Kaki King “Communist Friends”

Kaki King had previously focused on instrumental compositions that showcased her chops as a guitarist, but more recently, she’s become more of an indie rock singer-songwriter. It’s a trade-off: She’s a lot more accessible now, but less distinct. She’s still a remarkable guitarist and the songs all come out of her skill with that instrument, but the songs rely on her voice, which is fine but not as flashy or commanding. Junior, her latest and most vocal-centric release to date, is confident yet slightly tentative — you get the sense that she’s exploring and experimenting, but she knows what she’s doing. “Communist Friends” is a very well-written piece, basically a slicked-up version of a strain of indie rock that is familiar but has no genre name as far as I know — Pacific Northwest guitar-centric indie, I guess. It’s a fragile, paranoid song, understated in style compared to much of her previous work, but bold in a way she’s never been. She sings out, she sounds betrayed and confused. The climax is strong, but it pretty much ends on a sigh.

Buy it from Amazon.

The New Pornographers “Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk”

I think of “Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk” as being a showcase for Kathryn Calder, though her voice is shadowed by Carl Newman almost the entire way. She’s the one who sings out, the one who matches the infatuated tone of the music as Newman gives weight to its more cynical and ambivalent sentiments. It’s hard to tell what to make of the feelings here. There’s a fondness and sweetness to the song, but also a lot of emotional distance stemming from the awareness that every coupling is arbitrary and all nostalgia is at least somewhat removed from reality. The mixed emotions carry over to the arrangement, which is mostly quite perky, but is full of counterpoint parts that are like a blissful grin transforming into confused grimace. The song is both cheery and resigned, balancing out somewhere in the middle of the emotional spectrum as a shrug of “Okay, let’s just go with it.” It may all just be a “mistake on the part of nature,” but who are they to argue against what at least seems to be some grand design?

Buy it from Amazon.

The Game featuring Justin Timberlake and Pharrell “Ain’t No Doubt About It”

The Game is the headliner on this track, but that’s mostly a formality. There’s nothing wrong with his performance here, but if we’re being real, this song is all about Justin Timberlake’s hook and DJ Skee’s funky malfunctioning-Nintendo game keyboard loop. Pretty much any halfway-competent rapper could be on this track and sound good as long as they kept from distracting from the music’s casual grooviness. To cut right through all pretense of critical writing for a moment, I looooooove the keyboard part in this song. Love it, love it, love it. It’s automatic joy for me. It’s the sort of sound that zaps my brain and translates as blue skies, sunshine, and victory. Timberlake and Pharrell are old pros at working with this sort of track, they just amp up the endorphin levels. The Game is charming, he has his moments too. I just don’t focus in on them much because I find myself so lost in the music.

Buy music by the Game from Amazon.

Robyn “Cry When You Get Older”

Let’s focus in on one small part of this song. This is what Robyn sings at the start of the second verse:

back in suburbia, kids get high and make out on the train

but in this, incomprehensible boredom takes a hold again

There’s a wonderful tension in these two lines. The words are vivid and specific, yet vague and universal. She could be talking about anyone anywhere, or calling back to your own memories, and it’s the same point either way. The language is clunky and not particularly musical, but the syllables fall into the rhythm in a way that catches the ear better than something with a more typical meter. This works almost entirely because Robyn is a compelling pop singer with a strong instinct for evocative phrasing. The chorus and bridge of “Cry When You Get Older” are smooth and sugary, and those parts function so intuitively that our attention is placed mainly on the verses, where the rhythm is trickier and her words are more complicated. She calls back to Prince in the first verse, which is appropriate because she’s definitely taking cues from his mid-80s work here. The best Prince songs all have great choruses and hooks, but the most memorable lyrics and bits of phrasing are usually in the verses. He makes you hang on his every word, and though a lot of that has to do with natural charisma, it’s also to do with keeping those parts dynamic and just slightly off from expectations. Robyn has a lot of charisma too, but this success mainly comes down to her high level of craft. A lot of pop songs wash over us without any particular focal points, but this is constructed in such a way that we can’t help but get snagged by one hook or another.

Pre-order it from Amazon.

Sunglasses “Stand Fast”

It’s so perfect that a band that would write a song like this would be called Sunglasses. I can’t hear this guy sing without picturing some laid-back, vaguely macho alt-bro in shades. (Not to scare you off or insult him, but imagine the chillwave version of that guy from Smashmouth.) The arrangement is like a venn diagram of groovy coolness — touches of lounge and exotica, some vague hint of hip hop beatmaking, the twinkling hazy keyboard washes of Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion. There’s a bit of melancholy and wistfulness to this, but not enough to be particularly moving. You wouldn’t want it to be moving, you know? There’s a suggestion of depth, but it’s mostly just relaxing and fun.

Visit the Sunglasses page at Lefse Records.

Anni Rossi “Crushing Limbs”

Anni Rossi seems to work in extremes — she’s either slashing away at a viola and punctuating her vocal parts with wordless, orgasmic bleats, or limiting her expressive range within rigid arrangements that remind me of Piet Mondrian’s painted grids. “Crushing Limbs” falls into the latter category, more so than any other song she has released to date. It is ostensibly a perky pop song with a bouncy beat and analog synthesizers, but its words are grim and her vocal tone has a deliberate shell-shocked affect. The song is effective in conveying blank confusion and muted terror, but it makes me worry that Rossi could be pushing too far in this direction for her next record, and abandoning the wild streak that I found so compelling in her first EP. I would be very interested if she found some kind of aesthetic half-way point — a controlled performance dotted with moments of unhinged emoting.

Visit the Anni Rossi portion of the 4AD website.

Sabbath Assembly “Glory Hallelujah”

The first several times I listened to Sabbath Assembly, I had absolutely no context for what they were doing, and so I found myself wondering what their angle could be. The record is a mish-mash of gospel and psychedelic rock, and every track is concerned with the Apocalypse and the judgment of God. Some of it is a bit ponderous and grim, but for the most part, they seem to eagerly anticipate this devastation. “Glory Hallelujah,” the most groovy number on the record, welcomes the End of Days with an alarming cheeriness, as two women sing about Armageddon with a wholesome, sweet tone typically reserved for songs about crushes on dreamy boys. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Were they for real? Did they write this music? Is this an ironic pastiche?

As it turns out, the songs are for real, but the band is not. The album is a collection of previously unrecorded hymns written by and for the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a quasi-Satanist religious cult that thrived in the 1960s and ’70s. It’s kind of a museum piece, really — a matter of preserving the music for historical record. There is some degree of irony here, at least in that I am reasonably certain these performers are not members of the Process Church, but the execution is straightforward, and the vocals at least simulate the appropriate sentiment and level of engagement.

The context is fascinating, but the project is mainly successful on purely musical terms. The essence of Process Church theology is a faith in the reconciliation of Christ and Satan, and their music played that out in genre terms, blending Christian church music with the darker, sexier end of rock and roll at the time. Obviously many other artists have gone for the same thing, but the Apocalyptic obsession of the Process songs has a feeling very different from, say, Jesus Christ Superstar. The rhetoric is more extreme, the mood is more intense. I suppose it would have to be, given that it’s all about actively wishing for the end of the world as we know it.

Buy it from Amazon.

Dom “Jesus”

Knowing what you want is usually a lot more exciting than having no idea at all. “Jesus” is basically a song about being aware of your desires, and trying to wish them into reality. The list of demands are not incredibly specific…

1) Take me to a different place.

2) I want to feel it in my heart again.

3) Give me something to believe in.

4) I want a party in a basement.

…but it’s all in the realm of the possible. Maybe it’s about trying to experience something all over again, maybe it’s an idealized version of the life you already know. Either way, this song captures that feeling of imagining some perfect moment, and thinking that you’re right on the edge of it actually coming true.

Buy it from Burning Mill Records.

Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings “Money”

There’s a lot of ways to write about being broke, but I’m really into this take on it: Money as this lowlife asshole who bails on you whenever you need him to be around, and doesn’t do you all that much good when he does show up. Even still, you’re left feeling insecure and wanting — is it me, did I do something wrong? How can I get you to take me back? All the while, you’re just bitter about getting caught up in this mess. Capitalism as a terrible boyfriend, basically.

Buy it from Amazon.

The Mynabirds “What We Gained In The Fire”

The Mynabirds’ debut album opens with “What We Gained In The Fire,” a song that feels more like a climax than a beginning. Nevertheless, the sequencing makes perfect sense. Musically, it puts the most dramatic and immediately impressive track at the start of the record, and thematically, it’s about finding a new path following the emotional upheaval of a traumatic break-up. You can sense the shock and confusion from the start of the song, but as it progresses and builds toward its cathartic release, the feeling is calm and hopeful. The fear subsides, the anguish fades, and what remains in the end is the faith that it all happened for a reason: “What we lose in the fire, we gain in the flood.” The song provides a feeling of closure and resolution, but its ending is only just the beginning of a new story.

Buy it from Saddle Creek. So many options!

LCD Soundsystem “I Can Change”

James Murphy has excellent taste and builds his songs from top-notch reference points, but his genius is in the way he understands how those sounds function and resonate. When he appropriates elements from older records, it’s not some surface-level affectation or empty gesture of nostalgia. Instead, it’s all in the service of articulating an emotion and/or provoking a particular physical reaction. Although sometimes you can trace a sound on an LCD Soundsystem song to a specific record, more often the reference is more vague and intuitive — it’s the sound and feeling of a type of song, something in your cultural memory that may be a bit hazy but nonetheless stirs up precise sense memories and an odd cocktail of emotions.

“I Can Change” is a certain type of song, for sure. It’s the yearning, romantic ’80s new wave ballad, boppy but sentimental, lovesick in the glow of tacky neon colors. There are echoes of Bowie, Human League, Gary Numan, OMD, and a few dozen synthpop bands people barely remember, but more than anything, it’s James Murphy singing his own song about his own experience in his own voice. His songs may call back to other works, but Murphy is always present in his music, and his distinct character is a lot of what makes the music work — we need that recognizable person to identify with, it makes everything more powerful, pointed, and poignant. The style of “I Can Change” is flawless, but the substance of it is sublime. Like the best of LCD Soundsystem, it taps into the ineffable quality that makes songs great rather than just nodding in the general direction of better songs.

Pre-order it from Amazon.

Liars @ Bowery Ballroom 4/15/2010

A Visit From Drum / No Barrier Fun / Clear Island / I Still Can See An Outside World / We Fenced Other Houses With Bones Of Our Own / Scissor / The Overachievers / The Other Side Of Mt. Heart Attack / Scarecrows On A Killer Slant / Sailing To Byzantium / Here Comes All The People / Plaster Casts Of Everything / The Garden Was Crowded And Outside / Proud Evolution // Be Quiet Mt. Heart Attack! / Broken Witch

“Goodnight Everything” was cut from the printed setlist I saw and replaced with a song from their first album.

Liars “Proud Evolution”

Liars perform as a quintet these days, with two players from Fol Chen filling out the arrangements and leaving Angus Andrew to focus his energies on being a singer. He is an immensely charismatic frontman with a fascinating physicality — lanky and imposing, not especially graceful but very deliberate in his mannerisms. He has the energy of a bratty child, but the emotional depth of a grown man. He’s a great anchor for the band’s music, which is always rooted in that punky aggression, but typically stretches out beyond that into something more complex and beautiful in a sad, dark sort of way. The more violent, rocking songs like “Clear Island,” “The Overachievers,” “Scarecrows On A Killer Slant,” and “Plaster Casts Of Everything” were staggered through the set, giving space to the slow songs and more groove-oriented compositions. In either mode, drummer Julian Gross was the MVP, guiding the mood swings with his precise, urgent rhythms and setting the atmosphere with his beats. This is a remarkably gift and talented band hitting their stride — of all the bands I’ve ever seen, the two they most recalled were Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead in their intensity and the way they balanced out polished performance with a necessary degree of rawness and spontaneity.

Buy it from Amazon.

Robert Pollard “I Can See”

If you’ve heard enough of Robert Pollard’s music, the guitar parts in “I Can See” will immediately ring out with familiarity. You’ve heard this before, though not quite — it’s just this distinctly Pollard-y guitar style, both in the melody picked out on the verses, and the rhythm strummed on the chorus as the song shifts into more dramatic territory. The vocal tics are familiar too, but it comes together feeling more fresh than a great deal of his recent material. Pollard is prolific to the point that his output seems more rooted in a need to keep producing than a desire to communicate anything in particular, but he can still pull off a song like this, where an appealing tune and song structure connects with a gentle emotional epiphany that comes across as earnest and true.

Buy it from Amazon.

Animal Collective “Peacebone”

1) When I first heard “Peacebone” and the Strawberry Jam album, I hated it. HATED IT. It turned me off so intensely that I pretty much gave up on the band until Merriweather Post Pavilion came around and won me over. After I had spent a fair amount of time with that record, I went back over Strawberry Jam and fell for it. I’m not sure what it was that bothered me about the album when it came out, though I don’t think it was the sort of thing I wanted at the time. My memory is hazy, but I think I thought it was a crass and unsuccessful attempt to be commercial like the Flaming Lips. I don’t hear that now. I hear confidence in Avey Tare’s voice, a simple folk structure applied to oddball synthpop, and incredible keyboard tones that are like the musical equivalent of incredibly saturated colors.

2) In fairness to myself, the song is called “Peacebone.” Out of all the amazing lyrics it, they chose to title this thing “Peacebone.” It’s one of the worst titles for a great song ever.

3) After years of cherry-picking songs from their records but generally feeling ambivalent about their music, I bonded with the Animal Collective catalog last summer while my father was dying. It was the right music for the moment. Sometimes I identified with the lyrics and themes in a literal way, other times it was a more abstracted feeling. “Peacebone” became something I knew could make me happy, so I listened to it every day when I needed it most. (It’s the most-played song on my laptop’s iTunes library, to give you an idea.) I hadn’t been listening to Animal Collective much in the past few months, but last week I was down and remembered that I had not heard “Peacebone” in a while, so I put it on to see if it still worked. It did. We can sometimes build a function into music, and make it a trigger for memories, emotions, etc. It’s a good thing, if you do it right. It’s pretty easy to do this in a self-destructive way, obviously.

4) “Only the taste of your cooking can make me bow on the ground” is one of the sweetest lyrics I have ever heard. I think it resonates with me because it suggests so much gratitude and admiration, but also a specific kind of intimacy and creativity rarely remarked upon in pop music.

5) There are a lot of other brilliant lines in this: “A blowout does not mean I will have a good night” and “you find out you can’t ask a baby to cry” because despite what I wrote above, you can’t always command your emotions. “The other side of take-out is mildew on rice” because it’s such a vivid and surprising image. “You think I’ll carve a path through New York and be an artist, but are you anything?”, because it calls into question the ambitions and expectations that get projected upon us by others, and how easy it can be to confuse them with your actual motivations. “An obsession with the past is like a dead fly,” because it doesn’t make sense, but then again it totally does. It’s just like a dead fly.

Buy it from Amazon.

Fol Chen “In Ruins”

Fol Chen are basically a slick LA keyboard-centric band, but it’s kinda tricky to figure out exactly what they’re doing and where they’re coming from. They always seem to put themselves at a distance from “pop music” while reveling in it, giving off a vibe that while they love a particular strain of danceable pop music and technically are playing within that genre, they don’t actually feel as though they actually belong in the genre. While “Cable TV”, the stand-out track from the debut album, quoted Janet Jackson and was basically about indulging in simple — if not “guilty” — pleasures, “In Ruins” seems more at peace with being a pop song. The melody and rhythms are engaging, the production has a lot of color and dimension. Nevertheless, it’s still a bit reserved. I like what they’ve got going on here, but man, can you imagine what this could be if they went all the way?

Visit the Asthmatic Kitty site for more on Fol Chen.

Phosphorescent “It’s Hard To Be Humble (When You’re From Alabama)”

Ideal conditions for listening to “It’s Hard To Be Humble (When You’re From Alabama)”, a rollicking country rock song by Phosphorescent: You should be drunk and happy. You ought to be on your feet, too — dancing, sure, why not, but more likely just stumbling around. Gravity should feel a bit loose on you, but not enough that you just fall over. Wobbly is best. Something should be going on around you — a crowded bar, a party, something outdoors. Fireworks would be great, if you can pull that off. You should be a bit silly, and glad to be alive without really having any particular reason to feel that way.

Buy it from Amazon.

Power und Beauty “Lavender”

I’ve been doing this for a long time now so I could be forgetting something, but I’m pretty sure this is the first song I’ve ever covered on this site to have accordion as the lead instrument. Don’t let that put you off, though. Power und Beauty call back to German tradition and folklore, but their music is mostly rooted in the casual sweetness of Pacific Northwest DIY pop. Even with its peppy oompah, “Lavender” is fairly relaxed, emphasizing a woozy sentimentality and a gentle enthusiasm. At some points, the song seems to drift off course, as if blown along by some light springtime wind, but that’s all a part of its appealing lightness.

Get the EP for free from Peppermill Records.

Kings Go Forth “High On Your Love”

Kings Go Forth write and perform soul music in a way that is convincingly old school, but the sound of their recordings isn’t vintage. This is a good thing — the music doesn’t come out sounding like an overly fussy simulacrum of something from over 40 years ago, and the songs benefit from modern techniques and the influence of hip hop. This is most apparent in the way the bass and drums fit in the mix: Crisp hits and warm bass tone given plenty of space and volume, not only sample-ready, but sounding as if it could already be the handiwork of a DJ. Rather than simply propping up the chords and vocal parts with a backbeat, the rhythm section here gives the tune shape and dimension, so when the harmonies cascade, you get the full intensity of the melody and the sweetness of the sentiment.

Buy it from Amazon.

Das Racist “Shorty Said (Gordon Voidwell Remix)”

It’s a shame that these guys are so often dismissed as “joke rap.” Yeah, they’re funny, but so is a lot of rap. Not everyone is so good with pointed irony, or writing slippery, witty, danceable pop songs about race and pop culture. “Shorty Said” is basically about people trying to get a handle on their other-ness, and attempting to place them in the context of a pop culture with scattered representations of minorities. It’s not an angry song — to a large extent, it’s just them being happy to get with these well-meaning but sorta clueless girls — but it’s definitely something designed to make the listener feel slightly self-conscious.

Get the new mixtape for free from Nah Right.

Laura Marling “Alpha Shallows”

Nearly every review of Laura Marling’s second album comments on her youth, which could be considered hacky, but it’s ultimately crucial in understanding what she has accomplished. She is 20 now, and was in her late teens when she wrote these songs, and yet the maturity and sophistication of this music comes across like the work of a veteran of twice her age. It’s not simply that her songs tend to be fairly dour and bleak — that’s a default tone for very many young artists who wish to be taken seriously — but in that she expresses herself with such understated precision and emotional perspective. At times she’s a bit too measured and polite, though this is to be expected of artists working in the folk genre. She’s at her best, though, when she focuses her weariness into a nearly religious intensity. (Pagan, to be specific.) “Alpha Shallows” builds from a solemn, simple British folk song to something more yearning, and climaxes with a cathartic swell of vocal harmony. The conclusion feels optimistic, if not outright triumphant. It’s not cheap or sentimental, either — it truly seems like something that was hard-earned.

Buy it from Amazon.