Separately, bass music knob-twiddlers Mark Pritchard and Steve Spacek take to different styles of production-- Pritchard prefers dense and disorienting beats, while Spacek favors a light, woozy, soul-inflected style. On the pairing's debut LP as Africa Hitech, 93 Million Miles, Pritchard and Spacek come together to create music that sounds removed from what folks might expect from their solo careers. The album title refers to the distance between the Earth and the Sun, but it could just as well allude to the breadth of styles covered by the record itself-- from the aggressiveness to grime and Chicago juke, to ambient field recordings and astral jazz blowouts. There's a lot to take in here, and the album's eclectic nature takes a few listens to click, but as our own Hari Ashurst pointed out, 93 Million Miles rarely sounds overstuffed, hanging together beautifully and sharing "the cohesion of a DJ mix". --Larry Fitzmaurice.
Artist: Africa Hitech
Album: 93 Million Miles
Label: Warp
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Artist: The Caretaker
Album: An Empty Bliss Beyond This World
Label: History Always Favours the Winners
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A telling lyric from Cities Aviv: "In a city full of fake Rick Rosses, I rock Cuban link chains with inverted crosses." Cities Aviv comes from Memphis, the town that invented the gothic fight-rap music that eventually morphed into crunk. Memphis has been going through a minor renaissance lately, its sound revived by great mixtapes from guys like Juicy J and Don Trip. But Cities Aviv has little to do with all of that. Instead, he's the head-blown artsy weirdo of his city's rap scene, and Digital Lows reflects that in both sound and disposition. In purely musical terms, the mixtape is a wonderfully warm and languid listen; the first sound you hear is birds chirping, and the single hardest track is a flip of Depeche Mode's "People Are People". And over these spacey bedroom-pop soundscapes, Cities Aviv himself is half bravado and half meditation-- a simple rap everyman wondering at the world. --Tom Breihan.
Artist: Cities Aviv
Album: Digital Lows
Label: Fat Sandwich
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Mild-mannered physical therapy student by day, producer of lumbering, luminescent backing tracks for rising rappers by night, Clams Casino didn't even ask money for his creations until a couple of highly limited, vinyl-only releases earlier this year. The first and more comprehensive of these was the suburban New Jersey beatsmith's Instrumental Mixtape, originally available in March as MP3s. With slowed-down, blurred-out samples of sighing songstresses from Imogen Heap to Björk, the record shows Clams' intricately glazed PC productions are even more fascinating without rhymes over them. --Marc Hogan
Artist: Clams Casino
Album: Instrumental Mixtape
Label: Self-released
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Over the past few years, Michigan-born, Montreal-based saxophonist Colin Stetson has contributed work to albums by both Arcade Fire and Bon Iver. But in this, New History Warfare Vol 2: Judges, his second full-length recording on his own, Stetson has crafted a throbbing, pulsing, experimental record whose rich colors don't really require any prior knowledge of jazz or the avant-garde. Playing every track live, and with microphones place in the space, on his instrument, and even on his body, Stetson has created a raw and visceral sound that is also approachable and easy to take in. As Mark Richardson put it in his review here, it's "like music I've been subconsciously craving without even knowing it exists." --David Bevan
Artist: Colin Stetson
Album: New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges
Label: Constellation
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Those unfamiliar with the long and industrious career of California rapper E-40, as well as the intensely local Bay Area hip-hop scene, are likely most familiar with 2006's minor hit single "Tell Me When to Go". Five years later and two decades into his legacy, 40 is working hard as ever with this double-LP installment in his Revenue Retrievin' series (which saw him releasing four albums in the span of 12 months). Throughout Overtime Shift and Graveyard Shift, E-40 takes a wide-lens view of street rap from multiple narrative angles, exuding such confidence that even guest appearances from artists like T-Pain come off as sincere choices rather than trend-chasing moves. Quoth our own David Drake: "Few MCs release as many consistently great rap songs as E-40; the list of veterans with two-decade careers who aren't reiterating old formulas is even shorter." --Larry Fitzmaurice
Artist: E-40
Album: Revenue Retrievin': Graveyard Shift / Revenue Retrievin': Overtime Shift
Label: EMI/Heavy on the Grind
Recording as Oneohtrix Point Never on last year's Returnal, Daniel Lopatin turned experimental synth-drone into something approachable and sensuous, bringing a sense of wonder and melody to a form of music that's generally defined by its guttural freakout potential. But recording with old friend Joel Ford on Channel Pressure, Lopatin does much the opposite. He takes a few fundamentally pop styles-- synthetic 80s soft-rock, triumphantly tinny glam-metal, subtlety-free early-90s club-jams-- and uses their basic sounds to push toward something nervous and disorienting. The result sounds like a beautifully rendered slick-pop universe busting apart at the seams, like the Vulcan homeworld in J.J. Abrams' Star Trek movie. It's how 80s pop could've felt if all that era's nuclear anxiety were right there on the surface. --Tom Breihan
Artist: Ford & Lopatin
Album: Channel Pressure
Label: Software
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G-Side is the duo of ST 2 Lettaz and Yung Clova, two blue-collar natives of Huntsville, Ala., who rapped about traveling to Europe and to SXSW before they did either. The ONE is their third excellent underground album in almost as many years, and like the others, it features them mostly collaborating with the hometown production unit Block Beattaz, whose gorgeously woozy psychedelic rap sound pushes the bottom-heavy ornamental funk of Dungeon Family toward 21st-century synthetic prettiness. The combination of these emotively straightforward rappers and these fearlessly heady producers is a powerful one, and it leads to tracks like "How Far", where ST and Clova rap about dreams of a better life over a sample of Beach House's dreamy "10 Mile Stereo". On The ONE, you can hear the rappers' desperation for escape bleeding through the tracks-- and if they keep rapping this well over beats this stellar, that escape seems like it could come any day. --Tom Breihan
Artist: G-Side
Album: The ONE... COHESIVE
Label: Slow Motion Soundz
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In what became his last release before his death in May, We're New Here found Gil Scott-Heron combining with Jamie Smith, producer and percussionist for London minimalists the xx. Smith, a gifted re-mixer, was tasked by XL Record chief Richard Russell with re-contextualizing and refitting the dimly lit sounds and arrangements of 2010's I'm New Here, Scott-Heron's first release in 16 years as well as one on which he sang and spoke over spiny production provided by Russell. Smith approaches his mission by adding what Sean Fennessey calls "brightness, an energy, and a historical milieu" and in effect, transforming Scott-Heron from "broken man into a recombinant diva." --David Bevan
Artist: Gil Scott-Heron / Jamie xx
Album: We're New Here
Label: XL/Young Turks
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Portland-based ambient pop artist Liz Harris returns with a proper follow-up to 2008's striking, acoustic guitar-heavy Dragging a Dead Deer up a Hill with this double-mini-LP set of amniotic drone and spacey reverb that recalls the "rural psychedelia" of David Pearce's music as Flying Saucer Attack as much as it does Grouper's 2007 LP Cover the Windows and the Walls. The ambient pop field has become a surprisingly crowded genre over the past few years due to the ease of home recording, but Harris' approach to creating expertly placed sonic texture-- an approach that's both cruder and more sophisticated-sounding than her peers-- continues to place her above the crop. Her voice hangs above these haunting, spectral songs like a ghostly presence, but it's a presence that's always felt amidst music that takes you places. --Larry Fitzmaurice
Artist: Grouper
Album: A I A: Alien Observer / A I A: Dream Loss
Label: Yellowelectric
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Leading up to this year's self-titled debut LP for DFA, NYC production pop duo Holy Ghost! gained recognition by releasing a few rock-solid singles ("Static on the Wire", "Hold On"), but Holy Ghost!, s a record packed with excellent, earwormy standalone cuts, shows they work in an album format as well. It's a front-to-back collection of wistful electronic pop that spans the classic sounds of sleek Manhattan disco ("Jam for Jerry") and playful, pop-and-lock club music ("Wait and See"). Frankel's rounded, soulful vocals add depth to lyrics about love, loss, and the inevitability of growing old; despite the sometimes serious subject matter, though, the music always sounds playful and party-ready. --Larry Fitzmaurice
Artist: Holy Ghost!
Album: Holy Ghost!
Label: DFA
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In their second full-length and first for Thrill Jockey, this band of Brooklyn metal outliers produced an album that both teems and "shrieks" with ideas. While they've been known to both bait and incite the more fanatical proponents of the genre's purity, Aesthetica finds its own balance by refashioning the genre's "basic components-- all-sixteenths assault of blast beats, shredding tremolo guitars, and boiled-pitch vocals"-- and in the process, creating a listen that writer Jayson Greene sums up as "black metal by way of the conservatory." The result is their most furious and engrossing effort to date. --David Bevan
Artist: Liturgy
Album: Aesthetica
Label: Thrill Jockey
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If you measured artists' popularity by the devotion of their cults, Marissa Nadler wouldn't exactly be overlooked. After four finely wrought neo-folk albums, the Massachusetts-based songwriter got by with a little help from her fans in making this self-titled, self-released album. That successful Kickstarter funding campaign bears deeply rewarding fruit on Marissa Nadler, an uncommonly detailed album that's full of otherworldly romantic melancholy, whether in country-glinting "The Sun Always Reminds Me of You" or synth-touched "Baby, I Will Leave You in the Morning". Nadler's patient, often-elliptical songwriting shines through clearly enough to welcome a whole new crowd of rabid supporters. --Marc Hogan
Artist: Marissa Nadler
Album: Marissa Nadler
Label: Box of Cedar
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It's a long way from Madison, Wisconsin, to Kingston, Jamaica. Though Peaking Lights' hometown may be better known for its Big Ten university, abundance of beer and cheese, and recent political protests, their new album's warm, dub-wise psych-pop should convince plenty of coastal music fans to stop ignoring the rich, inventive sounds coming out of the heartland these days. Where last year's vinyl- and cassette-only Space Primitive was an exercise in fuzzy abstraction, on 936 the band's busy percussion, ambling bass, drifting keyboards, reverb-drenched guitar harmonics, and chant-like female vocals strike a deft balance between languid tropical atmosphere and no-nonsense Midwestern hooks. --Marc Hogan.
Artist: Peaking Lights
Album: 936
Label: Not Not Fun
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Over the course of their first two albums, Ponytail, while still loved by many, developed a rep as a band that "wasn't for everybody." Some found them too spazzy or chaotic, with their intertwining lead guitars and breakneck tempos; others couldn't warm to Molly Siegel's unique approach to vocals, which often finds her wordlessly yelping and wailing. These qualities are still present on Do Whatever You Want All the Time, but here they're mixed into a broader, trance-heavy psych context, which makes this album the ideal entry point for those turned off by a track or two before. At points, the guitar work veers closer to the spaced-out minimalism of Dustin Wong's solo work, and Siegel's vocalizing serves a more musical role here. --Mark Richardson
Artist: Ponytail
Album: Do Whatever You Want All the Time
Label: We Are Free
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There's a lot going on on II: math-rock tempo-fucking, blissed-out ambient textures, intricate instrumental interplay. But New York instrumental trio the Psychic Paramount aren't exactly Tortoise. Their vision of instrumental rock is heavy on the rock. Riffs churn and bang, guitar leads triumphantly well up, and drummer Jeff Conaway smashes his kit hard enough that to break skulls. This is experimental underground rock that the kids from Dazed and Confused could appreciate-- a pure-badass astral exploration that always keeps its toes in the mud. It took the Psychic Paramount six years to make the album, but it still sounds-- in a good way-- like the result of a week's worth of seriously locked-in garage jamming. --Tom Breihan
Artist: The Psychic Paramount
Album: II
Label: No Quarter
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A band from Perth playing abrasive avant-rock with weird vocals is obviously a tough sell, so it's no surprise that Snowman finally decided to call it quits after the release of this, their third album. But there was something special about these guys. Their percussion-heavy music could be ethereal, dissonant, and riff-heavy, depending on what the tune call for, and they had a knack for making songs feel like rituals. Absence is less intense and prettier compared to The Horse, the Rat, and the Swan, but is its equal in terms of quality, an intriguing portrait of an original sounding band that should have been more widely heard. --Mark Richardson
Artist: Snowman
Album: Absence
Label: Dot Dash
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Segall is the surging young star of San Francisco's massively fertile retro-psych scene, a guy who's built a reputation as a fuck-shit-up garage-rock firebrand. But on Goodbye Bread, he largely leaves behind the caveman stomp of his previous records, moving toward a sun-baked singer-songwriter sound that still leaves plenty of room for fuzzbox-mashing distortion. The straightforward melodic simplicity of last year's Melted is still in evidence on Goodbye Bread, but it's used in service of slower, more expansive songwriting. While fellow garage-rock up-and-comers like Smith Westerns clean up their sound and go glam, Segall keeps things messy, playing every instrument on Goodbye Bread and retaining a certain trash-can fidelity while still showing a stylistic dexterity that nobody really expected from him. It's proof that Segall is a restless talent with a whole lot more to offer. --Tom Breihan
Artist: Ty Segall
Album: Goodbye Bread
Label: Drag City
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"You wonder if it might be an artifact from some psych-rock acid casualty, a long-forgotten Kiwi-popper, or an Elephant 6 offshoot. You want to poke at it, prod it, and try to carbon date it". That's Pitchfork's Ian Cohen describing early reactions to this elusive Portland trio's self-titled debut, an "eerily extraterrestrial" record whose prickly analog production and beat-driven psychedelia gave way to a few Cults and Sleigh Bells comparisons. But unlike those acts, UMO seem to have found a lot of their rhythmic inspiration in funk, taking its oscillating grooves and turning them upside down in the name of singular pop songwriting that's not only deliciously quirky, but human as well. --David Bevan.
Artist: Unknown Mortal Orchestra
Album: Unknown Mortal Orchestra
Label: Fat Possum/True Panther
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The third full-length from this peerless and sometimes polarizing English four-piece found them continuing to pare down their already slinky sound to fantastic, ultra-erotic effect. Frontman Hayden Thorpe's wily falsetto has been brushed soft and anchored further with multi-instrumentalist Tom Fleming's lower-register drawl, each singing over dimpled textures and minimalists grooves that bring to mind Talk Talk as their most melodic. As David Bevan phrased it, Smother contains "gloriously layered music", a feat in intimate listening from a band that continues to spurn compromise. --David Bevan
Artist: Wild Beasts
Album: Smother
Label: Domino
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