“Hallo?” Jahmek Power shouts into his mobile phone, the sounds of a raging party drowning out his valiant attempts at being heard. “I’m at a pahty. I’m going to leave the building because it’s way too loud.” Once outside, the situation gets worse as party-goers start asking the artist known as Jammer for directions. “This is the pahty here. I’m doing an interview bruvva,” he says as his patience wears thin. “Because I’ve come outside, they think I work here or somefink.”
     Contrary to what it might sound like, Jammer is in fact an extremely professional fellow — particularly when compared to his fellow grime masters, like Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, and Tinchy Stryder. Grime superstars (and unknowns) are notoriously unreliable, notoriously competitive, notoriously antagonistic. Jammer is none of these things. “A lot of people didn’t expect to be in the situation they are in,” Jammer says of the grime mentality. “They had a talent. They loved music. They done it and didn’t know they were going to get that much interest. I don’t think they was really ready for it. I’ve been doing this for ten years. I have an understanding of how things work and how necessary it is to let people know about what’s happening.”

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.

This Portland, Oregon, threesome is known for its free-form experimental style of progressive rock. Electronic instrumentation and vocals that sound like discount Damon Albarn have resulted in Menomena being filed in the indie slot. On its fourth full-length, Mines, the trio have created a scaffold upon which to arrange its wandering jams. Not losing its exploratory tendencies or curbing its quality musicianship, Menomena has used this framework to create defined songs instead of dense, meandering sounds. More emotional than before, the unfortunately named “Oh Pretty Boy, You’re Such A Big Boy” offers honking horns and measured organ stabs that speak straight from the heart. Theatrical to the extreme, the chorus of “Five Little Rooms” blasts against tethered piano and thunderous drum work. While these two are the standouts on Mines the album has a solid hold on melody that has eluded Menomena in the past. The band is developing a distinct song structure without losing any musical chops in the process — the best of both worlds.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Buy this at Other Music or iTunes.

“We were already, already bored/Sometimes I can’t believe it/I’m moving past the feeling”, sings Win Butler on “The Suburbs”. With its simple pianos and otherwise stripped-down sound, the opening track from Arcade Fire’s third album immediately announces the Montreal band’s attempts at (and, perhaps, anxieties over) departing from the baroque bombast that has become its hallmark. Given the name of the album, much focus has centered on how Arcade Fire might be moving from the political provocations of Neon Bible to critiquing the impact and ennui of residential sprawl in modern society. And while that theme appears throughout the album, just as salient is the corresponding unease with passing time and the inevitability of change as Butler croons that “the clock keeps ticking” over unadorned guitars on “Modern Man”. Yet, The Suburbs’ standout tracks are those that indeed dwell in the past, reminding the listener of the grand theatrics of Funeral and Neon Bible, such as “We Used to Wait” and “Suburban War”, which features the lyrics: “You said the past won’t rest/Until we jump the fence and leave it behind”.

Last summer, like the scattered showers that unpredictably color a July afternoon, Bethany Cosentino and Bobb Bruno, better known as Best Coast, drizzled a handful of noisy love songs upon the Internet — each one adding a few minutes to the season’s soundtrack. The songs were lo-fi and reverbed to the point of distortion but, with Cosentino’s disarmingly sweet voice, proved to be an essential summer combination. Nevertheless, with every addictive melody chugging along at a similar mid-tempo, repeat plays made overdose inevitable.
     The songwriting on Crazy for You, Best Coast’s full-length debut, is more diverse and assertive than on the band’s early singles, making those songs sound like rough demos of half-baked ideas. The noise here has been turned down, morphed into a vibrant haze that surrounds and buoys Cosentino’s voice in a real ’60s-girl-group style. Songs wobble between the Jesus-and-Mary-Chain drum-n-fuzz of “Honey” to the up-tempo indie-pop of “The End” — and though there’s still plenty of reverb, it sounds like Cosentino’s the one controlling it, not the other way around. Even when she’s saying nothing at all, just oohing along with the music, it’s still great to hear her sing.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Buy this at iTunes.

Less is more — so much more when in the hands of Mountain Man. Made the Harbor, the debut by this Vermont-based trio of women, is a musical meditation harking back to pastoral scenes and folksy tunes of a passing America. Molly Erin Sarle, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, and Amelia Randall Meath produce spartan instrumentation and rapturous vocals that are brimming with an unassuming charm. The effect makes for a daringly beautiful release. Far beyond gimmicky or complicated messages, Made the Harbor manages to be organic, earnest, and competent. The stately, “Dog Songs”, blends to the soulful, “How I’m Doin”, and then to the rapturous “Honeybee”, as the doleful notes of a singularly plucked acoustic guitar complement the bountiful, uplifting harmonies. On the road with the likes of The Low Anthem and Deer Tick, the ladies of Mountain Man will perform at the Wilco-curated Solid Sound Festival, August 13-15, before joining Sigur Ros’ Jonsi in Europe and North America this fall. These siren songs promise unexpected glories once reserved for a choir of angels.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Buy this at iTunes. After the jump, check out a performance of “Honeybee” overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Bazombo trance troupe from Congo have released their eagerly anticipated follow-up to 2005’s Congotronics 1, not to mention collaborations with Björk and Herbie Hancock. On tracks, like “Mama Na Bana” and the epic “Makembe”, effervescent blips — produced organically by steel rods resonating against hollowed wood — and the polyrhythmic patter of drums forged from scrap metal, car parts, pots, and pans resound with hypnotic chants, whistles, and soukous guitars. The subsequent effect fuses the futuristic with the old-fashioned, invoking the glitchy electronics of Aphex Twin and dense tapestries of Can matched with more traditional touchstones, like Fela Kuti. At times, the songs’ relentless jubilation can be a tad overwhelming; but just when you think you cannot take much more, Konono softens and slows it down with “Nakobala Lisusu Te”, Crash Position’s stripped-down finale, featuring only septuagenarian patriarch, Mawangu Mingiedi, and his thumb piano — and then they are gone. It’s the act of master craftsmen wholly confident in the power they wield over their audience — giving and taking away as they deem fit, always leaving them wanting, demanding more.

Buy this at Other Music or iTunes. After the jump, check out a live performance of “Makembe”.

With plans to pulverize the free world with so-called “next level beats”, South Africa’s Die Antwoord encapsulates quite possibly the best and worst of pop music for the summer of 2010. The trio, whose name is Afrikaans for “the answer”, orchestrates an in-your-face attack with explicit lyrics layered with electro, rasta, gangsta rap, and Top 40 influences. An implosion of pop culture so delicious it can’t be ignored, 5 is the crew’s first American release and follows a stream of nutty videos released under a slew of names, most famously of the character “Max Normal” and his pen-and-ink creations. “Enter the Ninja” is a galvanizing fight song and “Fish Paste” plunders an innocuous Mariah Carey sample and a heady dose of M.I.A.-style attitude.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Buy this at iTunes.

After months flying through space, the bad press meteor that is M.I.A. finally crashed on Earth as /\/\/\Y/\ (Maya), her first new album since 2007’s Kala, came out this week. But, instead of making a mind-blowing follow-up, and proving she has some substance beyond her frustrating public image, M.I.A. released a mess — an atonal collection of unpolished half-ideas that do little to push her forward artistically.
     M.I.A. has always been kind of controversial. She’s outspoken about her relatively radical (and sometimes misinformed) political views, feelings about other, more mainstream, artists, and her own musical abilities. So yeah, she’s annoying. With a new record, though, M.I.A. has a platform, the only one that really matters, to show the world what she’s all about. And what does she do? Releases a song called “Teqkilla”, a messy party jam with the chorus, “I got sticky sticky icky icky weed/I got a shot of tequila in me.”

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Buy this album at iTunes.

“I thought it was the apocalypse,” says Diplo. That is how the Grammy-nominated DJ/producer describes attending a baile funk party in Rio de Janeiro, a culture and city he immersed himself in to film his documentary, Favela On Blast. There — “at the end of the world” — the pavement gave way to dirt paths even the police feared crossing; a redheaded man holding a machine gun stood next to his Black brother, while another man wired the electricity for a congregation decked out with a hefty sound-system.
     According to Diplo (whose real name is Wesley Pentz), baile funk developed on its own without a guiding hand from the record industry. During a 2004 Hollertronix show in Philadelphia, two Argentine girls handed him a cassette. “It was like a Smiths record looped up, like an 80s record, a little kid screaming over the top and heavy bass drums and all this surface noise,” Diplo recalls. “I thought it was the best music I had ever heard.” With no information on the hybrid of heavy metal and Miami bass readily available in these early days of the Internet, Diplo headed to Brazil to conduct his own investigative research. Once he was initiated into the often dangerous and drug-laden scene, he felt as if the blend of people coming together made it seem like “all the things bad in the world — European colonization, African immigration, and the industrial revolution — were all set right.”

Our old pals in Murder Mystery have kicked off the summer season with a couple of one-off releases. These new tracks offer an insight into a slightly new direction for this Brooklyn four-piece. The sprawling guitars that dominated 2007’s Are You Ready for the Heartache Cause Here it Comes and evoked comparisons to Pavement have been superceded by an easygoing electro-pop aesthetic. Over a buoyant set of synths and beats, siblings Jeremy and Laura Coleman take turns on the microphone for melodies that recall Stars and Belle & Sebastian. “I Am (If You Are)” and “Change My Mind” show a band brandishing its verstaility and, we hope, revealing a promising new sound for their next full-length.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Both tracks are downloadable at murdermysterymusic.com. Buy Are You Ready for the Heartache… at iTunes. Murder Mystery will be playing with Food Will Win the War at Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory on July 18.