“Things,” a bright and bouncy dance track, adds a new color to Oddisee’s production palette — but the song’s energy belies its lyrical content. It’s a confessional that finds the Maryland-born, Brooklyn-based rapper-producer wrestling with his status, summed up by a nod to The Notorious B.I.G.‘s “mo’ money, mo’ problems” mantra. Much of Oddisee’s career has been marked by that dilemma, and here, he likens it to a horror-film cliché: He’s unable to resist the urge to run towards the screams.

Still, Oddisee’s words have an equivocal quality to them. The third verse opens with a declaration that “we just want to matter more,” and in that moment, it becomes unclear whether “we” means underground rappers — or something else altogether. In fact, that entire section can be read as a demand for equity on multiple fronts. Perceived invisibility is, after all, a sentiment shared by any who are outcast. As the U.S.’s legislative tides turn — Oddisee explicitly engaged the possibility on March’s Alwasta EP — The Iceberg figures to stand as some of his most politically charged work. In those terms, the alternate reading of “Things” feels especially penetrating.

The Iceberg comes out Feb. 24 via Mello Music Group.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Kevin Pace Trio – 7524
PREE – Alvin
Nick Hakim – Heaven
Griefloss – łłł
Projected Man – Raspberry Jam
CrushnPain – Forms Of Relaxation
Max D- Bubblegum
Three Man Soul Machine – Kiki
RDGLDGRN – Hangout
Cheick Hamala Diabate – Diamonds and Gold
Todd Simon – Amalgam
Lands – Sometimes
Sligo Creek Stompers – Cuckoo’s Nest
small craft – of the mountain
Aztec Sun – Get Up
Boat Burning – RM1
Smoke Bellow – Patient Belongings
Corm – Then I Built My Own Violin (Instrumental)
Calm The Waters – Stay
Olivia Neutron-John – 16 BEAT

Dizzy Gillespie once described Charlie Parker as the other half of his heartbeat. They were young men creating something from whole cloth, stretching the limits of their creativity and intellect every time they drew a breath together on the bandstand.

For musicians, that heartbeat thing is real. When you link into someone else’s well of creativity and imagination, there really are no words to describe the connection. So it makes sense that it took Grateful Dead veteran Bob Weir as long as it did to come up with an album’s worth of new writing that he wanted to share with the world.

Weir has said in interviews that losing his friend Jerry Garcia in 1995 was a cataclysmic shock on both a personal and musical level. They’d been of one mind for more than 2,300 shows and an untold number of rehearsals and jams, joined together like part of a single organism. Losing Garcia had to be a serious blow to absorb.

But what emerges on the heartfelt Blue Mountain — which Weir crafted with the likes of Josh Ritter and The National‘s Bryce and Aaron Dessner — is another chapter of his life as a storyteller. If he’d never written another song, he could stand on the accomplishments of his 30 years writing for the Dead. The characters and circumstances he’s chronicled were pulled from great American musical traditions, as well as his own self-exploration as he’s matured and become more observant.

Now, fans can take a step back and admire Bob Weir for the extremely gifted songwriter he’s become. Hiding behind that post-Dead beard is a poet laureate of deep thinking and whimsy. His voice has taken on a character that finally replaces the forever-young, fresh-faced heartthrob fans knew so well, but even with age, he sounds as good as ever.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

If Jenny Hval’s music is the bramble, her message is the Disney castle nestled (or, depending on perspective, trapped) inside. The experimental singer-songwriter surrounds her vulnerable voice and razor’s edge lyrics with spiky, disarming instrumentation and production that work to both belie and bolster the intensity and intimacy of her work. Blood Bitch, Hval’s sixth album, is her first that offers a sword for cutting through the thorns.

The production, with Lasse Marhaug, sometimes decentralizes Hval’s voice. On “Female Vampire,” Marhaug and Hval build a sonic house of mirrors in which vocals bounce brightly from high to low and soft to loud. This seems like the direction this album will take: immaculate, fairly incomprehensible avant garde electronic pop. But the true clues to Hval’s intent come, it turns out, immediately before and after “Female Vampire.” The last line of album opener “Ritual Awakening” is “I get so afraid / So I start speaking,” and the only lyrics on track three, “In the Red,” are, “It hurts / Everywhere.” Blood Bitch, in both name and tone, does not aim for immaculacy — it aims for impact. Highly-produced electro-pop songs are followed by the sounds of frantic breathing, or the scratch of a pen on paper, or a scream trapped in the infinite loop and distortion of a bell jar. There is never a question that a human being is operating all these machines. “The Great Undressing” claims that this record “is about vampires,” but it’s too rooted in Hval’s own body to be mystical. If she’s writing about vampires, she’s not writing about the fabled unfeeling undead. She’s writing about dealers in all things hidden and dark and vital, and sometimes covered in blood.

Hval’s feminism and her interests (both musical and scholarly) in gender and sexuality continue to factor into this album, as they have in her past work. The urgency and directness with which she confronts them, though, are new. She incorporates periods, speculums and birth control into her lyrics, which are sometimes sung, sometimes spoken and always direct as a harpoon. There’s a palpable lack of pretense or distortion to Hval’s linguistic faculties here, which is a change from her earlier, more theoretically dense projects. The choppy, almost gasping style of delivery she uses across Blood Bitch sounds like it could be completely spontaneous, or could be predetermined to the point of agony. The overall effect is that she’s chasing her ideas; like she’s not entirely in control of the process of choosing them. This record is only superficially about the supernatural. At its core, it’s an unmistakably human cross-section, and Hval’s great asset is her ability to turn an X-ray into a wonder cabinet. Emily Dickinson named this gift perfectly, 100 years before Hval was born: She tells all the truth, but tells it slant.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Drive-By Truckers has always been a political band. Even while Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley were writing goofy songs like “Buttholeville” and “Too Much Sex (Too Little Jesus)” two decades ago, they were also calling out Southern character and culture while embracing what they’d soon dub the “duality of the Southern thing.” Home is home, for better or worse, but sometimes a home stuck in its ways needs a kick in the ass. It’s a unique position for a rock band that writes catchy, foot-stomping rallying cries played not only to Southerners, but also to an increasingly diverse audience. More than anything, Drive-By Truckers’ examination of the Southern psyche is a microcosm of how Americans respond to triumph and tragedy.

The Truckers have long worked in history and metaphor to weave complicated morality into its songs, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the band’s 11th album, American Band, explicitly responds to the desperate and ugly climate of our country right now. It joins a line of in-the-moment political records released in the last two decades, where some succeed and continue to resonate (Sleater-Kinney‘s One Beat, Kendrick Lamar‘s To Pimp A Butterfly) and others, while admirable in their passion, do not (the rushed hot mess that is Neil Young‘s Living With War). The fiery first single, “Surrender Under Protest,” mashes up a “Lost Cause” catchphrase from Civil War apologists with Civil Rights activists’ successful campaign to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse. When the song came out, a certain segment of fans felt betrayed by Mike Cooley’s pointed and damning position. Maybe they hadn’t been paying attention — but, then again, it’s often easy to recognize and laugh at your own until the words really hit home. And Drive-By Truckers’ music hits home, hard.

The Alabama-raised, Athens, Ga.-based band doesn’t stop there. Cooley also writes the historical retelling “Ramon Casiano,” a muscular piece of Muscle Shoals punk about the late Harlon Carter — a gun-rights advocate and former NRA leader — who shot and killed a 15-year-old Hispanic boy, but escaped incarceration. Just after “Surrender Under Protest,” Patterson Hood’s “Guns Of Umpqua” is a sobering examination of the horrific shooting at Umpqua Community College in rural Oregon last year. The song is written with his poetic far-away glance, but it’s poignant in its scene-setting: “Made it back from hell’s attack in some distant bloody war / Only to stare down hell back home.” Hood’s soft, nearly defeated mood continues with the lonesome, hushed howl of “What It Means,” which questions the point of human progress when young black men like Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin are killed: “We’re living in an age where limitations are forgotten / The outer edges move and dazzle us / But the core is something rotten.”

Cooley’s no-holds-barred approach yields some of Drive-By Truckers’ hardest-rocking songs in years — the rolling “Filthy And Fried,” driven by Jay Gonzalez’s B3, and the Southern-rock boogie “Kinky Hypocrite,” in addition to the ones previously mentioned — but Hood’s contributions are far more subdued. It’s said that absence makes the heart grow fonder, and in Hood’s case, it may make it wiser, too. After living in the South all his life, Hood moved to Portland, Ore., last year. The change of scenery has helped yield what might be his greatest song; it’s about not just the South, but forever being a Southerner. The moody and soulful “Ever South” is an immigrant song that reaches back to his Scotch-Irish roots and hits parallels between that and his move out west, when a family’s brighter future is suddenly judged on those roots. Generations apart, those prejudices remain, but history allows us to “Tell you stories of our father and the glories of our house / Always told a little slower, ever south.”

American Band lives up to its name in how it digests, understands and challenges the notions of what it means to be American. In short, it’s complicated. In the band’s ambition to be current, to speak hard truths without metaphorical tangles, American Band is still remarkably nuanced in its quiet and not-so-quiet anger. This is and has always been Drive-By Truckers’ creed. Now, it’s time to challenge the audience that always took “the duality of the Southern thing” for granted.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The score he created is masterfully emotional, to the point where you don’t have to see the film to feel the gravity of its plot. But what makes Nagasaki special is the way Sakamoto evokes deep feeling without easy sentiment or maudlin clichés. Though he employs many standard soundtrack tools — swelling strings, echoing piano, mournful woodwinds — he limits them to hushed tones and reserved tempos. This music unfolds slowly and quietly, suggesting that the proper way to process this story is meditative contemplation rather than rushed melodrama.

The 28 tracks on Nagasaki are so patient, they can make the world seem to move in slow motion. In the ruminative piano pieces “How Are You?” and “Funeral,” Sakamoto gives every note time to reverberate and decay before moving on to the next. String-based tracks “Ghost” and “Memories Of My Son — Requiem” are strong yet subdued, habitually retreating into distant quietude. Even when the music is busier, as in the woodwind-led “Raindrops” and “Pastoral,” the essence of Sakamoto’s approach remains calm reflection.

Because the bulk of Nagasaki is so subtle and reserved, the moments when Sakamoto changes course feel deeply resonant. The brief “MP” is a harrowing blast of steely noise, while the cavernous drone of “Soul Of The Dead Brother” registers as scarier than any phantom. When singing enters for the first time via the soaring choir in “Nobuko,” the score hits a poignant peak. But Sakamoto doesn’t need real human voices to find real human emotions. They’re there in every moment of this moving score.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Still, changing Wye Oak was only part of the picture. Wasner had already begun a pair of side pursuits under different names: a duo called Dungeonesse, which released a 2013 dance-pop record, and a low-key solo project using the name Flock Of Dimes. After a string of 7″ singles (including a gorgeous one-shot collaboration with Sylvan Esso‘s Amelia Meath), Flock Of Dimes is finally releasing its full-length debut, a slyly infectious and characteristically reflective set of synth-pop songs titled If You See Me, Say Yes.

The album’s first single, “Semaphore,” is a snaky jam fueled by roiling bass and a throbbing earworm of a chorus. But much of If You See Me, Say Yes treads moodier ground, as Wasner sets a dreamy pace across an assortment of stirring ballads that incorporate everything from vocal effects (“Minor Justice”) to subtle doses of slide guitar (“The Joke”) and fingerpicking (“Apparition,” “Given/Electric Life”). Throughout the album, Wasner demonstrates her gift for atmospheric, patiently building slow burns, but she also has a way with softly swaying pop songs like “Birthplace.”

In that track, Wasner quickly re-creates a gift she showcases so frequently in Wye Oak: a way of mixing self-doubt and self-knowledge to form real insight. “My love is not an object that rusts with lack of use,” she sings, her voice pairing as well with cool, shimmering electro-pop as it has with the stormy rock of Wye Oak. That band lives on, too. But with a voice this versatile, it’s easy to understand why Wasner chooses to spread it around.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Prince Rama:

Dan Deacon Ensemble:

Abdu Ali with the Dan Deacon Ensemble:

FlucT:

Future Islands:

Lexie Mountain Boys:

People of the festival:

Member of the festival security team:

Pool party:

Sun Ra Arkestra:

Pittsburgh might not seem like a psychedelic stronghold, but in the recent past, the band Black Moth Super Rainbow has proven to be a reliably potent source of reality-bending indie-pop. Yet while BMSR sounds more organic, Tobacco — the alter ego of BMSR frontman Thomas Fec — revels in all things synthetic.

Over the last few years, Tobacco has left trails of mind-warping electronic music that meld a proud psychedelic tradition with the beeps, thumps and loops of synths, samples and drum machines. The result is pleasantly disorienting.

Tobacco’s fourth and latest album, Sweatbox Dynasty, doubles down on that trip. Engineering synth-pop’s DNA into something far weirder and less linear, Fec cranks up Atari-era blips and vocoder-mutated vocals in “Wipeth Out,” which may or may not be a radical reinterpretation of the legendary surf song “Wipe Out” by The Surfaris. Familiar landmarks also emerge, evaporate and drift away in “Gods In Heat,” with a funky, Prince-like, “na-na-na” refrain buried in layers of digitized distortion and seesawing sine waves.

Brief interludes like “Hong” and “The Madonna” aren’t exactly respites from Tobacco’s onslaught of strangeness. Fec uses these tracks, awash in stuttering glitches and wayward keyboard stabs, as highly concentrated bursts of abrasive experimentation. That’s not to say there aren’t hooks galore. The metallic riffs and robotic whispers of “Dimensional Hum” give way to the spacious, effervescent “Warlock Mary,” a song burbling with fuzz and euphoric swells of static. At six minutes, the album’s closer, “Let’s Get Worn Away,” is its most sprawling, but even then, Fec affects a sumptuous croon that humanizes his abstract and challenging tendencies. Still, enough psychedelic splicing and gleeful loops pop up in “Let’s Get Worn Away” to merit a warning label.

For all its giddy noise and cyborg saber rattling, warmth and charm still seep in. “Human Om” throbs with an appropriately meditative pulse; like a new-wave club hit from some parallel dimension, the song oozes and meanders, pushed along by languidly sequenced arpeggios and Fec’s vivid tunefulness. As a whole, Sweatbox Dynasty is a shimmering, hallucinatory odyssey. It’s not always clear where it’s going or what it’s after, but that only makes its electronic ecstasy more tantalizing.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

John Paul White’s voice was meant to be heard on its own. At the start of his career, he was poised to be a breakout solo singer until Capitol Records dropped him before the release of his debut album. That set him on a path to writing songs for other people and then forming The Civil Wars with Joy Williams — a duo whose strength lay in its harmonies. Now, years later, White delivers on the long-delayed promise of a solo career in Beulah, a wise, entrancing and meticulous bit of Southern folk.

White has always sung like a melody can be dangerous. On a foundation of tension and surrender, the Civil Wars created magnetic songs about dark magnetism. When the duo broke up in 2013, White returned home to Muscle Shoals, Ala. to be with his family and focus on his Single Lock Records label. With Beulah, White emerges as if drawn by song from a quiet life, drawn with that romantic regret.

If White is out of practice, he doesn’t show it. The songs on Beulah strike a tricky balance between precision in their craft and a loose folksiness in their sound and delivery. Longtime fans will recognize the pure tone of his voice and the finger-thrumming parlor sound of his acoustic guitar. Yet in nearly every song he conjures fresh sonic adventurousness — the haunted percussion on “The Once And Future Queen” or the minimalist grooves of “Hope I Die.”

White can’t help but speak clearly, which made Civil Wars songs feel like conversations, intimate moments a listener happened upon. With Beulah, he is plainspoken without sacrificing his poetics. For every emotional sledgehammer of a pop-country profundity like “I hate the way you love me,” there’s the subtle pull of a character line such as “you don’t get above your raising.”

Beneath the themes of heartache, resentment and redemption is an elegant idea: Beulah. It’s a biblical word, denoting in Isaiah a place of peace and isolation from strife. The biblical sense lives in roots, blues and gospel music like Mississippi John Hurt’s laconically blissful “Beulah Land.” William Blake used the word as a term for the poetic universal unconscious. That’s the sense White favors, but he has his own transcendent reason for claiming Beulah: It’s a family nickname.

For White, this is a return to self. If The Civil Wars invited listeners to confuse their characters with the singers, he is now making clear where his songs come from. It’s bracing to hear the return of a voice many have missed in a form few have heard.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.