Music

AUX Top 10: February 2014

by AUX staff

Each month at AUX, our specialists in punk, metal, indie, hip hop, electronic, and pop vouch for their favourite releases of the month and have it out behind the scenes to bring you a trim, alphabetical, genre-representational list of the Top 10 Albums of the Month. Ain’t it nice?

So, after much hand-wringing, here’s the best things we were listening to in February.

By: Jeremy Mersereau (JM), Tyler Munro (TM), Mark Teo (MT), Nicole Villeneuve (NV), and Aaron Zorgel (AZ)

Katy B
Little Red
(Columbia)

In the pop world, it’s increasingly difficult to find club-friendly music with a human quality. The booze-soaked sisters in Krewella are busy “drinkin’ till it’s nada,” while Zedd’s chart-topping, lovesick duet with Foxes seems to lack feeling, for a song that’s about, well, feeling feelings. Katy B has always had a skill for adding depth to dance music, and Little Red certainly picks up where On A Mission (2011) left off in terms of bringing much-needed lyrical narrative to the club. Lyrics fraught with heartbroken insecurity (“Aaliyah,” “Crying For No Reason”) shine over blissed-out beats by grime godfather Geeneus. Katy B would be one of the biggest pop stars in the world if she wasn’t so far ahead of the curve. (AZ)

Behemoth
The Satanist
(Metal Blade)

Even the best Behemoth albums are marred by a bit of glaring excess, and with its brass and stringed instruments, organs, and litany of samples, The Satanist is no different. But this time, the excess works. These new additions feel less like gimmicks than textures, and while The Satanist mostly carries itself with the same demonic speed of its predecessors, the introduction of new ideas and slower songs makes for a gratifying listen. Lead single “Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel” plays at a slower pace that at first feels alien to the band before riling itself into a frenzied cacophony of shouts and horns that play like the best song Sear Bliss never wrote. The title track is an even bigger leap; with its hallowed march, the song carries itself like something off The Cure’s Seventeen Seconds filtered through early Type O Negative. Still, they both sound like Behemoth, and alongside Nergal’s best vocal performance yet, help to make The Satanist the strongest album in the band’s extensive back catalogue. (TM)

The Beverleys
The Beverleys EP
(Buzz Records)

Self-proclaimed Toronto “junk punk” (!) band The Beverleys have appeared around Toronto with some of the rest of the best up-and-coming garage/punk bands of their ilk for the past few years, and now they’ve finally distilled that beloved live show into a scratchy, sludgy little self-titled EP. At only three songs, the trio (singer/guitarist guitarist Joanna Lund, guitarist Susan Burke, and drummer Audrey Hammer) doesn’t waste a second showing off their strengths: grit, hooks, and an unpredictable depth of dynamic—“Dreams” in particular retains the band’s relentless rhythm while grazing through shoegaze guitar sounds and a straight-up anthemic vocal delivery. (NV)

Black Walls
Communion
(Pleasence)
It’d be erroneous to call Black Walls’ music challenging, but Ken Reaume’s one-man project has a wonderful way of getting under your skin. His previous LP, Acedia, was nothing short of a revelation: All skittering guitars ghostly vocals, it firmly established the Toronto west-ender as a songwriter of the Mark Kozelek mould. Those comparisons persist with Communion, but with his sophomore LP, it’s hard to call Black Walls singer-songwriter fare—it finds Reaume moving in ambient directions, letting his atmospherics, not his music, do the talking. “Communion” might be the busiest of the LP’s five tracks; more than ever, Reaume uses sparseness to construct a world that’s desolate, mournful, and quietly despairing. Reaume manages, more than anything, to conjure up the abstract in his songs: While Communion’s musical passages don’t stick long after listening to the LP, the sentiment—one of monochromatic melancholy—lingers. (MT)

Francis Harris
Minutes of Sleep
(Scissor + Thread)
Scissor + Thread, a Brooklyn-based boutique label, has built their name on dance music that’s built for anywhere but the dancefloor—their output is often solitary, cerebral, and introspective (it was, after all, was formed in the image of their founder, Francis Harris). Though Harris built his rep with his house / techno project, Adultnapper, the work bearing his birth name finds the producer dabbling in ambient and neo-classical, often with the help of live instrumentation. Like his debut, Minutes of Sleep pushes Harris even deeper into the fray: Faint contours of deep house still remain, but mostly, weeping strings, ghostly static, and forlorn pianos take centre stage—there are beat-based tracks, but they’re submerged. What remains is a deeply affecting—but endlessly listenable—work that, wordlessly, communicates big concepts: Loss, yearning, and melancholy. (MT)

Lucy
Churches Schools and Guns
(Stroboscopic Artefacts)

Luca Mortellaro has been releasing dark, forward-thinking techno since 2009 through his Stroboscopic Artefacts label, and the Italian producer’s second album furthers the Stroboscopic MO: unsettling analog synths, sparse-but-heavy beats, and constantly morphing productions. For most of its runtime, Churches Schools and Guns stays true to the suffocating, getting-dragged-through-the-woods tone set by beatless opener “The Horror,” but it isn’t till standout “The Illusion of Choice” that Lucy lets up, with the album’s final third following suit. “We Live As We Dream” and “The Best Selling Show” sound like Autechre at their most reflective, and gorgeous closer “Falling” makes everything that came before seem like just a bad dream, in the best way. Churches Schools and Guns doesn’t always hit the heights of Lucy’s previous releases (especially the awesome Monad X), but for pure, dark techno, you can’t do much better than the Stroboscopic family and their commander-in-chief. (JM)

Nothing
Guilty of Everything
(Relapse)

I have a longstanding theory that hardcore teaches invaluable musical lessons to its devotees: It imparts a certain economy of songwriting, an ear for dynamics, an editor’s penchant for trimming excess. Nothing’s primary songwriter, Dominic Palermo, once spent time in Deathwish Inc., and hardcore’s faint imprint is still evident in Guilty of Everything. Sure, the band’s heady distortion could surely be seen as nod to Kevin Shields and their songcraft could be likened to Slowdive, but there’s a songwriting precision here that transcends shoegaze. Guilty is built on interlocking riffage, seamless transitions, and and uncanny ear for the dramatic—and it’s evident in the crushing crescendo of “Hymn to the Pillory,” the razorsharp instrumental interplay in “Bent Nail,” the blown-out layering of “Guilty of Everything.” Guilty of Everything is a wonderful shoegaze album—but its attention to detail and airtight songwriting is less reminiscent of Loveless, more recalling of Hatebreed’s Satisfaction is the Death of Desire. And believe us, that’s a good thing. (MT)

St. Vincent
St. Vincent
(Loma Vista)

St. Vincent could have gone one of a few ways. Would Strange Mercy‘s follow-up carry on the sludge-soaked, doom-laden vibes of “Grot” or “Krokodil,” or would she go full Byrne after Love This Giant? For all its points of reference, St. Vincent’s self-titled album is as much the culmination of Annie Clark’s music and influences to date as it is our first real look at the finished product. Clark has long been lauded as the next great guitarist, and rightfully so, but St. Vincent cloaks much of her virtuosic shredding under layers of Frippertronics and smoke, like The Melvins filtered through King Crimson’s Discipline. And even if “Digital Witness” is pure Talking Heads and “I Prefer Your Love” is soaked in Kate Bush, Clark has evolved beyond simple comparisons. Where before the “Actor” singer played as St. Vincent—here, she is St. Vincent. She plays it free and natural, but with a clear vision of what her sound is. (TM)

ScHoolboy Q
Oxymoron
(Top Dawg)
When I first heard ScHoolboy Q’s “Collard Greens,” I thought, “hey, wow, this might be better than anything on Habits & Contradictions.” Later, when I heard the Chromatics-sampling “Man Of The Year,” I thought, “whoa man, if the rest of the record is like this, the new Q record is gonna be FIRE.” When Quincy rolled out “Break The Bank” just a few days in advance of his major label debut, I was already set to declare May-through-August 2014 the Summer of the Bucket Hat, and Oxymoron the album of the year. When I finally got to sit down with ScHoolboy’s Interscope debut, I wasn’t instantly grabbed by anything I hadn’t heard already; I found myself knee-jerk backpedaling, like, “yo, do I still have that receipt for the sixty-dollar bucket hat I bought from Stussy?” It’s fair to say that Q unleashed his heaters during Oxymoron’s promo cycle, so we’re left to explore the album cuts that string ScHoolboy’s bangers together. Musically, Q is best when he’s at his weirdest, crafting nasally melodic hooks and multi-syllabic flow over beats by TDE-exclusive production squads THC and Digi+Phonics. Oxymoron might be a lateral move sonically, but in terms of exposure and saleability, it’s next level. (AZ)

Untold
Black Light Spiral
(Hemlock Records)

Statement records are a dime a dozen in the club music world, where trends and micro genres are born and fizzle out in nanoseconds. Fortunately Jack Dunning, aka Untold, doesn’t just draw a line in the sand with Black Light Spiral, he dynamites a canyon in it. Not many producers would start their proper debut album with the cavalcade of police and air raid sirens of “5 Wheels,” but it’s a fitting start to Black Light Spiral’s eight unclassifiable tracks (“dub industrial” is the best I got). Tracks like “Drop It On the One” and “Strange Dreams” hiss with the ghostly menace of dub retrofitters Pole and Rhythm & Sound, all while massive bass rolls out like an Abrams tank at the apocalypse. It was only earlier this year Untold was releasing more conventional bass music fare, and now he’s sculpting futuristic blown-out hellscapes. Sounds like forward momentum to me. (JM)