Winds Howling

Charley Crockett — Clovis
Released July 3

This was a not-bad serving of nostalgia-inflected country music that only occasionally sparkled, mostly skating by on good vibes alone. A few of the rockers rose to the occasion (‘The Hallelujah Trail,’ ‘Country Music,’ ‘Down By Law’), and a notable darker tone showed through on ‘Top Hand’ and a menacing, sort of Nick Cave-y cover of Johnny Cash’s ‘Don’t Take Your Guns To Town.’ ‘Image of a Woman’ employed many of the exact same sonic hooks as my favorite Crockett song, ‘Midnight Run,’ but was nowhere near as good. ‘Clovis’ was an interesting diversion, a western-soundtracky instrumental composed by Stephen Barber with a good, ominous jaw harp part. Songs occasionally overstayed their welcome, and the production sometimes got in the way (see ‘Eagle and the Crow’), but I was never particularly offended — mostly just disappointed the album wasn’t making more of an impression.

Sienna Spiro — Visitor
Released July 3

This is a showcase for “indie girl voice,” that strange accent that stretches vowels into extra syllables, underpronounces everything else and exists nowhere on Earth, so where it comes from I don’t know.

The main distinctive feature of Spiro’s voice is that it’s always on the edge of cracking, which sounds deeply emotive in a five-second snippet but quickly gets old when it goes on for an entire song. It almost sounds like her microphone is cutting out when you’re only hearing half of every word. Here’s my transcription of the beginning of track 2, “We’re Not In Love”:

aybe its the owa

aybe its the ay you ooked at me

now i been devowrr

theres no way that i could ever lee

These songs are mostly odes to submissive man-needing, a “fallen trad wife” shtick familiar from Lana Del Rey, a yearning for a man tinged with a yearning for patriarchy. It’s all there on the album cover.

The second half of the album picks things up a bit as Spiro lifts her voice for a few impassioned ballads with straightforwardly good, non-cringe lyrics. The title track is one of these. A couple others grew on me on the second and third listen: ‘He’s Not My Baby, I’m His’ is groovy enough to raise it up a notch, creepy age-gap lyrics notwithstanding, and one song, ‘Time, You & Me,’ got stuck in my head for most of Friday. But this one wasn’t for me.

Madeon — Victory
Released June 26

This is a shift away from Madeon’s poppy and optimistic style of electronic music towards something louder and harder-driving. A few of the synth leads were satisfyingly rough and sawtoothed (‘Car Crash Baby,’ ‘Red Jacket’), and I caught feelings of ‘Invaders Must Die’-era The Prodigy at times, especially on the lead track ‘Hi!’ A few vocal parts had genuine promise (‘Dancing On Your Grave,’ ‘Chaos Magic’), but the strongest vocals are paradoxically the most shrouded in distortion and electronica, so that they sound like overdriven samples of songs by somebody else.

The Madeon magic has been steadily dribbling away since his 2015 full-length album debut. It isn’t entirely gone, but it’s nearing undetectable levels on this album.

Pond — Terrestrials
Released June 19

Pond is channeling various strains of underground ‘80s music — to my untrained ear much of it is stuff like New Order, The Cure or Love and Rockets. The vocals are theatrical and gothy, the guitars are detuned, and the margins are sprinkled with synth stabs and cheesy sound effects. The album never slowed down for the first five tracks, launching from one banger to the next (‘Casuarina,’ ‘Through the Heather’) before hitting a snoozer (‘The Fatal Shore’). Then came four more tracks that were somewhat less cohesive than what came before but seemed more strongly rooted as pieces of songwriting, rather than pieces of studiocraft. I only took notice of any of the lyrics during the last two songs (‘Personal Hell,’ ‘Nashville (I’m Dying)’).

This album was a good listen, but pretty low on songs I foresee wanting to hear again. The one thing that really stuck with me, that I’ve gone back to listen to, was the chorus of ‘Through the Heather.’ It’s made up of two parts — a soft little synth line and a two-note vocal part alternating up and down — that sound so good together.

Boards of Canada — Inferno
Released May 29

A fair serving of Boards of Canada. You might hope there’s more to say, given it’s only their second album in twenty years, but I don’t have much. It sounds a lot like the Boards of Canada music I spent a lot of time shuffling while playing games as a teenager. Tracks are either entirely synth-driven or led by vocal samples, mostly of normal human speech, lightly chopped to fit the rhythm. It’s hard to get much meaning out of these garbled, context-free vocal snippets, but many of them seem like the sort of religious ramblings you might hear if you accidentally switch to AM radio. They make for a weird sort of music, but the Boards are good at making it fairly groovy. The album took all the way until track 12 to hit me with something strikingly good: the sitar-like synth lead in “Blood in the Labyrinth,” which is by far the standout track.