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Travis Egedy’s last Pictureplane album, Thee Physical, was a crowded concoction of garish rave signifiers, dance music clichés, and the punk-inspired free-for-all collage aesthetic of his earlier work weighted with lyrical conceits surrounding gender identity. With beefier production values that pointed more directly toward trance and euphoric house, it was undoubtedly the most complete and confident thing the Denver producer’s created to date. But never a stranger to the internet, Egedy’s free download series, Dimensional Rip, has played host to a handful of jumbled, messy mixes, and the seventh installment is a full-blown Thee Physical remix album.

Well, sort of: It depends on how you define “album.” Only five of Thee Physical‘s 11 originals are given the remix treatment, and they’re plopped down as an unordered clump of beats. I’m not sure how we’re supposed to listen to this; on my mp3 player, they’re sorted alphabetically, meaning three remixes of “Body Mod” are followed by a whopping seven reworks of lead single “Post Physical”– it’s not the most measured playlist I’ve ever heard. In my iTunes, however, the tracks are assorted seemingly randomly, splitting up the monotony but throwing in a whole lot of volatile randomness. So as much as we might want to call Dimensional Rip 7 an album, in practice it’s merely a collection of tracks for us to peruse and choose from.

Even though the production values of Thee Physical seemed to pull Egedy away from the kind of homemade dance music made from big obvious samples (such as 2009′s memorable “Goth Star”), its remix companion hands the album over to a whole spectrum of DIY denizens, from recognizable to obscure names. The results vary in quality just as much. For as many that simply aren’t distinctive, there’s a number of cringe-worthy facepalms. Chicago’s Fire For Effect seize on the slow, belaboured theatricality of “Post Physical”, turning it into something saccharine and overblown, while the less said about Craxxxmurf’s headache-inducing take on “Touching Transform” the better. Dimensional Rip 7‘s sheer size has one advantage, however: For every misstep there’s a good remix lurking behind it. Ritualz’s “Alien Trance remix” of “Post Physical” takes hold of the trance thread that weaves through Egedy’s work and turns it rubbery and warped, while Adeptus lay down a bed of lush synths and acid gurgles, turning “Trancegender” into the aching duet with Zola Jesus it should have been in the first place.

Dimensional Rip 7 features some prominent and well-timed guests, too. Montreal woman-of-the-moment Grimes dismantles “Real Is a Feeling” and reconstructs it into one of her own pins-and-needles skeletons, infusing the track with her breathy coos for a remix so delicate it almost sounds out of place on a package full of speaker-blown hymns to homemade dance music. But the crown jewel undoubtedly belongs to makeshift chop’n'screw master Physical Therapy. The New Jersey producer’s own distinct style– taking huge samples and inflating them until they’re puffy clouds of distortion and then drenching everything in sad, defeated, lean-dripping slowdown– is more than compatible with Pictureplane’s, and his take on “Post Physical” layers sirens, heavy metallic breaks, and the original’s stirring synth riff. It’s one of the collection’s few moments that feels truly innovative, one of the American underground’s weirdest personalities putting his imprint on another bizarro underdog.

That inspiring collaboration sits atop a veritable heap of information-overload excess, and a project as cheeky but quietly ambitious as Pictureplane deserves nothing less than a sprawling song-vomit remix album. Like most of what he does, it’s far from tasteful and not always all that great, but the highlights are some of the most fun and carefree electronic music from this side of the Atlantic. There’s been a lot of talk about the American “new rave generation” fueled by artists like Skrillex and Deadmau5, but it’s really Pictureplane that embodies everything caricatured in images of those neon-clad teenagers. Honestly, Dimensional Rip 7 is a complete mess and not even close to a coherent listening experience, but its highs are high enough to make wading through the mud a worthwhile endeavor.

Source: Pitchfork: Album Reviews

Juicy J cuts to the chase early on Blue Dream Lean: The entire chorus of “Juicy J Can’t”, the album’s third track, is, “You say no to drugs/ Juicy J can’t.” It’s informative, though not completely necessary on a mixtape that derives its title by rhyming the slang for cough syrup and soda with the name of a strand of weed. Juicy– one half of legendary, and legendarily bizarre, Memphis rap group Three 6 Mafia– seemingly spent most of 2011 ingesting enough recreational drugs to make Nikki Sixx raise an eyebrow, and paying producer Lex Luger for beats so he can rap about it. Blue Dream Lean is basically a continuation of Juicy’s two collaborative mixtapes with Luger, Rubber Band Business and Rubber Band Business 2. Despite Luger’s producing only nine of the album’s 28 tracks, beats by Sonny Digital and Juicy himself work off of Luger’s blueprint, which itself is partially filtered down from the type of dark, head-knocking production of classic Three 6.

The success and failure of the mixtape are two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, there’s cohesion to Blue Dream Lean that serves it well. The result of Juicy’s chanting about taking drugs over tracks that are largely similar is that he pulls you into his world, one where narcotics blur everything together until one day you have a 28-track mixtape, yet you still need to title every song, but you’re so stoned that you just pick the dominant line from every chorus. Lesser artists have tried much harder to achieve the same effect and failed, and Juicy pulls it off effortlessly. The flip side of that, of course, is that a 28-track mixtape featuring Juicy J chanting over largely similar beats is far too many tracks, especially on the heels of two related tapes. Blue Dream Lean could be chopped in half and be no worse for the wear, but that’s par for the course.

It’s a shame, too, because a combination of the best Luger-style tracks and the few songs that go in a different direction would make for a very good album. The opening quarter of the mixtape is especially inspired, as it finds Juicy at the point where he’s most concentrated on casually, almost mindlessly, talking shit. Interspersed throughout the album are songs like “Big Bank”(produced by Drumma Boy, one of the most diverse producers in the South) and “Stoners Night 2″, which break up the slight monotony but deserve to be highlighted even further. The latter, done by notable up-and-coming producer Harry Fraud, features a lush, soulful sample that’s a breath of fresh air amongst the album’s suffocating palette.

The latter part of the tape gives shine to blog favorites like A$AP Rocky, Spaceghostpurrp, Alley Boy, and Kreayshawn, all of whom sound much too eager to please. And though that’s perfectly understandable, it’s quite jarring considering that Juicy is trading in his ability to make the listener believe that he’s self-destructively destroying his body regardless of the consequences. Kreayshawn at least managed to score the best chorus, and she and Juicy repeatedly asking each other, “you trippy, mane?” is the only time any of the aforementioned guests come off as carefree enough to hit on the album’s vibe.

Blue Dream Lean is allegedly Juicy’s first offering as a member of Wiz Khalifa‘s Taylor Gang, and though hot new rappers using their newfound power to sign legendary veterans that have faded from the spotlight almost always leads to a failure to meet inflated expectations, there’s enough here to suggest that Juicy could put out a really good album with the input of a dedicated editor.

Source: Pitchfork: Album Reviews

When Bristol legend Pinch released the out-of-nowhere “Croydon House” in 2010– on the London-based Swamp81 instead of his own foundational Tectonic imprint– it felt like a sea change. One of dubstep’s most influential pioneers, one of its diehard careerists, had made his own version of a house record (and this was before 2011 when it became the norm). In keeping with his usual heads-down dubstep, however, “Croydon House” was murky, dim-lit, and paranoid, not your standard garage-influenced thumper, and his tracks since have seen him navigate a no man’s land of in-between tempos and experimental rhythms, culminating in the bewildering Pinch and Shackleton collaborative album at the end of last year. It goes beyond just productions: This summer, Pinch started incorporating house into his DJ sets, dedicating sections of his timeslots to the 4/4 stuff. Was he moving on from dubstep?

It’s this many-limbed and flailing, vaguely house, vaguely techno hinterland that Rob Ellis’ long-overdue entry in the Fabriclive mix series occupies: The drums still swing and shake with that tribal energy that marks his best dubstep work, but there’s not always the snare on the third, and sometimes there’s a four-to-the-floor kick. The mix begins mid-track and cleverly continues the conceptual current that’s been running through commercial mix CDs as of late: think Four Tet’s own Fabriclive go for a similar example of artiness run amok in a dance mix. The nervily pulsating throb of Atlanta producer Distal’s “Venom” both opens and closes the set, sealing it into a closed circle that, at least in its peripheries, raises questions about the linearity of mixes in the first place. There’s an obvious left-to-right motion here, but there’s no grand closer, pensive opener, or any real climax: Left to its own devices, Pinch’s mix never really ends, the same bumpy journey over and over again, bubbling and bubbling but refusing to boil over. Does it need to end for it to be a satisfying product? According to Pinch, apparently not.

This little tweak allows Ellis to play around with the sequencing, and Fabriclive 61 begins with a gallop, running through a surprisingly techno-tinged opening stretch, with French producer F’s overlooked (and hugely inventive) “Slow Down” colliding with Shed’s latest in his rave-techno EQD alias: it’s an almost confrontational greeting from someone once associated with the purest of dubstep, and a true sign of the times for both the genre and one of its most prominent heroes.  The mix continues in this vein before fading out into beatless-near silence with Roly Porter’s gorgeous mechano-classical “Hessra”– at which point Pinch’s remix of Photek’s “Acid Reign” storms out, bringing the mix into more familiar 140-bpm dubstep territory.

Where some recent dubstep mixes like Youngsta’s Rinse CD or Distance’s Dubstep Allstars Vol. 8 were fine showcases of the genre’s steadfast traditionalist communities, they were nevertheless tainted by the genre’s turn inward (or the formulaic). Pinch’s selection of pounding kicks, crash-landing snares, and LFO growls, however, sound both more vital and crucially more alien(ating) than ever. His choice of producers is impeccable, mixing in old stalwarts who are at career highs (Distance’s sound is as mean as its ever been, and Goth-Trad’s lost in some LSD rabbithole) and producers like Roska and Addison Groove who provide strange, unconventional takes on the median dubstep tempo. It’s the most exciting 30 minutes of relatively pure “dubstep” since Appleblim’s career-defining Dubstep Allstars Vol. 6, taking that staggered “dungeon sound” and infusing it with all the psychological paranoia and jagged, jigsaw-puzzle rhythms that defined his own best work, both dubstep and otherwise.

So how do we get from dubstep back to whatever Distal’s “Venom” is supposed to be? Ellis one-ups the “Hessra” play, dropping the loping limp of Illum Sphere’s “Promise a Secret”– a tightknit blend of hyper-compressed string samples that’s eventually gutted by Distal’s more assertive track– on top of Om Unit’s jerky “Pressure”. Which brings us right back to where we started, traversing the most current iterations of the bass music continuum as viewed through Pinch’s dusty, obsidian lens.

What makes the halving between tempos less jarring is Pinch’s distinct aesthetic: the music here is damaged, blackened, and always foreboding, no matter what tempo it’s pounding at or what genre it might be interrogating. That unrelenting blackness can be suffocating, and it’s definitely unfriendly, but it’s never boring– which is a lot more than you can say about most “dubstep” mixes these days. So while Pinch might not have moved on from dubstep completely, he’s definitely moved somewhere, and it sounds like an exciting place to be.

Source: Pitchfork: Album Reviews

From the remote musical enclave of Fort Lauderdale, the young electronic songwriter Malcom Lacey has posted five Arrange albums on Bandcamp over the past couple of years. High productivity is common among laptop-wielding bedroom auteurs, but Lacey’s no data dumper. Each release exhibits unity and care– its own twist on a rapidly developing sound. The first one I discovered, before anyone knew much about Arrange, was Plantation, which I said was “thoroughly a breakup record.” But I was wrong.

Now that Lacey has done a little press– such as this interview with a South Florida weekly– we know more. His first instrument was the piano; he’s more inclined to slave over his ambient textures in private than to play shows in public; he likes Type Records and Perfume Genius. None of this was surprising. But one assertion caught me off guard: “Most of my lyrical content stems itself from an abusive childhood and the relationship I share with my incarcerated father,” with whom Plantation standout “When’d You Find Me?” was a “one-way conversation.”

The revelation casts new light on Lacey’s lyrics, which draw opposed qualities– hostility and tenderness, discretion and confession, self-hatred and self-help– into uneasy truces. (He’d have fit in well on Saddle Creek in the early 2000s.) On new EP Five Years With the Sun, Lacey is even more furtive than on Plantation, his halting voice washing in and out of audibility, and vanishing for long periods. In hushed tones, he dramatizes the process of a gentle person grappling with dark thoughts– now scathing, now contrite, lashing out and lashing in. His reticence comes to seem like an impulse for self-erasure, which makes the moments when he overcomes it feel especially poignant.

Is this palpable struggle what distinguishes Arrange from a thousand similar peers? It certainly isn’t the music’s substance, a fairly standard amalgamation of synth-pop, shoegaze, ambient, chillwave, and hip-hop. Nor is it any iconoclastic style– to the contrary, I prize its preternatural patience and humility. And Lacey is already developing a go-to track structure, which has a smoothly churning undercarriage of piano or guitar tones, ranks of juicy synthetic plucks pulsing above, and mechanical drums splashing the edges of the beats; all topped off with a synth lead that flaps like a tattered banner in a sluggish wind.

Maybe it’s something even harder to quantify: that vigilant, moody, quietly rapturous sensibility. While the orders of the day are pleasantly zoned-out or ethereally spiritual, Lacey’s music feels almost feverishly alert, with breath-catching pauses and mercurial embellishments calling for close attention to its dreamy flow. Below the Kompakt-isms, one hears the dulcet, revolving intervals of the lullaby. This is music as a ward or charm, its hermetic regularity holding a safe space against chaos. (It was recorded, I’m told, in a walk-in closet.) It doesn’t sound like a young man hunting for blog buzz. It sounds like a personal search for redemption, or at least some consolation, one moment at a time.

Careful sequencing makes Five Years With the Sun feel like an act of tentative revelation through gradual ascent. The immediate pop songs are divided by obscure but quirkily elegant set pieces: “Gone With the Snow”, where bizarrely treated vocals ride over glassy swells; “Airplane Notes”, a study in nocturnal counterpoint. The force gathered on the first half rises to a vertex on “Cure”, a burly production where Lacey opens up his voice with unaccustomed extroversion. “Mt. Rainer” vividly evokes traveling up switchbacks, the winds and vistas bending around, leading us up to the bright, clear peak of closer “Sun Showers”, where all the album’s fogs dispel.

“There’s a glow/ and I can feel it,” Lacey sings plainly, “deep below the hollow point of me.” A couple of inaudibly murmured lines later, we hear, “the way I felt when I first heard it say…” But the thought goes unfinished. Instead, a long instrumental passage culminates in a weary guitar anthem, then peters out into running waters. He’s not the type to make a sound just to fill space; he waits until he knows what he has to say. That’s what keeps me hanging on every moment. Enticingly, the open-ended conclusion of Five Years With the Sun promises more striving, more growth, more suffering and deliverance to come.

Source: Pitchfork: Album Reviews

Does it devalue Mobb Deep‘s output from the 1990s if I think they could still possibly perform at that level despite over a decade’s worth of evidence to the contrary? Let me clarify: I’m not talking so much about The Infamous or Hell on Earth, those would require reopening a window of commercial relevance for that rugged and raw aesthetic as well as Prodigy and Havoc reemerging as the fatalistic old souls of their early 20s, preferably rocking Hennessy football jerseys. That’s probably not going to happen, and it’s not entirely their fault. But they don’t need any of that to aspire to the standards set by the still-awesome Murda Muzik, their 1999 LP which, in retrospect, could be seen as a forerunner to DipSet’s synthesis of deadpan, absurdist violence, and a general disregard for actual rhyming. They just need to be entertaining and not give a fuck, and I mean– have you seen Prodigy’s Twitter feed since he got out of jail?

But while @PRODIGYMOBBDEEP is more than capable of reminding us never to question his trendsetting nor what he brought to the table, very little of that batshit sense of purpose or fun makes it to Black Cocaine. The trouble isn’t that Havoc and Prodigy have run out of things to say, or that they don’t really have much to rap about anymore– they’re real, you’re shook, and Prodigy will almost certainly have sex with your woman if only to make your bitch ass realize your own capability for being shook. That shit obviously never goes out of style, but rather than the likely legitimate insanity Prodigy flexed on 2007′s Return of the Mac, the two wring inspiration from that mode with the stubbornness of trying to get that last bit of toothpaste out the tube.

Once the author of the illest first lines (“Quiet Storm”, “Shook Ones, Pt. II”, the list goes on), Prodigy hardly comes up with one memorable rhyme during the entirety of Black Cocaine– we get brief teases at Illuminati P conspiracy theorizing, but little anyone who’s seen a one dollar bill couldn’t come up with. Likewise, Havoc delivers bar after bar of near-mesmeric placeholders, but he does boast about having “a ledger on my MacBook,” so now you know Excel is the spreadsheet of choice for dunn accountants. Still, at least they’re not fronting like club attendees or sex symbols anymore, and any remnant of G-Unit factory production is swapped out for wheelhouse Mobb with plenty of synthesized horns and ice-grilled hi-hats. But the title track and “Conquer” just remind me of any number of Infamy deep cuts whose titles escape me and whose quality doesn’t inspire me to find out.

If nothing else, you can be happy that Alchemist is inevitably involved, and I seriously doubt anyone’s still holding “Takeover” against them if Nas isn’t. While it’s a distinct pleasure to hear Queensbridge’s finest reconcile their differences, it’s a distinct disappointment all the same at the utter lack of spark present on “Get It Forever”: Nastradamus is considered one of the least-inspired hip-hop records ever made, and even then, these guys could still come up with something as bracing and utterly badass as “Family”. And you can also admire the stylistic window dressing as Hav and P try some kind of weird upper register flow on “Dead Man Shoes”. But they never find their footing, while you can imagine Bounty Killa spending the pauses during his offbeat hook wondering whether Gwen Stefani still has his phone number.

And so Black Cocaine comes across as not particularly different than, say, recent records from Saigon or Uncle Murda or M.O.P., guys who should be able to use the cratered rap economy to their advantage and create the rawest, most uncompromising, and NY-centric hardcore hip-hop they so choose, but who ultimately sound confused as to how to navigate a land with no boundaries. (Just bearing witness to “Hell On Earth 2k11″ featuring French Montana and Waka Flocka Flame is kinda mindblowing either way.) Truth is, Mobb Deep sound kinda unsure as to where they stand, too proud to truly change up their style and still too much of a name brand to have to.

Source: Pitchfork: Album Reviews

In a December review for Wire, British critic Joe Muggs explored the way Berlin producer Anstam uses technology to emulate acoustic instruments– and then, push those sounds to places that actual players in an orchestra could never go. Muggs invokes the concepts of “uncanny valley” and “trompe l’oreille,” related phrases describing the phenomenon of fabricated artifacts and intelligences mimicking “real life” to the point of being indistinguishable. “The dividing line between the physical and digital worlds is fast fading away,” Muggs writes in a prelude of praise for Anstam’s Dispel Dances, “in the process posing new questions about our relationship to what we’re hearing.” Most of Muggs’ fascination with Anstam appropriately stems from a sense of wonder, or imagining the possibilities of a set of computers refined enough to make digital music sound as though it were recorded in a studio but play music beyond the capabilities of human hands. It’s a post-milliennial update of Conlon Nancarrow’s player-piano rolls, where the human becomes the controller, if not the hands-on creator.

Glimmer, the new album by Polish producer Michał Jacaszek, takes a much different path to a very similar sort of intrigue. Jacaszek has long operated at artistic thresholds. His 2009 album, Pentral, for instance, seemed like an attempt to be as brutal and beautiful as possible. Without notice, he’d burst from near-silent calm into speaker-splitting tones. If that sounds off-putting, Pentral thankfully played more like an attempt to dismiss a binary than to bait and cruelly switch. For Glimmer, Jacaszek combines a real-time ensemble– here, harpsichordist Małgosia Skotnicka, clarinetist Andrzej Wojciechowski, and himself on acoustic guitar and metallophone– with his own web of electroacoustic effects.

Jacaszek possesses the soft programming touch of Christian Fennesz. Sensitive and slight, his electronics suggest a layer of lace sitting softly above patches of sculpted debris. As a composer with this small group, Jacaszek recalls recent romantics like Texas’ excellent Balmorhea and Sweden’s delicate Tape; the music is often pretty but not cloyingly so, meaning that there’s space for foreboding and worry between the oboe’s lifts and the harpsichord’s fanciest runs. Rather than simply process previously recorded sounds, he smartly trusses those qualities, shaping an album that feels like some science-fiction waking dream. In an atmosphere that’s very pleasant but vaguely eerie, the humans and the robots interact, each occasionally slipping behind the cover of the other. Jacaszek’s again craftily corroded another binary.

Glimmer‘s nine tracks work best as a whole, built with hard-won peaks and long-sloped valleys that disappear into the distance. As the album progresses, Jacaszek hints at previous themes and ideas, using a classical trope to earn a sense of cohesion. It works, too, making the 41 minutes between the repetition that opens “Goldengrove” and the granulated whirr that signals the exit of “Windhover” seem compulsory. But there are remix-ready instrumentals here, too, from the Burial-like stasis of the gorgeous “Dare-Gale” to the swollen majesty at the center of “As Each Tucked String Tells”. Think of Glimmer as a little symphony, just with singles, and made by a musician who can’t decide between the roles of producer or composer. Really, he shouldn’t anytime soon.

Source: Pitchfork: Album Reviews

Focus too long on any one part of Spills Out, the third LP from psych-splattered Brooklynite post-punk manglers Pterodactyl, and you risk losing track of the rest of it. The sprawling set from the shapeshifting band is bristling with basement-show energy one minute, stacking haunting Zombies-style harmonies the next. The pixelated, post-everything whoosh of their earlier, more forceful records is still very much in evidence on Spills Out, but it’s as though their turn-on-a-dime cubism’s been given the SpinArt treatment, globs of melody pooling at its edges. This unlikely meetup– of Les Savy Fav‘s hard-driving antsiness, the Olivia Tremor Control‘s echoing psych-pop, Abe Vigoda‘s clangy hot-weather punk, and any three or four second-tier SST bands of your choosing– sometimes smacks of eclectic overextension, but for the most part, Spills Out manages to revel in its own clutter.

Spills Out‘s first five numbers are all about propulsion, zig-zagging melodies and breathless vocals underpinned by insistent, edge-of-calamity drumbeats. This, in large part, is the art-punking Pterodactyl of old, never ones to shy away from melody, provided they can make it move. At times, the vigorous rhythms threaten to get the best of the trickily constructed tunes they’re mobilizing, but at this pace, they leave precious little time to notice. The woozy lurch of “Allergy Shots” is quite a toneshift, its duskily triumphant melody marching its way directly into your pituitary region. Though 2010′s Arnold’s Park saw Pterodactyl playing around with psychedelia– the acoustic flitters of Sung Tongs-era Animal Collective, among other things– here, Spills Out burrows its way into the rabbit hole on something of a mid-album mini-suite of thick, woozy psych.

Rife with spectral sound effects and blurry, tape-stressing maximalism, many of these songs could’ve fallen off the back end of last year’s stellar Olivia Tremor Control reissues. Like the Olivias, Pterodactyl wrest cohesion from calamity by soldiering surefootedly through all these far-flung juxtapositions, presenting these disparate styles as though they’re supposed to go together. But even on the sprightlier numbers, Pterodactyl’s formidable instrumental prowess sometimes blots out the songs themselves; with tempos slowed and melodies pushed to the forefront rather than rattling around the edges, they’re downplaying their strengths in favor of an experiment that proves only somewhat successful.

When, as on “The Break”, they match the two sides together– its drums rollicking, its harmonies circuitous– Pterodactyl’s messy vision for Spills Out is given its clearest expression. For the most part, the record’s final third does a nice job blending the two, squeezing little bits of baroque-bent vocalism or sci-fi sound collage in between the pummels. Their knack for jittery melody’s always fared best when matched to forward motion, and though much of Spills Out seems to zip by in a blur, it’s assembled with enough care to never quite spin out from its center. It can be more than a little dizzying, with all that stuff whizzing by, to settle on any particular chorus or guitar riff for too long. But throwing yourself in Spills Out‘s path means letting it reconfigure your circuits, and it’s hard to come out the other side not feeling pretty good about getting frazzled.

Source: Pitchfork: Album Reviews

Nate Young might not have meant the title of his 2009 LP Regression as a description of his musical direction. But the album’s stark, slow tones are a sonic reduction compared to his work with John Olson in Stare Case, a project that itself trims back the noise the pair make as a part of Wolf Eyes. Young’s path hasn’t been completely linear– Wolf Eyes often sound stark, too, and Regression included a few noisy moments.But his sequel to Regression, Stay Asleep, might be his most minimal work ever.

Each of the album’s five songs is built from two basic elements– a loop of low notes and a metronomic beat. Synths and other electronics add small accents, but often the bass and rhythm march forward unadorned. With this small arsenal of sounds, Young makes music that gets tenser without actually changing much. It’s tough to put a finger on how his repetitive notes can feel like a stair-climb instead of a still-life. Every track is pretty clean– there are no hazy sonics or cloaking distortion. Yet when I listen, I’m less aware of what’s happening musically than the mood the music creates.

That mood is almost always eerie and dark. Young’s sparse approach gives Stay Asleep tons of negative sonic space, making it as creepy as an unlit basement. The horror-movie feel is similar to that of Prurient’s last record, Bermuda Drain. But where Dominick Fernow openly mimics the tropes of 1970s slasher soundtracks, Young’s songs are more like analogues to onscreen suspense. In his tick-tock tones, time seems to creep unstoppably toward potential doom.

For Young, though, Stay Asleep isn’t so much a countdown to danger as a guard against it, “a hex sign… that can protect against the ‘evil eye.’” As he explained to Tiny Mix Tapes, “I like the idea of distracting negative energy with art and holding it at bay.” Closer “Collapse” succeeds at that goal, with piano chords that suggest rising optimism in the face of gloom. But it’s also the album’s weirdest track, with Olson’s horns and (ex-Wolf Eye) Aaron Dilloway’s tape effects adding a warpy insanity. Ending with such a surreal tone suggests that the title Stay Asleep is an actual command. Maybe this isn’t a horror movie but simply a dream, and the only real danger is waking up from its entrancing sounds.

Source: Pitchfork: Album Reviews

The music of Cleveland trio Emeralds is pretty wide, both in the range of sounds and instruments they use, and the expansive feel of their New Age-tinted creations. For his first proper solo release (after a handful of low-run cassettes and CD-Rs), Emeralds member Steve Hauschildt took a step in the opposite direction. As he told the website Stool Pigeon, Tragedy Geometry “came from just wanting to spend time with one instrument and really exploring all the possibilities of sound you can get from that.”

The instrument in question is synthesizer, and the music Hauschildt makes with it is like Emeralds in miniature. He focuses on small, basic patterns that produce two kinds of songs– slow, drifting drones and pulsing, minimalist loops. The effect can be as big and spacious as anything his group does, but Hauschildt always starts from a base of simplicity. Each track is an exercise in turning tiny sounds and gradual shifts into something large.

The lack of obvious variety could make Tragedy Geometry sound generic, but Hauschildt’s devout tack actually gives the album a distinct personality. Choose any single track, and reference points quickly come to mind– Tangerine Dream, Steve Reich, and various half-remembered foreign film scores and PBS-doc soundtracks. But listen in sequence, and Hauschildt’s consistent way with this kind of sound becomes clear, in a starry-eyed mix of small swells and planetarium-friendly wonder. At times the music can get sentimental and even sappy, but it’s never heavy-handed. In Hauschildt’s songs, emotion feels closer to a happy accident than an overarching intention.

This comes across strongest in Tragedy Geometry‘s best cut, “Music for a Moiré Pattern”. At 11 minutes, it’s by far the album’s longest piece, but it’s no grand epic. Though its sparkly loops crest into some moving crescendos, its core is simple repetition and the fascinating patterns it creates. Throughout, Hauschildt deftly treads the fine line between guiding his instrument and letting its cyclical mechanisms do the work. You get the sense that he’s basically happy to get out of his own way– a common goal with anything this mantra-like– and is as awed by the hypnotic aspects of overlapping synths as the emotional ones. Maybe that’s the key to Tragedy Geometry‘s sneaky power– by letting his synths tell tales instead of forcing them to, Hauschildt finds stories bigger than his own.

Source: Pitchfork: Album Reviews

Lioness is not Amy Winehouse‘s long-lost gem or interrupted follow-up album, nor is it a revealing view of a tortured star in the fraught final stages of her life. Instead, in true record-industry fashion, Lioness is a collection of odds-and-sods cobbled together over the course of nine years of recordings to create something that kinda-sorta feels like an album. Executive produced by longtime partner Salaam Remi, who helmed her 2003 debut album, Frank, Lioness carries little of the subversive swagger or playful arrogance of the Mark Ronson-dominated Back to Black. Whether it’s merely all the material that was left, or an effort to salvage her image after years of tabloid drama and self-abuse, Lioness presents a picture of a talented singer at her most restrained and polite. And let’s be honest: Polite is the last thing we expect (or want) from Amy Winehouse.

That’s not to say the results aren’t satisfying: No matter what she’s singing, it remains thrilling to hear that voice come to life again. On Lioness, for better or for worse, she takes on the role of standards singer: It feels like a hearkening back to her jazzy Frank days, the result of having Remi at the head of the project rather than Ronson. When it works, it really works: Opener “Our Day Will Come” is a gorgeous blend of triumph and autumnal wistfulness, a savvy intro to a record that’s bound to evoke emotions just as nuanced and conflicted in its listeners. However, on tracks like “The Girl From Ipanema” or first single and Tony Bennett duet “Body and Soul”, she sounds like a lounge singer, that unmistakable wit and smarmy charm only a faint glint in otherwise serviceable performances.

Considering that Mark Ronson– producer of her signature tracks like “Rehab”– is probably more responsible for her fame than anyone else, it’s surprising to see his involvement reduced to such a minuscule level. As ever, his contributions are the highlight: A new version of the Zutons’ “Valerie” turns what was a tongue-in-cheek cover into one of her most infectious vocal performances. Meanwhile, his melodramatic rendering of Carole King’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” toes the line between elegant and overblown, but better yet it’s a shroud of pomp surrounding one of Winehouse’s most delicately powerful vocals. When she breaks out into her best falsetto on the track’s bridge, it’s one of the few moments on Lioness that feels truly, heartbreakingly poignant, enough to cut through its stodgy accompaniment.

Winehouse’s best material never came from covers or standards, however, but her personality: her bitter sarcasm, her flagrant profanity, and her dominant-but-demure air of not-giving-a-fuck. Even though half of Lioness is by her own pen, it’s a different view of Winehouse’s songwriting persona: The gorgeous ballad “Half Time” is endearing but lacks the sardonic bite of her other slower material like “Wake Up Alone” (which itself is included in an alternate Remi-produced version here), and it’s easy to imagine the fake-cutesy “Best Friends, Right?” being more effective given an arrangement that wasn’t so transparently cutesy. Back to Black highlight “Tears Dry on Their Own” is present in its “original version,” an almost unrecognizably elegiac arrangement that on the other hand not only emphasizes the strength of Winehouse’s own songwriting but its diversity as well.

Chalk it up to fine-tuned and image-conscious execution, but there’s little on Lioness: Hidden Treasures that sounds throwaway, or like it should have never been released; but there’s equally little that sounds absolutely essential. Released before the album, the Nas collaboration “Like Smoke” seems like an attempt at a new Winehouse jam, a pertinent reminder of her slightly more adult-contemporary-challenging “urban” side, the part of her that made her more than just a Grammy-adorned, technically proficient singer. Here the track sounds like a guide vocal, unsure and smothered in reverb, with Nas filling in an excess of white space rather than just guesting. On the otherwise funny, doo-wop-styled “Between the Cheats”, her detached drawl enters full-on mumble territory, Winehouse sounding like she either can’t remember or can’t enunciate the words. The chorus of backing vocals feels mocking as a result, but it’s a necessary moment of discomfort on a record that sometimes feels like it’s desperately trying to sanitize a wild spirit after years of chaos.

If that all sounds a little negative, it’s because Lioness is still weighed down with the baggage that goes along with any posthumous compilation– but as these things go, it’s a pretty strong disc. It flows well, and if Winehouse didn’t sound so oddly neutered on so much of it, Lioness could easily be another solid entry in her catalog. As it stands, though, it sounds like the anachronistic time-travel job it is, going backward through the career of an artist who had a very distinct developmental arc. At least in one regard, Island and Salaam Remi have done the “honorable” thing: There’s no pretense of artistic intention here, and no exploitative stabs at an artist in the most vulnerable moments of her short life. But in their mission to present Winehouse as a singer first and foremost, whiting out her personal problems and demons– the very things that made Back to Black such a transcendent album in the first place– they reduce her to her pre-Black standard of budding talent. Instead of adding anything concrete to her legacy, Lioness only reaffirms what we already knew about her, and hopefully why she deserves to be remembered as an artist rather than a media circus.

Source: Pitchfork: Album Reviews