This solo EP from Katie Alice Greer, singer in lauded D.C. punks Priests, mixes industrial textures and synth-pop. Her talent for composing moody collages of unraveling sound is a pleasant revelation.

EP A

In the lauded D.C. punk band Priests, Katie Alice Greer’s voice holds a great deal of narrative responsibility. While her politically-inflected lyrics often slide toward the opaque, the quality of Greer’s singing works to make ideas and feelings legible: she hollers her lines, her voice cracking as she bends phrases over her bandmates’ driving basslines and squalls of distorted guitar. Greer’s performances can become soaked in feeling, albeit in a distinctly serrated way. Priests’ music isn’t inviting in the traditional sense, but it acts nonetheless as an invitation to participate in some communal seething.
Alongside the build-up to Priests’ first full-length release, Greer has quietly released a solo EP as KAG, recorded following a move from D.C. proper into the suburbs. The four songs that comprise EP A are built from industrial drum machines, iterative guitar phrases, and a generous amount of metallic squealing and tape hiss—an uneasy composite of unfinished textures, rather than something anthemic. If her output with Priests serves as a rallying cry, Greer’s solo effort is more isolated, better suited for private bouts of anxiety.
Throughout, vocals come in and out of focus, in moments barely recognizable. On “Diana Ross,” perhaps the tensest offering, Greer sings in a haunted falsetto that smears what might be lyrics into pure affect—a poignant act of obfuscation, given that the song is a tribute of sorts to another great, and complex, frontwoman. (In both interviews and her own songwriting—see “Lana,” for Lana Del Rey, on Priests’ 2013 EP Tape Two—Greer appears consistently fascinated with woman popstars as cultural signifiers, sites of something like femme mythmaking.) On “Sister Ruth” and “Narcissus,” her voice is faraway, sometimes picking up to a more insistent pace, sometimes receding below all-but-unintelligible samples of people chattering and other ambient urban noise. Greer’s talent for composing moody collages of unraveling sound is a pleasant revelation. It makes “Baby Judy” an outlier here, a comparatively gentle and sincerely delivered synth-pop song.
Generally, it sounds as if it might be a relief for Greer to dissolve a bit into a self-built world, one where there’s less pressure to signify and, consequently, more room to feel out the contours of everyday life’s disquiet. Her lyrics, though largely unintelligible on the recordings, are published on the project’s Bandcamp and are worth a read. When she references other women’s stories—on “Diana Ross,” or in nods to the film Black Narcissus, for example—she seems to be reaching out to these characters to find form, but succumbing to formlessness is also a theme: “Your sexuality is nothing like you say,” she mutters from somewhere deep within the mix on “Sister Ruth.” “It’s just something that floats away/It’s something you could never really keep at bay/Water that takes shape.” The sentiment is neither strictly political nor strictly personal. In its sung form’s obscurity, it reminds us that sometimes, legibility—and its attendant form, visibility—can feel like a trap, to women onstage and off.


On his fifth album and first for Fat Possum, the Southern folk singer finds ingenious ways to pull old obscurities into the anxious present.

When I’m Called

Not so long ago, Jake Xerxes Fussell was in a hurry. The son of Southern folklorists, Fussell took his family inheritance—that is, an invaluable intimacy with customs and cultures far beyond the mainstream of his ’90s youth—and immortalized it with his earliest records. Fussell played spirited and relatively faithful versions of rather obscure old songs. Sometimes, he sped through them, though, as if he were some folk-festival stenographer, putting down what he’d heard in his own hand before it was all lost to the future’s sweep.
But near the last decade’s end, on his third album, 2019’s Out of Sight, that seeming impatience began to erode, replaced by the desire to transform that inheritance into something truer to his own life and time. With his rhythmically idiosyncratic guitar and his golden mean of a folk singer’s voice, as inviting as a Sunday picnic, Fussell stitched together bits of those old tunes in ingenious shapes. It was as though Fussell finally realized just how much of his source material had made it online, ostensibly digitized forever; that work done, he could now tell his own story by using that source material in his own way and his own time, as slowly as he’d like.
Fussell has never been as patient—or, for that matter, as graceful or compelling, curious or inclusive—as he is on When I’m Called, his fifth and best album. Produced by kindred spirit James Elkington and played by a cast that includes Blake Mills, Joan Shelley, and Joe Westerlund, When I’m Called foregrounds Fussell’s ability to take songs moldering in university archives or reissue label stacks and locate another meaning within them, to imagine some new way to interpret that inheritance.
Fussell’s field of play is broad here, from a 1994 cassette by Maestro Gaxiola, who turned his life into a sort of anti-industry piece of performance art, to an English nursery rhyme about animals that dates at least to 1744 and may be an allegory for a half-dozen historic events. In conversation with what has come before, Fussell creates a space where our own modern malaises, whether loneliness and anxiety or political instability and social suspicion, feel less like our burdens than those of humanity at large. Fussell finds mostly forgotten songs to sing, less now to preserve them than to connect to a past we still share.
Much of When I’m Called is a survey of indecision, or at least of not knowing what is supposed to come next. Most obvious is “Leaving Here, Don’t Know Where I’m Going,” a century-old Georgia lament about needing to part from home to get some work. (Another of Fussell’s folklore mentors, the late Art Rosenbaum, captured it for Folkways 40 years ago.) Framed by gentle acoustic guitar that trickles like a country creek and horns that sound like soul-baring sighs, Fussell’s tragic rendition is an existential wrestling match in slow motion. Why does pursuing what we need so often cost us what we love, like “Alabama water that tastes like cherry wine”?
“Gone to Hilo,” meanwhile, sees the forlorn world from the other perspective—the lover whose Johnny has set sail for yet another foreign port to make his wage. That’s just life, but Fussell’s tender phrasing and measured pace feel interminably sad, as if this were the end of a line and a love. A touring musician with his own young family in North Carolina, Fussell seems to step out of his own body and brain here, imagining how it must feel to watch himself leave for adventures that are also just his job. Not good at all, he reckons. The great Robin Holcomb, another Georgia singer who has long mined the past for her own present, softly echoes Fussell, linking this conundrum across generations.
Someone is almost always on the move during When I’m Called. That’s Fussell contemplating his own responsibility and, ultimately, mortality amid the title track’s gentle and brilliant electric ripple. He’s waiting whatever turn is his. There’s the meet-cute of “Feeing Day,” a 19th-century ballad in which a gentleman extends his umbrella to a woman stranded in a rainstorm. They share some drinks, fall in love, and, in the classic version, quickly get married. Fussell omits that last bit here, closing instead on a fanfare of languid horns. They curl like a question mark, an ending shrouded in uncertainty.
It’s hard not to hear the closer, “Going to Georgia,” as the answer: “They’ll hug you, they’ll kiss you/They’ll tell you more lies,” Fussell sings of men at large, his voice deep and warm, like a father offering advice distilled from his own misdeeds. “And the crossties in the railway are the stars in the skies.” (He inveighs against cads with some of the same lines earlier in the album during “One Morning in May”; if it sounds playful there, it sounds like a real warning here.) Betrayal and selfishness are ancient arts, cosmic even. The best we can do is to canter on, then, just as Fussell and his band do through a final corona of wispy strings.
If you spend long enough diving into online repositories, you can find something about most every song Fussell invokes or interprets or recombines here—the complete lyrics of what was then called “Feeing Time,” the bouncy Maestro Gaxiola tape where he lampoons Andy Warhol, even a wobbly file of Virgil Anderson singing that perfect bit about Alabama water, Alabama women, and cherry wine. The sources, then, are mostly safe, so he doesn’t have to be in a hurry to immortalize them anymore. But unless you know what you’re looking for, those antiques are bits of folklorist flotsam locked in an endless data heap, viewed only by the most obsessive and diligent. Reverent and imaginative, Fussell does the work of pulling them out of the pile and making them ring again. No other American singer is repurposing our old folk scripts with so much authority or ingenuity; When I’m Called proclaims—softly, gently, and slowly, with a sly grin and a Southern ease—that what these songs have to say isn’t old at all.


A Winged Victory for the Sullen is a collaboration between Stars of the Lid's Adam Wiltzie and pianist Dustin O'Halloran. Their score for Wayne McGregor's ATOMOS recasts the elegant sound of their 2011 debut for McGregor's purposes, with pensive melancholy shading into physical menace.

ATOMOS

Wayne McGregor has great taste in ambient music. I saw his piece FAR a couple years ago, and hearing Ben Frost's delicate yet concussive score, then unreleased, was as rich a part of the experience as watching the dance. McGregor has also commissioned music from the likes of Max Richter (Sum and Infra) and Ólafur Arnalds (Dyad 1909), and you can add to that list A Winged Victory for the Sullen, a collaboration between Stars of the Lid's Adam Wiltzie and pianist Dustin O'Halloran. Their score for ATOMOS recasts the elegant sound of their 2011 debut for McGregor's purposes, with pensive melancholy shading into physical menace.
If Stars of the Lid's music sounds like a hollowed-out 100-piece ensemble with ether for its innards, AWVFTS is the opposite. Made from strings, piano, the occasional horn, and electric guitars processed into ambient washes and scrawls, it's all inner voices coiled together, more classical than drone. The music is recorded in large spaces, so that between natural acoustic and electronic effects, every instrument seems to float in an ocean-sized force field of harmonic resonance. Minimal melodic information carries maximal tone, the few voices somehow resplendently full and forlornly isolated at once.
McGregor choreographs for a leading modern company, London's Royal Ballet, and, occasionally, Thom Yorke. Rather than making his experimental work challenging and his traditional work beautiful, he makes all of his work both, building modern movement on ballet lines. This classically tempered novelty influences his musical commissions, where chamber music anchors electronic disturbances and asymmetrical structures. AWVFTS adapts, making ATOMOS louder and more mobile than its impeccably tentative predecessor—more volatile and disjointed, with basses you can feel in your body because this is for the body. The duo's signature stasis is now packed with interior movement; particles swarm through drones like dancers suspended in stage lighting.
If the first album was basically slow-moving, deeply sonorous chamber music under a microscope, ATOMOS pumps up elements of discord and chaos. The duo's usual minimalist classical core, formed somewhere between the sacred and nervy repetitions of Arvo Pärt and Philip Glass, is reshaped in accord with influential dance scorers Gavin Bryars and David Tudor. Slabs of hard, bright organ-like tones arc powerfully over dark crags of bass. Strings twist in relentless screw-like figures or creep forward in inexorably widening harmonies. Electronic guitar tones are more pronounced, forming rhythmic throughlines and pulses. Forbidding abstract landscapes rise up into plangent songs, sub-frequencies crumbling apart beneath them.
The best tracks, such as "I" and "VI", wrangle these maneuvers into an anxious, dynamic, almost symphonic sweep. All the song titles are Roman numerals—too bad, as it deprives us of the duo's unusually self-mocking song titles. Grandiose ambient musicians are not known for their sense of humor, so titles such as "Steep Hills of Vicodin Tears", "Requiem for the Static King" and, best of all, "We Played Some Open Chords" (they did!) were refreshing. But there's still something curious about this tracklist. There is no "IV". What went wrong? I like to imagine that one day this lost track will surface, and it will have a kazoo in it. For now, it brings a touch of mystery to a far better than average dance score that refines rather than suppresses the musical identity of its creators. Who will Wayne McGregor call on next? Tim Hecker's phone has got to be about to ring.


This young Montreal producer, best known at this point for his remixes and a collaboration with Sally Shapiro, offers an accomplished debut full-length.

Continent

Much of the music one might compare to CFCF's debut album, Continent, leans on an external medium or function. Like a lush film score, theme for a forgotten Don Johnson TV pilot, or an unused in-house mixtape intended to fill intermission space, Continent at first seems like a throwback record that really opens up only in a specific time and place. And to a degree, that's to be expected coming from a self-professed film geek who is likely keener on the idea of chatting about Cronenberg than Kraftwerk. Michael Silver, the Montreal-based 21-year-old behind CFCF, has garnered a modest following as a producer and prolific remix artist (you might remember him as the guy who won that Crystal Castles remix contest with his ambitious reconfiguring of "Air War"). And Continent, a surprisingly confident debut, suggests that he's equally concerned with how his music sounds as he is with where it's heard.
As successful as Continent is at evoking mood using deliberate pacing and ripe textures, it also managed to wrap its meticulously pruned pop reticence around everything from hushed poser-disco suites ("Invitation to Love") to sexy, swoon-struck soft-rock grooves ("Raining Patterns"). Hell, there's even a great Fleetwood Mac cover wedged in there, too. Since it's so easy to lose yourself in these lithe, languid electronic ruminations, it's no wonder that nearly everything I've read about CFCF-- and more specifically Continent itself-- has focused on the cinematic characteristics in Silver's work. But fair may it be to categorize these dozen tracks as a series of very accomplished daydream canvases, Continent becomes a richer experience when looked at as independent of any peripheral distraction, with its pop-friendly attention-grabbers very much in the foreground.
There's a patient, reserved quality at work that will no doubt land Continent a few iPod gigs in chic bistros. But to water down these beat-bolstered two-steppers-- like the propulsive, joyous Mac cover "Big Love" or the Quincy Jones-styled funk-out "Half Dreaming"-- is to rob them of their inherent catchiness and accessibility. Often a little sad or playing to a kind of ethereal, out-of-body vibe, most of the memorable moments here are ones that are felt with the hips, not the head. And that's likely because these are, for the most part, unapologetically svelte tunes jam-packed with cues taken from body-high inducing ambient atmospherics, beatific house loopings, 70s AM Easy Cheese, and bubbly Balearic turns.
All of this might appear indicative of how we spent our 2009 summer vacation (see "chillwave"), and while there are unmistakable nostalgic underpinnings that help define Silver's music, it's never cloyingly obvious. Where artists like Neon Indian or Washed Out rely on instant gratification to transport a listener back to specific time or feeling, CFCF's music is less concerned with arriving at a discernible destination than it is with detailing the journey. These are lengthy tunes for the most part (a few of the best clocking in well over seven minutes), so it's easy to lose track of every fleeting emotion or quirky little melody that happens to float on by.
Indeed, large parts of Continent may be considered too cautious or circuitous for the casual listener-- Easter eggs like that Prince-in-the-driving-rain guitar solo on "You Hear Colours" or the patient, synth-soaked yearning that plays throughout "Snake Charmer" might not be able to so readily produce any real effusive payoff for some. However, by employing a bit of listener fortitude, you'll hopefully unlock the vibrancy that lies at Continent's core and defines it as the sure-footed, elegantly stated electro-pop record it most certainly is.


The London duo's debut EP is a full-bodied, slinky embrace of the weirder end of R&B trailblazed by Timbaland and the Neptunes a decade ago.

You Know You Like It EP

George Reid, the producer half of London duo AlunaGeorge, has an ear for the slightly warped. His tracks are filled with skittish, hiccuping beats, helium-rush vocals, and vaguely eerie tones that drift in from the corners of the mix. When discussing his influences in a recent interview, he said that he drew inspiration as a producer from a time when "people weren't... afraid to do something a bit weird." Was he waxing nostalgic about some obscure, forgotten micro-scene he'd stumbled upon after endless hours of crate-digging? Nope, he was talking about how much he loves Timbaland and the Neptunes.
We've heard enough of this refrain recently-- from avant-pop artists like Grimes, Nite Jewel, and Purity Ring-- that it's starting to feel representative of a sea change. Artists with DIY leanings have been professing their love of the glossy bubblegum pop and R&B that dominated the airwaves when they were growing up-- the sort of music that a previous generation of indie musicians rejected entirely, or at least admired from a distance. Aluna Francis, the 24-year-old singer who certainly plumbs this sound on the group's debut EP, You Know You Like It, admits she used to feel that way too. "I had a big rejection of R&B for quite a long while, so when I started working for George, I was still trying to be something else," she recalls. "But it was so ingrained in me that our music ended up sounding quite R&B without meaning to." The three slick, glitchy tracks on You Know You Like It also pull from the left-field sounds associated with the LA label Brainfeeder and the Knife's creepily synthetic vibe, but a large part of their appeal comes from their glistening pop sensibility. When Francis coos on the title track, "You know you like it but you're scared of the shame," it feels like more than just a slinky taunt: It's also a pretty succinct summary of her generation's relationship with the mainstream pop that she and Reid so love. Thematically and sonically, that's You Know You Like It's agenda: to strip away the guilt from the guilty pleasure.
AlunaGeorge share some noticeable similarities with Canadian electro-pop duo Purity Ring: they've got a male/female dynamic, an affinity for manipulated vocals tracks that gurgle and burp, and a baby-voiced aesthetic that suggests they remember exactly where they were when they first heard Timbaland sample a cooing infant (by way of Prince's "Delirious") on Aaliyah's 1998 hit "Are You That Somebody?". But the two groups explore different tones, and unlike the Kewpie-eyed wonder of Purity Ring's sound, AlunaGeorge's tracks exude a seductive confidence. "I'm not as hard as a rock, I'm just not easy to break," Francis sings on "Just a Touch", a hint of cool combativeness in her voice. "But don't take it as an open invitation to try."
Though it's definitely not a dud, "Just a Touch" is the least memorable of the three songs, and at worst it feels like a missed opportunity to show some range. But for a debut EP that's just over 10-minutes long, You Know You Like It doesn't last long enough for its aesthetic limitations to become a problem. The commanding and instantly catchy "You Know You Like It" is the obvious single here, but the closing track "Put Up Your Hands" might just do it one better-- twisting and pulling Francis's vocals into otherworldly sounds. "I've got a million emails in a box unread from you," she exhales, sounding noticeably annoyed. "What you trying to prove?" The lyric might look a little banal on paper, but over the course of the song it distends into a bit of dark, fatalistic drama. And that's just what Reid and Francis do on this EP: poke and prod familiar things until they take on the cast of something lustrous, sinister, and ever so slightly weird.


The debut EP from the New Paltz duo Diet Cig is a collection of brisk, personal pop-punk. The music recalls '90s bands like Beat Happening or Tiger Trap in its simplicity and Eternal Summers in its tone.

Over Easy EP

Diet Cig burst out of the Hudson Valley college town and musical hotbed New Paltz, N.Y., this January with a memorable name and an origin story like something from a microbudget romantic comedy. Singer Alex Luciano and drummer Noah Bowman met at a house show when she interrupted a set to ask him for a lighter; a few months later, they were playing shows and getting ready to record their first songs at a studio in New Paltz. Over Easy, their debut EP, is the product of that labor, a collection of brisk, personal pop-punk that recalls '90s bands like Beat Happening or Tiger Trap in its simplicity and Eternal Summers in its tone.
It's not hard to get to the core of the songs on Over Easy. Built mostly out of Bowman's frenzied drumming and Luciano's distorted guitar and vocals, they're simple, propulsive, and monochromatic; they're dense, but not rich with detail. They mostly serve as vehicles for Luciano's reflections on the life changes, relationships, and social anxiety that characterize extended adolescence. It's a time that's served as fodder for more than its share of music, but Luciano comes at it with a keen observational eye and a fresh perspective. She turns opener "Breathless", an anthem for people living independently for the first time, into something with character through her use of location and detail (like the fact that she's still missing a shower curtain). In other moments, she has a knack for memorable and catchy phrasing that reminds me of Dashboard Confessional, specifically the way every song threatened to break into a cathartic group singalong in a live setting. When she hammers out the line, "and I am sweating and I'm/ betting you are, too!" in the chorus of "Pool Boyz", it's easy to imagine a roomful of people yelling it with her and revelling in the song's heat and pent-up lust.
There are moments on Over Easy where Diet Cig crosses the line from relatable young adult angst into petulant, immature whining. There are pieces of "Scene Sick" that are appealing on their own—the way its slow shuffle explodes into a speedy romp, the nicely varied percussive elements—but when tossed together with Luciano's powdered sugar vocal, it's painfully saccharine. It's also based around a complaint that's remarkably insular, namely the oppressiveness of the titular scene; it's a sentiment that likely resonates with people who have spent a lot of time embedded in the music industry, but without that context it hews a little closer to straightforward whining. Closer "Harvard", fuller and funnier and more dynamic, does a better job of conveying that kind of annoyance by focusing on a snobby, jerky ex.
There's obvious talent and light in these songs, though it's also obvious that Diet Cig are still in their infancy. (In spending time with the EP, I kept coming back to Eternal Summers' "Lightswitch" as a best case scenario for songs of this length and complexity: more colour, more depth, more space, more intensity.) There's promise here, but Over Easy barely scrapes the 10 minute mark, and the duo's next release will be the one that really proves their worth.


The Brooklyn band's newest is a vinyl-only LP consisting of two side-long tracks, both sharing a name with the album. It sounds uncalculated and uncontrived, as if Oneida's playing whatever they feel like playing at the moment.

A List of the Burning Mountains

Something about A List of the Burning Mountains makes me want to describe it as Oneida getting back to basics. The problem is I'm not sure exactly what "basics" would mean in the context of the Brooklyn band's vast sonic universe. Through a dozen albums in 15 years, they've covered a daunting amount of territory, darting between rock, noise, psych, drone, electronics, and minimalism. Their most recent project, the Thank Your Parents trilogy, was their most sprawling. It began with the kraut/Boredoms super-jam of 2008's Preteen Weaponry, swerved into the all-encompassing 2009 triple-LP Rated O (an even more accomplished statement than their 2002 masterpiece Each One Teach One), and ended last year with one of their most abstract releases, Absolute II.
So maybe there's no "basic" Oneida sound, and if so, that's part of what's made them such an interesting and unpredictable band. Their sonic shape-shifting continues on this vinyl-only offering, A List of the Burning Mountains. But compared to its conceptual predecessors, the album feels simple and frill-free. It consists of two side-long tracks, both sharing a name with the album. And it sounds uncalculated and uncontrived, as if Oneida's just playing whatever they feel like playing at the moment. The result is high-level improvised rock, infused with the assurance and proficiency that comes from 15 years of making so much varied music.
It's also infused with the expert drumming of Kid Millions, who this time out sounds like the band's unofficial leader. My guess is that every member had an equal, unspoken say in how this jam evolved, but Millions' busy beats are like wind blowing Oneida's clouds of noise and drone. When his playing is weighty and grounded, full of kick-drum drilling, his comrades dole out denser sounds; when his beats are more regular, the mix swerves toward rock riffs; and when he gets airier and more impulsive, the guitars lighten and the atmosphere expands. The band fuses these sections seamlessly; you don't really notice that they've made a shift until long after that shift actually began.
The peaks on A List of the Burning Mountains come when Oneida connects the dots so deftly that the differences between their individual contributions is nearly unnoticeable. My favorite instance comes about halfway through side two, when grinding feedback, swaths of electronic drone, and a churning low end all melt into one undulating ocean. Similar passages occur throughout-- take a dark section during side one that evokes Sunn O)))-style drone-metal, or the album's close, a free jazz sprint morphed into the echo of a symphony. But I have to admit I had to scan back through to remember those sections, because there's a unity to this album that's bigger and more indefinable than what individual moments can capture.
The impression I keep coming back to is how basic A List of the Burning Mountains is. As big and bold as it can sound, there's little here that's especially flashy or blatantly attention-seeking. The band never really gets into any obvious repetitions or motifs, content to run where they want to run and drift where they want to drift. Paradoxically, this understated approach means the album might be best appreciated by those most familiar with the band's specific internal language. But I can't imagine anyone checking out A List of the Burning Mountains and coming away unimpressed.


Alex Crossan’s debut album is a love letter to multicultural London that’s informed by the 21-year-old musician’s insular upbringing and abetted by a number of high-profile guests.

Mura Masa

Oscar Wilde once said, “The man who can dominate a London dinner table can dominate the world.” No wonder: A fast-paced haven for people of all nationalities, races, and faiths, the city itself is a kind of conversation between the four corners of the earth. Newly arriving to the metropolis can be a welcome assault to the senses, one that’s both confusing and exhilarating. For a young producer like Mura Masa (aka Alex Crossan), sponging up London’s global flavors and subcultures is part and parcel of the creative process. “It’s a big, confusing, beautiful thing,” he says of London, “and that’s the motivation behind my album too.” It’s an ambitious undertaking for a 21-year-old white kid to appoint himself the voice of multicultural Britain, but in an era in which terrorist attacks and nationalist populism have tested the UK’s inclusive ideals, drawing inspiration from the city’s diversity is a worthy—if admittedly somewhat precocious—way of expressing its resilient, future-forward spirit.
On his self-produced debut, Crossan works the city’s spidery Tube maps into an exhilarating electronic framework where the conflicting sounds of the modern-day Tower of Babel can harmoniously coexist. His interest in the city’s cartography is literal: “Messy Love” opens the album with the sounds of a city bus and deposits us at the stop for New Park Road, near Brixton. From there, Crossan traverses the various ends of his adopted home while also cruising through the genres that have filled its inhabitants’ headphones for the past few years, from big-beat hip-hop (“Nuggets”) to airhorn-assisted calypso (“Love$ick”) and harp-infused UK garage (“What If I Go?”). Some of his musical tourism is more tongue-in-cheek: He ventures as far as the South Pacific on “1 Night,” which adds a steel-drum melody to a sample from “Tahiti,” a kitschy piece of 1960s exotica by the Italian soundtrack composer Piero Piccioni, and sends Charli XCX bouncing about like a drunken reveler in a tiki bar. With so many high-profile guests along for the ride—including A$AP Rocky, Desiigner, Christine and the Queens, and Damon Albarn—there’s a risk that the album could become a top-heavy exercise in A&R. But Crossan never leans too hard on his hired talent as he pieces together house and hip-hop beats with sounds like marimba, steel pans, and kalimba.
Born an outlier himself, he spent most of his youth making music in a remote bedroom on the very white, insular island of Guernsey (population: 60,000), where the main local industries were finance and tourism and his nearest venue was five hours away by boat. The internet was his way out: He built his reputation on SoundCloud, and low-profile releases like 2014’s Soundtrack to a Death collection and 2015’s Someday Somewhere EP led to a production credit on Stormzy’s Gang Signs & Prayer. Like Disclosure’s Lawrence brothers, who began making music before they even reached clubbing age, Crossan is proof that going to raves isn’t a prerequisite for aspiring to start one. Being cut off only piqued his curiosity for all things electronic.
The first record he ever bought, Gorillaz’ Demon Days, was itself a genreless, guest-heavy hodgepodge, and Crossan’s millennial internet upbringing has similarly inspired him to seek connections across far-flung places. Mura Masa’s best moments arrive when he finds rejuvenating takes on old grooves. Take “NOTHING ELSE!,” a song written the day Prince died: Led by Tennessee transplant Jamie Lidell, it manages to channel both the Black Keys and Hercules and Love Affair. “Firefly” balances a finger-snap house beat with the feather-lite vocals of the East London R&B singer Nao. “helpline” pushes double-time drumming, with the faintest hint of classic punk, into sparkling future-garage territory. And on “Second 2 None,” Christine & the Queens' Héloïse Letissier is her exquisite ice-queen self, yet now over skittering drum ‘n’ bass beats. Coherent in spite of its range, Mura Masa never lets its jam-packed contents overshadow a vision that refuses to be boxed in.
It’s Damon Albarn’s willingness to let Crossan guide him, however, that makes for the most significant track on the record. Having his hero share vocals with him on the slow-paced, lovelorn “Blu” feels like a symbolic passing of the baton in the journey to a music without borders. The song embodies a melancholy that runs throughout Mura Masa—reflecting, perhaps, a sense of exhaustion from the challenges of being young and overwhelmed by the city. It’s a love song, but it’s also about the desire for communication and the need to be understood. Toward its close, a few bars of a cappella singing trail off into silence before the jumbled voices of the city rise in the distance. It sounds a lot like Crossan’s vision of home.


Captured in 2018, this live set leans heavily on the band’s last two albums but still plays like a greatest hits.

Arctic Monkeys: Live at the Royal Albert Hall

Live at the Royal Albert Hall

Arctic Monkeys’ career can be divided into the periods before and after AM, the smirking after-hours stomp that launched the group to previously unseen international success in 2013. Their boisterous riffs and louche anthems won over a new generation of fans—but in the aftermath, Alex Turner found himself struggling with writer’s block, only overcoming that hurdle by sequestering himself away with a piano. While the loungey follow-up Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino was divisive among fans upon its release, Arctic Monkeys’ new live album shows there’s an enduring throughline between the albums, anchored by Turner’s potent songwriting.
Live at the Royal Albert Hall captures a War Child charity gig that took place near the beginning of the Tranquility Base era, just a month after its release in 2018. (Proceeds from the album will also benefit War Child.) Though it leans most heavily on the aforementioned last two albums, the setlist scans like a collection of greatest hits. Across 90 minutes and 20 tracks, the Monkeys review their nearly two-decade career, refreshing old favorites and working out new material.
Arctic Monkeys were a compelling enough touring act prior to AM, but it was during their 2013-2014 run behind that album that the band truly came into their full powers. Hits from that period, like “Do I Wanna Know?” and “R U Mine?,” feel totally effortless here, irrespective of the occasional transposed key or vocal stumble to remind us that Turner is no longer the bright-eyed 19-year-old who recorded Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. He has a more worldly weariness to his vocal timbre now, which makes the older material feel satisfyingly lived-in.
Even though Tranquility Base was largely a studio project, built upon demos written by Turner while holed up in his Los Angeles home, the songs benefit from the limitations of the live environment. The acoustic guitar and synth overdubs in the slightly claustrophobic studio version of “Four Out of Five” blend into the background in favor of a far looser sequence, led by snarls of fuzz from guitarist Jamie Cook. And for Arctic Monkeys diehards who found their last studio album to be too severe a departure, Live at the Royal Albert Hall might help bring its strengths into focus. Turner’s breathy delivery on the studio version of “One Point Perspective” might scan as a put-on because his vocals are so isolated from the rest of the band, as he slurs into the slap-back. But his voice is commanding on the live version, sounding like a jaded Elton John.
At the time of the performance, Tranquility Base was recent enough that the concert actually marked the debut performance of album opener “Star Treatment,” Turner’s paean to the Strokes and Blade Runner. You wouldn’t know it was a new song from the cheers let loose after the opening chord. The fans might go crazy for Matt Helders’ blistering “Brianstorm” intro and the loping bassline of “Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?,” but they’re also right there singing along to newer tracks like “She Looks Like Fun.” Crowd noise can make or break a live album, and with 5,000-some-odd fans acting as de facto backing vocalists, Royal Albert Hall is a great example of the former. (As with any audio-only live document, the cheers can allude to untold stories; in the second verse of “Arabella,” the audience explodes after Turner neatly catches an avid fan’s castoff pair of tights.)
Compare Live at the Royal Albert Hall to Arctic Monkeys’ last official live release, 2008’s At the Apollo, and it’s apparent how significantly the band have grown in that time. After starting the decade in pursuit of a “more poppy” sound, they ended it by taking a chance on Turner’s conceptual songs about taco stands on the moon. From here, they’re free to pursue any direction they wish.


On the heels of a viral dance and a Drake feature, the Memphis rapper’s latest mixtape is a breakthrough that’s honest, clear, and incredibly fun.

Simi

There are no sure routes to rap stardom in the 21st century, but there are three tried-and-true mechanisms that give young rappers a puncher’s chance: viral dance crazes, out-and-out mixtape saturation, and the Drake feature. BlocBoy JB, an endlessly colorful 21-year-old from Memphis, has spent the past year leveraging all three. The number of tutorials and battles that sprung from last year’s “Shoot” is absolutely jarring, as is the breadth and pace of his work during a manic mixtape run, which saw him drop six records between June 2016 and September 2017. And then, of course, Aubrey: the pair’s collaboration, “Look Alive,” was inescapable earlier this year, conferring on Drake the cutting-edge sensibility he needs to replenish every album cycle, and on BlocBoy the sort of heat that can’t be engineered from a board room.
Simi, BlocBoy’s new mixtape, is named after one of his close friends, who was murdered two years ago. That sort of lingering pain colors the record which, on a textural level, skews toward the bright and danceable. It’s a beautifully executed tape, the type that could be played, uninterrupted, at a house party or in a strip club or on a long drive, alone. BlocBoy has a low drawl familiar to fans of Memphis rap, and often plays coy with the technical aspects of his music: he’ll stumble into a verse, and then lapse into two or three different, precisely syncopated flows. And he’s funny: he’ll crack jokes about Chris Rock and flip-flops and handing out Danimals to his doubters, or punctuate a line about selling drugs to white people with a shouted “A white!” The effect is a breakthrough record that’s honest, clear, and incredibly fun.
A significant portion of the production comes courtesy of Tay Keith, who crafted “Shoot” last summer. Simi has tremendous momentum because the songs, most of which articulate exactly one musical idea before moving on, work at a fast clip, giving BlocBoy rhythms just wonky enough to deploy the shifting, stop-and-start flows that are becoming his signature. “Wait”’s phrases loop back and wrap around one another; “No Chorus, Pt. 11”—which was given an instant-classic video this weekend—is BlocBoy at his most plainspoken, and even with few flourishes, his personality is immutable.
A cameo on a BlocBoy JB record, sunny yet serrated, seems to be a liberating exercise for other artists and Drake is not the only high-profile guest enlisted here. YG (“Nike Swoosh”) and 21 Savage (the remix of “Rover”) are capable; fellow Memphian Moneybagg Yo adds a guttural punch to the, uh, questionably titled “Asian Bitch.” And it must be said that the Floridian viral star Lil Pump is far more acrobatic on “Nun of Dat” than he has been on any of his solo material.
BlocBoy’s “Shoot” dance most recently resurfaced in “This Is America,” Childish Gambino’s ambitiously unsubtle new music video. (BlocBoy’s ad-libs are also included in the background of the song.) Throughout, its star is either dancing—gliding through a centuries-long revue—or murdering people, disposing of his weapons with a delicate care. At its end, he’s fleeing, eyes wide, from a murderous police—the same police that was brutalizing black men and women in the background while Donald Glover and his troupe interpolated some viral dances, including “Shoot.”
The implication—well, one of the implications—is that Americans, especially white Americans, are eager to gobble up black America’s cultural exports while ignoring the social and political contexts that black Americans are forced to endure. What gives BlocBoy’s music its replayability is that those moods and elements bleed into one another. Take “Good Day,” which is danceable but grim, lighthearted but packed with dread. “I just wanna have a good day” is loaded, if you want it to be. There are bright moments for trying times and more than a little menace.


Completed after the death of her producer, collaborator, and close friend, the New York singer-songwriter’s album envisions mourning as a form of meditative practice and constant renewal.

The Greater Wings

Julie Byrne became a shared secret among music obsessives with 2014’s Rooms With Walls and Windows, a beguiling compilation of two earlier cassettes that blurred the edges of folk and ambient in the manner of Grouper and early Cat Power. She invoked the great outdoors and the open road on her breakthrough, 2017’s Not Even Happiness, which cleared away the lo-fi murk and added graceful strings to serene explorations of intimacy and aloneness more reminiscent of psychedelic folkies like Linda Perhacs and Vashti Bunyan. Six years later, the itinerant Buffalo, New York, singer-songwriter incorporates harp, synth, and piano alongside her nimbly fingerpicked guitar and dusky vocals; the broader palette and cosmic scope—she invokes “distant galaxies” in the first verse—feel like a logical progression of her astral folk.
Byrne’s new album is her most stunning yet; it is also the product of almost unthinkable circumstances. In June 2021, halfway through the making of the album, her producer, synth player, and longtime collaborator Eric Littmann—who was integral in sculpting the tranquil sound world of Not Even Happiness and receives a dedication of endless, unconditional love in its liner notes—died unexpectedly at the age of 31. Largely written before Littmann’s passing and eventually completed with producer Alex Somers, who has skillfully conjured lush atmospheres on recordings by Julianna Barwick and Sigur Rós’s Jónsi, The Greater Wings feels like a leap forward. The songs honor their late co-creator less through melancholy than a hungry attentiveness to the minutiae of desire, loss, and memory. This is mourning as a form of meditative practice, of constant renewal. From an artist who can quote Leonard Cohen’s poetry by heart, here’s an album at which that painstaking observer of love and death might’ve tipped his fedora; it’s also limpid and bountiful enough that it could’ve been marketed under German avant-garde jazz label ECM’s 1970s motto, “the most beautiful sound next to silence.”
Despite the lengthy break between albums, The Greater Wings picks up right where Not Even Happiness left off with its last song, “I Live Now as a Singer,” which introduced sparkling synthesizer as Byrne peered beyond the natural blue skies. “At night beneath the universe, you walk with me/Shall I be ever near the edge of your mystery,” she sang at the record’s close. Littmann’s vintage Prophet synth ripples on “Summer Glass,” whose lyrics are so precise, so stuffed with vivid imagery, and so eccentrically phrased. There’s the joint lit with the end of a cigarette, the vision of the narrator’s skin one day turning to dust so that she may “travel again,” the way Byrne saves the bittersweet title image—“the shape of your hand left in the dust of summer glass”—until the penultimate line. Two phrases zero in on the album’s main preoccupations: “You are the family that I chose,” Byrne declares before an exquisite instrumental bridge, and then, “I want to be whole enough to risk again,” she sings as the song ends.
Few could be entirely whole after losing a family member, chosen or otherwise, but The Greater Wings gleams through the cracks. Byrne’s willingness to take a fresh plunge especially pays off on “Moonless,” self-described as both “a breakup song” and her first song written on the piano. With Marilu Donovan’s harp and Jake Falby’s strings adorning Byrne’s keys and unusually rich vocals, the production has the incantatory power of Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis. The lyrics follow suit in their concise abundance, from “that night at the old hotel” where Byrne’s narrator found “whatever eternity is” to her multivalent reclamation of self, “I’m not waiting for your love.” She ventures further on “Hope’s Return,” a cavernous, strummy reworking of a 2020 collaboration with experimental artist Jefre Cantu-Ledesma in which Somers makes the unexpected, very Sigur Rós-like decision to play acoustic guitar with a violin bow. Or take “Conversation Is a Flowstate,” a gauzy rebuke to a disrespectful romantic partner—an unspecified musician of prominence—that’s once again overstuffed with quotables (“I got blood on the sheets, it’s all right,” she sings, with the gnomic intensity of Destroyer’s Dan Bejar). None of this wayfaring is exactly out of character for Byrne: Following immediately after “Summer Glass,” “Summer’s End” dives headlong into headiness with harp glissandi and lolling chimes, but as a drifting mid-album instrumental it’s not unlike Not Even Happiness’ “Interlude.”
Byrne’s deft fingerstyle acoustic guitar also returns, brilliantly. The opening title track, a gorgeous elegy to Littmann, is silvery chamber folk of Nick Drake proportions: With great economy, Byrne alludes to their earliest shows together before gesturing toward her heartbreakingly positive vision of mourning when she sings, “I hope never to arrive here with nothing new to show you.” Littmann’s absence also looms over “Portrait of a Clear Day,” where Byrne sings in an aphoristic mode, “Love affirms the pain of life.” But wry regret flickers on another guitar-centered song, “Flare” (“I could have done better/You’re not the only one”), while “Lightning Comes Up From the Ground” aches with physical longing (“I tell you now what for so long I did not say/If I have no right to want you, I want you anyway”). This is still the same earnest seeker who once sang, “I’ve seen a double rainbow, I got a complicated soul,” but The Greater Wings is no funeral, and Byrne’s calm assurance renders her words irresistibly commanding.
The Greater Wings ends with an outlier. “Death Is the Diamond” is reportedly the only song on the album that was completely written after Littmann’s death. After a luminous ambient introduction, it is a stark piano ballad cloaked in tape hiss, Byrne’s formidable voice at its most raw. It’s a gut-wrenching final tribute to Littmann, a warm nod to Byrne’s surviving family of choice, and a dazzling encapsulation of Byrne’s implicit argument that love means constantly becoming new. “Alive, moving through dusk/Alive, if only once/You make me feel like the prom queen that I never was,” she sings. In moments of vulnerability like this, Byrne glimpses the sublime.


Retribution Gospel Choir's third album features just two songs, each in the neighborhood of 20 minutes. The trio have finally made a record worthy of a Crazy Horse-inspired Midwestern rock band that includes two-thirds of Low.

3

With 3, Retribution Gospel Choir have finally made a record worthy of a Crazy Horse-inspired Midwestern rock band featuring two-thirds of Low. That's not a slam against RGC's previous releases, just that Retribution Gospel Choir, 2, and last year's aggressively minor The Revolution EP were likeable stabs at classic-rock posturing that never really took. For all the sincere affection Alan Sparhawk clearly has for heavy-riffing songs rooted in AOR conventions-- he even dug out a cowbell for The Revolution-- it always seemed more like play-acting than a truly natural guise. There was no question about his desire to write visceral rock songs; what was debatable was whether he was any good at it.
3 is the ultimate RGC record, and the ultimate departure, composed of just two songs-- recorded live in the studio in one take-- that each run in the neighborhood of 20 minutes. It's a bit of a shock coming after The Revolution, the slickest and hookiest RGC record to date, not to mention the shtickiest. The soft-rock affectations of recent Low records like 2011's C'mon got the funhouse mirror treatment on The Revolution, with RGC verging awkwardly on full-blown power-pop and self-conscious 70s rock cheese. 3 is a wilder, woolier, and yet more coherent beast.
Just when RGC seemed to be turning into a borderline jokey chaser for Sparhawk's more thoughtful work in Low, 3 takes a sharp 180-degree turn toward some of the deepest, most exploratory music he's yet made under the moniker. It satisfies Sparhawk's need to crank up the amps away from Low while at the same time retaining the mastery of atmosphere and subtly evolving soundscapes that distinguishes his better known band. "Can't Walk Out" is a fearsome, nearly wordless squall of freeform fury, with Sparhawk oscillating between barely contained chaos and a hard-charging groove that swings between Live at Leeds and A Tribute to Jack Johnson. The point of RGC until now has been about releasing the energy that Low keeps under wraps. But "Can't Walk Out" builds a head of steam and turns it in on itself; the tension only increases as Sparhawk's guitar rages over the stormy, thoroughly submerged rhythms supplied by bassist Steve Garrington and drummer Eric Pollard. The final result is a thing of thrilling, terrifying beauty, like a tornado held on the horizon at a safe distance.
The other track, "Seven", is relatively catchy, though it goes on for a minute longer. "Seven" occasionally wanders back to a pretty folk-rock chorus that's as bleary-eyed as the simple melody that RGC mangles, mends, and mangles again during a sprawling, extemporaneous jam. The wobbly guitar lines that drop into the mix unmistakably belong to special guest star Nels Cline, who exhibits a similar telepathy with Sparhawk that he shares on-stage with Jeff Tweedy in Wilco. For long, wondrous stretches in the back half of "Seven", Cline and Sparhawk lock in to form a breathtaking duet of feedback and slow-motion soloing.
The obvious companion to 3 is last year's Neil Young and Crazy Horse double-LP, Psychedelic Pill. Sparhawk certainly isn't afraid to let his songs go on as long as Young does, and his excellent guitar playing is worthy of comparison to one of rock's all-time great sludgy shape-shifters. But 3 also warrants a nod to Low; it's surprising how well the high points of this record line up with Low's strong suits.
The best parts of Low albums often occur in the spaces between the music; few bands are as good about not filling every cubic inch with sound, allowing the listener to settle in and find their own place inside the songs. Retribution Gospel Choir have achieved the same quality on 3; the landscape is thornier, but equally vast, formless, and inviting for ample exploring over multiple listens. Before now, Retribution Gospel Choir records were a little too straight-forward, spilling all of the information they had to offer too quickly. On 3, they've turned up the noise without spoiling the mystery.


The Danish musician’s vibrant, uncanny new album gives alt-rock a hyperreal gleam.

Suntub

On her debut album, Skinned, ML Buch framed wry observations about modern life in futuristic, subtly off-kilter electronic pop. She was touching screens, mulling over online obsessions, contemplating the nexus of technology and desire. Her new album, Suntub, focuses on more abstract and corporeal themes—onomatopoeic words, “strange curves,” elemental forms like sun and sea and wind—teeming with the nitid detail of a Gregory Crewdson tableau. More than anything, Buch seems consumed with the mysteries of biology and the mazelike dimensions of human viscera. “Can I melt in algal bloom/Leak from bladder flower wombs,” she asks on “Solid,” stacking vocal harmonies over neo-grunge guitar. Across three different songs, she sings, respectively, of “flesh on air,” a “fleshless hand,” and a “flesh rag” in a “flesh bag.”
Accompanying this shift from URL to IRL, Skinned’s overtly electronic elements—vaporwave synths, atmospheric sound design, Auto-Tuned choruses—have largely disappeared, replaced by sparkling guitars, frictionless rock drumming, and vocal melodies rendered with airbrushed clarity. Buch leans further into emulating the “dad rock” of blockbuster acts like Dire Straits and the Police: Traces of Roxy Music’s DNA are evident in the chromium glow of her guitar tone, along with the fuzz of shoegaze and the crunch of ’90s indie. She even indulges in a little ersatz vinyl scratching. But more often than not, the reference points feel like a copy of a copy of a copy, emulated so many times that the original inspiration is impossible to identify, leaving only a vague feeling of deja vu.
To create her striking, ultra-vibrant sound—steeped in alt-rock naturalism yet wearing an uncanny sheen—Buch used a number of unusual techniques, including seven-stringed and fretless guitars. She apparently recorded her vocals inside her car, and reamped her instruments through spaces like a swimming pool and a wood-paneled sauna, but her production doesn’t offer a tangible sense of physical space: In an odd twist, it offers the suggestion of a virtual world, something conjured up entirely within the confines of her computer. There’s not a hair out of place in these immaculately polished assemblages. They’re almost too flawless—the lines unnaturally sharp, the colors unnaturally vivid, the rhythms as steady as HDTV with motion smoothing turned on. Yet that hyperreal gleam is also what gives them their magnetism.
Nowhere is the album’s curious airlessness more palpable than in Buch’s vocals. They sound weirdly placeless, perhaps even sourceless—smooth, free of vibrato, soft yet not quite breathy. But where such tactics might have been used to create a distancing effect, Buch’s unblemished tone and intuitive melodic turns never sound arch, affected, or ironic. Her tone may be cool, but her music is bathed in a warm, radiant glow. A similar paradox characterizes the album itself, which swaps the artificial veneer of Skinned for a deeper and more mysterious form of artifice. Outwardly, Suntub is so glossy that it suggests a kind of normcore, a pastiche of gentle alt-rock. Below the surface, however, Buch’s strange curves and fleshless hands point in a far more cryptic direction.


Sonic Youth followed their first full LP, Confusion Is Sex, with a pitch-black, punishing take on Americana titled after, of all things, a Creedence Clearwater Revival song. The newly reissued Bad Moon Rising is their most explicitly sexual album, and among their darkest, exploring the collision of America's obsession with death with the hopeful ecstasies of the hippie generation.

Bad Moon Rising

On their first LP Confusion Is Sex, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, and Lee Ranaldo established their reputation—noise-obsessed, acerbic, in thrall to subversion and half in love with nihilism. So it came as a surprise that they followed it up with a pitch-black, punishing take on Americana titled after, of all things, a Creedence Clearwater Revival song. Its timing was ripe, arriving amidst the culture wars of the Reagan era: Gordon and Moore cast a shadowy portrait slicked in sweat and blood, not unlike the nightmarish caricatures of American institutions you often saw on the cover art for hardcore bands.
But the band’s fury ran deeper than that. As Gordon recalls in her recent memoir Girl in a Band: "I ... preferred to sing about the darkness shimmering beneath the shiny quilt of American pop culture"—more specifically, "the westward pull, the American romance with death," as well as the collision of this all-American death-drive with the hopeful ecstasies of the hippie generation. Where Time Life Books was busy commemorating and canonizing Woodstock, Gordon and Moore raised up the leering specter of Charles Manson, highlighting the thin lines separating free love from violent sexual anarchy, and how such spaces are often exploited to attain power.
Bad Moon Rising is obsessed with sex and power, specifically with how one informs the other. It is the band’s most explicitly sexual album, and among its darkest. "I Love Her All the Time", "I’m Insane", and "Halloween" (a bonus track that’s since become standard on all CD versions of the album) develop female subjects as supplicants to male authority figures, ceding their bodies (and therefore, their identities) to them as if there’s no other choice. "She’s on my side," Moore coolly says of his strung-out paramour on "I Love Her All the Time", repeating the song’s title with the unsavory enthusiasm of a cult leader who’s finally cracked the code. On "Halloween", Gordon struggles to identify just what it is that makes her succumb to a man’s wiles, finally theorizing "it’s the devil in me": the female sex drive, corrupted.
Bad Moon Rising is not so much a collection of songs as it is an extended, unending uproar, seamless in sound and theme.  This is partially due to the band’s recording strategy, which translated the ebb-and-flow of their live show at the time into a singular composition. At this point in their career, Sonic Youth didn’t have guitar techs to assist during shows, and long stretches of feedback between songs allowed them time to tune. On the album, this approach lends itself well to a constantly shifting tableau of American nightmares, beginning with the primordial fury of "Brave Men Run (In My Family)" and barreling towards its final destination: Manson’s Death Valley and the terror of Helter Skelter.
In Bad Moon Rising’s world, the country’s loss of innocence—and its sexual corruption—began with an assault, chronicled in the terrifying "Ghost Bitch". Moore sounds possessed on the following, mournful track, "I’m Insane", a sinister piece assembled entirely of fragments from pulp novels like "a steaming swamp," "murdered angels," and the head-scratching "inside my head my dog’s a bear." It’s less a song and more the no wave aural equivalent of refrigerator magnet poetry, but it functions remarkably well within the album’s overarching narrative.
But what happens when women reclaim their bodies and fight back? Years before riot grrrl, "Flower" (a bonus track released after Bad Moon Rising alongside "Halloween" on 12” and added to the album in subsequent reissues) encapsulated the sex-positive sentiments, as well as the noise, of the forthcoming movement. Gordon's chanted manifesto, delivered over a paranoid, unstable rumble, urges us to "support the power of women" by "us[ing] the power of man." The nature of this power, of course, is sex, but Gordon’s vision encompasses more than the act itself; her culminating directive of "Use the word/ FUCK!" commands a recognition of women as carnal, sexual beings. "The word is love," she adds, completing a circular logic proof of sorts: Power is sex, but sex is love; love is universal, so universal recognition of sex has the ability to empower all. Granted, "Flower" might scan as slightly hippie-dippy next to Kathleen Hanna’s acerbic prose, but its mangled punk instrumentation and feminist politics set a precedent.
Bad Moon Rising reaches both its climax and conclusion with the Manson-inspired madness of "Death Valley ’69", Moore’s infamous duet with Lydia Lunch, and the closest the album comes to producing a viable single. A tortured yell drags the record out of the doldrums of the preceding "Justice Is Might" and into a busted-up Chevy parked in Death Valley on some dead night, in the Summer of Love. Moore and Lunch don’t try to harmonize or sing on key, because their minds aren’t on the melody; they wail over and under one another like coyotes in heat. A single glance over the lyrics suggests another instance of male-on-female violence ("She started to holler/ I didn't wanna/ But she started to holler/ So I had to hit it"). And yet, the ecstasy with which Lunch vocalizes all but says "This is a game, I’m trying to get you, and I’m winning." The balance of power shifts once more as Lunch unleashes that orgasmic shriek at song's end: a brilliant imitation of the whimpering guitars, a final paean to chaos before the fade to black.
Despite its compelling aesthetic, Bad Moon Rising suffers from a few technical shortcomings which become more evident in this remastering, specifically Bob Bert’s tom-heavy approach to the drums. They play a critical role in conveying the primal energy coursing through "Brave Men Run (In My Family)" and "Society Is a Hole", but the atmospheric boost quickly wears thin: not just because he sounds like he’s drumming with crab mallets, but because he can’t be bothered to beef up his fills or do little more than the bare minimum. One can’t help but long for the frenzied kit work of Steve Shelley, the hardcore-schooled, improvisatory percussionist who succeeded Bert. Additionally, your mileage may vary where vocal melodies, particularly Moore’s, are concerned; his grating refrains on "Society Is a Hole" and "I Love Her All the Time" show he hadn’t yet developed the tightness and control he would exhibit later. That said, this dissonance is a defining aspect of early Sonic Youth albums, and some might find it refreshing compared to the straitlaced sound of, say, "Incinerate".
Since its release, Bad Moon Rising has left behind many legacies. Thanks to the mangled mass of the guitars, as well as the lack of anthemic verse-chorus-verses structure that dominated Daydream Nation and Goo, the LP is regarded by many as Sonic Youth's most "difficult" album. Fans of contemporary acts like Swans (who Sonic Youth toured with prior to the Bad Moon Rising sessions) might find in the record’s structure a source of catharsis and narrative strength. Those who became fans post Daydream Nation, meanwhile, will need to re-acclimate themselves to the pitch-black soundscapes. And while the task may seem imposing, it’s also immediate and engrossing; after being immersed in this album's world, it’s jarring to return to the real one—and perhaps, by extension, Sonic Youth’s subsequent catalog, which never quite revisited the sheer alienation of Bad Moon Rising.


Noel Gallagher’s latest is the most ambitious of his solo releases, internalizing the heyday of late ’90s Britpop while sounding both urgent and absurd to mostly great effect.

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds: Who Built the Moon?

Who Built the Moon?

They were hard-pressed to top last year’s Potato Wars showdown, but on this season of every Britpop enthusiast’s favorite reality show, The Gallaghers, we’ve been treated to the most dramatic story arc yet. For the first time in their post-Oasis careers, Liam and Noel have each released albums within weeks of each other, setting up the proverbial WrestleMania of rock’s greatest sibling rivalry. Alas, it remains to be seen whether Noel’s latest record with current backing band the High Flying Birds, Who Built the Moon?, will match the chart performance of Liam’s recent solo effort, As You Were, which debuted at No. 1 in the UK. But in the real arena where winners are made and losers are shamed in 2017—i.e., Twitter—Liam has been putting on a clinic, delivering some his best material ever in the wake of what will go down in Gallaghers lore as Scissorsgate.
For his part, Noel seems to be heeding the lesson learned from Oasis’ rivalry with Blur throughout the ’90s. Only, in this case, he’s decided it’s better to be Blur—to brush off the nasty insults, disengage from the war of words, and just focus on making far more interesting records. Where Liam’s As You Were is essentially the perfunctory Fauxasis album that his old band would’ve churned out this year had they slogged it out this far, Who Built the Moon? feels like an attempt to rewrite their post-Morning Glory history.
The album imagines an alternate late-’90s where, instead of trying to make a cocaine-clouded update of Magical Mystery Tour, Noel deeply internalized the adventurous music being made by his peers in Primal Scream, Spiritualized, Death in Vegas, the Beta Band, and David Holmes (whom he wisely taps to be his producer this time out). The new album’s opening track, “Fort Knox” presents an immediate study in contrasts. Like the kick-off to 2000’s Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, it’s more of a crowd-rousing entrance theme than a proper song—but instead of bluesy guitar riffage, we hear screeching cello drones, clanging percussion, gospel chants, a hip-hop-scuffed backbeat, the relentless drill of a jackhammer, and a female backing singer’s ecstatic wordless wails. Call it “Kama Sutra in the Bushes.”
Sure, there are few prizes for being on the cutting edge of circa-1997 British rock in 2017, but Who Built the Moon? abounds with urgency and absurdity—qualities that were sorely lacking on the Birds’ previous albums. For the first time in a long while, Noel sounds like he’s genuinely having a blast, adopting a motor-mouthed monotone on the glam-slammed rumble “Holy Mountain” as if he were Plastic Bertrand doing “Diamond Dogs,” and blissfully skating atop the glacial motorik surface of “She Taught Me How to Fly.” And just as the skittering psych-pop of “It’s a Beautiful World” seems like it’s about to dissolve into the ether, he summons guest vocalist Charlotte Marionneau of indie-pop enigmas Le Volume Courbe to deliver a surprise megaphoned address that revives the song as a Francophone answer to “6 A.M. Jullandar Shere” by former Oasis tourmates Cornershop.
Who Built the Moon? feels like the sort of album where Noel spent way more time mapping out the sounds than writing the lyrics. But “Keep on Reaching” whips up enough manic, soul-stomping gusto to forgive its obvious Stevie Wonder swipes (”Keep on reaching out for that higher ground”), while “Be Careful What You Wish For” oozes enough creeping menace to elevate its title from clichéd phrase to prophetic threat. Alas, in the album’s closing stretch, Noel attempts to inject the proceedings with some conceptual gravitas, deploying a pair of moody instrumentals (dubbed “Interlude” and “End Credits”) to bookend the winsome, swashbuckling pop of “If Love Is the Law” and the climactic foreboding ballad “The Man Who Built the Moon.” With no discernible logic holding it all together, the result is a more of an awkwardly fitting framework than a proper song suite, though at the very least, the latter track’s ominous, In the Court of the Crimson King-style grandeur does raise the not-unwelcome notion of Noel going full prog.
But more than any particular musical experiment, the best gauge of Gallagher’s growth on Who Built the Moon? is the song that didn’t make the cut. Included as a bonus track, “Dead in the Water” is a quintessential Noel solo strummer, an unplugged transmission from the same dark night of the soul that yielded acoustic Oasis outliers like “Talk Tonight.” It’s a great song, right up there with Oasis’ best B-sides. But it’s one whose raw emotion and bare-bones simplicity represent low hanging fruit on the High Flying Birds’ current skyward path.


The full-length from singer-songwriter David Kitt moves from moody nighttime flickers to jazz-rooted deep house with Kitt’s pop-focused voice front and center.

From Night to Night

Despite the handle of New Jackson, Dublin singer-songwriter David Kitt has been on the scene nearly twenty years. Kitt’s CV includes albums on Rough Trade and Blanco Y Negro, as well as a stint in Tindersticks’ touring band and on 2010 album Falling Down a Mountain. But Kitt also became enchanted with making his own infectious house tracks and released a vocoder-laced EP at the end of 2011. Eight singles have followed on esteemed labels like Permanent Vacation and Hivern Discs.
From Night to Night marks Kitt’s first full-length on the All City Records, a curious Irish imprint that has released albums from breaks-obsessed locals, Parisian boogie producer Onra, as well as L.A. beatmakers like Knxwledge, Daedelus, and Ras_G. That sort of eclecticism plays out on From Night to Night, as New Jackson ranges from moody nighttime flickers to jazz-rooted deep house over its eleven tracks. Opener “Ghost Stomp” has its beat move from muffled to clarified, with bits of worming acid lines and echoing piano blipping into view, but never overtaking the track.
While he has the evident acumen for putting a beat together, where Kitt stands apart is with his own voice and years writing songs. He puts his vocals forward on the title track, a rubbery number with crisp hi-hats. Kitt’s delivery brings to mind Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard, in that it’s aware of and embracing its schlubby, everyman qualities, rather than the traditional, transportive vocalists of dance music’s heritage. He delivers lines like “raging at the details” in a deadpan, singing the refrain with a cautious nudge to a higher register. But Kitt’s voice has a tendency to dampen the effectiveness of his productions, drooping across the otherwise charming bits of sax and woodwind on “Put the Love in It” and unnecessarily interrupting the buzz of instrumental “Blaze All Day.”
Using minutely slivered samples reminiscent of Todd Edwards’ work on Daft Punk’s “Face to Face,” “SP2” stands out as one of the album’s most energetic tracks. Confetti’d bits of strummed acoustic guitar, electro drips and hiccupping voices flit about before Kitt’s kick makes them all cohere. While again using little snippets of sound, Kitt takes a different tack for “On Solid Air,” preferring gurgling ambience and the kind of echoplexed effects on bowed cello that hints at experimental folkie John Martyn’s own Solid Air. Bits of Four Tet-like chimes provide the pulse instead of a programmed beat, giving the track’s glitches and sawed strings a decidedly dreamy air.
From Night to Night’s dynamism picks up as the album goes deeper, leading to the standout “Anya’s Piano.” Beginning with a ruminative loop of stand-up bass that seems to stretch and expand with each successive pass, Kitt puts a skipping snare and watery synth behind it. It may namecheck that echoing bit of piano, but it’s when a horn line winds its way around the track that the track bursts into full bloom. And when Kitt layers more of the horn, it soon looses itself from gravity and elegantly floats through the track, all the elements of the song conveying the sense of suspension in its last minute.
The album’s longest tracks come near the end. The busy, burbling “After Midnight in a Perfect World” may hearken back to DJ Shadow’s track from Endtroducing..., but this nearly 11-minute epic races at a near-techno pace. It sounds like Kitt borrowed Pantha du Prince’s windchimes, but rather than aim for that German’s sterile sense of perfection, he adds vocodered growls, harpsichord and outbursts of snare. Kitt wisely goes with his 2013 single, “Of a Thousand Leaves.” A sidelong slice that brings to mind Caribou’s more wistful productions, it soon toughens with a house beat, with Kitt drizzling more vocoder and strings that impart a bit of drama as the track goes on. Though for a new album, there’s something not wholly satisfying in New Jackson closing it out by resorting to something old.


The iconoclastic rappers collide on a JPEG-produced joint album that plays things fast and loose.

JPEGMAFIA / Danny Brown: Scaring the Hoes

Scaring the Hoes

Danny Brown likes to tell the story of how he almost signed with G-Unit. In 2010, around the time of The Hybrid’s breakthrough, the Detroit rapper was palling around with Tony Yayo, workshopping a joint project. 50 Cent liked what he heard, but couldn’t brook the thought of a labelmate who dressed like an emo rocker. Brown’s rhymes were hard, but alas, his jeans were slim—he was on his own. By 2015, of course, 50’s pants were tighter than a drumhead. As G-Unit retreated into the nostalgia circuit, Brown’s blog-era technical showcases gave way to mosh-pit delirium and queasy, kaleidoscopic confessionals, each installment presaging a new avant-garde.
JPEGMAFIA, a genre-straddling iconoclast himself, shares Brown’s pharmaceutical appetites and distaste for culture-industry dross. A veteran of the U.S. Air Force and Baltimore punk clubs, he’s cultivated a comparably broad audience by contrasting frenetic glitch-hop with meme-fluent snark. Their collaborative full-length, Scaring the Hoes, produced entirely by JPEG, is a vehicle for the duo’s irreverent humor and energy that captures a pair of spitballing pranksters who nevertheless maintain perfect GPAs.
In colloquial parlance, “you’re scaring the hoes” is a request to ease up on the sanctimony. It’s a rejoinder for when Canibus stacks five-syllable adverbs on top of one another, for when Common cosplays as a lost Last Poet. The album title is a winking admission: Brown and JPEG are hardly traditionalists, yet their intensity and devotion to mechanics make them impervious to casual playlisting. On the title track, JPEG assumes the perspective of a vexed A&R, rapping over a dissonant sax instrumental: “Play something for the bitches/How the fuck you s’posed to make money off this shit?” He wrangles warped samples into thundering drum patterns on “Lean Beef Patty” and “Steppa Pig,” garnishing the bass kicks with screaming synths. The instrumentation lends the arrangements an industrial quality, but the lurching verse structures are hypnotic.
Brown meets JPEG’s tempos with alacrity, flashing a singsong flow on “Orange Juice Jones” and mirroring the jittery horn fanfare of “Burfict!” The short bursts don’t provide space for Brown to stretch his limbs, yet he remains a virtuoso in miniature: on “HOE (Heaven on Earth),” his desperate narrator reaches out to a therapist, watching forlornly as their iMessage thread turns from blue to green. JPEG’s lower vocal register rings clear, but the mix doesn’t do Brown many favors. On “Fentanyl Tester,” his verses are slathered in unflattering reverb, and the “Milkshake” flip obscures his couplets. Brown’s erratic technique is riveting as ever, but his reedy voice calls for delicacy; on JPEG’s louder productions, the rappers sound like they’re on opposite ends of a shaky long-distance connection.
One song on Scaring the Hoes is pointedly titled “Run the Jewels.” Killer Mike and El-P’s collaboration is a ready analog for the way Brown and JPEG collapse satire and shock-jock dissent into an intoxicating headrush. On “Steppa Pig,” a demolition derby of party drugs and anti-establishment insolence, JPEG celebrates his liberation from the rat race: “It’s like I’ve been workin’ for crumbs, now I’m feelin’ free as my speech.” Still, Scaring the Hoes is only glancingly political. JPEG refers to himself interchangeably as “Black AOC” and “Black Marjorie Taylor Greene”; he denounces Elon Musk and bemoans the dilapidation of Twitter. The defiance is more identity than statement, the topical headline-skimming all but guaranteeing a brief shelf life.
On a recent podcast, Brown discussed the costly process of clearing instrumental samples for 2016’s Atrocity Exhibition. “I would delete Atrocity Exhibition in a heartbeat,” he confessed. “I spent $70,000 on samples and the motherfucker sold 7,000 the first week.” Unlike that album, Scaring the Hoes isn’t quite in conversation with its source material. JPEG maintains a liberal sampling philosophy, drawing from gospel records and hits by Kelis, Mario Winans, and LL Cool J. On “Lean Beef Patty,” the “I Need a Girl (Part Two)” chorus is subsumed by pounding synths; “Run the Jewels” makes similarly short work of “Going Back to Cali,” burying the horns beneath an avalanche of drums and double-tracked vocals. The found-elements approach allows the duo to play loose with institutional deference, threshing familiar sounds in an atmospheric barrage. Brown and JPEG are laughing with them, but they’re also laughing at them.


Horse Feathers’ fifth album finds the Portland chamber-folk group tinkering with new sounds, major keys, faster tempos, and different emotional textures. Their palette is more expansive and more ambitious, drawing elements from tango and doo-wop, jazz and '50s pop.

So It Is With Us

There’s no way Horse Feathers could live up to a song title like “Violently Wild”, the track that opens their fifth album. Over the last decade the Portland chamber-folk group, led by singer-songwriter Justin Ringle, has perfected a gently gothic sound reliant on stringed instruments, painstaking compositions, and muted emotions, as though in direct opposition to the strummy histrionics of the Lumineers and Mumford & Sons. There’s always been something dignified in Horse Feathers’ restraint, even if that didn’t make them an especially exciting band to follow. And the wear of so many depressive tunes apparently began to weigh on Ringle, who followed up the tour for 2012’s Cynic’s New Year with an 18-month hiatus from music.
That break was productive, as So It Is With Us finds Horse Feathers tinkering with new sounds, major keys, faster tempos, and different emotional textures. There are even drums here. So, all things being relative, “Violently Wild” is certainly the most violently wild the band has ever been. Rather than mopey, Ringle’s vocals are heraldic. The music is more celebratory than mournful. The rhythm section sounds like it can actually hold a groove and make the song a kinetic show opener or closer. It’s a joyful noise: Horse Feathers perform the song like they’ve just discovered a new superpower.
On each of their four previous albums, all except debut Words Are Dead released on Kill Rock Stars, Horse Feathers have emphasized rigid song structures and careful arrangements that blend guitar, violin, cello, and voice into melancholy rural song suites. Broadening the tone of the music has opened up new possibilities, which means Horse Feathers play more like a band and less like a Ringle solo project. Their palette is more expansive and more ambitious, drawing elements from tango and doo-wop, jazz and '50s pop. They plays songs like “Old Media” and “Small Melody” with real enthusiasm. “Dead End Thanks” in particular thrums with energy, as Nathan Crockett’s violin spirals around Dustin Dybvig’s piano and pulls the song in unexpected directions.
This is still a Horse Feathers album, which means that underneath the liveliness lurks the same darkness that has informed all of the group’s material. “We’re out of tune, you’ll be gone, and I’ll be leaving soon,” Ringle promises on the sing-along chorus to “Violently Wild”, singing darkly of marriage and commitment and the inevitable end that quells all arguments. Throughout his tenure, Ringle has written eloquently—sometimes too eloquently—about gnawing disaffection and thwarted desires, but the relative sunniness of the music on So It Is With Us suggests higher stakes: The dark makes the lighter sound lighter, and the light makes the dark sound darker.
“Tell me why do you try hangin’ on?” Ringle asks on “Why Do I Try” sounding like a man who might just stop. It’s arguably the most downcast song on the album, as he wonders about the fate of his children, yet it’s one of the band’s most subtly adventurous arrangements. Ringle lays down sharp staccato guitar licks that summon Steve Cropper, and the band moves with a steadiness that gives the song a hymnlike feel, at least until the woozy piano comes in like the ghost of Buddy Holly. As Ringle hits the high notes on the bridge, the song reveals itself as Pacific Northwest soul—which is something completely unexpected from Horse Feathers and a fine answer to the song’s central question. He sounds like a man with renewed faith.


J Dilla's second posthumous album features 21 tracks of classically raw Motor City rap. Unlike his first posthumous collection, most of the tracks on Rebirth have rappers on them, a coterie of Detroit MCs who double as Dilla worshippers.

Rebirth of Detroit

*"Dilla was synonymous with Detroit for all of us and all of us kind of regarded him as a mythic figure." --*Eothen Alapatt, General Manager and A&R, Stones Throw Records
Rebirth of Detroit, J Dilla's second posthumous album, is a grandiose reclamation, as Detroit wraps the venerated MC and production pioneer into an inescapable bear hug. He's made, once again, into the figurehead and totem for the once-great city. The album holds 21 tracks of classically raw Motor City rap, and all the good and bad that comes with that mythic Michigan territory. Unlike his first posthumous collection, 2009's Jay Stay Paid, most of the tracks on Rebirth have rappers on them, a coterie of Detroit MC's who double as Dilla worshippers. This is occasionally a blessing, but too often subpar rhymes or poor chemistry between multiple rappers disguises what would otherwise be a solid beat.
This fervent Motown loyalty means that the beats on the album are vintage, Slum Village-era production, a sound that may have come to define Dilla if swan song Donuts hadn't added another facet to his legacy. They're pure Detroit tracks and, as such, serve as a more conservative collection than those featured on Jay Stay Paid. For the most part, these are pointed hi-fi beats with bass slaps and sharp snares, samples whittled to a point and deployed with casual precision. This quality, a kind of nonchalant strictness, is a gift of Dilla's-- he has the same kind of genius for making things look easy, as do the greatest athletes. Listen to the way that loop kaleidoscopes on "My Victory" or the rainbow synths and slightly flattened bass on "Ride With It". Check the vintage menace of the Jaylib sound on "Say My Name", "City of Boom", or "Do It Right". Every beat here is perfectly calibrated, reflecting an impressive, inborn discipline, one that Dilla would eventually leave behind in favor of a looser, messier sound.
One of the great things about Dilla's group Slum Village was the way that T3 and Baatin rapped quietly, with plenty of negative space available to give Jay Dee's beats the spotlight they deserved. It makes for a good litmus test to check how true the MC's on Rebirth are to that formula. Sometimes on an individual song, one rapper will stay chilled out, while another will rap his verses completely oblivious to the dynamic-- as on "Detroit Game", where Cool Kid Chuck Inglish exercises restraint to great effect, only to find the second verse ruined by one Boldy James, who raps rigidly, refusing to let the track breathe.
Then too, there's the problem of Dilla dogma. For the best example, take "Dillatroit", on which a trio of rappers sandwich a chorus of Detroit pride with undignified shots at Charles Hamilton, who had the gall to claim a J Dilla production credit on his debut album, This Perfect Life. Just to give you an idea of the way they hold grudges in Detroit, this blasphemy was committed all the way back in 2009. And yet Hamilton (who has all but disappeared from rap) still finds an entire verse dedicated to him on a song that's supposed to pay tribute.
The best moments come when Dilla's music is allowed to breathe, complemented by a competent artist. There's nothing quite like hearing a talented rapper rip through one of his beats. The highlight here is Danny Brown on "Jay Dee's Revenge".  There's no perfunctory Dilla or Detroit shoutouts on the song; just an ill beat with a burbling mess of bass, sparkling keys, and a perverted madman rhyming his ass off. Other highlights include the one-two punch of soul and instrumental tracks "Let's Pray Together" and "Requiem", both of which show a bit more of the producer's range. "Let's Pray Together" in particular is a reminder of the best of neo-soul, as Detroit legend Amp Fiddler croons smoothly over slow, descending funk.
There are other worthwhile tracks like the elegant "Detroit Madness" or "Do It for Dilla Dawg", which, despite being saddled with that name, finds Dilla's little brother Illa J and old friend Frank Nitt overcoming cliché and showing real love. But when at least 16 of 21 songs are dedicated to the same subject, it's pretty easy to pick out tracks that should have been pruned.
The quote at the top comes from the Stussy documentary on Dilla, which was released in 2010. Though it seems pretty cut and dry, it shows up in the part of the movie where Dilla's friends and collaborators are speculating on why he moved to Los Angeles, most of them surprised that someone so firmly attached to Detroit would leave his hometown. House Shoes, another Detroit transplant, whose DJing is referenced on the penultimate track, ends up supplying the answer. "The Detroit shit'll wear you out," he says. "Cats want to come out here... and get the love that they never got in their own city."
Six years after his death, Dilla gets that love in full on Rebirth of Detroit. But the exhausting nature of the record, and the somewhat limited portrait of Dilla's work that it leaves behind, reminds us why he moved. Your hometown defines you only as much as you let it-- but when you're gone, those left behind are free to enshrine you, creating hagiography that's at once adoring and dehumanizing. As an artist, Dilla was defined by his need for growth, constantly evolving. But once you're cast in stone, it becomes pretty difficult to move.


On Skepta's long-awaited new album, the grime pioneer is full of sneering contempt for popular culture’s industry of image, the press, the police, and the government at large.

Konnichiwa

In 2012 Skepta found himself at an impasse. He was integral in grime’s early hustle during the halcyon pirate radio days, but the music he was making, from 2008-2012 was soulless, kowtowing to a sanitized version of grime that went hand in hand with the slow-burning corporate ransacking of the genre that started with Dizzee Rascal’s breakthrough almost a decade earlier. He recently compared this dissatisfaction with his role in the mainstream with Britney Spears' infamous shaved head incident. If there is a similar meltdown for Skepta it happened in April of 2012, in a 26-minute video posted to Youtube, titled “#UnderdogPsychosis no.1” with a caption that read: “Break the cycle.” In a monologue by turns manic, vulnerable, self-aware, and inarticulate, he castigated himself, the system, (in DJ Khaled’s parlance the pervasive “they”), the industry, reflected on his forgotten and youthful musical past, and celebrated the life of the underdog. He promised to make music that had meaning. The video was later shown at the Tate Modern, a strange high watermark for the grime renaissance he helped ignite.
It’s been five years since a proper studio album from the 33-year-old Londoner, and after many delays his long-awaited Konnichiwa has finally arrived. It is arguably the first appointment listen in a genre that has never been defined by albums, but by singles, loosies, hotly pressed riddims, and pirate radio broadcasts. This partly comes from an album roll out and rebranding that has lasted almost two years. Last April, he organized an impromptu rave in a Shoreditch car park attended by almost a thousand people via an Instagram post. He helped hijack the stage of the Brits with Kanye West a month before. And even earlier than that Drake had cribbed lines from Skepta’s “That’s Not Me” for “Used To” starting a cross-continental musical love affair, leading to Drake symbolically signing to Skepta’s BBK label. He’s helped unfurl a ocean-spanning red carpet that’s led to wide ranging institutional support prompted magazine covers, documentaries, and a litany of think pieces asking, yet again, if was America ready for grime.
The sudden explosion of cultural cachet seems to have made no dents in his anarchic attitude. Konnichiwa is easily the most blatantly anti-authoritarian statement from rap this year, overflowing with sneering contempt for popular culture’s industry of image, the press, the police, and the government at large.  No matter the respect he’s garnered recently, and the friends he’s gained along the way, Konnichiwa proves that Skepta still bristles at the very idea of institutions. He is still flipping the bird, compelling you to help him burn it all down.
“That’s Not Me” was the first song Skepta released off Konnichiwa, and it’s a template for the album's tone: A combination of snarling bravado and earnest self directed criticism—an elegantly brutal volte-face from a previous life. He’s thrown his designer clothes in the garbage, donned his famous black track suit, and disavowed the trappings of the last few years (“I put it all in the bin cause that's not me”). He’s come back out of the thicket of a forced absence, full of self-aggrandizing swagger. (“It's the return of the mack/I'm still alive just like 2Pac”).  A year later, at the height of his return to prominence, the music video for the best song on this album,“Shutdown,” was released. Dressed in all white, in the middle of London’s bloated symbol of divisive gentrification the Barbican Centre, Skepta makes very clear that he fears no one: “Me and my Gs ain't scared of police/We don't listen to no politician/Everybody on the same mission/We don't care about your ‘isms and schisms," he rapped, lines that scan as both an indictment and a call-to-arms.
Skepta produced eight of the twelve tracks himself, and they have the same roughly hewn power of his early instrumentals, measured but fiery stews of dancehall, jungle, UK funky, and garage. When it works, it's bone-rattling stuff. Elsewhere, it's a mixed bag, sonically and qualitatively: He caricatures Noah “40” Shebib’s rose-quartz soul on “Ladies Hit Squad;” “Crime Riddim,” produced by Blaikie and Skepta’s brother Jason, has the wild flair of a Death Grips track; and “Numbers” (featuring and co-produced by Pharrell) fails to shoehorn Skepta into Pharrell's bubbly funk universe.
As for his lyrics, there is nothing coded about them, or their meaning: He raps exclusively about distrust and independence. He’s very much aware that London, and the world, will continue to exploit him and erase his individuality. This awareness is why he refuses to appear in pictures with fans or answer press emails in “Man.” It’s why he pulls way back, and samples Wiley’s call for peace in the middle of a battle (“Lyrics for lyrics, calm”) in “Lyrics.” He finds peace, if he finds it at all, in his roots: by  remaining loyal to family and friends, by being appreciative of the past, and by incubating a future for his genre. Konnichiwa is as nakedly vulnerable Skepta has ever been, and it represents a tantalizingly wide-open door for grime. It’ll be our job as listeners to step through and discover what we’ve been missing.


I've always enjoyed looking at photo albums. Whether I know the people in them or not is pretty irrelevant ...

The Photo Album

I've always enjoyed looking at photo albums. Whether I know the people in them or not is pretty irrelevant. There's something about the medium of photography that just strikes me. Maybe it's just the possibility of stumbling across an accidental work of art-- that one shot where all the visual elements are balanced perfectly and someone exposes perhaps more of their personality than they intended. People can't really hide from a camera; it catches everything, be it a touch of nervousness in the smiles of a newlywed couple or the momentary pain of exertion on an athlete's face.
It seems as though Ben Gibbard, on his latest outing with Death Cab for Cutie, the band's third album in just three years, has attempted to capture in his lyrics the verbal equivalent of amateur photography. That's not to say there's anything amateur about the poetry in his lyrics-- quite the contrary, in fact-- but he captures those same little secondary emotions of the moment that cameras capture so well. Add to this the fact that every song here contains at least one vividly rendered image in its lyrics, and The Photo Album, rotten pun aside, seems a fairly appropriate title.
The album opens quietly with the brief, sleepy "Steadier Footing," a glimpse at a relationship that seems fated not to be. The organs, loosely strummed guitar and softly struck floor toms conjure a dead-on after-party atmosphere-- quiet, empty, a little smoky. From there, the band heads into "A Movie Script Ending," which feels the most like a logical extension of their work on last year's We Have the Facts and Are Voting Yes of any song here. The spacious drumming, intertwining guitar arpeggios and Gibbard's impassioned tenor pour forth a thick syrup of melody in the verses and chorus, before an unfortunately awkward bridge disrupts the flow of the song.
Such moments haunt the remainder of the album, as well, though they're generally not too distracting. "We Laugh Indoors" suffers a bit from too-long instrumental passages centering on wandering, loosely connected guitar phrases, but drummer Michael Schorr keeps things moving with his insistent backbeat, and the band finds their way before long. Still, form-wise, the song is oddly constructed and fairly easy to tune out. "Information Travels Faster" kicks off with one of Gibbard's best opening lines. "I intentionally wrote it out to be an illegible mess/ You wanted me to write you letters, but I'd rather lose your address," he sings, as the band provides a steady backing for him and his atmospheric piano playing.
The most gripping song musically, though, is also one of the most lyrically puzzling songs Gibbard has ever penned. I'm curious if Gibbard simply had an especially bad experience in Los Angeles or something, because "Why You'd Want to Live Here" is intensely bitter. Lines like, "I can't see why you'd want to live here," "It's a lovely summer's day and I can almost see a skyline through a thickening shroud of egos/ Is this the city of angels or demons," and, "You can't swim in a town this shallow," make me wonder if he even tried to find something he liked about the city before he wrote the song. But while the unrelentingly negative lyrics may be hard to digest, the music certainly isn't. It's like swallowing arsenic with candy-- the sweet melody and passionate delivery cause the song to jump out of the pack as one of the few actually capable of lodging in your brain.
Similarly malicious is "Styrofoam Plates," though the vitriol expressed toward the narrator's departed father is a little more understandable when you consider the full story laid out in the song's lyrics. "It's no stretch to say you were not quite a father/ But a donor of seeds/ To a poor single mother/ Who would raise us alone/ We never saw the money/ That went down your throat through the hole in your belly," is a spiteful mouthful to be sure, and it seems quite plausible that Gibbard is writing autobiographically, though I won't purport to know his family history.
One thing you may have noticed by now is that Gibbard has a tendency to sing in full, grammatically correct sentences. This marks him as a unique lyricist to be sure, but the downside is that it sometimes forces him to jam a bunch of syllables that don't flow very well into a melodic phrase. This makes for more than a few moments where you wonder if he wouldn't be better off resorting to a more succinct form.
Thankfully, though, he has enough facility with his style that it doesn't hurt the music too much-- witness the pop excellence of "I Was a Kaleidoscope," a song that serves as a good reminder of why Death Cab were relentlessly compared to Built to Spill in the early stages of their career. Chris Walla's guitar hook shares the foreground nicely with Gibbard, who offers lines like, "My teeth chattered rhythms/ They were grouped in twos and threes/ Like a Morse code message from me to me." John Vanderslice and Sean Nelson offer backing vocals to fill out the sound.
The Photo Album comes to a curious close as "Debate Exposes Doubt" collapses into quiet but dissonant piano and guitar figures, eventually petering out completely. Overall, it reads like a look through some stranger's photo album-- there are a lot incredible images contained within it, but there are also a few embarrassing shots and the occasional moment in time that isn't framed quite right. Still, the good outweighs the bad by a fair shot and it's more than enough to wonder what kind of images the band has yet to treat us to.