MUSIC . Hang The DJ

Twisted

Janelle Monáe's The ArchAndroid and Nachtmystium's Addicts: Black Meddle Pt. II


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Published: May 25, 2010

If you need any further evidence of the irrelevance of genre tags, consider that there is now an album on the Bad Boy label that features an appearance by oddball cross-dressing indie-poppers Of Montreal. That record is The ArchAndroid, itself something of an oddball, the product of R&B dynamo Janelle Monáe, possessor of the best coif and most intense stare in all of pop music. To say the record is a dynamo is to sell it short: It barely stops moving over the course of its hour-plus length. And while many of the tracks are powered by the same kind of hyperkinetic percussion that powered OutKast's "B.O.B." (including and especially "Tightrope," on which OutKast's own Big Boi appears), Monáe isn't content to settle into a groove. "Oh, Maker" is a stormy, deity-directed R&B ballad; "Locked Inside" is a light-up roller disco; and "57821" is a madrigal, complete with plucked lute and "Scarborough Faire"-y vocals. That Of Montreal track ends up an intergalactic Prince/Bowie love affair in which Kevin Barnes rejiggers Robert Plant's infamous come-on, announcing, "I'm standing over you eating Juicy Fruit until it gets in your eye."

There's nothing nearly as sexy on Nachtmystium's Addicts: Black Meddle Pt. II. The follow-up to the Wheaton metal group's 2008 genre-buster Assassins: Black Meddle Pt. I, Addicts trades that album's fury and indignance for a steady satanic boil. Like many of the best metal bands of the last few years, Nachtmystium shows only a passing interest in maintaining genre tropes. Where most black metal moves at a million miles per second, the songs on Addicts mostly lope along — indeed, Monáe's record is often speedier. This creates a weird conundrum: Blake Judd still employs black metal's ghastly howl, but at half-speed, with plenty of space to enunciate, it sounds strangely out of place. The group's sonic restlessness has earned it unlikely fans in indie rockdom, and a lot of Addicts feels like it was written with a consciousness of a broader base. The results are unusually muted, a metal record that never shows its teeth.

(j_keyes@citypaper.net)