Posted by Michael Miller
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We hear, courtesy of the wacky Family Radio, that the world is ending, uh, tomorrow, so here’s your doomsday weekend playlist, including John Paul Keith, Serengeti and Night Beats, to get you through the rapture (hint: it’s not so different from the usual weekend playlist, as we’re still holding out hope for being here next week).
Posted by Michael Miller
The contradictorily named My Dry Wet Mess turns “Wolves and Bells” by Storms into a rhythmic collage of starts and stops and strange tempos, as if in response to the song itself (“I’m past the point/syncopated,” goes one line in the beginning). The track is brooding and frightening, only more so from the strange wall of production treatment it gets here, with a sheet of electronic percussion and dissonant synth lines that somehow both obstruct and add to the song’s melody.
Posted by Michael Miller
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“Safety Of Objects,” the closing track off of Anni Rossi’s excellent LP Heavy Meadow, out now from 3 Syllables, is filled with a kind of charming detachment that suits the album’s strange mix of minimalism and bombast. The verses are comprised of wholly objective (ahem) imagery—“the dogs are rattling their chains;” “the moms are driving their kids around to soccer practice and piano lessons”—and the chorus is an equally indifferent response: “We have committed ourselves to the safety of objects.” All the while, electronic instruments buzz and beep, sounding eerily like a rock band, creating a head-scratcher of a dance tune that is both thoughtful and appealing.
Posted by Michael Miller
DJ LGBT—Michael O’Neill of both Men as well as the band in question—transforms The Ladybug Transistor’s "Clutching Stems" from a pretty anthem in the vein of Arcade Fire into an intensely percussion-driven epic that just barely carries the suggestion of club music. O’Neill raises the stakes by excavating the song’s darkness, latent in the lyrics. “It’s all coming apart,” Gary Olson sings and instead of a delay-drenched guitar sounding off, the song’s melody cuts out, leaving only the rhythm of the ominously clanging thump of the drums.
“Dial 666” by Night Beats could go on for another ten minutes as far as we’re concerned, but its less than two-minute running time makes it all the more appealing for playing hard to get. It’s kind of astonishing that the song is off of their forthcoming self-titled LP, out June 28 from Trouble in Mind, and not, you know, the summer of 1967, with the kind of murky, overblown production so prevalent on the Nuggets boxset. That’s not to say the song is a genre experiment, or even a loving tribute to the golden age of AM radio, just further proof that sometimes all you need is three chords, guitar, bass, drums—and maybe an Ibanez Tubescreamer—to make a killer pop song.
“Blen,” a non-album track by Africa Hitech—who just released an excellent LP, 93 Million Miles, on Warp—is a stylistic kaleidoscope. The track sounds like a computer having an identity crisis, blooping and beeping with a surprising amount of tone and melody (not to mention rhythm), with verses that approximate a similarly frenetic cadence. It doesn’t really sound like much of anything, though, like a lot of Africa Hitech's music, it does feel eerily prescient.
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(Photo: Sofie Amalie Klougart)
“Brother Sparrow,” an ethereal folk song by Agnes Obel, is mostly just the whispering voice of the Danish singer with spare accompaniment by guitar and piano (and, briefly, hushed drums that sound more like footsteps at the songs’ end). Obel, who is quite a sensation in Europe, has a unique gift for melody and tone. Her voice is, at once, powerful and restrained, the perfect way to deliver the stark imagery of lyrics, deeply sad without explicitly mentioning sadness: “Voices in the street,” she sings, “Footsteps the concrete, guess I hear just every sound,” each word expressing some kind of incomprehensible loneliness.
Richard Youngs creates a lot of terror out of an acoustic guitar and a few sliding notes on “Tessellations,” from his album Amplifying Host, out July 19 from Jagjaguwar. The song sounds like being lost in the dessert feels, ominous and expansive, a free form folk song combining elements of jazz and minimal drone music that threatens to latch on to a melody or rhythm, but disintegrates each time the suggestion bubbles up, as if it has lost its way again. It’s a strange listen, almost frustrating at first but, like much of Youngs’ work, deeply rewarding once you let its strangeness take hold.
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