ALBUM OF THE WEEK
odd nosdam, the driving force behind the great Clouddead, has assembled (and assemble is the right word) a brilliant genre-defying epic with nods to electronic music, psychedelia, and hip-hop. Burner is a dense collection of found sounds, loops and old records (shades of the Books) buoyed by eclected instrumentation and guest vocals from the likes of Mike Patton and Jessica Bailiff. The album starts off with a warm and soothing collage of scratchy old records before giving away to layers of distortion and feedback (his trademark merging of laptops and 8-track players). Later songs explore similar ambient territory, but beautiful melodies quietly emerge through the thicket of overlapping sounds: “Clouded” and “Untitled Three” are particularly haunting in their loveliness.