Moving to nogenremusic.com!

The great Blogocide of 2010 has struck too many great folks out there to ignore the Sword of Damocles swinging ominously above my head. I don't blame Blogger; they have to protect their own interests against (frivolous) DMCA complaints. Once the (frivolous) complaints started mounting against my site, I decided to move. It is an act of pure self-preservation: I like doing this and I want to continue writing about music. I have spent the past week figuring out how to make Wordpress bend to my will. I have tried on more themes and configurations than I care to recount. But I'm happy with the design. The shark on fire is gone, but his spirit lives on.

No Genre Music's new home is now at www.nogenremusic.com.

Please update your bookmarks accordingly.

Additionally, I have set up a new email account for submissions. If you want me to listen to anything of yours, please send it to nogenremusic@gmail.com.

NEW Wolf Parade LP

Exclaim is reporting that a new Wolf Parade should expected on June 29 on Sub Pop. What's even more exciting is that the band recorded 15 songs and over 80 minutes of music. Dan Boeckner is on record as saying that the band would consider an LP plus EP set of releases or . . . wait for it . . . a double album. The album was recorded live (with "zero" overdubs) and consists of "a few songs that are really, really intensely keyboard-heavy" and some songs that are "heavy '80s coke rock." Considering that the band promised a prog-rock spectacle with At Mount Zoomer, we should probably take his word for it on this one. The band also expects to release a 7'' single ahead of the new album. And if you needed more good news from the camp, Boeckner also said that he and wife Alexei Perry are going to be writing songs for the next Handsome Furs record tentatively planned for next spring.

Check out a defining performance of "I'll Believe in Anything" from CMJ in 2005:

Swimming in Strawberry Yogurt

Blithe Field "Ghost Riding the Whip"
Blithe Field "Bible School"

Some albums are musical Advil to me. Literally. I listen to them when I feel a headache brewing behind my eyes. The best headache defense albums are ones that push a fair amount of repetition but introduce enough modulation to keep things interesting. The repetition helps me relax, while the modulation gives me something to focus on. My two go-to albums are Brightblack Morning Light's eponymous debut and The Books' The Lemon of Pink. Blithe Field's latest album, Beautiful Wave '74, is now among that rarefied bunch, an album that relaxes and focuses me enough to fend off a gray after-work headache.

Blithe Field is Ohio's own Spencer Radcliffe, who, incidentally, is friends with the one-man show behind Foxes in Fiction. Spencer's latest album, Beautiful Wave '74, employs a simple formula: buttress a simple organic melody with spoken word samples and found sounds. The album is simple without being childlike, reserved without being restrained. The two songs I've posted here ("Bible School" and "Ghost Riding the Whip") give you a glance of the range on the album. The cool beat that drives "Bible School" is belied by mid-song monologue about rectangles and straight lines by a British guy (who sounds remarkably like Martin Amis). Meanwhile, the gorgeously hypnotic "Ghost Riding the Whip" never sounds as busy as all the blips and tocks that actually make up the song.

I'm kind of excited to leave a frustrating workday of meetings and bureaucracy with a headache bubbling in my gray matter. Blithe Field's Beautiful Wave '74 is going to be right there with the antidote.

You can check out Blithe Field here and here, where you can purchase a copy of the new album.

Teenage Fanclub

Here's a fact that few are willing to remember or acknowledge: back in 1991, when Spin was a reputable publication, the magazine named Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque the best album of the year. It's important to remember that 1991 also saw Nevermind and Out of Time and Efil4zaggin and Gish and De La Soul is Dead and Ten and and Trompe Le Monde and The Low End Theory and Girlfriend and 2Pacalypse Now. All in all, a year that inexplicably saw Teenage Fanclub come out on top. Then again, you'd have to be one stingy bastard to deny that "Ain't That Enough" is a thoroughly charming song.

I'd always figured that they stopped releasing albums after the wonderful Songs from Northern Britain. But on June 8th, Merge will be releasing a new album, Shadows, by the band. On the heels of Alex Chilton's death, it's nice to see some Big Star acolytes carrying the torch.

Check out the first single here.

Forced to Love // All to All

I apologize for the absence. My real job has been monopolizing my time and energy and general life will for the past week. Also, I've been working on some BIG changes for No Genre Music. I'll announce them, you know, whenever.

In the meantime, scope out a pair of excellent new tracks from Broken Social Scene's forthcoming Forgiveness Rock Record. First up is your standard issue Kevin Drew love song, "Forced to Love." It's loud and brash and passionate. It's just another really good BSS song. But then there's "All to All," a lovely tune helmed by Lisa Lobsinger of Reverie Sound Reverie. The song is an engaging disco-flecked number that lilts and postures in ways that we haven't heard in a very long time from BSS. Stream/Download (for a fee) both right here.

Aepreantly Knauwt

mp3: RXRY "Aepreantly Knauwt"

With "Aepreantly Knauwt," the latest RXRY track, the balance between the organic thump of the bass and the metallic shivers of a machine is so tenuous that you're afraid to listen too closely. The whispy threads of song linger in that liminal state between consciousness and unconsciousness; it's careful only to reveal as much as it needs to for you to register its presence.

Jungle/Surf

mp3: Pill Wonder "Gone to the Market"

Jungle/Surf, the new album from Pill Wonder, clocks in at a little over 18 minutes. While the record has the running time of an EP, it certainly has the arc of a conventional length album. The record is anchored by the deeply catchy "Gone to the Market" and "Wishing Whale." These are the most conventionally structured songs with (more or less) proper verses and choruses, but that doesn't prevent Will Murdoch, the man behind Pill Wonder, from toying around with lo-fi production tricks that give the album a rough but warm feeling. Throughout the album, the band weaves in ambient sounds: the cacophony of a jungle opens "What We Know," the clatter and hum of a grocery store appropriately closes out the wonderful "Gone to the Market." The record, then, is more jungle than surf. Thickets of fuzzy sound vine their way around the album. The wonderfully dense "Family Vacation" manages to not choke out all the sun from the song, which is a trick repeated throughout the record.

Jungle/Surf is out now from Underwater Peoples. Buy it here or here.

Rating: 7/10

Cults

Cults "Go Outside"

I tried to ignore Cults. Their charmingly lo-fi jpeg of a couple spastically dancing has been popping up everywhere for the last week or two. In my ignorance, I gave "Go Outside" 30 seconds of my time, dismissed them, and then moved onto something else. But this morning I gave up and listened to their free EP closely. A friend of mine called it "tidy," and that's really a perfect descriptor: the three songs are about as neat and unfussy as Ikea furniture. Snap a copy here.

Shake Some Action

A bunch of great blogs (i.e. Weekly Tape Deck, Transparent Blog, Indie Verse, Yours Truly, Friendship Bracelet, and Underwater Peoples) are pooling their resources to bring some lucky folks at SXSW a ridiculous slew of terrific bands over the course of 3 days. To celebrate (promote) the event, they're collectively giving away an excellent two volume mixtape that features all the acts and their most representative work. Many of bands have received some form of attention right here at No Genre, including RXRY, Pill Wonder, Coasting, Truman Peyote, Twin Sister, and His Clancyness. There are also some folks that I've been meaning to write about for some time: Pure Ecstasy, Million Young, Eternal Summers.

The most exciting aspect of all of this is that Thursday will mark the public premiere of RXRY, the mysterious artist who has been soundtracking the slow winter thaw around here.

Scope out some mp3 highlights:

mp3: Mantles "Trust"
mp3: Truman Peyote "Magentadoor II"
mp3: Eternal Summers "Safe at Home"
mp3: Pure Ecstasy "Easy"

Grab Vol 1 and Vol 2 here and here, respectively.

Kissing the Beehive

In a rather surprising move, Wolf Parade's epic prog-rock exercise "Kissing the Beehive" finally gets the video treatment. Treatment is the operative word here: the video features only a few actual minutes of music from the 11 minute monolith. Instead, we get a frustrated Carey Mercer, the lunatic/frontman of the Frog Eyes, moping on a beach surfboard in hand. When the music finally arrives, we watch a man in a wetsuit whip the ocean until the scene abruptly cuts to night. A coven of prawn people congregate on the beach, kidnap Carey Mercer, and, presumably, sacrifice him, his blood squirting dramatically across his surfboard. Seriously:

The video was directed by Matt Moroz and Tracy Maurice, the pair behind both the modestly tragic "Shine a Light" and the operatically tragic "I'll Believe in Anything."

There are rumors swirling that Wolf Parade will be announcing a new album sometime soon. This seems likely because a) the band have a short European tour starting in May and b) Spencer Krug has gone over a month now without releasing anything.

Collector

In a world were hype can anoint kings and queens over the course of an afternoon, it was nice to see some restraint from the blogs over Here We Go Magic. Most everyone seemed to understand that Luke Temple's newest project was still in its nascent state. Last year's self-titled debut wasn't a great album, but it had plenty of terrific moments, particularly "Tunnelvision" and "Fangela." Here's hoping, thought, that they deliver on the promises of their debut with their new album, Pigeons, which sees its release on Secretly Canadian on June 8th. You can grab a free mp3 in exchange for your email. Barter here.

Fo Yo Sorrow

Normally when an artist records a video for a song from an unreleased album, that's a clear signal that said unreleased album is actually being, you know, released. While the song leaked sometime last September, the fact that a video now exists has got to mean something, right?

Along with the excellent "Shine Blockas" and the superb "Royal Flush," "Fo Yo Sorrow" is just another brick in the assuredly mighty wall that will be Sir Luscious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty.

Suburban Dogs

Pitchfork.tv posted a video of New Jersey's Real Estate playing the sad "Suburban Dogs" in a New Jersey real estate office. The footage is cut with nostalgic, hazy 35mm footage of suburban life. Check it out below:

Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain has my favorite opening to any album: a bass and a lead guitar argue while a drum kit tries to mediate. After the three have hashed it out, they start to work together to introduce what is probably my favorite song in Pavement's catalog, "Silence Kit." By the time Stephen Malkmus enters the mix, exactly one minute into the album, the song has exploded like a wild cannon shot. What follows is an anthemic take on Buddy Holly's "Everday" that ends with Malkmus jerking off backstage after a show. In a sliver over three minutes, Pavement make an open and shut case for themselves as one of the most inventive rock bands of the 90s (second only maybe to Radiohead).

From the pathologically catchy "Cut Your Hair" to the heart-on-sleeve earnestness of "Gold Soundz" to the brazen choices of "Filmore Jive," the next 39 minutes after "Silence Kit" offer the best of the band. The album is frequently talked about as if it was Pavement's conscious attempt to gain fame. Whether or not Pavement were this calculated when writing and recording the album, I'm not sure I care to speculate. What I do care about is how this album fits into Pavement's career. Crooked Rain is the most quintessentially Pavement album they ever made. They sound like a bunch of confidently intelligent, relaxed products of suburban California. They sound like themselves.

Like Slanted and Enchanted, Crooked Rain is boatloads of fun. "Unfair" is an ecstatic tour of California via its water rights issues. Malkmus doesn't pull punches: "You film hack, I don't use your pay." "5-4 = Unity" is a playful send-up of David Brubeck's seminal "Take Five." But unlike their full length debut, the band wasn't afraid to scrape the distortion off their guitars to make some direct statements. The spiritual center of the album is "Range Life." The song is a surprisingly personal take on band life and indie cred: "After the glow, the scene, the stage, the set/Talk becomes slow but there's one thing I'll never forget/Hey, you gotta pay your dues before you pay the rent." At this point in their careers, Pavement shouldn't have had to worry about paying their dues, but they clearly understood the fickle nature of the beast. And Malkmus sounds a little bitter about it: "If I could settle down, then I would settle down." But instead of bitching and moaning about being in a great band, he turns song's attention elsewhere. He's a teenager again, winding his way through the empty suburban streets on his skateboard. The lyrics are the most genuinely poetic thing Malkmus has ever written: "Out on my skateboard, the night is just hummin'/The gum smacks are the pulse I'll follow if my Walkman fades/But I've got absolutely no one, no one but myself to blame." Lines as poignant as that lose their luster under the microscope of interpretation.

When I got my turntable a while back, I started to make a list of albums that I wanted to own on vinyl (and to keep me on track in my local record stores). The only criteria for inclusion on the list was that the record had to be an album that I usually listened to from front to back. Crooked Rain was one of the first two or three records that made it on the list.

Plastic Beach

Do you realize how fucking great a Gorillaz greatest hits record would be? The thing would be practically unstoppable: "Clint Eastwood," "DARE," "Feel Good Inc," "Dirty Harry," "Slow Country," "Tomorrow Comes Today," "19-2000," among about a dozen others. Gorillaz has always been more of a great singles band than album-oriented outfit. That being said, Plastic Beach is their most consistent album that will, nonetheless, add quite a few more highlights to this imagined greatest hits package.

Each Gorillaz album has a dual highlight: the funky go-getter dressed in flashy t-shirt and neon kicks and the sad-sack downer wearing yesterday's pajamas. On their self-titled debut, this couple was "Clint Eastwood" and "Slow Country," respectively. The pair is readily identifiable on Plastic Beach: "Superfast Jellyfish" is the album's best rave-up, while the exquisite "Rhinestone Cowboys" plays to the surprising strength of Albarn's deadpan 2-D act.

As a whole the album balances these exuberant highs and the slouching lows. After a surprisingly slow start (two introductions to the album plus a prelude to the third song!), the album takes off with "White Flag" when MCs Kano and Bashy trade rhymes over a funky flute driven beat provided by the Lebanese National Orchestra for Oriental Arabic Music. The one-two punch of "Stylo" and "Superfast Jellyfish" employ surprising guests (Bobby Womack, De La Soul, Gruff Rhys) to great effect. On the softer side, Little Dragon gives Albarn a hand with "Empire Ants" and "To Binge" to create a pair of watery dreams. Later, Lou Reed lends his trademark talk-singing to the terrific "Some Kind of Nature," a song that sounds more upbeat than the lyrics suggest. Albarn assumes solo control over "On Melancholy Hill" and "Broken," the former of which is one of the strongest tracks on the album. Late on Plastic Beach, Bobby Womack returns for the forlorn "Cloud of Unknowing." The song finds him standing on the beach at night, staring at the lonely satellites swinging in their orbits.

While the album is a near perfect 50/50 split between the upbeat and the ponderous numbers, the sequencing is a bit off. The band has stacked the deck in favor of the first half of the album; the second half lags a bit due to the number of soggy down-tempo songs. Taken on their own, however, some of these moments (particularly "Cloud of Unknowing" and "To Binge") reward patient listeners.

Thematically, the album concerns the degeneration of the environment. For Gorillaz, though, the ruthless exploitation of our planet isn't just an inconvenient truth; it's a terrific metaphor for postmodern artistry. The way that far-flung detritus ends up on a beach in the middle of the ocean is evidence of chaos theory's cruel logic. The metaphor suggests that culture is really just an ocean of unmoored trash, washing up on far shores, waiting to be reused and recycled. And from the beginning, hasn't this been Gorillaz's modus operandi?

Rating: 7.5/10

Wallys and Pringles

mp3: Raekwon "Wallys and Pringles"

Raekwon's newest freestyle bonanza, the terrifically titled "Wallys and Pringles," is over almost before it begins. A frantic bongo beat (courtesy of The Alchemist) keeps the Chef on his toes, but he isn't fazed at all. He's in great form, bragging about how he's got two machetes in his mouth. Rae's right: he is fresher than Ron O'Neal.

Raekwon's latest project, a collaboration with Ghostface Killah and Method Man, Wu Massacre, is scheduled to arrive on March 30. I have it on good authority that this thing is fucking dope.

Zola Jesus

mp3: Zola Jesus "Night"

All happy goth girls resemble one another; every unhappy goth girl is unhappy in her own way.

The spunky goth girls are really in it for the fashion or the attention or the drugs. At some point, usually before moving off to college, they let their brown roots reclaim their matte black dye jobs. But the genuinely sullen goth girls are uniquely upset because they spend their time at home listening to The Swans or Diamanda Galas. They each have a distinct reason why Kate Bush or Ian Curtis or, if they're really scary, Boyd Rice has spoken to them.

For Madison's Zola Jesus, 19-year-old Nika Roza Danilova, it had everything to do with doubt and anxiety. She had to give up opera training because of her crippling misgivings about herself. Thankfully she's found another outlet because Zola Jesus' newest EP, Stridulum, is a jet black diamond of a record. Opener "Night" is a thumping piece of dark romance: "The night when I can be with you." It's clear after "Night" that Danilova has shed the noisy goth of her previous album, The Spoils. Stridulum is as polished as obsidian: the thwak of the drum machines is cold and brutal, the chilly synth tones sound like a bitter wind. The EP reaches its highlight with "Manifest Destiny." It's only here that Danilova really shows off her incredible pipes. Amid grating noise and controlled feedback, she worries that since she doesn't have a reason to go home she has to be with her lover. When the chorus breaks free of the gloomy industrial thrum of the verses, Danilova's husky voice soars. As the stunning conclusion to Stridulum, "Manifest Destiny" hopefully points the way out of the cheerless nagging of personal doubt for Danilova.

Stridulum is available now on Sacred Bones Records.

Sisterworld

According to the press release accompanying Liars' Sisterworld, the album creates "a space [...] somewhere remote from the false promises and discarded dreams amassed in LA. In it Liars explore the underground support systems created to deal with loss of self to society."

Sound familiar? That's basically the plot of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, which tells the story (I think) of a woman who willfully creates a supplemental persona to deal with the guilt and frustration that dictates the remains of her shattered life. I don't know that Sisterworld has as neat of a narrative structure. Then again, Liars are no strangers to narratives conceits: They Were Wrong, So We Drowned was about witches on Walpurgisnacht, and Drum's Not Dead was about negotiating the twin monsters of fear (Mt Heart Attack) and confidence (Drum).

I bring up Lynch because I approach both artists in much the same way. My investment in their work is not conditional: I don't need to be able to account for every image or sound to feel engaged and involved and, ultimately, moved. Honestly, I'm usually more interested in figuring out what, exactly, it is in their art that elicits reactions that range, literally, from anxiety to nausea.

As with Lynch, the atmospherics do most of the heavy lifting. The white noise and industrial drone that accompanies much of their music (at least everything since They Threw Us...) carve out a cavernous space that accommodates any spooky sound they can imagine. Liars is a band that understands the power of frequencies. Their albums sound so monolithic because the bass is deeply palpable and Angus Andrew's falsetto is convincingly strong. And the mid-range stuff that bridges these two extremes isn't just filler: these are the tones and textures that are the public face of Liars' superabundant weirdness. The range of sounds that they can create as a band is stunning: from the brutal "Plaster Casts of Everything" to the hellscape of "Let's Not Wrestle, Mt. Heart Attack," from the urgent punk flare of "Mr. You're On Fire Mr." to the unabashedly beautiful "The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack." And it's these sounds that provide a soundtrack to Andrew's interest in things that are truly terrifying: malevolent spirits, lost identity, unmotivated violence, crippling fear, uncontrollable ego, forests at night, post-industrial Los Angeles, claustrophobia, agoraphobia.

Sisterworld, the band's fifth album, continues the tradition of radical reinvention that has dictated the band's narrative for a decade now. The album isn't as exhilarating as They Threw Us, nor as abrasive as Drum's Not Dead. Sisterworld sheds a lot of the biker rock posturing that dominated their eponymous forth album in favor of a creepier, more expansive aesthetic. The record requires a fair amount of a patience to get through the first couple of times. Frankly, it's lugubrious in places, but those moments are a necessary antithesis to the towering infernos of hysteric noise that rise up suddenly in almost every song. The self-released "Scissor" opens the album and sets the basic template for most of the album: a ponderous murder ballad accompanied by the gentle piano and strings cracks open to reveal a molten core of caveman rage.

Thematically, Sisterworld draws heavily from the mood of They Were Wrong. Both albums are concerned with hysteria, and there's plenty unaccountable panic seething below the surface of the album. And when that panic breaks the surface tension of the song, Liars are capable of evoking profound violence. On 'Scarecrow On a Killer Slant," a gale force guitar riff blows in after a frightening bridge: "We should take the creeps out at night/Drag them incomplete by their ears/We should nail their thoughts to the wall/Stand them in the street with a gun/And then kill them all!" The violence of the music when coupled with the brutish lyrics makes for a potent combination that threatens to peel the paint off your walls. Liars unleashes similar musical firestorms throughout the record. The martial pomp of "Goodnight Everything" sounds like nothing less than the horn flourishes that will greet the ascent of the Antichrist. And the closing minutes of "I Still Can See an Outside World" rage with the intensity of an industrial fire. And while you wait for even more explosive crescendo, they suddenly pull back, which is more unnerving than watching the band burn down the whole structure of their composition. But this what makes Liars such an effective band: they overwhelm you with noisy pyrotechnics before abandoning you, alone, anxiously awaiting the next strike.

A couple of years ago, I heard "It Fit When I was a Kid" at a party. It was wrong. When the context of the song is removed (especially its preceding downer "Drum Gets a Glimpse"), a lot of its power is drained; it just sounds like weird noise. Liars make music that refuses to be relegated to the background. Their albums demand your attention. Sisterworld is no exception. This is 42 minutes of punishing, demanding music that gets deeper and weirder with each listen. Listening to the album endlessly for a few days has been pretty taxing. I don't think music this creepy, this brutal is meant to be lived with in that way. I won't always be in the mood to listen to it, but I'm not always in the mood to watch David Lynch either. That shouldn't detract from the raw power of the album because the best records are the ones that almost force you to stare unblinking into their depths.

Rating: 8/10

Buy it here or here.

Days

mp3: Sambassadeur "Days"

Eighteen seconds before the song is scheduled to end, the soulful drum rolls and piano lines fall away, leaving only the strings of a chamber pop orchestra. Anna Perrson sings in English with her lilting Swedish accent: "I don't care how it happened/Always have time for an old friend/I just have to know that you're coming back again." It's a surprising coda to a song that has been building to the big finish for the previous two minutes. Traditionally, this thing should end with a massive swell of strings and cymbals crashes and drum rolls. Instead, we left hanging in a moment that is, surprisingly, not unsatisfying. All those geniuses in Gothenburg are just running up the score on our meager indie pop scene.

"Stick to My Side" Remix

mp3: Pantha du Prince "Stick to My Side" (Four Tet Remix)

In advance of the 12'' single for Pantha du Prince's collaboration with Noah Lennox, "Stick to My Side," (out March 23rd) Rough Trade is now offering the b-side Four Tet's remix of the song. The re-imagining doesn't radically transform the song, but it does replace the chiming rhythm of the original with some full synth lines and a four-on-the-floor bass line. I think this version works a little better for Lennox's voice than the original, although that one has started to grow on me a little more.