Fleet Foxes
Helplessness Blues
(Sub Pop)

Ah, the difficult second album. Helplessness Blues took a toll on the Fleet Foxes as they struggled to create a follow-up to their acclaimed debut. The result is a moody, spacious, and complex record that’s less ingratiating, with fewer buoyant choruses and ecstatic group harmonies. The group’s chamber folk songs are more intricate, incorporating raga drones and shivery strings along with such baroque instrumentation as dulcimer, water harp, and harmonium. The album’s texture and momentum tends to imprint itself more deeply than the individual songs, but its pleasures make themselves evident over time. Highlights include the hypnotic rolling “Bedouin Dress,” the chiming lullaby “Lorelai,” and the expansively yearning title track. The band overreach with the skronky free jazz horn coda to their epic “The Shrine/An Argument” but it’s nice to see them pushing themselves.  —Jeff Jackson

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3:33
Live from the Grove
(Parallel Thought Ltd.)

It’s hard to know whether to call this a band, a duo of sound artists or audio propaganda for some retro-futuristic pagan religion. Much of the music is trance-like, stretching droning didgeridoo-type sounds over slightly distorted drum loops. The press materials make mention of very ancient things like “dead languages” and “Babylonian Blood Gods,” and the CD’s cover art is similarly Cthulu-flavored; it’s a worship, in sound, of something between demons and earth gods so old that almost nothing written remains of their once ubiquitous presence. Various sound effects imitate parts of the natural world like birds, water and wind, and many samples of other music and of people speaking are interspersed, often pitch-adjusted to sub-bass tones. With what sounds like Zool on bass and Gozer on drum machine, somebody better call Ghostbusters.  —Tom Sturm

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Thomas Dolby
Map of the Floating City
(Redeye)

Thomas Dolby was a unique presence in ’80s pop, a sort of New Wave geek’s geek, making electronic music that, through some weird process, ended up being funky. Now he’s back, and his new, guest-laden effort carves out territory that’s just as satisfying and unusual. Pop is, almost by definition, a realm of vapidity. Not true when Dolby applies his strange magic; the result is a wonderfully melodic, very well-sung group of tunes that sport shadows of his ’80s persona, yet feel current and vital. Dolby’s lyrics please throughout, and often seem to consist of brain-dumps, sets of wild images that pile up to reveal some sort of mad scientist uber-logic. The album opens with “Hippocratic oaf/ apathy on toast/ psilocybin nut roast/ panic on the seas/ mozzarella cheese/ diplomatic deepfreeze…/ stuck for a line you grovel for a rhyme.” It’s suprisingly great to have Dolby back in the saddle. —James Heflin