Emerging inconclusively from the grime and sleaze of 2010’s nightmarish Black City, Matthew Dear blazes a funny kind of light on the brand new Beams (Ghostly Inter-national), circling back to the elliptically alluring avant-pop of 2007’s Asa Breed while sinking ever deeper into mechanistic murk and terse, Talking Heads-y art-funk. The onetime microhouse poster boy’s fifth full-length opens in aberrantly sunny fashion: a burbling pseudo-tropical groove, complete with samba whistles. But just as you’re thinking he could probably give this a few tweaks, sell it to Rihanna or somebody and retire early, in comes that ineffable, dead-eyed monotone — Dear’s distinctive double-tracked creepy crooning — intoning characteristically inscrutable-yet-unsettling couplets, as if to assert that he will hardly be relinquishing it anytime soon.
Fri., Nov. 16, 9 p.m., $10-$15, with Light Asylum, Voyeur, 1221 St. James St., 215-735-5772, igetrvng.com.
