Like Mirage recalls one of Eno’s latest works, Small Craft on a Milk Sea — a self-proclaimed soundtrack with no movie. The soundscapes are grand and cinematic, but push far beyond Earth. The soft pulses of “Brute Neighbors” are like cosmic waves, lapping against a small boat. Those waves later wash onto lunar shores on “Sunday Brunch.”

The soft taps of the drum machine drifting through the drone on “Astronomy Is a Natural Science” are expected, but the band willingly steps out from the ambient shadow. They’re not afraid to add live drums and faster tempos, such as during the second half of “Brute Neighbors.”

Moholy-Nagy probably doesn’t seem like most of today’s music, but it is actually part of the burgeoning outer sound genre, alongside groups like Collections of Colonies of Bees and Julianna Barwick. Like Mirage draws from the past, looks to the future, and fits in seamlessly with the present.

(Temporary Residence Ltd., PO Box 60097, Brooklyn, NY 11206)

Shadowland

There is a sense of never-ending with these tracks. They seem to cycle together continuously and grow out of each other. The meditative quality of the overall composition is unique and stands out amidst the many cookie-cutter styles of music in existence today. With swelling bass lines and layers of feedback and synthesis the EP is shrouded in folklore.

Each song is part of the mythical hero’s journey. “Void and Devotion” is the ominous and menacing beginning. “Shadowland” is the epic climax in the protagonists’ conflict, and “Infinite Reach” is the melancholy and bitter-sweet ending.

Shadowland is something otherworldly. It is not for everyone. If hard beats, loud vocals, and catchy hooks are your bread and butter, look elsewhere. However, if you are searching for a short journey into the ambient nature of rolling guitar riffs and introspective synthesis, then this EP is for you.

(Thrill Jockey Records, PO Box 8038, Chicago, IL 60608)

Tracklisting
1. Desire Lines
2. Hazel St.
3. Don’t Cry
4. Revival
5. Helicopter
6. Fountain Stairs
7. Rainwater Cassette Exchange
8. He Would Have Laughed

This self-titled EP contains five songs and has movement. The thing that separates Hang Glider from your Washed Outs and your Neon Indians is that Hang Glider actually feels like it starts, builds up, climaxes, then lets you down, much like what hang gliding would feel like. The first song “Glide Time” actually feels like it is starting something, and “The Landings” and “Safety Bars” let you down feeling like you ended your journey. It goes without saying, but the third song in the middle of the EP “Ako” which is the EP’s single feels like you are cruising, gliding, running on fumes.

If you’ve got a sweet tooth for distortion and are sick of aimless “chillwave,” take Hang Glider for a spin and start the new year off with good vibes.

(Origami Vinyl, 1816 W. Sunset Blvd., Echo Park, CA 90026)

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• Ariel Pink\'s Haunted Graffiti

• Ariel Pink\'s Haunted Graffiti

• Best Coast

• Big Freedia

• Big Freedia

• Deerhunter

• Delorean

• Devin The Dude

• Dirty Projectors

• Os Mutantes

• Slick Rick

• Weird Al Yankovic

Amongst the commercialized Lollapalooza and the inflated Coachella, we need smaller, secluded festivals to keep us all grounded. Fun Fun Fun Fest gives Austin a more intimate, personalized, and risk-taking lineup in counterpart of Austin City Limits, featuring some of pop culture’s most surreal un-conventionalists like Yankovic, Gwar, and Suicidal Tendencies. Even the prime headliners MGMT, Bad Religion, Mastodon and Descendents (filling in for Devo) are not exactly main stage fodder, and beckon to a crowd that might not appreciate seeing a band on a “Budweiser” or “Toyota” stage. Fun Fun Fun is fighting the good fight — more promotors should pay attention to what they’re doing.

Who would’ve thought that in 2010, 27 years after he put out his first record, someone as willingly silly as “Weird Al” Yankovic could both curate and kick off a festival filled with some of the biggest names in indie rock? Al has spent his entire career teetering on the balance of the good graces of the pop culture public, but while Carrot Top and Sinbad fell to laughable (and completely justified) ends, something about Yankovic’s pure, undiluted likability has allowed him to prevail. He’s still touring, he’s a regular guest on “Comedy Death Ray,” and, most importantly, he’s still funny.

His performance was more or less the same basic incarnation I saw back in 2003 (coincidentally, my first ever rock show), but the mechanics have been updated. He opened with a bleeding-edge polka, stuffed full of 2010 chart-crashers: Bieber, Ke$ha and Gaga. But that sat right alongside near-ubiquitous *ahem* “hits” like “Dare to be Stupid” and “Smells Like Nirvana.” Naturally, this was all paired with a constant costume shuffle, de-contextualized apropos-of-nothing video clips, and your brief onstage sketches.

Surprisingly, some of this stuff hasn’t changed since 2003. The Eminem faux-interview he aired was the same exact one I remember my 12-year-old self laughing at, same with the draconian, period-accurate germ PSA. But it was all funny the second time around, and his setlist has been frontloaded with Billboard-identifiable rips. But that’s all semantics really — the crowd would’ve been smitten with whatever Yankovic dished up; his personality occupies such a specific spot in pop-ubiquity that he’s become a sort-of godhead. We live in a world where Weird Al can never risk self-parody, irrelevance, or disdain. That’s a good world to live in.

Devin the Dude: he likes his weed, that’s not a secret to anyone, and it occasionally got a little silly hearing the dressed-down street-rap hero offhandedly mention getting high every chance he could, but if Devin was ever going to escape that typecast and dominate a bill he wasn’t headlining, Fun Fun Fun Fest is certainly that show. The glassy-eyed demeanor and languished beats simply isn’t designed to fill an audience, but when the crowd has utterly immortalized the man’s underground mythos it doesn’t really matter. For at least this one afternoon in Austin, Devin the Dude was an utter star — lyrics were tossed back and forth, call-outs were graciously reciprocated, hands were thrown in the air like they just didn’t care, etc. Fun Fun Fun Fest is a celebration of left field goofballs who never took the world at large, and that’s the perfect spot for someone as prolific and hidden as Devin the Dude.

If there was anything that could’ve stymied, and sucked out all the good-hearted energy an underdog like Devin cued up on blue stage it was Slick Rick: former star, current legend, and a hell of a disappointment on stage. The svelte, well-dressed figure you remember is long gone; today, Slick Rick is a hulking, over-blinged, and overweight shell of his former greatness. Mic to his mouth, feet planted, he exhaustingly plodded through the entirety of The Great Adventures without even a modicum of intensity. It was literally the most disengaged performance of the weekend — blame it on age, or hubris, nothing remedies blatant sluggishness. If you can’t control a stage anymore, that’s fine, that’s what a hypeman is for, but Slick didn’t even the courtesy for that — just an absent-minded DJ and a checked-out disposition, amounting into what was probably the lowest point of the weekend.

Os Mutantes, on the other hand — a band whose very career almost exceeds Slick Rick’s 45 years — have aged very well since their 2006 reunion. Their legacy is well-engraved now: they exploded in their native Brazil, got cursory and cultish time-defying respect in the United States, eventually imploded in the mid-1970s due to acid-frazzled nerves and creative differences…but Sérgio Dias and company are looking happy, healthy, and incredibly excited to be playing for studious hipsters 30 years their junior. The music hasn’t changed, rainbow streaks of tropical glitz, but the Os Mutantes sound still stands solitarily unique in the canon of pop. Bad Religion, The Vandals, and Descendents — they couldn’t help but sound retro, while the oldest group of the weekend came off immediately current. Not many bands could pull that off.

I wasn’t sure who Big Freedia was before Friday — the wiki-proof MC more or less evaded me in the days before the fest, but I did know I liked how her press-bio described her as “New Orleans bounce-rap.” What I saw was a gargantuan, near-Amazonian transgendered titan of a woman who plays hyper-sexualized, semi-sarcastic crunk-attacks that completely bypass the brain and shudder right down to the hips. This was not a work-safe environment; in fact, it was the sweatiest, grossest, but still kinda enthralling moment all weekend. By the time she got to “Azz Everywhere,” the pretenses that were already lowered were cast aside entirely — because losing your shit is a lot more fun than judging others in the process of losing their shit.

How great must it feel to be Delorean? Trading in noisy punk for druggy club-rave is an odd and uneasy transition, but to come out the other end with a nighttime slot and a huge showing of American kids singing along? That must feel amazingly rewarding. They deserve all the love, too — Delorean adopted a nothing-but-bangers policy, churning through the biggest crests in electro-pop from both their 2009 teaser Ayrton Senna EP and this year’s hype-delivered Subzia. Basked in throbbing neon lights, songs like “Seasun,” “Real Love,” and “Stay Close” sound just as good as you can picture them. Delorean owe America a full tour, and judged by how they essentially managed to incite a riot with every song they played, they won’t have too much trouble winning us over more than they already have.

For whatever reason, I’ve managed to miss Dirty Projectors at the gaggle of festivals they’ve toured over the past year. Other acts — Fuck Buttons at Lollapalooza, The xx at Coachella — always stole my attention away. So this was the first time I saw Dave Longstreth perform with a band. Dirty Projectors have certainly evolved since their most avant-garde era (and now resemble a “band” more than ever before) — now all the boys and girls can sing along to Bitte Orca. During the jaw-dropping chorus of “Stillness is the Move,” Angel Deradoorian grabbed her microphone and pointed it at the audience, who shouted the incalculable notes right back at her — not something you’d expect out of the Projectors during The Getty Address days. Their performance was so taut, so chiseled, it’s almost as if the band has something to prove — if you ever doubted they could hit these notes, shape-shift their vocals, and ping-pong their verses on stage, well you ought to see them live. These are the most dedicated musicians playing today, and it’s utterly inspiring to see them together.

Of course, RJD2 is the guy who brings a bag full of vinyl to his show. Unlike pretty much every musical collagist these days, RJ Krohn is all analog — his setup included four turntables and a tuned-up drum machine. That’s it; not a laptop in sight. So that means when he cues up a classic like “Ghostwriter” it’s created from the same samples, and feasibly, the same records, which is a pretty cool thought. It wasn’t the most active or danceable set of the weekend, or even the day (that honor lies with Delorean) but RJ’s smoky, chilled-out psych-hop was a good way to end an active day of music listening.

It was clear that anyone who made it out to the Blue Stage at 4:50 despite stiff competition from Best Coast and The Bronx were going to be pretty big rapheads, especially to see such a scene-hero like Pharoahe Monch. The wayward rapper has put out a scarce two records in his career, a stark difference from the mixtape-monster mentality that every up-and-coming rapper subscribes to these days, but that didn’t really matter – Internal Affairs and Desire are both so dense with bangers, a 45-minute festival set turns into a slash-and-burn, profanity-laced rampage. Even the new songs he tried out from his perpetually-upcoming third album W.A.R. were greeted like old-school favorites. Few rappers have garnered so much love with so few songs.

If it wasn’t already clear on Crazy For You, most Best Coast songs sound pretty much the same. Bethany Cosentino finds her greatness by being easy to root for, and naturally, her sunset-backed performance was primarily highlighted by her bittersweet banter. “Just so you know, Bobb is super excited to see Mastodon tonight…but now he has to play in a fuckin’ girly pop band,” she said with a smile. The songs, well…they don’t exactly show well — Best Coast is something that works best with the sum of its parts all added up. They’d rather win your heart over the course of an album rather than during a set, but based on the amount of people singing along with deep-cuts like “Bratty B” and “Our Deal,” Bethany won’t have to worry about her status for quite some time.

And so, in 2010, Deerhunter are no longer forced to close their set with “Nothing Ever Happened.” That duty now lies with Halcyon Digest’s “Helicopter,” a song that exceeds everything else the band has done in terms of potency, humanism, and direct synapse-tugging impact. Like your average Deerhunter festival set, this was a vaguely passive-aggressive, somewhat indifferent attack of the band’s highlights, but those moments of uncomfortable irritation (Bradford giving some faceless crowd-member a quipping “shut up,” the band abandoning a sound-check with a “Fuck it, let’s just do it”) are all quickly forgettable when you consider just how great these songs are. Even at their most slack-jawed torpidity you can’t help but feel wrapped up in a specific guitar sound, or a lyrical snap. Even when they aren’t playing nice and mechanical, Deerhunter is better than nearly any other band going.

From the first piano clinks of “Constructive Summer,” it was all over. Craig Finn skipped across the stage like an enthused schizo, shouting quick-lipped cracks to the audience sans microphone, all with a huge grin on his face. This was the exact and logical opposite to Deerhunter, who played just one space down the bill. The Hold Steady couldn’t be any happier to be in a rock n’roll band. Say what you like about Heaven is Whenever, it doesn’t really make a qualitative difference when those songs are played with this much vigor. The songs were introduced with hammy couplets. which made it that much more fun. (“This song, well, this song is about a boy, a girl, and a horse,” before “Chips Ahoy.”) Truth is, we could barely hear Craig the entire night, thanks to an overpowered mix on the band’s labyrinth of guitar-amps. It didn’t really matter; we knew all the words anyway. The Hold Steady is exactly the band you want to be closing your festival, because regardless of what happened or who sucked earlier in the week, they’re genetically coded to restore faith in music.

On the whole, the production is cleaner, the vocals more crisp and clear, and the song structures tighter than on previous efforts, but something is missing from this album: the weird.  The bizarre, eccentric, and strange hung like a funeral shroud over everything Deerhunter did up to and including last year’s excellent Rainwater Cassette Exchange EP, but on Halcyon Digest, gone is the wide-eyed precocity of tracks like “Vox Humana” or “Hazel Street,” the sound collage of “Circulation” or “Saved by Old Times,” the brash experimentation of “Octet,” or the slinkiness of “Operation.”  Songs like these are replaced by numbers that plod along pleasantly, but lack the sonic dynamics that made the aforementioned albums such high wire walkers.

That’s not to say most listeners won’t find something to like about this album, but taken as a whole, it does not quite gel.  The band itself sounds sublimated, making Deerhunter sound more and more like the work of one man.  Though Cox’s vocals are more confident and assured than ever, the lyrics are drained of menace. The music itself seems more self-aware, making the listening less satisfying.  For all the atmospherics and studio gimmickry, Halcyon Digest comes off as the band’s most toothless effort to date.

This is not the album longtime listeners of Deerhunter were hoping for, but this might just work for the casual crossover fan.  Despite a couple of standouts, this record is pretty much a non-starter, relying too much on techno gadgetry, overdubs, and reverb, never emerging from its own mire.  One would hope this is only a temporary blip in what had been a steady ascendance.  No one hits a homerun in every at bat, but here we have what seems more like a bunt, a calculated play, not too flashy, just trying to advance the runners and just maybe make a big score.

The appearance of a saxophone on “Coronado” sounds almost Springsteen-esque, and by no means sweetens the deal.  Deerhunter is a band that built their reputation on weirdness, but this move toward the middle feels like a step backwards.  The record-buying public would be well advised to skip the filler on this dud and opt for the “Revival” b/w “Primitive 3D” single, which pretty much distills all that’s interesting about this record.

Maybe it has to do with the fact that Halcyon Digest isn’t as expansive as Deerhunter’s previous releases, or perhaps those earlier two records are actually four distinct pieces of music, since each album side has its own unique artwork and title. Maybe there’s a little less mystery to distinguish this one, or it could be that, opposed to every other Deerhunter album I’ve listened to, I heard this one as a digital stream, supporting my unprovable belief that analog is a richer, truer sound.  I can’t say it’s all that fair to review the album this way, and I wonder whether Brad would agree.  Maybe, for all I know, there’s a great album hidden among these ones and zeroes.  One thing is for sure, unlike past releases, Deerhunter is not reaching beyond their selves, which is a shame, because unbridled experimentation has always been this band’s greatest asset and defining characteristic.  In setting out to make an album that is palatable to the largest possible audience, Cox et al have succeeded only in making one that is rather forgettable.

(4AD, 17-19 Alma Road, London, SW18 1AA)

As a whole, the album alternatively shifts from droning, ambient instrumentals to twanging, sharp, guitar-heavy indie rock; the contrast is so sharp it’s difficult to hear the similarities. There’s a lot of thread missing from holding this album together; songs like “Penal Colony” stick out like sore thumbs. The droning, stoner-slow jams feel out of place against treble-loaded tracks like “Narrow With The Hall” and “China Steps.”

Conclusively, the jangling sharpness of the majority of Public Strain fails to mesh with the dial-tone drone interspersed for flavor; they collectively fail at cohesion, making for a hard listen.

(Jagjaguwar, 1499 West 2nd Street, Bloomington, IN 47403)

(self-released, no address provided)