Unlike other country & western stars, Pacific Northwest chanteuse Neko Case doesn’t traffic in heartache, but comeuppance. “You get what you deserve,” she sings atop twangy noir like a bruised yet not battered Nancy Sinatra-meets-Patsy Cline. Case, for her part, has no regrets as to what she gives, which, on…
Roni Size After coming up on Bryan Gee and Jumping Jack Frost’s V Recordings, the Mercury Prize-winning, Bristol-based Roni Size then built his own Full Cycle label and released intelligent drum and bass from the Reprazent/Breakbeat Era collectives, including the seminal New Forms and In the Mode. With Return to…
Nearly a year after the release of DFA Records Presents: Compilation #1, the New York label continues to compile its output with the aptly titled DFA Compilation #2. Bursting out of the new disco punk scene, Tim Goldsworthy and James Murphy made DFA (which stands for Death From Above) as…
No woman is an island. But in 1999, New York-based electropunks Le Tigre suggested one could be, since the DIY dance-punks — fronted by Bikini Kill’s socio-politico riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna — sounded equally idiosyncratic and didactic at the time, their sole peer being Germany’s Chicks on Speed. On Le…
East Coast pub-punk troubadour Ted Leo is a mad pundit in the tradition of Elvis Costello and Billy Bragg, and Shake the Sheets is his tautest album to date. Slithering songs such as “Angels’ Share,” “The One Who Got Us Out,” and “Bleeding Powers” acknowledge the downward spiral of American…
If German electronic producers Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma were to switch professions and tackle architecture, maybe they could be the new Frank Gehry. “Music can be seen like interior design,” says Toma, one half of the duo known as Mouse on Mars. “You are the architect of a…
Whereas New York fashion plate quartet Interpol’s brooding 2002 debut, Turn on the Bright Lights, was ladled with reverb-laden post-punk, the band’s sophomore entry Antics is finely honed pop. The dense barrage of spiritedly sawed guitar hits glistening strides while buoyed by bombastic four-on-the-floor, tension-building, fevered breaks, and the bass…
Whereas gritty dramatists such as Depeche Mode, Gary Numan, and Devo once existed in a vacuum, flouting pop tradition with idiosyncratic, synth-borne friction, new school progeny The Faint exists as if in a vacuum bag. The Omaha, Nebraska quintet amasses stylized flecks within its syncopated voltage-spiked vortex and spits forth…
Icelandic trio Múm collages memories, the more indistinct the better. Whether it’s detritus of digitally accosted acoustic sources, or the impressions of sailors drowned off the coast of Iceland hundreds of years ago, as permeate the mood of the band’s third full-length, Summer Make Good, Múm constructs songs out of…
Cologne, Germany’s Aksel “Superpitcher” Schaufler is in love, as the title to his debut LP indicates. Erase all images of women inspired by Swiss Miss packages from your head, however. What Here Comes Love reveals is that his heart does not lie with any one person or place, but in…
Soon after the advent of electronic composition — commencing with the breech birth of electric instrumentation, which came kicking and squalling into the academic world in the mid-1920s through the form of the theremin — Germany established an integral, indelible role in forwarding narrative minimalism. It was in the Fifties…
Every few years since the mid-Eighties, the true revival of “electro” has been heralded. The depth charge 808 drum machine and scratchy freestyle funk of Miami bass can be felt in everything from dirty South crunk to Detroit ghetto-tech to Orlando-based DJ Icey’s Florida breaks to the output of European…
Producing and reproducing crisply delineative yet densely rhythmic textural techno, Detroit-bred DJ/producer Jeff Mills weaves a nuanced mesh of pointillist percussion, ominous ambience, and undulating synths with pinpoint accuracy. His mixes are considered “minimalist” because they don’t rely on the push and pull of peak-and-valley pump. Like snow flurries, his…
It is said that a watched pot boils more slowly. Well, the genre coined as microhouse certainly has many a gaze — journo at least — turned on it. And if The Present Lover, only the second album since 2000 by Luomo — a PowerBook-pop guise of Finnish producer Vladislav…
Shuffling between pseudonyms like Delarosa and Asora (currently retired), Prefuse 73 (most popular), and Savath & Savalas (now receiving the lion’s share of recognition), Scott Herren has created a steady string of productions ranging from digitally flecked folk to frayed hip-hop. Yet he has simultaneously seemed to suffer from an…
Since forming in Munich in 1997, Chicks on Speed has evolved from a proto-electroclash pastiche to a boutique busker of buzzing electro. The multinational assembly of German Kiki Moorse, New Yorker Melissa Logan, and Australian Alex Murray-Leslie originated as art academy feminists, designing clothing that doubled as collages. Following suit,…
There’s an immediate urge to say something snarky such as, “Oh, look, it’s the second coming” when first introduced to Liquid Chris H., the Scottish electrocoustic composer known singularly as Christ. But on Metamorphic Reproduction Miracle, Christ’s debut full-length (following the 2002 Pylonesque EP), clichés can’t describe this murky, cavernous…
Sascha Funke Bravo (Bpitch Control) The Chilean-born producer Ricardo Villalobos immigrated early in life to Germany, a locale with a long history of electronic composition. It is impossible to ignore that influence when dissecting the hallmarks of his sound: The stark, angular distortions he creates are a sonic homage to…
Using techno’s minimalist rigidity to slim down the bloated diva that devoured house music, Michigan’s Matthew Dear has proved himself an accomplished producer of microhouse, the most progressive regressive movement in recent memory. With his debut full-length, Leave Luck to Heaven, he beefs up a sound flayed of fat by…
Following a series of EPs in the mid-Nineties, British producers Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe tried to insert a spirit of inventiveness into an ailing house music scene with Basement Jaxx’s 1999 debut full-length, Remedy, a refinement of raw materials like soulful New York salsa-house mined from both sides of…
Two years to the month after the release of Labor Days, the virile verbalist known as Aesop Rock returns with his fourth album, Bazooka Tooth. If fellow collegiate icons R.E.M. hadn’t already taken the name, Bazooka Tooth’s alternative title could be Fables of the Reconstruction. Like Fables, Bazooka Tooth is…
