June 30, 2011

Here’s what we know about Iceage: They are four friends, ages 18 and 19, from Denmark. Their debut LP, New Brigade, has actually been out in their home country since January, with a much smaller, limited run coming to the United States earlier this year. These are the essentials. Over the past few months, as New Brigade has been passed back and forth online with increasing enthusiasm, there has been a remarkable amount of chatter, some of it focused on their age, some of it on their music, some of it on faraway mystique.

Not long ago, a Danish daily deemed them “teenage punks full of anger and anxiety,” a line galvanized by bloody post-show photos of smiling audience members published on their blog. Questions like “Are they the saviors of punk music?” have been posed, as though punk music needs saving. They just played their first show in the U.S. this past weekend, in Brooklyn. It sold out. The New York Times and The New Yorker have weighed in. They’re set to return to Roskilde this summer. As you may have already realized, there’s a swirl of information and interest surrounding this band right now, at the heart of which is their music.

And it turns out that New Brigade is a refreshing and extraordinary debut. These four have located a punk-rock sweet spot: mixing the black atmosphere of goth, the wild-limbed whoosh of hardcore, and the clangor of post-punk. It’s a feat made all the more impressive by one very important intangible: energy. While they still have room to grow as songwriters, the energy in every atom of New Brigade‘s charred, sub-25-minute rush is seductive. From the moment “White Rune” starts to quake until those last tangles of guitar conk out on closer “You’re Blessed”, there’s little escape from this record’s grip. Even the foreboding mash and march of “Intro”, its wordless, 46-second pulse of a prelude, is enough to make you feel like you need to fling yourself in the direction of someone else.

That said, despite the typically direct, blunt-object nature of “punk,” much of New Brigade is also impressionistic. Elias Rønnenfelt’s words (sung in English rather than Danish) are largely unintelligible, leaving a lot up to the heart and imagination. Rønnenfelt finds an effective way of sharing just enough room for listeners to fill in the blanks. As if mimicking the motions of his own guitar, he scythes his way through each song, usually to anthemic heights. That you can hear in the gasp of “Collapse” and starry-eyed bounce of “Remember”. Even more so in aforementioned climax “You’re Blessed”, a song that sounds like a more irritable cousin to the poppy, post-hardcore emo that came of age here in the 1990s.

The album’s grit has nothing to do with fidelity. While Iceage employ decidedly abrasive no-wave textures, New Brigade was recorded in a proper studio. The result is a recording whose snare hits and basslines announce themselves with real fury. And though a lot of this music might seem from a distance like a dozen ideas thrown together in the space of a single song, what they’ve done here is deceptively precise and exists on a deeply personal, unfiltered plane. All these lurches and groans and crashes and bangs and stutters and roars come together to form one consistently rousing, emotionally immediate whole. From them to you.

Junior Boys started out making ridiculously complex music that had the intimate feel of a bedroom-based indie project. They’d mastered the intricate rhythmic syncopations of UK garage and Timbaland-style R&B, genres that had turned inventive and impossibly tricky rhythm programming into a game of pop oneupsmanship. Which is hardly the sort of thing that you’d want to hear an amateur’s take on. But JBs’ music was presented as if it were something fragile, homespun, made on a shoestring, full of negative space where the pop fizziness should be. It added an interesting, affecting friction to a sound that had defined glossy marquee pop around the turn of the millennium, like the difference between a love song written to please millions and one aimed at a special someone.

Pretty quickly, though, on 2006’s So This Is Goodbye and especially 2009’s Begone Dull Care, the JBs music started sounding like a million bucks, whatever it cost to make. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. There had always been an element of slick soulful 1980s synth-pop in their sound, and when they jettisoned the new millennium R&B touches, it was shocking and enjoyable to find out they actually had the production chops to mimic that 1980s opulence. But what about that one-on-one intimacy that had originally made them stand out? In that sense, It‘s All True sounds like the album the Junior Boys have been moving toward their whole career. It’s got the same low-key mixtape-from-a-lover charm as Last Exit, but sacrifices none of the appealing slickness of their last few albums.

Opener “Itchy Fingers” is actually a bit of bait-and-switch. It’s the most deliriously dense tune on the album– multiple basslines, stuttering R&B breakdowns, Art of Noise vocal stabs, zapping rave riffs, gleaming Japan/Duran-style guitar– a master class in just how much you can squeeze into a track without its seeming cluttered. It recalls the carefully plotted textural overload of UK funky producers like Ill Blu, even if the feel is still more disco-house smooth than frantic Jamaican ragga. But “Itchy Fingers” is more or less an anomaly. It‘s All True mostly dials back the sonic excess in favor of more streamlined grooves. Thankfully, the album also corrects the lack-of-hooks problem that occasionally plagued Begone Dull Care. “Second Chance” is still stuffed with whirling video game noises, and some glorious creamy vocal multi-tracking, but what stands out on first listen is that naggingly catchy bassline. Plus Jeremy Greenspan gives us his best batch of choruses in quite a while, and good thing, too. While this is still headphone music par excellence, all those gleaming little sonic gewgaws and sneaky ear-worm off-beats are often pushed to the back of the mix, meaning the bright lounging-on-the-yacht electro hooks and Greenspan’s voice both have to do a lot more work here.

Greenspan’s singing is the best it’s ever been on It‘s All True, proving the band’s mixing desk skills aren’t the only thing that’s matured over the past eight years. Where he initially sounded wounded and winsome, almost hiding his voice behind the stark beats, here he displays a bouncy, strident sense of playfulness. Just check the ecstatic peak-after-peak outro on “Banana Ripple“. There’s also a new subtlety to his breathy just-out-of-bed tenderness that weirdly reminds me of Sam Prekop, no faint praise considering Prekop is the reigning master of this sort of thing. And speaking of subtle and tender, along with the large helpings of dancefloor joy, some of the album’s most immediately arresting moments are its sparsest and most fragile. “The Reservoir” is an ultra-delicate experiment in seeing how far a rhythm can be stripped back– something that would have fit perfectly on Last Exit, though it sounds far richer here, with Greenspan pulling off a falsetto he never would have been able to in the old days. Despite a few curveballs, like the pinpoint precise homage to Kraftwerk and the bleep techno Kraftwerk inspired on “Kick the Can”, there’s not much “new” here if you’ve been following the Junior Boys’ sound over the last decade. But considering they seem to have perfected that sound here, it’s hard not to feel like they should keep making albums like It‘s All True for a long, long time.

DJ Shadow has been skirting predictability for a good long while. The Outsider might have been a critical and fanbase fiasco, but at least it proved he was trying to engage with the greater hip-hop world and make something that didn’t fit the precedent of Endtroducing…. (And we got a pretty damn good E-40 track out of it.) Shadow could be excused for testing his limits, for reacting to the sounds currently reverberating through the instrumental hip-hop arena he helped build. And it’s tempting to speculate what his next move might be. He could be ricocheting off recent psychedelic L.A. bass music, or trying to see how his beat-building/breakdown technique could spar against UK funky rhythms, or maybe just stripping things back to the point of minimalism. The fact that he’s calling his upcoming album The Less You Know, the Better says something about his M.O., at least.

Then again, the I Gotta Rokk EP contains a few singles drawn from that album, and they suggest a new direction more along the lines of what people expected from him 10 years ago. Any of the three original tracks on this EP would’ve fit well stylistically as follow-ups to the prog-skewing aspirations of The Private Press, representing a gradual evolution from his sample-virtuoso approach. As they stand in 2011, these songs are a bit of a mixed bag, flirting with sounds that could qualify as trendy or forward-thinking in bass music without jumping into the thick of it.

It’s not so much the scattershot styles that register as strange; if there’s anywhere hard rock, psych-folk, and electro-glitch all share a root context, it’s in the scrapyard assemblage of an ecclectic cratedigger like Shadow. It’s more of a structural disconnect, where it’s possible to hear what he’s reaching for but harder to grasp just how he plans to get there. The title track lurches around in a stoner-rock plod, as a creeping armada of metal guitars eventually bleeds through its slow build to a manic false-ending. The hesher trappings are novel enough, but its drums are uniquely Shadow’s: clipped yet heavy-sounding snares, hi-hats, and claps that sound culled from a dozen long-buried sources, but which coalesce into a dense vortex of percussion.

The other two originals debuted last year as a digital single, and if they’re both distinctly Shadow, they also prove how nebulous that descriptor really is. “I’ve Been Trying” leans toward the same vaguely soulful psych-folk that informed “Six Days” and “This Time (I’m Gonna Try It My Way)”, but it sounds less like an actual sample-based construction than a song with overdubs– it’s one of those cuts that might feel more alive if the seams were less concealed. “Def Surrounds Us” is the more intriguing proposition, Shadow loosely toying with dubstep in a somewhat self-aware mode. The Southern-bounce digital snare rolls and hornet-sting synthesizers approach Benga’s more jittery moments, but only until the song takes a left turn into glitchy drum’n’bass. It may be the most manic thing he’s done since the similarly structured “Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain”, and it’s proof positive that he can still do exhilarating, spectacular things with drum breaks.

Out of three additional remixes, the one that pulls it off the best ironically has the weakest source material: Various’ take on “I’ve Been Trying” scatters that track’s weedy vocals into lonely dub echoes, bringing out the same sense of isolation with a completely different mood. The other two– Irn Mnky’s Pendulum-style “Swagger Mix” of “I Gotta Rokk” and Rockwell’s twitchy, overstuffed remix of “Def Surrounds Us”– show just how tacky contemporary drum’n’bass bombast can be, weirdly managing to use all the prominent elements of their originals to create remixes that miss all the things that make Shadow’s tracks slice instead of bludgeon. At least the first three tracks prove that Shadow himself still knows how that approach works.

Up to this point, it’s been somewhat difficult to listen to the broke-down electro-pop of Handsome Furs without imagining what Dan Boeckner’s more established band, Wolf Parade, might do to elaborate on it. Though the projects sound very different, his songs for both bands rely heavily on his bleary-eyed lyricism and jagged guitar chug. But as Boeckner could tell you, there’s an easy way to get people to stop comparing your side project to your main gig: just break up the latter.

But it’s not just Wolf Parade’s recently announced “indefinite hiatus” that casts Sound Kaptial as Handsome Furs’ most passionate, committed album to date. Rather, by taking the emphasis off of Boeckner’s guitars and giving greater shine to wife Alexei Perry’s neon-bright keyboard lines and woofer-busting beats, Handsome Furs present themselves as a genuine, ready-for-the-floor synth-pop band rather than a frazzled rock act that happens to use synthesizers. With new wave confections like “Memories of the Future” and “What About Us”, Sound Kapital effectively conjures an alternate 1980s where Bruce Springsteen didn’t just tinker around with synths and drum machines on occasion, but actually tried to make a full-on Depeche Mode record.

However, Sound Kapital isn’t so much an 80s throwback in sound as in its spirit of sincerity. A handful of songs on the record were inspired by the Furs’ 2010 visit to Burma, where they performed alongside bands who were quite literally underground, forced to perform out of sight of the oppressive local authorities, with minimal access to electricity, let alone recording technology. Given that Boeckner’s always been drawn to the struggle of the underdog, the experience of being around people who routinely risked incarceration just to play their music naturally had a profound effect on his songwriting; the opening song is built around a click-tracked chant– “When I get back home/ I won’t be the same no more”– that effectively serves as a promise to put aside petty, material-world concerns.

And rather than deal in general, impressionistic images of hearts on fire and shining lights, the album’s centerpiece song, “Serve the People”, pays tribute to the Burmese band Side Effect with street-level scenes of “kids… making noise with their generators on till the cops say, ‘move along.'” It’s the sort of arm-swaying anthem you could easily imagine the Furs’ Montreal mates Arcade Fire turning into a Coachella-rocking showstopper. But the humbly lo-tech take– all shuffling drum-machine breaks and squelching frequencies– feels very true to the environment that inspired it, where music is exchanged via pirate radio and the power can be suddenly cut at any moment. The more frenzied companion track “Cheap Music” reframes the same scene, but downplays the overarching themes of valor and perseverance to convey the illicit, punk-rock thrill of hearing “a thousand lonely kids making noise in the basement.”

Therein lies Sound Kapital‘s greatest success: Handsome Furs no longer feel like a stripped-down antidote to Wolf Parade, but more like a band that’s able to execute progressively grander, emotionally resonant ideas while staying within their limited means. And nowhere is that more evident than on Sound Kapital‘s urgent, feedback-swathed closer “No Feelings”, which, despite its seven-minute sprawl, counts as Boeckner’s most immediately affecting performance since Wolf Parade’s “Shine a Light”. The song sees Boeckner returning to familiar concerns (emotional ennui, self-doubt) but as it reemerges from a My Bloody Valentine-like miasma for a final sprint to the finish, Boeckner’s repeated claims that he’s “got no feeling” provide Sound Kapital with a rare moment of irony: Everything about this song– and this entire album, for that matter– suggests this heart’s still got a lot left to burn.