Heavy Rotation! [April 4th Edition]
Many apologies for my extended absence. Life got crazy on me and I haven’t had the time to really sit down and collect thoughts. I have a couple political seeds germinating in my brain, but for now I will simply present my current Heavy Rotation! lineup
Panda Bear – Tomboy
Anyone who knows me knows I have a strong affinity for all things Animal Collective. The swirling sampled psychedelia and the slowly drifting melodies get me every time. Panda Bear certainly has not disappointed here. While Person Pitch excelled in texture painting, it sometimes left the listener without a memorable melodic hook. Tomboy continues to develop Pitch’s chillwave fuzz but adds a more concrete songwriting technique, making the former more structured than the hypnotic latter.
tUnE-yArDs – w h o k i l l
Sometimes an artist works within an established genre and excels through the strength of his or her songwriting. However, there is the rare artist whose brain brings together a unique collection of experiences and spits out something wonderfully new. Merrill Garbus, aka tUnE-yArDs, is that type of artist. A ukulist who has spent time in East Africa and happens to be gifted with powerful alto pipes, her music is an amalgamation of who she simply is, and it is stunning. Cut-and-paste rhythms, dense multi-instrumental layering, and manic song structures all leave you with the same sense of awe at one person’s left-field creativity that you felt the first time you heard Dirty Projectors.
Lykke Li – Wounded Rhymes
The artistic music world continues to be committed to the seemingly impossible mission of pop-music reclamation. Wounded Rhymes is another wonderful example of the mission’s against-the-odds success. The Swedish songstress is a rogue scientist, altering formulas and bucking traditionally held pop assumptions in the pursuit of her creations. The result: wonderful, danceable and memorable tunes that are completely devoid of the processed flavors of Clear Channel pop-radio.
Heavy Rotation!
Marnie Stern – Marnie Stern
Typically, when one thinks of guitar virtuosos, one thinks of guitar gods, not guitar goddesses. Marnie Stern is working to undo such stereotypes. This, her third proper LP, continues her committment to acrobatic and schizophrenic guitar lines, leading the listener on a manic whirlwind trip towards exhilarating heights. Although her music should not be recommended for those with a history of heart problems, she expertly navigates the razor’s edge separating the impossibly complex and delightfully melodic.
Iron and Wine – Kiss Each Other Clean
Sam Beam continues to move away from his breakthrough delicate lo-fi debut, The Creek Drank the Cradle. While his previous release The Shepherd’s Dog saw Beam experimenting with brand new textures and studio tricks, the album lacked the central quality that made Iron and Wine’s old work so effective, excellently written songs. Kiss Each Other Clean repairs the short-comings of The Shepherd’s Dog, combining the newfound wizardry with the song-writing chops that have made Beam’s work so admired.
Julianna Barwick – The Magic Place
Although I have not yet had the opportunity to 
listen to the totality of Julianna Barwick’s Asthmatic Kitty debut, the chamber-pop simplicity of the few tracks I have heard are certainly evident of a beautiful new trend in pop music. Borrowing post-rock’s affinity for using the crescendo as the central element of a song’s structure, Barwick has woven together an ethereal and hypnotic collection of vocal arrangements. Although those who want a classic pop verse, chorus, and bridge will be sorely disappointed, those with the patience to allow gentle arrangements to slowly develop will be rewarded.
Heavy Rotation!
Although the inaugural edition of “Heavy Rotation!” featured my favorite albums of 2010, this weekly column will typically be dedicated to the three albums that seem to keep finding their way into my stereo. While most music writers focus on the best of what’s new, I will at times be throwing albums into the mix that I have belatedly discovered or have made a resurgence out of my personal archives.
Destroyer – “Bay of Pigs”
Originally released as the a-side of a limited vinyl pressing, this extended opus is infectious and epic, leaving the listener to ride a neo-disco wave of stream-of-consciousness emotional signifiers. At once non-sensical and instantly relatable, absurdist lines such as “Magnolia’s a girl, her heart’s made of wood. As apocalypses go, that pretty good, wouldn’t you say? Sha-la-la” are nonetheless moving and understandable.
Avey Tare – Down There
By setting Animal Collective aside, its individual members are given
freedom to explore the themes and textures that makes the collaboration successful. By listening to solo work from Avey Tare and Panda Bear with the understanding that it secondary to the larger Collective, one’s experience of all three is buttressed by the analysis of the individual elements that comprise the molecule. The album’s closing track, “Lucky 1,” is a d.i.y.-electro dance classic awash with an ethereal audio-decay. In fact, the album sounds like a relic of an ancient hyper-technological extra-terrestrial race discovered in an asteroid. At least that’s what I think.
James Blake – James Blake
Not one who usually buys into the dubstep hype, this album will serve to take the hipster’s favorite secret genre out into open. Not for the purist with a hatred of auto-tune, it fits in with Justin Vernon’s most recent work: strikingly emotive due to its elegant sparsity. Brilliantly rendered, dynamics are not achieved through instrumental volume but instead through synthesized layers. Fluid and engrossing, manic and twitching, technological and timeless.
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