Brooklyn’s Sharon Van Etten gave birth to her fourth album Are We There last month. Shadowing her 2009 debut, Because I Was In Love, the album heavy-bellies in the same lovelorn notebooks, digesting a stinging romance by waving folky, impersonal heartbreak songs at her audience.

The album is purely Sharon Van Etten – following a signature song progression flowing free form along the borders between lovers. I can’t say, necessarily, that I find this to be particularly appealing. The package is a little boring, a little predictable and feels immature and hollow. Few songs carry spark. With that said, the album is incredibly easy to ignore and parallels the monotony of heartbreak. I find myself tensing when I try to listen closely, yearning to dust off the vocals, was it “Even I have taken my chances?” or… “Even I’ve taken my chances on you.”?

Her wispy, foiling vocals are akin to following the movement of a scarf crawling in the wind and getting caught in a dirty vacuum.  On much of the album she sounds lifeless and hollow, singing objectively about feelings. The music follows along mostly undetected. The poop reference toward the end helps shed light on the spirit within the singer, the soul and humanity behind these alleged felt emotions. That line contains the raw elements that fall short on the rest of the album. The highlight, “Our Love”, gives me the surge of energy I’m looking for. The beat and the sentiment feel ripe and alive.

This is not escapist or ethereal music. It’s a thorough encapsulation of antagonistic romance and the hardening experience. The album grew on me. Its melody is familiar. When Iife hurts, I can relate. I end up wanting to offer some counsel to Van Etten. It’s been five years since you began archiving your romantic charades through song and the rhythm remains the same. It might be time for some creative and emotional growth and reflect on patterns. I’d like to see Sharon push herself. With that said, I can’t seem to find a friend who doesn’t like her music. The album ends in the same way as a Britney Spears album in the early 2000s, giggling.

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Supremely basic – like a heartbeat – the tunes move through dismal to evocative. The quicksand of sucking on the straw for droplets. No leaf – no life –  I get the feeling it’s been a long time since we’ve seen the sky. An acid bleach quality, shades pulled to white as the colour drains, as in a waiting room – pooling the listlessness of a tunnel transience and the dying wisp of an engine. Here arrives the twisted nature of a stomach eating itself – the hungry ghost.

The recurring audio of a repetitive throat clearing highlights the micro-heightened pull of the narrator. “Contagious” winds a self-perpetuated bellowing that parallels self-perpetuated gloom. Following the track, a shift occurs to the use of upper palettes of pastel xylophone & brass rings. “Birdcage” hums a worker-beat – a determined, tight concentration on the rhythm, feathered by a chirps and rustles song of relief

At the base, a cast of snake skin – textural, detached, & abandoned. The album sends no tweak but a heavy dissolve. “Gaze” harpens flash of colour and then a new fade to ghost dance floors, vibrating silhouettes of hush. Spiral down to “Rule,” the final song on the album; vocals rev the listener into a tizzy, bouncing affirmative disapproval beside the xylophone’s call, reminiscent of Koopa Troopa Beach. We’re left wondering, ”Is this the end?”

Ghettoville is out on January 27, 2014 on iTunes and in the Ninja Shop.

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Playful, dreamlike, and sentient to the extreme, the sonic vapours emanate like they came from the mouth of a dragon floating through the streets on the Chinese New Year. “Vapor City is an album inspired by a dream city,” explains Stewart. “It’s become such a recurring dream of mine throughout the past few years that I began creating music to it, a collection of different songs each representing different districts in the city.”

Opening with “Gunshotta,” wispy voices against hammering dream beats light the canals. It’s safe here amidst the crammed stimulation of a city built on the psyche’s myths and dreams. Construction never ends in this place, where electronica meets architecture.

Hold in your breath for as long as humanly possible and let it out as slowly as humanly possible while listening to “U Still Lie” to experience the adrenaline produced alongside this malaise wave. Finishing with “Eyesdontlie,” you’re thrown back into reality, left with a sense of abandonment. Did that just happen? You’ll need to listen again to be sure.

Vapor City is reminiscent of New York’s ongoing show Fuerza Bruta, the album foams a fluorescent bubble sensory bath. Like the show, it poses a scenario hard to separate from the spectator. This one’s for the night people. Industrial scenes splatter against juggling urban imagery – close encounters of some kind.

Set to release September 30, 2013, on Ninja Tune.

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Torres, Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, and opener Judson Claiborne shut the doors on their tour on June 27 at the Empty Bottle in Chicago.

Chicago-based Judson Claiborne opened the night, warming an unusually breezy Empty Bottle like a bonfire. A pacifying presence, to hear Judson felt like following the light of a fire’s orb. Dressed in shorts and loose tops, the musicians played winter music in summer clothes. Timeless lyrics, “We are getting older,” flowed out of Judson’s mouth, pooling into glimmers of nostalgia and resolve. A man wearing a ‘Torres’  jersey fluttered into view. Two red circle-lights sat idly behind the performers as the songs passed, watching over the growing audience.

Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, the now Brooklyn-based folk-rock siren, followed, spinning her web in complete darkness. Melodic whispers of mythological creatures, curled in phonemes, crawled from her mouth as she lured the crowd in. (She’s not a beekeeper yet but wants to be, she told my friend, David, later). Lady Lamb captured attention like watching a streamer billow up through the rafters, while she possessed the sonic quality of wind. Songs about rebirth and a viral swing between the cry of a wolf to the gentle purr of a kitten reconciled with the heartbound.

Nashville’s Torres plunged the torch deeper into night. Her commanding, all-consuming presence, carried by an unwavering band, made the witnessing body spring to its feet. Torres embodied a nighttime diety, with the energy of a firefly, snapping into life on stage to provide us with an undeniable, elusive light, permeating the room with her afterglow. Torres has perfected the line between grounding and wildness. Songs like, “Jealousy and I” and “Honey” captured a familiar feeling in a new net, providing an unforeseen butterfly to catch.

From evening (Judson), dusk (Lady Lamb), to midnight (Torres), each performer spread their life in waves, capturing bits of the human spirit with them along the way.

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Opening call, “Revolution” paves the way into the jungle with a drum warm-up, echoing spoken word to hypnotic vocals. A classic reggae beginning, it blurs the line between song and dance. From morning to high noon, the track conjures heat through humid vocals built against solid, tickling drums, punctuated by unshakeable beats and crawling, mysterious, elusive electronic sounds that echo animal coos.

The track, “Nu Beginningz featuring Sister Mary,” speaks of love, youth, peace and, of course, new beginnings, defined as a move toward a more unified mankind. “Because it’s all about the love that we forget to show each other in the past, move to the future…wise up, rise up…. this life is just for livin’….I don’t know where the unity has gone conscious has gone wrong in the Gideon Dawn.” Look behind us, see the wreckage and leave it behind, the story goes.

Throughout the album, Congo Natty produces modern hymns lacing an urban feel, spoken words like burned memories, unavoidable in the street,s spun with the timeless nature of the elements and the human condition. Jungle Revolution inspires shaking and movement. Its range of vocals – quickly interchanged highs to lows – produces a rhythm that lights up and produces harmony in the brain through the body and senses, reminiscent of the yogic tradition of allowing vibrations to rise from the floor through the spine to the third mind at the base of the skull.

“What does the future hold for you?” he asks his listeners. The message of moving toward love and unity is a clear choice.

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Headed by Kieran Hebdan, Four Tet’s Rounds is a tightly coiled spring that sends electric waves throughout your nervous system. Each fast beat track is followed by a more pensive track, spiraling rhythms that cool down what’s heated up. Rounds chauffeurs the listener through a construction site of industrial ambient noise with pulsing beats complemented by a soft, childlike harmony – the symphony of a modern chain gang. As physically inspiring as it is mentally, the tracks have a knack for motivating dance and thought simultaneously, wrapping the listener into a spacious cocoon.

Stand out tracks include: (1) “My Angel Rocks Back & Forth,” feels like climbing inside the head of a whimsical construction worker, and (2) “Spirit Fingers,” incorporates drilling sounds that produce a spun out effect. Rounds constructs a soundscape of clean neon in daylight with clinkings on a trash can, the brightness of a xylophone and hush tones of a spinning discus. This definitive collection of Four Tet’s work crosses and melds territory, restructuring the boundary lines of genre in a way that is hospitable to the listener. Ten years, it’s clear Four Tet laid the groundwork for this generation’s crop of grown up, experimental electronic music. Today the album feels like a solid, familiar rocking chair, prepared to lull you into a place of active contemplation.

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The set is compiled of songs from Yo! Bum Rush The Show, It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Fear of a Black Planet, Apocalypse 91: The Enemy Strikes Back, and Muse Sick in Hour Mess Age & He Got Game. Public Enemy has reaked fervor using hypnotic, rhythmic rhymes that pulls an audience up by their ears. The songs act like a call to action. Their first, seminal album,Yo! Bum Rush the Show, lit the bush on fire, commanding the attention of common man to listen; represented first on the vinyl box set, it burns a pathway through the rest of the album.

As vivacious and cutting as ever, the message remains relevant. High voltage currents slice through the shit piled up by generations of social ills. The collection is best listened to at points of the day when you need an invigorating slap of truth, when you are fed up with the world around you and need some conviction. These are the words you need to hear. Reflecting on the golden age of hip-hop, Commander & Chief Public Enemy can’t be silenced after 25 years.

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