The Black Keys: El Camino (Nonesuch / Warner Bros.)

The Black Keys: "Lonely Boy"

The Black Keys has come a long way from its modest start in Akron, Ohio. Ever since the early 2000s, the band has been one of the most consistent acts around, churning out album after album of gritty, blues-infused garage rock. But with recent appearances on The Colbert Report and Saturday Night Live, as well as a North American tour featuring numerous arena stops, the band has refined its sound to adapt to its new surroundings and mounting exposure. And El Camino, the band's latest effort, showcases that adaptation, as the band has cultivated a bigger, more varied sound.

Guitarist/vocalist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney once again teamed up with Danger Mouse to oversee the production, and the result is one of the band’s most instrumentally diverse offerings. Though the songs are firmly fixed in the classic Black Keys style (tactile distortion, clamoring drums, bluesy vocals, and noodling guitar solos), El Camino builds on the band’s recent exploration of musical diversity and experimentation. The excellent “Dead and Gone” sounds like a ’60s jamboree, chocked full of xylophones and layered, harmonized vocals; “Gold on the Ceiling” features a variety of synths and new guitar sounds that integrate seamlessly into the duo’s signature rock-outs; “Little Black Submarines” starts out with a heartfelt, acoustic folk arrangement before colliding with a wall of grunged-out guitars and crashing cymbals.

The Black Keys may be getting bigger, but that hasn’t hindered the duo’s creative energy. If anything, it’s gotten stronger on El Camino.

- Text by Michael Danaher.

The Roots: Undun (Island / Def Jam)

It’s rare when an album asks deserving questions yet doesn’t let the message overshadow the music. But that’s what The Roots has done with its tenth studio album, Undun, which does for Philadelphia what The Wire did for Baltimore — portraying the dark and ruinous underworld of a drug trade that preys disproportionately on certain races and classes, especially their young.

The record traces the last hours in the life of Redford Stephens, a fictional Philly man whom Roots drummer ?uestlove says was inspired in part by The Wire’s Avon Barksdale. A low-level drug dealer, Stephens is a protagonist but not quite a hero. Over funk-fueled bass lines, ?uestlove’s signature beats, and a tasteful sprinkling of soul, the story is unraveled — backwards from the time of death — by MC Black Thought and a handful of guests, including Aaron Livingston, one half of Icebird.

It’s hardly a holiday record, though it does include a cameo by indie darling Sufjan Stevens, whose “Redford (for Yia-Yia and Pappou)” also helped inspire the Roots’ character and comprises the final four tracks of the album, interpreted in various styles. The third of these segments, “Will to Power,” is the most compelling, showing ?uestlove battling avant-garde pianist DD Jackson in a frenzied duel that owes more to free jazz than R&B.

It’s not untruthful to say the music on Undun stands alone — it doesn’t need its narrative any more than Fucked Up’s David Comes to Life needed its — but the words add a weight that transforms it from a solid hip-hop release into a powerful record. Musically, it ventures into some surprising territory, and lyrically, it communicates an urgent message.

- Text by Timothy A. Schuler.

Jacaszek: Glimmer (Ghostly International)

Jacaszek: "Dare-gale"

Polish composer Michał Jacaszek has made a specialty of moody, atmospheric ambience using a classical palette, with bowed strings, operatic voices, and chimes to construct a brooding build. His new album, Glimmer, is his first for Ghostly International, and though it might be misclassified as an electronic album — partly due to its affiliation with Ghostly — it's almost entirely an ambient classical release.

There's enough digital treatment and rearrangement to warrant a partial electronic tag, but it's otherwise a very organic album. Jacaszek wrote and recorded the acoustic-guitar and mellotron passages, and then he enlisted a number of other Polish musicians to play the harpsichord and clarinet parts. It's all a very stirring mix, with the harpsichord, bass clarinet, guitar, and vibraphone — not to mention the washes of fuzz — creating a richness of texture.

The album's inconspicuous complexity and professional performances make it a gem among ambient releases. Those factors also help explain why it's been a bit since Jacaszek's last release, and Glimmer was worth the wait.

- Text by Scott Morrow and Patrick Hajduch. Read the debate here.

Keep Shelly in Athens: Campus Martius EP (Planet Mu)

Keep Shelly in Athens: "Campus Martius"

Hailing from Athens, Greece, Keep Shelly in Athens (whose name is a play on the Grecian suburb Kypseli) is a down-tempo/chill-wave electronic two-piece that has garnered steady 'Net buzz since last year. The hype, to this point, might be a tad undeserved, but the duo's recent In Love With Dusk EP demonstrated potential across a spate of digitized genres, even if it was heavy on the Ibiza influence.

The major appeal here is the interplay between singer Sarah P and producer RPR, whose styles seem to be coming into their own. With Campus Martius, the duo's first release on Planet Mu, there's less of the beach-y nightlife and '80s cheese; instead, there's an urban, industrialized, and ambient vibe to better fit Sarah's elongated and reverberated vocals.

The EP also includes bits of spazzy Aphex Twin drum-and-melancholy, deep bass lines, vocals that would sound at home on a Sneaker Pimps record, and of-the-moment pitched vocal slicing. These elements hang together in a way that seems familiar and yet revelatory, and as a result, Campus Martius occupies a pleasant, bassy corner of the dubstep/post-dubstep/synthesizer continuum.

- Text by Scott Morrow and Patrick Hajduch. Read the debate here.

Loka: Passing Place (Ninja Tune)

Loka: "Sam Star"

In 1999, Liverpool residents Karl Webb and Mark Kyriacou began an exciting studio collaboration as Loka, merging psychedelic, classical, groove, down-tempo, and jazz elements in a daring but foolproof fusion. The project quickly signed to Ninja Tune, but the duo's first full album wasn't released until 2006, and Webb retired from the project in the following year. But now Loka is back, led by Kyriacou and the live Loka band, and the results were worth the wait.

Like that debut full-length (Fire Shepherds), Passing Place is a hybrid of the aforementioned elements. Here, however, a calmness meets the subdued tempos, and celestial vocals are part of a multilayered mélange. In fact, the oft-mentioned down-tempo feel of Fire Shepherds seems lively in comparison to Passing Place, which, despite its active moments, achieves a rare balance of beats and serenity.

“Entrance,” Passing Place’s opening track, almost tricks the listener into thinking that this album will be just like Loka’s first, with the heavy, haunting bass rumblings. But just as the song seems ready to launch into a break beat, a beautiful wordless vocal solo sets the mood of the album’s remainder. The vocal additions (by live-band members Lido Pimiento, Eleanor Mante, and Jaci Williams) weave through the keyboards, drums, and guitars and often determine the haunting, melancholy, or calming feel that each track transmits. It's a wonderful new direction, helping Loka to reestablish itself as a forerunner in classical psychedelia.

- Text by Lauren Zens.

Honorable Mentions

Anomie Belle: Machine EP

Czar: Vertical Mass Grave (Cracknation)

Eastern Blok: Underwater

Goldmund: All Will Prosper (Western Vinyl)

Sunn O))): øø Void reissue (Southern Lord)

Eskmo: "Cloudlight"

Brendan Angelides, the San Francisco-based electronic producer known as Eskmo, is not holding back anymore. With the release of his Hypercolor EP in 2009, he focused on writing “songs” instead of “dance tracks.” Because smaller dance labels tend to expect a specific track structure (intros, outros, breakdowns, etc.) on vinyl, Angelides was confined within a tight box of creation. But with tracks like the hypnotic, introspective “Harmony,” he was able to distance himself from the tired conventions of dance music. “I started to release exactly what I wanted without thinking about labels or what anyone else wanted,” he says.

Angelides has created music since 1999, when he took his moniker from Eskimo, the 1979 album by San Francisco avant-garde group The Residents. He first used the moniker as his alias on a full-length album that he created for a high-school graduation project. In place of the final paper that he needed to write to graduate high school, Angelides wrote and produced a complete album. “Then I knew I could make something,” he recalls. As to why he dropped the “I” in Eskimo, Angelides offers no explanation. “It just made sense to me at the time; there’s no other reason than that,” he says. “Now I joke [about it] and say that it's not about ‘I’; it's about ‘U.’”

He is equally mysterious when asked about his creative process, preferring to let the music speak for itself. “In terms of what feels right to me, I just dive deep into an idea, step back, modify, dive in again, step back,” Angelides says. “I Dream I’m Flying,” from Hypercolor, is a good example of the artist’s swirling, crunchy brand of dance-friendly electronica. The song forgoes any discernible intro and outro, while a military-march beat and rhythmic cascades of sound propel the listener from one uplifting sonic height to another. In typical understated fashion, Angelides says, “It’s weirder than your typical dance electronic.”

“Weird” is one way to put it, but “more innovative” and “more interesting” are a bit closer to the truth. These are meticulous compositions that reject predictability in favor of a consistently progressive and complex soundscape. On each track, Angelides develops a base layer of restrained polyrhythmic discord. Grimy dubstep beats are coupled with textured percussion that, instead of boring into your ear canals with bass-heavy brawn, seems to expand and take root. Found sounds are re-purposed in audio collages and become a part of Eskmo’s unique musical language.

On his eponymous full-length, released on Ninja Tune in October of 2010, track titles like “Cloudlight,” “Color Dropping,” and “Moving Glowstream” point to the highly visual characteristics of Eskmo’s music. His songs develop an unmistakable tone quality that begs for colorful descriptions like “warm” and “bright.” His album covers are similarly expressive, drawing from the same aesthetic wellspring that is the music. The art for Eskmo is blanketed in soft, glowing pastels, with an alien-like Angelides floating in ethereal repose. The layers of daubs, scratches, and drips — like the fragments that form the music — aren’t immediately apparent, but they make the sort of unheralded contributions that are necessary for an appropriately cryptic and beautiful cover.
 

“I finally wrote what I really wanted to write and broke through my own barriers.”

It makes sense that such colorful, visual music comes from a musician who learned the piano by ear. Angelides learned through experience, developing an acute sense of tone and pitch. In ninth grade, he was inspired by the English electronic dance band Prodigy and rock band Primus, prompting his decision to learn bass. While forming bands, he was further influenced by ambient-glitch artist Aphex Twin, house and techno godfather Frankie Bones, and Moby.

Following graduation, Angelides produced music that was born in seclusion and isolated thoughts. Living alone in a lakeside house in Connecticut for two years, he created soft, internal music, a more “chilled” version of electronica, under the alias Welder. But it wasn’t only the remote locale that inspired the quiet sounds. Poring over documents and papers about the dark underside of American society and government and conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11, Angelides got caught up in an introspective phase. “9/11 struck some serious chords for me in numerous ways, and my music started to reflect that shadow part of myself,” Angelides explains.

But ultimately, he grew tired of obsessing about the past. “I found that it was only separating me from those I cared about,” he says. For the past five years, Angelides has refrained from fixating on conspiracy documents. He started exploring a more jubilant side of himself that eventually spilled into his music. “I finally wrote what I really wanted to write,” Angelides says, “and broke through my own barriers.”

In the years following, he released a dozen singles and EPs while touring in North America and Europe, opening for producers like Brazilian electronic and hip-hop-fusion producer Amon Tobin and California experimental laptop musician Flying Lotus. He has remixed music by Bibio, Spor, STS9, and Bar 9 and also runs the record label Ancestor, which released Hypercolor.

With Eskmo, however, Angelides’ growth reaches another milestone. Whereas Welder was soft and introspective, Eskmo is open and sprawling, reflecting his emotional growth. The track “Siblings” communicates his experiences with family. With eight brothers and sisters from various marriages, Angelides finds joy in family visits. “Every time I see them, I always feel inspired to write music, and I put them in the songs,” Angelides says. The song “We Have Invisible Friends” is a reference to his spiritual side. “It’s the idea of tapping into the spirit realm — that remote viewing — and the overall concept that we all have a guardian angel watching over us,” he says.

In addition to family and spirituality, Angelides is passionate about working in the studio, and one particularly famous fan proved to be the perfect partner: Amon Tobin. Angelides opened for Tobin at Yuri’s Night, the annual worldwide party to celebrate Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s first flight into space, and the two hit it off.

Finding an equally laid-back yet focused artist in Tobin, the two collaborated as Eskamon on “Fine Objects,” a found-sound-laden drum-and-bass track released in April of 2010 on Eskmo’s Ancestor label. “[The collaboration] just came about because we both enjoy fiddling with field recordings and are both into the idea of sound for the sake of it,” Angelides says. “We both have the clear understanding that we know we’re going to get something down and we’re not going to stop until we do. Tobin really loves the sound and not the rock-star element of music; he’s not trying to write a track to make it cool.” Though he doesn’t say it, Angelides is also describing himself.

As for Eskmo, Angelides’ best and newest effort also finds him returning to his early musical origins. “It marks a full cycle of the character that I created back in 1999,” he explains. And now, with a clearer sense of the music that he wants to make, Angelides has been able to shed traditional electronic-music trappings. “I really let go of that [boxed-in] mentality,” he says. And, in a true return to form, he’s working on more Welder material — “slowly but surely.”

By the end of the 1960s, The Beatles had been absent from any kind of live performance for years. This supposed retirement from commercial concerts, however, never fully quelled speculation that the group could return to the stage in some way. Of the various conjectured shows, none held more what-if potential than a rumored collaboration between the Fab Four and German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.

According to a vague report noted in a biography by author Michael Kurtz, Stockhausen was said to have arranged a meeting with one of The Beatles at his New York apartment in 1969 to discuss a joint concert, but a blizzard ultimately kept the two parties apart. Between Paul McCartney occasionally citing a fascination with Stockhausen’s “Gesang der Junglinge” in interviews, The Beatles including a image of him in the cover crowd of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and John Lennon’s “Revolution 9” getting regular critical comparisons to Stockhausen’s Hymnen, The Beatles and Stockhausen maintained at least a shred of connectivity to make such a collaboration possible.

Though the rendezvous, like most hearsay, has been proven to be devoid of truth, fiction has never gotten in the way of inspiration. Such is the case with avant-garde ensemble Alarm Will Sound and its most recent work, 1969. Mixing musical composition, scripted acting, audio dialogue, and archival video, the group’s live production uses the myth of the would-be collaboration as a jumping-off point to examine a time period rife with political, artistic, and social change. ALARM recently spoke with the ensemble’s conductor, Alan Pierson, to discuss the new work, its combination of history and falsehood, and why the year of 1969 was such a big deal.

Let me ask you about 1969. How did this concept develop?

We had been working on this for a long time. In a way, it goes back to those composer portraits as one-composer concerts. Those sorts of concerts, we felt, were a really good way for us to be developing our reputation in New York. But at a certain point, we felt like we wanted to do something broader than that. What I liked about the composer portraits was that they were a way of creating a contemporary music concert that really felt like an event, rather than just a collection of pieces.

There was a really special kind of vibe that you got when you had people walking into a hall to experience an entire evening of Steve Reich or of György Ligeti. The question was "How [do we] create that kind of experience with a broader repertoire?" and "What is a way to bring together really different kinds of music in a coherent framework?"

We did a couple of things along those lines. We did a show called Odd Couples at Carnegie Hall in 2006, which I think was really successful. But as we started brainstorming ideas for concerts, one thing I started thinking about was this idea of doing music of a single year and using a period of time as a way to connect really different kinds of music. Nineteen sixty-nine just emerged pretty quickly in that process as a really interesting time to look at. In the process of looking at that more deeply, I stumbled on this story of the planned meeting between Stockhausen and The Beatles, and it just seemed like too great a story not to tell.

What is it about Lennon and Stockhausen that makes 1969 center around their potential meet-up? What is their juxtaposition supposed to represent?

In the show, we really characterize it as a meeting between Stockhausen and Lennon. But the source where this comes from only talks about Stockhausen and The Beatles — someone from The Beatles, or multiple people from The Beatles. Out of the need to make it a dramatic reality for the show, we turned it into Lennon, but that is from our own imagination. There are a couple of reasons why that event seemed like it needed to be the center of a show. One is just the nature of who we are as Alarm Will Sound. This seemed like a kind of symbol of a coming-together of these very separate worlds of popular music and art music. Alarm Will Sound has always tried to take a very broad view of the musical world and look at what is out there for us to play, not as being one kind of music or another kind of music, but as being the totality of what is happening now musically.

The concert and album that we did of music by Aphex Twin, I think, communicated that really strongly to people. Here was a new music group that was not just doing music by the sort of usual suspects that were writing for classical instruments, but was taking on electronica and figuring out how to play it. We looked at that meeting [between Stockhausen and The Beatles] and the idea of that meeting as having a kind of ancestral affinity to what we were trying to do as an ensemble.

How do you regard the finished product? Do you see it as an offshoot of musical theater? Is it film theater or an amalgamation of music mash-ups?

It is a concert that eludes categorization. It is certainly not a musical. It is certainly not a conventional concert. I guess I would characterize it as a theater piece in which music has a central role. Many of the pieces of music that we are visiting during the course of the event are kinds of collages that bring together many different elements and try to do so in a way that has a sort of continuity and integrity.

That is everything, from "Revolution 9" to Stockhausen’s Hymnen to Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia. It was something that was happening a lot in different realms during the late 1960s. In a way, 1969 has taken the form of the music that it’s talking about — the show itself has become a kind of collage that does tell a story. We are combining music and theater and image into this sort of indescribable unity that hopefully tells this story — more than tells the story, but brings people into this world of 1969.

The production definitely has an interesting thing to say between pop music and something more avant-garde or abstract. Do you feel that the distance between rock and the avant-garde has gotten smaller or larger over time?

Without a doubt, smaller. In 1969, you feel how big that gulf was at the time that these people were trying to cross. And that’s part of why they really feel like pioneers, because that gulf was pretty big in 1969. Looking at people like Leonard Bernstein and Stockhausen and The Beatles — who are all characters in the show, who were all seeing the possibility of making those connections and were reaching across that gulf — I have a lot of respect for that, seeing how big that chasm was then. It’s much closer now. There are concerts happening all the time that elude an easy categorization. I think that minimalism has been a big part of that; you now have that common language. So much of rock music has been influenced by minimalism. It’s rare to find a piece of concert music that doesn’t, in some way, show the mark of minimalism or seems untouched by it.

I look at someone like Caleb Burhans, who’s one of Alarm Will Sound’s violinists, whose music is very deeply influenced by post-rock. I look at groups like Dirty Projectors that we collaborated with a year ago, which is a really great indie band now, whose work has the kind of complexity that you would expect to see in a contemporary music concert. Those kinds of collaborations that we did feel very natural now because the boundaries are much less present. It’s hard to imagine how a collaboration like that would have worked 40 or 50 years ago.

Is it exciting to be performing 1969 in front of individuals who lived through that time period? Has anybody ever come up to you and said, “I was there, I lived through that?”

Yeah, we’ve gotten a lot of those kinds of comments. One of the major, non-composer characters of the show is Father Berrigan, who was a Catholic Priest and staunch anti-war activist during the time. Someone came up to me after the Carnegie performance and said, “I hid him; I was part of a group that hid him from the police,” after some of the events that we talked about in 1969. There are lots of people who came up after the show and shared personal experiences of the events that we’re talking about.

We’ve heard a lot that people are really moved by what they see and feel a special kind of resonance watching this story and these events being recreated and the time being recreated on the stage. And that’s really satisfying. As someone who didn’t live through those events, it’s clearly an extraordinary time in history. It was important for us not just to tell a story of it, but to try, in some way, to capture it and bring it to life on stage.

Boxcutter: The Dissolve (Planet Mu, 4/25/11)

Boxcutter: "TV Troubles"

Morrow: The Dissolve is the fourth full-length album by Boxcutter, a dubstep/IDM musician from Northern Ireland and a regular of the Planet Mu roster.  Also known as Barry Lynn, he often takes a dance-influenced approach to his music, enabling an entry point for those who can't handle thornier artists like Aphex Twin.

On The Dissolve, some of the dark dance elements remain, but by and large, this is a shift in a much funkier direction, with retro electronic sounds providing a much lighter and old-school feel.

Hajduch: I've been a fan of Boxcutter for a long time.  It's always seemed like his music was only "dubstep" in name only; he traded mainly in really brutal jungle / drum 'n' bass, which was no stranger to the super-heavy bass line.

He also accented his music with flourishes of horns and keys, with a jazz-fusion nod reminiscent of Squarepusher. That's all been changing, and The Dissolve gets him much closer to mid-'70s Herbie Hancock in sound, with artwork that owes a lot to current indie/experimental's fetish for a look approximating cheap VHS video.

Morrow: If you go back to his first full album, Oneiric, after listening to The Dissolve, it sounds like another artist — with deep, wobbling bass lines, foreboding samples, and increased atmospherics.  But if you go through the timeline, the metamorphosis is much more fluid.  I prefer some of the darker material and the more exotic samples, but it's been a relatively smooth transition to an album of get-down sounds.

And though some of the bubblier sounds aren't my cup of tea, I like that there's a lot going on, often with some exotic flavors in the mix.  There are elements that could double as digitized flutes or harpsichords, but there also are fluttering video-game sounds and outer-space effects over bouncing bass lines.

Hajduch: The transition has been a gradual one — basically from a light jazz-inflected sound to a more minor-key approach, closer to a more traditional notion of "dubstep."  And the back end of The Dissolve feels a lot more familiar for listeners of his previous album, Arecibo Message. It's primarily a busy, dark take on two-step.  It's not particularly adventurous, but the way that Lynn builds the tracks up, it's compelling listening nonetheless.

And given how flat some of the vocal funk excursions fall (neither of the Brian Greene vocal tracks are bad, per se; they're well executed but seem longer than they actually are), it's comforting to hear the shuffle of "Moon Pupils" or the skittering footwork toms (and sort of insane cymbal programming!) of "Allele."  These sparse, percussive, dubby workouts are much closer to Lynn's wheelhouse than tepid vocal funk, no matter how lush it sounds.

Morrow: I'm not too keen on the vocal funk either, but I think that The Dissolve finds a nice balance, and there are even a few reverberated guitar lines to pair with the synthesizers and samples.  Boxcutter has done another nice job of keeping things interesting.

Download the podcast for This Week’s Best Albums: November 16, 2010 and subscribe to This Week’s Best Albums for free with iTunes.

Stream the podcast for This Week's Best Albums: November 16, 2010.

Black Francis: The Golem

Black Francis: "Miriam and Florian"

In 2008, the iconic Pixies frontman Black Francis — a.k.a. Frank Black — was invited by the San Francisco International Film Festival to write a score for The Golem: How He Came into the World, the classic 1920 silent film and prequel to the 1915 film The Golem.  Black took the challenge, performing an hour-and-a-half of material as a live accompaniment, and earlier this year, he released a limited edition of the music alongside a DVD.

Now the quirky singer/songwriter is self-releasing most of the music individually, reordering it, and billing it as a rock opera.  Most of the material remains unaltered from its earlier recorded forms — the biggest difference, largely, is that this pairs down the reprises and extra song versions.

The music is easily recognized as Black Francis, but it establishes a playful, campy vibe thanks to harpsichord, saxophone, bass clarinet, and flute parts as well as string melodies that are played in reverse.  The challenge, ultimately, was a success, and The Golem shows a new side to an already multifaceted musician.

Jesu: Heart Ache & Dethroned (Hydra Head)

Jesu: "Annul"

Multi-instrumentalist Justin K. Broadrick has been involved in many boundary-crossing industrial, metal, and electronic bands — including Godflesh, Techno Animal, and Final — but these days, he's best known for his post-metal/shoe-gaze work as Jesu (and its electronic offshoot, Pale Sketcher).

Jesu's debut came back in 2004 with the Heart Ache EP, which presented two behemoth 20-minute tracks that were slow and doomy yet covered a lot of sonic territory.  Now Hydra Head Records has re-released Heart Ache and packaged it with a new EP of unreleased material, called Dethroned.

Much of the Dethroned EP was written and recorded in 2004, but Broadrick didn’t complete it until this year, and it better resembles the newer Jesu material – more concise, with seven-minute tracks instead of those 20-minute beasts.  The stylistic changes on Dethroned are a little more self-contained within each song, and though it still has heavy, occasionally chugging riffs, Broadrick’s vocals are more pronounced and airier, at times sounding vocoded.

Though Jesu only has three full-length albums since 2004, Broadrick's output under this name is expansive, and this is just the latest in a lengthy series of EPs.  Jesu fans already know the story, but because this is now packaged with Heart Ache, it presents a good starting point for the uninitiated.

Harmonious Bec: Her Strange Dreams (Monotreme)

Harmonious Bec: "Progress"

With members who go by ZaMaRoo and From Vapor to Water, Harmonious Bec is a relatively mysterious Japanese duo that makes exotic, far-reaching IDM.  Her Strange Dreams is the duo's debut, and it's a marvelous first effort.

The material is packed with hyperactive melodies, glitchy cut-ups, atmospheric effects, and sporadic dissonance.  Everything is cohesive, but from track to track, Her Strange Dreams is liable to take sharp turns.  "Funny Hierophant" combines massive drum-and-bass beats with glockenspiel and a harp-like instrument; "Shunrai" adds a quivering sample over a pretty piano line and a hip-hop beat; "Solitary Bonze Prayer" is a senses-altering journey through chopped-up vocal clips.

When put together, it channels more than a dozen electronic sub-genres — it builds upon some of the best genre-smashing artists that electronic music has to offer, such as Aphex Twin.  Undoubtedly, Her Strange Dreams is one of the best electronic releases of the year.

Serengeti & Polyphonic: Bells and a Floating World (Anticon)

Most known around their home base of Chicago, Serengeti and Polyphonic are a pair of unorthodox indie hip-hoppers who jumped to Anticon with their second LP, Terradactyl, in 2009.

Each has his hands in many forward-thinking releases.  Serengeti is particularly prolific, with too many projects and characters to list here.  (One such character, a sports-loving super fan, will be reprised on a forthcoming release with Anticon's Jel and Odd Nosdam.)

Bells and a Floating World, essentially, is a pair of combined EPs — six tracks of new material and six remixes featuring Why?, Jel, Son Lux, and others.  In the new material, Polyphonic's electro-classical style is every bit as vital as Serengeti's spoken-word musings and off-beat rhymes.

There are many great entry points to discover either artist, and listeners interested in this collaboration should start with Terradactyl.  After that, however, get this extra dose of strangeness and hear a few older tracks in a new way.

TOMO: Butterfly Dream and Other Guitar Works (Subvalent)

TOMO: "Carnival in Full Bloom"

TOMO – an acronym for Transcendental Organic Magical Objective — is a multi-instrumentalist and native of Japan who spent his late teens in Missouri, where he learned a bunch of folk-based styles of music (including blues, country, bluegrass, ragtime, and Dixieland jazz).  In addition to the guitar, he became proficient in the oud, saz, sitar, banjo, violin, hurdy gurdy, and more, and he later returned to Tokyo, where he picked up Middle Eastern and Indian techniques.

And if that weren't enough, he also is proficient with the saxophone, his instrument of choice in psychedelic improv trio Tetragrammaton.

Butterfly Dream and Other Guitar Works is TOMO's newest solo album.  There are scores of beautiful folk melodies, often care of super-fast finger-picking, and many tracks contain Eastern undertones as well as the hazy drone of the hurdy gurdy.  Ranging from slide-guitar blues to an Indian raga to a European waltz, the material is beautiful, intricate, and multicultural.

Soviet League: s/t (Angel Oven)

Soviet League: "Shylight"

Singer/songwriters Ben Eshbach and Matthew Kelly have a history in the LA underground, respectively fronting indie-rock bands The Sugarplastic and The Autumns.  By combining forces a few years ago, however, the two may have created something even better than what they've done individually — leading to a dense and masterful indie opus.

With the help of countless guest musicians, their new project, Soviet League, presents 12 meticulously crafted tracks, tapping into orch-pop, electronica, and Western music.  There are oodles of pretty guitar tones, big bass tones, and overabundant harmonies.  With the guest instruments, the music routinely crosses into baroque pop; there’s plenty of pizzicato strings, horns, marimba, glockenspiel, organ, and whistling.

Certain tracks, naturally, are denser than others.  "Row," the album's opener, is a lighthearted rock romp, whereas "All the Sailors Wave Goodbye" is a complex exhibition of classical technique.  Most of the album falls somewhere between these ends of the spectrum, and the music will appeal to both casual and hardcore music lovers.

The Soviet League debut threatens to be one of the best indie-rock albums of 2010.  No matter your tastes, if you love pop music, you’ll love this.

Honorable Mentions

Ranjit Barot: Bada Boom (Abstract Logix)

Ches Smith & These Arches: Finally Out of My Hands (Skirl)

Norah Jones: …Featuring Norah Jones (Blue Note)

Lavinia: There is Light Between Us (The Mylene Sheath)

Stereolab: Not Music (Drag City)

Bjørn Torske: Kokning (Smalltown Supersound)

Diamond Watch Wrists

Each maintaining a busy 2009, Guillermo Scott Herren (Prefuse 73, Savath & Savalas) and Zach Hill (Hella, Bygones) join forces to create Diamond Watch Wrists, a project that holds elements of each artist but sounds unlike what one might imagine their collaboration to be.

Like Hill's 2008 solo record, Ice Capped at Both Ends is very much a pop record, for as unconventional as both records may be.  Reverberated, multi-layered vocals guide each track, similarly to Savath & Savalas, and Hill's beats are as focused and straightforward as they've been in a while.  Effects and ambiance hold important roles, but Herren's electronic Prefuse work essentially is a nonfactor here.

Given the impending release of the next Savath & Savalas release, it's an interesting time to release Ice Capped at Both Ends, but at first glimpse, the S&S disc contains more elements of Herren's initimable work as Prefuse 73.  It seems that we've entered an impressive stretch of Herren's creative legacy.

Themselves: theFREEhoudini (Anticon)

After a seven-year hiatus, Anticon hip-hop duo Themselves (Doseone and Jel) has returned with this free (for 90 days) "mixtape."  Consisting of one 39-minute track, the release serves as a self-remixed album and teaser for the duo's third full-length album, CrownsDown, due in August.

Doseone's nasally delivery is as aggressive as ever, presenting less of the high-pitched anti-raps from his work in Subtle. Jel's breakbeats carry the well-balanced mix, and hip-hop bedfellows Aesop Rock, Slug, Busdriver, and Yoni Wolf make well-placed appearances.  Like the duo's respective careers, theFREEhoudini is a compelling, original endeavor.

Soap&Skin: Lovetune for Vacuum (PIAS)

Austrian singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and actress Anja Franziska Plaschg holds musical ability and power that is stunning for her age of 18.

On Lovetune for Vacuum, Plaschg's debut album, powerful, melancholy harmonies pour out of her throat and piano in contrast to softer, somber exchanges.  Vocal overdubs, pounding low keys, ominous sample, and bits of violin and electronics augment the main melodies as Plaschg channels influences from Bjork, Aphex Twin, and Sergei Rachmaninoff.  Prepare to hear a lot about Plaschg in the coming years.

Soap&Skin: "The Sun"
Soap&Skin: \"The Sun\"

Nadja: When I See the Sun Always Shines on TV (The End)

This interesting cover EP continues a highly prolific streak for Canadian heavy/ambient duo Nadja, which has a pair of upcoming albums due later in 2009 — one of which is a double release.

Foreseeable innovators like My Bloody Valentine and Swans are covered in baths of fuzz, feedback, and synthesizers, but less-predictable favorites such as Slayer, The Cure, Elliot Smith, and A-Ha also are turned on their heads.  Preexisting fans of Nadja and electro-noise dirge enthusiasts should both greatly enjoy this one.

Corey Wilkes & Abstrakt Pulse: Cries from tha Ghetto (Pi)

Trumpeter Corey Wilkes' debut album as a bandleader, Drop It, was released just 10 months ago on storied jazz/blues label Delmark Records.  The funky debut contained quirky soul jazz with moments of extended solos and improvisation, but Wilkes digs back to a bebop-fueled sound for this new release with his group Abstrakt Pulse.

Featuring the reed work of Kevin Nabors and the exemplary melodic guitar licks of Scott Hesse, the sextet fuses some 1960s Blue Note-era jazz with the freeform influence of Lester Bowie, a lauded experimentalist whose seat Wilkes filled for the Art Ensemble of Chicago.  The fusion on Cries from tha Ghetto isn't smashing any boundaries, but its execution is top notch.  Highly recommended for jazz heads.

Corey Wilkes & Abstrakt Pulse: "Visionary of an Abstrakt"
Corey Wilkes & Abstrakt Pulse: \"Visionary of an Abstrakt\"

Busdriver will release a new album, Jhelli Beam, via Anti- on June 9, dropping his tireless flow over a disc full of classical, jazz, Bollywood, and prog-rock samples.

Norwegian prog/jazz/metal group Shining currently has a chopped-up preview of its forthcoming album, slated for release on Rune Grammofon on October 12, posted on its MySpace page.

In an interview with BBC, Warp Records founder Steve Beckett says that a new Aphex Twin album definitely is on the way, possibly sometime this year.  The last Aphex Twin studio album, Drukqs, was released in 2001.

Stoner/doom duo Om has signed to Drag City, which will release its new, currently untitled album on September 8.  The album is being recorded by Steve Albini at his Electrical Audio studio.

Melodic metal instrumentalists Russian Circles will debut new material during a two-week US tour in late April, after which they will return to the studio to record a follow-up to 2008 album Station, due in October or November on Suicide Squeeze.

Converge has posted a brief preview video of a song from its upcoming album, out later this year on Epitaph/Deathwish.

Both this weekend and next weekend, guitarist/vocalist Nils Frykdahl of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum will provide musical accompaniment for Twobird, a performance-art piece in Berkely by Michael McCamish.

Tonight is the first UK performance by The Fear, a new project from Leo and Milo Smee, the founders of funk/prog/metal collective Chrome Hoof.  The duo performs with drums, bass, synths, and samples.

Hard-hitting jazz trio The Bad Plus knows how to pen pieces of proprietary gold. But its three members are also known for their genre-leaping renditions of rock songs, propelled by the chops of pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, and drummer David King. Here are the group's ten best covers (in order of release).

1. Nirvana: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (These Are the Vistas)

This cover of Nirvana's massive hit features super-scaling runs and occasionally dissonant harmonies from Anderson in one of the final choruses. It ends brilliantly with the quick piano tinkling of Cobain's famed bridge: "And I forget just what it takes, and yet I guess it makes me smile. I found it hard; it's hard to find. Oh well, whatever…never mind."

2. Aphex Twin: "Flim" (These Are the Vistas)

The original version of "Flim" caught some listeners off guard on the Come to Daddy EP, what with its pretty piano line that evoked thoughts of Willy Wonka's "Pure Imagination." This rendition brings Richard D. James' IDM beats to life under the melodic synchronization of Iverson and Anderson.

3. Ornette Coleman: "Street Woman" (Give)

Coming as a rare occasion, The Bad Plus cover a fellow artist in its genre – and a revered one at that. Originally from Coleman's 1971 album Science Fiction, "Street Woman" is bouncy, heavy, cheerful, and threatening – all while skillfully alternating rhythms.

4. Pixies: "Velouria" (Give)

If you're not looking at the track listing to Give, you'll have no idea that you're hearing a Pixies song until near the two-minute mark. This version begins soft and somber, spreading out Charles Thompson's melody over King's distant jingling and tapping. After the early minutes of building, King breaks into a rock beat for some of Iverson's mean improvisation.

5. Black Sabbath: "Iron Man" (Give)

After you hear The Bad Plus' rendition of "Iron Man," you won't go back. Far heavier than the original, this version cracks into full gear when Iverson's low notes thunder over his down-trickling scales, which come raining ominously from the intro. Iverson again grabs the attention over King's heavy beats, layering together chordal harmonies of Tony Iommi's famous progression. For the outro, the group employs a gentle quarter-time interpretation of the original's awesome ending.

6. "(Theme From) Chariots of Fire" (Suspicious Activity?)

Anderson's grooving bass line clashes nicely as Iverson brings in the song's inspirational melody. A free-jazz breakdown follows before Iverson resumes the theme over wildness from the rhythm section.

7. Radiohead: "Karma Police" (Exit Music: Songs with Radio Heads)

Soft brush strokes from King lay a delicate setting for the trio's homage to Radiohead. After some loose rhythms under the main melody, the song gets huge when the piano returns with Thom Yorke's "for a minute there…I lost myself" vocal theme. Iverson also handles the original's walking bass line while King plays freeform beats.

8. Rush: "Tom Sawyer" (Prog)

The poster child for radio-friendly prog rock, "Tom Sawyer" gets one of the most "authentic" replications from The Bad Plus. Iverson and Anderson trade off handling Geddy Lee's vocals on their respective instruments, but they can't hold out forever – like clockwork, the tune punches in an improvised break before resuming its course.

9. Burt Bacharach / Hal David: "This Guy's in Love With You" (Prog)

Faith No More also presented a live cover of this chart-topping Herb Alpert song, and though this can't quite compare to one with Mike Patton's emotive vocals, it's just as sensitive as both versions. Randomly, it closes with a quick reprise of the main rhythm from "Physical Cities," an original Bad Plus tune that comes earlier on Prog.

10. Neil Young: "Heart of Gold"

Without a released recording of Neil Young's classic hit, The Bad Plus saves "Heart of Gold" for concertgoers. It often begins with an abstract intro and ends with the three joining together for a harmonized a cappella chorus.

– Scott Morrow

The Bad Plus: www.thebadplus.com
Heads Up International: www.headsup.com