RAIN MACHINE
Rain Machine - Anti-
FILTER Grade: 80%

TV on the Radio’s hairiest guitarist-singer Kyp Malone’s newest is a solo experiment in avant-soul. Not because Malone approaches R&B grit or smooth vocal sonorousness within Rain Machine’s walls with mere wonkiness, but that no matter how sprawling and dissonant (the 10 minute-plus “Winter Song”), stridently askew (“Smiling Black Faces”) or tightly wound and shockingly approachable (the Biblically aware “Give Blood”), there’s an ardent emotionalism here that would make Otis Redding seem calm in comparison. The blues Malone wears on his sleeve (and his six-string) throughout Rain Machine are tortured, angular and weightily touched by the lightning rod mania of Albert King rather than, say, the sheets of noise he lays down as a member of his other “solo” project, Iran. Yet, there remains something still and rolling-holy soulful about this that Malone can’t find anywhere else.