Staff Lists: Overlooked Records 2013

It seems clear that 2013 has been an exceptional year for new music. The months of May and June in particular saw an astounding run of great records, some of which arrived on a huge crest of hype (Daft Punk, Kanye West), some of which bubbled up from the underground (Deafheaven, Dirty Beaches, After Dark 2). But there are always excellent records that you miss, releases that for one reason or another don't get around as much. Here are some of our favorites in that vein. None of these releases received a Best New Music designation and not all were rated above an 8.0, but they're all worth revisiting. Read, listen, and click through for the full reviews. We'll be back with album reviews on Monday.

Aye Nako
Unleash Yourself
[self-released]

Aye Nako: "Cut It Off" on SoundCloud.

Pop punk has generally been considered the province of teenagers (or at least adults in a state of arrested development). But lately the genre seems to be having its twentysomething moment, as a generation of bands who grew up on Drive-Thru Records comps, studded belts, and VFW-hall all-ages shows bring their power chords to (ever so slightly) more mature concerns. In the same spirit of the prolific Don Giovanni roster or Swearin's shambolic 2012 self-titled LP comes Unleash Yourself, the charmingly scrappy debut from Brooklyn four-piece Aye Nako. On tunes like "Molasses" and "Cut It Off", the band specializes in the kind of rumbling, ramshackle guitar pop that always sounds one step away from utter chaos-- which is a perfect vibe for songs about that youthful art of trying (and more often failing) to get your shit together. "Watch me hit snooze again and again," singer/guitarist Mars Ganito sings on the overcast "In Sickness, Pt. 1", his voice warbling in all the right places. Hopeful, disillusioned, and occasionally sharply funny ("The Bible Belt gave you a rash, too," he howls on "For the Inverted") Unleash Yourself turns the growing pains of its members and its chosen genre into gold. --Lindsay Zoladz

Classixx
Hanging Gardens
[Innovative Leisure]

Classixx: "Holding On" on SoundCloud.

L.A. producers Tyler Blake and Michael David ride the momentum established by some choice remixes into the low-frills Hanging Gardens, a straightforward dance record that's easy to love. Contributors like LCD Soundsystem's Nancy Whang, Kisses' Jesse Kivel, Active Child's Pat Grossi, and Sarah Chernoff give the proceedings a warm, friendly feel, resulting in swirling jams like the Chernoff-featuring "A Stranger Love" and bouncing, squealing songs like "Holding On". The best example of the album's joyful nature is probably "I'll Get You", a shimmering cut that features Junior Senior's Jeppe Laursen chanting "Do you like bass? Do you, do you like bass?" As mentioned in our review, it's the kind of moment that could easily come off as cloying or silly, but Classixx find a way to make it work. That's a snapshot of Hanging Gardens as a whole, a modest record that sneakily transcends its limitations. --Corban Goble

Colin Stetson
New History Warfare Vol. 3: To See More Light
[Constellation]

Colin Stetson: "High Above a Grey Green Sea" on SoundCloud.

Despite the consistently vast and overwhelming nature of the music that Colin Stetson has released over the last 11 years, it can be easy to forget him when it comes to listing what could be termed “big records,” the ones that come out of nowhere and shake you until you’re dumbstruck and limp. In the past 12 months, that list includes releases like Swans’ The Seer, the Knife’s Shaking the Habitual, and Deafhaven’s Sunbather. The final part of the Montreal saxophonist’s New History Warfare trilogy deserves to stand alongside any of those for its vanguard approach. To See More Light uses the same tools as 2011’s Judges, though switching the voices of Shara Worden and Laurie Anderson for Justin Vernon (on his best non-Bon Iver turn yet), but somehow pushes Stetson’s harrowing sound somewhere far more heartbreaking and desperate.

The two things I admire most about Stetson are his willingness to eschew external narratives and imagery from his music and his ability to wring something profoundly moving and meditative from a bludgeoning palette. His torrent of howled vocals and steaming saxophone lines are couched within the percussion of his instrument’s keys, constructing a desperate vista something like a landmass broken apart by an earthquake. And although Stetson’s performance style would bust anyone else’s lungs for the sheer force of it, on To See More Light, he’s flexing more musical muscle; there are mercilessly manic attacks, elephantine bellows, yanked-away, bungee-tethered teases of catharsis, courtly, complex mournful filigrees. Listen to feel cleansed, and awed. --Laura Snapes

Doldrums
Lesser Evil
[Arbutus]

On multiple levels (including the cover art), we're viewing Doldrums frontman Airick Woodhead through the prism of a broken computer screen on his full-length debut. The majority of Lesser Evil was recorded on a laptop borrowed from friend, collaborator, and fellow Montreal scene fixture Claire Boucher of Grimes, a narrative-establishing factoid that you're obligated to mention in 2013. But it's also an apt visual metaphor for Woodhead's sonic approach. Singles "Egypt" and "She Is the Wave" could've been straight-up electro-pop at one point, but they end up cracked, warped, and spiderwebbed as Woodhead throws in that one extra beat before the hook, an unexpected chord change or a yell that initially throws the entire thing off balance. To call it pop deconstruction sells it short; there are some masterfully crafted melodies underneath the yelping, while "Holographic Sandcastles" and "Sunrise" serve as gorgeous near-interludes that balance out the caffeinated, teeth-chattering highs. Doldrums is more of a pop contortionist that establishes a link to a decade prior when Black Dice and Animal Collective were starting to emerge from their noisy origins into something that could convey the forward-thinking excitability of their local scene to the world at large. But while Woodhead may owe them a debt of gratitude, the truth is, from the sounds of Centipede Hz and Mr. Impossible, those bands would've loved to call Lesser Evil their own. --Ian Cohen

Inc.
no world
[4AD]

Among the worshippers gathered outside the temple of Sade is Inc., Los Angeles-based brothers who have piloted away from earlier, more formative experimenting (for a while, they operated under the name Teen Inc) and into no world, their full-length debut for 4AD. While it doesn't pop in the same places as the more heralded releases from like-minded artists Rhye or How to Dress Well, no world creates and sustains its own deliberately-downstated-but-also-somehow-kind-of-muscular sound. Opener "the place" helps render the placid pulse, a groove that never quite overpowers Andrew and Daniel Aged's whispery vocals but sometimes comes close, creating an interesting tension. Not every album is designed to knock you over; no world would rather sneak up on you. Notorious for being the studio equivalent of gym rats, the duo's layering and nuance pays off, revealing more on each listen. It'll take a few of those to get there, but it's worth the investment. --Corban Goble

Jagwar Ma
Howlin
[Marathon Artists]

Jagwar Ma: "The Throw" on SoundCloud.

Australian duo Jagwar Ma have, along with Temples, recently earned the (not always reputable) endorsement of nascent Oasis man Noel Gallagher, and listening to their debut LP, Howlin, it's easy to understand why. Gabriel Winterfield and Jono Ma's heady mix of gauzy psychedelia and baggy beats are ear-candy for anyone who's ever gotten higher than the sun while listening to "Higher Than the Sun". The sound works so well, it's surprising it took a group this long to bring it back to the present day. But pegging Howlin as a pure nostalgia trip overlooks the more distinctive elements Jagwar Ma bring to the table. The record plays like a series of crashing waves, as the murkiness of every rolling tide ("Four", "Uncertainty") gives way to moments of simple psych-pop radiance ("That Loneliness", "Let Her Go"). At its best, this push-and-pull is reminiscent of last year's big-ticket candy-psych blowout, Tame Impala's expansive Lonerism. --Larry Fitzmaurice

Jai Paul
Jai Paul
[self-released]

Since we heard first his breakout demo "BTSTU" in 2010, London-area producer/singer/songwriter Jai Paul has kept an impeccably low profile. The mystifying circumstances surrounding a collection of his songs that leaked this spring have only made his case murkier: late on a Saturday night in April, an album was offered for sale on BandCamp, containing 16 untitled tracks. By Monday, the album had been removed (it was said to be a collection of unfinished demos uploaded from a stolen laptop), and those who paid were to be offered a refund. We've not heard a word from Jai Paul since, but the music, whatever its source, has left us much to explore.  

After many listens, I started to think that Jai Paul had woven secret messages into these songs-- small, abstract clues meant to provide listeners with a scavenger hunt of insights into his unorthodox approach to releasing music. "In the company of thieves, will I stay or will I leave?" he asks, almost pleading, through the muted percolation of the bass on the third track (none were given titles). "Will they steal away my life? Will I go down without a fight? I might." On one of the many sampled interstitial pieces, an unspecified woman explains that something "could almost melt in the mouth if cooked properly… but I like it raw." Could it be a reference to the jagged and unfinished nature of Jai Paul's songs, which sound like the seedlings of fuller-bodied hits? Is this a big conceptual art project for the producer, who might be winking at us the whole way through his virtuoso-recluse narrative?

It's a melodramatic proposal, but you can't put it past someone with Jai Paul's level of savvy. He's someone who grabbed a big handful of contemporary sounds and talking points-- lo-fi laptop production, sample collages, appropriation of global music, outré R&B, a shadowy online identity-- and spun them into one of the most spellbinding collection of songs (or non-songs) that's been released (or not released) this year. Who's to say he didn't calculate the whole thing? --Carrie Battan

Jenny Hval
Innocence Is Kinky
[Rune Grammofon]

Jenny Hval: "The Seer" on SoundCloud.

How did anyone overlook an album that begins with the whispered line "That night, I watched people fucking on my computer?" Perhaps it was more that we looked away; on Innocence is Kinky, Jenny Hval went to great lengths to disturb herself, and you. Produced by longtime PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish, Innocence Is Kinky bristles with provocations: Hval's lyrics roll around gleefully in tangles of body, mind, sexuality, gender. "My work is not meant to keep people happy or give them an escape," Hval stated flatly in a Pitchfork interview. That may be true, but she also didn't set out to make an alienating record: the music on Innocence Is Kinky is beckoning and beautiful, one that takes full advantage of Hval's striking voice, which can be operatic or childlike or gothic depending on the song. "The voice is a second flesh that cannot be seen," she sings, gorgeously, on the album's closer and emotional peak "The Seer", and on Innocence Hval is furiously shedding skins. --Jayson Greene

KEN mode
Entrench
[Season of Mist]

KEN mode's name is an acronym for "Kill Everyone Now", frontman Jesse Matthewson has one of the most frightening glares you'll ever witness, and the Winnipeg trio's adamantium alloy of post-hardcore, punk, and metal could slice your head clean off like their fellow countryman Wolverine. But let's talk about brains for a second; not just in the context of the math-rock song structures or the surgical precision of their rhythm section. Pay close attention to the words underneath Matthewson's screech and you'll hear Entrench for what it is: one of the most lyrically righteous albums in any genre this year. 

Entrench can definitely help you get through whatever shitty day you're having, but KEN mode ain't gonna hold your hand through it. "Counter Culture Complex" shouts down the condescension of liberal guilt with careening hooks, "Figure Your Life Out" and "Your Heartwarming Story Makes Me Sick" shout down the condescension encoded in society's expectation of upward mobility, while "Romeo Must Never Know" finds KEN mode internally bruised from all that shouting, a defeated tour diary entry where Matthewson spends another night sleeping next to litter boxes, wondering if things will ever be different. That might not be the case anymore - their fifth album did get longlisted for Canada's Polaris Prize. But listen to "The Terror Pulse" if you ever want to remember what it feels like when being ignored and overlooked dehumanizes you into a living weapon.  --Ian Cohen

Kevin Gates
The Luca Brasi Story
[Breadwinners Association]

"I don’t really have a writing process any more. I don’t know, If I was to tell you [how I come up with my material], I’d be lying." This is what Kevin Gatestold a Complex interviewer in March, one month after releasing his mixtape The Luca Brasi Story. Few rappers step this carefully around the threat of "lying," especially with such an innocuous question, but this fierce dedication to emotional honesty is part of why people have chosen to care deeply about Gates. The Baton Rouge rapper has developed a warm, fluid style that relies equally on singing as it does on rapping-- he has a wonderful ear for both. And either way, he always says exactly what he means: "What the fuck is up with these A&Rs criticizing music they can't make?/ Poking fun at my struggle, I don't find shit funny, I live in places that ain't safe/ 2008, I got my leg blown off/ Any given day could get my head blow off," goes a typically bracing passage on "I Need It". Gates' career has some hard-luck vet notches in it-- there was some YMCMB time, some jail time-- but Brasi got him an Atlantic Records deal, which means exponentially more people will be given the chance to care about Gates in the near future.  --Jayson Greene

Laura Mvula
Sing to the Moon
[RCA]

On the surface, British singer/songwriter Laura Mvula's debut Sing to the Moon sounds like the soundtrack to a modern fairytale-- soulful, impeccably arranged pop dotted with a bright, harp-dappled twinkle. But squint hard enough at the mist and these 12 songs start to feel less like fantasies than studies in hard-won realism; Mvula has a knack for capturing the precise moment when her down-but-not-out characters realize that the prince is a jerk and the fairy godmother is a no-show. But no matter: "I don't need love to rescue me," she sings on the sighing but resiliently punchy ballad "Make Me Lovely," which, like the album's other standouts "She", "Like the Morning Dew", and "Green Garden", showcases Mvula's signature trick of gracefully pivoting between between wistfulness and defiance. Moon is a multi-dimensional tour through the full range of Mvula's voice, which calls to mind the punchy grit of Amy Winehouse, the smoky poise of Nina Simone and the fleet-footed cool of Janelle Monáe, while still retaining an idiosyncratic personality of its own. "Is there anybody out there?" she hollers into the void during one sparsely arranged number-- a fair question from a promising new talent who's wasted no time carving out her own lane. --Lindsay Zoladz

Omar S
Thank You For Letting Me Be Myself
[FXHE]

Thank You for Letting Me Be Myself finds Detroit native Omar S doing his usual, highly enjoyable thing with the sounds of acid and techno, his hometown's pride and joy. But there are detours towards smoother, more easily accessible territories, too: there's the contemplative keys of closer "It's Money in the D" and "This Shit Baby"'s jazzy piano flourishes, while "Rewind" is as close as Omar S has come to pop-oriented vocal house in recent memory. These gorgeous melodic passages temper Thank You's rougher fare to make for a well-rounded full-album experience, not a given in the world of dance music.

The occasional vulnerability of Thank You is a different look for a producer who has always seemed incredibly sure of himself. For 2009's Fabric 45, he notoriously turned in a mix entirely comprised of his own material, one of only five people in the history of the series to do so; his last album was called It Can Be Done But Only I Can Do It, and its big highlight was titled "Here's Your Trance Now Dance". Given his history, Omar S has earned a certain stodginess, but the relative open-heartedness of Thank You For Letting Me Be Myself suggests there are more sides to his music than we imagined.

 --Larry Fitzmaurice

Parquet Courts
Light Up Gold
[What's Your Rupture?/Dull Tools]

Light Up Gold, the whip-smart debut from Brooklyn-via-Texas jangle-punks Parquet Courts, saw initial release in late 2012 but gained a wider audience when it was reissued by NYC lo-fi institution What's Yr Rupture? For many, the record was the first exposure to the songwriting talents of co-bandleader Andrew Savage, who's also one-half of Denton wiseacres Fergus & Geronimo. Over the last three years, F&G have released two full-lengths that place them squarely in the lineage of humor-heavy nerd-rock aesthetes like Ween and Sparks; Parquet Courts are similarly indebted to the past, with wiry guitar lines and sing-speak vocals that evoke 1970s NYC post-punk's stop-start tendencies.

Parquet Courts are a funny band, too (check the oft-quoted line "Socrates died in the fucking gutter!"), but their sense of humor is less explicit and rooted in rock's backpages than Fergus & Geronimo's über-referential joke-cracking. "Stoned and Starving", for instance, is exactly what you'd expect given the title, with references to nervously scanning nutritional labels in an altered state. The ability to laugh at yourself has always been an indicator of a good sense of humor, and Light Up Gold's mid-20s-pathos-as-comedy shows that Parquet Courts can hang with the best of them. --Larry Fitzmaurice

Pharmakon
Abandon
[Sacred Bones]

Pharmakon: "Crawling on Bruised Knees" on SoundCloud.

Whitehouse, Swans, Prurient-- you needn't be familiar with any entry into the abrasive trajectory of power electronics and noise to understand Pharmakon. The project is helmed by 23-year-old New Yorker Margaret Chardiet, and her Abandon LP is hellish, unnerving electronic noise that looks you in the eye, the brutal vulnerability of Chardiet exorcising what's boiled inside her. There is terror and despair and an engrossing industrial pulse to this deeply confrontational music-- an alarm that summons you to move, tied by skyward death screams that are punishing like Michael Gira. "It is human connection," Chardiet says of Pharmakon's core. "Inspiration is not just the music I listen to or literature I read. What inspires you to think? Why are you a human and not an ape? That is inspiration."

Recently a friend told me that while he'd enjoyed Pharmakon's intense live show, he couldn't imagine a specific context in everyday life when it would seem natural to play Abandon through headphones. But there is no one place. I've made a habit of putting Abandon on while traveling to Manhattan during rush hour. Amidst the chaos, I am made so acutely present and connected to my surroundings while simultaneously feeling as though I exist in another dimension of Chardiet's doing. "Bound to/ A vision/ I have not yet/ Created," she screams as the record closes, but Abandon helps you better see things as they really are.
--Jenn Pelly

Power Trip
Manifest Decimation
[Southern Lord]

Prurient
Through the Window
[Blackest Ever Black]

Longtime followers of Dominic Fernow like to point out how the sprawling, unwieldy discography of Prurient has no definitive document or easy entry point. Through the Window might not be either of those, but it's certainly the most accessible thing Fernow's done outside of his former band Cold Cave, following in the path pointed out by 2011's Time's Arrow for a half hour where his noise past and electronic future reach a fascinating, unsettling armistice. Bookended by 10-minute masterworks of mesmeric rhythms and charred textures, Through the Window grants Prurient some timely peers - you could safely recommend this to someone who wished Haxan Cloak had beats or that Burial conveyed terror more than dread. But it's hard not to think of "Terracotta Spine" as a definitive Prurient moment after all, as Fernow bisects Through the Window with a screeching assault of splattered noise and blood on the dance floor. --Ian Cohen

Sandwell District
Fabric 69
[Fabric]

Over the last decade, the darkly shaded techno collective Sandwell District picked up where key member Regis' 1990s label Downwards left off. Their music has drawn heavily from post-punk and industrial's bracing din and dub techno's tunnel-vision atmosphere while techno as a whole veered toward more minimal concerns. Sandwell District released the kind of dance music that would sound at home soundtracking a horror film as well as it worked on the dance floor, and the intricate, exquisitely produced Fabric 69 is a summation of that aesthetic.

S-D main men Regis and Function, who have toured under the name since the label's shuttering at the end of 2011, stitched together 30 tracks over 75 minutes, and the result is a harrowing yet deeply luxurious work that, like all great mixes, begs to be heard from start to finish. As they've said on the collective's website for a while now, Sandwell District is dead, and a recent Resident Advisor feature painted the pair's current working relationship as strained, suggesting that this very may well be the end for the foreseeable future; Regis himself has already moved on with James Ruskin and fellow S-D associate Silent Servant in the form of a new label, Jealous God. As the noisier areas of experimental music continue to turn their ears towards the dancefloor, then, Fabric 69 ties a bow around the past while pointing towards the future of all things that go "thump" in the night. --Larry Fitzmaurice

Torres
Torres
[self-released]

Torres: "Honey" on SoundCloud.

Anyone can smear danger out of aggression, but teasing it from weary silence takes a rare talent. Torres, the debut album from 22-year-old Nashville resident Mackenzie Scott, wreaks its devastation with just her voice and electric guitar, with occasional backing from a slight band. “Fool me once and I won’t make a sound/ Fool me twice, there’s shame to go around,” she sings on “Chains”, a song with the menacing grace of a match being skimmed over a barrel of oil. It ends with her scratching down her instrument’s fretboard as if snapping someone’s spine one vertebrae at a time, before the whole thing implodes with a jerk, Scott seemingly noosed from behind with her own amp cable. The circular, disturbed acoustic rush of “Come to Terms” feels like standing in the middle of a dusty, rumbling freeway, tempting fate; the subdued static warp on closer, suicide ballad “Waterfall”, smuggles a feeling of utterly crushed hopelessness into your gut.

One of Torres’ most spellbinding qualities is the way these songs live with extremes-- of heartbreak, regret, revenge-- but exercise control so convincing that they seem like manageable, everyday emotional states. On the first couple of listens, Torres may sound guileless and raw; yet listen harder to a song like “Jealousy and I”, where her low, tangled guitar line pools with reverb, echoes of the original performance lapping against one another. “Jealousy and I, we’re two of a kind,” Scott sings, accepting the destructive emotion as part of her loving manner, her voice taking on the same refracted, swimmy quality as her guitar. It’s Scott’s gimlet eye that makes Torres so captivating. “I wanna tell you everything,” she sings on “Don’t Run Away, Emilie”. “I’ll be the truest one you know, if you stay a while.” Like all the best psychological thrillers, it’s hard to look away. --Laura Snapes

Tree
Sunday School II: When Church Lets Out
[Creative Control]

Tree: "The King" on SoundCloud.

In his Pitchfork review, Miles Raymer smartly tagged Tree as "something like the David Banner of the Midwest."  It's a perfect reference point for the Chicago rapper/producer: Imagine a David Banner who was never torn to pieces in vain pursuit of a pop crossover, one who was always as confident and impassioned as the guy on "Cadillacs on 22's", and you're in Tree's neighborhood. 

Sunday School II is the self-described "soul-trap" artist's high-water mark so far, as musical and accomplished a rap mixtape as has been released this year. Tree is an incredible producer, adept at warping recognizable samples into unfamiliar, startling shapes--  hear what he does to Elvis's "Can't Help Fallin In Love" on Sunday School II's "King" and marvel at it-- and at manipulating tension with unpredictable drum-pad rhythms. His voice has a ragged edge and a hint of a wry smile in it, which softens his harder lyrics and deepens his thoughtful ones. Calling him "soulful" feels pat, but there's no other word for music this sincere and personal. --Jayson Greene

William Tyler
Impossible Truth
[Merge]

William Tyler: "Country of Illusion" on SoundCloud.

If someone listens to only one instrumental guitar record in 2013, there's a good chance it's going to be Impossible Truth -- being on the same label as Arcade Fire and Spoon gets you an unusual amount of exposure in this realm. But unlike most crossover records functioning outside of pop, William Tyler's second album doesn't capitalize on some ineffable star quality or serve as a substitute for the entirety of the genre. Tyler's prodigious skills impress the connoisseur and welcome the newcomer, reverential and idiosyncratic in equal measure. This isn't outre stuff-- in fact, if you've heard Led Zeppelin's "Bron-Yr-Aur", the fluid fingerpicking, sprightly melodies and open-tuned drones will ring familiar.

A gorgeously recorded album, Impossible Truth's pure sound is immaculate, rightfully putting the focus on Tyler's fingers, which evoke a lyricism and emotional evocativeness that escapes most bands with vocals. There's a sweet, searching playfulness to Impossible Truth, as Tyler sets scenes ("Cadillac Desert", "Hotel Catatonia") and lets you tell the story. Have you ever come up with poetry, lyrics or just a warm sentiment to a loved one you wanted to express, but couldn't find the right musical vessel for them? There's a good chance you'll find it on Impossible Truth. --Ian Cohen