#jeb bishop

Adult Jazz — So Sorry So Slow (Spare Thought)

Hard to believe it’s been 10 years since Adult Jazz’s stunning debut album, Gist Is. Perhaps the title of the Leeds band’s second full-length can be interpreted as an apology to those who have been eagerly awaiting a follow-up. So Sorry So Slow has not only been a long time coming, but also unfolds in fits and starts, as if unsure of the best way forward. It’s convulsive art-pop in the vein of Dirty Projectors or Bjork, with shades of hyper-pop in the digital sharpness of some of its edges, and chamber pop in the prominent employment of strings and horns. The album is most successful when the songs are straightforwardly beautiful, as in “Suffer One,” with its Owen Pallett string arrangement, and closer “Windfarm,” which has a pure, aching, almost New Age glow to it. Elsewhere, the overall lack of focus proves frustrating, and ultimately rather exhausting, across the album’s hour-long runtime. There’s plenty of beauty to be found, you just have to be patient.

Tim Clarke

Jeb Bishop / Tim Daisy / Mark Feldman — Begin, Again (Relay)

Begin, Again welcomes a couple of revenant Chicagoan musicians. Trombonist Jeb Bishop came back to the city after roughly ten years away, and violinist Mark Feldman after about 40. Drummer and vibraphonist  Tim Daisy invited them both to workshop some material in his home studio, and this session resulted. While both Bishop and Daisy wrote pieces, there’s an authentic ensemble feel; this music is very differently balanced than Daisy’s other chamber trio, Vox Arcana. Quick changes in direction and two-on-one dynamics abound, and it’s all enacted with a lightness that gives this music a feeling of floating even when the players are bearing down with serious intent.   

Bill Meyer

Cadence Weapon — Rollercoaster (MNRK)

The first thing you hear on Rollercoaster is a warm strum of acoustic guitar and the mellifluous voice of Bartees Strange. Then Canadian rapper/activist Rollie Pemberton AKA Cadence Weapon takes aim at technological saturation on his new LP Rollercoaster. The hectic production (there are 11 producer credits) mirrors the overwhelming chaos of social media flooded with bots, trolls, ads and misinformation overseen by the bloodless founder of Facebook and X’s fatuous head jester. Hip Hop, electro, RnB and manic hyperpop provide the backdrop to Pemberton’s diatribes which, although they occasionally have an odor of fish-filled barrels, say what needs saying with a maximum of snark and wit. Strange reappears periodically to offer a more organic musical and lyrical counterpoint to the hyperactivity. Pemberton has the awareness to embrace the paradox of working within the system he excoriates which adds an edge to his lyrics. If no-one is innocent and everyone’s throwing stones, Cadence Weapon is at least slinging the sharpest slates.

Andrew Forell  

The Children… — A Sudden Craving (Erototox Decodings)

Michael Wiener describes the music of The Children…, his long-running collaboration with Jim Coleman, Phil Puleo and others, as “gothic blues ambient.” At the height of my concern for tidy iTunes taxonomies, I would’ve been thrilled to think of that. And I’m not being glib: it is apt. One might be tempted to flip the last two words to get the more genre-y “Gothic Ambient Blues,” but Wiener, a Dusted contributor, has the order right. Their latest release, A Sudden Craving, may lead with a loose-hinged “gothic blues,” complete with eerie electronics, possessed voices, disturbed drums and alternately ghostly and shearing guitar chords, but it’s the way the band plays in the looming ambience, the engagement with the persistent presence of space – traced, occupied and ruptured – that ties together the album’s unsettling visions. In its haunted volatility, this can be a viscerally entertaining record and easy to get into, just make sure to carve out enough headroom.

Alex Johnson

Ciro Vitiello — The Island of Bouncy Memories (Haunter x Hundebliss)

Italian producer Ciro Vitiello’s work plays out like a reverie in the liminal space between dream and memory. Ethereal vocals and impressionist lyrics from Russian born singer Zimmy and Italian musician CRÆBABE float on warm wisps of synth and closely miked acoustic guitars. The instrumental tracks have a fractal, dislocated feel as Vitiello layers keyboards and sound effects of water, birds, child’s play and the odd menacing sounds one images hearing in the beast filled fairytale forests of childhood. The mood darkens further on “Sell Change of Heart for a Crocodile” or “Living in a Bouncy Castle” as scratchy disruptions like misfiring synapses interrupt the former as the keyboards swell crepuscular in the background. On the latter, titular castle seems to be deflating slowly, closing in on the occupants in slow motion, the air escaping in big wet bubbles. CRÆBABE closes the album steeped in a lonely haze of romantic and erotic nostalgia. Altogether as lovely and disquieting as the misty maze of memory can be.        

Andrew Forell

Coral Morphologic & Nick León — Projections of a Coral City (Balmat)

Miami duo Coral Morphologic (marine scientist Colin Foord and musician JD McKay) have worked together since 2007 producing projects that raise awareness of threats to marine biodiversity. Their new collaboration with producer Nick León soundtracks a multimedia installation which imagines the rising ocean reclaiming their city and enabling its colonization by resurgent coral reefs. The trio imbues this five-track suite with the tenacity and generative power of coral. An aqueous flow of somber tones dominates, but within them minute lifeforms take shape, coalesce, and spread with a quiet majesty that evokes the fragility of the reefs and inexorable process of survival and regrowth. Projections of a Coral City feels like a requiem, as much for Miami as the damage it has wrought on its environment. Poignant and hopeful it is a fitting tribute to the worlds we are in danger of losing for ever.    

Andrew Forell

Critical Defiance — The Search Won’t Fall (Unspeakable Axe)

Chilean thrash specialists Critical Defiance have delivered the metal record equivalent to a day at a theme park — absent all the waiting around in long lines. There are some long-ish tunes on The Search Won’t Fall (the title track runs close to eight minutes, and album closer “Critical Defiance” clocks in over nine and a half), but you never have to wait, for the next shift in rhythm, usually from fast to really, really fast; the next solo; the next crunching, athletically paced riff. Rollercoaster-scaled ascents and descents? Yep. Tilt-a-Whirl passages of dizzying axe-craft? Check. And the whole thing has the sort of so-bad-for-you-it’s-good sensibility of that extra-large bucket of French fries that came out of a huge bag of frozen shards of spuds, or the funnel cake you watched some tatted-up kid squeeze into a viscid pool of boiling oil of indeterminate age. It’s all hugely entertaining. This reviewer loves it when the songs get short; check out the sequence of “All the Powers” (44 seconds) to “Full Paranoia” (85 seconds) to “Margarita,” in which the record suddenly bottoms out into power-ballad mode. The move is delightfully goofy, a stolen kiss in the Tunnel of Love. It’s an open question if listening to The Search Won’t Fall has any sort of enduring significance, but when the ride is this much fun, who really cares?

Jonathan Shaw

Hässlig — Apex Predator (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Hässlig makes an unhealthily ugly sort of noise that the metal underground has insisted on calling “blackened punk” — a strangely provoking phrase that we seem to be stuck with. This specific iteration of the sound renders the relative kinship to punk neutral (wouldn’t “raw black metal” suffice here?), or perhaps a bit more worrisome. We should note that sole member DB also makes an especially bleak variety of depressive, sometimes doomy black metal under the name Negativa, the band logo of which does an irritating nod-and-wink in the direction of the swastika. So: A Spanish dude who records under a German-sounding band name and makes a record titled Apex Predator? Do we have to do some digging on the internet’s expanding communities of fash-hunting metal listeners? Likely we can take some consolation from Hässlig’s relationship with Sentient Ruin, a label that doesn’t fuck with NSBM nonsense. Unhappy song titles like “Psychopathic Triumph” and “Raping the Exoskeleton of Life” are likely meant to communicate equal-opportunity misanthropy: DB hates everybody. But “Slaves” and “Watch Them Hang” are a more unsavory combo, and it doesn’t help that DB claims Bone Awl and Ildjarn as influences. One wonders if associating the project with punk is a sort of semiotic gambit, hoping to temper some of the more troubling language DB uses (and maybe gets an edge-lord charge out of). It’s all becoming a bit tiresome. This reviewer really enjoys the music on Apex Predator, but by saying so, what is he validating?

Jonathan Shaw

Hour — Ease the Work (Dear Life)

Michael Cormier-O’Leary leads an ensemble of 10 through pensive instrumental reveries in this third full-length as Hour. You might know Cormier-O’Leary from the bands 2nd Grade or Friendship, or from running Dear Life Records. Others playing here have done time in various ambient, folk or mildly experimental outfits, Jason Calhoun, the synth player, in Paper Armies, Elizabeth Fuschia, a violinist in Footings and on the last Bonnie Prince Billy album, Peter Gill from 2nd Grade and drummer Peter McLaughlin from Dead Gowns among others. But the players meld in a very seamless, ego-less way, supporting brief, lovely bits of melody in guitar, strings, percussion, keyboards and, occasionally, electronic samples. The title track ambles nonchalantly, a skittery beat pacing tremulous washes of strings . “Dying of Laughter,” shades a little darker, pitched somewhere between conventional Americana and David Grubbs’ languid improvisations. None of these tracks last very long or stick very well in the limbic system, but Ease the Work is, regardless, a very pleasant way to spend three quarters of an hour.

Jennifer Kelly

Paul Lydon — Umvafin Loforð​un (Píanó)

Paul Lydon is an American who has lived in Iceland since the late 1980s. Throughout that time he’s kept up persistent but low-key recording under the names Blek Ink, Sanndreymi, Paul & Laura and most recently his own name. Over time, the music has changed from brittle, miniature songs to deliberately paced piano instrumentals. As befits a guy who lives his life within cultures, the music on Umvafin Loforð​un (translation: Wrapped Up In Promises) doesn’t slot easily into any genre. While spare, it lacks minimalism’s interest in repetition, and in its quiet way it remains to assertive to be ambient; and while his articulation brings to mind Mulatu Astatke and Alice Coltrane, there’s really no jazz or Ethiopian influence, just a similar respect for the qualities of individual notes. It does give the impression of reflection, as though he’s conversing with himself when he plays, but each piece has a lucidity which suggests that any spontaneous processes are tempered by some compositional pruning. It’s companionable stuff, at the service of those who could use some quiet company.

Bill Meyer

Mandy — Lawn Girl (Exploding in Sound)

Sugar pop melodies nestle into blistering onslaughts of fuzz guitar in this first solo outing from Melkbelly’s Miranda Winters, and maybe what’s interesting here is how a mature artist uses the basic rock and roll tools of her youth.For instance, though a new mom and well past the acne years, Winters casts a jaundiced eye on teenage love in “High School Boyfriend.”The song ends in a drum churning, guitar-busting, cheerleader shouting finale that kicks the whole experience to the curb.Sludgy “Forsythia,” by contrast, acknowledges the distance that Winters has travelled, the experiences she’s had, though that knowledge comes couched in muscular guitar blare.The one cover, of Jimmy Webb’s “I Am a Woman Now,” is acoustic and soft enough that you can hear Winters taking a sniffly breath, but also searing.“Now that I’m a woman, everything has changed,” she murmurs.The sentiment, maybe, but not so much the sound.

Jennifer Kelly

Orgöne — Chimera (3 Palms)

A chimera is a monster constructed of various parts—body of a lion, wings of an eagle, tail like a snake, etc.—and while by no means a monster, this latest LP from the West Coast soul collective Orgöne melds disparate threads into a slinky, funky groove. You can hear, for instance, futuristic fusion jazz, polyrhythmic Latin percussion, Afro-beat, way out soul positivity and psychedelic rock in these cuts, some instrumental, some with chanted vocals. An organ trembles with flickery vibrato, a bass slaps the off beats, a drum cadence saunters shambolically; it’s hot and cold at the same time. Blues-funky “Parasols,” blurts low-end and oozes chill, like Booker T & the MGs, but looser and more discursive. The groove rears up and you expect an old-style soul chorus—Charles Bradley maybe—but the work is done by the instruments, a nattering guitar and a flaring soaring keyboard. “Basilisk” twitches with wah wah and shudders with blasts of bass, not so far off from what the Budos Band does, but “Tula Muisi (Dance with Them)” adds torrid, Afro-beat style vocals. This stuff is fine on the home speakers, but likely much better in the room.

Jennifer Kelly

Polar Inertia — Environment Control (Northern Electronics)

There’s a lot of obscurity surrounding taciturn Parisian techno… artist? project? collective? Polar Inertia, but after a self-described “eight years of silence” they’ve reappeared with a full-length LP (a full hour, even) after previously only releasing EPs and live recordings. As with those EPs, there’s one track with a grim, foreboding spoken word accompaniment and if it puts one in mind of Annihilation at the South Pole, well, following it up with the brain-frying fuzz and throb of “Smothering Dreams” cashes that check immediately. The rest of the album ranges from beatless, dense noise (“Modeless Singularity”) to darkly insistent techno (“Arctic Singularity”) but all with enough of a shared vocabulary and similarly overwhelming, totalizing effect that it all lives up to the end of that opening monologue: “You will soon conceive what polar inertia is. What we do, at our scale, is environment control.”

Ian Mathers

Tomeka Reid / Isadora Edwards / Elisabeth Coudoux — Reid / Edwards / Coudoux (Relative Pitch)

This hour-long, completely improvised performance was captured in August 2021. The trio had played together a few days previously at the third iteration DARA Festival, a gathering of female string players organized by Biliana Voutchkova, so this was not a first encounter, but the trio’s interactions express a still a freshness that could come from players newly falling into a sympathetic union, or simply from the good vibes that tended to suffuse gatherings that post-vaccination, pre-Delta variant surge summer. Tomeka Reid (USA), Isadora Edwards (Chile/UK), and Elisabeth Coudoux (Germany) all play cello, and there’s sufficient consonance within the collective’s approach that time spent trying to figure out who’s who would be wasted. Rather, appreciate the spontaneous counterpoint, astute support, and uncluttered clarity of these four improvisations, which flow easily from rustling quietude to bright, bold cross-hatchings.

Bill Meyer

Sam Rubin — Bullet (Pleasure Tapes/Michi Tapes)

Two bullets, labeled “Bullet” and “Bullet 2” rip through the air on scuzzed-out guitar tone, like shoegaze but dirtier, as a rapturous chaos of drumming erupts and a noxious fog of noise envelopes high wistful vocals.You can taste the grit and sulfur in the air. Sam Rubin raises a lo-fi racket out of Kent, Ohio, letting factory effluents run through fragile melodies, corroding them, poisoning them and coaxing a poisoned beauty from the wreck. From the heart of Red America, Rubin launches “Trump,” a slow-motion, gut-shock of lumbering chords and feedback, but the best songs are about firearms.“Sniper Rifle” closes things out with Swans-ish clangor, guitar, drums, bass, all jumping on the downbeat, repeatedly, like a metal stamper gone amok in a post-apocalyptic heartland. Good stuff.

Jennifer Kelly

SAICOBAB — NRTYA (Thrill Jockey)

NRTYA by SAICOBAB

Japanese quartet SAICOBAB douses Indian raga in accelerant and showers it with sparks, creating an amorphous and fiery mix of traditional and contemporary sounds. Vocalist YoshimiO (Boredoms, OOIOO) both leads and chases the melodies proffered by sitarist Yoshida Daikiti. The two are engaged in a whirling quickstep (NRTYA is Sanskrit for “dance”) over the polyrhythmic pulsations of Motoyuki Hamamoto and Yojiro Tatekawa (Boredoms). The four musicians apply a hyperkinetic avant-rock slant to the traditionally placid raga format, emphasizing both rhythmic and melodic movement. YoshimiO’s extremely broad vocal range helps the music leap into the fourth dimension, and subtle electronic flourishes offer a glimpse into SAICOBAB’s futuristic worldview. With NRTYA, SAICOBAB challenges tradition, as the group’s infectious energy fractures the boundaries of both time and space.

Bryon Hayes

Alena Spanger — Fire Escape (Ruination)

Fire Escape by Alena Spanger

Alena Spanger’s voice is small, soft and very brave, as she ventures out of the shelter of prettiness into the wider world of dissonance and experiment. The singer made her first mark in Tiny Hazard, a Brooklyn art-music ensemble that similarly tested the boundaries of pop. Here in her debut solo album, she coos and hums and trills against a shifting background of baroque experiment; she lets us in, engagingly, into strange and wonderful places. “All that I Wanted,” for instance, pits a wild splatter-beat of tonal percussion, against a wispy pop anthem. “All I wanted is to dance with you,” she declares, in true diva pop style, against surging synths—but wait for it, the tune disintegrates into a soup of off-kilter fragments and spasmic beats. Spanger has some of Joanna Newsom’s wiry fragility, a way of infusing melody with intelligence and conflict, and she surrounds herself with Brooklyn avant-garde-ists, like Kalia Vandever on trombone in “My Feel,” Kitba’s Rebecca El-Saleh and harp and the critic Winston Cook-Wilson on keys and percussion. Ryan Weiner, who was also in Tiny Hazard, plays, engineers and mixes. But in the end, it comes down to one Alena Spanger, with the girlish voice and the voracious appetite for innovation. She can make a Satie reference sound like a sweet confessional ditty and a fire escape stand in for the soft, comforting edge of experiment.

Jennifer Kelly

Sunburned Hand of the Man — Nimbus (Three Lobed)

Nimbus by Sunburned Hand of the Man

Nimbus is Sunburned Hand of the Man at peak fidelity.Imagine Ken Kesey’s Furthur bus tuned up, cleaned up and given a fresh coat of DayGlo.The album also spans multiple iterations of the ever-mutating Sunburned line-up.Original member Phil Franklin returns after a multi-year hiatus, bringing his Franklin’s Mint songcraft with him; long-time associate Matt Krefting appears, offering a sinister spoken word monologue as the band writhes beneath.Poet and new Sunburned member Peter Gizzi unravels his verses over a pair of synth-heavy tunes: both the loping title track and the intense “Consider the Wound” benefit from his wry deadpan.The rest of the tracks are fare for those yearning for the Sunburned of yore, full of lysergic introspection and hedonistic grooves.Even at their cleanest, Sunburned Hand of the Man are weird and wild to the very core.     

Here’s a selection of things I’ve been paying attention to, or returning to, since the beginning of the COVID era:

Buddhist Chant: A Recorded Survey Of Actual Temple Rituals — (Lyrichord LLST 7118)

Two-LP set of recordings of chants from Buddhist temple services in Kyoto. Beautiful graphic design. I’m not sure what it means for me, in my living room in Boston, to listen to something like this so removed from its functional role in a completely different cultural setting. But I like to put the track “Chanting of Morning Services” on in the morning while having tea. The accelerating bell ringing at the beginning of that track always reminds me of the guitar at the beginning of “Liars Beware” by Richard Hell and the Voidoids.

Sonny Rollins/Don Cherry/Bob Cranshaw/Billy Higgins — Complete Live at the Village Gate 1962 (Solar)

Music from the year I was born — a minor fixation of mine. In a certain mood, I feel like you could raise the same question (see #1) about this. A project for the upcoming winter is to do some detailed side-by-side listening to this and the Miles Davis Live at the Plugged Nickel box. My sense right now is that the dramatic contrasts in this are more pronounced than in the Miles box. There’s something about both of them that makes me think of the musicians as dramatis personae and the music as a constantly unfolding stage production. For years I’ve been trying to find the key to emulating Don Cherry’s approach to soloing in this kind of context, but I don’t feel any closer to figuring it out. As Steve Lacy says about Cherry in Derek Bailey’s book Improvisation: “His playing was really free.”

Mia Dyberg Trio — “Ticket!” (Clean Feed)

Mia Dyberg and I played together as part of a group during an evening of improvisation in Berlin in late September 2019. I got this CD from her then and have been listening to it on and off since. I like it when people find a way to make shorter, focused tracks in this music (this one has 14 tracks), maybe because I am not good at that. I also like the sense of development over the course of this CD.

Assata Shakur — Assata: An Autobiography(Lawrence Hill Books)

The cops and FBI tried to do to Assata Shakur what they did to Fred Hampton: murder her for being a radical Black political activist. Fortunately they didn’t succeed. But this book is about much more than that – it’s a wonderfully written story of an American life from early childhood on. There’s focused, justified rage at the injustice of our racist society, but there is also a sense of hope, beauty, and even humor.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder — Berlin Alexanderplatz

A lockdown winter is a great time to catch up on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 14-part made-for-TV epic. The last episode is a mind-bending feature film all by itself.

Farida Amadou — 00:29:10:02 (19 mars productions)

00:29:10:02 by Farida Amadou

I got to see Belgian bass guitarist Farida Amadou play several sets in September 2019, at festivals in Antwerp and Mulhouse. Her recent solo release is raw and fascinating.

Tashi Dorji — Stateless (Drag City)

Stateless by Tashi Dorji

This is every bit as great as everyone is saying. If you’ll excuse the humblebrag, I’m proud to have helped put together the program of Dorji playing solo, followed by Paal Nilssen-Love’s Large Unit, for a show at King’s in Raleigh NC, when we were living down there a few years ago.

Werner Herzog — Herzog on Herzog: Conversations with Paul Cronin (Faber and Faber)

300 pages of interviews with the director. Some amazing stories and provocative thoughts about his craft (he dislikes being called an artist)

Eliot Cardinaux / Our Hearts as Thieves — “What the Wildflower Witnessed”

I met pianist/poet Eliot Cardinaux not long after moving to Boston. We did some playing together and, since he was living around the corner at the time, some good listening/talking sessions. I’ll confess that combining poetry and improvised music usually raises a red flag for me, which makes me admire all the more the strength of the solutions Eliot has found. I think his success at it comes down to the fact that his sense of how and when to deploy poetry in a musical situation is governed by his improviser’s sense of form, timing, and timbre. (His liner notes to Our Hearts as Thieves also address the question.)

Jeb Bishop / Alex Ward / Weasel Walter — Flayed (Ugexplode)

Flayed by Jeb Bishop / Alex Ward / Weasel Walter

You know a party is good if it carries on even though the organizer can’t show up. Bassist Damon Smith planned this encounter, which involved his long-term partner in intensity and chaos, drummer Weasel Walter; New England improvisational fellow traveler (at least until Smith moved to St. Louis a few months after this March, 2019 session) Jeb Bishop on trombone and electronics; and Alex Ward, a veteran of work with Derek Bailey and This Is Not This Heat, on guitar and clarinet. Since Walter has played with both of the other guys in and outside of the Flying Luttenbachers, when Smith had to drop out for scheduling reasons, he was confident that the trio could make something of both the opportunity to play and the space made available by the absent bass. He was right. Both the title and prevailing assumptions about Walter might set you up to expect a one-dimensional blowout, but there’s loads of listening and thoughtful, instant reacting taking place on each of the album’s eight, mostly pithy tracks. This music plays out like a combination of jujitsu and shuttle diplomacy, with players shifting between support and challenge, density and space, rapidity and reserve from second to second.

Bill Meyer  

 Cartel Madras — Age of the Goonda (Sub Pop)

Cartel Madras turns gangsta rap’s hyper-male, African-American-oriented bravado on its side, filtering the guns and blunts ethos through a female, queer, multicultural lens without diluting its violence in the least. Sisters Priya and Bhagya Ramesh, known as Contra and Eboshi, have lived in Calgary since childhood, but they immigrated from Chennai, India, once part of Madras, hence the name, hence the tricky scales and intricate, not-quite-Western rhythms of their rhymes. Age of the Goonda works in a spare, menacing way, dense, referential wordplay atop an undulating threat of sub-bass and the occasional spray of bullets.

“Goonda Gold,” celebrates cartoonish dominance, though with a South Asian twist. Little bits of Hindi harmonics decorate the bare architecture of synth bass sounds and cracking, stabbing percussion (augmented here by gunfire); the Cartel’s chant of “Gold on my neck I’m a Goonda/got guns in the air like a junta” puts a subcontinental spin on ghetto law. The clever-est word sprays come in “The Legend of Jalopeno Boiz,” where the duo references everything from Frost/Nixon to incel stereotypes, but the single “Lil Pump Type Beat,” is all hedonism, devious syncopation and sexual predation. Though wildly intersectional, these tracks make no concessions to soft, liberal ideas about how women/minorities/LGBTQ people wield power; they do it just like the men do, with guns. “Take off your top boy/somebody bring me my gun/that bag in the back of the jeep/you just a bitch on the run,” asserts one or the other sister in “Jumpscare.” What was that you were saying about women and nurture?

Jennifer Kelly

 CIA Debutante — The Landlord (Siltbreeze)

CIA Debutante-The Landlord by CIA Debutante

A new Siltbreeze record is a rare blessing nowadays. The label’s first release since 2018 comes from Paris duo CIA Debutante. The Landlord fits in nicely with the label’s storied '90s output, particularly the Shadow Ring. The electronics aren’t quite glitchy—they sound more like the batteries in a cheap toy dying. Still, CIA Debutante are savvy enough to avoid getting too clever with their sputtering, plodding, and whizzing, and they don’t go the easy route when layering incongruous sounds. There’s never the fatiguing sense that they rely on the same few tricks. It helps that their murky, paranoid vignettes are fully engrossing. CIA Debutante tap into something truly nightmarish on The Landlord, which is a rare accomplishment. Sure, plenty of music shoots for tense and creepy, but CIA Debutante have an exceptional gift for the uncanny, the kind of stuff that haunts you long after you’ve woken up and can no longer hope to grasp it. Ethan Milititsky

Decoherence — Ekpyrosis (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Ekpyrosis by Decoherence

Decoherence is a pretty good name for a band that locates itself in the liminal space between industrial music’s stomp and clangor and black metal’s astringent tumult. The band’s new LP (and first full length release) Ekpyrosis is at its best when its waves of distorted hiss, dissonant riffing and distant shrieks and growls threaten to rend the record to shreds. One imagines that if you found yourself in an aluminum ladder factory, amid the massive drills and extruding machines and metal presses and then removed your ear protectors, you’d hear something akin to this — especially if the place was possessed by demons of ill intent. It’s a well-crafted, ritualized chaos. The band is so insistent on a specific set of sounds and forms that the record’s long tracks tend to blur into one another. Which may be the point. Decoherence, indeed.

Jonathan Shaw

 Bertrand Denzler / CoÔ — Arc (Potlatch)

Arc is a two-part, album-length work by Bertrand Denzler, a Swiss-born, Paris-based saxophonist and composer. It is performed by CoÔ, a string septet led by double bassist Félicie Bazelaire. The ensemble’s composition is a sort of funhouse reflection of a string quartet, distorted towards breadth; it comprises one violin, two violas, one cello and three double basses. But there’s nothing comic about this music, which is quite beautiful in the same way as a slow winter sunset. Denzler’s method here involves the use of continuous sounds, but don’t call it drone. The players use both conventional and extended techniques to create a continually changing sequence of striated sounds. Naked scrapes and cavernous groans arc in formation, changing fairly frequently over the course of each piece. The result is immersive enough to let you get lost, but keep your ears and eyes open; you wouldn’t want to miss one moment of gradual transition. A note about circumstances — Potlatch, the label that released this CD, has slowed its production in recent years, and this is the only record it released in 2018. Apparently, the label isn’t wasting its time with unnecessary effort; Arc clears the necessity bar.

Bill Meyer

 Fujiya & Miyagi — Flashback (Impossible Objects of Desire)

One of the interesting things about Fujiya & Miyagi’s songwriting is that as the UK post-motorik outfit’s music becomes ever more focused and sleekly propulsive, frontman David Best has zeroed in on any number of little aspects of life disturb and upset the kind of cool pulse the band specializes in. Here it’s everything from violations of your “Personal Space,” the “Fear of Missing Out,” and nagging thoughts in the title track to the more political concerns of the closing lengthy workout of “Gammon” (which eventually, in one of the little touches that makes F&M’s music so addictive, settles on the “pure evil vibrating” of a dial-up modem). That doesn’t mean the band can no longer bust a groove just for the pure joy of it, as “Dying Swan Act” proves, but it’s the combination of those chops and the perceptive if increasingly jaundiced eye they turn on life that makes them such a unique and compelling act.

Ian Mathers

 Cate Le Bon & Bradford Cox — Myths 400 (Mexican Summer)

Myths 004 by Cate Le Bon & Bradford Cox

Intricate fancies turn just out of true in this pop-up collaboration between Cate Le Bon and Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox, the fourth in a series of joint EPs recorded under the auspices of Mexican Summer’s annual Marfa Myths festival (hence Myths 400). The two artists work in a skewed, peripheral vision take on artful pop, building interlocking boxes of percussion and whimsey in which fleeting glimpses of loveliness flit by. The song-i-est bit of Myths 400 is undoubtedly “Secretary,” a Weimar-decadent bit of mournful song hedged in clanks and clicks, strings and clarinets, and the odd combination of Le Bon’s pure art-song shiver and Cox’s less pristine, more grounded voice. Yet the rhythm-centered oddities are just as rewarding; resist the slap-bang fanciful-ness of growly-voiced, Cox-led “Fireman,” with Le Bon trilling off center arias in the margins at your own peril. “What Is She Wearing” bangs out disconsonant guitar tones in slightly off center patterns and tunings; it’s a wind-up toy’s existential crisis. Le Bon chants in a Middle European cadence, as the cut falls somewhere between early Michachu and a Kurt Weil song. It’s about the last thing you’d expect to emerge from the desert, eccentric, abstracted, playful and utterly urbane.

Jennifer Kelly

  Urs Leimgruber / Andreas Willers / Alvin Curran / Fabrizio Sperra—Rome-ing (Leo)

Urs Leimgruber has covered a lot of musical ground in a performing and recording career that spans over 45 years. The three musicians who join the Swiss saxophonist on this freely improvised encounter, which was recorded in Rome late in 2018, are well chosen to access aspects of that history and shape it into sound configurations that are quite present-focused. Quick, light-fingered, and restless, drummer Fabrizio Sperra keeps things in constant motion. Swiss guitarist Andreas Willers stirs chunks of almost rock-ish noise and sprinkles stinging, pure-toned notes into the mix that give the music heft without slowing it down. Alvin Curran, an American keyboardist and composer (and member of MEV), draws on classical more than jazz elements in his piano playing; there are moments where he stubbornly erects a structure that the other musicians must either inhabit or work around. But his sampler also enables him to inject the sounds of other places. Shifting between tenor and saxophones, Leimgruber drives quickly spiraling phrases through the open spaces and uses astringent, distressed tone-shards to suggest where there needs to be more space.

Bill Meyer

 The Master Musicians of Dyffryn Moor — Music for the National Health Service (Amgueddfa Llwch)

Music for the National Health Service by The Master Musicians of Dyffryn Moor

When I was a younger punk, I would sometimes take in the phenomenon of bands’ whose lyrical explanations would take longer to deliver than the playing of the actual songs. And while I haven’t seen this crop up much recently, I feel like that aesthetic is alive and well when I visit the Bandcamp page of The Master Musicians of Dyffryn Moor, which includes a terse essay about the dangers facing the NHS under the current British government. This new EP follows two excellent full-lengths, Cerddoriaeth Ddefodol Gogledd Sir Benfro (Ritual Music of North Pembrokeshire) and Contemporary Protest Music, which blend the “instrumental music can be politically charged” feel of Godspeed You! Black Emperor with the intricacy of Steve Reich’s Drumming. These two songs continue in that tradition — furiously played percussion with a heated political subtext — but add a few tweaks to the sound the group has already established. Specifically, there’s a stronger electronic element here: you could probably get a dancefloor moving if you cued up “A spell to protect the NHS from those who seek to destroy it.” Its opposite number, “A hex on those who seek to destroy the NHS,” is built around a steady pulse. You probably can’t dance as well to that, but given the potential psychic damage incurred by dancing to a hex, would you actually want to?

Tobias Carroll 

 Overground Collective — Super Mario (Babel Label)

SUPER MARIO by OverGround Collective

The Overground Collective is a pan-European big band that is based in London and led by Paulo Duarte, a Portuguese guitarist/composer currently based in Scandinavia. If that sounds like a bit to get your head around, you probably need only wait a while to see what Boris’s Britain does to the freedoms of movement and thought necessary for such an endeavor to get off the ground. For the rest of us, it’s a nice illustration of why such fluidity is part of a better way. Duarte spent some time in England studying the ways of various improvisers, and recruited 17 to join him in realizing a set of compositions designed expressly for them. Certain of the participants come from free jazz (Julie Kjaer, Rachel Musson) or cross-genre experimentation (Yazz Ahmed), and you can hear the influence of such approaches in a few moments of freefall and adventurously conceived solos. But these elements fit into a structure that fits squarely in the tradition. Duarte sets tunes you could hum on grooves that’ll make you tap your feet, albeit quickly enough to annoy your neighbor if the floorboards happen to transmit your amateur approximation of his beats, and dresses them up in arrangements that could speak to a person who thinks that jazz’s lineage is a straight line from Duke Ellington to Maria Schneider. Music like this is a reproach to those who think that differences can’t be complimentary parts of a whole.

Bill Meyer

  Pictish Trail — Thumb World (Fire)

Thumb World by Pictish Trail

Folktronica from the tiny island of Eigg in the Hebrides, this latest album by Pictish Trail (Johnny Lynch) demonstrates the aesthetic value of both isolation and connection. Per isolation: Lynch lives on a windblown island with fewer than 100 other people. But as for connection, he is intimately involved in a northerly folk scene through King Creosote’s Fence Records and surrounded by local musicians. There aren’t that many folks on Eigg, but almost everybody plays an instrument. That kind of environment allows space for eccentricity and practice, which shows up on these expansive, dance-inflected, folk-shadowed cuts. Pictish Trail enlarges his subtle, personal songs with enveloping arrangements of rock sounds and club electronics; Kim Moore contributes some string arrangements and Alex Thomas of Squarepusher sits in on drums. “Double Sided” has the lilt and ramble of Three EPs Beta Band (Lynch has been out touring with Steve Mason lately), while gorgeous, glistening “Slow Memories” has the glitch, glow and aura of early Tunng. Thumb World demonstrates that music can be solitary without being lonely, introspective without self-absorbation. “You’re my solitude/I’m never so alone by myself,” sings Lynch, on the surprisingly rock-guitared “Bad Algebra,” underlining the fact that too many people (or the wrong people) can be isolating, and a few can provide the space for originality and experiment.

Jennifer Kelly

Pinkish Black — Concept Unification (Relapse)

Texas psych sludge prog metal duo Pinkish Black has been quiet for a little while; their last record, 2015’s Bottom of the Morning, was such a compact and potent summation of the miasmic bad vibes that Daron Beck (synthesizers, voice) and Jon Teague (drums) can summon up seemingly at will. No more than a minute into the opening title track of their fourth record you get a strong reminder of just that atmosphere; you might as well be in a haunted castle during the full moon. The closing, lengthy “Next Solution” also offers a reminder of what you might call classic Pinkish Black, but it’s the four songs in between that show Beck and Teague working to make sure there is always room to expand their dark palette. Whether it’s the relatively straightforward, thrashy “Until” or the prettily drifting “Inanimatronic” the results are always interesting. Bottom of the Morning remains the best introduction for now to this duo’s indelible sound, but once you’re a fan Concept Unification makes for a strong and promising follow-up.  

Ian Mathers

  Alexa Rose—Medicine for Living (Big Legal Mess)

“How I wish I were kinder, how I wish I were patient, I could learn all the songs on the gospel station,” trills Alexa Rose in a water pure soprano touched with shivery vibrato as she navigates the twists and corners of the title track from her lovely debut album. The Virginia-born, Memphis-based songwriter has a native’s familiarity with gospel, country and folk blues, but a fresh, sparkling delivery that makes these well-worn forms sound like she just thought of them. A lilting, effortless voice elicits spare melancholy sparked with hope and a crack band of Americana pros in tow – Will Sexton on guitar, George Sluppick playing drums and Mark Edgard Stuart on bass — fill out the songs without a bit of bloat. “Tried and True” enlists a cajun squeeze box and skittering banjo into Rose’s smart, unsentimental songcraft; country teems with strong women disappointed by love, but Alexa Rose is clear-eyed and strong enough to kick its ass without breaking meter. Gorgeous and empowered stuff.

Jennifer Kelly

Sartegos — O Sangue da Noite (I, Voidhanger)

O Sangue da Noite by SARTEGOS

This new release by Sartegos isn’t so much blackened death metal as it is a death metal record that morphs its shape and sound into black metal. The buzzy crunch and acrobatic soloing of opener “Sangue e Noite” gradually give way to leaner, meaner riffs, and by the midpoint of fourth track “Solpor dos Mistérios,” the record has fully taken on the properties of merciless, muscular continental black metal. The record may engage with various metal subgenres, but O Sangue da Noite is held together by Sartegos’s focus on Galician nationalist themes and celebrations of its landscape. The band is named for a miniscule rural hamlet in Galicia, and we are told that all lyrics are delivered in the region’s native dialect. Black metal and ardent nationalism don’t always make for the happiest of combinations. For those of us lacking fluency in the language, it’s tough to know what ideological charge the lyrics carry. And Galician regional politics feature a panoply of leftist and right wing factions, all with their own fiery arguments for the region’s autonomy. What sort of blood? Who sings in the night? Hard to say. But the music’s pretty good.

Jonathan Shaw

 Seablite – Grass Stains and Novocaine (Emotional Response)

Bay Area quartet Seablite’s debut album navigates the fuzzy end of indie pop with aplomb. Vocalists Lauren Matsui (guitar) and Galine Tumasyan (bass) are joined by drummer Andy Pastalaniec and ex-Wax Idol Jen Mundy on lead guitar for 11 tracks of chipper, summery shoegaze that sit easily alongside their most obvious influences Lush, Curve and Stereolab. Seablite’s songs are elevated by the interplay of twin vocals, clean guitar lines and bouncy bass lines supported by cymbal heavy motorik drums. There’s steel beneath the gauze as Mundy brings a little of the Idols’ shade to proceedings and Pastalaniec drives songs like “Pillbox” and “Polygraph” hard and fast down a euphoric freeway of top-down thrumming thrills. Yes, it sounds like a lot of bands you’ve heard and maybe loved but Grass Stains and Novocaine is so well put together and convincingly played it’s hard to resist.

Andrew Forell

 Seiðr — Intethedens Afsky (Nattetale)

Seiðr is a one-man band from Denmark. For just one man, he was awfully busy in the past year, having put out three records. Intethedens Afsky can boast of 10 tracks of dirty, primitive sound with bursts of melody buried immediately under a wall of noise. The inspiration for Seiðr’s music can be found in early 1990s Norwegian black metal, and Claus H. (that’s his name) cannot be blamed for being too much of a good student. Why shouldn’t he have learnt from his elders? The first two tracks here have samples from “nature,” and this gives us a hint to how Seiðr’s music can be interpreted: it’s ruptures in Nature’s hellish landscape. No one will be saved.

Ray Garraty   

 Spider Bags — A Celebration of Hunger (Sophomore Lounge)

SPIDER BAGS "A Celebration of Hunger" by Spider Bags

Spider Bags are still around, making a record every three or four years for Merge. But listening to this debut, it’s hard to imagine how they did it. If subject matter reflects life style, then the motto of these guys back in 2008 was, “We do the hard stuff so there won’t be any left for you. Say, can you loan me a couple of twenties?” But there’s a self-observing intelligence at work in these songs that suggests that self-awareness wasn’t totally obliterated, and a loose, rumbling energy to these roots-tinged garage-rock songs that confirms that the Bags spent at least part of everyday upright. Add to that engineer Brian Paulson’s knack for getting sound under challenging circumstances, which renders the live-sounding performances with sufficient but not distracting clarity, and you have a good soundtrack for the next time you want to drink yourself off the barstool in the privacy of your own home.

Bill Meyer

 Luke Spook — Small Town (Third Eye Stimuli)

Australian multi-instrumentalist Luke Spook steps away from the garage-punk of his Pinheads to conjure up lysergic specters from bygone times on Small Town. There are a fair number of freaked out boil-overs in the offing but the general tone is one of reserved simplicity. Whether sipping tea with the subject of “The Owl” or gathering around the fire with some fellow townsfolk on the title track, Luke channels Syd Barrett to the point of becoming nearly indistinguishable. But what makes Small Town more than just a covers album is Luke’s ability to vary the intimacy of his arrangements when needed. “All the King’s Horses” features a harmonica solo backed up with an (accidental?) chorus of distant, wailing hounds. Those types of moments lurk beneath the surface and inject a pastoral quality that feels authentic. More quirky utopian village than small town, the world Spook creates is a place to live rather than to pass through.

Jason Gioncontere  

 Nick Storring — Qualms (Never Anything)

Qualms by Nick Storring

Nick Storring’s latest recording started life as the score for a dance performance, and it is easy to imagine how it might function in that role. The composition, which spans both sides of a cassette, is episodic. Each moment feels unique unto itself, creating an environment in which things — maybe movements, or maybe something in your own imagination — have the space to happen. If you caught him onstage with the group Picastro, you would probably see Storring play cello, but for Qualms he plays a couple dozen keyboard, stringed, percussive and woodwind instruments. This allows similar themes and actions to appear and reappear in different garb. One stalking theme, for example, manifests once as a psychedelically dense string melody, and again played by gamelan percussion. Elsewhere passages of meter-less sound temporarily halt the progress. Moments of Steve Reich-like repetition surface, but instead of locking in like they might in a Reich piece, they quickly morph into something else. The same pattern of change that probably made this a handy program for a dance performance makes it an engaging pure listening experience.

Bill Meyer

 Sun City Girls — Dawn of the Devi (Abduction)

Dawn of the Devi by Sun City Girls

Dawn of the Devi holds an important place in the Sun City Girls’ discography. Released in 1991, it was the follow up to the much-celebrated Torch of the Mystics, which remains one of the more tuneful and easily-relatable records that Charles Gocher and brothers Alan and Richard Bishop ever did. As such, it had a job to do, and it did it well. That was to throw the followers who sandals instead of sturdy shows off the track. They did this by serving up a song-free album of jagged, totally improvised jams. While it did the job at the time, and in doing so established a pattern of giving the people something other than what they want, in retrospect, you can appreciate it for another reason. Dawn of the Devi makes a pretty strong case for the trio as a rock-derived improvisational ensemble. They sound like they’re listening and responding to each other, and their transitions from acidic splatter to swooning hesitation or heavy ambush make intuitive sense. It wasn’t always that way.

Bill Meyer

 These New Puritans — Inside the Rose (BMG)

Essex experimentalists These New Puritans return with a lush yet disquieting take on English pastoralism. On Inside the Rose multi-instrumentalist twin brothers Jack and George Barnett create an often lovely, occasionally portentous, romantic paean to nature and love. As the Barnetts move further beyond the fractured post-punk of their debut Beat Pyramid, this, their fourth album, elaborates the use of contemporary classical and choral orchestration into arrangements that channel Talk Talk. Jack Barnett’s voice is high in the mix and evokes David Sylvian at his most emotive. Beneath the sheen and swooning strings George’s drumming shifts and slides between Reichian repetition and fierce Taiko inspired rhythms. Inside the Rose is a meticulously produced but never fussy collection, welcoming the listener but refusing either to compromise or patronize. A serious but accessible work full of carefully considered details, some gorgeous melodies and an almost Pre-Raphaelite sensibility expressed in a thoroughly contemporary manner.

Andrew Forell

 Various Artists — No Other Love (Tompkins Square)

No Other Love : Midwest Gospel (1965-1978) by Various Artists

No Other Love is, like the several albums that Mike McGonigal has compiled for different labels, a sequence of gospel records drawn from one collection. In this case it is the collection of Ramona Stout. She culled the 45s that make up this set from her husband Kevin’s trawls of records that had spent years in Chicagoan basements. A graduate student who had spent much of her life outside the USA, she saw with clear eyes the grime of American urban poverty, and found herself deeply compelled by the discovery that hopeful music could grow in such decay. There are no big stars amongst these recordings. Even at the time they were recorded they would have sounded rough and behind the times production-wise — just electric guitars, drum kits, whatever piano or organ was sitting in the church where they were recorded, and congregants’ voices. But the fervor of yearning and the joy of release makes every track a transporting listen.

Bill Meyer

 WOW — Come La Notte (Maple Death Records)

Come La Notte by wow

Underground Roman duo China Now (vocals, drums) and Leo Non (guitars) recent album as WOW, Come La Notte (Like the Night), is seven tracks of 1960s influenced Italian noir cabaret high on atmosphere and drama. Now’s almost operatic vocals are at the forefront over skeletal brushed drums, minimal bass and restrained guitar. The band lulls then surprises with a spectral sax and bursts of crashing cymbals and feedback on “Niente Di Speciale” (“Nothing Special”), a keening gypsy violin on “Vieni Un Po’ Qui” (“Come Over Here”), middle eastern organ on “Occhi Di Serpente” (“Snake Eyes”). Fatalism drips from every note bringing to mind a low ceilinged club in the catacombs where refugees from the sun fill the air with smoke and their guts with grappa and cheap vino rosso as Pasolini scouts for rough trade and fingers grip switchblades concealed in socks. Come La Notte is a slow grower that draws you in even while it picks your pocket. Put it on and live a little vicarious danger in your own private La Dolce Vita.  

Max B — House Money (Self-released)

Max B is doing 75 years in prison, yet before his bid he recorded a lot of music to be used by trusted collaborators. Last year’s Coke Wave 5 with French Montana felt authentic enough to be confused with Max’s pre-prison mixtapes, only a bit more polished. This new EP is no less wave-y and goofy, but too many guest verses dilute the fun. If French, with whom Max B recorded a lot of mixtapes together, seems like a natural collaborator, the rest of the guests are an uneasy fit. House Money is a Frankenstein-y affair exactly because Max himself wouldn’t invite them to his booth (not that they are lousy talents, they are just on a different frequency with Max B). It is probably mixed and produced by someone who thought that these collaborators would attract additional audience, yet the result is the opposite: Max B’s fans would feel alienated by impostors in his own domain.

Ray Garraty

 Jeb Bishop / Jaap Blonk / Weasel Walter / Damon Smith — JaJeWeDa (Balance Point Acoustics)

Pioneer Works Vol. 1 BPA 19 by JeJaWeDa (Jeb Bishop / Jaap Blonk / Weasel Walter / Damon Smith)

No matter how big the stage they occupy, it isn’t big enough for Jaap Blonk and Weasel Walter. Both men are masters of strategic exaggeration. Put them together and a clash is inevitable. Blonk not only spews sound poetry like a symphony of pan-lingual news broadcasts and surreptitiously recorded mouthwash experiments, he manipulates electronics with a video game controller that looks especially ridiculous in his gangly hands. Walter mugs and wallops, each movement lunging simultaneously at your ears and your funny bone. Perhaps you’re wondering, “isn’t this a record review? How will these visual descriptions clue me into the sound?” Play this record and you will know. And you will also marvel at the way bassist Damon Smith and trombonist Jeb Bishop balance the other half of the band’s nuttiness with seriousness so unfailing, you might put your money on them against Roscoe Mitchell in a game of poker.

Bill Meyer

 Ben Carey — Antimatter (Hospital Hill)

ANTIMATTER by Ben Carey

Sydney-based electronic musician Ben Carey played saxophone before he took on modular synthesizers. This may explain the quivering, palpable presence of the sounds he devises; he makes static pulse and shake like swollen lips engaged in the act of vocalizing. His deployments of attenuated tones, sudden swells, and insistent chimes are discontinuous and episodic, but also quite thoughtfully planned out. Both the sudden shifts and the long considerations of discrete elements feel as essential as the unforgettable bridge in a bubblegum cart hit, and the qualities of the sounds Carey ponders amply reward the attention required to follow their shifts in and out of audibility and back and forth across the stereo spectrum. If you’re inclined to get well acquainted with Antimatter, consider springing for the LP. Since both Carey and his label are situated in Australia, it might take some looking and spending, but Rashad Becker’s cut and the 45-rpm playing speed guarantee maximum presence.

Bill Meyer  

 John Chantler — Tomorrow Is Too Late (Room40)

Tomorrow Is Too Late by John Chantler

From the pig’s ass on the sleeve to the titles of the album’s two tracks, John Chantler’s Tomorrow is Too Late promises to deal with endings. But when you put the record on, you find yourself adrift in events that defy linear description, let alone the definition of a final point. Oh, sure, both of them end, but they don’t spend the time leading up to those terminations making sure that you know where they’re going. The title track was commissioned for the 2018 iteration of the French electronic music institution INA GRM’s Présences Électronique festival, and most of its sounds were obtained from a François Coupigny synthesizer that is over 50 years old. Rare earl synths are like worlds unto themselves, and the listener is adrift with Chantler as he invites sounds to converge, dispel, and recongregate in winking, restless masses. On “We’re Always at the End,” the electronic sound convergence make way for a pipe organ, which coheres into a solid sonic presence, but when it disappears, the piece does not. This is music to inhabit, over and over again.

Bill Meyer 

 Richard Dawson — 2020 (Weird World)

2020 by Richard Dawson

This sixth full-length from cult songwriter Richard Dawson unspools like a series of linked short stories, the characters sharing a blighted, latter-day English backdrop and perhaps avoiding one another’s eyes as they pass on the streets. Sung in Dawson’s wavery tenor — with flights up into a very uncertain falsetto — and backed with the most straightforward of rock-ish instrumental arrangements, the songs flourish in their specificity. The metal-riffing “Jogging,” for instance, tells the story of a mid-life crisis with startling exact-ness, an ex-school counselor, laid off and too anxious to leave the house, advised by a doctor to take up jogging. The story is told first person, in the most straightforward way possible, with minimal embellishments. If it weren’t for the crashing guitar chords, the squiggly lines of synth, you might be listening to a friend over coffee.  The scenarios are mostly dreary, of people stuck in soul-sucking jobs, in towns where things go wrong through neglect and inertia. Yet, once in a while the sun comes piercing through, and life, however stunted and bare and grey, turns ever so slightly hopeful. I’ll leave you with verse from lacerating “The Queen’s Head.”

“The guy from the vape shop Ferrying his chocolate labs Waves to us cheerily From a leaky kayak ‘I've lost everything apart from what counts’ Pointing to his dogs and then at his heart.”

Now that’s a pre-chorus.

Jennifer Kelly

 Frank Denyer — The Boundaries of Intimacy (Another Timbre)

On The Boundaries of Intimacy, composer Frank Denyer explores volume dropped to a soft level. The approach produces a sort of intimacy, nearly everything sounds hushed, although it remains unclear whether, as listeners, we're leaning into a confidant or cupping our hand to a wall to eavesdrop. Regardless of our position as listeners, Denyer continues his work with unpredictable instrumentation, highlighting sneh and koto playing in various places (including two version of a koto piece), and combining flute and electronics for a strange tonal study called “Beyond the Boundaries of Intimacy.” When he works with a more traditional set of instruments, as on “String Quartet,” the ostensibly comfortable sounds become unfamiliar, an experienced aided by Denyer's play with dynamics, turning from a crescendo to a near disappearance. Denyer presents those sorts of challenges across these pieces (written over the past 40 years). He requires attentive, patient listening, but rewards it with unsettling experiences.

Justin Cober-Lake

 Avram Fefer Quartet—Testament (Clean Feed)

This record is credited to the Avram Fefer Quartet, and it’s true that the Brooklyn-based alto and tenor saxophone wrote the tunes and leads the band. But he’s not necessarily the guy you will listen to every time that you play it. Not that there’s anything wrong with Fefer’s playing, which combines Sonny Rollins’ muscularity with an affinity for bold melodies rooted equally in soul jazz and West African pop music. He’s got ideas, emotion and chops to spare. But damn, what a band! Fefer and bassist Eric Revis have an association going back to the 1990s; no matter which way the music rolls, the foundation is solid. Drummer Chad Taylor is a regular member of a trio with Fefer and Revis which made a couple records a decade or so back, and he’s also a member of bands led by Revis and guitarist Marc Ribot. Taylor never misses a chance to turn the music up a little closer to a boil, and the blues-rooted tone that Ribot favors here adds steely sentiment to the blues, mass to the Afrobeat repetitions, and confident complexity to the free interludes in this music. So, if your attention wavers from the saxophone for a second, it’s probably because you’re listening to how one of his accompanists is playing off of another one. Wotta band!

Bill Meyer  

  Roc Marciano — Marcielago (Self-released)

In “Saw” Roc Marciano says, “Sometimes I pinch myself in disbelief,” referring to a level of fame he’s achieved after 20 years in the rap game. The listeners are pinching themselves as well, but for a different reason: Marciano doesn’t repeat himself. Roc Marci works with his lyrics on two levels: line by line as well as bar by bar. As defined by Marci, his songs are “poetry over beats.”Marcielago is a quieter effort, closer to Rosebudd’s Revenge 1 and 2, than to 2018’s KAOS and Behold a Dark Horse. To rephrase the poet himself, on Marcielago he’s more like a pimp than a mack. The standout here is “Ephesians” which starts with early electronica and then explodes into a full-scale attack. Marci’s long time collaborator Ka spits here a verse which does an impossible thing: Marciano is murdered on his own turf.

Ray Garraty

 Machtelinckx / Badenhorst / Cools / Gouband — Porous Structures (Aspen Edities)

porous structures by Machtelinckx/Badenhorst/Cools/Gouband

This quartet comprises two steel-stringed acoustic guitarists, one percussionist prone to placing stones on his drums, and one clarinet and a saxophone player who likes to sing. The album’s title implies permeability, and the music delivers by creating the impression of actions happen in different places at the same time. Ruben Machtelinckx and Bert Cools’ guitars create structures made of slow-moving, finger-picked patterns. Toma Gouband and Joachim Badenhorst often sound like they are playing in some resonant space outside of the guitars’ sanctuary, where their sounds can spread a halo of echo around and occasionally blow through the dry, close-miked string sounds. The former’s rattling rocks create more texture than motion; the latter’s distant croons and spare tones create a sense of distance. In their own quiet way, these musicians have arrived at a sound that can’t be mistaken for anyone else’s.

Bill Meyer

  Salim Nourallah — Jesus of Sad (Palo Santo)

The narrators of Salim Nourallah's songs don't often find things going so well. Nourallah's taken that point to its logical conclusion on new EP Jesus of Sad. Rather than indulging depressive tendencies, though, the songwriter brings his sense of humor for a parodic take. “So, you think you've suffered?” he sings to open the disc. “I sip the tears of the world from my coffee cup.” The hyperbole might immediately develops his exaggerated character. Accompanied by multi-instrumentalist Billy Harvey, Nourallah moves on to “Born with a Broken Heart,” a funky number owing something to Soul Coughing while providing one of the best bass lines in his catalog. The cut's full of wit while addressing serious questions about faith, gender equality, and more.  

“This Doesn't Feel like Peace, Love, or Understanding” (the second track here to echo a Nick Lowe title) sounds like quintessential Nourallah, with a pop-rock sound that would have fit on any of his last few records and a relatable sentiment conveyed in smart lyrics. Two versions of “Misanthrope” close out the disc. Nourallah co-wrote the song with Rhett Miller, but here he turns away from the Old 97's' bouncy version (called“She Hates Everyone”). Nourallah slows it down, building complex feelings; he can't fully enjoy his strange love now under his anxiety about the future. It closes the EP well, being yet more honest emotion that manages to misdirect and complicate things, the true heart covered by the knowing satire of “Jesus of Sad.”

Justin Cober-Lake

 Parashi—Tape From Oort Cloud (Sedimental/Skell)

When a record provokes images of a Captain Beefheart lyric turned inside out, you know its makers are on to something. The squelchy sounds that usher in “The Vanishing Coast,” which is the first of this LP’s four tracks, does not bring to mind synthesizers, even though that’s what Mike Griffin (that’s Mr. Parashi to you) probably used some time them. Nor does it bring to mind someone else’s record. Rather, I hear the words “slow and bulbous” as the music sinks slowly into its own swampy stealth. “Broadcast Failures” leaves even those alinear coordinates behind as it pings its way woozily into the depths. The titular malfunctions might be echoed calls which fail to distract the sonar-like main body of sound, or the squashed, distant carousel that follows. Or maybe it doesn’t. File this under best practice befuddlement, but be sure to tape a bookmark to the plastic outer sleeve to remind yourself of the necessity of playing it.

Bill Meyer 

Tom Redwood — The Glue (self released)

The Glue by Tom Redwood

With The Glue, his fourth album, Melbourne-based singer-songwriter Tom Redwood has tapped into a rewarding strain of country/folk that pulls hard on traditional roots, while adding a knowing wink, flowing performances, and plenty of tuneful song craft. As in Jim O’Rourke’s beloved series of Drag City albums, the music-making is taken seriously but is undercut by self-deprecating humor. On “Easy Love” Redwood sings, “When I was young I was easy loving / But now that I’m old, I’m not so dumb,” and on the title track he makes a playful reference to “round, gorgeous thighs.” He’s not afraid to play it straight, though, such as on the haunting “Cold Mother Night,” and reflective closer “Shut the Door.” There’s superb lap steel playing by Kier Stevens, smart counterpoint on guitar and “cheesy keys” from producer Matt Walker, and ethereal backing vocals from Rosie Luby, which contrasts nicely with Redwood’s aw-shucks delivery.

Tim Clarke

 Grisha Shakhnes — Being There (Unfathomless)

being there by grisha shakhnes

Being There presents the listener with a document of actor, action and the arena in which the former enacts the latter. Essentially, Grisha Shakhnes recorded himself recording and recorded the room in which he was recording. Sometimes a recording device filters the subjects of his inquiry on the way to the recorder; while the sounds were captured by a Zoom digital recorded, some of them went through a Rvox reel-to-reel tape deck along the way. Equipped with the knowledge that you’re hearing Shakhnes making recordings, you quickly find yourself making decisions about what sounds to follow, and then dealing with the consequences of the choices you made as your act of following draws you into the chain of events that made the album in the first place. You are present with Shakhnes, sharing in the creation of Being There.

Bill Meyer

 Six by Seven — Dream On (Cargo)

D R E A M . O N by six by seven

One of the great shoulda beens of 1990s British rock (on the other side of the Atlantic, it’s doubtful anyone not reading something like the NME at the time would have heard much of them), Six by Seven are also one of the few from that era to keep going in a way that’s not just repeating old glories. Now almost entirely just frontman Chris Olley (his son Charlie drums here, but otherwise it’s a solo show) you wouldn’t guess it from the massive, warmly analogue psychedelic/motorik drones and drifts here. Stylistically speaking, Olley can be a restless guy, never really revisiting the glory of Six by Seven’s first three albums (what you might call their classic period, and well worth checking out) but also covering an astonishing breadth during the years since. The recent Dream On is as good a place to dip into his stream of work as any, boasting three massive soundscapes (the best of which might be “And No One Knows Your Name” as well as briefer, dreamier song like “Hey Kid” and the title track. Both his muse and the demands of making music your day job keep Olley forever moving, though — even writing up this release was marked by the appearance of a double album-length Dream On 2, so anyone on Olley’s wavelength can expect a lot to keep up with.  

One answer lies in the question; because you like to hear people figuring it out as they’re doing it. This album, which comprises three quartet improvisations plus six break-out duos, is a superb example of free improvisation that exposes its process. You can hear Dan Clucas pick up on the technique and tone that Jeb Bishop proposes in the first seconds of “Condition Reports,” and then perceive how he takes those suggestions and warps them, and then hear Bishop respond with a contrasting texture. This stuff may be abstract, but it is pretty transparent about what’s happening. 

Another answer is that it’s pretty damned exciting. Take “Provenance,” where the music grows from a kick drum beat to a whirlwind of smearing brass, shuddering wood, and ringing metal inside of fifteen seconds. To follow it is to feel yourself spinning with it. 

Yet another answer is that you like hearing these instruments sound both like and unlike themselves. Smith’s bass sounds simultaneously huge and enclosing, like you’re inside of it and its sides are half a hockey rink away. Crane’s drums sound unenhanced but detailed; that’s a hi-hat in space that you’re hearing, not some stream of digital reinterpretations of a notion that started with someone’s foot mashing to bits of metal together. And both Clucas and Bishop toggle fluidly between conventionally beautiful and idiosyncratically personal ways of playing. 

So why do you listen to this music (if you’ve read this far, you either must already do so or are about to give it a try)? That’s your business, but I applaud your good judgment. And why do I happily listen to Universal or Directional? Because it’s not only a splendid example of American free improvisation in the first fifth of the century, but a welcome instigator for a bit of personal reflection on why one wants to spend hours of one’s life hearing people make it up as they go along. Somehow, hearing people do it and succeed beautifully feels comforting and hope-inducing in a time when it’s crystal clear that the powers that be can’t pull it off to save their mortgaged souls.   

Since leaving Chicago, Bishop has contributed to several Boston-area bands, others involving Weasel Walter, and improvisational duos with both American and European musicians. He is joined in the Centrifugal Trio by a couple Berliners, bassist Antonio Borghini (Schnell; Die Hochstappler; Hook, Line & Sinker) and drummer Michael Griener (Die Enttäuschung; Lina Allemano’s Orhenschmaus; Eskelin-Weber-Griener), who bring the requisite facility with both swinging jazz and atomizing free improvisation necessary to realize the full breadth of Bishop’s potential.  

On “Jitter,” Borghini repeatedly finishes Bishop’s one-note openings, and then falls into formation with Griener to create a sturdy platform upon which the trombonist develops long lines that make you wonder if you need to be calling a car in order to follow the music out the door, down the street and into the next neighborhood. “Plumb” is less linear, but still sequential. It opens with blasts of alternating breath-propelled and electronic blasts (the latter presumably courtesy of Bishop, who recently wielded noise-boxes on a splendid CD with Weasel Walter and Alex Ward), then shifts to a tumble of soft impacts, as though all three musicians were aspiring to make their instruments sound like beating bird wings. And on “Least Bittern,” the trio weaves between dopplering swerves and sprinting steeplechases. The trio’s music is freely improvised, but their shared commitment to linear development and bold expression makes it sound like one very solid set of composed tunes. This kind of aesthetically based international collaboration is both an antidote the antagonisms of our time and an ongoing reproach to those who think that higher visa fees and border walls are the answer to anything.