We at Monster are truly passionate about music.
To that end, we present this irregular series of transmissions.
These are albums that have caught our ears recently.
Bad as Me is Tom Waits' first collection of new material in seven years. He and Kathleen Brennan -- wife, co-songwriter, and production partner -- have, at the latter's insistence, come up with a tight-knit collection of short tunes, the longest is just over four minutes. This is a quick, insistent, and woolly aural road trip full of compelling stops and starts. While he's kept his sonic experimentation -- especially with percussion tracks -- Waits has returned to blues, rockabilly, rhythm & blues, and jazz as source material. Instead of sprawl and squall, we get chug and choogle.
Brennan's instincts were dead-on: it was time for a set of brief, tightly written and arranged songs -- something we haven't actually heard from Waits. Bad as Me is an aural portrait of all the places he's traveled as a recording artist, which is, in and of itself, illuminating and thoroughly enjoyable.

--All Music.com

    Stone Rollin’, Raphael Saadiq's second Columbia album, cuts straight to the chase. It begins with a tambourine-accented pounding groove à la Sly & the Family Stone's “Dance to the Music,” adding grinding rhythm guitar and making a plea of a different kind: one of co-dependent desperation, served up Holland-Dozier-Holland style. Indeed, Stone Rollin' is a little less clean-cut than 2008’s The Way I See It, tending to veer from pure mid-‘60s Motown for a more expansive approach that incorporates a number of late-‘60s and early-‘70s sounds, including Holland-Dozier-Holland’s grittier post-Motown work and early Philly soul, not to mention an apparent nod to Ray Charles on “Day Dreams.”

 

    Like The Way I See It, this is a big production. Saadiq plays the majority of the drums, guitars, and keyboards, but he is joined by dozens of string and horn players and a handful of crucial collaborators, including past associates and session legends Jack Ashford (percussion) and Paul Riser (string arrangements), as well as Earth, Wind & Fire's Larry Dunn and Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagano. These songs are tied together by the Mellotron, a vintage keyboard -- commonly associated with psychedelic and progressive rock recordings, but not foreign to soul -- that evokes diseased flutes and wheezing strings. Saadiq tends to use the instrument for shading, but it is central to the drama of “Go to Hell” (where it is played by Amp Fiddler), and it adds a melancholic tint to the otherwise happy-go-lucky “Movin’ Down the Line.”

 

    The songs that do not leave an immediate and lasting impression make moves on a subconscious level. “Good Man,” the most compelling song on the album, works both ways. A mini-epic of trouble-man soul, somewhere along the lines of Ohio Players' “Our Love Has Died” and a missing cut off David Porter's Victim of the Joke?, its elegant misery is instantly striking, enhanced by Taura Stinson's pouty guest vocal. After a few listens, that point where Saadiq reaches a falsetto, at the end of “So much better now, without you” -- just as the horns punch in -- raises the goose pimples and does so with successive plays. The album does not merely transcend period-piece status. It’s the high point of Saadiq’s career, his exceptional output with Tony! Toni! Toné! included.

 

--All Music.com
    A Los Angeles based band obsessed with the musical history of Cambodia, Dengue Fever have spent four albums staking out a unique place in the world of rock music.  Acting simultaneously as musicians, historians  and cultural ambassadors, Dengue Fever have worked to preserve and build upon the brief but vibrant explosion of Cambodian 60's era psychedelic rock nearly obliterated by the Khmer Rouge.

    Their new album, Cannibal Courtship, is their finest work to date.  The band careens wildly through the songs, with surf rock rhythms, fuzzy guitars, brash horns and ubiquitous organs becoming ever more hypnotic.  Lead singer Chhom Nimol's intoxicatingly beautiful voice moves deftly between English and Khmer, cascading over the cacophony.  In "Cement Slippers" she trades wicked barbs with guitarist Zac Holtzman, singing, "My boyfriend loves everything about me/except the endless hours of therapy." 

    The most satisfying tracks, like the mystical, delirious "Uku" or explosive title track, prove Dengue Fever to be more than mere archaeologists of a lost musical past.  Though respectful of the past, they're fully in the present, and they're one of the most intriguing bands out there.
    It's hard for me to remain objective about Lucinda Williams.  She's a figure of such immense talent, such raw emotive power, that she frequently drives me to hyperbole.  None the less, her new album Blessed is tremendous.

    Have you ever noticed how perfect the beginnings of her albums are?  Like the teardrop of warm, liquid guitar that opens "Fruits of My Labor" or the stuttering misfire that jerks the listener into "Real Love."  "Buttercup", he opening track of Blessed, is no exception.  The drums hit hard and launch you into the kind of righteous kiss-off song she can pull off like no one else.

    The most surprising thing about Blessed is the tone.  Striking for an artist so comfortable in the realm of the the heartbroken and down-and-out, Blessed is permeated by something that might very well be optimism.  Which isn't to say there aren't harrowing moments, in particular a wrenching song about the suicide of her friend and fellow songwriter Vic Chesnutt.  But the hopefulness of the album is because of, not in spite of, the terrible moments.  It's the all the more valuable for being honest and hard won.