NO GENRE

The frighteningly schizophrenic “A Cold Freezin’ Night” gets a frighteningly schizophrenic video.

mp3:  A Cold Freezin Night

Four reviews.  Two hundred words or less.  No mercy.  Let’s do this.

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Sunglasses – s/t EP Savannah’s Sunglasses is headed by a pair who go by the names 8000 Bam Bam and Baby Seal.  If you’re comfortable with such obvious affected whimsy, then Sunglasses might be right in your wheelhouse.  They make a brand of sunny pop that feels as once slightly ironic and genuinely heartfelt.  While their debut EP is padded with a couple throwaway tracks of field recordings, they manage to throw down a couple of songs with your pleasure center squared in their sites.  Check out “Whiplash,” a breezy little affair featuring a slide whistle, a bouncy piano riff, and one of the most addictive melodies all year.  mp3:  Whiplash

Rating:  7 / 10

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Eminem – Recovery For all intents and purposes, Eminem’s Recovery is his last record of any consequence.  There might be a surprise comeback in a couple of years, but it will only be celebrated by a small minority.  Recovery is a unique kind of hip hop failure.  Instead of trading in the goofy, uninspired rhymes that dominated Encore and Relapse, Eminem has built a carefully constructed PR campaign of an album.  He apologizes to his fans literally dozens of times for the shitty records that have defined the latter half of his career.  No one wants to listen to mea culpas from the most talented emcee in a generation; we want to hear him rip the fucking mic in two.  It’s increasingly unlikely that we’ll ever have that again.  mp3:  Not Afraid

Rating:  4 / 10

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Matmos/So Percussion – Treasure State The prospect of the glitchy squeaks of Matmos paired with the glassy instrumentation of So Percussion should have cause for significant celebration.  But I’m having the damnedest time finding anyone really talking about this collaborative album.  Matmos, perhaps more so than other experimental electronic artists, trade in high concept:  albums composed entirely about historical gay figures (A Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast) or sounds culled from surgery (A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure).  So Percussion, on the other hand, are merely very good at making disarmingly pretty sounds.  It’s not really surprising, then, to find that the album is both conceptually pure and aurally pleasing.  From the amplified cactus needles of “Needles” to the chiming guitars of “Flame,” this is a quiet treat of an album that I hope people take a chance on.  mp3:  Flame

Rating:  7.5 / 10

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The proliferation of microgenres is so absurd that I’m surprised that we haven’t invented a term to pigeonhole The Drums’ New Order meets surf rock aesthetic.  I mean, what the hell would you call it?  New Wave?  Regardless, The Drums’ debut album is a pleasant enough affair.  The songs that stood out on the EP stand out here.  “Best Friend” is more genuinely moving than it should be, considering that the opening lyric is “You were my best friend/Then you died.”  Oof.  But the band usually manages to pull off something so sticky, so sincere that you’re sure you’re supposed to hate it.  “Forever and Ever Amen” is a wide-screen, technicolor slice of pop that doesn’t try to hide it’s source material.  And why would it?  There’s a lot worse bands than New Order that are free for the pilfering.  mp3:  Best Friend

Rating:  7 / 10

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My favorite lo-fi smooth jam artists How to Dress Well are ready to release their first 7” single, “Ready for the World” on Lefse Records.  The song was the centerpiece of HtDW’s Friday Morning Hymnal EP (grab a copy right here).  As usual, the song is a murky affair with smears of synths and heavily processed voices.  Much more affecting than anything like this has a right to be.  The single will also feature a remix of the song by Twin Sister.

This release is the inaugural release of what should be a couple of 7” singles before a full-length album and a couple of live dates.  No word yet on the album or the tour, but the promise alone is exciting enough.

mp3:  Ready for the World

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I’ve been sitting on this beauty for far too long now.  But it’s pretty easy to hoard Blackbird Blackbird‘s songs: they come across like an intimate soundtrack to the pleasant moments that we usually share with no one else. In a nice interview over at The Digital Outhouse, Mikey Sanders indicated that he’s currently working on a full-length, which at this point cannot come fast enough.

mp3:  Summer Heart

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At this point, my love for Neu! is pretty well documented; I spent a week reviewing the first 3 Neu! records back in May.  So you can imagine that I was pretty excited to receive an email about TracksandFields.com‘s Neu! remix contest.  To celebrate the mammoth and comprehensive Neu! boxed set recently reissues by Gronland, the folks at Tracks and Fields are asking for people to submit remixes of “Crazy” from the highly contentious Neu!4 (or Neu! 86, if you will).  The winner’s remix will be featured on the forthcoming CD resissue of Neu! 4.  If you’re interested, you should download the stems and get to work.  And use the neat little widget below to scope out some of the early submissions.

mp3:  Crazy

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The ballsiest song in The Books‘ catalog, which is filled with ballsy songs, is “Motherless Bastard.”  The song opens with a horrifying field recording of a father denying that he is his little girl’s dad.  The upsetting dialogue suddenly gives way to a rustic duet between acoustic guitars.  The production is stellar, and the melodies are unabashedly gorgeous.  Now, on The Books’ latest song to leak from The Way Out, their forthcoming album from Temporary Residence, takes the same track, using some terrifying vocal samples from children.  One little boy vividly recounts the ways that he could kill you:  “I can kill you with a rifle, a shotgun, any way I want to.  Probably cutting your toes and working my up toward your brain.”  Yikes.  But underneath the violent imaginations of children, the duo have composed a fundamentally unsound beat that suddenly bursts with borrowed sounds: whistles, screams, harmonicas, electronic rushes, bird calls.  The whole sounds like it’s on the verge of collapse, and it’s a thrillingly unnerving listen.

mp3:  A Cold Freezin’ Night

As much as I enjoy geeking out by building best-of album lists, song lists are infinity more interesting.  A song is a high-wire act: one slip, one faulty step and you’ve got a mess on your hands.  Albums, almost by their very nature, are more forgiving: great albums still have awful, awful songs.  So a list of the best songs of a period tend to be more inclusive of different types of talent.  Quite a few of these bands here don’t have enough of it to sustain an album (yet?), but they have enough to absolutely crush one.  So, culled together with scraps of time over the past week and crafted with a fair amount of thought and consideration, I humbly submit 40 songs that have it pretty well locked down this year.  Comments, omissions, counter-arguments all certainly welcome.

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I would be lying if I said that the first two peeks at Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs weren’t slightly disappointing.  While I think they’re good songs, particularly the tight punk rock of “Month of May,” they didn’t sound as accomplished as the band’s usual compositions.  They felt more like rough drafts than finished pieces, so it comes as a huge relief that the next two songs to leak from the album are full-blown Arcade Fire songs.

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First up, there’s “Ready to Start,” an anxious rocker that strides forward on wobbly legs.  And Win Butler’s voice sounds ghosted, hollowed out:  “If I was yours/But I’m not.”  Unlike “The Suburbs,” which captured a collective sense of suburban ennui, “Ready to Start” is an intensely personal song from start to finish.  For a band who have staked most of their career on examining and reproducing the national and global consciousness of a generation (they’ve never aimed for anything less), this is a gutsy move.  And it’s thrilling to see that they pull it off.

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Next, we have the twitchy “We Used to Wait.”  The sound quality of the radio rip is pretty poor, but you still get the sense that the band has worked to master the low end of the mix (fuck you, Sasha Frere Jones).  The slinky beat with a four-on-the-floor bass and the insistent piano work to recreate Arcade Fire’s unique brand of personal disco that closed out “Crown of Love” and “Neighborhoods #2 (Laika).”  Of everything we’ve seen now from The Suburbs, “We Used to Wait” is the most consistent with their previous work and, therefore, the most immediately enjoyable.

mp3:  Ready to Start

mp3:  We Used to Wait

The take-the-cake biggest cliché in music journalism is that every year is a great year in music.  And, of course, this is true because music is one of our lastingly great contributions as a species.  So, just how great is 2010 going to be?  Pretty fucking great.  After the jump, check out my best/favorite albums of the year so-far.

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Make no mistake about it: Black Mountain are vastly underrated.  They make thunderous noise that swings effortlessly between sleazy hard rock and Wagnerian metal.  On their last LP, 2008′s terrific In the Future, the band had the the sand to pair the achingly tender “Night Walks” with the audacious 16-minute epic “Bright Lights.”  The band even lent the heartbreaking “Stay Free” to the Spiderman 3 soundtrack without sacrificing the cowboy authenticity of the song.  This is a band of considerable talent and bravery.

Last year, Black Mountain’s best side projects released terrific albums.  Pink Montaintops’ generous Outside Love was a big-hearted affair, while Lightning Dust’s exquisite Infinite Light was a chance to showcase Amber Webber’s wonderfully soulful voice.  Now, coming quickly on the heels of those albums, Black Mountain have announced their third long player, Wilderness Heart. (out 9/14 on Jagjaguwar)  The lead single is “Old Fangs,” a tight number that tries its cards close to its chest.  But the band quickly tips its hand because those palm muted chords are aching to ring out in all their distorted glory.  And when they do the relief is temporary: the band quickly clamps down and wrangles everything back into order.  The exciting push and pull of the song’s dynamics are augmented by some spacey synths that add  curious textures to the mix.

Download the mp3 at Jagjaguwar for the price of an email address.