It’s one thing to be experimental, quite another to perform a successful experiment. The first is a compulsion, a personality quirk like generosity or reckless driving. The second is something people other than your mother should pay attention to. Boshra al Saadi, a songwriter with visionary aesthetics and a voice in the birthing stages of becoming legendary, from Damascus, Pittsburgh and currently the Lower East Side, is something everybody—even, maybe, your mother—should be paying attention to. For every shitheaded musical algorithm you could throw this artist’s way, like if Cornelius had a sex change and re-recorded Tusk, or if, you know, Regina Spektor had ousted Aaliyah at the Timbaland audition, there is really only one accurate way of encompassing the emotional kick these tracks deliver. Maybe it’s a thing about eponymous musicians, Prince, Madonna, whatever. But here’s the catch: I don’t want to just listen to SAADI songs or go to SAADI shows; I want to be SAADI. After you hear the A and B sides, you’ll probably feel similarly, and we can start a creepy support group for one another where we dress up and write borderline fan fiction.

Let’s start with “Pollen Seeking Bees,” available in physical format this March on the Bad City 12” released by our buddies at Serious Business. What’s cool here is how potentially terrible that opening piano bang could have become. Think about it. No one really needs more fey, post-post-post K Records kiddy-ness on his or her iPod even if 10th grade was terrible and you never got to build that treehouse with your best friend before he moved to Utah. But here, from the four-second mark on, we know we’re in the hands of a master technician, a performer who knows not only how to excoriate a cliche but how to twist one into all kinds of cool new balloon animals. That expertly syncopated scratch, those eternal Glaswegian “aaahs”…it’s the kind of mix-up that allows you to accept that this song, like a particularly charming drunk or a Higgs boson, will probably do whatever the fuck it wants.

A promo page on Serious Business says that SAADI, “draws from sources as diverse as Bob Dylan, classic 80’s synth pop, traditional Arabic music, punk rock, Nigerian music and Brian Eno.” That’s all well and good, and she probably does. But the point here is less the specificity of these taste-wise impulses—did you hear that Chief Ebenezer Obey sample?, and so on—than the sense of sonic transience and mutability their even-illusory presence inspires. We are getting to the point in popular music—thanks Internet!—where genre has become an essentially empty category, and all that really matters is posturing and shout-outs. Record digging, for most of us, is a dead art, and Google is the new back of the CD store. It’s no big deal that one band can sound like Dinosaur Jr. meets Cybotron, or The Byrds meets John Cage. On the other hand, it is a big deal when influences stop being predictable, where the historical fabric of layered tracks and takes slides off the sewing machine. “Pollen Seeking Bees” sounds like a bunch of things: rainy-day pop music, club rap, musique concrete. But the fusion is fluid, not forced. The songs set their own terms, and the classification scrambles to catch up.

B-side “3 am (Black Lodge)” is similarly, um, different; an acoustic guitar figure, an electric wash that sounds like dividing cells look like under a microscope, SAADI’s centered voice the constant that holds it all together. It’s not hard to imagine this as some late-career live recording by an artist you’ve been told a million times to listen to but never have. There’s an effortless confidence at play here, a sort of fan service for fan-base that’s still being created. It catches you up like an American at a European soccer match, shows you slides of an imagined community that you suddenly feel and will forever feel a part of.

SAADI, in the vein of other transcendently forward-thinking female artists like Bridgitte Fontaine or Lizzie Mercier Descloux, doesn’t have a hypothesis of what might sound amazing if interlaced at the right ratios. The experiment is concluded. Here are the results.

Ben Lasman

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

There’s this wonderful moment in the British hipster-psychopath comedy The Mighty Boosh where the two protagonists Howard, an overweight, balding Jazz nerd, and Vince, a stringy vapid self-styled rave Jesus, are practicing for an upcoming gig at a local music club called The Velvet Onion. Howard has a microKorg running through a wall of effects pedals, several test-tubes bubbling with green liquid, and a dead crab in a vat of grease. Vince is banging on a cymbal and improvising a tuneless shaman warble while waving his hands around like a octopus who has just been exposed to a deadly dose of scopolamine. The sound is ungodly, a near-platonic interpretation of the worst music in the world. Eventually, the pair grind the track to a close. Vince looks at Howard, smiling like a super-shy, zit-covered twelve-year-old who has just masturbated for the first time. “Howard,” he says, barely able to contain his excitement, “We’ve invented a new genre!”

I bring this up because anyone who’s ever played music in a somewhat self-serious way has had this exact same epiphany at least fifteen times. The point isn’t that Howard and Vince, or you or I, or that terrible ska band at the cross-campus barbecue are hopeless romantics ass-deep in their own personal mysticism. It’s that inventing a genre isn’t the same as making a sound no one has heard before. I could fart into an echoplex and call it sniff-core and hope to God someone finds it interesting or hilarious. No, a new genre is about making a sound that everyone has heard before, just not in real life. Imagined musical futures, invented archetypes…that’s more like it. That’s what Lingering Last Drops, a crazy fucking good band from Sao Paulo, are conjuring up in this particular bottle-tornado of cyclical history.

We’ve seen some of the elementary particles of this music before: krautrock, freak folk, ambient dub, Throbbing Gristle, Bob Dylan, Flying Saucer Attack, Diamanda Galas. But, through some sort of Nobel-worthy experimentation, a new kind of microscope maybe, or an even larger Hadron Collider, Lingering Last Drops has produced prophetic and ingenious records of how those particles fit together, collide, mark quark babies. Imagine if Neu! were the bar band in Twin Peaks, or if the Basement Tapes were made in the cargo hold of Solaris with the oxygen levels hovering just above zero. The evil in these tracks isn’t a sneer or a leather jacket but a death virus, a mummification ritual burned in .0000001 font on the back of a silicon chip. Reverbed-out guitars, synths that sound like resonating teeth, drums delayed out until infinity, voices that sound like Satan’s out-of-the-office voicemail…you get the idea.

But not really until you listen to the songs. A-side “Love Shadow Syndrome” hovers weirdly on the edge of being pretty, like a girl-next-door type porn actress recovering from harelip surgery. Bendy demon surf guitars weave in and out of suffocating waves of synth pads, some syncopated tambourine motif hovering like scavenger gulls. The voice here is interesting too, somewhere between a Slint-ian breakdown whisper and a Nocturno Culto-esque frog burb. Eventually the whole thing disintegrates into hissing chaos, a CD skipping over the same patch of white noise forever, with, what else, a mellotron solo over it. I have to say, the audacity of that gesture is mad ballsy.

“Light,” the B-side, is both shorter and sparser, propulsive like a bad cough or a Serge Gainsberg track recorded from inside Melody Nelson’s skull. There’s a groove somewhere in here, climbing up joint by joint out of a snow-covered grave, but it’s so scattered, itchy-uncomfortable that it doesn’t make you bob your head as much as squirm in your seat. When the circuitry babble outro comes in at 4:20 like a million bot fly babies suddenly exploding out of your forearm, it’s hard not to seek out the nearest shower or bottle of Xanax. This might be the opposite of chill music, the kind of thing you might begin to hear if you broke out in a rash three minutes into a fifteen-year-long, cold-storage trip to the outer regions of space.

There still isn’t really a name for the music Lingering Last Drops is making. There is, however, a sensation associated with it at once so specific you wonder how to get rid of it, and so universal you wonder why you’ve never noticed it before. This band makes sounds so uncomfortable they should come with a prescription. I can’t wait for the remix album.

Ben Lasman

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

Ivana XL is the latest subversion of one of the more familiar rock ‘n roll personas: That Weird Girl. Look at her press photo: What crazy hair! Why is she dressed like a Google employee? Is that shit under her eye? That Weird Girl isn’t the girl who stuffed rolls into her sweatpants at lunch in middle school. That Weird Girl isn’t the lady who walks around your neighborhood with a block of wood tied to her arm that she checks periodically like a watch. Those are just weird girls.

That Weird Girl, on the other hand, is beautiful but damaged (but not in any way that would leave her dysfunctionally insane), neurotic but relatable (just like you!), a hard drinker (no pussy drinks), plays the guitar (or OK, the piano). Of course, the fact that That Weird Girl scans like a grocery list of every rock nerd’s masturbation scenarios is definitely some kind of dead giveaway.

Still, the question is less one of authenticity than it is one of attachment. Why do we always, for lack of a better word, believe, in That Weird Girl? No one questions if the guys in Bon Jovi walk around Walgreens in leather pants and cowboy shirts (I mean, they probably do). But embedded within the iconography of That Weird Girl is a presupposition of truthfulness, a pact between listener and artist that says “Don’t lie to me.” From then on out, every affectation—from smoking in bed to rolling your r’s to dressing like an lumberjack—becomes an example of individual quirkiness. From Grace Slick to Betty Davis to Bikini Kill to Courtney Love to Missy Elliot to Regina Spector to Amy Winehouse to Lady Gaga…these weird girls bank their careers not just on their music, but on a carefully crafted larger-than-true-to-life-ness that both exceeds our expectations and matches them perfectly.

I know I haven’t talked much about music yet, but that’s about to change. I mentioned at the beginning of this review that Ivana XL is a subversion of the That Weird Girl, something she accomplishes both on the level of pose and product. Take the name, the Donald Trump-ian opposite of slacker wet-dreaminess, to account for the latter. Sounding like a cross between some kind of Soviet super-secret agent and a Powerpoint presentation, Ivana XL recognizes the simultaneous irony and sexiness in what amounts to overselling oneself.

On the other hand, consider the record: These arrangements, consisting mostly of piano, acoustic guitars, Ivana’s voice and a fuck-ton of reverb, sound like they were laid down in a zero-gravity chamber with all the instruments floating around, banging into one another, bunching up in the corners. The effect strikes an odd balance between intimacy and coldness, like someone telling you about her childhood over hot cocoa spiked with poison. If That Weird Girls are all about trust, then Ivana XL is about only letting you get so close before stepping back into the infinite spaciousness of her music, substituting one of her overdubbed voices for another, coolly multiplying personalities behind a beat-up saloon-style keyboard.

The first track “Happy Birthday” might be a human transcription of a music box melody, stop-starting sweet verses in order to let some terrifying overtones carry over the bar-line. It’s like the hallucinated soundtrack to a film version of Alice in Wonderland animated entirely in crayon and cutouts from strangers wedding photographs. I can’t get a handle on the creepiness here, but it’s definitely there, lurking inside the arpeggios like the older-gentleman next-door-neighbor who’s always inviting kids over to earn a couple extra bucks doing yard work or polishing his car or whatever. Suburban mythology, danger in the land of circle driveways and gazebos: this is the toxic subtext of the tune, a birthday salutation hissed by a bag lady through the tracheotomy hole in her throat.

“Ex Oh,” has a similarly shaky relationship to fact, fiction and nightmare, fitting chamber-pop hookiness, folksy guitar pulls and a big drumkit crescendo into a three-minute super-8 home movie, the film crackling, the lens flare obscuring your own face in all the family shots. The sound is intensely personal in the vaguest way possible, somehow culling up everyone and no one’s half-remembered childhood summers, kids you kind of knew drowning in creeks, years and years of life condensed into a drunken bathroom stall remembrance some twenty years down the line. How these songs were written I don’t know, but these are some of the chanciest, scariest slow jams I know.

Ivana XL, like a scholar of weird girls everywhere, has pulled the camera back on the singer-songwriter fakebook, the real that is somehow less real than the fakes it helped produce.

Ben Lasman

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

It’s hard to tell when exactly this happened, but at some point over the past ten years, electronic music started sounding, I don’t know, more alive than rock or country or folk or jazz or other kinds of real-life noise-making. Whereas plenty of revivalists seemed perfectly content to disinter long-dead dinosaur jams and repackage them in tight pants, man-machine hybrids everywhere were evolving, reproducing, absorbing influences and creating new ones out of silicone chips and synthesizers. It wasn’t the end of music, but it was the end of a certain idea of music, that it should be played on instruments that needed to be tuned, that the frontman needed pipes like a Basilica organ, that the drummer…hell, even that there be a drummer. Texture was the new guitar solo, attack sustain decay release the new “Never Mind the Bollocks.” It smelled like…nothing. And sweat and sex and liquor.

That’s why bands like Best Hits are so exciting. Whatever they’re indebted to stylistically they sound basically influence-less. Even if that’s an impossible assumption, they at least are trying to sound like nothing ever heard before. Ambient onamonapoeiatic hip-hop? Electro-twee? Whatever, no. I wouldn’t call this music experimental, not because it’s not, but because listening to these tracks doesn’t entail a particularly severe learning curve. They’re short and great. It’s like eating something that looks like a green cube that tastes exactly like bacon and candy. A twosome based out of Brooklyn (Matt Weiner on dials and knobs and Claire Elise Tippins on more dials and knobs), these guys have a lot of projects going on: the Peace Age label, a whole host of awesome artwork, and bands called Ger, Shrur and Twins. Apart from sounding like the programming lineup of a British children’s television network, they all are awesome and well worth checking out.

Onto the 7-inch, we start off with the alternate-dimension club anthem “Fantastic Lands,” which reminds me of some kind of electrified world-music from a country that doesn’t exist. It’s the kind of track that makes Diplo-style globetrotting seem positively boring. While MIA is all about universal mash-up bassquaking, these guys pose a compelling counterpoint: like kids hiding under a blanket and calling it the homeworld, Best Hits are imagining what it means to be indigenous beat-makers from imaginary places, coining MC-ing languages and extra-geographic rhythm figures for a crossover market. If Mad Decent-style cool-onialism happens to rub you the wrong way, Best Hits throws it down guilt free.

B-side “Heartbeats,” on the other hand, sounds slightly more local, almost perversely so, like overhearing a next door neighbor masturbating to exercise videos and pretending to talk to his dead mother on speakerphone. It’s an interesting channeling of Mr. Roboto-esque autism into awkward dancefloor anthem, almost as if David Byrne’s onstage persona got programmed into a revolting late-80s era Macintosh, or 2001’s HAL ended up living inside your beer fridge. Imagine if Grease with a soundtrack by Suicide and you’re half-way there.

I can’t really tell which of these tunes I like better, a feeling that I hope will be exacerbated by the Best Hits full-length, out sometime this Winter. Until then, I can just put the two songs on repeat, put on warpaint in my bedroom, and terrify my girlfriend every time she comes home from class. If your New Year’s resolution is lose your fucking mind, I suggest you do the same.

But back, briefly, to the idea that I started with, that electronic music breathes in a way almost no other genre can these days. If faced with a decision between the Greatest Hits of Cream and the cream of the Best Hits crop, I urge you to relax and let Darwin take control. Put on your headphones, and evolve.

Ben Lasman

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

Rock n’ roll is a bit like my turtle, in the sense that every time I think it’s going to die, it manages somehow to plug along for another ten years. It’s a new decade everyone, and even if the oughts gave birth to more micro-revivals and quantum genres than anyone could care to keep track of, I think it’s safe to say that rock came out sounding not only alright, but perhaps even more rigorously defined than at any other point in its now officially geriatric lifespan. Remember the opening seconds of Radiohead’s Hail To The Thief back in 2005, that buzzy sound of a guitar getting plugged in and the nasty hiss of speakers. After Kid A and Amnesiac, it was like, oh, amplifiers! That was rock in the 2000s. What’s that crappy sound? Oh, rock! After a decade’s worth of electro-shock therapy and drainpipes posturing, the dirty, scuzzy nature of the beast still persisted like a bad personality trait.

That’s why, I think, WALLcreeper, a four-piece from Boston, sound so fucking on. This is some gristly, pretty music, the kind of thing that makes you want to grow a beard, start a garden, and learn how to do some real motorcycle maintenance. It’s not Zen, necessarily, and certainly not Nirvana. But, listened to on the right pair of headphones or shit-tastic car stereo, it’s not that far from either. If you planted these songs in the ground, they would sprout into really great-looking carnivorous plants.

Check out the A-side “Should Have Known Better,” the longest three-minute rock song of the year. These guys play at a dinosaur pace, slow, hungry, casually devastating, evolving the track like a time-lapse photo of a tundra or some past-its-prime mill town. It sounds natural, like dirt migrating cross-country or stones eroding into weird shapes. Tremolo-picking, half-buried vocals, gastrointestinal bass rumblings…the whole thing accumulates like sediment sitting at the bottom of a river filled with liquor.

People mention shoegaze when talking about this band, and while there’s all kinds of Ride-ish echoes in the project, I think the tag is a bit reductive, and not that accurate. Shoegaze was, from the Madchester groups through My Bloody Valentine, and even today with look-backs like A Place To Bury Strangers, never really about distortion and reverb and huge textural washes, but about being a kind of club music for antisocial white people who couldn’t dance. WALLcreeper grooves, for sure, but the mission of this music is different, closer, in my opinion, to groups like The Drones, or, hell, even The Dead Weather, in that it belongs in beer-reeking bars rather than actual parties, not as a tool for meeting fellow damaged and agoraphobic people, but an excuse to get into a brawl. There’s a bestial swagger to this style, interlocking guitar harmonies and feedback duels and woolly-mammoth drums dealing damage rather than hooks.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on the B-side, the justifiably 8-minute “Empty in the Eyes.” It’s rare that you want bands to work on this kind of scale, but WALLcreeper pulls off the epic so well that you wonder if the mp3-induced extinction of the album track really was a tragedy worth reversing. It’s not so much that the ideas of the band need this much space to breathe, but that the sound itself, like aurora borealis or the Grand Canyon, is best observed in the open. Rising, falling, tension, release are the important compositional components here, so much so that I would argue “Empty in the Eyes” is less a song than a workout in the best possible sense, a deep-play exercise in atmospheric rock measured on a geologic scale. The thing buries you.

The 2000s, I think, did a lot to tame the rock monster. Riffs got compressed, drums got sequenced, vocals got autotuned. Consider WALLcreeper the glorious antithesis to all that, a band that’s down to throw mud and shit all over it’s platonically gorgeous songs. Fuck Spike Jonze. This is where the wild things are.

Ben Lasman

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]