PSEUDOSIX
Pseudosix
(Sonic Boom Recordings)
We’ve all heard it—the album is dead. Well, apparently
somebody forgot to tell Portland’s Tim Perry, whose band, Pseudosix,
has put together an honest-to-goodness album, not just a collection of
iTunes singles. The eponymous Pseudosix is the kind of album
that’s best appreciated as a progression—”The flow and the songs
themselves are one and the same,” said Perry in a recent
Stranger interview—with a pair of headphones and a
darkened room on a rainy afternoon. Its shuffling guitar lines,
slightly menacing rhythms, and layered, elliptical vocals form a
perfect background for Perry’s uneasy stories of insecurity
and
lost love.
The album’s opener, “Some Sort of Revelation,” takes a while to get
going, but ends in crescendo after crescendo, bombast following
introspection, a musical analog of a loner attempting to break free of
his self-imposed bonds. Warm acoustic tracks like “Under the Waves” and
“Apathy and Excess” lighten the mood with half-hearted
jauntiness—at least until you listen to the lyrics, which never
stray far from oblique depiction of desolation and destruction.
Influences abound—Gram Parsons, Bright Eyes, even a little
Simon and Garfunkel—but Perry adds his own ominous overtones to
even his sweetest songs. It’s his consistent tone that provides the
glue for the album and impresses upon the listener the stark, quotidian
nature of despair. Near the end of the album, in the sly “Treacherous
Ways,” Perry deadpans, “I had to find something to keep me in a
positive way.” This posturing, however, is done with a rueful smile.
Lyrically, Pseudosix is obsessed with things that are broken;
musically, everything fits perfectly in
place. CHRIS McCANN
Pseudosix play Wed Oct 31
at the High Dive, w/David
Kilgour, Euros Childs, 9 pm, $8/$10, 21+.
UNDERWORLD
Oblivion with Bells
(PIAS)
Listening to Underworld is like getting drunk with the HAL 9000. If
you read Karl Hyde’s angular, processed poetry word for word, it stops
just short of total gibberish—like the precision-detailed mess of
the band’s cover art, or the words-are-instruments vibe of Ken
Nordine’s 1950s Word Jazz. But if you sit back, unfocus your
ears, and soak it in as a whole, it tiptoes over into brilliance. Just
as good techno plays subtle head games with sound and dares you to
dance smart, Hyde’s lyrics twist and weave around the noise,
adding just enough to make the songs mean something, but
leaving it up to you to figure out what that is. This either makes
people lifelong fans or it drives them batshit.
In the five years since the sadly underrated A Hundred Days
Off, Underworld has been under the radar, and busy as hell. They
scored Anthony Minghella’s Breaking and Entering and Danny
Boyle’s Sunshine. They left the major labels behind and
released the pioneering Riverrun series of multimedia
downloads on their own. They kept up their touring schedule and
released a live album and career-spanning anthology. All this work has
nudged them away from producing dance-floor bangers—the
high-energy tracks on Oblivion sound more like rock than
anything else, the techno is subtle and nuanced, and the rest is all
expansive piano and strings—but it has refined the sound they
nailed more than a decade ago: dramatic electronic music, surrounded by
cryptic, vulnerable lyrics full of fleeting thoughts, first impressions
and missing pieces. If you’ve never liked them before, Oblivion
with Bells might turn you around. And if you already do, this is
their best work yet. MATT CORWINE
HENRIK SCHWARZ
Live
(K7)
1/2
A DJ mix CD in which most or all of the tracks are by the same
person who mixed it seems somehow like cheating—why not just make
a regular album (or, in a pinch, a compilation)? But in the case of
Henrik Schwarz’s Live, it’s obvious that the mix is where
these songs belong. Only two (of 16) don’t have the German techno-house
producer/DJ’s name on them, either as artist or remixer, but even
those—Sun Ra’s “Lullaby for Realville,” which opens the set, and
Mandrill’s “Mango Meat”—bear his touch, with the DJ sending their
slinky horns, bass, and high hats through filters and effortlessly
marrying their squinched-
up essence to his own
glide-
and-jitter approach.
Schwarz’s 2006 installment of the DJ-Kicks series was warm,
dreamlike, and amazingly cohesive, especially given its disparate
sources—it takes a certain genius to make Womack & Womack,
Moondog, and Drexciya not just line up, but blend unobtrusively. The
coherency of Live is a little easier to figure out in advance,
but that doesn’t make it any less impressive. When the spoken vocals of
“Where We At,” by Schwarz, Âme, and Dixon, nudge their way into
the mix, they draw attention to just how deeply the preceding tracks
have infiltrated the room. Schwarz’s remix of James Brown’s “It’s a
Man’s World” shouldn’t really work—he mostly places the
Godfather’s vocals over a pulsating cut of his own design—but it
fits perfectly into its surroundings. Few albums since Ornette Coleman
coined the term have so richly deserved the phrase “dancing in
your head.” MICHAELANGELO MATOS
Beluga
Ossetra
Sevruga
Sterlet