The Artist/Album: Roly Porter, Aftertime (Subtext, 2011)
The Reason(s) We Can’t Stop Listening: Anyone wondering why Roly Porter and Jamie Teasdale stopped working together as Vex’d simply needs to host back-to-back listening sessions of the former’s solo debut and the latter’s saturated Blade Runner beats under his new Kuedo guise. As stirring as some of Porter’s synthetic strings are, most of his rusty sound collages imagine a soot-soaked world that’s on the brink of collapse. Dire and deep, this one.
The Artist/Album: Moon Wiring Club, Clutch It Like a Gonk (Gecophonic Audio Systems, 2011)
The Reason(s) We Can’t Stop Listening: We’re not sure what a gonk is, but we do know a deranged disasterpiece when we hear it. Falling in line with one of its many disembodied samples—”I used the word tripping in its Elizabethan sense,” goes one ghostly vocal—Ian Hodgson’s latest Moon Wiring Club LP is a magic mushroom-fueled trip down a bottomless rabbit hole. As such, it’s best in doses, or sprinkled atop a DJ set as adventurous as the two-parter Hodgson recently did for FACT. Unless you enjoy inhabiting a carnivalesque nightmare, of course.
The Artist/Album: Various Artists, Chicago Soul (Soul Jazz, 2004)
The Reason(s) We Can’t Stop Listening: As much as we relish the rare soul records that pass through the pipelines of reissue labels like Numero Group, it’s nice to be reminded of just how rock solid that era’s key imprints were. Chess Records is one prime example, a peddler of such familiar names as Etta James, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and the rest of the A-listers on the sleeve to your left. Soul Jazz’s Chicago Soul compilation is by no means a be-all, end-all survey of Motown’s Midwestern brother. It’s a nice starter kit, though, right down to the expansive liner notes that hammer home just how influential all of the above were, and still are.
The Reason(s) We Can’t Stop Listening: Expect post-dubstep perfection that leans on ’90s R&B loops and restless rhythms heavily, yet brings enough fresh perspectives to the fore to keep you from feeling like Damu’s just another member of the James Blake generation. This is what being blinded by beat science feels like—a color block cavalcade of busted brake pads, hover craft hooks and gleaming grooves that glide on by effortlessly.
The Reason(s) We Can’t Stop Listening: The eerie, deeply emotive subtleties of this alternate reality soundtrack—cut for the cult favorite Solaris—passed right through us when we first saw it performed at Unsound’s New York festival. Not because Ben Frost and Daníel Bjarnason can’t string a composition together. (They’re actually two of Iceland’s strongest rising stars.) No, the problem was Brian Eno’s visuals, which fell surprisingly flat despite his efforts to turn Andrei Tarkovsky’s stunning sci-fi film into “another strange loop of computer-generated distortion.”
Taken on its own, SÓLARIS is one of the year’s most sinister song suites, a startling miasma of prepared piano, cutting chords and strings that seem to be strangling your speakers ever so slowly. And when all those taut terror tactics suddenly segues into pure silence near the end, it’s as if you just watched something truly awful happen and the clouds parted at a moment that can only be described as “too late.”
The Artist/Album: Total Control, Henge Beat (Iron Lung, 2011)
The Reason(s) We Can’t Stop Listening: Several labels are reportedly waging a bidding war over this Australian band; one that threatens to overshadow its restless members’ other projects, including Mikey Young’s riff-slinging role in Eddy Current Suppression Ring. Which is understandable. Unlike the bratty, stick-in-the-eye songs of Iceage—Total Control’s nearest descendants in the Punk Bands We Can All Agree On club—Henge Beat strikes a perfect balance between blustery bursts of pure vitriol (“No Bibs,” “Retiree”) and patient songs that poke and prod your speakers for minutes on end (“Carpet Rash,” “Meds II”).
The Artist/Album: Youth Lagoon, The Year of Hibernation (Fat Possum, 2011)
The Reason(s) We Can’t Stop Listening: Trevor Powers sounds like he’s teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown throughout Youth Lagoon’s debut LP, but he’s not being melodramatic for the sake of his spare, spooky songs. Dude’s obviously dealing with some serious issues, channeling his crippling anxiety and deeply personal confessionals into one of the year’s most focused full-lengths. And by that, we mean how each song seems to build to the same cacophonous crescendo, a familiar refrain that manages to reduce us to rubble every…single…time. If you listen to this one with headphones on and don’t tear up a little, you obviously don’t have a soul.
The Artist/Album:Sandwell District, Feed Forward (Sandwell District, 2011)
The Reason(s) We Can’t Stop Listening: One of the year’s most immersive, infinitely rewarding underground dance records finally gets a proper digital release. (It was originally pressed as a limited double LP/Tumblr-inspired fanzine way back in January.) And just in time for the early sundowns and endless nights that go with the gloomy winter months ahead. In case you’re unfamiliar, Sandwell District is a Berlin label/elusive collective that excels at high-wire techno; propulsive club pieces that seem to levitate on the strength of their crackly loops and spastic samples. If someone suddenly named a monthly party after Cabaret Voltaire, this record could play on repeat throughout the first night and no one would notice. It’s that seamless and sure of itself in the angular and atmospheric aesthetics department.
The Artist/Album: Charlatan, Triangles (Foxy Digitalis, 2011)
The Reason(s) We Can’t Stop Listening: Brad Rose (Digitalis Industries, the North Sea, Altar Eagle) translates his tape-centric solo project to a thick slab of yellow vinyl with six instrumental pieces that seem to be in search of a higher state of consciousness; one that’s guided by gleaming synth lines, vaporized vistas and deeply meditative melodies. And to keep things more interesting than most analog architects, Rose doesn’t just gaze at the stars. He passes right through them.
The Artist/Album: Marilyn Manson, Antichrist Superstar (Interscope, 1996)
The Reason(s) We Can’t Stop Listening: A song cycle that’s “Satantic” in the Anton LaVey sense of the word—an ego-exercising celebration of the self rather than an absent, unseen god—Marilyn Manson’s second album single-handedly tore the country’s moral fabric in half when it went platinum 15 years ago. Back then, Brian “I Swear I’m Not That Kid From Wonder Years” Warner transformed himself from a scrawny, pasty Floridian to hell’s most popular Nietzsche-quoting nihilist by transcending the shock rock tactics of the band’s Bible Belt-baiting debut (1994’s Portrait of An American Family, an album that opens with a campy Willy Wonka reference) right before our eyes.
Having Trent Reznor in one corner and Skinny Puppy’s Dave Ogilvie in the other certainly didn’t hurt in the production department, as Warner dug his meaty hooks into a massive mix of skittish drums, sinewy samples and locust-like loops. The three-part storyline—a blow-by-blow Metamorphosis of Giger-like proportions—may sound like an melodramatic midnight movie in retrospect, but there’s no denying the blind ambition of an album that offset a few obvious singles (“The Beautiful People,” “Tourniquet”) with chain-gun choruses (“The Reflecting God”), fluttering falsettos (“Wormboy”), lyrics that’d make Ozzy and Alice blush, and the nagging sense that it’ll all be over soon.
The Artist/Album: Roly Porter, Aftertime (Subtext, 2011)
