Whether they come from Ladakh, Nunavut, or Detroit, the albums featured in this instalment of our bite-sized review column managed to catch our ears. Whether jazz, techno, or just plain unclassifiable, maybe they'll catch yours too. Contributions from Bill Meyer, Ian Mathers, Olivia Bradley-Skill, Justin Cober-Lake, and Eric McDowell.
Aaron Dilloway — The Gag File (Dais)
The Gag File by Aaron Dilloway
Is The Gag File a compilation of jokes or a compendium of emetic influences? The album cover’s image of a ventriloquist’s dummy may suggest the former, but this is show business of a particularly queasy bent. Slowed-down vocal and rhythm loops mix with a chorus of whistles to distinctly uneasy effect. A narcotized narrator assures the listener that “It’s alright” over and over, sinking into a miasma of sci-fi synths that give way to a party where everyone sounds too wasted to perform the sexual act prescribed by the Little Feat song on the hi-fi. Paradoxically the passages where Dilloway gets his noise ya-yas out are the moments of relief, since they invite you to bang your head in time to the locked grooves and spliced tapes rather than think about what’s really going on.
Bill Meyer
Kelly Lee Owens - s/t (Smalltown Supersound)
There are plenty of wonderful first albums out there, and also plenty of wonderful, let’s say, fifth albums; what’s significantly rarer than either of those on their own is a debut that has the quiet self-assurance and comfort in its own skin that’s much more typical of those great fifth albums. All of which is to say that Kelly Lee Owens is the kind of great first album that’s seemingly leapfrogged over the typical stumbling blocks you often get with early work. Owens uses deceptively simple elements as a producer, and manages to range all over the place stylistically and structurally (even in terms of the genres she evokes; while this is pretty much all electronic, even dance music, at times she brings to mind the gentler end of shoegaze or twee pop or any number of other things) while still feeling like a coherent emotional and sonic statement. She’s no more sui generis than any artist, moments here strike sparks off the likes of anyone from the Field to Glasser or the namechecked-here Arthur Russell, but she always has her own distinct voice. For someone who’s just getting started, it’s an incredibly accomplished and captivating one.
Ian Mathers
Various Artists — Where the Mountains Meet the Sky: Folk Music Of Ladakh (Sublime Frequencies)
Where the Mountains Meet the Sky: Folk Music of Ladakh by [see album description]
You can’t head much farther north than Ladakh and still be in in India. In times past the Himalayan region was on the Silk Road trade route, but now it has been isolated by the closure of the border between India and China. Folk culture is languishing, and this LP fits into the lifelong effort of one man, Morup Namgyal, to document it before it passes. Five of the record’s tracks come from his collection, the rest from more recent recordings made to accompany a film about him called The Sound Collector. Where the Mountains Meet the Sky could fairly have been put out under Namgyal’s name, since he sings on eight out of nine vocal selections. But even though his throaty voice puts the songs across quite effectively, focusing on him misses the point; it’s the survival of the songs that matters, not the identity of the singer. The instrumental accompaniment (tablas, drums, flutes and a double reed instrument called a surna) is sparse, and hard to fix to a single tradition, with droning timbres and irregular beats that sound fairly Indian coexisting with melodies and rhythms that feel closer to Tuvan folk music.
Bill Meyer
Tiny Vipers — Laughter (Ba Da Bing)
After two albums of hauntingly spare and direct folk-adjacent music as Tiny Vipers, the last in 2009, Jesy Fortino took a break to get a civil engineering degree. Now she’s back, but in a form significantly altered enough to match the magnitude of the change in her life; where once Fortino’s voice and acoustic guitar were foregrounded, here there’s none of the latter and precious little of the former. Instead Laughter features synthesizers and tape hiss, arpeggios and loops. The result is just as captivating as those older Tiny Vipers records, but in an entirely new sense, where the songs are as dense as “The Summer of Moments” or as tentatively beautiful as “Crossing the River of Yourself”. “K.I.S.S.” indicates that Fortino can make these kinds of songs work with her lyrics and vocals just as well as with her old setup, so the real question this fascinating, exploratory effort leaves the listener with is whether she will wind up following its lead and integrating these sounds and structures with the strong lyrical viewpoint of past work, or if the more abstract and experimental likes of the 14-minute title track are a more accurate indicator of where she’s going.
Ian Mathers
ADULT. — Detroit House Guests (Mute)
ADULT.’s music summons nocturne sleeplessness, paranoia, and meditation. In Detroit House Guests, the hyperactive and anxious dance music of their last album, The Way Things Fall (2013), has given way to a more trance-like, hazy sway. Wide-awake restlessness and solitude permeate through its emphasis on repetition, reverb and echo. Yet despite the album’s circular and looping approach to melody, the album isn’t stuck in any one direction. The duo worked with a number of collaborators, who include Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (Lichens), Michael Gira (Swans), Lun_na Menoh, Douglas J McCarthy (Nitzer Ebb), Dorit Chrysler (NY Theremin Society), and Shannon Funchess (Light Asylum). Their added presence is felt, in a good way, through the album’s wider sound and scope. ADULT. feels less insular than it has in the past, and reminds us of the various textures the nighttime can hold. By not restricting itself to the headspace of the club, ADULT. experiments with a myriad of energies that span from jittery insomnia to fertile dreams, between dusk, twilight and pitch black skies. Favorite tracks: “P rts M ss ng”, “Uncomfortable Positions”, “As You Dream”.
Olivia Bradley-Skill
The Jerry Cans — Inuusiq (Aakuluk)
The Jerry Cans would appear to be a highly localized act. They come from Nunavut in northern Canada, sing mostly in the Inuit language Inuktitut, utilize local throat singing, and even started the first record label in their territory. Far from being a “welcome to global cultures” lesson, the band demonstrates how to skillfully build a world of sounds. The music on their latest album Inuusiq centers on traditional folk and roots-rock sounds, almost always maintaining a high level of energy (the album’s English title is Life, after all). Their Celtic influence comes through with both the fiddle and rollicking approach to performance. “Maikliqta” brings a personalized element of reggae, but it doesn’t sound out of place next to the hoedown of “Paniarjuk.” With touches of pop around the edges of its songs, the band just sounds full of gas and ready to go. The language might not always translate easily, but good roots is good roots.
Justin Cober-Lake
Bottle Tree — s/t (International Anthem)
Bottle Tree by Bottle Tree
Keeping up its reputation as a champion of local talent, International Anthem presents the self-titled debut album by the Windy City trio Bottle Tree, featuring Ben Lamar Gay, A.M. Frison and Italian transplant Tmmaso Moretti. As the 7” single “Open Secret” first attested, this isn’t quite the Ben Lamar Gay we sampled on the 2015 compilation Nine/Two at Constellation, nor the one in assistance on Jaimie Branch’s recent standout debut, also on International Anthem. For Bottle Tree’s spare and funky soul persona, he trades cornet for keys and compositional duties, keeping his presence largely behind the scenes or else in the middle ground, as a buffer of sorts between Frison’s fluid vocals and Moretti’s clattering, twitchy beats. Over the cassette’s 30 minutes, the trio gets significant mileage out of contrasted layers, deft structural pivots and sudden harmonic cadences. While fans of Frison’s Coultrain project will find lots to like on this nimble, grooving and mellow gem, Bottle Tree is the perfect opportunity for everyone else to get to know these three important and too far under-the-radar Chicagoans, too.
