MUSIC: Wiggly Air by Kurt Gottschalk

When 14th Street was Cooler. Back in the deep, dark ’90s, before the Meatpacking District was home to the Highline and the Whitney Museum and the Apple Store, West 14th Street housed one of the city’s great venues for music outside the norm, one that history seems to have left behind. The Cooler was a big, old, retrofitted, basement meat locker. For a few years, it was also a haven for downtown jazz, experimental rock and out-and-out oddities, before the burgeoning model-and-gawker crowd took over the hood, traipsing through the puddles of blood seeping out of the dumpsters in front of wholesale butcher shops in their Air Jordans and Prada Slingbacks.

The Cooler became a stop for a lot of Japanese experimental rock bands, not infrequently featuring Asahito Nanjo’s extreme overdrive and psychedelic freakouts. His High Rise, Mainliner and Musica Transonic all played there, and played loud. Nanjo also brought merch like nobody’s business, recordings that could be lost to the dustbins if it weren’t for the efforts of the Los Angeles label Black Editions, who have been reissuing titles from his La Musica Records and the more established P.S.F. Records.

The simply titled M (LP, download out Feb. 6) was originally released on La Musica in 1996 and may well have been on the table at The Cooler at some point. To those who missed it (such as your correspondent), it comes as quite a surprise: Reverb-drenched guitar, gently tinkling piano, modest use of electronics all shadowing an ethereal set of soft, lovely and nebulous songs, sung in Japanese in a hesitant falsetto. It gets a bit samey, but that doesn’t matter if you just let it float by. Next month, the label will release the equally esoteric Black Tape II, recorded in 1992 by Nanjo’s Ohkami No Jikan—still not as heavy as the groups he used to bring to NYC, but it’s a power trio lineup that gets pretty close. No telling what he’s been up to for the last decade or two, but his free-range rock is worth revisiting, or even discovering.

Windy City incongruities. Even etherealer than M is cellist Ishmael Ali’s Burn the Plastic, Steal the Copper (CD, LP, download out Feb. 3 from Amalgam). It’s a trip of an album, launching in experimental improvisation zone but before too long finding its way into song formats. The third track, “Stars In My Pocket,” strongly recalls another Chicagoan, trumpeter Ben Lamar Gay, who also refuses to stay in any one place very long. A plaintive melody, almost a chant, maybe in Arabic, is sung over a quick, off-kilter rhythm with open-ended soloing and electronic noodling. Buried in the mix is a bit of accompanying scat. “Everness” includes a glitched out voice. “Anathema” follows a similar formula, but the processed singing might be in Spanish, or maybe it’s just the melody fooling me. It all gets a little like dream logic.

There are indications of it being a jazz album, but there are surprises around every corner. Guest musicians include fellow Chicagoans Jim Baker (piano, synthesizer), Bill Harris (percussion), Ed Wilkerson (saxophones) and Corey Wilkes (trumpet). The album closes with its longest, and maybe best, track, “Every Circle a Moon,” features singer Brianna Tong repeating, “Three hands—weigh your soul against the sun / Wait for end of time and we’ll be done / Three moons—three and three, they turn into one / Ashes—sinking silence into form” like a plainchant incantation with a half-submerged rap landing somewhere in the middle and the hottest soloing on the record. Burn the Plastic is a mixed bag. The glue that holds it together is Ali’s short, aggressive solo tracks, but what’s most memorable is the songs that lie in between.

Doggie done it. “Fungai Free 2023,” falling about halfway through Dog Chocolate’s new So Inspired, So Done In (LP, download out Feb. 27 from Upset The Rhythm) starts off not so far off from their countrymen Slade’s 1974 hit “Ballroom Blitz.” I’m not sure if it’s supposed to, maybe Brits just can’t help it, but over a strutting drum pattern singer Andrew announces that we’re time-traveling back to 2022, when he had a rash on his face. The song is maybe a wish, though, to no longer have a rash the following year. Whatever it is, it’s a ripper, and a funny one at that. It’s been seven years since Dog Chocolate’s last release (longer even than they were active before that) and they’ve, well, “matured” isn’t the word, but they’ve refined their sound, polished and tightened their cacophony. “Employee” is a “Working Class Hero” for the 21st Century, when the heroes are influencers and gig workers don’t get paid. Their songs are old-school sing-along punk but with occasional twists, even recalling the great US Maple in moments (and who doesn’t appreciate hints of Maple?); good time tunes for uncertain times.

Also of note. The job of song interpreter has lost respect since the days of Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra. For the last half century, singers have been expected to write their songs, or at least to own them. Exceptions prove rules, one shining example being Tori Amos’s Strange Little Girls: a dozen tracks originally written and performed by men, which she reinterprets in her own style and gendered point of view. Selections included songs by Eminem, Joe Jackson, Slayer, the Stranglers, 10cc, the Velvet Underground, Tom Waits and Neil Young, with a highlight being her take on the Beatles’ “Happiness is a Warm Gun.” That album’s 15th birthday isn’t until the fall, but Amos is celebrating with a double LP reissue (Feb. 20 from Rhino) including songs from David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen that didn’t make the original release. (The Bowie and Cooper songs were pressed to a single and then pulled from release but have been online for years.) Calling Strange Little Girls Amos’s best album sounds like a slight in an era when cover versions are considered sideshow attractions, but it was a project full of thought, instinct and heart.

Jan. 22 marked 10 years since Savages released their second, brilliant, scathing and final album Adore Life and began a slow fade into the sunset. For years, their website was updated with announcements about solo projects and no indication of their ever working together again. The implication seemed obvious but the question was put to rest last summer in a couple of definitive and venomous Instagram posts by singer Jehnny Beth. To mark the album’s birthday, however, they re-emerged, in a fashion, with two songs from the Adore sessions posted to YouTube, one being a perfectly lovely cover of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid.” Ultimately, their flame burned too bright. It’s nice to have something new from them, even if it is a decade old.

Speaking of celebrating male songwriters, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts announced last month that it has acquired the archives of Television frontman Tom Verlaine, including unpublished songs, poetry and short stories, as well as correspondence with Richard Hell, Patti Smith and others. The collection should feel comfortable, if not exactly happy, sitting alongside the Lou Reed archive in the stacks.