Staff Picks for February 2021
February 28, 2021
Although his career was short, Ervin still managed to record some 20 albums as a frontman, most notably his "book" series, including this fine session, which finds him working with a rhythm section of Jaki Byard on piano, Richard Davis on bass, and Alan Dawson on drums. It's a near perfect set of modern hard bop, ranging just far enough out there to feel fresh but retaining a strong lifeline to bop tradition.
February 27, 2021
This paint-peeling quartet from Lansing, Michigan, tore up basements, restaurants, and even frat parties with their brand of light-speed uncontrolled aggression and no-future simplicity. At the Speed... issues the band's 7" single and EP, a compilation cut, outtakes, and a live tape. It's for those who were there, those who wish they were, and those who only read about this mysterious punk rock band that helped to define the Midwest hardcore scene.
February 26, 2021
From beginning to end, Savage Republic's discography is fascinating and unique, but it’s also quite uneven and necessitates an overview, provided here by LTM. This hits upon each one of the band’s releases from 1982 through 2007 and illustrates SR's often-thrilling hybrid of scampering post-punk, caustic hardcore punk, clattering industrial, and ominous surf rock.
February 25, 2021
The project of Iowa-born singer/songwriter Andrew Choi, St. Lenox offers a bold and relevant 21st century pop record chronicling the American experience from the perspective of an immigrant's son.
February 24, 2021
Though this album was in the works before the volatile 2016 election season and briefly set aside, its messages are still pertinent, touching on social and economic woes as well as humanity and matters of the heart. It does so with bright and bittersweet tunes that draw heavily on '60s sunshine pop; songs like "Monday, You're Not So Bad" could have been released by Chad & Jeremy, or maybe the Monkees or Herman's Hermits ("Saturday is overrated/Friday night is a drag/Sunday morning's heavy coming down").
February 23, 2021
The enigmatic jack-of-all-trades has dabbled in everything from carpentry to free-form electronic music and worked with everyone from the Blue Man Group to Sesame Street, so it comes as no surprise that his latest mission is to rescue as many long-buried American folk songs from "old schoolbooks, garage sales attics, and basements" as he can find and filter them through his sepia-toned armory of parlor-room instrumentation.
February 22, 2021
Released in 2014, the second full length from Atlanta indie pop collective Gold Bears is a rush of biting songwriting cloaked in fuzzy melodies. A vehicle for Jeremy Underwood's songwriting, Gold Bears reached their pinnacle on Dalliance. The album's eleven songs are marked by punky tempos, bitter lyricism, and catchy guitar pop that follows a direct line from The Wedding Present, Black Tambourine, and the entire C-86 movement.
February 21, 2021
Few bands before the mid-'70s'70s punk explosion were as thunderously raw and primal as the Troggs; "Wild Thing" was a throbbing outburst of three-chord lust, and "I Can't Control Myself," "Gonna Make You," and "I Want You" were even wilder. This 20-track collection also makes room for the group's poppier side ("Love Is All Around" and "You Can Cry If You Want To"), but it's the less subtle material that really makes this shine.
February 20, 2021
An instant classic, this debut from the multi-faceted R&B wiz sounds just as good now as it did upon release in 2012. Fully immersive, Channel Orange blends R&B, soul, funk, and hip-hop with a distinctly alternative bent. From the epic "Pyramids" to irresistibly catchy deep cuts like "Sweet Life" and "Lost," it's a creative melee from a budding artist and icon whose "Thinkin Bout You" and "Forrest Gump" were revolutionary at the time.
February 19, 2021
Sweet Trip's just-reissued third album was a departure from the spacy ambient techno and glitchy shoegaze of their earlier releases. A more streamlined indie pop album, You Will Never Know Why flirts with bossa nova, psychedelia, and space age pop, and its lyrics are emotionally direct, dealing with disenchantment and hopelessness, yet ultimately offering encouraging messages on songs like "Your World Is Eternally Complete". Easily the most accessible entry in Sweet Trip's pre-hiatus discography, it contains some of the most affecting, relatable material they've ever written.
February 18, 2021
The overlap in the Venn diagram of '70s electronic novelty pop and late '90s IDM found its perfect expression in Add N to (X). On their third and arguably finest album Avant Hard, the band brings more structure and melody to their analog synth mischief, delivering dystopian tracks with Wagnerian drama alongside distortion-laden homages to pioneering figures like Buckminster Fuller. More than two decades after its release, Avant Hard's synth rock fantasies sound as vibrantly retrofuturistic as ever.
February 17, 2021
One of America's greatest pop vocalists, Johnny Mathis turns in a gorgeously understated 1959 set whose title describes not only its concept, but it's inviting tone.
February 16, 2021
David Byrne's edgy nerdiness was the focal point of Talking Heads' earliest work, but on their second album, 1978's More Songs About Buildings and Food, producer Brian Eno confirmed the band was every bit as strong as their frontman. This was two years before the group embraced funk on Remain In Light, but these songs cut sinewy grooves that enhanced Byrne's off-kilter wit.
February 15, 2021
The laconic California indie minstrel's fifth offering is a thrift shop photo album filled with histories that may or may not have been, dust bowl carnival rides, and slices of sunlit Western Americana so thick that you need a broom to sweep up the bits that fall off of the knife.
February 14, 2021
This confusingly packaged triple CD contains two discs' worth of DOOM-produced beats, continuously mixed and taken from the ten-volume Special Herbs LP series, as well as an unmixed bonus disc of KMD instrumentals (including the one built around a loop of Bert from Sesame Street humming). His productions were just as brilliant and unconventional as his rhymes, excavating samples from old cartoons, Godzilla movies, and '80s R&B and yacht rock records, which other producers simply weren't touching around the late '90s.
February 13, 2021
2002's Grava 4 would be the final fully-realized studio album from Detroit's techno mystics Drexciya, released the same year founding member and one half of the duo James Stinson died from a heart condition. The album is among Drexciya's best work, loosely tying together themes of race, futurism and high concept science fiction in dark techno tracks that moved between hypnotic high energy electro and watery ambience.
February 12, 2021
This 1977 release is one of the rare "lost treasures" that actually deserves to be called that. On it the Beach Boys' drummer lays his soul bare over arrangements made up of swelling strings, heavenly choirs, fragments of piano chords, and Wilson’s own bruised, but not broken, vocals. There are no hit singles and precious little fun in the sun on offer; instead it's devastatingly sad music best heard once the surfboards have been stowed and the second bottle of wine is flowing.
February 11, 2021
Those listeners familiar only with the group's later incarnation as the first British folk-rock band will be in for a shock when they hear the group's 1968 debut. Largely free of any particularly British influences, the early Fairport were, by their own estimation, an attempt at re-creating the sound of the California folk-rock-into-psychedelia scene, á la the early Jefferson Airplane or the Mamas and the Papas.
February 10, 2021
Recorded near the bitter end of the original Animals' lifetime, Animalisms found this edition of the group going out in a blaze of glory. The Animals generally fared better on singles than LPs, but Animalisms is their one "all killer, no filler" long player, with Eric Burdon's vocals sounding seasoned but spirited, and the band as tight and ferocious as any of their rivals in British blues. Rest in peace, guitarist Hilton Valentine.
February 9, 2021
This is an extremely symbolic album, for Herbie Hancock and the V.S.O.P. rhythm section essentially pass the torch of the '80s acoustic jazz revival to the younger generation, as personified by then 19-year-old Wynton Marsalis. Recorded during a break on a tour of Japan, a month before Marsalis made his first Columbia album, the technically fearless teenaged trumpeter mostly plays the eager student, imitating Miles, Freddie Hubbard, and Clifford Brown, obviously relishing the challenge of keeping up with his world-class cohorts.
February 8, 2021
Coloring straight-ahead pop melodies with a bit of Manchester danceability and shoegazer experimentation, this group from Coventry broke through with their 1988 debut. Memorable for those complex guitar textures alongside compact hooks and singer Tracy Tracy's sweet, intelligent delivery, it includes the U.K. Top Ten and U.S. alternative-radio hit "Crash."
February 7, 2021
Even though Bionic needs more love, this forgotten seventh set from the Y2K generation's finest voice also deserves a listen, especially for fans left wanting more from 2018's Liberation. Both a nostalgic flashback to 2012-pop's "discovery" of house music and a reminder of Aguilera's vocal power, Lotus features the best of both worlds, from sweeping ballads that highlight her perfect pipes ("Sing For Me") to classic pop bangers ("Army of Me").
February 6, 2021
Broadening his musical palette, the guitarist detoured into a number of "theme" sessions in 1962 -- the light Latin jazz of The Latin Bit; the country & western standards of Goin' West; and the best of the bunch, the old-time gospel album Feelin' the Spirit. Green, backed by Herbie Hancock, Butch Warren, and Billy Higgins, takes five traditional, public-domain African-American spirituals and gives them swinging jazz treatments.
February 5, 2021
This loose trio date brings together three Philadelphia-bred musicians with radically divergent careers but a lot in common nonetheless. They are pianist/keyboardist Uri Caine, bassist Christian McBride, and drummer/programmer Ahmir ("?uestlove") Thompson from the Roots. It's a textbook example of how jazz, soul, and hip-hop were becoming deeply intertwined at the outset of the new millennium.
February 4, 2021
Of Phil Spector's latter day projects, none were stranger than his 1977 collaboration with Leonard Cohen, Death of a Ladies' Man. Spector co-wrote the songs with Cohen as well as producing, and blending Cohen's spare, emotional poetry with Spector's wobbly reconstruction of his Wall of Sound was at best problematic and at worst disastrous. But the opening and closing songs -- "True Love Leaves No Traces" and the title track -- are unexpectedly inspired and moving.
February 3, 2021
Following her untimely death, revisiting SOPHIE's masterpiece Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides feels necessary and therapeutic. It's hard to believe that with her prolific output and tremendous influence on the worlds of electronic pop music, she only released one album, but what an album it is: Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides introduced a newfound openness and vulnerability as it built on the queerness and originality of her music. Juxtaposing vaporous ballads with ferocious bangers, the album's inventiveness hints at just how much more SOPHIE could have changed music.
February 2, 2021
Recorded concurrently to 1992's superb The Tokyo Sessions, Beauty and the Beast finds trumpeter Roy Hargrove and altoist Antonio Hart diving into a vibrant set of Disney favorites alongside a Japanese rhythm section led by pianist Yutaka Shiina. Rising jazz stars in their early 20s at the time, Hargrove and Hart seem to be having fun as they blaze through these beloved, hard-swinging standards.
February 1, 2021
While not at the top of the Elvis soundtrack heap, it's fun to hear Presley explore the carnival world, with songs shoehorned in to match the theme and various plot contrivances. It's really best experienced as part of the movie, which plays a touch grittier than the standard Elvis fare and co-stars the great Barbara Stanwyck. It's streaming free on Pluto TV.