Life Like released its first compilation Lifers 2 years ago, and now its sequel is finally here. This one is a little shorter and less experimental, a bit more pop-focused, but still in an abstract way. It starts with a brief instrumental jam by the prolific Hydropark (which is already up to 4 tapes, all untitled), and then new songs from Ian Svenonius’ Chain & The Gang, E6-y indie-pop group Household Objects, and of course Saturday Looks Good To Me. Then there’s a few great tracks by some new names: really nice atmospheric electro-pop by Creme Betweens; dubby, High Places-like dreaminess from Babydown; dark, reverby folk from Itasca. Then there’s a brief, devastating track by dream-folk duo Raw Honey, who deserve to be much more well known. Then there’s a brief sample-and-beat blip by someone credited as Loop Goat, and then a more rocking track by Glass Clue, who I initially confused with Glass Rock and was wondering why it sounded more grungy and had a male singer. Then more cello-and-guitar dreaming from Known Moons (who is 1/2 of Raw Honey), and hard-jamming organ-driven noise-psych-rock from Mother Whale which suddenly cuts off mid-thought. Side B starts off with a brief, twinkly loop from Shigeto (who has a tape coming out on Life Like one of these days), and then a strummy song fro, Rebel Kind, who put out a 1-sided LP on Life Like last year. Then there’s an edited-for-immediate-direct-impact track from Scared To Death, a doom-metal/post-rock group who are sort of one of the secret weapons of the Ann Arbor music scene. Their album on Arbco is seriously amazing and deserves to be more widely known. Then there’s Wolf Eyes, who need no introduction, and some noisy free-rock from Anonymous Touch, and then local garage-rock heroes Tyvek end the tape. Limited to 100 copies and still available direct from Life Like.
First album in over a decade from lo-fi experimental pop artist Zeek Sheck. The band has a concept about a society living in a complex underground maze, with one of the members of the society sending his son to the surface to see the sun. The inner gatefold of the LP shows this maze, which feature a series of blue, red, yellow and green doors, each of which correspond to a side of the double LP. The first disc (blue and red doors) focuses on shorter, poppier songs, although in Zeek Sheck’s world, poppy tends to mean repeated mantras like “join us” or “I am nothing”, over a basic, hypnotic lo-fi beat and flurries of noises. There’s also some spoken word narratives tying this together. The main singer has sort of a scratchy Daniel Johnston quality to her voice, but the songwriting and instrumentation and basically everything else is totally different. “Magnet” has a bit more of a folky melody than other songs here, but the music is a thudding drum machine beat with lots of crazy backward violin. It seems as if the society is doomed, however; the last song on the disc is called “Trapped” and it ends suddenly after a brief chant of “we are all going to die”, and the group’s website lists this as the project’s last album. But before it ends, there’s the album’s second disc (yellow and green doors), which features two longform compositions which take up the entirety of each side. “Notch Your Stick” (the Yellow Door side) starts with wordless vocals and bomb-shelter noise, later going through deep foghorns and ending with a long passage of intertwining clarinets and horns. “The Mind Will Travel” (the Green Door side) is bookended by more spoken-word narration, along with noise, spiralling synth patterns, and finally cascading pianos, before the epic conclusion to the story.
Dark, murky, dreamy bad-trip music. Think Portishead meets early Zola Jesus and Circuit Des Yeux, and maybe Chelsea Wolfe too. Opener “Black and Crimson” is definitely the more trip-hoppy track, it seems to skip like an old record and then fall into quicksand. “Personal” is much more melodic and uplifting, with clear, chiming acoustic guitar sounds. “Evaun” is more gauzy and ethereal, with layers of echoed vocals, but also a persistent pounding rhythm. “Iron Age” is strange and floating, but there’s a faint, fastly beating 4/4 beat buried underneath which seems to get faster before it dissipates. “Desperate” has a hypnotic groove (if just a spare, repetitive bassline built on a note or two can be considered a groove) and is hypnotic enough to remind me of Swans’ softer material. Come to think of it, Jarboe and recent Swans associates St. Vincent and Cold Specks come to mind while listening to this album too. “The Devil” is another dark dirge with chain-gang-like rhythm and strings. “Arrows Wing” is more of a bluesy dark folk song, and “Bright Bad Canyons” is the album’s sparest and most acoustic song. “Delta Sands” has synths that shift like the song’s title, and eventually a softly pulsating electronic beat.
I loved this group in high school, but I haven’t paid attention to them at all since their second album, which came out back in 2001. Since then, they’ve had a minor hit single with Kanye West in 2004, and released several independent solo albums. This is their first proper album as a group in 8 years, and their first independent album, since ending their major label contract. Musically, their sound hasn’t really changed since their earlier stuff, it’s simply a refinement of their style of underground hip-hop. The production is still heavily influenced by RZA and DJ Premier (who actually produces a track on here), and DJ Babu still constructs dense, clever sample collages. It’s actually somewhat refreshing to hear a new hip-hop album stay true to the culture of turntablism, even though it doesn’t seem like that long ago that it was so commonplace for hip-hop (underground or not). “Figure It Out (Melvin’s Theme)” comes somewhat close to a chopped-n-screwed sound, with a slow tempo and pitched-down chorus vocals, but there’s still some lightning-quick scratching, almost an entire verse’s worth actually. Now-mainstream pan-genre neo-soul crooner Aloe Blacc provides a chorus on “Show Me The Way”, sort of coming full circle, as he started out doing underground hip-hop and released albums on Stones Throw before crossing over. Nothing here sticks in my head as much as “Triple Optics” and “Work The Angles” did, but it’s still a solid album.
I’m hoping these folks mean they’re fans of Calvin’s stuffed tiger buddy, but I’m guessing they mean the philosopher. Which means this band probably agrees that life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. This album isn’t as dreary as you’d expect, though. More than anything, it recalls late ’80s/early ’90s British indie, the days after C86 but before Britpop. I’m thinking Stone Roses, and bands that were around a little before them. Also, New Zealand indie-pop bands like The Chills and The Clean, of course. Jangly, reverby, earnest/yearning, wide-eyed but still kind of drowsy, kind of anthemic. Could’ve been released on Slumberland any year since that label began. Most uptempo tracks: “Your Doubting Heart”, “I Knew You’d Understand”, “Outside Myself”, “Why Should You Tell The Truth?”. Slowest: “How Could You Leave Me Like This?”, “Sometimes”. “Stay Gold” has a bit of a surfy twang to it, but in an indie-pop context.
This record is a work of beauty. Tom Scharpling’s 2013 marathon premium has finally arrived (almost a year after the end of the Best Show’s run on WFMU), and it includes a record by one of his puppet alter-egos, wisecracking rodent Gary The Squirrel. The first side shows Gary’s “rock and roll side”, the leather jacket-wearing, pompadoured loverboy who playfully sings about bopping AP Mike in the nose, and sings a doo-wop love duet with Denise The Squirrel (AKA Best Show regular Coco from The Ettes). On the other side is Gary’s “punk side”, with Gary sporting a mohawk, threatening to bite you in a moshpit, covering “Minor Threat” as “Rodent Threat”, and inventing the genre “squirrelcore”. Best record ever made by a rodent, easily, and that includes every record by any incarnation of the Chipmunks, or any of their imitators.
Soundtrack to a new documentary about Fela Kuti. Almost all of the tracks are original Fela recordings, but there’s a couple tracks from the cast of the Fela musical, and the last track is a new recording featuring Fela’s son Femi. Not much new to say about Fela’s music, it’s as powerful and revolutionary and awesome as ever. If you’re not familiar with him yet, this is yet another decent sampling of his work, with 1 track by his early highlife group Koola Lobitos, and the bulk of the material coming from his ’70s ensembles, and a couple from Egypt 80. Even though half the tracks here are edited for time constraints, there’s still 6 tracks on here that pass the 10 minute mark (and even most of them are actually edited versions). The first disc shows off Fela’s diversity, not just focusing on the usual call-and-response Afrobeat sound, but the jazzy instrumental “Jeun Ko Ku (Chop ‘N Quench)”, the almost calypso-sounding Koola Lobitos track “Highlife Time”, slow jam “Lover”, and spoken word peace treaty “Viva Nigeria”. “Upside Down”, included here in a 6 minute edit, features vocals by former Black Panther party member Sandra Izsadore, who was one of Fela’s many lovers and helped open his eyes towards black consciousness. The last 3 tracks on disc 1 are all from live performances and contain applause, showing the energy of Fela’s live performances. I wish they’d included an original version of “Zombie” instead of the version by the Fela musical band, which is only 4 minutes long here, but the original’s been anthologized before. Now when’s the documentary playing in Detroit?
3:02 AM Cluster ~ Rote Riki ~ Zuckerzeit ~ Brain
3:08 AM Moebius & Plank ~ Two Oldtimers ~ Rastakraut Pasta ~ Sky
3:15 AM Woo ~ No More Telly ~ It’s Cosy Inside ~ Independent Project
3:17 AM Woo ~ End Of The Attic ~ It’s Cosy Inside ~ Independent Project
3:18 AM Harmonia 76 ~ Almost ~ Tracks & Traces ~ Ryko
3:22 AM Roedelius ~ Vom Fliegen ~ Lustwandel ~ Sky
3:25 AM Faust ~ Mamie Is Blue ~ So Far ~ Polydor
3:32 AM Edgar Froese ~ Scarlet Score For Mescalero ~ Beyond The Storm ~ Caroline/Blue Plate
3:37 AM Laraaji ~ Unicorns In Paradise ~ Celestial Music 1978-2011 ~ All Saints
3:48 AM Brian Eno/Karl Hyde ~ Cells & Bells ~ High Life ~ Warp
3:56 AM Lewis ~ Don’t Stop It Now ~ Romantic Times ~ R.A.W. Records
4:01 AM Topdown Dialectic ~ side B track 1 ~ tape ~ Aught
4:06 AM Gen Ken Montgomery ~ Shoot Me Down ~ Birds + Machines ~ Pogus Productions
4:10 AM Mother Whale ~ Albion Moonlight ~ Hello, Earth….Goodbye, Moon ~ Lo & Behold!
4:16 AM Itasca ~ Milk Tea (Edit) ~ Life Blood ~ Life Like
4:19 AM The 442’s ~ Chelsea ~ The 442’s ~ self-released
4:22 AM Tomotsugu Nakamura ~ Gallop ~ Soundium ~ Kaico
4:26 AM Lawrence English ~ Forgiving Noir ~ Wilderness Of Mirrors ~ Room40
4:34 AM Richard Carr ~ Coaxial Gears ~ Music For Four Electric Violins ~ self-released
4:38 AM Tom Hamilton/Bruce Eisenbeil ~ Shadow Machine ~ Shadow Machine ~ Pogus Productions
4:41 AM Secluded Bronte ~ Endocarp ~ Secluded In Jersey City ~ Pogus Productions
4:43 AM Dimitri Voudouris ~ UVIVI ~ ΑΛΟ = Φ / UVIVI / 1:Θφ4 / ONTA ~ Pogus Productions
4:51 AM Lou Cohen ~ shape03 ~ Music ~ Pogus Productions
4:57 AM Thought Broadcast ~ Runaway Signal 2 ~ Votive Zero ~ Editions Mego
5:03 AM Sophie ~ Hard ~ single ~ Numbers
5:06 AM 18+ ~ Crow (Clean Radio Edit) ~ single ~ Houndstooth
5:09 AM ODESZA ~ Memories That You Call ~ In Return ~ Counter
5:13 AM DJ Rashad featuring DJ Spinn & Taso ~ Only One ~ Hyperdub 10.2 ~ Hyperdub
5:17 AM Jenny Burton ~ Vena Cava ~ In Black And White ~ Atlantic
5:24 AM Venetian Snares ~ Amazon ~ My Love Is A Bulldozer ~ Planet Mu
5:28 AM Qixoni ~ Disharmony (Bipolar Mix By Insect Deli) ~ Disharmony Remixes Vol. 2 ~ Naboamusic
5:32 AM Pinkcourtesyphone ~ Perfunctory Attachments ~ Description Of Problem ~ Line
5:36 AM clipping. ~ Brian ~ 7″ ~ Sub Pop
5:40 AM The Bug ~ Function ~ Angels & Devils ~ Ninja Tune
5:45 AM Tim Reaper & Dev/Null ~ Eckhart ~ mp3 ~ blogtotheoldskool.com
5:50 AM D. D. Danahy ~ Chupacabra Samba ~ Second Renaissance ~ Scolex Recordings
5:55 AM FaltyDL ~ Grief ~ In The Wild ~ Ninja Tune
Prolific NYC-based producer FaltyDL is already on his second Ninja Tune album, following last year’s Hardcourage. That album was his most accessible release to date, providing an easily danceable (and sometimes loungeable) distillation of his take on current bass-heavy dance music. This sprawling 17-track effort is a lot more abstract, and while it isn’t quite as crazy as his early breakcore releases, it’s closer to his older releases on Planet Mu such as the Bravery EP. There’s plenty of shorter, ambient interlude tracks, and a lot of the proper songs seem to have their minds fixated somewhere other than the dancefloor. The album’s title suggests jungle/wildlife imagery, and there’s a lot of tracks with hand drums and shaking and rattling sounds, some approximating tambourines like you’d hear in a jungle (as in drum’n’bass) track, and others are more in an exotica sense. No tracks have full vocals the way his last album’s single “She Sleeps” did, but there’s chopped, sampled vocals on a bunch of the tracks. “Do Me” is the first track with a solid danceable beat, and the way it kicks in after about 2 minutes, it might as well be saying “doomy”. “Nine” basically sounds like the intro to a jungle/d’n’b record gets stuck, and then he just builds a beat around it and goes from there. “Frontin” chops up a voice saying “frontin’ on some bullshit”, approximating a slower, more uneasy, less in-your-face juke track. “Untitled 12” is a 4 minute ambient track in which you keep expecting a beat to drop, but it never does, and then “Ahead The Ship Sleeps” is a slow, jazzy downtempo-house track. “Dos Gardenias” build up delicate guitar samples and sinister synths and echoes, then a surprising beat erupts 2 minutes in. “Heart & Soul” flirts with abrasive breakbeats and fluttery vocals, not quite arriving on full-on junglism, but tantalizing nonetheless. Watch for the way it breaks down into a slower tempo during the last minute. “Grief” works its way through another broken-down rhythm, but eventually seems to just give up. “In The Shit” is a quizzical, mad-scientist track with deep bass tones, pizzicato strings, spiralling synths, and more submerged jungle breaks. “Danger” is the street corner where future garage and ’90s jungle meet, with choppy (but not overdriven) breaks, mellow synths and a constant voice proclaiming “danger!” “Some Jazz Shit” is the album’s longest track at 6 minutes, and the best 4/4 dance track, and even it’s a bit of a slow burner with a slightly relaxed tempo.
The Answer Is In The Beat 