Fischerspooner makes us actually miss ‘Emerge’ … a lot

“The melodic one,” eh? Who do you think you’re kidding, Kitsuné? This is a Maison compilation, after all, and doesn’t Maison mean serrated synths and tweeter-blowing bass lines in English?

Apparently not. Well, not in most cases this time around. While d.i.m. flips Fischerpooner’s “Danse en France” into Boys Noize-approved electro—a sound that chips away at the pristine pop sheen of the group’s past singles—and Heartsrevolution’s  Leyla Safai howls like a hardcore punk princess atop the shimmering keys of “Ultraviolence,” most of this Maison mix could classify as electronic emo music.

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A cross-continental collaboration between a Berlin-based BBC employee (vocalist Nadja Korinth) and one deadly serious New Yorker (multi-instrumentalist/singer Ryan Schaefer), Palms eludes any easy reference points on their impossible-to-pin-down debut. Which is exactly why we fell for its 32 tidy minutes—presented by Nicolas Vernhes’ freshly-minted Rare Book Room imprint—in the first place. Quite awkwardly, mind you. Here’s the thing: Palms’ lyrical obsession with darkness and light is matched up with some rather unsettling music, bewildering but beautiful stuff that toes the line between being compulsively listenable and downright off-putting.

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As is often the case with Southern Lord’s limited LP releases, Dømkirke’s vinyl-only pressing is so meticulously designed/packaged that it’s essentially an art piece masquerading as two 180-gram slabs of music. Doubly so since it involves Sunn O))), the New York Times-approved duo that churns out confusing—some would even say infuriating—drone/doom compositions you don’t listen to so much as lose yourself in.

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[Photo by Garry Issacs]

Here’s the thing about former 16 Horsepower frontman David Eugene Edwards: he sounds like evil incarnate, yet he’s haunted by the Holy Spirit and all of the heaven-or-bust guilt that comes with ‘being a good Christian’. In other words, his work as Wovenhand is like Johnny Cash in his God-seeking years crossed with Mark Lanegan during his pit-of-despair days—a redemptive western waiting to happen.

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[Photo by Michael Schmelling]

Don’t let Nico Muhly’s Julliard degree intimidate you. While it means he actually knows how to compose music—Philip Glass and Steve Reich, meet your long lost bastard child—Muhly’s not stringing together suites that’ll lull you to sleep or bore you to tears.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. Muhly’s Mothertongue collection is like a waking dream set to music; make that a nightmare, carried out in three layered, multi-chapter compositions. Take “The Only Tune,” for instance. Featuring the haunted vocals of Samamidon (Muhly’s labelmate and frequent collaborator), it’s a murder ballad that mirrors its subject, constantly weaving in and out of consciousness and control. Read more

While it’s not exactly the “power violence” throwback promised by a press release (except for, say, the shock treatment tactics of “I Keep Living the Same Day”), United Nations—a top-secret side project featuring members of Thursday (vocalist Geoff Rickly), Glassjaw (vocalist Daryl Palumbo), Converge (drummer Ben Koller), Made Out of Babies (bassist Eric Cooper) and more—is a total screamo record. Not in the Atreyu/Taking Back Sunday sense of the word; we’re talking angry & angular noise cadets like Orchid, Saetia, and Reversal of Man.

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As we sit here stunned—more like numbed, actually—by the “Go team!” rhetoric behind Sarah Palin’s RNC speech last night, it’s no surprise that the self-titled office has had an end-of-days cloud hovering over it from the moment we all walked through the door. Seeing as we’re masochists and all, no one wanted to pick our morale up with pop music, either.

Quite the contrary. After all, nothing screams “situation normal, all fucked up” quite like today’s must-listen LP: Abandoned Language, a disasterpiece of black-hearted hip-hop as imagined by the Godflesh-gone-Bomb Squad duo Dälek. Beginning with a 10-minute (!) title track, this isn’t the difficult listen it should be, largely due to the effortless interplay between dälek the MC and his production partner Oktopus. Four full-lengths into a disorienting discography that includes collaborative splits with Kid 606, Faust and Techno Animal, the Newark-based duo has showed no signs of slowing down in their pursuit of post-apocalyptic rap music.

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If you’re wondering why we ran a haunting hallway photo here instead of, say, Twine themselves, the choice has nothing to do with the duo’s camera shyness. It’s just that nothing quite evokes the lingering music of Greg Malcolm and Chad Mossholder quite like sepia tones, peeled paint and melancholic mood lighting. Hence their MySpace-provided shot.

To put things into perspective, Twine’s last LP (their self-titled Ghostly debut and second full-length) was one of those records we put on and simply couldn’t walk away from, no matter how disturbing it sounded. And it was mighty disturbing, from the muffled, Mulholland Drive-channeling cries of “Girl Song” to “Plectrum”’s disembodied vocals and steady downward spiral into madness.

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Cold Fact starts off in the unlikeliest of places: a woozy Vietnam-era spin on Queens of the Stone Age’s “Feel Good Hit of the Summer.” (Not literally, of course; this deep cut came out in 1969.) The twist being the subtlety that Rodriguez’s brings to his dealer-channeling tale, as he waits for his man and a ‘question-answering’ mix of “jumpers/coke/sweet mary jane.” The thing is, drugs aren’t a punchline in Rodriguez’s psych-pop songs; they’re simply a fact of life.

As the long-forgotten, recently-rediscovered singer-songwriter rhymes like a Greenwich Village ghost over the fuzzbox hooks of “Hate Street Dialogue,” “The inner city birthed me/the local pusher, nursed me.” And so it is. The guy isn’t complaining so much as sharing his street-hardened stories, with occasional glimpses into the turbulence of a time period that ours is starting to mirror, save for the presence of iPods and TiVo. For instance, anyone listening to “This Is Not a Song, It’s an Outburst” is bound to make comparisons to a certain Bobby Dylan, from Rodriguez’s suave, deadpan delivery to his verses about how the “public gets irate/but forgets the vote date/the weatherman complaining/predicted sun, it’s raining/everyone’s protesting/boyfriend keeps suggesting, ‘you’re not like all the rest.’”

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Some building maintenance motherfucker has been using a power drill right outside self-titled’s office door for the past two hours. Actually, now he’s up in our area.

So what did we do in defiance to such distractions? Why, we put on Scott Hull’s accidental debut, a scrapped film score that has nothing to do with his daily grind routine in Pig Destroyer and Agoraphobic Nosebleed. Quite the complete opposite, actually. Read more