The Mutable Beauty of Bach’s B minor Mass

Bach’s B minor Mass is a masterpiece that by rights shouldn’t really exist. A setting of Catholic liturgy by a Lutheran composer, it seems to have been willed into being for no clear purpose. Though it’s a work of formidable coherence, Bach tinkered with it over the course of 20 years, gathering its bits and pieces practically until his death. Meanwhile, musical fashion had moved on, and the younger generation surely thought of him as a curmudgeonly geezer, patiently scratching out old-fashioned counterpoint in the ancient language of the wrong church. He lived the life of a pragmatic professional musician, but even as he completed the Mass, he must have known that there was virtually no chance that he would ever hear the whole thing performed. But his audience was a God who would understand, and posterity is the beneficiary of his devotion.

Bach was generous with musical invention, but reticent with information about how to perform his scores. Accustomed to directing the players he worked with, he didn’t specify how soft or loud any given passage should be, how sharp the accents, or how colorful the sound. The players knew these things, and if they didn’t he would tell them. Only now, they don’t.

The lack of detail is part of the Mass’s magnetism, because it allows performers to project onto it whatever they imagine it contains. That’s one reason there are so many recordings, ranging from syrupy orchestrations (with whipped cream on top) to the first original-instruments performances so thin and jerky they sound like a wheezing squeezebox. Search carefully through the bin, and you emerge with a map of changing tastes inscribed in Bach’s tough and pliant music.

The B minor Mass crept gradually into the repertoire over the course of the 19th century, so that by the turn of the 20th, orchestras had inherited it bundled with a repertoire of vast romantic symphonies. That’s the way things remained for decades. Orchestras that had expanded to cover the huge sonic expanses of Mahler and Bruckner symphonies lavished resources on composers who could never have imagined gathering such immense musical armies. In a 1959 recording with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra and Chorus, Hermann Scherchen opens the Kyrie Eleison with a vast, sunlit chord that seems to burst from an ocean of silence, a chord sung by a great gathering of souls. The numbers matter, and not just because a bigger ensemble produces a thicker sound, but also because it amplifies the distance between the loudest loud and the most reverent soft, between the group shout and the solo plea. Scherchen uses that acoustic fact to produce operatic extremes of intensity. The “Crucifixus” is terribly poignant music almost no matter how you play it, and in Scherchen’s sublimely mournful version, you can practically see the lights dim, and a procession of burlap-clad mourners tread slowly across the stage. The “Et resurrexit” follows in a flash of brass and drums, Christ’s resurrection heralded by outbursts of collective ecstasy.

The goes-to-11 treatment could easily turn into caricature, which is where Herbert Von Karajan took it in 1974, with the Berlin Philharmonic. His “Kyrie” is so intent on achieving instant glory, it’s practically hysterical. His “Crucifixus” is a juggernaut’s tread. The authentic performance practice movement was born partly in reaction to such excesses. Soon Karajan and his cohort were defending against a small but dedicated band of scholar-musicians who thought they knew exactly what instructions the composer gave and to whom. Joshua Rifkin declared symphonic Bach an abomination and insisted on one singer per part in lieu of massed choirs. In 1982 Rifkin produced a version that, in accordance with the new orthodoxy, was slender to the point of scratchiness. Still, he made his point: that the B Minor Mass is a work of vocal music and so the singers are the stars. He recruited agile, light-voiced singers like Julianne Baird, who skips through the “Laudamus Te” with an ingénue’s charm. Rifkin had launched a paradox: What is the authentic way to execute a work that had no place in Bach’s time? If the most historically accurate way to interpret the piece would be not to do it at all, then the only question is not how he did perform it but how he might have.

The next 20 years brought a flood of versions that were both scrupulous and musical, faithful to the evidence that Bach counted his musicians by the handful and not by the hundred, but also to the cosmic drama of the score. I have kept Philippe Herreweghe’s supple recording in rotation for many years, sometimes supplanted by John Eliot Gardiner’s more caffeinated version. Lately, though, I’ve been entranced by another finely tooled recording featuring the Bach Collegium Japan, conducted by Maasaki Suzuki. Instead of stunning revelations and volcanic upwellings of the spirit, Suzuki offers the Mass as an intimate, contemplative experience.

The wheel may be turning once again. The New York Philharmonic recently reclaimed the B Minor Mass from the early music specialists, performing it as part of the orchestra’s Bach Variations festival. That concert was recorded for future release, perhaps opening the door for a new generation of orchestral versions that are once large and light, baroque in spirit and modern in execution.

No Joy, Wait To Pleasure

If you adhere to the strict definition of the term, you really shouldn’t call it shoegaze if you can dance to it. This is a problem you run into when categorizing the most recent effort by No Joy. While the Montreal band formed by Jasamine White-Glutz and Laura Lloyd had its feet firmly plastered onto its reverb pedals on 2010 debut Ghost Blonde, new album Wait To Pleasure is far more agile and aggressive. Make no mistake: No Joy retains the bathyspheric vibe it established on Ghost Blonde, if only by virtue of its distant-sounding vocals, which rarely interrupt the mysterious vibe with an enunciated word. What’s different here is an avowed guitar crunch and blasts of white noise that at times make No Joy resemble a ragtag version of the Raveonettes. It’s just as easy to spot similarities to Lush’s shimmying pop (“Wrack Attack”), the Breeders’ bass-heavy rumbles (“E”), or the Kills mucking about with the Cure’s “A Forest” (“Blue Neck Riviera”). While these are somewhat expected influences and sounds, “Lunar Phobia” serves up a mid-album surprise, as a shaggy Madchester beat bubbles alongside some shamelessly catchy synth-pop tricks. It may be time to retire the band name as well as their shoegazer label.

Guards, In Guards We Trust

Guards are positioning themselves to take up residence in the house that Foster the People built; unacquainted with understatement, the trio pepper their caffeinated debut album with anthem-ready sing-alongs, full of pumped-up hooks for pumped-up kids. In Guards We Trust packs a spectrum of touch points into its 12 tracks, plucking influences from across the dial. Although leaning heavily on a slacker charm, “Silver Lining” is more jingle pop than garage, the raw guitar mostly used to frame the sugary chorus. “Can’t Repair” repackages their energy into a Motown swagger. The unifying factor here is energy, every song eagerly poised to become summer barbeque and film credit fodder alike.

The Phoenix Foundation, Fandango

If there’s any embarrassment about the notions of excess attached to the double-album format, then New Zealand sextet The Phoenix Foundation certainly don’t suffer from it. Their fifth album clocks in at an undeniably hefty 77 minutes and took them 15 months to record, but they remain blush-free about its high ambition and the sonic adventurism that packs every groove. As vocalist and guitarist Samuel Scott puts it, this is a record “that pays absolutely no attention to the short-form game of contemporary music.” What it does pay attention to is sound — the most complexly imagined, seductively layered and immaculately produced kind. Fandango lays out a dazzling buffet of psychedelia, prog-folk, synth pop and motorik rock, then variously treats each piece with ’60s echo and delay, fuzzes it out via ’70s analog gear or applies ’80s AOR glaze. So diverse are its sources, and so obliquely are they tapped, that it would take a week to pinpoint them all, but Can, Ash Ra Tempel, the Flying Nun roster (in particular, The Clean and The Chills), George Harrison, Aphrodite’s Child, ELO and Fairport Convention are certainly there in spirit.

Which might suggest The Phoenix Foundation as little more than talented revivalists with ADD, but the dizzying multiple pleasure of their magnum opus lies in its unforced eccentricity and sumptuous detail, in its headphones-friendly, enveloping melodic warmth and attendant sweet melancholy. Whether it’s deeply groovy opener “Black Mould,” the keening, Goldfrapp-like “Sideways Glance” or closing psychedelic blowout “Friendly Society,” Fandango reveals an obvious delight in taking its time and sweating the small stuff.

Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, Whitey: The Life of America’s Most Notorious Mob Boss

Some Bostonians used to like to paint James Joseph “Whitey” Bulger, Jr. as a wicked-awesome folk hero. “He robbed and murdered drug dealuhs and mobstuhs!” they said. “Whitey kept Southie safe!” They seemed to forget Bulger was a mobster himself, a man who robbed and killed lots of regular people, burying them all over Beantown since the ’60s.

The authors of this masterful new biography, Boston Globe reporters Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, dispel the modern-day-Robin Hood storyline early, kicking things off with the sickening strangulation of the young and happy Debra Davis — just a lady who got in Whitey’s way. That kind of thing sticks with you, even as the book loops back to the beginning to trace his immigrant roots, working-class upbringing and cruel treatment as a guinea pig in the CIA’s program testing LSD on prisoners. Once he’s out of jail (thanks in part to his politician brother Billy Bulger), Whitey becomes America’s most wanted man — part criminal genius, part reckless psychopath. And the most amazing thing? Until going on the run in the mid ’90s, he was moonlighting as an FBI informant. Turns out the feds were almost as crooked as he was.

Lehr and O’Neill have made a career out of mining Boston’s colorful criminal underworld; in Whitey they make equal use of the official paper trail and anecdotal interviews to turn a would-be procedural into a thriller. Clinical and precise, they lead you through every confrontation, close call and corpse disposal, right up to the worldwide manhunt and his heart-pounding arrest in 2011. By now even Southie has to be happy about that.

Ron Currie Jr., Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

Ron Currie Jr. begins his second novel with a clear invitation to call him a liar: “Everything I’m about to tell you is capital-T true,” he claims, and then proceeds to relentlessly throw that statement in our faces. Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles is presented as the memoir of one Ron Currie Jr., but very quickly we doubt that it is — while the book’s Currie, taken for dead, recuperates in Sinai after a failed suicide attempt, his manuscript sells millions of copies based on the erroneous public belief that he died tragically. This narrative intertwines with one much more authentically autobiographical: Currie’s father’s death from cancer (the title refers to the nicotine patches people use to try to quit smoking).

If this sounds like melancholy stuff, well, at times it is, but in Currie’s capable hands, this wide-ranging novel balances its poignancy with hilarity and outright wonder. It even gets vaguely utopian in the novel’s fascinating third strand, when the author turns his attention to the Singularity, the theorized techno-apocalypse that will come from runaway artificial intelligence, which Currie the narrator thinks is a sort of salvation. It all ties together in a thought-provoking investigation into which truths feel most meaningful to us, those that come from “real life” or those we get from stories.

Narrated in short bursts — often just a paragraph in length — Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles slips past with beguiling ease but is not easily forgotten. This robustly entertaining, lightly philosophical quest proves Currie’s widely lauded first novel, Everything Matters! was no fluke.

Who Are…Bleached

When women and girls listen to love songs written by and/or performed by men, we have to filter stuff out, switch pronouns and, often, navigate a sexist point of view. After a lifetime of listening to male-dominated pop music I’m used to making these kinds of adjustments in my head, but I still feel starved for love songs that I can actually identify with and dance to without a power struggle. This drives me to write my own songs and actively seek out pop groups that give voice to a female perspective on desire. I want to know what girls want, not just what guys tell us we want.

Bleached’s Ride Your Heart is quickly becoming my favorite American guitar-pop album since The Breeders’ Last Splash. Upbeat, infectious melodies are enhanced by minimalist arrangements reminiscent of power pop by Nick Lowe or mid-period Ramones. The songs explore the tension between narcissism and objectification, desire and attraction, longing and sweet sadness, real feelings and true crushes. It’s the sound of a girl’s fast-beating heart. You don’t have to be a teenager to feel like one; just put this album on repeat.

It was my pleasure to chat on the phone with Jennifer and Jessie Clavin about their evolution from Mika Miko, their visual aesthetic, and the L.A. music scene.

On playing in the all-teenage-girl punk band Mika Miko:

Jennifer: We would tour so much, but we were all like best friends. We learned how to play our instruments playing in that band; I learned how to book our tours. Also the hard parts of touring: how to deal with being so close to people all the time and work through situations. Just a lot of crazy things would happen, and we’d have to deal with it on tour and being really young. One night in Texas — it was our first tour around the U.S., and we stopped at SXSW and met this guy who invited us back to his house to party. So we went, and like — we know, you know, “don’t eat like shit, drink water” — but we were smoking weed from this huge bong and all of a sudden the cat started throwing up all over the house and the guy who lived there came out of this dark hallway and he was totally green and someone in Mika Miko started freaking out. I think there was something else in the weed, and we had to take her to the emergency room.

Another time this guy was like, “Oh come play our festival” and we had a day off so we were like, “Why not, we’ll just go play our set.” So we finally get there — and it was so out of the way — and he’s like, “You’re playing in the living room.” So we play in the living room and he was literally the only person in the living room watching us, the only other people in there were just walking by to go to the bathroom. Finally, he was like, “Sorry I can’t pay you guys any money because I had to buy the keg just to get people to come here.” We were like “whatever” and ended up stealing one of his pedals.

That made me realize that maybe doing everything yourself doesn’t always work out. At that point I was still booking the tours myself. I realized that if we wanna keep doing this, we have to get a booker.

On the musical aesthetic of Bleached:

Jennifer: In Mika Miko we were just playing straight punk. My favorite bands were Black Flag, Redd Kross, Circle Jerks, TSOL, and that’s what Mika Miko was trying to do. Jesse and I started getting into different kinds of music, like Fleetwood Mac, Rolling Stones, Gun Club. We’re writing songs that are punk, but also rock ‘n’ roll with a little bit of pop. We’ll pretty much write the whole song and I get to sing whatever I wanna sing. With Mika Miko, I was kinda scared to sing about what I wanted because there were so many people’s opinions. In Bleached I feel comfortable and we can experiment and we get to have a lot more control over everything.

On making stuff look cool:

Jennifer: When we first started, we didn’t know if we were gonna take Bleached seriously or not. We didn’t know where we wanted to go with it. We were really excited to have a visual side that wasn’t just live. The record art I really wanted to have a similar look and feel. I think when you look at all our record art, you kind of get the same feeling from each picture. They’re beautiful, but also dark in a way and they say something about love. I got that from the bands I grew up liking. They all have a visual side. It’s also just like taking what you have and expressing it. Like the Smiths records, you know [by looking at it] that it’s a Smiths record or like Black Sabbath art or Rolling Stones. Those are all my favorite bands, so I was inspired by that. If you have a band, why not take the art side of it seriously too, and make it look just as cool as you want it to look?

Jessie: Growing up, our dad was working in the industry as a sound engineer at Universal, so he was around movie sets a lot and we were always visiting him. Someone always had a video camera. I remember even just being in a car and playing some punk song, and someone would just push record on the camera. Sometimes we’d go film our friends skateboarding. Most of it was just fun, but then we started doing little shorts and did some videos for Mika Miko. I have a box of so much footage of us, but I have to find the equipment to set it up to watch it again. There’s so much Super 8 footage from tour that I keep because I’m gonna use it for something.

On making the record:

Jennifer: When we record we have a drummer, but me and Jesse do everything else. I play rhythm guitar and sing and Jessie does lead guitar and bass. When we first started, we just wanted it to be Jessie and I, because we had already been in a band where it was so hectic trying to get everyone together all the time. We were like, “We’ll just do it ourselves.”

On hanging out in the L.A. music scene:

Jennifer: It’s actually been really fun lately. There was a period where there weren’t that many fun bands, then it just started up again. FIDLAR are really good live, and Tangea are really fun live, too. And our friends Chad and the Meatbodies. There was just a festival in Santa Ana called Burgerfest because Burger Records is a label from Santa Ana and it was all these bands that are on Burger, like Gap Dream and they’re so good. That festival was soooooo fuuunnn, just so many kids going crazy. It was insane. I don’t know how many people that place holds, but it must be at least 1000. It was so crazy.

On where they will be 10 years from now:

Jessie: Jen will have her own clothing line. Possibly lingerie. She also wants a flower shop. Next to Jen’s flower shop, I’ll have a restaurant and it will be, like, all the food we ate on tour. Our band will still play shows. Maybe not tour as much — festivals would be cool. In 10 years we’ll be ready to do things at home.

But right now, we’re in this moment with Bleached. This is what we are doing right now. This is what’s in front of us to do. If you wanna go back to school, you can always do that later. This is the right time to be doing Bleached. It’s what we’re supposed to be doing.

Who Are…Bleached

When women and girls listen to love songs written by and/or performed by men, we have to filter stuff out, switch pronouns and, often, navigate a sexist point of view. After a lifetime of listening to male-dominated pop music I’m used to making these kinds of adjustments in my head, but I still feel starved for love songs that I can actually identify with and dance to without a power struggle. This drives me to write my own songs and actively seek out pop groups that give voice to a female perspective on desire. I want to know what girls want, not just what guys tell us we want.

Bleached’s Ride Your Heart is quickly becoming my favorite American guitar-pop album since The Breeders’ Last Splash. Upbeat, infectious melodies are enhanced by minimalist arrangements reminiscent of power pop by Nick Lowe or mid-period Ramones. The songs explore the tension between narcissism and objectification, desire and attraction, longing and sweet sadness, real feelings and true crushes. It’s the sound of a girl’s fast-beating heart. You don’t have to be a teenager to feel like one; just put this album on repeat.

It was my pleasure to chat on the phone with Jennifer and Jessie Clavin about their evolution from Mika Miko, their visual aesthetic, and the best show they almost didn’t get to play.

On playing in the all-teenage-girl punk band Mika Miko:

Jennifer: We would tour so much, but we were all like best friends. We learned how to play our instruments playing in that band; I learned how to book our tours. Also the hard parts of touring: how to deal with being so close to people all the time and work through situations. Just a lot of crazy things would happen, and we’d have to deal with it on tour and being really young. One night in Texas — it was our first tour around the U.S., and we stopped at SXSW and met this guy who invited us back to his house to party. So we went, and like — we know, you know, “don’t eat like shit, drink water” — but we were smoking weed from this huge bong and all of a sudden the cat started throwing up all over the house and the guy who lived there came out of this dark hallway and he was totally green and someone in Mika Miko started freaking out. I think there was something else in the weed, and we had to take her to the emergency room.

Another time this guy was like, “Oh come play our festival” and we had a day off so we were like, “Why not, we’ll just go play our set.” So we finally get there — and it was so out of the way — and he’s like, “You’re playing in the living room.” So we play in the living room and he was literally the only person in the living room watching us, the only other people in there were just walking by to go to the bathroom. Finally, he was like, “Sorry I can’t pay you guys any money because I had to buy the keg just to get people to come here.” We were like “whatever” and ended up stealing one of his pedals.

That made me realize that maybe doing everything yourself doesn’t always work out. At that point I was still booking the tours myself. I realized that if we wanna keep doing this, we have to get a booker.

On the musical aesthetic of Bleached:

Jennifer: In Mika Miko we were just playing straight punk. My favorite bands were Black Flag, Redd Kross, Circle Jerks, TSOL, and that’s what Mika Miko was trying to do. Jesse and I started getting into different kinds of music, like Fleetwood Mac, Rolling Stones, Gun Club. We’re writing songs that are punk, but also rock ‘n’ roll with a little bit of pop. We’ll pretty much write the whole song and I get to sing whatever I wanna sing. With Mika Miko, I was kinda scared to sing about what I wanted because there were so many people’s opinions. In Bleached I feel comfortable and we can experiment and we get to have a lot more control over everything.

On making stuff look cool:

Jennifer: When we first started, we didn’t know if we were gonna take Bleached seriously or not. We didn’t know where we wanted to go with it. We were really excited to have a visual side that wasn’t just live. The record art I really wanted to have a similar look and feel. I think when you look at all our record art, you kind of get the same feeling from each picture. They’re beautiful, but also dark in a way and they say something about love. I got that from the bands I grew up liking. They all have a visual side. It’s also just like taking what you have and expressing it. Like the Smiths records, you know [by looking at it] that it’s a Smiths record or like Black Sabbath art or Rolling Stones. Those are all my favorite bands, so I was inspired by that. If you have a band, why not take the art side of it seriously too, and make it look just as cool as you want it to look?

Jessie: Growing up, our dad was working in the industry as a sound engineer at Universal, so he was around movie sets a lot and we were always visiting him. Someone always had a video camera. I remember even just being in a car and playing some punk song, and someone would just push record on the camera. Sometimes we’d go film our friends skateboarding. Most of it was just fun, but then we started doing little shorts and did some videos for Mika Miko. I have a box of so much footage of us, but I have to find the equipment to set it up to watch it again. There’s so much Super 8 footage from tour that I keep because I’m gonna use it for something.

On making the record:

Jennifer: When we record we have a drummer, but me and Jesse do everything else. I play rhythm guitar and sing and Jessie does lead guitar and bass. When we first started, we just wanted it to be Jessie and I, because we had already been in a band where it was so hectic trying to get everyone together all the time. We were like, “We’ll just do it ourselves.”

On hanging out in the L.A. music scene:

Jennifer: It’s actually been really fun lately. There was a period where there weren’t that many fun bands, then it just started up again. FIDLAR are really good live, and Tangea are really fun live, too. And our friends Chad and the Meatbodies. There was just a festival in Santa Ana called Burgerfest because Burger Records is a label from Santa Ana and it was all these bands that are on Burger, like Gap Dream and they’re so good. That festival was soooooo fuuunnn, just so many kids going crazy. It was insane. I don’t know how many people that place holds, but it must be at least 1000. It was so crazy.

On where they will be 10 years from now:

Jessie: Jen will have her own clothing line. Possibly lingerie. She also wants a flower shop. Next to Jen’s flower shop, I’ll have a restaurant and it will be, like, all the food we ate on tour. Our band will still play shows. Maybe not tour as much — festivals would be cool. In 10 years we’ll be ready to do things at home.

But right now, we’re in this moment with Bleached. This is what we are doing right now. This is what’s in front of us to do. If you wanna go back to school, you can always do that later. This is the right time to be doing Bleached. It’s what we’re supposed to be doing.

New This Week: At The Drive-In, Laura Stevenson, Sweet Baboo & More

At the Drive-In, Relationship of Command The post-hardcore legends’ definitive statement, reissued on coloured vinyl for Record Store Day, is now available to download. Yancey Strickler reappraises a classic:

“One Armed Scissor” paced Command, earning modern-rock airplay with shouts of, “Get away! Get away!”, but it’s “Invalid Litter Dept.”, an epic indictment of globalism and imperialism that makes this album great, and, from start to finish, their best.”

Lilacs & Champagne, Danish & Blue Grails members continue their dusky, loop-soul side project with another album of album of pastiche-sampling that’s full of vintage-vinyl warmth. Nate Patrin writes:

“Grails members Alex Hall and Emil Amos struck beat-geek paydirt in 2012 with their self-titled debut, a musty, scraped-up soak in sample-based psychedelia that played like the lost score to a 1972 Italo-American giallo set in a desert. To continue that cinematic analogy, Danish & Blue is the soundtrack to the best stoner-rap neo-noir never made. It’s the kind of album where RZA-eerie piano loops pair up with heatstruck AOR guitar riffs and decaying fragments of Gary Wright’s synthesizer, before everything is soaked in whiskey, and set on fire at 4 in the morning.”

Sweet Baboo, Ships This singer-songwriter’s fourth album is billed as a “concept album about the sea”. Stephen Black sets his nautical theme – and songs about navigating love’s choppy waters – to sweet, sunny indie-pop, reminiscent of Belle & Sebastian. A duffle-coated delight.

Laura Stevenson, Wheel One of our favorite records of the year so far, Laura Stevenson’s Wheel is the New York singer-songwriter’s most focused and self-assured release. Rachael Maddux says:

“Rather than make the choice between draping the record in heartstring-plucking orchestral folk or loading it with unstoppered rock ‘n’ roll sass, Stevenson and producer Kevin McMahon (Titus Andronicus, Swans) went with all of the above, and it’s for the best; the songs plot themselves out one by one, each as connected and disconnected from what comes before and what comes next as the endless numbered days they taunt and lament. They bloom unexpectedly, then wither away; they blindside, linger and end before you’re ready.”

No Joy, Wait For Pleasure No Joy’s second record sends them diving further into Lush/Swervedriver territory, and they turn up with sharper songwriter and bigger hooks this time around.

Slava, Raw Solutions The debut from this Moscow-born, Chicago-raised, Brooklyn-based DJ/producer. Andy Battaglia says:

“Many of the tracks on Raw Solutions take a snippet of a vocal sample and circle around it until it’s been spied from every conceivable angle. Apart from his love for spin-cycle sampling, Slava showcases a nimble production style that favors house music-derived rhythmic syncopation and infusions of pan-electronic elements like rave sirens (“Heartbroken”) and quasi-jungle “rinse-outs” (“Girls on Dick”). It’s all clenched and economical and tight, and it never lets up.”

Luke Winslow-King, The Coming Tide A long-ago eMusic Selects artist masters the art of revival folk on his latest. Hilary Saunders says:

“The 29-year-old singer/songwriter, slide guitarist Luke Winslow-King is from Michigan, but he has called The Big Easy home since 2001. On his third full-length, you can hear that the city has made its way into his bones. Winslow-King masters the art of revivalist folk, seamlessly blending New Orleans jazz, Delta blues and ragtime into an album as sweet and satisfying as devouring plate of beignets and sipping a café au lait on the banks of the Mississippi.”

Six Degrees of At the Drive-In’s Relationship of Command

It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five other albums we've deemed related in some way. In some cases these connections are obvious, in others they are tenuous. But, most important to you, all of the records are highly, highly recommended.

Six Degrees of At the Drive-In’s Relationship of Command

It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five other albums we've deemed related in some way. In some cases these connections are obvious, in others they are tenuous. But, most important to you, all of the records are highly, highly recommended.

Lilacs & Champagne, Danish & Blue

Grails members Alex Hall and Emil Amos struck beat-geek paydirt in 2012 with their self-titled debut as Lilacs & Champagne, a musty, scraped-up soak in sample-based psychedelia that played like the lost score to a 1972 Italo-American giallo set in a desert. To continue that cinematic analogy, Danish & Blue is the soundtrack to the best stoner-rap neo-noir never made. It’s the kind of album where RZA-eerie piano loops pair up with heatstruck AOR guitar riffs and decaying fragments of Gary Wright’s synthesizer, soaked in whiskey, and set on fire at 4 in the morning. If that reads like lightweight chillwave kitsch, it ain’t – the drums knock too hard to lull listeners into a reverie. Danish & Blue trades in its predecessor’s bristling spookiness for a mirror-shaded, marquee-lit haze wafting somewhere between sleaze and sophistication — dig the fusion-via-Schifrin bass growl of “Police Story” and the Thin Lizzy-assaults-Precinct 13 dirge of “Hamburgers and Tangerines” for the choicest highlights.

Vhöl, Vhöl

After breaking up their black metal band Ludicra in 2011, guitarist John Cobett and drummer Aesop Dekkar decided to make one more album together, so they recruited YOB vocalist Mike Scheidt and Hammers of Misfortune’s multi-instrumentalist Sigrid Sheie (on bass) and formed Vhöl, a band that combines well-honed songwriting with offbeat experimentation and freewheeling abandon. The band’s self-titled debut is rooted in black metal and hardcore, but it’s the injections of classic and prog-metal between bludgeoning rhythms and blastbeats that make the album exceptional. Picture old-school Darkthrone and Motorhead tangled in a burning mosh pit with Mastodon, Voivod and Rob Halford.

More than anything, it’s those Halford touches that make Vhöl stand out. Unlike the countless bands that interrupt extreme metal passages with melodic riffs and clean vocals, Vhöl layer soaring vibrato atop sepulchral growls and wherever the fuck they feel like it, and never to create sing-along choruses. The same holds true for Cobbett’s tuneful leads and fills, which provide euphony to even the most dissonant parts of a song. Throwing caution to the wind is Vhöl’s M.O., and it’s what they’re best at. On “Plastic Shaman” they weave an epic NWOBHM guitar melody, sustained chords and marching drums through a black crust rhythm and halfway through “Illuminate” the song takes a chiming, psychedelic left turn before transforming into a transition that can only be described as power metal to unlock the gates of Valhalla. Even stranger is whatever lurks in the middle of “Arising,” which resembles a nightmarish ho-down replete with shuffling drums and slide guitar. Although Vhöl was originally intended as a one-off, the members reportedly are already making plans for a follow-up. As long as they don’t lose their bold spontaneity and hunger to reinvent, it should mark yet another step in the continued growth of extreme metal.

About the Album: Phoenix’s Bankrupt!

In our age of overnight indie mega-stars, Phoenix are the last of a dying breed. The French quartet earned their success the hard way: gradually building an international fanbase over the course of a decade and expanding and refining their quirky, hook-driven pop from album to album. In 2009, Phoenix delivered their commercial breakthrough, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, which remained a constant fixture on bar playlists and workout mixes well into the following year. It’s a punchy, synth-splattered crossover masterpiece, fueled by Thomas Mars’s pleading, tuneful yelp. Singles like “1901″ and “Listzomania” became ubiquitous car-commercial anthems, and the reviews across-the-board were glowing.

So it’s not a surprise that Phoenix took their sweet time crafting an encore. Four long years after Wolfgang, they’ve delivered, Bankrupt!, their fifth studio album that contains a slightly hazier, more impressionistic batch of songs that nonetheless maintains their genial approach and pack epic hooks.

eMusic’s Ryan Reed spoke with bassist Deck D’Arcy just before the group’s performance at Coachella, discussing their steady career trajectory and to unlock the eclectic influences behind Bankrupt!‘s standout tracks.

On the album’s slightly more experimental vibe:

[The experimentation] was not really conscious. We have a bit of a weird way to write songs — it’s a bit empirical. We basically record everything we are doing and listen to stuff afterward with fresh ears and make a very thorough selection of short bits of music that we then put together, trying to create cool stuff at random. It’s hard to consciously write a proper song from A to Z. What we find attractive at first is something quite predictable, so we kind of have to put together kind of random stuff, and sometimes it ends up being weird.

But what’s weird now is not going to be weird in two weeks or years or whatever. What’s weird is relative to the timeline — it’s not very absolute. It just depends on when you hear stuff. Most of my favorite albums, I didn’t care for on my first listen. I remember the first time I listened to [Beck's 1996 album] Odelay, I didn’t like it, and it ended up being my favorite album of all-time — or in the top three. So for us, this is how we see music anyway. We love “grower” albums.

On the pressures of following Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix:

The thing is we don’t really choose where we’re going, you know? We just make everything ready to capture our inspiration in the studio, but we don’t know where we’re going, and that’s the exciting part of it. If we knew where we were going, it wouldn’t be genuine. We don’t know what we want, but we know what is cool and not cool for us. We just generate as much music as possible and select what’s cool.

Shit, I lost my point [laughs]. The thing is, we did have quite crazy success on the last album from where we were before, but every album has been a relative success. The first album came out of nothing — we were just a Versailles band, and we released an album and ended up touring the world. The album wasn’t a worldwide success, but it was still kind of crazy. We felt like, “Wow, this is amazing!” With the second album, we had success in some other countries. We had an idea of what success is and an idea of how inconsistent it is. This time, [the success] was the U.S., so it had a bigger consequence, of course. But I really think we haven’t been influenced by the success of the previous album.

We did all of our albums in a very selfish way. The only goal is to impress the other band members, not really to impress the audience. We just decided to do it exactly the same way we did Wolfgang — not trying to impress anyone other than ourselves. When we finished Wolfgang, no one really liked it – like, [among] our friends. We had no record company then. We didn’t struggle with it, but it wasn’t easy. People were like, “Yeah, that’s cool, whatever.” It ended up being successful, but that wasn’t really obvious at the time. So we decided to apply exactly the same formula [with Bankrupt!].

On the album’s track sequence:

That’s the specialty of Phillipe Zdar. He’s very good at it. I remember for awhile, we were having arguments, but on this one, he found the perfect order the first time. It took him like two days, and he came back with it, and everyone agreed. Which never happens in Phoenix — we have arguments about everything. But it was just perfect, or we felt it was perfect. Especially on this album, the sequence is quite important. We tried a lot, and we felt, “This is not right.” And Phillipe found a good one, so it’s thanks to him. We grew up with the LP — we are old now, so we’re used to the LP’s A-side, B-side vibe. It’s very important to us, the album format. So it’s something that has to be exactly right.

Luke Winslow-King, The Coming Tide

The 29-year-old singer/songwriter, slide guitarist and eMusic Selects alum Luke Winslow-King is from Michigan, but he has called The Big Easy home since 2001. On his third full-length, you can hear that the city has made its way into his bones. On The Coming Tide, Winslow-King masters the art of revivalist folk, seamlessly blending New Orleans jazz, Delta blues and ragtime into an album as sweet and satisfying as devouring plate of beignets and sipping a café au lait on the banks of the Mississippi.

Accompanied by his girlfriend, the sugary-voiced, washboard-wielding Esther Rose, Winslow-King amasses a fine collection of traditionalist originals and personalized covers on The Coming Tide. Rose sings harmony while a thumping upright bass and a brass section leading call-and-repeats accompany them, and the album sways with easy confidence. Winslow-King particularly shines in his blues numbers, namely a faithful, slower rendition of Blind Willie Johnson’s “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning” and a slide-driven cover of “Got My Mind Set On You,” made famous by George Harrison in the late ’80s. Nostalgia rains heavy on The Coming Tide, but Winslow-King reins it in, refashioning weathered words and sounds and branding them his own.

New This Week: Phoenix, Laura Stevenson, Craig Taborn, & More

Phoenix, Bankrupt!: Of this week’s biggest release, Barry Walters argues that Phoenix are still “the epitome of rock-disco dialectic.”

Their new one picks up where 2009′s mainstream breakthrough Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix left off, maintaining that album’s crowd-pleasing formula while accentuating the group’s gentle waywardness. Mostly, there’s pleasure on top of pleasure, sweat mixed with digital mathematics, both equally generous.

Laura Stevenson, Wheel: One of our editors’ favorite records of the year, Laura Stevenson’s Wheel is the New York singer-songwriter’s most focused and self-assured release. Rachael Maddux says:

Rather than make the choice between draping the record in heartstring-plucking orchestral folk or loading it with unstoppered rock ‘n’ roll sass, Stevenson and producer Kevin McMahon (Titus Andronicus, Swans) went with all of the above, and it’s for the best; the songs plot themselves out one by one, each as connected and disconnected from what comes before and what comes next as the endless numbered days they taunt and lament. They bloom unexpectedly, then wither away; they blindside, linger and end before you’re ready.

Craig Taborn Trio, Chants : Craig Taborn, Gerald Cleaver and Thomas Morgan are not your grandfather’s piano trio. Of Taborn and co.’s latest, Britt Robson says:

Craig Taborn set a daunting standard with his two previous outings as a leader: 2004′s Junk Magic is a jazz-electronica masterwork that updated Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew for the 21st century; while 2011′s Avenging Angel has been hailed for expanding the language of solo piano improvisation. Chants doesn’t detract from the luster of that legacy. It scrolls out like a seamless series of surprises, with interplay that is earthy and organic, yet whirring with intimate, nuanced colors, like a pastel kaleidoscope.

Junip, Junip: On Junip’s latest, Jose Gonzalez and co. withdraw further into their comfortable cocoon of airy melancholy and spacey synths. Marc Hogan says:

Throughout, Junip is unassumingly elegant, particularly on bleary-eyed dancefloor pick-me-up “Your Life Your Call,” jagged psych excursion “Villain” and tranquil epiphany “After All Is Said and Done.” Over African-style rhythms, “Baton” finds a way to make even whistling sound subtle. As suggested in the lyrics of patiently propulsive first single “Line of Fire,” sometimes it’s best to beat a graceful retreat. There’s more than one way to deconstruct the mechanisms of consumer culture.

Luke Winslow-King, The Coming Tide: a long-ago eMusic Selects artist maters the art of revival folk on his latest. Hilary Saunders says:

The 29-year-old singer/songwriter, slide guitarist Luke Winslow-King is from Michigan, but he has called The Big Easy home since 2001. On his third full-length, you can hear that the city has made its way into his bones. On The Coming Tide, Winslow-King masters the art of revivalist folk, seamlessly blending New Orleans jazz, Delta blues and ragtime into an album as sweet and satisfying as devouring plate of beignets and sipping a café au lait on the banks of the Mississippi.

Slava, Raw Solutions: The debut from this Moscow-born, Chicago-raised, Brooklyn-based DJ/producer. Andy Battaglia says:

Many of the tracks on Raw Solutions take a snippet of a vocal sample and circle around it until it’s been spied from every conceivable angle. Apart from his love for spin-cycle sampling, Slava showcases a nimble production style that favors house music-derived rhythmic syncopation and infusions of pan-electronic elements like rave sirens (“Heartbroken”) and quasi-jungle “rinse-outs” (“Girls on Dick”). It’s all clenched and economical and tight, and it never lets up.

Lilacs & Champagne, Danish & Blue – Grails members continue their dusky, loop-soul side project with another album of album of pastiche-sampling you can smell the used-record bin on. Nate Patrin writes:

Grails members Alex Hall and Emil Amos struck beat-geek paydirt in 2012 with their self-titled debut as Lilacs & Champagne, a musty, scraped-up soak in sample-based psychedelia that played like the lost score to a 1972 Italo-American giallo set in a desert. To continue that cinematic analogy, Danish & Blue is the soundtrack to the best stoner-rap neo-noir never made. It’s the kind of album where RZA-eerie piano loops pair up with heatstruck AOR guitar riffs and decaying fragments of Gary Wright’s synthesizer, before everything is soaked in whiskey, and set on fire at 4 in the morning.

Amy Dickson, Dusk & Dawn  - I know, I know – another classical saxophonist performing Faure. How crowded can one niche get? Jokes, obviously. This is a tastefully and beautifully played selection of light classics that steer well clear of Muzak; Dickson has a wonderfully pure, even tone, and she interprets “I Only Have Eyes For You” as elegantly as she does Faure’s Pavane.  An unusual treat.

Bill Ryder-Jones, A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart – The former Coral guitarist continues his solo career with a wonderful collection of sad-eyed, gently warped ballads, in the vein of XO-era Elliott Smith.

Black Milk, Synth or Soul – Black Milk is a phenomenally talented hip-hop producer from Detroit, and this beat tape reaffirms that. I want him to make more music with Danny Brown soon.

No Joy, Wait For Pleasure -  No Joy’s second record sends them diving further into Lush/Swervedriver territory, and they turn up with sharper songwriter and bigger hooks this time around.

Frank Turner, Tape Deck Heart – Hmm, a “tape deck heart.” Does that mean…it eats whatever goes into it? Curious. Frank Turner’s punky folk rock is pretty meat-and-potatoes, and it sounds like Frank Turner fans are getting what they want here.

Har Mar Superstar, Bye Bye 17 – The swarthy soul man’s latest is a sort of tribute to Sam Cooke, apparently. Lead singer “Lady You Shot Me” (the last words Sam Cooke is ever said to have spoken), however, has a distinctly ’70s Rod Stewart meets the Daptones vibe. Makes sense, as Rod was initially a white guy trying to sound like Sam Cooke.

Snoop Lion, Reincarnated – Snoop Dogg went to Jamaica for the first time. Snoop Dogg is now Snoop Lion. He has made a reggae album. Careful, folks: visiting Jamaica can be very dangerous. Featuring Drake, Mavado, Mr. Vegas, Akon, and others.

The Thermals, Desperate Ground Demos – Some demo versions of Thermals balled-fists triumphal new one.

Tom Jones, Spirit in the Room – Tom Jones attempts his geezer-stares-down-mortality, Johnny-Cash-on-The-Man-Comes-Around moment, covering Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Odetta, Bob Dylan, and more.

Lana Del Rey, Young and Beautiful – LDR sings another version of her exact same song. This time for the up-and-coming Thing Baz Lurhmann Is About To Do To The Great Gatsby.

Craig Taborn Trio, Chants

Craig Taborn HAS set a daunting standard with his outings as a leader: 2004′s Junk Magic, for one, is a jazz-electronica masterwork that updated Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew for the 21st century; 2011′s Avenging Angel, for its part has been hailed for expanding the language of solo piano improvisation. Chants doesn’t detract from the luster of that legacy. Drummer Gerald Cleaver (who has known Taborn for 25 years) and bassist Thomas Morgan have been playing the vast majority of these nine Taborn originals for years now, and the resultant music scrolls out like a seamless series of surprises, with interplay that is earthy and organic, yet whirring with intimate, nuanced colors, like a pastel kaleidoscope.

Sometimes the innovations are spun off from a repetitive riff, as on “Beat the Ground.” Sometimes they roam into a journey, as on the 13-minute “All True Night/Future Perfect,” which begins with a classically-oriented piano solo and concludes with roguish intensity. Sometimes they coalesce, as in the gorgeous bass-and-drums engagement during the quiet “In Chant.” They can feel “avant-garde,” as during the delicate sonic crumpling of “Cracking Hearts,” or bold and insistent, as in the rousing closer, “Speak the Name.” This is not your grandfather’s piano trio; this is a shape-shifting music that snuggles into nooks and crannies of its own making.

Junip, Junip

Jose González, who came to renown for a muted cover of fellow Swedish act the Knife’s “Heartbeats,” has, like them, spent the years since reacting against that hit. After slipping off into bleakness and haunting textures of 2007′s sophomore solo outing In Our Nature, he returned to pre-fame band Junip for his next album, 2010′s Fields, which expertly spiked González’s airy acoustic melancholy with spacey synths and free-flowing drums.

The follow-up shakes off its own shackles by instead withdrawing even further into Junip’s comfortable cocoon. Throughout, Junip is unassumingly elegant, particularly on bleary-eyed dancefloor pick-me-up “Your Life Your Call,” jagged psych excursion “Villain” and tranquil epiphany “After All Is Said and Done.” Over African-style rhythms, “Baton” finds a way to make even whistling sound subtle. As suggested in the lyrics of patiently propulsive first single “Line of Fire,” sometimes it’s best to beat a graceful retreat. There’s more than one way to deconstruct the mechanisms of consumer culture.

Interview: Laura Stevenson

It’s a gorgeous spring afternoon on the Lower East Side, and Laura Stevenson is talking about death. Not her fear of it so much as its inevitability — the fact that it’s coming for all of us, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. That she delivers the observation in a bright, chipper, skipping voice just makes it feel more ominous.

That, in part, is one of the most bewitching things about Wheel, Stevenson’s third record and first credited solely to her as opposed to “Laura Stevenson & the Cans.” Musically, it’s big and brash and joyous — Crazy Horse by way of the Blackhearts — but tune in to Stevenson’s lyrics and you’ll find California being decimated by an earthquake and fragile, trembling children begging for their mother to notice them. That Stevenson should reach such stunning musical maturation so quickly is, in part, hereditary: Her grandfather, Harry Simeone, was a musical arranger most famous for co-writing the Christmas standard “The Little Drummer Boy” and her grandmother, Margaret McCrae (née McCravy), sang with Benny Goodman’s orchestra. Stevenson’s own music eschews the lush for the ragged — they’re scrappy songs that claw their way forward, bleeding, bruised and determined.

eMusic’s Editor-in-Chief J. Edward Keyes met up with Stevenson at the Grey Dog Café to talk about suicide, nihilism and how America faked the moon landing.

To wrap up: I know that you’re on the road a lot. I was wondering what some of your more unfortunate tour stops have been.

Oh man. In Bozeman, Montana, we played a show for two people, plus the sound guy. We didn’t know what to expect. We played with this band called Genitaliens — they were, you know, your basic two-piece funk jammer — and the lead singer had been stung by a bee. His eyes were swollen shut. The sound guy was like, “Bro, you need to go to the hospital bro?” And he was like, “No, I’m cool. The show must go on.” Yeah, the show must go on, for no one.

I mean, all of those in-between shows are still hard, the ones in places like Boise, Idaho — even though they should have a good scene, because that’s where Built to Spill is from. We have a manager now who looks out for us, but on the tours we were booking ourselves, we’d be like, “Yeah, we’ll play in this community space at this college we didn’t even know existed,” and then we’d show up and it’s like three kids and they’re like, “Yay! You made it! Um, we can’t pay you, is that OK?”

I get weirdly fascinated with places like that in the middle of the country. I mean, I’d never have any cause to go to Boise. I always just wonder what it’s like there.

I mean, the drive through Idaho was one of the most scenic drives that we did. Wyoming was fucking beautiful. But you’re just bleeding money. Bleeding money.

I mean, on the other hand, it seems like the bands that suffer a lot in the early days and pay dues are the ones that have a longer career arc as opposed to the ones that blow up instantly.

I think so, too. Because you just come across people who love your music, because it’s this little thing that they watched grow. And they know that you care about them, too. So maybe we’re not the coolest band in the world, but, you know…

We have a fan who went through gender transformation, and he got the lyrics to our song “The Pretty Ones” tattooed on his arm during that process, because we helped him go through that. And that was really touching to me, to be able to help someone in a way.

I mean, I don’t want to get too philosophical about it, but to go back to something we talked about earlier — maybe that’s the point of all of this. Maybe that’s what we’re all doing here.

To give back something meaningful. [Pause.] Yeah, I think so.

Phoenix, Bankrupt!

What Phoenix does better than just about any current band is combine the euphoria of a raucous rock ‘n’ roll show with the surgical exactitude of studio-crafted dance music. Mixing the obstreperousness of old-fashioned guitar/bass/drums/keys grooves with hyper-precise digital calibration, this supremely, this supremely French foursome remains the epitome of rock-disco dialectic.

Their new one picks up where 2009′s mainstream breakthrough Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix left off, maintaining that album’s crowd-pleasing formula while accentuating the group’s gentle waywardness. The lyrics, for example, are often nonsensical: “Victory lap, formal with feathery eyes/ Dating vendetta win small spray pesticide” goes a typical near-rhyme in the title track, an abstracted take on EDM’s slow-burning trance. It further abstracts the build-up into ambient doodles over muted four-four thumping, accentuates the breakdown via oscillating Phillip Glass-like synths, and climaxes with a psychedelic folk-rock coda. This is and the similarly spaced-out verses of “Bourgeois” are clearly what the band had on its mind when it announced that Bankrupt! would be more experimental.

Otherwise, though, it’s just as generous with its hooks and anxiously-happy propulsion as any Phoenix number: “Entertainment” storms the gates with chiming “Turning Japanese” synths that reappear throughout the album; “The Real Thing” holds back its catchiest bits until near the end, when the cut practically levitates; “S.O.S. in Bel Air” similarly affirms the band’s ever-increasing dynamic command. The peaks, of which there are many, are bombastic, while the restrained parts offer woozy respite; one is self-descriptively called “Chloroform.” Mostly, though, there’s pleasure on top of pleasure, sweat mixed with digital mathematics, both equally generous.