Steve Gordon

Connan Mockasin - Caramel
New Zealand's Connan Mockasin is what would happen if you made circa-1997 Radiohead drop acid with Syd Barrett and Ariel Pink. Bizarre and haunted, jazzy and demented, lo-fi bedroom space rock. Fill that bedroom with some baby-making, and you have his 2013 album, Caramel; all the aforementioned artists, with a little bit of Brothers Johnson on top. “Lysergic Sex Funk” is how a friend once described it, and I can't beat that. “I'm the Man, That Will Find You” is a standout track.




Jaz Frazier

The Malones - The Malones
If there is any one album that I abused, it’s easily the Malones’ self-titled album. This album got me through my day, through my night, and through mornings when I was pushing through an unforgiving hangover. It certainly helped that the shows these guys [Steven Floyd, Elliott Douglas, and Brandon Schlia] performances were EXPLOSIVE. If during their set you were too winded to shout the lyrics anymore or too achy to troll the floor, the crowd would carry you, in addition to an energetic Douglas hopping into the audience making them all go ballistic. The live performances were transmitted so well into their recorded work, making this my most-loved album of the year.



Jessica Brant

Lorde - Pure Heroine
This saucy songstress from down under struck a chord with me--and everyone else--when "Royals," a nod to, and dodge from, all things ostentatious hit the radio waves. She left the world asking, "Who on God's earth is this beautiful soul with golden brown tendrils, doe-like eyes and the voice of an ethereal fairy?" And then we all found out it was a 17-year-old high school kid singing us to shame. Each listen is like opening a scrapbook from high school days past, complete with sloppy prom pictures, gushy love letters, and torn-up concert tickets...Oh, to be seventeen again. Most notably described as the reigning queen of "confessional bedroom pop," Lorde compiles an impressive track list filled with silky harmonies and free-spirited hip hop and electronic beats. Feel the power in her gloriously arranged "Glory and Gore," and the bubbly dance rhythms of "Tennis Court." This girl can brag all she wants; she is the true queen bee, taking pop where it needs to be. Lorde is now, and Lorde is the future.

If you have followed some of my past posts on the blog, you should know my dislike of remixes, but every now and again, I come across one that catches my interest. Usually its from an act you would not normally think of when discussing remixes. Local Natives, who released one of 2013's best in Hummingbird, look the liberty of remixing one of the album's better tunes, "Wooly Mammoth." Titled "Wooly Robot," the new take kicks off with some clattering percussion, adding to a song with an already rich rhythm section, while some vocal loops and dizzying effects give the song a bit of a manic Animal Collective vibe. Check it out below.

On Local Natives’ debut album, Gorilla Manor, Taylor Rice and Kelcey Ayer took turns handling lead vocal duties on almost every other song.

Rice’s songs were primarily concerned with nature and mysticism and self-identity and often sounded that way. They were vast or dark or impenetrable or solemn. They had titles like “Wide Eyes,” “Sun Hands,” “Shape Shifter,” “Who Knows Who Cares,” and “Stranger Things.” They had lyrics about “evil spirits” and “tree trunks” and “hands blessed to have touched the sun.” “Hallucinating souls” and “caves made of sheets.”

Ayer was in charge of the slightly lighter fare on the album. His songs were largely personal with direct lyrical references to traveling and family members and relationships. These songs were a bit more upbeat and approachable and contained many of the most memorable hooks on the album. Titles concerned everyday objects and themes like “Airplanes,” “World News,” and “Camera Talk” and spoke of grandfathers, and photo albums, and long distance relationships.



Where Rice sounded like a wide-eyed, innocent soul struggling to find a path through the forests of his mind, Ayer sounded relatively composed and confident, making his way though the “real world” with sentimental gestures and astute observations. The constant back and forth between these two realms gave the album the distinct feeling of being surreally existential and eloquently practical at the same time. Local Natives’ second album, Hummingbird, has the distinct feeling of being pensively existential and mournfully existential at the same time.

Ayer’s light-hearted touch is mostly gone here. Popular conjecture is that this was likely a result of the departure of the band’s bass player as well as the death of Ayer’s mother. Both make sense. Another significant factor in the darkening of the band’s mood and sound was probably the use of the National’s Aaron Dessner as producer on the album.

Dessner’s musical contributions to the National have become increasingly morose over the past few years. The energetic guitars and background yelping on 2005’s Alligator gave way to somber pianos and business-man balladry on 2007’s Boxer. On 2010’s High Violet, the more prolific of the Dessner brothers is credited with having written the music to all but two of the songs and the result was an album that sounded like a room full of ghosts drunk on red wine playing instruments in an abandoned mansion. His production on the more recent National albums, as well as last year’s excellent Sharon Van Etten album, Tramp, have found Dessner further developing these tendencies that he brings to the latest Local Natives album.


First, Dessner has developed a habit of castrating guitars in his production. They’re there, but they’re subtle. Usually accenting. Rarely leading the way. This is emblematic of his overall proclivity toward subtlety, which fans of nuance may appreciate but the same type of listener who may accuse the National of sounding a bit tame may find that criticism here. Second, Hummingbird is treated with the seriousness of a funeral. Gone are the folksy handclap-breakdowns, Talking Heads covers, and Ayer’s goofy references to encyclopedias, NPR, and Skyping with his girlfriend. Finally, as noted above, the stylistic shifting throughout the prior album has been ironed over to create a homogenous sound that is more representative of Rice’s cryptic spiritualism than Ayer’s prior upbeat numbers. It seems that since their last album Ayer has wandered out of reality and into Rice’s opaque shadow-land where, for him, the cloak of self-awareness manifests itself via much wistful, falsetto singing.

This darkening of atmosphere is apparent in the titles of the songs on the album, containing words like “heavy,” “wooly,” and two that begin with the word “black.”

Ayer begins the album on “You & I” sounding completely forlorn: “in all this light/ all I feel is dark/ had the sun without its warmth/ now I’m freezing.” He then picks up on “Heavy Feet” (where Dessner evidently taught drummer Matt Frazier how to drum exactly like Bryan Devendorf) and gets hung up on the idea of “outliving one’s body” before repeating the refrain: “after everything/ left in the sun/ shivering.” Things are definitely bleaker than they were when Ayer was joking around about  fumbling with the radio on their last album.



From this point, Rice and Ayer trade back and forth on lead vocals for the rest of the album. Rice’s songs are still vague and questioning though, if anything, his inquisitiveness does appear to be aimed toward accomplishing some goal in the realm of reality. On “Ceilings” he sings “silver dreams bring me to you.” On “Breakers” it’s “breathing out/ hoping to breathe in/ I know nothing’s wrong but I’m not convinced.” On “Black Balloons,” which sounds like a sequel to “Wide Eyes,” he tells a third party “hold me down and bring me back up again/ until I can’t/ I can’t tell the difference.” On “Mt. Washington” it’s the repetition of the line “I don’t have to see you right now.”

Nothing is clear. Nothing is obvious. But it sounds like the story of a man struggling to harness his negative thoughts into positive actions for the benefit of both himself and another person.


Ayer’s trajectory, on the other hand, finds him attempting to fight off paranoia and insecurity to come to some peace with the misery of finality. On “Black Spot” he seems to be staring death in the face and states “if it comes to claim/ I won’t run.” Death seems to be the focus again on “Three Months” when Ayer sings: “I’ve go to go on now/ having thought this wasn’t your last year.” On “Wooly Mammoth” he seems to be looking for some light at the end of the tunnel: “there’s a sun rising/ steady now/ comfort me.”

This is all a build up to the album’s finest moment and, quite possibly, a song we may be able to use in the future to test for Cylons who don’t show extreme emotional reaction upon listening to it.


“Columbia” is Ayer’s ultimate statement about the death of his mother and gives one of the few direct storylines on the entire album: “The day after I had counted down all of your breaths/ down until there were none/ a hummingbird crashed right in front of me and I understood all you did for us.” It’s this imagery that gives the album its title and it’s an interesting scenario. It’s not until the day after the death, upon seeing a tiny, helpless bird also meet its demise that he suddenly begins questioning his own self-worth in light of everything his mother had done for him.

Throughout the rest of the song (while appropriately escalating in musical intensity), Ayer asks: “Am I giving enough? Am I giving enough? Am I?” It’s a brilliant bit of melody-writing with each successive “I” going further up the scale for emphasis and the implication is clearly meant to be: “compared to my mother.” It’s a heart-wrenching piece, especially toward the end when he begins singing “Patricia, every night I’ll ask myself” (Jesus…) and a really fitting culmination of the work done on the album. If we can’t take something fragile and inevitable and figure out a way to turn it into something hopeful and permanent, then what’s the point?

10. Spectral Park - Spectral Park
While Spectral Park aka Luke Donovan will be releasing his debut LP on the 29th of this month, you shouldn’t expect any greater production level than the blotchy, coarse 60s rock they offered on his two-track demo from 2011, Gratis. The first cut from the self-titled record, “L’appel du Vide” is equally as dusty, and could even come off as a demo, but its corrosive energy carries the group as it does lo-fi artists Ty Segall or Ariel Pink. It might also help to know that Donovan’s recordings are, as Mexican Summer puts it, “Borne from the trash, literally sourced from a box of records the Southampton multi-instrumentalist found on a walk by a council block’s curbside garbage.” But seriously, he did that. By chopping-up clips in a sampler and adding vocal tracks Donovan has set out to reconstruct a cacophonous ghost of pop-music past.

9. Ra Ra Riot - Beta Love



8. Parquet Courts - Light Up Gold
 


7. The Revival Hour - Scorpio Little Devil 


6. Yo La Tengo - Fade

5. Foxygen - We Are 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic

4. Ducktails - The Flower Lane

3. Christopher Owens - Lysandre

2. Local Natives - Hummingbird


1. Toro Y Moi - Anything In Return