JOHN TALABOT: fIN

The best dance music has always contained a very specific breed of melancholy, a feeling that stretches toward some kind of... I don't know. Transcendence? Wistful longing? I'm thinking of that story about dancer Isadora Duncan responding to a question about what her performance meant: "If I could tell you that, I wouldn't have danced it."

Whatever it is, you can hear it in the starry-eyed teen love songs your grandma swayed to at sock hops, you can hear it in the earnest desperation of Donna Summer's velvet croon, and you can hear it in the best records from Detroit Techno's heyday (check out "Icon” by Rhythim is Rhythim [sic], for example).

You can also hear what I’m talking about throughout fIN, the debut full-length from Spanish producer John Talabot. It’s my favorite album from 2012. I’ve listened to this thing a thousand times and it’s warm-bath music now.

Warm-bath music: Sometimes, after a terrible day at work or elsewhere, I feel defeated. I don’t want Daft Punk to cheer me up (because my misery is too stubborn) but I know better than to wallow in The Downward Spiral. There’s a sweet spot, somewhere. It’s feel-good music precisely because it’s just the right kind of melancholy. It trickles from your headphones with a hand on your shoulder: “We’re all in this together, kid.”

Talabot’s melancholy uplift floats along the techno-house continuum in humidity made from lightly distorted samples and synths. Voices, in particular, are sampled and treated and made woozy with heartsickness. “Depak Ine” opens the album with simmering drones and chopped up, pitch-shifted syllables. Somewhere along the way, Talabot folds in gauzy, harmonized “Ooohhhhs” and swooning lamentations. It sounds like driving away from something, and toward something else. At night. Having forgotten the exact directions. Excited? Scared? Yes.

Prior to this album, Talabot released music under another moniker (though he seems to have disowned that stuff now) as well as a handful of excellent 12’’ records as John Talabot (all easily, and legally, found in digital form now). Building on that music, fIN is a confident, fully-realized deal, a start-to-end listen.

He keeps it moody. When my spouse and I threw a Halloween party last year, "Oro Y Sangre" was the first song I thought of for the obligatory Halloween Mixtape 2012. (It’s not just the sfx-library screams that pop up, you should know. House music rarely employs such effectively dense harmonic structures. This track is a relentless and menacing glare.) Elsewhere, “El Oeste” is a lesson in ominous lurking: Arpeggios and pads, warped like a cassette left in the sun, are needled by sparse percussion until they give up in exhaustion. “Missing You” sounds like exactly what it sounds like: S/he left you, you’re left behind, you’ve got some space to stare into now.

I don’t want to give you the impression that this is the House equivalent of, say, Disintegration by the Cure (not that I would mind such a thing, come to think of it…) This is still dance music, and blissfully so. Talabot’s command of rhythm is deft. I can remember hearing “Estiu” while listening to the album for the first time. For ten seconds or so, I though the beat was hokey. Suddenly, an extra layer, subtle and syncopated, tied everything into something transcendent! Or at least grin-making.

fIN’s rave-readiness notwithstanding, the time I’ve spent with this music has been pretty inert. Usually, it’s been the soundtrack to a long, nocturnal drive or a moody, shoegazing walk. I’ll soak in it, sulking, until it gradually warms me up and (despite my best efforts to stay bitter) I get that heart-in-throat glee and a nice emotional reboot.

So I have no idea how this would work on a dancefloor. Thanks to my mysophobic teetotaling, I very rarely hear electronic dance music in its natural, intended environment. Hearing music is an experience that is not improved by booze-breathed bodies bumping into me. I went to see Richie Hawtin in Detroit a few Novembers ago, and I couldn’t stand the thronging pelvisgrind around me. “Don’t you people realize you’re in the presence of the Plastikman? Pipe down!” Dear lord, I am uncool.

No reveler should have to tolerate my cantankerousness, so I get my fix from Resident Advisor podcasts on calm, brain-rave-for-one walks. I wonder sometimes how producers of House music would feel about that. Most of them are DJs as well, and while that puts them tightly in the middle of the carousing, the art and curation of a producer/DJ are essentially solitary acts; intently focused, frequently without collaboration. I think the best of them know something about loneliness. (I don't have to tell you how crowds can be much lonelier than empty bedrooms, right?) I think they see, regularly, a kind of celebration that leaves people a little empty. I think they see people who have come to escape something. I think they know how stubborn a person’s bitterness can be. I think they know just what to do about it.

And maybe there’s your melancholy.

GHOSTFACE KILLAH & ADRIAN YOUNGE: 12 Reasons to Die

It’s been about two decades since Ghostface Killah delivered the opening verse on the Wu-Tang Clan’s classic debut album. The world caught the blast of a hype verse, and RZA’a hip-hop/branding juggernaut was launched. Considering RZA’a ingenuous conceptualizing, it’s actually rather surprising that Wu-Tang lore has gone so underdeveloped. Until now, we’ve never heard a fully fleshed-out origin-story for any Wu-Tang member, which is surprising. The world of the Wu-Tang Clan, a world as insular and complex as Middle Earth or the Star Trek universe, is a rough neighborhood, built on low-budget 1970s genre films (Shaw Brothers kung-fu in particular), Five-Percent Nation terminology and theology, and a series of interconnected samples, slang and catchphrases that could fill a glossary. Comic books are an ingredient, too, particularly with Ghostface, whose debut solo album was a titled with a Marvel Comics reference that also provided his alternate moniker. Origin stories are the most well-known part of any superhero’s (or supervillian’s) mythology, and it seems inevitable that Ghostface would reveal his eventually. (I don’t want to get bogged down in making a distinction between the persona and the human being behind it, or where one ends and the other begins. That’s between Ghostface and either his god, his therapist or his lawyers.)

Here’s the paperback summary: The Ghostface Killah was once an ambitious mobster named Tony Starks before he was betrayed and murdered in a record-pressing plant by the 12 Delucas, who pressed his remains into twelve vinyl records. Written into those grooves was a seething specter of vengeance. The rest, as you can imagine, is a saga haunted by the spirit of those 1970s revenge flicks that made a young Quentin Tarantino say “I want to make one of THOSE! That would be awesome!”

This tale unfolds in 12 Reasons to Die, a collaboration with Adrian Younge. Previously known best for his uncanny blaxploitation score for the uncanny blaxploitation homage Black Dynamite (also known as the movie in the #1 spot on your need-to-see-it list), Younge conceived this project, recording the score with his (one-man?) band (on vintage reel-to-reels, no less!) and sent a script to Ghostface detailing which segments of the story take place in which songs. This record feels like a giddy passion project born out of a that-would-be-awesome moment. “I should produce a record for Ghostface Killah that tells his supernatural origin story! That would be awesome!”

It is awesome, by the way. Younge’s retro-fresh instrumentation is grindhouse cinematic and rare-groove nostalgic. Ennio Morricone and David Axelrod are the most obvious reference points. His sonic palette emphasizes ominous pianos, gloomy organs and stinging fuzz-guitars, with sprinklings of mellotron, strings, horns and harpsichord. “I Declare War” utilizes the wordless singing of a soprano, evoking Once Upon a Time in the West. All the while, live drums boom and bap in charging four-on-the-bloodstained-cement-floor patterns. The arrangements shift from verse to verse, and they’re colorful enough on their own to make the instrumentals disc a worthy listen. I haven’t heard another hip-hop album that sounds quite like this one.

Ghostface turns in a solid performance here, although it seems like focusing on one coherent narrative creates something of a challenge. There really isn’t time here for tangents or non-sequiturs, and you won’t hear much of the cleverness, wordplay or emotional resonance Ghost is capable of delivering. You could call these lyrics “workmanlike”. The storytelling is pretty literal, and in the coffee-table book of Ghostface Killah’s most memorable lines, nothing will come from 12 Reasons to Die. If some of the gut-bursting emotional resonance and renegade poetry wordplay of, say, Ironman is lacking here, it’s a fair trade for such a focused narrative. Anyway, Mr. Killah’s actual performance is as urgent and powerful as ever. He’s always had an intense theatricality to him, and that’s exactly what a project like this needs.

A comic book is being published concurrently with the album, and Apollo Brown produced a remix called 12 Reasons to Die: The Brown Tape (it’s really good, although the sample-based beats he employs are less-than-unique accompaniment for Ghost, compared to Younge’s retro score). This is the kind of immersive project you can really spend some time with.

The supporting cast (Inspectah Deck, U-God, Masta Killa, Cappadonna) would normally be considered Wu-Tang B-listers, but they’re uniformly good here. It’s strange that Raekwon doesn’t make an appearance, but maybe he’s waiting in the wings for an Adrian Younge-produced Mafioso rap-opera of his own. That would be awesome.

AESOP ROCK: Skeleton

In the past, Aesop Rock’s labyrinthine lyrics (dense with metonymy, synecdoche and tongue-twister internal rhyme) spiked from the headphones of a million paranoid backpackers like the furious logorrhea of a supercomputer programmed to communicate only through hyperlinks. (Imagine a caffeinated MF DOOM whose book of rhymes features enough footnotes to flummox David Foster Wallace.) On 2001’s Labor Days (one of the great Pissed Off Opuses in hip-hop) he cemented a unique place in pop culture. Here’s a guy with the semantic complexity of a Wikipedia-addicted T.S. Eliot, and all the haunting, middle-finger snark of a vampire Lenny Bruce. No rapper is as clever. No rapper possesses such mastery of wordplay, allusion and surreal imagery. No rapper can make me grin so consistently by telling people to screw off in 10,000 words or more.

You only need to hear about ten seconds of Labor Days, after which you will either demand to hear the whole thing, right now, and again and again forever, or you will recoil in disgust. “Prickles of his voice too nasal! Ugghhhh, give us Barabbas!” 

On None Shall Pass, he focused his dense, daredevil rhymes into coherent narratives, (dig the surreal pirate yarn “The Harbor is Yours”) but didn’t always focus those narratives into anything relevant. For example, “Fumes” tells the sad story of an aspiring author and his addict girlfriend’s drug-death, and tells the tale with detail and clarity that eludes most short-story writers. But why? I don’t demand a clear-cut moral, or anything. These aren’t Aesop’s Fables (heh). I just need a reason to be invested.

That’s not a problem on Skelethon. This record is so personal you can see the aorta stains on Aesop’s ratty denim jacket. On what will probably be his last solo album before he’s officially middle-aged, Ian Bavtz sounds urgent, mature and laser-focused.

A song about a donut shop (“Fryerstarter”) investigates the relationship between aesthetic pleasure and faith, tongue in jelly-filled cheek. A song about a washed up daredevil (“Cycles to Gehenna”) is a surprisingly moving meditation on the way people deal with pain and loss. Elsewhere, songs about adolescent haircuts (“Racing Stripes”), teenage graffiti (“ZZZ Top”*) and a parent/child standoff over unwanted vegetables (“Grace”) show remarkable sensitivity and humor as they investigate the eager identity-assertion of childhood and adolescence.  

Adding to the personal nature of the project is the fact that Aes produced these tracks himself. I’m a fan of his usual go-to guy, Blockhead, and I think the self-produced Bazooka Tooth is the least-good of his albums. Here, however, the production is impeccably designed. Drums are muffled and rumbling, allowing the piercing vocals to stab and dart between columns of gauzy guitars and lo-fi whoooo-ing sounds that sound like ghosts (because, you know, I know what ghosts sound like, apparently). The sound world here is dense and desolate, much like the lyrics. It doesn't sound like anything else on the contemporary rap landscape.

“Zero Dark Thirty” and “Gopher Guts” are two of the most moving moments in hip-hop’s recent history, and they’re indicative of Skelethon’s soft-focus gloom and aching tightrope between nostalgia and regret, the things that made it the most played 2012 release on my stereo. Aesop Rock may be the world’s least-accessible rapper, and he’s also the best lyricist since Bob Dylan.

·         * The titular Zs are ZOSO, Zulu Nation and TheZeros.

MADLIB: Medicine Show No. 9 - Channel 85 Presents Nittyville

When Frank Nitt picks up a microphone he sounds like a man hosting a party. It makes sense: He's an MC, and his acronym job description has that connotation built in. (Do I need to tell you what it stands for?) Grave, streetwise lyricism is all well and good, and most of my favorite rappers lean in the conscious direction, but Mr. Nitt's impresario persona is refreshing.

On this out-of-chronology Medicine Show release, he celebrates the kind of capitalist decadence once caricatured in Soviet propaganda. It's easy to imagine champagne glasses and Monopoly Man monocles. This kind of thing irks bleeding hearts, but it's nice to see the Underground Mitten (as Mr. Nitt calls it) described in a way that would make people want to be here. Nittyville's vibe is quintessentially Detroit: privileged co-ed hipsters bump shoulders with ass-busting day-job MPC nuts. Scarcity makes for strange clubfellows, particularly in a city that birthed Derrick May and J. Dilla.

Mr. Nitt boasts, toasts, flirts with your girl and gives a few shout-outs to his DJ while Madlib adapts seamlessly, a consummate professional, switching over to Channel 85 with a series of drinks-in-the-air productions that perfectly compliment Mr. Nitt's buoyant staccato. More often than not, the layered samples are draped over thick kicks and bundleclap CLOPs on the twos and fours. The way this knocks you could dance to it drunk. Compare Nittyville's decadent bounce to the brittle haze on the Medicine Show's first volume, which perfectly suited Guilty Simpson's heavy-as-lead deadpan. One of Madlib's greatest strengths is his ability to compliment any vocalist.

Chemistry between an MC and a DJ is the classic recipe for great hip-hop. The gold standard is probably Guru and DJ Premier, or maybe C.L. Smooth and Pete Rock. In either case, both partners not only excelled in their respective fields as distinct individuals with instantly recognizable techniques, they also complemented each other perfectly. Madlib has never had a fruitful, ongoing partnership. He's done great work with Dudley Perkins, Percee P, Wildchild and others, with the best fit being his one-off joint effort with DOOM. Musical marriage isn't his bag, I guess, and the benefit of this beatsmithing bachelorhood is the wide, wide variety of rap records to be endowed with his blunted, magic touch.

Rap records like this one: You can't resist the way this project invites you to tango, and teases you with goofy mystery. Who is the un-credited guest on "Eyegotcha"? Why does the "What do you think you're gonna do about them?" chant in "Just Follow" make me think of Oompa-Loompas? Is that Dalek cameo (not the militant hip-hop group, the Doctor Who villain) a clue that Lord Quas loves his BBC sci-fi as much as I do? Am I crazy, or is Madlib sampling the same Residents track he used in a beat from Movie Scenes? (In a totally different way, I mean.) Who are these groupies? Who is that stand-up comic? Did Frank Nitt just name-drop I-75? I'm driving on I-75!

We’re almost to the end, true believers. The Medicine Show's two-part finale finds our blunted protagonist stepping back into the arena that made him a champion in the first place. Stay tuned.

Hiatus

If anyone reads this, I apologize for the recent silence. I recently began a new life as a full-time teacher, and I am adjusting.

DTSS! will have to go on hold for a little while, but I'll be back soon, catching up with Madlib, telling you all about Matana Roberts (our new musical champion!) and some other good stuff.

Stay tuned.

ZOMBY: Dedication

When I wrote about Zomby’s debut album, I was struck by how it looked backwards, flirting with the line between music-as-art and music-as-discipline. “Maybe” I said “Zomby is making one last nostalgic stop before launching into the wide unknown.”

I guess this is the wide unknown. Shorter than his first (it’s a hair over 35 minutes), Dedication could easily be mistaken for another of Zomby’s many EPs. Packaging music as an album rather than an EP gives a listener certain expectations, though. Traditionally, the EP is interstitial and transitional, taking artistic risks in a safer, below-the-radar release likely to only be heard by people predisposed to be root for you. The album, on the other hand, is expected to be a fully-formed statement with a cohesive structure.

One thing carried over from Where Were U in 92? is Zomby’s preference for short tracks crammed together end-to-end with sudden transitions (or, put another way, without transitions.) Those short running-times (along with nervy syncopation on tracks like "Digital Rain") might remind you of the L.A. beat scene, but without the textured warmth that gives Teebs and Flying Lotus their playful bent, Dedication has the dead stare of an NES game-over screen. On Where Were U, this was the quick-minded excitement of a bedroom-studio raver ready to party. Here, though, it’s more like the fractured conversation of someone who is deeply distracted. The inner jacket, in stark white-on-black text, says “Dedicated to BDM 11.11.46 – 25.06.10”. I know a quick Google could probably fill in the gaps, but if Zomby thought I required more backstory, he would have written liner-notes.

What is clear is that this is music in mourning. Everything is dark here. The minimal cover lists titles like “Witch Hunt”, “Vanquish”, “Riding with Death” and “Things Fall Apart”. The second track (“Natalia’s Song”) is so pretty and eager and desperate, not only the (probably sampled) female vocals, but also the minimal, Burial-esque percussion and the swaying synths sulking through their dirge chords. It’s one of the few tracks given a chance to develop, (at four minutes it is by far the longest on the album) but it still strains against some plastic sheet trapping it against the ground, as if it wants to take off into something cathartic but never does. On “Witch Hunt” gunshots (the saddest sound in the world) are used as percussion.

Everywhere, crisp synths with sharp, digital timbres, loop in big empty warehouses, with reverb ping-pong against cement and steel. There are no breaks or breakdowns, and the clouds never part. Even a guest spot from Animal Collective’s Panda Bear does nothing to break the cold, morose spell.
 
This is a record with an emotional purpose singular and clear. I actually find the unrelenting gloom to be a little overwhelming. The way incredible moments like “Vortex” are cut short is almost cruel, but I found myself with a kind of Stockholm Syndrome while listening to this. Dedication made me uneasy, and it captivated me totally. Comparing it to Where Were U in 92? reveals considerable range on Zomby’s part, and I’m sure both records will occupy unique roles in his slowly-growing body of work.

MADLIB: Medicine Show No. 11 - Low Budget High Fi Music

Here's the paradox: Madlib's music is, on the one hand, deeply intertextual and, on the other hand, perplexingly insular. To the theory that music can only be about itself, The Bad Kid offers a revision: His music can only be about other people's music. And, repurposed and scrambled as it is, much of it (in one way or another) literally is other people's music. Hijacking is Madlib's art, and he's brilliant at it. When he's not curating or sampling the work of others he's interpreting it with Yesterday's Universe, naming tracks after his heroes, or aping their styles and rhythms.

In theory, this project should be deeply intertextual, connecting to and reflecting the work of others, but it is strangely self-contained, and the resulting music functions best as an obsessive binge. I don't listen to Madlib's music in a rotation with other music. Instead, I listen to Madlib almost exclusively for a chunk of time, and then forget him until the next big Madlib Kick. This is not because he's made about 700 albums, or the fact that his work is diverse enough to be a complete musical diet. It is because his music only makes sense according to the laws of nature in Madlibland.

You can think of this place as underground hip-hop's version of The Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. Direct routes are forbidden, and the ground is littered with long forgotten artifacts and debris. When I'm not there, I'm not interested in it and I can't see the appeal of this erratic, scattered mindspace. I'd rather go somewhere safe and warm like Abbey Road. When I feel that specific pull to Madlibland, however, I have to answer and like the Stalkers who lead passengers through The Zone, I have an obsessive compulsion to evangelize the experience.

Among this terrain's most distinct features are the jagged, abrupt changes. Beats and verses and grooves tumble out of the toybox with no obvious structure, sequence, or any transitions a Q-switch couldn't provide. At any moment, any idea can halt or start right in the "middle" of things. Quick cross fades and chaotic sound collage make it impossible to get your bearings. This infuriates outsiders, delights the die-hards, and has never been more prominent than it is on the Medicine Show. If that's not by design, it's a very happy accident. There's something transitory about these volumes, and the release schedule, flexible as it has turned out to be, makes the series something no one will even try to follow unless they are perfectly tuned to Madlib's ADHDJ wavelength.

Low Budget High Fi Music is a microcosm of Madlibland. Inconsistent, messy and scattershot, this volume is vault material (most from around 2005, some more recent) put together like those 1970s Miles Davis records that were pieced together from various late-60s sessions (think Water Babies and Big Fun). The archival nature doesn't bother me - Madlib's release schedule rarely corresponds to when the music is actually made, particularly in the Medicine Show, which has reached as far back as the 1990s. The execution is a little lacking, though. When Teo Macreo spliced and overdubbed those Miles Davis jam sessions, he sculpted them into something more cohesive. Cohesion has no place in Madlibland, and on Low Budget things are even more scattered than usual. Verses fade in and out in medias res, a Beastie Boys cover is split into two (a little here, and some more of it there.)

I wish Madlib employed a more judicious editor (I humbly volunteer!) and I wish he would expand the stable of MCs who rap on his beats, but this is how you listen to prolific eccentrics – you take the good with the bad. Thankfully, the good (the short Loop Digga instrumentals, for example, and the Strong Arm Steady remix) outweighs the bad, and the listening experience is an adventure. I’m going to be sad to see the Medicine Show end.

GENESIS: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

"Mike, if Prince wrote a song about peanut butter, it would sound like this." Nate’s Prince impression was a profound relief. If there hadn’t been one other person on the dreaded Youth Retreat who could make a reference like that, I might have lost my shit.

The Midwest Christian-youth culture in the 1990s was obsessive about what pundits call "the culture wars." There was a cottage industry of embarrassing simulacrum with pseudo-Christian themes, syrupy earnestness and budget-priced production. People in church would actually say things like "They’re sort of like a Christian Pink Floyd, Mike, you’d like them!" Please, friends, contain your nausea. This nihilistic conformation to the ways of the world filled a void created by a party-line mantra that "secular music" was evil. A woman who volunteered with the youth group once tried to explain what a troubled lost lamb she had been. "I even owned a Led Zeppelin album," she told me. It was a lonely moment for me: By that point I owned every Led Zeppelin album, even Coda. I just assumed that my fondness for “The Battle of Evermore” wasn’t likely to be a priority for Jesus.

On this retreat to a Washington D.C. convention, however, it was a priority. (These trips away from home and family are called "retreats." The irony, dear reader, is yours to unpack.) Our youth pastor Jason told the busload of smiling, pimple-marked teenage faces under his guidance that certain among us had brought secular music and were listening to it on the bus. This weekend was supposed to be about drawing closer to God, he said, and those things were distractions.

Of course they were distractions, Jason. Other than talking to Nate about our shared interest in David Lynch and Radiohead (what another kid in the youth group called "all that weird stuff you guys like"), the only thing getting me through the ordeal was the little wallet of CDs in my backpack. Without that, I might have grown up to be Christopher Hitchens.

When our bus stopped at a shopping mall so we could eat in the food court, I slipped away to Harmony House with the money my mom had given me for food. I bought The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway because I had seen a magazine article about progressive rock and I was working my way through the sidebar of "essential albums" with each band name, title and trippy album cover retained like a shopping list of holy relics. By this point I was already obsessed with Fragile, Aqualung, 2112 and In The Court of the Crimson King. Genesis was next in line, even though material put out by more recent incarnations of the band made me reluctant. (The guys that sing "I Can’t Dance"? Seriously?)

Prog-rock was a good fit for an archetypal dork like me. The compulsive rhythms and coitus-simulating guitar wankery of traditional rock music didn't speak to me in any way other than to bitterly remind me of all the fun my schoolmates (the worldly counterparts to the youth group kids) were supposedly having while I listened to Gentle Giant in my parents' basement. Anyway, songs about cars and girls were utterly pedestrian and I fancied myself too sophisticated for that kids' stuff. The satirical theatrics and surreal, stately pomp of Jethro Tull and Emerson, Lake & Palmer was music from another place, music that WAS another place, and I loved that alternate universe, contra-Pete Townshend, sans Green Day. (I know what you're thinking, jaded music snob, but stop right there. The circus-show wackiness and extensive musical vocabulary employed by 1970s prog is no more bloated than the "three chords and TRUTH" pretension preached by Joe Strummer and it’s a hell of a lot more creative than the stolen blues and statutory-rape fantasies of The Rolling Stones.)

Back on the bus, I discreetly leafed through the liner notes. The lyrics were included, along with an absurdist prose piece ("Autoghosts keep the pace for the cabman’s early mobile race...") by lead singer Peter Gabriel (The guy that sings "Shock the Monkey"? Seriously?) that ostensibly explained the rock-opera plot. My little portable CD player, perhaps the most cherished Christmas gift in my young life, sputtered into operation and I heard the opening cascade of piano arpeggios fade up like stage lights. I stared out the window at passing cars and buildings, occasionally pressing the headphones tight against my ears to hear the quieter passages over the hum of the bus engine and the chipper, chaste silliness of my peers.

This is an ideal headphones album, and not just because a young Genesis fan doesn’t want Mom and Dad to hear lyrics like "Erogenous zones, I love you! Without you what would a poor boy do?" (The hilarious answer, delivered in the song’s climax: "Without you mankind handkinds though the blues!") On headphones, the dense arrangements, meticulously produced and stereo-panned, surround you in a subterranean cathedral built from Steve Hackett's inventive guitar, Tony Banks' alien synths, Mike Rutherford’s thick bass lines, Phill Collins' bursting, technical percussion (before he was Lord Pantywaist of the Soft Rock Kingdom, he was an amazing drummer) and Peter Gabriel's arsenal of cartoon voices. Lamb creates the kind of atmosphere that makes you forget you're trapped on a bus with thirty kids who think you're weird. As that bus carried us to the nation's capital, I was winding through purgatory with Rael.

Rael. Or as he’s known in the title-song, "RAEL IMPERIAL AEROSOL KID!" He is nether the grim narcissist of Pink Floyd's The Wall or the hippie messiah of The Who's Tommy. This is a much more dangerous story than those classic rock bitchfests-of-the-famous. Rael is a New York punk rapist who burns things for fun and descends into an underground afterlife that exists only in Peter Gabriel's twisted imagination, where he chases his genitals into a tunnel, or something like that.

I was enraptured with this album. It was dramatic and theatrical, contrasting chaos and serenity, building careful countermelodies and quirky chord changes. The melodies were familiar, but strange, like nursery songs shredded and patched back together. The phantasmagoric allegory in the lyrics particularly captivated me. This wasn't the hollow motivation-speak that I thought surrounded me at church, and it wasn't the winking worldliness that I thought surrounded me at school. This was uncomfortable. There was some dark territory here; rape, castration, damnation, that part where Rael has sex with the snake women and then they die and then he eats their bodies… It took some figuring out. It was ambiguous and confusing. Paced with a number of tension-building passages, it required patience. Filled with meta-textual detail, (quotes from other pop songs, lines about Lenny Bruce, etc.) it presupposed prior knowledge. It demanded a reaction from the listener in order to complete the experience.

Apart from Genesis and Nate's Prince imitation, the retreat was embarrassing or boring or upsetting, depending on the moment. There were loud, earnest presentations. There was dull, swaying "praise music" and lots of showy public prayer. I was terrified at how many products were being sold in the name of Jesus, and when I mentioned to the youth pastor that it reminded me of that business in the temple when Christ chases out the profiteers, he stroked his goatee and said I might be on to something. Of course, this event was not about the Christ depicted in the gospels; it was about Sanitized American Jesus, who lacks all the danger, creativity and disturbing viewpoints of his scriptural counterpart. Real shame, that. I loved danger, creativity and disturbing viewpoints. Whenever I had a free moment, I was back between headphones, absorbing The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, which was filled with all three.

My youth pastor worried that the dangerous messages in the music I liked were distracting me from his ministry and he was right, but this distraction was the very escape I needed. In the denouement of Peter Gabriel's mad narrative, Rael sacrifices himself to save his brother and the Imperial Aerosol Kid is redeemed. The world is haunted and frightening, but if we learn to lay down our lives for others, somewhere in all this mystery even the most troubled lost lamb has hope for redemption.

A dangerous message indeed.

NICOLAS JAAR: Space is Only Noise

On his debut album, released earlier this year, Nicolas Jaar creates caverns like King Tubby, sputters kicks and clops like Flying Lotus, sings like a young Leonard Cohen, samples soul voices like RJD2, plucks at pianos like Max Richter, cyberneticizes like Kraftwerk and locks organic sounds into electronic grids like Ricardo Villalobos. These reference points are handy, but misleading. This is a cohesive suite of tracks that all sound like Nicolas Jaar; playful and patient in wide open spaces. It's a lazy record; not artistically lazy (Jaar's ingenuity is obvious), but relaxed and dreamlike. When you were a kid, did you ever play outside first thing in the morning? That feeling of still-heavy eyelids and dawning possibility is what it feels like to listen to Space is Only Noise.

What roots Jaar most firmly in the "electronic music" camp is the way many of these tracks are structured according to the addition and subtraction of layers. Like Legos, each element is designed to fit with every other element. Jaar's pacing is uncanny, never hurried, never tedious, and when something new is added it is not just an insular earworm - it alters what is already present by subtly shifting context. During "Keep Me There" a piano part cycles and cycles, and when an extra sprinkling (of three simple notes) is dashed in, the original piano cycle is suddenly new again, changed by its relationship with the surrounding elements.

This isn't just a series of loops and grids, though. Not only does Jaar play some lilting live piano (meticulously edited, it seems, but basically live) on "Sunflower" and the two similar tracks that bookend the record, he performs some bona fide pop songs (the whimsical "Problems With the Sun" and the monochrome neon synth-pop gem "Space is only Noise if You Can See"). It’s a testament to Jaar’s big-picture cognizance that these tracks sit so nicely alongside things like the marshmellow synths on "Colomb" and that vocoded Demis Rousso soundalike crooning through "Balance Her In Between Your Eyes".

I hate this guy a little, because he's only 21 and this record accomplishes everything I've tried (with a tragic lack of success) to accomplish in my own paltry attempts to make electronic music. What a jerk, right? I mean, the audacity! It's a safe bet that Nicolas Jaar isn't interested in burrowing into one little niche and staying there. Future projects could take him anywhere, and envy aside I hope they do.

RADIOHEAD: The King of Limbs

Since everyone is going to assess this only in relation to previous Radiohead releases, I'll just be upfront:
1. Kid A
2. OK Computer
3. In Rainbows
4. Amnesiac
5. The King of Limbs <---------------- (Not bad!)
6. The Bends
7. Hail to the Thief
8. Pablo Honey 

I never thought I would describe a Radiohead record as playful and sexy, but here it is. When I was in junior high, OK Computer hit me like a freight because I was paranoid and pretentious and it was too. Hail to the Theif came out just as I was developing an interest in (and by that I mean "a chip on my shoulder about") politics. In 2011 I've mellowed out quite a bit, and even if I wouldn’t describe myself as "playful and sexy" I will say I’m far less concerned with sneering technocratic rebellion than my teenage self. Like so many of their previous records, this one kinda hit me at just the right moment. I came home on a Friday after an emotionally exhausting substitute run at a local high school, found out it was available A DAY EARLY and collapsed to it. Just what I needed.

This is a good one. I even like the latest installment in Thom Yorke's quest to write "Pyramid Song" as many times as possible (this one's even better than "Pyramid Song"!).

I saw Radiohead do a webcast on the internet in 2007 or so. Part of it was the band acting as DJs and they played Fela Kuti, M.I.A. and Burial. MF DOOM claims he's making an album with ThomYorke. "Excuse me, I noticed you like the same bands I like - let's be best friends forever." See, Radiohead take influences from all these different things I like (Penderecki, Autechre, Can, Mingus, The Stone Roses - even Flying Lotus on this one) and then spit them back out as pretty pop songs. I'm on board with that project, and I think it's fine that Radiohead's influences (the usual stuff loved by insular music nerds like you) are so prominently displayed on the sleeves of their fashionable fair-trade jackets. This band is like a filmmaker who is so immersed in the oeuvres of the auteurs that his own work is covered in Bergman sauce and minced Ozu. What's-a-mattah, you don't like a little Ozu on your pulp?

We were playing this at my after-school job and these were the reactions:

First Coworker: "I don't like this. It's just a bunch of sounds."

Me: "That's what music is - a bunch of sounds."

First Coworker: "Yeah, but this is too... different."

Second Coworker: "It's like being in a tripped-out video game."

Third Coworker: "I'm glad we're listening to this because this music makes me feel really good."

Third Coworker wins.

My girlfriend, upon discovering that after three years of silence Radiohead put out an album that is 38 minutes long, said "That's all they've got after three years? In that time, I earned a doctorate." She did, too, and I perfected my Thom Yorke impression. It scares little kids and old people.