(Too Pure / Beggars Group)

If the term art-pop conjures up images of archly obscurantist noise bands with a heady disdain for melody, think again. It would be hard to be more artsy than Brighton, U.K.-based quartet Electrelane. On their first album, they eschewed the use of vocals (classy), but for “The Power Out”, their debut album for indie label Beggars Group, frontwoman Verity Susman (classier) has contributed vocals in four different languages (classiest). And get this: the English words on “The Valleys” are from a Siegried Sassoon poem, while the German ones on “This Deed” are from The Gay Science—by Nietzsche.

So with their art credentials well and truly established, and a gallery show for the album in the offing (seriously), what does the music sound like? Susman’s deadpan delivery and the occasionally cerebral music are a little arch at times. On “Oh Sombra,” Susman’s voice appears deliberately quavery, overpowered by the gathering waves of chiming guitars and snowballing drums. Yet the album never abandons the ideal of pop music, taking some surprising and ambitious turns in order to keep the pretensions light-footed. The garage strut of “Take The Bit Between Your Teeth” sounds like Jack White might if he were a girl, and went to art college. But Susman has some vocal chops entirely her own: the supersonic double punch she delivers on “On Parade” is neither screech nor wail, but somewhere between a radar ping and a rock ‘n roll yelp. In fact, for all its artsyness, the music is irrepressibly, slyly cool, from the sly strut that accompanies Mr. Sassoon to the lush indie-pop of “Enter Smiling.” If all art were this much fun, museums would have happy hours.

—Andrew R. Iliff

Savath & Savalas

Apropa’t

(Warp)

Perhaps the ultimate appeal of Scott Herren’s music is how he always gets things wrong. Not purposely irreverent or consciously malfunctioning, his work simply sounds half-executed with an air of open experimentation. Under his Prefuse 73 alias, he chops Hip-Hop beats in a manner more akin to Mille Plateaux glitch artists like Farben and Vladislav Delay than to DJ Premier. But in doing so, he cuts off their potential to groove, making his compositions as involuted and intricate as the best of Warp’s back catalogue.

Prefuse’s melodies are barely articulated, coloring his beats in two or three translucent shades. Herren clearly has little melodic training. Accompanied by singer Eva Puyuelo and a small band on the new Savath & Savalas album, his abstract tendencies lead to constructive conflict. The original songs, recorded with live horns, keys and drums, are hollowed-out, taken apart and re-stitched until they’re nothing more than a series of textures floating dreamily. Herren’s additions—subtle crackles, blips and melodic tweaks—give potentially evocative recordings a strikingly dull sheen, like tarnished silver. His electronic smudges obscure Puyuelo and musicians just enough to make it all a lazy game of finding the ghost in the shell.

The songs on “Apropa’t” are distinctly more compelling than Herren’s beat-driven material. As Prefuse, he carves useless sculptures out of head-nod functionalism; as Savath & Savalas, his explorations turn “real” music into dense head music. Given the studio treatment, mournful songs like “Te Quiero Pero Por Otro Lado…” and “Um Girassol de Cor de Seu Cabelo” become confused and hazy, blurred beneath raindrops.

–Ryan J. Kuo