(2012-2017) - Against All Logic (Other People, 2018)
Experimental genius Nicolas Jaar dropped this collection of tracks without warning under an alias: Against All Logic. It’s unclear whether he did this to create mystery surrounding the origin of the tracks within, or to separate the album from his other work. If it’s the latter, I’m actually kind of angry. This sample-based dancefloor fuel is too damn good to be an afterthought, a side project. It’s like Jaar is casually tossing you a copy, saying, “oh yeah, I can do this too”.
The ominous boom of “This Old House Is All I Have,” the unstoppable bassline of “Such A Bad Way,” the unbelievable vocal chopping in “I Never Dream.” It’s all immediately danceable, but there’s this lonely undercurrent running through all of it. He’s got me hooked. - Bram Rickett
It’s Album Time! - Todd Terje (Olsen, 2014)
Terje Olsen did not need to do any more this decade after landing an anthem as pure and fun as “Inspector Norse,” but he managed to record an entire album based on the track’s exuberant synthesizer-driven joy. It’s Album Time! the producer’s debut album as Todd Terje, expands on the geekery documented on the It’s the Arps EP. Instead of showing what you can do on just the ARP synth, however, he now invites us to see what you can dream up with the aid of a full studio. The record provides a variety of escapist thrills: the dank voyage of “Leisure Suit Preben,” the tropical boogie of “Strandbar,” the sleazy nightride of “DeLorean Dynamite.” It’s infectious when Olsen lets the electronics sing; you can just see the stink face when a song like “Preben Goes to Acapulco” reaches the peak of its liquid funk. But enthusiasm is only one of many moods of It’s Album Time! The synth constantly shape-shifts as Olsen tries to figure out every emotion he can possibly convey through its quirky sounds and textures. “Johnny and Mary” carries with it a wistfulness like the love of Bryan Ferry’s life is forever out of his reach; you can feel the sweat drip off from the deep concentration of “Swing Star.” He explores a full emotional spectrum before he returns to “Inspector Norse” as the final track. While the anthem still remains unimpeachable, Olsen makes you long for the new and curious for what else might be possible. - Ryo Miyauchi
All Hail Bright Futures – And So I Watch You From Afar (Sargent House, 2013)
You’ll know within three minutes of All Hail Bright Futures’ run time if you’re in it or not. After the blissed-out build of “Eunoia” (literally meaning “good mind”), ASIWYFA colorfully burst forth like a salvo of fireworks being let off in the Met. The color palette is cartoony, almost gaudy in its sheer overwhelmingness. This is a bright, brilliant, absurdly positive album. Even while bashing your skull in with double bass pedals and crunching guitar riffs, the overarching sentiment of pure, bubbling joy never leaves.
“The sun is in our eyes!” is one of the few vocal motifs allowed, and it sums up All Hail Bright Futures nicely. There is a golden shimmer of belief, of hope to every note. The daredevil thrash of “Big Thinks Do Remarkable” the speedy rave of “Like a Mouse” and the stadium filling bounce of “Things Amazing” all blitz along with a sense of radiant happiness flowing through them. I once said it sounded like Adventure Time as scored by Maps & Atlases, but ASIWYFA and All Hail Bright Futures are singular in their smile. - Nathan Stevens
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Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light - Earth (Southern Lord, 2011)
Dylan Carlson mentions the Grateful Dead, Fairport Convention and Tinariwen as his influences on Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light. But like an abstract painter explaining what made them flourish the canvas with color, these are only tid-bits of truth. The rest is from somewhere surreal.
The musical comparisons are there. The expansive moments of Talk Talk’s heyday and Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s calmer passages, but both parts of Angels of Darkness are so firmly within their own world, outside reality is quickly crushed. This is heavy music, as massive and dense as a mountain. And you can look at it in awe or climb the damn thing. - NS
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Anthropocene - Peter Oren (Western Vinyl, 2017)
Great protest music comes in the shadow of disaster. Whether it’s already struck or is lurking just out of sight, apocalypse looms and creates wonder in the mind. Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan sharpened their lyrical knifes on the grindstones of Vietnam and nuclear war, Jamila Woods on the continued exploitation of Black America. And Peter Oren finds his focused fury on great crosses nailed into the earth, corporations treated better than humans and the doom of the Climate Crisis. Oren, out of Columbus, Indiana, knows his history but is blurrier on the future. He disowns his town "named for a killer and a misnomer” and wonders into the wild present, criss-crossing the great highway of America, seeing natural beauty turned rotten by pollution.
“Make your grandkids proud/ It’s time to throw down,” he intones in his immeasurable bass. In his demand for all of us to rise up and reconnect, he weaves a larger story of America, constantly running from old sins and new problems, unable to look itself in the face. But on Anthropocene, even through the smog, Oren sees clearly. “Change ain’t coming from above,” he sings. Instead, it must come from folks like us and like Oren. People who don’t wish for a better future, but can see it just out of reach. - NS
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Black Up - Shabazz Palaces (Sub Pop, 2011)
To be clear, Shabazz Palaces were channeling the far future before they were Shabazz Palaces. Baba Maraire, son of mbira maestro Dumisani Maraire, was fitting all sorts of instruments into beats, finding new peanut butter and chocolate combos at each turn. And Ish Butler was once Butterfly of ‘90s space cadets Digable Planets, whose landmark Blowout Combwas essentially Black Up in ‘94, a rap odyssey that waved aside boundaries and genre restrictions like a king to his peons.
Even with that pedigree, Black Upfelt like a bolt from the blue. A Phillip Glass sampling, Sun Ra bumping, braggidio wrapped in eldritch text joint that was as surreal as it was catchy. ‘Cause you can’t stuff all that nonsense in if it doesn’t bump. Black Up beamed in production from 2122, with beat switches on a dime, vocal effects that invited a procession of alien voices and Ish standing above all of it with a grin. - NS
Blowout - The So So Glos (Shea Stadium, 2013)
In the late ‘00s/early ‘10s output of the National, you can chronicle the entire arc of Punk destroys itself when it gets too serious. Not in terms of raging against the machine or expressing vulnerability, but if gets its head up its own ass too much on the mythos. We are serious, serious people with the staples in our jeans and pins through our ears damn it.
That’s why The So So Glos Blowout had to worm its silly way into our ears. These delightful brats tossed beer cans at the Mets, fist bumped Bodega cats and Beastie Boyed their way across Manhattan. New York, being New York, never got around to making its own Dookie, convinced that Green Day’s snotty pop-punk was a California fluke. But The So So boys had hooks on the mind, even as they hollered obscenities. Nearly 20 years too late, Blowout is the East Coast Dookie, even hiding surprising passion between the middle fingers. - NS
Brothers - The Black Keys (Nonesuch, 2010)
You know this album even if you don’t know it. If you’ve seen any commercial or movie trailer released during or after 2010, you’ve heard the retro rock of the Black Keys, deriving both from the breakthrough hit Brothersand its follow-up, El Camino. Nothing pushes someone to buy a printer or a cell phone plan like the uber-retro riff of “Gold on the Ceiling.” The Black Keys hit the licensing jackpot for the better part of this decade, but commercial omnipresence hasn’t diminished the excellence of Brothersone bit. Lead single “Tighten Up” followed in the footsteps of what was at that point the duo’s biggest experiment, 2008’s Attack and Release.
Brothers plays like a greatest hits album for a band that’s been around for ages, all the while serving as a veritable tour of classic rock’s greatest acts and tropes. You want some T.Rex? Check the opener “Everlasting Light,” which cops the chord progression of “Mambo Sun.” (James Murphy liked that song too – go back and listen to the quiet opening part of “Dance Yrself Clean.”) How about the Moody Blues? Well, there’s “Ten Cent Pistol.” Anyone who’s a sucker for a good guitar riff will dig the swampy “Next Girl” and the bluesy “Sinister Kid.” (I would say that any of these songs should be treated as goldmines for samples, but Wick-It the Instigator already hit that one out of the park.) The Black Keys, at least for now, would never hit a higher peak than this – but, then again, any band should be so lucky to gather together a collection of tunes this good. - Brice Ezell
Bravado - Kirin J Callinan (Terrible, 2016)
“It was all bravado” sings Kirin J Callinan. But was it? Was all the literal shit throwing, the hedonism that would make Caligula blush and the crowd decimating EDM chords Bravado? We’ve got no clue, nor does Callinan. But that’s the center of Bravado’s woozy entertainment. Enough cheese to out-glam a Poison concert and enough drugs to mortally wound a bull elephant later, Callinan is stripped naked, just as confused as we are.
There’s the bonkers key changes in “S.A.D. (Song About Drugs)” which is a PCP trip on musical quality alone, ignoring Callinan’s croon of “wrapped up in plastic/ thrown down the stairs/ feeling fantastic.” The pop-country life affirmation anthem “Live Each Day” forgets whether Callinan’s kaons of wisdom came from his dad or a “fridge magnet” and, of course, came the impossible meme power of “Big Enough.” So gay cowboys, Alex Cameron cameos and Tinder anthems are all par for the course. But what about vulnerability and beauty?
Somehow, in this debaucherous haze, Callinan made the finest pastiche album of the 2010s, in the baffling pantheon next to Ween and Zappa. And just like those loony luminaries, Callinan never lost sight of his love for the music he was parading around. Despite all the piss-taking, Callinan’s adoration for pop music shines through. He kids because he loves. - NS
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Carrie and Lowell - Sufjan Stevens (Asthmatic Kitty, 2016)
I was bothered by the praise heaped upon Carrie and Lowell when it was first released. It all struck me as more reflective of sympathy for Sufjan Stevens’ admittedly gripping narrative – about the death of his mother, and his reflections on her absence in his youth – than any real engagement with the music on the album. The story was too good, too powerful; the record just couldn’t be bad. Time passed. I learned something that I need to be reminded of every now and then: just because groupthink is groupthink, doesn’t mean it’s wrong. And the hive-mind got Carrie and Lowell exactly right.
Stevens has never been more understated than he is here – not even the spare Seven Swans can match the minimal and hushed arrangements of Carrie and Lowell. On the devastating “Fourth of July,” Stevens takes what could have been a high-volume climax – a repeated chant of “we’re all gonna die” – and renders it an exercise in almost banal repetition. It’s all the sadder for it. Imagery of the holy & the mundane is suffused through the album. The dead feels proximal, like he’s reaching toward something that is terrifyingly close and terrifyingly real. But this isn’t dry prose of simple grief, but elevated into a lullaby for sadness, for love, for loss. A haunting, melancholy ballad from the undisputed king of geographic angst, there’s an irony to a line like this one which appears at the end of the transcendent bridge on “The Only Thing”: “I want to save you from your sorrow.” Listening to Stevens, you’d be forgiven for thinking he’s trying to deliver you to sadness. But if this is what sadness sounds like, then happiness be damned.
- BE/Dante Douglas