The first minute of Transference sounds like a false start. Not since 1995’s Telephono has Spoon sounded so anxious. A skeletal organ leaks onto a drum twitch in “Before Destruction,” and then it all withers away, brushed aside on the eve of some contorted chorus. Britt Daniel is then left mumbling and crunching casually on a lo-fi acoustic, and he sounds like he’s not quite sure what to do next. These uncharacteristically unkempt moments riddle the whole of Transference. 

After the professionalism of their career up to Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Transference is a refreshing glimpse underneath Spoon’s seams, which Daniel has afforded himself to bear after six albums of perfectly tailored song writing. Working with no editor, the would-be defects of Transference are preserved, and Daniel turns his songs inside-out in order to start from scratch and recharge the impulse that has kept Spoon working for 15 years. Minimalism turns to expressionism, Daniel leaving more songs to unfold as kinetic processes rather than bargains for pop digestibility. Fragmented show-cases of studio tricks range from the hydraulic charges and off-beat echos of “Is Love Forever” to the hushed sweeps of “Who Makes Your Money.” Sometimes frenetic, but sometimes guarded and absent minded. It’s frail but honest, like many of the candidly sketched characters that are trapped in each song.

The notion of transference itself describes an act of redirecting repressed feelings to another person, the things we have to get out before we can move on.

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Absorbing all ocean metaphors between the 60s and the late 90s, surf rock has long been the medium of summer fun. But in the last decade of DIY spectacles splashing up an ocean-like internet arena, listeners fervently watched innumerable bands take the plunge into a larger online medium that mostly sounds like disorder. Of late it’s been either wipe-out, wash up deserted, get caught in riptides of messiah-like hype or judgmental dissent, or ride the wave long enough to finally earn high marks on their out-of-ten-scorecards and still see modest digital sustenance, see for example Animal Collective/Grizzly Bear/Vampire Weekend. Watching these bands be tested against mega waves of reception is like wondering which kid is going to go first in Lord of the Flies. But here’s Surfer Blood, a lightning rod through the cutthroat internet canonization of 00s indie. Astro Coast is a skillful and patient balancing act calmly recalling an anthology of pop, new-wave, and underground influences and then deftly rerouting it to listeners lost between Pandora and Pitchfork.

Surfer Blood – “Floating Vibes”

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Despite being written in the brig-like dorms of Florida USA Universities, Astro Coast bears significantly few marks of the College Try, an epithet made irrelevant by songwriter and singer John Paul Pitts, whose vast array of wise-beyond-his-20-or-so-years hooks smoothly break thumping rock-steady waves in carefully groomed skin of reverb that repels instead of attracts the sticky humidity in which his glow-rock classmates are steeped, see for example “Best Coast/Wavves.”  Boyishly confident without a pubescent shrill, vocal melodies efficiently lilt their way around each song’s path-finding sharp-corner turns, such as in the elegantly riffed “Floating Vibes.” Stomping out the first guitar thrusts of this first track, mega waves are nothing with Surfer Blood’s cool approach. “If you’re moving out to the west/then you better learn how to surf…/I swear that ocean, it’d swallow you fully/And it might have to follow you home.” Save sometimes Surfer Blood’s coy insider-joke tones, “Take it Easy,” “Harmonix” “Twin Peaks,” “Fast Jabroni” etc., are sobering and trustworthy as twin guitars cleverly navigate these as well as Astro Coast’s more shadowy, idiosyncratic routes like “Anchorage” and “Slow Jabroni,” which both ultimately converge on the same brilliant silver lining.

Recently signing on to Canine Records, Surfer Blood now has the sponsorship to illustrate their uniquely idealistic thesis that channels rather than possesses entire decades of fun: warm nostalgia for 60s anthems (including surf-rock), caustic post-punk, heartfelt twee, anxious garage, corky afrobeat, and the brainy verve of Phoenix-like synthesis.

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Surfer Blood – Swim (To Reach the End)

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Hearing Tom Waits live will never reveal the man behind the myth. In each of three live albums that span his forty-year career, Waits has always sounded near death, if not undead. Since his first live album, 1975′s Nighthawks at the Diner, Waits has drifted like a drunken ghost out of beatnik clubs to wander across the nocturnal Earth, growling out taller tales with each album. With his third, Glitter and Doom, Waits’ monstrous bellow has only grown as grotesque as the characters that haunt the vaudevillian graveyard in which he has always toiled.

Split into two parts, Glitter and Doom begins with a seamless compilation of live tracks hand-picked from the tour’s sold out performances. Forged into one beastly fantasy, the first disc captures the swagger of a grand ball attended by the ghostly sailors of “Singanpore” from 1985′s Rain Dogs as well as the brooding reanimation of Leadbelly in his cover of “Fannin Street” from the tomb of his most recent three-disc compilation Orphans. Free from the distortion of the modern studio which turned Waits’ last several albums into virtual circuses, the swampy band churns together to turn blues and classicism into gargling grandeur.

For the second part, entitled Tom Tales, Waits rambles on a Tulsa stage over jokes about Swastika soups and the etymology of “the graveyard shift” amid commenting on unique Oklahoma laws against getting fish drunk. Narrating a documentary of a scorched planet earth, Tom Waits is like a boogeyman who has kicked out the door of our imagination’s coffin just to show us how dismal things can get. Waits seems to develop captivating split personalities with each disc, but at times the contrast detracts from the mythic Waits that lurks behind every street corner and bayou in the world.

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It’s been said that the bone dry dirges of Doby Watson’s Twenty Two were inspired from the cornering crises of Watson’s own twenty-second year. But these intimate memories are much less the balladry of a suburban cowboy and more the disturbing moans of someone, anyone caught in the nightmare of the past. XXII nevertheless locates a point at the end of Watson’s youth, where his soft, contoured reflection in the mirror seems to have suddenly shattered under some enormous weight. What exactly Watson lost is never clear, but some grotesque fate robbed it from him and blindsided him into a confession of loneliness and despair. The songs of XXII recount in broad lyrical strokes the grueling salvaging process of Watson’s fragmented yet vivid musical identity.

Doby Watson – Twenty Two

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Each song ruminates on the assembly of Watson’s matured soul, which seems to be covered with a threadbare, yet graceful veil. As in the early confessions, “Pummel,” “I’m just so goddamn scared of every little thing,” Watson’s mind, body and soul seem to be exhibited in nearly every line. But as the album hums along, the songs’ sentiment becomes impressionistic, and the dark Doby Watson we all are introduced to fades into abstraction. What seems to rise from the ash is the lush band of 24 twanged guitar strings and Watson’s gravely croon. The minimal arrangements lack a drum, but a simple heartbeat is the rhythm Watson wants you to keep. Pillars of the album like “Colors of Sun” and “Juxtaposition” bear a brutally straight-faced honesty that is palpable but often ironic: “I smell death wherever I go… you will never know how it feels to be alone/ I sure don’t… I will be yours, and I will be anybody else’s but mine.”

Despite his prolific history of genre bending and whimsical musical exploration, his furrow into solemn meditation can alienate a listener as well as Doby Watson. But after years of touring the still basements and galleries of the mid-continent, Watson’s voice over these has never been so humbling and homeward bound. When Watson performs XXII in a reverie of deafening and demanding silence, he seems wise enough to know that this year does not only belong to him. It belongs to everyone that’s ever heard, listened, or bore such a weight. It’s for every soul struggling to be cultivated in a year where the future beckons and dreams of youth are crumpled up and tossed to a prairie wind.

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Psychedelia is an impossibly slow language to the soberer audience. It’s from the other side, communicating after reaching the brink of aphasia. In the translational effort of this often distorted language, Forge You Own Chains is the final presentation of an international dig for 15 psychedelic escape-artists once left behind, welcomed back neatly and preserved in vinyl reverie. Their wise jives from 1968-1974 are intimate signals that were saved from blaring acoustic towers of the psychedelic heyday. With beats too heavy to let wayward guitars wander in the clouds, these Ballads and Dirges revere the good Earth from its every corner, honing their trip rather than inflating it.

The album is a work of rock and roll archeology by Now-Again Records, whose previous research includes The Funky 16 Corners and Cold Heat. Likewise, Chains upholds both the integrity of a genre and the mission of this work. It redefines the texture of psychedelia and with it a new dialect of classic forms. The songs are too smooth to swagger like the memorable giants heard now. These were unsung bands toiling in the fields to cultivate the natural glow of psychedelics while others dissected it in the studio. In an effort to achieve the former, the Beatles even ditched Abbey Road in 1969 for the Twickenham sessions and tried to record as a band again, which became the concept of the film Let it Be. Filming reel after reel of squabbling, they quickly realized the precious achievement of a band that can tell about other worlds without alienating sounds in the studio. Chains is a time capsule of bands who harnessed this fleeting sound. Incredibly, these songs never talk over you, no matter what language they’re in.

As soaked as these songs are with soul, the come-down is noticeable. Songs sometimes get too wasted or lazy rather than hypnotic. The milky “Song of a Sinner” by the Top Drawers slides steadily, but can wander off the path. But the others from overseas share fascinating perspective with familiar groove. The tracers may get boring, but the fuzzy high is a phonic pleasure now only available in this exclusive exhibit.

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As Atlas Sound, Bradford Cox is not a punk from Georgia anymore. And although Logos is two years and two albums removed from the memories of Deerhunter, his last noisy band, it nevertheless contents itself in remembering the murky, often eerie sound of the past. If Deerhunter was the sound of Cox as a thrashing punk grotesque with Marfan syndrome in the Gothic South, Atlas Sound is his inward journey to a more surreal plane.

Atlas Sound – Walkabout (ft. Noah Lennox)

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Logos is largely comprised of understated experiments in contemporary pop and folk, as if the album was the unadulterated product of a musical dreamer who locks himself in a room with a few guitars, toms, a tape machine, and a laptop with internet access. (In fact, Atlas Sound is the brand name of the karaoke tape machine Cox recorded with way back in junior high, which explains some of the album’s nostalgic tones.) Judging by Logos‘ distant sound, Cox lets his exploration of conscious memory melt the walls of that room, so he can then float far away, as in songs like “Attic Lights,” where Cox confesses from an imagined paradise, “I remember the punk.”

As we float on we are enchanted with visits from heralded legends on this astral plane of pop. Logos prominently features the likes of Noah Lennox, a.k.a Panda Bear in the currently circulating mp3 single, “Walkabout,” a collaboration that could have happened in a toy-box, (but probably over the internet) which constantly begs innocent nostalgic questions such as, “What did you want to see / what did you want to be / when you grew up?” Later, the album features Laetitia Sadier of  Stereolab on an eight-minute tribute to Stereolab’s signature mid-century-modern aesthetic, complete with rich, oscillating electric organ and popping bass groove.

The remainder of Logos is a tapestry of jabbing low-bit sweeps that give way to meandering melodies over lilting washed-out drums. And though these fuzzy pop memories can drone like an ambient slide-show, closer listens reveal in these vignettes a haunted unrest that Cox evokes with his dynamic voice – sometimes like a child’s call from a distance, and others like a monster’s breath on the back of your neck.

Like many other outfits who have introduced a unique craft to contemporary pop songs, Atlas Sound remains in a realm of songwriting that stays comfortably above the medieval pop music industry. Logos positions Atlas Sound as one of the primary explorers of this boundless sphere, as long as he doesn’t come down.

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