Oh, the music writer’s dilemma. Deeply entrenched in “the scene,” almost exclusively friends with the callus-fingered, can’t spit without hitting an unknown savant, practiced at writing the “this stuff is great, but [something about ‘journalistic integrity’]” email, and so, in a wild stab at impartiality, writing instead about the latest Animal Collective record, which is already stained with the sweat and semen of a hundred other critics.

So isn’t it ironic (don’t ya think?) that I’m breaking my own personal no-pals-allowed code to write about a project that probably wasn’t meant for anyone but friends. And even then, only for silent friends, intimate friends, campfire friends—not the “check my shit, bro!” friends so many musicians know and, perhaps by necessity, become. Or perhaps this project isn’t really even for friends, but just for the band itself. It is, after all, called Quality Time, and its membership is just husband and wife duo Franny and (yes, I know this guy) Joe Gurba (aka the Joe), sewing tracks together from old love letters as “a way of keeping their marriage off/on the rocks.”

Perhaps the way this track feels like it’s in confidence is what makes it so affecting. No one creates a Bandcamp page without visualizing an audience, but with “Magnetic North,” Quality Time still manages to keep itself focused on that ebbing, immaterial power that quiet music sometimes (rarely) births, and that two people sometimes (rarely) create between themselves. The track is not what a producer would call “fully realized”; it’s a tinny and time-flexing, with voices tumbling gently as if caught in an indecisive crosswind. But it’s magic, the way that the Microphones or Seven Swans (2004)-era Sufjan were magic in the early aughts, a reminder of what can be done when you lock that producer from the room. It is a sad, snowed-in song that invests its scant two minutes with a romance that the listener may borrow for the song’s duration but cannot keep. Regardless of who it came from, this track will be found fumbling out of my speakers come subzero temperatures.

I trust that this tiny light of attention won’t change the fact that this is essentially a bedroom project, ambitious only in its goal of documenting, shaping, and enduring a relationship. I hope Quality Time keeps writing songs and allowing friends to peer in. But I also hope that they remain looking at themselves—at each other—and not looking back out.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Quality Time

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While the world waits for Ridley Scott to revisit/further fuck up the Alien franchise, bedroom composers everywhere are dabbling with retro sci-fi scores. Terry Davey is one such nut, imagining a future of successful Europa landings. He’s also imagined the music they should pack in the time capsule: something a lot less rousing than “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” on Voyager but mindful of the films that left Earth before him. It takes guts, still wanting to map the outer cosmos after the scare stories fed to us by Hollywood. Apollo 18 said we stayed off the moon as it’s secretly crawling with spiders, undeterred, aims straight for Jupiter, expanding on those blurred orange photographs with domes, humanoids, and meditation.

Although his ambience might seem timeless on the surface, Davey’s space music has a Cold War feel to it, his sound filled with the mood of Silent Running instead of the runaway pyrotechnics of Transformers. “Tangential Part 1” is made from analogue Yamahas, meandering like Jean Michel Jare if he’d been forced to compose music on a sundial. Peripheral beats, eerie tones, and the odd geyser edge things toward ambient house, but otherwise this is a gas giant; something the nerdiest of astronauts might play as he steps onto a new landscape. It’s good to know there are stargazers/composers out there who still think the heavens are peaceful. Obsessives would know there’s so much debris approaching that the ozone layer should be fitted with sieves.

[MP3]

⊙ Keyword Tags: Zenith: Unto The Stars

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Few things will earn you a round of high-fives like saying, “Fuck chillwave.” Maybe a moon or two ago, a review of mine included a couple sentences of how deliriously cheap and recession-friendly chillwave is, and to my dismay, a slew of people took this as a personal declaration of “I hate chillwave” and responded with…whatever the Internet’s version of a high-five is.

So, um, I like chillwave? With ringing affirmation: “I like chillwave.” And it’s the pulmonary-pounding, distortion-wielders like Toronto’s three-piece Tearjerker that make me stick my neck out for their like. Repeatedly. Unabashedly.

Previously released LP Strangers (2010; which was and still is a free download, by the bye, as a little gift prior to the release of recently released, full-length album, Rare) was a notably raw execution with rough-hewn tracks set in lake-sized puddles of dark, drippy synths and bass rolls. Its big, sad-eyed professions and pleas one could only imagine coming from the seductively droopy face of Ryan Gosling.

While that is all clearly something I enjoy, the first of two new tracks instantly dislodges Tearjerker from the sad-saturated bed of silt. “So Dead” plummets from the opening beat into a resolute momentum, driving with something as unexpected as maraca shakes and an uplifting froth of excitement just beneath the no-less-discernible buzz of lyrics. Like having just enough whiskey after a redbull, second new track “Blood” balances this body-high with something explicitly chilled out: a melodic trickle of piano, bare licks of electric guitar, and a nasal strain of vocals reaching an appreciable Woods-like falsetto, tethered to the rest of the song from a great height.

Connected by a consistent trace of radio crackle and wrapped in the same layer of starchy distortion—thick as rice rolled around tuna in shitty sushi—the aesthetic that delivered such a direct and slow-lurching impact on Strangers is now re-imagined as a more frenetic take on the genre. Two different songs and two different takes, what remains is: this is chillwave I sincerely believe in.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Tearjerker

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The best thing about Lambchop has always been the juxtaposition of the elaborate, almost grandiose orchestral style of the sometimes double-digits-deep band, and singer/songwriter Kurt Wagner’s understated delivery and lyrics. Wagner’s focus on the small, genuinely weird minutiae of life (some of How I Quit Smoking‘s [1996] lines about cheese dip and fries come to mind) manages to draw the listener in intimately, while the sound of the band itself has no problem filling a stage or a room. Throughout their career, Wagner and Co. have been prolific and remarkably consistent, and if this first single is any indication, their 11th record Mr. M (coming in February) won’t deviate from this track.

“If Not I’ll Just Die” starts off with sweeping strings like a Sinatra song, but just when you expect crooning, Wagner comes in with his famously clipped, dry delivery. The sentimentality of the music is undermined by Wagner’s shrugging f-bomb in the first line: “Don’t know what the fuck they talk about.” The rest of the song glides along, a beautiful, cozy melody winding around deadpan, stream-of-consciousness lyrics. “Grandpa’s coughing in the kitchen,” he half-sings, “But the strings sound good / Maybe add some flute / But how do you get the cups out / from up there?” Though Wagner occasionally gets soulful on its transition “Oh-oh-oh’s,” mostly the song just rests on these half-baked observations, interrupted by self-referencing and sly wit.

When I started getting into Lambchop just last year, I was struck immediately by how unique their voice was—not just Wagner’s, but their collective voice as a band. And “If Not I’ll Just Die,” like so much of their work, is frequently amusing, occasionally enthralling, and never tired or ordinary.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Lambchop

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What makes Burial so predisposed to repeat listening is the tendency his music has to infiltrate the brain—his productions bedding deep amongst the synapses and receptors, where they stimulate surges of reaction and form new iterations which then refuse to be uprooted. With Untrue (2007), William Bevan revealed himself to be capable of the kind of panoramic ode to nocturnal London promised by earlier releases, and cemented his position as a prerequisite influence on many high profile remixes and collaborations. Joining him on this split 12” are Massive Attack, who themselves are no strangers to the corridors of the mind, their music at its prime more of a resonant ache, throbbing bass lines and off-kilter rhythms the foundations of their icy craft. So, especially given Bevan’s renowned ability to meld his sound with the principles of other artists—see: his mind-bendingly great split with Four Tet, Moth/Wolf Cub (2009)—the combining of the two promises much. Yet I can’t help but be disappointed by “Four Walls,” the one all-new track from this release.

First: this thing drags. I’m all for songs being as long as they need to be, but in this instance the twelve-minute run time certainly stretches the boundaries of justification. Were “Four Walls” to lose, say, two minutes of the tone-setting haze and crackling from the introduction, it is doubtful that the murky atmospherics would be too heavily compromised. When a shuffling rhythm does emerge a little further on, it is joined by disjointed cello strokes and an eerie female vocal line that heralds the strongest part of the track, where the combination of sounds form a beautiful, perfectly sculpted soundscape. But its shimmering nature starts to feel superficial as it winds on, noticeably unchanging to the point where it starts to evoke a very un-Burial-like monotony. Flashes of production brilliance occasionally protrude from the mix—the forlorn bleating of a horn; the static restlessness of feedback; a panning digital shudder—yet none are able to truly break free from the mould.

Inexplicably, when the track feels like it has reached a logical (and welcome) conclusion, fading to near silence, we get a couple of further minutes of beleaguered ambience and sedate electronics. It is surprisingly, really, that given the combined weight and experience of the artists involved that “Four Walls” is so quotidian. The nature of the song lacks any really compelling element to the degree that passing comment on it is actually made difficult by the lack of lasting sentiment; where both Burial and Massive Attack have excelled before exists in concentrating the focus of the listener to a sharper midst of their chiseled productions. Here, attentions are permitted to wander, a mirror to the inoffensive meanderings of the track itself. While “Four Walls” certainly isn’t bad, it ultimately leaves little to reflect upon, and much to forget. Because frankly, few will want to spend time lamenting the fact that these combined forces have produced something that is strangely, sadly, boring.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Burial, Massive Attack

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It takes very little time to identify a Kurt Vile song; the very moment those drowsy, spaced-out guitars creep from the speaker, I know. I’ve been thinking recently about what it is about Smoke Ring for My Halo that makes it my favorite record so far this year, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s because Vile’s songs are all such obvious products of his unique worldview. Each song may shift subtly in mood and theme, but each is happily preserved in that heavy raincloud of Kurt Vile-ness, a cloud that is simultaneously weary, lazy, quietly sarcastic, multi-layered, and, well, gorgeous. It’s a thrill to hear a young musician find his sound so wholly—and on his recent work, Vile seems to only lose himself more and more in it, completely at ease.

“The Creature,” then, is the ultimate Kurt Vile track, instantly recognizable as his work yet finding him gently pursuing more complex songwriting. Though it will be found on his upcoming EP So Outta Reach, “The Creature” was produced during the Smoke Ring sessions, one of a handful of tracks left off the record. This is apparent—while it definitely fits in with the record’s flow and personality, it seems a little too cumbersome for a full-length that already offered a six-minute opus in “Ghost Town.” “The Creature,” while not as hypnotic as “Ghost Town,” shares that track’s cyclical structure while adding even more layers; Vile’s intricate guitar work evolves from complex acoustic leads, to stabs of country twang, to a dark, echoing undercurrent that seems to mimic a cello. While “The Creature”’s sound is dark, the lyrics are cryptic and left open to interpretation. “They call me the creature of habit,” Vile sings, but is he talking about a homebody routine, or something more sinister? Either way, he retains his standard lukewarm-slacker enthusiasm: “That’s alright for me / So far, so good for me.”

That “The Creature” is just a left-overs for Vile betrays that whole slacker shtick: he’s a man on a hot streak, but he’s not just riding it out. He’s pushing himself, making music we can dream to, and making every last B-side matter.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Kurt Vile

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Octavius’s William Marshall makes music that’s as stone cold as the cast-in-ancient-marble moniker would suggest. This month’s Laws LP does itself mighty fine by vocalizing an association with Eno-era Bowie (side two of Low [1977] comes happily to mind), not to mention the obvious marks of others like Suicide, Tangerine Dream, and Cabaret Voltaire. Octavius has long been a known disciple of the ’90s trip-hop lineage as well, but he channels those tendencies into his own beckoning, menacing minimalism without giving in to grandiosity or anything beyond a certain open-space claustrophobia. It’s chilling fun. I think I’ve found my Halloween dance record.

The vocabulary of “Of Mask & Money” is a telling slice of Laws as a whole, though its pulsing beat stands as one of the heaviest and simplest among its peers. Rhythms coalesce out of distant machinery, all filtered through discordant veils of icicle synths and robotic chants. It’s like a revelatory moment of perfect, random celestial alignment in the midst of an auto shop in full swing, or the aleatoric song created by the clanking of chains hanging against the aluminum siding of a bass-banging party house at 2 AM.

Despite the professed inventory of convenient taste, and the relatively wide range of sounds contained by Laws, Octavius’s tunes sound unified and personal, like music from another dimension—a dimension where Brian Eno and Giorgio Moroder were once conjoined twins but had discovered an ancient Mayan secret to immortality and were allowed to somehow progress on their own indefinitely in a culture vacuum somewhere on an island in the North Atlantic. There’s lots of petty squabbling over simple decisions like where best to shop for outlandish sunglasses.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Octavius

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More full of gnarly than the 7th circle’s middle ring, this two-track sampling from Turquoise Feeling’s forthcoming album-on-cassette, January Sisters in Drag, is hands-down some of the roughest, most cranky-pantsy garage rock I’ve heard in a while.

In stark contrast to surf-y snark or nostalgic sentiments bloated with distortion and whammy bars, “From a Buick 666” drives in with a firm stance and chugging pace, David Treneff at the wheel; guitar chords shred at the distortion in thick swipes of angry badger paws; metaphors mix; our scrunch-faced and sour lead vocalist Treneff resolutely “fuck-you”s his way through a bird-flipped gesture of a drag track. Without actually using the words “fuck you.” Spittle flying into the mic, he informs us he just does not even care: politics, whatever we’re on about, he wants none of it. And it’s all spewed with the vehement set-of-jaw of “Enough”-era J-Lo, which makes me think this guy must be going to a lot of the same parties I go to.

I feel the guy. I am a firm believer in the innate right of whining. Fussing and complaining being a survivalist necessity, these tracks are rife with venting—and the second track? While a romantic twist ensues, it sees no relief for our ticked-off and fuming narrator. All that we know of “Pizza Lovin’ Baby”s leading lady is: by gum she loves pizza and also she’s gone. After how long, who knows. For what reason? Who knows. In what manner? One could only hazard a guess. As assuredly as she loves pizza, that bitch has left our gentle/not-gentle narrator in the throes of disbelief, to which he can only muster a petulant and Melrose Place appropriate “No way!”

Now, while the more trashy rock of the garage genre may be conducive to the airing of power-pop grade grievances and non-specific sentiments like “she’s gone” or “fuck you” or just “pizza”—and at first listen they may strike you as being just as shallow of sentiments—it is worth mentioning just how flush with import this pizza-loving quality of his lady-love was to our narrator. A food-item nestled oh-so-close to my own heart, pizza is almost the second leading lady at play here. To wit: Treneff has only so recently changed the name of the band to Turquoise Feeling from previous Pizza Slayer, perhaps solely reserving the moniker for his blog project: Pizza Slayer. It’s a blog, wherein Treneff actually does deign to consume and thoughtfully, cogently review and critique pizza from every local Columbus, Ohio pizza joint. Of which I’m told there are enough to support this kind of extensive project.

I like how this sour cat rolls. And while I’m listening for the full-length cassette, released in mid-October on Nova Guarda Records, to flesh out some of these songs with more minutae and certainly more of those same Wire and Black Lips chords, albeit the cliffs notes version, I—to borrow the words of Frasier Crane—am listening. And also visiting the pie-hole across the street, twofold.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Turquoise Feeling

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After making a serious habit out of proving my expectations of an eventually diminished return completely wrong, Röyksopp have played me for a fool again. “Shores of Easy” is billed on the band’s website as “the perfect soundtrack to that borderline state between being awake and being asleep—the state where everything seems possible,” and as “not indicative of things to come.” Now, I at least know by this point that the downtempo legends are really the only ones with the skills necessary to effectively sidestep any sneaking suspicion of coy baiting when it comes to casually releasing a fourteen-minute ambient house monster that confidently rivals anything comparable this year and proceeding to yawn it off like Saturday morning cartoons—but I’ve got my critical tendencies. Still, considering what stands in my opinion as a pretty monolithic and genre-defining career, this probably really is just the languid Frankenstein result of another ho-hum virtuosic afternoon in Röyksoppland.

And I do actually have visions of Röyksopp’s dual CPUs Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland living in some sort of contented suburban banality, taking moments between sipping tea, adjusting pictures on the wall, vacuuming in aprons, and glancing pensively through kitchen windows to turn a knob here, press a switch there, or maybe offer a bellowed comment from room to room on the timing of this or that modulation. They stroll past each other through the hallways wearing yellow rubber gloves or flipping through trashy pop magazines, confirming their opinions on the opus blaring into every inch of the otherwise prim domicile with slow, sardonic headbangs or a paused rubbing of the chin.

But dammit if I just don’t want to believe it. It shouldn’t be so easy, but here these guys are living on the shores? Preposterous. And here we are, replete with these dense, soaring Orb-ish chords, distantly clanging windswept scaffolding, and Field-generating swish-rhythms. The whole thing really does come off as effortless and masterful. Of course any paranoid effort to use this as a prophetic touchstone was completely defeated before the tea was done steeping, so there goes any obsessive critical speculation. Halfway through “Shores” I decided to just give it up, and I couldn’t say much about what happened beyond that, because by the time that epic arpeggiated breakdown at nine minutes popped up, I felt like I was living it just as comfortably as the Röyksopp boys have been for a long time. Whatever “Shores” says or doesn’t say about what’s yet to come, I’m left with a big enough pile of high hopes and smooth vibes to be able to put my feet up indefinitely until it’s time to investigate.

:: Download mp3

⊙ Keyword Tags: Röyksopp

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So it turns out Bradford Cox is actually a pretty great singer. Who would’ve thought? He might not have the force and pathos of, say, Hamilton Leithauser—still indie rock’s best overall vocalist, for my money—but as Cox has gradually cleared away the static and industrial sludge that used to define Deerhunter’s sound, he has revealed to the world a soulful, expressive, and often heartbreaking voice. It was that voice that made “Helicopter,” the centerpiece of last year’s Halcyon Digest, such an achingly gorgeous song, and it is that voice that sells “Te Amo,” the second single from Atlas Sound’s upcoming Parallax.

And frankly, it’s about damn time Cox put himself front and center. Up to this point, Atlas Sound has felt too much like a vanity project without the vanity, as Cox has been more interested in exploring the contours of a specific acoustic atmosphere than foregrounding his formidable songcraft. With “Te Amo,” he seems to have found a way to reconcile the two approaches. The song is built around a cyclical electric piano figure that grows more and more hypnotic as the song progresses, Cox’s ever-shifting layers of digital percussion and subtle background riffs adding rich harmonic textures to the central melody. As with many Atlas Sound works, it is a track that rewards close listening, as Cox has become something of a master at seamlessly integrating disparate textures and tones into an affecting whole.

Unlike most of Atlas Sound’s work, however, this one jumps to a whole new level once Cox joins in. He doesn’t exactly have a lot to say in “Te Amo”—it’s a love song, I guess, or so the title would seem to indicate—but he invests each word with such conviction that essentially meaningless lines like “When you’re down, you’re always down” seem to take on about five different meanings as Cox repeats them over the course of the song. Cox is eminently capable of writing sharp, emotionally direct lyrics—just revisit Halcyon Digest closer “He Would Have Laughed” if you need proof—but I have always gotten the sense that Atlas Sound, true to its name, is less about “saying something” and more about experimenting with sound as such, and this song serves as further evidence for this idea. The only difference being that Cox’s voice, stronger and more expressive than one could have ever guessed it would be a few years back, is now at the forefront of his dense sonic tapestries, and provides a firm center for his meandering tonal explorations. And it sounds fantastic.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Atlas Sound

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