The Orb No Sounds Are Out of Bounds (Cooking Vinyl) The English ambient house legends have had an uneven if steady output since their landmark debut in 1991, but they seem to have settled into a reliable if redundant groove after their 2012 collaboration with Lee “Scratch” Perry. No Sounds Are Out of Bounds brings […]
Chromeo Head Over Heels (Atlantic) Montreal’s gift to dancing frat bros returns with a phone book of guests, starting with DRAM, coming off like Biz Markie on “Must’ve Been” (as in “must’ve been high”). French Mon- tana and Stefflon Don follow up on “Don’t Sleep” and it’s clear Chromeo wants you to WOO PARTY! “Right […]
Golden Dawn Arkestra Children of the Sun (Nine Mile) While borrowing Sun Ra’s band name and giving songs titles like “Ra Horahkty” and “Wings of Ra,” Golden Dawn Arkestra comes from a planet that’s as much spy rock as cosmic jazz. Despite some vintage keyboards and occasional attempts at menace, GDA never fully weirds the […]
Melody’s Echo Chamber Bon Voyage (Fat Possum) Melody Prochet’s 2012 debut was produced by Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker and shared many stylistic markers with Impala’s Innerspeaker, which was just peachy. Bon Voyage was co-produced by Dungen’s Reine Fiske, but while Fiske’s guitar and Dungen main man Gustav Esjtes’ flute are present here, they’re not exactly […]
Chip Wickham Shamal Wind (Lovemonk) Wickham, a flute-and-reeds player who has worked with artists from Badly Drawn Boy to Roy Ayers, relocated from Manchester to Qatar and emerged as a bandleader on 2017’s La Sombra—a fruitful hybrid of ’60s modal jazz and funk with Latin shadings. This follow-up is more of the same, and buoyed […]
Domenico Lancellotti The Good is a Big God (Luaka Bop) One of the most creative interpreters of traditional Brazilian pop, Lancellotti puts an odd foot forward on The Good is a Big God with the plodding incantation “Voltar Se” before correcting course and finding a groove on the title track, a clavinet-laden postcard from some […]
King Tuff “The Other” (Sub Pop) Didn’t King Tuff used to rock? Last year, an exhausted Kyle Thomas paused to recover and reflect—and he’s clearly going for some kind of contemplative statement on “The Other,” (yes, the title carries those pretentious quotes). But whether about alienation on the titletrack or about toxic technology on “Circuits in […]
The Voidz Virtue (RCA) Albert Hammond Jr. Francis Trouble (Red Bull) It seemed the Strokes had already endured the breathless-hype-into-vicious-backlash cycle even before its debut full-length, Is This It, dropped in 2001. The band’s momentum, attitude and simply perfectly simple songwriting blew through that milestone with authority. But since then, the band’s output has been […]
Van Hunt Popular (Blue Note) The “great lost” album by the vastly undersung Van Hunt is no longer lost, but it’s pretty great. The Ohio savant caught notice in 2004 with his self-titled debut and Grammy-nominated single “Dust,” then took a leap forward with On the Jungle Floor, and its agile mix of soul, funk, […]
First Aid Kit Ruins (Sony) Stockholm’s Klara and Johanna Söderberg have lived a charmed life. In 2007, Swedish state radio turned one of their demos into a summer hit. In 2008, their video of Fleet Foxes’ “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” went viral, and their 2010 debut won rave reviews—all while they were still teenagers. On […]