News of a new Yo La Tengo album is reason enough to celebrate. News of a great new Yo La Tengo album? Well, there ought to be a national holiday of some sort. The long-running band has just announced their 15th full-length, the daringly titled There’s A Riot Going On (out March 16 on Matador), and you can check out four tunes from the record today. The LP is a world unto itself, but if you had to pick an analogue from the catalog, it would have to be 2003’s Summer Sun. With multi-instrumentalist James McNew manning the boards, Riot shares a certain sensibility with that effort, boasting spacious/spacey layers, tumbling rhythms and flickering balladry, all with the friendly ghost of Sun Ra overseeing the proceedings. There’s also a notable lack of Ira Kaplan’s signature guitar skronk. But as its title suggests, one thing Riot is not is placid. Even in its loveliest moments, there’s a restless tension lurking beneath every note here, a perfect reflection of our restlessly tense times. More than 30 years into their unpredictable adventure, Yo La Tengo still captivate, inviting us back into their little corner of the world one more time. words / t wilcox

This coming week Michael Nesmith revives the spirit of the First National Band, the pioneering country-rock outfit he fronted from 1970 to 1971, for a series of shows in Southern California. Though best known for the knit wool beanie he donned during his two-season stint as a member of NBC’s The Monkees, Nesmith has worn many hats in his storied career in the arts, including label head, movie producer, author, VR impresario, and, arguably, inventor of the modern music video. This compilation focuses on the polymathic Nesmith’s Stetson years of 1970 to 1975. During this prolific period “Papa Nez” produced a series of albums for RCA and his own Pacific Arts label that set challenging meditations on subjects such as freedom, acceptance, and the nature of subject-object relationships to a backing track of rollicking country rock.

After departing The Monkees at the start of the decade Nesmith joined forces with Orville “Red” Rhodes, the pedal steel ace, electronics wizard, and LA session journeyman who headed up the house band at the San Fernando Valley’s premiere honky tonk, The Palomino. Their partnership, which stretched across seven albums in various band and duo configurations, took Nesmith back to his Texas roots at the same time as it propelled the emerging genre of country rock to new heights. In Rhodes Nesmith found his perfect musical foil. In addition to being a virtuoso on his instrument the 40-something Rhodes was a legendary stoner who kept a jar of kif-infused peanut butter handy to keep the mood dialed in. Nesmith, on the other hand, was old before his time, a serious young man predisposed to serious thoughts and weighty topics. Together, Rhodes’ levity and Nesmith’s gravity struck an improbable balance, creating in the process some of the smartest songs ever penned about cows, break-ups, and broken-down Chevys.

Unlike many of his contemporaries in the 70s country rock scene, Nesmith was neither a traditionalist nor a dilettante. Rather, he found in the country music of his youth forms and themes that allowed him to give a more immediate, visceral voice to the heady abstractions he was exploring in his own ongoing studies of religion and philosophy. His recordings from this period made a compelling case that homesickness, whiskey-soaked heartache, and the loneliness one sometimes feels in a crowded bar are really just banal expressions of existential angst. As filtered through Rhodes’ swirling tone, the sounds and imagery of country became a form of vernacular philosophy. As he sings in “Hollywood” (Magnetic South, 1970), for Nesmith the appeal of the idiom was first and foremost intellectual:

It’s not the countryside that appealed to my heart
It’s the spirit and it captured my mind

This compilation collects more than twenty album cuts and live performances from Nesmith’s First and Second National Bands and his stripped-down collaborations with Rhodes. They range from a cosmic cover of Patsy Cline’s classic “I Fall To Pieces” to the koan-like “The Grand Ennui” to the uncharacteristically sentimental “Propinquity (I’ve Just Begun To Care).” Taken together, they put on full display the breadth of Nesmith’s catholic musical interests, the depth of his personal philosophy, and the exaggerated height of his archly raised eyebrow. words / m dawson

The Grand Ennui: Michael Nesmith 1970-1975

Witness – The End Is At Hand: Volume four. Similar to volumes 1-3, this homemade collection rounds up super-obscure, often private press, outsider psychedelic guitar and folk music from the 60s and 70s…all with the underlying theme of the Jesus People Movement.

The End Is At Hand Vol. 4 – Deeper Than The Mighty Rolling Sea (1 hour, 28 minutes)

George Harrison called his sprawling debut All Things Must Pass. Alvarius B. (aka Sun City Girls/Sublime Frequencies co-founder Alan Bishop) could’ve called his new similarly styled triple record/two-CD set All Things Suck Ass. Yeah, if you’re looking for a blast of optimism in 2018, you might want to look elsewhere. Bishop’s outlook on 21st century humanity is positively nightmarish. “Some prick called me a cynic / said I don’t have any hope,” he sings in “Dark in my Heart.” “But I hope he croaks.” Misanthropy might not be a strong enough term. Interestingly, however, the songwriter cloaks his pitch black musings in some of the most accessible (downright welcoming!) music of his career, drawing from the deep wells of Dylan, Davies and Cash (as well as touches of Morricone). Throw in the fact that Bishop is usually pretty hilarious (in an extremely dark/provocative way, of course), and you’ve got a listening experience that is actually … fun? Something like that anyway. At 35 songs, With a Beaker on the Burner and an Otter in the Oven is a lot to take in all at once, but its skewed visions are well worth experiencing. words / t wilcox

In his book The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World, Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi casts a widescreen lens on the digital landscape, in search of the answer to the question “What elements of the analog world should we hang onto as we navigate the digital?”

He began writing about the subject with an article for Pitchfork in 2012, where he broke down the royalty rates of popular streaming services. But with his book and accompanying podcast, Ways of Hearing, Krukowski cracks the subject wide open, examining it from scientific, technological, sociological, and emotional angles. It’s not a screed against progress; rather, it’s an insightful and beautifully written investigation of music’s true value. In a field of constant disruption, Krukowski holds up what might be worth preserving from the analog age, and how the “noise” of context adds to our understanding of, and connection to, the “signal” source of music itself.

Last month, before the winter break, Krukowski joined Aquarium Drunkard on the phone from Massachusetts to explore the radical possibilities of streaming music, the role of nostalgia in his writing, and the importance of the fight for Net Neutrality. Our conversation, edited and condensed, follows.

Aquarium Drunkard: Congrats on a great read. I picked up my copy at an independent bookstore, driving home from my job at an independent record store. So the questions you’re grappling with — about what we might be losing as our culture shifts around us — those are my kind of questions. In addition to purchasing music, I do stream, but this is not an “anti-streaming” book so much as it is a book asking some tough questions about how we stream. But let’s push that aside for a second and establish: What is your favorite thing about streaming?

Damon Krukowski: I use streaming a lot, too. I feel that all these ways of sharing information are useful and have their place in our lives…so long as we keep them open and accessible enough that users can determine how they place them in their lives, I think that they’re all positive. What is scary about streaming to me is not the medium [itself] but the corporate control of it. It’s becoming so centrally-controlled by giant corporations. I mean, the size of Apple, the size of the competition at companies like Spotify, it’s mind-boggling.

Primal, out there, and truly embodying the oft-used adjective ‘psychedelic’, Amon Düül II’s sophmore lp Yeti found the genre-bending Krautrock pioneers hitting their stride on all fronts. Structured chaos bubbling just beneath the surface, bent in all the right places. Below is an AD edit of side two’s “Cerberus” – a track I played on the radio show last week just before sliding into the droning, gauzy “Just Enough” via Julian Lynch. Sip on, below.

Amon Düül II :: Cerberus (AD edit)

Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35, can be heard twice every Friday – Noon EST with an encore broadcast at Midnight EST.

SIRIUS 507: Jean Michel Bernard – Générique Stephane ++ The Astral Army – Interstellar Shortwave ++ Amon Düül II – Halluzination Guillotine ++ Sunwatchers – Ancestors (Aquarium Drunkard Session) ++ Sunwatchers – Aurora Borealis  (Aquarium Drunkard Session) ++ Spirulina – The Message (AD edit) ++ Faust – It’s A Bit of A Pain ++ Pink Floyd – Paintbox ++ Amon Düül II – Cerberus ++ Julian Lynch – Just Enough ++ Indian Jewelry – Hello Africa ++ Atlas Sound – Rained ++ Hollow Hand – A World Outside ++ OCs – On And On Corridor ++ Cluster – Caramel ++ Robert Wyatt – Yolanda ++ Hermanos Calatrava – Space Oddity ++ Lee “Scratch” Perry – Double Six ++ Damo Suzuki / Kraftwerk – Transistor ++ David Lee Jr. – Cosmic Vision ++ Thee Oh Sees – Palace Doctor ++ Chris Cohen – Torrey Pine ++ Sam Cohen – Pretty Lights ++ Sam Amidon – Juma Mountain ++ Arthur Russell – Instrumentals Volume 1 ++ Lenny Kravitz – Riding On The Wings of My Lord (demo) ++ John Cale – Taking It All Away (1975 Peel Session) ++ John Cale – Darling I Need You (1975 Peel Session) ++ John Cale – You Know More Than I Know (1975 Peel Session) ++ John Cale – Fear (1975  Peel Session) ++ Robert Walter’s 20th Congress – Artbella (Aquarium Drunkard Session) ++ Robert Walter’s 20th Congress – Flying (Aquarium Drunkard Session) ++ Robert Walter’s 20th Congress – Black Narcissus (Aquarium Drunkard Session)

*You can listen, for free, online with the SIRIUS three day trial — just submit an email address and they will send you a password.