(Ghostly International)
A year after making the best and last word on electroclash—Tangent 2002: Disco Nouveau—upstart Ann Arbor label Ghostly International has released the year’s finest label compilation, its first full-length showcase.
At its heart, Idol Tryouts is a superlative mixtape, bereft of filler and filled with killer tunes, all of which make perfect sense next to each other and fashion a satisfying whole. But it’s also a revelation that makes an irresistible case for the label’s unique aesthetics. The disc’s painstaking curation is a template for future movements—casual experiments, pristine dancefloor bombs.
Dabrye’s “Making It Pay” sets the stage in shades of grey, a slice of abstract hip-hop whose pulverizing bassline and stainless snares sound more computerized than crunk. But soon the album’s pulled in opposite directions by tracks like Charles Manier’s “At The Bottle” (whose post-Kraftwerk synths and four-on-the-floor thump sound made for anime dancefloors) and a Telefon Tel Aviv rework of Midwest Product’s “A Genuine Display.” The latter’s rainy fragility is the compilation’s wildcard, showing that indie introspection can paint hip-hop and tech-house rhythms as beautifully as ambient did in the early 90s.
Most poignant is Dykehouse’s “Wire” cover, which resurrects “My Bloody Valentine” but somehow makes the guitars even more amorphous and suffocating. The track’s shoegazer leanings sound out of place amidst the album’s bloops and beats at first, but they reflect the slowly, surely dissolving boundaries in marginal music.
—Ryan J. Kuo
My Morning Jacket
It Still Moves
(ATO)
From the opening of It Still Moves, the folk tale-named Jim James sounds like he’s crooning out of the window of a dusty Cadillac, horns tied to the overheating hood.
Scratch that—picture instead a shiny tour bus with Dave Matthews’ name emblazoned on the grill. After years spent floating around the Midwest, My Morning Jacket have finally graduated to the big leagues—to Matthews’ BMG imprint to be exact—and It Still Moves is their brand new ride.
The Kentucky quintet’s foray onto the empty alt-country road has never been brighter, more decisive or had more reverb. Where Tennessee Fire drunkenly laid out maps and 2001’s beautiful At Dawn sounded the ignition, the new album pulls out all the stops along the 72-minute path. The beer-stained pool halls and one-night plans of James’ hitchhiker poetry all point to a Neil Young education, while his cyclic, hypnotizing voice (falling between that of early Young and a drunken Wayne Coyne) is as seductive as always. As James himself describes it: “Soft and warm all the time, make you want it over and over / Strong on the horizon, but ends up bein’ really so sweet.”
That emotional range also belongs to the band, who channel Allman (“Easy Morning Rebel”) and Ozzy (“Run Thru”) with powerful grace. Recorded in the same farmhouse that made previous albums spacious and spacey, the major label production stays true to the quartet’s down-home sound. There may be a moral here about how “selling out” isn’t so bad after all, but the real lesson is about country music—well, ’tain’t so bad either.
—Alex L. Pasternack