Kent Burnside, My World Is So Cold (Lucky 13) Kent Burnside’s grandfather, the late R.L. Burnside, spent most of his life playing raw, single-chord “trance blues” in jukes around his hometown of Holly Springs, Mississippi. Like any self-respecting son (or grandson) of the blues, Burnside remains true to his lineage while blazing his own trail: on his debut album, My World Is So Cold, he duplicates R.L.’s distinctive style with almost eerie accuracy, reinforcing it with tough, bass-heavy bombast borrowed from modern rock and R&B. His guitar playing, distorted by tremolo and wah-wah as the occasion demands, brings garage-punk feistiness to the atavistic, modally constructed lines and relentlessly propulsive rhythms he learned from his grandfather. When he expands into more pop-oriented chordal and melodic material (as on the title tune), he attains a callow sort of vulnerability that feels anomalous juxtaposed with his usual hardened persona. On “I Miss You,” a tribute to R.L., his breathy, occasionally uncertain vocals sound almost overwhelmed with emotion, but he still comes across as a survivor: the song builds from an acoustic meditation to full-band, house-wrecking backwoods soul, as though dramatizing his determination to prevail. —David Whiteis
Future, Honest (A-1/Freebandz/Epic) Coke rap has always had a dark, mournful side, which surfaces when its normally gleeful pusher-protagonists are confronted by their consciences, realizing the roles they play in a self-perpetuating, self-destructive system. On any given album, though, usually only one song follows this melancholy path. Atlanta’s Future is the first major rap artist to build a career by taking soul-ache as his primary theme, and he mines the mood as passionately and artfully as Marvin Gaye ever did. “Move That Dope,” the lead single from his second full-length, uses a raw, minimalist Mike Will Made It beat and off-kilter rhyme patterns to make dealing cocaine sound as fatalistic, compulsive, and ultimately unrewarding as being addicted to it. Even the album’s most triumphal moments—on “Covered N Money” Future asks us to imagine him literally covered in money—are undercut by a formidable existential streak. —Miles Raymer
Lord Mantis, Death Mask (Profound Lore) Chicago’s Lord Mantis don’t exactly play death metal—usually they sound more like a pissed-off steel mill—but they’ve got the “death” part down. Or at least an antipathy to life: “Everything is just meat,” bassist and front man Charlie Fell said in a recent interview, “living as part of some giant regurgitating machine that you’re just some fucking gear in.” The band’s third full-length, Death Mask, trudges and bludgeons more than it thrashes, its repetitions numbing and punishingly deliberate—these guys like to dig into one note at a time, diverging only momentarily, like a drill bit skipping out of the hole it’s chewing into an anvil. But if any one thing persuades me that Lord Mantis would be happy to see the planet sterilized and glowing like a cinder, it’s the vocals: Fell isn’t screaming just because that’s what people do in this kind of metal. He sounds like you’ve impaled him on a spear, and now he’s gonna pull it through his own body so he can get close enough to you to tear off your lower jaw with his bare hands and throw it under your car. The best reason to make cathartic music, after all, is because you’ve got something you really need to get out of your system. Lord Mantis plays a release party for Death Mask at Cobra Lounge on Fri 4/25; Abigail Williams and Terminate open. —Philip Montoro
Various artists, The Space Project (Lefse) The explanation of what exactly makes up The Space Project‘s “space sounds” is itself a little out there. The audio threaded through this compilation’s 14 tracks comes from the two Voyager space probes launched in 1977—it’s been derived from data representing “electromagnetic radiation fluctuations in the magnetosphere of the planets.” More important, though, is the lineup of notable artists who signed on to contribute—among them Antlers, Blues Control, Beach House, Jesu, Zomes, and Spiritualized (whose Jason Pierce, always the colorful crank, admitted that he did it for the $1,500 the gig paid). Predictably given its subject matter, the album has a celestial, ambient bent, and it’s both adventurous and somewhat difficult to parse—but only in the sense that it’s hard to know what’s making which noise. The “space sounds” often consist of low steady hums and scratches, sometimes morphing into walkie-talkie-style static or what the vacuum of a black hole might sound like. And the tracks that incorporate these sounds—some with dreamy vocals, some without—are chilling, even disturbing. —Kevin Warwick
