2016: Second Quarter Favorites 22 picks from the last three months

M.E.S.H.

Damaged Merc [EP]

[PAN]

There’s minimalism and there’s minimalism. Some artists have an uncanny way of filling in the void with sparseness and isolation; maybe the brushstrokes of their instruments are just bold and three-dimensional enough. On Damaged Merc, James Whipple a.k.a. M.E.S.H. manages that feat incredibly well. His club-ready third EP is not just spacious; it is propelled by space. Contrasting clattering beats, biting synths, and intrusive vocal samples with factory-floor abyss, it’s as though these four songs broke off and restarted incessantly, creating rhythmic tension with the time count alone. Whipple earned his stripes producing drum & bass, among other electronic forms, and it shows: his brand of techno slants in a syncopated, unmistakably British direction, not unlike the productions of another adept negative-space painter, Bok Bok. Damaged Merc is brief but supremely compelling: dark, angular, unpredictable, vicious music. –Patryk Mrozek

Amnesia Scanner

AS [EP]

[Young Turks]

AS self destructing tremolo
AS right thurr
AS ( ´ ▽ ` )ﾉ （＾_＾） （￣ー￣）
AS gleaming metal trash can lid in the sun
AS Alvin Simon Theodore
AS bass pressure sucker punching you in the guts –Joe Davenport

William Tyler

Modern Country

[Merge]

The modern country is the old country. The same mountains, same rivers, same valleys stretch out and cover this gorgeous piece of land as they have always done. The same beauty is still available to us: rain clouds hanging in the Grand Canyon, a windy turn up the Blue Ridge Parkway, a sun shower in the afternoon slicking the asphalt of the interstate gold. We still have access to all this majesty. What’s modern, what’s really changed in America, is us. Safely indoors, we forget those places are real and huge and outliving us and are not humbled by them anymore. We fit them onto screens, frame them in nice pictures, imagine them as idylls with fixed edges. We need a reality check once in a while. William Tyler’s guitar plucks us out of that comfort, bravely throwing us into the open air, the wild Americana, a humbling place where we have no control, where we must travel wordlessly against our anxieties and embrace the unknown to begin to understand ourselves again. I listen and feel the pull of the road stronger than ever. –Adam Devlin

Gobby

No Mercy Bad Poet

[DFA]

It’s all too exciting. Psych is alive and well living in the mutant chill-out room that is this album. All the fashionable subgenres are there, but unlike many in the realms of delirious experimental dance music, Gobby stabs on something deep, something you had no idea was there. His genre curatorial sense is trigger-happy keen, but these are vast, trippy structures that insinuate themselves with breezy confidence (and more than a touch of the sinister). It’s not so much a bad trip, simply one that’s a hard sell and somehow more fulfilling for the struggle. No Mercy is some persuasively sophisticated muck, despite the mosquito cloud overwhelm of its restless texture and occasionally prickly auto-tuned rants. It’s easily 2016’s best-dressed happy mess thus far (with glinting periphery hooks for subliminal stamina). –Willcoma

death’s dynamic shroud.wmv

CLASSROOM SEXXTAPE

[Orange Milk]

Cut, loop, and run it into f∞rever; rising from Olympia’s ruins, our #NUWRLD aesthetes invade pop as if it were a public domain, its ubiquity seized and reconstituted into obscure microgenerity, subsumed by errant streaks of internet culture. These anthems for the virtual utopia experience are as twisted as a glass of curdled orange milk, at once aching with regret and d.e.s.i.r.e. — a farcical tragedy soundtracked by iPhone notifications and narrated by PornHub actors. Yeah, it’s part SEXXTAPE, part YouTube tribute video, but we’d be damned if we didn’t find the whole thing so irresistibly perverse. Pop’s sex is yet another sample to be fed through plug-in after plug-in, stretched beyond temporal and social context to imperceptible, ultra-accelerated heights of joy/indifference/heartbreak/etc., kinda like conveying rudimentary moods and motivations with emoji. Miley’s “we can’t stop,” echoing ad infinitum, becomes a revolutionary maxim. You a’ready know that loading this into the tape deck (or, indeed, your hard drive) is gonna be a play-of-the-game, 100 move. –Soe Jherwood.m4a

Mitski

Puberty 2

[Dead Oceans]

Puberty 2, the fourth full-length album (and first from Dead Oceans) for Mitski, is a skeletal centerpiece, an entropic force of plaintive pop affect that swells far past the many ceilings of generational scaffolding on Bandcamp. Equal parts personal and powerful, 2014’s Bury Me at Makeout Creek trembled through meandering melodies, choking on lines of broke weekdays and collateral love. Swift, sharp, christened with heavy heartbreak and an unwavering gaze inward, the tracks chronicled destruction and defeat, self-loathing and internalized anxiety, growing outward past frenzied, clunky metaphor toward the brink of collapse. It’s a theatric call-to-action for radical kindness everywhere, a symbiotic acceptance of the world’s millions of beautiful inconsistencies, streamlined and packaged with wide-eyed uncertainty and the will to push ahead. It’s living on your own terms, every bit as messy and inconsistent as they need to be. –Rob Arcand