Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week it’s Black Meteoric Star’s “Dawn”/”Dreamcatcher” 12-inch. Buy the album it’s from and read Schnipper’s thoughts on it after the jump.

I was nervous to play Black Meteoric Star in the office because I thought it was too aggressive. I interviewed Gavin Russom, who records as Black Meteoric Star, not long ago and he immediately referenced Trax Records as an influence and an inspiration. The Chicago house label’s records from the eighties had always lodged themselves in my memory as particularly harsh and raw—early, inexperienced recordings from adventurous musicians. Russom told me he had been sleeping in the cold basement studio of an airy 13th Street building, said he preferred to stay there when he was in New York, as opposed to with friends. He can focus better in the basement, make sure he’s on the right warpath. I told him I’d seen him perform at a club recently and that the bright light attached to his equipment made the marker scrawl on some piece of homemade electronics clearly legible—“relax and enjoy the ride.” “I wear sunglasses when I perform,” he said. The extra light is so he can see what he is doing.

“Dreamcatcher” and “Dawn” are the best two songs of the six-part suite of three 12-inch singles and one CD of edits Black Meteoric Star recently released. Turns out it’s not very aggressive, that a primitive drum machine no longer has the same fierceness. I wonder if that’s anything like shopping, or babies, or drugs. There’s an initial inertia from the newness but then it is just worn and regular. It’s a quagmire, then, to maintain a healthy level of excitement after the initial gloss had faded. I think that’s true of everything. Everyone thinks that’s true of everything. I wonder if that’s why Gavin Russom performs with girls with their tits out, lazers, balloons, 3-D glasses and masks. He wears wigs, scarves, tutus, tights, garters and a red thong. It’s something new to see.

Yesterday, Jon Caramanica reviewed the first tour performance Major Lazer (another pseudonym for dudes, Diplo and Switch, who make electronic music and themselves aren’t much to look at as performers). He ripped it a new one for being trite and appropriating, but not before opining that the performance would have been better if he didn’t have to look at anything (“And what smarter way to comment on cultural appropriation than by removing the author altogether?”). This is a sort of inverse of John Cage sitting at a piano and not playing anything. To a lot of people, that sounded beyond harsh. But instead of a blank slate and full ears, Caramanica got “Diplo and Switch trading off on the turntables; uninspired cut-up visuals, including a throbbing Jamaican flag; a pair of dancers intermittently displaying energy; an intently focused conga drummer; and a hypeman, 77Klash, seemingly uninterested in hyping the crowd.” I’m not sure I’d want to look at those things either (and certainly not at a show with doors at midnight), but it seemed a peculiar derision for a show he knew to be featuring two men who perform only as DJs. I cannot imagine their unfeisty performance to be of great surprise. But my major qualm was with Caramanica’s dancing around the question of authenticity—a word he never uses—and cloaking it in the grimmer ring of “cultural appropriation,” by which he means, white guys taking black stuff. It’s a sensitive issue, obviously, and not one I have a great knowledge or interest in myself (I like music made by white ladies for the most part. And dead gay guys), but it reminded me of his wonderful piece about the rapper Rick Ross—“Beyond Authenticity”—and the possible exaggeration of his drug dealing past. Not long ago it was revealed (not by Rick Ross) that he used to be a prison guard. This, somehow, has not much mattered, and Ross can keep his Timberlands spraypainted with “rich off cocaine” with no one much minding. “Impenetrability of image,” Caramanica writes, “that old signal of hip-hop authenticity, somehow no longer seems to count.” Too bad it counts when you are dudes in suits making dancehall. Either way, my favorite song on the album is definitely the one that sounds Puerto Rican. And, you know, in my office, no one minded Gavin Russom’s new take on old gay black music.