On "Softly Draining Seas," 18-year-old King Krule brethren Jamie Issac goes icy, spacious and emotive – a very 2013 sound. It hits right, though – all melancholy and pretty with all the instruments in tune and impeccably produced. And while there's a clear James Blake influence, Issac seems to view smoothness as a path to deeper atmosphere and washy sorrow.
A seemingly odd pairing at first, DOOM's word avalanche collides with Clams Casino's cloudy valleys on "Bookfiend." Neither artist bends their style too much as ol' MF slows it down, turns his drawl to molasses and garbles through dense, one-liner wordplay. Rap as escapism.
Hype be damned! With Savages, the ghost of post-punk past is alive and thriving. Their debut LP, Silence Yourself, is aggressive, visceral, catchy and a bit dangerous, possessing the brutal intensity and energy that has been converting live audiences into disciples all year. Check the whole thing – out May 7 via Matador.
From the smoldering ashes of Wu Lyf comes the awfully-named Los Porcos. "Do You Wanna Live?" is a summer-ready first taste, and it's very much ready for your first boat excursion of the year with light AM warble-disco nods and a roaring guitar solo that ranks up there with the best of the Ariel Pink basement acolytes.
Sneering swamp punk is the realm of "Digsaw" by The Wytches. With a flailing bassline, disaffected surf guitar and nasal vocal intensity, this is going to my new shadowboxing anthem when I walk through the park at night.
I've said it before, but this is the Internet, so here we go again: Pure X's Crawling Up The Stairs is absolutely one of the best albums of the year. Deeply personal, painful, emotional (whatever means 'authentic' to you), it also boasts a few atmospheric rootsy jams of the highest order. "Thousand Year Old Child" is one of those. I feel like I could be putting this on a mixtape in 2030.
On "Green Blood," Sonny & The Sunsets goes all classicist jangle and helium pop under a blasé spoken word narrative about loss. Its steady intergalactic pulse chugs into psychedelic atmosphere, but the underlying strum rests firmly in the heart of underground American rock.
A 25-minute trip through insulated fog, vague nostalgia, personal turmoil and static morphing imagery, the Hana Tajima-directed video for Port St. Willow's "Soft Light Rush" is a hazy head-trip companion piece to the ambitious song suite. The track, which closes out the reissue of Holiday by our big brother label Downtown, presents multiple movements that, instead of summing the album up, returns back to its distinct world with a little more experience and perspective. It's like revisiting a room that consists of your entire life up to this point but still getting the chance to run away towards something new in the end.
When Brian DeGraw – likely known to you as the dude that expertly plays like 10 million things in Gang Gang Dance – gets his hands on a mix, something glorious, schizophrenic, foreign, ecstatic, intergalactic and primal happens. This redo of Animal Collective's "Monkey Riches" is certainly no exception. It jitters, sputters, fires wide-and-long and eventually converges into a moment of crystallized pop glory.
While the idea of a Grizzly Bear remix is nauseating in most situations, Nicolas Jaar works some true-blue magical hypnosis on "Sleeping Ute." Stretching the original so wide and fluidly that it becomes mere drops of sonic water, Jaar eventually finds a new pulse – one where he can reposition the vocals as indie ghosts staring at an uncertain and most intriguing electronic future.
