*Kindred* is London-based dubstep producer Burial’s hardest and darkest-sounding EP to date. While there are only three songs here, keep in mind that they total more than a half-hour. The title track opens with keyboard ambience and looped vinyl hiss before metallic, clanging beats start driving the tune like an old car in first gear. As the song shifts into second, Burial seamlessly fuses dusty, lo-fi garage beats with the heft of his signature dubstep and some jungle that bobs and weaves with a middleweight boxer\'s agility. In place of a lead vocal, Burial uses manipulated fragments of female vocals, pitched down and up for a haunting effect. The faster-driving “Loner” serves as a snapshot of past raves. Its locomotive beats and brooding bass synth set the stage for the type of fluttering keyboard notes that dancers can feel sputtering in their sternums when cranked from huge speakers. The closing “Ashtray Wasp” is 11 minutes and 44 seconds of dark, foreboding house from the postapocalyptic future.
Talk about a teaser. Rather than follow the all-too-brief speaker-clobbering beats of last summer’s *Satin Panthers* EP with a proper full-length, Hudson Mohawke has taken a detour with the equally promising EP transmissions of *TNGHT*, by his duo of the same name. A sample-flinging standoff between the groove-riding Glaswegian and Montreal’s own rising bass cadet Lunice, it’s off to the races as soon as the snake-charmer shudder and shake of “Top Floor” slips into a puddle of liquefied low-end lashings and manic melodies. From that point on, *TNGHT* is a hands-in-the-air moment waiting to happen, whether it’s triggered by bleach-stomping breaks and breathless cheers (“Goooo”), bubble gun blasts and baby-dropping Aaliyah allusions (“Bugg’n”), or apocalyptic calliopes made from compressed chorus lines (“Easy Easy”). It’s controlled chaos at its best, really, and quite the palette cleanser for whatever Mohawke has on deck next.
There are times that Mac DeMarco’s debut sounds less like an album of songs than an extended comedy sketch designed to make soft rock sound as sleazy and weird as possible. What spares *Rock and Roll Night Club* from amounting to a joke—warped radio-announcer interludes and all—is how beautifully DeMarco writes, from the plaintive, ‘50s-style heartbeat of “One More Tear to Cry” to the glam-inflected haze of “She’s All I Really Need.”
The 2012 EP by Grizzly Bear\'s Daniel Rossen, *Silent Hour/Golden Mile*, features material intended for the next Grizzly Bear album. It\'s a refocus for Rossen, centering on the emotive and artsy underpinnings that made the Bear\'s earliest material so engrossing. Always in danger of being overdone by ornate musicianship, Rossen\'s songs are here kept to a minimum of fuss (by his standards). The overpronounced bass guitar of \"Up on High\" adds to the attractively askew arrangement, which also features orchestration that\'s kept tidily in the background. \"Silent Song\" adds slide guitar pinched from the George Harrison school, while \"Golden Mile\" goes a stretch further in evoking the ex-Beatle\'s solo work, with a vocal and arrangement that could place it on *All Things Must Pass*. \"Saint Nothing\" is curiously reminiscent of Harrison\'s bandmate Paul McCartney, with a piano ballad that sounds like a lost early-\'70s deep album cut. Despite these obvious reference points, Rossen is a distinct individual who\'s arguably at his best on his own.
