ROYKSOPP FEATURING KARIN DREIJER ANDERSSON
BAT FOR LASHES
(Glassnote)
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Natasha Khan separates herself from the pack on Bat for Lashes’ second album, the imminent Two Suns, ditching the British folk and girl-group big beat for luxuriant but minimal dance music cum polychromatic witch tunes. The album is built on plush electronics and abundant reverb, its spartan arrangements employing a wide variety of heavily processed sounds—is that a guitar, or is it a cheap keyboard set to “French horn”?—but Khan puts her ethereal voice authoritatively front and center. So far the tone of this spring’s version of the 80s has been set by “1901,” the first single from Phoenix’s new Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, and the zillion remixes thereof, but that band’s beige-on-beige nu-Hammer moves connect with those parts of the 80s aesthetic that are synthetic and obvious—they barely merit the minute of listening it takes to dismiss them. The cool, synthetic mood of “Daniel,” by contrast, feels like the aftermath of something, not just a hollow signifier; Khan’s curious song demands we follow her down the rabbit hole she’s fashioned from plastic and burnt lace, where we’ll play the zither and fast dance to Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love until dawn.
Jenny Wilson’s Hardships! is leaking its way across America, slowly but surely—though the “slowly” part is a baffler, given that the album has broken the top ten in her native Sweden. “The Wooden Chair” is characteristic of its low-tech R&B weirdness: Wilson has abandoned the indie-pop singer-songwriter template for arrangements that recall vintage Timbaland, but instead of sub-bass and baby samples it’s flute and multitracked handclaps and her big, seductive voice. It sounds like someone trying to make a hit R&B album with a four-track and whatever she happens to have around the house—and that inventiveness is only one of Wilson’s talents.
MICACHU
“A New Error” and “Nasty Silence”
