Author: brian

Artist: Rudi Zygadlo

Album: Tragicomedies

Scotland’s Rudi Zygadlo was introduced to me, for his 2010 debut the Great Western Layman, as a maker of something electronic called “dubstep”. He does do clever things with electro-sonic manipulation, about which more shortly, but that label slowed my recognition of what on Tragicomedies is at least as important: he writes excellent, distinctive vocal melodies. They’re graceful, and modest in scope, but full of odd intervals, sharps or flats where none would be expected. They have a composery feel, and at first the only comparisons I thought of — once my brain had caught up — were hopelessly obscure: Liam Singer, Chris Letcher, Stars in Battledress, William D. Drake. But no, by Russian Dolls I’d realized his tunes might pass as slowed-down fragments from Broadway’s Stephen Sondheim (Into the Woods, Sweeney Todd, Assassins). By Tragicomedies itself, aided by the arrangement, I’d recognized Zygadlo‘s sometime kinship as a tunesmith with Steely Dan (or Francis and the Lights). By the Domino Quivers I’d picked up on the resemblance to some of XTC’s slower, more pastoral songs. Sometimes even Crowded House recorded songs that were a little evasive in their prettiness. There, now you have starting points.

So about that electronic tomfoolery. First of all, Zygadlo‘s voice seems mild and pleasant – like Roddy Frame of Aztec Camera, or Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout – but we don’t hear it untampered. There’s often several of him, pitch-corrected in harmony, or sent through a vocoder (a la Laurie Anderson on O Superman), or chipmunked, or deepened into a robotic Big Bopper (especially on the doo-wop Waltz for Daphnis), or sent through a dozen other forms of distortion. Instrumentally, many songs are based in classically-trained piano, but electronics will wobble the pitch, fade the notes artificially in and out, slow down or briefly warp-speed the playing. Some shiny keyboard lines are purely artificial, such as Catharine‘s synthesizer insisting a grin while it tries to  distract you from its machine indigestion; I guess that’s dubstep, though without Skrillex’s abrasiveness. Some sound like ’70s Wurlitzer organs; Tragicomedy sounds, specifically, like Steely Dan mixed on a computer while my 4-year-old jabbed at the keys and tried to swipe the mouse. The Deaf School could even play in goth or ’80s dance clubs, though not without inspiring questions.

By final tracks On and Variously Made Men, it feels entirely natural that people have electronic filters attached to their vocal cords; that notes sound louder half-a-second *after* they’re played; that instruments rebuild themselves from scratch from one measure to another. Tragicomedies creates its own world of pop elegance.

– Brian Block

To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2012 page!

Artist: Paul Weller

Album: Sonik Kicks

Paul Weller is a major star in England; has been since 1977. First he led the Jam, the most articulate and cautious of the first-wave punk stars. Then he led the Style Council, who made smooth soul/ R+B/ swing jazz musics. Then, under his own name, he spent two decades making rootsier soul-rock: brand new Classic Rock for the Adult Contemporary stations. I’ve never really been a fan. But suddenly, in 2012, at 54 years old, he essentially made his own Super Furry Animals album: flashy, groove-based, eclectic, ultra-modern, and above all, playful. (As Pooh observed, you never can tell with Top of the Pops stars.) Sonik Kicks he called it, presumably misspelling it to avoid licensing hassles from Sonic the Hedgehog; it went to #1 on the U.K. albums chart.

There’s a lot of kinds of music here, and you just need to wait a bit if you don’t like one, since most of the tracks range from 2:00 to 3:41 in length. Kling I Klang rushes by as a punk polka strafed by “futuristic” synth music from ’70s concept albums, and also by autoharp. By the Waters is soft, plaintive, and violin-centered. That Dangerous Age is peppy neo-Motown decorated with prog-rock organ and hip-hop/ techno beatwork. Study in Blue, the one long track here, is like Blondie’s Call Me reworked into drifting and exploratory jazz-pop that wanders towards ambient techno; it works far better for me than stuff like that generally does. Perhaps because it feeds into Dragonfly (heavy psychedelic pop that reminds me of Babylon Zoo), then When Your Garden’s Overgrown (upbeat psychedelic power-pop full of bright-eyed keyboard lines), then Around the Lake (a high-speed 2:11 of menacing two-chord bass, alien twittering, echoed vocals, and echoed everything else). Etc.

Paul Weller‘s lyrics on Sonik Kicks are sketchy and mostly play on mood, although songs like That Dangerous Age show a continued talent for personality profiles. The song structures are straight-ahead and mostly play on mood, although a few — the slower ones, mostly — have nicely imaginative melodies. There are a lot of moods here, but the overriding one, to me, seems to be creative play. No wonder I’m warming to the guy.

– Brian Block

To see the rest of our favorites, visit our Favorite Albums of 2012 page!

Artist: Mawwal

Album: High Hills in the Creaving Road

My largest musical discovery of 2012 was songwriter/ band leader Jim Matus, long-ago Berklee composition student and guitar student of jazz great Pat Metheny. First, I discovered his three albums leading Paranoise, who began as a skronky, brassy,  angular New Wave band for Start a New Race, but evolved — here’s the relevant part — into making heavy, hypnotic World Music with tunings centered in the Afghanistan/ Pakistan region. Loud, distorted guitar rock was joined by string sections and tabla drums; by choral ideas swiped from Morocco and Bulgaria; by low didgeridoo drones. The results were equally suitable for dance music, trance music, or thoughtful headphone listening. If Paranoise’s Ishq were a 2012 release, it would be in my top ten. Though Paranoise has disbanded and Matus formed Mawwal instead, High Hills in the Creaving Road sounds far more to me like Paranoise than like anything else in my collection.

Not that Central Asian musical ideas should be completely alien or exotic. The songs center on guitar/bass that wouldn’t sound out of place on Alice in Chains’s calmer records, or some of Richard Thompson’s albums where he’s really in the mood to show off his darkness and his guitar skills, or even Alanis Morissette’s Baba/ Can’t Not just-got-back-from-India phase. They also use Indian tabla and African talking drums for percussion and (in We Must Fall ‘s case) long, wailing flute melodies, and theirmale/female harmonies and non-English duets make more sense on Eastern scales than on the ones Meat Loaf and Ellen Foley use. But Foley isn’t a bad comparison for the strength and flexibility of the (several) female singers — Richard Thompson’s low voice and careful diction, with less grouchiness and more sustain, would be a good comp for Matus’s singing. I don’t need to be educated to find the songs catchy. No Finer Men Than We even feels like a rousing Irish folk song — one somehow written with Middle Eastern scales and a trumpet solo, to be sure. I’d still try it on Dropkick Murphy or Pogues fans happily enough.

I’m not certain why I find Mawwal’s High Hills in the Creaving Road less terrific than Paranoise‘s Ishq. One notion is I’ve spent too little time with it (it was a November release). Another is that Paranoise had a bit less of Alice in Chains’s weightiness, and more of Fairport Convention’s or Jethro Tull’s limberness. They’re both quite good, though, and perhaps which comparison *you* prefer would help you decide among them.