I’m not sure where my first expo­sure to Alias came from, but I remem­ber that one of my most favorite tracks by him was “Sea Lion” by Sage Fran­cis and fea­tur­ing Will Old­ham. It was tough, but won­der­fully com­posed and heart­felt. His album Muted had this same qual­ity as well, but it was a bit scat­tered to me, feel­ing more like an odds and ends album. The col­lab­o­ra­tion with his brother Ehren was beau­ti­ful, but left some­thing to be desir­able. All through these works, though, I could sense a deter­mined pro­ducer and com­poser hon­ing his craft. Resurgam is absolutely that craft per­fected. I didn’t even really know it was com­ing out but Bent Crayon told me it was great. I was astounded by how var­ied yet cohe­sive it was, how beau­ti­ful but blind­ingly hard it was, too. After the sig­na­ture “A-L-I-A-S” intro track (this time start­ing with some old school elec­tro that morphs into a ridicu­lous heavy banger), the lov­ingly titled “I Heart Drum Machines” is an ode to the back­bone of this musician’s work. It starts out as a gor­geous bed of synths and gran­u­lar, almost-IDM beats (not unlike the the first Boom Bip album or work from BoC), but then switches into a drum machine work­out as the title promised. After that comes prob­a­bly my favorite track on the album, “Well Water Black,” which fea­tures Yoni Wolf of Why?, a singer I don’t nor­mally like. Here, though, his style of speak-sing-rap fits pur­pose­fully with the rolling drums and gui­tars on this mon­ster of a track. Also, I’m say­ing it here: this track is a love let­ter to Sia’s “Breathe Me,” that unbe­liev­able track that closed out Six Feet Under and remains my top guilty plea­sure of pop music. The struc­ture of Alias’ track and that one sound fairly iden­ti­cal, and the big tom-rolling fill-in drum pat­tern is a big wink and a nod to my ears. It’s a fan­tas­tic track (see below) on it’s own right, really push­ing the bound­aries of song­writ­ing with a drum machine based setup. Some­thing new on this album for Alias are the short ambi­ent inter­ludes, lit­tle breaks of pure melody and sound exper­i­ments, they bridge the album together beau­ti­fully, some­times giv­ing you a break between the mael­strom of rhythm. The mid­dle por­tion of the album is breath­tak­ing, with lots of gui­tar used in glis­ten­ing waves over top spi­ral­ing beats and synths. “Death Watch” is a par­tic­u­larly stand­out exam­ple of this level of focus and exper­tise in pure melody. Which isn’t to say it doesn’t hit hard. Trust me, about mid­way through, the beat bangs against your chest while the gui­tars enve­lope you. It’s an intox­i­cat­ing aes­thetic and no one is doing it bet­ter than Alias right now. Another per­fect exam­ple of this is “Autum­nal Ego,” the sound­track for dri­ving around at dusk this fall. Huge but del­i­cate gui­tars pro­pelled by a boom­ing and steady back­beat. The record sta­tic helps give us this warm feel­ing and the mega-distortion on the beats of the sec­ond punch it through the roof of “atmoso­phere.” I love this track. The albums other col­lab­o­ra­tion comes near the end, with good rea­son. It’s a melan­choly closer, “Weath­er­ing,” fea­tur­ing The One A.M. Radio, an artist Alias has remixed before. This is cold weather torch song cen­tral. Pianos lead off, but Alias gui­tar exper­i­ments soon fill in the melody. Com­ing near the end, before Alias final beat inferno send off, it works per­fectly. The song is say­ing this rela­tion­ship of per­former and lis­tener is almost over, but hold on to hope, we’ll be back. And back he comes, with a vengeance, for “Jus­ta­ma­chine,” fea­tur­ing the biggest, loud­est drums yet, sur­round­ing small moments of lilt­ing rest. It defies you to say a drum machine isn’t an instru­ment, at the same as it cel­e­brates what it can today. Make no mis­take, Alias is play­ing the drums, just in a dif­fer­ent way. Resurgam is a bril­liant and inspir­ing album in a style of music that needs to be inspired every once in awhile. This one was a mas­ter­piece. I can’t wait to hear what he comes with next.
“Well Water Black (feat. Yoni Wolf)” (mp3)

Short post* about some­thing I’ve been lis­ten­ing to a lot lately, the great Ethiopian jazz musi­cian Mulatu Astatke with Helio­centrics in Lon­don from April ’08. Gor­geous gor­geous music. Check out Eardrum­mer blog for a write-up, pics, and links to the entire per­for­mance. Astound­ing event, it looks like. Hope­fully there will be some US per­for­mances someday…

*Hope­fully ahead of some real reviews… 2tall, Alias, Mr Cooper in the pipeline…all great albums.