Free Release Friday
Best New Music.
Power und Beauty: The Gnome E.P.
2010, Peppermill Records

This album is available as a free download here.

The netlabel world is typically a world of ambient electronica experimentalism.  This is not a bad thing, but finding a brilliant little exhuberant acoustic-based E.P. like Power und Beauty’s The Gnome E.P., was a tremendous surprise for me.

Power und Beauty is a four-piece female band from Spokane, Washington.  The band makes four-part choral folk songs that are partly beautiful and partly unsettling.  One can easily recall Pavement and Fleet Foxes while listening to Power und Beauty’s four tracks on this E.P., yet the band has the ability to never feel derivative.

The band makes a special effort to create arrangements that are familiar and foreign, which plays well to the unsettling vibe on the record.  This reveals itself immediately in “Beggars and Felons,” the E.P.’s opening track.  Apart from the subject matter, the band introduces their music with an accordion waltz, hardly an instantly familiar song form for contemporary indie rock. 

Pair Power und Beauty’s grade school choir treatments with their unfamiliar song forms and you have the equation of a band that is likeably off-kilter.  You see this in the E.P.’s next two tracks, “Lavender” and “Peaches.”  Rather abruptly, the E.P. closes with the acoustic “The Author of Spring.” The choral arrangements are brilliant here, on par with anything that Fleet Foxes is doing, and it leaves the E.P. with a haunted feeling.

Power und Beauty are poised to make a remarkable statement to the folk community.  There is a tremendous gap between acoustic innovation and folk song forms that Fleet Foxes have only scratched in their self-titled debut for Sub Pop.  Pairing these lo-fi treatments to non-standard folk forms is truly a promising step in the right direction, even if it is a bit unsettling.

Cover art and Mp3s via Peppermill Records.

Best New Music
Hanalei: One Big Night
2010, Big Scary Monsters Recording Company/Brick Gun

In the early 2000s, Chicago was a haven for Jawbreaker-esque punk rock bands that rocked.  Out of the scene came no less than the Alkaline Trio and the Lawrence Arms.

People forget the contributions of the other bands affiliated with the scene.  One of the contributing acts was Brian Moss’ ‘The Ghost.’ That band, as I remember it, was better known for the band that it came from, San Francisco’s ‘The Wunder Years.’ I had seen The Wunder Years on several cheap-o compilations throughout that late 90s and always liked what they did.  Brian never gained a huge following like Matt Skiba, the Alkaline Trio’s lead singer.  He never really had the cult following that Brendan Kelly, the lead singer of the Lawrence Arms, did either.

Sometime in 2004, I began to hear Moss record as ‘Hanalei.’ As Hanalei, he generally arranged songs acoustically, with small rhythm tracks providing environment to the recordings.  This setting really worked for him much better than The Wunder Years or The Ghost did.  It made sense at the time, since nearly every lead singer of every regionally-popular emo band was starting his own version of Dashboard Confessional and Hanalei was definitely no different.

But Moss was a different kind of presence than the rest of the Dashboard Confessional emo sweethearts.  The sweetness of his voice echoed his California beginnings particularly well, and everything that I heard from him was good in the sense that it wasn’t overdone.  Moss took care by understating his aesthetic.  He went full band on a second release, which bored me, and I didn’t think much about him again.

Somehow I stumbled upon Brian Moss’ Hanalei page on MySpace and read about this record, One Big Night.  The record is another understated acoustic affair sounding dangerously close to hastily arranged demos more than fully developed songs.  That being said, Moss has put forward a group of songs that is incredibly rewarding because they are so understated again.

The album’s crowning glory is the track, “Moth to the Flame,” a driving punk-inspired moment of hybridized screaming and driving rhythm, done acoustically.  This is textbook Jawbreaker inspired pop-punk of the finest kind, done without the gloss of the current production of Alkaline Trio.  It beckons Moss’ songwriting roots, but done in a way that is tasteful.  Somehow Moss is able to explore this territory without being unnecessarily nostalgic, evoking the urgency of the aesthetic but not the sound of the day.

Moss’ subject matter is also restrained; rather than going for the textbook Rocky Votolato combination of heart-on-the-sleeve emotion, Moss retains many righteous/unrighteous thematic elements throughout the record.  This is not foreign material to a Jawbreaker-inspired punk, yet Moss is able to create songs like “Scalpels and Saints” and “Neverending Cigarette” that aesthetically seem simple, and are thematically unrestrained.

It is this kind of attention that really legitimizes Hanalei on One Big Night.  There isn’t the requisite boredom that most singer-songwriters explore in their mid-career malaise.  There is real energy teaming throughout the release that evoke the sense of a songwriter with something to say and nothing to lose, but do so in such a way that don’t require glitz and glamor.

Cover Art and Mp3s via eMusic

Free Release Friday.
Best New Music.
The Strait of Anain: This Wandering Winter
2010, Qunabu
This album is available for free download here.

Precision is the logical complement to delicacy.  It is the choice to be precise that reveals sensitivity to environment, which reveals what the artist is delicate about.  It is only in environment that truly delicate choices come through, because the delicate choices are the most emotionally effectual.

This Wandering Winter is a delicate exploration of ambient moods and electronic melodies.  One can easily see The artist’s clear influence of light upon his mood as the record meanders between euphoric melodies and subtle textural rhythmic structure.  The artist restrains himself as a subject throughout, resisting the easy impulse to break his songs into full dance-like electronica on the basis of his mood in relation to his environment, yet never fully giving his songs over to ambient expressionism.

On his site, the artist discusses that the intent of the work is to explore the ambient
moods and emotions of himself within his environment, which is filled
with light.  One can hear the grappling that he has between his own
artistic commentary personified in rhythm, and his environmental
exploration evoked in melody.  This juxtaposition keeps the listener
intrigued throughout, wondering what choice he might make while exploring
his theme.

Tracks like “The Air from Alaska” frame the artist’s desire to explore the ambient space and his emotional reaction to it.  Throughout the track, one can feel a refreshing feeling emanate from the ambient themes that bookend the track.  There is rhythm and structure in the middle that feel evocative of the artist’s feelings while working.  It is this comparison that reveals the delicate precision that the artist grapples with in his subject matter–environmental exploration or emotional impact?

The gentle pulsation at the beginning of “Light Reflecting” begs not just an ambient inspiration from clear influences like Jimmy Tamborello, but also evokes the kind of gentle lullaby of the theme songs of video games from youth.  The artist seems clear in his intent not just to evoke environment in his work, but to mine the well of emotional, both immediate and innate.

This grappling gives the listener a portrait of a delicate man at work.  This Wandering Winter invites the listener, but reveals its rewards upon intentional listening.  The record seems innocuously ambient, but reveals its rich blessings in the listener’s reactions to the artist’s emotional creation.

Mp3s via Qunabu.  Cover art via The Strait of Anain.

Free Download

Socket Science’s second release, Ephedra, is a study in themes and hooks.  Each of the album’s three tracks study similar territory–poppy, danceable, moderate-speed electronic music that begs to be in rotation in most people’s iPods.

There are few complaints that I have with this record, other than the criminally small track number.  Socket Science’s studies of pop hooks and melodic themes sound short despite their anthemic time span.  The tracks are probably too long for the casual listener, certainly far too long for any kind of radio play, however the hooks are so solid you will want to hear their repetition constantly.

It is EPs like Ephedra that really ask the listener why netlabel music hasn’t become a larger part of people’s listening attention.  Netlabels are perfectly suited to microcultures.  Different than subcultures, microcultures are small communities that are based around specific media and neglect the full-fledged ideological development of subcultures.  Today’s highly fractured, yet highly networked society is especially condusive to microcultures, which begs listeners to broaden their horizons and pick up releases like this one.

Socket Science’s studies in themes and hooks are epitomized on “A Friend of the Family,” which features a seven-dwarfish whistle as one of the thematic hooks used in the song.  The whistle isn’t exactly inventive in its execution, but it is skilled in terms of its study.  Played close to its rhythm, like most of the great sample-based songs of the late 1990s, the rhythm pulls together the theme in “A Friend of the Family” to keep the song flowing freely.

It is this care and attention that epitomizes the worthiness of Socket Science to any electronic fan’s iPod.  The deftness and clarity with which the artist executes these three studies of theme and hook is a nice addition to any electronic collection.  It begs the microculture, “why not listen to this?” This music is enjoyable, it is marketable, and it definitely has its place.

Mp3s and cover art via Astor Bell

Listen to this.
Samantha Crain: You (Understood)
2010, Ramseur Records / Thirty Tigers

Samantha Crain’s voice is a star.  She doesn’t sing in your typical Billie Holiday-faked warble, though she does have a throatiness that might remind you of that cliché.  She also doesn’t bubble and brim with bubbly glee, the other major trend for most female singer-songwriters at the moment.  What she offers is earnest songwriting with a rustic flair that is indicative of her Oklahoma roots, yet doesn’t pander to VH1 or the former staff writers of No Depression.  These are songs that are real and it shows.

As with most of the roots revival music coming from the southwest, there is some legitimate proficiency on You (Understood).  Crain’s band is as much a part of this record as she is, managing subtle flavors of indie rock beneath the rustic songwriting of Crain.  You (Understood) could have quickly become just another vanilla note in the rapidly-expanding menu of singer-songwriters putting out rustic songwriting, but Crain’s band is a competent backup to Crain’s distinctive vocal style.

Without a doubt, “We Are the Same,” a quiet acoustic number, is the standout track of this record because of Crain’s powerful vocals played against her delicately plucked acoustic guitar.  But there’s a greatness that is bursting from Crain that is featured in other tracks like “Lions” and “Santa Fe” because she doesn’t go for the female songwriter jugular by picking on every track on the record.  Crain develops her lyrics carefully here with her music, allowing for a subtle delivery that doesn’t push Crain toward a vocal warble.  Surely, acts like Bosque Brown and Sarah Jaffe have utilized the vocal warble brilliantly over the past five years, but Crain’s real skill is her phrasing.

“Santa Fe” comes across particularly strong in this regard.  Crain uses a sing-songy rhyme in the last syllables of each line that works on every level–rustic, yet not cliche–a device for managing rhythm and evoking a sense of time.  This is where I want to see Crain live as a singer-songwriter, managing the elements of song against the meter of the lyric.  It is in these moments that Crain’s band shines and the songs just saunter swiftly in and out of the listener’s ear effortlessly, and Crain is able to soar.

Cover and Mp3s via eMusic

Rating: 8.3 / 7.5

The only appropriate adjective for Suns would be ‘savage.’ And while the term is appropriate enough, it wouldn’t do justice to the absolute immensity that embodies the intensity of the band on these two releases.  This set of free EPs, The Howl and the Many and Close Calls in the U.S. Space Program, mine the intersection of Dischord-era post-punk and Radiohead-inspired, postmodern ‘alternative.’ The reaction is nothing short of inspired and confounding–music for the imaginative, emotional listener.

The two EPs are disparate works, though they are the product of the first year of work of the band.  They span similar territory: thick, dark guitars and a hulking rhythm section ripple beneath the shimmery highs of harmonium and synthesizer, creating an atmospheric sound that would draw easy comparisons to their Radiohead and Sigur Rós inspiration.  But the immediate comparisons stop there, as the band’s backbone is an aggression that can only be compared to brooding post-punk acts like Fugazi or Jawbox.

The result is a band whose first two EPs feel truly imaginative and emotional, finding an appropriate depth and height that hasn’t been measured before.  The results are particularly interesting on The Howl and the Many, a basement-recorded affair that feels severe in only the best possible way.  The band employs an energy that has all of the effect of thin streams of blood running across a face after a fight, and echo all of the enthusiasm of the swift run to safety afterward.

Close Calls in the U.S. Space Program is a bit more controlled by virtue of its studio recording efforts, a ploy that streamlines the band’s sound, but increases the tension between the care paid to the songs and the restraint of the arrangements.  Clearly Close Calls in the U.S. Space Program feels like the professional effort, and it suffers from all the limitations that The Howl and the Many does not.  The brooding tension between the careful precision of the lead guitar and the rest of the band on Close Calls in the U.S. Space Program seems almost distracting in contrast to the unrestrained energy behind the loose arrangements of The Howl and the Many.

At their core, Suns have turned in amazing debut EPs and show amazing energy as a band.  These releases show not only promise, but hearken a musical identity that has not yet been born.

Mp3s and covers via Suns

Best New Music
How to Destroy Angels: How to Destroy Angels
Self-Released
Available as a Free Download Here

Rating: 8.8

I am of the opinion that Trent Reznor is and remains a genius.  At the same time, I believe him to be an auteur, an artist with a highly developed aesthetic that essentially defines his work.

Reznor is an enigma.  At one time he was essentially a recluse, hiding himself from the world, supposedly tortured by the art that makes him so brilliant.  Five years between Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral.  Another five years between The Downward Spiral and The Fragile.  Six years between The Fragile and With Teeth.  Then Trent Reznor found an enemy.

His record label, Interscope Records, stopped putting the force behind Trent Reznor that they had in his glory days.  Records like The Fragile, a dual-disc concept record was essentially unmarketable.  Someone made the mistake in thinking that Reznor’s best days were behind him.  They heard a freindlier Reznor on Nine Inch Nails’ With Teeth and mistook that as Reznor going soft.  They suggested that he work with hip-hop producers, probably under poor assumptions that Reznor had lost his edge.  What they didn’t know was that they made themselves fodder for Reznor’s creative genius.

In 2008, Reznor released The Slip free over the internet.  The album proved to bring a vitality to Reznor that he hadn’t had in previous incarnations of Nine Inch Nails on a major label.  He released the record, which sounded surprisingly commercial, on a slick pricing model that provided free and pay versions of the record in the digital realm.  This was Reznor’s version of DIY, and the record had all the enthusiasm of an early punk rock release.

Then Reznor sold it all.  He disbanded Nine Inch Nails as a touring entity and started work on a project with his wife, Mariqueen Maandig, called How to Destroy Angels.  This release is signature Reznor.

How to Destroy Angels isn’t terribly different from a Nine Inch Nails record.  There is the requisite dark, sexual energy that is found on previous releases on “BBB.”  There are the long instrumental songs that meander between ambient and industrial on “A Drowning.” There’s loud, animalistic texture on “Parasite.”

That isn’t saying that there isn’t anything here that doesn’t sound fresh.  Reznor has, by far and away, been an artist that is too underrated for his own good.  The Downward Spiral feels as fresh as anything on any dubstep or grime playlist.  Reznor, along with the Dust Brothers, helped to create an audio aesthetic that was both highly produced and highly confrontational in the use of texture and rhythm against melody.  He departs from the Dust Brothers in his continual refinement of that palette.

So hearing How to Destroy Angels shouldn’t be a surprise for anyone listening to it.  But perhaps one ought to listen to it with new ears.  Even Reznor’s most arduous moments, his explorations into the ambient subgenre, have yielded incredibly exciting results.  The release’s final track, “A Drowning,” leaves the listener in this exploration between ambient and pop, creating a kind of magic that was never revealed in Nine Inch Nails.  Maandig’s vocals are both haunting and warm, inviting you to feel the destruction that Reznor flirts with on every release.

It is here that the auteur reveals his craft: work that has all the serenity of the Mona Lisa’s smile and all of the destruction of a nuclear winter.

Cover and Mp3s via How to Destroy Angels

Free Release Friday
ZOE.LEELA: Queendom Come
2010, Rec72
Download Here

Rating: 5.0

Dance music.  Yes, and not just any dance music, German dance music.  And what’s to say that hasn’t already been said by an American about their European counterparts?  Nothing.  Which begs the question, why dig this mine any deeper?

ZOE.LEELA is an emerging voice in the German dance music scene, and she plays that part conservatively.  She has an amazing single on this EP, “Destroy She Says,” a lively, catchy dance tune that would feel at home in any dance music collection.  Its fierce, yet textbook, rhythmic guitar hook keeps the tune straddling the great dance music chasm that separates annoying and brilliant.  And on this track, ZOE.LEELA seems to aspire to reach the brilliant side of the chasm, using textbook 90s dance vocals and a simple, understated hook that plays for your attention.  But this is the sole highlight on this EP.  ZOE.LEELA’s textbook approach to dance music reveals she plays her archetype too close to the hip.

Throughout the EP’s six tracks, ZOE.LEELA’s breathy vocals play against cheap keyboard hooks which seem to mimic the texture and aggression of Dubstep, but fall completely short.  Using ZOE.LEELA’s voice as the centerpiece is the principle mistake.  The singer’s vocals are too shallow to reveal any real soul and lack the range needed to carry a clear hook.  The result is that the mix of the record loses the record between the rhythm and the hook feeling like one huge murky grey track.  This may have seemed to work on tracks like C+C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now),” but Martha Walsh’s vocals carry the competing hook on that track due to their range and clarity, something that ZOE.LEELA clearly cannot mimic.

The stylistic choices on the record seem relatively dated as well, with songs like “Bridges” lost in some kind of Paula Abdul-era synth style, while tracks like “Silence” almost feels like some Annie Lennox solo track.  The result seems conflicted stylistically, and the performance lacking any standout moments.  The reason feels like the stylistic lines that ZOE.LEELA is trying to draw seem too direct.  There are moments where her producers are trying to add texture to these melodies, but the choice to stay stylistically close to her influences makes the record feel labored.

Mp3s and Cover Art via Rec72

Kings Go Forth: The Outsiders Are Back
2010, Luaka Bop

Rating: 6.5

In the late 1990s, a ska revival began to sweep across the United States.  Like the years prior with punk, this seemed to be the time that America let ska break into the mainstream.  Enter Moon Ska Records, a record label via the Moon Ska record store and ska band the Toasters.  Moon Ska was a legendary ska label that put out some of the best third-wave and ska revival records of the time.  Mustard Plug, The Slackers, and the Pietasters all had records on the legendary Moon Ska label; however, Moon also put out some of the most sentimental ska-revival junk that ever was pressed to record.  There was a healthy dose of mediocrity throughout the label’s many releases, many of these records products of the revivalist culture that promoted and recorded boring, ready-made arrangements, ready to feed the ska revival culture.  These records made up the genre’s low point.

In the mid-2000s, a soul revival began to sweep simultaneously through the United Kingdom and the United States.  Unlike the punk and ska revivals that came in the 1990s, the U.S. was on the cutting edge of this revival.  With artists like Sharon Jones taking the helm, inspired versions of the thick nostalgia on these soul revival records coming from the U.S. still felt significant.  There was still something to say on these records, still rhythms to mine, still grooves to explore.

The U.K. roster included acts like Amy Winehouse, Joss Stone, and Adele, among others.  Some acts were strongly influenced by the nostalgia of the era, some more diverse, but still drawing from the same influences.  These U.K. acts sounded like the Moon Ska version of soul.  The hodge-podge of stylistic conventions played like some kind of ready-made version of soul.  The stuff fell flat.  Classic sounding, yet incredibly contrived.

Which brings me to The Outsiders Are Back, an overly-ripe, ready-made collection of soul revival tunes from an American act.  Let me first emphasize that the record label and record cover are a dead giveaway for what you’re going to get here:  this is island-influenced neo-soul on a world music label.  This is stuff that would be incredible and dumbfounding if it were on a shelf next to your favorite Natural Sounds record found next to the Yoga mats at Target.

Kings Go Forth are a band that use the template of soul revival to bring hippie-flavored nostalgia to your living room.  It’s all here–saxophone, ska rhythms, even some Motown strings thrown in for good measure.  It’s the stuff that aims to make you feel like you’re vacationing in some hidden, vibrantly-colored villa while listening to a single speaker radio in 95-degrees.  The joke in on you though; these guys are from Milwaukee.

I’ll concede, the bonus points in this review come from some pretty great high points in the record made while trying to mimic late-era Motown. “Don’t Take My Shadow (A Tom Moulton Mix)” incredibly peppers a shimmering string line somewhere on the order of mid-1970s Diana Ross or the Jackson 5. “You’re the One” plays with a similar aesthetic, trading in the shimmery string lines for an easy-going groove, evocative of the same era.  It is this stuff that we haven’t heard before from soul revival, and it seems to play well for a band like Kings Go Forth that handily plays with the environments of their recordings.

However, it is the creamy center of this record that reveals the true low points of this band and their ethos. “Fight with Love” and “High on Your Love” play like sentimental, tacky stuff out of a soul cover band.  Who likes this stuff?  The audience steeped in world music and anxious to buy their groceries from the organic aisle at Whole Foods eat sentimentality like this up.  It is stuff that feels authentic, but is actually skill masquerading as soul–a deceptive brand of authenticity that the casual listener buys as product and does not receive as art.

So how does one resolve disdain for this music without truly failing this band?  The one thing I can appreciate about King Go Forth is their appreciation for rhythm and environmental production.  This record sounds like something played out of an old FM radio in the best possible way.  The record is incredibly clean past its bettina, with rhythm and horns approached with such skill and appreciation that one cannot help but share in what Kings Go Forth aspires to make sanitary for their audience:  real soul.

MP3s and Cover Art via eMusic

Free Release Friday
Adam & Alma: Back to the Sea
2010, 23 Seconds Netlabel
Download Here

Rating: 7.8

Adam & Alma are a deceptive electronic duo.  They are equal parts American indie rock, European trip-hop, and 80s electronic pop nostalgia.  The group sounds like a thesis statement of all that is good about electronic music over the last 10 years.  The only problem is that they don’t sell themselves, literally and musically.

The duo begins their debut EP with the hushed track, “Things,” a environmentally-immersive track of melon collie indie rock.  With small guitars framing the hushed vocals of Ellen Arkbro, the track swells into a thick, Portishead-like environment of deep-swelling bass and glistening bell-sounding harmonic fringe.  The band bookends the EP in the same way, with the lush ambient arrangements on “Bon.”

The inherent problem with Adam & Alma is this lush understatement.  The EP delightfully saunters onto your playlist, hardly making any waves in your sea of singles and album tracks and then, just as you notice Ellen Arkbro’s and Johan Graden’s presence, the EP is finished. Adam & Alma won’t make a case in their five tracks like Coldplay would.  No, this is an album that reveals its charm inside, a sweet center covered in neutral outsides.

Tracks like “Smile For Me, Sun” approach 80s pop with the same knowledge that Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello had on their Postal Service project.  Fun synth hooks and harmonies clamour for the listener’s attention and hold it–prolonging the listening experience and taking the listener on an adventure.  The stuff of fascinating listening is all here:  texture, melody, hooks, environment, all of the high points of the genres the group references and done in such a way that recalls the artistic movements of the last 10 years yet never feeling contextualized within them.

Make no mistake, Adam & Alma are everything that is good and familiar, but performed in such a way that brings fresh rewards.  This is an EP that makes me eager to see the band’s full length and even more eager to see them make a true single.  Despite such knowledge and deft handling of the devices that the group employs throughout the album’s six tracks, it is nuanced to its fault.  There is no single track that would provoke the causal listener to shell out $.99 on ITunes, yet the album has six tracks that would send a music geek to his eBay account anxiously trying to find a first edition vinyl of this EP.

Mp3s & Cover Art via 23 Seconds Netlabel