No Genre

Frying saxophone solos!  Synthesizers recreating lost sunny days!  Nihilistically lewd mixtapes inspiring dozens of new entries on Urban Dictionary!  Tricked-out dubstep for American mall rats!  The musical trends that defined much of 2011′s critically-lauded output were roundly ignored by my favorite records of the year.  The best albums of the year invented their own one-band microgenres.  EMA gave us California confessional poetry, while WU LYF reinvented protest punk for a generation without a cause.  Wolves in the Throne Room continued to hone their environmental black metal.  Das Racist refined their postmodern identity joke rap.  Peaking Lights invented Midwestern dub, and Matthew Herbert imagined such a thing as porcine house.  Colin Stetson’s Blood Meridian jazz was as refreshing as The Field’s glacial soul trance.  The Weeknd was a visionaire who fashioned a shockingly sleazy form of rohypnol R&B.  And then there was Björk doing her best Björk in years.  As always, the bands that conveniently forgot that a dominant aesthetic existed in both the mainstream and the underground produced the most rewarding albums.  Maybe this is more a reflection of personal taste, but 2011 seemed like a thrillingly strange year because it took me months to listen to anything that sat on top of the iTunes charts because I was so deeply enmeshed in an album of skronky avant-garde jazz.  As a relatively low-key year (compared to the beast that was 2010), 2011 favored a lot of these dark horses and long shots if you were willing to listen past the noise of the lomography revivalists and the bedroom mix-masters.

Photo Credit:  TheHutch

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As near as I can tell, here is probably what happened:  Flying Lotus, holed up in his L.A. apartment with a spare weekend alone with his newly invented time machine, chrono-hopped back to 1993 to kidnap a minor British popstar in training, a lanky woman whose voice oscillates between cutesy husk to breathy tease, and future-returned back to 2011 where he graciously explained how pop music has sorta not really changed in too many important ways in the past eighteen years and cajoled her into recording a song with him, nothing too serious, an infectious groover called, say, “You Know You Like It,” that would feature a chorus that could have easily come from a Cece Peniston throwaway and a miraculously bassy beat whose only real interest is a good time, and then he filed away the masters on his private SoundCloud (a concept he also patiently explained to her) and sent her back to flat in Camden Town in time for her to pick up the brand new Ace of Base.  Or, you know, something pretty close to all that.

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But seriously, Perfume Genius needs to come with a warning label.  Let’s not worry about schlock hip hop lyrics or coy radio-friendly puns.  A revivalist PMRC needs to petition Matador to warn consumers that overexposure to Mike Hadreas’ woeful breathtakers is likely to leave one with something to a life hangover.  Hadreas’ latest tender depressive is “All Waters,” a fragile downer that, as Matador freely admists, is “a gorgeous soundtrack for anyone trying to keep it together in everyday life.”  The song’s lyrics are either bravely tenderhearted (everything will be beautiful when I learn to love you) or painfully bleak (learning to love you is conditional upon the impossible):

When all waters still
And flowers cover the earth,
When no tree’s shivering
And the dust settles in the desert,

When I can take your hand
On any crowded street
And hold you close to me
With no hesitating.

Because if these lyrics are as bleak as I think they are, then how the fuck does Matador suggest you keep it together after this wrist-slitter?  Just how are you supposed to find the internal motivation to actually get out of bed or shower or shave or climb on the subway or sit at your desk for a full work day or brave another commute home or visit with friends or hold hands with your lover or hope for anything more than for the pain to stop?

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Inconceivably, full-throated chanteuse Anna Calvi has made TV on the Radio’s erotically-charged  ”Wolf Like Me“ even sexier.  By slowing down the race to get each other’s pants off, Calvi recasts the song as a slow grind of metallic shudders and squealing feedback.  The song is no longer a bawdy hunt for a body in the dark; it’s a carnal feast on one another’s bodies.  And when she reaches the song’s climax with its most lascivious couplet—”Down on all fours/Show me what all this howling is for”—she unleashes a brutishly suggestive churn of lecherous blues.

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Disillusionment is a painfully necessary part of growing up.  You have to have your expectations unmet to understand that you even had expectations in the first place.  Resentment and disappointment have to chip away at the mythologies you create in order for them to be replaced by a more sympathetic understanding of how the world works.  This is just as true of pop culture as it is of your relationships or your belief systems.  Before he was a washed-up sad sack with an ego as monstrous as it was pathetic, before he was flaccidly sentimental and desperately out-of-touch, Billy Corgan was the solar body at the center of my musical universe.  He was fabricator of alt rock symphonies as bombastic as they were desperate, a maker of elaborate fantasies as weepy as they were nihilistic.

Between 1991 and 1993, the Smashing Pumpkins released a pair of albums so ludicrously out-of-sync with the rest of alt-rock nation that they seem now almost endearingly naïve.  Listen to Siamese Dream and In Utero side-by-side and tell me that these albums were released in the same country within two months of each other.  But this is exactly what I kind of still love about Gish and Siamese Dream.  They are overly-serious without being stuffy, humorless without being dull.

Gish, of course, is the more forced of the two records: it’s the sound of a band finding its footing.  Not to suggest, of course, that “Siva” or “Rhinoceros” or “Bury Me” aren’t anything short of stratospheric scorchers.  In fact, the closing moments of “Bury Me” have to my among my favorite in the entirety of the band’s catalog.  The album is finely balanced:  the front half contains the most insistent psychedelic rockers while the back half opens up into more patiently spacious jams.  The slower daydreams that close out the album are occasionally ponderous; the lugubrious “Suffer” feels a lot longer than it’s five-minute running time and “Window Paine” is stubborn in its aimlessness.  Gish, for all its faults, is still a fine debut album, defining the basic aesthetic boundaries that the band would spend the next decade exploring.

And while the Smashing Pumpkins certainly played well within the vast confines they set for themselves, they would never be as focused as they were on Siamese Dream, a volcanic rush of incisive riffage.  I haven’t listened to Siamese Dream in probably close to a decade, and I am surprised at how good most of it still sounds.  And it’s not just warm nostalgia for the afternoons I spent memorizing every nook and cranny of the record.  ”Cherub Rock” still roars out of the gate with a drumroll and a molten riff.  It still sounds as blindingly anthemic as it did in the summer of 1993.  The lead riff for “Hummer” still sounds like a laser etching its melody onto the folds of your brain, and the fuzzy figure that starts sparking at the three-minute mark on “Rocket” still sends chills down my spine.  ”Today” still sounds like a weirdly ironic ode to the apathy that defined Generation X.  ”Soma” still surpasses everything that they attempted to do with “Window Paine.”  And “Silverfuck” remains a pompous and indulgent mess of a song that nonetheless overpowers its own limitations by doubling down on both its tender core and its unpredictable flare-ups.  What’s ultimately amazing about Siamese Dream is that nearly each song works within a wide dynamic range without every becoming tedious or exhausting.  Think about it:  nearly every song contains a quietly somber passage that sharply contrasts with the twin guitar attack that aims at nothing less than melting your speakers.  Sometimes, though, the band is able to fuse these modes onto each other to create a kind of aggressive sentimentality:  ”Hummer” and “Mayonaise,” in particular.  This perfect realization of their sound was the first and last time that the Smashing Pumpkins ever got it all right.

There was a time in my life when Corgan’s nasal snarl was a shiver-inducing signifier of teenage angst.  There was a time when his band was loose and flexible, agile to the point of stunning virtuosity—just listen to the dynamics casually play off one another in “Rocket” or the inspired pomp of the opening minutes of “Silverfuck.”  There was a time when Corgan claimed to be “bored by the chore of saving face.”  So he just stopped.  He stopped saving face.  He stopped restraining himself.  He stopped pretending like he was anything more than an oversized adolescent vampire.  He stopped writing tenable albums, and he stopped writing consistently good songs.  The Smashing Pumpkins would have a few a few flashes of brilliance after 1994—”For Martha,” “1979,” “Muzzle,” “Eye,” ”Ava Adore”—but they were almost always outweighed by Corgan’s overbearing sensitivity and scathing opinion of his peers and his fanbase.  He stopped pretending that he was anything other than an eminently dismissible dick.

Though it took me a long time to accept any of these unfortunate interpretations of a band that once meant a great deal to me, I suspect that I knew a lot longer than I was willing to admit.  I think I instinctively knew when I first made it through the scorched wilderness of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness that it was a fundamentally untenable record.  I quietly disliked “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” for years out of loyalty to the band.   While some of the extravagant double-album still holds up today, most of it comes across as monomaniacal melodrama.  And though the swooning Adore still rewards a patient listen, the band utterly collapsed in their final act:  MACHINA I and II are unlistenable dreck of over-baked ideas and excruciatingly compressed production.  The abject badness of the band at their end was a lesson in the power of disillusionment.  Understanding that I disliked a band that I once loved helped shape my values as a listener.  As much as Siamese Dream taught me that I have a weakness for killer riffs, MACHINA taught me that balanced production was a quality that sometimes good albums from bad albums.  Mellon Collie taught me that bands have to take care to censor themselves in what they decide to release.  But ultimately, the Smashing Pumpkins taught me everything I needed to know about rock mythology that Kurt Cobain failed to teach me.  Fandom is premised on a certain amount of identification with the band’s personalities, but sometimes obsessive fandom requires an unreasonable identification with someone whose moral and aesthetic compass are irreparably broken.  And at these moments, you’re confronted with the profoundly transitory nature of art:  you cannot love everything forever.  Or, said another way, nothing good lasts forever.

Gish Rating: 7.5 / 10

Siamese Dream Rating: 9 / 10

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Pinch and Shackleton Pinch and Shackleton // Jay and ‘Ye’s Watch the Throne was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of collaboration, a meeting of the minds between minds that, considering their respective stations in life, seem essentially unmeetable.  But the album worked precisely because the pair played to their respective strengths:  Jay was the gracious host to Kanye’s increasingly bracing pronouncements about fame and fortune.  As a sort of underground analogue to this dream team, Pinch and Shackleton have released an eponymous album that functions kind of like a Watch the Thrones for the theoretical bass set.  And in this way, Pinch and Shackleton is a deeply satisfying record full spectacular futuro-dub superbly crafted at the hands of some of its most adroit practitioners.  The pair’s roles couldn’t be more clearly defined:  Pinch digs out deep pockets of sub-bass while Shackleton meticulously constructs elaborate beats that bridge those throbbing gulfs.  As a veritable master’s class in production, Pinch and Shackleton is greater than the sum of its considerable parts.  No single song fully captures the exotically strange ethos of the record, though they each obviously defines the possible dynamic range of the record.  From the anxious fidgeting of “Boracay Drift” to the apocalyptic “Burning Blood,” Pinch and Shackleton is often a dark and foreboding record that wrestles with its own contradictions.  ”Room Within a Room” fights its own claustrophobia with panoramic synths and tribal drum beats, and the excellent “Torn and Submerged” alternates between dense bassy passages to extended sections of terrifying openness.  And within other songs, the pair alternates between metallic beats employed with laser-like precision and organic grooves that rely on rounder sounding hand drums.  Sure, the dizzying variety of instrumentation and its accompanying emotional timbre is stunning, but the thing that makes Pinch and Shackleton such a remarkable record is that this is a collaboration between two artists functioning at their highest level.  Rating: 8 / 10

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Rihanna Talk That Talk // There’s a moment almost exactly halfway through Rihanna’s Talk That Talk when the disingenuousness of the contemporary mainstream pop album becomes utterly repulsive.  The moment is the four minute stretch that covers both “Cockiness (Love It)” and “Birthday Cake.”  These songs are so abjectly braindead, so distressingly literal and overt that they don’y titillate so much as depress.  That executives and producers meticulously craft a couple of killer singles and then slop together another 30 minutes of filler to form an expensive album is not news to anyone.  But forcing Rihanna, one of the greatest singles artists in the last decade, to release an album a year for the past five or six years is such an opportunistically market-driven decision that it threatens her already considerable legacy.  So, let’s be straight with each other:  while Rihanna is unlikely to ever create a single album statement that feels essential and indispensable, her singles collection is going to be an incredible pop document.  So what’s likely to join the best of her singles from Talk That Talk?  The record’s opening salvo is formidably catchy:  ”You Da One,” “Where Have You Been,” and “We Found Love” are all custom-built vehicles for RiRi’s playful balance between romance and lust.  Elsewhere, though, Talk That Talk is filled with the kind of over-wrought filler that paradoxically glides by almost without notice (“Talk That Talk,” “Roc Me Out,” “Farewell”).  What’s ultimately so strange about Talk That Talk is that this has been billed as Rihanna’s Erotica, an album throbbing with palpable and challenging sexuality.  It’s not this.  At all.  It’s mechanical, prescripted, devoid of the bouncy naughtiness that made “Rude Boy” and “S+M” such incredible singles.  At the very least, Talk That Talk will help fill out a singles collection that will stand alongside Beyoncé’s and Mariah Carey’s and Lady Gaga’s and Missy Elliott’s as the most inescapable artists in recent memory.  Rating: 5 / 10

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Beacon No Body // The cover of Beacon’s debut release, No Body EP, features “a cheap prom set where real and imaginary moments continually conjure up feelings of love, lust, and all things in between.”  This account of their own music is remarkably precise:  No Body features a quartet of  luxuriously sad love songs .  The pair behind Beacon—Thomas Mullarney and Jacob Gossett—use prom-ready signifiers like finger snaps and gauzy synthesizers to create a soundtrack to the emptiest years of your twenties.  The melancholic loveliness of the whole record practically aches with its own conflation of love and lust, sadness and quiet joy.  The patiently  seductive “Exhale” is for anyone who has felt too deeply about someone too quickly.  The songs sounds tragically self-serious, a declaration of sentiment that might embarrass should it ever see the light of day.  But this is precisely the quality that makes Beacon so intriguing:  they write such earnestly tender songs that their sincerity is strangely bracing.  The titular “No Body” is a syrupy love jam that promises the world to the object of its affection:  ”I’m you’re sky when its blue/And I’ll be your ocean, too.”  In the end, what perhaps comes across as over-blown teenage sentiment is actually a distressingly precise account of what it felt like to desperately want and need someone at sixteen.  While these aren’t love songs for adults in adult relationships, they are love songs for nostalgic grownups looking to remember what made prom such a comfortingly sad affair.  Rating: 7.5 / 10

Not all prodigies are good at everything.  In fact, I tend to think of the sublimely talented as relatively limited in their range of gifts.  Not James Blake.  This fucking guy can evidently do it all: elegantly sad dub, tender torch songs, theoretical bass manipulations, and, now, dirty rave ups with goofy old skool horns.  ”Curbside” is the funky first cut from Blake’s upcoming Love What Happened Here EP.  And it’s a curiously arrogant title.  Of course he loves what happened this year; he dominated by breaking your heart and then finding you a killer party.

James Blake – Curbside by The 405

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For all his hemming and hawing about his burgeoning celebrity, Drake’s debut, Thank Me Later, actually sounded like a pretty decent party, flush with enough coke and champagne to chase away any doubts long enough to get at least some of the day seized.  Certainly not a bad place to find yourself on a friday night.  But Take Care, the official sequel to Thank Me Later, sounds like the Saturday hangover that stretches well into the evening.  Through the record, Drake’s delivery sound forlorn and forsaken, wary of any serious engagement with the material because his head aches just too damn bad.  It’s been said often enough now that it’s moved from being a mere truism to a solid truth:  Drake is our first post-Kanye hip hop star.  And on Take Care, Drake seems to take this role seriously: Take Care is Drake’s 808s and Heartbreak.

Drake has dated enough voluptuous models in recent years that the album’s consistent throb of heartache is sadly sincere.  At nearly every turn, Drake is bemoaning the loss of a relationship in his candid confessional poetry.  Quite a few of these moments fall flat (“We live in a generation of not being love”), but enough of them hit a little close to home to anyone whose lost someone in a wrenching breakup (“So cry if you need to, but I can’t stay to watch you/That’s the wrong thing to do”).   Even his boast raps sound like melancholic downers—see opener “Over My Dead Body”.  The album reaches its devastating nadir with “Marvin’s Room,” a profoundly sad drunk-dial punctuated by understand bass bumps.  Between the self-loathing and the co-dependency, Drake has completely bottomed out here:  ”Having a hard time adjusting to fame/Sprite and that mixed up, I’ve been talking crazy, girl/I’m lucky that you picked up, lucky that you stayed on/I need someone to put this weight on.”  Throughout the album, Drake expands the possibilities of pos-Kanye confessional hip hop.  His sadness is almost always conflated with his astounding ego.  In “Shot For Me,” Drake explicitly addresses a couple of his exes, taunting them with a cutting couplet (“This is one I know you hated when you heard it/And it’s worse because you know that I deserve it”) before comforting them with an Irish blessing (“May your neighbors respect you, trouble neglect you, angels protect you, and heaven accept you”).

And much like 808s, Take Care is kept fresh by its crisp production.  All the belly-aching and heart-aching could get tiresome if the music wasn’t so subtly inventive.  By balancing melody in the hooks and rhythm in the raps, Drake fashions himself a jack-of-all-hip-hop-trades.  For such a large pop star, Drake keeps the guest stars to an absolute minimum, enlisting a handful of marquee headliners to lend a hand (Andre 3000, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, The Weeknd).  Both T-Minus and 40 craft stark minimalistic beats to accompany the complex emotional knots Drake is untangling.  It’s this light touch that makes Take Care imminently accessible.  With the sole exception of the lush “Lord Knows” and “Headlines,” the album is quick to invite listeners into its psychological intricacies, rightly focusing attention on Drake’s lyrics instead of the flashy production.

Again, this album functions like Drake’s 808s and Heartbreak.  That is to say, this is not his My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.  Not yet, at least.  And it remains to be seen whether or not he has something that complex within him, but it’s not hard to imagine him giving it the old college try.  Lord knows this man’s life is fucked up enough—drinking binges, model girlfriends, famous exes, inflated ego, nasty codeine habit, fistfuls of dollars (Canadian)—that whenever he does undertake his psychologically-damaged masterwork it’s going to be a harrowing listen.  For the time being, though, Take Care is harrowing enough.

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At some point in late 1992 or early 1993, I had copies of both Dr. Dre’s The Chronic and REM’s Automatic for the People on cassette.  I cherished both of them deeply. Funny though the combination is now, it seems striking that I understood a key different between these seminal albums.  The Chronic was exciting because it was an illicit a talking point, a cultural pass, a literacy test of sorts.  The Chronic was instantly pleasurable because it was so bracingly alive with its near-juvenile ethos (Deeez Nuuuts!).  Automatic for the People, though, was an adult record, a slow bloomer whose emotional register was almost unrecognizable to most teenagers my age.  It sounded like nothing else on MTV, especially in 1992 and 1993 when the alt nation moved completely off the pages of ‘zines and onto the screens of suburban televisions.  While most young punkish bands found meaning in elaborately angry hissy fits of generational frustration, REM released a disquietingly graceful album about death.  Where others discovered the cultural currency in blank irony, REM traded in sincere reflection and introspection about mortality.  Though it would be years before I really understood the ineffable power of tracks like “Nightswimming” or “Find the River,” something seemed exceptional about this band.

Because REM were always exceptional.  They were the exception to nearly every trend that swayed American bands between 1982 and 2011.  Think of the rock contemporaries they’ve seen in their time:  Sonic Youth, The Talking Heads, Black Flag, The Replacements, Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr, Pixies, Fugazi, Nirvana, Built to Spill, The Strokes, The White Stripes, Modest Mouse.  How many of these bands do you hear in REM’s music?  Hell, even thinking about their predecessors doesn’t really yield too many definitive influences:  Big Star (kind of), Patti Smith (later and only indirectly), The Velvet Underground (at their prettiest sometimes), The Byrds (obviously).  Jesus, no one really even plagiarizes REM all that convincingly.  Let me be especially clear then:  REM was the greatest American band of all time.

They had a broader appeal than Metallica, and they had a deeper catalogue than Nirvana.  Their dynamic range was wider than The Ramones.  Stipe is a more rewardingly cryptic poet than Jim Morrison, and Peter Buck is a more emotional guitar player than Jimi Hendrix.  As much as I gushingly adore the Pixies and Talking Heads, I think REM have just accomplished more than either of these pioneers.  The only two bands that really rival REM for their essential contributions would be Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band and The Beach Boys.  The discography of both of those bands at the height of their powers is undeniable:  Born to Run, Darkness at the Edge of Town, Born in the U.S.A., SMiLE, Pet Sounds, Surf’s Up.  But the key difference between REM and practically any other great American band you can name is that none of them had a run of eight (!!) truly great albums (Murmur through Automatic for the People).  And none of those bands in your best-of list ever aged with as much grace and dignity as REM, who recorded weaker late-career albums without inspiring anything like total resentment or disgust in their fan base.

Now they are gone.  The most productive, most interesting, most rewarding, most singular American band this nation has ever produced has called it a day.  So, a career retrospective like Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage takes on an undeniable air of significance.  While the compilation is sure to irk some fans—four tracks are taken from Collapse Into Now while Reckoning only gets two—the record is as fine an introduction to the band that exists in a convenient commercial form.  Certainly, I have my own grumbles with the omissions of personal favorites (“Me in Honey,” “New Orleans Instrumental No 1,” “Exhuming McCarthy,” “Harborcoat,” “Be Mine,” “Pilgrimage”), but the fact is that this is an excellent summary of an essential piece of America’s cultural identity.  Hell, REM’s back catalogue represents an essential piece of my own cultural identity.  These songs are so deeply embedded in my psyche that I was ready to write this review after quickly peeking at the tracklist.

What’s probably coming across now as heated exaggeration, baseless rhetorical intensification, is really just my out-sized love of this band.  There are lots of bands that I cherish very deeply, but it seems unlikely that I’ve spent nearly the same amount of time getting lost in their music as I have with REM.  REM was—God, that’s going to stick in my throat for a while—REM was there when I first started earning enough disposable income to buy my own music.  While I never bothered to replace my tape of The Chronic until I decided to download it on Napster in a fit of nostalgia, I upgraded my REM tapes with CDs at every opportunity.  I felt a pang of jealousy when some friends of mine got to see the band on their Monster tour, and I felt a swelling of pride when I got to drive down to my local record store to buy Up shortly after finally earning my driver’s license.  I felt genuinely hurt, confused even, when Reveal and Around the Sun failed to live up to the band that moved me so many times in the past.  I felt a level of emotional investment that most people only reserve for a few bands in their lives.

Some bands are only worthy of our attention (and dollars) for a few albums; we don’t feel bad about not following them any more because they’ve broken some unspoken cultural contract.  Some bands, though, get successively worse until we are strangely repulsed by the idea of their new music.  A few bands in the course of our active listening years warrant the kind of attention that REM commanded.  I have closely followed them as long as I have because it seemed impossible to ignore the way that hearing “Fall on Me” or “Country Feedback” or “The One I Love” made me feel like I was experiencing something truly exceptional.

Rating: 9.5 / 10

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Matthew Herbert One Pig //  One of the most enduring stories about Native Americans we learn in elementary school is that they used every part of the buffalo, from hide to horn.  I guess we’re supposed to admire that resourcefulness of the Native American, rejecting our own wastefulness in the process.  This is as good of a lesson as you can learn from the genocidal history of the first nations, and it’s a lesson that Matthew Herbert has taken to its logical conclusion with One Pig.  This remarkable album trances the life of a single pig from pen to plate, sampling its oinks and snorts and using its remains to create instruments like drums and something called a blood organ.  At every moment, the core sound of the album is derived in some way, shape, or form from the pig’s corpus.  The album is arranged chronologically with each track named after the month in which the samples were collected.  And total effect, then, is very unsettling as we listen to progression of degradation, from the pig squealing during mealtime to the faint sizzle of its flesh frying in a layer of oil.  But instead of coming across as a heavy-handed diatribe against the meat industry (cough-”Meat is Murder”-cough), One Pig feels respectful of the complexities of food politics.  But more importantly, One Pig is an engaging album of avant-garde “electronic” music: each tracks slowly introduces its elements until they coalesce into a shambling beat with a killer melody (especially “August 2010“).  Certainly it’s very strange to realize that you are grooving to the arranged sounds of a pig being dismantled, but it’s the kind of brilliant realization that elevates One Pig above the petty pieties of food politics and into the realm of art.  Rating: 8 / 10

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Oneohtrix Point Never Replica //  Spotify has made my life immeasurably better (obviously) because it allows me to stream music at work.  Since I’m usually trying to untangle knotty logic and patiently correct comma splices in students’ papers, I find myself listening to a lot of low-key ambient music to keep my blood pressure in check.  There’s nothing like Brian Eno’s Apollo to calm me when a single paper functions like a master class in logical fallacies.  The danger, besides associating calming music with the occasionally tedious work of doling out grades, is that I’m splitting my attention with a kind of music that rewards mindfulness.  I was pretty surprised, then, to find that Oneohtrix Point Never’s latest, Replica, sounds remarkably different when it’s played intentionally instead of relegating it to soothing background noise.  The album functions in two modes:  bleached techno shorn of its oomph and piano-based ambient fortified by sheets of drone.  When Daniel Lopatin is deconstructing techno’s core aesthetic (as he does most successfully on “Child Soldier” and “Up”), Replica sounds like a thoughtful experiment on the boundaries of genre.  But when he’s blown apart every genre apart and recorded the sound of the ash settling on its own ruins (especially on the gorgeous “Remember“), then Replica sounds like something otherworldly, encouraging you to lean closer to your speakers to find the logic hidden just beneath the surface.  After spending an afternoon walking around with Replica captivating my attention, I realize that listening to it while explaining the differences between a dangling and misplaced modifier has been a terrible disservice to this wonderfully strange album.  Rating:  7.5 / 10

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Bill Orcutt How the Thing Sings // Listening to Bill Orcutt’s beguiling How the Thing Sings is just almost exactly like watching one of Stan Brakhage’s painted films.  In fact, watching Mothlight or Acid Mothers Temple while listening to practically any cut from How the Thing Sings is a revelatory experience.  Just as Brakhage tediously constructed each frame of his flashy artfilms to create a dizzying sense of accumulated images, Orcutt’s freewheeling acoustic noise is built from a kaleidoscopic array of disembodied notes.  Eschewing melodic structure, Orcutt sometimes sounds like a deranged unmusical backwater hick inventing the blues after discovering a guitar in the corner of his one room swamp shack.  Since there’s no real standout, no obvious highlight, How the Thing Sings relies entirely on its cumulative effect.  Exactly what happens when you listen to How the Thing Sings in a single sitting is hard to say.  But you feel really fucking weird.  For kind of a long time afterward.  Kind of like watching a bunch of Brakhage videos, one after the other, on YouTube.  In a really good way, too.  As with any experimental art form, the ideal relationship between demand and reward would be directly proportional.  Log as many miles as you’d like with How the Thing Sings, but you’ll still find an uncompromising avant-garde blues record that stares a lot harder at you than you can at it.  Which is amazing, really.  Rating:  7 / 10