May-June
May 25. Beach House: Bloom.
Beach House’s beautiful slow-motion music would make the perfect soundtrack for
watching the earth slowly recede into the inky deepness of space. Bloom, album number 4 and by far the
most sophisticated, is their best yet, leading me to conclude that even if somnambulist
lead singer Victoria Legrand is responsible for much of the band’s mystique,
it’s really the gauzy, haunting, but imminently melodious musical beauty that
allows the album to coalesce into a singular, perfectly distilled vision.
June 2. Earth: Angels
of Darkness, Demons of Light II. In five meandering, slow-motion
instrumentals, the guitar, bass, cello, and very light percussion search
for—search for but are necessarily incapable of finding—the silence of empty
space, though what the four players ultimately settle for, a kind of subdued
but uneasy melodicism, is reminiscent of the Dirty Three, if the Dirty Three
were to play a session on many, many barbiturates.
June 10. Battles: Dross
Glop. Worth-hearing remixes of Battles’ second album, but strictly supplemental.
June 10. Off!: Off!
Though sixteen start-stop-start hardcore punk songs in as many minutes (actual
runtime: 15 minutes, 44 seconds) doesn’t add up to an “album” using even the
loosest definition of the word, the short length is perhaps the band’s wisest
artistic decision. [MARGINALIA, June 11: After attempting to listen to 2010’s First Four EPs and this new one in a
single sitting, I can safely say that spending much more than 15
minutes with these increasingly indistinguishable rants takes away from the
novelty of four middle-aged guys who simply refuse to mellow.]
June 11. Julia Holter: Ekstasis.
Though challenging and essentially esoteric, this album, Holter’s second, is an
arresting and intellectually invigorating artistic triumph. Ekstasis is a devastatingly great work,
indeed a masterpiece, that more than lives up to the incredible standard set by
Holter’s debut, Tragedy, with which
it shares its arduous perfectionism, innovative construction of instrumental
and vocal passages, and, of course, “Goddess Eyes” (now expanded and divided
into two parts). Of the two albums, Ekstasis
is more immediately accessible due to a newfound (but by no means
“conventional”) emphasis on lyricism and melodicism, showcased especially in the
overlapping vocal arrangements of the album opener “Marienbad” and “Für Felix.”
Holter’s mastery of sonics is always at work, particularly in the instrumental
coda of “Boy in the Moon” and the unconventional, jazz-influenced structure of
the nine-minute finale, “This Is Ekstasis.” This is one of my favorite albums
of the last 5 or 10 years, even though it’s way too cool to care about how much
I love it: “I can see you but my eyes are not allowed to cry,” she sings
through a vocoder on “Goddess Eyes.”
June 17. Japandroids: Celebration Rock. If it is not
remembered for the music, this album will surely find a place in the annals of
Perfectly-Named Albums, at least. The first and last sounds you hear on the
album are firecrackers popping and hissing in the starlight, and in between
these apt bookends are eight firecrackers of a different, musical kind:
orgiastic bombast of drum and guitar, accompanied by streams of equally
bombastic Springsteenian anti-poetry that celebrates everything worth
celebrating about the dumb simplicity of youth.
June 18. Killer Mike: R.A.P.
Music. Make it stop make it stop make it stop make it st [MARGINALIA, June
18: Aborted listen, switched to new solo album by EL-P.]
June 18. EL-P: Cancer
for Cure. Unmellowed and never one with a particular knack for subtlety,
EL-P’s third proper solo album is a relentless, invasive, and eviscerating
49-minute slab of angst and outrage. The lyrics, some of EL-P’s most painfully
direct, evoke an American politician undergoing psychoanalysis. As always, his
scorching approach leaves the listener nary a chance to catch her breath,
making even this, one of his shortest works, wearying.
June 19. Spiritualized: Sweet
Heart Sweet Light. “Hey Jane” is probably a career highlight—it’s at least
a good abstract for everything Spiritualized do, for better and worse. It’s not
just a re-write of “Sweet Jane” or “Hey Jude” but a third song, somewhere
between and below them, where Jason Pierce, the loving thief, has etched out a
living.
June 29. The Tallest Man on Earth: There’s No Leaving Now. In which the American-sounding Swede, now
married and, apparently, quite content trades in his trademark intensity and
intimacy for a more relaxed, collaborative sounding album. But this description
is misleading, imprecise: the Erstwhile Tallest Man on Earth (now asked to
shrink and stand among others!) overdubs much of the added instruments this
time around, creating an album whose music, once so self-consciously insular,
tries (but fails) to capture the open, majestic freedom evoked by the lyrics.
So the result is, disjointedly, somewhere between what he’s moving toward and
where he’s already been. No wonder the mountains treat him like a stranger.
