STEVE HAUSCHILDT
RANGERS
tragedy and geometry (kranky)
Out of all three members in Ohio’s Emeralds, synth wizard Steve Hauschildt is by far the least prolific, having only released a couple CDRs and cassettes since 2007. While Mark McGuire and John Elliot (best known as Outer Space) have pumped out albums at a wallet-draining pace, Hauschildt is obviously striving for quality over quantity, and the latter is definitely what we get here. Kranky has stepped up to help get this modern masterwork of synthesizer-based kosmische out to a broader audience, and this record certainly deserves as wide a release as his higher profile band mates have already received. Tragedy and Geometry reveals the many angles and deployments of Hauschildt’s sizeable synthesizer arsenal. From the pulsing warehouse groove of “Batteries May Drain” to the sublime hovering ambience of “Peroxide”, the man proves he is more than adequate at evoking the many moods his vintage gear has to offer. With Emeralds on hiatus for the foreseeable future, Tragedy and Geometry will more than do until their next move.
If Rangers critically lauded debut (it landed #6 on Wire’s 2010 year-end list, among others), Suburban Tours, was a hazy journey through late night suburbia, then the aptly named Pan Am Stories floats eight miles above the sprawl. The expansive two-LP set is a continuation of the murky, warbled and soft focus guitar-based meditations, though this time around, the hypnogogic musings are much wider in scope. Gently strummed and heavily flanged guitar co-mingle with prolonged fuzzy synth stabs and breezy bass lines, coupled with Joe Knight’s (the singular man behind Rangers) barely there vocal delivery, all of which form together like 40 years worth of ephemeral, canned culture. Pan Am Stories makes you wonder if you’ve heard this somewhere before, causing an unshakeable déjà vu throughout the record— perhaps in an elevator, infomercial, late night TV or waiting in the dentist’s office. It’s these seemingly familiar vibrations that Knight reigns in and regurgitates back at you in a psychedelic swirl that make this record so haunting, yet utterly gorgeous.
—mark richardson
—mark richardson
Sandro Perri
After a novelty internet hit (“Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell”) and two enjoyable mixtapes (Shut up, Dude, and Sit down, Man), hip-hop satirists Das Racist have released a commercial hip-hop album that sounds like a commercial hip-hop album. Relax is divided into conventional threeminute chunks of verses and choruses, scaling back the onslaught of pop culture references and puns to manageable portions. The production, led by Patrick Wimberly of Chairlift, sets a playful mood with plenty of lush synths and bright guitars. Kool A.D. still plays a perfect laidback stoner, but Heems has a stronger vocal attack, going after haters who dismiss the “smart brown boys” and their “dumb sound.” On “Serena” he spits back, “Homie, this is Queens rap.” But their surest song is “Girl,” a tongue-in-cheek rap ballad that rises to sincerity: “You’re pretty, beautiful, and I heard you got a pool.” Though not quite “the new Kool G Rap,” the Racists are the rap game’s cleverest sweethearts. —chris dingwall
FAC. DANCE
whatever/whenever (in the red)
Mark Sultan of The King Khan & BBQ Show and Spaceshits fame, normally pounds out his rock n’ roll by himself as a one-man R&B, garage, psychedelic, punk anomaly, stomping out the beats with his feet, attacking his guitar with his hands, and singing you his heart and soul by himself— until now! On Whatever/Whenever (not to be confused with Shakira’s “Whenever, Wherever”) Mark utilizes a cast of musicians such as Dan Kroha of The Gories, Erin Wood of The Spits, half of The Black Lips, and his old buddy King Khan, to produce some of his most diverse sounding material to date. Songs range from rockabilly, “Satisfied And Lazy,” and doo-wop, “Just Like Before,” to psyched-out noise, “For Those Who Don’t Exist,” all with signature R&B/punk/rock n’ roll sounds. I definitely suggest getting the LP version of this record as it has twice the amount of songs included on it, and if those other songs are as good as the songs on the CD then I think that will entitle you to be happy for twice as long. You feel me cousin?
JOYCE COLLINGWOOD
relax (greedhead)
MARK SULTAN
impossible spaces (constellation)
Toronto’s Sandro Perri has his fingers in a lot of places. In the early 00’s, he mainly recorded dub-smeared electronic post-rock under the name Polmo Polpo (Italian for “octopus lung”), but that multi-tentacled moniker suitably evokes the variety of his endeavors since then. He’s been a session player for the Great Lake Swimmers, produced retro groove music as Glissandro 70, experimented with straight-up dance music in two groups (Continuous Dick and Dot Wiggin), and collaborated with Christine Fellows and John K. Samson for last year’s National Parks Project. Perri remains well under the radar pretty much everywhere outside of Toronto but Impossible Spaces is likely to change all that. It’s an extraordinarily unified hybrid of everything Perri has dabbled in up until now; a fluid, shape-shifting oddity of jazzy percussion, folky pop, and pulsating electronic grooves, all glued together by Perri’s gorgeous, liltingly agile voice. It’s a minor masterpiece that sounds like virtually nothing else. An absolute must-hear for fans of leftfield pop. —saelan twerdy
Das Racist
pan am stories (not not fun)
factory records: 12” mixes & rarities 19801987 (strut) Sometimes you just need to get serious and bust a move and when that feeling hits, this is the perfect solution to the problem. Fac. Dance is a retrospective covering the early dance floor-based work by several bands on Manchester’s seminal Factory Records label, that also highlights Martin Hannett’s unmistakable production style and shows off the pioneering studio work of Bernard Sumner (New Order), and Donald Johnson (A Certain Ration). Everything you wanna shake a tail feather to is on here from Blurt’s mutant-funk experiment “Puppeteer” to post punk jams by Section 25 and A Certain Ratio, to a reggae track provided by X-O-Dus with “See Them A’ Come.” This double disc compilation is a perfect blueprint for later Manchester bands, and an essential album if you love good dance music and have half a brain. Even if you have a whole brain you should love this.
s/t 7” (self released)
I was at the Joyce/Collingwood skytrain station waiting to go downtown and I saw this elderly woman asking people if they were “French Canada” while she was lying down on the cement in a leisurely position wearing a child’s Batman costume. We made eye contact and she told me she was writing an essay on Quadrophenia, and that she didn’t like what John Goodman was doing to our animals. I started laughing and she went insane(r), and started yelling all types of complete nonsense at me right as the train was arriving. I jumped on, sat down, and looked out the window to see that she was lying down again—a very quick interaction in an insane package, just like Joyce Collingwood’s debut 7-inch record. Ripping through eight songs of metal-infected hardcore, and all hand-packaged, photocopied, duct taped, and safety pinned together, this makes for a very good first release, and it makes one wonder: is there is a Robin out there? —justin gradin
Spank Rock
everything is boring and everyone is a fucking liar (bad blood) Not since 2 Live Crew’s “Pop That Pussy” has pussy popping been raised to such an epic level. On “Nasty,” one of the filthiest singles on Spank Rock’s very filthy new album, guest Big Freedia commands the girls on the dance floor to “bend over” and “move it in motion” with the gravitas of Hector rallying the troops outside the gates of Troy. Like their debut YoYoYoYoYo, Everything is Boring… sheathes MC Spank Rock’s dance floor hedonism in the perfectly-calibrated dissonance of an MDMA stress dream. The sonic palette has been expanded with a touch of doo-wop (“The Dance”) and stomping minimalism (“DTF DADT”), putting Spank Rock in charge of the least wholesome and most abstract sock hops in history. As a rapper, Spank Rock works within his range and adopts the role of a seedy playboy, seducing women with his fine style and never missing a chance to talk about his dick. —chris dingwall
—justin gradin
—justin gradin
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