For each year's first three quarters, we celebrate by sharing a list of our favorite music releases. Unlike our year-end lists, these quarter features are casually compiled, with an aim to spotlight the underdogs and the lesser-heard among the more popular picks. More from this series
Dawn Richard
Blackheart
[Our Dawn]
There can be no denying that Blackheart is the result of a fiercely independent vision. It distorts, it dismantles, it disrupts. The signs and signifiers of R&B are present and correct here — vocoders, 808s, synth washes, grandiose string sections — but with the assistance of producer Noisecastle III, Dawn Richard mutates and subverts them to establish her own gender-less, colour-less and genre-less worldview. By way of negative space, polyrhythmic beat programming, and densely layered instrumentation, Blackheart is at once daring and fully-formed, a studio experiment that succeeds largely because it doesn’t just upend the verse-chorus-verse methodology; it warps genre tropes and resists classification to a wildly self-mythologizing end in doing so. Indeed, following a veritable annus horribilis of breakups, bust-ups, and bereavements, Richard’s effort could’ve been viewed as a mere cog in a much wider narrative. Not so: rather, it is a narrative unto itself, one that sees her become Calypso, Billie Jean, and the phoenix in an autarchic song cycle of loss, discovery, and eventual (read: inevitable) triumph.
Drake
If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late
[Cash Money]
Instagram confirms that our society is even more obsessed with beauty and popularity than ever before. You’ve got to have the savvy — that Drake has — to be bold with social media, because making rap music in the age of a technocracy is an arms race. And to drop an album out of nowhere, like Beyoncé? Well, Drake can say that he did it. On If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, he doesn’t so much take the listener on a journey with him as return from the journey, bragging, telling stories, tweeting tweets, and posting pics with the braggadocio of #latergram after #latergram. For Drake, making music is part hard work and part social media performance — and then life goes on, like a meme.
Lotic
Heterocetera
[Tri Angle]
BDSM is draped all over the ear-piercing, high-frequency drones and clanking shuddering percussion of Heterocetera, Lotic’s Tri Angle debut. But pain isn’t simply transformed into perverse pleasure here, nor is it revealed as simple performance. This is distinctly painful music, melodic lines unresolved and dripping with anxiety and nervousness, samples decaying and weeping, thickets of buzzing noise upending hastily erected structures. This pain is allowed to blossom as real pain, real fear, real urgency. And yet there’s pleasure here too, a masochism built on the letting go, the physicality of bodies stimulated into movement and interactive cohesion through what might once have been termed body music, the permanently delayed release that nearly becomes a hope through its reiterated status as a potentiality. Not a synthesis of the pleasure/pain binary, but a simultaneous stimulation of both with a distinctly contemporary affect, Heterocetera is ominous, thundering, enveloping, and seductive, a dance floor of discrete and specific units that eschews a numbing universality in favor of a productive, well, heterogenesis.
Amnesia Scanner
AS ANGELS RIG HOOK
[Gum Artefacts]
“Where is my mind?” call androgynous voices encrypted into a gram of DNA (777 terabytes of data). The illegibility of AS ANGELS RIG HOOK comes primarily from Jaakko Pallasvuo’s remarkable text, with images of torn cheeks, tigers in mid-leap tattooed underneath fingernails, of augmented reality contact lenses re-envisioning memories of minerals and paper money pre-apocalypse. Amnesia Scanner’s deft splicing techniques create mutant soundscapes that visually contain Jaakko’s text; the words are trapped in steel barrels filled with the liquified swill of 1,000 cyborg tears. As an “audioplay,” it’s hard not to compare the piece to the work of Ryan Trecartin. Demonic, disembodied voices chatter to create a fragmented narrative coded into drones providing high-speed Wi-Fi, Gregorian monks, or “Google Krishna.” When taken in one sitting, it’s a fascinating data-trip that pins the assumed semiosis occurring in “high-club” music to the wall, letting its images drip down into oceans of pitch-black oil and salty, contaminated Red Bull.
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
A Year With 13 Moons
[Mexican Summer]
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s aesthetic on A Year With 13 Moons is a portmanteau of styles, reminiscent of the 1980s and yet unmoored and drifting in a way that can only signify its gestation in the present. The album attempts to fold aspects of his post-Love Is A Stream output — Conversations With Myself, Faceless Kiss, Songs of Remembrance — back into a single full-length set of compositions, but the artifact left in totality is far greater than what could be seen as first attempts at this style. The timbre of the LinnDrum as accompaniment on several tracks produces memories of my first encounters with it, wired into my brain since childhood because of Prince’s “When Doves Cry” and “Little Red Corvette,” while the aqueous guitar tone moves this work closer to The Cocteau Twins and Slowdive and away from Love Is A Stream and its My Bloody Valentine worship. Cantu-Ledesma has talked about this being his breakup album, and each time I hear the bombastic guitar swoon of “Love After Love,” I want to put my arm around him and tell him everything will be alright.
For each year's first three quarters, we celebrate by sharing a list of our favorite music releases. Unlike our year-end lists, these quarter features are casually compiled, with an aim to spotlight the underdogs and the lesser-heard among the more popular picks. More from this series
