Author & Punisher, Women & Children (Seventh Rule)
Industrial music is having a bit of a moment right now, thanks to the gothier arm of the 90s revivalist movement and to Kanye’s booming digital meltdown, Yeezus, which has more in common with Skinny Puppy than with the new Jay Z. But even so, I don’t see the industrial-tinged metal racket of Author & Punisher finding much of a mainstream audience as a result. The project of sculptor and engineer Tristan Shone, who produces his music with a laptop and a nest of custom-built machines that looks like something out of the Terminator movies’ dystopian future, Author & Punisher recently released its second full-length, an unforgivingly grim pileup of sludgy doom grooves and aggressively tweaked electronics that paints a vivid picture of an extremely unpleasant worldview. Pop audiences don’t really go for that kind of thing, but anyone prone to moods where they just want to watch the world burn will be thoroughly satisfied. —Miles Raymer
The Convergence Quartet, Slow and Steady (No Business)
The third and best album by this nimble transatlantic jazz band (cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum is American, drummer Harris Eisenstadt is Canadian, and bassist Dominic Lash and pianist Alexander Hawkins, one of the most exciting keyboardists in improvised music, are both British) applies the distinctive musical personalities of first-rate improvisers to a series of detailed, structured compositions written by all four members. The songs veer in and out of postbop but maintain a single cogent sound. Eisenstadt’s multipartite “Third Convergence,” for example, opens with knotty freebop rambling, then suddenly melts into a gorgeous ballad sequence, where Hawkins injects subtly sour, beautifully lyrical harmonies and Bynum plays a plush, radiant solo—and that’s only halfway through the tune. Moods and styles shift from track to track, but no matter the territory, the musicians dissolve the gap between their jazz foundations and their predilection for abstraction. Few recordings I’ve heard in the past couple years have so vividly collided extended technique and pure-sound exploration with melody and crisp swing. —Peter Margasak
Robert Pollard, Honey Locust Honky Tonk (GBV Inc.)
All it took was 20 records with Guided by Voices and 19 solo releases for Robert Pollard to really find his voice. On the brand-new Honey Locust Honky Tonk (which isn’t a country record), Pollard is back with his signature hooks-on-hooks songwriting style, and his music has never sounded so cohesive and full. GBV got famous by making fractured, deconstructed pop, but on Honky Tonk, Pollard steps out from that band’s lo-fi shadow—he crafts fully realized, mellow, carefully structured songs, deliberately paced and brimming with subtle, beautiful melodies. Hard-core Pollard fans have been calling this his best record yet, but that’s a tough call to make, given that there are more than 60 releases out there from his various projects over the past three decades. What isn’t hard to say, though, is that Honey Locust Honky Tonk is excellent. —Luca Cimarusti
Zorch, Zzoorrcchh (Sargent House)
In 2011 Austin psych-pop duo Zorch turned heads in the music media with a string of messy songs about prominent critics such as Christopher Weingarten and Ryan Dombal. It’s a shame that nobody paid much attention to anything besides that stunt, though, because that same year Zorch released the stunning cassingle “Cosmic Gloss,” a prog-pop jam that charts a course for the bright heart of the Milky Way with interstellar synths and melodic loops of tweaked vocal samples. That song sits near the end of the group’s debut full-length, Zzoorrcchh, and it strikes a lovely, cathartic note on an album that’s already packed with celebratory drum-circle patterns and pileups of uplifting synth melodies. —Leor Galil
