Josh Homme has filled out. Two decades of Herculean-level imbibing, consuming, and partaking will do that to a rock star — even the most untameable, red-haired Lotharios eventually become bulkier, ruddy-faced versions of themselves. But, no, what I’m talking about aren’t the extra lbs that pad the Queens of the Stone Age front man’s 6′ 4″ frame. It’s the inner transformation that Homme has undergone during the last six years (during which QOTSA hasn’t released a single lick of music) that really plays a role in the band’s sixth album. Homme has grown up and grown old — twice becoming a father, surviving a brush with death that involved flat-lining on an operating room table after surgical complications, and descending into a subsequent depression so deep he nearly didn’t recover. Most of the weight Homme has accrued since 2007 has been emotional.

…Like Clockwork is the stoner-rock titan’s method for coming to terms with that burden. It bears the same elephantine yet tuneful tension that has made QOTSA so uniquely devastating, as well as the two other trademarks that seem to follow Homme around: drama and collaboration. During recordings, Homme kicked out one band member (drummer Joey Castillo) for undisclosed reasons and then re-invited another (Nick Oliveri) who he had ousted for undisclosed reasons back in 2004. Dave Grohl returns to man the drum kit, Screaming Trees’ Mark Lanegan once again contributes back-up vocals, and a bevy of notable guest musicians chip in (including Trent Reznor, the Arctic Monkey’s Alex Taylor, and Elton John, among others). It’s enough line-up changes to warrant a Human Resources department.

But Homme’s musicianship makes it work. …Like Clockwork’s pop leanings make it an ideal entry point for those unfamiliar with the Queens’ scuzzy juggernaut of a catalog, an odd thing for a band to be releasing six albums into their career. It remains neutron star dense, weirdly wonderful, and rambunctiously carnal in that vintage Queens of the Stone Age way.  For a band predicated on the concept of hard and fast living, the album is both a puzzle and pleasure — a rare glimpse into something that’s survived well past it’s expiration date.

Homme has been the one constant member in QOTSA’s revolving door line-up for the past fifteen years, so it’s fitting that …Like Clockwork remain indisputably his creation; he writes, produces, and sings lead on all ten tracks. It’s a smart choice — Homme’s pipes are in fine form (he tries on a Bowie-like glam falsetto for the closing title track), and the clean recording style makes …Like Clockwork the band’s most melodic and accessible album to date. Pummeling robot riffs and complex stop and start tempos still dominate tracks like “Keep Your Eyes Peeled” and the desert-scorched, Peyote-fueled hallucination “My God Is The Sun,” but they’re offset by orchestral strings and the piano-laced intros of tracks like “Kalopsia” and “The Vampyre of Time and Memory.”  QOTSA’s heavy, classic rock vibe remains intact, as much an artifact of their ferocious, double guitar barrages as it is of Homme’s wealth of musical references, on full display whether he’s borrowing guitar riffs from Billy Squire (“I Sat By the Ocean”), da-do-run-run’s from the Crystals (“If I Had A Tail”) or shh-bop, shh-bops from the Flamingos (“Kalopsia”).

Homme’s brush with mortality seeps into Like Clockwork’s bones in the form of both fear and defiance. On the title track, he croons “Most everything you see is purely for show/ Not everything that goes around/ Comes back around you know/ One thing is clear, It’s all downhill from here” just before a celebratory Jimmy Page-like axe solo. Homme once said in an interview that he always has something dangling from him, whether it’s a wallet chain or guitar strap: “I just like the idea that I’m falling apart, like something’s hanging off of me.”  Yet Homme encapsulates that metaphor for mortality in one of the album’s most hulking, swaggering tracks, “If I Had A Tail,” like a big-hearted teddy bear wrapped in a suit of chain mail armor. Lest you think he’s gone completely soft, Homme ends group hug “Fairweather Friends” with the kiss-off: “Fairweather friends/ I don’t give a shit about them anyhow” before launching straight into the bone-rattling boogie of “Smooth Sailing,” as raw, raunchy, and cocksure as anything in QOTSA’s playbook. Over a barking funk, he sneers and howls: “I got bruises and hickeys, stitches and scars/ I got my own them music that plays wherever I are.” It becomes apparent you’re listening to it.

A visual artist known simply as Boneface designed both the graphic novel-style videos and cover art for …Like Clockwork; they depict a troupe of violent, Mad Max-like freaks wreaking havoc in a bombed out city and a woman swooning in the arms of some skull-masked vampire, respectively. Queens of the Stone Age has always felt like a little bit of both — enjoying dirty, apocalyptic fun and embracing something seductive but undeniably bad.  Too big and dumb to fit in hipster playlists, too smart to be a guilty pleasure, QOTSA are sandwiched somewhere in the middle, yet nowhere near the middle of the road. Even though Homme is a forty year-old dad who’s rubbed elbows with the grim reaper, he’s still the guy whose idea of fun is to “blow my load over the status quo.” It’s that sort of charm that’s endeared him to the newest wave of hard rock bands like Savages, the all-girl, post-punk revivalists who confess they consider Homme a bona fide hunk and “modern-day Elvis.” So is he Blue Hawaii heart throb or Fat Elvis ’77? Again, somewhere in the middle. He may be creaky, but he’s still shaking hips and erasing minds with the best of them. Their namesake might suggest it, but these guys aren’t dinosaurs yet.

Queens of the Stone Age – “Smooth Sailing” – mp3

Are machines imparted with the human characteristics of their creators, or are we destined to adopt theirs? People are prone to exchanging pleasantries with Siri, calling the Internet bad names when it’s slow, and grieving when our computers’ hard drives crash. But we’re just as apt to reverse-anthropomorphize ourselves — multitasking, wishing we had more “cycles,” and thinking of our brains as “hardwired” for particular behaviors. As avid technologists trying to make a living in the 21st century, musicians Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo experience this conundrum just like anyone else; they work with computer software, have a healthy fear of technology, and try not to let it prevent them from having some semblance of a private life.

But that’s where the similarities between the French duo and the rest of us end, you see, because your day job is not being in Daft Punk. You are not a robot who gets to wear sequined smoking jackets courtesy of St. Laurent, plays to 40,000 people in front of a glowing, four-story pyramid, and is programmed for one purpose — bringing the human soul back into electronic dance music. You don’t need to answer silly questions about how a machine might think when you are one. The only thing you need to concentrate on is making sure that everyone within earshot is feeling da funk.

The clever naming of Daft Punk’s fourth album simultaneously romanticizes the duo’s recollection of their many musical influences and offers a nod to a key technological invention that revolutionized computing back in the 1940′s — like Bangalter and de Homem-Christo’s music, it’s both retro and futuristic at once. In a year marked by high-profile music releases from big-name indie rock and pop artists (Bowie, My Bloody Valentine, Phoenix, and the National), Random Access Memories is the most eagerly anticipated and scrutinized album of 2013; it’s also likely the best, though not for the reasons you might expect.

By going analog and stressing virtuosic musicianship over technological trend-setting, Daft Punk’s turn their reputation as electronic music trailblazers on its head while retaining the pioneering spirit and love for dance music that has always defined their best work. Random Access Memories is an anti-anachronism — a record so indebted to and reverent of the past, that even its existence today feels like an aberration. It is Daft Punk’s crowning achievement and the record their career will come to be defined by, which is astonishing considering how crucial albums like Homework and Discovery were for demolishing the boundaries between pop and rock music.

Most of the stories surrounding the creation of Random Access Memories are documented ad nauseum by now, but a brief recounting is required for context. In order to match their desire to emulate the warm, organic sound of music from the disco era, Daft Punk swore off sampling and electronics, and instead committed to using only live instrumentation on RAM. Recordings began in 2008, but the duo was forced to scrap a chunk of work after realizing that, as musicians, they were unable “to hold a groove the way (they) wanted for more than eight or 16 bars.” They had tremendous songwriting ideas, but were unable to execute on them.

Confronted with their own human limitations yet refusing to turn to technology, Bangalter and De Homem-Christo sought the services of expert session musicians from the 70′s and 80′s to help achieve their artistic vision. They also initiated individual collaborative sessions with several hand-picked musical peers that included (among others) Giorgio Moroder, Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers, Neptunes’ producer/singer Pharrell Williams, and Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox (a.k.a. Panda Bear).  Through persistence and painstaking labor, Random Access Memories slowly began to take shape.

As Nile Rogers is fond of remarking, Daft Punk “went back to go forward” on RAM, but it wasn’t just in their style of playing and recording. Daft Punk specifically chose to release Random Access Memories on storied industry heavyweight Columbia Records who promoted the album through roadside billboards, SNL commercials spots featuring 15 second teasers of some unnamed, heavily-vocoded chorus that the gremlins of the internet affectionately christened “Mexican Monkey”, and a buzz-generating video premiere of the now identifiable track (“Get Lucky”) weeks later at Coachella.

Each week, Columbia released a new internet video episode of “The Collaborators,” an eight part series of interviews with the artists who had worked with Daft Punk on Random Access Memories. The videos served two purposes (both brilliantly): mythologizing Random Access Memories before anyone had even heard the album and providing rich anecdotal fodder for fans to further promote the album’s excellence. It was a simple, yet shrewd marketing concept — other musicians (A-listers, in fact) were being interviewed for Daft Punk, allowing the silent duo to grow in stature with their mysterious aura intact. Without even knowing it, we had all become their hype men.

Although it’s analog recording process, live instrumentation, and stylistic eclecticism initially conspired to disappoint some internet insta-critics (especially ones who absorbed RAM via iTunes streams over shitty laptop speakers), it’s those very same qualities that grant RAM deep textures and  tremendous staying power. It sounds fantastic both played at full volume (ask Bangalter and De Homem-Christo, who blew out a set of studio speakers during the playback of thunderous album closer “Contact”) and through headphones, where you immediately notice the enormous care that the duo has invested in these songs.  In a genre defined by cut, copy, and paste aesthetics, Random Access Memories is Daft Punk’s hand written love letter to dance music, gorgeously penned in a sprawling sonic cursive. It nimbly hop-scotches through forty years of history, connecting the squares of electro pop, funk, disco, Philly soul, house, and techno into one dazzling, modern compendium.

“Giorgio by Moroder” pays loving tribute to the icy, italo-disco sounds of the the groundbreaking dance pioneer; “Beyond” features a laid back, one-arm-out-the-window guitar chirp that harkens back to Warren G. ‘s “Regulate” and by extension Michael McDonald’s “I Keep Forgettin’” — both emblematic of the chilled-out, barbituate-ridden West Coast lifestyle Daft Punk seeks to embody with RAM. “Lose Yourself to Dance” is a pure club banger — over a slinky, four on the floor thump and a relentlessly vocoded “Come on/ Come on/ Come on/ Come on,” Pharrell Williams offers his services to a girl on the dance floor: “Here, take my shirt and just go ahead and wipe up all the sweat” — which would presumably leave her still glistening and him shirtless — a good approximation of the how Daft Punk want this record to make you feel. Every note feels immaculately spaced yet luxurious in an almost filthy way, the kind of sound you can only get by slaving over an album for five years.

Daft Punk enlisted classical pianist Chilly Gonzales to construct a crucial melodic key change inside fourth track “Within” as the bridge between the album’s two sections (every song before the juncture is played in A minor and every song afterwards is in B flat). As a result, the album’s first quarter has more a intellectual, pensive slant, while the hungrier, more ecstatic tracks come later —  like a dream date with a Stanford University grad whose hiding a set of sexy, washboard abs.  Similiarly, the crowd-pleasing climax of “Touch” is sandwiched inside a cerebral, unorthodox soliloquy from famed song-writer Paul Williams, which is in turn bookended by “Lose Yourself to Dance” and “Get Lucky,” the album’s two most libidinous tracks. Bangalter and De Homem-Christo know how to make music for the masses without compromising their eclectic tendencies or creative independence.

At nearly 75 minutes, RAM can come across as overwrought, but given that Daft Punk pay homage to four decades of dance music, excess comes with the territory. Those who complain that RAM’s referential tendencies fail to live up to the revolutionary vision offered by Discovery in 2000 are likely missing the point. Whatever the tools or technology, dance music is about those moments that grant us transcendence — the ones where we can literally lose ourselves — and Random Access Memories teems with them.

There’s the moment on “Motherboard” where the snares, maracas, and glacial synths hit upon an “Electrobank”-like grind and shuffle, or the early jaw-dropping climax of album centerpiece “Touch” where live drums, funk guitars, brass, woodwinds, and a vocal choir deliver a full sixty seconds of prolonged melodic ecstasy, or the 3:05 mark of “Fragments in Time” where house music producer Todd Edwards’ ode to working with the French duo accelerates from Steely Dan/80′s yacht-rock cruise control into electro-pop engine-revving reminiscent of “Digital Love” — the first time I heard the tambourines and that “whoa-whoa-whoa” vocoder hook take off over the “Greatest American Hero”-style synths, it was so unexpectedly blissful that I actually laughed aloud.

Stories suggest that the joy found in listening to this music was equally infectious for those who creating it. Edwards literally moved from New Jersey to California to hold onto the ephemeral West Coast vibes that he and Daft Punk bottled on “Fragments in Time.” Nile Rodgers, a guy whose legendary work with Chic, Bowie and Madonna has never made him shy about applauding his own abilities (he refers to himself in 3rd person several times during his interview), remarked that working with Daft Punk inspired him “to go to another level.”  The unexpected, 80′s inclinations of the Strokes’ Comedown Machine makes a lot of sense now when you consider Julian Casablancas had been working with Daft Punk on the New-Wavey “Instant Crush.”

On songs like “Give Life Back to Music” and “Lose Yourself to Dance,” Daft Punk refer to their work almost like it’s an organic, living entity — a philosophy seconded by Pharrell when he was asked to describe “Get Lucky.”  Wistfully, he said it reminded him of an island with peach-colored sunsets “…where it was forever four in the morning (and) the music was as alive as the air was.” That two guys masquerading as robots are making music this vibrant is part of what makes Random Access Memories so marvelous.

At one point during his Collaborators interview, Pharrell Williams gives props to Daft Punk with such deadpan humor that you’d swear he was utterly serious: “They’re not bound by time and space.” he says solemnly. “It’s like their music is in the mid 70′s and early 80′s of a different universe and dimension. Not of this one.” When asked where they should go from here, Pharrell simply responds with one word: “Up.” More likely, it will be in yet another direction we won’t predict — Random Access Memories follows the path of dance music’s evolution as it extends both outward and back upon itself in wide looping spirals, from Giorgio Moroder to Donna Summer to Chic to David Bowie to the Cars to the Strokes to Phoenix to Daft Punk and all the way back again to Moroder.

It’s as if Bangalter and De Homem-Christo are extending their octopus arms out toward all the genres from which they’ve sprung (disco, funk, house, etc.) and have in some part stemmed from them (indie electro, chillwave, microhouse, etc.) and are gathering them back into one rich, kaleidoscopic center — themselves. It’s a monumental act of confidence that requires more devotion and ingenuity than ordinary men/robots can muster. Pharrell again says it best: “We’re lucky they hang out on the planet. They could just get back on the spaceship that brought them here and go and leave us. But they’re gracious. They’re nice robots. They chose to stay.” Fans who were expecting music not of this earth will find something different but no less remarkable — music not of this time or place. And that, in its own way, is perfect.

All art has archetypes — those idealized forms to which all others must be compared. In the realm of post-punk bands, the definitive templates — Joy Division, Wire, PiL, and Gang of Four (among others) — each embody their genre’s jagged clash of punk’s DIY ethos with virtuosic musicianship, shrewd experimentation, and scathing cultural discontent. From a structural stand point, each one transmogrifies the basic, holy quartet of voice, guitar, bass, and drums into something unmistakably greater, the sort of songs that move even the most hardened cynic to remember: “ahhhh, this is what music is capable of.” It’s a sound that seeks to change the world, one sulking listener at a time.

On the rare occasions when a revivalist band taps directly into the mainline of that quintessential post-punkness, they become unstoppable (though Super Mario Mode doesn’t last for very long — just ask Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, or Yeah Yeah Yeahs about trying to top their debuts). With their ferocious first album, Silence Yourself, Savages finds that mythic vein and goes in deep. The London foursome never claim to be originators; one of their several mission statements goes so far as to say that the band is “not trying to give you something you didn’t have already, it is calling within yourself something you buried ages ago.”

They succeed not by reinventing the wheel, but by embodying its devastating geometric precision. Being an all-female band makes Savages’ triumph of aggression particularly intriguing, but by no means defines it. Instead, their superb songs do. Savages bear the introverted menace, physical magnetism, and arty vehemence of a band cast in the perfect post-punk mold, proving once again that when executed with the appropriate vigor, every revolution feels like the first.

In February 2012, the band’s stark, electrifying concert performance of “City’s Full” hit YouTube, accompanied by a link to pre-order double A-side single “Flying To Berlin”/”Husbands.” Since then, the buzz has grown exponentially for Savages, a project originally conceived as an outlet for French-born singer Jehnny Beth’s “more violent” songwriting urges and named after the societal regression described in Lord of the Flies and other apocalyptic fiction read by guitarist Gemma Thompson while growing up. “Husbands” spirals through a frantic, claustrophobic guitar riff before devolving into excoriating barbs of noise at the end of each bar, an ideal backdrop for Beth’s visceral distaste at waking up beside a man she doesn’t know. Everything about the song seeks to expel you, including the chorus: “God I want to get rid of it/ Get rid of it/ My house, my bed, my husbands.” And there it is. That last word, shrieked over and over again until you realize the true nature of Beth’s estrangement; this is someone she knows. In the face of the most sacred bond between man and woman, everything suggests — no screams for — a decoupling.

Silence Yourself plays on the same themes of entrapment, empowerment, and erotic energy. On “I Am Here,” Beth growls “I am shouldering you/ This is easy…/ Are you coming for the ride?” over a riff straight out of a certain Queens of the Stone Age’s song, sans stuttering cocaine reference. (It’s a pleasant surprise that Josh Homme, whom the band call “a modern day Elvis”, is one of their crushes) Over the heavy Sabbath riffs on “Strife,” Beth sneers: “They wonder how come/ I’ve been doing things with you/ I would never tell my mum.” “Hit Me,” which features the shocking line “I took a beating tonight, And that was the best I ever had” reads like a brutally sarcastic repudiation of domestic violence until Beth reveals it’s an actual quote from Belladonna, the porn star who infamously broke down crying while being interviewed by Diane Sawyer during a 2003 “Primetime” episode, then later claimed the show’s poor editing incorrectly portrayed her as a victim of the sex industry. “Hit Me” is Beth’s tribute to her carnal abandon. Is Savages in love with empowerment masquerading as debasement? Or the other way around? Like most things, it’s complicated.

Every gripping aspect about Savages — the spartan urgency of their songs, their arresting stage presence, and their prowess in conquering male-driven genres like post-hardcore, stoner rock, and metal  — feels engineered to induce voracious Googling: Who are they? What are their politics? Sexual orientation? and of course, Which legendary post-punk band do they most remind you of? (If bassist Ayse Hassan’s work on “Strife” doesn’t make you think of Peter Hook’s on “Candidate,” nothing will.) Yet the very act of exploring and deifying Savages places you in violation of their manifesto — to ignore distraction, shut off your phone, and to look within yourself for answers you already know. Silence Yourself is a Statement album from a group who are delightfully cagey about where they stand. “Shut Up”, whose frantic, hair-raising guitar riff pays homage to Refused’s “New Noise,” feels like a call to arms even as Beth says “If you tell me to shut it/ I’ll shut it now.” In spite of that pledge, Silence Yourself is Savages’ refusal to do so and a scathing rebuttal against all subjugation. Far more than the shape of punk to come, it’s the shape of punk today.

During Savages’ February homecoming concert at the Electric Ballroom in London, a few crowd members get particularly pissed off at an antagonistic security guard who’s positioned right in front of the stage and acting like an asshole. Later on, an incensed Beth dedicates the show’s encore to all “the fuckers in your life” and genuinely entreats Savages’ fans in her charming, broken English: “You’re supposed to go home now and feel better about yourself!” Hassan’s clangorous bass and drummer Fay Milton’s snare thwacks out an angry, militant stomp. The short-haired, beautiful front woman marches defiantly in place, punching the air, and staring unflinchingly into the hundreds of eyes in front of her. With a simple, blunt mantra “Don’t let the fuckers get you down,” she gives voice to the crowd’s quiet rage toward the security guard, everyone like him, and everything in their lives that seeks to oppress them. Video footage later reveals she’s wearing a pair of black stilettos throughout the entire song, yet her balance remains perfect. She never once falters.

Savages – “Husbands” – mp3

The first clue should have been the fruit. Thomas Mars and Laurent Brancowitz, one half of indie rock band Phoenix, chose Bankrupt!’s vibrant, oddly generic cover image after significant deliberation, admitting they thought it fit perfectly with the album’s decadent title. For a pop group, the French foursome are extraordinarily particular, striving for symbolism in minute creative details and rarely arriving at artistic decisions by anything other than total consensus. Recording an album of ten songs (averaging just under four minutes a piece) usually takes the Versailles natives about three or four years — an eternity when you consider how fast buzz builds and fades in the internet age. Apparently, it takes a lot of work to sound this effortless.

In 2009, singles “1901″ and “Litsztomania” were so sublime, they almost made people overlook the rest of the Francophiles’ excellent breakthrough album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. Its fiendishly catchy predecessor, It’s Never Been Like That, is quite frankly one of the most underrated albums of the last decade. Phoenix’s best work feels both edgy and immaculate, the perfect concoction of wiry garage rock and delicious indie electronica that attracts and satiates in a way only the smartest pop music can.

It’s probably this reputation for quality control that makes the start-to-finish mediocrity of their fifth album so startling. In many ways, Bankrupt! feels like a quintessential Phoenix record, with bubbly choruses, fashionable musicianship, and Thomas Mars’ adorably quirky translation of broken English into elongated yelps. However, some crucial elements are missing, namely attention-grabbing song structures, adequate sonic spacing, and most importantly, memorable hooks.

As a strangely delighted Brancowitz admitted, the fake marmalade product art on the cover of Bankrupt! appealed to the band’s sensibilities because it felt “under the level of art. A beauty with no artistic purpose. Fascinating!” Audiences might feel otherwise. Both Bankrupt!’s cover and its music possess a deflating blandness, perhaps a sign that the dysphoric pressures of becoming a one of the world’s biggest indie bands are wearing on the quartet. Regrettably, Phoenix almost sounds like their impersonating themselves here, minus the benefit of great songs and their usual impeccable taste.

Phoenix has a knack for releasing its best songs as singles (going all the way back to United’s “Too Young” and “If I Ever Feel Better”) so when lead track “Entertainment” falls flat out of the gate, you get the sense there might be trouble. The song is a microcosm for everything that’s amiss with Bankrupt! —  it’s neither poorly performed nor offensively bad, but nothing really feels extraordinary about it either. The joyous dance floor bounce that Phoenix is known for feels almost forced and claustrophobic here, like the synth riff’s hopped up on too much caffeine. At least the fidgety melody is one you can actually remember — the rest of the Bankrupt! blends into one white-washed mass of keyboards and bright chords that makes it hard to tell one track from another. “Entertainment” would be a decent deep cut on other Phoenix albums, but its placement here as lead single is immediate cause for concern.

Phoenix are masters of the traditional verse-chorus format, but it’s the connective tissue they build between them that makes their songs so exceptional. Their catalog is filled with ingenious tempo changes and structural variations to accentuate choruses and hooks; the way “1901′s” opening synth barrages are augmented by the downbeat of the late-arriving drums, how the guitars on “Napoleon Says” accentuate its four-on-floor beat then switch to a swaying melodic counterpoint, the ease with which “Consolation Prizes” accelerates from staccato strums and hand claps into a full blown Strokesian jangle, with a five second percussion-less bridge thrown in for show.

On Bankrupt!, there’s almost no mid-song rhythmic deviations; the insipid “Trying to Be Cool” feels stuck in low gear, mid-tempo numbers “Drakkar Noir” and “Chloroform” never break from their robotic cadence, and “Don’t” hurtles along over a menacing, industrial synth riff but never pauses to catch its breath and create significant tension. Even the title track, an extended, prog-synth instrumental followed by a few lyrics sung over an acoustic coda, adheres to a template Phoenix already established (unconvincingly at best) with both parts of “Love Like a Sunset” from Wolfgang.

Most damning is the way Bankrupt!’s overblown mixing and mastering makes it sound like a casualty of the loudness wars.  Part of Phoenix’s brilliance has always been in allowing their instruments to stand on their own (check out the fantastic negative space on “Lisztomania” and “Lasso”) and crafting melodies around the gaps. The twin guitar attack on It’s Never Been Like That worked so incredibly well not because it built a wall of sound, but because you could actually feel the separation between Laurent Brancowitz’s and Christian Mazzalai’s axes, and the tension that void created.

But with Bankrupt!, every sonic nook and cranny is jammed with digitized clutter, casting a gauzy processed sheen of irritating treble over the entire album. ”Bourgeois” and “Oblique City” suffer especially, their climaxes clipped and melodies buried under a tidal wave of over-equalized synths and compressed audio*. It’s unfortunate that even when a song like “Trying to Be Cool” offers sufficient aural spacing, it’s hook barely leaves an imprint on your brain. This paradox seems to define Bankrupt!; the songs you want to remember are crowded beyond caring, while the spacious ones are best left forgotten.

Bankrupt!’s vapidity and sonic sameness makes you realize how truly difficult it must have been for Phoenix to have made things sound so easy until now.  To date, they’ve seemed more comfortable in their role as the little band that could, their catchy, immediate pop songs cultivated for headphones, hipster bars, and house parties. Bankrupt’s tracks sound engineered to fill huge arenas and big outdoor spaces, and that they will, given Phoenix’s headliner status on the summer festival circuit stretching from Coachella to Lollapalooza. But as pleasant as Bankrupt might sound in those settings, there’s something disappointing about these recorded versions.

According to Brancowitz, several songs feature sampled harpsichords instead of the real thing because the band believed “the sound of harpsichords being processed and losing some kind of authenticity was better than the real sound of it. So we sampled every note. It sounded right in the end.” There’s a nondescript, vacant quality to this kind of ear candy (and thinking) that leaves you wanting — like the feeling you get when you start substituting clip art for pop art, preferring fake harpsichords over real ones, or tricking your taste buds into watering over a juicy piece of shiny, plastic fruit.

Phoenix – “Entertainment” – mp3

*Addendum: (5/21/13) A friend of mine, Nick, who works in audio software researched the compression on the Bankrupt! and shared the following:

I finally listened to Entertainment by Phoenix, and I completely agree about the loudness issue.  Here are some waveforms from three songs:

Come Together (The Beatles):  Very little compression, much more headroom, and higher variations between the quiet and loud parts of the song.

Long Distance Call (Phoenix):  Highly compressed as most of today’s modern music is, but still some breathing room.

Entertainment (Phoenix):  Ridiculous

James Blake is not unique in his predilection for bending, chopping, and fracturing melodies until all that remains is a sonic mosaic of meticulously arranged, stained-glass shards. He is also not the first vocalist possessed of such soulful affect that his album cover image of a skinny white kid in a trench coat induces double takes. What makes Blake truly remarkable is the tension of those devices presented in tandem.

On 2010′s EP’s The Bells Sketch, CMYK, and Klavierwerke, the London-based producer employed alien, forward-looking sounds to achieve an uncanny familiarity, warping his own voice and the sampled vocals of R&B divas around asymmetrical sculptures of wonky sub-bass, twinkling jazz percussion, and glitchy synth squelches. On his self-titled debut full-length, Blake straightened out those kinks into sinewy slow jams, letting his full-throated croon take center stage while maintaining hints of the eclectic knob-twiddling that made him so beguiling to EDM and dubstep crowds in the first place.

This simplification continues on Overgrown where Blake ventures even further from his experimental electronic roots into more traditional song structures that adhere to R&B and gospel tenets. The acutely pitch-shifted vocals, fragmented melodic loops, and disintegrating dance floor rhythms that were prominent in Blake’s early career have moved from focal points to mere embellishments. It takes some getting used to; the transformation is akin to a cubist painter dropping the angles and edges for a deep dive into aesthetic realism.

Fortunately, the subject matter remains unchanged — Overgrown explores the delicate, inner workings of Blake’s emotional core, a compass that’s calibrated along the wobbly axes of longing, loneliness, and estrangement. Understated, elegant, and aglow like a candescent stove burner turned up to its lowest setting, Overgrown takes time to heat up (several listens at least) but once the temperature gets there, it’s an inviting place to invest your hours.

There’s a dead of the night stillness and somnambulant intimacy to Overgrown that befits intent, nocturnal listening. The title track relies on little more than a pattering of cymbal taps, a soft organ, and Blake’s miraculous voice for color, its clean arrangement and spacing acting as an enormous canvas for the song’s subdued blue hues and muted sepia tones. It’s dark and quietly sultry without ever feeling unctuous.

First single “Retrograde” has gorgeously subtle chord changes that are underscored by Blake’s little inflections and vocal runs. His softly hummed intro is looped into a backing melody that steadily builds until a whining synth siren launches it into the stratosphere — it’s as close as Overgrown gets to the eye-popping climaxes of precursors “The Wilhelm Scream” or “Postpone.” Blake is less enamored with being an aural auteur and boundary pusher, instead focusing on bare melody and whisper-thin texture to evoke a broad range of emotions.

Blake’s lyrics are often as sparse and impressionistic as his sound — there’s frustratingly little to grasp onto in Overgrown. You rely less on the actual imagery evoked by Blake’s words and more on their repetition, context, and nuanced phrasing to tease out the feelings behind them. On “I Am Sold” the recurring line “We lay nocturnal/ Speculate how we feel” lingers uneasily over a creeping bass line, but on the glowing album closer, nearly the same thoughts (“Our love comes back/ In the middle of the night”) exude acceptance and hushed contentment.

“Take A Fall For Me’s” murky piano dirge feels weighed down by guest star RZA’s stilted, lackadaisical rhymes (“Candle light dinners of fish and chips with vinegar/ With a glass of cold stout or old wine or something similar”)  which feel more like a clichéd caricature of British life than heartfelt storytelling. It shows how delicate the balance is in Blake’s artistry — insert a guest rapper and the wispy atmosphere becomes little more than an old Wu-Tang motif, stoned out and stripped of its teeth.

More often than not though, Blake gets the subtleties right. On the title track, Blake likens himself to “a stone on the shore” and a “long door frame in a wall,” carefully marking his place in a dissolving love affair with images of insignificance and vacuity. Blake urges a lover to stay away from a bad relationship on the finely woven “DLM”, but there’s a shocking twist — “Don’t let me hurt you” he begs in a broken voice. He’s imploring her to seek protection from himself, as if his own desires are something he’s incapable of halting. It’s a provocative twist on the “don’t go to him” pleas that usually dominate R&B songs.

Blake isn’t above libidinous urges either. “Voyeur” features the maniacal, endlessly repeated line “And her mind was on me” — a moaned mantra whose prurient impulse is only augmented by cowbell, slinky bass tones, and the song’s suggestive title. The fact that Blake chose to include “Voyeur” on Overgrown instead of the more trance-inducing, climactic “dub” version (whose drop is ridiculous, by the way) is evidence that he’s more interested in mood crafting than reaching a sustained high.

Even “Voyeur” and Brian Eno-produced “Digital Lion” (which are about as close as Blake gets to a dance floor) are fairly straightforward, never truly duplicating the extra-terrestrial, frenzied lurch that Blake showed mastery over on old favorites “The Bells Sketch” and “CMYK.”  The jittery nerve generated by those weird, wonderful sounds is gone — replaced by Blake’s plaintive vocals which, while wonderfully emotive, feel oddly incomplete without digital altering.

Normally when singers auto-tune and pitch-correct their vocals, they’re criticized for being inauthentic. But in Blake’s case, the overt note warping, audio filters, and deconstructive manipulation are actually missed — they add an essential warble and character to his softly-textured performances. Blake’s songwriting idol Joni Mitchell might have been able to yodel me-decade anthems over nothing more than an acoustic guitar, but Blake’s cocktail of post-millennial rapture and anxiety is best served with a heavy dose of the thing that causes those feelings — technology.

Jame Blake has always teased us with the idea of being something more. Something more than dubstep, than R&B, than EDM —  a pioneer in the direction of music itself. On Overgrown, while Blake achieves polished-to-glass smoothness, it feels like he’s resting a bit, consciously toning down the risk taking and experimentation to make his mark as songwriter in the truest sense of the word. It’s a worthy, admirable endeavor that may help catapult him within pop music circles, but hopefully it’s merely a slight sidestep, a repose in Blake’s march toward something massive. Instincts say that if Blake can employ his unparalleled breadth of skills into a masterwork that is inventive as the three EPs, as impassioned and epic as “The Wilhelm Scream,” and as self-assured as the dark, dramatic maturity Overgrown displays, we’ll be in for something truly remarkable.

James Blake – “Overgrown” – mp3

During the Great Northern War pandemic of the early 18th century, the ghoulish, bird-like masks of Eastern European plague doctors became synonymous with death. Although appropriately macabre, their long, horned beaks actually served a functional purpose — containing aromatic materials to filter away the bad smells thought to carry disease — but given society’s lack of understanding of germ theory, they inevitably failed; the masks’ wearers were not only unsuccessful at preventing death, they often portended it. In Stockholm alone, over one-third of the population was killed by the Plague, casting a grim pall of morbidity over daily life. It’s fitting that Swedish electronic duo the Knife began to don similarly creepy head wear in 2006; their third album Silent Shout was a mixture of fascination and dread also achieved through utilitarian means — spartan, mechanical beats, sharp synth whines, and demonically pitched vocals. Pitchfork’s Mark Pytlik devised the perfect label — “haunted house” — for what would become one of the decade’s most original sounds.

In the seven years hence, brother and sister Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson have remained largely silent, letting Silent Shout’s dark, minimalistic aesthete grow in stature within dance and indie music circles. When not exploring Andersson’s side project Fever Ray or creating soundtracks for inscrutable Charles Darwin operas, the siblings spent their time delving into post-colonial feminist studies and queer theory — examining the idea that our identities are malleable and cannot be defined by traditional gender, sexual, race, or socio-econcomic categories. It’s given them ample lyrical and sonic inspiration for their long-awaited double album Shaking the Habitual. By splicing together digital and analog instrumentation until they become indistinguishable from one another (or “queering the sound,” as Karin puts it), the Knife have engorged their sleek, mechanistic compositions with the blood of rich, organic instrumentation, blurring the boundaries between the human and the synthetic until all that remains is their all-encompassing, staggeringly singular sound.

It’s no coincidence that Shaking the Habitual’s most inviting songs —  lead singles “A Tooth For An Eye” and “Full of Fire” — contain its most politically charged moments. The former’s poly-rhythmic, pan-flute laced synth pop is entrancing enough to make you forget the Knife are dismantling the fiscal policies of Sweden’s wealthy conservatives beneath the trills. At the end of “Full of Fire’s” industrial four-on-the-floor stomp, Karin moans “Let’s talk about gender, baby/ Let’s talk about you and me” in a voice so deformed by her brother’s monstrous FX filters that you almost overlook the twisted pop culture reference she’s making to Salt N’ Pepa’s manifesto on feminist power through sex. The Knife want their messages heard; both of these tracks are accompanied by arresting, gender-bending music videos that tear at the very fabric of our assumptions surrounding masculinity, economic advantages, and sexual orientation — institutions the siblings challenge throughout Shaking the the Habitual.  Album closer “Ready to Lose” makes reference to a dysfunctional culture of deteriorating bloodlines and birthrights that is “ready to lose (its) privilege”, while on “Wrap Your Arms Around Me,” Karin admits “I’ve got the urge for penetration” — though you’re never sure if it’s hers or yours.

The Knife brighten the dark, melodic corners of “Without You My Life Would Be Boring” with flutes, sprightly percussion, and an Oriental musical scale, while highlight “Raging Lung” pairs the duo’s languid, loping rhythms with the unexpected colors of tropical, steel pan drums and squeaky horn-like synths. As the track winds down, the air shakes with the reverberations of some deep, baritone woodwind instrument that doesn’t so much make sound as impose its owner’s living breaths straight into your ears and chest cavity. It’s very much like what the Knife do throughout Shaking the Habitual — using both organic and artificial devices to inject a very human essence directly into the marrow of their music.  Shaking the Habitual is a dense, ungent knot of a record — the very sound of Silent Shout’s haunted machines still chugging but overrun by layers of moss and creeping vines.

Shaking the Habitual ‘s 96-minute run time openly tests your patience, especially considering its more avant-garde pieces lack vocals, verse-chorus structure, and traditional melodic elements. A deadpan Andersson acknowledged as much in a recent interview: “It’s nice to play with people’s time these days,” but the Knife take it one step further — they stretch your tolerance for what is even considered music. “Crake” is 53 seconds of nearly intolerable dissonance, immediately followed by “Old Dreams Waiting to Be Realized” —19 minutes of ambient drone parsed from noises the duo recorded in the depths of a boiler room. Both are eerie, strangely bewitching, and terrifying to listen to alone in the dark, proving that fear is a natural side effect of Shaking the Habitual’s exercise in exhaustion. “Networking” is the sound of the brain’s panic synapses firing on all cylinders and an even more harrowing descent into the pupil-widening anxiety the Knife first explored in “Forest Families.” “Raging Lung” ends with Karin’s ominous whisper: “There’s something in the system, that still circulates/ Dig a hole in the backyard/ And drain the blood.” If Silent Shout was a late night scare flick, Shaking the Habitual is the horror movie that happens in broad daylight.

The simple act of forming an opinion on Shaking the Habitual requires a head-on collision with the “bubble” conundrum first articulated by music critic Nitsuh Abebe and referenced by Lucas Fagen in his deconstruction of the Village Voice’s annual Pazz and Jop poll. Music of this extreme nature lies so far on the fringes of public (and even critical) taste that judgments about its quality only matter to a small subset of people. No matter how objectively “good” Shaking the Habitual may be, a vast percentage of the population isn’t going to care about spooky, tribal electro-pop because it’s such a niche sound to begin with. And those people will be missing out on a fantastic album.

On the title track to Silent Shout, the Dreijer siblings seemed fearful of mortality: “I never knew this could happen to me/ I know now, fragility/ I know there’s people who I haven’t told/ I know of people who are getting old.” On Shaking the Habitual, they bask in the encroaching decay, both physical and moral: “Can you take me for one last ride?/ I want to bend my soul again/ That’s what we do when we get older” Karin admits on “Raging Lung.” When faced with this sort of aberrant self-psychology, most people quickly turn the other way. The Knife insist you look it directly in the face and notice what stares back. If you can resist the strong urge to quarantine yourself from these sounds and ignore the weird masked musicians who ask unpleasant questions about gender, race, poverty, and dissolving social norms, you may be surprised by what it raises within you.

The Knife – “Full of Fire” – mp3

For all the don’t-give-a-fuck dishevelment and dingy basement brilliance of their early records, the Strokes have always possessed a certain air of suppressed refinement. All five members attended elite prep schools, sported the kind of unruly, roll-out-of-bed coiffures that only come straight from the hair salon, and performed the neat trick of both sounding and looking like their leather-clad, proto-punk idols The Velvet Underground. You could argue that the carefully constructed artifice of the Strokes as greasy rock n’ roll saviors scraped off a CBGB sidewalk was just as central to their success as the superb songs on debut classic Is This It? (2001) and carbon copy Room on Fire (2003). Unfortunately, when the songwriting dried up on First Impressions of Earth (2006) and wasn’t replenished by 1980′s synth sounds on shaky comeback Angles (2011), it was easy to conclude that whatever style the Strokes chose, they had lost their substance.

Damned if Comedown Machine doesn’t prove the Strokes really are pretty boys. On their fifth album, the group abandons grittiness altogether and goes all-in on producer Gus Oberg’s cleaner, radio-slick recording style. It’s a risky move, but what’s truly surprising is how good the songs are once again. The Strokes exhibit an unexpectedly deft touch at crafting catchy, 80′s style pop gems, proving that the electronic experimentation on Angles was less a half-hearted detour than a calculated first step toward Comedown Machine’s extreme makeover. Keyboard riffs and New Wave hooks are still draped all over this record, but this time they’re backed up by the band’s best material in ten years.

It takes about thirty seconds of effervescent guitar chirps and a bouncing bass line to reveal the Strokes are plundering the bands of their youth — the melody on lead track “Tap Out” sounds like Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer,” Madonna’s “Into The Groove,” and New Order’s “True Faith” all rolled into one. “Welcome to Japan” sways like Duran Duran circa Rio and “One Way Trigger” shamelessly swipes the manic synth hook from A-Ha’s “Take On Me”. Honestly, if you had to pick these songs out of a line-up blindfolded, you’d have no idea they were even from the Strokes — that’s how complete the transformation from scuzzy garage guitars to glittery keyboards, from Julian Casablancas’ warbly growl to crooning falsetto, has become.

Purists will appreciate that lead single “All The Time” and “50 50″ recall the wiry, twin guitar phalanxes on Is This It?, even if the 2013 versions sound more polished and less fucked with, like the band power-washed the grime off their instruments. Casablancas wryly notes: “All the time that I need is never quite enough/ All the time that I have is all that’s necessary” — a nod to the irony of taking five years to make half-baked Angles but only two for the superior Comedown Machine. The two albums share the same immaculate sound dynamics, but Comedown Machine balances it with a warmth and immediacy its predecessor lacked. Casablancas wasn’t even in the studio for Angles’ recording (he sent his vocal parts via digital files and communicated by email), but this time around, he joins band mates behind the famed Electric Lady studio console. The Strokes intentionally left in the sounds of horseplay at the end of “Slow Animals” to prove a point; proximity breeds better chemistry.

The big payoff comes during a late four-song stretch that starts with “Slow Animals,” whose chiming, finger-picked guitars and subtle percussive underpinnings set a new Strokes’ standard for melodic sophistication, and ends with the blissful serotonin burst of “Happy Endings.” In between, “Partners In Crime” sways to jangly, tamborine-shaking rhythms, and “Chances” glistens with soft guitar arpeggios, Ric Ocasek-style production flourishes, and a stunningly nuanced vocal performance from Casablancas. Listen to his little inflections during the chorus, and you’ll scarcely believe this is the same guy who mumbled his way through “Modern Age” and “Soma.” “Chances” isn’t the best song in the Strokes’ catalog, but it’s certainly the loveliest, and all told, the second half of Comedown Machine offers the catchiest streak of choruses the Strokes have had in ages.

In 2006, an obscure French pop band borrowed heavily from muscular rock riffs in the Strokes’ playbook and released arguably their greatest album, It’s Never Been Like That. Seven years later, Phoenix is now one of the world’s biggest indie rock bands, and the Strokes are returning the favor by incorporating the Francophiles’ brand of understated, melodic pop sensibilities into their own palette. The Strokes attempted this once before on Angles with “Life Is Simple In The Moonlight,” but that tune barely rose above thin artistic mimicry given its lack of memorable hooks. Guitarist Nick Valensi knew as much, saying: “I feel like we have a better album in us, and it’s going to come out soon.” He was right. Irrespective of genre or production values, even the best bands like the Strokes and Phoenix live and die by one thing — the quality of their songcraft. On Comedown Machine, New York City’s coarsest sons of privilege rediscover their most valuable commodity, and in the process, make one of year’s most pleasurable records.

The Strokes – “Chances” – mp3

Happy birthday. 58! Isn’t it time you got a proper job? — Ricky Gervais, 42, comedian

I have a proper job — David Bowie, rock god

Word-for-word, that’s actual 2005 correspondence between Mr. Gervais and Mr. Bowie, two British performers whose shared enthusiasm for one another’s talents (relentless musical innovation and scathingly black humor) made them fast friends and pen pals. Eight birthdays later, Bowie’s half tongue-in-cheek response still sheds light on the paradox at the core of The Next Day, the alt-rock forefather’s unexpected twenty-fourth album and first since he suffered a heart attack in 2004. It’s a compelling and bold effort, if not a game-changing one, that both utilizes and pays respect to the myriad of musical genres and pop tropes that David Robert Jones has traversed across six decades.  It also reminds us what remains unchanged — his superb songwriting. Finely crafted, poised, and impassioned without being sentimental, The Next Day keenly acknowledges Bowie’s awareness of his unimpeachable place in rock music history and his increasingly apparent mortality.

The spectre of Bowie’s near demise hangs over The Next Day, a realization toward which he is both contemplative and contemptuous. A lovely piano melody and Bowie’s shaky croon embues lead single “Where Are We Now?” with a stark haggardness and sense of finality unlike anything else in the Thin White Duke’s canon. Never has the singer allowed himself to sound so old and fragile, but there’s unexpected beauty found in that truth. Nevertheless, Bowie snarls in defiance on the title track: “Here I am, not quite dying/ My body left to rot in a hollow tree.” Undaunted, he continues to fight for life on “the next day, and the next, and another day,” just like he’s always done. It’s a fitting maxim for one of rock music’s most legendary survivalists —a hedonist whose best work came during the 20th century’s most decadent decade, who revealed the extent of his cocaine usage by saying “one day I blew my nose and half my brains came out,” and who once came claimed he was a tri-sexual (“I’m willing to try anything once”) but somehow dodged AIDS, the bullet of his generation.

For an artist whose albums are often built around thematic concepts (Ziggy Stardust, Diamond Dogs, Outside) or carefully sequenced with peaks and troughs (Low, “Heroes”) The Next Day is remarkably straightforward and uncomplicated. It feels like a collection of could be singles that each highlight different facets of Bowie’s storied career. “The Next Day” and “(You Will) Set The World On Fire” are big-riff, axe-driven rockers in the spirit of the ones Bowie popularized in the 70′s. The burping horns and glam pop melodies of “I’d Rather Be High” and “Dirty Boys” sound exactly like Brit Pop from mid-90′s Blur, a band who once made their living off of aping Bowie. “Dancing Out in Space” melds the sort of buttery guitar hook and catchy-as-hell pop swing that Bowie practically invented during his years in Berlin, while “If You Can See Me’s” stuttering time signature and jungle rhythms recall the experimental electronica on 1997′s Earthling. “Now you could say/ I’ve got a gift of sorts,” Bowie belts out confidently, his chameleonic talents on full display in the best material he’s had in decades.

Although the deep cuts on The Next Day give nods to Bowie’s older works, the best moments aren’t quite up to par with those masterpieces. The album lacks the sort of sure-fire radio classics that Bowie seemed to crank out with regularity in the 70′s and early 80′s. Second single “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” is an upbeat sing-along number that’s pleasant enough for a couple of listens until you realize it’s built around little more than a cliched pun and an awkwardly phrased chorus. Bowie is well-versed in the price and pleasures of modern stardom (this is the guy who wrote “Fame” and “Fashion”, after all) so it’s unfortunate that a muddled, sappy lyric like “We will never be rid of these stars/ But I hope they live forever” should aim for satire but fall like limp flattery. The unintentionally absurd video doesn’t help either, with Bowie and Tilda Swinton cast as a sycophantic suburban couple who fight off their younger doppelgangers. Bowie comes off a bit out of touch in one of The Next Day’s rare misfires.

On the pensive album closer “Heat”, Bowie cryptically reveals: “I tell myself/ I don’t know who I am,” but all signs indicate otherwise. The Next Day’s homage to Bowie’s former musical selves and and its knocked-out “Heroes” album cover make it clear that the owner of one of world’s most famous rock brands is leveraging his own iconography.  Over the course of his career, Bowie’s become a walking avatar — transforming both his music, creative style and public persona into a representation of current trends. But ever since Bowie’s neo-classicist period that began around the turn of the millennium, he’s gradually become comfortable with sounding like himself. This is the culmination of these efforts, and while it’s difficult to compare The Next Day with an album from a different era, it’s Bowie’s most well-rounded record since 1980′s Scary Monsters.

When “Where Are We Now?” was released on Bowie’s sixty-sixth birthday, one YouTube poster lamented “Oh David, why can’t you be immortal?” Given the impact of Bowie’s body of work, I’d wager that he already is. Critics have already likened The Next Day as a return to many things —  Bowie’s classic rock roots, the indie glory of the Berlin Trilogy, and 80′s pop mega-stardom — which is fine because its all of these things and none of them. At heart, The Next Day is simply the work of a gifted songwriter who knows that his time is growing short and is intent on giving us the best he has to offer. It is more than we had any right to expect.

David Bowie – “Where Are We Now” – mp3

Even the best of illusions can backfire. The song “Analyse” from Thom Yorke’s solo debut The Eraser (2006) played during the credits of The Prestige, Christopher Nolan’s underrated film featuring two rival 19th century magicians who go to tragic lengths to craft the world’s greatest illusion. The competitors [spoiler alert!] suffer humiliation, the death of their wives, self-mutilation, and even a bizarre sort of suicide to finally pull off the trick. Amok, a pseudo-sequel to The Eraser, doesn’t meet such a grisly end, but it too pays a hefty price for its cleverness. Yorke and his side-project band Atoms for Peace, who were so adept at turning The Eraser’s digital constructs into punchy live concert pieces, are now required to perform the opposite task — recreate their best live performances as 1′s and 0′s in the studio. They do the job so well that it’s hard to tell if anyone besides Yorke and his laptop were ever involved.

Some of Amok’s high expectations surely stem from Atoms For Peace’s all star credentials — other members include Red Hot Chili Pepper’s bassist Flea, Nigel Godrich (Radiohead producer), Joey Waronker (drummer for Beck and R.E.M.), and percussionist Mauro Refosco (drummer for David Byrne). While Yorke’s friends are ace musicians in their own right, their union is neither the Next Big Thing nor the typical supergroup disaster of colliding egos and stylistic mishmosh (see Audioslave or Zwan). Amok actually stands as a low-key, fairly cohesive artistic statement…almost like a Thom Yorke solo record, in fact. Yorke’s mates seem content with deferring to him, and as a result, the album takes on it’s creator’s persona —- Amok is cerebral, tense, and gloom-ridden.

Yorke’s distrust of technology is legendary — his songs with Radiohead betray fears of flying and driving (“Airbag”), of war and encroaching climate change (“Idioteque”) and of being “brought.. to (your) knees” by the 21st century (“Bodysnatchers”). So it’s unnerving that every song on Amok is built from the same twin electronic pillars — layers of percussion (veering between skittering, jittery, and dizzyingly complex), and synthesizers (urgent, twitchy, and subversive) all stitched together by the warm thread of Yorke’s human vocals. Opener “Before Your Very Eyes…” adds a jumpy guitar figure over its tiny, intricate drum loop; it feels a bit like Radiohead hyped up on math rock.

There’s loads of interesting digital sounds here manipulated to sound real — the pattering faucet drips on “Ingenue” and the buzzing swarm of digital wasps at the end of “Reverse Running.” Waronker and Refosco perform an astonishingly good imitation of syncopated drum machines, softened by the occasional triangle or hi-hat. Flea delivers limber, organic bass lines that bring an adrenaline rush to tracks like “Dropped” and “Stuck Together Pieces,” largely because they act as a welcome human counterpoint to the mechanized proceedings. It’s similar to the way Colin Greenwood’s agile fretwork animated run-of-the-mill Radiohead compositions like “15 Step” or “Morning Mr. Magpie” into living, breathing melodic animals.

After a few listens though, Amok begins to sound detailed in the way digital images look pixelated when you zoom in. That is to say, there’s plenty of sonic intricacies here but not a lot of subtle texture and feel. Atoms For Peace’s electronic songs aren’t as melodically nuanced as those from Yorke’s idols Four Tet and Burial or as jaw-droppingly eclectic as electro-jazz experiments from tour partner Flying Lotus. There are too few changes in timbre — not surprising since most of this is driven by sequencers — but variation is lacking in other crucial areas, like attention-grabbing hooks or tempo changes.

The one obvious exception is Amok‘s title track which creates a beautiful sense of space, layering Yorke’s multi-tracked moans, ominous piano fills, and a dexterous bass line over click n’ whir beats. When a pins-and-needles synthesizer riff makes its appearance at the track’s end, it’s a huge reward, a crescendo that feels like something the whole album’s been shooting for and is finally reaching. “Amok” is a track I wished Yorke and his band mates would have extended for twice its length and a captivating reminder of what Atoms For Peace are capable of.

On Amok, Yorke continues to explore the degree to which his music’s beating heart can be deconstructed and rebuilt using new, synthetic materials. Since Kid A, his work has largely been a process of subtraction — the removal and replacement of Radiohead’s more humanistic elements one by one to see what musical DNA strand remains. It’s a courageous endeavor. And a curious one, considering he’d seemingly found the perfect chromosome long ago with a song like “Idioteque”. As loathe as I am to question what direction a talented, vital artist like Yorke is headed in, I can’t help but wish his creative pendulum hadn’t swung so far into his MacBook’s hard drive. He continues to surround himself with technology and digital devices (we all do), but he’s most compelling when he brings to bear his most innate characteristic — his humanness.

What’s called for here (besides better songs) is a stronger pulse of organic life — a flourish of arpeggiated guitar, some gloriously imperfect percussion, a steady analog sine wave amidst the staircase signals. This happened once before with that other Yorke band — Radiohead’s The King of Limbs initially received lukewarm reviews for sounding “bloodless” and “unreal,” so the band wisely recorded and filmed a live performance of the same tracks as part of the BBC’s magnificent From the Basement series. It revealed new pleasures and facets to the songs by unsubtly reminding us that real musicians, not just sequencers and drum machines, were making all that noise. I suspect that Amok would benefit from similar tinkering. Then again, it probably sounds exactly the way Yorke intended it to, the way he often feels — like a man trapped among the machines.

Atoms For Peace – “Amok – mp3

In a rare moment of candidness during last Sunday’s 2013 Grammy awards, pop music finally showed its age. An incredulous Nate Ruess, singer from the indie pop band Fun, had just taken the stage to accept the Best Pop Song award for the tune he had penned, the inane yet inescapable “We Are Young.” The diminutive, almost elf-like Ruess has been in the music business for over a decade, originally fronting indie rock band The Format from 2001 to 2008.  He’s the kind of guy you’re happy to see win; he’s certainly had his share of failures. The Format’s debut album Interventions + Lullabies had the kind of major key melodies, strong vocals, and catchy choruses that seemed destined to make it a crossover hit, but it never came close to panning out, languishing in bargain bin purgatory instead. I think I’m one of the six of people who actually bought that record.

What’s fascinating is why Fun succeeded where The Format did not.  Maybe alternative radio wasn’t ready for something so pop-sounding in 2003. But I think the reason is something a little sneakier. For all their polish and sweet harmonies, the Format professed serious worries about adult problems: “The thought of death just scares me to death” Ruess sang on “Try Try Try.” But a decade later, with appropriately named Fun (no confusing his intentions there), Ruess adopts a more light-hearted tone: “Tonight, we are young/ Let’s set the world on fire/ We can burn brighter/ Than the sun.” This song and it’s cousins “Some Nights” and “Carry On” have become self-appointed anthems of happy-go-lucky high schoolers and beer bong hitting college kids everywhere. They carry the distinct aura of youth’s promise, endless possibilities, and immortality. It doesn’t hurt that Ruess sounds like he’s about 19.

Upon accepting the award, the thirty-one year old lead singer began his speech with a wry observation: “I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote the chorus to this song. This is in HD, everyone can see our faces, and we are not very young.” It got a lot of laughs. But Ruess is getting the last laugh because he, along with several other musicians, have discovered a little secret in today’s entertainment business. Pop music may be for the young, but these days you don’t have to be young to make it.

Historically, artists in their teens and twenties have always been the epicenter of popular music — from the Beach Boys and the Monkees, to Little Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson, to Debbie Gibson and NKOTB, to Britney Spears and N’Sync. When a pop star like Wonder or MJ experienced success into their 30′s, it was typically as a result of some “artistic maturation” or “creative evolution” that they underwent. Artists who couldn’t make that leap typically faded into obscurity (or Celebrity Apprentice and 20 year reunion tours). It’s almost like every musician gets a memo before their 30th birthday that read:  “Sorry, your guest pass to Pop World has expired. It’s time to grow up now.”

Nowadays, the memo gets tossed. There are a rising number of pop artists — the Unyouth Movement we’ll call them — who don’t play by the rules. They have crossed the chasm into their thirties (or even beyond), but still make music for adolescents, which in many cases causes them to act like adolescents. Its a curious, glorious, and occasionally indecent phenomenon to witness.

Britney Spears (four kids and all) still wants all eyes on her in the club at age 31. Katy Perry (who at 28 is still hanging on) wrote a song in which she professes to “be your teenage dream.” Oddly enough, this satisfies the desires of her current beau John Mayer, a 35-year old who’s been known to date other musicians just out of high school. Maroon 5′s Adam Levine, he of body tattoos, young Victoria’s Secret model girlfriends, and deep v-necks, is 33. The list goes on: Pitbull – 32. Pink – 33  Usher – 34  Enrique – 37. JLo – 43. (Ever see the “On the Floor” video where Lopez presides like a slutty puppet master over a room of sycophantic club goers half her age? Awkward.) Madonna still wears spandex and pointy bras at age 54. There’s nothing wrong with people being over 30 (thank heavens) — it just seems a little weird when their day job is making music for the age 8-25 demographic.

All of this might help explain how and why the themes of pop music have…. shall we say, matured.  In the old days, pop music was associated with youthful notions of joy, optimism, yearning, and (naturally) pubescent curiosity. Even in 1987 when Tiffany co-opted the Tommy James and Shondell’s song “I think we’re alone now,” there was a certain naïveté to it — you thought she might be stealing kisses in the library.

But something happened along the way to 2013. Youthful notions got redefined. 17 year old Britney Spears did that Catholic schoolgirl thing, 15 year old Miley Cyrus was photographed in what appeared to be only bedsheets, and 18 year old Justin Bieber got busted playing beer pong. Underage pop stars began doing very overage things. And so, of course, did their fans.  Maybe the pleasures of “being free” in pop music have always been code language for being trashed, getting laid, and owning the world, but today’s kids have certainly become more forward about it. When Ke$ha sings: “Young hunks, taking shots/ Stripping down to dirty socks/ It’s pretty obvious that you’ve got a crush/ That magic in your pants, it’s making me blush/ We’re gonna die young,” she’s as subtle as a fart in church.  She’s 25, performing for 15 year olds who are behaving like they’re 21.

Is this a surprise? Not really. Peering through the glass of the Hollywood fishbowl guarantees you a warped view of life, but society’s entertainment reflects its values at some level. It’s no secret that given Western culture’s obsession with beauty and fame, we are forever looking for the perfect combination of the best things in life. Who doesn’t want to be good-looking, rich, and talented, yet still have the physical prime of your life just ahead of you? Big deal if the older folks want to be younger and younger kids want to be older. The grass seems greener on both sides, but we’re all aiming for the same holy middle ground — the one that houses a fountain of youth from which to insatiably quaff. Unfortunately, the result is often just a hangover. Or the sort of devil’s bargain that exists only in movies — like Justin Timberlake’s straight to video sci-fi thriller “In Time” in which everyone stops physically aging at 25, so they can stay hot, avoid beer bellies, and keep clubbing til the break of dawn. Until they genetically self destruct, that is.

Interestingly enough, Justin Timberlake was one of the two exceptions to the Unyouth Movement on display at the Grammys. His performance, while scintillating, somehow felt age appropriate. (It was even shown on TV in tasteful black and white) The new songs he played, “Suit & Tie” and “Pusher Love Girl,” have been criticized for not pushing pop boundaries enough, but they feel just right for him. At age 31, he’s stepping back from the cutting edge, utilizing full band ensembles, horn sections, and harps instead of sleek synth-driven beats, exhibiting a fashion sense that never goes out of style, and enjoying the finer moments of newly wedded bliss. It just so happens that he’s married to Jessica Biel and hosts dinner parties with Jay Z and Beyonce. A little unrealism is good for everyone.

The second exception to the rule was Prince, and he didn’t play a single note of music. He simply presented the Record of the Year award, exuding so much charisma that people gave him a standing ovation just for strutting on stage. Award winner Gotye appeared awestruck, but then again, we all were. Prince scratches his ass, and people think its cool. He carried a cane and wore bug-eyed wraparound shades, perfectly splitting the difference between 15 and 50.  Remember, this is the man who once famously sang “act your age, not your shoe size,” and he practices what he preaches — partying like it’s 1999 never seemed so old-fashioned.

The fact is, whether they like it or not, pop musicians are getting older by the minute. In fact, we all are. We just want to pretend that we aren’t. I guess, in that regard, pop music is doing what it always has — providing a healthy form of escapism. It just feels so much more obvious these days. We’ll probably never be able to pinpoint the exact moment when America’s youth staring losing its innocence and middle aged singers’ efforts to look young became pathetic (though its probably Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and fat Elvis circa 1977, respectively), but I think we can all agree that the trend has turned into a trainwreck of epic proportions. Pop stars aren’t without hope, though. Ruess’s admission that Fun was a bunch of old dudes capitalizing on the fact that they were pretending to be young was actually quite endearing in its honesty. It was also very smart, since the best way to dodge the slings and arrows of your detractors is to launch them at yourself first.