Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Herbie Hancock’s jazz-funk masterpiece, a celebration of all that is modern and ancient.

Head Hunters

In 1973, Herbie Hancock, a virtuosic jazz dissident, stomped out an entire history of sound when he walked out a bassline on a modular synthesizer. This was not someone’s upright acoustic bass played with calloused fingers, it was preprogrammed on a circuit board obscured inside a small wooden box, amplified by some hidden electrical process. And it wasn’t one bassline crawling out of the speakers, it was two, dubbed on top of each other, split across the stereo field, blasphemed onto what was ostensibly a jazz recording in post-production.
For purists, it was just another heretical element on another album of heresy from yet another jazz pioneer turned iconoclast. The afterimages of Miles Davis’ blinding turn toward the electric music a few years earlier were still being processed by audiences, players, and critics alike. Hancock, having played keys for six years with Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet, had his own gauntlet to throw. Inspired by the power he saw in James Brown and Sly & the Family Stone, Hancock wanted to quit wafting in the rarified air of acoustic and avant-garde jazz. “I was not trying to make a jazz record,” Hancock said later. He wanted to get low, down to the floor, through the earth. He wanted to make a pure funk record. Instead, he made Head Hunters.
A year before Hancock plunked out that bassline, his woodwind player, Bennie Maupin, sat among the sold-out crowd at Los Angeles Coliseum for Wattstax, a 1972 benefit concert sometimes referred to as “Black Woodstock.” Every marquee artist from the iconic Memphis soul label Stax performed that August afternoon—from the Staple Singers to the Bar-Kays to Isaac Hayes, who closed the concert wearing a gold chainmail cape. The eight-hour show meant to “give back to the community” in the primarily black Watts neighborhood, which had been torn by riots seven years earlier. Tickets were $1, and the security force was entirely black and unarmed. With over 110,000 in attendance, it was then the largest gathering of African Americans in one place since the civil rights March on Washington in 1963.
Maupin, a 32-year-old jazz woodwindist nonpareil from Detroit, had been playing with Hancock for the previous three years on a trilogy of experimental albums known as Hancock's Mwandishi period, from the Swahili name for “composer” that he had adopted at the time. Mwandishi (1971), Crossings (1972) and Sextant (1973) were lofty, sometimes electronic excursions, all influenced deeply by jazz’s big extinction event, Miles Davis’ 1970 album Bitches Brew. The Mwandishi group would sometimes sit in the tour bus and listen to records by German electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen at Hancock’s request. In the studio they were incorporating the vanguard production techniques of Bitches Brew, which were verboten in traditionalist jazz circles: extensive editing, amplified instruments, two drummers, overdubs, synth loops. Having played bass clarinet on Bitches Brew, Maupin served as real connective tissue from the most infamous jazz record to the second most infamous jazz record: Head Hunters. When Hancock disbanded the Mwandishi group in search of a new sound, Maupin was the only member he kept.
The heady strains of the Mwandishi era were a lot more highfalutin than the music Maupin witnessed at Wattstax, though. As the bands grooved to soul, R&B, and funk onstage, Maupin watched a group of young kids dancing the funky robot, popping and locking their joints at right angles. “I just started to hear in my mind melodies centered around that kind of movement,” Maupin later said. The melody: two little hitches, a staccato double-tap, followed by a bluesy riff down a minor pentatonic scale. Tributaries of jazz history flowed through Maupin, who had played with hard bop greats like Lee Morgan and avant-garde pioneers like Pharoah Sanders in the previous decade. But at Wattstax, he was tapping into a broader, more popular, more body-focused black experience. The music Hancock was plotting, like the melody Maupin imagined, drew from the politics of the Watts Riots and Black Nationalism and the counterculture, but also the beat, the one, the groove that made kids want to free their mind and dance.
When the concert let out, Maupin brought his riff idea based on the funky robot back to Hancock at a rehearsal space in Los Angeles, where he fed it to the newly assembled Head Hunters lineup. Maupin didn’t use the woozy timbre of the bass clarinet but rather the gritty R&B sound of the tenor sax. The upheaval of avant-garde and the donning of funk all poured into “Chameleon,” an indefatigable 15-minute track that staked a new epoch for jazz the minute Hancock plunked out its bassline. Nothing was what it seemed: the bassline was a synth; the guitar-sounding riff was a bass, played by Bay Area funk stylist Paul Jackson in the altissimo register. Hancock plays his clavinet like Hendrix comping time with a wah-wah pedal. The in-demand R&B session drummer Harvey Mason plays in a straight-eighth funk feel, like Clyde Stubblefield did behind James Brown. “Chameleon” slid in and out of the downbeat of ’70s funk, the looseness of cool jazz, the musical modes of R&B, all while drawing upon the rhythms of Anlo-Ewe and Afro-Cuban drumming, black counterculture, and the vanguard of modular synthesizers.
All this blending of traditional instruments and technology, of black American and African sound, was reflected on the album’s cover: Next to Maupin, there’s Jackson holding a Fender bass; Mason clutching a snare; a virtually unknown percussionist from the Bay Area, Bill Summers, holding gourd rattles. Front and center is Hancock, his face covered with something resembling the ritual kple kple mask worn by the Baoulé people of the Ivory Coast—the eyes, however, are radio knobs, and the mouth is a VU meter, an electronic tool for measuring loudness.
A satellite view of Head Hunters reveals a vast bazaar of cultures and genres, a complicated interchange of artistic and personal histories. Recorded in a single week and released shortly thereafter, on October 13, 1973, it spent 42 weeks on the Billboard chart, becoming the first platinum-selling jazz album, as it was being slammed by critics as a rapacious commercial move. It was an album that captured jazz as it broke out and mingled with America, appealing both to the Wattstax crowd and to white suburbia. “Sure I’m getting a bigger white audience,” Hancock said a year after the album’s release. “But I’m also getting a big black audience, which I never had...I’ve finally been able to come out with some music the general black public can relate to.”
By 1973, rock, pop, and R&B had been cannibalizing the jazz audience for over a decade. In the wake of Miles’ electric albums, jazz fusion groups like the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, and Return to Forever tried to capture both sides of the aisle. The walls were crumbling between the haughty air of jazz and what was being played on commercial radio. Taking a cynical view, jazz historian Grover Sales put it this way: “Some bored rock artists had been gravitating towards jazz because they were bored, while jazz players dallied with rock to recapture their dwindling audience.” In the eyes of purists, fusion groups had poisoned the sanctity of jazz, for reasons ranging from crass commercialization of what was once a pure art form to something more pernicious. Head Hunters co-producer David Rubinson said that “jazz fusion meant... white people playing black music.”
But Head Hunters avoids the fussy, technical chops of those fusion groups, and instead sinks deeply into funk. In a 1985 interview, Hancock revealed his mindset going into making a pure funk record: “When I heard [Sly & the Family Stone’s] “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” it just went to my core. I didn’t know what he was doing. I mean, I heard the chorus, but how could he think of that? I was afraid that was something I couldn’t do. And here I am, I call myself a musician. It bothered me…I decided to try my hand at funk.”
Like jazz, funk was, at its genesis, a wholly black and political genre, tempered in the Black Power movement of the ’60s and carried forth into the Nixon era by Brown, Sly, George Clinton, Curtis Mayfield, and others. For all of funk’s nastiness and ecstasy, its subversive emancipation of mind and ass, its no-pretense elemental nature, Rickey Vincent, in his 1995 book on the history of funk, lands on a long-view definition. He writes that funk is “...an aesthetic of deliberate confusion, soulful behavior that remains viable because of a faith in instinct, a joy of self, and a joy of life, particularly unassimilated black American life.” The black roots of Head Hunters create this underground communion of joy, a funky celebration of all that is modern and ancient.
Funk was psychedelic dance music, working-class rebellion, something elusive and unattainable to a mainstream white audience. And as always, mainstream America drank deep from this new well of underground black music. It made Hancock rich—and the numerous times “Chameleon” and “Watermelon Man” have been sampled in hip-hop only made him richer. But it was a sticking point for critics who called the great jazz piano player a pop sell-out. Members of the jazz cognoscenti did not want the hem of their garments sullied with the commercial slop of popular music. In conversation with famous jazz grouch Wynton Marsalis, Hancock defended Head Hunters not as an album that set out to make money, but an album that happened to make money. “Look I’d like to have a Rolls-Royce,” Hancock said, “but I’m not trying to set myself up to get a Rolls-Royce.”
It is impossible to capture the whole external life of the galactically important Head Hunters, what it touched, how it functioned, its shape in society, its place on the great cosmic map (though musicologist Steven Pond approaches totality in his peerless 2005 book on the album). Truthfully, though, Head Hunters doesn’t confer great importance by the sound of it. It doesn’t scream “cash-grab,” or signal a fissure in jazz, or really exist in any of the contexts that surrounded its release almost five decades ago. The microbial funk of the album, its living power, lies below all that.
Head Hunters states its intent in its name: The music will blow open your skull the second you press play, the instant the bassline from “Chameleon” comes out of the speakers in full stereo sound. And if that doesn’t move you, how about when Harvey Mason comes in with the funkiest drum part in the history of drumming, a groove even Hancock said he had never heard before in his life, that snare hit coming just before the two, the kick drum so dead and relaxed, are you kidding me? Head Hunters rightfully belongs to the Library of Congress as one of our nation's most treasured recordings, sitting there, smoking, untouchable, a factory of winces and hoooos.
Hancock’s idea for Head Hunters involved making a funk album with players who brought many other worlds to the table. Mason was an R&B drummer who played deep in the pocket, but he didn’t just sit on one pattern, he tugged and pulled at it throughout the song, a tailor constantly adjusting the fit and feel. Then there’s Summers’ famous solo on beer bottles, pennywhistle, shekere, handclaps, and falsetto ad-libs at the beginning of “Watermelon Man,” a tune carried over and radically reinterpreted from Hancock’s earlier career as a more traditional jazz player. This section is an adaptation of the traditional calls of Ba-Benzélé pygmies of Central Africa, an effort by Summers “to bring up the level of appreciation of the African experience.” With a fat Fender sound, Jackson plays the best bassline on the album—better even than “Chameleon”—defining the one and creating the syncopation outside of Summers’ nest of percussion.
Maupin doesn’t just riff around on the blues scale; on the vastly underappreciated “Sly,” he goes far out, squeaking and running high and low on the soprano sax, bringing his ’60s avant-gardism back into the soundscape, all on a song named after funk master Sly Stone himself. “Sly” may not have the cultural cachet of “Chameleon” or “Watermelon Man,” but it is the album’s true synthesis of funk texture and jazz feel. When the song shifts grooves around the two-minute mark, Hancock starts comping on his clavinet in stereo, Summers starts an Afro-Cuban groove on the conga, and Mason loosens his wrist on the snare to give Maupin as much room as he needs. By the time Hancock gets to his solo on his Rhodes, the song feels both impossibly free and tightly wound.
Finally, Head Hunters cools down with “Vein Melter,” the corpse pose, a psalm on death written for a friend of Hancock’s who died of a heroin overdose. With Mason’s snare rolls every measure, it sounds like a funeral march, but Hancock doesn’t put anything to rights. He delays interment with a sneaky grin while comping on the Rhodes with preternatural chill. “Vein Melter” never succumbs to meditative repetition—you can hear the heaving breath, the residual energy of the first three songs pulsing behind it.
Head Hunters is the bond that connects unnamable forces at the center of jazz and of funk, divine aspirations and base desires, head and body. It’s foolish to try to name the spark of music like this, a parlor game better left to the comedown of an acid trip or a street preacher on his last leg. Head Hunters isn’t the god, it’s just five consummate pros jamming, with a light amount of editing and production. It’s simple, really, even accidental. About six minutes and 55 seconds into “Chameleon,” as Hancock solos on his Arp Odyssey, he lands on a four-note phrase that’s about a half-step away from the key of the song. It is a phrase that pulls your shoulders up to your ears, makes you put your hands up to your face to block the punch. It is the single funkiest, unholiest, nastiest moment on the record, and it was a complete mistake. Hancock was futzing with the manual pitch bender on the synthesizer during his solo and didn’t realign it. He was playing the wrong notes, but the right notes were coming out.

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The Brooklyn rapper has a reputation for emulating Earl Sweatshirt’s brutal atmospherics and determined flow, but what sets him apart is the emotional precision he brings to his debut EP.

Ba Suba, Ak Jamm EP

The spirit of Earl Sweatshirt infuses Medhane’s small body of work, it’s true. You can feel his presence in the cracked beats, brutal atmospherics, internal rhyme patterns, and in Medhane’s stodgy, determined flow. Hell, I’ve been sending links to the rising Brooklyn rapper’s first EP, Ba Suba, Ak Jamm, to confirmed Earl fans myself. But, just as Action Bronson arrived in a haze of Ghostface Killah comparisons before his individuality revealed itself, listening to Medhane on repeat makes it obvious that he hasn’t simply heisted Earl’s style. There’s a specificity to his writing that sets him apart from the pack of rappers, like Sweatshirt, who’ve emerged from MF DOOM’s corner of the underground rap furnace.
Over six tracks packed tightly into 13 minutes, Medhane soulfully examines what it means to earn your keep in America and to find your purpose in life when you’re at the bottom of the capitalist crush. These are heavy topics, but there’s a richness and an emotional precision to his language that makes every angle explored feel authentic and relatable. It helps that Medhane is so resonant on the mic. In a voice that’s bled dry and grainy, he imbues his flow with a stoic determination; he has little interest in checking too many stylistic boxes or engaging in super-technical rappity-rap.
“Days” sees Medhane spitting over a string arrangement so deeply screwed, it could have originated in a George Martin recording session. Lines like “The weight of the world was heavy on my aching back/Trying to keep my soul straight and my faith intact” capture the trying nature of the daily grind with a refreshing directness. Medhane talks of being overworked for low wages on “Garden” and hopes that a decent payday is right around the corner on “AiteDen.” This is music for stalking the subway, headphones plugged in, on that cold journey home from a thankless job. He sounds like a young man whose next step always feels tantalizingly close and miles away at once.
Ba Suba, Ak Jamm is loaded with sentiments like this. Only in his early 20s, Medhane is an expert at capturing the feeling of being run down by this wicked thing called life. This isn’t desperation, exactly; it’s an everyday bitterness that most people can understand. Though he doesn’t feel the need to stud his bars with too much overt autobiographical detail, there’s personalization in how Medhane weaves his family into narratives. When kin make appearances in rap music, songs tend to get caught up in “Dear Mama”-style whimsy. But here, Medhane raps about his family like they’re simply omnipresent figures in his life: the aunt who gave him a meal when he needed it (“Garden”), the mother he deeply respects (“MedTypeBeat!”). Lyrics read as though lifted from dilapidated diary pages.
The beats are warped and wavy throughout the EP, adding a thickness to its climate—and with almost no hooks to be found, this is hip-hop stripped of any pop inclinations. But, as heavy as this all may sound, the record’s brevity gives it infinite replay potential. Music is often dubbed “depressing” because it uses downbeat chords. But Ba Suba, Ak Jamm is a reminder that music is one of the least depressing things in a universe that’s extremely cursed. Sometimes it’s grim, because life is often grim. When a young guy like Medhane so concisely captures that quality, the effect can be unexpectedly beautiful.


G Herbo remains rap’s youngest old man, a wizened 21-year-old who sounds, for the third year running, like he’s on the cusp of something truly great.

Strictly 4 My Fans

On the second half of Strictly 4 My Fans, when G Herbo’s longtime collaborator Lil Bibby shows up for the record’s sole collaboration, the headliner is having a crisis of confidence. He’s tired of clutching a pistol handle every time he turns a corner; he says his mother’s tired of wondering if he’s alive or not. And when the exhaustion really sets in, he turns back to a recurring nightmare: his face on the evening news under reports that he’s been gunned down, “no gun on me—so that means I lied in all them fucking rhymes.” By the time Bibby takes his turn, he’s mulling a move down south to cheaper real estate and quieter evenings. “I was always silent/Grew up violent, adapted to my climate.”
While that sort of bone-deep fatigue is the emotional throughline for many of Herbo’s best songs, Strictly 4 My Fans is anything but perfunctory. If anything, he sounds reenergized, like he’s been caged up for too long. And he has plenty to say—the tape opens with a furious take on the election, made all the more foreboding when the tape dropped a few weeks too late: “‘What if Fred Hampton was president?’ I woke up praying that/Because if Trump become the president he might bring slavery back/Been on black folks eighty years—might as well bring Reagan back.”
Whether he’s processing CNN tickers or drifting up and down Essex, Herbo has a gift for describing rapid change. On “Gutta,” he raps “These little niggas dangerous/Don’t even mask up no more, these little niggas brainless”—a notably weary point of view for someone who was born in 1995. Rappers from Chicago are far too often poked and prodded through sociological lenses, but with Herbo there’s something fundamental and cross-generational, a furious, unmoored delivery that always seems to be swimming upstream against the quickening decay of a country.
Strictly 4 My Fans is constructed strangely, in that it puts two mid-tempo sex songs back-to-back, right in the middle of the sequence. (The closest parallel in recent memory is probably the one-two punch of “Do It To Ya” and “Me & My Bitch” on YG’s My Krazy Life, though that suite was designed to serve a narrative purpose on a concept album.) Fortunately, each is well-produced (by Kid Marquis, flipping a Silk sample, and Charlie Handsome, respectively), and the momentum doesn’t ebb too much. “Pull Up” also features hands-down the record’s funniest moment, when Herbo opens the song “Let me show you how the gangstas do it/I know you tryna get it on, turn the Bryson Tiller off and let me fuck you to this gangsta music.”
More than last year’s Ballin’ Like I’m Kobe or Herbo’s breakthrough Welcome to Fazoland, this record relies on warm soul tones, including those approximated by 1980s gloss. And while he remains one of the best mechanical rappers working today, there’s rarely a moment here where Herbo sounds as if he’s breaking new formal ground. Strictly 4 My Fans is not an experiment or a leap forward. What it does provide is another fourth-quarter dose of rap’s youngest old man, a wizened 21-year-old who sounds, for the third year running, like he’s on the cusp of something truly great.


While he was recording his debut as Here We Go Magic, Luke Temple simultaneously made another solo album with a few friends helping him out, including future Here We Go Magic member Michael Bloch and Glass Ghost's Eliot Krimsky. Temple shelved the results, Don't Act Like You Don't Care, until the present day.

Luke Temple: Don't Act Like You Don't Care

Don't Act Like You Don't Care

This is sort of complicated, so try to follow along. Before Luke Temple self-recorded his murky, self-sampledelic 2009 debut as Here We Go Magic (the only release from the project thus far that features Temple all by his lonesome), he made two solo albums that mixed chamber-pop experimentation and singer/songwriter fare: 2005's Hold a Match for a Gasoline World and 2007's Snowbeast. While he was recording Here We Go Magic, he simultaneously made another solo album with a few friends helping him out, including future Here We Go Magic member Michael Bloch and Glass Ghost's Eliot Krimsky. When Here We Go Magic started gaining steam and turned into a full-band/full-time concern, Temple shelved the results, Don't Act Like You Don't Care, until the present day.
An early working title for the album was The Country Record, and that title speaks volumes. The majority of Don't Act Like You Don't Care is comprised of uncomplicated ditties, both jangly ("Ophelia") and bummed out ("So Long, So Long"). Temple experimented plenty on Gasoline World (Snowbeast, too); there are fewer risks taken overall here, which makes the record a fascinating window into an alternate-- and, to me, not totally desirable-- route his music could have taken had Here We Go Magic not attracted attention in the first place.
It's especially likely that listeners approaching this album are the ones who were initially ensnared by HWGM's increased profile; for them, potential (albeit minor) revelations are in store. Although Here We Go Magic's fleshed-out second album, last year's Pigeons, was far from the gestation period at the time of this LP's recording, you can pick out strands of that album's wooly, gently weird genetic code in the mutant folk of "More Than Muscle" and the unsettling twists and turns of "Weekend Warrior". Don't Act's sparse closing track, "Luck Part", slowly opens up with dark ambience and swaying unease. It'd be interesting to hear how these tracks would sound as played by Temple and his band now; they certainly fit in with his latest gig's M.O.
Don't Act Like You Don't Care is enjoyable but fails in key respects. It's poorly sequenced-- sprightly cuts up front with the slow, samey stuff crammed in the rear-- and the four-tracked production means that a decent amount of the material sounds like it never quite made it past the "basement demo" phase. In the three years since the recording of this album, Temple's made considerable leaps as a songwriter; a bit of present-day woodshedding would have likely benefited this material, which was recorded in a pair of four-hour sessions. Instead, this odd and intermittently pleasurable artifact just kinda sits there, an unintentional rebuke to the artist that orphaned this poor thing.


Kameron Bogges makes one-man black metal that charts the hellish exhilarations and debilitating lows of bipolar disorder.

I'm Losing Myself

Kameron Bogges wrote and recorded his first album as An Isolated Mind following a week-long stint at a psychiatric hospital and a subsequent bipolar diagnosis. Though rooted in black metal, the music he makes under this alias veers off in multiple directions, charting bipolar disorder’s hellish exhilarations and its debilitating lows. He self-released I’m Losing Myself in March, but now it’s available physically through I, Voidhanger Records, curators of outre and fringe black and death metal.
Losing is not a unified listen, but the brutal seams reflect its subject. “Turritopsis dohrnii” is the most tumultuous song, churning through discordant bits of black metal, synthesizer, and goth piano before opening into starlit post-rock guitar. Even a more conventional song like “Pathologized Existence” can’t stay on one track for long. Frantic subgenre-hopping around isn’t new for Bogges; his previous project Four Hoove Death Pig also played with stylistic collisions. But the stakes are higher here: for Bogges, exploration becomes a way to rebuild himself.
The last two tracks, “I’m Losing Myself” and “I’ve Lost Myself,” take up nearly half of the record, and they’re a devastating combo. “Losing” travels through desolate, bell-like bass, chilling strings, and errant, faint percussion, leading to “Lost’s” ambient drones, where there’s no metal, no drums, no direction, no hope. Unlike most ambient music, which encourages getting lost, “I’ve Lost Myself” feels claustrophobic and eerily blank. After the tumult, it feels less like release and more like surrender. Bogges captures depression at its most devastating: when your capacity to feel dissipates, where you can’t even conjure extreme sadness or self-hatred. Depression isn’t one monolithic mood, after all, but a complicated force with great internal violence.
One-man black metal is usually born of self-imposed isolation and self-righteous anti-humanism; Losing depicts how dangerous isolation can be for an already-fragile mind state. In that way, it feels painfully real, even intimate. Black metal is so often depicted as a destructive force, but Bogges uses it to heal.


The long-awaited debut from the lauded singer and guitarist is a fine showcase of her immense talent, though the constant balladeering doesn’t really capture what she does best.

Back of My Mind

The best song on Back of My Mind, H.E.R.’s debut full-length, is the first one. On “We Made It,” over a glimmering sample moving in reverse, the singer and guitarist nimbly hits swirls of falsetto notes, sing-songy raps, and full-on wails—the only time she does so on the album. There’s a gnarly guitar solo that she’s become known for at her many award-show performances, references to eating in fine-dining establishments in Paris, and a pretty piano outro. Back of My Mind never hits the triumphant high of its opener again. At 21 tracks, the album is too long, musically uneven, and leans on unnecessary guest appearances. But it also has moments of real promise, when H.E.R.—the four-time Grammy-award winner born Gabriella Wilson who’s been pitched to audiences for years now as a dynamic, mysterious talent—lives up to the hype.
One of those moments is on “Damage,” which thoughtfully incorporates a late-career Herb Alpert sample (one Bone Thugs-N-Harmony fans might recall) by adding in plucks of piano, thudding drums, and a big low end. With the help of songwriter Ant Clemons, H.E.R.’s delicate lilt folds in beautifully with the beat as she warns a lover to be careful with her heart. Its warm, ’80s-inspired production and schmaltzy lyrics sound like something you’d heard on a late-night slow jams radio show.
Ballads were a staple of H.E.R.’s initial five EPs, and she again uses them frequently on Back of My Mind, for better or worse. Nearly all of them are simple and pretty, like “Mean It,” a gentle and poignant acoustic song with a chorus that gets more lodged in your chest each time H.E.R. recites it. But by the time you get to “Exhausted,” another ballad that relies solely on her voice and one layer of instrumentation, you wish H.E.R. would break out of her sleepy hum and shoot for something more spirited.
Rather than doing that, she tries to switch things up through collaboration, which leads to mixed results. The Lil Baby feature on “Find a Way,” for example, sounds like a Lil Baby song, not a H.E.R. song, with its flavorless trap beat and stock lyrics. The title track, meanwhile, is more successful, as she and Ty Dolla $ign’s sweet spots overlap, creating a smooth back and forth. Elsewhere DJ Khaled and, disappointingly, Chris Brown, show up and don’t contribute anything to make the record feel more dynamic.
H.E.R. seemingly has the heavy, heartstruck ballads built for streaming playlists down, but there seems like there’s already a limit on where she’s willing to go within a song. The choices she makes—from the glossy R&B production to favoring vocal riffing over a good hook—feel altogether safe, like she’s protecting a legacy she was born into. What new wrinkles could she incorporate into her sound? Listening to Back of My Mind, it’s hard to tell, but the answer may lie in a song like “We Made It”—or its sonic opposite, the earthy, “Hold On.” Its soulful DNA feels endearingly familiar—so much so that I had to make sure it wasn’t a cover—and, paired with its live instrumentation, gives H.E.R. a different sort of backdrop to work with. She’s searching for more corners to place her voice in, singing up and down with the notes of her guitar. She harmonizes as the track fades out, conjuring an image of her standing on stage in the spotlight just before its cut. The stage is where H.E.R. shines—and it’s the closest the album comes to capturing H.E.R. at her greatest.

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Minor Victories includes members of Mogwai, Editors, and Slowdive, and their self-titled debut is a mix of sighing shoegaze, cinematic wanderlust, and gloomy riffage.

Minor Victories

Minor Victories have wisely shied away from billing themselves as a supergroup, a term that implies a degree of star power they can’t quite deliver. They prefer the much more neutral descriptor “band.” Still, it’s impossible to separate the group from their other projects. Any band featuring Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell, Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite, and Editors guitarist Justin Lockey (along with his brother James) is going to carry certain expectations, and on their self-titled debut they live up to each and every one of them.
The album’s creation involved a lot of emailing back and forth between members before some of them had even met, sort of a Postal Service situation only with a lot more CC’s. “We didn’t record in the same room, or at the same time,” they write in the album’s liner notes, “to be honest we probably didn’t start off with the same vision.” Shared visions are irrelevant, though, when you have a lineup of players with such defined lanes. The album’s sound feels preordained: Slowdive’s sighing shoegaze, Mogwai’s cinematic wanderlust, and Editors’ gloomy riffage are all represented, and in more or less equal measure.
If there’s one thing all three of those bands have in common, it’s that you if you’re reading this site you probably know what they all sound like, but you probably can’t hum any of their songs off the top of your head. That’s not a knock; like a lot of acts from their respective scenes, those groups prioritized aesthetic statements over strong songwriting voices. That sonics-first mindset inevitably carries through Minor Victories, too. On opener “Give Up the Ghost,” Goswell sings broodingly about black roses and the blood surging through her veins, but it’s mostly an excuse for the song’s gothy ambiance, buzzsaw guitars, and moody orchestral accents. “A Hundred Ropes” and “Folk Arp” are even more sweeping, with even more dramatic string arrangements. Everybody in the group clearly knows their way around a studio, and the album rarely sounds less than superb.
What’s missing, though, is the central promise of a supergroup: the thrill of hearing established musicians in a truly different context. Minor Victories’ lineup may stem from different circles, but their approaches are so complementary that there’s rarely any tension or surprise. Unsurprisingly, then, the album’s most memorable tracks each introduce an X factor. Twilight Sad’s James Graham gamely duets with Goswell on “Scattered Ashes (Song for Richard),” a pop number with handclap drums and a blissfully fuzzy riff that imagines a Jesus and Mary Chain cover of “Dancing in the Dark.” Then, a couple of tracks later, Mark Kozelek joins her for what’s essentially a stowaway Sun Kil Moon song, “For You Always.”
It’s at once completely out of place, completely obnoxious, and completely welcome. Kozelek goes into full Benji overshare mode, rattling off a flood of dates and locations with almost obsessive, journalistic detail. “We met once in Los Angeles just around the time of the Columbine murders and Mojave 3 were playing on Sunset Boulevard at Tower Records…” he sings (well, sort of sings), recounting his 20-year friendship with Goswell and its periodic romantic undertones. For her verses, Goswell mirrors his wordy delivery, and though she can match neither the grace nor the clumsiness of his prose, it’s exciting to finally hear her outside her element. Like everything Kozelek has a hand in, it’ll drive some listeners absolutely nuts. But in one song he does what Minor Victories manages only intermittently: He makes a lasting impression.


On her meditative and mesmerizing new album as Circuit Des Yeux, Haley Fohr embraces collaboration, working with members of Bitchin Bajas and other Chicago neighbors instead of going it alone. Accordingly, her music opens up, and the songs on In Plain Speech escort you toward stillness and awe.

In Plain Speech

Calling music "meditative" often means it's mellow and soothing—a conduit for relaxation. But truly meditative music isn't so much sedative as it is transformative, inducing a deliberately slower, quieter mental state. That's the kind of meditation Haley Fohr encourages as Circuit Des Yeux, and never more so than on In Plain Speech. The album is all long arcs and patient development. It's not laid-back; much of it is urgent and dramatically tense. Fohr's not here to placate, but she does seem bent on getting you to step back, to hear things calmly rather than in a rush.
If that sounds more like a task than a pleasure, don't worry: Fohr does most of the work for you. Her songs escort you toward stillness and awe rather than requiring you to get there first. The music is immediate and enveloping, and because of her rich, stirring voice, it's sometimes even bracing. But once you're ensnared, it becomes quietly mesmerizing. Part of that comes from the way she builds songs, adding pieces and textures subtly over time. But much of In Plain Speech's meditative power is a product of the wholeness and commitment of Fohr's vision, which communicates itself on a more intuitive level.
Often her approach is refreshingly simple: to make you pause, Fohr pauses herself. In "Do the Dishes", after a stretched-out haiku moaned over a cycling sample, she retreats into complete silence, then re-emerges with long, wordless tones. A similar full stop comes after the folk-rock climax of "Fantasize the Scene", as Fohr appends a string-heavy epilogue that evokes the best dirges of Nico.
Though it doesn't contain a literal pause, "A Story of This World" is In Plain Speech's most stillness-inducing track, and its best. On the surface, it's a simple folk tune, with acoustic strums, gentle strings, and Fohr's koans about how "all the gold turns to rust." But the tune's primal patience—its willingness to hang in space as it moves, to stand rather than sprint—is so thorough it feels like nature. Here and in the slow-burning instrumental "Dream of TV", Circuit Des Yeux recalls the Dirty Three, the way they grow a tune so organically it feels more like weather than music—and the way they tease out powerful emotions without triggering easy sentimentality.
Past Circuit Des Yeux albums flirted with the maudlin, but In Plain Speech feels brighter and more optimistic; the music seems to be continually rising. Where she was once introspective, Fohr is now interested in human connection, using second and third person more than first. "Do you roam for the end?/ Do you roam to transcend?" she asks beatifically in "Ride Blind". Later, "Fantasize the Scene" dreams of eternal companionship: "I know a place where we could go/ Maybe I will meet you there/ In a world where we'll go all the way."
The optimism of In Plain Speech still comes with plenty of heavy drama, especially in Fohr's harrowing singing. Dark, thick, and nearly scraping baritone, her voice is so strikingly different —and so unafraid to skirt melodrama—that you can never quite get comfortable with it. But that uniqueness is part of what makes her music so compelling, as is her willingness to drift into wordless sounds—perhaps her recent experience using her voice as an instrument in Mind Over Mirrors was an influence.
Part of In Plain Speech's relative sunniness comes from Fohr's embrace of collaborators. She went it alone on previous albums, and the music was accordingly intimate and confined. Here, with the help of some Chicago neighbors—including Cooper Crain (Cave, Bitchin Bajas), Rob Frye (Bitchin Bajas), and Kathleen Baird (Spires That in the Sunset Rise)—her music opens up and spreads out, incorporating more percussion and strings. Fohr's voice remains central, but these partnerships have added new verve to her music.
That openness to collaboration dovetails with Fohr's framing of In Plain Speech as an outward-looking album. As she recently put it, "This record is me putting out my hand and asking the world to grab onto it." That may seem to contradict the idea of this music as meditative, but it actually fits quite well. Where previous records offered a portal into Fohr's own inner space, In Plain Speech is about altering her listeners' perceptions, and taking them somewhere new.


Featuring members of Girlseeker, VÅR, and Sexdrome, the young Copenhagen punk band merges the noise and clangor of 1970s post-punk and no wave with the aggression of 1980s hardcore on this debut EP.

Walk on Heads EP

Earlier this month I finally witnesssed a person walking across the heads of fellow human beings, so now I can say with authority that it's an excruciating thing to watch. Imagine someone's heel pressed so firmly against your forehead it begins piercing into your skin, and the uncomfortable sensation of losing yourself beneath it. This makes it even more apt that the Copenhagen punk band Lower have taken the title Walk on Heads for their debut EP, which merges the noise and clangor of 1970s post-punk and no wave with an aggression akin to 1980s hardcore, stretching those downer feelings across eight-and-a-half all-too-short minutes. As my eyes glued themselves to that headwalker, I could hear Lower frontman Adrian Toubro shouting in the back of my mind: "Walk on heads/ Oppress the crowd/ Throw your bones/ Into their mouths."
If you clicked onto this review with even the slightest of preconceived notions about Lower, you're likely well aware that in 2012 it's impossible to have a conversation about blackened, underground punk without discussing Copenhagen. And the bands that compose that young scene are so intertwined that it's also difficult to talk about them individually without referencing the others. Lower, for example, also includes guitarist Simon Van Formann, who plays in Girlseeker with Iceage's Johan Suurballe Wieth; bassist Kristian Emdal, who plays in VÅR with Iceage's Elias Bender Rønnenfelt; and drummer Anton Rothstein, who plays in Sexdrome with VÅR's Loke Rahbek. Recently NME ran a feature on the Copenhagen scene, labeling it "the new heartland of hardcore" and "Hottest Underground Rock Scene," which are at once hilarious ways of putting it and also probably quite accurate.
Walk on Heads adds another dimension to the story, beginning with "Craver", the EP's undeniable highlight. The menacing drum rolls that open the song feel almost like a rotating crank, building tension for the rocket-fire speed that's on the brink of recklessly unwinding over three following tracks. The shrill chords of "Craver" are barely altered throughout, instead focusing on creaking, painfully stretched walls of noise, which suffocate the vague, snarled bassline creeping underneath, delivering faint hints of an oppressed hook.
But what makes "Craver" exceptional is Toubro's lyrics, which pop like dense, ambitious poetry with gray imagery even on paper. They're spit so fast on record you can barely catch them. In a deep and air-deprived fashion, he sings about yearning for a more inspired existence, "ignited by boredom" within "hermetic landscapes," pushed to burn holes through thick clouds to "brighten our vision." This is a classic punk theme, and an excellent topic for a song. There's an intrinsic urgency to it, and Toubro boils that down to an essential, oft-repeated "craving for oxygen." It's a visceral moment that's hard to shake.
And then Toubro describes a burning candle, equating its slow collapse to what sounds like death, conjuring a sense of the draining of time. "A light is lit/ But won't shine forever," and later, "A light is lit/ Soon it'll be dark again." Part of what makes Toubro's lyrics hard to decipher sonically is his Danish inflection. To my American ears, listening to Lower can often feel like hearing music with my face pressed up to a glass window, listening in on a moment so distant it's entirely untouchable. This can heighten the allure of a record in a way that still feels genuine.
A similar concept to "Craver" is at work on "Escape", which plows ahead with the perpetual assault of an uptempo drum beat. In a disillusioned city, within the confines of a bleak, fluorescent-lit room, Toubro grimly shades a "weak, faint, and pallid" character with "inane eyes," engaging in the "fast-fix liberty" of escapism through television. He calls it "a self-inflected genocide," screaming the words violently. But again Toubro moves so rapidly you could miss it all, including his description of the "trench" where he remains, quarantined. There are allusions to war and combat on nearly every Walk on Heads track, but it turns out those references are not the EP's most startling.
"Pictures of Passion" races forward on the heels of "Craver". It moves to a particularly curious and uncomfortable place when Toubro describes an image-- "a relic of fascism"-- depicting passion and purity in "machine-gun fashion." For fans of Iceage, these lines may recall the scrutiny that band underwent last year, over misguided accusations of nationalism, which pointed at drawings from the singer's Dogmeat zine. The images were misinterpreted as strikes against multiculturalism in Denmark, sentiments rekindled when Toubro sings of "[seaming] the beauty that's torn," stitching something back together that's been opened up. This line is followed directly by Toubro's reference to fascism and "hierarchy in the sun," provoking discourse. Lower are hardly the first to appropriate this kind of imagery for shock value. In that pool you'll also find Joy Division, New Order, Death in June, Throbbing Gristle, and David Bowie.
All of which is to say that Walk on Heads is a beguiling listen, one that works the mind in a way few brief, out-of-nowhere punk EPs have managed to in recent memory. Often with scenes like the one that's emerged in Copenhagen, a band can garner value simply for being an important piece of the cultural fabric. But Walk on Heads more than stands its own ground, picking you open for eight minutes, fucking you up, and throwing you down, pining for more. It makes you do a double take, not only at Lower, but at the entire place from which they spawned.


On her latest album, the goth-folk artist with an ear for black metal adds layers of electronics and a new sense of grandeur to the mix. The result is her best and most emotionally direct work yet.

Pain Is Beauty

The slightest decision can haunt an artist. This much is true of Chelsea Wolfe, an L.A. singer-songwriter whose records have synthesized doom folk, wasteland noise, and noirish experimentation. Wolfe's 2010 cover of "Black Spell of Destruction" by black metal outfit Burzum may follow her forever. Her own music, though difficult to categorize, shares something essential with that genre. It's austere and atmospheric, expressed with the reverb through which Wolfe often pushes her voice; she's opened for extreme bands like Sunn O))), Boris, and Swans and has cited Gorgoroth's "Of Ice and Movement" as a treasured song. Shortly after the Burzum cover came another one that's gained less traction on the web: a surreal, pitch-shifted take on the 1997 Notorious B.I.G. classic "Hypnotize", found on a collection of rap covers from Ben Chisholm's ghostly White Horse project. Chisholm also happens to be Wolfe's bassist and co-producer on Pain Is Beauty, her best and most emotionally direct work yet.
There are no nods to hip-hop on Pain, but their exercise in booming, electronic, populist territory is telling. While 2011's Apokalypsis and 2012's stark Unknown Rooms inched Wolfe closer to her melodic potential, they could only suggest the towering quality of this superseding new LP. At times Apokalypsis felt disguised in a permanent Halloween costume, a gothic nature fashioned so carefully as to induce skepticism. Her material had strong, original moments, but its overly witchy aura could distract; the veiled, candelabra-lit "Mer" video, though beautiful, edged toward self-parody. I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that Wolfe kept bats for pets or grew up with a cemetery in her backyard (the latter is actually true). Now, on Pain Is Beauty, we get a better sense of her talent and spirit.
Wolfe's songs of Pain emphasize massive builds with engulfing power in the vein of Swans. It's emotionally exhausting in equally mad and enjoyable ways, lasting nearly an hour across 12 twilight tracks of aggressive crescendos, poised reprieves, and suspended drama. The slower her metamorphosis, the heavier and more cavernous. As the record approaches its midway point, the ominous drones opening "Sick" signal the beginning of a wicked, cinematic patch. Wolfe has expressed interest in film soundtracks, and these songs, including "Kings" and "Rein", realize that ambition, building and swarming, creaking and pounding. They arrive at grim, seasick neo-folk balladry on "They'll Clap When You're Gone", which features some of Wolfe's most trudging and startling lyricism: "Someone opened me up while I was sleeping/ Filled my body right up with sand," she sings. "I carry a heaviness like a mountain." The clarity of her songs can be terrifying.
These songs require more patience than Pain's preceding, hook-driven opening, but the flood-tide dynamics remain-- the poppier songs are bleakly romantic, cheerlessly danceable, and equally all-consuming. The elegiac "We Hit a Wall" moves with a fierce march both funereal and inviting. The slyly anthemic "House of Metal" conjures the cool, emotional slink of dark Tri-Angle Records-style R&B, while "The Warden" has a metallic, soft-sung coldwave feel that could appear on a Wierd Records compilation. "Destruction Makes the World Burn Brighter" has a warped, ominous 60s girl group sound-- upbeat Spector pop paired with thoroughly deranged lyrics, a could-be Blue Velvet soundtrack extra.
Wolfe's indecipherable vocals tend to forego a lyrical message for the sake of mood, but the sublimely intoxicating strength of her melodies carries weight. At times her voice recalls Marissa Nadler, a kindred spirit who similarly has connections to both folk and metal along with a shared pop touchstone in Joni Mitchell. Wolfe sings with conviction, grounded in themes of nature, ancestry, and tormented love. "The Waves Have Come", an epic, skin-crawling, eight-minute ballad with pierced high strings, is a journey of terror and sorrow and the record's most intense moment-- sung from the lovelorn perspective of a natural disaster survivor, inspired by the hugely fatal Japanese earthquake and tsunami two years ago.
A peculiar thing about Chelsea Wolfe and her cultural presence is how her cultish following is so disjointed-- she's popular among fans of extreme music, but also the fashion and art worlds, having repped designers like Alexander McQueen and Iris van Herpen, and soundtracked New York painter Richard Phillips' 2011 art film with Sasha Grey. And while there's something fascinating in how Wolfe attracts these crowds, she seems to exist alone in her own world on Pain Is Beauty, crystallizing and strengthening her musical language without compromising her original, principled vision. There's a propulsive quality to much of the beat-oriented Pain, but there remains a relative sense of privacy. It's hard to imagine Wolfe dancing to Pain Is Beauty, save for inside her own head.


Talib Kweli's collaboration with 9th Wonder, Indie 500, takes its title from the Indie 5000 parties that briefly flourished in '90s New York during the Rawkus/Fondle 'Em years. The album is all about commitment, whether he's criticizing gentrification practices or memorializing fallen heroes.

Indie 500

On the first track of Indie 500, a song inspired by Pete Seeger's civil rights anthem "Which Side Are You On", Talib Kweli raps, "Celebrities be making money off the powerless/ Their silence in the silent in the face of injustice is just cowardice." He distances himself from the celebrity straw man, but he could easily be viewed as one of them. He's a public figure who visits eateries on Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations", debates politics with Bill Maher, and engages in public arguments like the one he had with CNN's Don Lemon. He's recorded hit albums like Eardrum, which peaked at No. 2 in 2007. And his 2002 song "Get By" is one of the best rap songs of the millennium, a perfect distillation of his working-class striver's aesthetic. Perhaps Kweli affects modesty to emphasize his commitment to the community, and to the political and social issues that affect us. But let's face it: He's not exactly an unknown Prisoner of Conscious.
Kweli's collaboration with 9th Wonder, Indie 500, is all about commitment, whether he's criticizing gentrification practices on "Every Ghetto" or memorializing fallen heroes Pimp C, J Dilla, and Roc Raida on "Great Day in the Morning". The album title appears to be repurposed from the Indie 5000 parties that briefly flourished in '90s New York during the Rawkus/Fondle 'Em years. Sadly, there are no appearances by Moodswingaz and the Juggaknots here. But Jessica Care Moore, whose name will ring familiar to Nuyorican Poets Café fans, and whose Black Tea: The Legend of Jessi James was released on Kweli's Javotti Media imprint, delivers a strident declaration of her self-worth on "These Waters". Another Javotti artist, the Brazilian-born rapper Niko Is, doesn't stand out as sharply, but he lands some nice lines. "Motherfuckers scared to speak out, so they tweet out," he claims on "These Waters".
Occasionally, Indie 500 loses focus. Kweli excels at the activist raps, and although his cipher with Problem and Bad Lucc on "Pay Ya Dues" lacks competitive tension, it's a nice display of the trio's lyrical skills. His humble-brags on "Lo Fi" about how "Promoters will walk me right to a table and be, like, this is your spread," however, seem perfunctory. He doesn't come off as insincere, but it's not his lane.
Indie 500 is intended as a statement of self-determination from two artists with superior track records. But its execution feels rushed. The track sequencing could be better. Kweli appears on all but three Indie 500 tracks, and overall, the compilation doesn't sound like a concise effort. The production, handled by members of 9th Wonder's Soul Council, often relies on conventional drum arrangements and loop-chopping techniques. There's considerable prowess, however, to be found in Khrysis' contributions. "Technicolor Easels", which is a Niko Is solo showcase, is bathed in synthesizer ice. "Understand", where Kweli raps alongside Brother Ali and Planet Asia, has an easygoing piano stride.
In spite of its flaws, Indie 500 features two can't-miss moments. "Bangers" opens with a brief lecture from 9th Wonder, who notes how golden age rap spurred youth to enroll at black colleges, and dryly notes, "In 1988 to 1993, black college enrollment went up 46 percent." MK Asante captures the vibe nicely when he says, "Live from the flames of Baltimore."
Then there's Rapsody, who is part of 9th Wonder's Jamla imprint and appears on three tracks here. In the past, she struggled to get noticed for albums like The Idea of Beautiful and She Got Game, at least until a feature on Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly brought her some long overdue attention. On "Life Ahead of Me", she candidly addresses sexism in the rap industry: "If I had a penis your penis would be hard as a brick is/ Saying I'm a king on some rap shit/ But my gender got 'em tender/ I recognize y'all lies." Rapsody argues that if she were a man, she'd be widely regarded as one of the most talented rappers today, and she might be right.


On the Baltimore musician’s first album in five years, he finds inspiration in his daily meditation practice, but his songwriting sounds as antic as ever.

Mystic Familiar

Five years have passed since Gliss Riffer, Dan Deacon’s last proper album, which isn’t to suggest he hasn’t stayed busy. In the intervening years, Deacon has scored eight films, ranging from HBO’s Well Groomed to Rat Film, which explored Baltimore’s racial segregation as seen through the lens of the city’s rodent infestation. These projects allowed Deacon to further explore his compositional side and his electro-acoustic work, previously best heard on his 2012 album America.
Mystic Familiar draws on these roots while retaining the manic, chewed-power-line indie pop that charged albums like Spiderman of the Rings and Bromst, infusing it all with a mystical inquiry into the nature of change and the mutability of nature. Those themes announce themselves with the very first track, “Become a Mountain,” which begins with just his unadulterated voice and intensifying piano chords. With every passing measure, new layers emerge—glissading keys, synth squiggles, then horns and strings—until the jittery song finally bursts into cinematic widescreen. It conveys all the thrills of Deacon’s best moments in the span of a few seconds.
Deacon’s perspective on change and evolution comes from a daily meditation routine and the use of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards—all part of a worthwhile attempt to get outside of himself. But for all of his newfound nuance as a film composer, some of the nagging aspects of Deacon’s previous efforts drag Mystic Familiar down. A Dan Deacon song generally toggles between an all-out gallop or a breakneck pace, suggesting at once the whirring arpeggiations of Philip Glass’s Glassworks and the froth of a basement mosh pit, to the point where they become undifferentiated. His go-to move remains dogpiling on all available sounds, always opting for a gushing dam break when a few drops would do the trick.
The four-part “Arp” is breathless and dizzying, taking in free-jazz saxophone, pummeling floor toms, modular-synth squelches, and all manner of chipmunk voices, but by the end, exhaustion sets in. The exuberant “Sat By a Tree” might be a retelling of the tale of Siddhartha Gautama, who famously found enlightenment beneath a bodhi tree: “What would you cast into existence/If you contained the persistence to unwind,” Deacon sings, but it’s hard to unwind amid all the aural Mountain Dew that sprays forth from every element of the song.
While Deacon’s instrumental command has demonstrably strengthened in the past few years, his lyrics have only gotten more pat, as evidenced by two songs near album’s end. “Fell Into the Ocean” is riddled with what resemble insipid inspirational Instagram captions, complete with garbled syntax, delivered in an infuriating cartoon voice: “Burn bright: The fire inside is brighter than you think” and “Feel free: First you must relax before transcend.”
Far more effective is the instrumental “Weeping Birch.” Composed of Deacon’s synths and Disklavier Mark IV in conversation with the quick bow work of violinist Ruby Fulton and the drumming of Jeremy Hyman, it boasts an evocative mix of acoustic and electric timbres; in contrast to his maximalist tendencies, it’s perfectly measured. Highlighting the compositional maturity too often gets buried in Deacon’s work, it conveys acute emotional profundity without needing to say a word.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Swedish rapper’s third album offers glimpses of his full potential, songs that pierce through the detachment that once obscured real emotion.

Stranger

It was easy, when he first emerged, to feel cynical about Yung Lean off name alone: a perfectly grating encapsulation of a certain early-2010s mode of irony that reconstituted hollowed-out rap tropes into winky Tumblr art. If Lean and his small crew of disillusioned Swedish teenagers hadn’t come up with the Sad Boys, inevitably someone else would have. My Twitter timeline, around the time “Ginseng Strip 2002” was blowing up, was filled with the same performative melancholy—sincere articulations of depression primed for external validation, or sometimes simply sadness as #aesthetic. Coupled with Lean’s tendency toward rap cliche word salad, it felt impossible to tell how seriously one was meant to take any of it. It wasn’t until later that I learned the real origin of Lean’s seemingly sardonic name, derived not from cool Internet rap but from his middle name, Jonatan Leandoer Håstad. The detail was funny in a sense—a man destined from birth to be a Cool Internet Rapper—and a bit symbolic too, a sign of something real behind the pose of it all.
The dialogue around Lean often felt more frustrating than the music: “Look how this Swedish teenager interprets hip-hop!” But Lean’s early releases rarely differentiated themselves from their source material enough to reward this curiosity, much less outweigh the baggage of a white rapper whose “outsider” status draws more attention than those who originated his style. More interesting than his “outsiderness” was his specific point of access: What kind of music do you make when Clams Casino is your DJ Premier? That premise, at least, seemed intriguing, even if the results usually made me feel jaded.
With Stranger—Lean’s third official album, and his best—it seems clear that the emphasis on Lean as “foreign rap interpreter” only did the 21-year old a disservice. “I don’t even know if I’m making hip-hop anymore,” he admitted in a recent interview. It’s an interesting statement in Lean’s case—if not a particularly unique one, generally—at a time when the current popular rap landscape sounds more like the Sad Boys than ever. But he’s right, in a sense: Lean’s rapping is, by a long shot, the least interesting part of his music. And the moments on Stranger where he breaks away from rap are striking glimpses of his full potential, piercing through the detachment that once obscured real emotion. In these moments, Lean’s identity shifts from something borrowed to something innate.
“Ice dropping, red bottom sky/Ice on my feet, I keep slipping,” Lean sing-songs on the chorus of “Red Bottom Sky,” his catchiest single to date. These are painterly lyrics—a bit evasive, maybe, but intense and world-building, closer in spirit to magical realism than the vacant randomness of his “iced-out Arizona Iced Tea” phase. And the way Lean sings them, especially, reminds me of Swedish indie pop of the mid-2000s like the Tough Alliance, CEO, and jj: bands whose blithe, Balearic sounds masked something unsettling beneath the surface, and who often weaved American cultural touchstones into their loose strands of thought in ways that were sometimes irritatingly twee, but sometimes transcendent. GUD’s production moves like a gentle tide, ebbing and flowing to create echoing pockets of empty space; the effect is somewhere between Boards of Canada, jj’s 2010 Kills tape, and Chief Keef.
The latter’s influence on Lean’s rapped and sung delivery here is hard to overstate (though the same could be said for 2017 rap in general), and tracks like “Drop It / Scooter” and “Push / Lost Weekend” are successful in the sense that they are capable Keef impressions. But even when Lean’s rapping falls short, Stranger’s breathtaking production from GUD, Yung Sherman, and White Armor holds the album together, albeit occasionally making me wish for instrumental versions (as with “Iceman,” a gorgeous, yearning beat that wouldn’t be at odds with elegant instrumental grime labels like Boxed or Gobstopper). Nevertheless, Lean presents well-crafted, transportive songs filled with clever, emo and pop-punk inspired bridges and outros that let the beat fade into nothingness.
But Lean saves Stranger’s most powerful, and promising, songs for the end, a one-two punch of raw emotion and no rapping whatsoever. “Agony” begins as little more than Lean accompanied by bleary piano; his plain-spoken imagery flickers with the quiet horror of gothic literature, infinitely more evocative than any of his percocet/molly/percocet cliches. “My window smiles in fright,” he sings shakily. “Isolation caved in/I adore you, sound of your skin.” And for just these last lines, he is backed by an Icelandic children’s choir in a breathtaking swell of quiet anguish. Finally, there is “Yellowman,” inspired according to Lean by the 1895 Robert W. Chambers story collection The King in Yellow—supernatural horror stories that circle around a play that causes madness in those who read it. Lean’s funereal chants drag, with resigned pathos, through Sigur Rós cinematics, sickly sirens, and fatalistic marching band snares. Lean, at some point, gets lost in the wall of sound. And still it feels like the most essential music of his career: no longer an outsider looking in, but an artist fully embodying himself.


Art Brut's Top of the Pops is a 2xCD greatest hits collection featuring a disc of B-sides and demos. In the narrative the collection spins, everything that followed the London band's 2005 debut Bang Bang Rock & Roll did so with increasing shades of bitterness.

Top of the Pops

These days, most people only pay attention to the British Top 40 when it's been hijacked by dullards trying to prove a point-- last week it was the battlefield for a protest at the late Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's increasingly rose-tinted legacy. Yet it still contains a certain romantic allure among those who never stood a chance of getting in it. Art Brut's new greatest hits collection Top of the Pops (a two-disc set featuring a CD of B-sides and demos) is named after the defunct BBC TV rundown of the nation's favourite songs, an obsession of their ever-enthusiastic frontman Eddie Argos on which they never appeared. In typically shambolic fashion, they've only gone and forgotten to include their actual song "Top of the Pops", an early and live favourite that was always prefaced by a gleeful string of fibs about where the south London band were number one.
Presciently named after the French for "outsider art," Art Brut always shot just wide of the mark; had they been around 10 years earlier, they'd undoubtedly have been a fixture of the ITV network's "Chart Show Indie Chart"-- an earnest rival to "TOTP" that broadcast videos by bands like the Wedding Present (who released two singles volumes called Hit Parade) on Saturday mornings-- if not genuine Britpop bona fides. In a Pitchfork interview from 2009, Argos recalled seeing a copy of NME that asked, "Who's the new Jarvis Cocker?" "I thought, 'Fucking hell, some prick I bet.' And I opened it up and it was me. I was like, 'Oh fuck! Well, that's nice."
Just as British indie music was getting smart again after a fallow few years either side of the millennium, Art Brut's demeanor embraced indie's coziest, most cardigan-wearing past; Argos standing against all prevailing trends, trying to recreate the world of his youth. But their 2005 debut Bang Bang Rock & Roll was a near perfect, shabbily anthemic post-punk record that set out Argos' abundantly hilarious lyrical stock in trade: singing about how his relationships with music and ladies were as close as the "n" in "snog" and "song".
In among the declarations of romantic haplessness ("I've seen her naked twice!") was a rampant self-mythologizing streak so overstated it was as if Art Brut knew they could only ever fail, despite being stated with such bounding naivety and joyous conviction that they believed it would all come true. If only; Argos' benign, brilliant, Half Man Half Biscuit-indebted sense of humor evident on the Bang Bang Rock & Roll singles included here is something painfully lacking among young British indie bands today.
Art Brut were arguably obsessed with restoring a culture over individual success, which is lucky since their highest charting single went in like a bullet at number 41. Although one memorable scene in "Gilmore Girls" sees resident indie nut Lane Kim swear that "Formed a Band" should be the national anthem, Art Brut abjectly failed at bringing back the time Argos craved, or slowing the path of an increasingly compromised alternative music culture to the mainstream. But having committed themselves to failure after establishing such lofty goals in the first place, you'd think it wouldn't matter to them.
Unfortunately, at least in the narrative that Top of the Pops spins, everything that followed Bang Bang Rock & Roll did so with increasingly unbecoming shades of bitterness. They'd have been better off reissuing Bang Bang for a second time than opting to tell this glum take on events. The songs included here from 2007's EMI-released It's a Bit Complicated (where Jasper Future replaced Chris Chinchilla on guitar) wonder "what else can we do when the kids don't like it?" Argos experiments with and ultimately muddles his personal narratives, and when he wearily yells "punk rock ist nicht tot!" it sounds like the delusional cry of a man bent over punk's dying corpse; not the words of the bloke who once joyously belted, "MODERN ART! MAKES ME! WANT TO ROCK OUT!"
The malaise increases with 2009's Art Brut vs. Satan (a return to Cooking Vinyl/Downtown), produced by Frank Black, where Argos sings of his arrested development, unruly drinking problems, and shit summer jobs. He also now hates all the idiots that just can't appreciate good music: "If we can't change the world/ Let's at least get the charts right/ How can you sleep at night/ When nobody likes the music we write?/ Record-buying public, we hate them/ This is Art Brut vs. Satan," goes "Demons Out!", where the band start to sound like the tiresomely dogmatic Cribs. The Wakefield band's 2005 single "Hey Scenesters!" was a disdainful comment on the emergence of indie culture that Art Brut ran around celebrating like lunatics on "Formed a Band". Here, the distance between them shrinks depressingly.
The returns don't stop diminishing: Also produced by Frank Black, 2011's Brilliant! Tragic!'s "Axl Rose" sees Argos reduced to a cantankerous cipher: "The world is fucked, and you're an idiot/ Why don't you take a long look at my middle digit!" He makes hapless attempts at singing in a sinister whisper that suggests a stalker ogling his unwitting intented; the band are as convincingly vigorous as someone trying to pogo on a belly full of Sunday roast.
Two new numbers close CD1: "Arizona Bay" is named for a Bill Hicks album where he fantasized about L.A. falling "in the fucking ocean", thus destroying the fantasy explored in Bang Bang Rock & Roll's "Moving to L.A." Here, Argos is in the middle of an earthquake situation that reads like a less-than-subtle take on the band's dwindling career. Closer "We Make Pop Music" is the only song on Top of the Pops' main disc that hits a musically regretful note, playing out with an almost-epic middle-eight over which Argos desperately yells, "We make pop music! We make pop music!" (Though in a recent blogpost, Argos wrote, "I only like guitar music and everybody who disagrees with me is a cunt.")
With the release of Top of the Pops, Argos keeps insisting that Art Brut were a "classic rock" band all along, offering the fact that they've been on the cover of German Rolling Stone and posed naked in the NME as proof. In a sense (though not the one intended), he's right: Bang Bang Rock & Roll was an accidentally classic album that gave Art Brut an immediate legacy that they seemed to know they'd never top-- a fate that befalls classic rock bands obsessed with besting their best and blaming the rest rather than engaging with the culture around them.


Starting out as a Valentine's Day gift for Passion Pit leader Michael Angelakos' girlfriend, this set of lap-pop serenades deftly walks the line between beat-driven, Hot Chip floor geeking and twee atmospherics.

Chunk of Change EP

It's a backstory you couldn't possibly escape: This past Valentine's Day, Michael Angelakos opted out of throwing down the coin for some chocolates, teddy bears, or a copy of Love Actually. A little on the late side, he instead recorded for his girlfriend the lion's share of the lap-pop serenade, Chunk of Change. Friends were excited by what they heard, a band was born, a record deal signed.
Defined as much by its lyrical prism and Angelakos' falsetto (more on that later) as its gooey textures, Chunk of Change walks the line between beat-driven, Hot Chip floor geeking and twee atmospherics. And while he gave his band the name of a 1980s skin flick, Angelakos' production mirrors the more cuddly bent that sparked the project: synths are Downy-soft, blankets of melodic skin that expand alongside their oversized choruses. More significantly, it suggests a certain level of un-self-conscious pop versatility. You can gyrate. You can navelgaze. You can shiver. You can cringe.
It's a sonic ethos that fits much of Angelakos' lyrical Lloyd Dobler-ing well. Opener "I've Got Your Number" is a clear standout, its synthetic handclaps and high frequency whirring offer a prime framework for introducing the dude's voice and poetry. Depending on your emotional constitution or complexion, the latter can be, understandably, something of a turn-off. As is the case with the less propulsive material here, most time is spent nose-to-nose with turns like "Have you seen me cry tears like diamonds? Down and down they fly, faster and faster," or "Whatever happens to you, whatever happens to me, I hope that I'll fall asleep knowing that you'll always be the story with no ending." But you can't fault a guy for loving someone his way. Given the notion that Angelakos initially expected just one person to really listen, the record benefits heavily from that which a lot of us look for in sound or elsewhere: emotional authenticity.
If anything, the EP's major flaw is also a gamebreaker. Angelakos' falsetto flirts dangerously with histrionics at times, the breathy swings of "Cuddle Fuddle" or forgettable disco-pop of "Better Things" are two examples of his pipes at their most distracting. He can veer way off course for sure, but when matching the movement and mood of his own textures, his exuberance can be narcotic. "Sleepyhead" is the one addition not included on the original mixtape and it hints at savvier, more muscular vibrations coming down the pipeline (a full-length is slated for early 2009). Also the EP's shortest and most infectious moment, it's a tipsy, bass-heavy Cristal bath with the likes of Mannheim Steamroller and Ginuwine. I think it's about a girl.


Newly reissued with bonus material for its 50th anniversary, the Dead’s fourth album returned them to their folk-blues roots and transformed the trajectory of their career in the process.

Grateful Dead: Workingman’s Dead / The Angel’s Share

Workingman’s Dead / The Angel’s Share

Freshly busted in New Orleans and teetering upon the edge of financial ruin, the Grateful Dead began 1970 in dire need of a new beginning. Remarkably for a band who had a habit of making their own bad luck, the Dead didn’t miss this opportunity. Operating with a focus they rarely possessed, the band returned to their folk-blues roots and knocked out their fourth album, Workingman’s Dead, in a matter of days, transforming the trajectory of their career in the process.
Often grouped together with its successor American Beauty—reasonably so, considering how Beauty is carved from the same rustic material and appeared just a matter of months later—Workingman’s Dead fit into the anti-psychedelia wave that swept through American rock’n’roll at the dawn of the 1970s. The zeitgeist shifted away from trippy excesses after the release of the Band’s Music From Big Pink in 1968 but the Grateful Dead found greater inspiration in the eponymous 1969 debut from Crosby, Stills & Nash, gravitating toward their harmony-laden homey folk-rock. Stephen Stills and David Crosby traveled similar circles to the Dead, eventually wandering out to Mickey Hart’s ranch in Marin County, a place that doubled as the group’s unofficial headquarters. Stills and Crosby encouraged Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Phil Lesh to sing harmonies, a skill that would come in handy when it came to recording the new batch of songs Garcia was writing with his lyricist Robert Hunter.
What came easily to CSN was work for the Dead. Garcia’s partner Mountain Girl—aka Carolyn Adams, a former Merry Prankster who wound up marrying the guitarist in 1981—laughed about the process to band biographer David Browne, claiming in his 2015 book So Many Roads: The Life And Times Of The Grateful Dead, “They were expected to sing all those parts, and it didn’t go well. It sounded like cats howling.” It’s possible to hear that howl echoing through Workingman’s Dead. The trio’s voices don’t quite mesh, sometimes hitting a dissonant chord, sometimes scrambling for the same note; their effort isn’t merely heard, it’s felt. All that fumbling winds up as an asset on Workingman’s Dead, adding a bit of messiness to the tight performances.
Much of that precision can be chalked up to how the Grateful Dead mapped out all of Workingman’s Dead prior to recording the album with their live-sound team of Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor, a pair who shared a co-production credit with the band. Nothing was left to chance. Matthews, Cantor, and Garcia drew up a provisional sequencing during these sessions, circulating this rough draft on demo cassettes among the band. Rehearsals came next, then the rapid sessions, outtakes of which can be heard on The Angel’s Share, a digital-only collection released alongside the 50th Anniversary edition of Workingman’s Dead. The chief insight provided by The Angel’s Share is how Garcia kept the Dead on track, calling for changes in tempo and directing the arrangements so neither the song nor vibe is obscured. Compared to its willfully spacy predecessor Aoxomoxoa—an album the band recorded twice, as the band exhausted the possibilities of a new 16-track tape recorder while exhausting the patience and wallet of Warner Bros—the simplicity of Workingman’s Dead is bracing, even refreshing, but it’s the earthy, weathered grooves that give the album its distinct character and power.
A crucial part of the Dead’s simplification was relying almost entirely on songs written by Garcia and Hunter in tandem. Jerry wound up singing nearly all the songs, too, sharing the lead with Weir on the bluegrass breakdown “Cumberland Blues” and turning over “Easy Wind,” a blues written by Hunter on his own, to Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, the band’s husky original frontman. If it weren’t for “Easy Wind,” Pigpen wouldn’t have registered on Workingman’s Dead at all, his absence a reflection of both his increasing alcoholism (he’d die of the disease three years later) and how the songs largely traded blues and experimentation for folk and country.
Drummer Bill Kreutzmann would later claim in his memoir Deal: My Three Decades Of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs With The Grateful Dead that Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty represented their “Bakersfield era,” a nod to the country music coming out of California in the 1960s. Certainly, the band made no attempt to conceal their debt to Merle Haggard—the album’s title is a nod to Hag’s 1969 number one country single “Workin’ Man Blues”—but Bakersfield country explicitly tangled with modern concerns, addressing contemporary issues in its lyrics and embracing electrified instruments. With its pronounced twang, only “Cumberland Blues” echoed the style of Bakersfield. The rest of the album is devoted to high lonesome ballads, Sunday afternoon singalongs, and fleet fingerpicking straight out of Appalachia. Inspired equally by old folk tales and black & white movies, Hunter spun legends of mines, dire wolves, and train conductors. His lyrical obsessions may not be all that dissimilar from Robbie Robertson, who populated Band records with Confederate soldiers and farmhands, but Hunter deliberately confounded and conflated his time frame, so it was hard to tell where the old, weird America ended and the paisley underground began.
”Casey Jones” makes hay of this confusion, with Garcia singing, “Driving that train/High on cocaine,” with an audible grin, recognizing that while Hunter may have based his verse on an old blues song documenting a turn-of-the-century train disaster, his verse could be heard as a rallying call for the underground. “Uncle John’s Band,” the band’s first charting hit, walked a similar line, sounding like a campfire perennial while being finely attuned to the hippie hangover of the early 1970s, the period when all the dreams of love and peace started to get a tad tarnished. Appropriately, the scaled-down Workingman’s Dead can be seen as reflecting the moment when hippies retreated from the universal aspirations to personal concerns, a perfect soundtrack to hunkering down on a commune or maybe learning how to grow up while ensconced in a suburb.
The complete performance that pushes the 50th Anniversary Edition of Workingman’s Dead into Super Deluxe status captures this uneasy change, only from a different angle. Plucked from the Dead’s multi-night stint at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York in February 1971, it finds the group navigating the absence of Mickey Hart. Weir mentions the missing Hart from the stage, claiming the drummer wasn’t feeling well, which wasn’t a lie but his illness stemmed from his unease at discovering how his father Lenny fleeced the Dead for many thousands of dollars while serving as the group’s manager.
Without Hart, the group sounds lean and fleet, nearly as simple as they were in the studio for Workingman’s Dead but allowing themselves plenty of space to jam and boogie. The set features several songs that would form the backbone of American Beauty, including the Weir-led “Sugar Magnolia” and “Truckin’”, a pair of tunes essential to the mythology of the band and their popularity through the 1970s. Hearing them as part of this (very) extended coda to the original album helps hammer home how different Workingman’s Dead is from the rest of the Dead’s catalog. American Beauty is superficially similar, mining the same folk-country blend, finding space for vocalists that weren’t Garcia and sanding off the rough edges apparent throughout Workingman’s Dead. It’s a smoother listen, but like any homespun art, the imperfections are what makes Workingman’s Dead compelling. Within those ragged harmonies, hard strums, and fables, it’s possible to hear the Grateful Dead transform from psychedelic upstarts to an American institution.

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No longer sounding like stripped-down Hold Steady songs, Finn's latest solo album is the accomplished work of a wise songwriter—mournful, musically layered, and full of empathy.

We All Want the Same Things

Craig Finn has never written a song like “God in Chicago.” Sure, the plot points should be familiar to anyone who’s followed his work since Lifter Puller or the Hold Steady. There’s kissing in the streets; there’s salvation in an unexpected place; there’s drugs; there’s a busted boombox playing Led Zeppelin III. But in “God in Chicago,” the spoken-word piano ballad centerpiece of Finn’s stunning new album, it feels heavier, like all his songs are contained in this one. Detailing a journey with a near stranger to settle the score for her dead brother, it illustrates the consequences of Finn’s reckless, dangerous characters with a newfound penchant for realism. When the central drug deal goes down, it happens swiftly and silently. “This isn’t the movies,” Finn explains—a distinction that would have been moot in earlier songs, where real life and rock’n’roll cliché blended into bar-band euphoria.
Through much of his career, Finn’s work has come with the coziness of a weekend spent returning to a college town: filled with old friends, inside jokes, and a bittersweet struggle to move forward. While the best moments of his previous two solo albums felt like little more than stripped-back versions of solid Hold Steady songs, We All Want the Same Things is more subtle and strange. Finn’s weathered voice is at its most expressive, tied to songs that take him as far from his comfort zone as he’s ever tread. It’s a remarkable record not for sounding like a return-to-form, but for feeling like entirely new territory without sacrificing its thrill or familiarity.
Finn’s writing in these songs often feels like an exercise in empathy, seeking out people who’ve never gotten the spotlight in his work. The male protagonist of “Tangletown” is a wealthy divorcee who works a boring job, goes to bed early, and surrounds himself with luxuries that poorly mask his inner turmoil. You never learn his name, but it’s almost certainly not “Charlemagne” or “Gideon”: it might be “Craig.” In “It Hits When It Hits,” Finn sounds lonely and lost atop a slow-pulsing rhythm. “I can tell that today is gonna be a celebration,” he repeats while the music drags at his words, suggesting that today will, in fact, be just the opposite. His call for hard-won joy is miles away from Hold Steady anthems where celebration felt like a divine right: “This summer, grant us all the power,” he once sang, “To drink on top of water towers.” Here, his characters have a hard time summoning the power just to make it through the day.
Finn has referred to these new songs as “co-dependency jams,” and the relationships he describes in them are complex and colorful, from the partners-in-crime of “Jester & June” to the grieving road-trippers of “God in Chicago.” When people are called by name, he simply affirms their presence in the world, his characters grateful for not being alone. “James, I’m glad that you’re here,” Finn sings through the synthy Kaputt-pop of “Birds Trapped in the Airport”; “Nathan, you’re my only friend,” he urges in “Ninety Bucks.” Of course, the sincerity of any of these statements is tenuous. In “Ninety Bucks,” Nathan responds to his friend by loaning her money, knowing she probably won’t use it for MRI-certification. All the while, a single piano note plods in the background as their monotonous dynamic starts sounding something like stability. “Sometimes I can push ahead,” Finn sings, “Some nights the wheels just spin.”
The entirety of We All Want the Same Things is steeped in a mournful haze that makes the “wild kind of sadness” Finn sings about in “Jester & June” come to life, and helps these songs transcend from short stories into action-packed anthems on par with his finest work. Bruce Springsteen, particularly his character-driven early work, has long been a reference point for Finn’s music. But here, he seems more inspired by Bruce’s darker material: the haunting fadeout of “Racing in the Street,” the layered vocals in “Stolen Car,” the muted trumpet in “Meeting Across the River” that made its star-crossed drug deal sound doomed before it even happened. In “Preludes,” Finn sings about driving through a storm, accompanied by flutes that sound like snow against windshield wipers. In “Rescue Blues,” Stuart Bogie’s horn ascends as Finn comes closer to finding a sense of resolution. “I guess we all/Get by in different ways,” he sings tenderly, more confident with each repetition. Finally, Craig Finn sounds like he’ll be all right, like he’s got somewhere to go when the party’s over.


Kamasi Washington, a member of the studio band that composed To Pimp a Butterfly, has released a triple-album set that functions as an extravagant love letter to (among other things): soul jazz, John Coltrane (various periods), and 1970s fusion leaders like Miles Davis and Weather Report. It’s a large and generous canvas, with the feel of a generational intervention.

The Epic

It is probably impossible to discuss Kamasi Washington's new record—all three impressive hours of it—without copping to at least some awareness of two extra-musical truths. The first of these holds that, as a member of the studio wrecking crew that brought Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly into being, this saxophonist-composer is unusually well poised to secure the attention of listeners who have previously been uninterested in jazz. (This past spring's celebration of all-things-TPAB was sufficiently strong that Billboard even published a well-reported piece that detailed exactly how Lamar's album came to feature so many jazz figures, including Washington.)
The second truth is that jazz could use a few more people with Washington's cachet in the wider world—touring with Snoop Dogg, or putting out albums on Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder imprint. Admitting this is not tantamount to saying that jazz is in some unhealthy creative state (it isn't), but rather that the music currently faces an uphill struggle in the marketplace (as it often has).
You can see hints of these outside considerations in some of the pre-release writing around The Epic—virtually all of which cites Washington's hip-hop associations as a reason to pay attention to his big debut as a jazz bandleader. (Washington cut one prior album as part of a collective, in 2004, but this set is his real coming-out party.) One can imagine other elite contemporary jazz artists grinding teeth while checking Twitter, muttering to themselves: if anyone paid attention to me, they'd notice the post-turntablism beats in my music.
Given all this, it's something of a gobsmacking paradox to discover what a hip-hop-free zone The Epic is, and how enamored of jazz's past it turns out to be. This triple-album set is an extravagant love letter to (among other things): soul jazz, John Coltrane (various periods), and 1970s fusion leaders like Miles Davis and Weather Report. The Epic's Disc 1 opener, "Change of the Guard", might as well be titled "We Love All Kinds of 'Trane". Its ringing opening piano chords sound almost entirely lifted from the playbook of McCoy Tyner, the pianist in Coltrane's so-called "Classic Quartet." (That's the group responsible for A Love Supreme.) The opening theme in the saxes is something that could only have been written after "Impressions". And the harmonious writing for Washington's string section recalls posthumous Coltrane releases like Infinity—tracks from which featured orchestral overdubs supervised by Alice Coltrane (who is, as you may have read, Flying Lotus's aunt). Toward the end of the 12-minute tune, Washington's tenor sax solo veers off into flights of screeching intensity that were the hallmark of Coltrane's later groups—specifically the ones that also included Pharoah Sanders. (Who is, by the way, still active—and still great, on the evidence of last year's record with the São Paulo Underground.)
What The Epic does come to sound like, over the course of its significant running time, is a generational intervention—an educational tool that widens the definition of styles that fall under "jazz classicism." With his writing for string sections and chorus, Washington even flirts with that most dreaded of appellations: smooth. But these specific choices also wind up paying dividends: The calmly spiritual voices and Washington's wailing playing during the back half of "Askim" feels novel.
Three hours is a lot of music, and Washington uses the space to range freely—the R&B vocals of Patrice Quinn crop up roughly once per disc, and there are long sections that feel indebted to grittier funk and soul. Washington has a healthy sense of melodrama, which is especially clear whenever the chorus swoops in with open-hearted "ooohs" and "aaahs", aiming straight for the listener's gooseflesh. Meantime, some of the longer, less ambitious instrumental tracks (like "Isabelle") play things much safer, in a kind of chill-jazz mode that features greasy-soul-organ and tasteful solos from Washington's large cast of skilled supporters (like electric bassist Thundercat and trombonist Ryan Porter). While faultlessly executed, these are the only moments across the music's three-hour sprawl that resemble padding. On the uptempo, high-energy music, like the updated Miles Davis-isms of "Re Run Home", as well the potent Disc 3 closer, "The Message", Washington and his band truly excel.
The big news is that The Epic actually makes good on its titular promise without bothering to make even a faint-hearted stab in the direction of fulfilling its pre-release hype. If you came for the hip-hop associations, and can't listen for anything else, you will surely be disappointed. But to listen like that is to cheat yourself. If you want rapping over contemporary jazz, you can find it elsewhere. If you're in the mood for acoustic adaptations of electronic-music practices, look to Vijay Iyer Trio's recent Break Stuff (specifically, the track "Hood", which is a shout-out to Detroit DJ Robert Hood). You can find more studiously contemporary R&B vocals on Robert Glasper's recent Black Radio series. Kamasi Washington's epic isn't the place for those things—though it is also a zone of surprise. Instead of a self-conscious attempt to seize someone else’s idea of the zeitgeist, it's a large and generous canvas, clearly created in the hopes of attracting new visitors to the post-Coltrane wing of the jazz museum. At this point, that project is its own form of radicalism.


The emo-rap artist rebounds from a sophomore slump with an album that glows with conviction and sometimes-uncomfortable honesty.

Trauma Factory

Twenty-eight-year-old Joe Mulherin has been performing as nothing,nowhere. since 2015, making emo rap as restrained and nervous as he appears to be in photos. But the raw lyricism of his debut album, Reaper, confirmed that his anxiety went deeper than just being camera-shy. His smoky production and surprising openness earned him critical acclaim in mid-2017, when Lil Peep was still alive and emo rap was flourishing. But the second nothing,nowhere. album that came out that year, ruiner, indicated an early sophomore slump, plagued by a lack of conviction. Fortunately, Mulherin’s latest album, Trauma Factory, makes that slump feel like a fluke. Aided by its dynamic pop-punk flourishes, Trauma Factory glows with earnestness and demonstrates all the good that can come from embracing pain.
The most noticeable difference between Trauma Factory and ruiner is Mulherin’s vocal performance. He has always had (and on occasion, still employs) a nasally delivery, over-enunciating with his reedy voice in a way that’s almost childish. His delivery is confident, but the brattiness of his voice is best served by the pop-punk melodies he favors when singing. And for most of Trauma Factory, that’s what he does, sometimes sounding like he’s putting his whole body into delivering each burning syllable. His strong rhythmic sensibility, essential for rap, boosts his singing, too. On the nocturnal pop-punk track “nightmare,” Mulherin hisses, “Well, I saw you with a new boy/I’m looking for something that I can destroy,” with precision, turning a rather basic concept into something venomous.
As usual on his albums, the pop-punk moments are more convincing and exciting than the straightforward rap ones. Although most of the songs are just slightly above the two-minute mark, Trauma Factory can occasionally feel bloated at 15 tracks, usually with its more trap-inspired songs. It’s strange to hear a song as restrained and plodding “exile” on the same album as something like the anthemic “fake friend,” which in comparison, sounds like it was made by a much more electric, impassioned artist.
But even when the music falters, Mulherin manages to save it with his own conviction. The production of “death” aims for something experimental, closer to Ho99o9 than emo rap, but its sputtering bass and rather unimpressive heavy guitar breakdown lands it closer to Twenty One Pilots. Mulherin’s voice, though, is ragged and panicky as he shrieks “I scare myself to death” over and over again. You forget all about the lackluster guitar and droopy bass to focus on his voice, his fear oozing like rotting fruit. The unexpected love song “crave” crackles with yearning; Mulherin sounds breathless as he notices “anticipation on your face and I wanna taste it.” Sometimes, Mulherin’s sincerity can be painful. On “real,” Mulherin sounds defeated, detailing reading album reviews in bed, becoming influenced by “a stranger’s opinion” until tension mounts and he shouts out that “You don’t know what I been dealing with/… Had a panic attack every day for a year.”
This line is almost uncomfortably truthful and specific, and it urges you to remember that you’re listening to a person. This reminder of humanity—that, just like you, Mulherin is worried, he has panic attacks, he stays in bed for too long—is essential to the music he makes. Emo, at its best, creates kinship. Mulherin allows his pain to flow through him, not trap him, and the result is liberating. He makes you feel like you can be honest, too, no matter the repercussions. You can get up the next day, give the world your full self, and embrace not knowing what happens next.

Buy: Rough Trade
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