Apathy

Wanna Snuggle?

(Traffic Ent.; US: 6 Oct 2009; UK: 5 Oct 2009)

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First and foremost, let’s get any discussion of this album’s artwork out of the way. Sure, it’s kind of ugly, but let’s not judge an album by its cover. Wanna Snuggle is the kind of album that just deserves more than some snarky remarks about its cover. For the most part, this is one hell of a record, as half of its tracks are some of the best you will probably hear this year. Of course, that depends on your taste—meaning if you have a penchant for more superficial hip-hop, you should probably move along. Truthfully, anyone interested remotely in hip-hop needs to hear at least some of Wanna Snuggle?.

Apathy hails from the underdog hip-hop state of Connecticut and is a rapper and producer who has built a healthy following for a damn good reason: He’s a talented artist. Armed with a great flow full of clever wordplay and equally strong abilities behind the boards, Apathy offers Wanna Snuggle?, a showcase for said skills in spades. Perfect examples include “Money Orientated” and “True Love”, two of 2009’s best tracks. The former features a slick loop of AZ’s famous verse on Nas’ “Life’s a Bitch” and a fresh look at the evils of money, and the latter pairs up Renaissance man Phonte with Apathy for a cut full of old-school vibes and loads of quotables. Other hits include eerie joints “Victim” and “Slave” along with the oddly fun “Shoot First”, which hosts a great guest verse from B-Real.

But the pacing of this record is extremely detrimental to its success. You more or less have a mixture of fantastic and dreadful songs with nothing in between. What’s frustrating about this is Apathy made this album unreasonably long at 21 tracks that clock in at nearly 70 minutes. Take the editor’s scissors to the tracklist, get rid of seven to eight tracks (like “Mind Ya Business”, “Anyday”, and “Run, Run Away”), and you would have what is close to a perfect album.

—Andrew Martin

The Moritz von Oswald Trio

Vertical Ascent

(Honest Jon’s; US: 21 Jul 2009; UK: 22 Jun 2009)

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Moritz von Oswald’s collaboration with Carl Craig titled its resected classical pieces “Movements”. On Vertical Ascent, von Oswald’s collective troika with NSI’s Max Lodbauer and Sasu Rippatti (Luomo/ Vladislav Delay), the four tracks are “patterns”, though they certainly exhibit their fair share of movement as well. Von Oswald’s minimalist work, under the vast esoteric network of Basic Channel and its sister labels, imagined the song as a single vector, bent and subject to gravitational resistance but ultimately cyclical and single-minded. Vertical Ascent in contrast is wildly divergent, scattering its patterns about, but contained within the authoritative kingdom of the beat. That’s not to say it’s organized chaos but rather chaotic organization. The disjointed stratosphere of free-formed contours resemble the indeterminate avant-garde at first, but it’s the persistence of the pulse which makes these shapes most unsettling (and perhaps disqualifies them from the electroacoustic ranks), not unlike the rhythms in Ricardo Villalobos’ Vasco or Wolf Eyes’ Dead Hills EP, which are unrelenting despite what happens around them. 

The gorgeous junglistic beats of “Pattern 3” come perhaps closest to containing its world of sounds in a way that a dancefloor could understand, instigating a beautiful paring of misty and sparse Konigsförst of melody with a Schwarzwald of tribal stick batterings. On the other “Patterns”, the melody is peripheral, at best parallel, like a ghost shadowing the bounce and refraction of the incidental SFX, a presence but painfully distantiated. This is not an unfamiliar phenomenon to Basic Channel fans, but the synergistic quality of von Oswald’s talent, combined with three classically trained players, makes for an altogether different quality—like the rhythmic remixes Chain Reaction releases deserved and never received.

—Timothy Gabriele

Caethua

The Long Afternoon of Earth

(Preservation; US: 25 Jul 2009; UK: 13 Jul 2009)

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On The Long Afternoon of Earth, Clare Adrienne Cameron Hubbard sings in a deliberately naïve soprano against a trickle of guitar and simple effects, sounding a little like Joanna Newsom, though without Newsom’s elfin tweet and with less compact poetry in the lyrics.

Buildings burn
To never return
Again!

Nothing after “burn” is completely necessary. Hubbard’s childlike delivery leaves the ends and middles of words plucked upwards, as if we’re listening to a person still learning to sing, which makes the singer sound young and plaintive and therefore sincere. The listener is invited to anticipate surprises—what will this sincere person say next, and what stories will she tell? This style is often referred to as “folk”, but this attenuate delicacy is folk in the way Marie Antoinette wearing a milkmaid dress was a farm worker. It’s an idea of folk simplicity, rather than the root of it. A thoughtful, wistful, and likeable album.

—Deanne Sole

2562

Unbalance

(Tectonic; US: 10 Nov 2009; UK: 19 Oct 2009)

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Dutch producer Dave Huismans flew in from out of nowhere to change the tenor of dubstep in the late 2000s. Beginning in 2007, Huismans released a string of 12” singles and one full-length album under the name 2562, which rejected the oily skank and amateurish techniques of the reigning South London dubsteppers (excluding Burial, naturally) for a sleek, intensely professional design. Initial recordings were spare affairs without much in the way of melody, but 2562 could knock a person out with a beat, forming bits of detritus into artful constructions and then pumping them so full of muscle that they shot like ammunition. As he began to incorporate jungle-inspired melodies into his beat maneuvers, the music became more appealing. His latest singles, Embrace / Hijack and Love in Outer Space, indicated not only that he’d made significant strides forward since his career’s inception, but also that his best material was still to come.

Unbalance delivers on this promise and establishes 2562 as the unequivocal front-runner of dubstep’s movement toward technical precision and aesthetic allure. On a basic level, Huismans simply married the beatwork from the full-length Aerial (2008) with the gooey jazz licks and spectral synths of his irregular second project, A Made Up Sound. Yet the record is much more than a summation of the producer’s history. It improves upon earlier releases’ sophisticated rhythms and makes them sing, their strength and agility balanced out so masterfully that they sound closer to poetry than the emissions of a hot laptop. It blurs the line between jackknifing two-step cadences and the double-time beat, rendering the tracks’ actual speed an enigma. It utilizes a maddening array of instruments and textures in the service of this artist’s newly realized melodic gifts, and mindfully welds them into song structures novel enough from each other to provide constant stimulation.

And then, as if it weren’t enough to pen some of the sickest dubstep tunes imaginable, Huismans edits them into a breathtakingly wide-screen whole that is as much about bringing us on an adventure as it is about creating electricity through nuance. Nowhere is this clearer than the title track, which distills the record to seven transfixing minutes. Synth-strings and hazy sci-fi sound effects meld with the rich chimes of a grandfather clock, setting a cozy mood. The beat arrives two minutes in, and it’s one of Huismans’ best, a seductive, tensile groove that lightly pushes the air around it, as though he were actually playing it with four arms on an electric drum set. It’s a panoramic piece at the center of a larger panorama, where characters like Slam, 4hero, Lawrence, Burial, and Larry Heard float and feint through the highly conceptual expanse. Unbalance offers a view into a future we might want to see, in which past musical loves are reimagined and rejuvenated, spoken in a new language that reveals something profound about what has already been said. Standing on the shoulders of giants, 2562 becomes one himself.

—Mike Newmark

Teenage Bottlerocket

They Came From the Shadows

(Fat Wreck Chords; US: 15 Sep 2009; UK: 14 Sep 2009)

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On They Came From the Shadows, Teenage Bottlerocket comes off as a group of smirking party animals. The band jokes its way through the bratty skate-park anthem “Skate or Die” and mock rock ‘n’ roll bravado on “Better Than Kiss”. While those songs are infectious and obvious attempts at humor (the band claims “Detroit couldn’t rock its way out of a paper bag” on the latter) the band is clearly at its best. Unfortunately, the band tries to have it both ways on this record. Those early songs seem to mock pop-punk culture, but the rest of the way the band falls into its same traps. Teenage Bottlerocket whines, meets girls at the show, and feels some vague form of dismissal. Even the title track, an attempt at a horror-flick-made-rock-song, sounds flat and uninspired. It’s bad enough when the band can’t decide if it wants us to bust a gut or pump our fist, but when it settles somewhere in between those and phones in a lethargic version of its energetic sound, you won’t really want to do either.

—Matthew Fiander

Total Jive

(Lexicon Devil; US: 23 Jun 2009; UK: 13 Jul 2009)

The Lexicon Devil imprint continues its reissues series with one of New York City’s truly unsung underground rock acts with the release of Total Jive, the excellent second album from the Scene Is Now. Formed in the early ‘80s from the ashes of no-wave greats the Information, the Scene Is Now created a more romanticized strain of a sound caught between No New York and New Wave. One can easily hear the influence of groups like the Feelies and Television in its style but also the rumbles of such art-ghetto heroes as DNA and Mofungo (drummer Jeff McGovern’s previous band) with echoes of then-younger groups like Yo La Tengo laying the foundation for future generations in the not-too-distant background. Jive, originally released on the Twin/Tone label in 1986, is perhaps the band’s most realized effort, expertly produced by downtown experimental luminary Elliott Sharp. This straight reissue (no bonus disc or tracks, sadly) marks the album’s debut on CD and has never sounded more urgent or incendiary. Anyone looking to further his or her education in the post no-wave sounds of New York City in the 1980s would be wise to look into the investment of this hidden jewel.

—Ron Hart

Mark O'Connor

String Quartets No.'s 2 & 3

(OMAC; US: 26 May 2009; UK: 26 May 2009)

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Violinist and composer Mark O’Connor is a musical deconstructionist. He takes big musical themes and breaks them down into small components that he manipulates in modern and heartfelt ways. On his most recent disc, Quartets No.‘s 2 & 3, O’Connor takes on two American traditions, bluegrass and old-time music, and turns them into abstract string quartets, resembling something Aaron Copeland might have created during the 1950s in their formal combination of robust vitality and folk motifs. Echoes of melodies repeat themselves to create hooks but always dissipate rather than move to a climax.

At times, it sounds metaphorically like O’Connor and company (Ida Kavafian, violin; Paul Neubauer, viola, and Matt Haimowitz, cello) are playing their respective stringed instruments with straw push brooms. The music seems brushed more than bowed except when someone takes a solo. Each of the players is a master musician. O’Connor’s quartets allow them to show off their virtuosity, but in the end, it’s the quality of the two quartets that matters most, and they are both damned good.

—Steve Horowitz

Think About Life

Family

(Alien8; US: 13 Oct 2009; UK: 13 Oct 2009)

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Think About Life’s 2006 self-titled debut drew some of its strength from its abrasiveness. It could get you moving, but it was as noisy as it was danceable. The band’s latest release, Family just throws down a dance party. While it has been more than three years between records, we shouldn’t be surprised by a change in sound, but it’s just a bit disconcerting.

Fortunately, Think About Life does this sort of indie-disco well. The key track here, “Havin’ My Baby”, delivers one of the year’s great earworms, and only the band’s lack of exposure will prevent us from having to hear too many imitative falsettos in the near future. With the sandpaper removed from the electronics, the band gets more upbeat this time. From the throwback opener “Johanna” (the style and placement of which suggests some sly humor) to the slow-down of “Nueva Nueva” to the threateningly explosive “Life of Crime”, the album offers plenty to get you going, whether by a shove onto the dance floor or as a pick-me-up during the late-afternoon lull.

—Justin Cober-Lake