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6 Music Reviews

The Buttless Chaps, Where Night Holds Light (Mint)

There's a forest on the cover of The Buttless Chaps' new album Where Night Holds Light; flip it over and you see a road, lined with electric wires. A few times their songs explicitly address that balance between city life and the natural world. Like on "Migratory Birds": "There's a vastness in the plains / that reflects off the wings of planes." Somehow their music itself reflects this same divide. It's sophisticated pop music, with trumpets darting here and there, and at the same has a backwoods country-music-ness to it. Call it countrypolitan, if you'd like. It's nuanced, delicate pop music, with textures and sweet melodies, and it also makes you feel that you're off in the woods somewhere, offering both the sense of mystery and the serenity which that implies. Dave Gowans takes the lead vocals, with his Nick Cave/Leonard Cohen-ish baritone, and Ida Nilsert sings pretty harmonies in a complementary way: another balance of moods. Much more developed and satisfying than The Buttless Chaps' previous album Love This Time, Where Night Holds Light has a romantic, charming quality on the surface, while deeper questions, ideas, and juxtapositions live underneath. – dave heaton

Jana Hunter, Blank Unstaring Heirs of Doom (Gnomonsong)

Jana Hunter's second album opens with a really beautiful, light tune sung by Hunter in a room of echo and ghostly backing vocals. She begins singing words of blessing ("all the best wishes for you / your dreams are finally coming true") but follows them with something even more intriguing: "and when we were together / I knew it was bad weather / but the last thing I expected / was for you to accept it." This is the essence of the album. Jana Hunter has the voice and singing power to be a torch singer, a heartstrings-tugging balladeer. Instead she chooses a lyrical world of philosophical dilemmas and a musical world of warped guitars and slanted voices, singing unusual, bluesy folk songs for the next generation (of ghosts). Blank Unstaring Heirs of Doom packs a punch through both intimacy and mystery. It's most powerful the simpler it is: for example, Hunter singing alone to hand-claps "laughing and crying are the same thing / tearing at something with nothing", is absolutely devastating for some reason, filled with truth and fear and hope and who-knows-what. The mood of the album is eerie and also comforting; her voice bites and soars at once. That these strange little songs are also raw and open-hearted makes them so much more inspiring than most "folk music", most "singer-songwriter" music, most music period. – dave heaton

Irving, Death in the Garden, Blood on the Flowers (Eenie Meenie)

"So come and talk to me in your language / with your glass eye and your wooden teeth." The Los Angeles-based band Irving stands out from the pack both because of their ace songwriting skills and because they manage to keep a certain eccentricity in their songs. Their melodies are irresistible, their playing tight, their '60s-influenced pop-rock approach is precise and stylish. Yet they don't dumb-down their lyrics to match the accessibility – they're filled with questions more than answers, puzzles too (would Borges dig the Beach Boys?). That's as true of their second full-length Death in the Garden Blood on the Flowers as it was of their debut Good Morning Beautiful (and the EP in between). Musically they've made their style more uniform; it sounds as if they've taken to heart the reviews that said they're debut was too scattered, that having five songwriters in the band made their style too varied to get a hold of. Death in the Garden… favors an uptempo pace and hooks, but somehow they've made the songs more consistent in sensibility without making them all sound the same, and without making their music have less individuality overall. Instead, Death… is a fun, energetic album on first listen and a rich, complicated one (yet still fun and energetic) after many, many listens. With relationships falling apart left and right, and beginning tentatively when they're not, there's a sadness hanging in the air while the choruses grab your brain. But it's a hopeful sadness, or at least a soft and sweet one, all the way through to the lovely final song "The Look of Flowers That Are Looked At," with its final lines, "Love comes and it fades away / like the sun moving through the day / that's why I'll always love you / in the morning." – dave heaton

Loka, Fire Shepherds (Ninja Tune)

Liverpudlian duo Loka, that is Karl Webb and Mark Kyriacou, debuted on Ninja Tune's Xen Cuts compilation in 2000. A first single followed in 2004, but it looks like Webb and Kyriacou saved their best stuff for their debut album. Fire Shepherds is indeed a cinematic avant-garde journey through beautiful mesmerising soundscapes. The album opens with 'Safe Self Tester' with an intro that makes you think you're listening to a classical music album. The track metamorphoses into an over 10 minutes long awesome hymn of glorious beauty, with moments in which you have the feeling you're listening to the best orchestra on the planet rehearsing. 'Meet Dad' switches towards jazz, while 'Airfling' is a mish-mash of Miles Davis and themes from spy films. Loka's love for film soundtracks is detectable also in 'Freda Mae', while their admiration for long and heartbreaking emotive and epic symphonies is evident in the two-part track 'Tabernacle'. An impressive debut. – anna battista

Lylas, Lessons for Lovers (Fictitiuous)

Care to dance? The cover of the debut Lylas album Lessons for Lovers shows men and women doing some sort of traditional dance, yet the men have no heads. That pretty much sums up Lessons for Lovers. The Nashville-based band Lylas plays graceful, truly romantic pop music: waltzes and ballads and rambler's tunes accented by instruments both country (pedal steel, banjo) and 'sophisticated' (flute, oboe, cello). Vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Kyle Hamlett sings in a uniquely soft, airy, jazz-leaning way, while the other musicians play just as lightly. It's gorgeous orchestral pop music, like the first Pernice Brothers album if it drew more from the world of ballroom dancing and big-band jazz. It's Valentine's Day music, lovers' music…that is, if the lovers are the undead, or on the path to destruction. "There are things that years cannot undo," one lyric goes, and many of these songs are soundtracks for fables and fairy tales where lovers are torn apart for lifetimes, or doomed to walk the earth forever, that sort of thing. Where one lover kills the other, and is haunted by her ghost forever. "I gave away years just to follow you here / and in one tiny second you disappeared," Hamlett sings on one track; "someone says I love you / in the silence of an empty room," he sings on another. Love is often chased, and often flees. "Sweethearts are bult to break." It all adds up to a beautiful, bittersweet album of slow-dance songs all about the painful, mysterious dance of people in love. Hamlett has found his own distinct way to write about love, and with Lylas has found a unique musical language in which to express those words. A rich, mesmerizing album, dark yet bright. – dave heaton

Zero dB, Bongos, Bleeps & Basslines (Ninja Tune)

Chris Vogado and Neil Combstock started working together six years ago. After releasing their early recordings on the label Fluid Ounce, the duo signed, under the moniker Zero dB, to Ninja Tine. While the duo is putting the final touches to their debut album, scheduled for release this summer, you can have a taste of what it will sound like, thanks to this single. 'Bongos, Bleeps & Basslines' features elements of jazz, but it mainly displays the influence of house music through avalanches of stupendously crowd-pleasing bleeps and pulsating basslines. B-side 'Know What I'm Sayin'' features on vocals Pase Rock, sometime member of Five Deez and, more recently, of Spank Rock, delivering his angry hip-hop on a background of unique and rhythmic sound environments. – anna battista


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