Thrill Jockey

Liturgy

The Metal Examiner: Liturgy’s Aesthethica

Every Friday, The Metal Examiner delves metal’s endless depths to present the genre’s most important and exciting albums.

Liturgy: AesthethicaLiturgy: Aesthethica (Thrill Jockey, 5/10/11)

Liturgy: “Returner”

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For a moment, Brooklyn-based quartet Liturgy seemed poised to steer black metal into a bold new direction. Renihilation, the group’s debut full-length from 2009, showed that even while employing the classic tenets of black metal, it was possible to push the genre forward and put it in a more efficient package. Yet whereas that album made a statement, the band’s follow-up, Aesthethica, turns many of those tactics into a mere reminder.

Liturgy comes armed once more with Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s mostly indecipherable howl and quasi-anthemic guitar lines blasted with co-pilot Bernard Gann, both positioned over Greg Fox’s machine-gun drumming and Tyler Dusenbury’s frenetic bass lines. But rather than let its pieces work alongside each other, Liturgy places its components atop each other, turning its formidable wall of sound into an unfiltered onslaught.

By most standards, Liturgy still has a fairly forward-thinking vision of what black metal can be, reaching out of the genre playbook at will. Odd-pattern tremolo picking gives “Tragic Laurel” a progressive feel that leaves the door open for the sucker punch of its main section, and “True Will” stacks layers of screams over a seesaw chord progression, interrupted only by a skipping-CD breakdown.

Tortoise

Concert Photos: Tortoise @ Empty Bottle (Chicago, IL)

Experimental instrumental quintet Tortoise played a pair of hometown shows recently, performing in front of welcoming crowds at the Empty Bottle in Chicago. The incomparable rock-dub-jazz shape-shifter garnered a “This Week’s Best Albums” tag for its 2009 release Beacons of Ancestorship (Thrill Jockey). Since then, it has released a 13-minute single (Ice Ice Gravy) and a Japan-only CD (Why Waste Time?).

As you wait for a new Tortoise full-length, check out photographer Drew Reynolds‘ captures from the performance, and then click on over and revisit guitarist Jeff Parker‘s late-2010 show with Andrew Bird right here.

Tortoise

Thank You

Record Review: Thank You’s Golden Worry

Thank You: Golden WorryThank You: Golden Worry (Thrill Jockey, 1/25/11)

Thank You: “1-2-3 Bad”

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Thank You‘s third album, Golden Worry, proves that the Baltimore trio is a band worth rooting for, and one that’s a step closer to making clear what it wants.

Like a few other recent albums to come out of Baltimore — namely, Pontytail‘s Ice Cream Spiritual and Dan Deacon‘s Bromst — Golden Worry stages a good-faith meeting between experimental impulses and an enthusiasm for amiable hooks. This hasn’t always been the case with Thank You. On the band’s last album, Terrible Two, its obsession with rhythm threatened to dry up the guitars, keys, and vocals into a tuneless murk.

Thank You has a compact feel that sometimes works for it and sometimes against it. The drums clamber actively on top of the song, often taking the lead but not always filling up the low end, and the guitars work up a noise-rhythm complement that, while often aggressive, doesn’t pursue a lot of fun back-and-forth with the percussion. As for vocals, only sometimes there and only sometimes coherent, they’re another constant variable in an open-ended format. It might help to know that Thrill Jockey’s bio for Thank You credits each member simply with “everything.”

World in Stereo: Sidi Touré’s Sahel Folk

Each week, World in Stereo examines classic and modern world music while striving for a greater appreciation of other cultures.

Sidi Touré: Sahel Folk (Thrill Jockey, 1/25/11)

Sidi Touré: “Bon Koum”

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It has been 13 years since Malian folk artist Sidi Touré released a solo album. Touré’s 1998 debut, Hoga, is a bluesy, foot-stomping, electric-overdrive kind of record. At the time, Touré and many of his Malian contemporaries were on the cutting edge of the evolving Afro-pop sound, just before its revival hit the West by the turn of the century. Now at 51, Touré’s sound has definitely changed, but it’s as powerful and provocative as ever.

Sahel Folk, the West African musician’s debut on Thrill Jockey, is informed by the people and places most important to him, making for a record that comes off naturally introspective. Direct from the stunning red-dirt roads of Bamako, Mali, Touré and his unmatched guitar playing have made an album that’s nothing short of inspirational.

100 Unheralded Albums from 2010

Among the thousands of under-appreciated or under-publicized albums that were released in 2010, hundreds became our favorites and were presented in ALARM and on AlarmPress.com. Of those, we pared down to 100 outstanding releases, leaving no genre unexplored in our list of this year’s overlooked gems.