Viking's Choice

As we near the year's end, #NowPlaying is recommending songs that slipped through the cracks, but remain in our headphones.

Moin is a post-punk trio with deep ties to London's electronic music scene — Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead make up Raime with percussionist Valentina Magaletti (Tomaga, Vanishing Twin) — and you can hear that precision infiltrate its debut album, Moot! The exclamation point in the album title is well earned; this is a dagger play of riff wreckage, with bass lines that groove as much as they open portals to other dimensions. The band exists somewhere in the deconstructed '90s punk nexus of Fugazi, Unwound and Shellac, but its high-definition payoff is somehow more psychedelic. For me, Magaletti's drumming is the draw, especially on a track like "Crappy Dreams Count" – the claustrophobic riff repeats and mutates throughout, but the drums shiver and shake with the electricity of a drum machine that's grown limbs.

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Aspidistrafly – singer-songwriter April Lee and producer Ricks Ang – traffics in a lush tranquility, attuned to the ever-changing movement of age and landscape. A Little Fable, released a decade ago, found a second life via fashionable fairies on TikTok, but now the Singapore-based duo returns to deepen its abstract, pastoral beauty with Altar of Dreams (out Feb. 25). In its gauzy-yet-glossy arrangement of flute, strings, clarinet, saxophone and piano, "The Voice of Flowers" feels less like the wispy Vashti Bunyan influence of Aspidistrafly's past, approaching something more like an ambient Adele ballad ornamented by environmental field recordings. Lee doesn't belt out her romantic sorrow here, but hangs it in the chasm of her lower register, to survey "the furthest crevices of the earth / We voyaged through death and birth."

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You don't simply listen to Sweeping Promises — you move, you groove, you strike a pose with an effortlessly cool 'tude. The post-punk band's Hunger for a Way Out was released in the middle of lockdown, but every song was made for punk-packed dance parties.

"Pain Without a Touch," a one-off single co-released by Richmond's Feel It Records and Sub Pop (the band's new worldwide label), retains all the elements that made the 2020 debut pop: a hard-picked punk bass line, crisp drumming and Caufield Schnug's sparse-yet-splashy guitar work as Lira Mondal belts over a mono mix with an audible mile-wide smile. But what the duo's learned in a short year (and across several different bands together) is structural drama; even as "Pain Without a Touch" pulses with incessant ecstasy, Mondal mixes her powerful vibrato with percussive sighs and, after a brief guitar solo, gets a lil' bit softer now (a la "Shout") to punctuate "some type of new invention / To ease up off this tension." It's a subtle reinvention, but redoubles Sweeping Promises' exuberant energy.

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"It's only gotten worse!" What better way to bellow our collective angst about the still-very-much-in-progress pandemic than with screamo? Overo's title track contribution to Another Year in Hell — a 4-way split featuring Punch On!, Zochor and Coma Regalia — is an exasperated thrust into Zoom-fatigued abyss. The Houston band features members from Perfect Future and Football, etc. in a '90s post-hardcore mode somewhere between I Hate Myself and Rainer Maria: chugging riffs and hoarse yelps in tandem with twinkly arpeggios and pop-punky vocal hooks. In just a couple years, Overo's quickly nestled into a nostalgic screamo sound, but "Another Year in Hell" is a great example of how dynamic personalities can reinvigorate memory. Case in point: the accompanying video, a tongue-in-cheek slideshow presentation graphing the rise of false screamo, egg punk's market saturation over chain punk and the ultimate screamo formula: riff, noodly bit, riff, scream, breakdown, repeat.

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For the first minute of "Magnolia" all you hear is Michael Cantor's voice, overdubbed using a harmonizer, the same effect used on the one Imogen Heap song that makes everyone cry. Cantor, who records as The Goodbye Party, is usually surrounded by peppy-yet-mopey indie rock, but on the 20-minute Stray Sparks EP he weaves ambient experiments into lowercase songs that recall the quirkier back half of the Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. "Magnolia," with its pitch-shifted harmony, lays bare the winsome sadness of Cantor's sweet voice as "love rewinds itself." Then, like the pink and white flowers that bloom from magnolia trees, shimmering synths spring into high-definition, reflecting the awe of a new day.

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Diglossia is a split dialect in a single community — code-switching between high and low language. The decades-spanning Pelt has always been instrumental, yet in its pursuit of cosmic ecstasy through various folk music forms, achieves a musical diglossia. (Pelt's members also make up the like-minded Black Twig Pickers and Spiral Joy Band.) The 21-minute opening track from Reticence / Resistance, Pelt's first album in nine years since the Jack Rose tribute Effigy, seeks enlightenment through Patrick Best's hypnotically frenzied piano, Mikel Dimmick's droning harmonium and Nathan Bowles' bowed banjo and delicately ornate percussion (heard mostly at the track's denouement). Mike Gangloff's plunging fiddle is the buoy bobbing in and out of these choppy waters, like hillbilly drone maestro Henry Flynt jamming to a transcendent Alice Coltrane improvisation. It's a thrilling piece of music that stays in one place, yet brightens every corner.

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Joy Electric was truly unlike anyone or anything in '90s and '00s synth-pop: an all-analog eccentric in every way, from his hardware and fashion sense to his pouty falsetto and high-fantasy (but also very Biblical) lyrics. Ronnie Martin (brother to Starflyer 59's Jason Martin) dropped the moniker long ago, and returns to the Electric vibe under his given name in a reclamation of sorts.

"From the Womb of the Morning, The Dew of Your Youth Will Be Yours," a title and chorus taken directly from Psalm 110, nods at the heavy synthwave textures that have become so popular in the past decade, not to mention a heightened sense of M83-style pop drama. But spend any time with 1994's Melody or 2001's Legacy: The White Songbook and there's a clear through line from Martin's inquisitive synth reveries to the neon-lit profiles that litter Bandcamp with '80s nostalgia. Dazzlingly complex in its glittering arrangement, pushed to the edge by hard-hitting drum machine beats, and featuring a vocal delivery both aged and sure, this is a fabulous reintroduction and discovery.

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The power of Endless Boogie compels you to take 'er easy, friend. Crack open something cold, settle into a bloozy groove and choogle all night long. At least that's how it feels when you put on a record by New York's finest and scuzziest rockers. The 22-minute opening track from double-album Admonitions is a pretty dang good indication of what guitarist Paul Major and pals have in store: The grunted lyrics at the top are little more than rock and roll formality, as "The Offender" is the vehicle for a buckin' ZZ Top blues riff that never changes course, only allows Endless Boogie's rusted-out muscle car to cruise into gritty terrain with a cigarette-smoked hypnosis. Major, Jesper Eklow and Matt Sweeney trade guitar solos – some more fuzzed and zonked than others – but drummer Harry Druzd and bassist Mike Bones are locked into a zone of minimalist blues euphoria.

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Emma Ruth Rundle's voice will pierce your chest and keep on going. Usually, she's accompanied by moody, doomed rock arrangements or, in the case of last year's May Our Chambers Be Full, essentially fronting the metal band Thou with arena-sized results. Rundle's new album, Engine of Hell out today, removes the heavy atmosphere to create her own, sticking to piano, acoustic guitar and little else besides her songs.

Rundle pens a grace note into "Body" that returns as a musical character throughout the funereal ballad; it sounds like a mistake, but the piano's ornamental blip is meant to draw your attention to how the music moves the narrative forward. In this case, as an observer of death or loss, but then becoming the object of grief itself. "I can't feel your arms around me," she repeatedly sings at the song's quiet close, "anymore."

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The pedal steel is full of possibility. That's especially the case in the atmospheric music made by Chuck Johnson and Daniel Lanois, or the improvised explorations of Susan Alcorn. For decades, Dave Easley's been in the background, specifically with the much celebrated Brian Blade Fellowship, even as the jazz scene's reverence for his playing has loomed large.

Byway of the Moon, out next month, corrects Easley's scant discography as a bandleader with Catherine Pineda (Wurlitzer electric piano), Chad Taylor (drums) and Dave Tranchina (double bass). "Jesus Maria" simmers the regal, brass-forward Christmas carol composed by Carla Bley into a sunset. Easley is nimble on the strings and motors of his instrument, gliding, picking and ascending the melody with glowing pointillism. It's easy to float away in his glissando, but Easley returns to Earth just as Pineda takes a spirited piano solo warmed by the Wurlizter's hum and the rhythm section's spacious scene setting.

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Lambs, our Christmas queen has blessed us again. Mariah Carey has given unto us two Christmas albums, a holiday special and, of course, the eternal classic "All I Want for Christmas is You," but never a snowflaked slow jam. "Fall in Love at Christmas" is a carol for grown folks several seasons into their love and the kind of sumptuous torch song that Carey hasn't sung in a minute. She delivers topline melody and sinuous runs in classic Carey form, and Khalid turns out to be a great duet partner: The 23-year-old R&B; singer knows no one can outdo Carey, so his harmonies add just the right amount of tinsel. But recognizing that lovers long into a relationship gotta balance romance with the little ones, "Fall in Love at Christmas" cleverly turns on a dime to a full-on Kirk Franklin stomp, as Carey's melisma decorates the gospel rave-up.

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Parenthood is a litany of failures somehow balanced out by participation trophies – metaphorical and physical, both cheap yet meaningful. OK, it's more than that, but the daily grind of professional and personal life (often the lack thereof) can amplify the sleep deprivation and frustration that come with the satisfying giggles and "I love you'"s. Rosie Thomas, who hasn't released an album in nine years, is a mom of three, and returns for a series of singles she dubs Lullabies for Parents. Previous collaborators and friends like Sufjan Stevens, David Bazan, Iron & Wine, Dawn Landes and others will contribute.

On "It'll Be Alright," Thomas plays the role of doula to parental worry and doubt. The piano is sparse, fluffed by a cozy pillow of ambient strings and dinging bells, but the center is her voice – quiet and maybe about to cry, but determined. But as the arrangement builds and Thomas repeats the title with equal reassurance and reluctance – like anytime you tell someone it'll be alright, without truly knowing – she offers this saving grace, in hopes that this loving work will grow: "Maybe in some ways, showing you my flaws / Will make you kinder to yourself when you see yours."

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I've said it before and I'll say it again: Fire-Toolz makes much more sense when you accept that Fire-Toolz doesn't. Or, at the very least, when you know that the Chicago wizard's highly detailed electro-metallic fusion comes from a sprawling sense of taste, as well as from the way everything clashes and gets cozy together.

The 78-minute double album Eternal Home is, as you might guess, quite stuffed. It's also brain-twistingly vibrant, so here's a way in for the curious: "[ Maternal ♥ Havening ]," featuring a squid-monster music video in both 2D and 360° VR, distills the blitzed Fire-Toolz ethos down to a two-minute banger. Black-metal screams and glitched vampiric beats rise to the surface, but cut into the hyperplane of the song and you'll find an effervescent melody that plays tricks on the ears; blink and you'll miss the modulation that heightens the drama. And yet the track is bookended by serene synths and RPG-inspired narration, in the process setting aside a meditative space to join Fire-Toolz in her ascension.

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Fuubutsushi has already released three albums in 2021, each part of the ambient-jazz quartet's tetralogy based on the seasons. Matthew Sage, Chris Jusell, Chaz Prymek and Patrick Shiroishi formed the group remotely (across different U.S. states) during the pandemic, editing improvisations into abstract yet accessible pieces of synesthetic nostalgia.

"Good Sky Day" stretches out the group's purpose in a 25-minute piece for Longform Editions, a Sydney-based label that focuses on deep listening experiences over extended periods of time. Jussel's melancholic violin plays the main character in a story that flies through cumulonimbus clouds out of a Miyasaki film. The music's free-flowing mood is a wonder to behold in its hail and thunder, heard in dissonant clashes of noisy drone and flickering feedback, only resolve in languid slide guitar and field recordings of children playing on the beach.

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Your mileage may vary, but pop music should explode on contact. Let the melodies glide into the stratosphere on a Hypercolor rocket, sure, but there also needs to be a collision of sight and sound. Dummy's "Daffodils" is a groovy refinement of the LA band's influences — namely, the unclassifiable and impossibly cool pop music of Stereolab, Broadcast and Silver Apples — set against trebly guitar jangle, droning organ, slyly funky drums and conversational vocals between Nathan O'Dell (formerly of the Baltimore dream-pop band Wildhoney) and Emma Maatman. "Daffodils" has a gelatinous-yet-static quality: It drones in place even as it mutates in real time — especially in the last 30 seconds, when a squeal of feedback announces the deliriously loud noise-pop denouement.

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Ghösh makes irreverent, high-energy, boot-stomping rave music that sounds as if the entirety of the Hackers soundtrack got melted down and poured into a punk-shaped mold. In its 2 minutes and 20 seconds, "Slamafied Buddhafied Funk" turns the dance floor into a mosh pit; it smashes Zachary Fairbrother's blitzed breakbeats against a wall of distortion (guitar and otherwise) and emcee Symphony Spell's exhilarating flow. But it's also the only track from the Alien Nation EP to feature the duo in a rowdy tête-à-tête, as they glow each other up in a body-rockin' boomshakalaka slam dunk that's equal parts bravado ("I see you got the funk / And you wield it like a weapon"), liberation ("Free some asses, bust some minds out of jail") and defiance ("No respects, 'cause I'm not a man / Riot Grrrl Funkenstein / That is my jam").

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Maria Elena Silva's voice floats like a feather swishing this way and that, painting invisible shapes with the wind. Her music, spacious and exploratory, does the same. "December," from the Wichita singer-songwriter's new album Eros (out Friday), starts as one thing and blooms and bursts as miniature revelations expand.

"I tell the truth too much these days / Some things are better left unsaid," Silva opens amid sparsely plucked electric guitar, her napkin-scrawled confession crumpled as soon as it's sung. Hammond organ drones and busy-yet-gentle drums enter the frame as sonic doulas, while a bass clarinet and second guitar lend a steady foundation to Silva's deepest anguish. The LA-assembled improv ensemble's arrangement can feel unsettled at times — the immense and intricate quiet of Talk Talk's Laughing Stock or Julie Tippetts' Sunset Glow come to mind — but is empathetic to the world shifting beneath Silva's feet.

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Eivind Aarset does everything in his power to make his guitar not sound like an instrument with six strings and a body tethered to earth. That's been the case for decades, netting the Norwegian gigs with like-minded sound sculptors Nils Petter Molvaer and Jon Hassell. "Manta Ray, or Soft Spot" — from Phantasmagoria, or A Different Kind of Journey — shimmers just below the ocean's surface with a translucent hypnosis. Over seven minutes, the ambient-jazz 4-Tet (along with guests) undulates the piece with resonant gongs, vibraphone, Arve Henriksen's fluttering trumpet and groaning, synth-like transmissions from – at least, what we have to assume is – Aarset's guitar. This is music that responds to the movement of its ever-changing environment that, especially, in the final minutes, opens to the sudden whims of euphoria.

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Sometimes you come across album artwork so sick and so silly that you have no choice but to smash the play button. Friction's seven-track Conditioned to Chaos features a cigar-chomping, guitar-wielding CN Tower tossing fireballs at a scorched city, a Toronto Raptor cradling (saving?) a streetcar and an anthropomorphized egg falling to its certain death. What it all means doesn't matter once you listen to "Take It or Leave It," a two-minute bruiser that heaves a hardcore groove with gruff bravado and subtle delay pedal riffs. The track is as catchy as it is circle-pit-stirring, only amplified by its back half, when a second vocalist adds a smeared sneer to the frontperson's swaggering bark.

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Calling Kadhja Bonet's music any one thing does her kaleidoscopic idiosyncrasies a disservice. That was especially the case on 2018's Childqueen, a low-key stunner that was never showy, but dazzlingly ornate. "For You," similarly, is deceptive in its synth-forward arrangement, but comes about Bonet's genre-less explorations with an ear towards a self-sensuous hook that curls up inside your psyche. The sonic palette – sparkling synths and drum machine draped in dreamy atmosphere – screams neon '80s, but the instantly hummable melody has all the gothic drama of The Cure's "Lovesong."

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Julie Doiron, right from the jump, captures the shrugging optimism of a blank slate: "There was never a plan / No need to explain / And here I am starting over again." The singer-songwriter's first solo album in nine years, I Thought of You, opens with this top-down road-tripper of an easy rocker – the kind of song heard as the credits roll, our protagonist heading nowhere in particular. "You Gave Me the Key," with its shufflin' rhythm section and a bendy line harmonized by double guitar, choogles along to Doiron's bright rasp tinged with a touch of life's uncertainty.

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When he's not collaborating remotely with the ambient-jazz quartet Fuubutsushi, L.A. composer Patrick Shiroishi makes all manner of exploratory music: drone, ambient, free-jazz, black metal and noise all sorta live and breathe together. "To Kill A Wind-Up Bird," off his upcoming solo album Hidemi, layers saxophone and woodwinds in a frantic, yet controlled splatter. (The album is a tribute to his grandfather, named Hidemi, a survivor of the Japanese-American internment camps during WWII.) Staccato sax shakes down the melody's twittering counterpoint, leading to a mournful adagio and the closing, a Peter Brötzmann-like blast of bravado. The song's heightened antics are rather like a classic cartoon — pride before fall, restoration — which is fitting, given music video director Dylan Pecora's slightly unsettling (but funny) beat-for-beat puppet show.