BOOM! Today! Brand new eMusic Selects form our old friends Army Navy! The last Army Navy record was a bit of a surprise hit on eMusic, and so when the band found themselves label-less around the time of record number two, adding them to our Selects Roster was a no-brainer.

And, man oh man, did they ever deliver. They somehow made a second record that topped their debut, fueled by a tumultuous relationship that tossed around frontman Justin Kennedy over the course of 2009 (he and I talk a bit more about it in this interview).

If you loved the shimmering guitars and hooks-for-days approach of the band’s debut, you’ll find even more to love here: angelic choruses, pristine hooks and heartsick lyrics, all making for the absolute ideal summer record. Download free track “Ode to Janice Melt” to get a taste, then plunge into the album in its entirety. Army Navy! Selects! The Last Place!!! GO TO TOWN!!!

Kitchen Sessions: Killer Mike performs “Burn” from 3 Little Digs on Vimeo.

I know there are a lot of people who feel that hip-hop would be a lot more accessible to them it if retained the sociopolitical edge it had in the late 1980s and early ’90s. It’s not something I feel, personally, but I sympathize with that viewpoint, and when I end up in conversations with those people, I usually end up recommending Killer Mike. (He actually calls himself “Mike Bigga” now, but I haven’t adjusted.) He’s an Atlanta rapper who hung with Outkast for awhile (he was Big Boi’s sidekick of sorts roundabout Stankonia.) As you will see in the above video, he has a talent for speaking his mind. This song, “Burn,” is off of his latest album Pl3dge, and it is built off a monstrous sample of Funkadelic’s “You and Your Folks and Me And My Folks.” It is straight revolution music, and it should make Talib Kweli sputter up his lukewarm Americano.

Shades of OK Computer and Teen Dream, PJ Harvey has recorded a video for every single song on her 2011 landmark Let England Shake. This album already feels like an old friend, and I sometimes think it’s the most singular statement that will be made this year, and spending the morning watching them only reinforced that.

I’ve watched several, and I must say, they fit the album’s tone pretty spectacularly — quaint, deeply English, equal parts beautiful and mournful. Many of them find an inexplicably unsettling image and stick with it — a skeleton in a glass case at a museum, for instance, or an empty, manically turning Ferris Wheel. The much- vaunted English countryside is filmed with an equally loving and critical eye: There are breathtaking shots of stark, untouched beaches, but also mist rising off of unpretty, hardened mud trenches and spotted debris washing ashore and plastic bags fluttering in the wind. Shots of Polly Jean, sipping tea and strumming from the shoreline cottage where she recorded the album, pop up repeatedly. My favorite moments glide in unexpectedly: the ladies playing bingo in “On Battleship Hill,” the older couples dancing seductively to “The Words That Maketh Murder.” If you love this album — and I think a lot of people really do — these are worth spending some time with. Below, some of my favorites. DISCLAIMER: There are mayyybe a few too many shots of trees, but you know — worse things have happened.

I was inspired by the baffling news that Big Boi is producing the next Modest Mouse record to revisit their last effort, 2007′s We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. The Big Boi collaboration is such an oddball decision, but I can squint and see a parallel universe in which it might have made sense to the participants: Big Boi is one of the best architects of groove, funk, and tension I know, and Modest Mouse seem more than ever to be barreling toward a place where they are some kind of creaky, meth-tweaked, dance-rock version of themselves. It’s an interesting journey for this long-in-the-tooth band to be undertaking, but as a longtime fan, I’ve been ambivalent about joining them on it. Their last effort, We Were Dead, was the moment I mentally parted ways with them. It struck me as something the band had never been before: tepid. And it kinda made me sad.

However, time proves me wrong constantly, and this Big Boi announcement is just so batshit weird that curiosity, and conversations with some fellow MM-loving friends, has brought me back here.The lyrics remains heart-breakingly awful (“It honestly was beautifully bold/Like trying to save an ice cube from the cold” is such a bad chorus phrase, and lends itself so little to being sung, that I feel it in my teeth), but the album is full of pretty sounds and little details I don’t remember savoring before: the cello groaning through “Parting of the Sensory” and the little Renaissance band of lute and mandolin that starts up 2/3rds of the way through the song; the puffing little drum machine on “Missed The Boat.” It’s both better than I remember and exactly as unmemorable to me as I left it.

But enough of my rambling. What does everyone think? Tell me if you love this record. They were once my favorite band in the whole entire universe; I am really open to hearing that this record is actually great. And yeah, I’m absolutely going to listen to whatever they end up creating with Big Boi at the helm. Maybe it will be the perfect mid-point between Building Nothing Out of Something and Got Purp, Vol. 2. Or maybe it will be a bunch of Modest Mouse songs with Sleepy Brown singing the hooks. Only time will tell!

It’s that time again — time to take a look at what eMusic staffers and members have been listening to lately. As usual, this month’s installment runs the spectrum and, no matter what your musical taste, you’re sure to find something you love. If you’re in the US, you can read it here — international editions to follow!

A wonderful composer. His most famous piece is undoubtedly his Symphony No. 3, the highest-selling piece of contemporary classical ever. It is simple and moving, and if you know it and love it, you should hear more of his work. He was 76. He will be missed.

Download:
Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3
Symphony No. 2
Miserere

Those of you that were around on the site in 2008 are already familiar with the darkly beguiling, quietly disturbing little emotional puzzles that were the four pieces on Victoire’s 2008 EP A Door Into the Dark. The all-female indie-classical ensemble, led by the dynamic young composer Missy Mazzoli, was eMusic Selects’ first foray into music that could be roughly classified under “classical,” but the music exists in some genre-less netherworld — if you’ve ever been lying awake at 4am and found that the ceiling cracks are starting to move and squiggle in front of your eyes, than you can find something to tap into with Victoire. Their full-length debut, the magnificently named Cathedral City, is up on eMusic now, and it contains re-recorded and significantly expanded versions of all the songs from the EP as well as four gorgeous new compositions. I caught up with Missy last week, before her group’s album-release-party show at Joe’s Pub. We talked about A Door Into the Dark and its gradual evolution into Cathedral City…

How did the four core songs of the EP develop or change as you lived with them and re-recorded them?

The EP came out a year and a half ago, and that came together really right after we’d formed the band. We did the recording all by ourselves, and it was a much more raw sound. But when eMusic invited us to do the EP, it really forced us to think about how these pieces work together as a recording. I wrote the final four pieces after that EP came out, with the idea that they would all be on a full length album. We re-recorded everything that was on the EP. But to me, it feels like I’ve been working on one piece for like, two years. I really think of the album as a kind of symphony; it’s like my Symphony No. 1. All these pieces are movements of the symphony, and while they stand alone, we did a lot of thinking about how they would exist together. Some of the pieces overlap; there are some tracks, like “The Diver” and “India Whiskey,” that are like these massive, dense, complicated tracks, but I think that they’re balanced out by pieces like “Like A Miracle” or “I’m Coming For My Things,” which are a little more repetitive and digestible.

Our relationship to that material definitely changed dramatically over time, having played it live so many times in the last two years. We’ve been playing them in such a huge variety of spaces. We just played a punk club in Detroit, and the day before that we played for Chicago’s Millennium Park for 2500 people. We’ve played it on concert halls; just kind of bringing the material into all that spaces showed us what people responded to, what kind of spaces it filled and how it reacted. With “I’m Coming For My Things” and the end of “Like A Miracle,” we pushed this distorted grittiness, because I felt like the album needed more of that. In things like “A Door Into the Dark,” we pushed the mellow, more romantic side of the sound, which we found was coming out more the more we played it. It was able to leave the page, where we could really let the melodies sing.

I was impressed, listening to it, how much more depth there is in the sound, how much more there is beneath the surface to plumb into. The pieces acquired a whole new bottom floor, which I wasn’t sure was a result of having a studio or what you discovered about the pieces.

Definitely a little of both. We had this amazing engineer, Lawson White, who understood the music completely. I don’t know if anybody else in New York could have understood it like he does. We recorded it like an indie-rock band, but using his knowledge of classical music. The strings sound really great, because he knows how to record a violin.

So let’s talk about the new compositions, one by one! Starting with …

“Cathedral City:”

“Cathedral City” was written when I was spending some time at the MacDowell Colony and happened to be there at the same time as Oliver Sacks. He told me about this man who learned to see, for the first time, in his fifties. I thought, “oh my god, what does the world look like to someone who was born blind and is able to see for the first time that far into their lives?” It’s a really crazy thing to imagine what was going on to his head. So that’s sort of what the lyrics and words are about.

I also really wanted to work with my friend Melissa Hughes, who is a classical singer who’s also had experience in rock and pop music, and I wrote it for her. It deviates from this dark, dense sound of the rest of the record; it starts with this huge unison, which is another departure. The beat for that is made up completely from samples of power tools, like hedge clippers and saws and just chopping them up into little pieces and making a beat out of them.

You guys are getting your Matmos on!

[Laughs.] I know!! Don’t tell them that!

The Diver:

This is not a brilliant observation, but this is the longest piece on the album. Is there anything worth saying about that, or did it sort of happen that way?

“The Diver actually began as part of my opera, Song of the Uproar. I really wanted to play some of that music live myself. That’s one of the hardest pieces for us to play on the album; there are a lot of little canons and complicated counterpoint. I wanted something that was relentless, this big, hovering thing in the middle of the album. So that’s our epic track!

“India Whisky:”

“India Whisky” was not on the EP, but it was one of the original pieces you submitted to us a long time ago, so that one’s been around, right?

It’s been around, but it’s changed a lot! This is the most malleable piece on the album; it’s really focused around our bass player Eleonore doing this crazy improvisation and then everything kind of snaps together into this really tightly composed section. Before I wrote “The Diver,” “India Whisky” was going to be my epic track!

“A Song For Mick Kelly:”

That was inspired by the character of Mick Kelly from the Carson McCullers novel The Heart is A Lonely Hunter. Mick Kelly wants to be a composer, but she can’t because she’s a girl and lives in the South in the 1930s and her family’s really poor. So she builds a violin out of a cigar box and goes around listening in to her neighbors’ windows as they listened to Beethoven on the stereo. So I wanted to imagine the kind of music she would write if she had been given the chance.

DOWNLOAD:
A Door Into the Dark EP
Cathedral City

Innova Recordings was founded in 1982 by an organization called the American Composers Forum so that composers, that most embattled and consistently maligned species of contemporary music makers, would be able to record the forward-thinking, fresh and visceral music they were making. This was music that had a firm foothold in no markets — not pop, not rock, not even traditional classical. This is music that defines itself by all of the things it isn’t, or only sort of is: classical, but not old; modern, but not Modernist; melodic, but not Pop. It slips through or under every classification crack there is. When you are faced with a lack of labels as severe as this, you can almost start to understand why people go around calling it ridiculous things like “art music” or “serious music” — anything to give it a name and to draw people’s attention to it.

The American Composers Forum just called it “music” — and recorded it in volume. When it began, the Saint Paul, Minnesota-based group had a very narrow, pragmatic focus: It recorded Minnesota composers who had been awarded the prestigious McKnight Fellowship. Since 1994, however, as its purview has grown, it has matured into a label that documents all the thrilling stuff happening at the fringes of the American contemporary scene. Well, guess what:now they’ve put the most vital swath of their catalogue on sale, and this sampler, right here, is free: That means you don’t have even the slightest excuse anymore not to be clued into this music. The sampler will whet your appetite, I guarantee it: once that happens, and you want to go exploring further, here’s a list of recordings on sale that I am a big fan of. The complete list of Innova records on sale can be found at eMusic’s Steals and Deals page.

Jayson’s Personal Innova Faves:
Terry Riley’s In C: Remixed
Harry Partch – Delusion of the Fury
Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project – Animal, Vegetable, Mineral
Maya Beiser – Provenance

Whether it’s the fiery iconoclast cellist Maya Beiser, who has worked with Brian Eno, played with Bang on A Can, and recently performed Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” for 12 cellos; the conductor Gil Rose and his inimitable Boston Modern Orchestra Project ensemble, which continually and fearlessly tackles music no one else is playing; or Harry Partch, the musical hermit who had to invent his own instruments and tuning system to write the music he heard in his head, the musicians recorded on Innova are some of the smartest, most vital artists that you probably know nothing about. Fix that.

I’m not gonna lie, I have been looking forward to this day for almost a year: Relapse Records returns to eMusic!

Relapse is one of my favorite labels running, and in the first batch we’ve got the cream of their recent crop. I’m going to run down a few of my musts, and any other fans, please add to the comments!

Baroness, Blue Record: Even if you don’t like metal, you will like this album. I promise. This was one of my favorite albums of last year — the musicianship on this record is jaw-dropping. The riffs! The drumming! The whiplash time signatures! I reviewed it, and in that review I say:

Baroness’s roots are in hardcore, not prog, so The Blue Record‘s grand ambitions are leavened with a healthy punk snarl. They’re self-confessed metal outsiders — as is producer John Congleton, whose resume includes St. Vincent‘s Actor as well as albums by the Mountain Goats and Okkervil River. Don’t think Armored Saint, think Hot Snakes with more compositional flair. The songs are packed with an astonishing level of detail: hairpin turns, methodically arranged subsections, surgically precise tempo changes and guitar leads that require an almost supernatural dexterity (How many 32nd notes can two men play?) Witness the apocalyptically named “A Horse Called Golgotha,” how it goes from blistering riffage to hammering punk rock to full-gallop hard rock — all within the first minute. Jaw-dropping dynamo “Jake Leg” is composed of no fewer than four distinct passages, but it moves so quickly and so fluidly its complexity almost escapes perception. Its single central riff — a call-and-response between Baizley and the group’s other guitarist, Peter Adams — corkscrews its way angrily up the song’s center, sounding nastier every time it appears — at different tempos, in different key signatures, with different effects. Baroness pulls off a cunning feat, reverse-engineering hardcore and gilding its raw brutality with alarmingly elegant guitar solos.

More Relapse picks after the jump!

Coalesce, Ox: Long-running hardcore band Coalesce returns with Ox, a record that’s as bracing and vital as any in their catalog. Ox is non-stop, man, hammering percussion, full-throated vocals and split-second songs that bottle up and explode like shaken soda pop.

Dillinger Escape Plan, Calculating Infinity: Breakthrough album from now-legendary technical-metallers — this is the one that earned them their rep, and just a few seconds makes it clear why. Light-speed playing, full-on fury. A must.

Howl, Full of Hell: This is a recent Relapse release, but I rep hard for it. Hear me out: this is practically a shoegaze record. The guitars on that first song sound like they were lifted from Starflyer 59′s Americana or something. But then that demonic vocalist comes in and the whole thing takes a long black dive into the abyss. It’s some kind of weird hybrid of stoner metal and black metal — everything is superfuckingslow and menacing. On my list of favorite records of 2010.

Mastodon, Leviathan: Breakthrough album from metal gods — one of their early experiments with a concept record, this one loosely based on Moby Dick. A new metal classic.

Pig Destroyer, Phantom Limb: YESSSS. This record is psychotic. The songs are about 90 seconds long, super intense grind metal, lots of flailing and shrieking. This is an adrenaline shot to the heart.

Tombs, Winter Hours: Brutal slab of metal from promising Brooklyn band. This is only their 2nd record, but Tombs are off to a great start. Roaring and cataclysmic with deep long nods toward hardcore. There are moments that you can hear a Dischord influence, which is fine by me.

Black Anvil, Time Insults the Mind: Black Anvil are a New York band playing Scandinavian black metal. Fairly straightforward in execution, but black metal fans should love.

Minsk, With Echoes in the Movement of Stone: I got way into Minsk’s first record; this one is slightly less technical but still super ominous. Minsk like long, atmospheric songs — Tool isn’t too far a jumping-off point, but that comparison tends to give people the heebie-jeebies. Long, loping, art metal. Maybe a bit of Danzig in here, too? But like if Danzig went to art school. Did Danzig go to art school? Anyway.

Neurosis, A Sun That Never Sets: This seems to be a fairly divisive Neurosis record among fans, but I like it just fine.

Brutal Truth, Evolution Through Revolution: Grindcore pioneers on another fine outing.

Brian Poeshn, Fart and Weiner Jokes: And why not close it all down with some comedy? Poeshn is metal’s court jester, and his latest is a light remedy to all of Relapse’s awesome darkness.

So the last week or two has seen some pretty stellar/high-profile stuff hitting the site in the UK, so I thought I’d take a moment to review some of it. Shall we? Note: A lot of these titles are UK-only, so apologies when/where not available:

Teenage Fanclub, Shadows – The evergreen power-pop masters return. The men who brought you Bandwagonesque are still trafficking in shimmering, heartache-filled guitar pop, and they can still kill you softly with it. James McNair did a Q&A with Norman Blake, and Dorian Lynskey had this to say:

Every generation has its musical comfort food, and for anyone who cherished 1991′s Bandwagonesque as Britain’s finest grunge album and 1994′s Grand Prix as an underrated Britpop tour de force, Teenage Fanclub fit the bill … On their ninth album, they still seem able to pluck tender, yearning melodies out of the air — “Shock and Awe” is a particularly lush example — but, as on their last few albums, the most rewarding songs come when they stray from the template.

The Divine Comedy, Bang Goes the Knighthood – Neil Hannon, underrated Britpop songsmith and redefiner of the term “arch,” is back with ripe, stately songs that exude Englishness and give immoderate pleasure. eMusic’s Andrew Perry chatted with Hannon, and it sounds like they had a great time; the Q&A that resulted is a must-read. Here’s Craig McLean, as well, with more on the record itself:

Neil Hannon, dandified son of a Bishop in Northern Ireland, was always a literate — and, occasionally, pretentious — chap … [But] this 10th studio album, coming 11 years after The Divine Comedy’s last UK Top 20 hit single, is pleasingly free of affectation, and jammed full of wit and melody. “At The Indie Disco,” sparkling with strings and a flight of female backing vocals, is irresistible.

Stornoway, Beachcomber’s Windowsill – Last week’s big new record was the debut from this well-scrubbed, quirky, and clever indie-pop group, who count an ornithologist and a doctor in their ranks. Their music sparkles with sly wit and gorgeous harmonies — it will put you in mind of classic, <IIf You’re Feeling Sinister-era Belle and Sebastian.

Rolo Tommassi, Cosmology – Soooo if gentle indie-folk songs comparing falling in love to zorbing are a bit too twee for your tastes, this might be the kind of nuclear insanity you need to clear out your ears. Jerking, berserk, prog/hardcore fusion, with all the disorienting switch-ups in tempo, palm-muted downstroke guitar chugging, and acid-gargled howling this might imply. This may or may not be a flattering comparison, but this feels like a melted-sulphur middle ground between the Melvins, Refused, and, uh, Mr. Bungle. If any of this fumbling off-the-cuff descrip intrigues, def check out.

Philly Groove Records, The Delfonics/First Choice/other classics – Philly Groove was a small but indispensable Philadelphia soul imprint set up by Stan Watson and Sam Bell in 1967, and together the released some of the era’s most vital Philly soul — the Delfonics and First Choice among them. Here they are, many of them available digitally for the first time. PLEASE dig into these — you really cannot go wrong.

Mock and Toof, Tuning Echoes – London-based producers and Juan MacLean remixers Mock and Toof delivered their airy, gorgeous synth-pop full-length last week, and I am just now getting to spending time with it.

Rowland S. Howard, Pop Crimes – Harrowing, haunted solo pop record from a former member of The Birthday Party.

Micah P. Hinson, And the Pioneer Saboteurs – Bleakly comic, pitch-dark country-folk from Hinson, who has the just the right pitted voice for songs this rangy and full of knowing regret.

Akala, Doublethink – Claustrophobic, industrial-tinged and incredibly eclectic rap concept album about , what else, an Orweillian future dystopia. Should appeal to El-P and anticon fans. Tim Noakes, in a review that will be live tomorrow, writes:

1984, George Orwell’s hellish vision of a dystopian future, has provided the inspiration for North London rapper Akala’s third album, Doublethink. Basing a whole record on Big Brother’s brainwashed surveillance society is not exactly a new concept. Yet, Akala has tried to accomplish something none of these artists ever dared — blending classical music, trance, rock, grime and hip-hop into a cohesive whole.Akala’s vision of modern inner city life will make you think twice about not only the state of the music industry, but Great Britain itself.

Rene Hell, Porcelain Opera – A gorgeous, ethereal record of ambient electronic music from the prolific American electronic musician Jeff Witscher. Vapor-trails synths, swirling sampled voices in babbling sensurround. A disarmingly beautiful little treasure.