On the first two entries in his mixtape trilogy, the native Torontoan Abel Tesfaye turned the meaning of R & B on its head. In place of the easy nostrums and tear-the-house-down melismas given precedence by his forebears, Tesfaye wrote confessions of his menace, letting anyone who dared to think well of his lifestyle understand how degraded it can be. His capstone, Echoes of Silence, is the trilogy’s dark apotheosis – at times, you wonder if songs like “Initiation” are grounds for criminal charges. Lyrics like “I love it when your eyes are red” and “You probably went and fucked the world” betray his true intentions, while the work of his producer, Illangelo, obscures them with somnolent synth lines. It’s tempting to label him the Antichrist of R & B, but that undersells his accomplishment. As a heretic of modern nightlife, The Weeknd is making his own genre.

Part poetry, part memoir, part journey into the ethereal spaces between reality and fantasy, Woolgathering is Patti Smith’s story of being a child, and becoming an artist. Moving from her working-class childhood to her years of poverty and burgeoning creativity in Greenwich Village, Smith recounts her life through its curiosities and epiphanies, sentient experiences and ardent images. Rather than tell the linear tale of her life, she brings the readers into the intimate, personal moments that have shaped her as an artist. Like the child’s discovery Smith describes, Woolgathering is ‘a crazy quilt of truths– wild and wooly ones, hardly bordering on truth at all.’
     Woolgathering, originally published in 1992, was recently re-published by New Directions with additional writing, photos and illustrations. Smith will be reading and signing Woolgathering at St. Mark’s Bookshop on January 3, 2012 at 7pm.

Calling a new Antlers record “mournful” is a bit misleading, if only because it implies that a listener might expect something different. On the 2008 LP that made their name, Hospice, the band made regret their M.O., turning strings of haunting chimes and vocals of hewn crystal into slow-cookers worthy of a send-off. Since then, they’ve honed their aesthetic, taking steps to make their latest, Burst Apart, a cleaner album than its forebear. Spritelier tracks like “Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out” and “French Exit” are leavened with a newfound optimism, the flipside of Hospice-era dirges like “Atrophy” and “Thirteen.” Uptick tempos and backing drum rolls lend a funk-laden snap to the bass lines, while the singer, Peter Silbermann, croons where he warbled in the past. None of these changes quite lift the album from its dominant mood of sorrow, but they do pepper the runtime with strategic moments of levity. You get the impression that whatever Silbermann’s lost, he knows he can win it back.

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Only an artist as seminal as Kate Bush can pull off unveiling two albums in one year. After having just released Director’s Cut in May, the eclectic singer is back again with the drop of 50 Words for Snow—the second album on her Fish People label. Taking inspiration from the Eskimo language’s possession of fifty words to describe snowfall, Bush
creates a self-contained environment with enough variety to capture a library of wintry emotions, narratives, and themes. The album’s stunning acoustic instrumentation mimics the fluctuating pattern of snow: from
the delicate piano which signals its arrival (“Snowflake”), to the gales encapsulating its unpredictability and potential to either create or destroy intimacy (“Snowed In At Wheeler Street”). In a style similar to a call and response, Bush skillfully manipulates her vocals to play off the meandering piano notes—echoing or responding— in a sort of perpetual duet, proving her voice to be as compelling a personification of natural forces as any instrument.

Though hard-edged rock is what Boris is known for, their latest LP, Attention Please, is anything but abrasive. After making their name with sixteen albums of party anthems and head bangers, the Japanese trio have filed their edges and sought out a gentler aesthetic. They’ve promoted their willowy guitarist, Wata, to the position of lead singer, and they’ve used her ethereal vocals to form the backdrop to meditative fuzz. They’ve softened their guitars so they ring like choral voices, giving fare like “Aileron” and “Hope” the resonance of Pink Floyd melodies. Throughout the album, the quietest moments thrum with hints of menace, as though the band, after years of aggression, have stumbled upon melancholy and fear. But their roots are still intact – on throwbacks like “Tokyo Wonderland,” they rush like impatient teenagers. It’s tempting at times to fault the album for its lack of unity, but its chaos suggests that’s the point. Nothing says you’re versatile like showcasing two warring sounds.

The sweep of support for Occupy Wall Street seems to grow by the day. While we at PLANET certainly commend the force of the movement, from a relatively apolitical vantage the demonstrations have also proven to be a music lover’s dream. Certainly, music’s connection to protest is long established, and OWS is no different, with the hypnotic rhythms of drum circles and impromptu performances by protesters beaming out from Zuccotti Park at all hours. Meanwhile, high-profile artists, such as Talib Kweli (left) and Tom Morello, have graced the park with their presence, expressing their allegiance to the cause and, moreover, rallying the troops with some stellar sets. On that account, we have compiled our favorite performances during the past few weeks of Wall Street’s occupation. After the jump, check out music by Morello, Amanda Palmer, Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel, and Michael Franti. Given the nature of the events, the recording quality can be inconsistent but the experience is no less inspiring.

How many rappers are name-checking Morrissey as an influence and using Smiths song titles for their various outlets? Trinidad-born and Brooklyn-raised, Theophilus London is quite possibly the only one. The twenty-something London, whose debut full-length, Timez Are Weird These Days, dropped in July, is an exemplar for the modern musician. Establishing himself as a persona through social networking and his sense of style long before he released any music, London is creating a blueprint for current artists.
     London is not all about futuristic approaches. He preceded any original material with two, now-classic mixtapes: This Charming Mixtape (a twist on the the Smiths’ “This Charming Man”) and I Want You. And prior to the release of his EP, Love’s Holiday, he had firm ties to high-end fashion brands such as Cole Haan.
     Alongside all this, London is maniacally active on his Twitter feed, his Facebook page, his “This Charming Blog” posts, his numerous Tumblr account posts, and his Hypebeast — not repeating the same information on any of those outlets, keeping the material fresh for today’s media-hungry, short attention span audiences.

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I can’t talk about who the Horrors are today without talking about who the Horrors used to be. When they made their debut in 2007 I took one look at them and thought they were a band of Peter Murphy’s disaffected nephews. They weren’t bad, but their freak-beat punk was easily over-shadowed by their vampire style. It was shocking then, in 2009, when they released Primary Colours, a psychedelic departure that drew from bands like the Velvet Underground and Spacemen 3. Skying sees the band continuing to mutate, but also establishes them as British pop preservationists.
     Skying is a sunny record. It lifts the band, as the title might suggest, into the upper atmospheres of pop. The album’s first song, “Changing The Rain”, starts with a cavernous electronic beat that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Fever Ray song, but soon blossoms into synth-pop heaven.

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This Irish siren has Southern American blood running through her veins. On her third full-length, Mayhem, Imelda May’s blues and rockabilly belt-outs positively burst with confidence. Not restricted to these styles, May steps into torch-singer ballads, big-band swings, and farm-girl country vibes just as smoothly and self-assuredly. A throwback in its entirety, Mayhem’s resolute old-school style is its charm. The only touches of modernity are in the crisp production of the superior musicians and May’s ballsy tones. She purrs and growls on the slowed down rockabilly of “All For You,” alternately teasing and taunting. Her vocals stretch out moodily over the brushed drums of the bluesy “Too Sad To Cry”. At times, May traverses country territory, where she is at home amongst cowboy-bar jangles, such as the square dance-ready “Eternity”. On “Proud and Humble”, she classes up the hay-strewn barroom floors with infusions of horns. May can do it all — even strut over Soft Cell, turning “Tainted Love” into a down home sing-along.

Buy this at iTunes. After the jump, check out the video for Mayhem’s title track.

Garden-variety grime may be what Wiley offers on 100% Publishing, but anything from the Wiley garden is still worth cultivating. After fifteen years as a central figure in this sound-from-the-streets scene, Wiley doesn’t neccesarily need to exert himself much on his latest full-length. 100% Publishing lets the listener be a fly on the wall of the grime pioneer’s day-to-day life, as Wiley mutters to himself about losing things and finding them again. As is the wont of rappers, he shouts out his friends (“Hold tight Jamie”) and talks about the music business in an insider fashion that the average listener may not always be able to relate to — case in point, the title song. Still, there is an appealing simplicity to the sparse backing tracks, such as the carousel tune of “Boom Boom Da Na”. In keeping with this basic attitude, the spartan beats eschew trying to come up with inventive twists. This can be the default of many artists in the genre; they tend to make the biggest impressions with their debut and then, at best, repeat fading photocopies of that work.

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Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.