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Boredoms – Ant 10 (DJ Lindstrøm Remix)
From Super Roots 10 : Thrill Jockey 221 [Buy]

Super Roots 10 is the new EP from Japanese rock-noise-art band Boredoms. It’s finally released this month outside Japan, after months of speculation. It’s a freaking cool record, but I’m stumped if I know exactly why.

The music here tracks a noise-ambient-minimalism path chasing some kind of obsessive internal logic requiring overblown guitars, analogue synths, ostinato figures and platoons of manic percussion. The overall effect is like listening to 15,000 WalkMans plugged into a nuclear powerstation. For 40 minutes.

Any band that’s been around for more than 20 years (Boredoms was founded in Osaka 1986 by Yamantaka Eye) has very little left to prove. Boredoms are all about their stage performances, and it really is their extensive use of live percussion that sets them apart from any other band on the planet.

In many ways the 3 remixes and the original track here are extensions of each other: four movements in a greater work that just happen break easily over the two sides of a 12 inch dance single.

And this is definitely dance music, especially designed for dancing while throwing oneself joyfully against brick walls and leaping off bungalow roofs into thornbushes. Super Roots 10 should sound like shit, and yet somehow, it makes complete sense. One of the best releases I’ve heard all year.

Extra Golden – Anyango
From Thank You Very Quickly: Thrill Jockey [Released March 2009]

Download free 320kbps mp3 of “Anyango” from Thrill Jockey Records

Extra Golden is a band that, on paper, displays all the hallmarks of an experiment: “A unique blend of Kenyan Benga music with American Rock and other, assorted African guitar stylings“. And yet on headphones it all sounds like the most natural thing in the world.

Perhaps these two musical streams sit together so well because both rock and benga are primarily guitar-based genres. The band is made up of American D.C.-based guitarists Alex Minoff and Ian Eagleson (whose experience doing doctoral research into benga was the ursprung of the band); alongside monster drummer Onyango Wuod Omari and guitarist Onyango Jagwasi.

If anything, Extra Golden leans further towards East Africa than the Eastern Seaboard – most lyrics are sung in Luo, and the only time (to my ears) when the music sounds somewhat dépaysé is when the odd verse is sung in English.

The music is Kenyan in focus, so are the bands’s politics and lyrical interest. Ukimwi deals with the scourge of AIDS sweeping through the country, and Thank You Very Quickly is an acknowledgement of the friends and fans who helped protect band members during the post-election violence in Kenya last year.

Thank You Very Quickly is Extra Golden’s third album, and it sounds like the band has solidified through touring. While their previous effort Hera Ma Nono, revelled in reverb and melody, (including a tribute to then-candidate Obama), TYVQ seems to groove more. The track Gimakiny Akia is effortlessly funky, its insistent and relentless bass guitar recalling Michael Henderson on Miles’s early 70s albums.

When talking about current indie bands that gain sustenance from the great sinkholes of African pop, perhaps some comparison to Vampire Weekend is inevitable. But Vampire Weekend’s whole schtick is that they’re gawky white college kids appropriating somebody elses’ music – ironic artifice is part of that band’s appeal.

By contrast, Extra Golden is rooted firmly in a single tradition and sounds like a more honest musical effort. The band are touring the UK in March with Senegal’s Baaba Maal and Zimbabwe’s Oliver Mtukudzi. But I’m thinking that some scintillating benga guitar would got down well in the heat of the 2009 festival circuit in Europe…

Arbouretum – False Spring
From Song of the Pearl : Thrill Jockey [Released March 2009]

2009′s first love affair with an American indie guitar band has struck early, in the form of Baltimore’s Arbouretum. Their third album Song of the Pearl is released in March and the lovely people at Thrill Jockey threw a preview copy over the fence at me (yes, some people still think that I only blog about music!)

Normally I’m not one for big crunchy guitar-scapes unless they’re framed by good arrangements  and attached to great tunes. Song of the Pearl has this in spades. Arbouretum is built around the writing of David Heumann:  to judge by his other projects Television Hill and Human Bell, Heumann is a songwriter (and photographer) to be reckoned with.

If Heumann’s songs hold Song of the Pearl together, the disc is underpinned by Heumann and Steve Strohmeier‘s guitars, whose interweaving textures recall (for me at least) the best moments of Sonic Youth or Neil Young with Crazy Horse.

Song of the Pearl sounds like an album from another age.  Perhaps intentionally, its eight songs and 40 minutes fit nicely on a 33rpm record. The dirge-like ballad Tomorrow is a Long Time has the sort of relentless melody that could have floated out of the Appalachians on a log. And the epic psychedelic folk-blues that informed Led Zep’s No Quarter haunts songs like Down By the Fall Line.

Arbouretum’s  previous two albums seem worth checking out too. Here’s the video for Mohammed’s Hex and Bounty off their 2007 album Rites of Uncovering:

The Sea and Cake – Car Alarm
From Car Alarm: Thrill Jockey Records [Buy]

The Sea and Cake‘s new album Car Alarm has recently arrived in the inbox, and it’s a cracker ! I’m not too familiar with this Chicago band’s previous work, but this material is really strong – recalling the best bits of mid-90s indie rock (Pavement, Sonic Youth’s pop side) mixed with a little bit of Tortoise-like experimentalism. The strong melodies sometimes echo that other Windy City band, Smashing Pumpkins. (But in a good, lacking-Billy-Corgan’s-whiny-voice sort of way).

It’s semi-intellectual stuff: vocalist/guitarist Sam Prekop has a PhD in music according to Wikipedia. And the band’s drummer is none other than the rather precocious John McEntire of Tortoise, dropping jazzy breakbeats into songs like Fuller Moon like it’s the most natural thing in the world. But the album never sounds like it’s shoe-gazing: all the tracks have strong pop hooks and super tunes. Yum yum yum.

Current favourite track is definitely Weekend – acoustic guitars dissolving into electro-breakbeat bliss. An example of how perfection is best wrought from simplicity and brevity. Here’s the video:

The Sea and Cake on myspace