A Fun Random Rediscovery

Isn’t it cool when you stumble on something completely random that’s so much fun that you have to share it? This is a mix simply titled Arabic Beat, assembled by the avid playlisters at Putomayo and streaming in its entirety at Bandcamp. It’s sort of a North African  equivalent of those Strictly the Best reggae compilations that VP Records have been putting out since forever. Most of the artists here are from Algeria or Morocco, playing variations on Rachid Taha-influenced rai-rock or Khaled-style trip-hop. For those unfamiliar with this kind of music, it sounds a lot more gypsyish, i.e. minor-key and chromatic than Arabic, i.e. microtonal and otherworldly.

The best song is a real surprise: French gypsy/Middle Eastern rockers Watcha Clan doing a spot-on Chicha Libre imitation, right down to the creepy analog synth on a psychedelic cumbia sung in Arabic and French. Of the rai-rock tracks, Algerian guitarist/singer Djamel Laroussi offfers a more sunny take on the classic Ya Rayyeh riff, with a bit of a Gipsy Kings vibe. That style is echoed a bit later on tracks by Moroccan chanteuse Samira Saeid and Moroccan-French bandleader Cheb Amar.

Another Algerian, singer Ali Slimani is represented with a bouncy habibi-pop track, as are Algerian brother duo Choubène, who manage to blend cheesy, techy synth with a bitingly tuneful chorus. The most traditionally Arabic-sounding song is a lush, string-driven ballad by Moroccan crooner Jalal El Hamdaoui. And Algerian dub maestro Nour has a chromatic Arabic reggae tune with growly bass and wah guitar.

Moroccan singer Ahmed Soultan’s hit Itim is minor-key, bluesy Rhodes funk, Bill Withers done North African style. And Syrian pop chanteuse Zein Al-Jundi has a tasty cut that blends rapidfire accordion with a little surfy guitar. All this is a fun way to discover some of the best of the curent crop of pop stars coming out of North Africa. Right now it’s gypsy music that’s all the rage – maybe, as the Arab Spring turns into summer, Middle Eastern music will take the world by storm. We can hope, right?

And for what it’s worth, there’s a funny (from this perspective, anyway) backstory here. This mix was originally pitched to this blog long before its release date last July. Trouble was, the label wouldn’t provide downloads, so that pitch went straight into the trash. Memo to what’s left of the record industry: want press? Give the bloggers what we need to do our jobs.

Lily Frost Brings Her Catchy, Edgy, Eclectic Chamber Pop to NYC

Canadian art-rock/chamber pop songwriter Lily Frost comes to Zirzamin for an early show at 7 PM on Feb 27, which promises to be a treat in that club’s intimate, sonically immaculate Blue Velvet space. She’s got a new album out, Do What You Love, which blends her eclectic purist pop intelligence with nonchalantly alluring vocals and the lyrical wit that flows through her work. Frost got her start in the oldtimey movement in the 90s – her band the Colorifics were sort of the Canadian Squirrel Nut Zuppers. After that she took a turn into retro Americana and has since branched out into darker, more ornate sounds with both jazz and classical tinges. An excellent career retrospective of sorts, with songs from most of her albums, is streaming at her Soundcloud page.

Frost has a disarming directness and bite that often contrasts with her tunes’ lively charm, in full effect on the album’s opening track, Background Radio, with its quirky surrealism, tricky tempo and upbeat ba-ba chamber-pop hooks. The second track, I’m on Fire, reaches back pensively toward oldtimey swing, sort of a cross between Jodi Shaw and Rachelle Garniez. The bouncy, mandolin-spiced title track reminds of another first-class Canadienne, Michal the Girl. Frost follows that with the understatedly snarling Grenade, a terse, noir cabaret-flavored kiss-off note.

Poetry – as in “you used to write me poetry” – sounds like ELO doing Sam Cooke over a trip-hop beat. Frost then takes a brightly pulsing turn toward early 60s Nashville pop with No Promises and its twangy Chris Isaak guitar, then follows it with the catchy but restless Long Sweet Ride and its coy Phil Spector allusions.

Opening with just a steady electric guitar strum and vocals, It Shines is the most nebulous of the tracks here and works a distant ominousness that rises even higher with the creepy gothic trip-hop of Stand. Frost reverts to jaunty mode to close the album with a cover of Pink Floyd’s St. Tropez that’s so breezy it’s funny: she absolutely nails Roger Waters’ brightly beachy sarcasm with an irrepressible grin that he only could have dreamed of. That Frost would have both the chops and the wit to do something like this speaks volumes about where she’s been, where she’s capable of going and how much fun she has doing it.

Lush, Trippy, Hard-Hitting Atmospherics from Naked Truth

Naked Truth’s new album Ouroboros is one of those deliciously uncategorizable ones. Is it art-rock? Some of it, definitely. Is it film music? Could be. Jazz? Sure, why not? Psychedelia? Hell yeah, especially when they open it with a “trippy Pink Floyd kind of thing,” as drummer Pat Mastelotto puts it. He leads the instrumental project, along with bassist Lorenzo Feliciati and keyboardist Roy Powell, cornetist Graham Haynes ably replacing the estimable Cuong Vu who played on their first album

Lush atmospheric sheets of synthesized strings and dozens of other textures rise and fall, fading in and out of the mix, often giving the music a dub feel. Mastelotto plays with an animated Bill Bruford intensity, often on a kit and syndrums at the same time. As with the swoosh of the keyboards, it’s often hard to tell what’s live and what’s tumbling from the laptop, but that’s part of the psychedelic appeal. Meanwhile, Haynes wafts in and out of the mix with a terse, wary Miles Davis clarity, adding a brooding noir edge that sometimes has a powerfully humanizing effect on the mechanical chill behind him.

The opening “trippy Pink Floyd thing” fades up and down gracefully and winds up on a cinematic crescendo with all kinds of wisps and fizzles percolating through the mix. Dancing with the Demons of Reality, a tricky atmospheric theme, alludes to a stomping King Crimson art-rock vibe, which makes sense since Mastelotto has held the drum chair in that venerable band since the 90s. From there they segue into Garden Ghosts, a long, distantly menacing piece contrasting Haynes’ fugitive angst against the intricately murky thud behind him.

The bass woozes, and eventually rises to squeaks and squalls throughout the trip-hop thump of Orange, bubbly oscillating electric piano playing off the uncannily steady, calmly atmospheric backdrop. Then they pick up the pace, fast and heavy, with Right of Nightly Passage. It’s a highway theme of sorts: if Kraftwerk had drums, in fact anything other than synths, they might have sounded something like this. Yang Ming Has Passsed winds up and down with a slow, shivery sway and more of that richly mournful cornet; In a Dead End with Joe picks it up again, a heavy but trickily rhythmic riff-driven theme. The album ends with Neither I, which works its way from atmospheric dub reggae to a pensive neoromantic piano outro, with a cool piano/cornet interlude along the way. Whoever would have thought that a founding member of Mr. Mister could have come up with anything as richly enveloping and darkly kaleidoscopic as this?

Clare & the Reasons Take It To the Next Level

Fronted by husband-wife duo Clare and Olivier Manchon, Brooklyn chamber pop band Clare & the Reasons have a new album out, KR-51, taking its name from a German autobahn. Like their previous three albums, the songs on this one feature a swirly, hypnotic blend of icy electronic keyboards and lush orchestration. Imagine Kate Bush at her most straightforward, or a more psychedelic version of the Universal Thump, and you’re on the right track. Clare’s chirpy high soprano is more expressive, more varied and more somber here: it sounds like she’s been listening to a lot of Marissa Nadler. Likewise, the music has a lot more gravitas than their more quirky previous releases: there’s none of the grating whimsy that would occasionally rear its self-indulgent head where least desired. There’s nothing here quite up to the level of Murder, They Want Murder – the gorgeously mysterious noir pop vignette from their 2009 Arrow album – but this one is solid all the way through. There literally isn’t a bad song here.

The opening track, The Lake sets a deceptively poppy tone, a vividly lyrical portrait of clinical depression matched by the coldness of the music, capped by an echoey synth hook that wouldn’t be out of place in a song by, say, Missing Persons. Similarly, Make Them Laugh is surreal but has a disquieting edge: steel pan and banjo add liveliness over the cloudy banks of strings and loopy broken chords on the synths. They follow that with the trippy, minimalist new wave tune Bass Face, punctuated by staccato blasts from Bob Hart’s guitar.

This Too Shall Pass blends goth angst with a steampunk vibe: it’s the closest thing to Marissa Nadler here, a long, hypnotically orchestratd vamp growing stormier by degrees, subsiding and then rising again. One of the coolest things about this album is that the song structures never follow a predictable verse/chorus pattern, and this is a prime example. Woodwinds bubble incongruously over a creepy modal electric piano riff on The Mauerpark – it sounds like a mashup of vintage Moody Blues and late-period ELO. Biting, offcenter Robert Fripp-style guitar, fuzz bass and hammering keys drive the next track, PS, an equally strange but compelling blend of mid-70s King Crimson art-rock and buzzy early Wire-style new wave. Then they go back to the artsy trip-hop of much of their previous work on the pulsing, hypnotic Step In the Gold.

The best song on the album is Colder, a brooding anthem that eventually hits a towering, majestic angst: “When will it get better, when will it better?” is the mantra, Clare’s voice rising to a rare, gritty, imploring tone. After that, Last Picture Sbow is somewhat of a letdown, nicking a popular Radiohead riff. They follow that with the shapeshifting Westward, which begins fluttery and minimalist and then shifts back and forth from a catchy noir pop melody, orchestration and guitars joining the mix and then receding: it’s a triumph of imaginative tunesmithing. The last song is Magpie, a rather stark, distantly Beatlesque, artsy folk-pop song. If you managed to catch one of their recent Bowery Ballroom shows, you most likely got to hear a lot of this in a more stripped-down format. The album is out now on their Frog Stand Records label.

Lakecia Benjamin Invents a Brand New Soul Sound

Ever see some generic corporate band or singer on tv and wonder to yourself if the backing musicians are content to play cliches all the time…or if they have secret lives where they pull off their masks and play real music? Saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin is one of those players. She’s toured with the kind of acts you hear in the laundromat – and also with Stevie Wonder. Last month, Motema released Retox, Benjamin’s debut album as a leader with her band Soul Squad, and it’s eclectic to the extreme, something you would expect from a musician who’s played as many styles as she has. Though drawing deeply on the classic sounds of James Brown, Maceo Parker, Sly and the Family Stone and the Meters, the album also includes several tracks that mix in a more current-day vibe. It won’t alienate those who’re satisfied with John Legend or Erykah Badu, but it’ll satisfy diehard fans of real oldschool artists from Sharon Jones to George Clinton.

It’s a blend of vocal and instrumental joints. Along with the blissfully peaceful, atmospheric Dreams, there are some serious party jams: the band’s signature, P-Funk flavored opening track, SoulSquad, which evolved out of a jam at a concert soundcheck; Maceo, a tribute to funky sax legend Maceo Parker that blends vintage JB’s with 70s P-Funk; and the horn-driven groove Get Down, a rousingly successful attempt to mix a 60s go-go feel with James Brown, right down to the fat but simple bass groove and tight, punchy horn riffs.

The rest of the tracks cover a lot of ground as well. Keep Talkin’, a casually seductive duet between Amp Fiddler and Tracey Nicole, mashes up a sweet mid 60s-style soul melody with more ambitious 70s stylings. Share My Life reaches for more of an early 90s soul/hip-hop feel, featuring airy, carefree vocals from Jacoria Marzett and a cameo from rapper Whosane over swirling, summery ambience. My Love features a nuanced, Sarah Vaughan-esque vocal by Krystle Warren, while Mavis Swan Poole sings Human Being, a hypnotically echoey jazz/funk fusion that brings to mind Digable Planets.

With its wickedly catchy hook, Jump and Shout holds nothing back, a driving but sultry kiss-off anthem: Benjamin had been looking for a singer to channel her lyrics’ righteous rage and when she heard Chinah Blac singing at a house party, she realized she’d found a match. The easygoing, satisfied, boudoir-pop song Smile bounces along with lead vocals by Maya Azucena and one of Benjamin’s signature lush, balmy horn charts – and an exquisitely warm, direct alto sax solo. And Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing pays homage to Benjamin’s longtime pal Stevie Wonder: Benjamin speeds it up, reinventing it for the dancefloor with latin sabor and a tight clave beat.

The closing track, Slow Juice originated as a studio mistake: when Benjamin heard an earlier composition being played back at halfspeed, she realized that she’d stumbled upon a tremendous slow groove. So she took out the horns and vocals and turned the new track into a sly, sultry downtempo/trip-hop anthem, a platform for Benjamin to subtly flex the jazz chops she’d originally honed as a teenager playing with Rashied Ali and the Clark Terry Big Band. Benjamin’s next NYC gig with this band is 8/20 at the Red Rooster, 310 Lenox Ave. (125/126), time/$TBA; she’s at the big room at the Rockwood the following day, 8/21 at 8:30 PM for $10.

The Spy From Cairo Stars in a Memorable Sequel

One-man bands are common throughout the Arab diaspora: it’s not uncommon for a master Middle Eastern musician to play several instruments expertly. One such master is Brooklyn-based Moreno Visini, AKA Zeb, AKA the Spy from Cairo: he does everything himself. He’ll lay down a drum loop, then add layers of oud, then saz lute, then washes of strings through a pedal effect run from either the oud or the saz. What makes him different is that he’ll also add a fat reggae bassline, or just a catchy bass riff, which he’ll loop so it runs over and over again beneath all the Middle Eastern instruments. His new album Arabadub – his second on Wonder Wheel Recordings - is more Egyptian than reggae, although when it’s Egyptian reggae it’s sprinkled with light dub touches as well. There’s nobody who sounds quite like him.

He’s a fantastic player, too. He’ll typically open a piece with either a bass riff or an improvisational taqsim on one of the stringed instruments, then add an anthemic string arrangement, then take a long, serpentine solo on the oud, or the saz, or both. Sometimes he intertwines the two lutes; several of the other tracks also feature ney, one of them building very hauntingly from the flute’s lowest, most breathy registers to a biting, agitated dervish dance. Every time, he goes for slinky, suspenseful ambience rather than showing off his fast fingers, so in the few instances when he goes for the jugular with frenzies of tremolo-picking on the oud, the effect is breathtaking.

With the jangle and plink of the saz, the unmistakeably boomy bite of the oud and the hypnotic pulse of the drums and bass, the tunes are downright gorgeous and often haunting. The most potent, and most dubwise one is the next-to-final cut, Latif, which blends Middle Eastern tonalities with a poignant Western neoromantic motif in the style of legendary Lebanese songwriters the Rahbani Brothers. The aptly titled Marseilles Noir hints at a plaintive French musette theme. The most anthemic one, Road to Ryhad, winds its way from a fat bass riff to a pensively incisive oud solo where all the other instruments eventually drop out of the mix to make way for a slow, ruminative taqsim, then another long oud solo that builds almost imperceptibly to an understatedly powerful crescendo followed playfully by the one time on the entire album where the drums actually do a reggae one-drop. Visini doesn’t confine himself to reggae beats, either: a handful of cuts have a clip-clop, trip-hop-like rhythm, and there’s a brisk number that’s basically levantine ska. If you listen closely, you’ll notice that in several instances, Visini will begin with a bass loop but by the middle of the song, he’s playing a bass countermelody to complement the other instruments. There’s a lot more here that reveals itself cleverly with repeated listening: after all, dub is music to get lost in, and you can get absolutely, completely lost in this album. Beyond the Arab world, who is the audience for this? Reggae fans, stoners, devotees of the more hypnotic side of esoterica and anyone with a taste for the beautiful, often haunting maqam scales of Arabic music.

Emel Mathlouthi Captures the Horrors of Fascism and the Thrill of Revolution

Fifty years ago, it was Americans who were writing some of the most powerful and resonant protest anthems and songs of freedom; a generation later, it was the British. Today, it’s the people of the Arabic-speaking world. To fail to acknowledge these artists at this moment, as their message of transformation and genuine hope spreads around the globe, would be the same as dismissing Bob Dylan in 1964 or the Clash in 1979. A star in France where she moved after leaving her native Tunisia, singer/guitarist Emel Mathlouthi became to last year’s Tunisian revolution what Warda was for the Algerians a half-century ago: a lightning rod, and a particularly fearless one. Mathlouthi’s album Kelmti Horra (Arabic for “Freedom of Speech”) is out recently worldwide from World Village Music – while the obvious audience is an Arabic-speaking one, it’s a riveting listen whether or not you understand the lyrics.

By any standard, Mathlouthi is an extraordinary singer, highly nuanced, evoking an intense tenderness yet often direct to the point of being confrontational. She cites both Dylan and Cheikh Imam as influences, and draws as much from American soul music and new wave rock like Siouxsie & the Banshees as she does from Arabic pop and classical styles, often layering her vocals into a mighty, ornate wall of harmonies. Behind her, violin and piano stand out stark and plaintive against murky low-register keyboard drones and the ominous boom or thud of a drum machine or percussion loop. This is haunted, exhausted, angry, bitter, wounded wartime music, with the inescapable message that if we continue to let the world be run by dictators and speculators, that choice is suicidal.

The album begins on a soul-infused but wary note with Houdou On (Calm), rising and then falling down into a nebulous interlude that she comes out of with an insistent intensity. Ma Ikit (Not Found) alternates a growling Marilyn Manson-ish synth bassline with an anguished, sweepingly anthemic minor-key melody. Rhythms here tend to be straight-up and closer to rock than the Middle East, whether the slow, stalking, Peter Gabriel-ish Stranger, with its stern chromatic riffage and Mathlouthi’s perfect English lyric, or the bittersweet, surprisingly delicate title track, a cautionary tale familiar to anyone watching his or her back while the spycams roll and the troops roll out.

Ya Tounes Ya Meskina (Poor Tunisia), the anthem that started the ball rolling, sets vocals that offer comfort rather than fueling the fires of rage, against a backdrop of ominous motorik synth, echoey syndrums and a string arrangement that’s absolutely majestic – it’s no surprise that this was such a hit. By contrast, Dhalem (Tyrant) is crushingly sarcastic, a faux lullaby with a creepy music box interpolated into its pleading, longing melody. And the epic Ethnia Twila (The Road Is Long) slowly and wistfully unwinds through constant tempo changes into a final crescendo of crowd noise and children chanting resolutely.

The single most gripping track here might be Dfina (Burial), a bitter Tunisian-flavored art-rock anthem that shifts between distant disillusion and raw, unhinged rage. The most pop-oriented one is Hinama (When), with its ominous post-new wave production and watery guitars. The album ends with another multi-part epic, Yezzi (Enough), shifting from a pensive folk rock-tinged intro as it reaches for freedom once and for all, resolute and indomitable. The album is best enjoyed as a whole – it’s hard to turn away once Mathlouthi hits her stride. There aren’t many albums that pack this kind of impact: simply one of 2012′s best, and probably destined for iconic status as both historical artifact and artistic achievement.

Haunting, Hypnotic Middle Eastern Sounds from Niyaz

In the era of the Arab Spring, it’s become clear that the people of the Middle East have not suffered gladly. As the revolution that spread from Tunisia, to Egypt, to Syria and Greece and soon these shores gains momentum, we owe a debt to its freedom fighters for jumpstarting the movement as it spreads around the world. Canadian ensemble Niyaz celebrate those heroes’ resilience – “Sumud” in Arabic – which is the title of the band’s hypnotically intense, melodically rich new album. The band’s multicultural viewpoint reflects its members’ diversity. Frontwoman/santoor player Azam Ali came to the United States as a refugee from India in 1985; multi-instrumentalist/composer Loga Ramin Torkian originally hails from Iran; keyboardist/drummer/effects wizard Carmen Rizzo is US-based. The rest of the group here includes Habib Meftah Boushehri on percussion and flute, Ulas Ozdemir on saz, Naser Musa on oud and Omer Avci on percussion. Rizzo’s signature sonic manipulation layers the organic textures of Torkian’s jangling, clanking, plunking lutes – rebab, saz, kamaan, djumbush, lafta and also guitar and viol – within a dense, chilly, endlessly echoing wash of drones, percussion loops wafting through the mix with a distant, muffled pulse. The effect is hypnotic, to say the least. The rhythms often give the songs a trip-hop or downtempo electronic lounge feel, albeit with dynamics which leave no doubt that this was created by musicians rather than by a computer.

Whether singing in Persian, Arabic or Turkish, Ali’s nuanced vocals span from longing, to rapturous beauty, to raw anguish: for those who don’t speak those languages, the cd booklet provides English translations. Most of the songs are new arrangements of traditional melodies, often with additional music by the band, which makes sense: in the countries where these tunes come from, improvisation rules. Ironically, the catchiest, most pop-oriented one here, Musa’s Rayat al Sumud (Palestine) is also the most lyrically intense: “No matter how many borders you create, no matter how many soldiers you line up, we will always fly the flag of resistance,” Ali sings in Arabic with a steely resolve. They follow that with another brisk anthem contrasting spiky lute textures with echoey, twinkling keyboards.

Many of the cuts here employ the haunting chromatics of the Arabic hijaz scale: a majestic Afghani folk song sung in Dari (a Persian dialect spoken there), whose message of peace has particular resonance these days; an almost imperceptibly crescendoing Persian love song; a steady, tiptoeing Kurdish tune and a duet by Ali and Torkian over a slinky Ethiopian-flavored triplet groove. A strolling, pulsing song by Ozdemir has echoes of gypsy rock; other songs here sound like an Iranian version of Portishead. The album ends with a gorgeous, longing Turkish epic that slowly comes together after a long, apprehensively crescendoing introduction. Sometimes solemn, sometimes soaring within Rizzo’s signature swirl, it’s the kind of album that sounds best late at night with the lights out.

Unclassifiable Music Is Always the Most Interesting

What if someone said to you, “listening to this album is like watching clouds.” You’d figure that they were bored, or high, right? Still, that’s a fair approximation of what Alexander Berne’srecent all-instrumental, double-cd magnum opus, Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes, evokes – and it’s absolutely fascinating. It’s like flying at low altitude at very low speed on an overcast day as dusk approaches. Shifting banks of sound come at you slowly, in waves: low drones, white noise, washes with endlessly changing, minute shifts in timbre or pitch, and tantalizing snatches of melody. It would be overly reductionistic to say that it’s a struggle between rhythm and stillness, between change and stasis, but that’s a big part of it. More apparent is the tug-of-war between balmy contentment and unease – and guess which one wins most of the time! Rock fans will call this ambient music; a musicologist would probably call it horizontal music; you could also file it under indie classical or avant-garde and nobody would complain. But more than anything else, this is an album of nocturnes.

Berne plays all the instruments: his background is jazz sax improvisation, and he has pyrotechnic chops, although the result is just the opposite here. Although the sounds are heavily processed via a pitch pedal and what seems to be an endless series of loops, many of the instruments are clearly recognizable: sax, piano, various percussion instruments (most of them on the low, boomy end of the register). Sometimes Berne is a one-man wind ensemble, occasionally reaching for regal, epic heights. Other times it’s impossible to figure out what the instrumentation is: organ? Ebow guitar? Bagpipes? A string section? A lonesome train whistle? Fluttering, bubbling, rippling, echoing or sirening, texture after texture enters the mix and then fades out or simply disappears. Occasionally, there are glacial conversational exchanges between them, or an unexpected, dramatic percussion cadenza (among them a wry Also Sprach Zarathustra quote that opens the second disc). Unexpectedly upbeat flashes of melody, including a tensely meandering handful of piano passages appear and then fade away into the nebulous, opaque backdrop. The most cohesive moments here are a couple of trip-hop interludes that, when you upload the album, work best at the end: by themselves, they’re not bad, but as they’re sequenced on the album, the segues they create are on the jarring side. But maybe that’s intentional. While each cd is divided up into discrete parts, it’s best enjoyed taken as a whole.

Those who require a catchy melody and a snappy beat will probably find this interminable (although there’s actually more melody here than you usually find in, say, Brian Eno). But at high volume, it’s absolutely intoxicating; at low volume, it’s a great album to send you off to dreamland on a whispery, surreal note. It came out on Innova last fall. That it’s taken this long to figure out what it’s about, between now and when it first came over the transom here, testifies to its hypnotic, mysterious power.

Trippy Downtempo Atmospherics from Emily Wells

It isn’t every day that someone popular enough to get a Bowery Ballroom gig appears on this page. Then again, not everything that’s popular is stupid. Emily Wells is a prime example. She’s got a new album out, simply titled Mama; her shtick is that she creates intricately trippy, swirling atmospheric pop all by herself on violin, using multiple loops and a million digital effects. Goldfrapp is the obvious comparison, although Wells downplays the vocals here: lyrics and voice take a backseat to the atmospherics. Where Alison Goldfrapp plays a Bond Girl, Wells wears a few faces here, sometimes a come-hither hip-hop vixen, sometimes a country chanteuse, sometimes a goth girl. Whichever direction she goes in, she typically doesn’t go over the top. In most cases, songs based on loops tend to be simple and hypnotic, which makes sense considering that the simpler the underlying riffs or changes are, the less complicated it is to add additional sonic layers on top as they come around again and again – especially if you’re playing them live as Wells does in concert. So there aren’t many surprises here tunewise, in the beginning at least: simple cake, artsy icing. Many of the songs segue into each other here, enhancing the psychedelic feel.

The opening track, Piece of It has Wells’ swaying, surreal muted staccato plucking contrasting with echoey, almost dubwise sustained lines. It gets dreamier and dreamier as the layers of echoey vocals and pinging, high bell-like tones make their way in. Dirty Sneakers and Underwear has shuffling drums and echoey atmospherics which conceal what’s essentially a hip-hop/”R&B” song. It gets creepier and more gothic as it goes along, leaving the pop vibe behind. Sepulchral accordion-like tones and swirly funeral organ pervade Passenger, a trip-hop number, followed by Mama’s Gonna Give You Love, the simplest and most direct track here with its minor-key soul/gospel groove.

Johnny Cash’s Mama’s House is just plain weird, a trip-hop country song with vocal harmonies via a pitch pedal and eventually some rippling banjo – does she play that? Let Your Guard Down goes for a Billie Holiday vocal, the music reaching for a lush late 60s/early 70s orchestrated soul atmosphere that picks up with genuine majesty as the drums rumble and crash. Fire Song has an only slightly restrained ornateness, like something off the live, orchestrated Portishead album: it’s the most overtly classical piece of music here. The last three tracks are a woozy, dubwise trip-hop tune with blippy horn-like patches flitting through the mix; a trip-hop take on delta blues (that actually works!!); and an echoey stab at Nashville gothic.

Who is the audience for this? People who like to end the day with a blunt; fans of dub and trip-hop; and probably because of marketing, trendoids. That seems to be the audience she’s been targeted to, and that’s too bad, because it would be sad if she ended up ghettoized with the rest of the wannabes in the Pitchfork crowd.