Old song, whole new Hume: If you've followed the Day-Glo prog pop of Britton Powell & Co., then you'll recognize "Grip," the first song on Sockets Records' spring mix. In the two years since Hume last committed the song to tape, the band has massaged it from propulsive Afropop into something gentler, just as lush but less busy. Things really click around the 1:30 mark, when the song melts into a soupy and spaced-out hosanna. It's the first song to emerge from Hume's upcoming EP on Sockets, and a sure sign that Hume is maturing into as much of a studio beast as a live one.

The rest of the mix, which you can grab here, blends material new and old; I'm really digging the Tyondai Braxton remix of Extra Life's "Head Shrinker." Tracklist after the jump:

1. Grip – Hume

2. Five Minutes at the Rainforest Cafe – Macaw

3. A Diviner – True Womanhood

4. Moon Rocks (Ricky Rabbit remix) – Rap Dragons

5. Rookie of the Year – Nine-11 Thesaurus

6. Head Shrinker (Tyondai Braxton remix) – Extra Life

7. In Pursuit of Sunshine – The Wholeheart

8. Hearted – Sean Peoples

9. Letter of a General – Imperial China

10. Durito's Revenge (Dirty Bombs) – The Cornel West Theory

Sean Peoples

• A new HUME EP this summer, with a tour to follow.
• A Laughing Man EP.
• An Aaron Thompson LP, with lotsa guests.
• An EP from N'Digo Rose, who plays keys in the Cornel West Theory.
• A Cornel West Theory mixtape.
• A Sean Peoples EP.

And other stuff! Sockets' next release is an EP of Extra Life remixes.

Reissue corner! Dr. Strange has rereleased Government Issue's Joyride; VHF has re-pressed Skullflower's This Is...

The new Medications record is out next week on Dischord; we've got a review in this week's issue, on stands Thursday.

Cunieform has a bunch of new releases slated for May, including another installment of its Soft Machine archival series.

This Friday's "Taking the Piss" DJ night at Marx Cafe in Mount Pleasant is doubling as a release party for the new Black Tambourine anthology out on Slumberland Records.

Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments.

It's easy to see why many have overlooked the experimental quintet, which will release a remix EP on D.C.'s Sockets Records in May: One can throw a rock in the group's native Brooklyn and hit five art-rock acts. Yet, as Made Flesh makes apparent, it's hard to understand how anyone could ignore Extra Life. Fronted by musical wiz kid Charlie Looker—a former member of the art-punk act Zs who has worked with Glenn Branca and Dirty Projectors—Extra Life exudes an exuberant and visceral sound missing from many of the band's artier peers, yet maintains a musical complexity and intelligence in every song.

Take "The Ladder," which clocks in at a little less than six-and-a-half minutes. The tune is as dynamic as any in the band's small oeuvre and suggests the kind of patience in its execution that many acts fail to demonstrate over decades-long careers. The ditty starts off slowly, and just as Looker sends his vocals into a gymnastics routine suggesting Gregorian chant, the song takes flight: Diversions toward mathy progressions collide with a creaky-sounding violin while Nicholas Podgurski's hardcore-worthy drumming directs the disparate sounds into a fluid whole.

Made Flesh is something of a step up, or rather, a step toward a more accessible composure for the band. Extra Life's criminally overlooked 2008 debut, Secular Works, sounds almost unapproachable by comparison. The new album is more fluid, its sonic flow a little clearer,  its dynamic changes harder.

One thing that may help people notice the band this time isn't even on the album. It's Dave Longstreth. Looker and Extra Life have garnered a lot of comparisons to Longstreth's Dirty Projectors, and Looker's own foray as a Projector has provided a great hook for many music writers and fans searching for a way to describe the band.

While Looker's intricate guitar play and vocal bungee-jumping certainly recall his peer's work, Extra Life is harder, more complex, and maybe even more spellbinding than Dirty Projectors. Still, once the Projectors' Bitte Orca hit the Billboard 200, the doors swung open for groups as challenging as Extra Life to find a larger audience. Fine, but experimental groups should now be less concerned with big numbers than measuring up to what Extra Life has made.

Extra Life performs tomorrow at We Used to be Family, Mr. Moccasin and Truth Serum at Windup Space in Baltimore.

Sockets, the local record label that has released works by Hume, Little Women, and Extra Life (and, in the interest of full disclosure, myself, albeit a while back), recently posted a Spring mixtape on its freshly redesigned website.

All sorts of good stuff here, most of surprisingly melodious, from Nick Rivetti (aka Ricky Rabbit of Food For Animals) ambient gurgling, to Chris Grier's (Kohoutek, To Live and Shave in LA, Ultimate VAG) SYR-worthy guitar playing. Most of all, I'm enjoying Excepter's minimalist remix of Brooklyn's Zs, which whittles the normally raucous band down to a muted throb.

Here's the tracklist:

1. Chris Lynn
2. Phat Daughter String Quartet
3. Fly Girlz
4. Nick Rivetti
5. Chris Grier
6. FFFFs
7. ZS (Excepter Remix)
8. Extra Life
9. Layne Garrett

Where 2007 was my love-affair year with free jazz, 2008 saw my affections turn to extreme metal in all its varied forms. The sad departure of Transparent Productions meant a dearth of interesting avant-garde jazz in the District, and I replaced concertgoing expeditions to Sangha (RIP) and Twins Jazz with rather different expeditions to places like Jaxx and various smaller venues booking the more underground kinds of metal. My passion for music tracks closely with what I'm seeing in the live setting, so it makes sense that my 2008 list is dominated by the heavy, evil stuff. (My friends—and especially housemates—didn't appreciate this so much.)

Be it metal, jazz, electronic music, free improvisation, or whatever, I've been convinced for a few years now that, industry woes aside, we're living in a renaissance period with fascinating new music being made at an unprecedented clip. Granted, I have absolutely no empirical basis for this claim, but I present the following 10 recordings as examples of the freshness of today's music-making scene...

1. One With Filth, Crowpath (Willowtip)
Pundits can quibble over whether or not “avant-garde metal” is really avant-garde in any meaningful sense, but the latest album from Swedish band Crowpath is an undeniably experimental and edgy slab of death metal. Compared to the band’s two earlier releases, it’s downright catchy and accessible, striking a perfect balance between challenging and immediately rewarding, but it’s still impossibly punishing. “Thinking man’s metal” is an overused phrase and too often refers to dry exercises in technicality, but it’s a perfect term for this recording.

Crowpath, "Cleansed In Chlorine":

2. Doombringer, Nasum (Relapse)
A more than welcome posthumous live release from these grindcore greats. Although Doombringer clocks in at a mere 23 minutes, the 16 tracks here are meatier than most albums twice the length or more. Brutal and unrelenting from start to finish, like getting punched in the face repeatedly, by a guy wearing spiked brass knuckles. You know, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Nasum, "Inhale/Exhale":

3. (duck), Buffalo Collision (Screwgun)
A collaboration between two members of the Bad Plus (piano and drums) and older free-jazzers Tim Berne (sax) and Hank Roberts (cello), Buffalo Collision straddles the line between groovy jazz and boisterous free improv. Comprised of three long, almost incomprehensible twisting pieces, this project bears Berne’s distinctive stamp, but the Bad Plus members add a wonderfully melodic tilt to the proceedings.

Buffalo Collision, "2nd of 4":

4. The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull, Earth (Southern Lord)
Classic drone metal band meets renowned jazz/Americana guitarist Bill Frisell… and the results are gorgeous. There’s little vestige of Earth’s doomy past to be found here; the new version of the band is obsessed with painting desolate pictures of rural America using extremely sparse, twangy, still heavy guitar notes. Frisell contributes a few lonely, windblown solos that take the album from good solidly into the realm of great.

Earth, "Engine of Ruin":

5. Salome, Salome (Vendetta)
The D.C. area’s best doom metal band, Salome is a simple guitar-drums-vocal band, but that lone guitarist sounds like three downtuned guitarists and a bassist all combined. The band has just about the biggest sound imaginable from a mere trio, and vocalist Kat’s memorable growls and shrieks just add to the stark, evil atmosphere.

Salome, "Black Tides":

6. Keio Line, Richard Pinhas and Merzbow (Cuneiform)
Ambient music at its best, Keio Line is a meeting of two very different but equally brilliant minds: a French guitarist and a legend of Japanese noise. The result is more than the sum of the parts, music that blends well into the background but still manages to reveal layer upon fascinating layer under a close listen.

Richard Pinhas & Merzbow, "Shibuya AKS":

7. Secular Works, Extra Life (Planaria)
What happens when you mash up rhythmically complex avant-rock with the stark, monochromatic vocal melodies of early Western music? Guitarist Charlie Looker, formerly of Zs, explores the possibilities with this new band. The album never quite lives up to the promise of its explosive opening track, but the sheer freshness of Looker’s ideas makes any of his work worth a close listen.

Extra Life, "Blackmail Blues":

8. Oneiromantical War, Wrnlrd (FSS)
Listening to this D.C.-area one-man atmospheric metal band’s latest album is akin to falling endlessly through a dark, damp abyss in slow motion. Oneiromantical War is as ugly and lo-fi as any early-’90s DIY Norwegian black metal record; “wall of sound” might be a good descriptor, but only if one imagines walls covered in sandpaper and sharp edges. Yet the overtly evil stuff is often hidden away in long, ambient drones, giving the album a nuance that the vast majority of metal recordings lack.

Wrnlrd, "War":

9. Belle Ville, Townhouse Orchestra (Clean Feed)
Second album by this all-star European quartet, led by Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love and featuring legendary British saxophonist Evan Parker. Belle Ville consists of two 45-minute long collective improvisations. Listening to it is a bit like wandering through a corn maze: you’re never quite sure what comes next, you can’t quite remember all the twists and turns, and eventually you emerge out at the end, a bit unsure of what you just went through but feeling a certain sense of satisfaction nevertheless.

Townhouse Orchestra, "Belle Ville":

10. Pitom, Yoshie Fruchter (Tzadik)
I found much of this year’s output from John Zorn’s Tzadik label a bit disappointing, but Pitom was a pleasant surprise. Imagine the loping, heavy prog of 70s-era King Crimson meets Zorn’s free-jazz group Masada, with a dash of Sonic Youth for good measure. Melody, chaos, noise, whimsy, fun.

Yoshie Fruchter, "The Dregs":

11. Twenty honorable mentions:

Holon, Nik Bärtsch's Ronin (ECM)
Studio 1, Box (Rune Grammofon)
Carried to Dust, Calexico (Quarterstick)
Traced in Air, Cynic (Season of Mist)
Incendio, Los Dorados & Cuong Vu (Intolerancia)
Hello, Voyager, Evangelista (Constellation)
V1.1, Fessenden (Other Electricities)
To Sail, To Sail, Fred Frith (Tzadik)
Street Horrrsing, Fuck Buttons (ATP)
Disgorge Mexico, Fuck the Facts (Relapse)
The Way of All Flesh, Gojira (Prosthetic)
Stockholm & Göteborg, Henry Cow (ReR)
Krallice, Krallice (Profound Lore)
Teeth, Little Women (SocketsCDR)
ObZen, Meshuggah (Nuclear Blast)
River Mouth Echoes, Maja Ratkje (Tzadik)
This Is It..., Marnie Stern (Kill Rock Stars)
Now and Forever, The Thing (Smalltown Superjazzz)
Beat Reader, The Vandermark 5 (Atavistic)
Oud Bass Piano Trio, Yitzhak Yedid (Between the Lines)

So I suppose we'd be remiss not to mention that show in this space; but more than that, there's no way I'm missing Extra Life in the flesh. Fans of tuneful, accessible avant-rock, you know who you are... if you haven't gotten your fill at 611 Florida on Saturday, come up to Comet on Sunday.

I've never seen live music at Comet before–rumor has it the show should start around 8pm, but I'd take that with a grain of salt. There's also a closing DJ set after Extra Life and Tussle are done, courtesy of Will Eastman.