ODDS AND SODS AND STILL ALIVE

I figure it might be a good idea at this point to say that I'm not shutting down this blog. I'm hoping to become a little more active again come May, but we'll just have to see. Now, that being said, that statement seems like the kiss of death for a blog. Before I started blogging, when I was just reading blogs as I discovered them, I found that prolonged periods of inactivity--or severely decreased activity--followed by a post saying "I'm not dead, hope to post more soon, etc." was almost always the last post in the archive. That's not what I have in mind here. I would like to finish my best of 2012 list before 2013 is half over. . . 

Anyway, I haven't actually been keeping up with music as much in the first quarter of the year, but some stuff that's been exciting me in 2013:

Mogwai - Les Revenants: This might actually be, for the first time, the best thing they've released since Young Team. At times it feels like a return to the Come On Die Young era, but the relative lack of guitars throughout shifts things from slow burn to post burn. When this is bleak, it's awfully bleak, but the stretch of music from "Relative Hysteria" to "Modern" is as good as Mogwai has ever been, with the former (whisper it) besting "Stanley Kubrick." The cover of "What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?" is a little more successful than "Hounds of Winter" from the Earth Divisions EP--I don't want Mogwai to go all Palace Brothers on me, but I'm kind of happy with this as a minor direction for the band (as opposed to something like "The Sun Smells Too Loud," which remains the nadir of their recorded output as far as I'm concerned). Also, parts of this soundtrack remind me of the soundtrack for Star Ocean 2 (mainly this and this), which I'm surprisingly okay with.

Cyclopean - Cyclopean EP: This comes on like a Martian Ege Bamyasi and might the closest thing to a prime period CAN release since Soon Over Babaluma. It's nervous and edgy in a way that the Malcolm Mooney period emphasised more than the Damo Suzuki period, but also shows off the kind of telepathic interplay that I wish people took away from krautrock, rather than playing another goddamn motorik drumbeat to put me to sleep. In a lot of ways, this EP feels like a more active version of Lokai's Transition (an underrated album if ever there was one). It sounds better in the room than it does through headphones, surprisingly, so I don't listen to it much on my commutes.

Karen Gwyer - Needs Continuum: Gorgeous, entrancing music. I put this on and disappear into another world. Enveloping in the best possible sense of the word. I get the Oneohtrix Point Never comparisons people keep throwing around, but whereas I find Lopatin's stuff leaves me cold for the most part, Gwyer's album is both warmly engaging and productively empty (that is, it works in the background to shape the space I'm in, but also invites me into its depths). It reminds me in a way of Fovea Hex's EPs from 2006; not so much in sound, but in attitude, the way it is aggressively its own thing without allowing that insularity to remove it entirely from the world. Thinking and living music, I'd say.

Waxahatchee - Cerulean Salt: I only really like about half of this album, but that half sounds great. The best moments are the shorter fragments of songs--"Hollow Bedroom," "Coast to Coast," "Misery Over Dispute," and "Waiting" (the former two being the highlights of the album)--when it feels like the album is a half-remembered patchwork of songs I might've heard on the radio once or twice as a kid by bands like the Breeders and Veruca Salt. The lyrics are often startlingly good, but it's the confidence in negative space the elevates the best moments above the glut of similar sounding stuff released over the past half decade.

I've also been digging Darkstar's News From Nowhere (what I wish Animal Collective sounded like), Four Tet's 0181 (Four Tet by numbers in a lot of ways, but really pretty nonetheless), and, obviously, the new My Bloody Valentine.

REVIEW: FOUR TET - PINK

Four Tet - Pink
Text, 2012

I figured I might as well join in the outpouring of love for Four Tet's new album, Pink (for examples, see the reviews here, here, and here, and the comments here). I don't know if I can call myself a long-time fan of Four Tet, but I've been pretty solidly on board since I first heard 2008's Ringer EP. "Ribbons" caught me in its spell--mysterious and alluring and weirdly beautiful; retrofuturistic in a strange way, like dusty chrome furniture in a space station. From there, I went backwards and caught up on what I'd missed. By the time 2010's There Is Love In You rolled around, it was fair to say that I was a fan. Over the past year and a half or so, it's been a pleasant surprise to have a steady trickle of music from Kieran Hebden, from collaborations with Burial to one-offs and pairs of tracks of new Four Tet songs. Those Four Tet songs are collected here, and it's a credit to the strength of Hebden's voice as a producer that Pink is a fairly unified set, exploring an area that, if not rigidly defined, at least has some pretty solid borders. If Pink doesn't quite match the heights of There Is Love In You, it's not for a lack of stunning moments, as throughout Hebden continues to demonstrate his ability to take what might seem affected in others' hands and turn out effortless, weightless music. The more overt turn for the dancefloor signaled by Ringer and followed through on his last album is front and centre, but there's also a nod towards his earlier work, with the sinuous, ever-shifting rhythms and cosmic outlook of free jazz, the gently psychedelic strains of 1960s folk and early 1970s singer-songwriter music, and the loose-limbed bop-and-knock of hip-hop shot through the floor-filling potential of the material here. Six albums into his career as Four Tet, Hebden's managed with Pink to sum up where he's been and hint at where else he might go. That both parts of that equation are thrilling suggests what a special talent Hebden is.

Pink is a lengthy album--it clocks in at just over an hour--but its length is put to good use: aside from a mid-album stretch of shorter tracks, extended run times provide Hebden with the room both to continually mutate the shape of tracks and to spotlight a track's parts. Thus, opener "Locked" allows its swinging percussion almost two full minutes to do all the lifting before it turns into infinitely refracted psychedelia, all shards of hallucinatory melody that subtly disorient even as they enchant. Similarly, closer "Pinnacles" pushes and pulls on its underwater, Caribou-esque techno centre, letting jauntily dissonant piano crash through the mix again and again, not to disrupt the groove but to highlight how swinging it is. Hebden is still able to pull back and isolate elements on the shorter tracks, though, as the drop into near-silence during the weirdly percolating break of "Jupiters" bridges its pretty overture with the jazzy and relentless groove that dominates its second half. Indeed, if there's a common denominator to the album, it's the importance of the drums to these tracks. Thrillingly alive--even when they clearly aren't live--they make the best argument for the evolution of Four Tet over the past decade, turning what's been an eclectic discography into a surprisingly linear trajectory. It's as if the collaborations with Steve Reid, the folktronica, the detours through house and techno had all been planned by Hebden, rather than happy accidents along the way as he developed. Regardless, it's all there in the drums, which, aside from the beatless epic "Peace For Earth" (probably the closest thing here to the material on There Is Love In You), cover the album like a web in much the same way those shimmering, Reich-ian pings and chimes covered the last album.

If the drums make the album, though, the stunning moments that I mentioned earlier come courtesy of the textures that interact with those drums. The chunky synths that close out "Locked" like a sunset. The kalimba/mbira that wends its way through the final three minutes of "Lion" and pushes the track's funkiness through the roof. The repetitive, old-school vocal sample that drives "128 Harps," and the heart-stopping pauses throughout the track, that inject some tension into what could otherwise be a bit of pretty filler. The chasing-its-tail vocal in "Pyramid" that allows the track to do "Love Cry" in reverse and offer the hardest, purest dance track of Hebden's career. These and other moments provide sumptuous highlights that move the body and fire the senses, suggesting that the music on Pink might best be called "gourmet techno." I've damned other albums for suffering from the dulling effects of great taste, but this is an example of undeniably great taste used to help the music rather than render it tame and predictable.

Despite the superlatives littering this and other reviews, it seems like it would be relatively easy to underrate Pink. Hebden's been so good for so long at this point that a new Four Tet album that does everything he's always done well and expands (or at least deepens) the project's aesthetic doesn't feel like a revelation. I doubt this album is going to be the starting point of any kind of revolution, and it's unlikely that Pink will be spoken of in the same hushed, reverential tones as his pal Burial's Untrue, say. What that doesn't and can't cover, though, is that this is well-written, well-produced music that hits all its targets in a relaxed, assured manner. Sometimes it pays to have a steady hand at the wheel, and it's difficult to imagine a steadier hand than Hebden's here.

On a deeper level there is one thing that Pink has going for it that suggests if it's not an "important" album, it's at least an interesting one: the tracks that make up Pink offer a model of how omnivorous music can avoid the over-caffeinated maximalism that tends to plague "post-everything" music, like Rustie's Glass Swords. At this point, Four Tet denotes an aesthetic sensibility that really does seem comfortable grabbing from just about anywhere, even if it mostly remains within certain genres and idioms. The pastoralism that first brought Four Tet notice is still present--if in limited supply on Pink; one of its wonders is how urban it feels--and the various elements at work in his sound are so integrated, so naturalised, that it's difficult to call anything he does a dalliance anymore. In this sense, Pink feels very timely: you could spend hours following its sounds and strands through YouTube, though that wouldn't necessarily make your experience of the album any richer. Knowledge of UK garage, 2-step, dubstep, house, and techno aren't required for entry--beauty and meaning are communicated on the surface as well as in the depths. In his study of literary modernism The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner compares the densely allusive poetry of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot before concluding:

[N]o knowledge about Coriolanus will lock Eliot's lines neatly together as the information that Paquin was a Paris dressmaker will lock Pound's. Pound omits, omits, but knows what he is omitting and can restore on demand; but behind Eliot's resonance there is frequently nothing to restore (how centrifugal are the Notes to The Waste Land!). (133)

In place of omitting, we might say that Hebden synthesizes or integrates, but, like Pound, he can restore what he's integrated, allowing worlds to continually bloom behind his music. Here an allusion, a citation, and the (seemingly) infinite archive of the internet that supports and supplements the experience of listening to Four Tet offers a connection to a broader cultural matrix without ever feeling like it threatens to overwhelm the music in the present moment. That might not seem like it's much, but I'm finding that an increasingly scarce experience when listening to music these days. If musicians can learn any trick from Four Tet's Pink, I hope it's to do the same.

REVIEW: BURIAL + FOUR TET - "NOVA"

Burial and Four Tet

Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) just tweeted a link to "Nova," the latest collaboration between Burial and himself (this follows their previous collaborations "Moth" and "Wolf Cub" from 2009, and their work with Thom Yorke last year on "Ego" and "Mirror"). This is a treat, coming so soon after Burial released his Kindred EP, and at less than six minutes it feels like something of a counterbalance to its lengthy suites. "Nova" is, as you can imagine, wonderful, starting off like a half-remembered song from a dream, all disconnected snatches of vocals just beyond comprehension and far away glimmers of melody. I particularly love the stuttering chords and vocals over those Burial drums in the first half of the track, and when everything takes off in the second half after a brief lull, "Nova" goes to another level. Achingly melodic, the climax is like the best moments of both artists distilled to deceptively simple elements, what every imitator and detractor has clumsily attempted to grasp, but with an obvious level of mastery and craftsmanship that transcends well-worn sonic signifiers. The close, with its static and what sounds almost like whale noises (a Burial favourite), is pretty, if a little inconsequential, but at that point the heavy lifting has been done.

This track hits the sweet spot for a collaboration between these two in a way that none of their other tracks have quite matched, with the lushness of Four Tet's work offered a propulsive lift from those 2-step drums that Burial favours and the approach to the vocal meeting somewhere in the middle. Both "Moth" and "Wolf Club" had moments of brilliant, but they felt stitched together, the boundaries between the two artists too clear to work as anything more than a Four Tet track added to a Burial track or vice versa. Here, though, there's a give and take that suggests two artists who are comfortable with each other and able to push each other into new territory. The idea of an album length collaboration between the two has become an increasingly tantalizing prospect over the course of their collaborative history, and this track really makes that seem like a masterpiece waiting to happen.

All in all, "Nova" is seriously, compulsively listenable and one of the best examples of  "glowing" music--as Burial has described the music he tries to make--I've ever heard. Indeed, this sounds more "glo-fi" than most of the chillwave stuff that got that tag a few years ago, bright and colourful in just the right way. Come December, I can see this fighting for track of the year. If it's any indication of what's to come on a new Four Tet album, the follow up to 2010's There is Love in You is going to be something special.

REVIEW: SHLOHMO - VACATION EP

Shlohmo - Vacation EP
Friends of Friends, 2012

As I am currently on vacation (well, sort of: I haven't gone anywhere and I'm still doing work, I just don't have to go into campus or teach this week), this seems like an appropriate confluence of subject matter and state-of-being.

I picked up Shlohmo's Bad Vibes last year on something of a whim; a few reviews compared it to the stuff coming out on Brainfeeder these days, which was enough to get me to at least take a look (sort of like how the letters MBV in a review are almost guaranteed to get me to give something a listen), though it already felt like I was up to my eyeballs in woozy deconstructions of r'n'b and hip-hop spliced with IDM. I came to like Bad Vibes quite a bit, though--it made it onto my Albums of the Year list in the Honourable Mentions category--partly because it served as such an able foil to other albums that caught my fancy last year. It was blurred and bleary, true, but it was also quite warm and inviting. Thinking about its sound, I always come back to the word humid: rust and moss slowly accumulating over a world while thick, damp air rests on top of everything.  This is in many ways the antithesis of something like the Weeknd's House of Balloons, whose music is so clean and stylish even at its blurred-est and bleariest. Nevertheless, there was a link in the way that both Shlohmo and the Weeknd took various of-the-moment signifiers and forced them into the service of distinctly personal visions (that Shlohmo recently remixed Drake's "Crew Love," a song co-written by and featuring the Weeknd, draws some attention to this shared approach).

The humidity hasn't decreased on the Vacation EP, and if the material here is not miles away from what Shlohmo was doing on Bad Vibes, there are enough new wrinkles here to keep things interesting and to suggest development. While he doesn't abandon the dying machinery sound palette that has such emotional resonance, nor the blues and r'n'b inflected guitar playing (though it's used sparingly here), Shlohmo pushes vocals to the foreground on Vacation. Whereas on Bad Vibes the vocals often sounded like they should come covered in a bedsheet with eyeholes cut out and some cheap chains to shake, here the vocals are at times more in line with what UK bass music has been doing over the past half decade and at other times a call back to turn of the millennium glitch, seemingly lifted from a volume of Clicks & Cuts. Lead-off track "The Way U Do" is in line with the former, an r'n'b vocal pitched up and disembodied, never quite able to say something, to make a connection, but present to do some of the heavy emotional (and melodic) lifting. Indeed, the foregrounded vocals of "The Way U Do" work to make it feel something like a 2012 version of "The Great Gig in the Sky," a comparison not quite as ludicrous as it might seem on the surface. "Wen Uuu," on the other hand, is in line with the kind of music Milles Plateaux used to put out, the syllables sliced, diced, and reconstructed beyond comprehension--if there is a contemporary analogue for it, "Aidy's Girl's a Computer" might come closest, though the vocals in "Wen Uuu" are clearly and recognizably human.

Beyond Shlohmo's more upfront work with vocals, though, Vacation's tempos feel quite a bit more sprightly than those found on Bad Vibes. These tempos are paired with arrangements that often feel quite busy and full (though not in a bad way) when compared with some of the more skeletal tracks on his last album. This doesn't always work out--for all its glitchy vocal work and magical backing (it sounds like an entire environment coming to life in a rainstorm and singing for you), "Wen Uuu" doesn't do a whole lot, content to unspool its way to a reverb and echo drenched retreat into the fog--but when it does, as on the second half of "The Way U Do" when the two vocal tracks merge and duet in a satisfying payoff (and one that's not far from the ground Burial explores on Kindred), Shlohmo's skill as an arranger becomes clear. The way that he constructs his tracks is quite similar to BNJMN, whose Black Square I like quite a bit.

The best track on Vacation is its final one, "Rained the Whole Time," though. Bringing back the guitars over a beat that calls to mind Disco Inferno's "Summer's Last Sound," Shlohmo largely does away with the vocals here while offering one of his most compelling productions. In the middle of the track, the song undoes itself--the drums dropping into a straight 4/4 before becoming a lone snare and then disappearing entirely--sounding like an r'n'b slow jam forced to go so slow that it comes apart at the seams. Without its beat, the song is at once weightless and impossibly heavy-limbed, a nicely disorienting effect. The reentry of the beat offers a jolt of energy and momentum before the song undoes itself once again to close, the pauses and hesitations of the beat giving way to that same lone snare and finally nothing.

Vacation is not a perfect release and at only three songs (plus some remixes on some versions), to have "Wen Uuu" feel so underwhelming is a disappointment. Nevertheless, "The Way U Do" is a strong update on the template laid out by Bad Vibes and "Rained the Whole Time" suggests just how far Shlohmo can push his sound. I wouldn't be surprised if Shlohmo makes a Cosmogramma style leap on his next full length, but given his name, modus operandi, and the tinkering on display on Vacation, Shlohmo seems more likely to take a path similar to that of Four Tet, gradually subsuming larger and larger amounts of sound under his own identity. On a slightly larger scale, this feels like one of the most obvious and fruitful cross-pollinations from Los Angeles' beat scene and the UK's post-dubstep milieu yet, connecting with Flying Lotus and Brainfeeder at the same time that it nods to Burial, James Blake, Kode9, BNJMN, and others. It might not be a tropical paradise, but you could do worse than to spend your vacation in the world conjured up by Vacation.

ON PERFECT SONGS

Mark Richardson's latest Resonant Frequency column is his usual mix of self-reflection and cultural insight. His description of "Flim,"* which I have to agree is a pretty fantastic song, is particularly nice:

[E]ach little pause, hesitation, and stutter is so perfectly placed, and . . . the drums plant ideas in my head about innocence, awkwardness, burgeoning confidence, and growth. . . . I picture myself sitting across from Richard James in his bedroom as he works over this material on his computer. It's an illusion, of course, but I like to imagine that I'm hearing what James was hearing at that moment, that the glass between us is completely transparent.

Part of what makes Richardson's columns such pleasures, though, is his talent as a writer for scenes that are so evocative of his subject matter--the relationship between memory, perception, music, and everyday life (his invisible music project is a really fascinating attempt to put those themes into practice). He has a doozy of a line to finish the second section of his most recent column: "All of these feelings are carried to me through the bass, so strong it's uncanny, like how the smell of a certain shampoo can instantly bring to mind a face you'd completely forgotten." The evanescent face that a smell conjures, the fleeting emotions that that note (right or wrong) calls forth, Richardson's one of the best at writing about those moments.

During his discussion of "Flim," Richardson linked to an earlier Resonant Frequency column in which he talked about "perfect songs." I'd thought about this idea for a long time, even before I read that column, how some songs that aren't my favourite songs are what I would consider to be perfect: nothing can be done to improve on these songs/performances of these songs. As Richardson puts it, "They cannot be improved; each has fulfilled its destiny and become everything it could hope to be." He lists a dozen such songs in his article, and I agree with several of them--"I Want You Back," "Crimson and Clover," "Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough"--though I'm not sure if I'd put "Flim" down as my choice of a perfect song from the Aphex Twin. Reading these columns this morning (re)inspired me to surf through some videos on YouTube and poke around my music collection to consider what some of my perfect songs might be.

Aphex Twin - "Avril 14th," from Drukqs (2001)

It's simple and direct (sort of), without any of the flashy drum programming of "Flim," but Richard D. James found one of those magic chord progressions that makes your chest ache and that's more than enough in his hands. The final section is pure joy, the high notes leaping out and shining. The little details are what really make this special, though: the way the melody line in the first section gets doubled an octave higher, the surprisingly tricky syncopations in the middle that manage to avoid disturbing the elegance and grace of piece. I played it at a wedding once during the ceremony (long story) and it went over surprisingly well.

Bark Psychosis - "Eyes & Smiles," from Hex (1994)

The peak of one of the few albums I'm tempted to call perfect. Graham Sutton and co. absolutely nail the feel of three in the morning throughout the album (that one song opens with the line "It's 3 am..." can't be a coincidence), and there are several stretches that I just can't imagine anyone equaling, ever.  In eight and a half minutes, "Eyes & Smiles" piles all of the conflicting emotions of being awake and alone when surrounded by people on top of each other and shepherds them to a point of ecstatic desolation.

Boards of Canada - "Kid for Today," from the In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country EP (2000)

I remember finding the percussion on this song absolutely mystifying when I first heard it. What was the source of that click? Now that I know it's a slide projector--what could be more in line with their ethic, really?--some of the mystery is gone, but that only allows me to appreciate the combination of joy, innocence, melancholy, and menace all the more. Complex psychological portraits of childhood are tough--how can you avoid idealizing or overdetermining any aspect?--and I think that's why Boards of Canada's music is so enthralling: they get it all in their music, the good and the bad, somehow. 

Four Tet - "My Angel Rocks Back and Forth," from Rounds (2003)

Kieran Hebden has a knack for making beautiful music. He also has a striking ability to match sound with title (cf. "Circling" and "This Unfolds" from There is Love in You and "Ribbons" from the Ringer EP for more examples), as here the music does feel like it's gently rocking you back and forth. What's more, he's wise enough to get out of his own way when he has a good thing going, as he does here, letting the prettiest melody he's ever written spool and unspool itself for five minutes with minimal accompaniment. Some dusty percussion to give the track a little forward momentum and an unobtrusive background wash for added colour are all he needs to make something that could go on for years and ends at just the right time.

Kevin Shields - "Are You Awake?," from the Lost in Translation soundtrack (2003)

As rudimentary as the beat is on this piece, it works quite well as a kind of driving background that the bouncing, echo-drenched melody can play off of. Richardson actually reviewed this soundtrack for Pitchfork and faulted "Are You Awake?" for its brevity: "it's painfully short at a minute and a half. I get the sense that Shields is on the verge of tapping into something deeper here . . . but 'Are You Awake?' doesn't give much to go on." I think it's the perfect length; "Are You Awake?" gains much of its charm from seeming like a sketch that turned out to be the finished product. Shields has produced at least one other masterpiece post-Loveless (his "MBV Arkestra" remix of Primal Scream's "If They Move, Kill 'Em"), but "Are You Awake?" is what gives me hope that he really can top Loveless someday.

Stereolab - "Three Women," from Chemical Chords (2008)

I'm not unconvinced that this song won't make the sun spontaneously appear, and I would put it on this list even if it were just the horn chart. The added bonus of one of Laetitia Sadier's typically bouncing, playful melodies and a rhythm section that drives harder on this than on almost anything else they've recorded makes it almost unbearably great. I have had to forcibly stop myself from dancing down the street if this comes on my iPod while I'm walking somewhere on more than one occasion.

Tim Hecker - "Harmony in Blue III," from Harmony in Ultraviolet (2006)

Really, I could put the whole "Harmony in Blue" suite here, but there's something about those gentle clusters of notes that just cuts right through me (Fripp and Eno's The Equatorial Stars tried to do much the same thing on songs like "Meissa," I think, though they didn't accomplish it anywhere near as well). Like much of Hecker's music, this piece is profoundly ambiguous, it's emotional content straddling so many borders that you can't help but be drawn back in. I think even the least synaesthetic person when it comes to music can hear the blue in this.

So, those are seven of my perfect songs. What are some of yours?

*The disadvantage of YouTube videos (and I guess music videos generally, though that's a conversation for another day...): with the admittedly quite pretty and bucolic scenes that are included there, something of the grace and beauty of "Flim" is cheapened. The images are too direct and obvious, grasping at the feelings that emerge so naturally from the music (just like all the videos of Boards of Canada songs cut to footage from Planet Earth).

SOMETHING LIKE A BLOG POST ON "SHUFFLE"

A few random thoughts on the eve of the start of a new semester.

Two song titles that make me chuckle every time I see them:
"Stupid Prick Gets Chased by the Police and Loses His Slut Girlfriend" by Mogwai and "Eat My Dust You Insensitive Fuck" by Catherine Wheel. Of course, it helps that both are actually great songs beyond having punchlines for titles: the Mogwai song is, fitting its origin, really quite tense and filmic and the Catherine Wheel song, thanks to Tim Friese-Greene's always stellar production work, features the same amazing harmonica sound found on those later Talk Talk albums.

Speaking of said harmonica sound: "The Rainbow" by Talk Talk. The way that note just builds and then explodes from 7:04-7:16 is just wonderful. I'd say it sounds like a rainbow, but it's a little too violent and unhinged (not that I'm complaining). Also, wow, the guitar that comes in at the start. He must be hitting the strings really hard because it sounds way out, but it works so well with the piano. It really is astounding that the same band that wrote this (which is also a great song) made Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock (twenty years old this year!). Both albums have a pretty sterling critical reputation these days, but they deserve more actual listening than I'm sure they get. I know I'm guilty of letting them sit for criminally long times without a spin. As albums they're so intense, though, that it's difficult to do anything else but let them wash over you--there's no fading into the background, especially not with Mark Hollis' voice coming out of the speakers at you.

I'd been hearing a bit about The Weeknd when they released their first album, but I wasn't really in the mood to check out an R&B band from Toronto. With the release of their second album of the year, Thursday, this past Thursday, though, I figured it couldn't hurt to see what they're about. After listening to Thursday, I have to say that I'm impressed: it sounds great, sort of halfway between Brainfeeder and mainstream pop. It reminds me of Massive Attack (pre-Mezzanine, maybe during the Protection era) and early Tricky (circa Maxinquaye) in a lot of ways. I didn't pay enough attention to the lyrics to pick up on the tales of debauchery that supposedly make up all the lyrics, but I can see this being just sort of noirish and outre enough to score a more "sophisticated" night out for a lot of people (kind of like Portishead when Dummy came out--actually, "Cowboys" from Portishead isn't a terrible touchstone for The Weeknd's sound, to a certain extent). The way that the voice is used isn't quite as arresting as Gonjasufi, but the vocals really do grab your attention. I'm interested to see what album #3 in this trilogy will sound like.

A great companion to The Weeknd that came out on Brainfeeder recently is Shlohmo's Bad Vibes. It's less indebted to IDM and jazz than Flying Lotus, so it's able to feel much more like a kind of malfunctioning, robotic R&B, but it retains the kind of glassy, airy tones that made Teebs' album Ardour so great and that Four Tet regularly transforms into moments of great beauty. There are some Burial-style disembodied voices that creep up and moan like ghosts in the background, but they're handled well and aren't really much of a distraction. It would be nice to hear what Shlohmo could do with some real vocals, though. Actually, lately I've been really wishing that Bjork would hook up with the Brainfeeder roster. Just the thought makes me sort of dizzy. Or maybe if Laura Darlington could guest on a few of Shlohmo's tracks the results might be as impressive as her turns at the mic on Flying Lotus' last two albums.