High Places
High Places
(Thrill Jockey)
All bets are off when the debut from this duo starts. Sounds sizzle and wiggle like a sonic heat haze. Hand claps, insectoid rattlings, hypnotic drones, artfully minced melodic patterns and sandblasted string samples accumulate in dizzying textures. Metallic percussion accents ping and pong across the mix. Singer Mary Pearson provides the lullaby-like vocals to this avant skinny-hipster business. At 30 minutes, it doesn't overstay its welcome, and it falls nicely somewhere between Animal Collective and Yeasayer. —John Adamian
Jonathan Byrd
The Law and the Lonesome
(Waterbug)
A guitar picker from North Carolina writing songs about Texas on an album recorded in Toronto—how does that work? Pretty darn well, in this case. Byrd especially excels at ballad narrative, telling the story of a coked-out youthful murderer on the title track. Most of the album is straight-up folk, but he does toss in the rockabilly "Houston Window Blues" and the muscular "May the River Run Dry." The latter is a stunning arrangement—an atmospheric and catchy outlaw song frontloaded with dust-filled vocals and edge-of-desperation flat-picking. There's a Larry McMurtry quality to the way in which Bryd captures played-out prairie backwaters, coyotes lurking in the brush, and following the white lines on empty roads. —Rob Weir
Various Artists
Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds & Nigerian Blues: 1970-6
(Soundway Records)
Fela Kuti rightfully looms large when people think about Nigerian music. But there is far more to the country's fertile scene than just the King of Afrobeat. Soundway's two-disc Nigeria Special offers an exciting cross-section of tunes from the 1970s, a golden age when modern and traditional Africa rubbed shoulders. The 26 tunes here include sweet highlife jazz, raw Afro-rock, laid-back blues, slinky lock-groove funk, and churning instrumental jams. The hit ratio is remarkably high, especially impressive since most of these tunes will be completely unknown outside of Lagos. The beautiful packaging and generous booklet help put these gems in context. —Jeff Jackson
Brightblack Morning Light
Motion to Rejoin
(Matador)
It's like this band forged some sort of previously unimagined genre out of parts that were lying in front of everybody all this time. Take your freak folk, your ambient music, your Native American New Age, your dub reggae, and graft it onto a funk record, the kind that practically emits a warm glow from all the Fender Rhodes, and that might give you an idea of what BML's CD sounds like. This is soul with a celestial metabolism, oozing at a glacial pace, like a Curtis Mayfield single slowed down to half speed. You can practically taste and smell the clouds of shamanic smoke—smudge stick, weed, camp fire—surrounding these hypnotic grooves. It's the soundtrack for a communion with the sky. —John Adamian
