MF Doom

MF Doom – MM…Food

After a self imposed retirement, Daniel Dumile (aka Zev Love X from 90’s hip hop group KMD) re-surfaced with the vigor of a villain who’d been scarred by the evils of the record industry. Masked with metal face mask of Marvel comic book character, Dr. Doom, he equipped himself with numerous personas, though mainly operating under the moniker, MF Doom. On MM…Food, Doom continues to dish up rugged self- produced beats and a butter smooth flow that is riddled with nutty non-sequiturs and deliciously acute metaphors, earning him the adulation of underground hip hop fans. “You telling me/ I try to act broke/ Jealousy the number killer of black folk” Doom quips on "Deep Fried Frenz" a update on Whodini’s infamous tale of backstabbing associates. Stuffed with numerous odd children read-along samples and kooky movie dialogue, Doom’s wild vision flaunts numerous savory bites; don’t expect to pick up on all the different tastes on your first sitting.

Spoon

Spoon – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga

Indie rock partially came about as a response to the overly pompous sound and vision of commercial rock: super sized arena pyrotechnics and albums stuffed with layers upon layers of excessive radio friendly overdubbing. Not to say that Spoon exhibits the lo-fi antithesis of production. In fact, they’ve dappled with far more studio refinement now than previous albums, even calling in the talents of producer and film scorer Jon Brion. However, every song is sprite and lean, like a middleweight fighter, brandishing muscle but only in the right places. In fact, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga will knock you out with the first four songs: the typical Spoon piano pounder “Don’t Make Me A Target, the hollow echoey dub of “The Ghost Of You Lingers”, the northern soul chimes and horns of “You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb”, and “Don’t You Evah” whose bass line recalls Prince’s Erotic City. Easily one the better albums of the year.

Yesterdays New Quintet

Yesterday’s New Quintet – Yesterday’s Universe

Aliases have grown to be a large part of hip hop culture. Everyone works more often behind a moniker than his own birth right name. Producer extraordinaire Madlib, whose created wonderful musical worlds under the names of Quasimoto, Jaylib and Madvillian, has once again stepped into the his finest tailored duds, and revived his self-created jazz band, Yesterday’s New Quintet. Surrounding himself with an arsenal of instruments and the influence of several decades of jazz, Madlib (Otis
Jackson Jr.) –with special guests including drummer Karriem Riggins and Azymuth precussionist Mamao – connects the dots between the groove oriented fusion of soul-jazz and the headier moments of 70’s avante-garde jazz movement. “Slave Riot” is muscled with an explosion of percussive soloing and a synthesizer meltdown that resembles the wilder compositions of Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi years, and funky drumming of “Street Talkin’” may be a the best Bernard Purdie track the Beastie Boys never stole. If you covet your Impusle and Strata East re-issues, Madlib offers you some additional astral traveling.

M Ward

M. Ward – Duet For Guitars #2

Every town has its musical favorite sons. Imagine the delight of the cluster of REM fans who witness them in beer drenched bars of Athens, Georgia, suddenly see them comet into the international skyline. Similarly, before Matt Ward shared a touring bill with Norah Jones, years back, he played his oversized guitar in local indie-rock trio Rodriguez. With quite a few home recording taking place within backyard chicken sized shacks, it was only a matter of time before he delivered his first album Duet For Guitars # 2, now re-released by his current record label, Merge. The Americana tint and John Fahey-styled rags his future albums now carry is present here, with his breathy, graveled croon embedding warmth in these dreamy narrations of teenage reflections (“Beautiful Car”) lonesome heartache (“Good News”) and emotional redemption (“It Won’t Happen Twice”). A very welcomed re-issue that points to the artistic fullness his currents albums swell with.

St. Vincent

St. Vincent – Marry Me

Besides lending her robed frame and skilled guitar hands to the Polyphonic Spree’s oversized ensemble, Annie Clark more resembles her other touring mate, Sujan Stevens, with her richly orchestrated debut album, recorded under her moniker, St. Vincent. A multi-instrumentalist and equipped with a voice that can sound as warm as Feist or as dangerous as Tori Amos, what she captures on record shifts continually. The French horns on “Human Racing” seduces with AM pop luster, where the brilliant indie-pop opener “Now Now” eventually explodes into a full noise collision of guitar shreds, an orchestration build-up and a kid-like chorus. But this says nothing of her lyrical talent for composing brief poetic visuals that bite with humor or lilt with cryptic sincerity. “With a heart like a socket/that I can plug into at will./And will you guess, when I’ll come around next/I hope your open sign is blinking still,” she flirts on Marry Me, continuing slyly with “let’s do what Mary and Joseph did, without the kid.”

Justice

Justice - † (Cross)

Justice wants to make you dance. These French boys, Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé, owe as much allegiance to the dark, sexy synth sounds of Italian disco as they do to the robotic electro drums of Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” or Cybotron’s “Clear”. But the accomplishment only arrives with the brazen attitude that surrounds the whole affair: the exercise of dicing a track apart, and applying snarling static and overblown guitar distortions as a fixing adhesive, without ever loosing eye contact of what keeps the dance floor flooded. The big beat of “New Jack” is interrupted by a transformer with loose wiring, yet the repairing hand wiggles the defect perfectly in time to the beat. “Genesis” opens with the heavy thud of ominous bass drum, as a warning to villainously fun that lies ahead. The charmer is kid’s choired sing-a-long “D.A.N.C.E.”, friendly enough for grandma, but still enough kick to get tired feet hustling to the middle of the floor.

Von Südenfed

Von Südenfed - Tromatic Reflexxions

With the Fall’s Mark E. Smith incomprehensible talking bark over wild electronic menageries created by Mouse On Mar’s Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner, this side-project may become your atypical dance anthem for the summer. Equally filled with tracks that could easily swell the dance floors at clubs, as well as part them, Von Südenfed is as dynamic in its compositional range as it is jarring to clubbers seeking redundant four-to-the-floor house rhythmic fodder. The album opens impressively with “Fledermaus Can’t Get Enough” that flashes the ID of LCD Soundsystem to get past the velvet ropes, and then follows up two songs later with the UK two-step sound of “Flooded” as Mark E. Smith peppers the track with his atonal delivery of “being the DJ.” Not until the end do they leave the Teutonic techno sound for African influence: “Chicken Yiamas” outfits a Mali blues acoustic guitar with glitchy back beats and “Dearest Friend” will have you thirsting for palm-wine its straightforward Afro-pop a la King Sunny Ade.

Roots Man Dub

Various Artists – Roots Man Dub

Once the foundation of a native music scene began to flourish on Jamaica’s jukeboxes and massive outdoor party sound systems, the knob twisting engineers introduced another element to the B-sides of their vinyl 45’s: dub versions. Originally, these B-sides were just the instrumental tracks of the A-side single, allowing partygoers the chance to lyrically participate as well as DJ’s to improvise with their native patois raps. Studio sharp engineers eventually began experimenting with the different layers of an instrumental track, emphasizing the rhythm and dropping out vocals or adding thick reverb or echo effects to the selected passages then extending the whole mix. Beneath the superstardom of King Tubby and Lee Scratch Perry, the two discs of Roots Man Dub (originally released in 1978) focus solely on the accomplishments of Alvin Ranglin and his G.G. Records Hits label. With a backing of infamous Jamaican musicians like Sly & Robbie, Leroy “Horsemouth” Wallace, Ansel Collins, this will soften the blows of the working week and allow mental escape.

Sea And Cake

Sea And Cake – Everybody

If ever indie rock made it into the yoga class, it may very well be Sam Prekop’s relaxed and breezy Sea And Cake outfit that demonstrates the first downward dog. With their recent album, Everybody, this Chicago supergroup – also featuring ex-Coctails Archer Prewitt and Tortoises’s John McEntire – continues to record albums that bubble open with spatial arrangements, and the airy light vocals of Sam Prekop’s wordplay. It’s difficult to pinpoint the source of their easily appealing sonics; its the fusion of pop, jazz, krautrock rhythms with hints of funk, all centrifuged together, and removing any of the jarring seeds. Think of this as homemade ice cream, organically pure and free of mass produced filler, but still a front porch treat.

Nouvelle Vauge Presents New Wave

Nouvelle Vague Presents – New Wave

With a curator’s eye, Nouvelle Vague view the songbook of 80’s post-punk and new wave as Ella Fitzgerald would her Cole Porter musical sheets: as a source of inspiration and as a vehicle for re-interpretation. With two previous albums offering cocktail/bossa nova treatment to such classics as Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, Nouvelle Vague's Marc Collin and DJ Gilles LeGuen now re-position their spotlight onto the bands they love, and select a two disc set of tracks as their new wave heroes delivery their own cover versions, thick in synth pop. Mixing the popular with the head scratching obscure, Devo’s instantly recognizable “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” offsets The Comateens take on “Summer In The City.” With any various artists collection, a few tracks do fall short, and are enjoyable sheerly for their kitsch factor. But those are few amongst the 24 tracks here, and to have the Slit’s bouncy take on Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” and The Original Mirrors new romantic on the Supreme’s “Reflection”, there is enough fun here for past and future generations of youth.

Sir Richard Bishop

Sir Richard Bishop – While My Guitar Violently Bleeds

The investigation of folk music in all its worldly forms didn’t begin with John Fahey, but his guitar workings – rampant with un-Western like chord structures and his intense aural survey of a guitar’s acoustical limits - still find new devotees today. Existing between this departed wizard and the recently emerged freak-folk scene is an equally vivid crew of elder guitar dazzlers: Jack Rose, Stephen Basho-Junghans, and Sir Richard Bishop. As the shortest piece (just under seven minutes) of the trio of tracks, “Zurvan” is a Flamenco influenced by the cinematic theatrics of a spaghetti Western; full of flashy runs and precise fingerpicking, like a skilled gunslinger’s showboating his hip cannons. “Smashana” is vigorously avant-garde. If ever the world heard the recorded exorcism of a be-deviled instrument, here lies its evidence: a darkly arranged composition haunted with stabs of feedback and ghoulish tonal moans. The record closes with a 22 minute Middle Eastern raga, as trance inducing as turkey on a Sunday.

White Stripes

The White Stripes – Icky Thump

After briefly side projecting with Brendan Benson and cohorts in the Raconteurs, Jack White re-unites with his sisterly other-half, Meg White, to outfit themselves in their red, white and black costumery and return to their drum-guitar garage aesthetics. While there is still the blues swagger that enriched much of their early albums, now their sound has become so ferociously thick, Jack’s guitar so dense with distortion, that the pop garage-rock gets swallowed by metal riffs and the enormous cymbal crashes. Not that you’ll ever hear a whole album of redundancy. “Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn” merges a Scottish bagpipes and mandolin with sharp angular guitar shredding as if Riverdance was co-opted by punk rockers. Some tracks are instantly recognizably White Stripes: the Jack’s Thor hammer punch on “Little Cream Soda”, Meg’s tribal drum beat opening “Rag And Bone”. Never as straightforward as their dogmatic approach would imply, the White Stripes continue to have fun with the simplest of tools, to our benefit.