NO GENRE

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The thing that’s so goddam magnificent about Fleet Foxes is that their stark uncoolness is almost warn as a badge of honor.  I mean, when was the last time a band consciously resurrected that classic golden CSNY sound and didn’t come across like a bunch of pantheistic hippies?  As good as their self-titled debut was, it seemed unlikely that Fleet Foxes could match, let alone top, themselves on a followup.  And after a nearly 3 year absence?  Thanks for the memories, but I’m going to be busy.  But then “Helplessness Blues” comes ringing out of the band’s autumnal holler, a song as warm and generous and unabashedly beautiful as anything that they’ve penned this far into their short careers.  Hell, I’ll even go out on a limb and proudly state that “Helplessness Blues” surpasses everything the band has committed to tape so far; in fact, I’m pretty well convinced that I will still be singing this song’s praises in December.  A couple of deep listens this evening and my arms and neck are still studded with goosebumps.

The song is a glorious ode to quarter life lostness:  ”And now after some thinking/I’d say I’d rather be/A functioning cog in some great machine/Serving something beyond me/But I don’t, I don’t know what that will be/I’ll get back you some day soon, you will see.”  But instead of being a mushy, indecisive plod through general twenty-something ennui, the song sounds fresh while borrowing liberally from the best of Simon and Garfunkel.  As a triptych, “Helplessness Blues” neatly divides its time between a melancholy introduction that soon bursts forth with sepia-toned acoustic guitars that eventually blossom into a sunset orange finale that glides on breathtaking swells.  By the end of its economical five minutes, this romantic idyll has sold itself on the unlikely but abundant merit of this dewy-eyed band of bearded troubadours.

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Various Artists Night Slugs Allstars Vol 1 // While still in its infancy, Night Slugs has quickly become a label worth watching in the underground electronic music scene.  Besides releasing a steady stream of terrific singles from producers like Jacques Greene and Kingdom, Night Slugs dropped the unspeakably great “Wut,” Girl Unit’s sweeping song of digitized atomization.  For those who haven’t kept up, Night Slugs released their first Allstars compilation, an annual tradition that hopefully I’m going to anticipate as much as I do Kompakt’s Total or Pop Ambient series.  The label specializes in a brash, stuttering kind of electronic music that draws influence from every conceivable corner of the electronic world:  dubstep, G-Funk, grime, hip hop, bass spelunkers, retro-futurism, even a little Afro-Beat.  This comp, then, presents a wildly diverse set of talents working in a variety of mediums.  There’s Kingdom’s cool study in contrast, “Bust Broke,” which relies just as much on a blaring synth horn as it does on the velvety spaces between beats.  Velour’s “Booty Slammer” is as patient and expansive as “Bust Broke,” but it feels significantly warmer in its execution.  Jacques Greene’s “(Baby I Don’t Know) What You Want” weds classic techno beats with a tightly pitched vocal sample to create a nostalgic disco marriage.  The compilation isn’t perfect —I’m not sure why Kingdom’s “Fogs” was left off of here or why Lil Silva gets two original tracks while one of Girl Unit’s is a remix—but complaining about these minor imperfections misses the point.  Night Slugs Allstars Vol 1 showcases the talent at one of the most exciting labels out there right now.  Rating:  7 / 10

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Various Artists Bangs and Works Vol 1: A Chicago Footwork Compilation // Depending on who you ask, Chicago footwork is either a really new or a really old form of electronic music.  But, then again, quite a few people will tell you that footwork isn’t even the genre of music; it’s a dance that accompanies juke, the name for the actual music.  I’m confused about the whole argument, but whatever the hell you want to call it, it’s clear from this primer that footwork (for argument’s sake) is a really fucking crazy amalgam of styles and subgenres that melds Detroit techno with Miami bass and London dubstep and New York hip hop while not really committing to any of them.  The music generally throws down a solid backbeat only to assault it with haywire 808s and 909s.  The synth work relies on building glitchy rhythms out of sputtering machines, and the samples, many of which are glaringly obvious, are shredded and reassembled into maniacally redundant soul androids.  Planet Mu has spent 2010 slowly rolling out the scene’s most noteable DJs, including DJ Rashad, DJ Roc, and DJ Nate, all of whom show up on the compilation.  Their presence builds a reliable foundation for the record: DJ Rashad’s “Itz Not Right” punishes his sample with slugging bass and crisp handclaps and DJ Roc’s “One Blood” creates a rhythm out of the titular rallying cry by sheer stubborn persistance.  But the anthology is careful to highlight the more under-exposed producers.  DJ Elmoe’s wonderful “Whea Yo Ghost At, Whea Yo Dead Man” welds a homemade sample to a New Age-y track by Vangelis, and Tha Pope’s show-stopping “Jungle Juke” perverts “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (one of my favorite songs of all time) to thrilling effect.  Then there’s DJ Trouble’s “Bangs and Works,” which might be the compilation’s highlight.  Here, Trouble has created a space where a soulful synthesized flute can dance with a mournful vocalist while the wobbly beat carries the tune.  At 25 tracks, Bangs and Works bubbles with so many exhilaratingly strange and goofy and deadly serious moments that you’re likely to get lost in this record for ages.  And when was the last time you could say that about a compilation?  Rating:  8 / 10

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Various Artists DFA 2010 Compilation // Even if you only paid attention to this particular blog, you would know that DFA has a stellar year:  a strangely alluring rerelease of Victoria and The Victorian Punks’ “Beautiful Dreamer,” another great lead-off single from Hot Chip, an unstoppable collaboration between Jarvis Cocker and Discodeine, a quiet masterpiece from NDF.  And, of course, DFA happened to release my favorite album of the year, LCD Soundsystem’s magnum opus This is Happening. And this was only the stuff I covered.  If you were a little more widely read, then you would have come across terrific reissues (Peter Gordon and The Love of Life Orchestra), unstoppable albums (Shit Robot’s From the Cradle to the Rave), and dance floor fillers (Jee Day’s “Like a Child”).  But if you didn’t know anything about any of this, then DFA has been kind enough to collect it all in one convenient package, the 2010 DFA Compilation.  Besides being a really serviceable overview of DFA’s productive year, this comp serves as a reminder of every strength they have as a label.  By crate digging for the masses, DFA has tirelessly reissued forgotten disco classics like Peter Gordon’s restless “Beginning of the Heartbreak/Don’t Don’t” and touching deep house of Woolfy’s “Looking Glass.”  But DFA have also been relentless champions of up-and-comers, everyone from The Rapture to Hot Chip.  In the past year, they’ve introduced us to an exquisite single NDF (“Since We Last Met”) and bewildering track from Michoacan (“In the Dark of the Night“), both of whom are represented on the record.  When the label isn’t rediscovering old treasures or nurturing new talent, they’re releasing a steady stream of great work by established in-house artists like Jee Day (“Like a Child”) or Holy Ghost! (“I Know, I Hear”) or Shit Robot (“Take Em Up”) or Prinzhorn Dance School (“Seed, Crop, Harvest”).  Look, DFA’s first two compilations are already classics in this early century, so it’s not surprising that this one also has the feel of something significant. It remains, though, to be seen if something like “Since We Last Met” or “In the Dark of the Night” become touchstones of contemporary music in the same ways as “House of Jealous Lovers” or “Losing My Edge.”  Rating: 8 / 10

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The last time we checked in with Carlos Parana’s Lingering Last Drops he was spooking us out with the creaking dread of entirely fictive abandoned factories. Whereas last year’s Some Silver Morning imagined the sound of haunted industrial sites, his latest EP, Innocent, imagines the sound of a haunted lounge.  Though he hasn’t necessarily picked up the pace at all, there’s something decidedly more lush about his songs this go around.  The slow march of “Seeing Voices” is bookended with warmly mournful horns, and the wobbly beat of “Innocent” is kept upright by a wah-wah’d guitar.  Don’t get me wrong: there’s still something nightmarish and unnerving about Parana’s compositions, whether it’s details like the dying computer sounds that occasionally interupt “Innocent” or the clash between the noisy guitar and the sophisticated bassline of “Love is a Pill.”  While the detailing is good on these songs, they feel less atmospheric and more fussed over, more composed.  In that way, I think Innocent shows Parana’s potential as a songwriter rather than a sound-maker, if you’ll allow me the distinction.  Parana released a couple of albums last year, and there’s no reason to think that he won’t be as productive this year.  Consider Innocent your scary appetizer for Lingering Last Drops in 2011.

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One of the only cultural arenas where Americans are sorely lacking is in the affecting 16 year old troubadour department.  Justin Bieber?  C’mon.  The Brits are killing us; they have a national treasure in Zoo Kid.  It’s fucking embarrassing, man.  Doesn’t Uncle Sam have a talented grandson in his varied brood?

Anyway, Zoo Kid is 16 year old Archy Marshal from London’s East End whose song “Out Getting Ribs” is an exceptional piece of teenage ennui.  I mean, Justin Bieber doesn’t know how to sing about being a teenager because he has never really been one.  I think there’s a lot of buzz around this song because it’s obvious that Marshal can translate the feelings of a teenager because he’s an honest-to-God teen who thinks in all the same ways that we all did.  The difference, though, is that whereas most teens fill notebooks with shoddy, overly-emotive poetry, Marshal has taken the pains to compose something that feels both age appropriate and emotionally universal.  Early on in the song he snarls, “I never thought I’d be shot down/But, girl, I’m black and blue/So beaten down for you.”  How perfect is that phrasing?  This is romantic white boy blues for anyone who was ever too sensitive for their tough phase to be at all convincing.

Pick up Zoo Kid’s debut 7” single from House Anxiety Records.

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As a pretty forgettable followup to their stellar Nux Vomica, The Veils’ third album, Sun Gangs, was the kind of album that can sink initial goodwill and interest in a band.  While Nux Vomica explored wide emotional terrain, from the exquisite and breathless desperation of the stunning “Calliope!” to the gospel-flecked menace of “Jesus for the Juggular,” Sun Gangs was larded with unmemorable MOR alt-rock that felt dour and uninspired.  This was wet-blanket kind of depression.  Thankfully, I have a good friend who is devoted enough to the band to clue me into Troubles of the Brain, a breezy EP that highlights Finn Andrews’ classic song-writing skills.  At times, Andrews sounds like a well-rounded Lennon acolyte; at others, he sounds like a dead ringer for Jeff Tweedy’s brand of buoyant melancholy.  But never does the band sound like anyone but themselves: I can’t think of another band that can sound so serious while being so bouncy.

The EP starts with “Bloom,” a quietly surging song whose exquisite melodies belie the sweaty desperation that soaks the neck collar of the song.  Andrews sounds positively lost when he flatly declares “She took my hand and now there is no other.”  From there, the band launches into the decidedly upbeat “Don’t Let the Same Bee Sting You Twice,” which finds Andrews and company doing their best Lennon impression with subtle Motown horn and string touches.  The Veils can often sound twisted and aggrieved, so an effortless node toward classic R&B is such a welcome relief.  The record takes a sour turn for its final act: four straight quietly devastating songs. “The Wishbone” and “Us Godless Teenagers” merely touch on the misery that rests at the center of the harrowing “Iodine and Iron.”  The song is pretty heavy stuff:  a murmuring acoustic guitar provides just enough of a musical apparatus to support Andrews’ desolate voice floating above the void stretching infinitely below it.  Of these four songs, the only song to transcend the sadness is “Grey Lynn Park,” which subtly reveals a sunrise guitar figure that casts a bit of optimistic light on this hangover of a song.  The effect is a genuine enough of a touch that the song becomes sincerely moving in its successively lighter shades of gray.

My only real complaint is that almost all the songs feel a little under-cooked; the band hasn’t figured out how to bring them to the pitch and yawl of a climax.  The songs just kind of end, which is always the sign that a song should have spent a little more time in a band’s workshop.  Plus, it should be fairly noted, this was the band’s first release on their homemade label, Pitch Beast, after leaving Rough Trade last year.  But it’s really hard to complain when these sketches feel this accomplished and this affecting in their rough cut form.  Between the soulful “Don’t Let the Same Bee . . .” and the soul stirring “Iodine and Iron,” Troubles of the Brain is a surprisingly satisfying EP from a band that didn’t seem to have this kind of second act in them.

Rating:  7 / 10

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Is Bryan Ferry  and Roxy Music the new indie rock inspiration du jour?  Sure seems like:  Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti’s Before Today and Twin Shadow’s Forget were both inoffensive postmodern takes on soft rock tropes.  A couple of years ago, everyone seemed to be enraptured by The Boss (Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade), and before that it was garage rock stompers like The Sonics and The Stooges influencing a slew of really forgettable bands (uh, remember The Von Bondies?  Me neither).  While I’m not even remotely interested in this trend, and, thus, not terribly bothered by it, I was a little shaken to discover the Dan Bejar, the solitary genius behind Destroyer, had been bitten by the soft rock bug for his latest album, Kaputt.  And this appropriation of Ferry’s signature sound begged serious questions:  what happens with Destroyer’s monumental guitar solos are replaced by slick, golden saxophone solos? what happens with Bejar’s wonderfully strange lyrics are accompanied by tired lounge music?

The answer, it turns out, is that the style saps Destroyer of almost every interesting quality that made them one of the most criminally under-heralded indie rock bands of the past decade.  If you got goosebumps at the closing minutes of “Rivers” or you were thrilled by the complexities of “Here Comes the Night” or you were deeply fascinated by “What Road,” then look elsewhere.  If you’re at all attached to the great Streethawk: A Seduction or Destroyer’s Rubies or This Night, then it’s best to just stick with those albums.  Gone are the Bowie-inspired European blues that defined nearly all of Destroyer’s catalog.  Gone is the sense of adventure and fun and discovery.  For the first time in his career, Bejar seems uninspired; he sounds like he’s run out of ideas.  ”Suicide Demo for Kara Walker” limps along, stringing a couple of half-formed ideas (Hecker-esque washes of synth, plaintive piano plinks, smooth jazz flute) for nearly 9 minutes.  ”Downtown” relies too heavily on a cop show bassline and horn section that is frankly embarrassing; the song wouldn’t be out of place on a video on Everything is Terrible.  These aren’t ideas and notions that an entire album can be built around; they’re the flotsam of a dead culture that created Kenny G and Chuck Mangione.  The appropriation of smooth jazz/soft rock kitsch isn’t funny or inventive or postmodern; it’s depressing.  While there are few redeeming moments—”Chinatown” and “Savage Night at the Opera” are just this side of tolerable—the bulk of this album sounds like shopping for sweaters at a T.J. Maxx in a suburban strip mall.

The only moment that saves the record from being utterly dismissible is the epic closing track, “Bay of Pigs.”  While the track was released as a stand alone 12” single a couple of years ago, it functions on Kaputt has a beacon of possibility.  From it’s position at the end of a really bad album, the song shuffles off the jazzy aesthetic for a clean-line disco brimming with acoustic guitars and ambient synths.  It’s a painful reminder that a Bejar-guided disco album is an interesting prospect, certainly something more interesting than listening to Bejar rewrite Lionel Ritchie in his own warped image.

Rating:  4 / 10

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Ghost Opus Eponymous // According to canonical rock n roll mythology, Robert Johnson made a Faustian bargin with Satan at a crossroads in Mississippi, exchanging his immortal soul for the ability to play the guitar.  From that moment on, popular blues and rock n roll, were inextricably linked to the Dark Master.  And metal, in particular, has embraced this relationship.  But Satanists come in a wide variety: your angry quasi-fascist Satan worshippers in Norway, your angry suburban kids who have discovered the power of the Sigil of Baphomet, your schlock metal artists trading in cheap shock tactics.  No one, however, has embraced Satan with as much glee as Ghost, a Swedish coven of hooded warlocks lead by a satanic pope in corpse paint and a towering mitre.   While Ghost may strike a scary pose, they sing fun-as-shit songs about general unholy mayhem: human sacrifice, Elizabeth Bathory, evil incantations.  Though the exaggerated lyrics are kitschy fun, the music is surprisingly serious.  It grinds and chugs and swells and overwhelms and grooves in all the ways that metal should.  There’s “Death Knell,” a creeping rager that only opens up when that deadly bell starts tolling for all the doomed souls.  Then there’s “Elizabeth,” which gallops before falling into a sweet-toothed chorus devoted to the murderous medieval countess who bathed in virgin’s blood.  And “Con Clavi Don Dio” burns with the heat of eternal hellfire.  Seriously, the production on this album is really impressive; everything is just perfectly placed in the mix, a rare feat in metal.  In the end, Opus Eponymous (which is an hilarious album title) is unlikely upset the strict world of metal, but it’s important to remember that this is more fun and better executed than it has a right to be. Rating:  7.5 / 10

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Electric Wizard Black Masses // On the eve of the release of Black Masses overseas, Jos Oborn had this to say about the new album:  ”This ritual incantation of heavy metal sorcery will break down your psyche as wave upon crushing wave of lead weight acid-laced Doom leaves you numb and broken before our unholy altar … Violent, bleak and ritualistic, we bow to the black altar of the RIFF.”  Awesome.  Totally and completely and convincingly awesome.  This is all I’ve ever wanted in a metal album.  Speed or technical virtuosity have never impressed me; heaviness is what ultimately matters to me.   Riffs this sluggishly awesome don’t come without images of slow moving demons rising out of hell. When Oborn sneers “Rise! Rise! Legions of hatred!” above the evil din of “Satyr IX,” the cultish call to arms is a convincing moment of satanic awe.  The evil druggy ethos of Black Masses is certainly impressive: you stick around with this album because it makes you feel like a stoned demon with nothing to fear.  As a suite of songs, Black Masses tends to blend together a little bit; frankly, it’s hard to tell one 8 minute epic about Satan apart from the 8 minute epic about LSD.  But it doesn’t really bother me because songs like “Black Mass” and “Turn Off Your Mind” are as overwhelming as the gathering armies of Satan.  Rating: 7 / 10

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The Body All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood // The oldest bait-and-switch in metal is still the most effective:  lure your listener in with a pretty musical figure only to blast it to pieces in an instant of savage musical volcanism.  But the first track (“A Body“) on The Body’s sophomore effort, All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood, seeks to reinvent the formula by combining paint-peeling shredding and howling with the celestial harmonies of the Assembly of Light Choir.  It’s a thrilling moment, and it’s too bad that the rest of the album isn’t this successful.  The Body certainly give it the old college try:  ”Empty Hearth” alternates between tape manipulations of a raving auctioneer and the hoarse screams of Chip King, the deranged lead singer; on “Song of Sarin, the Brave” the duo create head-spinning dissonance; and “Ruiner” is a slow chugging doom machine spitting out ash and smoke and aimless fury.  The band does, at times, recapture the artful surprise of “A Body.”  On “Even the Saints Knew Their Hour of Failure and Loss,” the pair slow the tempo way down and create perfectly placed pockets of microsilence that quickly get gobbled up with a titanic guitar strum and a bottomless kickdrum.  The album’s most successful moment, though, might be the ghoulish closer, “Lathspell, I Name You.”  The song is a grotesque tour through a menagerie of monstrous styles, each more twisted and possessed than the last.  The band really works the tempo changes to their advantage, the haunted circus act in the middle of the song slowly collapses into a fit of noisy psychosis before the bottom falls out on the whole thing, leaving King howling alone in a void filled with burning rubble.  All said, the album as a whole is incredibly unnerving, and, as Grayson Currin pointed out on Pitchfork, the music really does sound dangerous.  At the same time, though, I have a compulsion to work it out, to make sense of its internal madness.  I don’t know if this is an album to be revisited that often; I’m certain that I don’t want to suffer through All the Waters on a crowded train after a long day of work.  However, if I’m looking for something perversely difficult and demanding, this record will be sitting on my hard drive like an invitation to a post-apocalyptic hellstorm.  Rating:  6.5 / 10

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Castevet Mounds of Ash // Listening to Castevet’s debut album, Mounds of Ash, I was faced with the realization that my limited experience with black metal had left me in a wilderness of spooky sounds without a critical compass.  Beyond understanding some of the basic ground rules (appalling noise, screeched vocals, specific and real Satanic leanings, copious nature imagery), I just don’t feel well-versed enough in the genre to explain or evaluate how Castevet meet the genre’s expectations.  But from everything I’ve read, Castevet are reinventing black metal in their own image, a trend in American black metal bands.  What I can say about Mounds of Ash is that it is essentially a black metal asymptote: the band’s melodic metal strives to become noise, and they come very close, but they never quite reach that threshold.  Which is a great thing because Castevet have figured out how to be both disturbingly loud and dense while also being engaging and genuinely melodic.  They keep enough black metal signifiers (growl/shout vocals, tremolo picking, double bass drum tumbles) to make it sound pretty representative of the genre while also adding enough outside influences to make it wholly unique.  The shoegaze-influenced guitars that squall instead of incinerate, the technicalities of the precise stops and starts, the utterly surprising use of a brass section and synths—these kinds of unique touches are slipped into nearly every song, from the shimmering menace of “Grey Matter” to the horn blats that punctuate the instrumental “Wreathed in Smoke.”  The album is largely successful not because these touches are unique and genre-bending but because the band frequently locks into a groove that is trance inducing.  But just as you are stuck staring at this wide sonic vista of devastation, the band switches gears, suddenly changing the drum beat or tempo, and you’re shocked out of your metal revery.  Again, I don’t know much about black metal, but if this is what Americans are doing with the genre, it makes me excited to dig a bit deeper into the scene.  Rating:  7.5 / 10

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True story: on the night I first listened to Agalloch’s masterful Marrow of the Spirit, I had hellish nightmares of bleak landscapes suffused with unspeakable sorrow and evil.  I woke up the next morning, poured myself a cup of coffee, and fired up the album again.  This album is constructed of such a finely conceived mis en scene that had I known about it earlier it would have made a mess of my best albums list.  From the punishing “Into the Painted Grey” to the harrowing “To Drown,” Marrow of the Spirit is the kind of album that effortlessly repurposes metal as a vehicle for genuine emotional and, in a sense, spiritual release.  This isn’t Arcade Fire’s pervasive sense of suburban ennui or Yo La Tengo’s gentle melancholy; this is the music of truly epic depression.

Most black metal, to my ears, is unlistenable dreck: the blastbeats are disorienting, the whirlwind of guitar is undistinguishable grey noise, and the vocals are usually laughable because few have the requisite oomph to make them scary or forceful.  But Agalloch’s particular brand of black metal excels because they understand the power of dynamic range in forging an emotional landscape for a listener.  The album begins with the sorrowful “They Escaped the Weight of Darkness,” which features a lonely violin playing over the bubbling sound of an icy brook.  As soon as the violin fades into the dark wilderness, the band launches into “Into the Painted Grey,” a pummeling assault that slowly gains forceful grace and aggravated pathos over its expansive 12 minutes.  The band is careful not to rely on the power of the assault to impress; the song works so well because the band falls back every now and then to reconfigure their guitar attack, coming back each time with a louder but more beautiful set of figures.  The emotional register is a bit hard to decipher, but the song just throbs with desperation and frustration that eventually finds a kind of necessary kinship with nature: “Perched on the cliffside gazing out into the brine/My archaic beard pours downward and joins the feral sea.”  Eventually our sagacious guide curls up in the earth and dies, completing a cycle that seems to at the heart of Marrow of the Spirit.  But the band can only accomplish this feat by varying the volume and intensity of their assault.  An out-and-out siege would crush the sentiment under its callous boot heel; instead, the band works a small flame into a blinding fire of all-consuming heat.

The centerpiece of the album, the 17 minute “Black Lake Nidstång,” is an even more impressive monolith of songwriting.  As near as I can tell, the song tells the story of a band of dead souls lamenting the object that cursed them to their eternal fate, the titular nidstång, a pike with a severed horse head used in traditional Norse curses.  Halfway through the song, the nidstång is given a voice.  The moment is chilling: lead singer John Haughm lets out this tortured yowl that just reaches across your spine with icy fingers.  This figure of deathly magic speaks directly to the dead:  ”I am the silence inside the tomb.”  But in the next breath, the nidstång reassures them that even death cannot touch them:  ”You created the stars/and gave birth to all the heavens/the darkness of all space and time/so go . . . go to the nightside end below.”  Death here cannot conquer the limitless imagination of the human mind.  Nature might churn with machinery totally indifferent to humankind, but that doesn’t prevent us from transcending this narrow world.

The only metaphors that seem to fit with Marrow of the Spirit are geographical ones that give a senes of the wide scope of the album.  So, by the end of ”To Drown,” which seems to quote Kronos Quartet’s “Lux Aeterna,” you have traveled across a broad expanse of cheerless mental terrain.  This journey through desolate regions of despair and desperation is unlike anything I’ve experienced for a while now.  But instead of feeling a sense of crushing futility in the face of such obvious impermanence, I think most careful listeners would feel shaken and exhausted but indefinably comforted.  It’s not often an album shows you the blank emptiness around you and makes you feel completely enraptured by its thrilling nihilism.

Rating:  8.5 / 10

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On Friday, Noah Lennox finally announced the official release of the followup to his masterful Person Pitch. Tomboy is set to be released on April 19 via Paw Tracks, Animal Collective’s home imprint.  While there’s no tracklist, there is a new song that inexplicably appeared on a skate video by Atiba Jefferson and Ty Evans (skate photographers, evidently).  And some enterprising soul has ripped an mp3 of the audio!  The song, “Atiba Song” for all intents and purposes, sounds a lot more rhythmic and meditative than anything we’ve heard on the pre-release singles.  In fact, to my ear, this thing sounds more like a Person Pitch era track than anything that seems destined for Tomboy.  Also, look for an announcement on the last Tomboy lead-up single, which will be released on Kompakt, sometime real soon.

The Misfits were a well-conceived thought experiment in rockabilly: what happens if you take the stylings of Carl Perkins or Buddy Holly, spike it with some dubious crank, and take it out to a B-movie matinee featuring lascivious zombies and amoral space aliens?  The band performed the experiment in 2 minute blasts that recast “Tutti Frutti” has a horrorshow where the rallying call goes from “A-wop bop-a loo-mop, a-lop bam-boom!” to “I ain’t no goddam son of a bitch!”  Between Glenn Danzig’s immortal evil Elvis routine and the barreling hardcore of Jerry Only and Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein and a rotating cast of drummers, The Misfits made some powerfully addictive alt-rockabilly.  This peppy blend of styles soundtracked stories featuring every human and supernatural horror imaginable: genocide, murder, rape, alien invasion, zombie siege, pedophilia.  But the lyrics were so cartoonish and the music was so upbeat that it’s shockingly easy to ignore the fact that, say, “Last Caress” is actually about rape and infanticide.  And it’s this blend of pep and horror that makes the lyrics so interesting.  How are The Misfits’ songs any different that the slasher flicks and zombie films and monster mashes that have saturated our culture with comic book horror?  These received ideas about schlock and camp get reinterpreted by The Misfits and repackaged as hardcore punk.  And in this respect, there’s something undeniably postmodern about The Misfits; they are a pastiche of rockabilly signifiers and kitschy horror flicks.  But the larger point I want to make is that Danzig’s specific lyrics never really meant that much to people, I think, because the point was the general ethos of aggro-masculinity.  In other words, Glenn Danzig is not to fucked with and, by extension, neither are his fans.  But you know what?  I almost never think of any of that when I’m listening to The Misfits.  Instead, I usually get lost in Danzig’s strangely flexible voice or caught on the million hooks that dangle from these songs.

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