Here’s Craig’s new music video. Go and check him out at http://www.craigbevanmusic.com.

Roll: 4 – 8 – 19
Result: Summun, Bukmun, Umyun by Pharoah Sanders.

Summun, Bukmun, Umyun (Deaf, Dumb, Blind) is the answer for those who ask the question, “Can world-fusion be anything other than watered-down, artistically innocuous schmaltz suitable only for Disney movies and zoo commercials?”

Of course, this album by Pharoah Sanders is also one which is partly responsible for the Putumayos of the world. Though world music has been recorded since the days of wax cylinders, the idea of blending it with Western musical styles really took off in the late-Sixties and seventies when African American musicians began exploring their roots beyond blues and jazz. Some of the best of these early fusions came out of the free-jazz scene

The album opens with a repeated bass riff by Cecil McBee on the title track. Everyone with a free hand adds cowbell, hand drums, thumb piano, bylophone, and varied percussion to a ramshackle groove before Lonnie Liston Smith comes in on piano at the two-minute mark with a two-chord vamp reminiscent of Herbie Hancock. For the next 19 minutes Sanders (soprano sax), Gary Bartz (alto sax) and Woody Shaw (trumpet) trade riffs over the slightly discordant, untamed rhythm.

In many ways it’s one of Sander’s more accessible albums of his early free-jazz career. He keeps clear of his signature overblowing for most of the set and, at a casual listen, the band’s groove feels relatively sedate. At closer listen, the percussionists are treading a fine line between rhythm and chaos. By the ten-minute mark, the octet has progressed from a summer breeze into a firestorm. The second half of the track is dominated by African instruments (no vuvuzela, sadly) and vocalizations with Western musical ideals set aside in favour of pure expression.

The second track (side 2 of the ofiginal album), “Let Us Go Into The House Of The Lord” is a much more contemplative and traditionally spiritual piece. Sanders sax takes a backseat for most of the track letting McBee’s bowed bass improvisations weaving over and under Smiths uplifting chord progressions be the track’s focus. By the end the octet are twisting soaring melodies and rhythms around each other towards the light.

The album, and this track in particular, are a great place for people to start who are curious about—but afraid of—free-jazz and the more avant garde side of Sander’s time on Impulse.

(This is the last Bone Rolling Review selected before packing my CDs into boxes. It may be a while before they’re unpacked. See you then.)

Roll: 3 – 11 – 9
Result: Illinois  by Sufjan Stevens.
 
Sufjan Stevens didn’t mess around with the second installment in his project to write an album about each of the 50 United States. Any tribute to Illinois, the state that is home to both Chicago and gave birth to John Wayne Gacy, would have to be epic and it is.

Roll: 3 – 3 – 11
Result: The Eraser  by Thom Yorke.

Artwork by Jeremie Duval http://jeremieart.blogspot.com

Here’s a special treat for everyone! It’s a brand new EP by Whip Buffley featuring four tracks that aren’t available anywhere else. Wanna know what the best bit is? It’s free! All you have to do is click here to download the EP. That’s it, nothing else to do. No sign up, no email address, no nothing. Just click this link and download the free Whip Buffley EP.

If you’d like to hear more Whip Buffley tracks you can download his album Ruff Around The Edges on MusicalMouseMat.com.

Roll: 2 – 10 – 20
Result: Very/Relentless by Pet Shop Boys.

Roll: 1 – 6 – 17
Result: La Maison de Mon Rêve (2004) / The Grey Oceans (2010) by CocoRosie.

Roll: 3 – 4 – 17
Result: Quique (2-disc reissue) by Seefeel.

Roll: 2 – 6 – 17 
Result: Pump Up The Volume (3-track CDS) by M/A/R/R/S.

The Mighty Mighty Bosstones are best known to the masses for their 1997 hit, “The Impression That I Get,” (also known to many as the ‘Knock On Wood’ song), from their platinum album “Let’s Face It.”  You younger kids may know them from their song “Where’d You Go?” in Rock Band 2, or their cameo as the band playing in Clueless.  However you may know them, or even if you don’t, you should know that they have a new album out called “Pin Points & Gin Joints,” which reflects the band’s progression from young kids melding ska and hardcore in the 80’s Boston music scene, to their current status as grownups who still have the passion to put together an album despite being a part-time band, being scattered around the country, and holding down other jobs, like frontman Dicky Barrett’s current gig as announcer for late night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live.  I had the chance to reconnect with saxophonist and original member Tim “Johnny Vegas” Burton, who I haven’t spoken to since the heyday of ska music in the late 90’s, when I hosted a ska and punk rock radio show in New York.  We talk about the current state of the band, future plans, and cover the Gunaxin.com 6 questions.  Check out the band and their new album at www.BosstonesMusic.com.  Yes, I know this is Simply READ, but here is a special MP3 interview not available on our show feed, so Simply Listen.  (WARNING- Audio is not the best due to circumstances beyond my control.)

Posted by Jay from the Masters Of None podcast.  Follow Jay on Twitter.

 
Last week The Magnetic Fields released an album, Realism, to almost universally “meh” reviews. Fitting, since it’s an almost universally meh album. It really highlights what’s been Stephen Merrit’s Achilles heel for a long time—his voice. It’s just not a voice you can take seriously.

This had been fine in the past since his career has been built on lyrics so firmly planted in cheek, he looks like he’s miming a blowjob. Realism strips away the humour and the wit, which leaves some pleasant but boring ditties with a voice suited better to musical comedy than popular song. It’s the kind of disappointing offering that might make one question Merritt’s reputation as one of the top songwriters of his generation.

The last album of his to geniunely back-up that reputation up was probably 2004’s elegantly titled, i.

After an artist has released an almost universally acclaimed tour de force like the tripple-disc concept album 69 Love Songs, what do they do to follow-up that accomplishment? Well, if 69 Love Songs was indeed the album they were following, and the artist was Stephen Merritt, they might simply write another 14  love songs for an album that could almost be disc #4 of that set.

The only thing that really sets i apart from 69 Love Songs is its unique concept of each song’s title beginning with the letter “i”. Otherwise it really is just love songs 70 through 83. But don’t be put off by that. It’s a welcome thing.

What made 69 Love Songs great was Merritt’s wry, sarcastic take on the ironies of love and life. “I Don’t Believe You“, “I Wish I Had an Evil Twin“, “Is This What They Used To Call Love?” all tug at the heart strings while pulling the corners of your mouth upwards. As a single disc it might actually be a stronger album than any of the three 69 Love Songs discs on their own, but in the production and performance Merritt is showing what might be a touch of boredom with himself and his schtick. Or perhaps it’s just a case of too many edges being polished off in the studio. Regardless, and issues of a slightly muted enthusiasm aside, this is the last time we hear him playing to his strengths on record.

After this album Merritt focuses on increasingly eccentric side-projects (a Limony Snicket related Gothic Archies album and a fake Victorian vaudeville/opera under his own name) before returning to the Magnetic Fields with Realism’s predecessor, Distortion—an alleged tribute to noise-pop, which frankly sounds like the distortion was later added to the mix in an attempt to distract from the glaring lack of the brilliant songwriting expected from him.

At his best Merritt is a sort of tin pan alley Leonard Cohen with a more focused and cutting sense of humour (no small feat!). Or perhaps he isn’t, really. Perhaps that’s just a character he plays on certain albums. Judging by his work since 2004, it’s a character he sadly retired after i.

This out-of-print, limited edition three-way split put out by micro-label Folk Waste features Hat City Intuitive, Rocks In My Pillow and Imp(s).  A fair introduction to this free-folk/free-jazz/free-noise  imprint, it’s a shame this material isn’t (yet?) available to a wider audience.

The set opens with long-running free-jazz/improv unit Hat City Intuitive debasing dixieland with the upbeat, ramshackle mess of “Saint Marty D” before completely changing gears with “Newtown Etc to Greg“. The second track is as much wafty psychedelic exploration as the first is skronktastic jazz, yet Hat City manage a through-line between the two compositions. Perhaps the through-line is both would have been better off without the guitar. 

Rocks In My Pillow’s two contributions are simultaneously less engaging and more successful overall. Restrained in comparison to Hat City Intuitive’s unhinged free-for-all, their creepy soundscapes pack in a lot more atmosphere and considered playing. Almost like a soundtrack to an imaginary film about post-apocalyptic beatniks, these tracks come off a mellower, jazzier version of Godspeed! You Black Emperor. Bowed instruments and minimalist percussion drift like a radioactive dust storm through an abandoned city. Not as immediate as their counterparts, but easily the best moments on the disc.

IMP(s) finish off the set with “Open Space/Closed Space“. The five member collective check almost every box on the free-psyche checklist with this pairing. Bells, check. Plinky stringed instruments, check. Warbly vocals approximating all manner of ethic tradition, check. Yet unlike the contrived nature some acts in the scene check-off those boxes, IMP(s) do it with passion and authenticity. The twenty-four minute long “Closed Space” is, I suspect, a live recording of a performance and, though fantastic, was probably more successful seen as well as heard. Similar to the latter-day experimental and more theatrical work of Einsturzende Neubauten, there’s an element of theatre, spoken word performance, and chanted ceremony which feels merely hinted at on the recording. You get the feeling you’re only privy to half the picture here. It’s still a fascinating half and suggests IMP(s) are well worth experiencing live.

As I mentioned earlier, this split release is a fair introduction to the Folk Waste label. Fans of the above described sounds would find it well worth their while to check them out. And not delay since the extremely limited runs of their albums sell out very quickly.

Making good on the promises made by their debut, A Catholic Education, Teenage Fanclub created one of the few timeless classics of the 90s alt-rock heyday. Aptly—and cheekily—titled, Bandwagonesque has weathered better than many of its trendsetting counterparts. Time and distance set it apart from the glut of  post-Nirvana bandwagon jumpers revealing it to be a truly enjoyable set of fuzzed-out, Big Star and Byrds-inspired pop-rock ditties in its own right.

I remember being lukewarm on the album at the time of its release. I was a bit of a Cohen/Dylan snob at the time and the idea of a song repeating the one line “what you do to me” offended my lyrical sensibilities. I also found the feedback noise of tracks like “Satan” to be contrived and half-assed. I now think both are, if not brilliant po-mo statements on popular music, excellent examples of what a melodic-leaning rock’n'roll record should be. Infectious, rawkus, sloppy and finely crafted, it’s perhaps the definitive time-capsule of alternative rock circa 1991.

Over the years my “meh” feelings towards the album have slowly transformed into a begrudging appreciation and then into respect and even awe. Where Nevermind, Copper Blue and Dirty have started (or some time ago began) to sound like dated relics of the era, Bandwagonesque keeps getting better. It has even somehow remained relatively fresh sounding.

It could be due in part to their devotion to their classic-rock influences. Most of the songs on the album wouldn’t sound out of place played by a Neil Young or an Alex Chilton but with Kevin Shields snuck into their backing band.

I think that’s really the secret of the album’s success. Though it’s called Bandwagonesque, Fanclub aren’t really bandwagon jumpers. They didn’t write songs to specifically fit the alt-rock format, they wrote timelessly great, sticky, pop-rock songs (“The Concept“, “Alcoholiday“, “December“) which just happened to be produced with enough feedback, fuzzy distortion and washed-out noise to fit in with the day’s fashions on both sides of the Atlantic.

Put in human terms, Bandwagonesque is like that wallflower in your freshman French class you ignore, who blooms in senior year, becomes the queen of the prom and you spend the rest of your life secretly devoted to. Only I’m not secretly devoted to this album, I’m quite public about my love for it. In many ways this is the “first love” I judge all new noise-pop records against.

 
The danger with odds’n'ends collections is they tend towards half-baked experiments and an overall incohesive listening experience. Aggravatingly, there’s usually at least one of the band’s essential tracks on the thing. Can’s 1976 rarities compilation, Unlimited Edition, is no exception.

Expanded from a fairly solid 1974 album titled Limited Edition, the ‘76 version is an unwieldy beast which covers pretty much every aspect of the adventurous and influential krautrock band’s ever-evolving sound. That’s not necessarily a good thing from an “album” perspective.

The disc gathers up the band’s orphans from the years 1968-75 which might not be a problem if the songs were arranged purely chronologically, but they’re not. I haven’t been able to discern why.

By 1975, Can were almost an entirely different band, with a different approach to making music. It would be like compiling a Brian Eno retrospective and tossing in some early Roxy Music in the middle of his later ambient work. The contrast might be interesting, but it wouldn’t flow.

Of course, in the technological golden age in which we gloriously languish, sequencing quibbles can be rectified by programming your CD player or, even more easily, editing out the bum tracks in iTunes (or your mediaplayer of choice). Which is what I did.

For my money, it’s the early nuggets which make this disc worth while—my personal cut-off date for Can is 1972. “Doko E.”, “LH 702“, “Mother Upduff“, “Connection” and a handful of others are excellent examples of their early period art-rock (many of these are available on other, perhaps more rewarding, Can compilations).

The early material is not all gold though. The 18 minute “Cutaway“, a surprisingly pointless and unlistenable collage of sounds and grooves from 1968,  didn’t make the cut. Nor did a sequence of short pieces call the “Ethnological Forgery Series” which, in the context of the album, serve to be no more than irritating clutter. They are also a little too accurately titled as they sound exactly like white guys committing world-music forgery. Though one appreciates honesty, it might have been a good idea to distract the listener from this flaw.

So, as it is with many b-sides and rareties collections, Unlimited Edition houses enough treasures for the dedicated Can aficionado to make it worth picking up (at least to rip a few gems off), but for casual or new listeners it’s far from essential.

 
The award for most CDs by a band I hate on my shelf goes to AC/DC. The total is a whopping three titles by the audaciously long-running Aussie rockers. I should qualify my use of the word “hate” here. What I mean when I write that I “hate” AC/DC is that I absolutely loathe them. That is I loathe them, and the weak parody they’ve become, now.

But AC/DC circa 1975/76 were one of the best rock’n'roll bands to ever have their glorious, grimy, debauched, sleazy lunacy committed to wax. High Voltage combines the the best of their first two Australian platters (one confusingly also titled High Voltage) to serve up as perfect a set of gutter-rock as you could hope to find this side of the first two Stooges albums.

To me AC/DC will always be synonymous with gravel-pit parties, cheap beer, stale pot smoke, the fear of getting beat up, struggling to jam through Zeppelin’s “The Ocean” without ever having listened to the whole song, older girls with teased hair, skull earrings, tight jeans, rusted-out cars, my psychotic cousin’s martial arts magazines strewn over his water-bed as he lies to me about stuff he’s done with girls, wispy moustaches on guys who can’t really grow them, Judas Priest back-patches on denim jackets, poor kids, trailer parks, not understanding, not belonging … being 15 in a small town.

Highway to Hell, Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Cheap and, to a lesser extent, High Voltage were the soundtracks for my middle- and high-school years as a headbanger. AC/DC was the one band everyone could agree on or at least tolerate. Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath were too dark for some people. Dokken and Ratt were too glam and people weren’t quite sure yet what to do with Slayer, Metallica and Venom, though we had an idea that was where we were headed.

But no one argued when you put on some DeeCee from Back in Black or earlier. It was party music, it was driving music, it was playing cards music, it was hanging out in the parking lot music.

The music was simple. Older kids grew up on it and it’s not so heavy younger kids couldn’t get into it. There’s no twin-guitar leads or time signature changes, there’s no sword and sorcery imagery. There are double entendres about testicles.

Their universal appeal was very much due to, before they jumped the musical shark, the purity of their music. High Voltage in particular showcases all the traits of a perfect, undiluted, unpretentious rock’n'roll record. It seethes with genuine disdain for the establishment. But not in an intellectual or political way; in a “don’t look down on me because I’m going to drink myself to death, fuck you, let’s rock” way.

AC/DC’s world is tiny on this record. It stretches from the stage, across the bar, to the back of the tour bus. This world is only populated with themselves, underage girls and the assholes standing in their way they’re going to have to plow right through.

They’re punks. They’re rocking. This record is, though it’s rarely thought of in these terms, one of the true early punk rock discs. It’s more punk rock than many bands who intentionally tried to make punk rock. By comparison intelligentsia-core bands like Hüsker Dü and Dead Kennedys come off like Fleetwood Mac.

High Voltage captures the raw, reckless, unruly, adolescent and even naively innocent spirit of rock’n'roll in a way that’s been lost. There’s no polish, there’s no fat, there’s no play-acting. This is a truthful artistic statement from a band of young dirtbags who don’t give a shit about anything but the sex and drugs mythology of rock’n'roll.

You really can’t ask for anything more.

 
With their first five albums, King Crimson precariously balanced a tightrope between progressive rock and that four-letter-word, prog. In 1974 they finally lost their balance and their sixth album, Starless and Bible Black, proves what many had always believed. King Crimson were total wankers.

From the get-go Robert Fripp used Crimson to push the pretension envelope. Their 1969 debut, In the Court of the Crimson King, blends jazz, metal, folk and classical into an audacious melange that was—and remains—truly progressive. It was also rock.

Over the next four albums, even in the songs featuring mainly strings, Mellotron and flute, there is a revolutionary fire that burns underneath. No matter how skilled the players or meticulous the arrangements are, it’s still rock’n'roll somehow.

If this creative fire was already beginning to diminish by 1973’s Larks’ Tongue in Aspic, it’s all but extinguished with Starless and Bible Black.

This isn’t to say the album doesn’t technically ”rock” in places. The opening track blasts in with a juggernaut of a groove and “Lament” does its best to shake the speakers. But everything on the album is stripped of its passion, replaced by inhumanly tight synchronized phrases which feel planned down to the last nuance of every note.

Though musicianship had always been a centerpiece of what King Crimson was all about, this is the first time the musicianship takes precedence over the music. Previously the players seemed to be mere conduits for a creative and inventive expression with a life of its own. Starless, on the other hand, feels as if it’s being played by joyless machines with a clinical exactness both impressive and nausea inducing.

This is the kairotic moment where progressive rock becomes the loathesome prog. When you can’t honestly call it rock anymore and the whole becomes less than the sum of its parts.

Fripp would remedy this later the same year with the kraut-rock and (sometimes collaborator) Brian Eno influenced Red, but Starless remains a milestone truly terrible album in the Crimson catalogue signifying the end of their genius, warning the listener to pass no further.

Simply put, Starless and Bible Black is unlistenable in its pretentiously cloying sterility.

I was beginning to doubt my 1d4 was ever going to roll a four. I’m glad it finally did because CD tower #4 is where all my jazz, world music and hip-hop is located and it’s nice to write about it for a change. Now that I think about it, my CD filing system kind of smacks of segregation or apartheid or ghettoization. Well, I tried to mix my CDs in the past and it didn’t really work. That doesn’t make me a racist. Just a little OCD.

But themes of ghettoization and segregation are fitting for this review. The last recorded live performace of John Coltrane (before succumbing to liver cancer in 1967) was captured at the newly opened Olatunji Center for African Culture in New York. Here, Coltrane’s “second quartet” are in their prime and they’re playing as if the sheer force of their music could raise every black man, woman and child up from under oppression across America and the globe.

It should be noted part of the “heat ” on the disc is created, not by the musicians, but by fledgling audio engineer, Bernard Drayton, recording everything too hot. It’s easily the one of the rawest, dirtiest Trane recordings in existence. His sax is in the red for most of the set and, where this might have been a disaster at another point in his career, it adds a ferocious fire that is suitable to the album.

Drummer Rashied Ali’s cymbals are compressed into a glaring white noise and at times Jimmy Garrison’s bass sounds like it’s being run through a Fuzzface stompbox. These are good things in the context of the music.

Again, if the performances weren’t so impassioned, this might not be a virtue. Microphones drop in and out, creating odd, intermintent panning and phasing effects. From a technical standpoint the recording is a fiasco. It’s doubtful, if this weren’t the final live testament of John Coltrane, that these recordings would have seen the light of day outside of the bootleg circuit.

On the other hand, at this point in his career, Trane was still pushing his music further and further into the cosmos. It would have been interesting to see where the 1970s might have taken him. Maybe fuzz and wah-wah pedals would have become part of his gear as they did for Miles Davis. Or would he have mellowed and reverted to a more traditional jazz approach, perhaps akin to Wynton Marsalis?

The latter seems doubtful, at least in the immediate future, as the records his wife, Alice Coltrane, issued after his death were adventurous and innovative. One has to wonder what further collaboration between the two giants might have spawned.

Something wonderful judging by her piano solo starting at the ten-minute mark of “Ogunde“. It’s one of the highlights of this disc. Fluid and scorching like a river molten rock, it twists and flows over the next six minutes, burning everything in its path. Perhaps the only thing hotter on the album is Pharoah Sanders‘ skronking tenor solos which sound especially brutal here against Trane’s more finessed improvisations.

The Olatunji Concert certainly isn’t the best of the many Coltrane albums produced in his final months, but it’s a wonderful document of where the second quartet was at and hint at where they might have gone. Technical flaws in the recording really only add a visceral immediacy to the listening experience. Unlike with a Bob Thiele or Rudy Van Gelder recording, you won’t be able to close your eyes and imagine you’re there. But you’ll feel like you were when it’s over, scorched eardrums and all.

The beginning of the decade saw everyone was trying to sound like Gang of Four, New Order and PIL. I was pretty happy until wagon-jumpers started cloning the clones and the genes got too diluted.

Then the ‘00s seemed to hit a dry spell for indie rock. Free-psyche took its place for a while but by 2007-08 it seemed like everything was hitting a drought. I’m not sure I’ve been able to scrape an end-of-year top five together for the last three years much less a top ten.

This year I was able to jot down 13 titles without even thinking about it. Was it a strong year? Was I just more receptive to new music? Is it just that once again, like 1999-2003, one of the kinds of music I like (this time it’s noise-pop) is back in style and is being given a dust-off and a fresh coat of paint? Perhaps.

I’ve written about some of these albums already, and not all fall under the “noise-pop” umbrella, but here is, by my reckoning, the Top 13 Albums of 2009 in No Particular Order.

Japandroids: Post-Nothing — This duo from Vancouver remind us all that when you blend “pop” and “punk” it doesn’t have to sounds like Blink 182. It can sound like pop-punk was meant to sound like. Superchunk meets Husker-Du in the rec-room of The Replacements’ mom’s house and no one remembered to take out the trash.

Girls: Album — I like the idea of Elvis Costello. It’s a great theory, but in practice it’s somewhat of a disappointing experience. Especially that first album. Girls found a way to put the theory into practice and make it work. All it took was a little more of Johnathan Richmond’s wry nihilism and some lo-fi garage-punk aesthetic. After all this time, someone figured it out.

The xx: xx — Ex-ex or double ex? I don’t know. I do know that they sound a lot like Stars. Just as well since the Montreal storytellers seem to have suddenly stopped putting out brilliant pop records with their last few EPs of boring drivel. So while The xx aren’t even aping a band from 25 years ago (like most acts this decade have), they at least have the foresight to pick one of the best and have the chops to pull it off. They even add a little bit of surf-guitar twang to the breathy girl-boy vocals, catchy hooks and a nice beats. Nice die-cut cover too.

The Drums: Summertime EP — “Don’t Be a Jerk, Johnny” could be a sequel to “Johnny Are You Queer?” only it’s better. Drums are almost like a cuter, happier version of Magnetic Fields. Infectious three-chord party-pop for roof-top parties in the… well… summertime.

Crocodiles: Summer of Hate — “I Wanna Kill” sounds so much like a Psychocandy b-side you’d swear it’s Jesus and Mary Chain. That’s a good and bad thing. Zero points for originality, ten points for awesomeness. It also sets the listener up for a little bit of disappointment the whole album isn’t quite so reverential to JAMC’s television-static bubblegum. Still, even if the noise-pop that rounds out the disc is more “noise” than “pop” it’s still pretty great. Perhaps greater.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart — The best album Slumberland forgot to put out in 1992? Almost contrived in the perfect way they blend of early 90’s American dream-pop, a little brit-pop and shoegaze, these kids come off sort of like a Superchunk/Velocity Girl side project where they put on fake British accents. That’s the second time I’ve name-dropped Superchunk in this article. Actually this is shaping up to be a string of comparisons to bands from when I was young. Anyway… The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are as cute and infectious as any band, anywhere at anytime.

Woods: Songs of Shame — These freaky folksters eschew the Bolan-esque airy-fairy imagery of the Banhart school of eccentricity for a more CSNY approach. If Pavement had been trying to emulate America or CCR, they might have sounded like this. That’s a good thing, by the way. Lo-fi folk-rock hasn’t been this catchy and exciting in years.

Sonic Youth: The Eternal — A return to the more organic, psychedelic flow of A Thousand Leaves but with the punky punch of Goo and the noise experimentation of NYC Ghosts & Flowers. A true return to form by alt-rock veterans.

Crystal Stilts: Alight of Night — If Magnetic Fields’ Distortion had been good instead of embarrassing, this might have been that record. That’s my second name-drop of Magnetic Fields. Let’s drop some more. Stick Violent Femmes, Joy Division and JAMC in a blender, hit “frappe” and drink down this reverb and despair rock’n’roll smoothie.

Raveonettes: In and Out of Control — While I’m tossing-out names like plates at a Greek wedding, let’s drop JAMC one more time. If John Hughes got to produce a JAMC album, this might have been it. I’m almost suspicious this album is actually a mash-up of M83’s Saturdays=Youth and Barbed Wire Kisses. It’s that good.

James Blackshaw: The Glass Bead Game — There are no names to drop in this review. Well, maybe John Fahey. Maybe Jack Rose. James Blackshaw is a free-folk 12-string virtuoso. Well, “virtuoso” might be stretching it. But he sure is some kind of good. I usually get a bit sickly from this kind of wankery but James manages to make some gorgeous, gorgeous music that makes me forget he’s playing too many notes and vegan girls probably throw their diva cups on stage when he’s playing.

Tune Yards: Bird Brains — I feel a bit dodgy including this one on the list since I’m still new to it and I haven’t internalized it fully. I’m pretty confident it may end up being one of my all-time faves. It may not, but at the moment I’m really impressed with it’s fresh blend of abstract indie-folk meets 8-bit trip-hop. And that bluesy voice! It reminds me of a lo-fi, folky Tricky at his weirdest. I’m looking forward to getting to know this lady better.

Akron/Family: Set ‘em Wild, Set ‘em Free — Not too many bands from the original “New Weird America” outbreak are still making good records. Is this one of the Family’s best? Yes and no? Maybe. No. Yes. Kind of. It was much better than just “better than I expected.” It’s pretty great, really. They finally got all their influences corralled and lined up to be deployed effectively instead of their previous free-range approach. Breaking free of M. Gira’s gravitational pull probably also did them in good stead. They still sound like they wish it was 1972, but that’s what’s great about them.

Also rans: A Place To Bury Strangers: Exploding Head; Pet Shop Boys: Yes; The Big Pink: A Brief History of Love; Jonsi and Alex: Riceboy Sleeps; Mirah: (A)spera; Sufjan Stevens: The BQE

After the Jesus and Mary Chain hot-rod sputtered to rickety halt in 1998, the brothers Reid popped up here and there in a few projects. In 2005 Sister Vanilla saw their sister Linda on board as a singer for probably their best record  since Honey’s Dead. Yet it wasn’t so good a record as to inspire anybody notice or care. Too bad because it’s a great slice of poppy rock’n'roll (aptly titled Little Pop Rock). Though a bit smoother and shinier than JAMC ever tried to be, the chrome finish is still a little rusted, dusty and scuffed. Of course, if Scarlett Johansson (who’d sang with them at their Coachella reunion show) had been the vocalist, then maybe things would have gone differently. Perhaps in the worst possible way.

You really cannot make a case for much of Finbegin (2001) being anything other than bedroom demos for the JAMC completist. Usually just an acoustic guitar and a vocal with a second guitar overdub, the tracks generally have that compressed, slightly fuzzy sound of a cassette four-track which can be charming enough.

Still, the first three songs really come-off like unfinished JAMC cast-offs, probably recorded in one take. Intriguing for the fan, but not much there to hold interest over repeated listenings and the casual listener might mistake it for unearthed demos by a particularly strung-the-fuck-out Lou Reed.