French Canadian micro-house artist Marc Leclair is known for pioneering a production strategy called “microsampling” about 15 years ago. As you might guess, it involved the use of very short samples in the construction of electronic music. In his hands, it has usually taken the form of prickly, insectoid dance music, and the case is the same here.
Promo materials highlight the “classic house” element of this music, and indeed, it’s abundantly present. Four-on-the-floor rhythms dominate, along with offbeat hi-hat (or at least, glitchy sounds functioning like a hi-hat). For all the hype about his progressive sampling techniques, Leclair is a bit of a genre-traditionalist here in terms of the rhythmic content. However, one might be surprised by the out-of-character keyboard solo in…

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…the middle of opener “U.” Leclair continues stretching out a moment later in the same song, with longer-than-usual vocal samples. “Death of a Mascot” stands out for its sample of a discernible piano lick. While it’s still a relatively short sample by most standards, it’s worked into a fuller melodic phrase that comes back later in the song, almost like a sort of chorus.

Though the second half of the EP is a bit drier than the first, fans of Leclair’s particular brand of tightly wound dance music will still appreciate this addition to his catalogue, and if he keeps imbuing his sound with more warmth and accessibility like this, he could capture a few more ears along the way. — exclaim

A husband and wife duo from Austria, now based in Joshua Tree, Georg and Heike Altziebler enlisted Joe Henry to produce Dorado, their sixth album under the bizarre moniker of Son of the Velvet Rat.
There’s nothing bizarre about Son of the Velvet Rat’s music, however. Dorado is a ten track collection of haunted desert noir built around Georg’s dust-grained vocals and his wife’s accordion and organ backing.
They are complemented by a core band of Jay Bellerose on drums, Adam Levy’s electric guitar, bassist David Piltch and Patrick Warren providing piano, autoharp and marxophone (a fretless zither) plus some guest musicians.
The lonesome sounds of ‘Carry On’ provide entry to the album, setting the pervasive mood,…

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…Bob Furgo adding violin to colour the mood, followed by the throaty Dylan-tinged Copper Hill featuring Scott Kisinger on trombone and Kelly Corbin on sax and clarinet. On the dark shuffle of Blood Red Shoes, Victoria Williams adds additional vocals while Gar Robertson provides guitar on the largely spoken organ-backed delivery of Love’s the Devil’s Foe as well as contributing pedal steel to Tiger Honey’s acoustic bass enhanced smoky slow chug.

Although pacing and tone don’t vary significantly across the album, two numbers do provide variation. Surfer Joe adopts a more uptempo marching beat underpinning a circling melody line while Starlite Motel introduces harmonica and a moodier twang to weave a folk-noir ambience around steady marching drums.

Feted by Lucinda Williams, whose gravelly Americana and themes of love and loss they echo, they’ve been likened to Cohen and Nick Drake, though perhaps a less glowering Nick Cave filtered through the Willard Grant Conspiracy might be nearer the mark. Haunting and soulful, it may not be for wide consumption, but if you like your music steeped in the parched sand, dry rocks, forbidding cacti and mournful night winds, then this is your brand of vermin.

Converge mastermind Jacob Bannon is best known for his aggressive, harsh vocals, but on the debut album for his solo project, Wear Your Wounds, he takes a much softer and more melodic approach. WYW is the culmination of years of writing compiled into a massive project that focuses on the dark and clean aspects of Converge.
Album opener “Wear Your Wounds” begins with a sad, ominous-sounding piano lead before building a gargantuan sound through the rest of the instruments and Bannon’s droning vocals. The instruments progressively build upon one another throughout the album, creating a tense dynamic that allows each instrument to have its moment. The eight-minute epic “Iron Rose” uses Bannon’s voice almost exclusively in the first half…

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…before dropping vocals for a complex and melodic instrumental finale.

Although much can be said about the clean, melodic aspects of the album, WYW is a very heavy release — without relying on distorted guitars and screamed vocals. The emotions in Bannon’s lyrics, paired with the haunting piano tracks and atmospheric guitar work, generates an emphatic, powerful sound. “Best Cry of Your Life” is the sole track on the album that resembles something written by a metal band, with pounding, thunderous drums and energetic guitar work.

Wear Your Wounds’ debut is a masterpiece of emotion and tension. The minimalistic and atmospheric approach found here sounds vastly different from Bannon’s work in Converge, but it also complements it nicely, sounding like a counterpart to his main project.

Not much is known about Pedro Santos, a Brazilian percussionist, composer and sometime inventor of instruments, who worked as a side man with a host of Brazilian luminaries. Krishnanda, released in 1968 on the Brazilian division of CBS records, makes up his only solo recorded output, and it is so singular and eccentric and eclectic that listeners will have a hard time extrapolating from it.
A whimsical mash of samba, bossa nova, rock, funk, psychedelia, field recording, classical and lush movie soundtrack sound, the album wanders through a puzzle palace maze of connecting rooms, here undulating in African heat (“Savana”), there pushing tangled Amazonian vines aside (“Dentro da Selva”), and everywhere pulsing to a syncopated, samba-style beat.

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That beat — you’re not imagining it — remains constant (or nearly so, you can’t hear it in “Advertencia”) throughout the album, a stippled layering of hand- and stick-beaten percussion, some tonal, some not, some clanging like bells, some thudding like boots on ground. Santos invented this beat, apparently, and named it “Sorongo.” (It became a kind of nickname for the composer himself.) Everything else mutates and fluctuates in Krishnanda—melody, mood, instrumentation—but this distinctive cadence continues, a lilting swaggering stop-stepping heartbeat that comes as close to uniting these disparate pieces as anything can.

Krishnanda blenderizes traditional Brazilian sounds with a hodge podge of outside influences; conceptually and in terms of timing, it falls close to early Os Mutantes recordings. Yet Santos is far less enamored of rock and roll than the Baptista brothers. His work feels more spiritual and even metaphysical, and it employs a full orchestra rather than the typical rock band line-up. “Sem Sobra” billows with lavish strings and a hypnotic women’s choir, which might remind you of Rubias Del Norte. “Savana”’s melody comes from a sinuous oboe line, which snakes above drum slaps and movie-soundtrack-lush swathes of strings. After the relative sparseness of “Ritual Negro” and “Um So,” these cuts feel Westernized, like a bossa nova reimagined by Ennio Morricone.

Santos also uses samples and field recordings in some interesting ways, interspersing the plop and splash of water drops into “Agua Viva,” and an ominous rumble of thunder into “Advertencia” (which means “Warning”). Several of the tracks feel not just like sound track work, but actual parts of movies, missing only dialogue and pictures to turn them into film. The work is most fascinating when it veers the furthest from convention, as on the oddly tuned, spookily entrancing “Quem Sou Eu” (“Who Am I”) where twanging strings or, perhaps,  keyboard notes have been dialed into weird resonances, like a harpsichord coming down with dementia. Or “Flor De Lotus,” with its B-movie string crescendos and stage-whispered threats, a scenario in sound, that melts finally into a stutter-stepped Latin funk.

And this is, perhaps, the charm of Krishnanda, that it implies whole worlds of sensory input without ever exactly defining them. You might feel like you’re in a movie house facing, inexplicably away from the screen, but give it time and you’ll see your own image stream, as hallucinatory and elusive as the music.

The world has finally caught up with Slowdive. A band whose reach goes far beyond just influencing music is back, with their first new album in 22 years.
The long-awaited follow-up to 1995’s Pygmalion was recorded at the band’s “talismanic Oxfordshire haunt, The Courtyard,” and was mixed at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles by Chris Coady (Beach House, Grizzly Bear). A press release describes this fourth full-length as the English shoegaze outfit’s “most direct material to date,” while also noting that it isn’t meant to be “a trip down memory lane.”
Principal songwriter Neil Halstead says that their 2014 reunion tour had an impact on the making of the new album. “When you’re in a band and you do three records, there’s a continuous flow and a development,” he explains. “For us, that flow…

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…re-started with us playing live again and that has continued into the record.”

In a previous interview about their studio sessions, drummer Simon Scott also emphasized the importance of their live recordings: “It’s Neil, who is the primary songwriter, but what has changed since the ’90s, is that he asked me to manipulate some of the sounds we have recorded. It’s not that the album is going to sound electronically. We’ve played together for two years after the restoration, and Neil wanted to capture how well a live band, we are, in the studio. So in that way it’s a live record.”

Weightless is a waterfall of amiable, free-flowing music. Pianist Alex Kozobolis has, in the past, collaborated with artists such as Harry Edwards and Anna Rose Carter, and the tender compositions of Weightless don’t waste any time in unravelling and blossoming. Zesty and thoughtful melodic lines and sparkling phrases repeat their sequences of sensitivity, and Kozobolis brings a bright, flowing approach to his sustained flurries and colourful bursts.
This mini-album moves along at a surprising pace, but despite playing at a quick tempo Kozobolis isn’t in much of a rush; while the notes accelerate, the slow-burning mood deepens. As the music approaches the cooler afterglow of dusk, his light, calming touch has the effect of melting…

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…the world; the fluid sound is subconsciously saying ‘slow down’. Kozobolis has a serene, soft and ticklish touch which trickles like a fine outpouring of honey.

Four remixes dissect the EP. The first, a remix of the title track from Tom Adams, adds wintry beats, but interestingly the rhythm doesn’t necessarily increase the energy within the track itself. It was already there to begin with, despite the original not having the stability nor the driving rhythm of the drum. Adding it in doesn’t always inject more verve into a song, but the remix is refreshing. Siavash Amini’s remix of ‘And Find Yourself’ is altogether more atmospheric, where grey, dank cloaks of sound wash over the track, the music skating over a road of black ice and landing in a swamp of wet reverb. At this point the atmosphere fits the dark like a cosy nightgown, but Weightless is much brighter than that; it’s music for innocent daydreaming.

The London/Colorado cassette label Obsolete Future landed a lucky strike for its thirteenth release, a trio recording from Thor Harris, Conor Walker, and Lawrence English. Succinctly titled Walker Harris English, the liner notes are skinny on particulars — we know the group recorded in East Austin and that the outcome was mastered at English’s current homestead in Brisbane, but not much else. This economy of detail directs the listener to parse out an interpretant from the album’s song titles, all of which signal humanity’s baseline need for a place to hang its hat: home.
This may surprise the listener who only knows Harris from his thundering contributions to recent SWANS records or English’s dense drone pieces, but it’s this domestic signaling that best frames…

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…the content. Walker Harris English trades on the players’ comfort with restraint and the careful, intimate interplay that can only come from close quarters and deep listening.

“The House Part I” best illustrates this hominess. It opens with the high-register shimmer of tremulous electronics — whether they issue from Walker’s field recordings or English’s processed concert bass drum is uncertain, and immaterial — with Harris soon joining in on his home-built hammered dulcimer, striking double strokes on the strings that repeat like rain drops on a roof. At the four-and-a-half minute mark, English strikes a muffled thump on the bass drum that sounds like thunder out on the prairie. The piece doesn’t so much develop from that point as extend the moment of meeting, inviting you to put your feet up on the front porch and pass some time in good company, looking out on acre after acre of tall, windswept grass.

Paul McCartney must not only have been conscious of his slipping commercial fortunes, he must have realized that his records hadn’t been treated seriously for years, so he decided to make a full- fledged comeback effort with Flowers in the Dirt. His most significant move was to write a series of songs with Elvis Costello, some of which appeared on Costello’s own Spike and many of which surfaced here. These may not be epochal songs, the way many wished them to be, but McCartney and Costello turn out to be successful collaborators, spurring each other toward interesting work. And, in McCartney’s case, that carried over to the album as a whole, as he aimed for more ambitious lyrics, themes, sounds,…

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…and productions for Flowers in the Dirt. This didn’t necessarily result in a more successful album than its predecessors, but it had more heart, ambition, and nerve, which was certainly welcome. And the moments that did work were pretty terrific. Many of these were McCartney/McManus collaborations, from the moderate hit “My Brave Face” to the duet “You Want Her Too” and “That Day Is Done,” but McCartney also demonstrates considerable muscle on his own, from the domestic journal “We Got Married” to the lovely “This One.” This increased ambition also means McCartney meanders a bit, writing songs that are more notable for what they try to achieve than what they do, and at times the production is too fussy and inextricably tied to its time, but as a self-styled comeback affair, Flowers in the Dirt works very well.

The 2017 Archive Edition of Flowers in the Dirt arrives in two editions: a double-disc Special Edition and a Deluxe Edition that contains three CDs and a DVD. Both editions share the initial acoustic demos Paul McCartney recorded with Elvis Costello, which is the centerpiece of the set. McCartney and Costello seem to delight in each other’s company as they rush through songs that would show up on Flowers and Paul’s Off the Ground, in addition to Elvis’ Mighty Like a Rose. A few of these never showed up on record and they’re all excellent, particularly “Tommy’s Coming Home” and “Twenty Fine Fingers.”

Disc 1
1. My Brave Face [03:16]
2. Rough Ride [04:40]
3. You Want Her Too [03:10]
4. Distractions [04:38]
5. We Got Married [04:54]
6. Put It There [02:07]
7. Figure of Eight [03:22]
8. This One [04:07]
9. Don’t Be Careless Love [03:16]
10. That Day Is Done [04:18]
11. How Many People [04:12]
12. Motor of Love [06:23]
13. Ou Est le Soleil [04:42]

Disc 2
14. The Lovers That Never Were [03:53]
15. Tommy’s Coming Home [04:05]
16. Twenty Fine Fingers [02:23]
17. So Like Candy [03:24]
18. You Want Her Too [02:35]
19. That Day Is Done [04:12]
20. Don’t Be Careless Love [03:39]
21. My Brave Face [02:35]
22. Playboy to a Man [07:17]

Disc 3
23. The Lovers That Never Were (1988 Demo) [03:45]
24. Tommy’s Coming Home (1988 Demo) [04:59]
25. Twenty Fine Fingers (1988 Demo) [02:42]
26. So Like Candy (1988 Demo) [03:43]
27. You Want Her Too (1988 Demo) [03:15]
28. That Day Is Done (1988 Demo) [04:17]
29. Don’t Be Careless Love (1988 Demo) [03:20]
30. My Brave Face (1988 Demo) [03:25]
31. Playboy to a Man (1988 Demo) [02:50]

Original B-sides, remixes and single edits
32. Back On My Feet (2017 Reissue) [04:20]
33. Flying to My Home (2017 Reissue) [04:10]
34. The First Stone (2017 Reissue) [04:01]
35. Good Sign (2017 Reissue) [06:54]
36. This One (Club Lovejoys Mix) (2017 Reissue) [06:06]
37. Figure of Eight (12” Bob Clearmountain Mix) (2017 Reissue) [05:09]
38. Loveliest Thing (2017 Reissue) [03:58]
39. Ou Est le Soleil? (12” Mix) (2017 Reissue) [07:01]
40. Ou Est le Soleil? (Tub Dub Mix) (2017 Reissue) [04:25]
41. Ou Est le Soleil (7” Mix) (2017 Reissue) [04:49]
42. Ou Est le Soleil? (Instrumental) (2017 Reissue) [04:24]
43. Party Party (Original Mix) (2017 Reissue) [05:27]
44. Party Party (Club Mix) (2017 Reissue) [06:16]
45. I Don’t Want to Confess (Cassette Demo)[02:16]
46. Shallow Grave (Cassette Demo) [02:09]
47. Mistress and Maid (Cassette Demo) [02:24]

What do you get when Kevin Hearn, the brilliant, multi-instrumentalist best known as the keyboardist for Barenaked Ladies, teams up with his real-life cousin Harland Williams, the actor and comedian? To be honest, it’s hard to pin down, but it’s called Rattlesnake Love and the 11 tracks here are a super eclectic, sometimes trippy, strangely hypnotic musical map crosser.
See if you can follow along: alien-channelling electro-pop gives way to alt-country, then a beach party intermission, before regrouping for some fab ’80s synth-pop. In the middle is a Spaghetti Western set, which turns out to be the bridge to the psychedelic title track (listen closely for a guest vocal by Carole Pope), another stop at the beach (this time there’s a breeze) and then it’s on…

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…to the accordion-infused folk ballad night-ender.

Somewhere in there is a lovely little country record, conversational, emotional — “Baby don’t lie about loving me again,” sings Williams on the gorgeous closer “You Can Lie” — with the sonic beauty and spaciousness to lure you into Hearn and Williams’ dreamy worldview.

Credit to Williams for handling lead vocals like he’s been doing it all along, and to Hearn, who also produced the album, for building expansive soundscapes in a way that only he can. Rattlesnake Love is a journey entirely of the Cousins’ own making, but you won’t regret going along for the ride.

The legendary Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire specializes in the 19th century and has turned to recording Bach in his eighth decade, apparently for the first time. All you can say is that it was worth the wait. His Bach is typically restrained, not unaware of the long tradition of Bach piano performances, but decidedly unlike anyone else’s approach. In general, Freire is pianistic without applying a lot of pedal. It’s there, but it applies only the slightest shades, and it can fade away quickly. Instead, Freire applies a great variety of attacks and textures, all subtle and well considered.
The program falls into three parts, the first two interlocking. There is a pair of big quasi-improvisatory pieces, the Toccata in C minor, BWV 911, and the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in…

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…D minor, BWV 903. These don’t get their usual epic quality, but they get something else instead: an uncanny, even spooky interiority, an entrée into their existence as improvisatory works. There are two dance-suite pieces, the Partita No. 4 in D major for keyboard, BWV 828, and the English Suite No. 3 in G minor, BWV 808. These have little in the way of dance rhythms, but much that reflects the French origin of the style: the music is ornate, complex, fascinatingly closed in. At the end everything relaxes into beauty, with Bach’s arrangement of a concerto movement by Marcello and then a series of chorale preludes, ending with the Myra Hess transcription of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, from the Cantata No. 147. These are limpid and really transcendent. Freire is backed by excellent unfussy engineering from Decca at the Friedrich Ebert-Halle (also the recording site of the first Beatles album), and the end result is a short Bach program to treasure.

If time heals all wounds, as anybody who has ever suffered heartbreak has been reassured, that’s scant comfort when time won’t move.
On Male Bonding’s 2010 debut Nothing Hurts, a high watermark of the era’s fuzz-punk boom, the London trio stared at the clock, wondering when, exactly, the healing was supposed to begin. “Year’s not long,” singer/ guitarist John Arthur Webb repeated to himself on the band’s breakthrough song, unconvincingly — because in the wake of trauma, a year is an eternity. On the band’s fuming third album Headache, Webb stops straining to find a bright side and just leans into the misery. Opener “Wrench” begins by laying out the kind of worst-case scenario that even the most dejected scorned lovers try to resist considering: What if 15…

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…years pass and you still don’t feel any fucking better about things?

It’s been five years since Male Bonding’s last album, Endless Nothing, though it just as well could have been 15, given how off the radar they’ve been lately. At some point after that record, they split from Sub Pop, the label that aided their swift rise, and ceased touring. Their social media accounts sat dark for more than a year before they surprise-released Headache, and at this point even its existence does little to clarify whether they have or haven’t broken up. Releasing a new album for free, with no promotion or any live shows to support it, is the type of thing a band does when they’re over. The no-frills Facebook post announcing the record reads like a farewell note: “Have our third album for free—see ya.”

Was another Male Bonding record necessary after all these years? The band’s debut so effectively laid out their formula—fizzy hooks, neurotic tempos, 1990 production values—that there wasn’t much room to improve on it. Endless Nothing faced the same burden justifying itself, too, and good as it was, that album didn’t add much to their legacy, either. But then again, in the post-No Age age, where this kind of purist noise-rock generates a fraction of the interest it did just a half decade ago, Male Bonding have fallen so far from the public consciousness that they barely have a legacy to protect. There was nothing to lose by giving it another stab.

Perhaps the best thing about Headache, then, is the reminder that this band even existed in the first place, but the album stands on its own merits, too. Since the band once touted the youthful fallacy that nothing ever changes, there’s a curious poignance in hearing how they’ve aged—and, to be sure, they have aged. They’ve grown angrier, crankier and, fittingly, grungier. The boyish harmonies of Nothing Hurts are mostly gone; the band can still turn a hook, but they aren’t nearly as sweet or nimble as the old ones. There used to be something vaguely anti-gravitational about the band’s songs, a lightness, but these tunes hang low to the ground, collecting dirt.

What hasn’t changed is the emotional charge. If anything, Webb’s conviction comes across more pointedly than ever. “Why does this keep happening? I cannot feel the way I want to feel,” he shudders over helter-skelter guitars on “What’s Wrong?” On “Chipping Away,” a sloppy, half-finished sketch of a song, he curses his writer’s block, blaming it on his inability to move on from an estranged ex, but he saves his harshest accusation for the Dinosaur Jr.-heavy “I Would Say”: “Why did you leave when I needed help?”

So on the surface, Headache is another album about wounds that won’t heal. But at its best it brings a wizened new perspective to those same themes. It’s also about growing older and, for all the wear, still feeling like yourself, something that anybody who’s been shocked to discover that they connect as deeply with In Utero in their 30s as they did as a teen can relate to. Sometimes there’s comfort in feeling sad, simply because it can remind us of times when we were younger and felt the same. Judging from these cloudy songs, Webb needs all the comfort he can get. “What deserts me cannot hurt me,” he sings on the closer “Out to Sea,” but once again, he’s deluding himself. It already has.

The Canadian-American alt-prog collective’s fifth full-length outing, Grace Street delivers a heady mix of the accessible and the labyrinthine; a smartly structured, skillfully executed set of left-field radio hits with cosmic aspirations. Anchored by Ian Thornley’s mellifluous voice, which pairs the elastic falsetto of Coldplay’s Chris Martin with the seismic power of Peter Gabriel, the 13-track LP, despite its nearly 70-minute runtime, never forgets that strong songwriting is the fulcrum on which even the most adventurous run or clever time or key change finds equilibrium. Whether it’s the knotty “Tomorrow Down,” with its propulsive backbeat and Floyd-meets-Zeppelin chorus, the funky, Stones-ian “You Don’t Even Know,” the goose bump-inducing acoustic ballad “Useless,”…

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…or the ripping lead single “One Good Piece of Me,” the latter of which is a perfect rendering of soaring alt-rock and Asia-inspired pop smarts, Grace Street has a little something for everyone.

Mo Troper‘s Gold is pure rock’n’roll, fuelled by the melancholy, self-deprecating sound of bands like Weezer, Sloan and Thrush Hermit. It’s fun, fuzzy power pop for people who like Thin Lizzy and crying themselves to sleep. Troper’s lo-fi sensibilities add a layer of vulnerability and humanity to his music, with every crack and quiver in his voice paired with seriously rad guitar, like a young Mr. Cuomo.
“Spraycan” sounds like it could be on any of your favourite late ’90s teen comedies, with its chugging guitar riff and some of the best vocals on the record. “New Korea” is another fun, self-hating jam, as Troper bemoans that “I don’t wanna be funny anymore” on the chorus — he’s done being the butt of the joke. Penning these silly, sad little songs is Troper’s strong suit. He never ever takes…

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…himself too seriously, either, as evidenced by his take on Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable,” which goes from monster pop jam to early ’90s breakup hit in its short runtime.

Unfortunately, Troper sometimes gets caught up in the emotionality of the songs, and things get a bit too maudlin, as on the whine-rock anthem “Border Patrol,” on which Troper scream-sings the line, “I cried my eyes out” — it would be a bit much to hear a teenager sing, let alone an adult. Save for these few moments, though, Gold is a whole lot of fun for people who like to be sad and party at the same time.

Posh Isolation’s catalog is wide-ranging and mercurial. Kristian Emdal and Simon Formann, the duo known as Age Coin, have been ensconced in the Danish label for years. In addition to their interests in industrial, techno and ambient, they share a post-punk background and have been in synth and pop bands in the past. On Performance, Age Coin’s debut album, these qualities are abundantly clear.
The duo have previously kept to a brooding, sinister sound, but this music breaks out of the gloom (typified by the breezy, skittering “Raptor”) and uses a broader stylistic palette. The results are inventive and refreshing, disconnected from DJ formalities and yet thoroughly digestible in the dance.
“Damp” is the album’s centrepiece. It opens with a breathy swell and drops to the floor,…

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…where it unleashes a downpour of cranky, syncopated beats. “Esprit,” “Monday” and “Protein” also explore this kind of snaking, palpitating techno. With its swinging, smokey nature, it could be described as industrialised bass music—think Szare set up in a warehouse with mics and a few power tools.

The two “Domestic” compositions are strange, wonderful anomalies. The first makes a curious connection between droning strings and a buzzsaw, and the second begins as a piano soliloquy, a transmission that’s eventually corrupted with static. Both seem to point to where the album got its title, but the fantastic rhythms deployed elsewhere are more memorable. It’s an avant-garde album inspired by the club, without any of the pretense that could entail.

Philly’s Loose Tooth deliver cozy ’90s alt-rock nostalgia, combining math rock, post-hardcore and grunge on their second album, Big Day. The album has a lot going on, but always keeps its cool.
Just the right amount of looseness, both in their songwriting and delivery, results in something less scrappy and more unified than the band’s debut. A grungier version of Pavement, Loose Tooth revel in lo-fi, their sound off-kilter, peppered with a Built to Spill kind of playfulness (“Free Skate”) and an understated emo sense of sincerity (“Fish Boy”).
They’ve also amped up the reverb here to create a thicker sound, so when the going gets chunky, clunky and math-y, bands like North of America also come to mind, especially on tracks like “L Blu.” Highlight “Garlic Soup” is atmospheric and…

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…angular, echoing Autolux’s Future Perfect, while the soaring “Free Skate” features washed out harmonies. The sentimental stomp of “Roach Motel” both drags you down and pulls you up.

Big Day is like an oddball friend, predominantly introverted, but with sporadic extroverted outbursts. It establishes Loose Tooth as slacker maestros, their vibe oscillating slyly between downtrodden dreariness and upbeat optimism.

Following the 2009 release of Enter the 37th Chamber, El Michels Affair’s first Wu-centric album, the calendar of bandleader Leon Michels remained filled. A small fraction of Michels’ activity included continued work with Menahan Street Band and the Expressions, whole-album productions for Aloe Blacc and Chicano Batman, and session gigs with Dr. John and Lana Del Rey. Additionally, he co-founded a second label, Big Crown (the first was Truth & Soul), home to Lady Wray’s Queen Alone (another one of his productions), and this sequel to EMA’s 2009 LP, inevitably titled Return to the 37th Chamber. Including all four sides of singles released in 2016 and early 2017, it goes a little deeper and farther out than Enter the 37th Chamber. Michels, Nick Movshon, and…

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…Thomas Brenneck perform the majority of the music, supported with a familiar extended cast of associates on one or two cuts each, while Wray, Lee Fields, and the Shacks’ Shannon Wise add occasional cross-generational vocals to the predominantly instrumental set. As with the earlier volume, the inspiration here is the RZA, specifically the rugged yet elegant material that formed the foundation of Wu-Tang Clan’s 1993 debut and the first wave of solo albums that followed it, including those from Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Raekwon, and GZA. The late-’60s/early-’70s soul that RZA sampled — the Hi and Stax labels were frequent sources — is still in Michels and company’s wheelhouse, and they’re as inspired as ever by the soul and reggae session crews of Memphis, Detroit, and Kingston. Even when EMA’s efforts don’t match the beauty of the source material or the brawn of RZA’s beats, the level of commitment and imagination is undeniable. Deepest of all is the hard-hitting “Shaolin Brew,” based on the track RZA cooked up for Wu-Tang’s mid-’90s malt liquor ad (as seen on television and heard in the background of the intro to Raekwon’s “Spot Rusherz,” but never released properly).

Sheryl Crow’s country makeover Feels Like Home didn’t click commercially in 2013, so she decided to radically shift directions for this 2017 successor, Be Myself. The title alone is a tacit admission that she’s returning to her roots, reuniting with producers Jeff Trott and Tchad Blake, the pair who helmed 1996’s Sheryl Crow and 1998’s The Globe Sessions. Crow last worked with Trott on 2002’s C’mon, C’mon, and Be Myself deliberately mirrors that album’s sunny vibe while also nodding at specific songs from Crow’s past.
“Roller Skate” grooves to a beat that echoes “All I Want to Do” and “Strangers Again” struts like “If It Makes You Happy” — sly winks that acknowledge Crow is happy to embrace her past. Perhaps this retro move would seem desperate if Crow…

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…didn’t seem so enthusiastic reviving this collaboration. With Trott and Blake in tow, she’s happy to embrace her eccentricity in addition to her fondness for big pop hooks — a combination that fuels Be Myself as surely as it did Sheryl Crow or The Globe Sessions. Compared to those two ’90s records, this 2017 album isn’t quite as daring — a revival is by definition a safe bet, plus Crow’s long since reined in her purple prose — but one of the charms of Be Myself is what lies along the fringe. Most of the record’s 11 songs are graced by provocative sounds lurking at the margins of the mix — something that sounds like a music box on “Halfway There,” a saloon piano on “Rest of Me,” all the compressed guitars as percussion — that help elevate this set of strong, sophisticated pop into something special.

…Deliverance, the EP of previously unheard Prince material feature six newly unearthed songs recorded between 2006 and 2008. It is said to feature ‘Man Opera’ – a track which includes a “four-movement medley”; ‘I Am’ and an extended version of the same song; ‘Touch Me’; ‘Sunrise Sunset’; and ‘No One Else’. The songs were written and recorded during a period in which Prince was without a label and was ardently against the climate of online music sharing and downloads.
Ian Boxill, a long-time Prince collaborator who has also worked with the likes of 2Pac, Gladys Knight and Janet Jackson, co-wrote and co-produced all of the tracks beginning in 2006.
Following Prince’s death, Boxill continued completing the compositions for this purpose.

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“I believe Deliverance is a timely release with everything going on in the world today, and in light of the one-year anniversary of his passing,” Boxill says. “I hope when people hear Prince singing these songs it will bring comfort to many.

“Prince once told me that he would go to bed every night thinking of ways to bypass major labels and get his music directly to the public. When considering how to release this important work, we decided to go independent because that’s what Prince would have wanted.”

…feature B-sides, bonus tracks, unreleased outtakes, alternative versions and frontman Colin Meloy’s solo acoustic demos.
Colin Meloy and his brave Decemberists made the unlikely jump to a major label after 2005’s excellent Picaresque, a move that surprised both longtime fans and detractors of the band. While it is difficult to imagine the suits at Capitol seeing dollar signs in the eyes of an accordion- and bouzouki-wielding, British folk-inspired collective from Portland, OR, that dresses in period Civil War outfits and has been known to cover Morrissey, it’s hard to argue with what the Decemberists have wrought from their bounty. The Crane Wife is loosely based on a Japanese folk tale that concerns a crane, an arrow, a beautiful woman, and a whole lot of…

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…clandestine weaving. The record’s spirited opener and namesake picks off almost exactly where Picaresque left off, building slowly off a simple folk melody before exploding into some serious Who power chords. This is the first indication that the band itself was ready to take the loosely ornate, reverb-heavy Decemberists sound to a new sonic level, or rather that producers Tucker Martine and Chris Walla were. On first listen, the tight, dry, and compressed production style sounds more like Queens of the Stone Age than Fairport Convention, but as The Crane Wife develops over its 60-plus minutes, a bigger picture appears. Meloy, who along with Destroyer’s Dan Bejar has mastered the art of the North American English accent, has given himself over to early-’70s progressive rock with gleeful abandon, and while many of the tracks pale in comparison to those on Picaresque, the ones that succeed do so in the grandest of fashions.

Fans of the group’s Tain EP will find themselves drawn to “Island: Come and See/The Landlord’s Daughter/You’ll Not Feel the Drowning” and “The Crane Wife, Pts. 1 & 2,” both of which are well over ten minutes long and feature some truly inspired moments that echo everyone from the Waterboys and R.E.M. to Deep Purple and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, while those who embrace the band’s poppier side will flock around the winsome “Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then),” which relies heavily on the breathy delivery of Seattle singer/songwriter and part-time Decemberist Laura Veirs. Some cuts, like the English murder ballad “Shankill Butchers” and “Summersong” (the latter eerily reminiscent of Edie Brickell’s “What I Am”), sound like outtakes from previous records, but by the time the listener arrives at the Donovan-esque (in a good way) closer, “Sons & Daughters,” the less tasty bits of The Crane Wife seem a wee bit sweeter.

After recording and releasing a career’s worth of good to brilliant albums over a 15-year span, the Raveonettes decided to try something different in 2016. They wrote and recorded a song a month, offering them for download and then collecting them on 2016 Atomized. The process forced them to work quickly, with Sune Rose Wagner often delivering the nearly finished tracks to Sharin Foo so she could add vocals mere hours before the deadline. The nature of how the recordings were made didn’t do much to alter the basic core sound the duo have established over the years. The noise-drenched ’50s pop meets knife-scarred Blondie approach still informs everything they do, and there are plenty of really strong songs here that could only be by the Raveonettes.

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Tracks like “Won’t You Leave Me Alone” and “Where Are You Wild Horses” have all the blasted glamour and death-obsessed guitar overload of the duo’s best work. Mostly though, the order of the day seems to have been experimentation, as Wagner takes plenty of left turns and tries out all kinds of new and interesting stuff. They add some hip-hop and even a little bit of doomy whispered rapping to “Run Mascara Run,” forgo guitars entirely on “This World Is Empty (Without You),” layer in funky drummer samples on the snappy pop strutter “Scout,” and build the ultra-peppy “Choke on Love” around some samba beats and tropical guitar twang. That’s just a taste of the new colors and textures Wagner brings to the songs; he really goes all out to make the most of the process, and in the end it turns out that 2016 Atomized is the band’s most varied and unique-sounding album yet. Whatever style or sound they take on, they conquer. Whether it’s epically chilly synth pop (“Fast Food”), swaggering modern rock (“EXCUSES”), oddball David Lynchian pop (“A Good Fight”), or good old blown-out noise pop (“Junko Ozawa”), Wagner’s quest for exploration, his unerring ability to marry hooks with danger, and Foo’s always perfect vocals never miss.

Whether the duo plan to work this way in the future or not, 2016 Atomized documents a year when they successfully rebooted their sound and opened up their future to all kinds of possibilities.