There's a perfectly practical reason the Kansas-based band Müscle Wörship uses umlauts in its name - to protect people who would rather not know about a particular sexual fetish. So a word of advice to those folks: Don't do an online search for the band without those umlauts!
But the combination of a somewhat-deviant punk-ish name and those metal dots (àla Motörhead) makes musical sense, too, as Müscle Wörship lives in the cracks between styles. There's the lean aggression of punk, the experimental complexity of post-punk, the general heaviness of metal, extensive use of the tremolo bar that sometimes recalls the signature guitar sounds of both My Bloody Valentine and Neil Young, alternative tunings that bring to mind Sonic Youth, a grunge-y emphasis on hooks and distorted melody, and even hints of emo in the vocals.
The magic is that - on Müscle Wörship's self-titled debut album from earlier this year - those disparate elements have been combined in a way that, against all odds, is nearly monolithic: 32 furious minutes of great and nearly great infectious hard rock. (And just to be clear: The whole record is 32 minutes.) The group's music has three very different methods of persuasion - forceful enough to grab you by the throat, accessible enough to suck you in, and intricate enough to get lost in. In that sense, the name is wholly appropriate: This is music that's all beautifully sculpted muscle.
Singer Joey Niceforo, the founder and frontman for the musical quartet Destino, first met two of his group's other members - violinist Rosemary Siemens and pianist Roy Tan - when all three were active in the operatic ensemble The Canadian Tenors in 2006. The fourth member, tenor Terance Reddick, joined Destino two years later, and initially auditioned for the group by singing opera over the phone.
Jennifer Higdon's Violin Concerto unfolds as a slow burn with flickering, firefly-like tones, then straps you into a sonic roller coaster, corkscrewing through ever-changing musical images. When you have experienced the sublime disorderliness of Higdon's concerto, it seems miraculous that it ultimately makes sense; you have experienced something that was perceivable if not completely comprehensible.
On Minus Six's new album Come Out from Where You Hide, "Grassfed" boldly announces itself with gorgeously intertwined fast runs on sax and piano - downhill, then up, and back down again, a deft flash of early jazz grafted onto verses of piano rock. The instrumental breaks elevate the whole, with pianist Kevin Carton and saxophonist Matt Sivertsen given the space to playfully develop and explore.
Would you like to see a photo of perhaps the happiest child in the world?
