New Music: Marnie Stern, Sky Larkin, Shakira and the xx

My greatest regret of CMJ week, which just blew through New York in a whirlwind of panels and open bars and late-night Kanye sightings, was missing the almost-dozen performances by Marnie Stern. Marnie's self-titled album, which came out earlier this month on Kill Rock Stars, is my favorite record of the year—brash but vulnerable, energetic but melancholy, and stuffed with ideas from top to bottom. Plus, "Female Guitar Players Are The New Black" is not only a great title that sorta-forces critics to deal with their "OMG a girl is playing guitar really fast that's like so weird" biases, it's a whirlwind of a track, with an army of Sterns leading the assault over Zach Hill's pummeling drumming and guitar bursts that sound like they were inspired by the "pew! pew!" sounds people make when they're playing Finger Lasers.

Stern gets a lot of attention for her tap-happy guitar playing—which is, admittedly, sick, and well-matched with Hill's manic work on the drums—and her wicked sense of humor, which is a breath of fresh air in the often way too self-serious rock world of 2010. Not only does it make for a fairly entertaining tour blog, it also informs musical ventures like her slightly twisted take on the Hawaii Five-O theme. (Why this couldn't be the version blaring from that sound installation at the corner of E. 4th Street and Lafayette advertising the show's recent reboot is beyond me.)

The British act Sky Larkin is another act I regretted missing last week, being that they're a pretty exciting post-post-punk act with a crazy good gutiarist. (Plus, they were touring with the outstanding duo Blood Red Shoes.) I first heard their new album Kaleide through the old-school social-networking method of "listening to a record while at a friend's house," and it all combined to bring me back to 1996 in a very good way:

Shakira's Sale el Sol isn't as deliriously weird as her 2009 ode to thirtysomething ladies' libidos She Wolf; where She Wolf was her attempt to play DJ, where she mixed up up disco and minimalist synthpop and lusty lyrics, Sale el Sol represents a return to her more polyglot aesthetic. It's a fairly solid album, although not as grabby as She Wolf. The highlight is probably its spiky cover of "Islands," originally done by the British soul miserablists the xx:

It is very hard for me to mention the xx—who have had a pretty good year, winning the Mercury Prize and having their music in an ad that was all over the Olympics—without mentioning their stunning rainy-day cover of Womack and Womack's "Teardrops." If you've heard it, it's worth hearing again. If you haven't, you're welcome:

This track also sounds very nice when paired with "You're The One," a gospel-influenced rumination on keeping a relationship together by the Jermaine Dupri protégé Dondria. (It also did OK on the Christian music chart, which I guess means that other people found the lyrics "And that feeling you just can't control it makes you wanna just call me / And tell me how much you really miss me / It makes you wanna call me / And say that you can't wait to hold and kiss me kiss me all over" to be about her special relationship with the Lord?)

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"The Smartest Thing She Ever Said" is a Tumblr based digital storytelling art project featuring four teams of two-one artist and one story editor-between now and the end of the year. For three weeks each, the teams were asked to interpret the phrase, "The Smartest Thing She's Ever Said." The current team features photographer Amanda Merton and writer Alice Gregory with support from project curator Alexis Hyde. ArtSheSaid.com and its artists are entirely supported by Ann Taylor in collaboration with Flavorpill.

Maura Johnston likes music and is relieved that CMJ is over.