NO GENRE

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James Blake’s rapid evolution from a functional dubstep beat slinger to a producer of strikingly originality has been a case of punctuated equilibrium.  But the speed of his transformation isn’t what’s ultimately interesting about Blake’s worth.  He is among the most exciting producers right now because he rides that fine line between theory and praxis.  By combining dubby bass with German microbeats and American R&B voice snippets, Blake has fashioned something that sounds entirely new.  And though we only have a little under an hour’s worth of officially released music, Blake has positioned himself as the producer du jour with his newest EP, Klavierwerke.

On his last taster record, the excellent CMYK, Blake grafted the smallest fragments of American soul onto tiny fine-boned beats.  The twin highlights were “CMYK” and “Postpone.”  The former is genius-level exercise in sample juggling, though virtuosity has nothing to do with it.  The song is incredible because Blake creates a narrative about a women scorned and a mistress slinking around with another’s man by casting samples of Kelis and Aaliyah into character roles.  But instead of being gimmicky, the song was strangely and thrillingly affecting.  And then “Postpone” recreated soul music in dubstep’s image.  The song reimagines nearly every aspect of the Stax sound by recasting the parts: the organ becomes grumbling bass, the horn section morphs into a brassy synth line, and the singers only show up for their most soulful half-notes.

Klavierwerke takes this formula and strips it of almost all recognizable vestiges of R&B.  What remains is a spare beat, the occasional plink of a piano, and ghostly pitch-shifted vocals.  With these elements arranged, Blake then squeezes and compresses them into tiny, flat shapes that squirm and wiggle.  And though the album is composed of microscopic fragments , the songs still feel weighty and consequential.  These aren’t charming little numbers that can drift through your headphones; these songs command your attention and reward your patience.  The finest moment on the EP is unquestionably “I Only Know (What I Know Now).”  A languid beat and a spectral synth line rise and fall, leaving hissing voids in the middle of the song, which Blake fills with an aching vocal sample repeating the titular line.  The song’s tone is hard to pin down.  Sometimes I think it’s impossibly sad in the way that Portishead could be impossibly sad.  Other times, though, it sounds wounded but hopeful.  And since the vocal line is repeated a number of times, the moment takes on a different character each time because of subtle changes Blake introduces.  Elsewhere, “Tell Her Safe” sounds stubbornly optimistic despite the fact that it sounds like the vocals drowned in a murky lake ages ago.  Finally, “Don’t You Think I Do” is a club banger in its embryonic state.  Given time, that kick drum would mature and the piano chords would coalesce into a steady melody and the song could be a barn-burner.  But as it stands, it sounds like the echo in your head the morning after a night out.  In fact, the whole record sounds like the reverberations that haunt your ears on Sunday mornings.  Morning after records are a dime a dozen, but almost none of them represent the most promising thing in electronic music right now.

Rating: 8 / 10

Since I voluntarily function as How to Dress Well’s one-man PR operation, I must insist that you check out his recent cover of R. Kelly’s “I Wish,” a heartbreaking song about losing someone.  It’s a fascinating take on the song, and only partly because we get to hear Krell’s voice in its unvarnished beauty and fragility.

And be sure to scope out the original, too.

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that every review of an LCD Soundsystem show must begin with the phrase I was there. But being there matters because after having been there you have earned the right to say I was there.

The Orpheum Theatre, tucked snuggly into a hellish little corner of downtown Boston, is a remarkably frightening piece of architecture.  The pre-show haze is so thick that you can’t make out any of the mawkish murals on the ceiling.  The seats are lumpy, and the space between rows couldn’t anorectic dwarf.  The balcony groans and sighs with every person that wides her way up the byzantine stairwell system.  The walls nervously sweat all night, fretting the next thump of the kick drum will unloosen the last bolt holding the place together.  It’s tempting to echo John Updike’s description of Fenway and call it a lyric little bandbox, but the truth of the matter is that there is little that is actually charming about the Orpheum.  All of that is to say that the Orpheum doesn’t privilege anyone.

And that suits LCD Soundsystem’s purposes just fine because the band is perhaps the most truly egalitarian band working right now.  They don’t privilege anyone either.  Their music honestly appeals to everyone: the record geeks who have worn copies of Manuel Gottsching’s E2-E4 or Come Away with ESG, the dance fanatics who worship the celestial discoball, the hipsters looking to bolster their credit, the grown ass men who get misty eyed when they hear Bowie or Byrne in Murphy’s yelp, the prickly audiophile, the Kraftwerk enthusiast, the funk junky, the converted punk rocker.  That their shows, then, appeal to such a broad audience is hardly surprising.  What’s remarkable is that they do this without changing a single aspect of their essential character.

The band opened with a sparkling, hard-hitting version of “Dance Yrself Clean,” another one of Murphy’s complex emotional workouts that is as fierce as it is tender.  Live, the song sounds sweatier, more desperate, reaching such a fevered pitch by the end that it’s difficult to imagine the band topping themselves.  Wisely, they moved on to the funkiest stretch of the set:  ”Drunk Girls,” “Get Innocuous!” “Yr City’s a Sucker,” “Daft Punk is Playing at My House.”  While both “Drunk Girls” and “Daft Punk” have a poppier structure, the other two are straight dance numbers.  They locate a great groove and ride it into the sunset, adding and subtracting elements in an attempt to create a sense of dance floor urgency.  They upped the ante with their closing trio of early singles:  the deep-house new wave of “Tribulations,” the punk flare of”Movement,” and sublime goofiness of “Yeah.”

But it was the middle of the set that consisted of some of the band’s most affecting work: “I Can Change” and “All My Friends.”  These, of course, are two of the best songs in a practically flawless catalog of songs.  But more importantly, their reception last night says a lot about fans’ affection for the band.  LCD Soundsystem can turn private worries into dance floor shakedowns that can bolster you as quickly as they can unmoor you.  ”All My Friends,” in particular, is an anthem that is as invigorating as it is devastating.  I concluded my review of This is Happening with this sentence:  ”LCD Soundsystem are great because [after listening to the album] you realize that you’ve been dancing with a lump in your throat for the past 60 minutes.”  It’s not until you sing “All My Friends” with 2,000 of your newest, closest friends that you understand exactly what that means.  And now I can say that I was there.

Setlist after the jump.

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Fetishists—the bottom-spankers, the hog-tiers, the boot-lickers, the bound, the gagged—must be rejoicing today.  They no longer have to be content with brutal German industrial to soundtrack their sessions.  As tight as a corset and as depthless as a stretch of latex, How to Dress Well’s peerless Love Remains is the sound of emotional mortification for paraphiliacs among us.  The thing that people forget about fetishism is that it isn’t about cruelty or deviancy; it’s usually about love and trust.  Likewise, HTDW’s debut album is primarily concerned with the ways in which we crave other people and the ways that we’re hurt in their absence.  If fetishistic behavior is the physical representation of need at all costs, then Love Remains is the sound of declaring your intentions, your hopes, your fears despite the possible repercussions.

The catch with HTDW, though, is that this is all innuendo.  It’s very difficult to make out the lyrics behind the layers and layers of production silt that have settled on the masters.  In fact, the production is so integral to the sound of HTDW that to divorce the lo-fi tape hiss and feedback from the compositions would entirely endanger the project.  Elsewhere, I’ve written about how HTDW sound like Shai playing at the bottom of a murky swimming pool or Jodeci being covered by an ambient drone band.  In other words, Love Remains is the most strangely beautiful record of the year.  I stand behind this lo-fi R&B label, which means that saying anything definitive about the lyrical content of the album is going to be impossible.  Without that immediate connection to most of the lyrics, we’re left to interpret the shifting tones of the songs.

The man behind How to Dress Well, the unfailingly polite philosophy student Tom Krell, is a master at subtly changing the emotional register of a song.  With almost every song, Krell moves the listener through a set of emotions that never feel manipulated.  The most stunning example of this the remarkable “Decisions.”  Everything from the mournful thump of the kick drum to the ethereal synths work to guide the song on its sharp emotional arc from hopeless melancholy to wary contentedness.  In under 3 minutes, Krell has given you the entire spectrum of heartbreak, from lassitude and exhaustion to contentment and lonely joy.  Elsewhere, “Date of Birth” comes on strong and insistent and soon becomes dejected, satisfied with giving up the fight.  Many of the songs follow this trajectory, but, amazingly, the album doesn’t feel apathetic or whiny.  Krell instinctively knows when he’s lost the battle, and he knows when he needs to stand up straight and declare his love.  Amid the throbbing bass and ghosted reverb of this album’s core aesthetic, “Can’t See My Own Face” rises up as a palate-cleansing burst of early morning sun:  ”Every day, it’s just to make it through/I want to know that I will always love you, babe.”  But it’s the titular sentiment that sells the sweetness of the song: “With my eyes, I won’t see my own face.”  This is a twist on VU’s stickiest moment.  That is to say, you are my mirror.

Fetishism is, I think, an apt metaphor for How to Dress Well.  After all, the cover of his Can’t See My Own Face EP featured a pair of latex-clad lovers connected by an air hose running between their shiny face masks.  But more to the point, fetishism requires the careful management of degrees of romantic and sexual intensity, culminating in a moment of exquisitely ecstatic pain.  HTDW’s lo-fi production is another form of intensities management; he will bring a song to the breaking point with a swell of feedback or a wave of reverb and then carefully ratchet down the intensity by returning to the melody that you feel in love with in the first place. Love Remains, like fetishism of all varieties, is ultimately interested in the malleability of love and trust.  Fetishists have each other; How to Dress Well has us.

Rating: 9 / 10

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Baths Cerulean // Will Wiessenfeld’s best moments cannot be captured; they are elusive and amorphous creatures that shift and lean just outside of your grasp.  But the fact that you’re chasing a beat, leaning in to the music to understand what is drawing you nearer is what makes Baths such a promising act.  Born in the futuristic city-shock of Los Angeles’ well-stocked experimental hip-hop scene, Baths’ debut album is a beat-centered affair that never once feels like your standard-issue beat record.  These compositions are too pretty, too composed to comprise a theoretical manifesto on hazy possibilities of poppy hip-hop.  So while this isn’t a manifesto in the sense that Nosaj Thing or Flying Lotus’ records are manifestos, Cerulean demonstrates the way that hip-hop and pop intersect without fully committing to their mode.  The record is certainly inconsistent (the album’s center is a little mushy), but there are enough standout moments to warrant the hype.  In particular, both “♥” and “Hall,” despite the nervous breakdown synths, are warm, gushy love songs.  But the album’s centerpiece is the spare “Rain Smell,” which hinges on a heartbreakingly sticky lyric:  ”I still smell you, distance aside.”  The song’s minimal arrangement (piano, ambient sound, detuned drum machine pops) underscores the lyrics’s emptiness.  Rating: 6.5 / 10

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Isan Glow in the Dark Safari Set // The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was a beautiful piece of government-funded weirdness.  Can you imagine our federal government paying people to make strange electronic noises on some of the most advanced audio equipment in the world?  The sounds that the Workshop created have become part and parcel of the early foundations of electronic music: warped sine waves fluttering like digital butterflies, processed gongs that had a warm metallic edge, tape loops of surprising samples that could be processed to within an inch of their lives.  But the Workshop did not create jarring or discordant sounds; they created tones and melodies that were achingly beautiful and strange and comforting.  Listening to folks like Delia Derbyshire and John Baker, you’re struck by how great sound itself is.  Just being able to hear things is incredible.  This feeling of exhilaration at simple but potent sounds is at the heart of ISAN’s new album, Glow in the Dark Safari Set. At its worst (especially the beatless “The Axle” and “Slurs and Slowly”), the band sounds like they’re raiding the Workshop’s vaults for forgotten scraps.  At its best, though, Isan sound like they’re enthralled with the power of stitching noises together.  The LP, then, has a naive, child-like sense of wonder about it, almost a sense of whimsy that I’m not always comfortable with.  But when the charms become overwhelming, when you let your guard down, you’ll find that the album has plenty of wonderful moments.  Take “Eastside,” for example.  A languid beat wrapped tightly in oscillating synths carries a clipped vocal sample to create the glowing album closer.  Then there’s “64 Fire Damage,” a 9-minute exercise in simple electronic elegance; the themes developed early in the song don’ change much but it’s hard to notice when you’re daydreaming. [mp3]  Rating: 7 / 10

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Wise Blood + // It’s hard to tell whether or not Wise Blood (aka Chris Laufman) is actually a great artist because his samples are such obviously great hooks.  When you listen to the thumping spiritual rave-up that is “Here Comes the Sun,” which employs the transcendentally great ending to “Hello Goodbye,” you immediately suspect that the man is hiding behind the sample to cover for his own lack of ideas.  But Laufman buries enough in the number that it does, over time, feel like an original composition.  Perhaps this is because you’re searching for those personal touches he’s added to the song.  Likewise, it’s all too easy to dismiss “B.I.G. E.G.O.,” which borrows the beat from “When the Levee Breaks.”  But instead of riding the greatest beat in rock n roll, he adds his washed-out falsetto singing some wash-out R&B swagger.  These songs still feel like an apprentice’s work, but I can understand his excitement about wanting to give these puppies away.  I would be pretty pleased with myself if I made the most tired sample in hip-hop sound fresh.  Rating: 7 / 10

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When Hamilton Leithauser sings, he becomes even more attenuated.  He rises on his tip-toes, he locks his knees and commands his spine to stand at attention.  He even stretches his neck in a way that makes him conspicuously vulnerable.  All this so that he can put as much oomph behind a note as the song demands from him.  If The Walkmen’s songs weren’t so goddam great, then this might be incredibly irritating to watch.  But after 10 years of tremendously consistent body of work, Leithauser still comes across as a guy with something to prove.

The Walkmen have nothing left to prove.  They have recorded an oddly shaped gem (Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone) that was quietly cherished by a small group of listeners.  They followed that up with their flat-out masterpiece, the unstoppable Bows + Arrows.  After a brief series of bold choices that were sometimes unsatisfying (covering Harry Nilsson’s wonderful Pussy Cats only seems logical in retrospect).  Then, two years ago, The Walkmen showed up with their most mature suite of songs to date, the elegant melancholy of You and Me.  The album was surprising because there were no rave-ups, no temper tantrums, no barn-burners that made the band so fascinating.  Instead, we got a collection of torch songs that turned the anger and disappointment inward.  The band hadn’t really changed their subject matter, but they had changed their approach.

Now, the band has returned with the romantic, yet muscular Lisbon.  The album is a continuation of You and Me‘s aesthetic, but it never quite feels like the band is treading water.  When coupled with You and Me, it’s clear that the sun has set on the days when The Walkmen’s anger burned with the heat of a blast furnace.  Whereas they were content to burn down their songs in a fiery blaze of rage and confusion, the band seems more comfortable in their emotional confusion.  Take “All My Great Designs” for example.  The song is a slow burning number in the middle of the album.  Leithauser sings with enough reservation that you can almost hear him smothering his voice, flattening it into something weary sounding.  This is a man talking to the one who deserted him.  While Leithauser used to scream “No one speaks to me that way/I’ll be hanging from my ceiling fan,” he now sorrowfully assesses the situation with empathy and care.  And then there’s the show-stopper, the brassy, dejected “Stranded.”  The song is disarmingly introspective, but instead of navel-gazing, the band manages to find the nobility in lostness.

But none of this is to say that there aren’t plenty of upbeat moments that seem to recall the old Walkmen.  ”Victory” reaches for the rafters, pounding away in a temple-bursting chorus, with a palpable sense of frustration.  And “Woe is Me” is a bounces with more hooks and catches that almost anything the band has ever written.  ”Torch Song,” which pretty neatly sums up the band’s aesthetic, is a triumphantly sad parade of doo-wop harmonies and cymbal crashes and prickly guitar licks.  And while these moments, good as they are, don’t burn as hotly, as brightly as their work on Bows + Arrows, they fit nicely alongside the restrained, mature songs that serve as the centerpiece of the album.

Over email, a friend of mine argued that Lisbon was the album that The National thought they were recording.  That sounds about right.  Both The Walkmen and The National are doing something similar: they make music that speaks to an aging group of men and women who are slowly but surely accumulating small victories and devastating defeats.  As the core audiences of these bands get older, it’s nice to see the bands themselves growing with the audience, creating a soundtrack to our disappointments and our triumphs.

Rating: 8 / 10

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At some point in their careers, most rock bands write a song about radio, an ode to the golden days when a DJ connected you to a larger world that seems brighter and more promising than your bedroom.  Pavement never really wrote a tribute to radio; instead, they wrote “Stereo,” a song that celebrates listeners more than DJs.  After all, Pavement were more of a stereo band than a radio band; they depended entirely on fans sitting at home with their worn copies of Slanted & Enchanted.  This acknowledgment that conscious, decision-making listeners at home made Pavement into everything than they have become explains why a couple thousand people filled Boston University’s surgically clean hockey arena on Saturday to do a lot of the work for the band.

Watching the band, though, you get the sense that there are probably some residual bad vibes from their final years.  Malkmus and Kannberg couldn’t be further apart, while Ibold occupies the no man’s land between them with the serene docility of a Buddhist monk.  And Nastanovich, of course, is still a wonderfully goofy guy whose vocal duties are only either funny or terrifying.  During “Conduit for Sale!” Nastanovich approached the audience, bending down to look them in the eyes while he shredded his throat for the choruses.  From interviews, it sounds as if the only person who really understands why Pavement broke up and reunited now is Malkmus, and he certainly isn’t tipping his hat.  The likelihood of another tour after this one seems distant, and the possibility of any new material seems downright impossible.  That said, the show was the best of all possible worlds.  I had hopes that they would play at least 5 of my all-time, dessert-island Pavement favorites:  ”Silence Kid,” “Summer Babe,” “Loretta’s Scars,” “Range Life,” “Kennel District.”  They played all of them.  Considering that this is most likely the last time I’ll ever see Pavement, it would have been nice to hear other classics like “Box Elder” or “Shady Lane” or the endearing oddballs “No More Kings” or “Unseen Power of the Picket Fence.”  But complaining about the setlist is ridiculous.  If I had a choice in the matter, this is bascially the show I would have wanted to see.

Pavement’s set opened with a muscular version “Silence Kid.”  While Malkmus’ voice sounded a little thin, the band tore into the song with a ferocious passion that settled any fear that the band was going to glide through their set like disinterested veterans.  In fact, more than anything else, Pavement did not seem interested in going  through the motions.  Instead of riding the carefully-curated best-of Quarantine the Past, the band chose to throw a couple of curveballs at the audience:  they ground out a particularly menacing version of “Heckler Spray” and jammed a little on “Fin,” the underrated closer to Brighten the Corners, and created a version of “Shoot the Singer (1 Sick Verse)” that soared more than the original.

The usual suspects were, unsurprisingly, glorious.  ”In the Mouth a Desert” was an towering wall of sound that crumbled with every chorus and rose again for every new verse.  ”Here*,” the show’s closing number, was as stately and beautiful as its always been, even though it sounded both emptier and fuller than it does on record.  And “Summer Babe (Winter Version)” is still the most anthemic, the most soul-stirring piece of inspiring nonsense that the band ever composed.  Malkmus even ceded his inflamed yowl heading into the song’s final third over to the audience.  He stepped back from the mic and the crowd dutifully picked up the slack.  To hear a couple thousand people scream the most singularly awesome moment of Pavement’s career filled me with the kind of awe and humility that confirms that the only faith I’ll ever subscribe to is the theology of rock n roll.

Setlist after the jump.

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Kanye’s G.O.O.D. Friday is such a capital idea that I almost don’t care if Dark Twisted Fantasy ever sees the light of day.  While “Lord Lord Lord” doesn’t have the immediate appeal of “Monster” (especially Nikki Minaj’s unfathomably awesome verse) or the fascinating social commentary of “Runaway,” the song is an easy going number that belies the complexity of its roster.  When you have this many folks guesting on your track, it should be much more of a mess.  And both Mos Def and Raekwon continue to demonstrate that maybe their second wind is here to stay.

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This cosmically black electro pop is unlikely release for the prophetic crew over at Brainfeeder Records, but the massive percussion and zooming buzzsaw synths seem right at home with Flying Lotus and Daedelus.  And nothing on Lorn’s fine but unremarkable debut, Nothing Else, hinted that he could write a gem as sticky and as spooky as “Until There is No End.”   But the song’s architecture is impressive: the towering beat creates enough space to house Lorn’s haunted synthesizers to ring out with glowering menace.

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That Kanye West is kind of a douchebag does not surprise anyone.  Neither does the fact that he’s an asshole, a scumbag, and a jerk-off.  He knows this much; that’s why he seemed so willing to compose an apology to Taylor Swift that inexplicably featured Pusha T.  (Editorial aside: do the kids know who Pusha T is?)  He’s done this before.  Hell, the man’s career seems to be composed entirely of transgressions and apologies.  What he hasn’t done before is perform a song that drips with such nihilistic self-loathing and bitterness.

He knew that ahead of his forthcoming album he would be greeted with welcome arms.  All he had to do was apologize to the white blond girl that he offended.  He did steal her thunder; she seems like a very genuine and talented young woman.  He did that last night (actually, twelve months ago, in fact), and it felt earnest.  But this song sounded like a personal indictment, as well as an indictment of the entire star system.  Kanye, perhaps more than any other celebrity, understands that we’re aching to forgive him.  We want to forgive Kanye because we want Kanye rocking our parties, our Jeeps, our Saturday afternoon barbecues for a long time.  We will forgive the most boorish behavior that we wouldn’t tolerate from even our closest relatives because we don’t actually understand Kanye West.  Want proof that we don’t really understand Kanye?  Aren’t we celebrating Kanye today because of his honest admission that he’s an asshole, a jerk-off, a douchebag?  Not quite. Kanye’s not just admitting that he’s a jerk. He’s showing us that this is only narrative we’re ultimately interested in, even if it’s only part of the truth.

That Kanye West is the most brilliant, vital pop star alive should not surprise anyone.  He’s only been aching to show you this for a decade now.

UPDATE: Here’s the studio version of the excellent “Runaway.”  Inexplicably, the song is even better better than Sunday night’s stunning live debut.  Maybe because I could make out all the lyrics of the verses, which includes gems like “I sent this girl a picture of my dick/I don’t know what it is with females/But I’m not too good at that shit.”  Sounds like Ms. Swift got off pretty easy . . .  Also, Pusha T’s verse sounds a lot better than it did the other night.

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Photograph by WireImage