The relationship between rock music and straight up terrible noise is a long and complicated one, punctuated equally by periods of domestic tranquility (Sonic Youth’s easy-listening records), malicious abuse (Metal Machine Music and its descendants), and toothless hypocrisy (remember Test Icicles?). Like in any lovers’ quarrel, outsiders tend to draw lines in the sand: some people like their chord changes neatly separated from their feedback freakouts (sometimes even, they like feedback freakouts over chord changes), while others come to realize that they never liked the noisier stuff to begin with, even though they feel guilty enough about their tenuous allegiances to talk up the experimental tendencies of bands like Animal Collective with something approaching seriousness. Finally, there are people who felt that rock music had become bloated and disingenuous with its increasing lip service to the avant-garde, a mongrel artistic commodity aimed at weekend warriors and self-hating yuppies who claimed to love the Velvet Underground but invariably left the room about four minutes into “Sister Ray.” These people, to borrow a term from Lester Bangs, albeit in a slightly different context, could be called “White Noise Supremacists.” These were individuals who, on the one hand, had developed over the course of decades exposed to pop radio and concept albums an ideological revulsion to all things melodic, rhythmic, and marketable, and, on the other, had suffered enough actual brain damage in the process to enjoy aesthetically the sound of vacuum cleaners and police sirens howling in the dark, wet urban night. Somewhere along the line, this group’s wiring had gotten disconnected from the mass-cultural mainframe and found itself channeling the random and nihilistic ambience of real life.

Listening to A-side “come home eccentric” off peopling’s self-titled EP is a bit like receiving a stray transmission from the ambivalent midpoint of this self-alienating process, its origin about equidistant from the poles of “fun” and “not fun.” There’s a confessional quality to the track’s stylistic indecisiveness, a kind of emo music for people with no feelings whatsoever. Let’s describe the thing: what we hear first is the static blast of a shortwave radio between signals, reaching out hopefully to the shadow-world of long-haul truckers and emergency responders. Then we get a two note bassline burbling up like primordial tar underneath the whole thing. If this was a Spaceman 3 record, all you’d need to add at this point would be some stiff-lipped Brit moaning about Jesus and hey, six minutes later, you’ve got your single in the bag. But peopling isn’t really about tribute in any normal sense, and so, about one and a half minutes into the jam there’s an abrupt switch into blurt-y, shout-along synth-pop not completely unlike an under-circulated Screamer’s bootleg. The effect of this transition is comparable to stabbing an RCA cable repeatedly into the broken input on your iPod, only to have the thing connect half-way through the song and at way to high too high a volume. It’s really pretty awesome, not only because of the visceral thrill of hearing drums and bass and synthesizers and human voices after all that hissing, but also because of the crippling sense of shame you feel for having secretly wanted this kind of thing to happen all along. “Please, turn into an actual song,” whispers your lizard brain, while the higher cortexes that control things like art appreciation and pretentiousness shake their heads like a disappointed girlfriend. The song part of the song continues for about two minutes more before being enveloped once more in crackle and hum. As far as outbursts go, it’s up there with screaming “Freebird!” at a Merzbow performance.

The kind of raw self-consciousness at work on this track is rare in any genre, especially one as dehumanizing and purist as power electronics. Since it’s impossible to listen to Whitehouse albums for actual enjoyment, those who find themselves attracted to noise for whatever reason have to develop rock-solid ideologies to support their counterintuitive fandom. These beliefs run the gamut from garden variety suburban listlessness to an extreme willingness to ingest psychedelic drugs. Whatever the pretext, the point is that the genre always operates in relation to some kind of contrarian rationale, feeding the listener’s urge to become more and more like the non-person he or she wishes so hard to be. Cueing up noise is probably the closest music nerds get to self-actualization, scarifying themselves into iconoclastic ubermenschen through a pair of headphones and the comfort of a bean bag chair. peopling latches onto the latent hypocrisy of these self-flagellating gestures with a unique courage, twisting the deadened headspace of their target audience into something that is equal parts satire and introspection. It has the same humor as a soul-shattering gulag joke.

“summer such and such,” the slighter, shorter B-side to “come home eccentric” works along similarly critical lines, opting to dispense with the cathartic midsection of its sister track in favor of sheer anxiety. A pretty bedroom pop song buried within an echo chamber of squeaks and burps, the piece ends before any resolution can take place. At one minute and fifty four seconds, about the length of time “come home” takes before shooting its payload, you can read the cutoff as an intentional blue-balling. In the notes peopling contributed to us with his music, he calls this track “heartbreaking.” I’d call it simply cruel.

Being a white noise ideologue is admirable, in some sense, but also myopic. Back in the half-formed prehistory of garage rock, bands made noisy recordings filled with feedback and garbage acoustics by accident. Eventually, some people began to find these technological imperfections more interesting than the three-chord bash-alongs they helped preserve. Noise, at a certain point, became an intentional choice rather than an understandable mistake. Now a symbolic referent to the conditions that created rock music rather than the crap side-effects that prevented an ideal incarnation of “Louie Louie” ever being produced, noise became more than an instrument like a guitar or a saxophone; it became an idea, something to believe in. What came next is well-preserved in record store geology: no-wave, Japanoise, Throbbing Gristle, Darkthrone, glitch. Subgenres became defined by their level of audio fidelity, the amount of time on a record dedicated exclusively to found sounds and ring modulators, the degree to which static blasts of varying textures and pitches could be constructed into recognizable verses and choruses. peopling looks at this contrived landscape and hold up the mirror, documentary-style, crafting two-to-five-minute studies into the personal effects of prolonged exposure to stuff most sane people would never want to understand. Even psychopaths need to be analyzed every now and again. All you goners, it’s time to meet your shrinks.

peopling is the solo noise project of Ronnie Gonzalez. He records and lives in NYC. These tracks are from his self-released six-song EP, available for sale now through Ampeater Music, and coming soon on iTunes.

Ben Lasman

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There’s a moment-a bunch of moments, actually-in Jay-Z’s 2009 monster-jam “Empire State of Mind” where, hidden underneath the real-estate shout outs and bends-inducing compression like a C-section scar on a TV actress, you can pick out something wrong, jarring, fucked-up. Tune in at around 21 seconds and you can hear it: this high-pitched clip, like a CD skipping or a steak knife striking a glass table. It’s a strange little imperfection to find in a more or less immaculately constructed pop song, something ostensibly unrelated to musicianship or writing, but still too much there to be considered an oversight. Every ten seconds or so it pops up out of nowhere, grinding at the gears of the chorus, tearing the whole jam apart from the inside out like an armful of bot fly babies.

I bring this up not only because Blissed Out, an NYC-based duo specializing in all kinds of trunk-rattling audio detritus, have a genius edit of this track, but because that millisecond-long mistake in “Empire” and the massive circuit-bent mixology this group throw down flow from the same old-school source. Rap is quite a bit different today than it was a decade ago, sure, but where most heads like to whine about the lyrical transition from the socially-conscious to the fiscally-conservative, it’s also important to note how that thematic shift has been mirrored in the genre’s musical methodology. Sampling, record scratching, the infinite repetition of a breakbeat were all transcendent sonic malfunctions, punk gestures stemming from the same kind of technological anti-humanism as playing slide guitar with a lead pipe or cutting up your torso with a bunch of broken beer bottles thrown hatefully at the stage. Synth-crazed Mannie Fresh-ness, on the other hand, no matter how great it might sound vibrating the tinted windows of your Escalade, doesn’t inspire fear of a black planet, just envy of a black AmEx. Which is why, when Hova’s biggest hit in years comes accidentally equipped with incessant, intrusive noisiness, we not only get a throwback to the auto-destructing golden years of rap, but an exciting insight into how this sort of musical antagonism could pop a hole in hip-hop’s fat-suit. This is where Blissed Out really come into the picture, taking that phantom peak off “Empire” and spinning it not only into a single remix, but an entire project’s worth of deeply damaged low end theory. If these guys were somehow selected to produce Jigga’s next album, it would be released on Deaf Jam, and instead of being Black, it would be the kinds of colors you see when someone punches you really hard in the face.

“Both hip hop and noise involve re-appropriating instruments and technology, removing them from their intended contexts and creating something new with that,” says Alex, one half of the group, on Blissed Out’s conceptual heritage. “There also is a physical connection between hip hop and harsh noise. That is, a physical feeling one gets when listening to it, created by the frequencies. With hip hop, this is found in the extreme low tones used and with noise the extreme highs that are often found.” It’s usually bad news when rock writers conflate signature sonics with biography—Ray Charles’ ivory style mimicking a heroin score, Justin Beiber’s pedophile-baiting croon being anything more than an accident of prepubescence, and so on—but this dichotomy of found sound and physical pain, a devastating low to a redemptive, ear-cleansing high, seems distinctly related to the band’s formation. When asked about it, Alex says, obliquely, “I almost died. But a little less than 2 years before that, I met Sasha…” Sasha being dude number two in BO. Long story short, Alex got sick for an entire year, underwent surgery, confined himself to his apartment and rediscovered an old sampler he had bought when he was younger. A series of early morning electro workouts followed, these one-man-jam seshes culminating in an extended improvised sound check with Sasha one evening in 2009 at a house show in Bed Stuy. Like Gillespie meeting Parker, or Cash joining Carter, it was pure Bliss.

It’s rare to find a band with this refined an aesthetic, let alone one that’s been playing together for less than a year. Falling somewhere between Merzbow-ian tape-fuckery, the distorted narco-haze of 90s shoegaze, 808s and heart disease, Blissed Out manage to condense and amplify the elemental nightmare of new-century pop music—that it’s made by machines, that it has no soul—into something that makes assimilation into SkyNet not seem like such a terrible idea after all. Plenty of people are pushing electronica in emotive, wonky directions, but where the vibe of something like Disaro and witch house is spooky in an anachronistic way—old, creaky houses and super-8 film—Blissed Out excels in thoroughly modern modes of terror, the sound of your brain cells turning into numbers, the rape-breathing of a thousand sentient samplers, the holographic image of Peter Brotzman conducting a full-blown army of pixelated machine guns.

The two tracks posted here come off the group’s White Triangle cassette, recorded live at Silent Barn and released by Mirror Universe Tapes in June. A-side “+Empire State of Mind Edit+” we mentioned before, and B-side “+Tropical Fantasy+” retains a similar payload of skittering, underwater beatwork wrapped inside a variegated caul of bit-crushed dub. The song titles all have pluses at either end, kind of like a battery with only positive ends.

Keeping in tune with that hopeful tip, Alex concludes, “I get the most inspired to create by listening to hot 97, reading art and fashion magazines, late night walks around the city, and the people that are around us. Even before recording music for Blissed Out, I had fallen into something where I kept meeting people, then, following that, discovering they were creating music. Seeing all of these kids around me doing it made me realize that creating music wasn’t an unattainable goal.” Alicia Keyes, dodging the demon clip, playing the world’s loudest piano, said it herself: there’s nothing you can’t do. Out of New York, that is.

Ben Lasman

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Quite a bit of the press on Denver, CO quartet Woodsman leans towards discussions of longish songs and instrumental jamminess, two musical qualities that might be notable if you think Tangerine Dream and the String Cheese Incident belong on the same bill by virtue of their thematically foodie names. Of course, in situations where longish, jammy music is appropriate, length and jamminess turn out, ironically, to be the least notable points of interest. Like a film review describing a Holocaust documentary as “dark” and “historical,” it’s like tell me something I don’t know! Whoever is there came prepared. The biggest problem faced by any band pushing supertight guitar-and-drums instrumentals, vulnerable to the metaphysical trappings of “post-rock” (as if rock had a metaphysics to begin with), whose notions of song-structure place vibe above parts a, b and c is a categoric rather than a creative one. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that instead of the Nuggets anthology, there was something similarly enormous and comprehensive called Noodles: Bands That Didn’t Know When to Stop 1965–1979. It’s a terrifying prospect, imagining a Kilimanjaro-sized stack of vinyl, two songs to a side, “packaged” in 200 acres of pristine Vermont farmland. I point all this out because Woodsman, despite their bucolic namesake, are percolating a very different kind of longishness and jamminess than either term would have you believe outright, something closer to Dusseldorf than Dartmouth, something that demands your zone-outs with an urgency that’s almost political.

I got into this band backwards, seeing them live without foreknowledge and then digging into their Internet presence in the aftermath. To say something is lost in translation between the stage and the silicon isn’t a dis by any means, just the acknowledgement that different acts inevitably have their ideal mediums and Woodsman’s happens to be packed, million-degree basements where the collective sweat of some two-hundred odd strangers actually acts as an electro-spiritual conduit for an almighty suburban Shango. The setup is ritualistically symmetrical, two guitarists and two drummers in a square configuration like telephone poles in a cornfield. Operating like the world’s simplest circuit, these guys loop the voltage for forty-five killer minutes while the collective brain hovering invisibly over the rafters draws an infinite series of connecting doodles between them. It’s a powerful thing, shuddering reverb distress signals undercut by rapidly complicating motorik patterns and vocals like ghosts in some superlatively advanced German-made machine. How long were these songs? I didn’t check my watch once.

Compressing this kind of physical sensationalism into something you can own and play at home is certainly no small task. Smartly, Woodsman’s recordings are different enough from their show tunes as to discourage direct comparison. For one, they’re softer. For two, they’re cleaner. Think of a pristinely rendered two-dimensional blueprint viewed with the understanding that some day it will become a house you can inhabit. They’re kind of like that, a concise symbolic language for communicating and making permanent  the ephemeral, a work of taxidermy designed to inspire admiration for the animal, alive and in its native habitat. Both “Beached” and “Balance” come off the five-song Mystery Tape EP that was released on Lefse records earlier this month.

What’s great about these tracks (both at the virtually radio-friendly durations of 4:41 and 4:37, respectively) is how they communicate the tension-wire tautness of the group’s gigs into a domestic night-terror, exchanging volume for eeriness and echo, distortion for space and clarity. From the submarine siren guitar on “Beached” to the skittery forrest-floor rhythms on “Balance”, the band allows unknowable evil presences to maneuver unchained through its etherized instrumental atmospheres. Post-rock has burdened itself with a number of distasteful connotations over the past two decades, but where other groups come off as embarrassingly bathetic (Explosions in the Sky) or comically overblown (Fucking Champs) or disingenuously mopey (Mogwai), Woodsman—like Neu! or Harmonia—comprehend the cumulative value of restraint, repetition, the acid-streak euphoria you get from listening to the same hypnotic ritual again and again. What if “Kick out the Jams” had been a literal and clairvoyant criticism of every air-sucking, self-indulgent rock act ever to grace the festival circuit in its wake? Woodsman is the hypothetical heir to that alternate reading, a repossession of the epic in the name of the simply exceptional.

Ben Lasman

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The big thing missing from the majority of oughts rock was drama, plain and simple. I don’t mean real-life drama, necessarily, like overdoses and feuds and breakups and uncharacteristically horrible sophomore albums—although I guess there wasn’t all that much of that either—but musical drama, chills, bands that sound like murder. I can think of a couple of reasons for this backlash against laying on the terror: the first might be the Frankensteining of emo early in the decade into something that would make any post-pubescent person blush; the second, nu-Indie’s clinical passiveness, that narcotized monotone that now runs through every hipster’s bloodstream like a Joy Division bassline. It’s regrettable, really. If one genre oversold the art of feeling bad, then the other undersold the cathartic potential of bombast. The situation is almost Freudian in its logic: unable to adequately confront lived trauma through music, our emotionality has regressed, seriously, to the level of very small children. Check, Animal Collective connects on the basis that their songs are the audio equivalent of finger paintings; check, Lightning Bolt’s dense and manic album art; check, the talent reservoir feeding the Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack. It’s not really a musical problem, but a mass-cultural one: everything from the popularity of Wes Anderson to the resurgence of tights to the Web virus of adorable cat pictures to the apotheosis of the graphic novel are all indicators that our generation is retreating, with varying degrees of pathology, to the pillow fort. Instead of the bold and the beautiful, we have the fey and the cute. Instead of the Mamas and the Papas, an incestuous fake family who burned and choked publicly, we had the White Stripes, a brother and sister who got divorced. It’s the key metaphor: Bury the horror, get back to the playground.

What this all leads up to, I guess, is that Lil Daggers, a fairly accurately self-proclaimed garage psych group from Miami, are pretty awesome. What’s more, their messy, catchy, cocaine-demon style of songwriting is the antithesis of all that is kid-friendly in the emphatically adult world of American pop music. That drama you’ve been craving? These guys have it bottled. We’re not talking over-the-top, pantomiming, Killers shit, either. These two tracks are almost platonically scary, like the dank armpit of a bouncer at an off-shore casino, or a pile of syringes, only one of which contains anything you would consider jacking into your body. Falling somewhere between the Cramps (minus camp spookiness) and some band you’ve never heard of…er, falling somewhere between the MC5 on different drugs and an electrical storm…ok, falling somewhere between Lou Reed and Stockhausen…

But in all seriousness, there isn’t a lot comparisons can help you surmise about this band, precisely because their appeal lies less in the uniqueness of their sonic vision —a healthy dose of punk and rockabilly, twangs of surf and noisy kosmiche—than the characteristic snarl that vision happens to be imbued with. You won’t find a dirtier record this year, a blaster that’s equal parts party jam and depressive drive to the coast, urine streaked dive and strip glitz for miles upon diamond miles.

A-side “King Korpse,” off the probably not accurately quoted, but brilliantly named Unmastered Dungeon Sesh II, has a 40 second intro of lugubrious minor chords and cornball organ, the rock parallel to the lit fuse leading into the crypt. It’s a builder, the sort of song that lets you know what’s coming (goofball dancing, shots all around, grave robbing, etc.) long before it actually delivers. Talk about drama! You want instant gratification? Get a ringtone. Like a galvanized bit of taxidermy, the track comes to life in a predictably grimy, undeniably satisfying way: fuzz-filtered vocals, a noodly lead guitar riff, double time snare thwacks. It’s fantastic, like watching the opening credits to an ancient biker flick only to realize slowly, ineffably, that all the action is taking place live, right now, in your driveway.

B-side “Ya Tu Sabe,” backs up its hubristic title with a set of opening bars so simultaneously menacing and invigorating, it’s hard to decide whether to head for the fridge for a comfort snack or start shadowboxing. This thing stalks like a feral beast, all the while maintaining a woozy funhouse swirl that leaves you nauseous and loving it. Shambolic does not begin to describe the chaos that ensues. Sure, it’s all tight enough, but just listen to that blasting arc of crash cymbals and skid-mark guitar and some thick gauze of hiss and crackle that makes it sound like the record was pressed on a mud cake rather than any kind of archive-grade material. If the Mission Impossible tape self-destructed in thirty seconds, Lil Daggers’s music doesn’t even wait for you to finish hearing it before it starts spinning itself to pieces.

From Big Star to Lil Wayne, Big Black to Fats Waller, the best adjective-noun band names don’t discriminate between the relative importance of the first and second term. Where the noun is fact, the adjective is commentary, always crucial for placing the artist in context. Lil Daggers is no different. If drama is for kids, these kids flash the knives and get to work.

Ben Lasman

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Writing the perfect pop song, unlike writing, say, the Great American novel, isn’t that much of an accomplishment. Just listen to a Nick Lowe album, or the first fifty or so NOW compilations: spot-on songcraft happens all the time. And, like any respectable thing produced in excess, (e.g. episodes of Law and Order: SVU or nice Catholic children) it can get pretty boring pretty fast. Most good musicians understand this. If the radio won the war against entropy, compressing vocals into weaponized siren-calls and cropping rock epics into low-calorie 3:39 chart-climbers, then the pop underground has consistently filtered chaos back into the mega-hit equation, slowing things down, chopping things up, cutting things out, replacing x with y and xy/xx with xxx and y oh y oh y. Darwinism, it turns out, applies equally in the natural and aesthetic worlds: perfect copies shrivel into evolutionary stumps and fuck-ups shape the future. Dig it, the Rolling Stones became superstars for being the worst R&B band in the world, Led Zeppelin for being the worst blues band of all time, and Hip-Hop for being basically the worst music ever produced. In all cases, it was spectacular. Rock history, it’s clear, is less the elegant progression of a master design than an accumulation of beautiful mistakes, holes poked in Marshall cones, decommissioned military hardware co-opted by the bohemian rabble, mishandled reggae vibes, and hissy tapes made on a four-track and handed out for free from the back of a station wagon. James William Roy, a genius songwriter, who in his promo pictures looks like a cross between a cool dad and the Duane Johnson of a less-literal Rock, might as well be the authority on pop mishaps spun into metaphorical, if not monetary, gold. This guy writes perfect songs. Then he ruins them. Case in point: The best way to find a great artist is by following the trail of debris he leaves behind.

Of course, this process of create and destroy can take some time. “Sometimes I’ll bang out a progression, but I won’t know what’s happening with those until I go back to them in a year or so and see what’s worth resurrecting,” says Roy. Resurrection might in fact be the key term to this guy’s appeal, the bottled resurrection of 80s DIY touring van odor, the resurrection of decades-old musical memes that never lost their integrity, the resurrection of mammoth hooks spun out by everyman bands rather than some studio supercomputer capable of turning the sound of guitars into distorted square waves and bass into a physical sensation rather than a series of notes. You can really feel the dew of rehearsal space sweat in these recordings. The choruses stick with you like a shirt you’ve worn to about a hundred shows too many. Do-It-Yourself might be a useful mantra, but Roy embodies an even more important epithet: DIR, Do-It-Right. If someone had played me this record in a car, I would have guessed peak-form Bob Mould. Call it Misguided by Voices.

If you, like me, read This Band Could Be Your Life about a million times, you can imagine the kind of nostalgic kudos this kind of stuff deserves. The US indie rock of the Reagan years boasts one of the strongest discographies in existence, a stack of vinyl so consistently brilliant I’d endorse burying it in a mountain for eventual excavation by aliens once the human race has been reduced to dust. Fuck the pyramids. 100,000 years from now, Zen Arcade will show up in digital telepathy chronologs as the fifth wonder of the world, alongside Double Nickels On the Dime, You’re Living All Over Me , Goo and ok, maybe Pet Sounds. But the really great thing about the sonics of two tracks here is that there really isn’t a contemporary analog to it, no blog-band parallel, no micro-movement generating knee-jerk buzz. It’s not so much that Roy’s old-school as much as his songs school the broadband generation’s light-speed taste fluctuations, mp3 hoarding, the desperate fetishization of the even-newer-than-brand-new. It’s timeless stuff, recorded for nothing, signifying everything. In a time when the term indie is virtually (as in virtually) meaningless, this band has maneuvered to the outside by avoiding the outre, stabbing at the center through tuneful grit instead of wonkish gimmickry.

One listen to “Paper Valentine” is about all it takes to make it your favorite song of the month, an a-side in the most quintessential sense. Not to harp on this allusion, but the hook hits you in the same place as a vintage Sugar track, a pop gloss tossed over punk-honed workmanship, the tastefulness of the vocal track that never sounds stretched but nevertheless manages to nail every nuance. Do I have any gripes? Only that if Roy begins moving away from mp3s in favor of vinyl, as he claims he wants to do, I’ll have a much harder time putting this song on infinite repeat.

B-side “Rush Delivery” marries some wobbly guitar texture to the kind of blissfully shambolic instrumental meltdowns you might find in Crooked Rain-era pavement, the chord changes lurching like an inebriated college student towards whatever mystic revelation happens to hang out on the other side of the quad. It’s a tremendous mess, executed with the electric energy of live band on the verge of shorting out the back of some shithole bar. There’s a humble majesty to this sort of thing, a refreshing execution of every pretentious instinct you could isolate  in 99% of acts indebted to the same lineage.

Roy mentioned that “Paper Valentine” can be imported into Rock Band, which sounds perfect if you happen to throw a lot of parties with an exclusively rock-nerd guest list. I’ve never played the game, but I understand that it works by tapping out on-screen patterns of notes on a small plastic guitar. The more accurate your shreddage, the bigger your score. But, Roy’s contribution has a unique catch. The more notes you miss, the drunker you get, the more off-kilter your vocals and the sloppier your drummer, the higher you climb on the leader-board. Getting it right in real life and simply getting it right were never the same thing after all.

Ben Lasman

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Evil—living like it, sounding like it, being it—was something akin to the Holy Grail of Old Weird America. Even today, listening to Harry Smith or Goodbye Babylon or the Secret Museum of Mankind, the sensation is more physical than intellectual, a moonshine chill coursing through your lymphatic system, the mingled smell of blood and wet leaves rising out of the earth in tiny, invisible particles. You don’t get into this kind of music; it gets into you. Like whiskey, it’s the infective, curse-like quality of the really good, ancient stuff that distinguishes it from any number of fresher, younger, endlessly subcategorized “Folk” brands, kids who think flannel and whispering constitute a workable detour around the crossroads, or that “Freak”—indeed, unspeakable freakiness—wasn’t a fundamental part of the 12-bar equation to begin with. I’m not down with calling any kind of music-making disrespectful, but the late-20th century’s turn towards the easy-listening side of acoustic trad stylings certainly is boring, like if suddenly we started collectively imagining that all jazz sounded like Mel Torme, or that punk rock began and ended with Good Charlotte. Folk is not chill music, it is chilling music. And, more so than virtually every other contemporary folk artist, from the catelepsy-inducing boredom of Iron & Wine, to the fey shenanigans of the Decemberists, to the woolier tendencies of Devendra and Wooden Wand, Blaque Boose understand the implicit and electrifying horror of the original craft.

Based out of the Maine hinterlands, Blaque Boose foregrounds the disarmingly eery vocal talents of a woman named Sheena Charland and encases them in a dust storm of fingerpicked guitars, cavernous flutes and some fairly aggressive tape-mangling. The effect is more darkly hallucinogenic than psychedelic, like the middle hours of an endless acid trip initiated in a trailer park and moving ever closer to the busted speaker a secondhand, static-spitting wireless radio. There are no good vibes here, just the aural history of a lifetime of bad lovers and mental health problems. It’s great, like Throbbing Gristle dismantling the myth of America from a fallout bunker filled with strange, rural preserves.

What’s interesting about Blaque Boose’s approach to the folksy idiom is how true to tradition it seems without sounding anything like what purists might classify as “authentic.” Sure, some of the staples are here: repetitive, blues-informed song structures; acoustic instruments all over the place; thick banshee harmonies. But when you factor in the infinite overdubs, the cavernous ambience, the electronic malfunctions coursing through the background, it becomes overwhelmingly clear that we’re a long way from the songbook. All the stylistic familiarities here are based on vibe, not sonic mimicry. There’s no fake vinyl hiss. No lyrics about devils and train tracks. No mandolins. Yet somehow, the whole thing captures an unnamable, old-school realness beyond the aesthetic. It’s a demonic authenticity, like the muscle tremors and delusions of the possessed. You only know it’s there when you feel it for yourself.

So let’s feel it. Check out A-side “Winter,” an undulating dirge of acoustic fragments and witchy chanting. Charland’s voice has a deep, mystical quality almost organically suited to the delayed multi-tracking of the lyrics. You don’t imagine the recording technology, but a kind of multi-headed medusa with impeccable pitch and an introspective bent. It’s like being caught in a hurricane in the middle of a haunted pine forest, half-nature and half-magic. The track engulfs you in a thicket of tortured harmonies, a sound collage rendered out of wind and breaking branches and shredded bark. It doesn’t get rawer.

B-side “Past Lives Owen,” a meditation on Charland’s former boyfriend and bandmate, might be what Nico would have recorded had she been raised in a one-room shack in Appalachia with nothing in it but a Wurlitzer and some tape-splicing equipment. Less a song than a kind of supernatural field recording, “Past Lives” makes good on the dark promises of “Winter,” creeping ever further off the well-beaten path of chord progressions and verses towards something more abstract, more entropic, the kind of noise you could imagine emerging from the bored spirits of abandoned farmsteads, the unearthing of something eternal and malevolent. The evil, of course, has always been here, lurking in the shadows, poisoning the drinking water. Blaque Boose, like any archivists worth their microphones, are in the business of preservation.

The Blaque Boose 7-inch is part of Eternal Otter Records’ Death Rebirth & Transformation vinyl series, and is available through Ampeater’s Store.

Ben Lasman

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It’s one thing to cash in on “borrowed nostalgia from the unremembered ‘80s,” as James Murphy put it. It’s quite another to dig deep into borrowed nostalgia from the unexperienced 80s. The first is a kind of homage for an unrepeatable bucolic past of Casios and barbiturates and roller skates. It’s pretty and a little bit sad, like finding a fuzzy picture of some attractive teenagers you don’t know hanging out on a beach in California, or worse, Florida. But the second kind of nostalgia is a bit weirder: unexperienced nostalgia, after all, has bred things as diverse as Renfairs, Civil War reenactments, and the Flintstones. In other words, it’s more cartoonish than elegiac, more fetishistic than sincere. This isn’t a bad exchange, necessarily, especially if you’re the kind of person who prefers the idea of dating Molly Ringwald in high school to the real-life experience of dating your actual high-school girlfriend. To bring things back to music, though, if the first kind of nostalgia is a band like Delorean, then the second is Magic Man, a baller group of college students born post-Reagan based out of New Haven and Boston and bound to blow up big in t-minus 5…4…3…2…

Check it out. The story behind Magic Man’s fantastic debut record Real Life Color (free download here: http://magicman.bandcamp.com) is so spot on that it reads like erotic fiction for PR firms. Written while the band was organic farming in France, the group proceeded to record the 10-song set on Garageband in an alternating series of dorm rooms primarily through their Macbooks’ built-in microphones! Holy shit, call the laundry service. What’s shocking, though, is how great the whole production sounds, crisp, warm, the synths blippy and blurrpy and the vocals echo-y and full. Whoever manned the boards for these masterful not-so-lo-fi sessions deserves a Grammy. Fuck Steely Dan: this is studio wizardry.

Even though it might be easy to deride Magic Man as just what the blogosphere ordered, I would urge the skeptical listener to suspend judgment a little bit longer. For all the links one could make between Real Life Color’s sonic palette and any number of other Internet generation phenoms—the pulsating melodic sensibilities of more recent Animal Collective, the chirpy blip-tune of the Postal Service, the quasi-Afro vocal tics of Vampire Weekend—the songs themselves are so immaculately crafted that they could, for all intents and purposes, be performed on Alpine horn and maracas and still sound like a million literal bucks. Blogs tend to latch on to gimmicky affectations (for a particularly egregious example, note recent Frenchkiss band Freelance Whales’ use of a watering can in their drum kit), in some extreme cases equating a group’s genre or identity with a single aesthetic decision: consider the fake genre of chill-wave, encompassing artists as diverse as Wavves and Neon Indian and predicated on nothing more than some vague combination of tape-hiss, bit-crushed sine waves, and a melted-vinyl quality to the master. What I’m saying is that our ears over the past couple of years have been trained to listen for acoustic minutiae rather than hooks or songcraft, the technical components of tracks rather than the platonic nature of the tracks themselves. Get over it. If Magic Man were a guitar-drums-and-bass kind of deal, no one would be equating them with the Arctic Monkeys; by extension, the band’s effortless evocation of the catchwords of late-00’s blog rock is too successful to be dismissed automatically as simple aping.

So, the songs: Side-A “Daughter” is a kind of suburban worldbeat anthem, all glitchy drum loops, some rollicking synth hooks, and a propulsive energy that breathes life into the otherwise synthetic soundworks. Then there’s the voice, which is hardly a voice, but more like the computer-generated composite voice of the singers from millions of other up-and-coming buzz bands. There’s not a lot of personality to it, but it’s undeniably effective, sort of like the way mood stabilizers might make a fine substitute for real emotions. The punch, though, lies in the instrumentals: there’s a tremendous fluency with the dynamics of synth-pop at work here, an avoidance of easy structures and verse-chorus redundancy. Think Tears for Fears with a digital twist and fewer melodramatic gestures and you’re getting close.

B-side “Nest” is actually my favorite of the two, a swirling bedroom tribal workout that evokes the gauzy aura of a half-remembered childhood hallucination. This kind of deconstructed pop strikes me as distinct from the overt song-ishness of “Daughter”; it’s the sort of track you could get lost in for days, an infinitely-replayable 5:42 that never seems to age, like a great screensaver you can listen to.

Perhaps, then, that mercurial 80s vibe isn’t unremembered, or unexperienced, but universal, not a cosmic music of the spheres, but a more personal music of the synths. What else can I say? It’s magic, man.

Ben Lasman

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It’s crucial here not to equate the French propensity for crafting immaculate pop songs with a racist a priori like black people are good rappers, or even something logical, yet reductive, like Indonesians make the nicest gamelans. It’s not enough, in other words, to write these things off as natural. Instead, we need to work backwards from the who to the why. Lozninger himself sets us in the right direction with this priceless quote about his artistic output: “LØZNINGER’s music extremely sucks though some people say it sounds nice.” The closer you look at this statement, the more you realize how transcendentally apt it is in describing that elusive, quasi-nonexistent French aesthetic we’ve been groping for. I don’t want to be dismissive—and believe me, I’m MySpace buddies with more than one French band—but how often when a group is categorized as French Pop is that an indicator that the music they’re making is, in at least one or two obvious ways, really terrible? Let’s look at some outdated, but trendy, examples: Justice’s music, with its obese mid-range blastsynths, its pseudo-glitchy malfunctions, its winking homages to hair metal, is essentially a counterintuitively awesome culmination of horrible influences and creative choices. Air and Daft Punk, too, seem to occupy a similar state of qualitative ambiguity: Barry Manilow in a space suit is objectively still Barry Manilow. In a space suit. Undoubtedly bad ideas, in all these cases, miraculously add up not necessarily to more than their constituent parts, but something so effortlessly cool, so autistically controlled, that their constituent parts cease to exist. Can you think of any American band where influence is subverted in such a holistic way? Imagine something as innocuously unbearable as Smashmouth, ostensibly a revamp of 50’s doo-wop music with a big-room house twist, and you get the idea of how strange and impossible to duplicate the French model of sonic success really is.

To get a sense of how Lozninger figures into this context, it might be best to take a look at the B-side, a cover of Britney Spears’s “Toxic.” Ironic indie-rock covers of multiplatinum mega-hits is a practically antediluvian practice at this point, so overplayed that you might expect to find one buried near the cave paintings at Lascaux packaged along with a promotional coupon for a pair of Reeboks. Goddammit, this shit is so terrible most of the time! But Lozninger, with a practiced—or, I suppose, ancestral—nonchalance towards this kind of thing (“Ew, that song by Brittneey Speeaars,” I imagine some dude wearing APC jeans and aviator shades, pulling on a Gauloise and downing a 5 Euro bottle of fantastic wine, saying completely unselfconsciously, “Eet is tres cool, no?”) manages to make the tune, already perfect in its original incarnation, not only worthwhile but worth your time to check out. By dropping the Night on Bald Mountain string hook that 100% made the Britney jam and replacing it with acoustic guitars, hushed vocals, some suffocatingly-dense atmospheric synths, the effect of the cover is less one of laffs than of a guilty pleasure, like the urge to eat not one but two orders of mozzarella sticks, slowly grafting itself to your insides. What can I say about this version other than it seems sincere, so sincere that it makes you appreciate the song platonically rather than discretely, a masterpiece of celestial tunesmithing in search of the ideal vessel. Of course, if Dynamite Hack decides to come out of retirement, this no longer applies.

Lozninger’s more, I don’t know, artistic side, comes out in “Moving Targets,” a beautifully constructed bit of noise-pop, all found sound and melancholic piano that seems to fall into playlist format almost by accident. Originally when I downloaded these tracks, only the first twenty seconds of this song came through, and I was forced, temporarily, to contemplate what it might mean to package “Toxic” alongside the inchoate blips and fuzz of the A-side’s opening bars. I guess it’s kind of like a 4-minute Pet Sounds. Which, come to think of it, is about as French a maneuver as going on vacation on a Wednesday, or eating pizza with a fork.

Ben Lasman

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There’s something endearing about music that always seems to be on the verge of falling apart. We’re not talking mass destruction, like if Iron Maiden’s infrastructural backline suddenly started melting down, but a series of smaller catastrophes: the guitar goes out of tune, the homemade electronics begin to shoot sparks and smoke into the audience, the legs of the organ go out like a buffalo shot from a stagecoach. You get the idea pretty much every time you go to a local band showcase in some smaller city in the Northeast, that heart-thunk moment of Oh shit! when the drummer starts soloing mid-verse and the rest of the band exchanges awkward glances, or when the iPod somehow falls out of the chiptune dude’s back pocket. If music is about control—tight pants, technology, etc.—these are the rough times when entropy turns the mixer all the way to suck.

But, as free jazz and Cage and Lucky Dragons and Mix Master Mike all prove, the hard-wired human fear of chaos can go both ways. Sometimes, the Oh shit! moment, in the right hands, can be infinitely more exhilarating than super-tight studio professionalism. You lose control of your internal metronome and embrace the terror of the void.

Chad VanGaalen, who has a name like a Dutch trance producer and the chased-by-wolves voice bizarro of the Meat Puppet’s Curt Kirkwood, has a promo photo of himself sitting alone in what appears to be his backyard, surrounded by odd gadget-y creations, playing a Casio and sticking his finger into a nest of wires. It’s a scary scene, not only for the rustic hellishness I typically associate with lawns covered in busted-up machines, but also because the whole thing looks like it’s seconds away from exploding. I don’t know if Canada—VanGaalen’s from Calgary— has looser laws regarding these kinds of hi-tech supplies, but if I wasn’t listening to this guy’s music and loving it, I might be tempted to drop a line to Interpol.

Still, to paraphrase the Supreme Court, “If it looks like a duck, it must be a duck.” In VanGaalen’s case, too, what you see is what you get. If you, like me, get a hard on for homemade rave gear, that’s a really good thing. Listening to these cuts, B-sides of 2008’s Soft Airplane (Flemish Eye), you get a sense of how the weird, the out-of-sync and the questionably-conceived can metastasize in genius ways. None of it sounds right. But it all sounds so good.

It’s sometimes difficult to imagine music being made—let alone blogged—these days without a heavy dose of generic calculation. Call it search term tyranny, but I can’t remember the last band that got hyped based on something other than some kind of ostentatious gimmick. This probably has to do with any number of things: the growing unimportance of local scenes, the indie set’s own dictatorial ideas of ironic PR. But weren’t things just a little weirder before the mp3? Not weird in a way that you can categorize, but just subversively, invisibly weird, like Dylan’s Basement Tapes or Sebadoh III, music that sounds off the way a slight case of jaundice might make a person look more unattractive than you remember. Perhaps VanGaalen’s found the workaround to this unanticipated side-effect of digital distribution in that pile of circuits in his backyard, but there’s this cassette era warped-ness in his tunes, an off-kilter malfunction that haunts the music like a ghost in the speaker cabinet. Somewhere between nostalgia and a full-on poltergeist confrontation, this guy has mastered that elusive and alien discomfort that makes old Sub Pop compilations so horrifying and cool. Do you remember Cat Butt, Terry Lee Hale, the Thrown Ups? If you do, you probably know what I’m talking about. If not, I suggest you do some fucking research!

A-side (or maybe AB-side) “Pyramids Float” is, despite it’s hallucinogenic title, pretty close to folk music, or at least the kind of folk music that would emerge from a community raised on cow punk rarities collections and whose Bar Mitzvah’s included an obligatory demonstration of synthesizer atmospherics. VanGaalen nails that middle ground between rock dynamism and clinical paranoia that makes so many mid-80s indie pop records such awesome listens. With a jerky rhythm like a failing motor and a chorus that wouldn’t seem particularly out of place on a Jawbox record, this song is at once almost scientifically close to a meticulously architected crossover single, and technically sketchy, like an inebriated robot, circuit-bent to perform karaoke on command and nursing the damage with pints after pints of mediocre beer.

“Stuffed Animal,” on the other hand, comes across as a kind of deranged house music designed to be played exclusively at regional kiddy circuses. Imagine if the eclectic ingredients of drum-machine chatter, Raincoat’s-style pre-K melodic sensibilities, a children’s chorus, and VanGaalen’s own second-hand auto-detune somehow congealed into an acetate dubplate that you could only play on an orange and blue Fisher Price record player. The batshit appeal here is tremendous. The tune bounces, but sadly, self-reflexively, like a trunk beat for all kinds of universal pre-adolescent baggage.

VanGaalen wards off Armageddon for the duration of these tracks, but just barely. I haven’t seen a car accident for a couple of years, but this is the kind of stuff that makes me want to pay closer attention to the more wrecked parts of the world, the things that don’t fit together, the mistakes that end up becoming bigger parts of who you are than any number of right decisions. VanGaalen starts by breaking a formula. He ends by breaking your heart.

Ben Lasman

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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But let’s break this down further. If we were to construct a band-generator from whatever’s left of Brian Wilson’s bathtub, that spinning 9-necked guitar from Cheap Trick, and the foreclosed ruins of Lou Perlman’s boy dungeon, the device, no matter how complex on the inside, would only need to have two inputs: “adjective” and “noun,” or, as it states in the manual, “idea” and “thing.” Wonderful! We have just given birth to Whitesnake, Darkthrone, Big Black, Lightning Bolt, and, why not, Cheap Trick. This construct is useful not just because you can make new bands forever, but because the layman can decipher what he’s about to listen to before he even hits play. Whitesnake sounds like a huge penis, Darkthrone sounds like a malevolent, slightly smaller penis, and Big Black sounds like Steve Albini’s idea of Parliament were Parliament to turn into a…oh wait, never mind. The idea begets the name begets the band. Click, spit, another gem off the assembly line.

But what are the limits of this magical machine? What function would fry the system? Repetition of terms? No, there’s Duran Duran, the adjective of Duran modifying the noun Duran for extra clarity. Nonsense? Nope, Kajagoogoo comes out looking pretty sleek. These are all New Wave bands, of course, and should be expected to communicate sympathetically with the motherboard.

Here’s where the story starts, though: the other day I was tinkering with the BG (I have one in my basement), and, completely by accident, came across the killer combo: “Dino”, “Walrus”. Dinowalrus. Sparks flew everywhere. There was an explosion inside the casing. The steel bubble split open like the pod from Bodysnatchers or Cocoon. Before me were three dudes: One was tall and lanky and looked like an anorexic Slash. One was Asian, slightly shorter. The last one, holding drum sticks, resembled a twelve-year old. He had braces for Christsakes! We got to talking. I went to one of their gigs. They were nice guys.

Troubleshooting the breakdown a few days later, I came across the error log, lines and lines of perfect code and then, right above the bit where the whole system went to shit, a simple message: “What is the idea?”

Even as we approach the inevitable Singularity, Machines still aren’t really that good at abstract thinking. To the CPU, an idea is really just an “idea”: “Hate”, “War”, “Love”, “Peace”. Cool ideas. The problem with Dinowalrus is that instead of having an “idea”, they inverted the generator’s fundamental equation. Dinowalrus, like the fucked-up primordial soup-beast they name drop, generated their own idea.

I’ll be honest. I don’t really know what that idea is. But who does when it comes to a paradigm shift like this? It’s like asking someone circa year 0 what the idea of God is. He’d be like: “What? God is God, man.” I, who, some 2009 years later, can rattle off the Cliff Notes of contemporary atheism without hesitation, am forced in this case to harken back to that old-time ancestor: “Dinowalrus is Dinowalrus, man.”

So what do they sound like: a cyborg thrash collective doing body percussion; what would happen if they jacked a Gibson SG into the Matrix instead of Neo’s skull; field recordings from a future where we all live inside computers.

The Mae Shi remix of “Nuke Duke ‘Em” off Dinowalrus’s forthcoming record % runs the gamut from eponymous video game questing to white club spazz dancing, nixing the band’s ambient tendencies in favor of heavily textured breakbeats and clipped synths over an, um HEALTH-y guitar rumble and breathy, humanoid vox. What’s amazing here is how malleable the source material seems to be. Dinowalrus’s music, already existing in a state of near-infinite recombination and remix, is rendered by the Mae Shi not as greater or less than, but precisely, literally as the sum of its parts. This is the real Shi-house, not a banger for the club circuit, but banged up circuits for clubgoing computers.

B-side, the older track “Dole,” resembles some kind of self-conscious Italo-disco forgery distilled with an infusion of Pac-man cherries and imported axle grease from 1980s Detroit. Jackin’ beats, arpeggiator runs, a vocal take that sounds like it was recorded in the Cave of Montesinos: its like workout music for sedentary MMORPG addicts, the starter kit for “8 Minute Abs(straction).” This stuff makes you stronger, for sure, reinforcing neural pathways with titanium and figuring out algorithms for life after death.

You don’t put ideas like these into the band generator. Version 2.0, already rebuilding itself downstairs as I write this, can sentiently remix itself while my weak biological body falls asleep onto the keyboard. Dinowalrus is the sound of that construction project, a new kind of fractal culture-jamming where all material is fair game, where all evolution is instantaneous.

Ben Lasman

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