After nearly a decade apart, Jesse Keeler and Sebastien Grainger are back together recording and performing as Death From Above 1979. “Cheap Talk” leads off the album, and it reveals the theme of the disc: the divergence between live and machine music, written and recorded, the created and the manufactured. You can’t get back what’s lost, no matter how hard you try. In “Always On,” which talks about living in the “always on” Internet age, Grainger sings “If we brought Kurt back to life/there’s no way he would survive.” This is a highly danceable dystopia—no Nirvana indeed. Even though they miraculously picked up where they left off, living in The Physical World is, among other things, sobering. As they say in “Right On, Frankenstein!,” “It’s the same old song, just a different tune.” They are even jaded about their own creativity, though they exuberantly rock hard as they express it. This musical monster they’ve created is no new Cobain, but it’s one mean mutha. –Stakerized!

The ghostly musical renderings of David Thomas, the singer/songwriter frontman of long-time Cleveland bizzarro band Pere Ubu, are more like strange narratives, stories told through a smoky, foggy lens of the imagined world than songs. By “singer” I mean he creates an off-kilter, high-pitched lilt that careens around the corners of verses like a carnival ride. Titled after the 1962 horror movie Carnival of Souls, filmed partly at Saltair, the album has more than one tie to the Beehive State. These songs were developed as an underscore for the film, and are a continuation of the trilogy that began with last year’s Lady From Shanghai. Thomas weaves together elements of poetry, sci-fi stories, ambient radio signals and religious mythology to create a truly uncategorizable musical vision. Two songs from Carnival of Souls will be featured on the TV show American Horror Story: Freak Show. The group, in the form of Thomas, drummer Steve Mehlman and synth player Robert Wheeler (sans guitar and bass), premiered the song “Road to Utah” and others at a house show in Farmington, Utah last December. Attending it was a musical transport, candles adding an eerie ambience. I also found this the perfect soundtrack for my Halloween hauntings. –Stakerized!