Manhattan Records

Minnesotan by way of Mexico, Lila Downs’ diversity is more accurately showcased in her music. From folk and blues to Latin jazz and pop, Shake Away, Lila Downs’ latest release is her most ambitious. Crammed with impressive guests including Spanish flamenco-fusion sensation La Mari, Mercedes Sosa and Enrique Bunbury (former lead singer of Heroes del Silencio) it’s an album that is, not surprisingly, all over the place. But somehow her version of Lucinda Williams’ “I Envy the Wind” blends in with a silly fast-paced ditty like “Los Pollos”. For a multicultural and multi-mood experience, it doesn’t get more comprehensive than this.

Photography by Marcus Palmqvist

In England, they breed their pop ingénues big-haired and boozy, apt to trash their exes with intimate details of drug habits and dodgy new girlfriends. In America, they strap on a Fender Strat and jump around the strip mall. In Sweden, however, they take the high road. Twenty-two-year-old Stockholm singer Lykke Li calls her songs “spaces”. Her full-length debut, Youth Novels, measures the glacial intensity that made her compatriots the Concretes and the Shout Out Louds so fun to eat meatballs to. And it boasts a transcontinental dance flair. Li grew up on the mountaintops of Portugal with two hippie parents before moving to a windowless apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, at the age of nineteen to perform at open mike nights, to no avail. “I was a young skinny white girl without a clue about anything the first time I was in New York, so it was kind of a disaster,” Li admits. “My nickname was Blanquita and my friend got eggs thrown at her because she was white. We had no heat in the apartment even though it was December, so I slept with two jackets on.”

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Kemado

Largely the project of Swedish singer and multi-instrumentalist Gustav Ejstes, the psychedelic rock revivalists return with their signature spectral guitar solos, primitive and groovy beats, and jazzy flights of flute. On this fourth album, Ejstes has delegated, among other instruments, guitar duties to longtime collaborator Reine Fiske in order to focus on song structures, piano-playing, and vocals that are tender with a touch of menace. Highlighted by the warming harmonies of “Mina Damer och Fasaner”, the resulting ten songs present a band (in its truest sense) that’s tighter and more elegant than ever.

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Photography by Dan Monick

It can all change in a week. Life, death, love, indie rock trends—these are products of moments, not years. Everything can come together, or fall apart, in a flash. For Mikel Jollett, it all changed in March 2006. A writer, Jollett had just started his first novel. Those plans were quickly derailed in days. His mother was diagnosed with cancer, to match his terminally ill father. Jollett himself was diagnosed with a genetic autoimmune disorder, then pneumonia. And he broke up with a longtime girlfriend. “All this shit happened in the same week,” he recalls. “Everyone was sick. I felt sick. I felt everyone was dying. I thought I was going to lose my mind.” One day, Jollett picked up a guitar. He played for four hours straight. The next day, he played for six hours. Then eight hours. Everyday. For a year. “Out of nowhere,” he says, “I realized suddenly I had all this music in me.” As full-fledged songs soon developed, Jollett enlisted mutual friends from the Los Angeles area — drummer Daren Taylor, violinist Anna Bulbrook, bassist Noah Harmon, and guitarist Steven Chen — to form the Airborne Toxic Event.

City Slang/Domino

Over two decades, the Notwist have dabbled in both the chugging riffs of indie rock and the synth-glitches of electropop. But six years after the landmark Neon Golden — a gorgeous and infectious album that presaged the appeal of Postal Service — the German quartet has returned with a more melancholic affair. Somber acoustics and wistful vocals suffuse songs like “Gone Gone Gone” and the title track in starkness. “Good Lies” and “Gloomy Planets” both open with gentle strums but soon ignite into an epic swirl of binary blips and whirring synths. It all makes for another superb sonic odyssey.

Light in the Attic Records

While Black Angels surely fall into the psychedelic-rock category, the opening track on their sophomore album previews a versatility that’s not often heard in an age of genre-conscious throwbacks that are too often easily pigeonholed. Though the band is named after a Velvet Underground song, Directions To See A Ghost belongs more among Earthless, Joy Division, and the Doors — a (perhaps unimaginable) combination that really is superb. Droning bass, guitar, and macabre vocals are complimented paradoxically by structured drums, some peppy tambourine, and a dash of sitar, making this Austin quintets’ latest trip a standout from its myriad peers.

Blue Note Records

Al Green’s Lay It Down is an eleven-song sermon, preaching love without sounding preachy. While resurrecting his signature old-school R&B sound marked by joyful horns, quiet beats, and his wide-ranging but always smooth vocals, Green has injected a bit of hip-hop swagger into his latest album. This is due, no doubt, to slick co-production by the Roots’ ?uestlove Thompson and James Poyser. The best moments of Lay It Down achieve a seamless mix of classic and current by sharing the vocal limelight with co-conspirators and fans including John Legend, Corinne Bailey Rae, and Anthony Hamilton. Unquestionably, Green still has more love to spread.

Photography by Noel Spirandelli

New York-based experimental band Gang Gang Dance are often described as “neo-primitive” or “neo-tribal”, but then again, so was starkly edged modern art. These descriptors apply only insofar as the band’s music can be trance-inducing. Indeed, despite the fact that members Lizzi Bougatsos, Brian DeGraw, Tim Dewitt, Josh Diamond, and Nathan Maddox have all the loud beats of a rock and roll band and all the good looks expected of rock stars, there’s something about watching them that makes the eyes roll back and the mind glaze over.
     Though make no mistake, they are not the live equivalent of your high school rave mix. Theirs is a trance for the robot set: for people on the go in a high-tech society, to whom the electronic drone that envelops lead singer Lizzi Bougatsos’ voice is a natural language. These are people who can’t help but connect to and be lulled by the band’s aggressive mixing and their stroboscopic waxing and waning of reverb that works like the blades of a fan spinning so fast as to give the illusion of stasis. Each of the group’s more highly orchestrated song elements tends to be punctuated by these cascading jam breaks.

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