Christopher Leary combines beats with orchestral elements in this mostly airy and pleasant album. The songs are all solidly constructed and easy on the ears, but frequently lack distinction. Leary expresses a limited emotional palette on these compositions, and as a result the album is short on personality.
Admittedly, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Les Temps Modernes. Founder James Nice has an unshakeable blind passion for '80s proto-electronica, post-punk, and anything Factory Records ever considered releasing. What this translates to is a reissue program comprised of lost classics, adequate relics, and unearthed turds. Chicken Rhythms falls squarely into that middle category.
This disc, the first of two collaborative volumes, is the live studio seed of Hototogisu and Burning Star Core, and stands as tall as the best of their own work. Creating something beyond their usual repertoires, this five-tracker collaboration sees both acts oozing into one five-brained monster. These are not the usual furious black-outs or dolorous droning jeremiads of much underground collaboration.
Ridiculously slobbered over by elite geeks as well as the far more fashionable new disco vanguard, the progressive music of Black Devil was allegedly rediscovered after years of obscurity, culminating in a handful of overblown, overlapping releases from Rephlex. Irrespective of the convuluted backstory's validity, original member Bernard Fevre's return after roughly three decades manifests itself as this nebulous collection of undated, unglamorous tunes.
Using only the sound of manipulated AM radios, Fages creates washes of slow, seemingly unchanging studies of frigid sound. Not unlike the asceticism of Eleh, these deliberately static pieces require intensive listening to fully unravel.
On his first true solo follow-up to 2008's brilliant Black Sea, Christian Fennesz has once again presented a work of hazy, inviting brilliance. With the addition of percussion from Steven Hess on the title track, there’s an even greater sense of pop musicality shining through the more abstract moments.
This massive double-album was pretty much a dream commission for Simon Fisher Turner: being asked by the British Film Institute to score the restored footage from Robert Falcon Scott's doomed 1910 expedition to the South Pole.  Given the demands and difficulties involved (soundtracking endless silent footage of cavorting penguins, for example), I'd say Simon's efforts were hugely successful in regards to verisimilitude, ingenuity, subtlety, and creating an appropriately haunted and desolate mood.  When taken as a stand-alone album with no visual context, however, the long lulls between flashes of beauty and interludes of bittersweet whimsy can be a bit wearying.
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's Love Is A Stream was one of my favorite albums from last year, but somehow the fact that his Tarentel bandmate released a great solo album of his own slipped completely under my radar.  Curiously, the two albums could not be more different, as Grady almost completely eschews any hints of the languid post-rock experimentalism of his main gig in favor of more traditional acoustic fare informed by both West African kora music and Eastern-tinged acoustic guitar titans from the '70s folk scene.  Some of it sounds a bit too familiar to make much of an impact on me, but the album's high points are impressive enough to easily eclipse such moments.
This is Alec Koone's full-length debut and it is a feverishly anticipated one in many circles, as his 2010 EP (See Birds) boasted some pretty spectacular moments.  Wander/Wonder thankfully keeps most of elements that I love about Balam Acab's languorous, spectral soul intact, but takes a large leap forward in sophistication and ambitionl– in fact, quite a few people are already hailing it as one the year's best albums.  There are a couple of things that keep me from making that claim myself, but there is no denying that Koone is a goddamn wizard at what he does.
The Mountain Goats have finally released a true Euripidean goat song, a sparkling Floridian tragedy which places an alcoholic couple whose once true love has soured in a two-story bungalow filled with cases of vodka and ashtrays teeming with stale cigarette butts. We have seen this couple before: they inhabit all the songs with "Alpha" in the title. The difference is now their exploits are being documented with the assistance of a fancy recording studio, sometimes even complemented by bass, drums, piano, and other instruments.
