Andy Battaglia appears in the following:
First Listen: Cymbals Eat Guitars, 'Pretty Years'
Thursday, September 08, 2016
First Listen: James Vincent McMorrow, 'We Move'
Thursday, August 25, 2016
First Listen: Polica, 'United Crushers'
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Poliça's third album opens in a downcast mood, with a mother's murky voice telling a newborn baby that, in no uncertain terms, "It's all s***." An excremental worldview rarely makes for rousing anthems — much less repetition of that worldview as a refrain — but there's a spirit of ...
First Listen: Dr. Dog, 'The Psychedelic Swamp'
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
It's no surprise that a band called Dr. Dog might tend toward loopy, loping outsider rock with a slightly goofy streak. If there were any doubt, it's quickly dispelled by The Psychedelic Swamp, a concept album that wanders and sprawls to absorbing effect. The songs on Dr. Dog's ninth ...
First Listen: Eleanor Friedberger, 'New View'
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
The book on Eleanor Friedberger as a solo artist away from the sprawl of her band Fiery Furnaces is that she's pared down, constricted and simplified; that she's become, as both a lyricist and a songwriter, less bookish over time. Of course, any album, compared to a typical ...
Heavenly Bodies
Friday, December 11, 2015
It's odd to have a body. Limbs, joints, cartilage, veins, nerves, cells—the looming presence of such inescapable parts can make for confounding states of existential estrangement. Move on to other parts that signify conventions of gender and the notion can be enough to turn a mind inside-out.
Electronic music in ...
First Listen: Escort, 'Animal Nature'
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
There should be a term other than "old-school" to account for Escort's habit of approaching throwback sounds with the full weight of an institution rather than just the wisdom that comes with regular study. The New York band's members presented themselves as vintage dance-music precisionists from the beginning, in ...
First Listen: Dave Gahan & Soulsavers, 'Angels & Ghosts'
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Dave Gahan has sung about a soul that needs saving since his earliest murmurings as the frontman of Depeche Mode. Now, he's recorded his second collection of collaborative songs with Soulsavers since teaming up with the U.K. production enterprise in 2012. The first release was solely a ...
First Listen: Neon Indian, 'VEGA INTL. Night School'
Monday, October 12, 2015
"Hey there, sexy," a saucy voice says on a hotline set up to promote Neon Indian's new album, in a sort of send-up of phone-sex festivity. Dial the number (512-643-VEGA) and, after sitting through a few lascivious intimations, a link gets sent by way of text to hear the ...
First Listen: Born Ruffians, 'Ruff'
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Born Ruffians' members leach electricity from a long line of wily, wiry art-rock weirdoes, from historical markers like Talking Heads and Violent Femmes to present paragons Animal Collective and Vampire Weekend. So many seeming allusions fly by in a typical Born Ruffians song that a ...
First Listen: Youth Lagoon, 'Savage Hills Ballroom'
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
In rococo indie-rock songs that have wormed their way into ears well beyond his native Boise, Idaho, Youth Lagoon mastermind Trevor Powers comes across as a sensitive, trembling soul who combines precision and poise with a sense of being forever on the verge of falling apart. Shows of strength ...
In Classic Pop, Destroyer's Dan Bejar Finds A New Voice
Thursday, August 20, 2015
For nearly two decades now, Dan Bejar — the mind behind the enigmatic rock enterprise Destroyer — has put out albums that double as propositions to consider what this thing called Destroyer has been and what it might continue to be. There have been a good number so far, including ...
First Listen: HEALTH, 'Death Magic'
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
For HEALTH, an ambitious noise-rock band from Los Angeles, the all-caps designation is well-deserved. Every gesture on Death Magic, the group's third album (not counting remix packages or video-game music), is grand, and each resulting sound is scaled to match. The opening track, "Victim," commences with a slow, steady beating ...
First Listen: Arthur Russell, 'Corn'
Sunday, May 31, 2015
To those who adore his work, Arthur Russell was a sort of musical saint whose flittings between styles — disco, pop, folk, rock, quasi-classical stirrings from solo electric cello — were evidence of a divine being on earth. Before his death in 1992, Russell mingled with fellow artsy minds ...
First Listen: Holly Herndon, 'Platform'
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Holly Herndon works in a post-human mode that's become customary in electronic music, yet remains abstract in realms beyond. Voices figure heavily in Platform, her follow-up to a breakthrough album in 2012, but they're spliced, diced, dissected — too processed, in any case, to suggest origins in a fleshy ...
First Listen: Jim O'Rourke, 'Simple Songs'
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Throughout a long and varied career, Jim O'Rourke has approached music the way a watchmaker might approach complications, the catch-all term for parts of a timepiece that go beyond simply telling the time. (A display of the date would be one, as would the day of the week, star charts ...
First Listen: Bill Fay, 'Who Is The Sender?'
Sunday, April 19, 2015
Cult songwriter Bill Fay was never in a hurry to follow up his 1971 classic Time Of The Last Persecution, but he's been on a comparative tear since coming back with a decades-in-the-making album just two years ago. The title of that 2012 return, Life Is People, conveyed part ...
First Listen: Squarepusher, 'Damogen Furies'
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Of all the fitful, fractious breakbeat expressionists who got their start in the U.K. in the late 1990s — see also: Aphex Twin, Autechre, μ-ziq — Squarepusher has proven the most wild and untamed. Unpredictability has always been integral to a genre that merges rave-minded electronic sounds with the strictures ...
First Listen: Twin Shadow, 'Eclipse'
Sunday, March 08, 2015
In songs that go big and hit home, Twin Shadow sets his musical register to "epic" and only looks upward from there. As a default mode, it's intense and unrelenting, occasionally disorienting for its outsize sense of scale. But then little details — a delicate synth sound here, an ...
First Listen: Of Montreal, 'Aureate Gloom'
Sunday, February 22, 2015
In a recent interview, Of Montreal mastermind Kevin Barnes described Aureate Gloom, the band's 13th full-length album, as "sort of all over the place musically," which is really something for an artist whose style has been scattered and spastic from the start. When other indie-pop bands were trotting out ...