Rebels know how to stir the pot, but Swedish musician Christine Owman kicks the whole damn thing over. Asked about the state of the music industry, the Swedish singer/songwriter once said, “The music industry is what you call ‘music culture’ when you suck the individualism and integrity out and let businessmen try to make money out of it.” Those are tall words right there. Unlike the millions of other supposedly badass musicians on this Earth, Owman backs her growl with a rabies-giving bite. She founded her own record label, Revolving Records, on which she released her latest album, Throwing Knives, in 2010. Unfortunately for the rebellious bard, part of pissing off the status quo is that they don’t want anything to do with you. That’s why Throwing Knives is just now making its triumphant review debut with ESM. You won’t find this shit on Pitchfork so listen up.

Owman is a multi-instrumentalist songwriting prodigy in the strain of Tom Waits, St. Vincent, and Beck. Owman’s second LP evokes sounds reminiscent of its title: beautiful, emotional, precise, and deadly. Blending folk, industrial, and indie, Owman lends a mind open to musical meldings, the likes of which are seldom seen and even less often delightful. Playing cello, guitar, ukulele, violin, banjo, piano, bass, and saw, Owman brings a diverse repertoire of sound to Throwing Knives. “Circles” finds the maestro rocking her uke in a typical snappy strum pattern but playing a dark melody uncharacteristic for the island-living instrument. Owman layers vocals and unleashes a heart-wrenching violin in the background, further darkening the song’s soul. The dynamic contrast of influences makes “Circles” one of Throwing Knives’ most unique songs. If St. Vincent and Nine Inch Nails had a love child, it’d be Owman’s “Dance.” The lo-fi ditty belongs in a German horror film with its sludge synths and drums trickling out a sadistic groove like crimson blood dripping from a fresh wound.

Despite her Scandinavian identity, the blonde Owman flexes her mastery of the English language with lyrics often equally as ingenious as her musical compositions. “God help us when love becomes the shame of all,” she sings on the finger picked guitar accompanied “Sinners.” “Are my opinions of you a result of what express is yours/ Or is it an interpretation reflecting myself,” Owman asks with male vocal accompaniment on the very Tom Waits-sounding “Spelling Words.” To complete the artistic package that is Owman, her performances feature theatrical showmanship with the Euro rebel wearing antique dresses while scenes from old movies are projected behind her. Owman is giving music a much-needed kick in the ass; because of it, however, she’s hard to get a hold of, so keep your eyes and ears open. By Alex Lemonde-Gray

If I were to cut my arm off in a wood chipper tonight I would expect some form of emotion from my friends and family. I would expect sympathy of some sort, hopefully not empathy, but certainly not apathy. I can only imagine one group of people I know who would express apathy at my loss of an arm and that would be the majority of bands I have met. Certainly not every band, but a great deal of them would look at me, bandaged/ bleeding/ grimaced and struggling to pick up my Fresca, and they would walk away at least acting as though they do not care. 

Please don’t mistake this observation for a discovery. I know that this has been the operating mode for musicians throughout the last five decades. I also know that “arm lost to wood chipper” is a bad example, but I have a point. Musicians are classic professionals at feigning apathy, or at the worst amateurs in showing disgust. This is something that can really get to a person working with music and those who create it. We feel that the disgust is aimed at us sometimes and that hurts, and we don’t like it, and we play Mortal Kombat and cuss at the television to relieve the pain.

My basic goal here is to show that Pursesnatchers are relatively refreshing with the gentle nature and modesty they own. Despite the ability within their trio to take listeners on a transcontinental excursion (I stole this line from a textbook lesson on diction) of audio and mind, the Connecticut-based band is surprisingly humble. I don’t know much about their origins and I can’t really place them in a genre but I love one thing I read where they classified their own sound as “seaweed.” They seem to know that they have a clear sound of non-clarity. If you’re looking to blur the boundaries of punk, kelp rock, jock-pop, and good-crud synth with the emotions felt during the group Electric Slide from your last 5th-grade dance, you’ll probably hit close to your target with A Pattern Language. By Will Tunstall

Oh New Zealand, you’ve given the world so little and yet so much. From setting the appropriately epic backdrop for The Lord Of The Rings movies to the comical song kidding of The Flight Of The Concords to a beached-ass whale, New Zealand has opened itself to Americans like a virus-ridden porn website to a 13-year-old boy. Back in the technological dark ages of the late 1980s and early 1990s, NZ first came into the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world’s consciousness thanks to the frantic finagling of The 3D’s. This Kiwi foursome gained international popularity with its take on the grunge movement of the time as epitomized by Nirvana.

Based in Dunedin, The 3D’s launched as three friends from different bands looking for cheap rent, crap booze, and fun times jamming the night away. In 1988, founding members Dominic Stones (drums), Denise Roughan (bass, vocals) and David Saunders (guitar, vocals) would play live, improvised songs based on rough, repetitive melodies. The band’s name refers to the first letter of the three founding members’ first name. Luckily, David Mitchell (guitar, mandolin, vocals) fulfilled the band’s tough member criterion and joined in 1989. We Bury The Living: The Early Recordings 1989-90 features The 3D’s’ first recorded work, the EPs Fish Tales (1990) and Swarthy Songs For Swabs (1991), as well as seven previously unreleased demos. The two EPs were digitally re-mastered for the compilation, but the demos were recorded on porta-studio, meaning all of the then-fledging band’s original grit remains.

To mindlessly toss The 3D’s in the generic trash can of early ‘90s grunge bands would be an insult to the group’s legacy. The band warrants comparisons to The Pixies sonically and in terms of lineup. Like Kim Deal, Denise Roughan has a limited but powerful approach to building bass melodies and squeezes in some backing and occasionally main vocals. The band’s playful sardonic nature walks the fuzzy boundaries between alternative, punk, and grunge, sounding like the gleefully dysfunctional love child of Black Sabbath and Jefferson Airplane. “Evocation Of W.C. Fields” sees the disheartened band wishing to project a slightest inkling of the comedian’s aura in nasal distortion. The 3D’s wear their punk credibility on their sleeve with “Evil Kid,” a heavy, bass-driven fury of a song with David Mitchell going riff crazy and David Saunders verifying potential arrows to Black Francis. We Bury The Living tastefully exists in the gray matter between punk and alternative, a testament to what would become The 3D’s. By Alex Lemonde-Gray

Break out the skin-tight white suit with overplayed lapel and dust off those platforms, because old-school DJ extraordinaire Norman Jay has come a-knocking. That’s right, the ‘70s and ‘80s will be blasting from car stereos once again whether you like it or not, because the man just rode a wave of funk across the hurricane-nurturing Atlantic to the colonies. Don’t feel bad if you have no idea who Norman Jay is, I’m still figuring it out myself. For starters, the dark stranger is a Member of the Order of the British Empire, so he’s no Johnny Rotten, except he got his “professional” start with a pirate radio station, so he kind of is…

While Jay reportedly considers himself a house DJ, the rest of the UK remembers him as the soothsayer who coined the phrased “rare groove.” And that’s just what Jay is about: rare grooves. Jay famously started spinning those ditties with his brother at Notting Hill Carnival (I think it’s an English music festival; no carnies, sorry) 30 years ago in an outfit that called itself Good Times Sound System. He became the go-to DJ, changing the festival’s entire scene and maintaining a yearly residence at the party ever since. Norman Jay Presents Good Times 30 celebrates Jay’s Good Times stint by packing a sucker punch full of disco days hits from a mess of unknown and hit musicians performing a cross-section of hip-moving genres.

In accordance with Jay’s calling card style, Norman Jay Presents Good Times 30 slaps soul, disco, funk, hip-hop, reggae, and early house together tight like a PB&J. Album opener “I Believe In Miracles” by little known disco-soulster Mark Cappani leaves you working your best Saturday Night Fever dance moves in full ‘70s garb. Jay spins the funk side of disco with “Ghetto Disco (Edit),” which features Ted Taylor belting away in his smooth-as-sugar voice over a heady funk guitar riff and backing horns. Doo-wop even slips in with the album’s most famous track, “My Girl.” Jay keeps things pleasantly obscure by throwing in early ‘80s house music with “Forever This,” roots-reggae in “Tired F Lick Weed In Bush,” and socially minded hip-hop with 1988’s rousing “Everybody (L I F E)” by The Basement Khemist. Judging by the seamless flow of jams on Norman Jay Presents Good Times 30, Jay’s UK rep as a music-mixing genius is well deserved, and we colonists would do good to learn a thing or two. By Alex Lemonde-Gray