Prefix's Top Albums of 2011

Vancouver’s Dan Bejar has always been a sly kind of agitator, tearing apart the conventions of indie rock from the inside out. *Kaputt* turns the sloppy proclamations of his earlier albums on their head, opting for streamlined yacht-club funk in the vein of Steely Dan and \'80s Roxy Music. Though the music is soft and leisurely, Bejar’s lyrics remain serrated: “Hey, mystic prince of the purlieu at night/I heard your record, it’s alright,” he sings on “Savage Night at the Opera,” half-whispering with witty contempt.

The serene Dan Graham cover photo is no misdirection: this is some relaxing music. The Garden State’s pre-eminent chillout band gets deeply mellow on their second album, but they never drown in a bottomless sea of reverb. Instead, Real Estate’s swirling guitars and wispy vocals strike just the right balance of sharpness and haziness, as on the gorgeous “Out of Tune” and the sparkling “Wonder Years.” *Days* perfectly conjures those sun-soaked July afternoons when you’ve got nowhere to go and nothing to do.

On their sophomore album, Bon Iver add just a touch of color to their stark indie folk, while retaining every bit of its intimacy. The haunting chill of solitude continues to cling to Justin Vernon\'s every word, even when his lilting falsetto radiates warmth over a rich bed of acoustic guitar, synths, and horns. The drama exudes from every little sound—the soft, pattering snare guiding \"Perth,\" the delicate whirrs of sax on \"Holocene,\" and the big, gleaming synths on \'80s-esque noir jam \"Beth / Rest.\"

Bon Iver, Bon Iver is Justin Vernon returning to former haunts with a new spirit. The reprises are there – solitude, quietude, hope and desperation compressed – but always a rhythm arises, a pulse vivified by gratitude and grace notes. The winter, the legend, has faded to just that, and this is the new momentary present. The icicles have dropped, rising up again as grass.

Drake\'s still fretting about lost love, the perils of fame, and connecting with his fellow man; just look at him on the cover, staring into a golden chalice like a lonely king. These naked emotions, however, are what make *Take Care* a classic, placing Drake in a league with legendary emoters like Marvin Gaye and Al Green. \"Marvin\'s Room\" is one of the most sullen singles to hit the Top 100, and the winsome guitar howls of the title track, coproduced by Jamie xx, are among of the most recognizable sounds of the decade.

M83’s cinematic tendencies come to a head on French musician Anthony Gonzalez\'s sixth album. Zola Jesus’ turn on “Intro” sets the scene like a cliff dive filmed in sparkling slow motion, and “Midnight City” amps up the synth-pop drama with soaring vocals and volleys of electronic drums. “Reunion” revisits the ringing guitars of ‘80s soundtrack staples from bands like Simple Minds, and from there Gonzalez glides across ambient interludes, bright digital keys, and stadium-sized New Wave. It’s the perfect marriage of indie aesthetics and blockbuster production.

Philadelphia’s The War On Drugs hold the perfect balance of classic rock and spaced-out indie rock. Members Kurt Vile, Charlie Hall and Kyle Lloyd departed the band at the end of 2008, leaving founding singer and guitarist Adam Granduciel to recruit drummer Mike Zanghi and bassist/guitar player Dave Hartley. Yet somehow, 2011’s *Slave Ambient* sounds a lot like 2008’s *Wagonwheel Blues*. “Best Night” sets the tone like *Nebraska*-era Springsteen as accompanied by the musicians who played on Spiritualized’s *Songs in A & E*. Throughout *Slave Ambient* there’s also a prevalent lean on Krautrock-inspired repetitions, immediately noticeable during the first song’s end jam and in the hypnotic “It’s Your Destiny.” The consecutive pulsing speeds up on “Your Love Is Calling My Name” where Granduciel’s nasal-toned croons recall a young Tom Petty under driving indie-rock oscillations braided together with some dream-pop ambience. Fans of the band’s previous penchant for anthemic epics will feel right at home with the uplifting “Come to the City.”

Philadelphia’s The War on Drugs, the vehicle of Adam Granduciel — frontman, rambler, shaman, pied piper guitarist and apparent arranger-extraordinaire, returns with 'Slave Ambient'. On their debut, the life-affirming 'Wagonwheel Blues', and the follow-up EP, 'Future Weather', The War on Drugs seemed obsessed with disparate ideas, with building uncompromised rock monuments from pieces that may have seemed like odd pairs. Folk-rock marathons come damaged by drum machines. Electronic and instrumental reprises precede songs they’ve yet to play, and Dr. Seuss becomes lyrical motivation for bold futuristic visions. Now, Granduciel has done it again, better than before: 'Slave Ambient', their proper second album, is a brilliant 47-minute sprawl of rock ’n’ roll, conceptualized with a sense of adventure and captured with seasons of bravado.

After two previous releases, St. Vincent (a.k.a. Annie Clark) finds a way to channel her avant-garde instincts in more accessible directions, displaying a firm grasp on pop songwriting forms even as she subverts them. In tandem with producer John Congleton, she plays nervous industrial beats and quivering keyboards against billowing ‘60s-ish melodies. Her cooing vocals on “Cruel” and “Surgeon” insinuate dark scenarios of betrayal and abandonment, transcending mere irony into something palpably sinister. More direct in their intentions are “Cheerleader” (an anthem of personal liberation) and “Champagne Year” (a jaundiced look at success). If Clark’s lyrics tease and dazzle, her music hits hard sonically, clattering to a galloping groove on “Hysterical Strength” and erupting into guitar-fueled cacophony on “Northern Lights.” The otherworldly grandeur of Kate Bush or Björk is recalled on tracks like “Chloe In the Afternoon.” But St. Vincent is in a class all her own as she exorcises sexual demons, grapples with psychic breakdown, and achieves an uncanny catharsis.

Colin Stetson is a Montreal-based woodwinds player whose main ax is the bass saxophone. His impressive and expansive technique on the big horn — he employs circular breathing allowing him to play continuously — is absolutely dazzling. In 2008, he released a striking album, *New History Warfare, Volume 1*, and this 2011 follow-up is excellent as well. No overdubs or loops were used to capture his sax work, but 24 microphones were employed to record Stetson’s massive sound. (A lovely, brief piece, “All the Days I’ve Missed You,”finds Stetson overdubbing French Horn parts.) Laurie Anderson adds spoken word on a few tracks, and Shara Worden sings on two cuts, including a version of the traditional, “Lord I Just Can’t Keep from Crying Sometimes.” Listening to this album, you might think of Terry Riley’s soprano saxophone and Time-Lag Generator work from the ‘60s, but Stetson’s one-man band workouts are all his own. *Judges* ends strongly with “In Love and In Justice,” where droning tones and breathy sounds circle again and again.

ORDER PHYSICAL LP OR CD HERE: cstrecords.com/cst075 Colin Stetson is a horn player of uncommon strength, skill and genre- defying creativity. He composes and performs otherworldly songs that combine a mastery of circular breathing technique with percussive valve- work and reed vocalisations, making a polyphonic solo music that combines influences as diverse as Bach, early metal, American pre-war Gospel, and the explorations of Jimi Hendrix, Peter Brotzman and Albert Ayler. New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges is Stetson's second solo record and his first for Constellation. Colin has been making his mark as a staggering solo performer for several years now, in front of audiences small and large, from intimate jazz and experimental music venues to big stages, whether opening for Arcade Fire or The National, or playing at jazz and new music festivals like Moers and London Jazz. His talents have been widely recognised and employed by artists as diverse as Tom Waits, Laurie Anderson, TV On The Radio and Bon Iver. Colin also plays in Belle Orchestre and Sway Machinery. The music on New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges was captured entirely live in single takes at Montréal's Hotel2Tango studio, with no overdubs or looping, using over 20 mics positioned close and far throughout the live room. Guest vocals by Laurie Anderson and Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond) are the only exceptions to this rule, along with one brief french horn piece that was multi-tracked. The Judges sessions were co-produced by Stetson and Shahzad Ismaily and engineered by Efrim Menuck at the Hotel2Tango, then taken to Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavik and mixed by Ben Frost. The result is a highly original, experimental, euphoric record that fires on all levels: a document of a profoundly gifted player, a compositional tour- de-force, and a studio production bursting with intensity and inventiveness. New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges features cover art by Tracy Maurice and will be issued on CD in custom 100% recycled paperboard gatefold jacket and on Deluxe 180gLP with a limited edition screenprinted poster and a CD copy contained in the first pressing.

The British electronic pop artist James Blake was showered with attention and nominations in his native land in 2010 and 2011. That’s striking because Blake’s music is truly strange. Drawing on the weirder side of R&B as well as leftfield English dance music, the singer/songwriter crafts spare and spooky gems. On “Unluck,” simple electric piano (evocative of ‘70s Sly & The Family Stone), itchy rhythmic tics, and sound blurts serve as a backdrop as Blake sings, at times through a vocoder. The track sounds like something you would hear while a producer was tinkering with a mix, but here it’s the intriguing end result. One of the album’s singles, “The Wilhelm Scream,” is as lovely as it is eldritch. The catchy melody is surrounded by music that is both minimal and ambient. Blake is capable of all sorts of odd moves: on “I Never Learnt to Share,” a beat doesn’t kick in until the cut is more than half over. One of the album’s highlights is a cover of the Canadian songwriter Feist’s “Limit to Your Love,” which consists of his naked voice, piano, and a haunted atmosphere.

When The Weeknd’s debut mixtape, *House of Balloons*, dropped in 2011, it was clear, even then, that something had shifted. This was a divergent kind of R&B that hinged on atmospherics over vocal prowess—an almost soulless quality in a genre built around soul. At the time, The Weeknd was largely anonymous, hiding in the shadows of his own music, the aloofness only adding to the allure. He was no one and yet everyone, as his raw, bruised candor resonated with fans suffering the effects of overexposure and contradicting desires to both feel and be numb simultaneously. He was a decent enough singer (his falsetto often drew comparisons to Michael Jackson), but it was the one-two punch of the nocturnal sound and indulgent lyrics—the darkness, the dysfunction, the hazy synth-bath of it all—that gave it staying power. When he says, “Trust me, girl, you wanna be high for this,” as he declares on the opening track, it\'s hard to tell whether it\'s an invitation or a warning, but it landed on ears that were all too happy to oblige. *House of Balloons*, here now in its original form with all samples restored, introduces the sentiment that has underscored nearly all of The Weeknd\'s music that\'s followed: a blurring of the lines between love and addiction, between having a good time and being consumed by it. In multi-part songs such as “House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls” and “The Party & The After Party,” a night\'s zenith and nadir are never too far apart; his audience, like his women, are held captive by the mercurial nature of his moods. A line like “Bring your love, baby, I could bring my shame/Bring the drugs, baby, I could bring my pain,” from lead single “Wicked Games,” serves as a kind of mission statement for the mixtape\'s (and, perhaps, the singer himself\'s) central tension. In the exchange of affection and substances, there exists an emotional transference wherein power is gained by feeling the least. The Weeknd taps into our id-driven urges for pleasure and domination and rewards them again and again. Cruelty somehow becomes sexy in this world where detachment—from everything—is the only goal; the music that he’s created as a soundtrack continues to leave its audience equally insatiable. As the years go by, *House of Balloons* has become increasingly timeless. It remains as much an exercise in mythmaking (and star-making) for The Weeknd as a testament to our own pathological impulses, sending us barreling towards destruction and ecstasy all at once.

Helplessness Blues is the new full-length from Fleet Foxes. Helplessness Blues was recorded over the course of a year at Avast Recording, Bear Creek Studios, Dreamland Studios, and Reciprocal Recording. The album was recorded and mixed by Phil Ek and co-produced by Fleet Foxes and Ek. The piece that appears on the album cover was illustrated by Seattle artist Toby Liebowitz and painted by Chris Alderson. Fleet Foxes is Robin Pecknold, Skyler Skjelset, Christian Wargo, Casey Wescott, Josh Tillman and Morgan Henderson.

Tim Hecker albums have always sounded like an eternal struggle between darkness and light, with glimpses of terror and tranquility lurking around the edges of every ambient loop. And while they’re all worth a late-night listen, *Ravedeath, 1972* is one of his most cohesive artistic statements yet; 12 songs that bleed into one another beautifully. So beautifully, in fact, that they could have been combined into a single track without anyone noticing. Since they aren’t, it’s best to let the entire thing fill your room like the live recording that led to its creation. (Most of the record was captured in one day at an Icelandic church with Hecker’s close friend, fellow sound sculptor Ben Frost.) To listen is to let the light creep in through the bandages, and feel cleansed as the very last note flickers and dies like a rain-doused bonfire. Heavy stuff indeed.

While they’re clearly inspired by classic late ‘80s and early ‘90s shoegaze and indie rock—Ride, Dinosaur Jr., Pavement—this young London quintet proved on their self-titled debut that they could spin their influences into a memorable, blissful, fuzzed-out sound all their own. Whether heavy in the red on the ebullient “Holing Out” or swooning on the sweet, reverb-laden ballad “Stutter,” Yuck’s sunny songwriting has that sense of infinite possibility that, at its best, underground rock music is all about.

If *In Rainbows*—with its direct, live-influenced songcraft and game-changing honesty box pricing—was Radiohead aligning two distinct visions of the band, this eighth record explores a third way. Concise, dance-indebted, and dripping nocturnal electronica, *The King of Limbs* sees them experiment with galloping loops (“Bloom”) and blippy production (“Morning Mr Magpie”). Still, their knack for affecting avant-rock is undimmed, and “Lotus Flower” is a spectral—and appropriately beautiful—career-high.

Formed by (underrated) Mint Chicks guitarist Ruban Nielson, Unknown Mortal Orchestra sounds like an Elephant 6 band sent back to the ‘70s. They groove on simple funk rhythms, guitars and keys cloaked in a rather thorny kind of reverb, a snare drum happily clanking out a bony backbeat. Nielson’s voice sounds like a cross between Beck and Marc Bolan, and his proficient guitar work periodically steps out into the limelight, like a shy stoner trying out his moves. On the viral “hit” “FFunny FFriends,” Nielson offers up a coolly restrained 30-second break amidst the snaky rhythm parts, and on “Bicycle,” the spare lead is accompanied by a hilarious and charming manipulated vocal approximation of a wah-wah peddle. The garage-punk guitars on “Nerve Damage” are one unexpected delight, among many: “Strangers Are Strange” undulates to a slinky, soul-pop vibe (remember Sly & The Family Stone?), and “Thought Ballune” is a paisley-colored slice of sweet psych-pop that could turn a dark day sunny. The brilliance of “How Can You Luv Me” is evident from the first bit of Fender Mustang funk-twang and percolating bass line. Dance? Try not to.

UMO was initially conceived by New Zealand native, Ruban, to release some tracks via a Bandcamp page to promote his limited addition vinyl in 2010. He pieced a band together, with a skilled producer, Jake, on bass and a brilliant teenage drummer named Julian to fill out the band. They are based in Portland.

As Smog and as himself, Bill Callahan writes and records subtle, flat-toned tunes that are dryly hilarious. Lyrics come first for Callahan and listening straight through a handful of his songs, it’s apparent that he has a thirst for words and concepts. *Apocalypse* plays to his strengths. “Drover” begins as a faux-Western. The chords build dramatically. A fiddle saws until the music falls away and it weeps. “America!” plays as word-association, with Callahan sounding like he’s messing around on the guitar absent-mindedly while the rhythm section takes an occasional break that leads to an over-caffeinated ending with everyone celebrating so hard they trip over themselves. “Universal Applicant” throws a flute into the mix. Recorded and mixed in Texas, *Apocalypse* prominently reflects the great sprawling real estate of that state with pauses and leisurely paces in nearly every tune. “Free’s” clocks in at a punchy 3:13, but the others are all over five minutes. There’s nothing indulgent here. Every moment deserves to be heard. The album ends with “One Fine Morning,” a beautifully expansive piece that is reminiscent of the great works of Van Morrison.

A mirror held up to the self and then turned around to the world. This record makes us wonder what has really happened in the last 100 years. And what will happen in the next 10. The soul of your country called and left you a message. Seven messages.

The former leader of the Texas cult-indie-Americana band Lift To Experience, Josh T. Pearson has an unusual musical vision. His songs drift beyond the breaking point until they are well past the country, folk and blues that initially inspired them. Pearson creates lonesome extended works that defy categorization. There’s a self-exorcism going on here that’s as naked and obsessive as the obsessions he sings about. Recorded in two nights in a Berlin studio, *Last of the Country Gentlemen* is a stirring masterwork. “Thou Art Loosed,” the three-minute intro, features singing that escapes into a wordless moan, into the ether of the big sky country. “Sweetheart I Ain’t Your Christ” chases its desperation for over 11 minutes. “Woman When I Raised Hell” adds a longing violin to address his alcoholism. Every song demands and deserves its excessive length. For the silences are every bit as shattering as the lyrics.

Toronto trio Austra works with a simple synth/drum/bass palette, rooted in the ‘80s sounds farmed both by commercial bands like Depeche Mode and a number of artists in the 4AD stable. Katie Stelmanis’ remarkable, lightly tremeloed voice has an ethereal quality, with a dark spirit and a lost-soul plaintiveness that is sturdier than, say, Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser. (The band has covered Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” a tune well suited to Stelmanis’ voice.) Synths are the core of Austra’s sound — they gurgle and purr (albeit, darkly and often fuzzily) when in dance mode, glide and glisten and glare in atmospherics mode; the crisp, skeletal drums of Maya Postepski and Dorian Wolf’s understated bass are the sturdy armature around which the tunes swirl. A song like “Beat and the Pulse” puts the band clearly in the electronica arena — it’s quiet, cool, slightly foreboding and sensual. But tracks like “Lose It” belie an ear for pop-dom, with a trilling, sing-along chorus and appealing — dare we say “happy” — dance beat. If you are utterly enchanted with Stelmanis’ (classically trained) voice, seek out her previous solo work.

Cass McCombs, singer-songwriter born in Northern California in 1977 and currently residing somewhere in that State, is set to release WIT’S END, his fifth-and-a-half album and third on Domino, on April 26th. The result of two years recording in various homes and studios in California, New York, New Jersey and Chicago, Wit’s End was produced by Cass with Ariel Rechtshaid, with whom he also created CATACOMBS. Sounds that conjure the colors purple and black, this is his darkest record to date. It seems he is going deeper into the mania of a man buried alive inside his self-made Catacombs, banging the stone walls, crying to be let out, and enjoying the quiet away from the outside world. However, he is not a man afraid of his own shadow, for in this environment of complete darkness, no shadows can be cast. This is a world of total Feeling. Here, words become a catalyst away from the slavery of arbitrary Thought and toward Feeling. “With each release, Cass McCombs has proven himself a wordsmith of great economy and precision. His compositions, often sparse and non-traditional, paired with his melodies and arrangements, transform into subtly revealing songs, filled with depth of emotion and meaning. It is that precision that would lead one to believe that all the autobiographical material a person would seek about McCombs is embedded in the songs (and you'd be right) but then he would insist after the fact that your deductions couldn't be more off the mark about what is truth and what is simply artistic expression. Light in its darkness, claustrophobic in its panorama, distant in its intimacy, present in its timelessness; WIT’S END should be given one’s full and undivided attention” -Kris Gillespie, Domino Records

It’s fitting that *Eye Contact* — the fifth studio album from Gang Gang Dance — found a home on the esteemed 4AD label; after all, some of the imprint’s earliest signings were purveyors of the sort of mystical/global amalgam favored by Gang Gang Dance. After the Brooklyn quartet injected their own unique brand of experimental music with a tougher street vibe — highlighting the electronic over the organic on 2009’s *Saint Dymphna* — here the band polishes the edges to a softer finish, each track flowing easily to the next in a mix of down-tempo beats, Bollywood melodies and Middle Eastern-inflected rhythms. The epic opener “Glass Jar” is a fantastic intro to the journey ahead, morphing from a fluttering, primordial space-trip to a climactic landing, a splash-down against an intense palette of sunset color and galactic promise. One of the most muscular tracks, the breathless “MindKilla,” has been given the remix treatment by his royal highness, Lee Scratch Perry, and is well worth seeking out.

If Bradford Cox’s first two albums under his Atlas Sound moniker are intimate patchworks of ambient bedroom pop, *Parallax* is where he fully emerges into the spotlight. Full-blown folk-rockers like “Mona Lisa” stand beside Technicolor art-pop masterpieces like “Te Amo” and “Terra Incognita,” rivaling his best work in Deerhunter and bridging his experimental and accessible sides with beautiful harmony. This album features one of indie rock’s most beloved voices coming into his own without losing his unique sense of grace.

Although Youth Lagoon’s masterfully crafted debut was recorded by a barely 20-year-old Trevor Powers in his bedroom, kitchen, and garage, it shares production values with seminal indie rock albums like Mercury Rev’s *Deserter’s Songs* and The Flaming Lips’ *The Soft Bulletin*. “Posters” opens with a whirlpool of ambient noise funneling under plodding bass and analog synthesizers before electric guitars and a drum machine get things going. In the following “Cannons,” Powers’ vulnerability is accented by slathering his vocals with so much reverb it sounds like he’s confessing his feelings from the depths of a wet cavern. He whistles alongside a keyboard in “Afternoon,” a lilting standout with dynamic layers building a kinetic composition; by the tune’s end it sounds like an oiled machine has run itself into the ground. But there’s more momentum throughout *The Year of Hibernation*; check out “July” with its gradual swells building like a set of hurricane waves or the faster-paced “Daydream,” which finds Powers slipping into a fantasy realm to escape the chronic anxiety that’s plagued him since childhood.

Taiwanese-born Canadian indie musician Alex Zhang Hungtai finally bequeaths *Badlands*, his debut full-length vocal album. Here Hungtai’s creativity culminates in lo-fi experimental post-rockabilly. “Speedway King” opens with a hypnotic mantra of minimally mechanical sounding drums that recall those of the band Suicide. Over these haunting rhythms Hungtai croons in a curious accent with the slippery inflections of a young Elvis Presley. “Horses” follows with similarly plodding rhythms as a ‘50s guitar tone reverberates through a continuous riff while Hungtai’s voice simmers down to sound like a young Roy Orbison singing on a David Lynch soundtrack. Hungtai ingeniously foregoes a guitar solo for a bridge where he instead implements manipulation of the spring in a reverb chamber to create some vintage sounding noise-rock that sounds both menacing and sexy. He whisper-sings in the libidinous “Sweet 17” over more riff repetition creating an atmosphere where those ‘50s juvenile delinquents from Karlheinz Weinberger’s photos run rampant. The serpentine “Hotel” closes with Hungtai returning to his spooky instrumental style.

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It’s been a crazy year for Cloud Nothings since they burst onto the music scene last winter. At the time main man Dylan Baldi was eighteen, living at home, and making lo-fi indie rock on a crappy computer in his parent’s suburban basement outside Cleveland. Since then, Cloud Nothings has released an EP and a handful of singles, and the band has put a few North American tours under its belt. With all the internet notoriety and their recent signing with Carpark, Cloud Nothings are now able to record somewhere besides the basement. For a producer, Dylan chose Baltimore’s Chester Gwazda, known for his work with Dan Deacon and Future Islands. Recorded this past August in a warehouse studio in Baltimore’s famed Copycat Building (home to the original Wham City and many of the city’s best musicians and artists), the self-titled Cloud Nothings album shines through with a crispness and boldness that Dylan has always envisioned. The songs now sound as they do live: full of energy, precision, and catchy bits. Dylan plays all the instruments on the album, but this time without the lo-fi scuzz. The excitement and emotion are practically jumping off the grooves.

The first full-length release by producer and multi-instrumentalist Ernest Greene helped define the sound of the chillwave movement. *Within and Without* is a heady mix of throbbing bass and cleverly layered synth sounds underpinning Greene\'s tender, faded vocals. The single \"You and I,\" featuring Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek, is a particular high point. But from the sumptuous melodies of \"Eyes Be Closed\" and the uplifting \"Amor Fati\" to the blissed-out haze of \"Soft\" and the title track, Greene\'s relaxed, sensual vibe creates a sustained mood of pleasurable nostalgia.

Washed Out is the operational alias for Atlanta, GA’s Ernest Greene, and on July 12th, we at Sub Pop Records will be releasing the first Washed Out full-length, Within and Without. We are excited about this, to an almost unseemly degree. Greene recorded Within and Without with Ben Allen, who, among a great many other things, co-produced Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavillion, Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere and Deerhunter’s Halcyon Digest. In 2009 Washed Out released two critically-acclaimed EPs; Life of Leisure (Mexican Summer) and High Times (Mirror Universe Tapes). Most recently, the Washed Out song “Feel It All Around,” from Life of Leisure, was chosen as the theme song for the new and very funny IFC series Portlandia, which features Saturday Night Live cast member Fred Armisen and Sleater-Kinney/Sub Pop alum and current Wild Flag member Carrie Brownstein. Early confirmed press for Within and Without includes a “Breaking Out” feature in the June issue of SPIN, as well as NPR “Song of the Day” coverage for the album’s lead track “Eyes Be Closed.”

In the wake of 2007’s spectral *White Chalk*, Polly Jean Harvey turned her songwriting focus outward. Dismayed by the direction of politics in her British homeland and around the world, she set to writing lyrics—fever-dreamish poems that used brutal imagery and borrowed lines from older music—that worked through her sadness and anger. Using three autoharps, each tuned to different, dissonant chord configurations, she transformed the verses into striking, sad songs. *Let England Shake* is an elegiac 21st-century reimagining of the protest album, an urgent call to end global cycles of war that hits harder because of its ghostly sonics. Harvey’s voice is the focal point of *Let England Shake*, although its timbre sharply contrasts with the shredded wailing that made her harsher ‘90s records so celebrated. On songs like the rain-spattered “The Glorious Land” and the swirling “Hanging on the Wire,” she’s in the upper reaches of her range, adding a pleading edge to her cutting observations; she hovers over the echoing chords of “On Battleship Hill” in an unnervingly beautiful way, heightening the horrors once committed on that site. “The Words That Maketh Murder,” meanwhile, accentuates its grimy images with bleating brass and a snippet of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” that simutaneously calls back to the post-World War II era’s seemingly endless promise and mourns the present. *Let England Shake* evokes the fog of war while puncturing it with potent reminders of its bloody reality.