welcome to Bill’s Indie Basement: the week in classic indie, college rock, and more

Like The Fall and Mark E Smith, a lot of people consider The Intelligence and Lars Finberg one and the same -- on early records like Boredom and Terror that was essentially true (he played everything). Here we are, though, with a Lars Finberg solo album which begs the question, what’s the diff? He tells us that while The Intelligence began as a solitary project, band member collaboration “pushed it from a little wooden puppet to a real live boy.” This time, working in his childhood hometown of Bakersfield, CA, he wanted to go it alone. “I wanted to devolve back in time by pasting junk together myself and try making a new entry in a new catalog. Or maybe I just want even more of all the credit.”

As for "all the credit," a lot of cool people help out on this record. Ty Segall served as co-producer, and it features appearances by Mikal Cronin, Shana Cleveland (La Luz), and Melvins walloper Coady Willis, among others. The surfing-at-angles sound -- which heads in some new territory here -- and the skewed worldview, however, are all Lars. Few can tightrope between bleak, funny and charming like Finberg, and he’s especially sharp here, whether the subject is love and death (“Benevolent Panic”), connecting with others (“Ambiverts,” “Alone Alas”) or health care woes (“Empty Network”). The anything-goes freedom of a solo LP, and having Segall as a sonic foil, pays off in spades too, with some of the wildest, coolest, weirdest arrangements Finberg has done in some time. Never, of course, at the sacrifice of big, meaty hooks. Lars is one of a kind, and Moonlight Over Bakersfield finds him at his sardonic best.

Here We Go Magic main man Luke Temple, who has also released a handful of solo records under his own name, reinvented himself this year as Art Feynman, filtering ‘70s slinky Nigerian funk and krautrock through charmingly loose low-fi four-track recordings. That album, Blast Off Through the Wicker, proved to be the freshest thing he’d done in ages. He’s already back with a new Art Feynman EP, Near Negative, which will be out December 15 via Western Vinyl. The first single, “Monday Give Me Monday,” might be a catchier pop song than anything on Blast Off -- light and breezy with a funky guitar riff that twists around a two-note keyboard line. Luke’s playing really shines on the jammy second half of the song, dropping an extended solo that manages to sound impressive and tossed-off at the same time.

If you can only listen to one current groovy krautrock band from Switzerland, make it Klaus Johann Grobe. If you can listen to two groovy krautrocking bands from Switzerland, make your second choice Neutral Zone -- which is actually Klaus Johann Grobe producer David Langhard. He’s been making records under the Neutral Zone moniker since 1995, apparently, but the just-released Hogofogo is the first to be widely available. Drawing major influence from Kraftwerk (dig that [Trans Europe Ex]press photo) and bicyles, Langhard knows his way around bleeps and bloops, crafting lush, mostly instrumental music, though subtly autotuned spoken word samples provide vocals of sorts, like on “Cycling Champion.” It’s the more inconspicuous production touches like that make Hogofogo really shine, as when you realize the ambient street noises on atmospheric “Industrie” are actually the rhythm track. There’s also a point in the same song where what seems like a chirpy digital glitch is also 100% intentional. (This is an excellent headphones album.) There are also zoomy motorikk bangers ("Toujours le même," “Merckx”) and at least one song where his working with KJG rubbed off (“Led73” which gets its title from either sampling the opening notes of “No Quarter” or recreating it exactly). There’s even a proper pop song, the glam-ish “The Bigger the Pile,” to close out the proceedings that, if it doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the record, makes for a nice bike ride off into the sunset.

I’ll wrap things up with Grooms' new video for “Softer Now.” The album it’s from, the recently released Exit Index, is a dark one; tilted, alien and a little disturbing in a surreal sort of way. Director Edmond Hawkins, who does visual effects for Saturday Night Live, matches that with visuals. “After listening to the song, but not knowing what it was about, Edmond had this idea of someone being messed with by crowds of people, but you don’t know why,” says Grooms frontman Travis Johnson. “Or at least, he didn’t tell us. The vague menace of that worked really well with the song, and the album in general really.” Edmond also made the mask the main character wears in the video which, at one point, becomes jarringly lifelike. The black-and-white photography is gorgeous and it’s more than a little creepy: