Short Takes on Recent Releases

Accessible Aussie club jams, improv-inflected pop, and epic eldritch metal

Cut Copy In Ghost Colours (Modular)

There’s a reason no one in the rock world takes Australia seriously—the moments of greatness AC/DC, the Saints, and Nick Cave have brought us only barely make up for acres of mediocre drivel from Midnight Oil, Silverchair, and Wolfmother. But dance music from down under is another matter. In the past few years an explosion of antipodean electronic acts—the Presets, Muscles, Van She, the Bang Gang DJs—have given Sydney and Melbourne reps as hot spots for cutting-edge club jams.

The tone of the music coming out of this scene is generally bright and beach-party decadent, without the hip-hop swagger of its American counterparts or the black-leather haute Frenchiness of the Ed Banger set. This amicable lack of pretension is what gives it much of its crossover potential—stateside, only dedicated clubgoers have picked up on Australia’s goods so far, but the Melbourne group Cut Copy sounds ready to make a Justice-style leap into the mainstream.

Though they have a cool, serious, grown-up vibe, at least compared to most other high-profile Australian club acts, there’s still a lot about Cut Copy’s new album, In Ghost Colours, that ought to appeal to the electronica averse—the songs have strong pop structures, with lots of electric guitar and not too many of the harsh rave-revival synth sounds currently in vogue in the underground. They seem to want to occupy the zone between club music and rock where New Order spent their best years, and in fact there’s little on In Ghost Colours that you can’t find on a New Order record—the vintage keyboard tones, the propulsive drumming, the swooning vocals (here by front man Dan Whitford).

But New Order were strongest when they balanced rock and electro, and Cut Copy are better when they’re bipolar, alternating between electronics-heavy cuts (“Hearts on Fire,” “Lights & Music”) and straight-up guitar rockers (“Unforgettable Season,” “So Haunted”) that would fit comfortably on a playlist between Interpol and the Strokes. This approach might seem like a nakedly mercenary attempt to climb out of the dance-music demimonde, but they’re so good at both styles that it’s hard to argue they don’t deserve a broader audience. Besides, if “Lights & Music” gets a club kid to check out Cut Copy’s shoegaze-style guitar wrangling or “Unforgettable Season” convinces a rock guy to buy a record that’s half electro, they’ve done the world a solid. —Miles Raymer

The Magic I.D. Till My Breath Gives Out (ErstPop)

Four habitues of Berlin’s thriving electroacoustic improv scene—guitarist and vocalist Margareth Kammerer, computer manipulator Christof Kurzmann, and clarinetists Kai Fagaschinski and Michael Thieke—have put together six strange tunes that really have their hooks in me. Calling them pop would be quite a stretch, but there’s no confusing them with the abstract improvised music the folks in the Magic I.D. normally play. Built around Kammerer’s measured strumming and vocal melodies (Kurzmann also does some singing, though it’s hardly his strong suit), this low-key record marries loose song forms with the extended techniques of free improv, creating something stranger, richer, and more original than the sum of its parts.

Kammerer has a wonderfully peculiar voice—strong and sanguine, but with a sorrowful, fluttering vibrato, it suggests an alternate-universe Billie Holiday who cut her teeth on British folk songs. There are no big hooks here, no verse-chorus structures, but neither is there any of the disorienting noise common in electroacoustic improv—everything is elegant and nuanced, and as such it’s relatively accessible, even at its strangest. Fagaschinski and Thieke’s braided clarinets kick off the opener, “True Holiday,” rising and falling in a soothing melodic pattern and then settling into a drone, at which point they’re joined by electronic flickers and chirps from Kurzmann and a sampled spoken-word passage by Assata Shakur. Soon Kammerer’s steady acoustic chords signal the start of what you might call the singer-songwriter part; her vocals and guitar are kissed by Kurzmann’s swoops and twitters and shadowed by new clarinet lines that drift in and out of harmony with the melody and each other, an effective gambit the reedists have imported from their more abstract work.

All the pieces have multiple sections, but within each there’s elaboration, usually from the clarinetists: on “Feet Deep” they alternate between long tones that sound like amplifier feedback, cranking up the tension of Kammerer’s scrappy electric guitar, and wobbly licks that cross paths with her vocals almost drunkenly. A couple years ago Fagaschinski and Thieke released the excellent duo recording Mainstream (Ftarri) as the International Nothing, and their rapport is powerful here—they seem to function as a single voice much of the time.

The constant slippages and shifts within the arrangements make this an absorbing “pop” record, albeit one more notable for its ability to surprise than for the strength of its melodies. It’s also fascinating approached as an experimental record—the radical techniques of free improv gain power when they’re focused by composed structures. Till My Breath Gives Out may not be the kind of pop music that’ll hold up well on your iPod at the gym, but it deserves closer attention than that anyway. —Peter Margasak

Unearthly Trance Electrocution (Relapse)

Rock bands love to front-load albums—you could easily make a filler-free mix long enough to play for a week straight just by stringing together the opening cuts of a zillion different records. But metal and psych-rock bands are just as fond of back-loading—you could make an equally excellent mix out of nothing but climactic final blowouts. So many metal albums put their most memorable track last—I think Satyricon’s “Black Lava” is still my favorite of this type—that I’m often tempted, as with a novel, to skip to the end right away, to see if the payoff will be worth the ride.

I’m glad I didn’t do that with Electrocution, the fourth full-length from New York trio Unearthly Trance. The album isn’t nonstop thrills—“God Is a Beast,” with its flogging of metal’s antinomian cliches, is just sort of eh—but at least to my ears that works to its advantage. Because I love Tony Conrad’s grainy, glacially shifting drones, C-SPAN’s endlessly nattering talking heads, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s every-blade-of-grass travelogues, I’ve learned to appreciate every step of a long journey. If you aren’t willing to delay gratification, you can never be startled by a sudden eruption of vivid excitement.

Electrocution’s eldritch hybrid of doom and black metal contains plenty of those eruptions. The grinding, insistent middle stretch of “The Dust Will Never Settle” grabs you by the throat and shakes you like a wolf on a rabbit. The vocal declamations on “Diseased” sound like something not quite human—something with a nasty chip on its shoulder—thrusting its heavy head free of the mire where it was born. Even the guitar solo in “The Scum Is in Orbit” (I know, I know, a guitar solo in a metal song—stop the presses!) manages to be surprising, achieving a lyricism reminiscent of Buck Dharma.

Still, Electrocution isn’t quite as engrossing as its predecessor, The Trident—that album had a certain seductiveness, a mystery it never quite resolved. The new disc is hardly straightforward, but there are relatively few hints of deeper secrets yet to be revealed. But there is that epic closer that makes the whole thing worthwhile. “Distant Roads Overgrown,” at nearly 13 minutes long, seems to contain whole worlds—it’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. —Monica Kendrick

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