Motion City Soundtrack, "Panic Stations"

Blackalicious

“IMANI, VOL. 1”

OGM Recordings / Mahogany Sun / Quannum

After the hip-hop duo’s third album “The Craft” in 2005, rapper Gift of Gab (Timothy Parker) and beats maestro Chief Xcel (Xavier Mosley) were not heard from in a decade — until now. “Imani, Vol. 1” arrives as the first of a projected trilogy.

The duo acts like the last 10 years didn’t happen. There are no concessions to trendy guests or producers, no EDM flavors or Europop glitter. But it’s not retro either. Instead, Parker and Mosley have produced a genre-crossing, era-leaping concept album about time and perseverance. It’s not so much about being in the moment as moving beyond it, of creating a conceptual framework for how an oppressed people can move forward.

The tracks brim with singalong choruses, strutting horns and bright melodies that evoke the heyday of Philly soul, the mystic optimism of Earth Wind & Fire and the “Car Wash” soundtrack.

But it’s not all sunshine. Over an expansive landscape of piano and strings, “Escape” contemplates the “young gun who used to get respect, but now he’s turning 30 … (and) no one cares.” The Afro-futuristic glow threatens to burn off completely on the closing, “Imani,” with its litany of corruption and betrayal. “Imani” is the word for “faith” in the Swahili language, but in “The Hour Glass,” a plaintive question suggests that even faith has its limits: “Can there be a revolution without carnage and waste?”

— Greg Cot,

Chicago Tribune

Motion City Soundtrack

“PANIC STATIONS”

Epitaph Records

It seems redundant, if not painfully obvious, to label any Motion City Soundtrack record a breakup record. It’s like calling Brand New records hopeless. Or John Mayer records romantic. Or Rage Against the Machine records angry. Such are the reasons why we go to these people in the first place. We get it. They get it. It’s an unspoken agreement between artist and consumer.

Yet even with as much established, “Panic Stations” is a different kind of lonely album, even by Motion City Soundtrack standards. It’s a matured darkness, a type of acceptance that comes after having to get up off the floor one too many times. The recording process came between what feels like a perpetual touring cycle on which the band embarks as hard as any other emotionally charged punk-pop band in recent memory. Suffice to say, that rawness serves them well here.

A song like “TKO” feels subversively loose, proving to be the antithesis for something as polished as 2007’s “Even If It Kills Me.” The spaced-out keyboards are still there, and of course singer Justin Pierre’s underrated ability to craft an infectious hook sits front and center as he insists over and over again, “You keep knocking me out.” But this time around, the group appears much more cocksure than they have before, apologizing for nothing about how they got to this burst of artistic output in the first place.

— Colin McGuire,

PopMatters.com

Battles

“LA DI DA DI”

Warp Records

Hasta la vista, vocals. Battles, the definitive math-rock band, goes fully instrumental on “La Di Da Di,” the group’s third studio album and a tour de force. Vocals from a founding member who has left the band, Tyondai Braxton, meshed with the instruments on Battles’ 2007 debut album, “Mirrored”; guest singers on the 2011 “Gloss Drop” often cluttered up their songs.

Now, Battles has recalibrated. The tracks on “La Di Da Di” are often dense but always streamlined. They’re all about forward momentum, dollops of melody, layered repetition that mutates as it goes, and out-of-nowhere pivots and swerves that turn out to serve an underlying plan.

Battles has honed a kind of high-impact minimalism, situating its music between the methodical propulsion of loops and the upside-your-head power of impulse and surprise. John Stanier’s drums are the music’s visceral core, keeping things funky and sometimes knocking sense into a welter of burbling synthesizers. Ian Williams, on keyboards and guitars, and Dave Konopka, on guitar and bass, stack up the rest of the sounds: blurry and crystalline, fractured and tuneful. The components of the music are often cyclical, but it’s rare that a Battles track goes for more than 10 seconds without some conspicuous change.

ON TOUR: Oct. 8 — Hawthorne Theater, Portland; www.cascadetickets.com.

— Jon Pareles,

New York Times