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dclevinson · 3 years

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August 21: my kaddish month

I’ve sent this to a number of people, but I’m putting it here too in case some readers who might be interested will stumble across it:

A little more than a month has passed since Cindy died, and I get asked a lot how I’m doing. My standard answer starts with a couple ways of framing:

--- the earthquake is over, but there are lots of unpredictable emotional aftershocks

--- I’m past the Shock & Numbness phase, but normal life doesn’t seem normal. Lots of How Can This Be Real moments that can be disorienting and distressing

--- many times emotions collide: how much to lean into or away from grief, how to feel it’s OK to feel OK when I do, how keep her with me and move forward too, etc

I suppose at some point a fascination with grief can start to make others uncomfortable, but grieving has a logic of its own. One key part of “after” life was the 30 days of daily religious services I attended to honor her memory. I found the routine and --- surprisingly, the ritual --- spiritually nourishing. Cindy’s eyebrows always shot up at the word “spiritual.” Usually mine too. I hope those of you I send these four pages to don’t find it too tedious Perhaps it’s a way of keeping Cindy in your thoughts and hearts too…

I am a most unlikely daily mourning ritual observer. I didn’t do it for my father, and he asked us not to. But the ritual mourning prayers and the place where I’d be doing it meant a lot to Cindy, so I just committed without much deliberation. One problem in writing about a fairly traditional type of observance is that the spectrum of Jewish religious practice can be mystifying, even to many Jews. So how explain it to outsiders? I’ve tried to do it without being either too reverent or irreverent.

One basic mourning commitment is to say “kaddish”, the mourner’s prayer, for a set amount of time. Jewish practice and custom is intellectually intricate and often arcane; there are rules and exceptions to rules and different interpretations of rules, etc. There are other customs/demands for remembrance too. Many think of saying kaddish as a year long commitment. Plus yearly anniversaries, set to a moving Hebrew calendar --- just to add to the degree of difficulty. But even the year thing has permutations: actual practice for some groups is 11 months, not 12.

Why?. Different interpreters and communities make their own choices on duration. Our ritual director says “eleven.” Basically, some 13th century source says that “the wicked in Gehinom took 12 months for their souls to reach the highest levels of heaven.” But most Jews don’t even believe in a physical heaven!? Never mind. So, the reasoning goes, if the wicked took 12 months, we’ll mourn for 11: because our beloved Was Not Wicked. Welcome to Talmudic reasoning. But, traditionally, the year(ish) is for parents and children. For spouses the allotted time is 30 days. Though many people today may just do a year for anyone in the family. Thirty struck me as the perfect amount for the act to stay meaningful, helpful and not something I would treat as an increasingly resented chore.

It’s not a prayer that religious custom allows you to say by yourself. You need a minyan (quorum) of 10. It used to be men, but now men or women, at least at our conservative temple (shul, synagogue, whatever --- more insider confusing terminology). But some do say it by themselves for the comfort it brings if finding a group is too arduous. And I cheated a couple days by joining the group virtually. But I found being with a gathering of supporters did matter to me. I could have gone to a shorter evening service to do this, but preferred the morning time. And came to think a 40ish minute observance time a good block to have meaningful daily impact.

And then there’s the prayer itself. I realized right away that the weekday morning prayer service had many different kaddishs, similar prayers of thanks for and praise to a divine entity. But there’s one specific mourner’s version, said 3 times in oour short 40ish minute service. Twice, almost in succession at the end --- overkill or emphasis, depending on your point of view. Why the repeats? Haven’t pursued that yet. And, as some of you know, the prayer for the dead doesn’t mention dying or losing loved ones or honoring their memory, etc. It just profusely praises God (and lots of different words or phrases to refer to such entity since he/she/it is too holy and all powerful to mention the Real Name). Some phrases: “May god’s name be exalted and hallowed, his sovereignty soon accepted… glorified, celebrated, lauded, worshiped, exalted, honored, extolled and acclaimed… Lots of current Jewish religious practice incorporates the Middle Ages wholesale. Or earlier. Read the English on the facing page of the prayer book and much of the service sounds like the practice of a small, threatened tribe huddling in the desert thousands of years ago.

There’s a lot about Jewish practice that seems natural and essential to practitioners but might alienate the uninitiated. Or reluctant observers like me. The head coverings. The shoulder covering prayer shawls. The standing for this (many do: why not all??!), turning right for that, covering eyes for this line, fingering prayer shawl strings (tzitzit) for that. Whew. So many prayers and practices for so many different occasions. Designed, I’ve thought, to cement the devotion of believers. But it repel skeptics, too, I surmise.

One such example: in these early services most men put on tefillin. Leather straps with little black boxes attached (a prayer inside) that have very specific wrapping/unwrapping procedures for arms and head. It’s deeply moving to believers, but I’ve always thought it look repellent or ridiculous. Way too much like the garb of the ultra orthodox “crazies.” There are lots of I’ll do this/not that decisions in religious practice. I understand there’s a tenuous dynamic that exists between any minority and majority community, and clinging to tradition and being true to oneself can seem preferable to “selling out” to fit in. But sometimes it strikes us skeptics as more a clinging to “guns and religion” type intransigence.

So, if you walked in on these services cold (I was lukewarm), there’s lots that would be pretty mystifying and potentially off-putting. How could you possibly fit in? In fact, I believe I was the only new guy or gal over my month. And there had to be a decent number of temple members who have lost family members during the time I attended. Seemingly no person younger than I was doing the morning kaddish thing. And usually I was the only or 1 of 2 who didn’t put on tefillin. Men. Women usually don’t. Though one of our female rabbis did. Good for her, though I wasn’t tempted to follow.

I could fit in and feel comfortable at these services because a) I knew people there b) I was committed to being there and c) people took care of me. I no longer bristled at the imputation (real or just in my head?) that I’m a Bad Jew and I need instruction to be a Good One. This time I felt many there had cherished Cindy, understood why I was there, and quietly welcomed me. I was willing to look/be ignorant and accept guidance.

It was reassuring to see many of Cindy’s compatriots from the temple sisterhood there day after day too. The whole group (20 to 40 most days) was interesting to observe: lots more joking and side conversations during the service than I’d imagined. And there was the guy older than I who usually wore cycling shorts and shirt, the much older guy who sat to my right who usually shuffled in 15 minutes late, etc etc. Lots of accomplished people and interesting stories for another writer’s version. And --- most days --- someone called out the pages so I had some sense where we were.

I can read Hebrew if I already know the prayer or chant. So I can’t really read Hebrew anymore. Much of the service is praising God’s amazing powers, thanking him for singling out and helping Jews (don’t let anti-Semites see this!), an intricate mix of different intricate sections that over days start to fit a pattern. There are a always some bits in any prayer book that I find edifying and worth recalling; often I’m reading in one place when the service is in another. My favorite in this one:

Rabbi Schuel ben Nahmani said: We find that the Holy One created everything in the world; only falsehood and exaggeration were not God’s doing. People devised those on their own.

There’s no sermon on any days, just the chanting. And different melodies for different sections. And torah reading ritual (I could spend pages on this alone) Monday and Thursday. I still have to learn why those days. I preferred the shorter days without.

I was most fortunate to have a long time neighbor and, like Cindy, long time temple leader who I was delighted to learn (only some 30 some years later) is a regular attendee of daily morning services. Like Cindy, he has the ability I don’t to take what’s worthwhile in religious practice and ignore the rest. He credits Cindy with his reading the new alternate section of one prayer praising the Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob) by adding Matriarchs too.

It’s not supposed to be used at this particular service, but a couple women who led services on a rotating schedule snuck it in. Much to my friend Rick’s and my glee. He joked about wanting to write: Minyan, the Musical. Have to decide how reverent or irreverent to be I replied. Yes he said, and some would love it, some hate it. Like so much else in life, I thought.

There’s way more I could describe: the various “honors” during torah reading for one. Early on I got congratulated for pulling the strings to open the torah ark/cabinet. Basically, the only task our ritual director could be sure at that point I wouldn’t flub. One more key detail: I was wearing Cindy remarkable hand knit prayer shawl. Which, of course, many of her friends recognized. Once I made the mistake when taking it off at the service end of holding it to my face: way too emotional to repeat daily. Much more detail I could include, but there’s likely already too much. Ask me if you want more.

I was asked to say a few words on the last day, right before the concluding prayers. I told people I was a most unlikely minyan attendee, etc. Grateful for this and that person’s help and Rebbe Rick’s (joke) guidance and company. Uplifted seeing Cindy’s sisterhood comrades, etc. Hoped in coming months to find an enduring way to honor her memory, etc.

My one specific observation: I had been hearing people recite kaddish at Saturday services off and on for over 60 years. But I’d never given a thought to the brief parts where the congregation joins in on a quick line. Just part of the practice I’d heard without really hearing. Until I was the mourner. Then, on many days when the congregation joined in…

Y’he sh’meh rabbvo m’orach l’olam ulolmey olmayo…

…on many days I felt my heart lifting and a wave of emotional support wash over me. This is why you should say kaddish in a minyan if at all possible. Or I hope in your tradition or life there’s some equivalent thing to bring you comfort when/if you need it. Em and I have been lighting candles at a set time each week also. That works for us too.

The morning group skews old. But I hope that such a group is always there for anyone who needs it. I don’t want to attend any religious services daily. Or weekly. But this is my favorite service. I’ll be back. But on a day they don’t read torah. Forty minutes is plenty.

I decided, too, that on day 30, I would take off my wedding ring. I sensed that if I didn’t tie that act to a ritual I might have a hard time doing it.

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dustedmagazine · 4 years

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Dust Volume 6, Number 1

A new year means new music. At least eventually, it does, though January is notoriously slow for album releases. Meanwhile, there’s plenty we missed from late (and mid and even early) 2019, so let’s dig into that for one last big Dust. Here we cover subcontinental LGBTQ gangsta rap, industrial clangor, string quartets, Welsh agitpunk, electronics, free jazz, blackened death metal and an odd, charming collaboration between Cate Le Bon and Bradford Cox (see photo). Writers include Bill Meyer, Jennifer Kelly, Ian Mathers, Tobias Carroll, Andrew Forell, Ray Garraty, Jason Gioncontere, Ethan Militsky and Jonathan Shaw.

Jeb Bishop / Alex Ward / Weasel Walter — Flayed (Ugexplode)

Flayed by Jeb Bishop / Alex Ward / Weasel Walter

You know a party is good if it carries on even though the organizer can’t show up. Bassist Damon Smith planned this encounter, which involved his long-term partner in intensity and chaos, drummer Weasel Walter; New England improvisational fellow traveler (at least until Smith moved to St. Louis a few months after this March, 2019 session) Jeb Bishop on trombone and electronics; and Alex Ward, a veteran of work with Derek Bailey and This Is Not This Heat, on guitar and clarinet. Since Walter has played with both of the other guys in and outside of the Flying Luttenbachers, when Smith had to drop out for scheduling reasons, he was confident that the trio could make something of both the opportunity to play and the space made available by the absent bass. He was right. Both the title and prevailing assumptions about Walter might set you up to expect a one-dimensional blowout, but there’s loads of listening and thoughtful, instant reacting taking place on each of the album’s eight, mostly pithy tracks. This music plays out like a combination of jujitsu and shuttle diplomacy, with players shifting between support and challenge, density and space, rapidity and reserve from second to second.

Bill Meyer

Cartel Madras — Age of the Goonda (Sub Pop)

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Cartel Madras turns gangsta rap’s hyper-male, African-American-oriented bravado on its side, filtering the guns and blunts ethos through a female, queer, multicultural lens without diluting its violence in the least. Sisters Priya and Bhagya Ramesh, known as Contra and Eboshi, have lived in Calgary since childhood, but they immigrated from Chennai, India, once part of Madras, hence the name, hence the tricky scales and intricate, not-quite-Western rhythms of their rhymes. Age of the Goonda works in a spare, menacing way, dense, referential wordplay atop an undulating threat of sub-bass and the occasional spray of bullets.

“Goonda Gold,” celebrates cartoonish dominance, though with a South Asian twist. Little bits of Hindi harmonics decorate the bare architecture of synth bass sounds and cracking, stabbing percussion (augmented here by gunfire); the Cartel’s chant of “Gold on my neck I’m a Goonda/got guns in the air like a junta” puts a subcontinental spin on ghetto law. The clever-est word sprays come in “The Legend of Jalopeno Boiz,” where the duo references everything from Frost/Nixon to incel stereotypes, but the single “Lil Pump Type Beat,” is all hedonism, devious syncopation and sexual predation. Though wildly intersectional, these tracks make no concessions to soft, liberal ideas about how women/minorities/LGBTQ people wield power; they do it just like the men do, with guns. “Take off your top boy/somebody bring me my gun/that bag in the back of the jeep/you just a bitch on the run,” asserts one or the other sister in “Jumpscare.” What was that you were saying about women and nurture?

Jennifer Kelly

CIA Debutante — The Landlord (Siltbreeze)

CIA Debutante-The Landlord by CIA Debutante

A new Siltbreeze record is a rare blessing nowadays. The label’s first release since 2018 comes from Paris duo CIA Debutante. The Landlord fits in nicely with the label’s storied '90s output, particularly the Shadow Ring. The electronics aren’t quite glitchy—they sound more like the batteries in a cheap toy dying. Still, CIA Debutante are savvy enough to avoid getting too clever with their sputtering, plodding, and whizzing, and they don’t go the easy route when layering incongruous sounds. There’s never the fatiguing sense that they rely on the same few tricks. It helps that their murky, paranoid vignettes are fully engrossing. CIA Debutante tap into something truly nightmarish on The Landlord, which is a rare accomplishment. Sure, plenty of music shoots for tense and creepy, but CIA Debutante have an exceptional gift for the uncanny, the kind of stuff that haunts you long after you’ve woken up and can no longer hope to grasp it. Ethan Milititsky

Decoherence — Ekpyrosis (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Ekpyrosis by Decoherence

Decoherence is a pretty good name for a band that locates itself in the liminal space between industrial music’s stomp and clangor and black metal’s astringent tumult. The band’s new LP (and first full length release) Ekpyrosis is at its best when its waves of distorted hiss, dissonant riffing and distant shrieks and growls threaten to rend the record to shreds. One imagines that if you found yourself in an aluminum ladder factory, amid the massive drills and extruding machines and metal presses and then removed your ear protectors, you’d hear something akin to this — especially if the place was possessed by demons of ill intent. It’s a well-crafted, ritualized chaos. The band is so insistent on a specific set of sounds and forms that the record’s long tracks tend to blur into one another. Which may be the point. Decoherence, indeed.

Jonathan Shaw

Bertrand Denzler / CoÔ — Arc (Potlatch)

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Arc is a two-part, album-length work by Bertrand Denzler, a Swiss-born, Paris-based saxophonist and composer. It is performed by CoÔ, a string septet led by double bassist Félicie Bazelaire. The ensemble’s composition is a sort of funhouse reflection of a string quartet, distorted towards breadth; it comprises one violin, two violas, one cello and three double basses. But there’s nothing comic about this music, which is quite beautiful in the same way as a slow winter sunset. Denzler’s method here involves the use of continuous sounds, but don’t call it drone. The players use both conventional and extended techniques to create a continually changing sequence of striated sounds. Naked scrapes and cavernous groans arc in formation, changing fairly frequently over the course of each piece. The result is immersive enough to let you get lost, but keep your ears and eyes open; you wouldn’t want to miss one moment of gradual transition. A note about circumstances — Potlatch, the label that released this CD, has slowed its production in recent years, and this is the only record it released in 2018. Apparently, the label isn’t wasting its time with unnecessary effort; Arc clears the necessity bar.

Bill Meyer

Fujiya & Miyagi — Flashback (Impossible Objects of Desire)

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One of the interesting things about Fujiya & Miyagi’s songwriting is that as the UK post-motorik outfit’s music becomes ever more focused and sleekly propulsive, frontman David Best has zeroed in on any number of little aspects of life disturb and upset the kind of cool pulse the band specializes in. Here it’s everything from violations of your “Personal Space,” the “Fear of Missing Out,” and nagging thoughts in the title track to the more political concerns of the closing lengthy workout of “Gammon” (which eventually, in one of the little touches that makes F&M’s music so addictive, settles on the “pure evil vibrating” of a dial-up modem). That doesn’t mean the band can no longer bust a groove just for the pure joy of it, as “Dying Swan Act” proves, but it’s the combination of those chops and the perceptive if increasingly jaundiced eye they turn on life that makes them such a unique and compelling act.

Ian Mathers

Cate Le Bon & Bradford Cox — Myths 400 (Mexican Summer)

Myths 004 by Cate Le Bon & Bradford Cox

Intricate fancies turn just out of true in this pop-up collaboration between Cate Le Bon and Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox, the fourth in a series of joint EPs recorded under the auspices of Mexican Summer’s annual Marfa Myths festival (hence Myths 400). The two artists work in a skewed, peripheral vision take on artful pop, building interlocking boxes of percussion and whimsey in which fleeting glimpses of loveliness flit by. The song-i-est bit of Myths 400 is undoubtedly “Secretary,” a Weimar-decadent bit of mournful song hedged in clanks and clicks, strings and clarinets, and the odd combination of Le Bon’s pure art-song shiver and Cox’s less pristine, more grounded voice. Yet the rhythm-centered oddities are just as rewarding; resist the slap-bang fanciful-ness of growly-voiced, Cox-led “Fireman,” with Le Bon trilling off center arias in the margins at your own peril. “What Is She Wearing” bangs out disconsonant guitar tones in slightly off center patterns and tunings; it’s a wind-up toy’s existential crisis. Le Bon chants in a Middle European cadence, as the cut falls somewhere between early Michachu and a Kurt Weil song. It’s about the last thing you’d expect to emerge from the desert, eccentric, abstracted, playful and utterly urbane.

Jennifer Kelly

Urs Leimgruber / Andreas Willers / Alvin Curran / Fabrizio Sperra—Rome-ing (Leo)

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Urs Leimgruber has covered a lot of musical ground in a performing and recording career that spans over 45 years. The three musicians who join the Swiss saxophonist on this freely improvised encounter, which was recorded in Rome late in 2018, are well chosen to access aspects of that history and shape it into sound configurations that are quite present-focused. Quick, light-fingered, and restless, drummer Fabrizio Sperra keeps things in constant motion. Swiss guitarist Andreas Willers stirs chunks of almost rock-ish noise and sprinkles stinging, pure-toned notes into the mix that give the music heft without slowing it down. Alvin Curran, an American keyboardist and composer (and member of MEV), draws on classical more than jazz elements in his piano playing; there are moments where he stubbornly erects a structure that the other musicians must either inhabit or work around. But his sampler also enables him to inject the sounds of other places. Shifting between tenor and saxophones, Leimgruber drives quickly spiraling phrases through the open spaces and uses astringent, distressed tone-shards to suggest where there needs to be more space.

Bill Meyer

The Master Musicians of Dyffryn Moor — Music for the National Health Service (Amgueddfa Llwch)

Music for the National Health Service by The Master Musicians of Dyffryn Moor

When I was a younger punk, I would sometimes take in the phenomenon of bands’ whose lyrical explanations would take longer to deliver than the playing of the actual songs. And while I haven’t seen this crop up much recently, I feel like that aesthetic is alive and well when I visit the Bandcamp page of The Master Musicians of Dyffryn Moor, which includes a terse essay about the dangers facing the NHS under the current British government. This new EP follows two excellent full-lengths, Cerddoriaeth Ddefodol Gogledd Sir Benfro (Ritual Music of North Pembrokeshire) and Contemporary Protest Music, which blend the “instrumental music can be politically charged” feel of Godspeed You! Black Emperor with the intricacy of Steve Reich’s Drumming. These two songs continue in that tradition — furiously played percussion with a heated political subtext — but add a few tweaks to the sound the group has already established. Specifically, there’s a stronger electronic element here: you could probably get a dancefloor moving if you cued up “A spell to protect the NHS from those who seek to destroy it.” Its opposite number, “A hex on those who seek to destroy the NHS,” is built around a steady pulse. You probably can’t dance as well to that, but given the potential psychic damage incurred by dancing to a hex, would you actually want to?

Tobias Carroll

Overground Collective — Super Mario (Babel Label)

SUPER MARIO by OverGround Collective

The Overground Collective is a pan-European big band that is based in London and led by Paulo Duarte, a Portuguese guitarist/composer currently based in Scandinavia. If that sounds like a bit to get your head around, you probably need only wait a while to see what Boris’s Britain does to the freedoms of movement and thought necessary for such an endeavor to get off the ground. For the rest of us, it’s a nice illustration of why such fluidity is part of a better way. Duarte spent some time in England studying the ways of various improvisers, and recruited 17 to join him in realizing a set of compositions designed expressly for them. Certain of the participants come from free jazz (Julie Kjaer, Rachel Musson) or cross-genre experimentation (Yazz Ahmed), and you can hear the influence of such approaches in a few moments of freefall and adventurously conceived solos. But these elements fit into a structure that fits squarely in the tradition. Duarte sets tunes you could hum on grooves that’ll make you tap your feet, albeit quickly enough to annoy your neighbor if the floorboards happen to transmit your amateur approximation of his beats, and dresses them up in arrangements that could speak to a person who thinks that jazz’s lineage is a straight line from Duke Ellington to Maria Schneider. Music like this is a reproach to those who think that differences can’t be complimentary parts of a whole.

Bill Meyer

Pictish Trail — Thumb World (Fire)

Thumb World by Pictish Trail

Folktronica from the tiny island of Eigg in the Hebrides, this latest album by Pictish Trail (Johnny Lynch) demonstrates the aesthetic value of both isolation and connection. Per isolation: Lynch lives on a windblown island with fewer than 100 other people. But as for connection, he is intimately involved in a northerly folk scene through King Creosote’s Fence Records and surrounded by local musicians. There aren’t that many folks on Eigg, but almost everybody plays an instrument. That kind of environment allows space for eccentricity and practice, which shows up on these expansive, dance-inflected, folk-shadowed cuts. Pictish Trail enlarges his subtle, personal songs with enveloping arrangements of rock sounds and club electronics; Kim Moore contributes some string arrangements and Alex Thomas of Squarepusher sits in on drums. “Double Sided” has the lilt and ramble of Three EPs Beta Band (Lynch has been out touring with Steve Mason lately), while gorgeous, glistening “Slow Memories” has the glitch, glow and aura of early Tunng. Thumb World demonstrates that music can be solitary without being lonely, introspective without self-absorbation. “You’re my solitude/I’m never so alone by myself,” sings Lynch, on the surprisingly rock-guitared “Bad Algebra,” underlining the fact that too many people (or the wrong people) can be isolating, and a few can provide the space for originality and experiment.

Jennifer Kelly

Pinkish Black — Concept Unification (Relapse)

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Texas psych sludge prog metal duo Pinkish Black has been quiet for a little while; their last record, 2015’s Bottom of the Morning, was such a compact and potent summation of the miasmic bad vibes that Daron Beck (synthesizers, voice) and Jon Teague (drums) can summon up seemingly at will. No more than a minute into the opening title track of their fourth record you get a strong reminder of just that atmosphere; you might as well be in a haunted castle during the full moon. The closing, lengthy “Next Solution” also offers a reminder of what you might call classic Pinkish Black, but it’s the four songs in between that show Beck and Teague working to make sure there is always room to expand their dark palette. Whether it’s the relatively straightforward, thrashy “Until” or the prettily drifting “Inanimatronic” the results are always interesting. Bottom of the Morning remains the best introduction for now to this duo’s indelible sound, but once you’re a fan Concept Unification makes for a strong and promising follow-up.

Ian Mathers

Alexa Rose—Medicine for Living (Big Legal Mess)

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“How I wish I were kinder, how I wish I were patient, I could learn all the songs on the gospel station,” trills Alexa Rose in a water pure soprano touched with shivery vibrato as she navigates the twists and corners of the title track from her lovely debut album. The Virginia-born, Memphis-based songwriter has a native’s familiarity with gospel, country and folk blues, but a fresh, sparkling delivery that makes these well-worn forms sound like she just thought of them. A lilting, effortless voice elicits spare melancholy sparked with hope and a crack band of Americana pros in tow – Will Sexton on guitar, George Sluppick playing drums and Mark Edgard Stuart on bass — fill out the songs without a bit of bloat. “Tried and True” enlists a cajun squeeze box and skittering banjo into Rose’s smart, unsentimental songcraft; country teems with strong women disappointed by love, but Alexa Rose is clear-eyed and strong enough to kick its ass without breaking meter. Gorgeous and empowered stuff.

Jennifer Kelly

Sartegos — O Sangue da Noite (I, Voidhanger)

O Sangue da Noite by SARTEGOS

This new release by Sartegos isn’t so much blackened death metal as it is a death metal record that morphs its shape and sound into black metal. The buzzy crunch and acrobatic soloing of opener “Sangue e Noite” gradually give way to leaner, meaner riffs, and by the midpoint of fourth track “Solpor dos Mistérios,” the record has fully taken on the properties of merciless, muscular continental black metal. The record may engage with various metal subgenres, but O Sangue da Noite is held together by Sartegos’s focus on Galician nationalist themes and celebrations of its landscape. The band is named for a miniscule rural hamlet in Galicia, and we are told that all lyrics are delivered in the region’s native dialect. Black metal and ardent nationalism don’t always make for the happiest of combinations. For those of us lacking fluency in the language, it’s tough to know what ideological charge the lyrics carry. And Galician regional politics feature a panoply of leftist and right wing factions, all with their own fiery arguments for the region’s autonomy. What sort of blood? Who sings in the night? Hard to say. But the music’s pretty good.

Jonathan Shaw

Seablite – Grass Stains and Novocaine (Emotional Response)

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Bay Area quartet Seablite’s debut album navigates the fuzzy end of indie pop with aplomb. Vocalists Lauren Matsui (guitar) and Galine Tumasyan (bass) are joined by drummer Andy Pastalaniec and ex-Wax Idol Jen Mundy on lead guitar for 11 tracks of chipper, summery shoegaze that sit easily alongside their most obvious influences Lush, Curve and Stereolab. Seablite’s songs are elevated by the interplay of twin vocals, clean guitar lines and bouncy bass lines supported by cymbal heavy motorik drums. There’s steel beneath the gauze as Mundy brings a little of the Idols’ shade to proceedings and Pastalaniec drives songs like “Pillbox” and “Polygraph” hard and fast down a euphoric freeway of top-down thrumming thrills. Yes, it sounds like a lot of bands you’ve heard and maybe loved but Grass Stains and Novocaine is so well put together and convincingly played it’s hard to resist.

Andrew Forell

Seiðr — Intethedens Afsky (Nattetale)

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Seiðr is a one-man band from Denmark. For just one man, he was awfully busy in the past year, having put out three records. Intethedens Afsky can boast of 10 tracks of dirty, primitive sound with bursts of melody buried immediately under a wall of noise. The inspiration for Seiðr’s music can be found in early 1990s Norwegian black metal, and Claus H. (that’s his name) cannot be blamed for being too much of a good student. Why shouldn’t he have learnt from his elders? The first two tracks here have samples from “nature,” and this gives us a hint to how Seiðr’s music can be interpreted: it’s ruptures in Nature’s hellish landscape. No one will be saved.

Ray Garraty

Spider Bags — A Celebration of Hunger (Sophomore Lounge)

SPIDER BAGS "A Celebration of Hunger" by Spider Bags

Spider Bags are still around, making a record every three or four years for Merge. But listening to this debut, it’s hard to imagine how they did it. If subject matter reflects life style, then the motto of these guys back in 2008 was, “We do the hard stuff so there won’t be any left for you. Say, can you loan me a couple of twenties?” But there’s a self-observing intelligence at work in these songs that suggests that self-awareness wasn’t totally obliterated, and a loose, rumbling energy to these roots-tinged garage-rock songs that confirms that the Bags spent at least part of everyday upright. Add to that engineer Brian Paulson’s knack for getting sound under challenging circumstances, which renders the live-sounding performances with sufficient but not distracting clarity, and you have a good soundtrack for the next time you want to drink yourself off the barstool in the privacy of your own home.

Bill Meyer

Luke Spook — Small Town (Third Eye Stimuli)

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Australian multi-instrumentalist Luke Spook steps away from the garage-punk of his Pinheads to conjure up lysergic specters from bygone times on Small Town. There are a fair number of freaked out boil-overs in the offing but the general tone is one of reserved simplicity. Whether sipping tea with the subject of “The Owl” or gathering around the fire with some fellow townsfolk on the title track, Luke channels Syd Barrett to the point of becoming nearly indistinguishable. But what makes Small Town more than just a covers album is Luke’s ability to vary the intimacy of his arrangements when needed. “All the King’s Horses” features a harmonica solo backed up with an (accidental?) chorus of distant, wailing hounds. Those types of moments lurk beneath the surface and inject a pastoral quality that feels authentic. More quirky utopian village than small town, the world Spook creates is a place to live rather than to pass through.

Jason Gioncontere

Nick Storring — Qualms (Never Anything)

Qualms by Nick Storring

Nick Storring’s latest recording started life as the score for a dance performance, and it is easy to imagine how it might function in that role. The composition, which spans both sides of a cassette, is episodic. Each moment feels unique unto itself, creating an environment in which things — maybe movements, or maybe something in your own imagination — have the space to happen. If you caught him onstage with the group Picastro, you would probably see Storring play cello, but for Qualms he plays a couple dozen keyboard, stringed, percussive and woodwind instruments. This allows similar themes and actions to appear and reappear in different garb. One stalking theme, for example, manifests once as a psychedelically dense string melody, and again played by gamelan percussion. Elsewhere passages of meter-less sound temporarily halt the progress. Moments of Steve Reich-like repetition surface, but instead of locking in like they might in a Reich piece, they quickly morph into something else. The same pattern of change that probably made this a handy program for a dance performance makes it an engaging pure listening experience.

Bill Meyer

Sun City Girls — Dawn of the Devi (Abduction)

Dawn of the Devi by Sun City Girls

Dawn of the Devi holds an important place in the Sun City Girls’ discography. Released in 1991, it was the follow up to the much-celebrated Torch of the Mystics, which remains one of the more tuneful and easily-relatable records that Charles Gocher and brothers Alan and Richard Bishop ever did. As such, it had a job to do, and it did it well. That was to throw the followers who sandals instead of sturdy shows off the track. They did this by serving up a song-free album of jagged, totally improvised jams. While it did the job at the time, and in doing so established a pattern of giving the people something other than what they want, in retrospect, you can appreciate it for another reason. Dawn of the Devi makes a pretty strong case for the trio as a rock-derived improvisational ensemble. They sound like they’re listening and responding to each other, and their transitions from acidic splatter to swooning hesitation or heavy ambush make intuitive sense. It wasn’t always that way.

Bill Meyer

These New Puritans — Inside the Rose (BMG)

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Essex experimentalists These New Puritans return with a lush yet disquieting take on English pastoralism. On Inside the Rose multi-instrumentalist twin brothers Jack and George Barnett create an often lovely, occasionally portentous, romantic paean to nature and love. As the Barnetts move further beyond the fractured post-punk of their debut Beat Pyramid, this, their fourth album, elaborates the use of contemporary classical and choral orchestration into arrangements that channel Talk Talk. Jack Barnett’s voice is high in the mix and evokes David Sylvian at his most emotive. Beneath the sheen and swooning strings George’s drumming shifts and slides between Reichian repetition and fierce Taiko inspired rhythms. Inside the Rose is a meticulously produced but never fussy collection, welcoming the listener but refusing either to compromise or patronize. A serious but accessible work full of carefully considered details, some gorgeous melodies and an almost Pre-Raphaelite sensibility expressed in a thoroughly contemporary manner.

Andrew Forell

Various Artists — No Other Love (Tompkins Square)

No Other Love : Midwest Gospel (1965-1978) by Various Artists

No Other Love is, like the several albums that Mike McGonigal has compiled for different labels, a sequence of gospel records drawn from one collection. In this case it is the collection of Ramona Stout. She culled the 45s that make up this set from her husband Kevin’s trawls of records that had spent years in Chicagoan basements. A graduate student who had spent much of her life outside the USA, she saw with clear eyes the grime of American urban poverty, and found herself deeply compelled by the discovery that hopeful music could grow in such decay. There are no big stars amongst these recordings. Even at the time they were recorded they would have sounded rough and behind the times production-wise — just electric guitars, drum kits, whatever piano or organ was sitting in the church where they were recorded, and congregants’ voices. But the fervor of yearning and the joy of release makes every track a transporting listen.

Bill Meyer

WOW — Come La Notte (Maple Death Records)

Come La Notte by wow

Underground Roman duo China Now (vocals, drums) and Leo Non (guitars) recent album as WOW, Come La Notte (Like the Night), is seven tracks of 1960s influenced Italian noir cabaret high on atmosphere and drama. Now’s almost operatic vocals are at the forefront over skeletal brushed drums, minimal bass and restrained guitar. The band lulls then surprises with a spectral sax and bursts of crashing cymbals and feedback on “Niente Di Speciale” (“Nothing Special”), a keening gypsy violin on “Vieni Un Po’ Qui” (“Come Over Here”), middle eastern organ on “Occhi Di Serpente” (“Snake Eyes”). Fatalism drips from every note bringing to mind a low ceilinged club in the catacombs where refugees from the sun fill the air with smoke and their guts with grappa and cheap vino rosso as Pasolini scouts for rough trade and fingers grip switchblades concealed in socks. Come La Notte is a slow grower that draws you in even while it picks your pocket. Put it on and live a little vicarious danger in your own private La Dolce Vita.

Andrew Forell

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