September 1. Frank Ocean: Channel Orange. The most
overrated act since, what, Radiohead?
September 3. Aaron Novik: Secret of Secrets. One of the more
abrasive works of Jewish mysticism, this avant-garde jazz album, inflected with
Mid-Eastern tones and industrial textures, is the most personal work yet from
Aaron Novik, and it offers a bracing glimpse of the musical discourse of the current
Bay-area improve scene. Despite the mystical concept, however, the influence of
the decidedly non-metaphysical claustrophobia of John Zorn (credited as
executive producer) is not to be underestimated in shaping Novik’s vision, nor
is the guitar work of the great Fred Frith, whose playing elevates several key
tracks.
September 3. Thee Oh Sees: Putrifiers II. Well, it lacks the
sustained manic brilliance of Thee Oh Sees’ best work (namely last year’s Carrion Crawler/The Dream), and unfortunately,
Dwyer and co. are not the consummate musicians or composers to generate a worthwhile
full-length album without resorting to that singular monomaniacal bliss.
September 5. Mike Reed’s People, Places, and Things: Clean on the Corner. No longer content
to bear witness to obscurities from the archives of Chicago jazz, Mike Reed’s
fourth quartet recording moves from reconstructive historical scholarship qua jazz to the mimetic embrace of jazz
composition itself. However, the historical density of these recordings is beyond
reproach. In particular, the mixture of brooding, melancholy cuts (e.g.,
“December?”) and the more playful tunes (e.g., “Sharon”) recalls the ambiguous
spirit of early Ornette Coleman.
September 5. Tatsuro Kojima: 16g. A gorgeous minimalist articulation of grief and wonder, with
tracks like “Out Noise” and “Composition6” offering miniaturizations of your
lost childhood so fragile that they might dissolve from the heat of your breath
like paper-thin sheets of ice. The work practically coins a new emotional range
for minimalist electronic music while simultaneously redefining what is
possible for composers working with found sound.
September 7. Anders Jormin: Ad Lucem. A dark, moving work of vocal jazz in which almost all the
lyrics are sung, get this, in Latin. Though this sounds like your paradigmatic Bad
Idea, a reaction perhaps vindicated when considering previous attempts at
Latin-language song-cycles in popular music (see, e.g., the poorly aged Mass in F Minor by the Electric Prunes),
the vocals serve to elevate the surroundings, bridging, too, the more reserved,
opaque pieces with the less restrained, abstract improvisational pieces. The
intriguing synthesis results in one of the most enigmatic jazz albums of the
year.
September 7. Darius Jones Quartet: Book of Mae’bul (Another Kind of Sunrise). Darius Jones, who over
the course of a trilogy of albums and various collaborations has defined
himself as one of the most important and versatile voices in formal jazz, has
concocted his greatest musical statement yet, a flowing and intricately
composed suite that both exploits and twists free of the crystalline structures
that have come to define (and confine) the genre. The tones and melodies
communicate earthiness not aloofness, immanence not transcendence.
September 10. Animal Collective: Centipede Hz. The only thing left for them to do now is learn how
to play their instruments. Lord knows they’ve reached the terminal point in the
evolution of their sound.
September 10. Louis Sclavis Atlas Trio: Sources. This percussion-less collaboration between Louis Sclavis
(clarinets), Benjamin Moussay (keys), and Gilles Coronado (elec. guitar) is intense,
angular stuff, slipping in and out of the Cartesian coordinate grid with
determined ease and recalling Blake’s oft-dropped phrase “frightful symmetry.”
Imagine a team of synchronized swimmers improvising a new routine that also
included high wire antics and you will have a rough idea of what this recording
sounds like.
September 13. John Berman & His Gang: There Now. Like a nervous bird, the band
flits back and forth between a skintight jazz vocabulary indebted to 78s from
the 20s and 30s and more expressionistic flights of fancy, using five classic
compositions and three of Berman’s own as points of departure. One of the most
playful and good-humored jazz albums of the year is also one of the year’s
best—it doesn’t take itself too seriously yet never sacrifices musicality or
virtuosity. Consider “Liza,” which begins as a morbid Dixieland melody before
mutating into something truly inspirational, and the gripping rupture of “I’ve
Found New Baby,” and most of all the poetry of “Cloudy,” in which, as in
several tracks on the album, the brass and woodwinds form such an opaque cloud
of delicious energy that Jason Adasiewicz’s vibes swoop in to steal the show.
September 15. Tim Berne: Snakeoil.
Berne’s debut-as-leader for ECM is almost certainly one of the finest releases
of the upstanding label, whose preference for slow-burning jazz poses an
excellent challenge to what we have come to think of as the Berne aesthetic.
The longer tracks serpentine their way through Berne’s odd directives and
bending, bleeding time signatures, with the players scattering and retracting
and folding their individual passages into and under one another like world
class origamists at work. Berne’s sidemen indeed carry plenty of the weight:
Matt Mitchell’s piano, Oscar Noreiga’s slithering clarinets, and especially
Ches Smith’s tone-perfect percussion perspicaciously bring Berne’s vertiginous compositional
dares to life.
September 17. Noah Bernstein: Six. Bernstein, saxophonist for tUnE-yArDs, generated the money for
this project through Kickstarter, but Six
is much more than a mere vanity project or hesitant toe-dip into jazz
waters. Bernstein is a consummate jazz musician, and while there is nothing
here that hasn’t been done before, it’s worth remarking that there’s nothing
here that isn’t worth hearing, either.
September 17. Jens Lekman: I Know What Love Isn’t. If I say that the preponderance of live
instrumentation and the conceptual angle serve to humanize Jens, I don’t really
mean it in a complimentary way.
September 19. Bob Mould: Silver
Age. Not a comeback, no, but a smoothed-out, overproduced pop/rock with
boring autobiographical contours. It was probably a mistake to release such a
mediocre album the same year as the fine reissues of the Sugar albums, which
together, as I am sure you are tired of hearing, constitute Mould’s best
post-Hüsker Dü work.
September 19. Bob Dylan: Tempest.
This album gets off to a mighty slow start with four off-the-cuff love songs
that sound like leftovers from the already slight Together Through Life, and it finishes with an unremarkable eulogy of
John Lennon that is about as obvious as George Harrison’s “All Those Years Ago”
and a few decades late (suggesting to me that it’s been sitting in a box in
Dylan’s attic for a while). The song about the Titanic is not, as some have
suggested, an apocalyptic anatomy of destruction and ruin or a sublimated rumination of socio-cultural
disintegration, though it is one of his more coherent attempts at narrative.
The real stars of this set are the middle songs: the hypnotic ballad “Tin Angel” and
haunting “Scarlet Town”; the bitter “Pay in Blood” and the satirical “Early
Roman Kings.” But then, is there any use in writing this? What can I say about
the New Dylan Album that 500 music critics haven’t already said?
September 22. Robert Glasper: Black Radio. A fairly groovy triangulation of modern jazz, hip hop,
and soul music, rehearsing with confidence the type of trans-generic articulations
that have already been occurring since the 80s.
September 22. Woods: Bend
Beyond. Another year, another album of rustic Amerindie from Woods; whereas
last year’s passable Sun and Shade was
loose and jammy, Bend Beyond focuses
on songcraft—which, sorry to say, doesn’t really play to the band’s strengths.
