Chris Brokaw's Gambler's Ectasy

Another very fine record from Chris Brokaw, this one more or less in the indie-pop vein of Incredible Love but with members of Tortoise along. The review's up now at Blurt, which is still giving me virus warnings every time I go there.

CHRIS BROKAW
Gambler’s Ecstasy
(12XU)


Chris Brokaw hasn't been quiet in the six years since Incredible Love, recording a half-dozen albums in the interim. Still Gambler's Ecstasy is the first real guitar pop album for Brokaw in more than half a decade, once again threading the songwriter's sandpapery voice through thickets of rock guitar and drums. Brokaw works mostly solo, but Tortoise's Doug McCombs and John Herndon turn up to add density to the long album centerpiece, a droning, kraut-pulsing, faintly hallucinatory cut called "The Appetites." Here Brokaw's voice seldom rises above a murmur, the tone confidential but the words abstract.

Likewise, the music sounds more accessible than it is, layering indie-rock strumming with oddball melodic flourishes. Later Thalia Zedek's violist, David Michael Curry embellishes the album's lone cover ("Crooked" from Cincinnati band Wussy) with melancholy swoops of strings. Brokaw makes his best lyrical statement in "Danny Borracho," a barn-raising, tongue-biting snapshot of scenester pretense. Gambler's Ecstasy takes some risks, pursuing diverse styles and eccentric paths to tunefulness, but it mostly comes up sevens.

DOWNLOAD: "Danny Borracho," "The Appetites" -JENNIFER KELLY

Harlan...and why I continue to check out self-releases

I've got a review up today of a really lovely, dark-wave, home-recorded album by John Harlan Norris....who goes by the name of Harlan professionally.

It's up at Blurt today. Here's a bit.

Harlan
Night Loop
(Self-released)

This third album from the Louisiana-based synth pop artist summons the sweep and drama of late new wave (Echo & the Bunnymen, the Psychedelic Furs, the Cure) into the bedroom. Its self-recorded intimacy cross-hatches epic climaxes with vulnerability.

Harlan began as a solo project from electronic experimenter John Harlan Norris, who built his first album The Still Beat entirely alone, relying on synthesizers, programmed drums and loops. Night Loop, by contrast, incorporates more live musicians and natural sounds, Norris' elegant, florid voice framed by guitar and piano, as well as electronic sounds.

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"Daffodil"

"You're a Teenager"

A.C. Newman

It's not every week I get to review an album previewed by the Huffington Post.

AC Newman
Shut Down the Streets
Matador


A.C. Newman’s third solo album filters spiky pop through a Vaseline-smeared lens, strummy guitar lines bristling against glossy synths and made-for-TV saxophone solos. Following Dan Bejar into the gleaming corridors of 1970s radio pop (Newman claims Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” as an influence), he undercuts his strengths, the swagger, the oblique sardonic cuts, the giant pop crescendos that mark his best work.


Newman says Shut Down the Streets is about “about birth, death, happiness and sadness, chronicling a time in my life where all those things had to learn to coexist side by side,” and indeed the emotional timbre shifts weightlessly from melancholy to giddy euphoria. There are sad lines buoyed by massive, triumphant melodies, humorous asides couched in melancholy baroque string arrangements. Yet, with a few exceptions (“Encyclopedia of Classic Takedowns,” “Hostages”), Newman works large themes with constricted, needlepoint-ish precision. He is, perhaps, himself the “author of small works” cited in “I’m Not Talking.” He seems unable to let the songs fly.

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He also did a live show at WFMU on Saturday.

Dan Friel's Valedictorian/Exoskeleton

Hey, it's Monday again. I have a review up at Dusted.

Dan Friel
Valedictorian / Exoskeleton
Thrill Jockey

Dan Friel’s solo rig is a rat’s nest of keyboard interface, knobs, samplers, pedals, wires and switches, compact enough to fit in a suitcase, and jerry-rigged and vaguely bomb-like enough to make you wonder how he ever gets through airport security. Since Parts & Labor folded — and even before — he has been coaxing an extraordinary variety of sounds from this self-designed and self-made apparatus, coarse blares of feedback, delicate patterns of synth, pummeling rhythms, and the kind of triumphant, joy-bubbling anthems that, except for the lack of vocals, sound very much like Parts & Labor. This interim EP contains four very different cuts, two originals and two remixes from like-minded noise-inflected tunesmiths, Moss of Aura (who also plays with Future Islands) and Peaking Lights.

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There are also a bunch of MP3s at the Free Music Archive.

In sad weekend news, I dropped my iPod again and shattered the glass, so am trying to get it repaired via DigiExpress...let you know how that turns out. The iPod still plays fine, but it's hard to read the track titles.

Meshell Ndegeocello does Nina Simone

So, covering Nina Simone is kinda asking for trouble, isn't it? But Meshell Ndegeocello doesn't strike me as a wallflower and she does a really credible job in a new tribute album called Pour Une Ame Souverain...all covers of songs that Simone very famously sang.

Here's Ndegeocello doing "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"


And the lady herself


Ndegeocello's album, which has guest shots from Toshi Reagon and Sinead O'Connor, came out last week on the Naive label.

The Calm Blue Sea

What is it about Texas and psyche? The Calm Blue Sea is a four-person band out of Austin that favors surging, crescendoing post-rock epics, along the lines of fellow Texans in Explosions in the Sky, as well as other non-Lonestar outfits like Pelican, Red Sparrowes and (especially, because of the way they use piano) Mogwai. Their second album Arrivals and Departures came out on Tuesday on the Modern Outsider label, and I like it a lot.

They're also doing a pretty interesting project with Le Blogoteque where they are filming videos for each of the new album's eight songs in a different Austin location. Baebel music has parts one and two up at their website now.

Meanwhile, here's a short, kind of haunting video

Chrome Canyon...like the future sounded in 1976

Morgan Z Whirledge, ex of the wildly theatrical Apes & Androids, has a new synthy, crescendo-happy project called Chrome Canyon, whose first album Elemental Themes has been getting a work-out on my stereo lately. It's futuristic, but in that cool, slightly retro way of old sci fi movies -- very likely because of all the theremin.

In an interview at Percussion Lab, actually a pretty interesting piece, Whirledge says:

I knew I was in love with this retro-futurist idea of music à la Vangelis, Tangerine Dream, Wendy Carlos, etc... but I guess until I actually got myself some analog gear I wasn't really able to find the right sound. Once I got my first analog synth (a Juno-60) and started to mess around with it I realized that I was making a lot of this spacey, cinematic sounding stuff and thought I should give it a serious shot and put some stuff out just to see what happens. I feel like it was the first time I was making the unabashed nerd music I had always kept bottled up. Hence, Chrome Canyon was born.

The new album is out this week on Stones Throw Records.