Music And The Mind Machine

Pacific Rim: The Black is an animated series set in the monsters-versus-robots world of Pacific Rim. After interdimensional behemoths known as Kaiju ravage Australia, two siblings pilot a Jaeger, a war machine of enormous size, to search for their parents in the ruins of the continent. Traveling across the blasted landscape, they encounter new creatures, seedy characters, and chance allies.

Jazz is supposedly a grown folks’ genre, played by aging bohemians in tiny clubs. Tell that to the Breathing Effect—a self-described electronic group influenced by soul, rock and jazz—whose debut album, Mars Is a Very Bad Place for Love, toes a line between traditional and turn up. As a unit, producer/keyboardist Eli Goss and drummer/bassist Harry Terrell merge the standards of conventional jazz with modern bounce beats. By definition, it scans as "jazz fusion," but the results conjure '70s R&B as well as the contemporary Los Angeles beat scene and hip-hop.

Dap Dippin' with Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings is the debut album by Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings. It is also the first full length release from Daptone Records.

Davina and the Vagabonds are well-known for their live shows, blending jazz, soul, brilliant stage presence, and top-notch musicianship. Attendees walk away converts. It stands to reason then, that Davina and the Vagabonds would at some point put out a live album. So they did.

Growing up in middle-class suburban Pennsylvania, Jen Pague looked around at the routine of family life and rejected it in full. The suburban isolation, the lack of culture, the white picket fences: “I didn’t want to be part of it in any capacity,” Pague says. “Even from a very young age. I wasn’t going to do what my parents did.” So she started a band.

It's not surprising that Lou Reed finds a kindred spirit in Edgar Allan Poe. The godfather of punk's early ambition was to bring the darker elements of great literature–decay, death, and decadence–to rock & roll. The Raven was born following a spoken-word performance of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" during which Reed "came to understand it in a way I never had before." Accordingly, The Raven may strike Reed's longtime fans in a way the artist never has before. Although dark, the music is stylistically all over the place–from Velvet Underground-like rock instrumentals to actor Steve Buscemi's creepy lounge-lizard take on the anti-showbiz "Broadway Song," to moments that recall such diverse past Reed ventures as Metal Machine Music and the Bells. He even reprises two classics–"Perfect Day" and "The Bed" from Transformer and Berlin, respectively – in almost unrecognizable forms. Ornette Coleman and David Bowie drop in, and actors read text in which Reed mixes Poe's poems and stories with his own words. The opium references are surely Poe's; the explicit images probably all Reed's. It's hard to tell, though; the blend's that good. – Bill Holdship

Belated Christmas presents for fans of the late, great Brit-jazz tenorist Tubby Hayes as Universal have announced the arrival of selected remastered albums.

One of BookRiot's Must-Read Books from Indie Presses for 2014