NO GENRE

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Angel Deradoorian’s voice is so unmistakably distinct that it might actually be impossible to describe.  You want to call it husky, but then you remember that it’s light as a feather.  You want to call it decidedly modern, but it is adorned with enough old fashioned trills and coos that it sounds like it could come from a toy 78rpm gramophone record.  These delightful contradictions are on full display on her latest release, a split 7” single with Albert McCloud out on Lovepump United, the label that released her debut EP.  Her contribution to the a side is “Marichka,” a clangy trashcan love song produced by herself and Avey Tare.  In less talented hands, this song was be a grating bore, but Deradoorian turns it into a hypnotically urban/tribal hymn.  While her delicate voice is given a harder edge, it would be impossible to press all of the charm out of it.

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Earth Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I // Dylan Carson is a badass who makes badass records.  His first run of three albums (Earth 2, Phase 3, and Pentastar) were badass.  Then, he took a decade-long badass break (probably to be a more low-key badass) only to surprise everyone with a couple of totally badass records.  On the whole, Carson doesn’t have time for your concerns about conventional song structure or length.  And he clearly has no idea what’s happening in contemporary music because, let’s face it, this badass shit sounds out of place.  But that doesn’t mean that Carson is a stodgy old man out of touch with your hip drum machines or your cool vintage synthesizers.  No, Carson is making the music that brought about the Twilight of the Gods before history was recorded in known human language.  His work sounds more like myth than music.  Yeah, he’s a badass, like I told you.  Much like his badass return album, Hex; or Printing in the Infernal Method, (Oh, I should have mentioned that his song and album titles are also badass), his latest release, Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light is a dusty western guitar epic that blooms slowly over sixty minutes.  There are no real highlights to speak of because you have to consume the totality of Carson’s records to feel any impact.  And in that sense, Earth is a distinctly cinematic project: its panoramic portrait of a barren lanscape that thrums with unshaped menace.   Also, I’m going to call this one early: Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light is the most badass album cover of the year.  Rating: 7.5 / 10

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Gil Scott Heron and Jamie XX We’re New Here // At the end of the day, Jaime Smith’s remix of Gil Scott Heron’s I’m New Here is pretty pointless.  The decision seems so arbitrary that it might actually be genius.  I would have expected the man who defined The XX’s singular sound to remix almost anyone else before revisiting an old man’s triumphant return to form.  Granted, I don’t know Scott Heron’s I’m New Here well enough to compare/contrast the remix with the original.  What I can say with confidence, though, is that Smith’s work both within and without The XX has been nothing short of revelatory (check out his awesome remix of Nosaj Thing’s “Fog“).  Seemingly everything he’s touched in the past year or two has been solid gold.  And he brings that Midas Touch to We’re New Here.  Smith dresses Scott Heron’s wonderfully poignant voice, which croaks and groans in all the right places, in slick duds that sparkle and glimmer.  The production on this record is a marvel.  The dynamic range is clearly defined by the three elements that are usually present in a given track: the terrifyingly deep low end, Scott Heron’s wizened voice riding in the mid range, and ringing synths shooting skyward.  The whole record plays like an exquisite mixtape that gains traction early, builds inexorable momentum, and crescendos within the last couple of minutes.  As such, there’s no real single highlight, though there are few tracks that standout a little bit more than the others. “NY is Killing Me,” “I’m New Here,” Running,” and “I’ll Take Care of You” are all particularly excellent.  For a remix record that no one really asked for, We’re New Here nonetheless defies expectations by being a lot better than it has to be.  Rating:  8 / 10

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Braids Native Speaker // If Animal Collective had never recorded Feels, then Braids’ debut album would be a brilliant revelation.  But considering that Feels does exist, Braids comes across as inoffensive acolytes who are measurably talented but perhaps short on original ideas.  But maybe this isn’t nearly the damning charge that it appears to be: Native Speaker is a thoroughly enjoyable record filled with adventurous tunes that create colorful, expansive environments that encourage you to roam and explore.  At its best, Braids borrows Feels’ jangley guitar figures and tribal drum patterns and weds them with the sweet-voiced Raphaelle Standell-Preston.  ”Lemonade” and “Glass Deers” take this motif and run it to its logical conclusion: hypnotic beats ground swirling guitars and synths while Standell-Preston yelps and coos and yowls.  In the end, it probably important to remember that most AC biters are creating awful reductive hypnogagic pop that sounds indistinguishable from one another.  At least Braids are liberally borrowing from Animal Collective’s best period.  Rating: 6 / 10

Demdike Stare Tryptych // Image a haunted house that isn’t so much scary as it is gloomy and you’ve envisioned something close to Demdike Stare’s mammoth triple-album Tryptych.  The record, which collects the pair’s trio of album-length EPs from last year (Forest of Evil, Liberation Through Hearing, and Voices of Dust), is a sprawling complex of ghost-haunted hallways and ghoulish trapdoors and spooky ambient noises.  From the exorcism chorus of “Caged in Stammheim” to the dub-Arabia of “Desert Ascetic,” Tryptych is eager to unnerve you with eerie sounds.  Disembodied voices, icy gusts of wind, rattling chains, psychotic violins, deathly bass hits, distant samples from mysterious corners of the earth, the musical palate is grim but adventurous.  There are a lot of analogues to Demdike’s signature sound (Aphex Twin, moodier Autechre, obscure dub plates and horror movie soundtracks), but I’m not quite knowledgeable enough to point to specific influences.  I can say that the trio of records collected together is utterly haunting, though perhaps a lot much for most people.  If you’re feeling adventerous, you should head over to Modern Love’s website to stream the individual EPs.  Rating: 7 / 10

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Released in the winter of 1992, Incesticide was an odds-and-ends stopgap between the thunderous Nevermind and the pissy fuck-you of In Utero. The cover was originally painted by Kurt Cobain.  In retrospect, the cover is a little on-the-nose: a hollowed out stick figure without eyes draws in a pair of poppy flower while a doll without a cranium pulls at the figure.  C’mon: Kurt, Courtney, and the heroin that would ravage them for years until one of them was dead and the other was an unlikely Hollywood starlet.  Even the original liner notes read like a righteous parody of Nirvana’s DIY ethos.  In sum: Kurt declares the hanging out with cool bands is more rewarding  than “playing in front of thousands of people each night, rock-god idolization from fans, music industry plankton kissing my ass, and the million dollars [he made in 1991].”  While the haunting cover art and the defensive liner notes obviously spoke to Cobain’s anxieties about his inexorable superstardom, the record itself is refreshing free of all that angst.  And in that respect, Incesticide, which is being remastered and reissued by Org Music this week, has always been my go-to record when I feel like listening to Nirvana because I can actually listen to the music and ignore the tragic story that haunts everything in this gnarly trio’s catalog.

As a collection of various hard-to-find b-sides and unreleased material, Incesticide is wildly uneven, veering from the sweet Vaselines covers like “Molly’s Lips” and “Son of a Gun” to the raw burnouts like “Hairspray Queen” and “Beeswax.”  But within these 15 tracks, you get everything that made Nirvana both the most exciting and most frustrating band of the early 90s.  The classic line on Nirvana has always been that Cobain was secretly a pop music genius who insisted on oxidizing his songs in rusty guitar distortion and pummeling drum beats.  Incesticide bears out this interpretation.  In addition to the uniformly excellent Vaselines covers, a couple of stunning poppy numbers are included on the collection.  ”Sliver,” of course, is so upbeat and sunny that it’s easy to overlook that it convincingly recaptures that sense of childhood fear in the face of the unfamiliar into a smart and effecting narrative about a night with grandma.  Likewise, the bitter sentiment that dominates “Been a Son” completely undermines the verse-chorus-verse pop song structure.  Elsewhere, though, Nirvana present the experimental ugliness that would define the bulk of In Utero a year later.  The underrated “Hairspray Queen” relies on the strange squeeze of Krist Novoselic’s bass and the manic vocal performance that Cobain turns in.  The song sounds like Cobain’s trying to match his guitar’s squealing histrionics.  While the overly serious “Big Long Now” comes across as a grunge parody, the derivative “Aero Zeppelin” feels like a tongue-in-cheek homage to both Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin that reinvents the bands in Nirvana’s image.  But the greatest triumph of the album is unquestionably “Aneurysm.”  While Nirvana wrote plenty of twisted love songs (“Drain You,” “Very Ape,” “About a Girl”), none of them contains the urgent heart of “Aneurysm,” my all-time, no-questions-asked favorite Nirvana song.  The band builds a tremendous amount of tension that gets periodically purged during the verses but practically explodes during the raging choruses.  Here, Cobain has reclaimed the tired trope of the love song as a dance number (“Come on over and do the twist!”), turning it into a breathless plea to have his identity completely subsumed by another (“Beat me out of me!”).  What starts out as a smirking, ironic come-on eventually becomes a genuinely passionate appeal rid himself of his lovesickness by losing his self-consciousness.

As we all understood from the very beginning, Cobain’s self-consciousness was his greatest gift and his heaviest burden.  Kurt Cobain hagiography has to be the most boring cultural industry since Boomers gentrified the messy story of the pop culture of 60s.  But it bears repeating that Cobain was an immensely talented songwriter who turned his anxiety about art in the market place into instantly classic punk rock reclamation project.  His self-consciousness allowed him to undermine the goodwill established by Nevermind in a desperate bid to reclaim his credibility.  There’s a good chance that this hall of credibility mirrors that he entered by the fall of 1991 actually led directly to his suicide.   And while this part of his story is actually fascinating, I ultimately find it exhausting because it so thoroughly clouds the music.  As much as I love and admire In Utero, it’s very difficult for me to listen to the record without inadvertently comparing it to Nevermind.  And the greatest singles on Nevermind are impossible for me to actually hear anymore.  Twenty years of Saint Kurt rhetoric has made it impossible to appreciate on any gut level songs like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Litium.”  This isn’t the band’s fault, or it’s not quite the band’s fault.  Incesticide, though, does afford me the opportunity to enjoy Nirvana again without trying to further understand their place in the culture.  It’s only on this diverse collection of songs recorded for no particular album that we are able to study Cobain and company without the distractions of their status, their ambition, or their anxieties about either of those twin monsters.

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As hard as it is to believe, the fragmented bliss that is “Seventh Heaven” is made by the same merciless dude (Justin Broadrick) who unleashed both Napalm Death and Godflesh and Jesu onto an unsuspecting world.  While I’m not entirely familiar with any of those bands, I know enough to understand that this stunning extended crescendo is as anomalous as it is great.  Like Girl Unit’s “Wut,” a repetitive vocal sample rides the swell of an enormous beat under a blazing sun of synthesizers smiling down on the proceedings.  The swirling black hole on the single’s cover is totally misleading: “Seventh Heaven” is a bright beauty whose power resides on its audacious lack of subtlety.  Or, maybe it’s not misleading; maybe this thing really is a vacuously catchy as a collapsed star.

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In Don DeLillo’s strange novella The Body Artist, a grieving widow is supernaturally visited by a mysterious man.  The man—Mr. Tuttle—doesn’t talk much, but when he does he seems to repeat phrases uttered by the couple in the house.  Mr. Tuttle does absolutely nothing to help the widow mourn her lost husband and, in the process, seems to do everything.  With that in mind, Radiohead’s eighth album, The King of Limbs, is their own version of Mr. Tuttle: it arrives suddenly like a ghost muttering words that seem oddly familiar and it disappears just as suddenly, leaving you with a dulled sense of loss.

When I studied the cover of The King of Limbs at my desk last Monday morning, I tried to imagine the sonic weirdness that could possibly represent the twin neon monsters lurking in a dark forest: odd time signatures, twitchy guitar sketches, beautiful yowls that imperceptibly morph into nasty snarls.  Radiohead, of course, have always channeled their fear of these kinds of monsters in their music.  These ghouls usually take the shape of isolating technology or environmental degradation or the indifferent powers of the state.  But The King of Limbs doesn’t really bear out this anticipation because those aren’t monsters.  Those are the grotesque ghosts that haunt this somber album.  On The King of Limbs, those ghosts don’t hector or menace the band; they are a fact of existence, which makes the record a decidedly low key affair, relying on atmospherics more than they have since Kid A. The exact tone of the record is a little hard to describe, but it seems defeated and sleepy, distracted and dreamy.

The clearest manifestation of this sedated ethos is the fact that The King of Limbs’ sound lacks Radiohead’s excellent use of counterpointing.  The band has always created tension and conflict in their records by examining emotional and musical peaks and valleys.  Each record has an anxious high and a somber low that defines the dynamics of the album.  Think of the extreme pairs that exist on Radiohead’s best records:  ”Electioneering” and “Exit Music (for a Film)” on OK Computer or “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” / “Nude” on In Rainbows or “National Anthem” / “Treefingers” on Kid A.  These songs represent extremes in tone and tempo that allow the band to define the boundaries of a given record.  The King of Limbs has a much narrower range with which to work.  At the extreme end of twitchy anxiety, the album’s opener, “Bloom,” presents a ramshackle off-kilter beat into a soothing swirl of synths.  And at the other end of the spectrum, “Codex” is a depressing and understated suicide dirge.  In fact, the band makes the audacious decision to split the record in half, dispensing with the up-beat songs in the first half and relegating the syrupy downers to the second half.  While the weirdness of “Bloom” and the sobriety of “Codex” seem miles apart from one another, they’re compositions utilizing strikingly similar tones.  The King of Limbs is an understated record in which seemingly all the songs sit somewhere on a very short emotional continuum.

And in this respect, it would be very easy to dismiss the record: it sounds emotionally stunted and unnecessarily maudlin, overly obsessed with its own melancholy.  Though The King of Limbs does not try to reinvent Radiohead’s sound (we certainly know by now that they can do sad), it does offer a new set of possibilites with their core sound.  Whereas Radiohead have always sounded exactingly precise, The King of Limbs allows them to smear and blur their songs with reverberating washes of undifferentiated sound.  In nearly every song, the band creates blousy layers of hazy noise that betray Radiohead’s obvious influences on this record (Flying Lotus, Burial, Aphex Twin).  The deep layering is what lends the record its distinct sense of dreaminess: everything sounds like a daydream about lost possibility and half-forgotten heartache.  There’s a reason that the album’s breezy closer, “Separator,” ends with Yorke pleading to be woken up.  But even the up-tempo movers and shakers like the excellent “Feral” and “Morning Mr. Magpie” sound like elegies with frantic beats overlaid on top of them.

For the bulk of the record, Jonny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien’s guitars are muted in favor of a weird kind of electronic pastoralia that highlights Colin Greenwood’s excellent bass work and Phil Selway’s precise drumming.  The album generally is so bottom-heavy that the low end of the mix contains some the album’s greatest treasures.  Check out the wonderful bassline of “Bloom” or the swampy bass swell on “Feral.” Yorke, for his part, mostly stays in the same softly angelic register; his voice is rarely touched with any kind of processing and he never reaches down to snarl or chew over a line.  Again, this doesn’t necessarily spell disaster, but it does mean that Radiohead have settled into a surprisingly comfortable zone for this album.

Taken together, the songs that comprise The King of Limbs show us a Radiohead that actually sound like the band their strongest detractors frequently describe:  sullen, dour, melancholy, overly-serious.  Of course, long-time admirers know better: the Radiohead of The King of Limbs is actually looser and less uptight than the Radiohead of, say, Kid A. But that doesn’t mean that the album isn’t something of a disappointment.  There are a few truly standout songs (notably ”Feral” and “Lotus Flower” and “Codex”), but the whole record quickly glides by without really touching a nerve in the listener.  There are really no brilliant moments that make the listener giddily confused.  There is nothing so strangely exhilarating as “Life in a Glass House” or “A Wolf at the Door,” and there certainly isn’t anything that reinvents rock music in the band’s image like ”Bodysnatchers” or “Myxomatosis.”  At some point, Radiohead had to record a merely good record.  The band can’t release a masterpiece on the level of Kid A or In Rainbows every three or four years, and it’s totally unreasonable to expect them to do so.  Look, no other band in the past 30 years has written as many essential albums and songs that just obliterate the musical zeitgeist in the same way that Radiohead has since at least 1997.  But the fact remains that The King of Limbs is not a capital-G great record; it’s not the kind of record that demands and rewards a month’s worth of attention.  I would firmly place this album alongside other second-tier Radiohead albums, namely Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief. Like those records, The King of Limbs is flawed, but since letting go of my crushing expectations of the band, I’ve found that the album is a fine addition to the greatest contemporary back catalog.

In The Body Artist, Lauren Hartke, our grief-numbed widow, doesn’t exactly know what to do with Mr. Tuttle.  In the end, the best she can get from him is an opportunity to reflect in the unnerving penumbra of Mr. Tuttle’s silence.  If The King of Limbs is Radiohead’s Mr. Tuttle, then this is an opportunity to see everything the band has been albe to achieve by noticing what they sometimes fail to achieve here.

Rating: 7.5 / 10

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Near the end of Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy’s hallucinatory western about a merciless band of itinerant war-mongers, Judge Holden, a bald giant prone to chilling existential soliloquies, utters the novel’s most satanic lines:

[War is] the ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.  [. . . ]  War is the truest form of divination.  It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select.  War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.  War is god.

In effect, Blood Meridian makes the case that war is a practice that forges meaning out of our lives by placing our meager lives on the line.  War forces us to see life as a game of existence because it makes us see death.  And in this respect, it makes sense that the Thanatotic urge to clash with others has intoxicated humans with its nihilistic promises of life and death for millennia.  And war as a subject in popular music certainly has a colorful history, but it all seems to buy into the false dichotomy of the anti-war screed and the patriotic war ballad.  Where is popular music’s Catch-22 or The Things They Carried or Gravity’s Rainbow?  Where are the songs that paint the absurdity of war with a lighter brush?  Where are the songs that reveal the horrors of war while eschewing shock tactics and bland moralizing?

PJ Harvey, of all people, seems to offer answers to these questions with her complex and engaging new album, Let England Shake. The album is a brief but harrowing exhibition about the horrors of World War I.  The album is by turns grimly apocalyptic, touching sensitive, and unnervingly funny.  It’s a political album only in the sense that war has to be politically validated by its belligerents.   In the end, the album is concerned with aestheticizing the omnipresence of death:  ”Death hung in the smoke and clung/to 400 useless acres of useless beachfront./A bank of red earth, dripping down death/now and now and now,/in the air and in the sounds/coming off the mounds.”  At every turn, death is there, rank breath curling under the pale nostrils of the dead.  Harvey has chosen to examine the human damage of war by focusing almost exclusively on World War I, specifically referencing the Battle of Gallipoli.  The Great War, of course, ushered in a horrifying new era of mechanized death; this was slaughter on an unimaginable scale.  This also marked the advent of trench fighting, a tactic that only ensured a bitterly prolonged war of attrition.  Old photographs of the nihilistic wasteland between the trench fronts provides enough of a reference point to understand the totalizing artistic concerns of Let England Shake.

This album would be remarkable if it conjured up just those hellish images of death and destruction, but the album is an interesting progression in Harvey’s considerable songcraft.  She and longtime producer John Parish have largely abandoned the sturm und drang of Dry and Rid of Me and the swampy blues of To Bring You My Love, and she doesn’t seem eager to recapture the past.  Let England Shake finds Harvey toying with twisted folk featuring nervy guitars and shakey percussion.  So much of Harvey’s music is so bottom-heavy, lending an earthy weight, that it comes as a surprise to find such rickety scaffolds holding up her songs.  ”The Last Living Rose” limps and shuffles on a thin guitar riff and a off-kilter drum beat, and “On Battleship Hill” sounds like a bravely strummy affair until you realize just how little is there.  Everything on the record is suffused with a grey, ghostly quality that’s kind of hard to define.  The bleak “All and Everyone” leans heavily on a church organ and a watery guitar strum.  Later, the pretty “Hanging in the Wire” finds Harvey revisiting the frail piano work of 2007′s White Chalk. But not everything is so dour and grim sounding.  The previously released “Written on the Forehead” soundtracks its apocalyptic visions (“blood, blood, blood, blood and fire”) with a strange reggae backbeat.  And there are plenty of interesting touches added to nearly every song: there’s the sarcastic reveille trill that punctuates “The Glorious Land,” the fat horn flourishes that accompany “Last Living Rose,” and the bitter quote of “Summertime Blues” on “The Words that Maketh Murder” (“What if I take my problems to the United Nations?”).

Ultimately, Let England Shake poses a unique problem to its listener: is this record an elaborate metaphor for a U.S. and NATO backed war in Afghanistan (and, by extension, the tribal regions of Pakistan) or is it a culturally anomalous document about a war whose fighters largely died out a couple of generations ago?  I’m not sure I know either way.  I can’t seem to make heads or tails of this record’s place in the music landscape of 2011.  But I don’t think that makes this any less of a disquieting album with uncommon power to revolt and move things deep in its listeners.

Rating:  8 / 10

The King of Limbs.  Saturday.  Not soon enough.

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I never realized how much bloody noses grossed me out until I became familiar with the Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All posse.  A shocking number of their videos seem to feature misanthropic teens suffering from bloody noses, their hot vitality running in unnoticed streams from their nostrils to their lips.  At some point, they instinctively wipe their upper lips, smearing blood across the face.  Whether it’s the drugs or superhuman indifference, the Odd Future crew frequently have a thin wash of blood on their faces.  And like clockwork, it happens again in Tyler, the Creator’s latest video for “Yonkers,” the lead track of his forthcoming album, Goblin. For once, the bloody nose is the least of my worries because it begins with Tyler eating a cockroach (I have a deeply pathological fear of these worthless creatures) and ends with him casually hanging himself before the running camera.

Tyler, if you didn’t know already, is the de facto leader of Odd Future, an L.A. teenage droog collective that specializes in shockingly misanthropic raps about suicide, drugs, absent fathers, drugs, mindless violence, masturbation, drugs, skateboarding, blog hype, and drugs.  The lyrical content is beyond eye-brow raising; it startles your moral center and urges you to make a choice.  Can you (should you?) actually listen to a talented young emcee with a seductive flow rap about raping a captive woman?  This is a nightmarish version of American teenagers fed up with your bullshit.  They’re going to eat the inedible, they’re going to slam has many drugs into their bodies as possible, and they’re going to peace out early at the end of a homemade noose.

I have really struggled for months to be able to listen to their stuff for any sustained length of time.  But the thing that I keep coming back to is the fact that Tyler is pedaling the same shock tactics as Eminem or Gravediggaz or NWA before him.  The key different is that Tyler doesn’t surround his tales of debauched mayhem with funky breakbeats; Tyler surrounds his legitimate complaints and twisted fantasies with woozily sick beats that actually sound pathological.  Check out the beat for “Yonkers”: it sounds like it’s on death’s door.  So while the music sounds seriously ill, Tyler’s cadence and joke timing are impeccable:  ”I slipped myself some pink Xanies/And danced around the house in all-over print panties/My mom’s gone, that fucking broad will never understand me/I’m not gay, I just want to boogie with some Marvin.”  Those lines are as disturbing as they are hilarious (Marvin Gaye, get it?).  But it’s not all clever wordplay.  Tyler is obviously an angry young man, and it’s nearly impossible not to feel an immense amount of sympathy for him.  As a teacher, I’ve come across my share of cases, and I’ve realized that kids like Tyler don’t want my sympathy; they want my understanding.  And as long as Tyler the Creator is this articulate, he has it.

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Kvelertak Kvelertak // An album with John Dyer Baizley cover art this great really had better be equally inspired.  Thankfully, Kvelertak’s self-titled debut, which finally sees a North American release next month, constructs a powerful blast furnace that’s hot enough to meld hardcore punk with AC/DC-inspired hard rock into metal object threaded with black metal veins.  The result of this industrial chemistry is an album that is a real bruiser: it’s loud and melodic and catchy and punishing and surprising and just generally fun to hang out with.  The album opens with a screaming, manic rush of songs.  Each stays well enough under four minutes, which makes the first portion of the album an exhilarating fight to catch your breath.  But Kvelertak rarely stop long enough for you to get your bearings; a short acoustic instrumental passage only means that they’re gearing up to go bounding into a knotty wilderness.  Each song contains enough great ideas—from the blistering breakdown of “Sultans of Satan” to the acoustic/flanger pairing in “Blodtørst”—that the album makes a concerted effort to constantly engage the listener.  While this constant shifting makes the whole thing a bit exhausting, the best songs on the record (“Mjød,” “Fossegrim,” “Utrydd Dei Svake”) tend to incorporate schizophrenic variety in service of the song’s greater aims.  The don’t feel over-stuffed so much as over-inspired.  Albums that try to be everything to everyone tend to be misguided messes, but Kvelertak pull it off because the hybrid monster they’ve created is capable of as much violence as it is generosity.  Rating: 8 / 10

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Owen Hart Earth Control // Criminal insanity must be pretty difficult to recreate in a drum beat or a guitar riff or a bassline.  Otherwise, I guess, we would hear it a lot more frequently.  No, Owen Hart’s debut, Earth Control, actually sounds criminally insane: blazing riffs flame and spark like a chemical fire, drum beats could pummel mountains into submission.  There are more ideas stuffed into each song that it’s pretty difficult to separate one song from another; the whole record sounds like a single merciless set by a supremely talented and energetic band of pissed off dudes.  Lyrically, who the shit knows what’s going down on this record, but I’ll tell that it sure sounds aggrieved and unhinged.  But if the song titles are in any way representative (no joke: “Welcome to Worthless-Piece-of-Shit-Ville, Population: You,” “Fuck Morrissey, Fuck The Smiths, Fuck The Cure,” “Methlahem“), I suspect that there is something really wry and subversive going on lyrically.  For Christ’s sake, they named their band after Owen Hart the tragi-comic pro wrestler who actually died doing a stunt maneuver.  Like Kvelertak, Owen Hart’s debut is so stuffed with ideas that you sometimes wish that the band would see an idea out a little longer.  The ground shifts beneath you so frequently that it’s difficult to trust the artistic terrain the band creates.  In a sense, this is what makes the record so thrillingly unsettling, but it also signals a band that doesn’t trust its stuff.  The album, at its worst, then, feels a tad neurotic and indecisive.  In the end, though, Earth Control is a savage and brutal record that more than satisfies.  Rating:  7/10

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Xasthur Portal of Sorrow // The line between black metal seriousness and black metal silliness is so fine sometimes as to be indistinguishable.  Take Xasthur, for example.  With song titles like “Shrine of Failure’ and “Mesmerized by Misery,” Xasthur’s last album sounds like a spot-on parody of overly-sensitive gothicky teen notebook poetry.  And when the album doesn’t work, like on “Shrine of Failure” with its cartoonishly evil bassline, Portal of Sorrow feels like a farce.  But when it’s on, the album sounds like a genuinely wretched howl from a really dark place.  Xasthur’s work has always been about atmospherics, rather than songcraft.  When the music sounds windswept and expansive and deserted, Portal of Sorrow can be a strangely affecting work.  On “Stream of Subconsciousness,” Xasthur reveals a barren environment buffeted by ghosts by layering a yearning guitar line with a vocal crossroads that unites a haunted incantation and a ghostly gray whisper with Marissa Nadler’s sweet ambience.  Later, on “Horizon of Plastic Caskets” (Jesus, these titles . . .), Malefic (Scott Connor’s pseudonym for his Xasthur project), unleashes a vicious howl that signals some real bone chilling despair.  The album’s best single track (though they can be hard to distinguish between one another) is “The Abyss Holds the Mirror,” which features a lot more haunting prettiness from Nadler and demonic growling from Malefic.  There’s something about this spooky amalgam of Nadler’s voice and Malefic’s gutteral rumbles and a depressive church organ that makes the song affecting in the middle of the night.  Though there are some admirable moments, the album is a ultimately long downer that makes no gesture toward quality control.  The musicianship is pretty amateurish (there are a number of glaring mistakes), and the mix generally sounds awful.  The distance between the guitars and the bass can sometimes be an unbridgeable gulf.  And I guess this is the weird disconnect at the heart of the record:  Malefic obviously wants to translate some intensely personal feelings into aural misery, so why take short cuts?  Rating: 5 / 10

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Do we need The Strokes anymore?  Are they serving a necessary cultural function?  Do we need them in the same way that we need artists like Radiohead or Kanye West or Animal Collective?  No, certainly not.  The Strokes, especially after emerging from a five year absence, serve absolutely no purpose.  Namely, they are no longer a band that reminds us that independent rock can be bluesy and stylish and fun.  They pulled us out of the self-serious rut of the late-90s.  But now that we have our neon-spangled, genre-hybrid mash-ups, our post-ironic musical ghetto gentrifiers.  We have a ‘stache with panache now.  We happily live in a post-Strokes world.  Thanks for the memories, but we’re all going to be Tweeting about witch house from the weathered frame of our fixies while listening to Diplo’s latest dancehall resurrections.  Mission accomplished.

But, in a sense, The Strokes are vital again because they’re absolutely not vital.  I’d apologize for the paradoxical, winkingly Klostermanian thesis, but I really think I’m right about this one.  The Strokes are so foundational that returning to them at this point in independent culture’s historical trajectory seems necessary.   The hype around their return is fundamentally different than the hype that ushered them to something resembling indie rock superstardom.  I think most people are excited about a no-frills rock band coming back after a long absence; they’re not looking for anyone to save rock because that body was buried a long time ago.  In fact, the idea of a band of hip rock ‘n roll saviors seems so ridiculous now that it’s better to think about The Strokes as exactly what they’ve been all along: a really tight rock band.  So, no, The Strokes are no longer important, but that only means that we can enjoy them without the unwieldy weight of expectations.

Oh, also “Under Cover of Darkness” is really good.