Couple more electronic records...Shigeto and Ensemble Economique

That's right, it's time for me to struggle against the use of the word "blippy" and fret pointlessly about which instruments are "real" and which ones come out of computers. I've been listening to a couple of electronic albums with the raw enthusiasm of an Iron Age warrior contemplating his first iPod. I love the way that both of them sound, which I will try to describe to you in a naive and non-genre specific way that real electronics writers will find amusing or offensive, depending on how much they hate women. (And yes, actually, most of them do.)

First up Shigeto, who pulls heavily from jazz as he creates slinky, syncopated meshes of percussion. Elements of the sound suggest glockenspiel, marimba, xylophone and Fender Rhodes, all cool, serene and tonal, slightly idealized versions of the sounds they evoke. I like the way the beats drag behind, then step up sharp to the twos and fours, a succession of hesitations and slaps that feels unhurried, laid-back yet structured. It's quite sensual, but you'd have trouble dancing to it, sexual without heat, sweat or bother. The record is called No Better Time Than Now and it's out on Ghostly on August 19.

Disturbingly, given recent events, it includes a "Detroit Part 1," but no "Part 2" or subsequent.


With the second, Fever Logic from Ensemble Economique, I feel myself on somewhat firmer ground, since it is exactly the kind of landscape-y, outrageously gorgeous drone meditation that I tend to like on guitar, transposed to booming synths. Really, it could be Jesu in parts. There are even vocals. Lots of kissing on the video, lots of long hair flying around...enjoy.

ENSEMBLE ECONOMIQUE - We Come Spinning Out Of Control from PɨK on Vimeo.

The record has been out on the Not Not Fun label since July, but nowhere near enough people have heard it.

Back to guitars and banjos and such tomorrow.

I brush the fuzz off Jackson Scott

Quite enjoyed this debut CD from an NC-based songwriter, working in the same general area as Woods, White Fence, Lotus Plaza and King Tuff. The production is super foggy, but you can hear the songs through it if you concentrate, and anyway, sharpening things up for this kind of artist is almost always a mistake.

My review at Blurt begins...

Jackson Scott, a 20-something home recorder from Ashville, NC, slips radiant bits of pop melody into a slushy mix of static, cymbal clash and jangle. Pretty lines drift in and out of focus, subsumed in an inchoate rainbow hash of unstrung bedroom pop. You live, during this short but intriguing album, for the moments when a song rises up out of the mess and fuzz, the melody taking shape like a cloud takes shape if you look at it long enough. And then, just when you’ve got it (“It’s a frog!” “it’s an angel!” “it’s the guitar lick from the Pixies’ ‘Where Is My Mind?’”), the wind shifts and the outlines dissolve. Melbourne is easy to listen to, but hard to make sense of.

More here.

A not-quite-a-video for "Together Forever."


We are going to try to see the Evens at the Flywheel tonight, though there's no way to buy tickets ahead and I'm worried about getting shut out.

Garifuna Collective's "Ayo"

A wonderful album saying goodbye ("Ayo") to Garifuna Collective's founder Andy Palacio, who died shortly after the release of Watina in 2007. Garifuna is a hybrid of African and Caribbean styles, born out of the slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries and now mostly practiced in coastal communities of Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras. The album's been out on the Cumbancha label since early July.

Speedy Ortiz on a roll

A few months ago, Otis asked me to think about reviewing some self-release-ish/EP-ish type recordings from Speedy Ortiz, a semi-local (guitarist Matt Robidoux is from Keene, the rest from Northampton and thereabouts) punk-pop-noise-math foursome already making some waves. (You get the irony that Otis, who lives in Brooklyn, had to tell me about a local band, right?) Anyway, I reviewed the first three recordings when hardly anyone was interested, but since then, they have started to gain some traction. For instance, they got an 8.4 and Best New Music from Pitchfork about a month ago. So now, with the Dusted hiatus and all, I am actually a little late to proclaim my admiration for Major Arcana. It came out last month. It's a monster.

My Dusted review runs today. Among other things, it says:

Speedy Ortiz, the Western Massachusetts foursome fronted by Sadie Depuis, power blasts through its debut full-length with an unsettling combination of force and vulnerability. Major Arcana is simultaneously cleaner and denser than earlier EPs, its parts blistered with distortion yet easily audible as separate elements. An early 1990s fascination with wandering hooks, loud-soft shifts, disconsolate lyrics and dissonance swathed melodic hooks continues to make comparisons to Nirvana and Dinosaur Jr. apt, yet the fizzy exuberance of the choruses (though buried in fuzz) is more like The Breeders. Depuis, in particular, is a volatile and fascinating performer, singing softly, sardonically, knowingly in the spaces between firewall blasts of volume, or picking her way carefully among sharp-edged, off-kilter constructions of post-rock guitar.

More

Check this out

Monochrome Set

I've got another review up at Dusted today, this one of the very fine, very odd debut by the Monochrome Set, reissued three decades plus later by Water Music.

Strange Boutique, the 1980 major label debut from a band that will forever be associated with its offshoot (Adam and The Ants), begins in a stew of jungle sounds and a relentless pounding. “Monochrome Set (I Presume)” is still, 30 years later, the band’s calling card and the kick-off to its live set. It’s an idiosyncratic blend of punk aggression and new wave suavity, a Dada string of surrealist imagery set to irregular bursts of guitar jangle and syncopated drumming. “Monochrome Set (I Presume)” resides at the spikier end of the band’s continuum, more jitter than swoon, but still altogether too florid to really fit into early 1980s punk. It’s an intoxicating combination of eloquence and brute force, manicured and ironic but also explosively chaotic.

More

Here they are older but still pretty compelling...in 2011.

Dusted is back!!!

Very exciting, Dusted is off its several-months-long hiatus, and I have a review up...the reissue of Come's 11:11.

The album is remarkable for its unvarnished fury, its firehouse spray of emotion. Zedek’s voice is feral and catlike, now crouched in a corner, now spitting and hissing, now leaping through the air at you, claws out for the attack. No one has ever sounded more lost and desolate than Zedek, singing the last line of “Bell” all alone, naked, a tumult of guitar noise still echoing in our ears, as she murmurs, “Do you remember what I’m waiting for?” No one has ever sounded fiercer or more triumphant than she, as she belts “Just relax! Just relax! Just relax!” in the drum-clattering coda to “Submerge.” No one has wailed, before or since, in exactly the same way that Zedek does in “Power Failure,” as she exhorts her listener to “Find the switch.” The bleakness that pervades Come emanates mostly from Zedek’s voice, and it is very bleak, indeed.

More

Let's see, what else? I haven't been blogging much lately, but lots going on. I saw the deeply weird, disturbing, ultra-modern Marnie last week, surely one of Hitchcock's oddest, least accessible films and marveled at Sean Connery's animal vitality (as well as Tippi Hedron's convincing psychosis and chill).

I read August Wilson's "Fences"...one of Sean's assigned plays for next year, which he let me borrow before packing it up for the trip.

I'm getting very excited about "Richard III" which starts on Friday and runs through Sunday. It's Sean's last play at the New England Youth Theater, which is kind of sad, but I'm trying not to think about that part of it.

I have been extremely busy on the work front, all good, though I'm still waiting on a very large check. In other financial news, I finished paying off Sean's first semester at CCPA. We also bought him a couple hundred dollars worth of books, mostly plays, and a leotard and ballet shoes, since he will be taking Ballet 1 this fall. (!!!)

We are getting ready to go to Chicago, leaving on the 13th, will be there over the weekend (and Sean will be there, essentially, until Christmas).

Qs, Cale, R3

I am limping my way to the finish of my Swimming Pool Qs feature, both helped and hindered by the fact that my interview with Jeff Calder ran well over an hour (I also have some email quotes from Anne Richmond Boston). So I'm sort of lost in early 1980s Athens/Atlanta this morning, pogoing at least in my head to the sounds of R.E.M., Pylon, B-52s and, naturally, the Swimming Pool Qs. It's not a bad part of recent history to get lost in, though I'm hoping I can surface in a couple of hours and do some paying work.

Meanwhile, I've been listening to the alphabetic end of my to-do pile...Venom P. Stinger (the first band together for future Dirty Three mainstays Mick Turner and Jim White), White Hills (awesomely rock outing for the more typically drone-y guitar band) and Zola Jesus.

All three of these are albums that I think I'm going to review and send to Dusted, which has been dark for months but may be reviving soon. I've done the initial what-the-fuck-is-this listening, now I'm trying to figure out what to write...but the new one in the stack is from Zachary Cale (hah, you thought I was going to write about JJ, didn't you? RIP, but no.) He's a really good songwriter, well connected (last album had a guest shot from Christopher Brokaw and a couple other musicians' musicians) and just a quality act. this album Bluerider is also possibly named after one of my favorite mini-periods in modern art (or maybe not) and it's a lot more laid back and acoustic than the last. If you like Kurt Vile, and these days who doesn't, you should check it out.

Try this one, then.


We are also heading down the stretch for Sean's very last New England Youth Theater production, which is Richard the III. He was initially pretty bummed to be playing King Edward, who has one really good speech before kicking it in the first act. However, he has gotten a couple of other parts as he's gone along. He has picked up Richmond who kills R3 and takes over, and a little bit of Henry the VI, so now he is all the kings but Richard (which is the one he really wanted, but oh well). Anyway, they're doing it Mad Men-style in sharp suits and it's going to be super super cool and now I want to cry because it's the last one ever and then he's leaving.