The Lacking Details

This producer-songwriter duo invests electronic beats and heavily-textured arrangements with soaring vocals, sometimes wordless but always emotive.

Twenty years ago, Grandaddy’s banged-up future was wrapped up in heavy production… now that has been stripped out, leaving only Jason Lytle, his songs, his piano, and his characteristic keening on inevitable observations.

Subtle expressions of singing strings from a guitar and pedal steel, mixed with ambient sounds and other sources to make the soundtrack for the most intense relaxation you’ve had in a while.

One of the kingpins of dub easily proves his worth on this retrospective covering the first four decades of UK producer Mad Professor and his deep undulating grooves, universal sounds that are neither fresh nor dated, but eternal.

Something’s in the water Down Under; there’s a veritable rainbow of guitar-forward fuzziness emanating from the land, and Bananagun is the kind that has a loose-limbed ability to pivot from genuine ‘60s jingleisms into full-out afrobeat.

Dutch indie rock psychedelic bands often stand out from their UK or US counterparts because they are just too good at the tropes. It’s like they took the test and got 110%, and there wasn’t even extra credit.

Bootsy lays out the not-so-secret ingredient in funk right there in the title, and then gives you a giant plate and puts you at the head of the line of this 70-minute buffet of lose-you-inhibitions-and-dig-in variations on the recipe.

I haven’t seen the word skronk bandied about lately, it feels good to bring it out again. The Free Radicals are rhythmic, abrasive, definitely political, but most of all extra funky and pure of heart.

If this band were actual woods, they would be filled with fog swirling in sunlight, sparkling yet tenebrous, a distant falsetto clearly audible inside your ear as the leaves are chiming in the light.

They hit hard and they hit fast, with half of the songs here clocking in at two minutes or less, but they also hit sweet, with layers of boy-girl harmonies and drizzles of horn section.