Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment

“Surf”

Self-released

Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment’s “Surf,” the new album associated with Chance the Rapper’s crew, finally arrived as a free download after a couple of years of increasingly feverish anticipation. Just don’t call it a follow-up.

Chance’s 2013 mix tape, “Acid Rap,” became one of the most lauded hip-hop albums of recent years, but instead of focusing on his solo career, the Chicago MC poured his energies into what the music industry might call a side project.

“Surf” sounds more ambitious than that, though. Officially, it’s the debut album by Chance’s childhood friend and trumpet player, Nico Segal, aka Donnie Trumpet. Segal was part of the Social Experiment band that Chance put together for his 2013 tour, and it’s a hothouse of young musicians/songwriters/producers steeped not only in hip-hop, but in R&B, soul, jazz, funk, rock, and other subcultures.

This is an album where Latin rhythms coexist with gospel, where Beach Boys harmonies rub shoulders with disco, and “Lion King”-scale theatrical production rolls into psychedelia and rap. It resists instant analysis or quick judgments.

“Surf” integrates a mish-mash of sounds, genres and guests into a relatively coherent whole, textured and nuanced in ways that demand repeat listens. Smaller pieces provide bridges to more ambitious tracks, which leads to the impression of an endless, nonstop river of music flowing across continents and decades. It’s an open-ended musical search that takes the ceiling off the Social Experiment’s future.

— Greg Kot,

Chicago Tribune

Jenny Hval

“Apocalypse, Girl”

Sacred Bones Records

Now with three albums released under her own name (not including her previous two as Rockettothesky), Norwegian singer, songwriter, author, and academic Jenny Hval continues to make the human body and human sexuality central to her work, but on her latest, “Apocalypse, Girl,” she also takes on a litany of anxieties and concerns both individual and societal. As on her previous two albums, “Viscera” (2011) and “Innocence Is Kinky” (2013), Hval embraces aspects of popular music while also disregarding the limiting expectations that come tied to such forms. Still, “Apocalypse, Girl” might be, musically speaking, her most concise collection of songs yet, if also the most thematically loose and diverse.

Though never verse-chorus-verse, these songs, their anti-structures and capricious melodies, prove accessible on their own terms. There’s nothing here as plainly gorgeous as “Golden Locks” or “Milk of Marrow” from “Viscera.”

Even more than the unsettlingly vivid images and intellectual confrontation proffered by her words, it is those wild shifts and dramatic declamations, the risks that Hval is willing to take with her vocal delivery, that make “Apocalypse, Girl” so singular. You may squirm at times, but it is almost impossible to look away.

— Ian King,

PopMatters.com

Tenement

“Predatory Headlights”

Don Giovanni Records

A rock band’s best use of the double album isn’t lordly time-wasting; it’s straining against limitations and predictability. Tenement is a pop-punk trio from Appleton, Wisconsin, a do-it-yourself band from top to bottom. It has just made a double album that might be great. Whether the album is actually improbable, or straining against limitations, is another question.

Pop-punk is an impassioned and economical medium. But Amos Pitsch, Tenement’s singer, guitarist and songwriter, has a hypersophisticated interest in the mechanics of music in general. Like Ty Segall, or Kurt Heasley from the Lilys, he’s a dictionary of rock riffs and chord changes.

And so “Predatory Headlights,” Tenement’s first album in four years, expands his central talent — bright punk songs with counterintuitive lyric phrasing, jangling harmonies and effectively contrasting bridges — into other areas. None of it is haphazard; every song is a puzzle, an attempt to connect varied impulses, shaped with a beginning and an end.

“Predatory Headlights” has already been compared to records like Husker Du’s “Zen Arcade” and the Minutemen’s “Double Nickels on the Dime.” Those records felt like extravagant surprises. It doesn’t feel like a record that tumbled out because it had to. It’s an extended formal study, music about music. It’s still pretty thrilling.

— Ben Ratliff,

New York Times