Let Alone Sea

pOprOck Records

It’s rare to come across a recording that has synced the three pillars of memorable modern popular music—song, style, and personae. Arrica Rose and her band, the …’s, new record Let Alone Sea is as close as I’ve heard in ages. It’s winning as a piece of song-craft. Melodies that soar and poetry that conveys real emotion. Songs you can sing and share knowing the hooks will do their work. But this isn’t a mere singer-songwriter exercise: it’s the recordings that are the magic here. Rose and her producer Dan Garcia have built airy soundscapes with an eclectic blend of instrumentation that falls on the ear as an evolution in folk music. “When The Clouds Hang This Low” is a fine example. Violins and cello drift in and out of the fog. Arrica’s voice is a whisper. Harmonies ring in the background. It’s like being in an impressionist painting.  Stirring stuff. Arrica brings powerful personae to the work as well with snippets of Patti Smith, Fiest, Catpower, Karen Carpenter and the range to do much more. It is Indie Rock by strict definition, but she’s sanded off the edges and set the whole show in a 1970′s Topanga Canyon dream. The music has a perspective and while she nods to different styles Americana, Pop, and Indie Rock…she’s always coming from her place. Let Alone Sea isn’t flawless certainly, but the misses are minor. Hand claps might be a gratuitous overreach, but you’re going to be thrilled you bought this record.

-Grant Langston

Break. Broken. Broke.

(Ilse)

Any band with a palindrome as a name is okay by me. Loopool is one man, Los Angeles émigré Jean-Paul Garnier, and we’re lucky to have him: as much a “drone” artist as a noise artist, loopool has spent thirteen years and over 40 albums making sound collages out of field recordings and a sparse set of electronic and analog equipment. As you’d expect from an album entitled Break. Broken. Broke., this time, things are getting violent. The first track begins with the rush of racecars interspersed with sinister bloops—and the album never lets up, providing consistent scares and dread, as you’d expect from something with song titles like “Bluebeard-Audiocamo” and “How Long Would You Wait in Hell.” Though there are never really drums or a beat, as would be almost implied from a name with “loop” in it, this is not pure musique concrete. There are always as many as five or six layers here, and there’s as much “play” here as there is construction. In the background, “real” instruments abound, especially in the live track “Irruptions – Dead Mix” performed with Danse Perdue. My favorite track may be “As You Walk Away,” with what sound like bass piano notes against a backdrop of gentle zombie feedback. But for fans of noise, you can’t go wrong with “Lost in the Murk,” which has squeaky hinge noises straight out of David Tudor’s “Rainforest” backed up against what sounds like someone breathing angrily. This may not be your cup of tea, but the emperor does wear clothes.

-Dan Collins

Real Late

Manimal

When I received the new CD by Multi-instumentalist Michael Quinn, AKA Corridor, I knew that I’d have to listen to it at least ten times before giving my true opinion. His music tends to improve with each listen. Corridor’s music is dense, in a good way, full of virtuosic instrumentation that is played deliberately dark. This is not lightweight pop. He’s the only cellist in rock and roll whose performances are worthy of playing air cello to.  He’s truly an artist whose music stands alone as its own genre. On his new CD, Real Late, rhythms are daringly maintained long past traditional comfort zones, often abruptly changing tone and direction on a dime. This music challenges the listener and dares them to be worthy of the rewards at the end of the voyage, like trusting a sailor to escort you through icebergs as he smokes his pipe and follows the stars. Quinn’s vocals are ultra cool, and fade into the mix. I don’t pick up many of the lyrics, but with music this good supporting them, they must be about something awesome. Standout tracks include the cello-driven epic, “Rebuilding My Internal World” and the exotic intricate guitar heavy, also-epic track “Roam Room.” Really, epic could apply to all of these songs. Each track is a soundtrack to itself, and each clocks in between four and a half to eight minutes long. This is a CD that I will be listening to for years, and by the time December rolls along, this could be my favorite release of 2011.

-Scott Schultz

QLUSTER
Fragen
Bureau B

Download Qluster – “Haste Töne”

It sounds like King Crimson.

-Bill Leighty

The Demon and the Devotee

Atomic a Go Go

It’s fantastic to think that somewhere out by Phoenix the sounds of a haunting organ laid over a heavy guitar riffs are spilling out of a garage across the torrid heat of the Arizona desert into the vast night. In reality, this likely isn’t true, as the people behind this neo-sixties, Dead Kennedys inspired music, the Love Me Nots, now play to much larger audiences than a few cacti and rock dwelling reptiles. Band members Nicole Laurenne, Michael Johnny Walker, Sophie O and Jay Lien this year offer up their fourth release, The Demon and the Devotee. At its core the album’s pointy-toed shoes toe the garage rock line, like on the track “The End of the Line,” which starts with Walker laying down some particularly stellar guitar work over a rhythmic intro, and the aptly named party tune “Let’s Get Wrecked.” On other tracks however, the quartet creates a sound distinctly their own—and it’s all about Laurenne playing those amazing tones on the Farfisa organ. The opening of “Make Up Your Mind” is reminiscent of a horror movie sound track stuck on fast forward, but escapes the trap of cheesiness to instead reveal one of the album’s most memorable songs. Again, on “Demons,” it is Laurenne’s organ adding the element that adds the unexpected depth. The Love Me Nots have successfully put together an outstanding album that explores the exciting diversity within the garage rock genre, even if they don’t play there anymore.

-Tim McLaughlin

The Tractatus

Alpha Pup

The Tractatus begins, and my first thoughts are, “Why is my 6^th grade science teacher talking during this guy’s album?” followed by “Wait. Real drums and a drum machine?” Kone, an L.A. based producer who recently signed on with Alpha Pup, describes his music as “psychedelic gangster funk.” Sample heavy, with each song an ever-layering progression based around snippets of running male commentary about scientific philosophy (possibly by or about Ludwig Wittgenstein), The Tractatus is like a shopping cart of sounds, and each track throws a new aisle’s worth of magic into the basket. Like Kone’s love for layering within each song, the album itself grows as it progresses: we leave the ethereal opening tracks for a heavier taste of the gangster around track five, “Chunky Dust,” and by the time we reach songs like “The Rage” and “Destiny Manifest,” we’re hearing funkier world music sounds. Get your skip finger ready for “Filth to Fury,” which is like an airplane landing behind your eyes and exploding, and not in the good airplane exploding way. But the final track on the album, “Life Has No End,” is a perfect way to touch down, taking us out in a sweet moment of joy, the kind you get from celebrating something that feels complex, yet effortless. By the final note I was feeling pretty happy about the world around me.

-Nikol Hasler

This 45 arrived sandwiched between a sleeve made from a map of Brazil and Africa with a skull hovering over a pair of hairy legs in pink—the slightly uneven sides where scissors had cut along the western border of Chile and Madagascar were a personal, handcrafted touch. Collapsible Mammals is a mish-mash of sampling and what sounds like a spontaneous approach to instrumentation. They’re adept at creating soundscapes that appear to border the haphazard and strange. A member of OJO, head-mammal Chris Avitabile has been creating piecey “soundtrack-like” jams like these since 2006, after he returned inspired from his own travels to put his odd collection of instruments and records to use. Travel Themes, his third such labors of love and experimentation under the Collapsible Mammals banner, is a perfectly titled release, evoking exotic journeys, mutation, and mechanical whirring. In it, you can hear Avitabile’s affinity for hip hop with some thrown-in bits of noise and a lounge-like feel. It makes for excellent late-night adventure music because it has a particular background-music laxness and a contempt for the predictable. The tracks are simply titled “Travel Theme 1” and “2.” “Travel Theme 1” has a spacey throb laid over an almost too-simplistic drum machine, and then gradually earns your interest. I found the second “Travel Theme” to be more interesting, with its components coming together in an improved and natural approach to modern elevator music.

-Lauren Arevalo

Sure, the Aggrolites have recently been Tim Armstrong’s backing band. The Aggrolites have played the fucking Warped Tour, repeatedly. I would never even have given this band the time of day had they not sent us a really beautiful red vinyl 12”. And that would have been a shame, because during those moments when I’ve had a glass of scotch and am at my most receptive, I feel like Rugged Road by the Aggrolites is the finest modern piece of classic reggae I’ve heard in a quarter century.

And the scotch helps, because there’s an enraged musical purist at the forefront of my brain that knows this is an extension of the nineties ska revival and that still feels betrayed by how shameful I felt at being a ska fan in the early 90s, only to see the genre bloat on its own gas into ska-punk and devolve into terrible bands as far-flung as Sublime, Gogol Bordello, and (early) No Doubt. Somehow the Aggrolites are of that Warped world, and yet they have successfully fought its worst urges and drained all the suck out, leaving behind a “dirty reggae” sound that is highly pure, largely instrumental, organ-driven, and at times even beautiful. Listening to this album is like watching the female skinheads of This Is England walking down the street in their braces and boots. It’s late 60s reggae, just without the pops and scratches, and it might even make you like Tim Armstrong, just a little bit.

-Dan Collins

Cameron Stallones, the Los Angeles-based beatmaker/sound wizard behind Sun Araw, isn’t afraid to get heavy. 2010’s On Patrol was a dizzyingly complex, room-filling psych-dub wonderland; with Ancient Romans, Stallones’ fifth full-length under the Sun Araw moniker, the textures to the music have evolved (simplified, even) but that body-numbing heaviness remains as Stallones searches for new lenses through which to project his quasi-religious musical musings. Decidedly freeform in nature — most of Ancient Romans’ tracks clock in around 10 minutes in length — there’s still a tangible sense of structure and deliberate arrangement in Stallones’ work. The freaky, blissed-out Joe Meek muzak of “Crown Shell” (one of the album’s more captivating tracks) builds upon layers of leads and loops before exploding into a calculated cacophony of sludgy psych-funk. As with previous Sun Araw releases, vocals on Ancient Romans rarely take precedence over Stallones’ arsenal of grounded rhythms, flittering guitars and droning synth lines. Instead, the chant-like vocal functions as another instrument, perhaps a more human, familiar one, amidst Ancient Romans’ otherworldly collection of alien tones and melodies. Occasionally, Ancient Romans dips into heady territory, with certain songs like sonic quicksand; you find yourself sinking so deep into the album, an hour passes and you find yourself struggling to remember where all that time went. It’s not a completely horrible thing for music of this nature to suffer from — yet the album’s more introspective qualities would certainly make Ancient Romans difficult L.A. driving music. Save this one for an evening on the couch.

-Kat Bee

If Ty Segall and Tim Presley’s White Fence are our era’s New York Dolls and Velvets, then Portland’s Welcome Home Walker could easily be our Brownsville Station: comparatively clean but subversively hip Americana about girls, parties, and, um… taking baths (see how clean this is?), too raw to be the Georgia Satellites but too aw-shucks to be garage. Singer and guitarist Devin Clark’s voice (which stayed too far in the background during his stint in the far more Dolls-like Soda Pop Kids), had the kind of hoarse adrenaline-fueled Mark Arm delivery that announces itself as a party from the get-go, and that, combined with his raw guitar riffs, might obscure the fact that some of these lyrics are damned clever. Besides the aforementioned bath opus “Suds” (which is exactly what it sounds like—perhaps the best rock song about bathing since “Splish Splash”), I can’t get enough of “It’s Not Enough,” a Costello-ey almost-ballad about women who “pull away like you never needed anything/but Choo Choo, you know you got all of your steam from me.” And perhaps my favorite is “Listen Up, Mac,” secretly advice to a girl whose chemical consumption is making her too skeletal to be sexy: “Uh uh, String Bean, just keep your nose clean.” Diction isn’t exactly Clark’s goal with the vocals—luckily the awesome vinyl package comes with lyrics and hand-detailed chunks of other albums pasted on! Who knows, your copy might have Michael Jackson and the Ninja Turtles.

-Dan Collins