst into a 90-second gallop. Elsewhere, it’s all trudging, lumbering, groaning and shouting. But throughout, Vitus create more from less, using their simple, hypnotic structures as opportunities to explore. On “Dependence,” bassist Mark Adams plays counter-melodies over guitarist Dave Chandler elongated chords, and on “The Waste of Time”Chandler relies on noise over notes, saturating a minimalistic solo with tidal waves of feedback-saturated wah-wah.

Two instrumentals provide brief, welcome diversions from the sludge storm. “Vertigo” features a haze of layered distorted guitars, and possibly a violin swimming through a melancholy acoustic arpeggio and a monochromatic bass drum. And “Withdrawal” ends the album with a chaotic three-and-a-half minute collage of tangled, effect-laden guitars.

Lillie: F-65 is arguably Saint Vitus’s best release since Weinrich’s 1986 debut with the band on the classic Born to Late, and one which illustrates that, despite their morose songs, Saint Vitus are excited to be back experimenting with mind-altering volume and depressing audiences together again.

El-P, Cancer 4 Cure

El-P’s music has always been a mix of sci-fi futurist grandiosity and old-school rap grime, like watching a chromed-out chromed-out, mile-long spaceship reenact the Licensed to Ill cover. Cancer 4 Cure has some familiar hallmarks: El still pushes analog synth distortion until it growls like a ’70s stoner-metal guitar; he still sneaks classic hip-hop signifiers into an otherwise dystopian-tomorrow sound (Billy Squier and the J.B.’s always seem to survive the apocalypse), his drums still break bones, and he still spits verbiage like he’s letting loose internal-rhyme-twisting panic attacks. (His words, in opener “Request Denied”: “I’m a ‘holy fuck, what did he just utter’ marksman”.) But he’s rarely sounded this full-throttle start to finish — the sounds aren’t just pushed to the red but knifepoint immediate. And for all the hints of space-age debris on the margins, El recognizes that 2012 NYC is its own kind of Ridley Scott future. So he stays a master of reality, from the domestic-victim solidarity story of “For My Upstairs Neighbor” (the indelible sing-song chorus: “if you kill him I won’t tell”) to the police-state-ducking “Drones Over BKLYN” to the con-artist psyche-out “The Jig Is Up.”

Lords of the Underground: A Guide to Underground Hip-Hop

“Underground” is one of those tantalizingly vague terms that’s always on the verge of obsolescence until some mouthy, hungry new rapper comes along and reanimates it. Whether it was being dismissed as a fad, derided as a menace to society or ascending the pop charts, there’s always been a distinct way in which hip-hop has represented its underground ethos — the long-repressed reality straight from America’s cities on one hand, or a new set of soon-to-be-ubiquitous creative norms on the other.

But ever since people saw that you could make money and get signed to major label contracts by recording and selling rap records, there have existed self-identified underground communities on the fringes of convention, trying to subsist on their own terms. “Underground” means whatever you want it to: the sound of purist raps and backpack zippers; pride in local color and an alternative way of doing business; an opportunity to lose yourself in the performance — even if it means wearing clown makeup. To commemorate the release of El-P’s Cancer 4 Cure — the return of one ofNew York’s most influential independent hip-hop figures — what follows are some of those moments when someone came long and plumbed the depths of the “underground.”

Cold Specks, I Predict A Graceful Expulsion

“Cross your heart and remember me, the good father and the bad seed,” London-based songstress Al Spx sings on the opening track of her debut, I Predict A Graceful Expulsion. A sea away from her Toronto, Canada, home, it’s difficult to believe that Spx — who refuses to use her real name out of respect for her God-fearing, disapproving family — is writing from a place of anything less than gut-wrenching sincerity.

Slung somewhere between Bill Callahan’s folk nihilism and Flannery O’Connor’s down and dirty spirituality, I Predict A Graceful Expulsion is an extended dalliance with darkness. As though weaving a gospel for the unbelieving, Spx fills her “doom soul” with tales of fractured families, weary travels, and what feels like emotional weight of the world. There’s some sparse, sophisticated, instrumentation — a single piano here, a strummed guitar there, a trumpeting horn from somewhere in the distance — but it all comes back to the barebones elegance of her emotive rasp. When Spx repeatedly sings, “I am a goddamn believer” over the chorus of “Blank Maps,” her voice growing to an unhinged howl, oh, how she’ll make you believe.

Gossip, A Joyful Noise

At the beginning of the last decade, the Gossip were a garage band similar to pre-stardom White Stripes, if they were from Searcy, Arkansas, by way of Olympia, Washington, and led by an out, proud and queer fat advocate. Not anyone’s recipe for mainstream success. Fast-forward to the present: Gossip have massive European hits behind them; they’ve recorded with Rick Rubin and Simian Mobile Disco alike, and on A Joyful Noise, the threesome team with Xenomania’s Brian Higgins, the U.K. production whiz behind dance-pop hits from Girls Aloud, Sugababes, Danni Minogue, Pet Shop Boys and Cher. It’s a journey that would defy all logic except for the fact that frontwoman Beth Ditto possesses an utterly arresting voice, one that conveys extreme levels of intensity while squarely hitting the notes, and that along the way, she and her bandmates learned how to write proper songs.

Guitarist Brace Paine and drummer Hannah Billie still rock out righteously on punk-funk grooves, but this time they’re joined by flattering synths that lend harmonic support to Ditto’s vocals and make the melodies as strong as the rhythms. “Casualites of War” takes them into Fleetwood Mac territory, but they’re just as comfortable conjuring New Order on “Moving in the Right Direction.” “Get a Job” offers the sharpest class commentary since Pulp’s “Common People,” and the rest of the album features simple romantic declarations that mean more because Ditto delivers them as if she’s reliving every emotional tremor as she sings.

Linda Oh, Initial Here

On her terrific second album, bassist and composer Linda Oh digs deep within her personal history and surrounds herself with top-flight musicians to bring her ideas to life in full-blown color. Oh was born in Malaysia to Chinese parents and when she was only three, her family migrated to Australia; by the time she moved to New York to study jazz bass at the Manhattan School of Music in 2006 she had already studied piano and bassoon, and followed classical training with a love for pop and jazz. There’s a malleable rigor to music on Initial Here, suggesting a band that trusts ones another. On tune after tune her excellent quartet — drummer Rudy Royston, tenor saxophonist Dayna Stephens and pianist Fabian Almazan — plays with time, density, structure and intensity like taffy, dialing down and revving up, pushing and pulling.

Certain tunes explore her roots, like “Thicker Than Water,” where lyrics beautifully sung by guest Jen Shyu in both Mandarin and English offer encouragement and hope for someone in the process of being culturally uprooted, while the propulsive “Desert Island Dream” was written with a spirit of optimism, recalling the bassist’s move to Australia. Yet even without some of the narrative subtexts the music communicates expertly. The opener “Ultimate Persona” rides upon a fat, stuttering groove shaped by Oh’s forceful lines and Royston’s funky polyrhythms — giving both Stephens and Almazan plenty to improvise upon — while her ballad “Mr M,” written for Charles Mingus, wisely eschews any sort of literal homage, instead saluting the tune’s subject largely by being herself. She breathes new life into Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story song “Something’s Coming,” giving it a wonderfully halting performance that peaks with some breathless traded fours by bassist and drummer. She closes out the performance with a brief snippet of Stravinsky’s piano piece “Les Cinq Doigts.” She even veers toward some funky fusion on “Deeper Than Happy,” a high-energy slalom through stop-start effervescence — with Oh on nimble electric bass — but there’s never a whiff of grandstanding. It often takes years for jazz musicians to so adroitly bring personal experiences so directly into their music — if it happens at all — but Oh makes it clear that she’s wise beyond her years while remaining as curious as a kid.

Interview: The Cult’s Ian Astbury

Without charismatic frontman Ian Astbury, there is no Cult. The band’s co-founder and longtime guitarist Billy Duffy understands this, which is probably why he has agreed to put the Cult on hiatus whenever Astbury has become disenchanted with the arena-rock world and needed a break. During these periods, Astbury has created a garage band, Holy Barbarians, a solo album, toured with the Doors and traveled halfway across the world on a quest for self-discovery. In some respects, the Cult’s ephemeral existence is the key to their continued longevity. Instead of burning themselves out, as they did in 1994 after 14 years of nonstop work, they’ve simply faded out when the climate was wrong, and resurfaced when times were better, and in doing so they’ve retained their freshness, primal energy and marketability.

The Cult’s new record, Choice of Weapon, is their first in five years and their loudest and most immediate since 1989′s Sonic Temple. It also contains some of the band’s most diverse material, including Stooges-style abrasion (“Honey From a Knife”), David Bowie-esque balladry (“Life > Death”), New York Dolls swagger (“For the Animals”) and guitar-blaring anthems in the vein of “Fire Woman” or “Love Removal Machine” (“The Wolf,” “A Pale Horse”). In addition, it’s the Cult’s most lyrically poignant and eclectic release, addressing political oppression, violence, female empowerment, isolation, depression, self-immolation and, ultimately, redemption. More significantly, it’s a record of survival — one that might never have happened had Astbury been unable to lift himself from a pit of despair and find a reason to keep living.

A complex and multi-faceted character, Astbury has often been categorized as a stumbling rock ‘n’ roll hedonist, and through his 20s and 30s, he lived up to his reputation, getting drunk, taking drugs, and crashing cars and motorcycles. But what many interviewers have dismissed as pomposity is his genuine compassion and artistic motivation — his burning desire to help generate change through his ideas.

As exciting as Choice of Weapon is musically, it’s a pretty dark album. On “Elemental Light” Astbury croons, “Every one of us feels alone inside/ Every one of us has forgotten our way,” and on “A Pale Horse,” he sings, “Mercy gonna cut you right where you stand.” About a month before the album’s release, eMusic spent 90 minutes on the phone with Astbury discussing his abusive childhood, the ethics of punk, the excesses and indulgences of the ’80s and ’90s, the injuries that almost led him to suicide and the spiritual path that guided him back to health.

In some respects, you have gone from a rock ‘n’ roll stereotype to becoming someone who has questioned the validity and ethics of the music business and found a greater purpose.

Think about it, mate. You’re a kid and you join a band, and certain lifestyle choices open up to you that you’ve never had before. Of course you’re going to indulge. Now meanwhile, unbeknownst to yourself, you’re being objectified from the outside by people who are not in your position with those choices available to them, and the judgments and observations that are being made are coming from somebody who does not have those experiences you have. And they don’t understand what comes with this lifestyle you’re living. Suddenly, you’re a highly visual person. In 1987, I once walked through Leicester Square in London in a full Mariachi suit because that’s what I wanted to wear that day. Some skinhead recognized me from the cover of a magazine and punched me squarely in the face. When you’re on the inside of it, this is your life.

Young musicians often feel like there’s a mythology of decadence to live up to that’s been passed down through the generations. Some of them reach or even exceed the extreme levels of behavior of their idols. Others turn into stumbling caricatures of themselves or worse, and die before they reach 30.

Absolutely — usually around 27. I think it’s inevitable. Everybody goes through that Messianic period, where you look in the mirror and become narcissistic. You’re on the cover of magazines, you’re being lauded left right and center, you’ve got bags of money, you’re being worshipped. And you go, “Yeah, it’s me. I’m that guy.” But my period of that probably lasted about seven minutes. I got slapped down so fucking hard. There was this idea that I was taking myself too seriously and I was too big for my boots. People saw me as this cocksure kind of kid, but in reality I was dealing with my father dying of lymphoma through the height of the Sonic Temple period. Between shows, I was flying back to my father, who was vomiting and sitting in his own feces. That was my reality. And before that, when I was 17, I was going through exactly the same thing with my mother. But the difference was when I was going through it with my mother we were living in squalor. I wasn’t on the front page of the music pages. I didn’t have millions of dollars. So I was very, very grounded in terms of having some sense of propriety in my life. So, the drunken antics are only part of the picture, and for some people who don’t get out very often, an exciting part. But then there’s a private part of the picture that I would never disclose because I didn’t think it was anyone’s business.

Were you spiritual at that point in your life or had you not discovered that side of yourself yet?

I’ve been a spiritual person since I was born. My grandmother was in a spiritualist church as a clairvoyant. But when I was 10 years old, my real spiritual awakening began when my father moved the family to Canada because he couldn’t find work in Britain, and I was introduced to indigenous culture, which I found fascinating. I’d get in some trouble in grade school and these two indigenous kids would stand up for me. I was bullied a lot because I was an immigrant. So my friends were all the outsiders, the indigenous kids, Jamaicans, Turks. And that gave me some grounding when I came into the music business. I had some different perspectives and a different philosophy and I went at it in a different way.

Many vocalists view their band as their calling and their identity is defined by their role in the group. You don’t fit that mold.

I never did because it wasn’t a career choice for me. I got asked to join the band. I was picked. The guys in Violation became Southern Death Cult. They looked at me and said, “We love your look. Can you sing? Do you know any Sex Pistols songs?” I said, “Sure.” They put me in a room in the basement of a house and I sang “God Save the Queen.” They went, “That sounds great. Wanna join our band?” I said, “Okay.” I was an unemployed punk. I had nowhere else to go. I had recently been homeless and I had just moved into this house in a room that was 10 pounds a week. I got 18 pounds on the dole. So, 10 pounds rent and I only had eight pounds left. I had to steal my food or else I would have starved. So I join this band and by our fifth gig we’re playing the Marquee in London opening for Chelsea. It was reviewed in Sounds; we had six songs. We’d been together for three months. It happened instantaneously. And that roller coaster went on for 12 years before I walked away off a beach in Rio de Janeiro in 1995. I sat in a hotel room in Miami for 24 hours. My mental fabric was torn. I knew that I was in rough shape. I was actually afraid for my own life and my own survival. I buried 12 of my friends during this time and I thought I might be next.

As a punk turned major-label rocker, were you rebelling against the conformity of or confectionary quality of the music industry?

I railed against it every stage of the way, starting from Southern Death Cult. There’d be points when I’d just walk away and embrace other musical genres and other friends. I started [the garage band] Holy Barbarians in 1996 and I did a solo album [which came out in 2000]. I disappeared into the acid-house scene for a while. I was around the hip-hop community a lot. I’d go to clubs that had nothing to do with rock music or postmodern music.

How did you end up singing for the Doors?

After 9/11, the industry began to collapse and the band began to age. Rock music was falling out of favor with the popular culture. An offer to sing for the Doors came along, and I jumped on that for a few years. And during that period I started wondering, “Well, what is this all about?” I’d been going through various cycles and I seemed to be repeating patterns. I wanted to get to the core of what I was about and I found out that a lot of it was hidden in the shadows of my childhood. A lot of it was hidden in broken hotel rooms through the derelict self-destruction of my 20s and 30s. So I got off the ride for a bit and went deep into the mountains of India and into Nepal and had a very cathartic realization that I didn’t have to go to a holy site in the mountains ofNepalto find out who I was. The head abbot of the monastery made me realize that I belonged back in the West and that was where I would have my spiritual awakening.

Being in New York wasn’t a particularly healthy period for you, was it?

It was a dark night of the soul. I went through a difficult relationship breakup and also a period of intense physical pain. I was in two major car wrecks when I was a kid and motorcycle wrecks later. And then through the years I’ve put a lot of wear and tear on my body. I actually destroyed my left hip. I had bone spurs. It was mushroomed. I’ve been carried off stages in tears. I had to have major hip surgery. They cut the ball part of the ball and socket in my left hip and capped the socket with a pound and a half of titanium. So here I am on the Upper East Side in Manhattan loaded up with painkillers. I’m alone in a hospital bed looking out the window at the snowflakes coming down. And I’m thinking, “I’m done. This is it.” I was about to cash in my chips. I was seriously looking at the abyss and considering jumping in.

What stopped you?

I had a very close friend who was going through some difficulties in his life at the same time, and he ended up committing suicide. So the bullet went past me, so to speak. Also, I have two incredible boys in my life, my kids. I looked at them and decided, “I’ve got to get through this and get to the core of this self-destructive gene, the self-sabotaging element that’s overtaking me.” So I let New York help rehabilitate me. I walked the streets. I lived in an apartment on my own. Yeah, I’d fly toL.A.and I’d work and tour, but I’d come back to New York and live a monastic existence. I spent most of my time at the Shambhala Buddhist Center on the West Side. I read a lot of philosophy and meditated at home in an old 19th-century building near NYU between the East and West Village. It had a huge wall, so I got a projector and started watching films by Andrei Tarkovski, Akira Kurosawa, all the things I’d wanted to see for many years. And I had incredible, life-affirming moments, like going to the Gagosian Gallery one morning when the new Richard Prince show was going up and there was nobody in there, and having an hour and a half of Richard Prince to myself. I’d go to the Guggenheim early in the morning when very few people were there and I’d walk the Bowery at 5 a.m. and visit Central Park in the snow.

It was almost a very Zen experience. In fact, I went and studied at a Zen temple in New York as well. And as I was having this contemplative period, I was training in boxing at a club in Midtown. During this time, flashes of my childhood and my life as a musician came back to me. It’s a travesty what parts of my childhood were like. I was violently abused, sexually abused, alienated. I was always the new kid at school. Now, it wasn’t like I went around complaining about these things. It was just my lot in life. So, I started to write down these ideas and visions, and the molecules started coming together and became something. I was almost replenishing and regenerating myself during this spiritual break from the psychic wear and tear I had experienced.

Is that when the ideas for Choice of Weapon came together?

That’s where it began. And interestingly enough, some of it was happening around the time of the 2008 election, so there was a great energy in the city and great anticipation. It was November 4, 2008. That’s where the song “This Night in the City Forever” came from. It was about optimism and the feeling that anything was possible. The mantra, “Yes, we can!” really had some validity. It was like, “Fuck, we can do this! I can do this! I can be the artist I’ve always wanted to be. I can direct films. I can make the clothes I want to. And I can be a valuable member of society, and give back, contribute and carry my weight.”

Does the world need another musical revolution on the scale of ’60s folk or ’70s punk to effect cultural and political change?

It’s happening, just not in the same way. I see it in the rise of the heroine in a dystopian age, whether it’s Katniss from The Hunger Games or The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo. Major corporations are being run by women. We’re definitely in an age of feminine empowerment.

Do you feel women are more nurturing or is that just buying into cultural stereotypes?

Well, most stereotypes are perpetuated by men for their own reasons and for control. That’s what happened when organized religion started. When you go back to the hunter-gatherer time, men would go out and hunt and the women stayed at home and created a society. They developed language and communication and raised the children. So they’d stay at home and tend to whatever domestic livestock they were developing. But then the men came back and they saw the women actually had it better than they did. Women had the knowledge and power. What evolved out of that was organized religions and men’s clubs, and women’s knowledge and wisdom began to be suppressed. The domains of religion and spirituality were coveted by men, hence things like the witch trials, the Middle Ages. Even now you have fundamentalists debating abortion. A man can tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her own reproductive organs, yet these women can go to Afghanistan and put their lives on the line. If you go to Somalia there are young girls being subjected to genital mutilation. What the fuck’s that about?

Maybe it’s just another reflection of the savagery of mankind.

Exactly. Mankind. Because there still aren’t enough women out there. I’m not trying to be clever; it’s just that the events in my life have led me towards certain conclusions and actions. I’m working on documentary right now called Conquest, based on a book by Andrea Smith, who was in charge of indigenous studies atMichiganStateUniversity. It’s about the experience of Native American women over the past 500 years and it talks about sexism, racism, genocide and what women in these environments have experienced and what they’re experiencing right now. Some of the facts in this book are shocking.

I gave it to a friend, who’s a filmmaker and the wife of [electronic music producer] James Lavelle, who was making a film on UNKLE, and she read it and said, “I want to make this into a documentary and I want you to help me.” Next thing I know I’m a producer on the film and I’m driving to Yankton, South Dakota, to interview the head of the women’s health institute there. I’m sitting behind the camera while she proceeds to fucking school me about  what their experience is really like today with forced sterilizations, sexual abuse, the decline of the family. It’s a closed society, so the energy goes inward and they rip each other apart. Not all families are like that, but the community is really destroyed. These indigenous people hold a very valuable resource, this information that we in the West don’t have. We’ve gotten out of contact with our original balance and our original nature, but the indigenous people still practice that.

Is there still a fire and ice relationship between you and Cult guitarist Billy Duffy?

We’re very different guys and that’s part of the beauty of the chemistry of The Cult. Sometimes I go off into the mountains; he can pull me back and ground me. If I wasn’t working with Billy I don’t think there would have been a “Fire Woman” or a “Love Removal Machine.” Those kinds of songs wouldn’t have existed. They were very pragmatic, economical pop songs that he was the principal architect of. What I added to them was raw, earnest emotion and sensuality. He’s definitely been a great balance and I respect him. I love him. He’s my brother. I care for him very much.

Has he been understanding of when you’ve had to disappear for a while and put the Cult on hold?

He has shown his true colors as being a friend and really caring for me. His attitude has been, “Okay, when Ian’s ready for me, I’m here.” That’s been cool. But he definitely plays more the west side of L.A. and I play more the east side of L.A. It’s a different kind of crowd we grow from. Our friends are very different. And that reflects in the music. There’s music for the everyman and then there’s something deeper. There’s something there for everybody.

The Temper Trap, The Temper Trap (Deluxe Edition)

The Temper Trap have been heading toward world domination from the get-go. The Melbourne five-piece relocated to London prior to the release of their 2009 debut Conditions, figuring it would provide a better strategic base for their commercial assault on Europe and America. Ironically, that album, a proficient slab of Coldplay-hued, anthemic soft rock, went platinum in Australia but did little elsewhere.

Their follow-up has the world in its sights. From the shimmering electro-throb of opening track “Need Your Love,” it’s a ruthlessly efficient collection of Big Pop numbers forensically calculated to vibrate the Madison Square Gardens and O2 Arenas of this world. Whereas Conditions triggered U2 comparisons, here the synths are at the fore: “This Isn’t Happiness,” the glutinous ballads “Dreams” and “The Sea Is Calling” evoke Erasure, OMD and Tears For Fears, respectively. The group’s trump card remains the choirboy falsetto of singer Dougy Mandagi, which is enchanting both amongst the beguiling glitch-pop of “Miracles” as well as “London’s Burning,” a soft-focus analysis of the riots that struck their adopted city last summer. If enough moonlighting Keane and Snow Patrol fans discover The Temper Trap, that desired Big League status will soon be theirs.

Time Warp: Naxos’ Early/Modern Music Sale

Naxos Recordings — one of classical music’s most adventurous, renowned and consistent labels — is celebrating the big 2-5 this year. And we are celebrating right alongside them, with catalog sales on highlighted sections of their vast collection from month to month. This time, we’ve taken a top-shelf selection of early-music titles and paired them with a selection of equally first-rate modern classical, to see what kind of strange frequencies arise when we smash together the remote and the hyper-modern. That’s why we’re calling this one Time Warp: from Gesualdo to Cage, from madrigal to Minimalism, you’d be surprised how much composers from the 16^th century and from the current moment have to say to one another. Take a look.

Jukebox Jury: The Sugarman 3

Neal Sugarman is the co-founder of Daptone Records, the Brooklyn throwback-R&B indie that — thanks to collaborations with Amy Winehouse, Mark Ronson, the Roots and Al Green — have become known well outside their niche audience. Sugarman began as a jazz saxophonist before switching to funkier stuff more than 20 years ago, when he first moved to New York Cityfrom his hometown of Boston. In the late ’90s, he began hanging out with Gabriel Roth and Philippe Lehman, then running the Brooklynindie Desco Records and playing together in the Soul Providers. Sugarman’s band the Sugarman 3 — with Hammondorganist Adam Scone and drummer Rudy Albin — released two albums with Desco, 1998′s Sugar’s Boogaloo and 2000′s Soul Donkey.

When Roth and Lehman parted ways in 2000, Sugarman and Roth started Daptone and began a new band with several Soul Providers and Desco singer Sharon Jones, now called Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings. (Roth, a bassist/writer/producer, takes the alias Bosco Mann for much of his Daptone work.) The Sugarman 3 issued a third album on Daptone, 2002′s Pure Cane Sugar, but when the Dap-Kings’ profile blew up in the wake of their work on Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black in 2006-07, Sugarman was busy behind the scenes, as well as on the road. Ten years after Pure Cane Sugar, the fourth Sugarman 3 album, What the World Needs Now, is as classicist as anything else on Daptone, and as groovy — though as Sugarman points out below, he’s been more of a soul than funk man of late, as has the label generally.

eMusic’s Michaelangelo Matos took the M train to the Daptone offices in Bushwick to conduct this Jukebox Jury. Sugarman, who had just returned from the road (again), was in the midst of buying a new home in Sunnyside,Queens, when he sat down for these selections.

The Standells, “Dirty Water”

You did a version of this song on What the World Needs Now. Was it something you wanted to cover for a long time?

Yeah. I’m from Boston. And I know the Standells are from Seattle, and it was about a night in Boston. I am very familiar with this genre of music. I came up in Boston around bands like the Lyres. My brother was in a band called the Prime Movers. When I was in high school, we were all flipping out over our Lenny Kaye compilations. So it’s not like I just stumbled on this shit. I really have an affinity for it. And much like what Daptone does, it’s raw. The Remains are one of my favorite bands. The Sonics are cool.

Not to mention, I used to play that song, “More Today Than Yesterday” [by the Spiral Staircase]. There is a soul-jazz version by Charles Earland. I was always interested in these instrumental-shuffle versions of popular songs. This is a shuffle. Doing it with the Sugarman 3, it just felt like naturally an opportunity to take it back to [that].

Booker T. & the MG’s or somebody like that might have done this song if it were by a bigger artist, like the Beatles.

Yeah. But there were songs on the record I did do because of that: The Eddie Floyd/J.J. Barnes song, “But It’s Alright.” I was really thinking of Booker T., or the Fame Gang, actually. That cut was like much like how the Fame Gang were covering “Can I Change My Mind,” by Tyrone Davis. That was the one that I was really trying to do the Booker T. thing.

With ["Dirty Water"], it was just super fun to play that song. The Boston thing was a big thing for me. Also, I heard that at Fenway Park there is someone who programs the music who’s really into Daptone stuff. Like, I’ll get calls from my brother and different friends: “Yeah, I just heard Sharon Jones at Fenway.” So, I figured, “Man, I want to get this song played at Fenway, the Sugarman 3′s version.” [Laughs]

There is a tradition of Daptone covers. Is there anything contemporary you’ve thought about doing? Something obvious, like Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” or something?

Well, we did do a version — a Sharon-cut version of “Crazy,” a ballad version. We did that with the Roots. When we were doing that Al Green record they wanted to do a duet with Al Green and Sharon Jones [on] “Crazy,” which is kind of perfect, ’cause they’re both a little…[laughs]. But it never came out.

Bill Doggett, “Honky Tonk Pt. 1″

Yeah, I know this. Man, I have this. He played uptown, organ player. Damn it, the “Honky Tonk” guy. Why am I drawing a blank?

You got the title. It’s Bill Doggett. This is the original version.

Bill Doggett, of course. One of my biggest regrets is, when I moved toNew Yorkin ’91, Bill Doggett was playing every week at Showman’s inHarlem, which was a real organ bar. He was a resident. There are other things, like this guy Jimmy Robbins was up there on a regular basis. Bill Doggett I never got up to see. It was one of those things like, “Got to get up to see Bill Doggett. Got to get up to see Bill Doggett.” Bill Doggett’s an organ player, so just to hear some nasty bluesy organ shit. And then he just died, you know?

This is Clifford Scott playing saxophone. He was the honky-tonk. This was on King originally. Bill Doggett is definitely…those records are really powerful for me. It’s so simple and just grooving you know? I can’t imagine playing them for anyone and [them] saying they don’t like it.

The Lebron Brothers, “Boogaloo Lebron”

This is Mongo [Santamaria]? Definitely some more New York shit — just that it’s Nuyorican, but it’s also like soul-jazz. I mean, all the great musicians were playing inNew York. I wish I was more up on my Latin shit.

It’s the Lebron brothers’ “Boogaloo Lebron.”

The whole thing with boogaloo, which is kind of weird, is that there were these soul-jazz guys like Lou Donaldson that were calling their songs “Alligator Boogaloo.” There was real Latin boogaloo: Ray Barretto, the Lebron Brothers and all this stuff. Then there’s soul-jazz boogaloo, which was John Patton and Jimmy McGriff and Jack McDuff. They started playing this funky, Latin-y, straight stuff, and somehow that got the phrase “boogaloo.” When we were thinking of [the Sugarman 3's 1999 debut], Sugar’s Boogaloo, that was really where we were coming out of.

But since then, for Daptone, the Latin stuff is the one part of soul music that we haven’t really [touched]. I think of Daptone as a regional label. Every artist that we’ve done is from Brooklyn, for the most part. It’s not like we’re out A&Ring. We meet people that sing good, and we hang out with them and want to record them, and they join the family. The fact that we haven’t done a Latin record yet feels like that’s the one real big piece of what happened in New York in the ’60s and ’70s — and still happening — that we haven’t necessarily tapped into yet.

Walter Jones, “Living without Your Love”

I’m going to guess you won’t necessarily know this, but it’s on another local label.

It’s weird that it kind of cops some ’80s-sounding shit. But it’s not ’80s.

No, this is from 2009. It’s a New Orleans musician named Walter Jones.

But he’s definitely copping that ’80s no-wave stuff, like the stuff that was going on in the Bronx. What was that girl group — [sings "Moody"] — ESG. Which I thought was cool stuff, even on the rawer side, like the Bush Tetras.

Specifically, this keyboard sound and guitar lick strike me as being very like Prelude Records, circa ’82.

The crazy thing is, it’s not my thing, but it definitely feels pretty good. Definitely, you sit here and you start moving — you can’t not. Even the rhythmic electronic stuff, it’s not my tip, but it really in some ways can be closer to what we do than rock, because it’s hypnotic. I think that when we’re trying to groove, like Afrobeat, it’s really just trying to tap into that pulse. This is not bad. What label was it?

DFA, which is a label people think of as having a signature sound, even though it doesn’t.

So it has, like, a brand.

It’s branding, yeah — and Daptone is also pretty good at that.

Yeah, well, we focused on it. It’s a niche-oriented label, and [we wanted] to create a logo and put a brand on it and make it come alive outside of the track so that when you see that logo you feel something, as you do with Stax — which has certainly become some kind of brand for sure. It’s not like we plan on making shoes or shirts, but it’s important to have an association and a scene.

The Band, “Chest Fever”

Amazing. [Emerson, Lake & Palmer]? Deep Purple?

Very different from both, and not English.

Rascals? Oh, I know what it is, but…wasn’t that lick from a different song?

No, it’s the opening of this one. This is “Chest Fever” by the Band, from Music from Big Pink.

I have heard this before. I was thinking it was something else. But it’s amazing that you should play it just because I’ve been thinking about this group a lot — obviously, Levon Helm just died. Just the importance of this group in that period, just this great studio band that knew how to play great music in the studio and their shit was always grooving. I was just talking to someone about them recently. I was hanging out with Mark Ronson and he was playing [them]. A lot of the guys in the Menahan [Street] Band have been just listening a lot of the Band.

It sounds great. It’s weird. Especially working, I get real wrapped up in our genre of music. Sometimes as a musician you start to listen to music in a different way. You listen to a lot of music as how it relates to you and what can you get out of it. So especially now I’ve been DJing a bit, I’ve been buying more records. It’s that same thing. Don’t get me wrong: When I buy these soul records, I fall in love, and they can make me cry when I listen to them. It’s emotional for me. But I sometimes forget to look outside my genre. I’ll try to download this song today.

Jimmy McGriff, “Fat Cakes”

And this is the boogaloo shit — is that Jimmy McGriff? Electric Funk, is that the album?

The album was Soul Sugar, but I grabbed this off his Greatest Hits. For a concentrated best-of, you’re not going to get too much better.

No, this is cool. This was like real big when I was starting out and just buying records, when I first met Gabe. This was the stuff that I was flipping out on all the time, that whole soul-jazz scene. That’s what got me into this stuff. When I started, moved to New York, I was a jazz musician. I was not into bebop, the athletics of the way a lot of these musicians who were hanging out and playing. So it was real fun for me to start to play funk music — laid-back stuff with organ players. Also being able to play and get people involved in the music, which also put me away from the jazz scene and got more into raw funk, which was maybe what Pure Cane was heading in. From that, I just got really into soul records. That’s where my head is at now. I don’t listen to that much funk stuff. That genre of music, that organ soul-jazz stuff, was what kind of what got me real into where I’m at presently.

Was Gabe already a fan of this type of jazz stuff?

He was definitely a funk guy, like James Brown stuff. It was Sugarman 3 that got me into [Daptone]. We made this demo and this guy Frankie Inglesias just had this party called Soul Kitchen in New York. He was the one that was like, “Man, you’ve got to meet Philippe [Lehman] and Gabe [Roth].” They were running Desco [Records] the time.

Did you already know Desco at that point?

I didn’t. I had seen the Pure stuff: Philip had Pure Records, which was doing compilations. Desco I didn’t know about. They had just started. I took my demo up, called, and they said, “Come over.” I played them a demo, and at that point it was just trying to find a time when we could record the first album. It was amazing. It was such a cool scene.

Pantera, Vulgar Display of Power

The early ’90s were a bleak time for metal, especially thrash. Many bands either conformed to the popularity of grunge and alternative or packed it in. Then, in February 1992, Texas ragers Pantera released their second major label album, Vulgar Display of Power, and almost single-handedly regained the thrash metal reigns. Slower than both Slayer and early Metallica, Pantera were propelled by a trenchant groove that empowered their music and gave them a more contemporary sound than their peers had. If their 1990 album Cowboys From Hell was a bolt from the blue, Vulgar Display of Power was a finely crafted precision attack that capitalized on the strengths of its predecessor and gave Pantera a clearly defined voice that would influence generations of future musicians, including Lamb of God, Trivium and Throwdown.

At the heart of Power is a fierce, hungry and united band determined to make its mark with a sound that combined the lunging riffs, machinegun rhythms and untethered hostility of thrash with aspects of hardcore and southern rock. Much of the firepower came from late guitarist Dimebag Darrell Abbott, who was equally adept at rooting songs with slow, melodic crunch (“Walk”) unearthly six-string squeals (“By Demons Be Driven)” rapid-fire intensity (“Fucking Hostile”) or heart-rending calm-before-the-storm arpeggios (This Love,” “Hollow.”) And whichever direction the songs went, Abbott embellished them with virtuosic solos that were equal parts flash, speed and melody and always matched the mood.

Supporting Abbott was roaring, mouth-foaming vocalist Philip Anselmo, who sang with just enough melody to adhere to the band’s ravaged, undeniable hooks. Bassist Rex Brown played right alongside Abbott’s rhythms, making the band sound more dense and drummer Vinnie Paul Abbott complimented his brother’s playing with plundering double-bass, short, sharp snare and cymbal strikes and a variety of  bombastic fills.

Pantera, Vulgar Display of Power (Expanded Edition)

The early ’90s were a bleak time for metal, especially thrash. Many bands either conformed to the popularity of grunge and alternative or packed it in. Then, in February 1992, Texas ragers Pantera released their second major label album, Vulgar Display of Power, and almost single-handedly regained the thrash metal reigns. Slower than both Slayer and early Metallica, Pantera were propelled by a trenchant groove that empowered their music and gave them a more contemporary sound than their peers had. If their 1990 album Cowboys From Hell was a bolt from the blue, Vulgar Display of Power was a finely crafted precision attack that capitalized on the strengths of its predecessor and gave Pantera a clearly defined voice that would influence generations of future musicians, including Lamb of God, Trivium and Throwdown.

At the heart of Power is a fierce, hungry and united band determined to make its mark with a sound that combined the lunging riffs, machinegun rhythms and untethered hostility of thrash with aspects of hardcore and southern rock. Much of the firepower came from late guitarist Dimebag Darrell Abbott, who was equally adept at rooting songs with slow, melodic crunch (“Walk”) unearthly six-string squeals (“By Demons Be Driven)” rapid-fire intensity (“Fucking Hostile”) or heart-rending calm-before-the-storm arpeggios (This Love,” “Hollow.”) And whichever direction the songs went, Abbott embellished them with virtuosic solos that were equal parts flash, speed and melody and always matched the mood.

Supporting Abbott was roaring, mouth-foaming vocalist Philip Anselmo, who sang with just enough melody to adhere to the band’s ravaged, undeniable hooks. Bassist Rex Brown played right alongside Abbott’s rhythms, making the band sound more dense and drummer Vinnie Paul Abbott complimented his brother’s playing with plundering double-bass, short, sharp snare and cymbal strikes and a variety of  bombastic fills.

The reissue of Power includes the solid outtake “Piss,” which flips between a doomy, straightforward vibe and a faster more complex mid-section. Twenty years after its original release, Power sounds as sonically and musically exciting as when it first came out and remains as essential to any metal fan’s collection at Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, Metallica’s Master of Puppets and Judas Priest’s British Steel.