3 Music Reviews

DJ Ordeal & VB12, Usher/Guitango/Usherette (Sparticus Stargazer/Other Worlds)

"Usher" kicks off this three-track LP in grand DJ Ordeal style, meaning we're hearing a cut-up version of some sophisticate's party of decades past. Saxophones, pianos, and drums are circling into each other, as a multitude of jazz combos melt into one. A vague sense of nostalgia may be in the air, but it also feels like we're caught up in a infinite loop, lost in some kind of puzzle, and by seconds it gets more mysterious. An enigmatic narrator keeps popping in to tell some spooky tale, perhaps related to the Edgar Allen Poe character the track takes its title from. Eventually his voice will get more frantic, and as he speaks there's a crazy burst of screams underneath. Then the jazz comes back in, only to fade away. The other Ordeal track here, "Guitango," offers up a similar mix of jazzy sophistication and eerie non-sequitors, though here the latter mostly takes the form of laser beams and abrupt transitions. Al Caiola's jazz guitar is always being interrupted, and then beginning again. We're continually given a pleasurable, comfortable mood, and that mood keeps being pulled out from under us. On the B side Vb12 takes the two Ordeal tracks (both created with his method of taking cassette tapes and cutting up onto reel-to-reel and 4-track tape) and remixes them into one, quite different track called "Usherette." Ghosts are somewhere in the air on the two Ordeal tracks, but here they're right there in your speakers. First they whine and whir, and then they lead us into a haunted house, where severely warped pianos slowly give a recital, eventually giving way to a groaning, chaotic mixture of instruments and stormclouds and the load, overbearing groan of death. – dave heaton

Squares, self-titled (Best Kept Secret)

I have a cassette player in my kitchen. Lately I can't so much as walk past it without hitting play on this Squares cassette; it's become a reflex action. Why? It's brief, and has a pretty atmosphere about it. The first thing we hear is a gentle, humble guitar playing softly, with a tea-kettle-like noise lurking lightly in the background, and we're instantly drawn into the environment, set up for an equally gentle-in-tone male vocalist to come in singing, "Underneath the starry sky / there were moonbeams…" Something about this collection of small homemade pop songs feels like a little vacation. Lyrically there's themes of traveling, often with a lightly surreal tone: travel to space, underwater, within the US. The final song's last lyric is "Now I'm here at summertime bay / and I'm awake," and that pretty well captures the music's feeling of being completely present in a place. Whether it's the delicate instrumental "Siebenundswanzig," the particularly hook-driven "Oceans and Trees," or any of the other five songs, the atmosphere is vivid and the melody riveting. The music here is spare – hearing it you imagine a few people with a few instruments (acoustic guitar, a keyboard, some maracas), playing in a dimly lit room. And the sounds they're making are in their own way magical, with lovely tunes and an aura of strange beauty. – dave heaton

Starlight Mints, Drowaton (Barsuk)

Big chunky guitars kick off the new Starlight Mints album, followed by a fat bassline, horns, and Allan Vest singing in an odd falsetto. It sounds on one level like a classic rock anthem, and on another like a slightly off Prince imitation. That song leads into one with whistling, a circus-like feeling, and a now falsetto-less Vest singing like some kind of warped circus leader. That is, before the main melody kicks in and the song lurches forward into rock. Of course, though, it leans back to the circus-like circling, and back to the rock, and so on. The Starlight Mints have been around a long time, doing their slightly psychedelic version of turn-it-up-and-sing-along rock. In the past, they've often struck me as trying too hard to be odd on the surface, while sticking too close to the ordinary underneath. Maybe I wasn't listening closely enough, or maybe they're progressing, as here it all seems to meld perfectly well together. These songs are arena-rock punchy and college-rock radio catchy – mostly, though not always, in a way that I find appealing. But they also display a desire to twist things up, to let your wilder inclinations drive the songs in weirder directions. Drowaton has a fantasy vibe, a dreamer's circus atmosphere of world-tripping and myth-creating. And that vibe doesn't seem forced, doesn't seem like a put-on. Sometimes it's lessened in favor of the hooks, but it's always there. That dreamy, slightly twisted edge is what keeps the album interesting even when the melodies themselves seem a bit common, as they sometimes do. Sometimes a little weirdness can do a lot of good. – dave heaton