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Glitch is one of those microgenres that seemed to disappear halfway through the last decade. When the German outfit Oval– early on reduced to founding member Markus Popp– made its return in 2010 with O, it was hard to decide how to react. Especially since O was one of its most difficult and fussy efforts yet, and largely divorced from Oval’s previously established and instantly recognizable aesthetic as heard on landmarks like 94 Diskont and Ovalcommers. With a palette based on the sound of live instruments, O lacked some of the algorithmic wizardry of Popp’s best work and was a fatiguingly lengthy listen either way. You’d be forgiven for thinking that OvalDNA, coming just a year later and clocking in with another 25 tracks– and this after the complementary 15-track 12″ Oh– is something like overkill.

Here’s the surprise: OvalDNA is actually a collection of bits and bytes from assorted Oval eras past. The even bigger surprise? While it indeed sounds like the old Oval we know and love, there’s nothing even remotely scatterbrained or assorted about this one. Not only is OvalDNA remarkably consistent and thematically sound, it’s so well-sequenced that its 25 tracks fly by in a glorious, easygoing blur, a far cry from that fatal fragmentation that ate away at O. Its variety renders these sounds in a fluid and volatile technicolor missing from even early records like Systemisch. In a way, it’s the best of both Oval worlds.  Included in the package is a DVD with ten bonus tracks, a music video, a documentary, and 2000 AIFF files of sounds and elements from the entirety of Popp’s musical output “intended for music producers.”  Okay, so maybe it’s a little overkill, but coming from an artist who made a public installation inviting people to render their own interpretations of his work (as part of 2000′s Ovalprocess), it shouldn’t really come as a surprise either.

Like so much of this music, sometimes it’s hard to tell whether or not the decay and destruction that pries apart the layers is accidental or planned, but here the manipulation feels effortless, executed with a smart and steady hand. There are many varieties of Oval on offer, though it’s most often a warm-hued, even honeyed sound palette rather than the acerbic distortion of, say, Ovalcommers. While some tracks like “Savvy” do focus on harsher, more challenging sounds, even these– or the hushed, rushed thermal swooshing of “70 Kino” and its choked string section– feel oddly accommodating. OvalDNA doesn’t dip into the same well of asceticism as the conceptually driven sound-design experiments you’ll find on labels like Mille Plateaux or Raster-Noton; instead, each stutter and skip feels melodically driven, each sample caught and clipped mid-moment like a key to some larger world of musical delights that we’re given glimpses of but are never actually led to– dig the teases at jungle on “Mare Fax”– on account of the album’s sprightly pace.

Even if it can be a tease, some moments on OvalDNA are downright welcoming: It’s hard to think of anything from Oval since the legendary “Do While” as beautiful as “Australasia”. One of the album’s more compositionally complete tracks, it juggles jerkily plucked strings, organs that whir to life before being pulled apart into groaning rumbles, and drums that stutter across the stereo spectrum at random. That might sound like a mess, but the elements just slightly coalesce to form a stirring, heart-tugging refrain gently morphing over the track’s three-and-a-half minutes, a chief example of the accidental alchemy of OvalDNA. “Octaeder 0.2″, which formed the centerpiece to Oval’s live contribution to the Henri Pousseur tribute 4 Parabolic Mixes, proves the emotional potential of these flurries of compressed ones and zeroes, while the more recent Oval material is at least coincidentally referenced with a number of tracks that make live-instrument samples their focus (“Credit Line”), stumbling on an odd hybrid of acoustic and computerized sounds in the process, like twang rendered with right angles.

Approachability is one thing, and OvalDNA has it in spades, but there’s also the issue of relevance: Can a veteran act in a largely outmoded genre still command attention with an outtakes collection? Certainly, any fan of Oval (particularly those lapsed after O) will find a lot to love in OvalDNA‘s gentle reassurances, but even for a newcomer, these sounds are idiosyncratic and stimulating enough to get lost in. OvalDNA is curiously timeless, as if these tracks were encased in amber, still holding that intriguingly alien gleam and shine as back in Oval’s halcyon days, even polished up a little nicer this time. It might not be something we knew we still needed, but at the least, OvalDNA is a solid addition to the canon of one of the most innovative electronic acts of the 1990s.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Reissues

Forget James Cameron and his $200 million budget: Equipped only with outdated Japanese electronics, Drexciya were the true masters of the deep. From 1992 until 2002, the mysterious electro outfit created not only some of Detroit’s most original and enduring electronic music; they created an entire imaginary world, one of the greatest myth systems in the history of techno.

A new compilation of the group’s work, the first in a planned four-volume anthology put out by Rotterdam’s Clone label, serves as a crucial introduction to Drexciya’s worldview as well as, of course, their music. It’s a good time for it: In the past two decades, the meaning of “electro” has repeatedly mutated and diluted though its association with electroclash, then Ed Banger‘s buzzy brand of dance music, and, lately, big-tent commercial rave like Deadmau5 and Wolfgang Gartner. The Drexciya reissue rightly returns the spotlight to the original electro’s signature rhythms and analog palette.

From their first release, 1992′s Deep Sea Dweller EP, Drexciya were obsessed with sub-aquatic realms. Their first tracks bore titles like “Sea Quake” and “Nautilus 12″, and the following year’s Bubble Metropolis EP, divided into “Fresh Water” and “Salt Water” sides and with center stickers depicting dolphins cavorting beneath craggy cliffs, poured it on thicker with “Aqua Worm Hole” and “Danger Bay”. The music was appropriately liquid, with hi-hats like raindrops, bass like the belch of some fanged denizen of the fathomless dark, and blippy melodies bobbing like bioluminescent lures.

Adapting the lurching rhythmic template of 1980s electro-funk acts like Man Parrish, Cybotron, and Jonzun Crew, Drexciya emphasized the depth-charge qualities of a booming 808 kick, and the electric-eel jolt of a zapping filter sweep. But it went deeper than that. The music was punctuated by cryptic interludes and scraps of code, like an intercepted transmission from “Drexciyan Cruise Control Bubble 1 to Lardossan Cruiser 8 dash 203 X”, a head-spinning array of names and numbers relating to something called the “Aquabahn”.

Drexciya weren’t just trafficking in metaphor and affect; they were telling a story, one worthy of its own blockbuster film. Their “Aquabahn” was, of course, a reference to Kraftwerk, whose robotic method act set an important precedent for Drexciya’s own mythmaking. Played out across track titles and cover art, one sheets and liner notes, it went something like this: During the Middle Passage, many pregnant women, sick or dying or simply too much trouble for their captors, were thrown overboard. The fetuses in their wombs, still accustomed to a liquid environment, survived. They thrived, in fact, growing fins and gills, and made their home in the ruins of an underwater city, where they mounted their counter-offensive against human greed and stupidity.

The message fit with the militant stance of Detroit’s Underground Resistance label collective, with which Drexciya were affiliated, and so did their anonymity. When James Stinson died, in 2002, I’m willing to bet that most fans didn’t even know his name, nor that of his collaborator Gerald Donald. Drexciya were rumored to be related to other shadowy electro projects of the era, like Elecktroids and Dopplereffekt– a creepy, ostensibly antihumanist project featuring showroom dummies on its record covers and vocoded lyrics like “We have to sterilize the population”– but in the pre-Discogs era, this was all speculation. To immerse yourself in Drexciya’s world was akin to following a particularly far-out comic book, where the misfits wrote the rules and justice always prevailed. It was punk as fuck, frankly– but from an Afrofuturist perspective.

But for all the talk of combat, Drexciya’s was profoundly joyful music: impish, rippling, unpredictable, and never anything less than profoundly funky. This is the first takeaway from Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller I. This first volume focuses on the group’s first five years, drawing from seven EPs released on labels like Underground Resistance, Submerge, and Warp. (Some tracks have been anthologized before, on 1997′s landmark double CD The Quest, but that’s long out of print.) Certain tropes predominate: whip-cracking 808 drum patterns, squelchy synthesizer arpeggios, dissonant bleeps and creepy chromatic chord progressions. But there’s nothing formulaic about these tracks, which range from the pensive funk of “Aquarazorda” to the double-time frenzy of “Hydro Theory” and “Beyond the Abyss”; it’s striking to realize how wildly Drexciya’s tempos could vary, especially when compared to the deeply regimented BPMs of today’s subgenres of electronic dance music. Indeed, Drexciya made few concessions to DJs: there are no 16-bar intros to facilitate mixing, and at least one point, you can hear a synthesizer pattern skip a beat, probably because one of the musicians leaned on his sequencer at the wrong time.

Lo-fi by today’s standards, recorded straight to tape, in real time, with analog machines, Drexciya’s sonics are unfailingly urgent and raw; there’s more genuine menace in the roiling “Sea Quake” than in practically anything being made today. Clone’s Alden Tyrell did a great job with the remastering, preserving the music’s wide dynamic range and letting each frequency positively sizzle in space. As hair-raising as the songs can be, it’s never an exhausting listen– unlike too much contemporary electronic music, mastered so uniformly loud that it leaves your ears gasping for air.

It’s easy to remember Drexciya primarily for their shtick. Academics love them for their applicability to concepts like Afrofuturism and the Black Atlantic. (Kodwo Eshun was particularly brilliant writing about Drexciya; their slippery maneuvers served as the perfect foil for his own techno-theoretical poetics.) Detroit true-schoolers hold them up as examples of Motor City militancy and analog purism. These are all valid positions, but Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller I also reminds us of Drexciya’s influence in other contexts, as well. The opening “Welcome to Drexciya” is a beatless burble that wouldn’t sound out of place on a record from Emeralds or Oneohtrix Point Never, artists more commonly associated with the “cosmic” traditions of 1970s synthesizer music. Space is a place, sure. But to immerse yourself in Drexciya’s underwater world is to be reminded that there are other dimensions just as worthy of exploration.

“Are Drexciyans water breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed?” wrote a figure identified as the Unknown Writer in the liner notes to 1997′s The Quest. “Have they been spared by God to teach us or terrorize us? Did they migrate from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mississippi river basin and on to the great lakes of Michigan? Do they walk among us? Are they more advanced than us? How and why do they make their strange music? What is their Quest? These are many of the questions that you don’t know and never will. The end of one thing… and the beginning of another. Out.”

These questions had a different kind of resonance in the 1990s, before the answer to every question was just a click or two away, before every new “anonymous” artist felt like a walking, talking spoiler alert. To listen to Drexciya today is to wipe the slate clean. We may know James Stinson and Gerald Donald’s names now, but their quest feels as cryptic as ever.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Reissues

If you were around when Neutral Milk Hotel were a working band, it would have been difficult to predict the stature they’d later acquire in the independent rock sphere. That they were great, and special, was clear to a lot of people following indie rock, but they didn’t necessarily seem like the kind of group that would develop into something amounting to a “legend.” For one thing, they were visible during the mid and late 1990s, doing exactly the same kinds of things other indie rock bands were doing. They were on Merge, putting out albums, EPs, and singles, touring the same venues as young bands like Modest Mouse and Helium. They weren’t under-appreciated and were by no means obscure; and the fact that they were part of a “scene” that made for such great copy– the Elephant 6 Recording Company– meant they got their share of attention in the indie music press.

But then they went away. Jeff Mangum, the project’s creative force, stopped releasing new music and quit playing shows. Yet unlike the followers of many bands from that time who moved on, his fans didn’t trickle away. Instead, in place of a working band with a growing catalog, Neutral Milk Hotel became an absent band with a growing cult. People were rediscovering this music, and the median age of the Neutral Milk Hotel obsessive has continued to hover in the early twenties. Since Mangum’s return to performing, first as part of the Elephant 6 reunion in 2008 and then with a slate of shows last year, Neutral Milk Hotel started to seem like something that existed in the present tense again. Possibly serving as a sort of tribute to this moment, Mangum has released this limited vinyl-only box set, which collects almost all of the material released under the Neutral Milk Hotel name and adds 15 additional rare and unreleased tracks.

I’ve met people who adore In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and didn’t know that Neutral Milk Hotel had ever released anything else, so it’s temping to view everything Mangum released with an eye to the part it played in the Aeroplane story. And while it’s a settled matter that Aereoplane is the high-water mark for the band (as well as being one of the best indie rock records of the last two decades), I can tell you that at the time there were plenty of people who felt that its predecessor, 1996′s On Avery Island, was nearly its equal. Certainly, Avery has a comparatively muffled sound and doesn’t always seem to understand how to best showcase Mangum’s gifts (his voice is often double-tracked and lower in the mix and hence less distinctive), but on a song-by-song basis it has almost as many great moments. The opening “Song Against Sex” is one of them, a fuzz rocker with a hypnotically catchy and repetitive melody and lyrics that hint at the awkwardness and alienation that draws people toward Mangum’s work. NMH’s world is a place where sex is fumbling, a reliably imperfect expression of an emotion that dreamers want to see perfected. And in “Song Against Sex”, drugs and porn and staged representations of lust are so repellent that the narrator wants to leave the world altogether. It’s the kind of sentiment that teenagers who feel assaulted by their surroundings will continue to discover, and its wide-eyed and wounded view of the world goes a long way toward explaining why they keep returning to this songwriter.

Despite its vague and decidedly lo-fi profile, Avery also has its share of experimentation, and it’s well integrated into the songs themselves. The album was produced by Robert Schneider of Apples in Stereo, whose house-producer role in the E6 sphere you might compare to Conny Plank‘s in the German experimental rock underground. I believe that’s Schneider’s voice talking excitedly as “Song Against Sex” opens, encouraging Mangum and describing his performance as “perfect,” and Mangum has spoken repeatedly about how important his enthusiasm and belief was to the NMH project. The way Schneider and Mangum structured Avery, it feels like a suite, tunes bunched together with interludes and repeating motifs and details that fade away and then return a few songs later. The lurching “Marching Theme” may not have the memorable arrangement of the following record’s instrumental “The Fool”, but the surging fuzz guitar and odd, snaking keyboard melody form a superb bridge between the acoustic “Baby for Pree” and the electric variation on the same gorgeous melody that follows, “Where You’ll Find Me Now”. The simple horn and organ duet “Avery Island/April 1st” connects that to the comparatively fierce “Gardenhead/Leave Me Alone”, and “Naomi” is another key Mangum track, not least for its strangely wandering melody. The closing “Pree-Sisters Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye”, 13 minutes on CD but 10 minutes shorter on vinyl, is a throbbing drone piece that sometimes touches on noise music, putting it in league with similar experiments by NMH’s sister band, Olivia Tremor Control.

If Avery could reasonably be compared to other music going on in the Elephant 6 sphere in the mid and late 1990s, Aeroplane is where Mangum created something with no easy reference points. Mixing Salvation Army band pomp, hushed folk, roaring power pop, and almost unbearably intense guitar and voice songs that are difficult to classify, Aeroplane still feels like one of a kind, 14 years and countless inspired bands later. It’s never not been a part of the conversation in indie rock since it was reissued in 2005, and suffice to say that it has lost none of its power. It’s always been mastered loud and with a mix that puts Mangum’s voice right in your face, and the remaster here is just a hair softer and rounder but otherwise wisely does little to alter its forceful sonic character. Aeroplane is the sound of an artist fully in tune with his creativity putting himself out there with an almost painful sense of vulnerability, and the reverberations from that statement are still being felt after a decade and a half. I wrote at length about the record when it was reissued in 2005 and don’t have much to add here, except that the packaging and sound of this reissue are first rate. As an addendum, the gorgeous picture disc/poster sleeve 7″ of “Holland 1945″, backed by a live version of “Engine”, first released in 1998, is nice to have in circulation.

Beyond the two proper albums, the box offers a mix of revelations and welcome artifacts. Early song “Everything Is” has been been released in various configurations over the years, as both a two-song 7″ and as a proper EP, and it’s included here in expanded EP form as a 10″. Originally released in 1994, it finds Mangum in a much different place in terms of both songwriting and performance. This is where he felt most Elephant 6, enamored with the pop of the 1960s and doing his best to sing sweetly, in a higher and smoother register, to make his voice palatable. The title track and “Tuesday Moon” (once identified on a comp as “Love You on a Tuesday”) are basically solid, down-the-middle guitar pop songs recorded crudely but with a hint of the spark that would lead to so much more. “Ruby Bulbs”, the first song Mangum ever officially released, is raw and noisy and shouty and reflects Mangum’s interest in aggro punk, an influence that didn’t otherwise surface on his records. All in all, the Everything Is EP feels gestational and enjoyable but ultimately unexceptional; had things ended here, Neutral Milk Hotel might be as well remembered as E6 compatriots the Gerbils.

The Ferris Wheel on Fire 10″ EP, on the other hand, is the real treasure of the set. Hearing Mangum in acoustic mode (there are seven demos here and a recording from an in-store), it’s striking how much these recordings from 1992 to 1996 sound so much more like his later style compared to what was issued on Everything Is. “Oh Sister”, from 1995 perfectly captures that moment of the growing boldness of his songwriting; the strums and vocals seem very “Two Headed Boy”, and it has some melodic and lyrical motifs from that song. “My Dream Girl Don’t Exist”, possibly the most well-known unreleased Mangum song, feels like a dry run for Aeroplane, with strummed chords reminiscent of “The King of Carrot Flowers”, lyrics about a dead girl in the ground, and a closing “now she knows she’ll never be afraid” that was later used on “Ghost”. The studio version of “Engine” is quite close to the version released on the B-side of the “Holland 1945″ single, and other songs (“A Baby for Pree/Glow Into You”, “April 8th”) found their way to On Avery Island. Hearing acoustic songs and demos from the early days of Neutral Milk Hotel and marveling at how fully realized they sound, Ferris Wheel on Fire reminds me most of Time of No Reply, the posthumous collection of Nick Drake rarities and outtakes that evokes the sound of Pink Moon more than either of his two other properly released records. It’s certainly a fans-only collection, but it also stands well on its own, with a unified sound and mood.

One 7″ included on the record serves more as an extension of Ferris Wheel, with versions of songs released elsewhere. “You’ve Passed” and “Where You’ll Find Me Now” both made it onto Avery. The first is not terribly different, it sounds like the basic arrangement and sound had been determined, but the fuzz guitar has more roar in the riff. The second is a welcome change-up: much slower, more downcast, less desperate, less naked. The other 7″ has two versions of “Little Birds”– one recorded at home, one with Robert Schneider– which happens to be the one song here that was written after the release of Aeroplane. It’s a harrowing composition that is dedicated to Matthew Shepard, who was murdered two months before the song was composed in December 1998, and its lyrics, “Another boy in town at night he took him for his lover/ And deep in sin they held each other/ So I took a hammer and nearly beat his little brains in/ Knowing God in heaven could have, never could forgive him,” seem to reference the incident.

It’s clear in spending time with this set and listening to it in varying sequences that Mangum the songwriter liked to tinker. On this evidence he was not prolific, but he also didn’t waste ideas. Parts of songs pop up in other tracks, variations get turned into extended sequences, songs are divided into parts. The seven-or-so-year songwriting arc represented here yielded only about two-dozen completely distinct songs, and a clutch more that are variations on some of those themes.

An overlooked element of Neutral Milk Hotel’s enduring appeal is that Mangum stopped making new music at the precise moment that music was about to become “an internet thing.” A year after Aeroplane came Napster, and pretty soon the way we hear and experience music would never be the same. But Neutral Milk Hotel remain, as if preserved in amber, in that moment when independent music was bought in stores and spread by word of mouth that came from actual mouths. A moment when people had to hold something physical in their hands to be able to experience the music, whether tape, vinyl, or CD. And it’s fitting that this box set has been assembled with care and high-quality materials that seem bound to last well into the time when the next generation discovers this music. “There are some lives you live and some you leave behind,” Mangum sings in “Leave Me Alone”, and it’s such a perfect line for this guy. He left the music-making life behind for years, and now, maybe, he’s inching back toward it. Even if he never gets there, whether by choice or because forces of whatever kind conspire against him, there’s the music contained here, rich and beautiful enough to fill a career.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Reissues

Fucking Queen. For all their reported bombast, pomp, and tendency to overshoot and double-slaughter any semblances of good taste, everything you’ve heard about them is still true. They’re one of the few phenomena who deliver on the hype, regardless of how you approach them. Hate or love proggy album suites? Doesn’t matter, Queen will make you feel good about your choice. Can’t stand operatic drama, or can’t get enough unitard-clad frontmen? Love to hate prime 1970s hard rock with arena sheen? Welcome to the greatest/most horrible band of the 20th century. They did and wanted it all. Yet, so much of Queen’s music is still under-recognized even by people who know and love the hits.

Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara on the British colony of Zanzibar, East Africa), guitarist Brian May, drummer Roger Taylor, and bassist John Deacon comprised one of the most successful, effective, and productive bands of the rock era– indeed, by some estimates, the most successful rock band of all time (having spent more time atop the UK album charts than any other act). And how did they do this? With: a gay male lead singer who specialized in operatic vocals and classically classed piano playing; an insanely talented lead guitarist who may actually have been more valuable as a songwriter or quasi-orchestral arranger of his instrument; a drummer who not only possessed the highest vocal register in the band (and this is Queen we’re talking

about), but also arguably the greatest songwriting range; a non-singing bassist who managed to pen one of the greatest karaoke anthems of all time, “Another One Bites the Dust”. Like the Beatles, Queen capitalized on major group synergy, and as a result, forged a career that was as varied and resourceful as any act in rock.

Queen formed in late 1970, when Mercury (late of art school) joined up with May and Taylor (late of the Cream-ish band Smile). Deacon joined the following year, and the newly dubbed Queen played shows, rehearsed, and recorded their self-titled debut. Though they had to wait a couple of years for a release, Queen is quite clearly the work of an assured group of young men. May’s album opener “Keep Yourself Alive” was an early anthem and showcase for his multi-tracked guitar. It didn’t really have the operatic flair of the band’s later hits, but it was catchy, well-produced, and just ridiculously easy to fist-pump along to in concert. Mercury-penned songs like “Great King Rat” and “My Fairy King” offered ample evidence where Queen’s more precocious interests lie, though even then, the songs rocked way harder than their titles let on. Indeed, a song like “Son and Daughter” is like the lovechild of Black Sabbath and Ziggy Stardust, taking the most potent attributes of both, and refusing to tone down anything in favor of a harmonious mix. And they were just getting started.

Queen II– the first of two albums they released in 1974– was the mini-breakthrough. Part of this was due to diving with abandon into recording experimentation, particularly the elaborate vocal and guitar overdubs that would soon become the band’s trademarks. May wrote most of the music for the album’s “Side White”: the stately (if modest by Queen standards) guitar prelude “Procession” leads directly into the still-statelier would-be rock anthem “Father to Son”. Sounding like a hippie-era group sing-along crammed face-first into murky, early-70s proto-metal, it’s another good example of Queen’s penchant for at least attempting to unite disparate musical worlds– even if the end result was more than a bit bloated.

However, Mercury’s “Side Black” was the masterstroke, and the first real evidence of the double-decker Fabergé egg that would become Queen’s career on record. “Ogre Battle” (a live holdover from the time of the first record) begins with a long, ominous fade into screeching vocal harmonies and flailing, backwards drums and guitars. The song busts and tumbles its way into the “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke”, a dry run for the kind of music-hall rock they’d perfect with the next album’s “Killer Queen”, and which should probably win a few awards as the world’s most apt Queen song title. “Nevermore” is a piano and vocal ballad that nicely introduces the album’s central epic (and direct “Bohemian Rhapsody” precursor) “The March of the Black Queen”. And the people noticed: The album produced a UK hit with a remake of the up-tempo gallop “Seven Seas of Rhye” from the debut. Dizzying, overstuffed, and unflinching, Queen II is a die-hard fan favorite, and arguably the band’s most underrated record.

Sheer Heart Attack (also 1974) not only improves on every aspect of their sound suggested by the first two records, but delivers some of the finest music of their career. First off, the band had mastered the recording studio. Tracks like the hit “Killer Queen”, “In the Lap of the Gods”, and the hyper-vaudeville “Bring Back That Leroy Brown” simply could not have appeared on previous records due to the complexity of the arrangements, and the amazing job by the band and producer Roy Thomas Baker in getting umpteen dozens of overdubs and edits to sound like cohesive recordings. And they rocked! “Stone Cold Crazy” predates speed-metal (and was eventually covered by Metallica), “Brighton Rock” was May’s theretofore best guitar showcase, and for heaven’s sake, “In the Lap of the Gods… Revisited” ends the album with an explosion. Even Taylor’s “Tenement Funster” (sample lyric: “My new purple shoes been amazing the people next door”) and Deacon’s bouncy “Misfire” bring good things to the table.  This is the band at the height of its powers.

After “Killer Queen” and Sheer Heart Attack, there was no looking back. 1975′s A Night at the Opera was reportedly the most expensive album ever produced at the time, and even if the only thing you knew about it was that it contained “Bohemian Rhapsody”, you’d have a pretty good idea of the kind of record to expect. Yet the fun hardly stopped there: “Death on Two Legs (Dedicated to…)” was a heavy, hilarious kiss-off from Mercury to their former manager; “Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon” and “Seaside Rendezvous” were further entries into the band’s vaudeville-rock canon; “You’re My Best Friend” was Deacon’s first big hit for Queen, while Taylor’s “I’m in Love With My Car” was another good, slyly funny rocker. And if you’re still in need of fireworks, May’s “The Prophet’s Song” features an amazing solo-through-delay vocal performance from Mercury that eventually transforms into a call-response choir, and further still into one of May’s best guitar solos. No punches pulled, no expense spared: A Night at the Opera was Queen at the top of the mountain.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, 1976′s A Day at the Races feels a bit retread. Even down to its Marx Brothers-derived title, the album doesn’t retain the same quantum-leap progression from its predecessor as the ones had before. Indeed “The Millionaire Waltz” borrows liberally from “Bohemian Rhapsody”; classical piano playing, massive vocal overdubs, and a big rock breakdown– but without much of the surprise or humor. Rather, the best tracks here are the ones where Queen is willing to go outside of their already established template: “You Take My Breath Away” is one of Mercury’s best ballads, sung without a trace of irony or camp, and a good example of the band’s perhaps underrated abilities as songwriters. “Somebody to Love” was the record’s biggest hit, and positions Mercury as the gospel church soloist amidst walls of choral backdrop (i.e. him, May, and Taylor). Taylor’s “Drowse” is a hazily burnt (dare I say “chill”?) piece of psychedelia that sounds unlike anything else in Queen’s catalog– and is yet another reminder of the power in the band’s democratic songwriting ethos.

As much as any band, Queen commands the best audio quality money can buy, and these remasters sound great. There are lots of new bonus tracks, live versions, and B-sides– none of which are required listening but– particularly in the cases of the a cappella vocal tracks for “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Bring Back That Leroy Brown”– are good fun for fans. Furthermore, the Deep Cuts: 1973-1976 disc is an admirable attempt to introduce some of Queen’s non-hit album tracks to folks otherwise familiar only with the band’s UK #1s (all 18 of them)– though it contains nothing previously unreleased. Still, bang for the buck has always been one of Queen’s strong points: Jump in, be prepared for anything, and most of all, check your modesty at the door.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Reissues

There is music on these albums. Obviously. The reason I’m saying that up front is that discussion of the first two Suede albums is invariably framed in a discussion of the bigger picture, both in terms of what was happening in British rock in the early 1990s and in terms of the discord within the band, particularly during 1994. There are good reasons for this. Suede were at the center of the conversation that gave us the Britpop narrative that so dominated the UK in the mid-90s. They were the band on the cover of the issue of Select that invented Britpop as a concept, they were massively hyped before they even released anything, and their debut album was the fastest-selling in British history. They were ignored in the United States and ridiculously had to change their name in this country to the London Suede after a lawsuit by an obscure lounge singer.

This stuff is all important to understanding who Suede were– the music they made, especially on their first three albums, is tied closely to their story as a band– but I really want to make sure that as I make my way through that story, the music doesn’t slip to the side of the conversation. Stories and meta-cultural narratives aside, the music is what we have to listen to now, and there is a lot of great music spread over these elaborate reissues. The whole band, including once-estranged original guitarist Bernard Butler, was involved in putting together these packages, each of them a 2xCD/DVD featuring the original album, demos, unreleased outtakes, every contemporary B-side (plus one non-album A-side), music videos, interviews and live performances. The band’s entire output, with the notable exception of three early unreleased tracks, “Be My God”, “Art”, and “Wonderful Sometimes”, is now available on five very well-done reissues that include all of the original artwork for both the albums and the singles. They have curated their past well.

Consider the arena this band was entering when it debuted in May, 1992 with “The Drowners“. The British rock world was dominated by two waning trends, shoegaze and Madchester, both of which emphasized sound and vibe over personality and pomp. And here Suede were, with a very bold, direct, and sexually charged song that had the swagger of glam rock and was focused on the voice of Brett Anderson, who was powerful and distinctive. Anderson’s vocals had a little of Bowie and a little of Morrissey, but there was a lot more there than a simple swirling of influences. Here was a guy who could sing frankly about drug abuse and rough sex without plasticizing it or stylizing it– actions had consequences in the world he created, and wild nights had mornings after, but he was careful not to tell you the moral of the story.

It wouldn’t always be like that, but during the brief years Butler was still in the band, Anderson was at his best as both lyricist and vocalist. The band had a good rhythm section, too. Bassist Mat Osman is a subtle force in the band, playing melodic lines that keep the songs light on their feet, even when Simon Gilbert’s drumming locks in on a stomping and otherwise heavy beat. When they matched up with Butler’s guitar, they were nearly as charismatic as a trio as the guy who was singing for them. “The Drowners”– which for all the early hype around the band (they were on the cover of Melody Maker a month before its release under the headline “The Best New Band in Britain”) only charted at #49– has a destructive energy to it that I can understand hearing as a clarion call in the musical climate of Britain in the early 90s. The opening drum stomp, soon joined by Butler’s crunching, metallic riff, seems to announce the band as something different and exciting. It drips with sex before Anderson even opens his mouth.

“The Drowners” is joined by three other excellent singles on the band’s self-titled debut. “Metal Mickey” was the band’s only song to chart in the U.S. top 10, and it is one of their best– Butler didn’t play much conventional rhythm guitar, and this song is a good early example of how his shifting lead style complemented Anderson’s vocal melodies. The singles reinforced the idea that Suede were a breath of fresh air, and even though they are fairly basic rock, the band still didn’t sound quite like any of their contemporaries. And there are the album tracks as well, which showed them to be a band with considerable range. The interplay between Anderson’s vocal and Butler’s lead guitar on “Sleeping Pills” is like some sort of dance, and the band makes a convincing modern murder ballad on “She’s Not Dead“. And Mat Osman’s bass does as much to drive the quieter songs as Butler’s guitar.

Between albums, the band released a non-album single, “Stay Together“, that signaled a shift in direction. By this point, Britpop was a real thing, at least as far as the UK music press was concerned, and Suede were being lumped in with Oasis, Blur, Cast, and a host of other bands that were being championed as the saviors of British rock. This horrified Anderson, who felt his band had very little to do with the laddish groups he was being mentioned in the same breath with, and it strengthened his resolve to move the band further away from conventional rock. Butler’s relationship with the rest of the group was deteriorating; on the band’s messy American tour in late 1993, he sometimes left the stage mid-gig, having a member of the Cranberries, who were opening, fill in for him. Anderson sequestered himself to write, and the songs he came up with were much darker and more introverted than anything on their mostly demonstrative debut.

By all accounts, the recording sessions for Dog Man Star, the band’s masterpiece, were fraught with tension, and Butler often recorded separately, ultimately leaving the band before the album was completed. Whether that tension helped or hurt the album is debatable, but what’s not in dispute is that the album is the band’s very best work, completely transcending the Britpop wave they’d supposedly helped launch. In many ways, it’s more like an album that might have been released in the 70s than in the 90s, and not just because of its heavy glam riffs and towering vocals. It does everything to its extreme, is unafraid of excess or bombast, and is well-structured to play as a cohesive work. From its eerily throbbing, weightless opener, “Introducing the Band”, to the orchestral overload of its sweeping closer, “Still Life“, there’s not a moment on the album that doesn’t feel in danger of breaking down, flying apart, or disappearing entirely.

It’s a thrilling record. I can’t think of anything that’s been released since that has quite the same balance of elements. It was enormously risky, but the risk paid off with big returns. Where Butler did play, he played his most inspired parts. “New Generation”, “We Are the Pigs”, “Heroine”, and “This Hollywood Life” thrash and churn; “The Asphalt World” caps its slow burn with a wild and lengthy instrumental coda; and “The Wild Ones” might be Suede’s best single, its sweeping orchestration, vocals, and guitar parts coming together in fragile but perfect balance. The quieter songs are stunning. “Daddy’s Speeding” ends in a torrent of static and sampled engine noises that sounds like the earth tearing open, and “The 2 of Us” is simply gorgeous, a devastatingly sad song that doesn’t feel forced or morose.

The reissue appends full-length versions of “The Wild Ones” and “The Asphalt World” that are significantly longer, and they’re worth hearing, as are most of the other outtakes. The demos that fill out the first discs after the albums are marginally interesting, but the essential inclusion on these sets is the B-sides, all of them, from every single the band released through early 1994 (some recorded after Butler left are on the Coming Up reissue). Suede made B-sides that a lot of bands would die to release as lead singles– their Sci-Fi Lullabies compilation, now redundant, has long been considered an essential part of their discography, and for good reason. Here, you get the elastic snap of “Whipsnade”, the stomp of “Killing of a Flash Boy”, the breezy swagger of “Modern Boys”, the majesty of “My Dark Star”, the crystalline sadness of “The Living Dead”, and the shimmer of “To the Birds” right alongside the albums, and they alone make these sets worth the price. Anderson even makes alternate tracklists in his liner notes for each album, which often swap out weaker album tracks for B-sides, and I can’t really argue with any of his substitutions (dropping “The Power” for “My Dark Star” and “Black or Blue” for “The Living Dead” might have been the only way to make Dog Man Star better).

The DVDs are full of good stuff– Suede comes with all of its charmingly dated music videos, and Dog Man Star has the concert projections for the band’s 1994 tour, though that album’s videos are oddly absent. Each set has two live performances– and strangely, all but one appear to have been shot by audience members rather than professionally, though the sound is acceptable. They were a very good live band, but honestly, as with most bonus DVDs, these are likely to be watched a few times and shelved. It’s not bad to have this stuff available, though. More importantly, the band’s discography has been consolidated, and their first two albums feel more complete with the contemporary B-sides in tow. Suede were an important band, pivotal to what the 90s came to sound like in Britain, even if they distanced themselves from it. But Suede were also a great band, and these records still sound vital all these years later.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Reissues

Fucking Queen. For all their reported bombast, pomp, and tendency to overshoot and double-slaughter any semblances of good taste, everything you’ve heard about them is still true. They’re one of the few phenomena who deliver on the hype, regardless of how you approach them. Hate or love proggy album suites? Doesn’t matter, Queen will make you feel good about your choice. Can’t stand operatic drama, or can’t get enough unitard-clad frontmen? Love to hate prime 1970s hard rock with arena sheen? Welcome to the greatest/most horrible band of the 20th century. They did and wanted it all. Yet, so much of Queen’s music is still under-recognized even by people who know and love the hits.

Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara on the British colony of Zanzibar, East Africa), guitarist Brian May, drummer Roger Taylor, and bassist John Deacon comprised one of the most successful, effective, and productive bands of the rock era– indeed, by some estimates, the most successful rock band of all time (having spent more time atop the UK album charts than any other act). And how did they do this? With: a gay male lead singer who specialized in operatic vocals and classically classed piano playing; an insanely talented lead guitarist who may actually have been more valuable as a songwriter or quasi-orchestral arranger of his instrument; a drummer who not only possessed the highest vocal register in the band (and this is Queen we’re talking

about), but also arguably the greatest songwriting range; a non-singing bassist who managed to pen one of the greatest karaoke anthems of all time, “Another One Bites the Dust”. Like the Beatles, Queen capitalized on major group synergy, and as a result, forged a career that was as varied and resourceful as any act in rock.

Queen formed in late 1970, when Mercury (late of art school) joined up with May and Taylor (late of the Cream-ish band Smile). Deacon joined the following year, and the newly dubbed Queen played shows, rehearsed, and recorded their self-titled debut. Though they had to wait a couple of years for a release, Queen is quite clearly the work of an assured group of young men. May’s album opener “Keep Yourself Alive” was an early anthem and showcase for his multi-tracked guitar. It didn’t really have the operatic flair of the band’s later hits, but it was catchy, well-produced, and just ridiculously easy to fist-pump along to in concert. Mercury-penned songs like “Great King Rat” and “My Fairy King” offered ample evidence where Queen’s more precocious interests lie, though even then, the songs rocked way harder than their titles let on. Indeed, a song like “Son and Daughter” is like the lovechild of Black Sabbath and Ziggy Stardust, taking the most potent attributes of both, and refusing to tone down anything in favor of a harmonious mix. And they were just getting started.

Queen II– the first of two albums they released in 1974– was the mini-breakthrough. Part of this was due to diving with abandon into recording experimentation, particularly the elaborate vocal and guitar overdubs that would soon become the band’s trademarks. May wrote most of the music for the album’s “Side White”: the stately (if modest by Queen standards) guitar prelude “Procession” leads directly into the still-statelier would-be rock anthem “Father to Son”. Sounding like a hippie-era group sing-along crammed face-first into murky, early-70s proto-metal, it’s another good example of Queen’s penchant for at least attempting to unite disparate musical worlds– even if the end result was more than a bit bloated.

However, Mercury’s “Side Black” was the masterstroke, and the first real evidence of the double-decker Fabergé egg that would become Queen’s career on record. “Ogre Battle” (a live holdover from the time of the first record) begins with a long, ominous fade into screeching vocal harmonies and flailing, backwards drums and guitars. The song busts and tumbles its way into the “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke”, a dry run for the kind of music-hall rock they’d perfect with the next album’s “Killer Queen”, and which should probably win a few awards as the world’s most apt Queen song title. “Nevermore” is a piano and vocal ballad that nicely introduces the album’s central epic (and direct “Bohemian Rhapsody” precursor) “The March of the Black Queen”. And the people noticed: The album produced a UK hit with a remake of the up-tempo gallop “Seven Seas of Rhye” from the debut. Dizzying, overstuffed, and unflinching, Queen II is a die-hard fan favorite, and arguably the band’s most underrated record.

Sheer Heart Attack (also 1974) not only improves on every aspect of their sound suggested by the first two records, but delivers some of the finest music of their career. First off, the band had mastered the recording studio. Tracks like the hit “Killer Queen”, “In the Lap of the Gods”, and the hyper-vaudeville “Bring Back That Leroy Brown” simply could not have appeared on previous records due to the complexity of the arrangements, and the amazing job by the band and producer Roy Thomas Baker in getting umpteen dozens of overdubs and edits to sound like cohesive recordings. And they rocked! “Stone Cold Crazy” predates speed-metal (and was eventually covered by Metallica), “Brighton Rock” was May’s theretofore best guitar showcase, and for heaven’s sake, “In the Lap of the Gods… Revisited” ends the album with an explosion. Even Taylor’s “Tenement Funster” (sample lyric: “My new purple shoes been amazing the people next door”) and Deacon’s bouncy “Misfire” bring good things to the table.  This is the band at the height of its powers.

After “Killer Queen” and Sheer Heart Attack, there was no looking back. 1975′s A Night at the Opera was reportedly the most expensive album ever produced at the time, and even if the only thing you knew about it was that it contained “Bohemian Rhapsody”, you’d have a pretty good idea of the kind of record to expect. Yet the fun hardly stopped there: “Death on Two Legs (Dedicated to…)” was a heavy, hilarious kiss-off from Mercury to their former manager; “Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon” and “Seaside Rendezvous” were further entries into the band’s vaudeville-rock canon; “You’re My Best Friend” was Deacon’s first big hit for Queen, while Taylor’s “I’m in Love With My Car” was another good, slyly funny rocker. And if you’re still in need of fireworks, May’s “The Prophet’s Song” features an amazing solo-through-delay vocal performance from Mercury that eventually transforms into a call-response choir, and further still into one of May’s best guitar solos. No punches pulled, no expense spared: A Night at the Opera was Queen at the top of the mountain.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, 1976′s A Day at the Races feels a bit retread. Even down to its Marx Brothers-derived title, the album doesn’t retain the same quantum-leap progression from its predecessor as the ones had before. Indeed “The Millionaire Waltz” borrows liberally from “Bohemian Rhapsody”; classical piano playing, massive vocal overdubs, and a big rock breakdown– but without much of the surprise or humor. Rather, the best tracks here are the ones where Queen is willing to go outside of their already established template: “You Take My Breath Away” is one of Mercury’s best ballads, sung without a trace of irony or camp, and a good example of the band’s perhaps underrated abilities as songwriters. “Somebody to Love” was the record’s biggest hit, and positions Mercury as the gospel church soloist amidst walls of choral backdrop (i.e. him, May, and Taylor). Taylor’s “Drowse” is a hazily burnt (dare I say “chill”?) piece of psychedelia that sounds unlike anything else in Queen’s catalog– and is yet another reminder of the power in the band’s democratic songwriting ethos.

As much as any band, Queen commands the best audio quality money can buy, and these remasters sound great. There are lots of new bonus tracks, live versions, and B-sides– none of which are required listening but– particularly in the cases of the a cappella vocal tracks for “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Bring Back That Leroy Brown”– are good fun for fans. Furthermore, the Deep Cuts: 1973-1976 disc is an admirable attempt to introduce some of Queen’s non-hit album tracks to folks otherwise familiar only with the band’s UK #1s (all 18 of them)– though it contains nothing previously unreleased. Still, bang for the buck has always been one of Queen’s strong points: Jump in, be prepared for anything, and most of all, check your modesty at the door.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Reissues

Fucking Queen. For all their reported bombast, pomp, and tendency to overshoot and double-slaughter any semblances of good taste, everything you’ve heard about them is still true. They’re one of the few phenomena who deliver on the hype, regardless of how you approach them. Hate or love proggy album suites? Doesn’t matter, Queen will make you feel good about your choice. Can’t stand operatic drama, or can’t get enough unitard-clad frontmen? Love to hate prime 1970s hard rock with arena sheen? Welcome to the greatest/most horrible band of the 20th century. They did and wanted it all. Yet, so much of Queen’s music is still under-recognized even by people who know and love the hits.

Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara on the British colony of Zanzibar, East Africa), guitarist Brian May, drummer Roger Taylor, and bassist John Deacon comprised one of the most successful, effective, and productive bands of the rock era– indeed, by some estimates, the most successful rock band of all time (having spent more time atop the UK album charts than any other act). And how did they do this? With: a gay male lead singer who specialized in operatic vocals and classically classed piano playing; an insanely talented lead guitarist who may actually have been more valuable as a songwriter or quasi-orchestral arranger of his instrument; a drummer who not only possessed the highest vocal register in the band (and this is Queen we’re talking

about), but also arguably the greatest songwriting range; a non-singing bassist who managed to pen one of the greatest karaoke anthems of all time, “Another One Bites the Dust”. Like the Beatles, Queen capitalized on major group synergy, and as a result, forged a career that was as varied and resourceful as any act in rock.

Queen formed in late 1970, when Mercury (late of art school) joined up with May and Taylor (late of the Cream-ish band Smile). Deacon joined the following year, and the newly dubbed Queen played shows, rehearsed, and recorded their self-titled debut. Though they had to wait a couple of years for a release, Queen is quite clearly the work of an assured group of young men. May’s album opener “Keep Yourself Alive” was an early anthem and showcase for his multi-tracked guitar. It didn’t really have the operatic flair of the band’s later hits, but it was catchy, well-produced, and just ridiculously easy to fist-pump along to in concert. Mercury-penned songs like “Great King Rat” and “My Fairy King” offered ample evidence where Queen’s more precocious interests lie, though even then, the songs rocked way harder than their titles let on. Indeed, a song like “Son and Daughter” is like the lovechild of Black Sabbath and Ziggy Stardust, taking the most potent attributes of both, and refusing to tone down anything in favor of a harmonious mix. And they were just getting started.

Queen II– the first of two albums they released in 1974– was the mini-breakthrough. Part of this was due to diving with abandon into recording experimentation, particularly the elaborate vocal and guitar overdubs that would soon become the band’s trademarks. May wrote most of the music for the album’s “Side White”: the stately (if modest by Queen standards) guitar prelude “Procession” leads directly into the still-statelier would-be rock anthem “Father to Son”. Sounding like a hippie-era group sing-along crammed face-first into murky, early-70s proto-metal, it’s another good example of Queen’s penchant for at least attempting to unite disparate musical worlds– even if the end result was more than a bit bloated.

However, Mercury’s “Side Black” was the masterstroke, and the first real evidence of the double-decker Fabergé egg that would become Queen’s career on record. “Ogre Battle” (a live holdover from the time of the first record) begins with a long, ominous fade into screeching vocal harmonies and flailing, backwards drums and guitars. The song busts and tumbles its way into the “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke”, a dry run for the kind of music-hall rock they’d perfect with the next album’s “Killer Queen”, and which should probably win a few awards as the world’s most apt Queen song title. “Nevermore” is a piano and vocal ballad that nicely introduces the album’s central epic (and direct “Bohemian Rhapsody” precursor) “The March of the Black Queen”. And the people noticed: The album produced a UK hit with a remake of the up-tempo gallop “Seven Seas of Rhye” from the debut. Dizzying, overstuffed, and unflinching, Queen II is a die-hard fan favorite, and arguably the band’s most underrated record.

Sheer Heart Attack (also 1974) not only improves on every aspect of their sound suggested by the first two records, but delivers some of the finest music of their career. First off, the band had mastered the recording studio. Tracks like the hit “Killer Queen”, “In the Lap of the Gods”, and the hyper-vaudeville “Bring Back That Leroy Brown” simply could not have appeared on previous records due to the complexity of the arrangements, and the amazing job by the band and producer Roy Thomas Baker in getting umpteen dozens of overdubs and edits to sound like cohesive recordings. And they rocked! “Stone Cold Crazy” predates speed-metal (and was eventually covered by Metallica), “Brighton Rock” was May’s theretofore best guitar showcase, and for heaven’s sake, “In the Lap of the Gods… Revisited” ends the album with an explosion. Even Taylor’s “Tenement Funster” (sample lyric: “My new purple shoes been amazing the people next door”) and Deacon’s bouncy “Misfire” bring good things to the table.  This is the band at the height of its powers.

After “Killer Queen” and Sheer Heart Attack, there was no looking back. 1975′s A Night at the Opera was reportedly the most expensive album ever produced at the time, and even if the only thing you knew about it was that it contained “Bohemian Rhapsody”, you’d have a pretty good idea of the kind of record to expect. Yet the fun hardly stopped there: “Death on Two Legs (Dedicated to…)” was a heavy, hilarious kiss-off from Mercury to their former manager; “Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon” and “Seaside Rendezvous” were further entries into the band’s vaudeville-rock canon; “You’re My Best Friend” was Deacon’s first big hit for Queen, while Taylor’s “I’m in Love With My Car” was another good, slyly funny rocker. And if you’re still in need of fireworks, May’s “The Prophet’s Song” features an amazing solo-through-delay vocal performance from Mercury that eventually transforms into a call-response choir, and further still into one of May’s best guitar solos. No punches pulled, no expense spared: A Night at the Opera was Queen at the top of the mountain.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, 1976′s A Day at the Races feels a bit retread. Even down to its Marx Brothers-derived title, the album doesn’t retain the same quantum-leap progression from its predecessor as the ones had before. Indeed “The Millionaire Waltz” borrows liberally from “Bohemian Rhapsody”; classical piano playing, massive vocal overdubs, and a big rock breakdown– but without much of the surprise or humor. Rather, the best tracks here are the ones where Queen is willing to go outside of their already established template: “You Take My Breath Away” is one of Mercury’s best ballads, sung without a trace of irony or camp, and a good example of the band’s perhaps underrated abilities as songwriters. “Somebody to Love” was the record’s biggest hit, and positions Mercury as the gospel church soloist amidst walls of choral backdrop (i.e. him, May, and Taylor). Taylor’s “Drowse” is a hazily burnt (dare I say “chill”?) piece of psychedelia that sounds unlike anything else in Queen’s catalog– and is yet another reminder of the power in the band’s democratic songwriting ethos.

As much as any band, Queen commands the best audio quality money can buy, and these remasters sound great. There are lots of new bonus tracks, live versions, and B-sides– none of which are required listening but– particularly in the cases of the a cappella vocal tracks for “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Bring Back That Leroy Brown”– are good fun for fans. Furthermore, the Deep Cuts: 1973-1976 disc is an admirable attempt to introduce some of Queen’s non-hit album tracks to folks otherwise familiar only with the band’s UK #1s (all 18 of them)– though it contains nothing previously unreleased. Still, bang for the buck has always been one of Queen’s strong points: Jump in, be prepared for anything, and most of all, check your modesty at the door.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Reissues

By the time Robert Wyatt made 1997′s Shleep– his first album in six years– he was something of a British institution: a magnificent, one-of-a-kind singer who’d become mostly known for memorable cameos on other people’s records. The popular perception of him seemed to be his wheelchair and long white beard, without much between them. Shleep, though, re-established Wyatt as the center of attention, and became the foundation of his career’s third act, documented (along with parts of the first two) by the second new batch of re-releases of his discography.

Shleep reintroduced a long-absent sense of playfulness and joy into Wyatt’s work. (It also helped that the production was more focused and varied than it had been on anything he’d done since Rock Bottom.) The album starts off with the two wittiest songs in his repertoire: “Heaps of Sheeps”, a collaboration with his old compatriot Brian Eno, and “The Duchess”, a mischievous tribute to his wife Alfreda Benge that erases language the way his earlier “Alifib” confounds it. Nearly every song on Shleep shines in one way or another: It features a couple of his most elegant melodies in “Was a Friend” (co-written by his old Soft Machine bandmate Hugh Hopper) and “Free Will and Testament”, as well as an extended paraphrase of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (“Blues in Bob Minor”) and a little instrumental written by Paul Weller. Its centerpiece is a three-song suite whose lyrics (by Benge) are ostensibly about birds and metaphorically about aliens and refugees: their leftist politics were more effective for being integrated into their art rather than plunked onto it, as they’d been in the Dondestan
era.

EPs, a box of five short CDs initially released in 1999, is a grab-bag of some of Wyatt’s not-really-album-length work. His miraculous 1974 cover of “I’m a Believer”– which got him on “Top of the Pops” in his wheelchair– is here; so is his definitive 1982 recording of Elvis Costello’s “Shipbuilding”, the 1984 Work in Progress EP (with a spine-chilling, minimalist version of Peter Gabriel’s “Biko”), a tedious 20-minute suite he composed for an animal-rights film, and a set of not-particularly-useful remixes from Shleep. It’s useful as a display of how much his solo work is of a piece, but it’s also spotty and incomplete: It’d have been nice for the new edition to include 1992′s A Short Break EP or 2002′s Airplay EP.

Since the 70s, Wyatt has collaborated on and off with jazz outliers Michael Mantler and Carla Bley. 2003′s Cuckooland– another bird reference, another reference to exile and absence– prominently features their daughter Karen Mantler, and features covers of three of her songs. (She also sings A.C. Jobim’s “Insensatez”, aka “How Insensitive”, as a duet with Wyatt; he plays a “Karenotron” programmed with samples of her voice.) The album feels like a messier, slightly less coherent sequel to Shleep–there’s even another sheep song, Mantler’s “Life Is Sheep”– and the arrangements prominently involve the chintzy synth presets of which Wyatt is inexplicably fond. But his singing makes the most of his voice’s cracked, sun-bleached grain, the songwriting pushes victoriously into new territory (“Lullaloop” ingeniously reworks a sample of another one of the album’s songs, “Lullaby for Hamza”), and a solo piano version of Buddy Holly’s “Raining in My Heart” is a welcome casual touch.

Theatre Royal Drury Lane, recorded in 1974 and released in 2005 (after being reconstructed from incomplete tapes), documents one of the very few stage performances of Wyatt’s solo career. The band is fantastic– it includes Mongezi Feza, Fred Frith, Nick Mason, and Julie Tippetts, among other luminaries of the British jazz and art-rock scene– and the set features all of Rock Bottom, a handful of favorites from Wyatt’s Soft Machine days, and an extended jam on “I’m a Believer”. Regrettably, the sound quality is indifferent, and the performances don’t particularly improve on their studio equivalents. It’s fun for fans, but shouldn’t be anybody’s first (or fifth) Wyatt album.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Reissues

The liner notes for the reissue of the Dismemberment Plan’s Emergency I come as an oral history: interviews with the band, label types, and D.C. scene staples, touching on everything from the death of singer Travis Morrison’s father shortly before the album’s conception to the band’s oft-repeated, ill-conceived goal to cross-pollinate Radiohead and De La Soul. Among the best bits is Morrison’s story of sketching the album’s now-famous cover on his computer, then showing it off to skeptical friends. “People would just stare at me,” he remembers. “It’s a weird image. I’ve seen people with tattoos of it in the last few years.”

To a certain segment of indie kids, many now indie adults, branding ourselves permanently with that weird sunset scene seems no stranger than an older dude’s Black Flag bars or a youngster’s Funeral laptop wallpaper. To many, Emergency I, first released in 1999, is that record; breakup balm, to be sure, but also the voice in your head, the thing that seems to say as much about us as we know about ourselves. Though its influence on music at large has been difficult to chart, if we’re to gauge a work’s import by what it’s meant to the people that come across it, Emergency I is one of indie’s key LPs. Its songs– nervy, cacophonous, uncomfortably real– actually mean something to people, whether they came to the record recently or have been letting it run through their lives for the last decade and change.

The history of Emergency I isn’t contained in the particulars of Eric Axelson’s bass tone, or the band’s brush-up with Interscope, or how much they liked Brainiac, or what was or wasn’t going on in D.C. in the late 1990s. That stuff is just the prelude. Fact is, the history of Emergency I lies with the people; people who hear too much of themselves in “The Jitters”, who’ve vented spleen to the tune of “What Do You Want Me to Say?”, who’ve cast off all shackles to the strains of “Back and Forth”. Morrison claims not to grasp the significance of the album’s title, but it’s always seemed fairly obvious to me: There’s the encroaching chaos of modern life– the emergency– and then there’s you, standing outside it, yet inextricably linked. Emergency I is a record about learning how to live with both.

Better than anyone, Morrison captures that awful, driftless, locked-up feeling you back yourself into sometimes; bored at work, unlucky in love, low on friends, lower on prospects. You’re unsure where to move, be it another city or into another room, or whether either is worth the effort; that feeling, so perfectly articulated in “The City”, that “something seems to happen somewhere else,” yet for reasons financial and social and geographical alike, you’re powerless to do anything about it. Call it self-insult to existential injury: You’re so down, you start counting yourself out. That’s “Spider in the Snow”, in which a change of scenery still means the “same VCR, the same cats”; the same rut. That’s “Memory Machine”, in which eternal life seems little more than an excuse to chain-smoke. That, especially, is “The Jitters”, in which our sick and sad protagonist can’t bring himself to do much more than 10,000 push-ups a day.

But allowing himself to wallow or pointing fingers at everyone but himself, Morrison assesses the situation, turns over the problems in his head, sorts out what’s in his control and what’s out of it, and moves along. He sometimes invents elaborate metaphysical devices– the all-access pass of “You Are Invited”, the memory machine of “Memory Machine”– to explain away what a more rational observation couldn’t, but he’s a strikingly realistic, austere lyricist, detailing just how dull feeling like crap can be, encouraging action even when he’s not so certain he can manage it himself. He’s not striving for perfection, just normalcy. That’s struggle enough.

All this, Morrison delivers deftly, elastically, switching up cadence to match the mood. In 2011, an indie rock frontman copping to liking rap doesn’t merit mention, but Morrison’s MC-inspired delivery was and is rather novel; his voice alone is just a few notches above merely okay, yet he’s never less than a commanding presence on the mic, able to pull off sharp tone-switches and jutting asides with the unusual clarity of a guy who’s picked up just as much from Rakim as Ian MacKaye. Drummer Joe Easley’s gifts are immediately apparent, his beefy, hyperkinetic style owing as much to dusty rock royalty as the then-contemporary drum’n'bass the band were clearly keen on. Axelson’s basswork is unparalleled in both speed and tone. Jason Caddell’s guitar weaves in and out of the tunes; they’re a rock band, but not a guitar band per se, and Caddell’s reserve is a big reason why they rarely get lumped in with the glut of D.C.’s spazzy post-hardcore contemporaries. And that woozy synth, a frequent presence throughout Emergency, beautifully echoes the weary resolve of Morrison’s lyrics. Nearly as much as his voice and their explosive rhythm section, that keyboard smear is the sound of Emergency I.

The Plan’s melodic sense was unusual, borderline dissonant, and their arrangements curiously spare and well-considered. It’s a busy record but never cluttered; weird but not altogether alien; lush and constantly transmogrifying. It is a perfectly realized sound– difficult if not impossible to imitate. Not even the band itself ever quite sounded like this anywhere else. As the liners explain, at some point during the sessions, all assembled parties came to the realization that what they were working on was really something special. The reissue comes with a smattering of enjoyable singles, but even the best of those– the barnstorming “B.O.B.” rewrite “The Dismemberment Plan Gets Rich”– feels thin and frenzied next to the vibrant, remarkably self-assured Emergency I material.

That tension between musical perfection and lyrical uncertainty is the heart of Emergency I; here you have these incredibly exacting musicians playing this gorgeous, frantic, hyperstylized pop who then let some neurotic chart his insecurities over top. And yet the two disparate sides form an electrifying symbiosis. The music seems to alchemize around Morrison’s lyrics, throbbing and melting to match the mood: “The Jitters” is the most downtrodden in tone and tempo alike, steady closer “Back and Forth” echoes a kind of acceptance with the state of things, frantic Brainiac hat-tip “Girl O’Clock” feels like the murderous sexual frustration it depicts. “8 1/2 Minutes” is positively apocalyptic, its whirring keyboards and Axelson’s humongous bass runs akin to sonic blitzkrieg, and while the world ends around him, all Morrison can talk about is how beautiful it is. It’s a survival strategy, the self-obsessive’s way of navigating the world, a way to keep the emergency at bay. That’s what Morrison seems to be positing throughout Emergency I, urged along by its crazy rhythms: Retreat is as good as defeat. Bad as it gets, you’ve gotta keep moving.

I was a teenager when I first heard Emergency I, still months from college, in a relationship I sensed then was shaky and know now was doomed. Back then, it was a constant. It deepened further for a couple years afterward, after I’d discovered all sorts of instincts I couldn’t trust, after I’d found that I too can put myself on pause the way Morrison does in “The Jitters”. I set it aside for a while in my mid-twenties, convinced I’d juiced the thing of all its meaning; then I lost a job and a best friend in quick succession, and I buried myself in it again, uncovering untold solace in the same old lines. Talking about these songs with others over the past few weeks, arguing over their slippery meanings, there’s precious little in the way of consensus; we’ve all used it for breakups, for family emergencies, for nights when we’re feeling low and can’t quite settle on the source. But there’s so much in these songs, so many situations to which they seem to hold up a mirror, what we take from them seems forever in flux. Their history, like ours, is constantly changing. One thing keeps coming up, though: Everyone I’ve talked to mentions that they can’t imagine getting through their twenties without it. I certainly couldn’t have. Bet those guys who made it feel the same way.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Reissues

All their mother wanted was to keep them off the streets. The Scroggins sisters came of age in a South Bronx eviscerated by Robert Moses’ Cross Bronx Expressway– a neighborhood carved up by projects and abandoned by government. Their mother bought them instruments in the hope that her girls might devote themselves to music and stay out of trouble. And they did. Her deal with them stipulated they had to give her a performance every week, and the band the teenaged sisters formed (with occasional minor assistance from a few neighborhood guys) became ESG. The “E” and “S” stand for emerald and sapphire, the birthstones of Valerie and Renee Scroggins. The “G” is for gold, which is what they wanted their records to be certified.

The gold records never came, but something even more unexpected did: The band developed a sound unlike any other and quite by accident became a major influence on hip-hop, dance music, and dance-punk, fitting right in with New York City’s arty downtown scene and the UK’s vibrant post-punk explosion. Their 1981 debut EP, recorded by Martin Hannett after the band was discovered at a talent show by 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman, is among the most sampled records around– “UFO” alone as been reused several dozen times, by Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys, N.W.A., Big Daddy Kane, EPMD, Liars, DJ Qbert, DJ Shadow, Girl Talk, and Nine Inch Nails.

It’s easy to hear why the band’s work is so ripe for sampling. It’s uniquely spartan music, driven by economical drumming, tersely phrased bass, and minimal, sometimes even surf-y guitar parts. Marie and Renee’s vocals and lyrics take a similarly minimal approach– chanting, repeating phrases, taunting, nearly rapping, nearly singing. On “Erase You”, Renee takes center stage, delivering a deliciously snotty, assured put-down. It’s easy to see why the band was embraced in punk circles– that song has a nasty guitar tone and tense rhythm that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Public Image Ltd. album, and their music was brilliantly concise. The sisters quickly realized where they fit.

The band’s debut EP and first album are nearly perfect, and Fire’s Dance to the Best of ESG acknowledges that, including all three studio tracks from the first EP and all but two songs from Come Away With ESG on the first of its two discs. None of it has aged: “UFO” still sounds intense and weird; “Moody”, which is heard in its original version and three other variations, is tough and sleek, a clear house antecedent; and “Chistelle” is a demented surf-punk romp that seems to be a case of convergent evolution with the Fall. “My Love For You” remains fantastically funky, mimicking the “My love for you, baby, is like a rollercoaster” opening line in its gonzo rhythm.

The songs aren’t sequenced chronologically, but most of disc one is devoted to those releases and the band’s self-titled 1991 album, while disc two concentrates on 12″s and later EP tracks. A few songs from the band’s 2002 and 2006 albums for Soul Jazz, with Valerie and Renee’s daughters in the group, pop up in the running order, too, sounding remarkably of a piece with the older material– organizing by chronology becomes less important when a band’s vision is this consistent. The set ends with three songs from the 1992 EP Sample Credits Don’t Pay Our Bills, which is perhaps a subtle way of telling the band’s side of the story of their immense influence. Even today, Renee has a company on retainer to track down payment for uncredited samples, and the band’s bitterness over others achieving success on the back of their music while they toiled in obscurity and kept day jobs is obvious, in both the music and the liner notes to this set.

The need to have a company constantly searching for uncleared samples of their work is also a measure of the band’s impact, of course. They started out as unpretentious amateurs accidentally bridging the gap between dance parties and art scenes, went on to play the opening of the Haçienda and the closing of the Paradise Garage, and can now be satisfied that what they did really meant something. If you’ve never heard ESG, you could be forgiven for approaching them with some skepticism. A lot of obscure bands are lauded as influential and essential by critics and other musicians, only to disappoint when you actually hear them, but ESG are the real deal. The music isn’t just influential and important, it’s exciting too, and very much its own thing. This set is a good place for beginners to get acquainted.

Source: Pitchfork: Best New Reissues