“I’ve always been a good imitator. I love music. But I’m just not that original,” said James Murphy, bandleader and songwriter of LCD Soundsystem, to The New Yorker a few weeks ago. It’s true, Murphy’s music is many things, original not being one of them, but that’s the point. LCD Soundsystem is a great band because, like all great rock bands, Murphy distills his influences (namely Brian Eno, ’90s House, and New York in the late ’70s) and re-formats them in his own unique style.
     Murphy made his creative breakthrough as LCD Soundsystem with 2007’s Sound of Silver, a giant leap beyond his 2005 self-titled debut. This Is Happening, supposedly Murphy’s last under the LCD moniker, doesn’t have as many breakout moments as Silver — it doesn’t reach the peaks of “Someone Great”, “All My Friends”, or “New York I Love You…” — but it doesn’t reach Silver’s relative lows either. The result is a more consistent, though flatter sounding, album.

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The Global Peace Initiative will be unveiling its second Peace Monument in the city of Liverpool, UK, on October 9, 2010. This monument has special significance on numerous levels. The location is chosen specifically as the place where John Lennon’s spirit was born. Its unveiling will occur on the day of Lennon’s birth, when he would have turned 70. It also coincides with the start of a two-month-long citywide festival celebrating Lennon and his spirit. The festival ends on December 9, 2010, 30 years, to the day, after Lennon’s assassination. (December 8, 1980 if you were stateside, December 9, 1980 if you were in Europe.)
     The vision of venerable art aficionado Ben Valenty, the California-based Global Peace Initiative was launched in 2003. The idea is to create seven monuments, one for each continent. The first, in Asia, was erected in Singapore in 2005. For the European installment, Valenty discovered and subsequently commissioned 19-year-old art prodigy Lauren Voiers of Ohio. Specializing in surrealist and cubist styles using oils, Voiers started by creating renderings of the monument. These renderings are transferred to three-dimensional representations and created in pieces. Voiers will then be hand-painting the 18-foot structure, which she has titled Peace and Harmony.

Internet buzz can destroy a band just as easily as it can build one up. People begin to form ideas and expectations before they have the chance to properly absorb the music, and overexposure is a constant risk. Sleigh Bells, the duo of songwriter/guitarist Derek E. Miller and singer Alexis Krauss, embody this perfectly. At first I just didn’t understand them, or their seemingly universal appeal. Many of Sleigh Bells’ songs are simple, sometimes to the point of being dumb. I was confused, and wondered how this silly music could be so beloved. And now, listening to Sleigh Bells’ debut — released after a handful of demos and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of blogger buzz — I’m just starting to get a handle on what they’re all about.

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With a supremely simple sub-thirty-minute, thirteen-track debut, this British trio calls to mind the brisk noise-pop of Sub Pop label-mates No Age (not to mention early Seattle grunge). Perhaps, a description of their first show says it all: the band played a party titled “RAGE” in their native London which purportedly involved a lot of beer and one giant trampoline, evoking an image of disgruntled, drunken, and high-flying youth that is only too apt given the sounds unleashed on Nothing Hurts. While “Worse to Come”, which features guests Vivian Girls, recalls a grimier version of the male-female vocal interplay of the Vaselines, much of this record revolves around hazy feedback giving way to the rapid-fire play of singer/guitarist John Arthur Webb. Chunky, distorted riffs spike through “Weird Feelings” only to be followed (if not soothed) by a lush, almost shoe-gazer-like, drone on the ethereal “Franklin”, during which Webb contemplates the band’s ostensible infatuation with ephemerality, crooning, “All this won’t last forever”. Combining both of these currents is “Years Not Long”. The grizzled sweep of guitars on the album’s opener deftly straddles the line between cockeyed exuberance and infecting heaviness for an effect that all but boils down Male Bonding’s unique allure in two-and-a-half glorious minutes.

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Buy this at iTunes. After the jump, watch a live session the band did for BBC.

The Fall is not a band; it’s punk attitude turned to music. “They are always different, they are always the same,” said noted British radio host John Peel. Always different, partly because Mark E. Smith has been the only consistent member throughout The Fall’s 34-year career, and the same because, regardless of album or decade, The Fall’s songs always follow the same basic structure, with Smith speak/singing, often in seemingly random spurts, over a repetitive hook. Brash and snotty, a first-time listener could easily mistake any one of The Fall’s countless songs as little more than a looped soundtrack for bandleader Mark E. Smith to sneer over.
    Your Future Our Clutter, The Fall’s 28th studio album, is uncharacteristically concise and fun. It’s also one of their best. Smith, a unrepentant curmudgeon, trades in his sneer for a smirk, making this the Bart Simpson of Fall records. Most of Clutter’s nine songs are built around a rollicking rhythm section, driving toward anti-climax.

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Jazz — African style — is Ethiopia’s Mulatu Astatke’s specialty. The veteran musician first reached Western ears with the domestic release of his work with the Heliocentrics, the third installment in the Inspiration Information series. On Mulatu Steps Ahead, the listener is exposed to Astatke’s work across time and space. Collecting together compositions written in the East Coast of the United States all the way to the South of France, it draws from Astatke’s thirty-plus years of musical experience. Mulatu Steps Ahead is a lot more structured than the Inspiration Information collaboration. This can best be attributed to the jazz scaffold that the album is built upon; Mulatu Steps Ahead has strung the Afro-jazz thread throughout. Like the soundtrack to a Discovery Channel program on lions, exotic, hollow woodwind sounds mingle with noodly, self-involved jazz passages, creating a dusty, calming blend. One can almost smell the shimmering heat rising from the ground on “Assosa” while the moodiness of the aptly titled “Mulatu’s Mood” is palpable. Jazz en Afrique.

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Buy this at iTunes. After the jump, check out a video in which Mulatu Astatke discusses the making of his first album in over two decades.

Everything about Massive Attack feels contradictory. The core members, Robert “3D” Del Naja and Grant “Daddy G” Marshall, are polar opposites. The former: diminutive, fair, pointy, reserved yet articulate. The latter: oversized, dark, rounded, affable yet hesitant. Not since the collective’s second album, 1994’s Protection, have these two made music in the same room.
    Starting as a reggae sound system collective, the Wild Bunch, they represented an array of cultures, backgrounds, ethnicities, and traditions. This array drove the collective and gave birth to Massive Attack and the inimitable flavor it had — and has. “We were literally white straight through to black,” says Marshall amidst babysitting his three children in his Bristol, England, home as he placates them with a DVD of Up. “We spread from Italian culture through Spanish roots to Black culture. Coming from all walks of life, it was funny to have us all in one group.”
    What has been heard since Protection — on albums like Mezzanine (1998), 100th Window (2003), and their latest Heglioland — is the individual members working on their own, then bringing their ideas to each other, ready for a face-off. More often than not, it is Del Naja’s vision that bullies itself to the forefront. On 100th Window — which should have been billed as Del Naja’s solo album — there was no input from Marshall, and erstwhile third member, Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles, who had since departed.

Flying Lotus’ commanding second album conjures alternate titles in my mind: “2010: A Space Oddity” or, perhaps more appropriate, “Sketches of Space”. Yet Cosmogramma is quite fitting — a journey into an alternate musical universe, seemingly worlds beyond ours. It’s a giant leap forward for this LA-based producer; not that his debut wasn’t impressive, but as its name Los Angeles connotes, he still had his feet firmly on local ground. Jet-pack strapped, FlyLo has taken along on his fantastic voyage a time capsule of jazz, funk, and psychedelics that leaks out across his electro blueprints. With its spastic, virtuoso bass line courtesy of Thundercat, “Pickled!” is the sound of droids dancing, while “Mmmhmm” is like an Outkast or Foreign Exchange track in orbit. “Computer Face/Pure Being” (stream below) is what Parliament-Funkadelic might be doing today if they were still making new music and using a Galaga machine as an instrument. Most promising is the showcase Flying Lotus creates for top musicians and vocalists including relative Ravi Coltrane on sax, harpist Rebekah Raff, and fellow cosmonaut Thom Yorke on guest vocals — it’s the deft trick Massive Attack and UNKLE employed to great strength when coming up, and it’s potent here. Most likely, the best electronic record you’ll hear all year and yet it’s so densely packed with multiple styles and layers, it could take through next year to fully decode its wonderful complexity.

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Cosmogramma comes out May 4. Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.

No one can accuse Caribou’s Dan Snaith of stagnation. The one man behind Caribou’s experimental operation delves into dance music deeper than ever before on his latest full-length, Swim. Looking back rather than forward, Swim re-imagines the rave sounds of the early ‘90s with ‘00s geek-chic style. Snaith’s signature psychedelic swirls oscillate in and out of the arrangements in varying volumes. This provides the backdrop for the minimal techno bumps and distorted vocals Snaith himself is providing. More than the passing reference to Hot Chip and Arthur Russell must be made, as Snaith borrows his ideas generously from Hot Chip’s nerd-electro and Russell’s fringe-disco. The scratchy plinks of “Hannibal” and falsetto-voiced “Leave House” are fodder for adult dance music. The ambient burps and messy synths of “Lalibela” make it sound like it’s being played backwards (if it weren’t for the incomprehensible vocals), where one can snatch a word or two here and there and realize this is the direction the song is meant to go. This is the type of dance music grownups can get with.

After the jump, check out the video for “Odessa”.
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In one of the unquestionably oddest releases of the year, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim memorialize the notorious First Lady of the Philippines and shoe connoisseur Imelda Marcos (as well as her nanny Estrella Cumpas) with this 22-track concept album. In exploring the life of one of the last century’s most infamous female figures, Byrne and Fatboy Slim have enlisted quite an array of strong women behind the mic, including Sharon Jones, Santigold, Cyndi Lauper, Tori Amos, Florence Welch, Nellie McKay, Natalie Merchant, as well as lone male guest, Steve Earle. In largely writing all lyrics in the first person, Byrne casts his subject as a wannabe disco diva reflecting upon her innocent teen-beauty-queen hopes and doomed dreams for fame, fortune, and power. Throughout the two discs (which also come in a deluxe edition with a DVD of music videos and a 100-page book), it is hard not to think of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita — both in concept and aesthetics. The title track, with Welch (of Florence and the Machine), starts the album with soft-rock flourishes, kitchy cabaret, and Seventies-era strings and horns befitting this twisted take on the Broadway biography.

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