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The Pains of Being Pure at Heart landed with a bookish and fuzzy aesthetic, the sound of ace indie pop students mimicking their heroes. Yet the band has been forthcoming in their love of crossover alternative rock, and on their second LP, Belong, Pains link up with Flood and Alan Moulder, the superproducers who manned the boards for a number of 90s titans– Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, U2, Depeche Mode, and PJ Harvey just to name a few. Coming after a scrappy, low-profile debut, this is the sort of power move that used to have cred-conscious listeners crying “sell-out!” (remember that word?), but fortunately, Belong is a bigger, bolder, and brighter follow-up that adds new dimensions to the Pains’ sound while nearly equaling the songwriting of their debut.

The first three tracks on Belong– the title track, “Heaven’s Gonna Happen Now”, and “Heart in Your Heartbreak”– make up the strongest run the Pains have put together. That’s in large part because, while they feature the seamless verse-chorus-bridge transitions the debut had in spades, they sound like actual 90s alt-rock radio hits. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart wasn’t as lo-fi as it was often made out to be, but it didn’t allow for the thrilling deluges of fuzz or the punchy clarity on this opening trio of tracks. Later, Pains nudge themselves slightly out of their comfort zone, replicating the motorbike roar of JAMC on “Girl of 1,000 Dreams” or the bliss of My Bloody Valentine on “Strange”.

Even with their shiny makeover, the most noticeable alteration is that Kip Berman is no longer just a lead singer– he’s a frontman as well. While maintaining his soft, lisping lilt, he’s now much higher in the mix, giving the singalong hooks of “Heart in Your Heartbreak” and “Too Tough” an underlined emphasis. His lyrics are also more inclusive; he’s dropping the puns and arch prose of its predecessor for magnanimous songs about you, we, and us. But this newfound stress on speaking directly to the listener doesn’t come without its awkward growth spurts: It’s worth questioning whether striving for the perfect chorus at times comes at the cost of fully thought-out verses. The group’s momentum also gets occasionally jarred by a stray lyric that can be overreaching or undercooked.

And yet, even the dodgiest lyrics on Belong don’t really come off as pandering to me so much as a reminder of the margin for error inherent in a move this brave and necessary. Having dabbled in brighter production and a Saint Etienne remix on their Higher Than the Stars EP, it was evident that the Pains were trying to figure an exit strategy from a narrow, reverent sound they utterly nailed the first time around. And considering the game plans of recent New York bands that faced the same struggle– either buy time by repeating themselves (like the Strokes or Interpol) or screw the pooch with a charmless, big-budget disaster (like the Strokes or Interpol)– it’s no small achievement that Belong transcends its time-coded sound as expertly as their self-titled did.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Albums

Noah Lennox’s Panda Bear project has always been about making “difficult” music scan as almost radio-friendly, to translate experimental moves to a broad audience with little interest in such things. It’s a strategy he learned, at least in part, from sonic forebears like Arthur Russell and Brian Wilson, along with the avant-techno types he reveres. Like those disparate influences, Lennox has used potentially off-putting compositional and textural ideas to craft some of the most inviting music of his era. In turn, he’s inspired more of his own followers in the last four years than anyone might have guessed. Lennox has found himself the unwitting king of the chillwave nation, hero to a whole generation of underground kids drawn to his mix of heavy reverb, sun-woozy synths, droning kraut-surf-ambient-pop songs, high childlike voice, and psychedelic-cum-nostalgic sleeve art.

Tomboy, Lennox’s fourth solo album as Panda Bear, was mixed with Pete “Sonic Boom” Kember of Spectrum/Spacemen 3. And again, in a way there’s little here that’s any further out-there than the blissful psychedelia and dream-pop Spacemen 3 and their peers were playing in the late 1980s, a lineage that stretches right back to stuff we now consider classic rock. With its angelic choirboy harmonies over an unchanging synth buzz, even “Drone”, the album’s roughest song, is a dead-ringer for the way Spacemen 3 songs like “Ecstasy Symphony” merged the pop high of Beach Boys with the woozy downer feel of the Velvet Underground.

But despite Tomboy‘s shorter songs and more conventional structures– especially compared to the loose percussive jams of Lennox’s 2007 solo breakthrough Person Pitch– he’s still committed to pushing his music to strange places. And few of his chilled-to-the-point-of-entropy acolytes can match Lennox for warped hooks. Forget comparing his gorgeous voice to their mumbling. Unlike many chillwave and dream-pop artists (and Spacemen 3), Lennox is blessed with the ability to actually sing, and he knows enough about crafting harmonies to do more than vaguely nod in the direction of 60s pop. So Tomboy is a pretty singular mix of the eerie and the inviting.

Despite the murk and terror and noise of Animal Collective’s earliest music, there’s never been anything particularly ugly about Lennox’s mature solo work, starting with 2004′s Young Prayer. But even then, he wasn’t comfortable playing the laid-back hippie stereotype that’s been laid on A.C. by detractors in recent years. Young Prayer might still be the most emotionally wrenching album in the Collective’s catalog, an album written by a young man wrestling with some heavy shit. Lennox’s father was dying of brain cancer while Young Prayer was being written. “[My father] got to read the lyrics, which was the most important thing to me,” he told me in 2005; Young Prayer was a last attempt at confirming the good his father had done for him.

Musically, the album was the least bleak, least difficult thing an Animal Collective member had recorded to that point. But the unembellished recording– you could almost hear the empty rooms in which it was recorded– only heightened the fragility of the songs. “I didn’t want to spend a lot of time producing it or thinking about how I wanted to get it to sound,” Lennox said in that same interview. “I just wanted to get it out quickly.” Tomboy is a much more considered record, with thickly layered psych-style production. There’s also another heavy dose of dub, the most studio-bound and effects-driven music of the last 50 years, with the kind of extreme echo that plays like an overt tribute to the very different Jamaican psychedelia of King Tubby and Lee Perry.

But Tomboy‘s also something of a return to the simplicity, if not the emotionally blasted vibe, of Young Prayer after the ornate structures and epic lengths of Person Pitch. Instead of a Young Prayer we now have a “Surfer’s Hymn”. Instead of a naked guitar and a lot of blank space in the recording we get a wall-of-sound rush and percussion that’s like Steve Reich by way of IDM. But the spare droning quality and devotional feeling of the music remains. There was plenty of church music in the Beach Boys and Arthur Russell, too, and Tomboy has a similar quality of embracing both summer fun and hushed spirituality.

The trouble with recording a ramshackle epic like Person Pitch is that you set up a portion of your audience to expect the next album to be at least as grand in both scope and design. There are certainly no obvious peaks on Tomboy like “Bros” or “Good Girl/Carrots”, where the 12-minute lengths announced them as attention-demanding stand-outs. So Tomboy‘s smoothness will likely be mildly divisive among Lennox’s fans. Many might have hoped that Lennox would have recorded something less accessible to separate him from the beach-obsessed glut of bedroom pop. But the scaling back on Tomboy in no way represents a scaling back of ambition on Lennox’s part. In a way, what he’s pulled off here is even more difficult. He’s condensed the sprawl and stylistic shifts of Person Pitch into seemingly tidy songs. The fact that he’s able to make music that’s both otherworldly and familiar-on-first-listen is something that all of his followers would like to achieve, and very few have the chops or inventiveness to pull off.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Albums

The stylization of the name tUnE-yArDs in print is a bit off-putting, but it at least gives people fair warning: This is not an act with any interest in politely conforming to expectations. tUnE-yArDs is the music project of Merrill Garbus, a songwriter, vocalist, percussionist, and ukulele player who has fused elements of acoustic folk, RB, funk, Afro-pop, and rock into a bold, uncompromising hybrid all her own. Garbus is blessed with an extraordinary voice, and she wields it with great confidence, always coming off in total control of her phrasing while seeming totally uninhibited in her expression. There’s an authoritative quality to her voice– she often sings with a commanding, full-bodied boldness, but even at her softest, Garbus sounds assertive and forthright.

w h o k i l l, Garbus’ second album as tUnE-yArDs, delivers on the promise of her 2009 debut, BiRd-BrAiNs. Unlike that album, which she recorded almost entirely on her own using a digital voice recorder and the sound editing program Audacity, w h o k i l l was mostly made in traditional studios in collaboration with bassist Nate Brenner, engineer Eli Crews, and a handful of other musicians. The music benefits from the increased professionalism, but Garbus has not abandoned her lo-fi aesthetic. As on BiRd-BrAiNs, Garbus layers sound to create a patchwork of contrasting textures. This time around, the greater clarity allows for more exaggerated dynamics. This is most apparent in “Gangsta”, a carefully arranged track that evokes danger and fear with bluntly abbreviated blasts of horn noise and sounds that cut in and out erratically like a set of headphones with a busted wire or a cell phone that can’t hold its signal. On the opposite end of the spectrum, she creates an almost unsettling intimacy on “Wooly Wolly Gong” by mixing the ambient hum of room sound with closely mic’d arpeggiated chords and vocals.

Brenner’s presence on bass is the biggest difference between w h o k i l l and BiRd-BrAiNs. His style is loose and jazzy, with fluid, melodic lines that add dimension to Garbus’ compositions. She sounded so isolated on BiRd-BrAiNs, but suddenly her music is like a conversation, with Brenner’s parts bouncing off her voice and rhythms like thoughtful banter. He brings a janky funk to “Es-so”, a zippy groove to “Bizness”, and a delicate weight to the airy “Doorstep”. On “Powa”, his lead lines slink around Garbus’ slo-mo rock riff as if in a subliminal duet with her expressive vocal performance. That song builds steadily over the course of five minutes until it reaches a stunning climax in which Brenner’s bass bounces gently as Garbus hits a glorious high note like a feral Mariah Carey.

Throughout w h o k i l l, Garbus confronts thorny issues of race, gender, body image, and privilege in ways that are pointed but nuanced. She mostly sticks to personal narratives, suggesting big ideas and complex tensions in her subtext while emphasizing the urgency of small moments and concrete details. She’s most direct in the opening cut “My Country”, in which she wrestles with guilt over her own privilege, but she’s more thought-provoking when in murkier, more ambiguous territory, like when she sings about a sexual fantasy involving the brutal cop who arrested her brother in “Riotriot” or when she wonders aloud why she does not have more black male friends at the end of “Killa”. Garbus is particularly fascinated by violence; most of the tracks on w h o k i l l deal with power struggles that arise from inequity and lead to further cruelty and injustice. Her lighter moments are still quite complicated– she playfully wrestles with negative body image in “Es-so”, while that same lingering disgust and self-doubt brings a moving subtext to “Powa”, an ode to a lover who can get her to momentarily let go of stress and insecurities.

Back in 1983 Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon wrote an essay for Art Forum that suggested that when we go to rock performances, we pay to see other people believe in themselves. A lot of what makes w h o k i l l and tUnE-yArDs’ excellent live performances so compelling is the degree to which Garbus commits to her ideas and displays a total conviction in her personal, idiosyncratic, high-stakes music. This, in and of itself, is very inspiring and empowering. This unguarded, individualistic expression encourages strong identification in listeners, so don’t be surprised if this record earns Garbus a very earnest and intense cult following.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Albums

As a rapper, Mississippi’s Big K.R.I.T. is pretty good but nothing amazing: With the empathetic warmth in his sticky drawl, he makes a convincing Southern everyman, and he has enough rhythmic dexterity to really stick to beats. On the new, free-for-download mixtape Return of 4Eva, he invests the cars-and-girls talk he’s already been doing with a sort of conscious-rap sensibility; toward the back end of the tape, he leaves behind boasting to talk about poverty and racism and materialism, sometimes coming up with a truly evocative line. But he’s also lost some of the snarl that made his delivery so great on tracks like last year’s Curren$y/Wiz Khalifa collab “Glass House”. He can get a bit clumsy when he tries to transform himself into some kind of loverman. And even in his strongest moments, he still sounds a whole lot like T.I. without much of T.I.’s effortless, charismatic confidence. He could still become an excellent rapper, but it hasn’t happened yet.

As a producer, though, he’s good enough that he could be half a Ying Yang Twin and his music would still be well worth the hard-drive real estate. On last year’s free online album K.R.I.T Wuz Here, he marked his place in a lineage of organic, soul-sampling Southern rap producers that includes giants like Pimp C and Organized Noize, making hard-thudding personalized version of the tracks he must’ve heard growing up. On Return of 4Eva (still free, still online), he progresses even further, turning his sound into a sleepier, woozier flutter– a comfortable bed for his voice to sink into. Refracted versions of guitar and organ sounds wind their way through oceans of bass, all building into a perfectly evocative, nostalgic sound. Every once in a while, he’ll come with something harder, like the skeletal keyboard bloops of “My Sub” or the horn-and-organ thunder of “Sookie Now”. But for the most part, he focuses on turning classic Southern rap sounds into comfort-food background music– the sort of thing that sounds absolutely gorgeous in a car on a warm spring afternoon, when you’re driving slow with the windows open. There’s a reason that Return of 4Eva dropped just as the weather was getting warmer.

In a sense, Big K.R.I.T. is like a hip-hop version of a group of rock revivalists. The same way that, say, Band of Horses turns dusty Neil Young guitar epics into something simple and comforting, K.R.I.T. trades on our collective memory of mid-90s Southern rap and turns that into brilliant invitations to nostalgia. At the end of “Sookie Now”, we hear a sample of Don Draper philosophizing in “Mad Men”: “There is the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash– if they have a sentimental bond with the product.” K.R.I.T. included that sample to draw attention to his younger rap peers; he’s the type of old soul who still complains about “ringtone rappers” sometimes. But it could just as well describe the Pavlovian attachment some of us have to a beautifully looped-up soul sample. And Return of 4Eva is absolutely packed with cascading looped-up falsetto harmonies. Sometimes, it feels like a set of variations on the beat for OutKast UGK’s “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You)”. And since “Int’l Players Anthem” is one of the greatest rap songs of the past 10 years, that’s no complaint.

Return of 4Eva doesn’t have too many guests, but most of the people who do show up are Southern rappers who peaked maybe seven years ago: Chamillionaire, David Banner, even Ludacris on a remix of last year’s “Country Shit”. All those guys sound reinvigorated; K.R.I.T.’s amber-hued production gives them a context that just works for them. And one of the real revelations here is K.R.I.T.’s own singing voice. Taking on a few hooks himself, he’s got a thoughtful, bluesy coo that seems custom-built for his tracks. It’s fun to imagine what might happen if K.R.I.T. teamed up with an honest-to-god great rapper for a full-length. He and Yelawolf have been teasing a mixtape together for a while, and that could be incredible. But for now, Return of 4Eva, all glowing warmth and lazy-afternoon drift, stands as one of the finest rap releases of 2011.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Albums

Singer-songwriter Cass McCombs named his fifth album WIT’S END, not WITS’ END. The distinction is slight, but telling. Because “wits” usually refers to an overall sense of sanity while “wit” is more commonly associated with one’s cleverness or humor. And this record does not mark the end of McCombs’ good judgment. Quite the contrary. However, it is not funny or quick or especially nimble-minded. Over the course of his previous four albums, McCombs fashioned himself an enigmatic vagabond in the classic Dylan mold, yet it wasn’t until 2009′s Catacombs that his enigma started to feel more like a complement than a crutch. While he may have let his wit get the better of him before through knowingly obtuse lyrics and showy arrangements, WIT’S END fittingly leaves those days behind. This is a gorgeous album of despair, the most believable evidence yet that McCombs is living up to his own legend.

Catacombs had McCombs stripping away the instrumentation he had built up around his songs, ending with a bare naturalism that suited him well. And WIT’S END goes even further, its empty spaces and deliberate tempos matching the album’s immense loneliness. To get an idea of how desolate, exactly, consider that opening track “County Line”– an inching ballad about severe unrequited love with its own frighteningly real, syringe-filled junkie video– is the jauntiest thing here. Catacombs highlight “You Saved My Life” saw McCombs voicing startling sincere and direct affection; if someone played it at a wedding, grandparents might not blink. The direness of WIT’S END suggests the California-born singer may need some more saving; if someone played these songs at a funeral, sons and daughters would bow their heads solemnly.

So yeah, this record is a downer. But there’s rare beauty in such darkness, too– just look at forebears like Leonard Cohen, Elliott Smith, and Nick Drake. Or even Edgar Allan Poe. Because, along with its mopiness, WIT’S END is creepy as hell. Its gothic eeriness embodies not Poe’s famous tales as much as his more ethereal and lovelorn poems. In the author’s 1827 verse “Spirits of the Dead”, he characterizes the titular ghosts as comforting– “a mystery of mysteries!” And that same infatuation with wispy denouements is all over WIT’S END, but much like Poe’s spirits, McCombs’ songs bring life to their withering characters over and over again.

Take the seven-and-a-half-minute elegy “Memory’s Stain”, in which a shared thrift-store sweater leads to ruminations on the unwashable blots that reside in our subconscious only to pop up without warning. “Boozing is the highest aim when spittle won’t get out Memory’s stain,” he sings, before a breathy bass clarinet takes over for the back half, its unique low tones planting many new memories of its own. And closer “A Knock Upon the Door” tells what could be a centuries-old tale of the tumultuous relationship between a minstrel and his creative muse. The song’s repetitive verse-upon-verse structure stretches out to nearly ten minutes, but more oddball sounds– the baroque, recorder-like chalumeau, a metallic dink in place of a snare drum, and the ominous door tap itself– keep things intriguingly askew. “The Lonely Doll”, meanwhile, holds its story of a drunken louse and weeping woman aloft over a pillow-y Hammond B3 and brushed drums, the woozy lilt a convincing callback to Leonard Cohen’s 1967 debut LP.

In a handwritten note to Stereogum, McCombs recently wrote, “I know people get lonely because I do, so that’s what I end up writing songs about, how you get lonely sometimes and come up with these big ideas that give you meaning for a second but then leave you like everything else leaves you.” The statement is economical and accurate, if overly modest. Because while there are lots of musicians trading in loneliness out there, most of them often veer into a self-pity that can leave listeners even more far gone. But the intangibility of WIT’S END makes it a more realistic and reliable companion, its elusive secrets offering a queer comfort. At the start of his first album, A, Cass McCombs posed the question, “Is it dying that terrifies you, or just being dead?” On WIT’S END, he’s come up with an answer; on “Buried Alive” he sings, “If I’m alive or dead I don’t really care, as long as my Soul’s intact.” He’s got soul to spare.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Albums

For more than 20 years, DJ Quik has been the secret ingredient in the broth. Whether you know it or not, the gifted West Coast producer/rapper has worked on dozens of L.A. gangsta rap classics you’ve drunkenly screamed along to, often without even a liner-note credit to show for his efforts. Pop music’s grumbling cast of neglected innovators is long, but Quik doesn’t quite fit with that crowd: He’s released platinum and gold records, as well as helped craft them for Tupac, Snoop, and Dre. Instead, he’s stuck in that weird purgatory between Unknown Legend and Not-Quite-Star. It’s a situation that could bog you down if you let it. But if you decide, one day, that you simply do not care anymore, something amazing can happen: You realize you can do whatever the hell you want.

This realization has been dawning in real time in DJ Quik’s music recently. On BlaQKout, his 2009 collaboration with fellow West Coast warrior Kurupt, he experimented with stylistic detours from electro to dub, letting his free-associative musical imagination run wild. On the surface, The Book of David feels more straightforward. A rich stew of warm disco, grown-and-sexy RB, and classic g-funk, it sounds engineered to waft out over barbecues. But it’s also riddled with idiosyncrasies: songs that dissolve into deep-dub fade-outs, vocal samples that pop up in unexpected places, astonishing statements of raw heartbreak and anger. It’s as weird as it is crowd-pleasing, and it underlines what BlaQKout suggested: Unencumbered by commercial expectations, Quik is making some of the most inventive music of his career.

Quik has always been quirkier than his gangsta-rap peers– underneath the monstrous knock of his drums, he’s snuck in all manner of odd little details. On The Book of David, though, he’s a full-blown mad scientist of trunk-rattle. “Fire and Brimstone”, the album’s opening track, lurches out of the gate with a stumbling drum pattern. It’s a pulverizing track that could transform a passing Jeep into a noise-disturbance complaint, but it’s also a sprawling grid of counter-rhythms oddly similar to the rhythmic map of Radiohead’s “Bloom”. (Seriously.) “Poppin’”, meanwhile, feels like a random collection of unrelated sounds accidentally colliding to form a perfectly coherent groove.

If any of this sounds wonky or cerebral, don’t worry– The Book of David is a pleasure-first listening experience, and Quik deploys each of his tricks with a showman’s flair. “Hydromatic” loops an intoxicating vocal sample around some bone-jarring piano stabs and New Orleans brass-band blurts, and that’s before the head-spinning syncopated hand-claps glide in. “Killer Dope” rolls in on a regal fanfare of French horn pads and jazz-inflected pianos. On that song, Quik brags about his ability to simultaneously rhyme and play his piano live; it’s a telling boast, revealing the old-school funk producer Quik is in his heart. On The Book of David, you feel his keen musical intelligence– and his humble pride in his talent– presiding.

Most rapper/producers struggle to be as memorable on the mic as they are in the booth, but not Quik. On BlaQKout, he effortlessly lapped frowning technical lyricist Kurupt, and given a sprawling 70-minute album to hold down, he makes for durably fascinating company. His word choices– meticulous and hilarious– land somewhere left of your expectations, making him the most vivid presence on each song he’s on. “I got wordplay acumen/ And I’ve had it since you was in grade school watchin’ the janitor vacuumin’,” he informs us on “Babylon”. When he doles out insults, it’s with a sense of school-teacherly calm (he’s “a dignitary, you’re a lowly beggar,” he says on “Fire and Brimstone”), and even when Quik summons true venom, his voice never rises above the level of casual conversation.

Most of that venom on The Book of David is directed, as it has been for most of his career, at an intimate place: his own family. “Ghetto Rendezvous” (“I hate you so much it just shows/ I hate you more than Michael hated Joe”) is directed to his own sister, whom he almost did 10 years in prison for pulling a gun on when she allegedly tried to kidnap his children. It’s a horrific story, the kind of dirty laundry some rappers would air as a perverse badge of honor (see: Game, The). But Quik has no interest in battering us with his personal pain; he just wants to tell us about it. So he slips it in easily among the boasts, the jokes, and the party jams. In that way, David mimics the texture of real life– jokes and confessions, partying and pain, all mixed up together.

The Book of David emanates this decidedly zen confidence and ease at every level. Quik has a lifetime’s worth of career relationships and unlimited lines of credibility to draw on, but he shows zero interest in crowding his tracks with guest-verse favors called in from his more famous friends to wiggle closer to the mainstream. The features on David– relative no-names like Jon B., BlaKKazz K. K., local legends like Suga Free, over-the-hill West Coast rappers like Ice Cube and Kurupt– are his compatriots, people he’s worked with for years, and they slot into his overall work exactly as he sees fit. When you’ve exerted the kind of unacknowledged influence on your art form that Quik has, bitterness can take hold easily. But Quik has chosen a wiser route: He’s created a tiny island on which he is king.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Albums

Gang Gang Dance started as free-form noiseniks; over the years, they’ve managed to mellow out without moving to the center– evolving into purveyors of pan-cultural body-music, marrying club beats with lyrics about communing with the dead. Like Arthur Russell before them, they give equal floorspace to the spiritual and the sensual. By those loopy standards, Eye Contact– the group’s latest album– is Gang Gang Dance’s finest, weirdest, and most uplifting statement yet.

Eye Contact doesn’t kick off so much as it wakes up, easing into existence via 11-minute opener, “Glass Jar”. Synth and piano arpeggios shine through the stereo field, percolating through a filter of jazz percussion before settling into a propulsive Eastern groove. It’s a song about reincarnation. It’s “Darkstar” and Alice Coltrane and the Boredoms in one blissed-out burst of sound. They’re not much of a singles band, though. Gang Gang Dance’s vision tends to require a larger, album-length, canvas. Since 2005′s God’s Money, each of the band’s records has played as a single piece– each song slurring into the next, building toward an ecstatic climax, mirroring the feel of a concert performance or a DJ set. Eye Contact holds to that ideal. Seven songs are strung together into a single composition, bound by abstract ligatures.

But it’s an improvement of the formula. On Eye Contact, Gang Gang strike a better balance of song craft and atmosphere. The band’s previous record, Saint Dymphna, had admirable futurist-pop ambitions– collaging elements of hyphy, grime, techno, and contemporary RB into a psychedelic stew– but it sometimes came off overcooked. The instrumentals were often bursting with soupy sonic details, while Gang Gang’s passes at honest-to-goodness pop– other than Kate Bush-homage “House Jam”– were at times stiff and over-considered.

Eye Contact is considerably more relaxed. It’s a smooth and moody record. The composed parts are more memorable. The interludes are, well, shorter. Following Dymphna, the band’s original drummer, Tim Dewit, parted ways with the group. His distinctive, stuttering rhythms are missed, but his replacement, Jesse Lee– a steadier and harder hitting player — brings a more consistent feel to the rhythm section. Ariel Pink bassist Tim Koh adds some quiet storm-style bass to the airy and melodic “Chinese High”. Hot Chip frontman Alexis Taylor wanders onto the mic during “Romance Layers” to croon over some a new jack-era soul.

And yet this is not a pop record, per se, but the stuff of pop records collected, melted down, and then dribbled Jackson Pollock-style onto a canvas. Singer Lizzi Bougatsos borrows melodies from Indian pop, Brian DeGraw swipes some sub bass from the UK underground, and guitarist Josh Diamond nicks some riffs from North Africa. But Gang Gang aren’t just collecting exotic hooks for the sake of bragging rights. The band seems to consciously gravitate toward cultures and genres where music is still overtly tethered to spirituality. Maybe it’s because they miss their friends. Eye Contact is a ghost-heavy record. Two songs are dedicated to fallen New York art scene comrades. “Glass Jar” pays homage to former band mate Nathan Maddox, who was killed by a lightning bolt in 2002. “Sacer” is a shout-out to artist Dash Snow, who perished in 2009, from a drug overdose.

Eye Contact dials back the aural fog, at least by Gang Gang standards. It’s a tighter and more focused record that pares back the band’s habit for noisy embellishment and psychic jewelry to reveal taught rhythms and catchy hooks. “In the past, I imagined our music being more about closing your eyes and escaping,” explained DeGraw during a recent interview. “This one felt wide-eyed, as if we were just staring at the listener.” Whether they’re comfortable with the outside world is less clear. “Better call the neurosurgeon,” sings Bougatsos on album closer “Thru and Thru”. “Our dreaming space it is open.”

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Albums

Fleet Foxes’ unpretentious, crowd-pleasing directness was the key to their rapid rise. Their Sun Giant EP and self-titled debut LP, both released in 2008, brimmed with inviting melodies, evocative lyrics, and open-armed harmonizing that seemed designed to reach a wide variety of listeners. Their bright folk-rock sound wasn’t exactly “cool,” but that was sort of the point– it’s familiar in the most pleasing way, lacking conceit or affectation. Their expression of their love for music (and making music) was refreshing three years ago, and that sort of thing never gets old.

But clouds inevitably roll in. On the band’s follow-up, Helplessness Blues, the mood is darker and more uncertain, adding shade to their gold-hued sound. The change in tone reflects the tumultuous road Fleet Foxes traveled during the album’s creation. In late 2009, Fleet Foxes had an album’s worth of songs ready, but the tracks were mostly scrapped before mixing. The arduous creative process took a toll on the group members, particularly singer/songwriter Robin Pecknold, who told Pitchfork at the time, “The last year has been a really trying creative process where I’ve not been knowing what to write or how to write.”

The group’s persistence paid off, though: Helplessness Blues is comparatively deeper, more intricate, and more complex, a triumphant follow-up to a blockbuster debut. Working again with producer Phil Ek, they’ve crafted a cavernous record that allows more room for them to breathe and stretch. The album’s longer, episodic cuts contain disquieting shifts in tone. “The Plains/Bitter Dancer”, for example, begins as a spindly, psychedelic folk tune reminiscent of some of the Zombies’ more introspective moments, and then, after a brief pause, bursts suddenly into the type of gangland chorus Fleet Foxes have practically trademarked by now. Elsewhere, shorter songs seem to end mid-thought; the rollicking tumble of “Battery Kinzie” cuts off suddenly, while “Sim Sala Bim”‘s heavy-strummed raga quickly unfurls like broken strings. This battle between tension and serenity is new to the band’s repertoire, and it lends the album a compelling uneasiness that starkly contrasts the sunnier disposition of their first two releases.

The group harmonies that flowed from Fleet Foxes are in shorter supply here, employed largely to embellish tracks, allowing Pecknold to take a clearer lead role, both vocally and lyrically. He first emerged as an impressionistic songwriter, but he’s since become stronger and more descriptive, conjuring vivid imagery of men striking matches on suitcase latches and penny-laden fountains. Mostly, he spends time working out his own personal puzzles, pondering the big questions of existence and meditating on the dissolution of his five-year relationship during one of Helplessness Blues‘ more difficult creative periods.

The record reflects his determination to deal with the present while leaving the past behind. At times, Pecknold’s voice takes an aggressive tone, as on the eight-minute breakup saga “The Shrine/An Argument”; other times, it cracks slightly, exposing his pain on the bittersweet “Lorelai”. But the warmth is there. On the album’s most intimate track, “Someone You’d Admire”, he contemplates the contradictory impulses to love and to destroy, accompanied by spare harmony and softly strummed guitar.

Pecknold confronts more universal concerns as well, starting with “Montezuma”‘s memorable album-opening lines: “So now, I am older/ Than my mother and father/ When they had their daughter/ Now, what does that say about me?” He wrestles throughout the record with his own measurements of success, and whether any of it adds up to anything. He asks questions only to come up with more questions, and they all lead into a sort of resolution on the album’s title track, “Helplessness Blues”. Here, he retreats from the world into idyllic, pastoral imagery and wishes for a simpler life before trying to come to grips with his newfound renown. “Someday I’ll be like the man on the screen,” he promises at the end of the song.

Helplessness Blues‘ analytical and inquisitive nature never tips into self-indulgence. Amidst the chaos, the record showcases the band’s expanded range and successful risk-taking, while retaining what so many people fell in love with about the group in the first place. And once again, a strong sense of empathy is at the heart of what makes Fleet Foxes special. Much has been made of American indie’s recent obsession with nostalgic escapism, but Robin Pecknold doesn’t retreat. He confronts uncertainty while feeling out his own place in the world, which is something a lot of us can relate to.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Albums

Erika M. Anderson has talked about finding “true bliss and terror” in the live performances of her former band, Gowns. The pressure-cooker atmosphere she and her partner in that group (and in life) Ezra Buchla immersed themselves in had to crack at some point, and it did, fatally and finally, at the beginning of 2010. Anderson’s way of propping open an escape hatch from the bruised purging of Gowns was to retreat into herself, by gathering her collective musical ideas and putting them out under her own initials. But it’s immediately apparent on hearing Past Life Martyred Saints, her debut full-length as EMA, that she’s still all tangled up in “bliss and terror.” For the most part, it’s a white-knuckle ride. There’s no pretense or pose here. No pulling back from the brink to foster an air of cool detachment. Anderson’s music has the power to plummet to the depths and drag you right down there with her.

There’s a lack of timidity in the way this music is expressed. It’s almost as though Anderson snoozed her way through the past decade and is picking up threads that have mostly lain dormant since the early-to-mid 1990s. The boldness in her language, which thematically pings back and forth between emotional and physical duress, has the same naked volatility as Kat Bjelland circa Spanking Machine or Courtney Love in her Pretty on the Inside phase. It’s often terrifying, distressing stuff. There’s a feeling that you’re watching someone in the midst of several life crises. It’s a strange kind of testament to Past Life Martyred Saints that it often feels like a daunting proposition to listen to, as if spending too much time with it will leave you as scarred as its creator.

The lyrical fixations here frequently zoom in on Cronenberg-ian body horror, with Anderson exploring the gnarly elasticity of the human frame when it’s placed under threat. EMA songs often duck into little mantras; “Butterfly Knife” bears one of the most unnerving of those in its “20 kisses with a butterfly knife” line. “Marked” is similarly nauseating and obsessed with physical abuse. Over a noise that sounds like water chugging down rusty steel piping Anderson devolves into repeating: “I wish that every time he touched me he left a mark.” It dwells in the same kind of unsettling territory as Goffin/King’s “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)”, and the bare-bones musical arrangement heightens the severity of the message just as Phil Spector‘s production did on the Crystals‘ song.

That ability for her arrangements to acutely reflect her lyrical mood is one of Anderson’s trump cards. She knows exactly when to add and subtract elements, bringing “Marked” out of the doldrums at its close with a warm organ tone that she deploys whenever things get a little too heavy (see also: “Milkman”). The opening “The Grey Ship” is one of her most ambitious conceits in that regard. It shifts in style several times, from its earthy, folk-y opening to a midsection where all the instrumentation vanishes suddenly as if the bottom just fell out of the world.

It’s a sign of her confidence and ambition that she can open the record with such a multi-faceted song, full of odd diversions and unexpected twists that need multiple plays to really sink in. But the hit-rate here is high. “California” is among Anderson’s best works, a stream-of-consciousness rant about displacement and alienation set to a musical backing that feels like civilization collapsing around her. “California” shows off her enviable talent for finding a comfortable place where big-topic sloganeering and personal tales can coexist. It’s that sweat-soaked head-rush of repulsion, sadness, anxiety, and nostalgia you get when you feel the tug of home.

Past Life Martyred Saints is a fiercely individual record, made by a musician with a fearless and courageous approach to her art. Crucially, the desire to let such raw emotion out in song never feels forced. It simply wouldn’t work this well if there was a hint of artifice, or a suggestion that Anderson hadn’t regurgitated all these feelings of loss, loathing, and rejection from a pit of genuinely volatile emotion. There’s a conviction to her delivery that leaves you in no doubt that this is something she needed to flush out of her system. Comparisons can certainly be drawn to artists such as Patti Smith or Cat Power, and her dry, deadpan delivery occasionally orbits the same sphere as Kim Gordon’s vocal work with Sonic Youth. But this is Anderson’s own brittle unease. It hits as hard as a cold slap in the face– and will leave its mark on you.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Albums

Brooklyn’s indie scene can feel like a series of bands each trying to be hipper than the next, but thankfully nobody told Pete Silberman. In the dog days of 2009′s deadbeat summer, the Antlers frontman emerged from his bedroom with his third LP, Hospice. On it, he unfashionably embraced hackles-raising choruses and concept-album ambition, and he pushed the button on emotional nuclear options: abortion, cancer, death, all that fun stuff. Now a trio, the Antlers have claimed the influence of “electronic music” for Burst Apart, a typical omen for a typically “difficult follow-up album.” But while Burst Apart sheds the PR-bait bio and Arcade Fire aspirations that made its predecessor a word-of-mouth success, it’s still tethered to a magnanimity and expressive clarity that makes it almost every bit as devastating.

Lead single “Parentheses” didn’t do much to show their hand; it’s pretty misleading out of context. Sounding like a higher-BPM “Climbing Up the Walls”, the knockabout electronic percussion and tweaked piano ripples rightfully marked some connection to the post-OK Computer, pre-Kid A application of Mo’ Wax and Warp textures to alt-rock song structures. But the aggression in Silberman’s falsetto and the gnarly guitar distortion are revealed as total outliers, and Burst Apart can actually be seen as Hospice turned inside out: Where before, long swathes of calm white noise linked emotive outcries, Burst Apart moves patiently through luxurious downtempo tones belying some serious romantic disturbance.

Those well-versed in dream journal interpretation could gather that from the mere title of “Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out” (a common symbolic manifestation of sexual frustration). After all, Burst Apart does open with “I Don’t Want Love”, a heartbreaking wallow in a numbing hangover from a singer who previously seemed doomed to feel too much. Its glistening melody at least helps it scan as pop, but “Parentheses” and “Every Night” feel cut from the same cloth as the Walkmen’s “The Rat”, holding onto sanity with white knuckles, sexual congress seen as mutually assured destruction.

Aside from those, Burst Apart‘s atmosphere is nocturnal and desolate. Foreboding death-crawl “No Widows” fears for vehicular disaster; brief flickers of light are allowed full exposure on the gorgeous, incantatory centerpiece “Rolled Together”, whose brushed drum work and silvery guitars could be heard as a studiously completed homework assignment on Agaetis Byrjun. Meanwhile, the tender, nearly beatless balladry of “Hounds” and “Corsicana” are wholly the Antlers’ own and painfully pretty to behold– however depressive Silberman’s lyrics, one can simply revel in the zero-gravity synth and vocal moans and feel some sort of uplift.

Shame that it makes Burst Apart‘s missteps all too egregious. This isn’t the sort of record that calls for a show-stopping power ballad, but we get one anyway with “Putting the Dog to Sleep”, where needlessly histrionic vocals and an overwrought doo-wop progression come off more like last call karaoke than a fitting closer. If nothing else, “Putting the Dog to Sleep” helps point toward the Antlers successfully making Burst Apart more about their growth as a band than a gripping backstory– for all of Hospice‘s raw power, it didn’t leave much to the imagination, and it either hit you right in the gut or not at all. The Antlers won’t hold your hand through Burst Apart, which will inevitably make it more of a grower, but stick around– it’s all the more affecting for how it allows you to pick your own stumbling, lonely path.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Albums