Pitchfork: Best New Music

No Age: Nouns

Mon, 05 May 2008 04:00:00 -0500

No Age follow their 2007 EP compilation, Weirdo Rippers, with a gorgeously thick Sub Pop debut-- a hazy, delirious expanse that's friendly and warm and, best of all, unpredictable. Like Times New Viking, No Age bury their addictive sing-alongs in layers of effects and fuzz: Nouns is so cacophonous, so fertile, and so ripe with sound that it's hard to comprehend how just two people manage to make so much noise while still sounding subdued and mysterious.

Portishead: Third

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 04:00:00 -0500

As radical reinventions go, Third-- the first Portishead studio album since 1997-- is surprisingly natural. Darker and bleaker lyrically than their previous work, Third is a sort of re-debut-- the band's sound after it has excised every possible remnant of trip-hop from it. Instead, Third is a psychedelic rock album, with an abrasive and jittery electro-industrial number, analog freakouts, free jazz horns, droning, rhythmically dense garage-kraut, and other sonic detours.

Titus Andronicus: The Airing of Grievances

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 04:00:00 -0500

Despite its title's implied politeness, The Airing of Grievances qualifies more as existentialism wrapped in an anti-suburban screed from an indie band that's at times violent, overblown, and irreverent. Frontman Patrick Stickles howls with anguish way beyond his 22 years, often cramming lyrics into tight spaces just to make sure he gets the last word in. Plus, as anyone who's heard five seconds of this band already knows, he sounds like Conor Oberst screaming from the bowels of hell. However, to peg these guys as "emo" would be sadly inaccurate. Sure, torn diary page scribbles clutter Airing's heart-on-sleeve, fist-in-air anthems, but the drama's more Boss than Bright Eyes, fueled by blue collar frustration and, most notably, beer.

M83: Saturdays=Youth

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 04:00:00 -0500

After a pair of impossibly huge, overpowering records, M83's Anthony Gonzalez changes up his sound, ditching maximalism for beauty and drama. His new album-- dedicated to "all the friends, music, movies, joints, and crazy teachers that made my teenage years so great!"-- is dense with 1980s new wave tropes and reflects the soft-focused mythology of eternal summers and young love.

Cut Copy: In Ghost Colours

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:00:00 -0500

"Blog house" may be increasingly used as an eye-rolling pejorative, but don't punish Cut Copy's hugely enjoyable In Ghost Colours, a fantastic record that feels light, confident, and unencumbered by the dictates of fashion. It's a gloriously positive record, one whose cheerily strummed acoustic guitars, shimmering synths, sweeping choruses, and playful sonics add up to a balanced, brilliant summer pop record.

Dodos: Visiter

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 04:00:00 -0500

Despite a stripped-down setup of just acoustic guitar and drums, this Bay Area duo hits with a full-band force that's even more pronounced in their astounding live sets. Visiter, their Frenchkiss Records debut, has garnered comparisons Animal Collective and new-primitivist bands like High Places and Yeasayer, but here, addictive hooks lurk beneath the rhymthic surface, resulting in one of the most welcoming (and welcome) records of 2008 so far.

Fuck Buttons: Street Horrrsing

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 04:00:00 -0500

Fuck Buttons came together in 2004 to create pain-inducing noise music, but soon became curious about mixing in prettier sounds, adding structure and melody to their brutal tracks. As a result, their debut LP is surprisingly welcoming-- for noise, anyway-- with a mix of dreamy melody and abrasive climax that evokes strange stylistic bedfellows from the hypnotic drones of Spacemen 3 to the chiming dissonance of Black Dice.

Hercules and Love Affair: Hercules and Love Affair

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 04:00:00 -0500

DFA introduces Andrew Butler, a compelling new voice in American dance music. His debut album is a self-contained, self-assured set that runs vintage styles through a restless compositional imagination to create something joyfully, startlingly unique. While most tracks could work on a forward-thinking dancefloor, what really works is the songwriting-- the album brims with hooks, choruses, bridges, strange twists, and turns. Antony Hegarty (Antony and the Johnsons) provides vocals on some tracks and !!!'s Tyler Pope chips in as well.

The Ruby Suns: Sea Lion

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 04:00:00 -0600

On his second Ruby Suns album, California native and New Zealand-based musician Ryan McPhun dresses his work in global music, nibbling at the edges of unfamiliar sounds as he skillfully creates sunny psych-pop. Like the jumbled orchestral experimentation of Olivia Tremor Control, Sea Lion will be rightly called a great guitar pop album, but it's sonically more complex than that suggests.

Fleet Foxes: Sun Giant EP

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 04:00:00 -0600

The first official release from Seattle-based Fleet Foxes may be largely influenced by vintage folk and rock LPs, but this pastoral psych-pop band does something special with these elements. Fusing classic rock, church music, old-timey folk, and epic, reverb-drenched harmonies, the group's brilliantly rustic songs never go quite where you expect them to, instead taking more scenic routes to arrive at perfect, natural conclusions.

Beach House: Devotion

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 04:00:00 -0600

Beach House's songwriting hasn't fundamentally changed on their second record: Their delicate, lovelorn pop still comes in the form of deathly waltzes and dark pastoral dirges on which Legrand sings about desire, loss, and dreams as if telling a ghost story. Devotion simply cleans up their sound, resulting in crisper, brighter, bolder songs that retain the Baltimore dream-pop duo's melodic sense and vibe of elegant decay while sweeping up the debris.

El Guincho: Alegranza!

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 04:00:00 -0600

Taking impressive and probably unwittingly fashionable source material-- Afrobeat, dub, Tropicália, and early rock'n'roll-- and applying an intuitive feel for rhythm, Spain's Pablo Díaz-Reixa crafts a fusion of songful simplicity and unpolished production wizardry that feels right more than it feels startling.