Dev Hynes’ fourth album as Blood Orange focuses on black depression, sketching his anxious alt-pop, progressive R&B, indie hip-hop, downtempo rock, and spacey chillwave into a minimalist emulsion.

Negro Swan

In his captivating book Black Swan Lake: Life of a Wetland, Australian scholar Rod Giblett traces a cultural history of the slender, waterborne bird. Black swans have long been prized by indigenous communities for their exotic, improbable beauty. European colonizers, however, tended to malign the birds as evil, ugly, and unwelcome, simply due to their color. Delicate and fierce, fetishized and rebuked, black swans live at the intersections: they’re both/and, more than one given thing at any given time.
On his fourth studio album as Blood Orange, musical polymath Devonté Hynes explores the comforts and complications of living a life as both/and—of being treated, to borrow from Thelonious Monk, as an ugly beauty. Negro Swan captures the scattershot, jittery, anxious, blissed-out-depressive feeling of what it’s like to be a marginalized person at a toxic and retrograde moment in global culture and politics. “No one wants to be the Negro Swan,” he laments on “Charcoal Baby.” “No one wants to be the odd one out at times…/Can you break sometimes?” Hynes goes for the anachronistic “Negro” to suggest the history of racial abjection—just like the phrase “Charcoal Baby” evokes 19th-century blackface performers who used burnt cork, or charcoal, to darken their faces for white audiences. The album’s cover photo, shot by the designer-photographer Ana Kraš, drives home the ugly beauty idea: A black man perches on a car windowpane, rocking a white, studded do-rag, eyeshadow, and wings on his back.
Negro Swan’s world-weary opening track “Orlando” offers a 21st-century update on those tragic politics of deflation and depletion. Hynes’ production goes for pretty, sprightly textures: sampled street sounds, twinkling electric piano, chicken-cluck wah-wah guitar, and a mid-tempo funky shuffle beat. As if to alert us to sudden danger, a dancehall-style alarm goes off (alarms are a recurring motif on the album). Sounding like a quivering Curtis Mayfield, Hynes falsetto-croons the hook, “First kiss was the floor,” a blood-chilling reflection about being bullied/bashed as a child on a school bus.
Like most of the tracks on Negro Swan, “Orlando” isn’t content to be just one thing. As the hook arrives, the song abruptly morphs into a pensive guitar vamp, and we’re treated to an interlude with trans activist Janet Mock, riffing about the value of “doing too much” in a culture that doesn’t allow marginalized people to truly excel at much of anything. Mock shows up on five of Negro Swan’s 16 tracks: Fly-on-the-wall interludes constituted from bits of their recorded conversations, Mock’s spoken-word commentaries provide a voice-of-wisdom presence throughout. They also confirm the album’s central conceit: how people of color and queers manage trauma in a racist, heteronormative culture, even as we pursue alternative models of kinship that ensure our liberation.
Hynes has said that Negro Swan is about black depression as well as his own tumultuous childhood in England. Besides “Orlando,” glum, detuned “Dagenham Dream” also explores the ins and outs of his earliest memories (the title refers to a scrappy neighborhood in East London); and on foreboding "Nappy Wonder,” featuring cellist and singer Kelsey Lu, Hynes reminisces about former days in Barking (another East London town) over doodling piano, reversed guitar riffs, and drum and bass that irregularly drop in and out of the track. Fusing together alt-pop, progressive R&B, indie hip-hop, downtempo rock, and spacey chillwave into a minimalist emulsion, Negro Swan can be jumpy and hard to pin down. You get the sense that Hynes would have it no other way.
In fact, Hynes’ entire career (oscillating between bands, solo ventures, aliases, side projects, auteur experimentalism, work-for-hire pop, etc.) has been about multiplicity and blurring categorizations. His last release, 2016’s Freetown Sound, ventured far afield, musing on his immigrant parents’ lives and merging political activism with melancholia for late 1980s queer NYC life. Hynes has long made good as an in-demand alternative pop producer for starlets like Carly Rae Jepsen and Solange; and more recently, he’s had unexpected collaborations with A$AP Rocky, Girlpool, and Philip Glass. Negro Swan’s unpredictable guest list is a testament to Hynes’ curatorial savvy: The album features Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek, Colombian-Canadian vocalist Tei Shi, NYC vocalist Ian Isiah, alt-soul singer Georgia Anne Muldrow, actress Amandla Stenberg, as well Kindness’ Adam Bainbridge, Diana Gordon, and others.
Though multi-instrumentalist producers are often lone-wolf figures, Hynes’ collaborative spirit confirms that he’s most interested in a communal “we” approach to making music. He also strives for a similar pluralism in his approach to gender. In the seven years since he first appeared under the Blood Orange alias, non-normative Hynes (who identifies as not gay, but not straight) pushes back against machismo and male power in an effort to diversify stylistic representations of black masculinity. In fact, he might be the key figure connecting the black polymath template (think of other Renaissance men like Smokey Robinson, Babyface, Pharrell Williams, Tyler, the Creator, etc.) to contemporary identity struggles around sexual fluidity and anti-racism. Negro Swan’s insistence on the politics of indeterminate identity especially resonates against the backdrop of a 2018 MAGA political climate in which collective anxieties—impacted by political and economic insecurity and public officials’ gaslighting tactics—have gone through the roof.
Despite its thematic focus on anxiety—or maybe because of it—Negro Swan is a drifty, loose, dissociated affair. Adrenaline-pounding dance beats like the ones found on Freetown Sound’s propulsive “Best to You” or “E.V.P.” don’t show up here. Instead, the album sounds more like a downcast mixtape constituted from helter-skelter sounds, sketched-out musical ideas, and conversation fragments. (Hynes has described his aesthetic as open tabs on a browser; that is certainly the case here). Ambient, blunted “Vulture Baby” taps into a vintage psychedelic soul sound; but at only one minute and 15 seconds, it’s here and gone. “Chewing Gum” centers on a languorous ’80s pop melody and a chugging hip-hop beat before turning the spotlight to A$AP Rocky and Memphis’ Project Pat rapping about pussy and dick. Negro Swan’s cauldron of abstract soundscapes, melancholic drift, and disjointed musical ideas will frustrate those looking for more structured pop, and it will enliven others who can respect the slapdash, bricolage aesthetic as a key element in Hynes’ creative master plan.
Hynes always racks up realness points for not being afraid to come off uncool. His skittish singing doesn’t have a lot of power, but its gawky delicateness feels modest and palpably intimate. Negro Swan leans on inspirational, self-help messages—standing in your truth, coming out of darkness into light—that could have come off as mawkish or gauche in lesser hands. “Holy Will,” one of the album’s left-curve highlights, happens to be a winning, deconstructed take on the Clark Sisters’ gospel “Center of Thy Will.” And album closer “Smoke” centers around a lyric—“The sun comes in/My heart fulfills within”—that makes Negro Swan a far less pessimistic affair than much of the bleak R&B that’s ruled the airwaves and streaming services for the last decade. For a project focused on fragility that asks the question, “Can you break sometimes?” the album closes on a blissful note that dreams of wholeness.
Slippery and cryptic, Negro Swan blurs boundaries between the finished and the unfinished; between focused deliberation and thrown-together spontaneity; between fly-on-the-wall conversations and self-contained songs; between indie experimentalism and overground pop; between insider and outsider, black and white, straight and gay, trans and cis; between taxing depletion and invigorating replenishment. Dev Hynes remains an unfettered black man making whatever the fuck music comes into his head. Given that his artistic ideas affirm the power of community, kinship, and therapeutic healing in the midst of grim, dark times, his adventures in musical freedom remain a sublime political act.


On his third album, the 26-year-old Afrobeats phenom grapples with newfound fame and attempts to trade his loverboy reputation for the role of suave rock star.

Playboy

As a young college student exploring his sound, Fireboy DML wasn’t sure how to stand out in the vibes-saturated Afrobeats scene, but he knew one thing: “I want to be a fucking superstar.” Once a nerdy kid who rarely ventured beyond school, church, and home, the Nigerian pop singer now finds himself at the forefront of the globalization of Afrobeats. The first Afrobeats artist to perform on the BET Awards mainstage, he’s made a name for himself as an Afropop ambassador in the age of virality and snippets. On his latest album, Playboy, the 26-year-old grapples with newfound fame and attempts to shed his characteristic loverboy reputation as he leans into a Starboy-esque cool-guy persona. The formerly earnest Fireboy sporadically peeks through while the newborn star parties, seduces, and manifests success, not just for himself but for his entire continent.
Since the success of 2020’s Apollo, Fireboy DML has embraced the universal appeal of Afrobeats and been welcomed in turn. His jet-setting, snare-punctuated single “Peru” achieved global TikTok fame and caught the attention of Afrobeats admirer and Ghanian flag tattoo enthusiast Ed Sheeran, who hopped on a remix. With megastars like Beyoncé, Drake, and Madonna also tapping into the Afrobeats wave, some critics have been wary of Western musicians taking from the continent, especially while African artists’ contributions often go unrecognized. Assured in the cultural power of Africa, Fireboy DML doesn’t see a reason to gatekeep. “Historical, deeply-rooted genres like hip-hop, Afrobeats, reggae, amapiano, they cannot be taken away,” he insists. “It’s only right that we collaborate, merge cultures and build bridges for the future.”
As if to make up for the time lost chasing elusive women on his 2019 debut Laughter, Tears and Goosebumps, on “Ashawo,” Fireboy DML adopts a laissez-faire approach to love. “If I cheat on you I’m sorry and if you cheat on me no worry,” he seems to assure his lover, but it really sounds like he’s assuring himself. He desperately tries to keep his affections for women on a purely physical level, but his mask slips on “Adore,” a collaboration with Dominican American rapper Euro, and on the smooth, R&B-influenced “Diana,” he can’t help but beg for her not to go. Though it comes at the cost of a Chris Brown feature, “Diana” proves that Fireboy is in his element when he does what he’s been doing since his breakthrough single “Jealous”: yearn. The only woman featured on the album, Jamaican dancehall singer Shenseea, lends her honeyed vocals as the song’s fictional muse.
On the final third of the album, the devastated loverboy is laid to rest and Fireboy the rock star rises from the ashes. The sharp horns paired with a chorus of voices on “Afro Highlife” signal his arrival with his people at his side. The album crescendos on the rousing closing track “Glory,” where Fireboy—still a church boy at heart—thanks God for family, fame, money, and protection from enemies. When he tries to spite his detractors by flaunting material wealth and success, it produces uncharacteristically unoriginal lyrics like, “She feeling the juice/Feeling the sauce/Look at my shoes/Christian Dior.” Even so, there’s something invigorating about the Fireboy who has a chip on his shoulder and wants everyone to know it.
While his earliest work was sprinkled with commentary about Nigerian society, Playboy, like Apollo, is noticeably apolitical. The artist who observed, “I think it was Nina Simone that said that an artist’s duty is to reflect the times,” is nowhere to be found. Instead, Fireboy keeps the affair light-hearted, opting for universal feel-good vibes on his way into the playlists of unfamiliar listeners. “Havin Fun’” captures him at his most carefree: “Me no dey stress anymore/’Cause I’m blessed and I’m young/And the blessings come from God…I’m just having fun.” With fleet-footed beats, breezy woodwinds, and impassioned lines in Yoruba, Fireboy invites the world to the lively sounds of his hometown.


The Philadelphia poet and experimental musician gives voice to implacable rage and impending cataclysm.

Moor Mother: Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes

Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes

The Philadelphia poet and musician Camae Ayewa, as Moor Mother, seems to be on a mission to give form to our collective grief. Death is so big, and Black deaths are rendered so small, that it leaves a remainder, a trace that refuses to simply disappear. It lives within us, it builds, it demands release. Conjuring this rage, ignored but implacable, Moor Mother makes music that feels halfway between necromancy and warning.
In comparison to 2016’s Fetish Bones, Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, is a refinement. The archival tapes appear again: Moor Mother tracks awaken the spirituals, poems and spoken words of mostly anonymous Black souls as wraiths, primed for revenge. In “Shadowgrams,” she spits, “they have killed our heroes and we forget their names.” These songs are a rejoinder to that erasure, and a proposed antidote to an anti-Black capitalism that insists cultural debts be forgotten.
The sound is as omnivorous as it is unforgiving, produced by Ayewa herself alongside King Britt and noise musician Mental Jewelry, with whom Ayewa collaborated on a joint EP in 2017. The collaborators are largely from Philly, yet Analog Fluids arrives at a moment when, in the cities of the northeast, ideological connections are becoming aesthetic ones. Hardcore, punk, noise and hip-hop are being compressed into a smear. A through-line runs from Philadelphia to New Brunswick and Brooklyn, uniting genres under the boots of unrelenting gentrification, intractable corporate power and unheard anger. Whether rapped or sung, played on digital or analog instruments, the sound is of heads hitting concrete.
Moor Mother is never satisfied to do anything other than confront. Less abrasive textures—strings, a tinny vocal sample, a wandering trumpet—are always distant, and instantly overwhelmed by Moor Mother’s vocal delivery, grim and booming. Her lyrics seethe with revelatory clarity: “I don’t believe in lies, I don’t believe in truth/I need their head as proof,” she seethes on "After Images." Calm arrives only in the closing track “The Passing of Time,” produced by Abstract Black and featuring the sweet vocals of Brazilian singer Juçara Marçal. But over this reverie, Moor Mother recites a steely, bitter truth: “My grandmama, my great-grandmama, my great-great-grandmama, they picked so much cotton they saved the world.”
Ayewa includes Moor Mother in her ongoing collaboration with fellow Philadelphia artist Rasheedah Phillips, Black Quantum Futurism, which Ayewa has called “a new language of healing, memory and justice that can be transmitted and used as a technology.”# Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, likewise is an afrofuturism, or maybe an afro-inevitability. This is the part of healing that looks into the gaping wounds. “The end is happening and it keeps happening, and you keep looking at the clock as if time ever protected you,” Ayewa says in “Shadowgrams,” and Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes arrives with a presentlessness, existing in a cataclysm that is coming, that is then and now. “Don’t Die,” an excruciating listen, is screamed, wept, and then finally gasped as the song cuts off. Bass creeps, voices moan, wail and shake. The sound is relentless, seasick. Moor Mother reminds us of forces beyond control, that are still out there, waiting.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Karin Dreijer’s richly detailed third album renders the search for love as something both sensual and alien.

Radical Romantics

Listen to Fever Ray and learn to recognize the unrecognizable. On one of their new songs, “Looking for a Ghost,” Karin Dreijer plunks out a tune inspired by Henry Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk,” stacking calliope synths behind the berserk couplet “eating out/like cannibal” and a Bob Marley quote. Then this horny little collage of references slowly assumes shape: In their slyly sincere way, Dreijer is writing a personals ad. “Looking for a person/With a special kind of smile,” it reads. “Teeth like razors/Fingers like spice.” You know, someone who gives you that tingle. Lisbon producer Nídia fits them with a corkscrewing synth and a beat that lurches and jingles. “Looking for a ghost in the midst of life,” Dreijer says, which could almost be a literal complaint about queer dating in one’s forties, and then they wink: “Asking for a friend/Who’s kind of shy.”
Shy or not, we’ve come to know Dreijer better since their days as a shadowy beaked figure alongside their brother Olof in the heady electronic project the Knife. As Fever Ray, they make synth-pop with mucous membrane and muscle memory, writing songs that throw off unlikely hooks (“mustn’t hurry”) and chart new orbital paths around large pop structures. With a title like a college seminar and Dreijer’s signature blend of kink and theory, Radical Romantics is essentially a collection of notes on love. Love—whether sexy, overwhelming, or vengeful—links together the recurring motivations of the Fever Ray catalog: curiosity and exploration, family born and chosen, sexual freedom and pleasure. In the past, perhaps, they have sung about love as something vague and unknowable. Now they go looking.
In the run-up to 2017’s vivid and lustful Plunge, Dreijer talked about their dating experiments with candor that came as a surprise. “I’ve been on Tinder,” they said then, presumably with a glint in their eye. Plunge was no stranger to love but also called it “the final puzzle piece.” Anybody will tell you that to find it, first you must look within. Like many, Dreijer shifted their priorities during the pandemic, saying recently that the past few years provided them space to practice patience. In a modern culture that promotes love as instant gratification—keep swiping—Fever Ray now search elsewhere. Referencing bell hooks’ influential All About Love and Gift From the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s 1955 spiritual bestseller, Dreijer is on an inner quest through a region of adult heartache that’s less often explored.
There are a typically savvy collection of collaborators: Along with Nídia on “Looking for a Ghost,” there’s Olof, whose sorcerous trap doors turn the album’s first four tracks into an unofficial and much-anticipated Knife reunion; English producer Vessel, on the standout “Carbon Dioxide”; Aasthma, the production duo of Peder Mannerfelt and Pär Grindvik, on “Tapping Fingers”; and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, whose creeping industrial groans give Dreijer’s reality the weird thrill of fiction. The baleful mood kicks in on “Even It Out,” a small act of cosmic reckoning: “This is for Zacharias/Who bullied my kid in high school/There’s no room for you/And we know where you live!” Dreijer yowls. Where Lydia Tár stoops, Dreijer stands. “I do things methodically,” they sneer, slicing up the word as implied violence: “M-m-m-m-m-methodically.”
Radical Romantics doesn’t have a line like Plunge’s “this country makes it hard to fuck.” It’s slipperier and often slower, working through problems that take longer to solve even as the sky darkens. “Did you hear what they call us?” Dreijer moans on opener “What They Call Us,” a song written from “a very queer perspective.” But we cannot hear the despicable words, only turn to one another anxiously for confirmation that we are not alone yet. Dreijer’s asphyxiating delivery implies danger—the silent alarm or the spreading cloud—but for the moment, love shields us and we proceed through a beat that licks like flames at the heel. Everywhere their words are full of the exquisite caution of experience, as on “Shiver,” where a high pitch shift seems to throw a question into the hands of its recipient: “Can I trust you?”
Sometimes you cannot. Sometimes love is bad for you. Sometimes the fire is too hot and the glove melts at the touch. This is the love of obsession and distraction, like the whining mosquito voice that echoes Dreijer’s words on “Carbon Dioxide”: “Hy-y-y-per focus!” (Later they quote from 1 Corinthians 13, the memorable Bible passage on love: “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”) We’ll need new tools to survive, so on the eerie “New Utensils,” they supply practical knowledge of how to build a fire and then the secret techniques, stretching and squeezing like a bellows as they list some of the ways to make love: “Lips/Fists/A mouthful of words.” Love and fire are the two essential human inventions and where we’re going, we’ll need both.
Love is patient but life is short. On Radical Romantics, Dreijer uncovers fresh anxiety about aging and the passage of time, if only because they feel they have so much love left to give: “What if I die with this song inside?” The album concludes with a mystery called “Bottom of the Ocean,” one for the whales, seven minutes of vocal drip-drops and scraping synths that unfold at the mournful pace of underwater footage of the Titanic. Previous Fever Ray albums set such meditative passages somewhere in the middle, so the bookend placement feels somehow deathly. Love is partially unknowable; could it be out of reach? Or, asks Lindbergh in Gift From the Sea, “Is it not possible that middle age can be looked upon as a period of second flowering, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence?” Here is love, vast as the ocean. Dreijer leaves us there, sinks down and out of sight as we come to rest in the ancestral womb of life, waiting to be born anew.


Self-professed anarchists and DIY devotees jump to a major label with this Butch Vig-produced record.

New Wave

Against Me!'s Reinventing Axl Rose sounded a bit like the Clash or Billy Bragg on the first take-- hardly polished, ragged, and throaty. AM! filtered folk, country, and reggae through the veneer of anthemic punk rock; with no rhythm section to speak of, their songs shot forward on the rough engine of Tom Gabel's voice and the headlong disorder of the band's ragtag instrumentation. They sounded, basically, like glorified spoken word pieces, set to a tune. The band's refusal to do anything resembling a second take hit a kind of DIY nerve so precisely that within a few months of the record's emergence, it was on its way to becoming No Idea's all-time best-selling release.
This was in 2002. Within a year there were hundreds of bands that sounded like them (check the excellent Plan-It-X label) and skeptics gritted their teeth, recognized a trend when they saw one, and waited for things to pass. Among these skeptics, it turned out, was the band itself. Against Me! saw the end long before most of their fans did-- it didn't help that their most popular song, "Baby, I'm an Anarchist!", was exactly the novelty it appears to be-- and this fact might explain how they ended up, five years later, on a major label, with Butch Vig at the controls, and seeking their third or fourth or tenth new audience in as many years.
For a bunch of self-professed anarchists and DIY devotees, the jump to pop-punk haven and Warped Tour affiliate Fat Wreck Chords only a year after they'd talked thousands of kids into believing what they ostensibly did was about as a jarring and contradictory as it sounds. Two records later, they finished the job of demolishing their own fans' newly learned anti-capitalist ethic by signing to Sire, after making an MTV video and a documentary about how extremely they were courted by besuited guys with way more money to burn than Fat Mike. In a post indie-rock world where the Decemberists and Death Cab for Cutie and even Mastodon were cheered for making the major label leap, Against Me! became the first band of the 21st Century to actually succeed at selling out.
"We can control the medium" are the first words you hear listening to New Wave: "We can control the context of presentation." Fan expectations aside, Against Me! built their sound in reaction to big-chorus guitar-rock, and this track, "New Wave", is almost exactly that: big jangly chorus, vague topicality ("Come on and wash these shores away!"), vocal overdubs by the scores. "No signs of original thought in the mainstream," sings Gabel, and the anxiety is palpable. It's also, as far as these things go, an immaculately stirring song, a sing-a-long on the first pass kind of confection.
This is comfortable territory on the Warped Tour axis, Against Me!'s adopted home. "Trash Unreal" is a Rancid-esque ode about a girl who gets mixed up with the wrong drugs and the wrong guys and the wrong crowd, dances to "Rebel Yell," ages out of the scene, and wakes up a thirty-something junkie. "Americans Abroad" is an anti- cultural imperialism anthem. Tegan of Tegan and Sara guests on "Borne on the FM Waves of the Heart", an emo duet. "White People for Peace" concerns the desire of white people for peace; it's also the first single, and with its "protest songs" refrain you'd have to be a pretty lousy guy not to like it. These are longstanding punk tropes boiled down and Vig-ed up, removed of their typical dirt sheen and bolstered by a couple extra guitar tracks.
Of course, the need to say something is a double-edged sword at this level, where Gabel's tasked with ways of making his standard stiff and excessive syllables-- "East and West could not agree, so their Generals gave call and gathered troops at the border"-- sound like something you'd buy a ticket to see. Earnest self-importance of the Bad Religion school rear-ends latter day Green Day we-are-the-worlditude, and the next thing you know you're shouting "civilian casualties had been a cost that was predetermined/when interviewed for report victims pleaded in frustration" and wondering what the hell happened.
For one thing, who even knows to whom this band is speaking anymore? "Up the Cuts", an agonized look at the failing record industry, is a song nobody thought Against Me! would write. "All the insiders rumor over the decline in sales, all the buzz is happening in the new digital marketplace" Gabel sings, or tries to anyway, and one feels for him. "In MRR, someone asks the question...is the culture now a product that's disposable?" Gabel asks, and on the lyric sheet, though not in the song, "MRR" is followed by a parenthesis: (Maximum Rock and Roll). Against Me! have come a long way indeed, when they need to explain to their audience what they mean by that acronym. And where they've arrived at, even they don't know. As Gabel sings, finishing the track: "All the punks still singing the same song, is there anybody thinking what I am? Is there any other alternative? Are you restless like me?"


The Scottish trio Chvrches’ debut is a seamless fusion of emotive theatrics, hook-loaded songwriting, and some of the most forward-thinking sonic tricks employed in electronic music right now. There are a dozen world-beating songs here, and The Bones of What You Believe bleeds big-scale ambition from every synthesized pore.

The Bones of What You Believe

For two decades, Glasgow’s indie-pop and dance music scenes have run in parallel, with only a few notable intersections; Chvrches are the latest meeting point. The Scottish trio’s debut LP, The Bones of What You Believe, is a seamless fusion of emotive theatrics, hook-loaded songwriting, and some of the more forward-thinking sonics in electronic music right now. It’s a style that feels very of-the-moment: Chvrches embody what a generation raised on electronic music is looking for in a rock band, taking the danceable textures favored by the Electric Daisy set and applying them to the sweeping songcraft of M83 and Passion Pit.
Unlike those those bands, Chvrches avoid guitars almost entirely, but the hooks on The Bones of What You Believe are indelible regardless of instrumentation, and the sound is immaculate. After Chvrches self-produced the album in band member Iain Cook’s own Glasgow studio, big-deal boards guy Rich Costey (Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine) handled the mixing; his touch gives these tunes the bright clarity they deserve, with plenty of space for funhouse sonic triggers—processed effects, pitched-down vocal samples, frizzy synth-pad textures. Every note sounds clean and sharp, a necessary corrective to the chemical-dipped wooziness that has dominated electronic indie pop in the last few years.
That sense of precision is unusual for a band this new, but Cook and Martin Doherty, who handle the majority of the instrumentation live and on record, are vets of Glasgow’s perpetually fertile indie scene. Cook handled guitars and programming as a member of defunct alt-leaning post-rockers Aereogramme, while Doherty was once a live member of throat-shredding shoegazers the Twilight Sad (who launched into their own synth excursions around the time that Chvrches became a full-time concern). Together they make music that complements distinctive vocalists without overshadowing them.
Heard in the context of Glasgow’s still-strong cottage industry of distinctly masculine anguish-rock bands, the emotional palette of Chvrches’ lead singer Lauren Mayberry is a welcome change of pace. A local-band lifer who once pursued a career in music journalism, Mayberry’s voice is a multifaceted instrument, the emotional kernel in Chvrches’ molecular makeup. She can sound cutting, aching, triumphant, fragile, and weightless, sometimes all at once; on “Lies,” she soars above the chorus’ mountainous build, and her vocal surge rescues the murky techno of “Science/Visions,” the closest thing to a miss on this otherwise rock-solid album.
Even when Mayberry’s at her most powerful, her voice possesses a specific, relatable humanity, which brightens the adolescent glow of her lyrics. (Occasional lead singer Doherty, previously the band’s weak link, makes good enough on his two featured songs, the rippling “Under the Tide” and the prom-dance lushness of “You Caught the Light”). Her words might look overwrought on paper, but when set to the emotive sounds that Chvrches trade in, they sound towering, impassioned, and life-affirming. Depeche Mode, a spiritual antecedent, have a classic song with the refrain “All I ever wanted/All I ever needed/Is here, in my arms”; that kind of emotional directness and simplicity is a hallmark of the songwriting here.
The Bones of What You Believe also shares some of Depeche Mode’s large-scale ambition: The arpeggiated-synth burst that closes “Tether” sounds like it was orchestrated for the optimal turn-all-the-lasers-on-at-once trigger at a live performance, and it’s all the better for it. Throughout, Chvrches’ effortless populism finds them in a long tradition of bands who take a highly personal sense of turmoil and blow it up onto an arena-sized screen. Granted, recent live performances have suggested that they have a ways to go before their concert-conquering potential catches up with the ability they display on record, but such growing pains are normal for a band this new. For now, on record, Chvrches know how to go big on an intimate scale, to remind us of the stuff that keeps us living.


The Chicago-based footwork scene gets its first comprehensive compilation, and it serves as a very solid overview of the dance music style.

Various Artists: Bangs & Works, Vol. 1: A Chicago Footwork Compilation

Let's be clear: footwork, or footwurk, or footwerk is not blowing up. Not like dubstep or electroclash or hyphy blew up. Footwork is really more of a lit fuse at this point, and one of those painfully slow, Wile E. Coyote-style fuses at that. Roughly, footwork pits sharp, repetitive samples of soul, hip-hop, and reggae against limping, junkyard-dog 808s. It is music composed, at least theoretically, to encourage a specific kind of dancing, but the strangeness of the tracks suggests the producers have ulterior motives. (The dancing looks a bit like breakdancing, but using your arms is discouraged.) Bangs & Works, Vol. 1 is the first widely available compilation of footwork music, released by London-based Planet Mu, whose founder, Mike Paradinas, is relentless in his quest for new sounds.
There is little question why footwork evolved in Chicago: House music birthed the raunchier, uptempo ghetto house (or "juke"), which in turn led to the stripped-for-parts footwork sound. Like ghetto house, tracks usually settle in around 160 bpm; at 140 you've found yourself a ballad. There are hip-hop roots too: the sound's genesis is rooted in RP Boo's "Baby Come On", a track that prominently features an Ol' Dirty Bastard sample (sadly not included here). Other tracks owe a debt to hip-hop's vulgar confidence. Kanye West is said to have been influenced by the scene's early progenitors.
Chicago-based journalist and DJ Dave Quam called footwork "more or less the gum under the shoe of mainstream electronic music," which is a fantastic visual that also speaks to the tuff pliability of the sound. Footwork is not expansive. Unlike, say, house music, which has been refracted into a million directions, Bangs & Works will sound homogenous and alien on first listen (remember back to your first listen to Run the Road or Favela Booty Beats; shit's going to start off a little annoying). Repeated listens will parcel the tracks into three or so basic categories: short, styled dance numbers; novelty tracks; and slyly artful tracks.
Regarding that third category: it's probably fair to say that ghetto house never spawned tracks that sought as obviously to transcend their club context as DJ Elmoe's "Whea Yo Ghost At, Whea Yo Dead Man" or DJ Trouble's "Bangs & Works". Tracks like DJ Roc's "One Blood" and DJ Nate's "Ima Dog" remind me of anyone's first experience with a sampler: They invariably mash a single pad, rhythmically restarting the sample again and again.
The core element of footwork appears to be contrast: between the sharp drums and the melodic samples, between art and novelty. "Ima Dog" pits its ripping, staccato title sample against what sounds like a new age elegy. RP Boo's "Eraser" feigns Armageddon, but its ascendant soul diva exposes it as something more optimistic. DJ Nate's "He Ain't Bout It" mixes banal trash talk with soothing chants. "Jungle Juke" goofily steals from "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", and "Freddy vs. Jason" is a horror-movie mashup.
Footwork seems like it should be a young man's game, but it's not, really. It's been fermenting in Chicago for at least a decade, if not longer, and many of its principals-- RP Boo, DJ Rashad, DJ Roc, DJ Spinn-- are hardly fresh faces. Footwork reminds me spiritually of the blues that artists like Junior Kimbrough used to play: raunchy, fun music that knowingly sacrificed complexity for rhythm (the ramshackle clubs this music was played in: juke joints). And like some strains of blues, footwork appears to be catching on overseas before it finds larger audiences stateside. Bristol-based dubstep producer Addison Groove's "Footcrab", one of the year's dance music smashes, is an obvious homage and would be even if its mantra-like, goofball refrain didn't sound like a G-rated version of DJ Roc's "Fuck Dat".
At this point, it's not worth speculating about the future prospects of the footwork scene. If dubstep and house long ago left the club in search of other musical terrains, footwork is only just peeking out the door. The real promise of Bangs & Works isn't an international footwork movement per se, but a generation of resourceful and creative producers-- heretofore ignored-- redefining dance music for themselves. Here's hoping the size of their audience matches their appetites for the goofy, the melancholy, and the left-field.


The Dominican producer takes a mischievous, electro-punk approach to genre fusions, mashing up the club, the rave, and the mosh pit.

Diego Raposo: YO NO ERA ASÍ PERO DE AHORA EN ADELANTE, SÍ

Yo No Era Así Pero de Ahora en Adelante, Sí

Dominican multi-instrumentalist Diego Raposo plays with contrast on YO NO ERA ASÍ PERO DE AHORA EN ADELANTE, SÍ. Melding jungle breakbeats, fuzzed-out electric guitar, and frantic bass with melancholy downtempo production, Raposo’s new LP, which he bills as his debut, stands in stark contrast to 2018’s Caribe Express. That mixtape drew more obviously from his Caribbean roots, utilizing congas, dembow riddims, and merengue. On his latest, the question of identity is not so clear-cut: He’s still brandishing the Dominican Republic’s red, white, and blue, but his freak flag flies above them.
The album is built around oscillating moods. Emo club tracks made for perreando y llorando mix freely with hyperactive cuts born for raves and mosh pits; gabber kicks give way to sticky-sweet pop punk. In “NORMAL,” fellow quisqueyano producer yendruy aquinx’s voice piles up in layers of Auto-Tune over lush synths; the energy shifts on “AL CONTRARIO,” where Chile’s AKRIILA belts through Auto-Tune over rapid-fire jungle breaks and alt-rock guitars. Extreme vocal processing is one of Raposo’s signature tools; he strikes a balance between icy digital effects and human warmth as he re-pitches and distorts his guest singers.
Ecuadorian indie-pop singer Kablito’s voice is turned into frothy hyperpop in “QUÉDATE.” Miami electronic upstart MJ Nebreda channels her best neoperreo diva on “EN LA DISCO,” a slow-burning scene-setter that culminates in a slow-motion club throb. In the wistful opener “19.322239, -68.540659,” queer Mexican alt heartthrob Blue Rojo, who worked with Raposo on last year’s playful “NO TE KIERO OLVIDAR,” performs angelic, Arca-esque vocal runs over glitchy electronic flourishes. Despite being just a minute long, the song feels like it could go on forever, so it’s fitting that the title’s coordinates map a point just northeast of Raposo’s native island in the wide expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.
The shifts that follow that calm, dulcet introduction show just how mischievous Raposo can be: “EL UNDERGROUND” is a lightning-fast rave anthem that underpins mediopicky’s seductive vocals (“Tengo hambre/Quiero tu sangre/Soy un vampiro/Y tu eres mi carne”) with rapid-fire kick drums; then “A&R” goes from pop-punk to screamo in less than a minute. However much these moments stick out, they fit right in with the album’s Caribbean punk ethos. And while it might seem surprising to hear Raposo making rock music, it shouldn’t: This is the producer who brought to life Venezuelan popetón golden boy Danny Ocean’s drum-heavy reinterpretation of Caracas alt-rock heroes Caramelos de Cianuro’s “Rubia Sol, Morena Luna.”
It’s instructive to compare Raposo’s eclectic album to Data, the producer project that superstar reggaeton beatmaker Tainy put out earlier this year. In that cohesive set, the Puerto Rican Luny Tunes acolyte kept the party going with polished song after polished song. But Raposo, in contrast, takes a willfully patchy approach to the dancefloor. YO NO ERA ASÍ PERO DE AHORA EN ADELANTE, SÍ revels in its inconsistencies: It’s a defiant statement that Spanish-language pop can be anything it wants to be.


Irish singer James Vincent McMorrow's sophomore effort Post Tropical is an album that seems suited to winter. It features lyrics about “elements of frost” and “cold air” and taut, pensive songs that carry a pristine stillness.

Post Tropical

There's a shot that crops up often in nature documentaries or early in the third act of movies that focus on a character's personal growth: An icicle slowly melts in tentative drips, or a cluster of pine needles covered in snow suddenly shakes off its crystalline burden. It's a shot that communicates things like “time has passed, slowly but surely” and “the character you're about to see has been through some deep contemplation!” But it works because there is something about the stark calm of late winter that seems to match up with those periodic spells of reflection, the slow, occasional seasons we spend gradually and deliberately healing or learning. They stretch on forever and then are suddenly complete. They feel like a dream.
Irish singer James Vincent McMorrow's sophomore effort Post Tropical is an album that seems suited to such seasons. It's a winter album in ways that go beyond its release date, with lyrics about “elements of frost” and “cold air” and taut, pensive songs that carry a pristine stillness. There are spare, open moments of longing vocals over solitary piano notes and stabs of sunny revelations in the periodic horn arrangements and cymbal crashes. Above all, Post Tropical is pretty. It's also the type of music to grow with for a little while as a personal soundtrack, a companion for a few months that one might fondly check in with from time to time later on.
If the album has that intimacy, it's likely because Post Tropical comes as a more personal turn for McMorrow. His first album, Early In The Morning, was a comforting collection of guitar folk that found unexpected acclaim and commercial success, charting well in several European countries and landing McMorrow high-profile performances on Later... With Jools Holland and elsewhere. But the acoustic guitar wasn't, according to McMorrow, what he intended to stake his career on. Inspired by the rediscovery of an old hard drive full of efforts at recreating N.E.R.D. songs, the resulting departure on Post Tropical is an attempt to channel the spirit of the electronic music, R&B and hip-hop that McMorrow likes to listen to.
In practice, the new bent means mostly swapping out the guitars for pianos and horns and using the occasional swatch of electronic drums. Although it does passingly resemble the low wattage D'Angelo tributes that get passed off on many blogs as R&B, to call Post Tropical that does a disservice to both the genre and the album. McMorrow's falsetto, already impressive, gets pushed to new heights that could call to mind Maxwell but are more likely to inspire comparisons to others in the indie and folk sphere like Bon Iver's Justin Vernon or the Antlers' Pete Silberman, particularly given the lyrical tone and a backing template that might feel at home on projects by either of those acts.
That voice is McMorrow's best tool, confessional and energizing whether he's hitting the unexpected climax of “there's no sense at all” on “Glacier” or using it to construct a plaintive mantra at the end of “Red Dust” with the repeated lyric, “sometimes my hands they don't feel like my own/ I need someone to love I need someone to hold.” The tone is pained, but the effect is both beautiful and comforting throughout, particularly in the way the album's songs often build to a single yearning, repeated phrase, like “I remember my first love” or “there is so little light from the warmth of the sun.”
Lyrically, the material is generally more oriented toward pulling emotions out of specific sounds of syllables than cohering into clear narratives or even realistic images (consider, for instance, that last line, from “Outside, Digging”, which sounds right but actually reverses cause and effect between light and warmth we're used to). The overall effect can be a little bit free associative, and it plays into the album's biggest weakness: While these songs are pretty, they don't really stand out as songs so much as meandering compositions that follow a similar, slow crescendo formula. There's nothing with the immediate structure or dramatic pull of a song like Early in the Morning's “We Don't Eat”.
But if the album does tend to drift rather than deliver hits, the drifting is awfully pleasant and particularly accomplished. Songs like “Cavalier”, “Outside, Digging” and especially “Red Dust”, an arresting blend of 808 drum machines and swirling piano, hit such memorable vocal highs that they feel both instantly familiar and starkly refreshing. At the same time, many of the best moments are more subtle surprises: the keening country guitars that swoop through the background of “The Lakes”, the flitter of clarinet that plays atop the plink of guitars at the end of “All Points”, the gorgeous depth of the low horn notes that build to the climax of “Glacier”. With its deliberate, languorous pleasures, this is an album to live with, settle with and be crisply rejuvenated by.


As the Strokes sound more confused with each new album, Albert Hammond Jr.'s own songwriting has turned more precise and concise. His latest album reasserts the carefree charm and hooky immediacy that’s gotten lost amid the band’s latter-day experimentation.

Momentary Masters

Unlike so many instantly iconic rock phenomena before them, the Strokes didn’t so much turn boring as frustrating. From 2006’s First Impressions of Earth onward, they’ve sounded like a band constantly second-guessing itself—one that knows it has to evolve beyond a signature sound, but unwilling to commit to a direction. That erratic behavior has extended to frontman Julian Casablancas’ sideline pursuits, whether it as a Daft Punk-approved synth-pop singer or polarizing prog-punk provocateur. But the solo career of guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. has emerged as a beaming ray of light poking through these turbulent skies—as his main band sounds more confused with each new album, his own songwriting has turned more precise and concise.
That said, the refinement in Hammond’s work is less a reaction to the Strokes than the result of significant changes in his personal life. In contrast to the art-pop aspirations that fuelled his first two solo albums, Hammond’s 2013 EP, AHJ, was a slight, scrappy four-song affair. But it bore the weight of considerable baggage: he spent much of the record’s press cycle coming clean about going clean, kicking a prolonged addiction to cocaine, heroin, and ketamine he claimed was draining him of $2,000 a week. If AHJ was a tentative toe-dip back into solo recording, Momentary Masters is a confident full-body dive.
Like its predecessor, the new album isn’t afraid to draw comparisons to Hammond’s day job; rather than try to establish an identity separate from the Strokes, it reasserts the carefree charm and hooky immediacy that’s gotten lost amid the band’s latter-day experimentation. And unlike, say, Angles or Comedown Machine, Momentary Masters manages to inject a little funk and finesse into the Strokes’ wiry rock schematic without forcing the issue, interlocking Hammond’s signature, spidery fills with "Tetris"-tight rhythms that will have you double-checking the liner notes to see if Nikolai Fraiture and Fabrizio Moretti were recruited for the record. (They were not—that’s AHJ-era touring bassist Jordan Brooks and drummer Jeremy Gustin doing the yeoman’s work.)
For an album reportedly inspired by Carl Sagan, the 10-song, 36-minute Momentary Masters is remarkably lean and focused. The title refers to the famed astronomer’s description of our infinitesimal standing in the universe at large; it could also scan as a comment on the Strokes’ own experience as one-time hype magnets, and the struggle to stay relevant after the spotlight points somewhere else. "Sometimes, the sun goes behind the clouds/ You’ll forget the warmth that could be found," he laments on the opening "Born Slippy"—not a cover of the Underworld classic, but perhaps an oblique, cautionary evocation of that track’s hedonistic Trainspotting associations. If the song draws from the same well of influences as the Strokes—the chorus is even underpinned by a rewrite of the "Marquee Moon" riff—Hammond forsakes Casablancas’ disaffected cool for a down-to-earth humility befitting of a former next big thing, and the seize-the-day urgency of a recovering addict who no longer takes anything for granted. And just when you think you’ve got a handle on the song’s A/B structure, Hammond introduces subtle but substantial changes—a pointillist guitar-solo breakdown, new variations on the chorus melody—that transform the song’s scale from modest to majestic.
At the outset, Momentary Masters suggests a parallel history for the Strokes if they had signed to DFA instead of RCA, with the louche groove and synthesized disco strings of "Power Hungry" bridging the early-2000s divide between L.E.S. rock dives and Williamsburg warehouse parties. The album even boasts a spiritual successor to "Losing My Edge" in "Losing Touch", though, buoyed by the song’s spirited new-wave sprint and towering chorus, Hammond sounds happy to be leaving hipsterdom behind. That sentiment is reinforced in more plaintive fashion on a drum-machined cover of Bob Dylan’s "Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright", which initially seems like an outlier on the album, but proves to be its thematic centerpiece. Embracing the song’s don’t-look-back sentiment, Hammond blazes through Momentary Masters’ breathless second half with a series of direct-hit power-pop pick-me-ups that channels the guttersnipe grittiness of vintage Strokes—from the double-timed "Modern Age" stomp of "Razors Edge" to the "I Can’t Win" echoes of "Side Boob"—but with a tuneful flamboyance that reminds you Hammond is the biggest Guided by Voices fan in the group. (And, no doubt, Bob Pollard would approve of a nonsensically evocative title like "Drunched in Crumbs".) "Now that we’re not perfect, we have to be good," Hammond sings on "Touché", like someone who’s being extra-careful to not squander their second lease on life, but who’s liberated from the pressures and anxieties that drive one to bad habits in the first place. As the song’s taut rhythmic drive loosens into a gloriously goofy chicken-scratched guitar solo, Hammond reinforces the notion that, while rock'n'roll may be the gateway to a lifetime of vice, it can also be the most effective form of rehab.


The two rap-and-soul fusionists aim for a retro aesthetic imbued with the intimacy of a basement club; the results are reminiscent of their Harlem Renaissance-inspired Luke Cage soundtrack.

Ali Shaheed Muhammad / Adrian Younge: The Midnight Hour

The Midnight Hour

Producers Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge are bonded by a shared optimism. Before linking up on Souls of Mischief’s 2014 album There Is Only Now, Muhammad’s group A Tribe Called Quest gave jazz a shot of hip-hop’s youthful vitality, while Younge molded blaxploitation-era sounds with a psychedelic sheen. They’re different modes that arm themselves with the belief in the historical centrality and regality of black music, which has been a guiding principle in their Harlem Renaissance-inspired work on the soundtrack to the Marvel series Luke Cage. “There are distinguished people. There’s an edginess,” Muhammad said in an interview about the Marvel show. “There’s such a creative pool that’s come out of [Harlem] throughout the decades.”
Divorced from the significance of scoring Marvel’s first live-action black superhero show, The Midnight Hour decontextualizes the retro stylings as simply two friends chilling and creating. The duo’s first album-length collaboration, first conceived five years ago, has more in common with Luke Cage than There Is Only Now. The latter was a more kinetic project that took advantage of Souls of Mischief and Younge’s improvisational leanings. The Midnight Hour is obsessed with creating a small-venue, buttoned-up atmosphere, not unlike the Marvel show’s musical setpieces. There’s a peculiar live intimacy to the production that threads through hollowed-out kick drums and scratchy bass strings—and you can picture Muhammad and Younge dapping themselves up in the process.
The Midnight Hour pivots for the sake of upholding that soulful aesthetic. Take the rework of Luther Vandross’ schmaltzy 1987 cut “So Amazing.” The 1980s radio harmonies and starry keys get updated with a complex rhythm section and bassline that slide into a climax of violins and harp-like strings. Muhammad has touched on modernizing the old-school bops hip-hop has sampled, and it’s clear here that applies to instrumentation as much as attitude. By switching the silk into worn velvet, The Midnight Hour transforms the devotional ode into a cooler shimmy. The Cee-Lo-featuring “Questions” isn’t as indelible as the Kendrick Lamar cut that sampled the duo’s 2013 demo of the song, but reflections like “I’m supernatural/I am strange/Into whom or to what shall I change” still stretch along sweetly here.
Even though it centers on two men connecting over their tastes, The Midnight Hour mostly peaks with the guest vocalists’ performances. Early cut “It’s You” is a two-parter that rises from uproarious low-end percussion (applause included) to an adult-contemporary lovers’ tune, and it’s the humane radiance of Raphael Saadiq’s voice that pulls it together. The album’s most intense moment comes from sometime collaborator Bilal on “Do It Together,” who you’d imagine has his tank top peeking through his shirt as he throws his controlled presence into a histrionic howl at the track’s end. Marsha Ambrosius is more subdued by several degrees on “Don’t Keep Me Waiting,” encapsulating the track’s pleasures in her whisper.
But most of The Midnight Hour rarely captures that same sort of ecstasy. With some exceptions, like the fervorous “Redneph in B Minor”—whose eerie bleats crack open for honeyed strings—Muhammad and Younge too often settle for static jam sessions. They tend to emphasize the bassline throughout the set, but the instrument almost gratingly insists on the same motif: tiptoeing up to the edge of the cliff before descending once again.
By the midway point, The Midnight Hour becomes a bit too insular for the listener to share in its joys. The effect is a little like finding yourself at an exclusive party yet realizing you hardly know the folks who are having a ball with each other. The two musicians have tasked themselves with bridging generational and genre gaps between black music’s multitudes, but The Midnight Hour finds them still fiddling with how to do so.


The Australian garage rock band gained an adoring cult with the catchy, loud, fuzzy, and frantic songs of their 2012 debut. Three years later, lead singer Shogun might have worked to temper his powerful soul shout and the production is cleaner, but the songs are just as catchy and full of emotion.

High

A recent Royal Headache show at the Sydney Opera House got stopped by police. During "Down the Lane", fans crashed the stage en masse, and when the chorus hit, they sang it as hard as they could. The scene became more raucous as the band sped into "Girls", and that's when cops eventually muscled the crowd off stage. A woman who'd eluded the wall of neon-vested officers took the mic and said, "I love you, Shogun." She was speaking to the band's sweaty, shirtless frontman who'd just been singing his heart out, lost somewhere in the mass of bodies.
Royal Headache have earned this beer-slinging, shout-along adulation fair and square. The songs of 2012's Royal Headache were catchy, loud, fuzzy, and frantic, and Shogun's voice has absurd range, plenty of force, and soul. It took three years to follow up on this debut, and with High they waste no time charging back in. On opener "My Own Fantasy", Shogun belts "I used to live in a world of rock'n'roll and tons of girls!" over a chugging, high-power intro. At a glance, it seems he's going through rock-god motions—romanticizing guitar music while extolling the virtues of fucking multiple strangers. Really, though, the song is about that bubble finally bursting—the sudden, cold feeling of loneliness even while fans are singing along and dancing all around you.
If there's an underlying sense of dissatisfaction here, it's safe to assume it might have something to do with the band's emotional state over the past year. In one interview, Shogun said he broke the band up due to their "dysfunctional" dynamic. (It was later clarified that they weren't breaking up after all.) In a statement, he said the whole album is "about someone I don't see anymore." The open wounds of relationship turmoil fuel High. The band are frenzied on "Need You", one of the best songs in their repertoire (buoyed significantly by Gabrielle de Giorgio's organ line). It's a song about professing love to no avail and eventually having those feelings decay into fruitless obsession. On "Another World", Shogun accuses the person he's with of judging him for superficial reasons. Both songs are as melodic and upbeat as anything on their debut.
Shogun labors over his vocals in the recording process, and his care shows. He could easily soul-scream all over the place, but instead he holds off on the high notes until the perfect moment comes around. He simmers calmly while addressing someone running scared from new love on "Wouldn't You Know". He's dismissive and contemptuous on "Garbage". When he does let loose, it's almost disorienting. He belts over and over during "Love Her If I Tried", and just when he appears to be going at full power, he seems to momentarily unhinge his jaw for one enormous, cathartic high note.
They still thrive on adrenaline and huge sing-along choruses, and "High" and "Electric Shock" deliver the dependable goods. They're not just going through the motions, though. "Carolina", with its acoustic underpinnings, is a surprisingly pastoral plea. The hook is indelible, stirring memories of other people singing the words "sweet Caroline". As ever, it's catchy and full of emotion. Royal Headache have taken steps forward since their last album—they’ve cleaned up their production and diversified their songwriting. Ultimately, though, the important bits are intact: the passion, the power, and the hooks that demand being shouted joyfully.


The Tokyo jazz-fusion quintet specializes in disorienting twists and turns, offsetting chaos with an unmistakable sense of fun.

De Lorians

Listening to the debut LP from Tokyo jazz-fusion quintet De Lorians for the first time is like taking a spin on a dark-ride roller coaster. Not just because the 32-minute prog odyssey is full of hairpin turns and inversions: Its transitions unfurl completely unpredictably. Here, 30 seconds of loungey trot offers no refuge from the barrage of sax honking that might rain down by the time you’ve blinked. De Lorians, led by bandleader and multi-instrumentalist Takefumi Ishida, feed on a theory-drunk disrespect for familiar patterns.
The music is calculatedly disorienting, but the assailing squeals of Ishida’s sax or Soya Nogami’s lead guitar should be enough to ensure that you don’t zone out. De Lorians proudly take after the work of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (“Zappa is God among us,” Ishida has said). But where their Mothers favorites like Weasels Ripped My Flesh would wholly commit to jumping across stylistic universes while getting messy with math, De Lorians maintain a few constants—namely, that Ishida’s or Nogami’s instrument is almost always atop the arrangement, appearing to direct the music with total autonomy. By minute two of opener “Daytona,” they play like they’re dancing to their own fantastical, incongruous meter, the rest of the band existing only in their imagination, because how could any other rational human minds follow along to this? At certain points, just trying to measure what time signature or key the band is in can be like grasping water: The moment you think you’ve closed your fingers around it, it’s already slipped through them and running down your forearm.
On “Roccatsu,” Ishida’s slow, despondent vibrato soundtracks a stroll through a shady alley in a noir film, up until it turns a corner, and suddenly this film is 1970s blaxploitation, underscored with muted wicka-chucka funk guitar. “Toumai” ends the album with no fewer than nine movements inside its seven minutes, sequenced as haphazardly as a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Ultimately, there’s a sense of levity in these hard lefts that elevates De Lorians from hostile chaos. That’s where listeners can find payoff. De Lorians arm themselves with fun, from the toy piano that wanders into “Himalia” to the sound effects that crop up throughout, taken from Nogami’s growing collection of environmental recordings from his daily life, like the pop of a soda can or the flick of a lighter.
Ninety seconds into the tellingly named highlight “A Ship of Mental Health,” a duel breaks out between Nogami’s field recordings and the band. There’s a second or two of sound—laughing, munching, an empty potato-chips bag crinkling—followed by a two-second phrase of music. They go back and forth a few times, as if in dialogue. The effect is similar to a technique used by artists including Steve Reich, the Books, and Charles Spearin, where recorded speech is transcribed and melodies written around its rising and falling pitches. Suddenly, a different kind of sense appears in the motion of De Lorians, one that doesn’t resemble familiar musical patterns so much as it does the accidental rhythms of your lunch break: the tumbling of a canned beverage through a vending machine, or the hesitation in human speech while waiting for processed thought to catch up. On a dizzying debut, it’s De Lorians’ most interesting twist.

Buy: Rough Trade
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At the Drive-In stuck around long enough to have an unequivocal impact and burned out before they could wear out their welcome. Now, without much fanfare, the charismatic El Paso post-hardcore band are reissuing their 1996 debut Acrobatic Tenement and their 2000 swan song Relationship of Command.

At the Drive In: Acrobatic Tenement / Relationship of Command

If you have any memories of modern rock radio in 2000, I’m guessing they aren’t fond recollections. The dominance of rap-metal, as defined by Limp Bizkit and Korn, was starting to wane ever so slightly, and that had to be a good thing, right? But at its best, rap-metal at least offered something new. Soon, playlists would be flooded with the ironically coined nu-metal, which manifested in the likes of Nickelback, Staind, Godsmack, and Puddle of Mudd, old fashioned grunge bands who imported rap-metal's misogyny, regrettable facial hair, and nothing else. When the pendulum has swung so far in one direction, a correction is likely already underway and this can be exciting for people who see the big picture; but we were still about a year away from the Strokes, White Stripes, Bleed American, Songs for the Deaf, I Get Wet, or anything that offered a reprieve. This gap in time proved perfect for At the Drive-In-- if you caught the video for “One Armed Scissor”, the vocals kinda sounded like Rage Against the Machine, the band sliced and diced like Fugazi, and rocked like hell, but seriously, THOSE AFROS…who the fuck are these guys and where did they come from and how many times is he gonna throw that microphone in the air?
In image, sound, and presentation, At the Drive-In were a fully-formed real deal, a Next Big Thing to most, even though their arrival on rock radio was six years in the making; by the release of Relationship of Command, they'd already accumulated an impressive discography and a live reputation. But the typical music consumer was still relying on MTV, Clear Channel, and Sam Goody as prime conveyers, so El Paso might as well have been the actual middle of nowhere. Less than a year after the release of Relationship, they broke up in a way that resembled a broken bone more than a torn ligament-- nasty and fast, but so clean and unmistakable that you could imagine they might patch things up. Who knows what was expected of ATDI as a commercial entity, but they stuck around long enough to have an unequivocal impact, burned out before they could wear out their welcome, and left a whole lot to explore and a whole to the imagination. And so a year removed from their big Coachella reunion and without much fanfare, At the Drive-In are reissuing their 1996 debut Acrobatic Tenement and their swan song Relationship of Command, the two ends of a compelling arc that foretold both their explosive music and implosive interpersonal relationships.
It stands to reason many ATDI fans discovered their discography in reverse order, and if you take the headfirst dive into Acrobatic Tenement, you’re shocked at how the same people responsible for “One Armed Scissor” sound every bit as naïve and scrawny as you’d expect of a band who named themselves after a Poison lyric. It’s not exactly their Pablo Honey: many early adapters still will vouch for it as their best and most honest record and they sound like a younger version of themselves more than a completely different version.
They more or less had an idea of what they wanted to sound like. Whether it’s the murky, almost clean guitar tone, the dual-frontman vocal interaction or just a tendency to get as strident as possible on the chorus, much of Acrobatic Tenement was on loan from Fugazi and their ilk. Bixler-Zavala’s vocals are likewise fully formed and while his lyrics tend to be a lot more grounded in tangible goods than they were later on, there’s still a lot of decoder-ring jabberwocky; “Initiation” is rumored to be about ATDI groupies, “Ebroglio” documents a friend’s suicide, but even the hardworking commenters at songmeanings.net think most of these tracks are about breakups, a sure sign that they’re out of ideas.
But the most startling aspect of Acrobatic Tenement is its anemic sound*,* which allows you to visualize At the Drive-In at the “Bandcamp with local gigs” phase of their career. It’s meant as a souvenir and possible replacement for their “you had to be there” live show; I use that term in the most literal sense, since even if their exhausting touring regimen is still spoken of in hushed tones, it rarely got them out of the Southwest. And Acrobatic Tenement struggles with the same quandary that faces bands whose live performance far outstrips their songwriting and recording skills: considering that the budget was taken from couch cushions (a rumored $600), why not just, you know, record a live show? I couldn’t imagine Acrobatic Tenement sounding any less slick-- even compared to the brickwalled Relationship of Command, the intended dynamics of “Skips On The Record” and “Schaffino” are rendered theoretical at best, the guitars mostly sound like someone forgot to hit a distortion pedal, and there are several times during the otherwise excellent “Ticklish” where it actually sounds like someone forgot to hit their distortion pedal until midway through a riff.
There are still good songs on Acrobatic Tenement-- “Initiation” and “Star Slight” in particular stand out as strong examples of where post-hardcore was at the time and where At the Drive-In could’ve taken it. But really, the reissue of Acrobatic Tenement is better used as a means of scaling At the Drive-In’s subsequent leaps and bounds-- guitarist/vocalist Jim Ward praised it for its “earnest and pure excitement,” relative to Relationship’s “craftsmanship.” In other words, both artist and listener alike can appreciate Acrobatic Tenement as the record At the Drive-In made because they really didn’t know any better.
What’s interesting about Relationship of Command in retrospect is just how much of it remains etched in 2000. For one thing, it was released on Grand Royal, the Beastie Boys’ boutique label which served as a late-90s booster for cosmopolitan, kitschy, and quirky acts like Bis, Atari Teenage Riot, and Luscious Jackson that mostly strayed far away from alt-rock’s mainstream. Relationship, along with the pre-9/11 vinyl pressing of Jimmy Eat World's Bleed American, was one of Grand Royal’s final releases before it shuttered in 2001 and also one of its most successful, selling over 1 million copies. And most crucially, there was the duo responsible for capturing ATDI’s sound. Relationship of Command was produced by Ross Robinson, nu-metal standard bearer, five-star general in the Loudness Wars, and the very person responsible for many of the records that made Relationship of Command sound so bold by comparison. And much to the band’s eventual regret, Andy Wallace mixed the LP, ensuring it was as juiced-up and steroidal as any number of sluggers restoring the nation’s faith in Major League Baseball at the time.
While guitarist and eventual Mars Volta member Omar Rodriguez-Lopez discredited the mixing of Relationship of Command, it’s hard to argue with Wallace’s decisions because it totally fucking worked. That At the Drive-In could go moonshot for moonshot with the heavy hitters without drastically altering the content of Relationship was its biggest success-- here was a band smuggling in post-hardcore, emo-punk, and math-rock in between whatever MACHINA/Machines of God or Californication single was poppin’ at the time. But if you liked omnidirectional anger, big choruses, and loud guitars*, Relationship of Command* was an album that could easily be taken at face value before the subversive aspects came to the fore.
From the very first seconds of “Arcarsenal”-- the kind of hardcore Pornography that even the Cure couldn’t replicate on their Ross Robinson album-- Relationship of Command grabs you by the collar and does not stop. A lot of the advances they'd made on In/Casino/Out and Vaya-- electronics, Latin percussion, more ambitious song structure-- were simply blown up to scale. Meanwhile, Bixler-Zavala’s cloak and dagger lyricism went even deeper into garbled SpyTech communiqué while becoming unintentionally anthemic or resonant-- “have you ever tasted skin?,” “hypodermic people poking fun at the living,” and of course, “this station is non-operational.”
Make no mistake, Relationship of Command is also ATDI’s best album on account of having its sharpest songwriting, most explosive hooks, and catchiest guitars. Sure, there’s a piano somewhere in the mix, but the windup leading to “I must’ve read a thousand faaaaaaaaces!” on “Arcarsenal” is about the only reprieve you get within the first 15 minutes. The chorus riff of “One Armed Scissor” would’ve been a major hit on Beavis & Butthead’s couch years prior. Bixler-Zavala’s eventual shift towards prog-metal operatics aren’t as much of a surprise in retrospect listening to the belted chorus of “Sleepwalk Capsules.”
But while Relationship of Command is a juggernaut, it’s not invincible. For one thing, you can sense the fissures forming in ATDI’s songwriting team-- the undeniable chorus of “Invalid Litter Dept.” (you know, the “dancing on the corpses’ ashes” song) is necessary to make up for its stilted interjections and even if “Enfilade” is about half as long as a standard Mars Volta song, it packs in every bit as many chintzy production tricks. Iggy Pop shows up to whisper a ransom note at the beginning of "Enfilade" and shows up somewhere indeterminate on "Rolodex Propaganda", because he was available and this was a major label rock album in 2000. Meanwhile, Relationship’s second half anticipates the utilitarian modern rock of Ward’s Sparta; Wallace and ATDI are equally complicit in turning “Quarantined” into a leaden slog and “Cosmonaut” into an undifferentiated flurry of pugilistic guitar.
ATDI’s recorded output appears to have been a parallel to their internal dynamic-- Relationship of Command represented the culmination of everything they’ve done to date, their passions and ambitions given a healthy infusion of money. Their implosion appears to have been the result of the same ol’ rock‘n’roll bullshit often abetted by a healthy infusion of money and subsequent hype, i.e., rumored drug abuse, van accidents, cancelled tours at the worst possible times, “creative differences,” and ultimately the sort of long-standing resentments that inevitably fester when you spend nearly every waking moment of an entire decade with the same five people.
At the Drive-In never made a perfect record, though the bigger questions here have more to do with the actual reissuing than the records themselves. Bearing only a single track of bonus material, it’s tough to imagine what the public gets out of increased availability of what are, by far, the weakest and the most popular At the Drive-In releases. Moreover, the timing just feels unnecessarily cruel. ATDI were so frank about their motivations for a reunion tour in 2012 that you had to take them at their word when they said had no plans to make another album. But that was before the dissolution of Mars Volta, a band that allowed Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez to achieve greater commercial success while simultaneously driving up the nostalgia and cred value of At the Drive-In. What’s stopping them now, other than Omar’s 12-dozen side projects?
And if you do feel invested in rock radio, it’s easy to mope about, thinking, “we sure could use another At the Drive-In.” This is a complaint that rings true on multiple levels: while I have plenty of anecdotal evidence of artists claiming to have been blown away by Relationship of Command as a teen, now that Thursday’s called it quits, the only bands that strike me as bearing any ATDI influence are dudes like Biffy Clyro or Alexisonfire, who are probably even further from the “indie” purview than Mars Volta. Or, maybe the cold administration of At the Drive-In’s legacy is its own sort of command, i.e., “this station is non-operational unless we say so.” They may have once been emo, but no ever said they were romantic.


Stevie Wonder’s second legendary album of 1972 contains heartbreaking hits about love and social crisis. Its revolutionary use of the synthesizer humanized the instrument to a degree never heard before.

Talking Book

In 1972, Stevie Wonder released the first two albums in a legendary series of LPs that would affirm the breadth of his talent and his signature sound as a songwriter: Music of My Mind and Talking Book. It’s not that Wonder’s 13 prior Motown recordings failed to show off his unique voice and personality, just that the blind polymath felt unfairly limited by Motown’s need to dictate what he could sing about and how it could be produced. By the end of the 1960s, the recording industry’s system of tightly controlled “hit factories” was losing ground to the more anarchic creativity of the folk-rock, jazz fusion, and singer-songwriter movements. Motown had been calling Wonder a genius since he was 12 years old but seemed afraid to give him the freedom to prove it.
Aside from some pop-R&B singles crafted by in-house production teams serving Black radio’s bottom line, what Berry Gordy wanted from a Stevie Wonder album was inoffensive pop covers and modern standards aimed at the adult crossover market. Ramping up to the glorious suite of original material that would comprise Talking Book were Wonder’s initial attempts to completely control his sound on 1971’s Where I’m Coming From and Music of My Mind. The singer had spent 10 years soaking up musical influences from church, television, radio, and a wide range of other performers before breaking free of the sonic straightjacket Motown imposed on all its artists.
The results were remarkable. Even the titles and cover art of what would become Wonder’s breakaway albums telegraphed his determination to start presenting his own ideas in his own way. The big afro looming above image-projecting sunglasses on Music of My Mind, followed by Wonder wearing African robes and braided cornrows on Talking Book, shows him in a proudly Afrocentric state. Despite physical blindness, he reveals himself to his fans as a seer; despite seeing all races as equal, he won’t ignore how racial and social injustice disproportionately oppress Blacks. Recording new music outside the vintage Motown system while using a revolutionary computerized instrument to do so helped drive these points home. If the Beatles’ music could be, by turns, sexy, spiritual, and political, so could Stevie Wonder.
But before we reassess the tracks on Talking Book, we need to remember what Mr. Steveland Morris would have been hearing on R&B and pop radio between 1969 and 1972. Back then, Black singer-songwriters like Isaac “Black Moses” Hayes, Sly Stone, and fellow Motown rebel Marvin Gaye were iconoclasts who were nonetheless commercially successful. The rising Black Power and anti-Vietnam War movements added a new seriousness and emotional urgency to popular music which the usually conservative radio stations began to embrace. After making scores of hits as a house musician at Stax, Hayes went solo to invent the trippy R&B concept album in 1969, then in 1971 became the first Black composer to win an Oscar with his pop-chart topping soundtrack to the movie Shaft. Sly Stone—a radio DJ, record producer, and bandleader—took the psychedelic funk of the Bay Area to the top of the charts when quirky singles from Dance to the Music (1968), Stand! (1969) and There’s a Riot Goin’ On (1971) achieved heavy rotation on both Black and pop radio.
Then, much to everyone’s surprise, Wonder’s labelmate Marvin Gaye joined this musical revolution in 1971 by defying Motown’s ban on protest material with What’s Going On. Hearing Gaye’s gorgeously orchestrated broadsides against war, pollution, and racism get massive praise and airplay during the repressive Nixon years only increased Wonder’s desire to make equally heartbreaking hits about love and social crisis. When discussing Wonder’s professional evolution, much has been made of his ability to receive millions in royalty earnings (held in trust) and simultaneously renegotiate his elapsed Motown contract when he turned 21. But there was much more involved in Wonder’s evolution from a cute adolescent singing “Fingertips Pt. II” during the closing credits of Annette Funicello’s Muscle Beach Party to the mature artist who debuted “Superstition” while touring with the Rolling Stones in 1972.
Wonder had started touring internationally by age 13. In 1963, after British TV producer Vicki Wickham and pop diva Dusty Springfield saw Wonder perform at a Paris theater, they immediately invited him to England to sing two songs on Wickham’s top-rated music show, Ready, Steady Go! Wonder thereby became the first Motown artist to appear on RSG!, which helped break the Motown sound to millions of British fans. The Rolling Stones were on that same episode, and Mick Jagger remembers chatting about music with a “13 or 14-year-old” Wonder at the TV studio as they waited to perform to a fashionable crowd of dancing teens during the live evening broadcast. Over the years, Wonder befriended many British musicians during his tours, and it was usually a case of mutual admiration. It would have been typically shrewd of Wonder to pay close attention to Jagger, Donovan, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Marc Bolan, and other British stars influenced by American pop music, attentively noticing how they adapted chords and tempos to make various Yankee blues and folk styles their own. Thus, if Wonder’s “Maybe Your Baby” on Talking Book evokes mutated chords and rhythms from Donovan’s “Season of the Witch”—or inserts layered vocal ad libs reminiscent of those Sly Stone used on “Family Affair”—it is only the sincerest form of flattery.
Another aspect of Wonder’s development as a songwriter that is too often glossed over is the contributions of his female collaborators. In the 1960s, Motown stalwart Sylvia Moy co-wrote several of Wonder’s most memorable singles. “I Was Made to Love Her,” “My Cherie Amor,” “I’m Wondering,” and even “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)”—the dance tune that reportedly kept Berry Gordy from dropping Wonder after his voice changed—are each marked by Moy’s eloquent turns of phrase and elegant yet emphatic vocal phrasing. What Wonder picked up from Moy and other female artists he admired was a kind of romantic gallantry expressed in genteel, wistful, and contemplative ways. When Wonder and then-wife Syreeta Wright co-wrote all nine tracks on 1971’s Where I’m Coming From, the single “If You Really Love Me” incorporated sudden shifts in tempo, mood, and phrasing that enhanced lyrics describing all the frustrating ups and downs of romance. “I Wanna Talk to You” was Wonder’s first deep exploration of the racial divide, daring to imagine a lyrical confrontation between old Southern whites and modern blacks. An effort was made to match lyrical content with tempos and melodies that would deepen meaning on each track.
Ultimately, this approach to songwriting would suffuse both Wonder’s political and romantic material, letting him insert elements of hippie mysticism, science-fictional speculation, and interdenominational spirituality. On Talking Book, “Big Brother” has Wonder quietly crooning, “You’ve killed all our leaders/I don’t even have to do nothin’ to you/You’ll cause your own country to fall,” over an irresistibly bouncy track of Moog baseline buoyed by cheerful clavinet and harmonica arpeggios. Inspired by George Orwell’s futuristic dystopian novel 1984, “Big Brother” delivers some of Wonder’s harshest observations about Nixon’s America with sophisticated and somehow soothing irony. Similarly, the scenarios of love-gone-wrong addressed in “Tuesday Heartbreak” and “Maybe Your Baby” stand out in terms of how Wonder articulates the painful ambivalence lovers often feel. Throughout “Tuesday,” the singer oscillates between breezy certainty that his love can win her back and his flip resignation to her wanting to leave him for another. In this way, the unavoidable cruelty of unrequited love is effectively juxtaposed against the necessary cruelty of telling someone you’ve found someone else.
During the early 1970s, British bass player and programmer Malcolm Cecil was helping Wonder incorporate the sounds of the Original New Timbral Orchestra (T.O.N.T.O) alongside American engineer Robert Margouleff. Cecil watched Wonder compose songs at different times with both Syreeta Wright and Yvonne Wright (unrelated). Speaking to Chris Williams for Okayplayer in 2019, Cecil recalled, “Yvonne would sit next to him at the piano and whisper words into his ear while he was singing.” Syreeta and Yvonne ended up having two tracks each on Talking Book. All four songs are about the trials of love and as such are amazingly synergistic in sound and mood. Significantly, the ex-wife Syreeta wrote the “I’m movin’ on” songs “Blame It On the Sun” and “Looking for Another Pure Love.” The latter is optimistic with a twist—the title refers to a surprise phone call in the first verse that ends a relationship, leading the singer to seek a replacement. The “pure” in the lyric is an important qualifier because the song’s protagonist—male or female—wants nothing insincere. But the records with Yvonne are about romantic beginnings, not endings. “You’ve Got It Bad Girl” is a cautionary tale about a woman not so sure she should give in to passion.
At this stage of his career, Wonder himself would admit to the press that he preferred writing music to lyrics. While promoting Talking Book in 1973, Wonder proudly confessed to Tony Norman of NME that the album’s No. 1 pop single “Superstition” was “really the first successful tune I’ve written for myself.” The first demo for “Superstition” was a collaboration completed in a single day after starting as a studio jam session between Jeff Beck on drums and Wonder improvising on piano. Wonder intended to write a tune for Beck in exchange for his adding guitar to some studio tracks; he even told Beck he could release his cover of “Superstition” first. But Beck’s subsequent album was delayed, and Berry Gordy insisted that “Superstition” be the lead single for Talking Book in October 1972.
It can be hard to tell the order in which tracks were selected for each of Wonder’s albums between 1971 and 1976 because of how prolific he and his collaborators were in the studio. Cecil and Margouleff typically over-recorded whenever Wonder was around. Days blended into nights for the energetic Stevie, who was exhilarated to have access to the pair’s experimental genius, as well as to the world’s largest (and only) polyphonic analog synthesizer. Working with T.O.N.T.O.’s massive array of Moog, Arp, Oberheim, and other synth modules could be slow and buggy. But it afforded Wonder a level of control over the recording process that was crucial to his getting the sounds in his head onto tape. Also, making his keyboard mimic any instrument known or unknown was a great goad to his imagination. Cecil’s goal of enabling musicians to have complete control of every technological step in the recording process dovetailed perfectly with Wonder’s desire to create music with fresh sounds for a challenging new decade. He’d gotten started by adopting the versatile Hohner clavinet as his signature keyboard. (One can’t overestimate the importance of a memorable and quasi-proprietary keyboard sound to an innovative recording artist. Imagine “96 Tears” without the Farfisa keyboard or “A Whiter Shade of Pale” without the Hammond B3 organ!)
What Talking Book did for synthesizer-based music was humanize it to a greater extent than ever before. How Wonder recorded vocals and analog instruments throughout the album was as important as how he deployed the synthesizers. The tiniest shift in inflection, a whispered aside, or an improvised solo had meaning and purpose. Even the vocal encouragement he gives to Jeff Beck during his guitar solo on “Lookin’ for Another Pure Love” adds focus and soulfulness to the composition. In “Blame It on the Sun,” hearing the naked purity of acoustic piano against the anachronistic harpsichord fills, and the Theremin-flavored pitch of T.O.N.T.O.’s nuanced wail serve to frame Stevie’s lead vocal perfectly. Multi-tracked backup vocals are underscored with skeletal tonal colors that warm them just enough to give an impression of unshed tears. These little sonic surprises happen throughout the album, giving it a lasting sense of intimacy and spontaneity.
The transition from Talking Book to Innervisions felt neither abrupt nor strained because some of the songs on both albums had arisen from the same sessions. Cecil and Margouleff always kept a quarter-inch tape reel running to preserve inspired jam sessions or random demos. That is part of the magic of this period when everything was moving so fast.
Today, most people would agree that what Talking Book did for Wonder was raise public expectations for all his subsequent work. The operatic intensity of downtempo arias like “Blame It on the Sun” or “You and I” were offset by the funky grind of “Maybe Your Baby” and the sardonic playfulness of “Big Brother.” This strategic way of counterbalancing different musical attitudes on the same LP would continue through 1974’s Fulfillingness’ First Finale and 1976’s Songs in the Key of Life. In retrospect, the combination of tunes cherry-picked for the Talking Book package became the artistic standard against which all future albums by Stevie Wonder would be measured.


Ty Segall's T. Rex covers haven't gotten the attention they deserve. Though they were just released as EPs and 7"s, they served as aesthetic stepping stones between Segall's fuzz-pop fury stage (Melted) and the more muted records he would make later.

Ty Rex

In any given year, few Record Store Day exclusives are worth the long lines or inflated prices. Sure, a select number of unearthed B-sides and overdue reissues reward the effort, but there's a whole swath of mediocre cover records destined to linger in the leftovers bin. So many of them read as easy cash grabs—not at all essential unless you're a superfan (because really, those are the only people clamoring to own the Foo Fighters' version of "Kids in America"). In 2011, Ty Segall offered an exception to that rule, releasing a covers EP that was worth buying and quietly stood as one of the best entries in his lengthy discography. Just that name alone, Ty Rex, was exciting—the promise that Segall at the top of his game would record a series of Marc Bolan covers. Now, the entire Ty Rex oeuvre is being issued in full (the original EP, its 2013 follow-up 7", and an unreleased bonus track). It's a good thing, too, because these covers demand a bigger audience.
Ty Rex arrived two months before Goodbye Bread, his most paced and subdued statement up to that point. He'd been touring behind Melted's giant-hook singles ("Girlfriend", "Imaginary Person", etc.), and he'd become very good at performing covers. His live sets usually featured his wide-eyed versions of hard rock staples (by Sabbath, AC/DC, and Motörhead, to name a few). His 2010 Daytrotter recording of G.G. Allin's "Don't Talk to Me" was an unhinged star turn. The expected move was for him to bring that same chaos to Ty Rex. But this time around, lizard-brained Segall took a step back. Instead, he showed restraint, recording an aesthetic stepping stone between the fuzz pop fury of Melted and the comparative lethargy of Goodbye Bread.
He didn't just run through the hits, either. It opens with "Fist Heart Mighty Dawn Dart", which appeared on the 1970 Tyrannosaurus Rex album Beard of Stars. Segall slows and steadies the pace, subbing out Micky Finn's Moroccan clay drums for the traditional rock'n'roll kit, and the vocal melody is smoothed out from Bolan's stilted chorus. Segall's groove is even more gradual on his reading of the 1968 track "Salamanda Palaganda", and the restraint gives every whimsical image—the old crones, the night eagles—the opportunity to fully sink in.
There's a posthumously released T. Rex record called Rabbit Fighter: The Alternate Slider, which features demos and acoustic versions of Slider songs. It's Bolan at his most restrained and pared back—proof that his songs were already gold before he slathered on the extra gilding (string sections, layered electric guitar solos, and so on). Ty Rex is also an album-length acknowledgment of Bolan's core strengths. Throughout, Segall plays it straight—the solos are never excessively flashy (sticking close to the originals) and the recording quality is slightly muffled. He never attempts a Bolan impression, either, and he largely forgoes any untethered Slaughterhouse wildness to play up Bolan's melodies, chord progressions, and absurd lyrics. He knows that you don't rewrite Shakespeare, and you don't attempt to outswagger one of rock'n'roll history's most confident heartthrobs.
Of course, it's a Ty Segall record, so he still brings some of that fire. His previously unreleased version of "20th Century Boy" is Ty Rex at its most fuzzy and abrasive, packing the record's most impressive, sky-high guitar solo. But every pound of rock'n'roll aggression is tempered by more withdrawn performances, like the slow burn of "The Motivator", "Cat Black", and "The Slider". That's what the best T. Rex records are like, too—for every "Rip Off", there a "Girl".
Clearly, Segall could do more than one installment of Ty Rex. During his Ty Rex set at Gonerfest 12, people went nuts at just the suggestion of "Bang a Gong". There are several reasons why Segall is well-suited to this material—he's a guitar hero and his voice is in exactly the right register. He's an excellent showman and a rock'n'roll screamer, but he can also emote behind his acoustic guitar. With his thoughtful, deft, and exciting performances, Segall also clearly has a reverence for these songs. As Segall works through Bolan's discography—from the early acoustic stuff to the big tent T. Rex singles—he's offering a convincing invitation to deep dive into Bolan's discography.


On The Scene Between, Ian Parton has gone back to his original method of composing, recording and producing all of the music himself, save for the vocals, which means he’s purposefully inviting comparisons to Thunder, Lightning, Strike. And yet, the results feel like his most truly songwriterly work yet.

The Scene Between

Located at a midpoint between the Avalanches’ giddy sampledelia and chillwave’s trapped-on-VHS arrested development, the music on the Go! Team’s Thunder, Lightning, Strike was so rich with personality, the guy who actually made it became an afterthought. We talked about car chases, Saturday morning cartoons, or Archie Bell & the Drells; Ian Parton, not so much. Subsequent LPs Proof of Youth and Rolling Blackouts were tasked with proving Parton's project was a viable band rather than a really good idea, and the polite reception of both felt fitting: Both somehow sounded too much like the Go! Team’s debut and not enough like it, unsure of whether to top Thunder, Lightning, Strike or move on.
On The Scene Between, Parton has gone back to his original method of composing, recording and producing all of the music himself, save for the vocals, which means he’s purposefully inviting comparisons to Thunder, Lightning, Strike. And yet, the results feel like his most truly songwriterly work yet. Without context, you’d think the Go! Team of T**he Scene Between were just a jubilant group of British indie pop enthusiasts emerging from their local DIY scene (the fact that they share their name with a Calvin Johnson project doesn't hurt).
His range as a composer, rather than an auteur or producer, has never been more evident. The minty fresh melodies of "What D’You Say?" and "Did You Know?" posit the Go! Team as having more in common with Camera Obscura or Alvvays than any crate-digger. On "Her Last Wave", they’re all of a sudden a dream-pop act. It’s all connected by Parton’s chunky drums and chaotic, buzzing production, roughage to the confectioner's pop.
But it’s a cohesive listen that doesn't quite translate into a cohesive statement of purpose. The presence of three interludes assumes the record is meant to be played in sequence, but the individually strong moments of The Scene Between never communicate with or build off each other enough. Considering it's bookended by its strongest tracks, The Scene Between might actually be a more satisfying listen on shuffle. Still, with Parton aiming to make "delicious, curvy, undeniable, sunshiny songs," you can’t say he missed the mark too often here. "I thought catchy melodies are the hardest thing to do in music," Parton admitted. Perhaps. The more important thing is to connect, and Parton believes the only way to do that is to make sure the power is never, ever off.


Bronx-bred singer Rahel is currently the lone female artist associated with Camp & Street, a label and collective overseen by New York rapper Le1f. Alkali’s sounds glide into each other, one track after another, and at times it feels like a one-on-one intervention with your friend who’s in need.

Alkali

Bronx-bred singer Rahel is currently the lone female artist associated with Camp & Street, a label and collective overseen by New York rapper Le1f. To date, the 27-year-old has guest vocals on songs by Le1f ("Star Me" and "Air Max") and rapper/singer DonChristian’s album, Renzo Piano. While her style is hard to grasp from her limited in-house contributions, on Rahel's recently released debut, Alkali, her approach mirrors that of her early '00s pop-R&B predecessors like Nivea, Ashanti and others: passionate vocals, a surgical focus on relationship disappointment and a sometimes foolish urge to hold on to something that’s gone bad long ago.
What initially stands out most about Alkali is its lush production, which in large part comes from The-Drum’s Jeremiah Meece, who’s also credited as an executive producer. While it could have easily fallen into the one-long-song trap that many do when chasing cohesion, Alkali’s sounds glide into each other, one track after another, their R&B fundamentals enhanced by off-kilter elements like the vocal processing that’s sprinkled throughout the album. The tracks are also distinguished by Rahel’s biggest strength on the record: her charm.
Her lyrics may not mirror the en-vogue, complex masochism of the Weeknd and FKA twigs, but her around-the-way girl sentiment resonates nonetheless. Her plainspoken lyrics, coupled with her conversational delivery, make it easy to zero in on her troubles. At times, Alkali feels like a one-on-one intervention with your friend who’s in need. On "Bae" with fellow Camp & Street member DonChristian, Rahel’s patience is running thin with a love interest who’s playing too many games, which perfectly segues into "Restless" where she demands complete honesty. It’s also during a distorted monologue in the latter where a giggly but serious Rahel urges, "Stop frontin’...we grown now." There’s often a seesaw of angst, playfulness and frustration in young relationships, which Rahel illustrates here quite naturally.
Rahel doesn’t spend the entirety of Alkali losing sleep over her uncooperative lover, though. At the midway point is "The Break", where the frustration  finally boils over into an "I'm through" proclamation. But, even in her exit, she’s still conflicted and attached: On "The Current", she sings a somewhat false-sounding "we’ll be alright" and "I think we gon' make it."
What’s most interesting about Alkali is how it changes depending on its context. When taken in as a full narrative, the nuances are easy to single out and appreciate, but when removed from context, no track outside of the ones that featured her Camp & Street teammates ("Bae" and "Flutter") stand alone. There’s nothing groundbreaking about the content either. But maybe intricacy isn’t what should matter much for Alkali, an album very much about the heart.
On the album closer "Easy", Rahel brings the narrative to a gratifying conclusion, singing "I feel like keeping what's mine/ 'Cause nothing is worth more than I." After her agony and ever-changing emotions, the affirmation feels hard-won and honest. Wounded and disappointed, Rahel’s resilience, self-analyzation and ability to rid herself of baggage feels like a triumph—and it's one you can feel even if you’re just focusing on the music.