Can You Come Down With Us?

The Albums That Hardly Employ A Guitar Appreciation Month:

High Places, 03/07-09/07
The pared-down electronic simplicity much in the same vein of Au Revoir Simone, but bolder. And bold is good. Very good. Probably what I'll nominate for Character Trait of the Year.

M.I.A., Arular
She is not a simple lyrics-set-to-a-tune artist: She's a full-on surround-sight/sound experience that infuses the entire nervous system with this writhing artistry. As Joshua Klein put it in describing another album, "such wonderfully weird and inventive craft that reveling in [the artist's] ingenuity and tapping your toes become inextricably linked activities, making the disc the perfect mind/body split: blowing the former while moving the latter." Except listening to this album involves a little more than tapping your toes.

Panda Bear, Person Pitch
Arena indie rock. There's a type of soaring, euphoric quality to this album that makes me think that if I ever went on a hot air balloon ride, this is what I'd listen to.

Wax Tailor
This was a concert, actually. (Hooray for seeing French electronica in Central America!) The performers included Wax on keyboards, a cellist, a flautist, and a visual artist whose electronic scribbled flourishings were projected on the large screen directly above the stage. There was also a small projector to the left that played random clips of WWII-era films and commercials. Good times!

Plus heaps of yummy India.Arie and Dar Williams, courtesy of the equally yummy Lily.

*

The Olivia Tremor Control, Dusk at Cubist Castle
Because there was no way the E6 month would have been complete without this album, but I couldn't fit all 10 green typewriters and the other 17 tracks into my monthly allotment of downloads last time. For all the active bands out there who are dying to have "the White Album" breathed in their reviews, Olivia Tremor is the most successful of any other I've heard. Not that they're trying to specifically emulate the White Album, but the best moments of Dusk harken back to it.

It's important to know that I have this section to promote albums popularly, not pretentiously. One reason I so loath absurdist band and album titles is because it strikes as an elitist move, some artist thinking they're coming off as "deeper" by making themselves more inaccessible (when they usually just end up seeming more convoluted). I would hate for someone to avoid buying, or even sampling, this album because the name – which, now that I think of it, just add a 'b' to the front and it pretty well describes Evo's job – threw someone off or thought that album couldn't be for them. This album is infinitely accessible.