On her second album as Wares, Cassia Hardy sings of rage, joy, and transformation on a dynamic and euphoric rock record.

Survival

Survival means something very specific to Cassia Hardy. Her 2017 self-titled debut album as Wares chronicled her life as an artist and outsider in Alberta (aka Canada’s Texas, with all the oil money and conservative politicking that goes with it) and her conflicted relationship with her home city of Edmonton, ultimately concluding that its supportive music community makes it “a nice place, but I don’t want to die here.” Wares’ second album, however, homes in on a very specific part of that experience: her transition into a woman, and all the locker-room bullying, judgemental doctors’ visits, and self-doubt she endured along the way. The cover painting on Survival depicts a gender-ambiguous figure in a red dress lurching towards a radiant sun poking over the horizon, but still surrounded by a forest that seems to be pulling them back into the darkness. It’s the perfect visual distillation of an album that perpetually teeters between euphoric, new-day-rising affirmations and the inescapable specter of past traumas.
Hardy’s process of self-realization has run parallel to Wares’ transformation from an acoustic-guitar-slinging solo operation into a fiery indie-rock quartet with the fighting spirit of a young Titus Andronicus. On Survival, Hardy’s need for intimate connection is matched only by Wares’ desire to go over the top and burn it all down, rendering joy and rage as the same exorcising expression. Like a slingshot being pulled to its breaking point, the opening “Hands, Skin” ratchets up its tense atmosphere before blasting off into a double-timed punk sprint, its ecstatic, liberated energy undercut by Hardy’s grim account of a violent attack inflicted upon her. The album’s seismic centerpiece, “Surrender Into Waiting Arms,” presents the optimistic flipside to that narrative, of finding acceptance and possibly even love (“Jump for a chance at a better life/Give myself to one I desire!”). But the energy is equally unsettled, particularly when the song suddenly detours into a dramatic, doomy second act where Hardy’s amorous exclamations (“Kiss my lover in the sun/Feel their heart pressed between finger and thumb”) sound like they’re being shouted from the bottom of a well, suggesting that happiness is all just an unattainable fantasy.
Survival is Wares’ first release for venerable Vancouver imprint Mint Records, the label that introduced the world to the New Pornographers 20 years ago. There are echoes of that group’s maximalist power-pop in the steady motorik cruise of “Tether” and jubilant jangle of “Surface World,” but Wares are ultimately less concerned with craft than catharsis, no matter how messy it gets. Hardy’s irrepressible personality abounds even in the album’s more delicate moments, like the anti-capitalist dream-folk lullaby (and readymade COVID rent-strike anthem) “Jenny Says” and the devastating “Tall Girl,” which could pass for an early non-electro MGMT track, but with their hazy cosmic jive replaced by a regretful account of being too nervous and wary of strangers to chat up a potential soulmate.
By album’s end, Hardy has found enough strength and confidence in her identity to shift the lens away from her past and back onto the current state of her home province, where oil barons dominate with a blatant disregard for the environment and Indigenous land rights. “Fight like a dying species rejecting parasitic scum/Before everyone you love gets used up,” she screams with throat-ravaging desperation. By coming clean with her own struggles over the course of the record, Hardy shows that even the most formidable obstacles are surmountable. She’s alive; now it’s your turn.


Brood Ma, a London-based producer and recent signee to the label Tri Angle, joins forward-thinking artists like Rabit, Roly Porter, and Lotic. Rather than maintain a singular focus, the producer skips from idea to idea, uniting decades of club music under a singular industrial umbrella.

Daze

There was a time when you mostly knew what to expect from a Tri Angle release, even if the sound was notoriously hard to describe. But the New York/London label has evolved in the six years since its founding. Rather than gravitate toward artists whose music pours from speakers like molasses, Tri Angle is now just as likely to sign acts that mix bass music, techno, and noise in unpredictable ways (so long as the atmosphere mostly remains sufficiently chilly). "Everyone I choose to work with, all the records have to make sense as a whole," label founder Robin Carolan told the Huffington Post last year. "I don't expect them to make sense to everyone, but for me I can connect the dots." As its signees have been increasingly adopted by mainstream pop artists like Björk and Kanye West, new acts continue to deconstruct the genre from the inside out.
Brood Ma, a London-based producer and recent signee to the label, joins forward-thinking artists like Rabit, Roly Porter, and Lotic, who seem capable of piling endless genre touchstones into a single track. Daze is Brood Ma's third LP and first with Tri Angle, but the artist's aesthetic couldn't be more in line with the label's current penchant for postmodern experimentation. Over the course of the album's 13 tracks, only one exceeds three minutes, and seven are less than two. Rather than maintain a singular focus, the producer skips from idea to idea, uniting decades of club music under a singular industrial umbrella.
Opening track "Westerly Spawned Lamb" is reminiscent of the Haxan Cloak's analgesic soundscapes, while the record's political themes parallel Fatima Al Qadiri's net-art politicking. (Brood Ma has described the record as "a documentary of the military engagements played out amongst adults and children across worldwide server space and an attempted critique of the current obsession with survival playtime, played out through politically prosed pop references and narratives of fictional, future juvenilia"—which, OK, sure.) There are forays into trip-hop ("Sex Compressor") and noise ("Sex Contortion"), but rarely does any singular genre tag capture the uncanniness, or uncategorizable Brood Ma-ness, of the producer's industrial synths, grime-oriented beats, and ominous sub-bass.
Most interesting is how Brood Ma treats pastiche as an ideology. Before joining Tri Angle, the producer released music via the Untold-run Hemlock Recordings as well as Quantum Natives, a UK label/collective whose members embody the intersection of Internet provocation and underground rave culture. (The label's website is an unofficial Google map showing an alien planet that recalls StarCraft and drone surveillance photography; its Soundcloud description: "a battle for survival in the nightmare undercity (in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war)".) Like much of the artists released by his previous labels, this is music whose technocratic aesthetic is impossible to divorce from the listening process. The album cover may recall an occult bonfire, but Brood Ma is more Neuromancer than necromancer.
Part of the success of Daze is how fully Brood Ma commits to his sonic palette without committing to a singular musical style. "Molten Brownian Motion" pounds like hardcore (of the drum and bass variety) injected with Xenomorph DNA, while "Social Re-Entry" is apocalyptic bass music with a twisted vocal sample that's both something soulful and sinister. Many of the tracks have a sculptural feel to them, like you're hearing the visual equivalent to one of Louise Bourgeois' metal spiders. There's also a wry playfulness to the music: "Goldman Sax" is 13 seconds of arpeggiated freakout, but its title is unabashedly cheeky. There's also, perhaps surprisingly, actual hooks to be found when the tracks are given time to unfurl. "Sacrificial Youth" is danceable enough that it could use another three minutes attached to its runtime, which is both a compliment and a criticism: How often do you wish that a club track was 110% longer? Then again, this is the sort of intellectual party where we're supposed to think about how we got here rather than lose ourselves in the music. Daze is one last defiant middle finger emoji to a world crumbling in on itself—scarily contemporary, often caustic, but not without a sense of humor.


Austrian producer and Mego labelhead Peter Rehberg is a pioneer of laptop music that's at turns abrasive and sublime. His first release as Pita since 2004 is defined by shifts in volume and intensity.

Get In

Though he’s been making music since the mid-’90s, Peter Rehberg is still a bit of a cult figure. It’s not too hard to understand why. A pioneer of laptop-based music that was at turns abrasive and sublime, the Austrian producer’s early records could be a bit intimidating, even alongside the work of experimental-minded peers like Jim O’Rourke, Fennesz, and Kevin Drumm. And it also doesn’t help that the last album released under his most prolific alias, Pita, came out more than a decade ago. Yet, it’s hard to think of anybody whose work—both as an artist and a label owner—has remained more deeply embedded in the DNA of contemporary electronic and out-there music.
Founded in the mid-'90s, Rehberg’s label, Mego, released computer music that defied classification, existing outside of terms like “dance” or “ambient.” The label’s most enduring releases – Fennesz’s Endless Summer, O’Rourke’s I’m Happy and I’m Singing, Drumm’s Sheer Hellish Miasma – made digitally mulched sounds register as dense and organic. That label’s Rehberg-run successor, Editions Mego, has proven equally influential, releasing records that helped establish American Kosmiche nobility like Emeralds, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Keith Fullerton Whitman. And that’s not even counting Editions Mego’s multitude of artist-curated sub-labels, which include Spectrum Spools (Emeralds’ John Elliott), Recollection GRM (curated by François Bonnet and Daniel Teruggi), Ideologic Organ (Stephen O'Malley), and Old News (Jim O’Rourke). You can also hear traces of Rehberg’s gritty sound design in releases on edgier contemporary dance labels like Trilogy Tapes and PAN. He even beat Matmos to the household appliance thing by two decades.
Get In is Rehberg’s first release as Pita since 2004’s Get Off and it picks up more or less where its predecessor left off. The sound design is cleaner and richer in detail, but the same rules apply. It is a record defined by not-so-subtle shifts in volume and intensity. Serene drones give way to rubbery atonal squelch. Familiar tones are dissected and decimated. On “S200729” the burble of a TB-303 bassline – the defining sound of acid house – is digitally deconstructed from a warm analog burble into the kind of sound that could bust up asphalt.
Attitude was a key to Pita’s first records: They were loud and rude. The music might lull you into a false sense of security only to turn around and fry your eardrums. However, Get In is more gripping in its meditative moments. On “Line Angel” glimmering keyboard tones are periodically interrupted and skewed out of tune, dive-bombing from soothing to seasick. “Mfbk” is more earnest, ascending in volume to reveal generative melodies and cello-like tones that evoke Brian Eno’s Discreet Music. If you’re a long-time Pita listener, you might keep the volume low, just in case a shocking blast of fuzz is imminent. The punishment never comes, though.
The tools that are used in its creation define so much about electronic music – it’s utility, it’s time and place. Rehberg’s process has always been a bit mysterious, though. It’s the product of a set of programs, rather than a table full of boxes and knobs. In concert, the back of a laptop screen obscures his moves, and it’s harder to date his records as a result. Get In was recorded last year, but it sounds like it could have been made at any time over the intervening decade. There are no melodic clichés to give it away and no organized rhythms. The sounds are proto-human, primeval and timeless.


Marked by newfound sonic adventurousness and evocative dream-logic lyrics, the long-running UK band’s new double album is a bold quest into the vast unknown.

I Am Not There Anymore

The Clientele were once the discerning indie critics’ discerning indie band. The songs collected on the UK group’s debut album, 2000’s Suburban Light, were first delivered in the collectible, cult-building format of 7" singles. This daydreamy music made sense to ears attuned to not only the post-Beatles pop of Love, the Zombies, and the Left Banke, but also the impressionistic ache of Felt and the reverb-coated reveries of Galaxie 500. The Clientele were so sensitive to their critical impulses, their singer and guitarist, Alasdair MacLean, publicly rubbished Belle and Sebastian, whose fan base they would’ve been most likely to share. After releasing a spate of broadly similar-sounding albums with various subtle refinements, and even quitting their day jobs, they eventually took a break. On their most recent outing, 2017’s Music for the Age of Miracles, they sounded cozy and familiar, but also slightly diminished, like twilight passing into dark.
I Am Not There Anymore, just the Clientele’s second full-length album since 2009, draws much of its inspiration from what MacLean remembers about the early summer of 1997, and the lyrics allude frequently to the death of his mother during that period. On paper, the incorporation of spoken-word, field recordings, and piano instrumentals, along with horns and a string quartet, is in keeping with the lush expansiveness that has carried throughout the Clientele’s discography, from the steel and Spanish guitar of 2000’s The Violet Hour up to the last album’s Iranian instruments. The further addition of programmed drum and bass samples, similarly, is of a piece with MacLean’s longtime affinity for Boards of Canada. And yet the 19-track double LP feels like a step away from their characteristic sounds, embarking on a quest into the vast unknown. No wonder publicity stills for the album show the trio of MacLean, drummer Mark Keen, and bassist James Hornsey dressed up as knights in shining armor.
If the key difference for I Am Not There Anymore, as MacLean has observed, is the Clientele’s purchase of a computer, then, with all due respect: What took ’em so long? Album opener “Fables of the Silverlink” brings fractured electronic beats and haunting Spanish-language guest vocals to a bustling eight-and-a-half minutes’ worth of chamber pop, but that really undersells the album’s sonic adventurousness. “Garden Eye Mantra” glides like a dubwise Moon Safari with luxe strings and flickering “Dear Prudence” guitar lines. “Dying in May” ditches guitar altogether for a dizzying drone where French horn, cello, and Mellotron undulate amid clattering polyrhythms, equal parts flamenco and On the Corner. Minimalist piano-and-celeste instrumentals with titles like “Radial B” offer a meditative reprieve, keeping all this eventfulness from growing too overwhelming. More remarkable still is “My Childhood,” where Jessica Griffin of veteran indie-poppers Would-Be Goods recites eerie bricolage poetry over Psycho-worthy strings digitally transposed from field recordings of the wind; an abstracted reprise, “The Village Is Always on Fire,” swaps in backwards-sounding beats. From a band that once seemed destined to repeat themselves, it’s all enough to suggest a glimmer of Low-like reinvention.
A fresh sense of discovery also suffuses I Am Not There Anymore’s more straightforward songs. Lead single “Blue Over Blue” is a sumptuous, string-adorned psych-pop reflection on a moment’s unreality while lost in the woods, enlivened by hazy IDM beats and distortion that honks like a car horn. “Claire’s Not Real,” the song that contains the album’s evocative title lyric, starts off flirting with bossa nova and eventually settles into the sort of purplish, the Kinks-meet-Yo La Tengo mood piece the band has been futzing away with since Suburban Light’s classic “Reflections After Jane” and “We Could Walk Together.” Even the stately chamber-folk of “Hey Siobhan”—again, quintessential Clientele—leaves room for a gorgeous outro of voices layered in harmony over little more than a burbling bass line.
One of my favorite facts about the Clientele is that MacLean was working at a London publishing house in 1997, when he advised his bosses to reject the first Harry Potter novel. He considered it too watered down—“like Oasis” to the Beatles of the British authors of children’s fantasy he’d adored growing up. His own writing, like theirs, has always juxtaposed enchantment with the everyday. Proper names and an overweening Englishness make the Clientele’s lyrics feel personal and specific, but MacLean also paints in more widely resonant images, like three balloons in a white sky, sad green grass, or walking on a trampoline. On I Am Not There Anymore the lyrical style is as grandiloquent as the song structures and arrangements, tracing the emotional and geographic contours around the passing of MacLean’s mother through a kind of dream logic.
The first words on the album, from “Fables of the Silverlink,” are, delivered in MacLean’s ethereal sigh: “Blue sloes caught/In wet grass/Jarita lasya.” He soon follows this esoteric introduction with something devastatingly concrete: “I remember so well/She was dying in May.” Certain phrases and names recur across songs, like the rolling hatchbacks, glowing cigarettes, and mysterious “garden eye” that first appear on “Garden Eye Mantra” and return at the close of the penultimate track, “I Dreamed of You, Maria”—Maria, likewise, is a name that appears first on “Dying in May.” How all this fits together in a literal way can be unclear; perhaps, as MacLean sings amid the vintage Clientele poignance of “Lady Grey,” “All the beautiful things are opaque.” But a revelation comes near the end of “I Dreamed of You, Maria,” when MacLean sings, “And I knew that I would die.” Although a loving tribute to his mother, I Am Not There Anymore is ultimately a contemplation of our own mortality: a suburban-London book of the dead.


Tim Heidecker (of Tim & Eric) has released a slick rock record that is also a comedy album, and it is full of all the nervous laughs and queasy vibes of his surrealist comedy.

In Glendale

Tim Heidecker has built a thriving career in comedy, delighting a wide swath of teens, stoners, and other assorted weirdos with sketches that lean heavily on surreal absurdity. The comedian has dabbled in music already with his Tim & Eric co-conspirators Eric Wareheim and Davin Wood, but the new In Glendale is only his second under his own name (the other is 2011’s Cainthology: Songs in the Key of Cain, ten songs about former presidential candidate Herman Cain).
The ten-track LP arrives via Rado Records, a new Jagjaguwar imprint from Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado. In Glendale doesn’t quite have such a concrete unifying concept, but it does focus on “normcore” in all its glory—or, more accurately, its lack thereof. Heidecker declares his love for the suburb over anywhere else in America on the opening title track, and without knowing his résumé, it would be easy to mistake “In Glendale” for a painfully earnest tune written by a dad who still desperately wants to be cool. Late in the record, “I Saw Nicolas Cage” feels like a familiar version of the kind of thrilling celebrity non-encounter that one of your relatives recounts at every family gathering.
“Work From Home,” though, is a magnificent tribute to the days when you’re too sick (let’s be real: hungover) to function at work, so you promise to “work from home,” but you’re equally useless there. In Glendale isn’t a riff on the sort of rock that glorifies the difficult common-man endeavors of the American working class. Rather, it’s about the extremely boring real-life shit that most of us deal with every day—to which Heidecker offers a literal nod with “Cleaning Up The Dog Shit.”
But while all the songs are fun, there’s an occasional dark streak that elicits nervous laughter as much as anything else. Heidecker begins “Ghost in My Bed” with “I put your head in a plastic bag and I buried it under the Hollywood sign,” before detailing the thoughts of a killer who was probably just a regular guy having a good time before the whole murder situation happened. Likewise, “I Dare You To Watch Me Sleep” reads like a creepy letter from a stranger. They’re so at odds with their otherwise unassuming instrumentation, and fit in so neatly among their counterparts, that you can miss them on a casual first pass.
All jokes aside, In Glendale actually is a pretty slick rock record. From any other outfit, it would be a solid effort, with horns and keys providing muscle to every song. Even the piano-led coda of “Ocean’s Too Cold” sounds like it could’ve been lifted from any other polished indie rock record. Heidecker manages to sneak humor into the liner notes, too: every player is noted parenthetically as “other featured artist,” while Heidecker is noted as a “contracted featured artist.” Like the rest of his comedy oeuvre, Heidecker pulls no punches. In Glendale arrives as a fully formed beast, equal parts parody and confession of our universal lameness. Heidecker is definitely laughing at himself and most of us, too—whether you drop your self-importance is up to you.


Mike Skinner follows two brave, brilliant records with an album chiefly about fame and its attendent trappings. The first two LPs found him clambering for closer contact with the people around him; this record takes place almost entirely in his own head, where he's either engaged in a struggle to stay on the right side of sanity (and possibly sobriety) or to keep his misanthropy contained.

The Streets: The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living

The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living

I know, I know. We hate it when our friends become successful. That's Mike Skinner's built-in defense against anyone who doesn't receive this, his third full-length record, with the same unquestioning enthusiasm that greeted 2002's Original Pirate Material and 2004's A Grand Don't Come for Free. With the benefit of hindsight, those records feel markedly more different from each other than they did originally: the former a blunted jubilee of skits, stoned tangents, unrumpled beatmaking, and catalogued moodswings that was elegantly and instructively produced-- practically the chav Parklife; the latter a much darker record with braver production choices, denser verbiage, and a central narrative that only worked because Skinner had the charisma to see it through.
It is Skinner's ability to exponentially increase the on-paper value of an ordinary idea by garnishing it with the right details that is his main strength and the core component of what he does. That's why, despite the fact that the The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living is devoted to one of the most tedious and overdone conceits in autobiographical storytelling-- that of fame and its attendent trappings-- most of us went into this third outing with good reason for hope, or at the least, cautious optimism.
So yeah, this is his blow-up record, the first music he's made knowing he's a truly bankable commodity, but instead of the celebratory club tracks to which he's entitled, we're tasked to sort through the dark insides of Skinner's post-fame headspace, which is fluctuating almost exclusively between yammering neuroses and smug self-aggrandizement. This is, by some distance, his most interior record. Where the first two found him clambering for closer contact with the people around him, The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living takes place almost entirely in his own head, where's he either engaged in a struggle to stay on the right side of sanity (and possibly sobriety) or to keep his misanthropy contained.
In the case of the latter, he is largely unsuccessful-- one of the most unlikable and disappointing things about Skinner Mk 2006 is that he seems to regard nearly everyone in the ouside world as either his prey or his inferior. "War of the Sexes" has Skinner-- a man who once agonized over a hair twirl for a whole song-- sermonizing on the fine art of sarging a "hostile lamb" before unfunnily concluding with a reminder not to get too drunk, because "people who get hammered don't get to nail." In "Can't Con an Honest John", he smarmily reprises a classic grift: "Using this technique/ You're going to take all this man's money/ But you're not going to care/ Cause he's going to fucking deserve it." And over the farting keys of "Memento Mori", perhaps the smuggest and laziest thing he's ever released, Skinner flaunts his ignorance with a flip of the billfold: "Memento Mori, Memento Mori/ It's Latin and it says we must all die/ But I tried it for a while and it's a load of boring shite/ So I buy buy buy/ Bye bye."
Worse yet, the album's requisite feelgooders-- the sappy paean to fidelity, "All Goes Out the Window", and the strangely unmoving blues-gospel tribute to his deceased father, "Never Went to Church"-- register as lyrically barren and a little strained. In all these moments, he seems both alienated and alienating, miles removed from his former warmth. Even his jokes are uncharacteristically spotty; a few punchlines are so leaden you feel like you're being shouted into a corner by someone who's had about six lines too many.
But here's the rub. Not only are there scattered moments of lyrical brilliance on The Hardest Way, but from a producerly standpoint, it's probably Skinner's most accomplished and interesting record yet. Opener "Pranging Out" is a highlight in both columns-- over a punchy, full-bodied, and garage-touched beat, Skinner details with brutal candor the downswing of a particularly ugly drug binge: "Carelessly racking out prang just to handle the fear/ I do a line but then panic and feel a bit prangy/ So I glug Marlon from the bottle to ease off the panic/ Then when it starts wearing off I just feel a bit sad." On the baroque title track, Skinner outlines the machinations of the business side of stardom to dizzying effect; misunderstood lead single "When You Wasn't Famous" marries a spell of Page Six-rumormongering with a mesmerizing marching beat that crumbles and woozes with a virtuoso touch; and the genuinely funny "Two Nations" offers up a cockeyed chord progression and a tongue-in-cheek riposte to Brit-baiting Americans: "Two nations divided by common language/ And about two hundred years of new songs and dances/ But the differences in language are just the bits you got wrong/ Cause we were the ones who invented the language."
The album's frustrating push/pull is neatly articulated with the closing track, "Fake Streets Hats", which intersperses a few choice tour anecdotes with actual recording snippets of backstage exchanges. It's a tantalizing idea executed poorly, and Skinner ultimately ends the track (and hence the album) so abruptly you're left wondering if he doesn't have the odd moment where he regards his audience as potential con victims as well. Yes, there's certainly enough greatness here to preserve the listener's goodwill towards him for another album; the bigger and more interesting question is whether Skinner will be able to reciprocate.


The New York composer-- commissioned to create something special for Paris' all-night La Nuit Blanche festival-- crafts this three-part, larger-than-life sonic environment.

Rhys Chatham: A Crimson Grail (For 400 Electric Guitars)

In 2002, the master archivists at Table of the Elements made a crowning achievement: the beautiful An Angel Moves Too Fast To See box set by legendary New York composer Rhys Chatham. Holding three discs of guitar-orchestra masterpieces and a thick book of notes inside a heavy silver-and-white package, An Angel was dauntingly monumental, more fit to sit under museum glass than rub up against dusty jewel cases. But it also felt a bit like a coffin. After all, something this massive and career-defining-- it even ended with a new peak, the 100-guitar title piece-- seemed insurmountable. How could Chatham ever top it?
Apparently the answer lies in simple math. If 100 guitars could sound so great, shouldn't 400 sound even better? In 2005, Chatham set out to test this theorem. Commissioned by the City of Paris to compose something for their all-night La Nuit Blanche Festival, he wrote the ambitious "A Crimson Grail (Moves Too Fast To See)." Gathering 400 guitarists (along with longtime comrades Ernie Brooks on bass and Jonathan Kane on hi-hat) and four leaders listening to his directions through headphones, Chatham led a 12-hour sonic marathon. Starting on the steps of France's largest church, the Sacré-Cœur, the ensemble ended the show inside, beneath a 272-foot ceiling. Nearly 1000 people witnessed this mini-miracle, while thousands more watched on television throughout France.
Given the huge mass of bodies and sound, it would be unreasonable to expect the recording to replicate this spectacle. But audio limitations become a blessing on this album, which excerpts the performance in three 20-minute chunks. Slightly hissy and foggy, at times even claustrophobic, the record sounds like the abstracted essence of electric guitar. Sure, you can hear a chord here, a string pluck there, and the clicking of Kane's cymbal throughout "Part Two". But the lasting impression is that of a vibrant, shimmering sound-cloud. Chatham's ensemble creates an atmosphere that rises above individual technique, leaving concerns of who, what, and how far behind.
Given that engrossing tone, A Crimson Grail's three parts are surprisingly distinct. "Part One" is the most symphonic, as guitar waves alternately gather into peaks and cascade into near-silence. Uncannily, the guitars climb separately in small shifts, yet invariably meet at each apex. As the echoes lengthen, the piece evokes a huge frozen wave, full of dense overtones and hymn-like hums. The cinematic drift of the Kranky roster and the power-drones of Phill Niblock come to mind, but the glow of Chatham's guitar army has a singular warmth.
The outdoors play a role in "Part Two", as the sound of rainfall mixes with oscillating guitar tones. Once Kane's clicking beat enters, the piece becomes hypnotically metronomic, with two-chord guitars marching forward. Over that robotic lurch, dense sounds roll in like thunder clouds, adding a scary dissonance. The piece ends like a soundtrack to a horror-film directed by Stan Brakhage, filled with blurry shots that imply violence through abstract light and color.
"Part Three" is A Crimson Grail's most direct statement, a buzzing, slow-burning drone that never wavers. It's also the closest to what one might expect from 400 guitars: a thick, solid wall of sound. But imagination alone couldn't predict the piece's undulating textures, a result of the massed intonation techniques Chatham has honed for three decades.
At least the audience didn't seem to expect that, judging by their sharp, reflexive applause. Chatham responds with an encore of a darker drone that seems to create howls and screams. Whether those noises came from the guitars or the delirious onlookers is hard to tell, but one thing is for sure: This wasn't just a performance, it was a larger-than-life sonic environment. And A Crimson Grail offers the best panoramic snapshot one could hope for.


A new box set collects the singer-songwriter’s 2001 debut alongside a set of live recordings from her early days in New York, showcasing the intimate performance style and vivid, theatrical lyrics that ignited her career.

11:11

Before Regina Spektor’s family emigrated from Russia in 1989, the 9-year-old pianist envisioned the United States as a sprawling safari where everyone owned lions and tigers as pets. Her family selected a tiny Bronx apartment for its proximity to the Jewish community, and she quickly learned that New York City is more urban jungle than forest preserve. Still, she was elated: “You know that thing that you see in immigrants sometimes where everything is new: What does this taste like? What does that say? What is that sound?” she recalled in 2004. “It was really exciting, especially to a kid, but my whole family had that. That’s a lucky way to be, you know?” That outlook came to define Spektor and her music. Upholding curiosity and playfulness as guiding principles, she began writing songs about mundanity and tragedy alike as if they were fairy tales. Once her music escaped her bedroom walls, her songs captured the hearts of the city and, in time, the world.
A new box set presents Spektor’s 2001 debut 11:11 alongside Papa’s Bootlegs, a collection of early live recordings. The majority of these songs were written during her teenage years and take on the style of cabaret performance: rousing but simple piano numbers with jazzy vocals. Although she claims she had “horrible self-discipline” learning piano as a child, Spektor fell in love with the instrument in Moscow, and she was gutted to part ways with both her classical teacher and the family’s beloved upright during their move. But when she discovered a dusty piano in the basement of her synagogue in New York, Spektor began sneaking away to practice. She ultimately landed free lessons from Sonia Vargas, a Manhattan School of Music professor, following a chance meeting on the subway between Vargas’ husband and Spektor’s father. On 11:11 and Papa’s Bootlegs, her piano studies take on colorful shapes, the rigidity of classical tutelage giving way to improvisation and willful flashes of personality.
When fans bought 11:11, originally released as a limited run of 1,000 CDs, they were greeted by “Love Affair,” a forlorn ode to heartsickness introduced by devious, staccato piano notes and a slinky upright bassline played by Chris Kuffner. More than 20 years later, the song’s bold opening still ushers you into Spektor’s world with an air of spontaneity. Spektor alternates between plodding and delicate piano melodies on the tracks that follow: “Back of a Truck,” an epic about a Mother Superior devouring everything within sight, sometimes literally, that devolves into semantic satiation; the moving “Buildings,” which follows an endlessly forgiving husband as alcoholism and suicidal ideation consume his wife; and “2.99¢ Blues,” which unites vignettes about a cozy ghost, a nightmare-riddled veteran, and an author peddling roadside stories. Tucked away throughout are clever turns of phrase—“carry-on luggage charms,” “an ambulance staking out the neighborhood,” “he was perfect except for the fact that he was an engineer”—that further establish her penchant for vivid imagery and character studies.
Spektor turned 21 the same year she self-released 11:11, but the seriousness of adulthood never sunk its claws into her. Back then, and arguably still, she anchored her outlook with a buoyant optimism and sense of wonder. During a semester abroad in London in the then-dreary neighborhood of Tottenham, she fawned over Argos catalogs and found comfort in the area’s similarities to the Bronx. The summer prior, she worked on a butterfly farm in a Wisconsin town called Luck, running through fields catching monarchs and painted ladies, an oversized net in hand, to be re-homed at botanical gardens. She wrote songs romanticizing life’s highs and lows because she was busy experiencing them firsthand, like a child pressing their face and palms against an airplane window in awe of everything below.
You can hear her embrace this outlook on 11:11 fan favorite “Pavlov’s Daughter.” At nearly eight minutes, it’s a theatrical production on piano that examines neighborly espionage verging on voyeurism, with lyrics that remain open to interpretation. (Is it a call-and-response to Suzanne Vega’s “Luka”? Or is Lucille actually Lucifer, with Regina playing God and Pavlov’s daughter representing humankind?) Most importantly, it’s Spektor’s earliest song that prompts the impulse to sing along dramatically. She molds words in her mouth to sound beautiful or ugly, their transformation dependent upon where in the song they fall rather than their definition: she repeats her name like hiccups (“Regin-AH! Regin-AH!“), drags the end of the word “garb-aaage” like it’s trailing on the ground behind her, and beats the word “quiet” back and forth violently until, on its 22nd utterance, it lays lifeless and still.
As she compiled era-appropriate photos to accompany the reissue of 11:11, Spektor received a USB drive from her father filled with footage of her earliest shows. Her initial instinct was to hide it out of embarrassment, but ultimately she compiled the recordings for the box set edition, handpicking 20 songs that capture her college years and ensuing entrance into New York City’s anti-folk scene. Before Spektor became a doyenne of the genre beside fellow luminaries Kimya Dawson, Jeffrey Lewis, and Diane Cluck, she was doing her part to squash the homogeneity of open-mic bars and cafes. Spanning her first-ever set in 1998 to shows promoting 11:11 in 2001, Papa’s Bootlegs preserves a storied era of her career that’s become difficult to revisit as 404 errors replace defunct fan blogs.
The joy of listening to Papa’s Bootlegs is the feeling of sitting in the crowd experiencing it first-hand: “This is my first-ever standing song!” Spektor declares ahead of “Wasteside.” She laughs shyly while performing the looping melody of “Rejazz,” asking herself and the audience, “How do we end this?” For every slightly off-key pitch or delayed keystroke, there are two belting, goosebump-raising notes. Spektor transposes the jazz and blues artists who inspired her in college—Nina Simone, Bessie Smith, Sidney Bechet—into her performance style, prefiguring her work to come. There’s the gorgeous chord progressions of “Amplifiers” that echo Begin to Hope, the solemn undercurrent of “Train Ballad” like a musical prelude to “Human of the Year,” and a whirlwind of piano runs on “Quarters” fit for Soviet Kitsch. You might imagine Spektor’s father, camcorder in hand, grinning with pride. Occasionally he caves and emits a small “Woo!” while the audience claps.
Barely two years after releasing 11:11, Spektor embarked on her first-ever nationwide tour opening for another New York act, the Strokes. Despite her intimate performance style and oddball songs, she quickly swept to international fame. That impending shift makes the intimacy of this box set all the more rewarding. Previously immortalized through digital file sharing after the CDs sold out, 11:11 is a portrait of an artist who appears too genuine to be human, too creative to be self-conscious, and too curious to be contained. Alongside Papa’s Bootlegs, it’s a time capsule for Spektor’s early days in New York City and a document of the spark that ignited her songwriting career.


The Philadelphia-born, Berlin-based producer, a former GHE20G0TH1K affiliate, follows a run of incendiary mixtapes with a four-track EP of lacerating, irresistibly kink-positive techno.

Dedicated 2 Disrespect EP

The past year has not been good for dancefloors, but it’s been an incredible year for dance music: Mining the rich histories of drum’n’bass, bitch and Baltimore house, juke, hardcore, and gabba, beat culture has been pushing so far and fast that listeners might be forgiven for not staying caught up. Berlin’s LSDXOXO is having a moment, too. A pivotal figure in the post-millennial NYC GHE20G0TH1K scene, which proved that rave, electroclash, and goth culture had both Black roots and futures, Philadelphia native LSDXOXO spent the last decade putting out a series of incendiary mixtapes (2013’s Softcore, 2015’s Sacanagem, 2018’s Body Mods, 2020’s Waiting 2 Exhale), each as brief and enticing as a well-cut jockstrap. In 2018, he left New York for Berlin to throw his own party, Floorgasm. Meanwhile, productions for VTSS and Shygirl let others try on his aesthetic, a flamboyant blend of high-tempo, high-camp techno, low-end bass, and pitch-shifted voices and samples. XL Recordings came calling with an invite to join up-and-comers including John FM and Overmono in its House Bag series, and LSDXOXO replied with Dedicated 2 Disrespect. A foursome of queer bangers, the EP foregrounds his own voice for the first time, with a ribald poise that makes one wonder why it took him so long.
Opener “The Devil” conjures a playground as infernal as Lil Nas X’s “Montero” but without all guilt. “I’ll make the Devil fuck me good,” LSDXOXO crows. “Sell my soul and my body.” His infectious delivery makes it clear the Devil would be lucky to have him; the rest of us would be lucky to shake our asses to the beat, a tough ride on the line between sleaze and wooze reminiscent of Green Velvet in his prime. “Baby” is a peak-time floor-filler that starts out sweet and ends up sour as its fluttering acid claps, bell tones, and vocal clucks and coos harden into a baroque demand for the return of a lover, or maybe a certain kind of high, or maybe the dancefloor itself—which, at the right time, “Baby” would destroy. It’s barely four minutes long, with kicks that sound so far in the red they’re positively black. It’s a lot, an almost-too-much that leaves you wanting more.
“Filth is my politics! Filth is my life!” Divine once preached in Pink Flamingos, and lead single “Sick Bitch” could be her campaign anthem. The platform? The abject as erotic power. “I’m a sick bitch and I like freak sex,” LSDXOXO vows. “If you wanna test the limits of my gag reflex… you gotta make it hurt if you wanna make it squirt.” LSDXOXO knows that bragging about one’sability to find the pleasure in pain is, by now, populism—just ask anyone from the Stooges to Rihanna—and that the only thing that should be shocking anymore is the expectation we should care if someone’s shocked by our sex lives. With a scuzzy beat that’s equal parts Peaches and Sweet Pussy Pauline and a flow worthy of Lil’ Kim, “Sick Bitch” is the song of 2021’s slutty summer.
Closer “Mutant Exotic” takes a victory lap around a deep-house party, wearing a loop of Lyn Collins’ deathless “Think About It” like a laurel wreath and chanting “Mutant exotic/Homoerotic.” If Dedicated 2 Disrespect began with him seducing the Devil, it ends with him ascending to divinity. As horns toot and little hisses of percussion contract into hi-hats and expand into snares, as piano and organ chords warm the ground, LSDXOXO testifies. “I’m sending out my signal hoping that you understand it: Maybe I’m a goddess.” Maybe? He’s definitely a star.

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Guided by detailed coaching from Kanye West, the Chicago duo embrace an urge to restore a kind of lyrical conscious rap that has never been lost.

Abstract Mindstate: Dreams Still Inspire

Dreams Still Inspire

In 2018, as Kanye West helmed G.O.O.D. Music’s infamous Wyoming sessions, he also made time for undersung Chicago rappers E.P. da Hellcat and Olskool Ice-Gre. As Abstract Mindstate, the pair had worked with West on their first and second albums in the early 2000s, but a one-two punch of bad and worse luck derailed the duo’s career. In Wyoming, their fortune improved after one of their old mixtapes helped West overcome writer’s block. In return, he offered to reunite and produce them. Dreams Still Inspire captures the joy and bonhomie of this impromptu reunion, celebrating the pair’s legacy and their wayward path back to rap.
Abstract Mindstate recorded their album between their day jobs as a behavioral therapist (Hellcat) and an A&R for G.O.O.D. Music (Olskool). Sparks didn’t immediately fly—they hadn’t recorded together in years, and Hellcat’s creativity suffered in the interim. “Greg never stopped writing. It was like pulling teeth for me,” she told Rolling Stone. Some days I was in tears—[thinking about] all these dope rhymes I used to write, and now I can’t write a verse.” Guided by detailed coaching from West, the two embraced that urge to restore what had been lost.
The resulting record is decidedly nostalgic. Abstract Mindstate has always been a throwback group, from the “I Used to Love H.E.R.” theme of their early song “Rhythm” to the on-the-nose “Nostalgia,” which features, of course, Common. Here, that retro aesthetic persists and gestures toward a bygone golden era of clever wordplay and moral authority. “We speak clarity, never mumbled it,” Hellcat says on “Salutations (Intro),” drawing a line in the generational sand. In interviews, they’ve described their music as “adult contemporary hip-hop,” a shtick that’s too flimsy to take seriously. Between Quelle Chris, Jean Grae, Run the Jewels, and Armand Hammer, as well as other Chicagoans like Noname, Saba, and Open Mike Eagle, the kind of lyrical conscious rap Abstract Mindstate claims to be resuscitating with their return never even went into shock.

That white lie of revitalizing the art gives the pair confidence, though. Their performances, while a little rickety at times, brim with energy and catharsis. “I’m back with my first love/It feel like my first time/I’m back in the studio/This ain’t my first rhyme,” Olskool says on “I Feel Good,” his voice resonant. Hellcat echoes that sentiment on “Expository Mode,” rapping, “It’s a marvelous feeling being back in the booth/’Cause being back in the booth/Is like reliving my youth.” Her verse trails off at the end of the line as if she’s stunned by her own longevity. On opener “Salutations (Intro),” she calls West Mr. Glass, using “Through the Wire” as a timestamp.

West’s beats are tailored to this reminiscent mood. The samples are conspicuously homesick, incorporating bits from Abstract Mindstate songs, multiple snippets from G.O.O.D. Music 1.0’s hip-hop soul aesthetic, and interpolations of Brand Nubian (“I Know You”) and 2Pac (“The Brenda Song”). The drum programming is unfussy and neat, the low end vacant. And there are few maximalist suites or beat changes, mainstays of West’s production over the past decade. Throughout the album’s 31 minutes, there’s never any doubt that Old Kanye is at the console.

In 1994, when Abstract Mindstate was coming together, another Chicagoan, William Upski Wimsatt, coined “Chicago Syndrome” to describe the city’s overlooked status in the music industry. As record contracts went to New Yorkers and Angelenos, and Windy City rappers lamented the lack of opportunity, Wimsatt argued that the people “who get the most out of hip-hop are those who do it just for its own sake. The ones who work their butts off just because it makes them feel alive.” The quote is priggish, but it captures the sense of sustenance and rapture that animates Dreams Still Inspire. Most of us will never have our dead passion resurrected by the whims of a megastar, but for Abstract Mindstate, it happened, and they had the time of their lives.

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With their unvarnished style, the music of Detroit electronic duo Drexciya was proudly DIY. On their newly reissued 2002 album, they turned their attention from the sea towards the cosmos.

Grava 4

Over the decade-long stretch between 1992-2002 that Gerald Donald and James Stinson released electronic music as Drexciya, water was a constant fixation. It was as if the ocean was a third member of the band. Their name described the group’s vision of an underwater society built by the children of pregnant slaves thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. EPs and albums bore titles like Neptune’s Lair, Hydro Doorways, and Digital Tsunami, and were littered with clues that outlined a byzantine afrofuturist mythology. “There are only two wavejumpers in existence today,” they creepily intoned on 1995’s riveting, white-knuckled “Wavejumper,” positioning themselves as the last representatives of a lost tribe. “A lot of things that come through water, all these different molecules—that’s the way I see the music we do,” Stinson once said in a rare interview. “It’s so endless.”
Each of Drexciya’s records—whether collaborating or going solo as Abstract Thought, Lab Rat XL, or Transllusion—had deeply considered conceptual and philosophical premises. Thankfully, Drexciya were never too forthcoming, offering far more questions than answers. Their final album, 2002’s newly-reissued Grava 4, continued to engage in this complex game of world building. It was originally released during a massively prolific 18-month period between 2001-2003, when the duo used various aliases to release seven albums, which they dubbed “storms,” a set of tantalizingly disparate works that hinted at strange new developments in the Drexciyan fable.
Grava 4 is an album of stark, brooding introspection, alternately expansive and oblique. It sees Drexciya turning their attention towards the cosmos, as song titles shifted from aquatic themes to “700 Million Light Years From Earth,” “Drexciyan Star Chamber,” and “Astronomical Guidepost.” A web of constellations was drawn on the cover. In the press surrounding Grava 4, the group claimed to have “finally discovered Utopia (Drexciya Home Universe),” and they allegedly named a star after themselves on this website.
Opener “Cascading Celestial Giants” casts a solemn, slow-motion tone. A churning rhythm sets a sluggish pace, while majestic choral pads suggest a reckoning with the infinite. (Close your eyes, and it’s not hard to imagine a pair of lonely travelers in a small spaceship drifting into the vast unknown.) This is followed up by the languid thrums of “Powers of the Deep,” which cruises at a melancholy clip and is ornamented with slithering, pinging effects. Though the group’s rugged electro drum programming remains intact, everything else sits back in a moody reserve, trading their terrestrial aggressions for something more contemplative.
Throughout their career, Drexciya could be by turns nimble, slamming, or willfully obtuse. The one constant was their live chemistry in the studio. Their records feel proudly DIY, with a raw, unvarnished sheen and track structures that could confound all but the most dedicated DJs. While Grava 4 skips the two-minute pipe bombs of their earlier EPs, the arrangements maintain this proud humanity. The gradual congealing and playful dubbing of “Drexciyan Star Chamber” feels too spontaneous to be the work of careful computer programming, with a sense of discovery and frenetic focus giving life to its spacious funk. “Gravity Waves,” meanwhile, has the tense, wiry urgency of a late-night jam.
Grava 4 is a grower, to be sure. There are no instant-classic, earworming anthems on the level of “Andreaen Sand Dunes” or “Black Sea” here (though the Kraftwerk-saluting “700 Million Light Years From Earth” comes close). Nor does the vulnerability Stinson showcased a year prior under the Other People Place moniker rub off on the duo. But Grava 4 opens up to those who give it space and attention.
Drexciya were pushing to the outer reaches of their sound on this album, and by the year’s end, Stinson would pass from heart complications. In this context, their final deluge of material was perhaps an attempt to sum up the totality of their vision before time ran out. (Stinson had spent his last months in Georgia “for health reasons,” and fans have interpreted his ’02 Transllusion title L.I.F.E. to stand for “life is fast ending.”) Album closer “Astronomical Guidepost” rides a bit of slippery funk, suggesting that space perhaps isn’t so different from the aquatic depths they spent 10 years exploring. Halfway through the track, the music drops out and a metallic voice comes in: “Use the star chart to fix a celestial navigation point. From there you should be able to plug your path back to Earth using rudimentary astronomical guideposts.” It’s a poignant bit of sci-fi ephemera. At the end of Drexciya’s journey, and of Stinson’s life, they’re leading listeners back home to begin the quest all over again.


Cass McCombs's music joins the personal freedom of '60s counterculture with the reticence of late-'90s indie rock—cowboy music for people with a lot of library fines. A Folk Set Apart, a collection of B-sides and outtakes, is scattered by definition but still contains moments of his quiet confidence and casual rebellion.

Cass McCombs: A Folk Set Apart: Rarities, B-Sides & Space Junk, ETC.

A friend once told me a story about the singer-songwriter Cass McCombs that I've always liked. One night, my friend was at a party in the Bay Area when McCombs showed up with a guest. It was a real punk-rock party. (My friend remembers overhearing someone insist that what people didn't understand about the American Revolution was that the American Revolution was still going on.) My friend was sitting on the porch when McCombs and his guest came out to leave. He said McCombs looked like he was about to cry. Not in a remarkable way, but like about-to-cry was his resting face. "Well," McCombs said to his guest, "we were just two sweaters at a sweatshirt party." They left without saying goodbye.
This was about 15 years ago, before McCombs had released his first album (the enigmatically titled A), but the sweater bit was prophetic. McCombs is one of those artists who looks out of place no matter where you put him. His biography says he was born in Concord, Calif., but it seems hard to say where he's from (in the metaphorical sense) or even where he lives (in the utility-bill one). He has no attachment to any particular scene, and though he has collaborated with a hundred unrelated artists over the last decade—including a producer for Vampire Weekend and Adele (Ariel Rechtshaid), the bass player from Phish (Mike Gordon), and an Academy Award–nominated actress (the late Karen Black)—he often appears to be totally alone, a tumbleweed drifting through the interior of nowhere. Characters in Cass McCombs songs are executioners, truck drivers, lifelong bachelors who treat liquor as their personal ticket to the moon and other people for whom being alone is not the product of bad luck but of religious election. At one point he only answered interview questions through the mail.
The style of McCombs' music differs from album to album but all shares a low-key American spirit that joins the personal freedom of '60s counterculture with the reticence of late-'90s indie rock—cowboy music for people with a lot of library fines. As a writer, he has a trickster's gift for resignation: He makes misery seem funny and his ability to control it seem smart. (This is why I tell the "sweater" story: Half because it presents McCombs as a loner, half because it presents him as someone with the ability to understand his solitude so well that he can turn it into a joke that connects with other people. )
His most recent album is a B-sides and outtakes collection called A Folk Set Apart. It covers 2003 to 2014, from A through the Wild West epic of Big Wheel and Others. On it you will hear songs that resemble garage-punk ("A.Y.D."), Neil Young ballads ("Bradley Manning"), nursery rhymes ("Three Men Sitting on a Hollow Log"), and stretches of recorded sound that people in the commuter pool would probably identify as non-music ("Texas").
One of my favorite things about listening to McCombs is that he seems unafraid to make some really bad decisions. This is a man who once orchestrated a three-minute outro that sounds like a dog sleeping in a clarinet ("Memory's Stain") and interrupted an otherwise beautiful song to ask what it was like to shit in space ("Morning Star"). A Folk Set Apart is scattered by nature but it has some of these moments, too—moments in which some line or turn that at first sounds unnatural becomes a signal both of McCombs' quiet confidence and of his casual rebellion against the idea of how songs are supposed to go. It's easy to understand why he was fascinated with someone like Bradley—now Chelsea—Manning, the trans woman dishonorably discharged from the Army and convicted of espionage for her relationship with WikiLeaks: Not only is Manning a modern variation on the American outlaw, but the turns in her life defy every extant script.
So start with Catacombs, or with the funereal WIT'S END or Dropping the Writ. Big Wheel is good, too. They all are in their idiosyncratic, prickly little ways. If pop's goal is to forge a path of identification between artist and listener, McCombs is defiantly un-pop, a singer continually trying to figure out how to outpace his audience's comfort levels without driving them out of the room. In modern parlance, Cass McCombs didn't come here to make friends. Which is good. There are plenty of sweatshirts in the hamper if you want them.


After six years, Max Tundra finally follows 2002's Mastered by Guy at the Exchange, a record that is passionately, obsessively, and madly loved by quite a few music-geek types for its strikingly unique sound, what seems to be a whole other realm of pop music that exists mostly inside one guy's head.

Parallax Error Beheads You

It probably bears mentioning that Max Tundra's second album, 2002's Mastered by Guy at the Exchange, is passionately, obsessively, madly loved by quite a few music-geek and critic types, including yours truly. Yet none of us harbored any delusions that our love-- or the 9.3 rating from this site-- was ever going to make the record popular: The sound of his music is pretty evidently Not for Everyone, and that's precisely where the love comes from.
Painstakingly assembled by a Londoner named Ben Jacobs, the music of Max Tundra is strikingly unique, documenting a whole other realm of pop music that seems to exist mostly inside one guy's head. There are recognizable things within it: streaks of quaint English pop and soul, oddball programming of video-game synth sounds, a keyboard sensibility that ranges from lite funk to a kind of gleeful prog-rock musical theater, and a happy calm that vaguely recalls Vince Guaraldi's Peanuts music. It's tempting to describe it all using some outlandish metaphor: I imagine a reality show where XTC, Prince, Aphex Twin, and George Gershwin have to live together inside the sound chip of an aging Game Boy. But that makes Max Tundra sound cartoonish and scattershot, when the surprise of this stuff is how much it can all feel beautiful, simple, and coherent.
Now, after six years spent programming on archaic Amiga music software, Max Tundra gives us the follow-up, Parallax Error Beheads You. At first listen, this set of pop songs may seem more cluttered and frantic than its predecessor; much like the string of remixes Jacobs has done in the meantime, the music here is peppier and more tightly wound, and more melodically serpentine than ever. Give it a few listens, though, and you begin to feel like someone is sneaking in while you sleep and removing twists and turns from the songs, or straightening out the rhythms.
The old line about literature is that a good book teaches you how to read it; in this case, a record might be teaching you how to listen to it. What starts out tricky and overwhelming quickly organizes itself in your head and becomes a joy to follow, to the point where you can delight in all the detail Jacobs packs in: The way he lets harmonies unravel and then step neatly back into focus, or how he executes chord changes by shifting the whole song down a few steps, like someone putting a thumb on a spinning record. What programmer spends six years on 10 songs without making sure every one of those details works?
A good starting point is the record's least tricky song, "The Entertainment", a quaint and sunny piece that sounds something like trance music for children. Another is the track that's bound to be the album's great takeaway, "Which Song", with its pop-soul vocals and creamy synthesizers. The 10-minute closer, "Until We Die", sounds like Tundra's answer to side two of Abbey Road, but the one I can't stop playing is "Number Our Days", which plays out like some kind of amateur musical about the afterlife, with sinister synth-funk verses and angelic strumming through the choruses.
For those who've been following Jacobs, the big news on this record is entirely personal. On his last album, he explained the way his lyrics work ("I only sing about things that happen to me") and talked rather a lot about having stolen someone's girlfriend, which neatly explained the title of his debut (Some Best Friend You Turned Out to Be). Not long into the first track here, a bouncy pastoral piece called "Gum Chimes", we get an update: Jacobs and the girlfriend in question have split up. Many of the lyrics that follow are, simply put, a lonely geek's lament-- the frustrations of a guy who's always distracted by a "future wife," yet can't find a girl to bring home to the family. I really can't tell whether this is wonderfully human, slightly embarrassing, or just honest, but my sense of who Jacobs is has jumped way, way forward with this record.
Thinking back on his last conversation with that girlfriend, Jacobs sings, "a pint of chicken soup came falling from my eyes." The fact that he's now actually selling cans of his own homemade chicken soup is mostly a joke, but it's also a metaphor; if this joyfully hyperactive record is what comes of his troubles, we're all the luckier. It's packed with ideas, some of which work beautifully and some of which are just a joy to hear play out, but most of all, it's still a whole other world of pop music-- an absolutely unique, enchanting, and irreplaceable vision of how the stuff can work.


As the Tokyo experimental musician’s work is finally made available digitally, this compilation offers an introduction to the artist’s critical perspective on capitalism, gender norms, trans identity, and more.

Comp x Comp

A commitment to non-essentialism is at the core of Terre Thaemlitz’s music and writing. Her work, positioned at the fringes of a cultural economy that trades in simplified forms and stable meanings, is imbued with a slippery oppositional quality. Even the sumptuous house music he makes as DJ Sprinkles doubles as a critique of dance music’s fraught history and corporate scaffolding. (Thaemlitz, who identifies as transgender, prefers alternating pronouns, in the argument that “gender is never neutral under patriarchy.”)
Thaemlitz is outspoken about the ways that capitalism structures cultural forms (particularly as both link back to gender and sexual politics). This interest has manifested in reflections on digital media and shifting methods of distribution—see the 32-hour 2012 release Soulnessless, the “world’s longest album in history & world’s first full-length mp3 album”—as well as in personal business practices. Since 1993, Thaemlitz has released the bulk of her music on his own label, Comatonse, and keeps tight control over how it circulates online. With the exception of remixes, her music has not been available for streaming or digital download. “Terre wishes to keep ‘queer’ audio and media functioning queerly, contextually, and with smallness,” reads a disclaimer on the artist’s website. “Populist social media engines that blast media ‘globally’ to as many people as possible may be appropriate for corporate pop music, but they function contrary to everything Terre believes about cultivating and protecting the hyper-specificities of 'underground' and minor situations. Indiscriminate file sharing, YouTube and SoundCloud grant too much exposure with too little precision.”
So it’s of some interest that, at the beginning of this year, Thaemlitz made a Bandcamp page for the first time, uploading a selection of releases dating back to the mid-19990s for streaming and digital download. Among these is Comp x Comp, which collects his contributions to assorted compilations from the ’90s and 2000s, most of which were released on CD and are now out of circulation. This rangy collection stretches into to the outer limits of what we might today call “ambient music,” encompassing electroacoustic pieces, sample-driven tracks that variously incorporate pop music and spoken language, installation soundtracks, and conceptual experiments. While album-length releases under Thaemlitz’s own name tend to take shape around a particular (if rarely stable) thematic or formal inquiry, this compilation—briefly annotated on the Bandcamp page—gives an introduction to a handful of the threads that have carried her ideas over the last several decades.
Those threads are presented in no particular order, and it’s the conceptual outliers, very much of their early-aughts time, that first jump out. Of the 76-song tracklist, 45 of those tracks are silent and just a second long. (The 46th track in the same series, three seconds long, contains a barely perceptible wisp of melody). Those are a sequence taken from a 2001 compilation paying tribute to the inventor of the CD, James T. Russell; they originally filled in the extra data space left on the compact disc, one second being the shortest length possible for a track on a CD. The ten tracks that make up “Mille Glaces.000”–“.009,” from 2003, involve first a digital mix of one thousand layers of audio from the catalogue of the iconic German label Mille Plateaux, and then subsequent recordings of Thaemlitz’s computer going haywire while he plays the files all at once.
Richer, though, are the ambient collages of sound and vocal samples that best characterize Thaemlitz’s output. Here the in-betweenness she espouses in his writings is embodied in sound in various ways, sometimes difficult and often beautiful. On “Genrecide (I Wish Tricky’d Die Any Way I Hope),” we are given an intimate set of slow melodies, set in a dim fuzz. But the stitching is always audible, a feature of Thaemlitz’s music that keeps the listener on edge: The lull of a synthesizer melody seems to take place far away, while the less inviting dry, machinic crackle is foregrounded and a conversational voice repeats: “I wish Tricky’d die…” Tracks like “Schizophonalysis,” originally released under the alias Aunty Eddie’s Pussy, and “What Is Between Is Missing,” which includes a recording of a debate over the “social problem” of being transgendered, follow a similarly indeterminate, glitchy aesthetic that provides a landscape for their respective meditations on transness.
The sound can also be much crisper and harmonious, developing into full soundscapes: “Sex on a Real Train,” or a dropped cut from Thaemlitz’s 1995 album Soil, “Get in and Drive,” which the artist refers to as “a failed attempt” to sound like late ambient producer Pete Namlook. And it can be screwball in its citations (“genrecide,” indeed): “Untitled (AV/M 8)” pastes James Taylor’s “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight” in full over a cold, tense computer-sound loop. Thaemlitz constructs her own worlds, but also reaches into the void that is the already-extant world of pop, of corporate populism.
I want to say that the unevenness of the compilation is beside the point, but maybe it is the point—at least, it’s a fitting quality for a partial document of the output of a challenging artist whose contributions have been underthought, especially in developing conversations around algorithmic listening practices and artists’ agency in a streaming-dominated music industry. Mark Richardson’s 2003 review of Thaemlitz’s Lovebomb—one of the releases, alongside projects like Soil and Interstices, that interested listeners might be compelled to visit after a listen to Comp x Comp—noted that the essays contained in that album’s liner notes “bring more questions than answers.” But aren’t the questions more interesting? This collection poses many; as a listener, I’m grateful for all Thaemlitz refuses to resolve.


For their droll, minimal collaboration, Jarvis Cocker and Chilly Gonzales turn their attention towards a famous hotel but end up with a more philosophical examination of these transient spaces.

Chilly Gonzales / Jarvis Cocker: Room 29

Room 29

“Do you check into a hotel? Or does the hotel condition check into you?” writes Wayne Koestenbaum in Hotel Theory,  a collection positioning the hotel room as a space for possibility. Consider it a companion piece to Jarvis Cocker and Chilly Gonzales’ Room 29, a meditation on the relationship between hotel and guest, comprised of piano, voice, bits of strings from the Kaiser Quartett, and sound effects. Of course, these seemingly blank slates still hold memories and emotions, and that’s where this collaboration gets interesting. Sorting through metaphorical traces left behind, Cocker asks on the title track, “Is there anything sadder than a hotel room that hasn't been fucked in?”
Some of the real-life stories from the Chateau Marmont, the infamous Los Angeles hotel where this room 29 is located (with a grand piano, no less), are indeed quite sad. In one of *Room 29’*s several tabloid tales, Cocker speak-sings of dear “Clara,” the pianist daughter of Mark Twain, who attempted to rouse the spirit of her dead husband at the Chateau. Memories of old Hollywood types haunt the record just as they do the hotel, like the only slightly veiled allusion to Jean Harlow in Bombshell. If one wishes to know all the references, the immediate concordance machine that is the internet will provide all the easter eggs for interested listeners.
For as mysterious a backdrop the Chateau can be, what’s more intriguing here is how Cocker’s lyrics edge into analytical territory while trying to figure out what it is, exactly, that people do in hotel rooms. Do they figure out relationships? Pretend like everything is okay? Perhaps take comfort in the free breakfast anyway? Lope about the lobby in a state of surreal emptiness while listening to cinematic numbers like “A Trick of the Light”? The music and the tone of voice seem to suggest this melancholy state. But combined with often laugh-out-loud funny lyrics—“You don’t need a girlfriend, you need a social worker,” Cocker quips on “Tearjerker”—the clanging rhymes can end up somewhere near a gaudy Tin Pan Alley standard.
It’s no surprise that this album (if you can call it that) will be performed at the Barbican in London, given that it’s all about bringing listeners into the room. But as much as this is supposed to be an experimental and theatrical tour of Room 29, both Cocker and Gonzales have way too much pop-song mastery for this to be just a fussy one-time stay. Cocker brings his wry Pulp persona to bear on Gonzales’ elegant piano and film-score approach and deep pop tune understanding. A few tracks are infectious enough to merit standalone listens.


The Y2K-era bubblegum-pop duo team up with Max Tundra for a fun, ambitious, downright bizarre comeback album, their first LP since 2000.

Daphne & Celeste: Daphne & Celeste Save The World

Daphne & Celeste Save The World

In 2015, Daphne & Celeste—the bubblegum-pop duo behind such Y2K-era schoolyard hits as “Ooh Stick You!” and “U.G.L.Y.”—released their first piece of music in more than a decade: an uncharacteristically low-key song called “You & I Alone.” It was a comeback that came completely out of left field. Though technically American in origin, Daphne & Celeste were part of a long-forgotten Europop wave known primarily for its extreme cheesiness. Even at the time, they were almost comically reviled by the UK press and many listeners, to the point that they were forced off stage by bottle-hurling fans during what was supposed to be a harmless novelty slot at the Reading Festival. Soon after that incident, Daphne & Celeste were dropped by their label, with just one album, 2000’s We Didn’t Say That!, to their name. Their music was a candy commercial, way too sugary and primarily aimed at children, and the high didn’t last long.
The biggest surprise about their new single, then, was that it actually wasn’t bad. This was bewildering to anyone who remembered, with varying degrees of fondness, Daphne & Celeste’s initial run. Built around an effervescent bassline and a simple, bleating keyboard part, “You & I Alone” stripped away the over-the-top theatrics that launched their careers, instead offering a dreamily subdued love song.
The upgraded sound came from the cult-favorite British synth auteur Ben Jacobs, a.k.a. Max Tundra, who knows a thing or two about long sabbaticals (his last full-length, Parallax Error Beheads You, came out in 2008). Three years after “You & I Alone,” he has returned to write, produce, and release Daphne & Celeste’s second-ever LP, the fun, ambitious, and sometimes downright bizarre Daphne & Celeste Save the World. Tundra hasn’t lost any of the innovative flair and technical prowess that made his previous records touchstones in the 2000s electronic scene, and on Save the World he manages to compress a dazzling range of pop genres into 13 tracks—from electro-pop to dream-pop to J-pop to the sort of ultra-commercial, high gloss Top 40 pop that made Daphne & Celeste famous in the first place.
The track that connects most clearly to the dubiously jocular days of We Didn’t Say That! is the single “BB,” which, it is revealed, stands for “Basic Busker.” Opening with a spoken-word segment where Daphne & Celeste bemoan the popularity of a terrible folk song—”This is the first thing you figure out when you get a guitar!” “Do people dig this?”—the track is an effective jab at the likes of Ed Sheeran, though his name is never mentioned. “Sonic simplicity is considerably over-represented/And sub-Dylan balladry was OK before the Fairlight was invented,” Daphne & Celeste sing at the song’s coda, taking a very funny (and unexpectedly highbrow) shot at the artists who have replaced them as maligned chart-toppers. Here as elsewhere, their upbeat sing-talk style rises to the challenge of Tundra’s technically dense production.
Mostly, though, Tundra reins in the duo’s silliness. “Alarms”, for example, seems more interested in deconstructing mainstream pop than in mocking it. The song, which recalls Saint Etienne’s recent output, begins as mid-tempo, spaced-out electro-pop, with Daphne & Celeste’s vocals run through layers of vocoders and supported by lush synths, before subtly shifting into a proper dancefloor banger with a disco backbeat and staccato strings. “A.L.T.O.” makes prominent use of steel drums, a tropical pop trope that has become all but synonymous with unimaginative club tracks over the past decade—but here it sounds like a deliberate choice to repurpose that cliché into something organic and alive.
Saves the World is full of clever production decisions like this, which are what make the project worthwhile. By working with Daphne & Celeste’s notoriety and, it turns out, actual charm, Tundra is able to project his idea of what pop should sound like in 2018 onto an essentially blank slate. Instead of a tired pastiche, the three musicians have created one of the most weirdly compelling pop collaborations in recent memory.


Despite a limited Internet presence, Doughboyz Cashout are currently the biggest street rappers in Detroit, and the best rap group in the Midwest. Their latest, BYLUG World (short for "Boss Yo Life Up Gang"), is a relatively minor release in the group's nearly decade-long career.

BYLUG World

To succeed in rap in 2015, you have to be good with the Internet—or prolifically bad, at bare minimum. It helps if you can meme-ify your personal brand, through Vine dance sensation or hashtaggable one-liner. The West Detroit supergroup Doughboyz Cashout, meanwhile, have not used their Twitter account in nearly two years. They don't have a Wikipedia page. They're signed to Jeezy's CTE World imprint, but haven't released an official single on the label since 2013's "Mob Life" remix, to say nothing of a full-length project. But the Doughboyz—whose membership has ranged from four to eight members since the group's 2006 inception—are currently the biggest street rappers in Detroit, and the best rap group in the Midwest.
Doughboyz' latest, BYLUG World (short for "Boss Yo Life Up Gang"), is a relatively minor release in the group's nearly decade-long career. It's not as consistent as last year's excellent We Run The City 4 tape, and lacks the immediate hits of 2012's Free Roc, their best work. There's nothing resembling a crossover play in the vein of "My Young Niggaz", a DJ Mustard-produced collaboration with Jeezy and YG; in fact, label boss Jeezy shows up exactly zero times here. But for longtime fans and those nostalgic for turn-of-the-century Cash Money and No Limit, there's a lot to love.
To the uninitiated, BYLUG World may sound anachronistic: the stabby piano, the rubber-band bass, and bounce are pure Mannie Fresh worship. Most of BYLUG World's production is handled by Payroll Giovanni, who doubles as Doughboyz' most popular solo rapper; you can hear the eerie ricochet of Fresh in most of his tracks here, from menacing opener "BYLUG Baby" to the stripped-down murder piano of "OVL". But like Fresh's best work, the production leaps out while providing space for the tape's rotating cast of rappers. And ultimately, storytelling is at the heart of Doughboyz' appeal. BYLUG's sole time-stamped moment, "Netflix", should be a goofy throwaway about Netflix and chill, but its novelty is redeemed by Payroll's deft but unshowy bars: "She was intimidated when I pulled up, for example/ She couldn't find the coupe door handles."
The tape's blunt edges are softened by the occasional warbling melody from Clay Baby—the closest thing Detroit has to a Nate Dogg, who delivers the tape's best hook on "Fell Off"—and a handful of smooth, contemplative synth-scapes from former Taylor Gang producer Cardo. On YG-featuring "Day Ones", he evokes a screwed-up, waterlogged AraabMuzik, and on his G-funk-leaning "Street Heaven", Payroll offers a coolly specific narrative that recalls Curren$y: "Meanwhile, I'm cracking smiles at Mr. Chow's/ Out in Cali, would I like another drink?/ Yes, gladly." But the celebration is shaded by struggle and countered with knowing paranoia: "Lately I been having dreams of trucks and 7s/ And nightmares of the Feds wanting me in their possession." This tightrope walk of aspiration and consequence is the Doughboyz' formula stripped down to its essence. Even at its core, it hits as hard as ever.


The Leeds band’s mouthy and acerbic take on Brexit-era post-punk has the humor, polish, and storytelling of classic Britpop.

The Overload

There’s no shortage of comparisons for Yard Act’s Brexit-era post-punk. It’s hard to resist all these groups channeling post-punk history to convey the tension of a fractured Britain while making noisy political music safe enough for Edgar Wright and FIFA soundtracks. But how many of these bands met Cillian Murphy on the set of Peaky Blinders years before releasing their debut? In a crowded field, the Leeds supergroup of Post War Glamour Girls’ James Smith, Menace Beach’s Ryan Needham, Sam Shjipstone, and Jay Russell just feels a little slicker and more fashionable than the competition. Their Coachella-safe take on The Fall—clever, jittery, and unapologetically British—has the humor, polish, and character-driven storytelling of classic Britpop. What they’d really like is for you to compare them to Pulp.
It’s not unwarranted. On the strength of 2021’s Dark Days EP—which, one year later, sounds like a concept album about “Remember when Johnny Marr was in Modest Mouse?”—Yard Act signed to Island, the same label that released Pulp’s major-label debut. Elton John became a fan. So did notable post-punk scholar Ed Sheeran. Cue the up-and-comer appearances in NME and DIY, on the BBC and Jools Holland. Smith, a frontperson who values a good narrative, seems to encourage the Britpop comparisons in interviews just so he can laugh them off (and shout out Orange Juice and Postcard Records instead). How you feel that he shares the same last name as Mark E. Smith—fun happenstance, insufferable media bait, a shrug—will probably tell you how much you’ll enjoy what Yard Act is selling.
But in a lean 37 minutes, The Overload earns its hype. It’s a confident debut LP from a young band seizing its moment and cutting the tension with a chuckle. They’re clearly aiming for something big. The ambition doesn’t always work, and the attempt to manifest a Yard Act extended universe yields mixed results. But it’s easy to root for a band whose failure to write a new “Common People” lands closer to “Darts of Pleasure.”
Dark Days had Smith rushing to spit out all his words as the band flexed their post-punk chops and Leeds-specific sense of rhythm and groove (see contemporaries like Galaxians and Big Softy). The Overload is still, indeed, wiry and angular. But now Smith (who’s credited with 50 percent of songwriting, alongside Needham and Shjipstone) and producer Ali Chant (PJ Harvey, Perfume Genius, Algiers) turn down the band’s fury to make room for Smith to perform a classic post-punk archetype: the despondent, overcoat-wearing sloganeer who mocks his peers and uses privilege to attack privilege. He’s too educated to start a riot, but young enough to support one. What we lose in velocity, we gain in clarity.
Smith has hinted that his outlandish characters recur across different songs, but it’s inconsequential whether the insufferable “Could he be a Leaver?” narrator from Dark Days’ “Fixer Upper” is the same insufferable narrator of this album’s title track. The fun is in the one-liners, like when Smith screams, “If you don’t challenge me on anything, you’ll find that I’m actually very nice. Are you listening? I’m actually very fucking nice!” On “The Incident,” he plays a white-collar crook who says, “I’m hellbent on expanding my heaven-sent empire, ethically,” like he’s ordering a latte. He’s having a grand time on “Rich,” picking on the anti-capitalist who comes into some capital and immediately changes the narrative to justify their own advancement. Even when the lyrics don’t work, like in the obvious England metaphor “Dead Horse,” the band tries to make the ranting sound compelling.
The Overload’s best moment might be its most restrained. While IDLES’ signature village song is full of racist idiots, “Tall Poppies” zooms in on one villager: a promising and handsome football captain who, for reasons unclear, never leaves home and trades his athletic gifts for a career in real estate. In comes a promotion, a mortgage, a marriage, a dog, children, and a vacation home in Costa del Sol. He can still play football on the side (he knows he’s still got it), and hey, his town now has an authentic Italian restaurant. The lyrics convey happy compromise. The music implies restlessness, growing looser and more uneasy as the footballer moves through marriage counseling, grandchildren, and an increasingly frightening feeling: Is this all there is? The whole village comes to his funeral. Smith then reveals himself to be the late footballer’s friend, viewing the deceased’s life as a question: Is the goal to live so that after we die, nobody speaks ill of us? Is it better to lead a small yet safe life involved in our communities, or to live big and in constant awareness of our insignificance? Does it matter?
The success of “Tall Poppies”—and the best moments on The Overload—is that it’s up to the listener to decide if these characters are sad sacks falling short of their full potential or decent human beings feeling thankful for their small existences. It’s a short-story delivery worthy of Jarvis Cocker, and the nuance and empathy that dares to ask these questions in a post-punk song make Yard Act the real deal.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Eve’s 1999 debut, a hard-bodied and self-determined showcase.

Eve: Let There Be Eve...Ruff Ryders’ First Lady

Back in 1997, Eve’s promising career was almost derailed by a snarky, pill-popping, bleach-blond white boy from Detroit. She’d started messing around with music as a teen, but only began pursuing it in good faith after a chance encounter with Mase at the Bronx strip club where she briefly sojourned. “That night, he drove me around and we rapped all night until the sun came up,” she recalled recently. “And I never went back in the club.” After another fortuitous meeting, this one with an executive at Dr. Dre’s Aftermath records, Eve delivered an audition, flew to Los Angeles, and was signed pretty much on the spot. Eight months into the collaboration, Dre met Eminem, and Eve was sent packing to Philly.
But as with all the best origin stories, that failure gave Eve Jihan Jeffers resolve. An opportunity presented itself in the form of Ruff Ryders, a New York crew which, in the late ’90s, had made the transition from management company to label. Eve stood out with her platinum-blonde baldie and a pair of selectively-deployed paw prints on her chest. Her rap skills would soon become just as striking. “They made me write and recite, write and recite,” she said. “It was like boot camp. You had to prove yourself to them, and that’s what made me a better MC.”
In 1998, the same year Ruff Ryders’ principal rapper DMX released two platinum-selling albums, Eve got to work. By that point, the only credit to her name was a loosie on the Bulworth soundtrack, released as Eve of Destruction. But in 1999, she appeared (although uncredited) alongside Erykah Badu on the Roots’ breakout “You Got Me” and joined Blackstreet, Janet Jackson, and Ja Rule on the pastel “Girlfriend/Boyfriend.” She employed a different style on all of them: sly, seductive incense-rap here, no-nonsense wit there. Eve’s first proper release, the vaguely salsa-inspired “What Ya Want,” featuring Nokio of Dru Hill, was built around a rudimentary Latin preset on an E-MU synth, but it soon cracked the Top 40.
That fall, amid Y2K mania and vague collective fears about an uncertain future, Eve officially claimed her spot as Ruff Ryders’ self-described “pitbull in a skirt” and released Let There Be Eve…Ruff Ryders’ First Lady. It became the third rap album by a woman to crest the Billboard 200. She was 21, one of a handful of women who served in the token but compulsory role as the “first lady” of any given ascendant rap crew. Lil’ Kim, Foxy Brown, Mia X, and Rah Digga, among others who had achieved name recognition within the genre, all had their own styles. And of course there was Lauryn Hill, who had managed to escape the tyranny of Wyclef and the Fugees to release an album that set records still standing today.
Like Eve, many of these women were more charismatic and skilled than their male counterparts, but often had less creative control of their own projects. You can hear that tension all over Let There Be Eve; across its 14 songs and four skits, the domineering energy of Ruff Ryders is palpable and weaselly. Eve isn’t even the first voice you hear on her own debut album, or the second, or third. The intro track, “First Lady,” is the equivalent of a red carpet being unfurled, a call-and-response chant delivered by Swizz Beatz and an anonymous male chorus: “When I say E-VAY, y’all say E/When I say RU-UFF, y’all say RYDERS.” The next track, the steel-tipped “Let’s Talk About,” opens with ad-libs from Ruff Ryders’ associate Drag-On. When Eve finally appears, a couple seconds in, it feels like the relief of a sunbeam.
Still, it’s very much a family affair throughout. Even when it feels like her ideas are retrofitted to preexisting, Swizz-produced morsels—on the frosty posse cut “Scenario 2000,” featuring DMX, Drag-On, and the Lox, for example, Swizz samples himself—Eve establishes breathing room for herself. One track, the chest-thumping skit “My Bitches,” is a direct response to DMX’s “My Niggas,” but is awesomely appropriated to act like something of a thesis statement for the entire project: “My bitches, my bitches that take care of they kids/My bitches, my bitches that you don’t respect/My bitches, my bitches that you always neglect/Y’all niggas ain’t real, y’all niggas ain’t shit.” Eve’s lyrics often appear simple in transcription, but they land with the heart and urgency Philly rap is celebrated for.
Despite the Ruff Ryders’ attempts at co-opting Let There Be Eve, it winds up being an album of self-determination, where she effortlessly bests the guys at what they think is their own game. There is little experimentation on the album—that would come later, with her blockbuster Scorpion album—but Eve bobs and weaves with dexterity, skillfully overcoming Swizz Beatz’s anemic production. At the time, collaborators and critics often attributed Eve’s success to her ability to hang with the guys without sacrificing her conventional femininity; the critic Touré, in a Rolling Stone review of the album, described her as “a thug with curves.” Her maneuvering required a kind of gender code-switching in which she had to be the “pitbull in a skirt,” years before the concept of the Cool Girl would become solidified in pop culture. It was an oppressive and offensive framework, mirrored across genres of all kinds, and Eve challenged it in part by using hardcore, “masculine” rap to sculpt her own power.
She defined herself boldly, a feminist former stripper who loved her all-male crew but reserved a unique allegiance for her girlfriends. The album’s primary singles were expressions of loyalty to both. The plucky, buoyant “Gotta Man,” is a ride-or-die anthem, featuring bail money happily paid and secrets kept. As a teen, I cried often to “Love Is Blind,” the semi-biographical single in which Eve recounts her best friend’s abuse at the hands of a partner, and dreams up a revenge fantasy: “I don’t even know you and I’d kill you myself/You played with her like a doll and put her back on the shelf/Wouldn’t let her go to school and better herself/She had a baby by your ass and you ain’t giving no help.” Elsewhere in 1999, Destiny’s Child and TLC were demanding accountability from men, across songs like “Bills, Bills, Bills” and “No Scrubs,” which unfairly lumped them together as man-hating feminists. Eve joined the chorus, but grounded that ethos in concrete, high-stakes realities—good riddance to men who ran up your phone bill, sure, but also men who didn’t take care of their children, who abused their partners, who made life materially harder for the women around them. The message stuck.
In 2000, Eve appeared on an episode of “The Queen Latifah Show” alongside the friend in question on “Love Is Blind,” offering personal experience as PSA. The song, whose hook features an uncharacteristically somber Faith Evans, was very far from my personal experience, but as a young woman approaching adolescence, it felt like it was within the realm of some shitty hypothetical future. In the ’90s, women like Salt-N-Pepa and Lil’ Kim forced hip-hop into something resembling hospitality to sex-positive feminism. Eve took it a step further, rapping about sex (“You make me cum, I might flood the block/Wet up ya socks”) in between complex narratives that got as gritty as life is. She was a welcome counterbalance to the glossy fantasies at the top of the charts, like watching a hard-hitting documentary after time spent bingeing Disney fairytales.
But after the album’s release, Eve fell into what she describes as a depression. She found herself submerged by the sudden, swift change in her professional life, and how it warped her every day. “I was 21,” she told Ebony in 2001, “and there was nobody who I felt like I could really talk to, who really understood what I was going through. I was going through a growth process, definitely changing from a young woman to a woman.”
She emerged from it by plucking some creative control from Ruff Ryders and making Scorpion, a more pop-minded album that featured “Let Me Blow Ya Mind,” the inaugural winner of the Grammys Best Rap/Sung Collaboration category; she had traded in Drag-On and Swizz Beatz for Gwen Stefani and Dr. Dre. In doing that, she expanded the territory claimed by women rappers. Her peers, like Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown, were finding desirability as It Girls in fashion, but Eve had her ambitions set higher than appearing in advertisements for luxury brands. “Some of y’all ain’t writing well, too concerned with fashion,” she rapped, a little smugly. And yet she soon launched her own clothing line, the beloved but short-lived Fetish by Eve. All the while, she had prophesied an early retirement for herself, telling a reporter she didn’t think she’d keep making music after 25. She wanted to act or direct or get into philanthropy. In the 18 years since Scorpion, appeared in a handful of big-budget studio films but released just two albums. She kept her promise.


Steve Earle continues his run of conceptually inspired records with a Texas blues album, an homage to the likes of Lightnin' Hopkins, Robert Johnson, and Stevie Ray Vaughn.

Terraplane

Steve Earle has learned to compartmentalize. In the twenty-first century he has released an album of Townes Van Zandt covers, a few collections of agit-Americana, and another inspired by the immigrant sounds of New York City—each one so laser-focused musically and thematically that they sound like concept albums. On one hand, the approach gives each record its own distinctive identity within his catalog. When his overarching subject was the idiocy of the Bush Administration he hit paydirt: Jerusalem and The Revolution Starts… Now had a hardscrabble righteousness only intensified by the fact that few other singer-songwriters were tackling that particular subject matter at that particular time. Both have aged more gracefully than their topicality would have suggested.
On the other hand, that urge to cordon off genres and ideas seems particularly odd for an artist who changed the course of country music in the 1980s by insisting that everything could be commingled freely. His 1986 debut Guitar Town and 1988's Copperhead Road melded rock guitars and country songwriting, honkytonk rowdiness and folky gentleness, as if to rebuke the timid conservatism of the Nashville mainstream. Even in the 1990s, he emerged from a four-year stint in the clink with a string of adventurous records that made forays into doo-wop, Beatlesque pop, Civil War storytelling, and twangy psychedelica. That eclecticism was—and still is—rousing, yet nowadays each of those creative impulses would get its own neat album.
Earle's latest is also his most specific: Terraplane is his Texas blues album, an homage to the likes of Lightnin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb, Robert Johnson and Stevie Ray Vaughn, Freddy King and ZZ Top. There are no cheeseball Blueshammer theatrics, which often accompany blues records made by non-blues artists. Earle's more interested in craft than ostentation, and his touring band the Dukes keep things raw and wiry, as though everything was caught in one take during Shiner runs. Only on "Baby's Just as Mean as Me", a he said/she said duet with Eleanor Whitmore, do Earle's blues sound less than casually persuasive.
To his credit, Earle understands that Texas is a big place and therefore Texas blues is a broad term that encompasses various sounds and song forms. Terraplane volleys from acoustic to electric, from solo delivery to full-band performances, from pop melodies to spoken-word verses. He conjures some fire and brimstone on a talking blues called "The Tennessee Kid", which would be one of the best songs here if it didn't so readily buy into some of the persistent myths orbiting the blues: reaching the crossroads, meeting the devil, selling your soul. These seem like tired tropes, equivalent to naming your album after a Robert Johnson song, yet Earle brings so much grit and wiliness to the song that you almost don't roll your eyes when he name-drops "Bob Johnson."
The blues is often mischaracterized as uniformly worried and woeful, as though a hellhound were on every strummer's trail, yet that is only one facet of the form. It can also be funny, or randy, and it's this last trait that Earle taps into most eagerly, as Terraplane is his lustiest album in a long while. Sex is the major theme, and Earle beholds his hard-on with a self-effacing chuckle. The first song is called "Baby Baby Baby (Baby)", and that parenthetical aside is not only his best punchline but a winking nod to the ridiculousness of it all. Casting him as the leering oldie, "Go-Go Boots Are Back" may be his most frivolous song yet, but its lack of gravity is freeing, even funny. Nevertheless, the concept framing Terraplane also reduces its scope and limits its impact. It's good for what it is—better than it needs to be, in fact—yet what it is is only a fraction of what it could be, if only Earle would stop trying to tidy up his inspirations.