Titus Andronicus, "The Airing of Grievances" (XL Recordings)
Hyped on: Atomic Ned; The Alphabetic Order; What Duvet Said...
Official site
MySpace
Who: Hailing from the sleepy suburban town of Glen Rock, New Jersey (“a very nice place to grow up,” says lead singer Patrick Stickles, without a trace of irony), this cacophonous five-piece burst onto the scene last spring with a very lo-fi, self-released debut album that caught the attention of Pitchfork, Spin and the usual tastemakers. Following a remaster that expands the dynamics but keeps the distortion gloriously intact, “The Airing of Grievances” is being reissued this month by XL Recordings, who almost exactly one year ago unleashed another blogger favorite called Vampire Weekend upon the mainstream.
What: If your freshman humanities classes had been co-taught by Bruce Springsteen, Shane MacGowan and Paul Westerberg, Titus Andronicus’ spectacularly messy debut would have been the soundtrack. Stickles’ lyrics and song titles flirt with pretension at every turn—referencing everything from Shakespeare to Camus to 16th century Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel—but his ragged vocals (imagine a really pissed-off Conor Oberst singing into a Radio Shack microphone) and the gutbucket production keep things grounded. Every track bristles with raw-nerve, post-punk energy, but the album’s centerpiece is the two-part, 14-minute “No Future,” one of the most epic expressions of suburban, teenaged angst since…well, ever.
Made for: Fans of the Arcade Fire who wish their albums sounded as joyously unhinged as their live shows. Punk kids who secretly enjoy listening to their parents’ Springsteen records. Liberal arts majors with anger management issues.
X-Factor: The band takes its name from one of Shakespeare’s less well-known and bloodiest tragedies, which features scenes of rape, dismemberment and cannibalism. Dude…Shakespeare rocks! – AH
Max Tundra, "Parallax Error Beheads You" (Domino)
Hyped on: Stereogum; Almost Cool; Coke Machine Glow
Official site
MySpace
Who: In this analog end of days—when singers don’t sing (see: Auto-Tune), drummers don’t drum (see: Timbaland’s bank account) and kids rush to their local laptop on Tuesdays for the coveted new release—there’s a guy in London creating slickly produced electronic symphonies with Reagan-era synths and a Commodore Amiga 500 as a sequencer. Max Tundra is the alter ego of Ben Jacobs, a guy with clearly too much time on his hands; given the limited technology, his song creation process is insanely labor-intensive and includes Jacobs hand-coding “sounds” and “pitches” into the Amiga terminal. The data (inputted as columns of numbers) is then translated to notes on the various synths lying around Jacobs’ studio. It’s sorta like “War Games,” if only Matthew Broderick was more into Kraftwerk than trying to lay Ally Sheedy.
What: Heady production notes aside, the album rivals the best of current laptronica. “The Entertainment,” the poppiest track of the lot, has Jacobs singing about shooting a student art film before expanding into a very trance-y breakdown that would fit on the Sirius/XM channel played at your local gym. (Unlike previous releases, “Parallax” features much singing, heavy on the falsetto). Cheerfully MIDI “Which Song” is somewhere between Stevie Wonder and robot dancing. “Number Our Day” is a triumphant skills flaunt, with funky guitar licks and blippy shimmers that feel like you were playing "Mario" after eating your own magic mushroom.
Made for: Two words: gear geeks. Or Hot Chip fans with a thing for pain and suffering.
X-Factor: Jacobs, as Max Tundra, has done official remixes for Tunng, Franz Ferdinand and the Strokes, earning a skip-the-line pass for all London clubs in the process. – MR
Astronautalis, "Pomegranate" (Eyeball)
Hyped on: Sundtrak; A Cloud of Starlings; Party Ends
MySpace
Who: On his third album, Andy Bothwell (a.k.a. Astronautalis), a freestyle rapper and theater major from Florida, moves away from his hip-hop roots and morphs into something far more esoteric. The punk community approves: Bothwell's gloomy indie-rap/rock has already graced three previous Warped Tours, and "Pomegranate" recently won the "Album of the Year" designation on punk blog AbsolutePunk.net.
What: Remember when Tom Waits added some hip-hop elements (turntables!) to his bluesy growl a few years back (2004's "Real Gone")? That was an interesting experiment, but Astronautalis seems to have perfected what Waits was aiming for: an amalgam of slow beats and gloomy, theatrical pop. Although he keeps his freestyling in check, Bothwell does pull out the occasional muffled rap ("Mr. Blessington's Imperialist Plot"), while other times chanting and yelping in his finest Modest Mouse imitation ("The Case of William Smith").
Made for: Indie rockers who wish the National were just a little more "street." Hip-hop fans who wish more MCs sounded like Isaac Brock. Followers of the anticon hip-hop style.
X-Factor: Your CD/iPod player/computer is working: the track called "The Most Important Track on the Album" really is two minutes, forty-five seconds of pure silence. At least it's not as oblique as calling a pseudo Irish ballad "A Love Song for Gary Numan," as Bothwell did on his previous record. – KM
