Daniel Bachman,Jesus I’m a Sinner (Tompkins Square)
Jesus I’m a Sinner might just as well have been titled “Jesus, What Do I Do Next?” With last year’s Seven Pines, Virgina-born acoustic guitarist Daniel Bachman offered an intimidatingly accomplished example of the style known as “American primitive guitar”—loosely speaking, a merger of American folk idioms and raga aesthetics. This time, the 23-year-old has combined the things that made that record great with several collaborative experiments. Consequently Jesus I’m a Sinner is less cohesive, though the individual parts are excellent: on the solo piece “Leaving Istanbul (4 AM)” and the eerie “Under the Shade of the Trees,” where he’s accompanied by a tree full of cicadas, he summons a brooding mystery that clashes with the more traditional sounds of the Cajun dance “Happy One Step,” a duet with fiddler Sally Morgan, and the old-time ramble “Variations on Goose Chase,” on which Bachman swaps his guitar for a banjo. —Bill Meyer
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Washington state noisemakers Mamiffer (aka Faith Coloccia and former Isis front man Aaron Turner) have already collaborated with locals Locrian and Coloccia’s group Pyramids, and to make Enharmonic Intervals (for Paschen Organ) they traveled to Finland to record with experimental rock band Circle in Keski-Porin Kirkko, a gothic church in Circle’s hometown of Pori. Most of the album consists of deep, trancelike organs, curdling guitar feedback, guttural howls, and wordless wailing, which echo off the cavernous church’s walls to create a creepy, dramatic ambience that’s tense and occasionally startling. “Tumulus” melds a grand prog-rock organ melody with minimalist quasi-tribal drumming, descending guitar riffs, shrieking vocals, and what sounds like an incantation chanted at just above a whisper—the musicians channel sinister energy into something that feels almost spiritual. —Leor Galil
Diplo,Revolution EP (Mad Decent)
Diplo has never been one to commit to any given style of music for more than 32 bars, and his sudden massive mainstream bankability has done nothing to tame that tendency. If anything it’s amplified it: coming off a year of working with the likes of Lil Wayne and K-pop star G-Dragon, as well as producing Snoop Lion’s Reincarnated with his Major Lazer crew, he’s dropped an EP whose opening track returns to the hyperkinetic, genre-mashing booty-pop music of 2012’s Express Yourself, which contributed as much to the twerking phenomenon as Miley Cyrus. “Biggie Bounce” sounds like confetti made out of dancehall, New Orleans bounce, Miami bass, Brazilian favela funk, and about a dozen other ass-focused dance-music microgenres, all thrown in the air and recorded. The other three originals on Revolution are exercises in radio pop, arena EDM, and (most unexpectedly) grimy 90s-style rap. Like many of the tracks Diplo releases under his own name, they’re spotty from second to second due to his lack of discipline when it comes to song structure—sometimes it feels like he just tosses together a bunch of half-finished parts and leaves it up to DJs and remixers to figure out how they’re supposed to go together. —Miles Raymer
Jumalhamara,Resitaali (Ahdistuksen Aihio Productions)
To get to their debut full-length, Resignaatio, in 2010, this Finnish black-metal band took a long and twisted road—and if they wanted to switch to a straight, broad careerist path from there, the new limited-release album Resitaali is hardly the next logical move. Resignaatio caught a lot of ears with its furiously complex and challenging black metal, but Resitaali isn’t more of the same, or even a recognizable evolutionary step—it’s four long tracks of melancholy harmonium drone, much of which wouldn’t sound out of place on an avant-garde indie label. On tracks three and four (they’re untitled) the foggy roar starts to mount to eerie heights and suffocating densities; the encroaching dissonance of the former sets the stage for the ten-minute cathedral build of the latter. I don’t see this album as a sequel to Resignaatio so much as a chaser: Resitaali wouldn’t have nearly the impact if I didn’t already know what Jumalhamara could do as a metal band, and Resignaatio is deepened and enriched by its moody, meditative sibling. —Monica Kendrick
Linda Thompson,Won’t Be Long Now (Pettifer Sounds)
Won’t Be Long Now is the third album since 2002 from beloved British folk singer Linda Thompson—a bonanza after a 17-year drought. This cobbled-together release contains new material cut in New York and London as well as older stuff—including a live a cappella reading of the traditional “Blue Bleezin’ Blind Drunk,” recorded at New York club Bottom Line in 2002, and “Paddy’s Lamentation,” an alternate version of a song on the soundtrack of Gangs of New York. The album is a bit of a family affair: ex-husband Richard played guitar on the bitter “Love’s for Babies and Fools”; her son Teddy wrote or cowrote several songs, played guitar, and sang; and her daughter Kami added vocals, including a lead turn on Anna McGarrigle’s “As Fast as My Feet.” Thompson’s clarion voice sounds a tad scuffed, which lends extra gravity to the songs about disappointment and heartbreak; as usual she moves easily between traditional British folk and modern pop-rock, and the cool of her singing can’t belie the sadness behind it. —Peter Margasak
