July/August
July 2. Vijay Iyer Trio: Accelerando.
Turning out roughly an album a year means that Iyer usually gets to include a
few choice covers each time. This time, FlyLo’s “MmmHmm” (!) and MJ’s “Human
Nature” get Iyer’s oblique treatment, along with remakes of Sir Duke, Herbie
Nichols, and others. The originals are grandly expansive despite their
relatively short runtimes, yet they retain the distance and complex opacity of
Iyer’s best song-puzzles. But Accelerando
is above all a groove affair; and the interplay of the trio consistently demands
more attention than the compositions themselves.
July 4. Laurel Halo: Quarantine.
An elusive, alluring voice undergirded and, perhaps, overdetermined by hazy
synth washes and woozy indie-electro and tribal-sounding beats. The album
cover, a surreal and disturbing image that looks ripped from a particularly
gruesome manga, perfectly evokes the disoriented woundedness and
science-fictional neuroses of the songs themselves. What we hear on this album
is a rare instance of an artist emerging self-conscious enough to make
un-self-conscious music, living in and speaking honestly about the concealed
contradictions of our violent, damaged life in advanced capitalism. From here,
as someone once said, we go sublime.
July 4. Lapalux: When You’re Gone. A downcast, depressive
mini-LP that foregrounds the substantial influence Burial and, more recently,
James Blake have had on the Brainfeeder roster. For such forward-thinking music
to bring to me so clearly the experience of nostalgia is a contradiction I’ll
just have to learn to live with. “Gutter Glitter” and “Gone” are particularly
eyebrow-raising.
July 6. Mount Eerie: Clear
Moon. Phil Elverum’s musings on nature have shifted over his career from
the earlier Microphones albums that offered wide-eyed paeans to earth and water
and fire to his more recent releases, in which, still enraptured, he comes to
appreciate the raw, destructive power of nature as embodied by those same
classical elements. Clear Moon
(forthcoming sequel: Ocean Roar)
naturally shares a fair amount of intertext with previous releases, especially
since he’s still inhabiting the “raw impermanence” (key lyrical phrase) mode of
Wind’s Poem.
July 30. The Walkmen: Heaven. OK, I admit it: the main reason
I listened to this album is because Laszlo Krasznahorkai said he’d been
listening to it. After listening to this and then turning toward a couple of
their previous albums, it seems to me that Heaven
is one of their lighter works, capturing as it does the band trying to do the
Fleet Foxes thing (the album even features that band’s lead singer on a few
tracks).
July 31. Yosi Horikawa: Wandering. Here is an electronic
composer whose impeccable sense of rhythm is matched by equally important
senses of humor, harmony, and aesthetics. Wandering
is an intriguing and, in the right conditions, transfixing collage of beats and
found sounds, playfully arranged into four intelligent and (here’s the thing) distinct and memorable compositions. Its 18 minutes are far too brief, so I
attached “Desert” and “Passed By” from this year’s Layer Forest 2 comp, the gorgeous remix of Uma’s “Drop Your Soul,”
and, why not, 2009’s jazzier mini-LP Touch
for the perfect length.
August 1. Ty Segall: Hair
(with White Fence) and Slaughterhouse.
Of the two releases curated by Segall this year, Slaughterhouse (credited to the Ty Segall Band—and boy does having
a band make a difference) contains the best songs and performances, along with,
for good measure, a hilarious, self-destructing cover of “Diddy Wah Diddy”
(“Fuck this fucking song! I don’t know what we’re doing!”), and a gripping
10-minute conclusion of amplifier worship called “Fuzz War.” Total death drive
going on there. On Hair, Segall lets down his, erm, hair, and
indulges in a few somewhat psychedelic, definitely druggy songs with White
Fence. [MARGINALIA, August 1: A third album (!), completely solo this time, Twins, is projected for later this year.
Apparently it’s going to be the logical continuation of last year’s Goodbye Bread, which I found much less
interesting than these two.]
August 7. Ryat: Totem.
A fairly nondescript piece of multi-instrumentalist, experimental electronica
in the vein of James Blake. The voice and lyrics, which might at first appear
to be the compositional core, are inconsequential and often self-sampled, so they
make much less of an impact than the mix of skippy beats and live
instrumentation.
August 12. Himuro Yoshiteru: Our Turn, Anytime. A whimsical
smorgasbord of gyrating ideas in various states of generic collision, with jazz
inflected IDM like “Night Shift” hardly containing itself before spiraling into
the jumbled cartridge aesthetic of tracks like “Bending Out.” Himuro’s parade
of masks ensures that the collection of songs does not cohere as an album,
though Our Turn stands out as one of
the more exuberant electronic releases of 2012.
August 13. Dan Deacon: America. Let this be cause to pause for
thought: On the surface, Dan Deacon’s America
of 2012 would appear to have little in common with John Fahey’s America from way back in 1971—beyond, of
course, purporting to represent the cultural contradictions of the country in a
given historical moment in a predominantly instrumental format. But just as
Fahey’s album takes its cue from Mark 1:15 (perhaps the paradigmatic
apocalyptic announcement of early Christian literature), so does Deacon’s work
constantly adopt the apocalyptic mode of signification, albeit in a more openly
celebratory way. This is certainly the case in the 4-part suite that closes
Deacon’s album, one of his finest compositions (especially considered next to
the less enthralling first half of the album).
August 13. Cicada: Let’s Go. A too-brief (but not
fragmentary) collection of nine delicate post-rock, post-classical,
post-whatever compositions by a piano-based, all-female group from Taiwan.
Tonally and compositionally mature, the precedent would seem to be the
ruminative, abstractly melodic minimalist chamber folk music of the Penguin
Café Orchestra. This is some truly lovely stuff that deserves to be heard by
way more people than who will hear it this year.
August 15. Dirty Projectors: Swing Low Magellan. The occasionally
beautiful vocal harmonies help to obscure the more general climate of an
exhausted imagination.
August 15. Zammuto: Zammuto. Zammuto, zammuto of the
zammuto-zammuto Zammuto, zammutoes this zammuto.
August 17. Actress: RIP. Electronic music with an essential
layer or two stripped away, signifying not so much gentleness or
minimalism-in-practice—much less “R&B concrete,” a clever discursive
gesture at most—but a fragmentary, disintegrated clamor.
August 17. Saint Etienne: Words and Music by Saint Etienne. From
the opening monologue to the last call of “Haunted Jukebox,” Saint Etienne’s
first substantial work since 2005 is a love letter to music, set to music. Très
nostalgique, oui, but somehow the almost total lack of irony makes the album
that much more compelling and endearing.
August 20. Spoek Mathambo: Father Creeper. The natural counterpoint
of the escapist electro-hip-hop beats and the throwaway lyrics that address the
luxurious (decadent) life of a somewhat famous music star is a second, more
painful and articulate set of music and lyrics that bears witness to a haunted
soul and a body inscribed by the horror of apartheid and poverty. The latter
gives the necessary historical grounding to the former, while the former
probably has to be there to ensure that someone will listen.
