Daníel Bjarnason, Over Light Earth (Bedroom Community)
For his second album, prodigiously talented Icelandic composer and pianist Daníel Bjarnason conducted the Reykjavik Sinfonia and played piano on three of his recent works. The title piece, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, was inspired by New York abstract expressionist painters such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. More exciting are the clashing layers of shimmering strings and turbulent horns on the three-part Emergence, whose lumbering, ominous melody hits its conclusion without resolving the piece’s unsettling harmonies, making for a tension-riddled trip to the very end. The album concludes with a version of the piano concerto Solitudes that combines brittle, twangy prepared piano with a rippling electronic sheen added by frequent Bjarnason collaborators Ben Frost and Valgeir Sigurdsson. —Peter Margasak
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Garage-rock wizard Mick Collins and his lovable Dirtbombs have devoted albums to covers of classic soul and Detroit techno, but for their long-threatened bubblegum record Collins wrote everything himself, inspired by the likes of the 1910 Fruitgum Company, the Monkees, the Spencer Davis Group, and the fictional bands on old Saturday-morning cartoons. (The almost painfully twee illustration on the back cover reimagines the Dirtbombs as a two-drummer version of the Archies.) Ooey Gooey Chewy Ka-Blooey! rushes at you with its arms outstretched, full of sunshiny major chords, shamelessly sentimental lyrics, stupidly catchy choruses, sticky-sweet backup vocals, frisky tambourine, and plummy horns—including a maudlin Ren Faire oboe part (“It took me three months to find an oboist,” says Collins). Even the pinched blurts of totally destroyed fuzz guitar come off as cute. Of course, because this is the Dirtbombs we’re talking about, the album sounds like the band played it wearing catcher’s mitts—but if anything, that makes it more endearing than the showbiz productions that inspired it. It’s like a construction-paper valentine with gluey fingerprints all over. —Philip Montoro
Glasser, Interiors (True Panther Sounds)
Cameron Mesirow (aka Glasser) ain’t quite on an even keel, which is a pretty promising quality in anyone making ethereal electro-pop. Interiors is more experimental than her debut, 2010’s Ring, blending Kraftwerk-style synth (“Design“) with quasi-tribal rhythms or carving out her own niche with experiments in beats, vocal layering, and noisy effects that nudge her just a tick more out-there than flamboyant contemporaries such as Natasha Kahn and Grimes. Mesirow’s smoldering vocals can rise suddenly from the depths of her belly to a dramatic falsetto in a bizarre, almost stair-steppy way, moving haltingly but with an ease that’s as eerie as it is pretty. The album can sometimes be operatic in its darkness, but its peculiarities rarely feel overwrought—”impressive” is a much more appropriate word. —Kevin Warwick
Oneohtrix Point Never, R Plus Seven (Warp)
On previous albums, Oneohtrix Point Never (the best-known guise of Brooklyn-based musician Daniel Lopatin) got its signature sound from “Judy”—that’s the name of the Roland Juno-60 synthesizer that gave Lopatin’s tracks their Vangelis-style “like tears in rain” feel. The 2011 release Replica added cut-up samples from old TV commercials, but that hardly foreshadowed the flat-out formal break of OPN’s fourth album, R Plus Seven—if the Juno-60 appears on it anywhere, it’s untraceable. Though there are ten “songs,” R Plus Seven feels like a single extended piece, its array of brief, sewn-together samples moving at a frenetic, strobe-light pace. More than any OPN material before it, R Plus Seven brings to mind Lopatin’s background in library science, in which he holds an MA—it’s simultaneously academic and goofy, like Michael Nyman and Laurie Anderson filtered through Aphex Twin and Prince Paul. —Tal Rosenberg
Charles Waters Quartet, Chroma Colossus: 13 Visions of the City (Amish)
Alto sax and clarinet player Charles Waters witnessed the 9/11 attacks from the plaza between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and the wounds they gouged into the heart of his adopted home impelled him to compose this suite for jazz quartet, which he recorded in 2004. It begins and ends with funeral chorales, as befits dark times, but in between are pithy, soulful assertions of defiance. The contrapuntal figures Waters articulates with trombonist Chris McIntyre on “Broadway Truce” draw equally from the impetuous fire of Charles Mingus and the structural ingenuity of J.S. Bach; drummer Andrew Barker and bassist George Rush tackle everything the tunes throw at them, whether it’s passages of sinuous swing, breakneck charges, or the circuitous “Coney Island Rag,” which sounds like a musical version of a spiral staircase. Why this LP has lain dormant for nine years is beyond me. —Bill Meyer
