The record that got me into hip-hop. The whole thing sounds thing; both Blockhead’s beats (more skillful than Aes Rock’s own, I realize) and the man’s voice, which I had never consciously noticed is double-tracked for, like, most of the album. More than anything else, the fact that he’s constantly chorusing with himself makes it all feel very homemade, and knowing that Aesop Rock would succeed, have a nervous breakdown, and then succeed even more gives these lyrics about trying to live for your art (and the ones about doing nothing all day) a kick they didn’t used to have. Plus it takes a few albums’ worth of practice as a listener before you can tell what his point is anyway.

I am now totally unsurprised he ended up working with John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats.

Even now, knowing what to expect, I find the kinds of music Mark Robinson and Bridget Cross played in Air Miami to be confusing when not found in large homogenous blocks. The mix of jumpy, rhythmic indie rock sung by Mark and spacy pop sung by Bridget still doesn’t jell across the album as a whole. But it’s easier to see (especially with my current drum-centric perspective) how the rhythm section was the whole point even when the drums weren’t mixed super-loud, so I appreciate “Neely” and “Sweet As A Candy Bar” a lot more than before. Also unchanged: I like Robinson best as a prankster, but have never been able to elucidate at whose expense his pranks come, nor why they’re funny. Also also unchanged: The moments of New Order homage ring no less true now that sounding like New Order is nothing special.

Why?’s last album, Elephant Eyelash, left songwriter Yoni Wolf hanging from an artistic cliff. The Pavement homage “Sanddollars” was the sort of pop song people kidnap musicians in order to force them to write more of at gunpoint, and the rest was assembled so nimbly that any time it jelled, Wolf seemed to have access to huge undiscovered veins of musical possibility. But the parts which didn’t come together proved he didn’t actually know where the treasure was buried, and worse, it sounded like he had a whole lot of raw misery he wanted to unload in his music but couldn’t– at least, he couldn’t do it with the skill he brought to wistfully celebratory jams like “Sanddollars” and “Rubber Traits”. How, I wondered, would he ever get out of this one?

And then, with a single mighty leap…

So for one thing, Wolf has obviously made his peace with the fact that a nasal-voiced absurdist rapper who tries to fuse his existing style with indie rock is going to end up sounding like John Linnell a couplet away from getting booed offstage at the Scribble Jam. That’s life. It never bothered me.

There isn’t a single track on Alopecia that doesn’t reward close listening, but if you listen to it as a whole album (which you should), some of them carry more weight than others. “The Hollows” has a creepy and unexpected section right in the middle, punctuating a defiant but vague anthem (dedicated to “all my underdone, other-tongued, lung-long frontmen”) with eerie fragments of a trip to Berlin. Meanwhile, Doseone crawls all over the verses, hissing lyrics from elsewhere on the album. The meaning is unclear but the effect stays the same every time I hear it: I get a chill down my spine when the guitar punches in to end the bridge. In fact, every time he sets aside his usual coded messages in favor of a real objective correlative, it gets to me. One recurring motif on the record is Wolf ducking into a bathroom in some public place because he needs to be alone– to masturbate, in “Good Friday”; to write down a song, in “By Torpedo Or Crohn’s”; to practice his “plane wreck face” in “Gnashville”. So that’s the most life-affirming record I’ve heard all year, one whose hero is constantly hiding out to try to process what’s going on, or prepare for disaster.

[This post used to have embedded players for "Fatalist Palmistry" and "The Hollows". Wordpress didn't like that.]

In the Pixies’ early days, Black Francis mastered a sort of encapsulated squick, a way to make the grotesque so obviously personal that even though it– and your own reaction to it– was the whole appeal, it never raised issues for anyone except Mr. F to deal with. At least, I don’t remember ever confronting my own mortality after listening to Surfer Rosa, even though you can’t really get in the door with that record unless you’re fundamentally not okay with being made out of bones and liquid. It was freaky, but it never stung.

So anyway, he’s back, with what seems to be a concept EP about a man “born of double seed” with seven fingers on each hand. The whole thing is soaked with the feeling that the narrator was doomed to some terrible fate by the circumstances of his conception, though the identity of that fate is obscure. It wouldn’t work with clearer edges drawn around the details, though: the narrator’s doubly-human-ness blurs into being half human, and the way to make up for his incompleteness might be to find a woman, or it might be to buy a robot, or to accept death at the hands of murderous enemies. Even with an ostensibly unifying conceit, Francis works mostly by juxtaposition of unrelated ideas, like in the Buñuel movie he wrote a song about all those years ago.

Musically, he sets the bar pretty high on opener “The Seus”, cramming a Jon Spencer Blues Explosion-ish song-sketch with lots of doubled vocal tracks and shouted exclamations, and though that one does rattle itself to pieces by the end, I would have liked a whole EP of that just fine. He settles down, though, still experimenting with how much old Pixies fire he can bring into his well-established solo sound, hitting the mark way more often than I’ve come to expect in the past decade. This may even send me back to Bluefinger– the one other record he’s released under his old stage name, rather than “Frank Black”– which I remember being so-so.

[You can hear three songs from the EP at blackfrancis.net; click on the guitar. Also, while writing this post I learned about the Irish hero Cuchulainn, who some or all of these songs might be about.]

Free web release* to promote Sway’s upcoming second record. The “mixtape” format means some of this is probably old material; who knows? Certainly the chorus of “F Ur X” (and its he-said-she-said structure, and the SMS conceit) sounds enough like Dizzee’s “I Luv U” that it would be embarrassing to have written it anytime later than 2005…

Except that Sway has talent to spare, and I think he comes off better here than in the high-pressure world of “official” releases. The best track is “Black Stars”, a loving, curiously relaxed (given its high velocity) rap about Ghana. The Lily Allen mashup’s nice too, and then we get excerpts from guest appearances, freestyles, and a radio show on which Sway encountered rapper and MTV reporter Sway Calloway, who also goes by “Sway”.

Sway’s good humor and ability to shrug off disagreements mostly offset his (standard-issue) arrogance and declarations of superiority. He can get a little self-pitying, though, as when he expresses surprise that anyone could be offended by his song “Fuck New York” or disses the other Sway. And the less said about his alter-ego Charlie Boy the better. But it’s free and sporadically brilliant.

* You can get it from swaymixtapes.com if you give a name and address– I strongly endorse mailinator.com for things like this– or hit Google for one of the many blogs that posted it on Rapidshare or whatever. Alternately, at least listen to “Black Stars” on his MySpace page.