Gabriel Kahane’s album, The Ambassador, is out now.
Countless musicians have concocted concept albums built around all sorts of subjects, places and artistic influences. But far fewer concept albums can double as tour guide. Enter Gabriel Kahane, the prolific songwriter and composer whose latest work, The Ambassador, draws inspiration from the architecture and culture of Los Angeles. While Kahane was raised on the East Coast and in Northern California, he was born in L.A., and as such, delivers a detailed sense of place in ten songs — each one representing a different location in the city.
Wye Oak’s new album, ‘Shriek,’ is out on Merge. (Shervin Lainez/Courtesy of the artist)
Let’s get this out of the way: There’s no guitar on this album. When Wye Oak revealed this tidbit last fall, many of us surely wondered what the Baltimore duo might even sound like without one of its most important elements. After all, the delight in Wye Oak’s music has always come from the interplay between Jenn Wasner’s blustery voice, her glorious cyclone of guitar riffs and screaming feedback, and skillful multi-tasker Andy Stack, who plays drums and keyboards — and on stage, simultaneously. But after the success of 2011’s Civilian, and countless tours performing within that “indie rock” format, it’s understandable that they’d feel restless and creatively blocked, and need to blow it up to start anew.
Shearwater is no stranger to high concept rock music. Through its first three albums, frontman Jonathan Meiburg built an ambitious trilogy around his interests in nature and science, and ornithology, masterfully marrying indie rock with prog rock grandiosity. Then, with 2012’s Animal Joy, the band totally shifted, downsizing in scope, yet crafting lean and distorted rockers.
So it’s not all that surprising that Meiburg’s next move was another conceptual album: On each of Fellow Travelers‘ ten songs, Meiburg and company pays tribute to an artist with whom the band has toured.
“But disassociation, I guess, is just a modern disease.” So sings Erika M. Anderson in the closing moments of “3Jane,” a pretty, yet disquieting ballad that freely references William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the influential cyberpunk sci-fi novel known for coining the term “cyberspace.” When it was published in 1984, the story of a past-his-prime hacker in a cold virtual reality was speculative futurism in the mold of Blade Runner or TRON. But its themes may resonate even more today.
For an artist as prolific and shapeshifting as Beck, five-plus years is a long time to wait between records. But in the time between 2008’s Modern Guilt and now, Beck has said that he was suffering from a serious back injury that prevented him from performing or even playing guitar for long. And yet, the inventive songwriter and producer kept himself more than busy. More than that, he seemed as creative as ever: He produced albums for artists like Charlotte Gainsbourg, Thurston Moore, Stephen Malkmus, and Dwight Yoakam; he and pals like St. Vincent, Wilco, and many more covered classic albums in his Record Club project; and he dropped a whole damn book of sheet music with Song Reader. As a longtime fan of Beck, I consider him an artist with a free pass to do anything he wants and I’ll follow.
Peter Moren’s Broken Swenglish Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 are out now. (Johan Bergmark/Courtesy of the artist)
Peter Morén — the singer and guitarist of Peter Bjorn & John fame — says that with his last two solo releases he found a new freedom in writing and singing entirely in his native Swedish for the first time. Morén’s songs on 2010’s I spåren av tåren and 2012’s Pyramiden, explored new influences like soul, New Wave, and even Brazilian rhythms, while retaining many of PB&J’s core calling cards — namely, the infectious pop hooks and his familiar Lennon-esque voice. But lyrically, he was able to tackle more Swedish-leaning politics and cultural references that he couldn’t do as easily in English.
The reissue of Vex’s ‘Sanctuary’ collects the punk band’s entire recorded output — all eight songs of it.
There’s often a unifying quality with some of my favorite record labels that tells me, “Yeah, this will be good.” At best, a label’s feel for musical curation — or sometimes, even a logo or design aesthetic — helps gives some idea of what to expect. This has certainly been the case with Sacred Bones — the Brooklyn label with a roster that includes The Men, Zola Jesus, Crystal Stilts, and Destruction Unit, among many others. Seemingly from its start, Sacred Bones’ “sound” — a bit of gothy electronic pop, some reverby garage rock, a lot of scorching noisy punk all come to mind — established a personality that carries through its entire lineup.
Many Beyonce fans woke up to a surprise new album, dropped to iTunes without any pre-release promotions, an outlier in 2013. (Nick Farrell/Courtesy of the artist)
The Internet awoke last Friday to find that Beyoncé had airdropped an entire new album onto iTunes. For most fans, the “visual album” was a total surprise and an instant success (it sold some 828,773 copies in the first three days — an iTunes record), despite a complete lack of advanced marketing, television appearances, or even a lead-up radio single. Granted, a pop artist of Beyoncé’s stature is clearly able to generate massive interest just by being, well, Beyoncé.
Still, Beyoncé’s model almost seems like an outlier, especially at a time where long, drawn-out hype cycles are now commonly expected — not just with artists of this magnitude much smaller indie bands as well.
All year, albums from pop music’s biggest names — and many mid-level and indie artists — were released after calculated, creative, and even mysterious marketing plans to help inspire fan interest, re-instill some fun in new music, and hopefully boost sales. Here’s a rundown of some of the year’s most notable.
Even in a crowded field of hip-hop megastars, there’s no denying Danny Brown is a straight-up original. Recording since his teens, the dynamic young rapper burst out of Detroit’s underground hip-hop scene — first with his self-released 2010 record The Hybrid, and again with the highly-praised XXX in 2011, an album that pushed Brown to hip-hop’s top shelf thanks to his skillfully concise lyrical voice, a hypnotic flow, and sharp humor.
In 1997, Kathleen Hanna — the no-holds-barred frontwoman of the influential ’90s band Bikini Kill and later of the band Le Tigre in the early 2000s — released a solo album under the moniker Julie Ruin. The self-titled album was a lo-fi but fierce collection of bedroom ballads and socially-charged songs that touched on feminism and politics, all in Hanna’s distinctive ecstatic voice.
Now, 16 years after that album — and seven years away from music dealing with a long-undiagnosed case of Lyme disease — Hanna is back with a new record. This time, what was once a pseudonymous side-project is a full-fledged band — The Julie Ruin.
