Reading Mark Richardson‘s latest Resonant Frequency column, which is all about BASS, and our perceptions of and reactions to it, I was charmed to learn that his favourite song of all time is Aphex Twin’s “Flim“. It’s a gorgeous composition from a musician who often prefers to alarm the listener, and it also represents electronic music at its most elegantly sequenced—calculated, even.

Thinking about “Flim” in such a way made me jump to maths, and from there to Spoon’s “My Mathematical Mind“, which is the rigid arithmetic to Aphex Twin’s differential equation. Or, if you consider the way it builds and grows and complexifies, it’s more like an exponential function.

No verse or chorus in sight, Britt Daniel plies layer upon layer as the song wears on, rocketing it skyward at an ever-increasing pace. Atop an octave-jumping piano drone, we get skronky guitar-work, frazzled brass and crashing percussion. And then, right at the end, the elements coalesce and the track coalesces into serenity, like the eventual solving of an equation. How very mathematical indeed.

McDonald went on to found the Doobie Brothers, but not before he did backup vocals on classics like “Peg” and “I Got The News“. And McDonald’s trademark pipes get around even today, cropping up now and again on other people’s songs. In 2009 he appeared on a B-side version of Grizzly Bear‘s “While You Wait For The Others“, which showcases his distinctive voice in a lead setting. The original version was led by Daniel Rossen, who has a pretty honeyed voice, but McDonald has a beefier go at it, and then tackles the complex vocal arrangement in the song’s final minute, augmenting it with soaring accents.

More recently still, DFA quasi-heirs Holy Ghost! brought in McDonald for the closing song on their eponymous debut, “Some Children“. Like many of the songs on Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest album, “Some Children” has a natty choral arrangement, but Holy Ghost! are totally different in every other way. No intricate baroque pop in sight, they make sleek electro-by-numbers which can come across rather characterless. They know their way round a disco bassline, and the DFA production team gives it the requisite layers of vintage Clavinet and close-miked live drums, but it can veer off into anonymity.

Not so “Some Children”, which is reined in by McDonald’s lead vocals. On this occasion, he makes a sweet song more sultry—his curious phrasing has the effect of virtually slowing the verses down, before unleashing a richly textured extended outro, with his harmonies piercing through the stacked choir. It’s a really lovely, fitting finale which restores my confidence in the band—and pays Michael McDonald’s heating bills.

Why do McDonald’s vocal talents still appeal? He doesn’t have an equivalent in contemporary popular music, which has increasingly become the territory of more polarised singers (dramatic falsetto on the one hand, pained baritone on the other). Moreover, the kind of complex arrangements he specialised in has become the preserve of composers, and not multi-taskers (think of Nico Muhly, for example). So, perhaps when a band goes hunting for a man who can do it all, and add an inimitable personality to a song, it’s unsurprising they alight upon him. If that’s the case, go forth and multiply.

At his hoarsest, Dylan Baldi, the mainman of Cloud Nothings, sounds like a pained cross between Anthony Kiedis and Thom Yorke. And there’s a bleak, growling desolation to this cut from their forthcoming third album Attack On Memory which is reminiscent of both the Red Hot Chili Peppers circa Blood Sugar Sex Magik and Radiohead circa The Bends.

“No Future/No Past” is the album’s opener; like the rest of the album it is engineered by Steve Albini, who gives it a bottomless, crisp and emotionally detached vibe that recalls his work on Nirvana’s In Utero. There are woody backing vocals which sound like Tuvan throat singing, and the guitars sound like sandpapered iron filings. I don’t think the rest of the album is identical in mood, but you and I can go and check on this here.

Steve Albini’s Shellac exists as an economical vehicle for his misanthropic persona. And their compositions don’t get more transparent than “Watch Song”, which appeared on the album 1000 Hurts, released in 2000.

“From the way that you behave,
It is clear, to me,
You would like to have one too!”

The song’s narrator has bought a digital watch and, such is his aggravation at its persistent beeping, he wishes to extract vengeance on either the device itself, or the man who sold it to him. Sounds like a good reason for a fight, especially against the backdrop of Shellac’s caustic, ricocheting post-hardcore. The snare cracks during the verses sound almost combustible, and the unresolved, atonal chords which pierce through the gaps between Albini’s phrasing either signal the impending fireworks, or serve as a sonic nod to the “POW!” and “ZOK!” of the Batman television series in the 1960s.

I haven’t yet seen Steve McQueen’s latest film, Shame, but I think I know an album that would work well as a soundtrack to it. Like McQueen, Matthew Dear is in a stable relationship but chose to make an uncomfortable work that flirts with sleaze and moral degradation—Black City is a punishing, oily album that demands total subjugation. Its centrepiece, “You Put A Smell On Me” (see above), is heartless and relentless, rather like the anti-hero in McQueen’s film.

Would you look at that? It looks, and sounds, stunning. And I guarantee you’ll see every white balloon popping in super-high-definition somewhere in the film.

And now I must go and wipe away the fresh-sprung tears.

In a previous, improbable life, Matthew Dear wrote “Hands Up For Detroit“, a small vocal phrase of which wound up serving as the backbone of the mother of all exercise anthems. Then he flirted with virtually every kind of music he loved, topping all he’d done before with 2010′s Black City, a sleazy slice of downtempo minimalism with a spiritual debt to Bowie’s Low (profile).

This year, he returns with the long-player Beams, which is preluded by the Headcage EP. The title track (see above) takes the noirish, oily grooves of Black City and gently sculpts them into something more softly polyphonic. The song bounces and trots where it might previously have oozed. The beat is more muffled too, a step away from the clattering, misfiring drum machines of old. And Dear’s vocals—always the Marmite factor in his work—are, while still digitally ameliorated, there to invoke a very different mood. The smearing lead voice is backed up a ghostly beatbox more in the vein of some of the songs on 2007′s Asa Breed.

In the final third, a synth patch not dissimilar to Fever Ray’s ethnic flutes [1] plays a lead riff which provides a brief and subtle nod to rave. All too soon, it vanishes, and the breathy outro makes sure the take-home message is a sensual one.

1. “Headcage” is actually co-produced by Fever Ray’s frequent collaborators, Van Rivers and The Subliminal Kid.

From one of those albums released too early in 2011 and therefore destined to be overlooked by end-of-year discourse (myself included, guilty as charged).
“Rabbit Will Run” is the melancholy centrepiece of Kiss Each Other Clean: a multi-part contemplation on inevitability which shuffles through several styles but never outstays its welcome.
It’s the kind of thing NPR listeners fawn over—no bad thing.

Omar S’s brand of Detroit techno isn’t as hubristic as his public image but it can be as threatening. A worker at the city’s Ford factory, he makes music as efficiently as a modern assembly-line, but it’s also imbued with soul. On “Day“, about which I have written before, he even samples the Supremes.

This song, the title track of his most recent long-player, is characteristic of his output: the rhythm is clackety but metronomic; there are murmurings of synth that wend their way through the track; at the apotheosis, resonant pings bounce around the two channels. Like everything else he makes, it’s masterful.

When I saw Prinzhorn Dance School (officially designated the band least likely to be signed to a major record label) at a 10th anniversary party for DFA Records (whoosh, thump, namedrop) I was surprised by how much more, in the flesh, they reminded me of Gang of Four. There is of course a shared caustic sense of humour to both bands’ work, but seen on stage the music itself melds with my memories of the original post-punk poster-boys.

On their forthcoming second album, Clay Class, I think there’s to be a subtle shift from the brittleness of their debut, towards a more flowing style that’s occasionally interrupted by the shouty bits of old. If you will, it sounds a bit more informed by Gang of Four. No bad thing, if you found their old stuff a bit too primal.

The second song to be teased out from Clay Class is “Happy in Bits“, which lopes along quite a melodic little riff. The bass-line is as primitive as ever, which is how I like it, but it’s lower in the mix; lower than Tobin Prinz and Suzi Horn’s angry/coital vocals, at least.