On Sophia Kennedy’s bewitching debut LP, flickering electronic music mingles with scraps of Tin Pan Alley signage. It’s an unlikely release from DJ Koze and Marcus Fink’s dance-oriented Pampa Records.

Sophia Kennedy

“Being lonely makes you special/But being special makes you lonely too,” Sophia Kennedy sings in “Being Special,” one of the witty, mysterious songs on her bewitching debut. Loneliness is a running theme throughout the album, yet her voice radiates delight; her language wears a faintly hallucinatory halo, placing the humdrum mechanics of living and longing in the shadow of melting clocks and “volleyball weather,” whatever that might be. Special she certainly is: Sophia Kennedy introduces us to a powerhouse voice and a unique sensibility, one where flickering electronic music mingles with scraps of Tin Pan Alley signage, and where knotty bon mots and curious non sequiturs make heartbreak seem almost surmountable.
Her specialness begins with her trajectory. Raised in Baltimore, Kennedy moved to Hamburg to study film and ended up staying there, writing music for theater—hardly the usual path for an emerging singer-songwriter. Given the kind of music she makes, it’s also unusual that her album appears on DJ Koze and Marcus Fink’s Pampa Records, a label far better known for house and techno. Granted, the artists on Pampa’s roster—Axel Boman, Ada, Robag Wruhme, Isolée—are no strangers to quirk, and Kennedy’s idiosyncratic music is as at home there as it would be anywhere else. Her co-producer here is Mense Reents, a veteran of a number of oddball Hamburg acts including Egoexpress, Die Goldenen Zitronen, and the Pampa-signed Die Vögel. The latter duo’s primary claim to fame is “The Chicken,” a minimalist house track that turns an off-the-cuff comment from Werner Herzog (“Try to look a chicken in the eye with great intensity”) into an unlikely dancefloor refrain. Here, though, offbeat details never overpower the music’s sentimental pull.
If you are accustomed to hearing pop music largely as a nexus of comparison points, a collection of small differences, Kennedy may leave you pleasantly flummoxed. It’s not entirely sui generis; she borrows Lou Reed’s sneering diction and boogie-woogie piano in “William By the Windowsill” and Stereolab’s gleaming organs for “Kimono Hill.” A trim, salsa-inspired bassline nestles inside the flickering machine beat of “3:05,” and “A Bug on a Rug in a Building” offers flashbacks to the DIY electronic pop of the German Wohnzimmerszene (“living-room scene”) of the 1990s. But these fleeting reference points function mainly like windows within an interior of her own design, one defined largely by bold, declarative keyboards and multi-tracked vocals. In “Foam,” trap beats and Phil Collins-grade drum fills serve as fuses for Kennedy’s close-harmonized fireworks. In “Dizzy Izzy,” a buzzing jaw harp twangs against cellos sampled from Nat Baldwin’s “In the Hollows”—an incongruous pairing, perhaps, but one that somehow makes sense in the glow of Kennedy’s arcing melodic line.
It all adds up to a frequently exhilarating listen, so it’s ironic that Kennedy’s lyrics are so often full of doubt. In “William By the Windowsill,” her character longs to stick his head into “The gutter of the roof/And whistle all the saddest tunes.” Behind the inscrutable roll call of “Dizzy Izzy” lies an observation that any high-school-reunion attendee will recognize as true: “In the mirror of our hometown/We are all the troubled ones.” Much of the album’s anxiety revolves around home. “I don’t know/Where I live,” she admits in the slinky, nervous “3:05,” and in the opening of “Build Me a House,” one of the album’s most gripping and immediate songs, she pleads, “Build me a house/Where I can live in.” It’s the most prosaic of requests, but the intensity of her singing elevates the sentiment until it seems almost existential.
Is this longing a kind of homesickness? A clue might be found in one of the album’s most affecting songs. In an early version, titled “Springtime in New Orleans,” she sings of blooming flowers and aching hearts in a voice reminiscent of Ella Fitzgerald. It feels like a pastiche of a silver-screen tearjerker, but in the album version, her voice has mellowed; gone is any trace of archness or irony. On the album, the song is called “Baltimore,” and with its new closing lines—“Gone without a trace, my love/Lost in Baltimore”—it no longer feels like a character study. Wreathed in warm strings but pierced by a sliver of digital noise, like a reminder that the prettification of grief has cold limits, it feels as real as a song can feel.


King Krule collaborator Kaya Wilkins escapes music-industry servitude and speaks truth on her own terms in a frank, often melancholy bedroom-pop debut leavened by diaristic sarcasm.

Both

Kaya Wilkins’ debut, released under her moniker Okay Kaya, is the soundtrack to a state of limbo where identity, feelings, and sexuality continually shapeshift. The defining qualities of Both—ardent lyrics and vocal melodies that lend a soulful dimension to angst—have long been linchpins of Wilkins’ work. It was these gifts that led her to a partnership with HXC Recordings a few years back. During that time, she laid down tracks whenever she could squeeze in some studio time and suffered the indignities of being a young woman in the music business. An urge to speak truth on her own terms spurred Wilkins to discard two years’ worth of songs made under corporate servitude and retreat to the safety of her Greenpoint apartment, where, over the course of three years, she recorded the majority of Both.
The gloomy atmosphere of Okay Kaya’s early HXC singles, like “Damn, Gravity” and “Clenched Teeth,” drew comparisons to the work of her eventual collaborator, King Krule (whose frequent producer Rodaidh McDonald also worked on “Damn, Gravity”). These releases have an ethereal feel: Their minimal guitar lines echo over spare beats as Wilkins’ lyrics weave intricate tapestries of uneasiness, her voice bobbing lightly above the noise.
Both preserves the beguiling vocal melodies of Okay Kaya’s HXC era, but the polished poetics and calculatedly offbeat styling have disappeared in favor of more unguarded material. No longer satisfied to make music designed for heavy coffee-shop rotation, she has entered the more intimate and experimental world of bedroom pop.
Her first album thrives on oversharing, and diaristic sarcasm brings self-awareness and emotional intelligence to Wilkins’ thoughtful ruminations on melancholy and the many mundane activities it braids itself into. “If I ever get a dog, Imma name it hindsight,” her doubled voice repeats over warm synths on “Hindsights a Bitch.” Electronic elements like the beat on this track add another new facet to Okay Kaya’s sound, which features production assistance from Wilkins’ boyfriend, Porches’ Aaron Maine.
“Habitual Love,” the record’s most infectious bop, is an off-kilter motivational anthem about summoning the strength to pull yourself out of a rut. Wilkins comes across as wise and confident for much of the song: “Who wants to be loved out of habit?” she asks. “I want my love to be magic.” But when the sensual beat drops out at the bridge, it’s like the floor has crumbled beneath her, and she plunges into uncertainty. Wilkins’ tone often varies like this within individual tracks, accentuating the spontaneity of her candid lyrics and imbuing her music with the immediacy of an artist impatient to get bottled-up frustrations out of her system. Instead of performing on cue in the studio, she was free to jump out of bed at four in the morning to record a vocal if inspiration struck—and it shows in the intimacy she creates on the album.
With a total runtime of 37 minutes, Both isn’t a long first effort, but it is one that could have benefited from more editing. On “French Press Girl,” the record’s most puzzling inclusion, Wilkins falls into a familiar singer-songwriter trap, neglecting melody in favor of emotional earnestness. Deprived of the catchiness and wit of the album’s other songs, the track feels unstructured, incomplete, and incongruous.
But excess is embedded in the very title of Both, a debut defined by conflicted feelings and Wilkins’ self-aware sense of humor about them. She describes the subtle but all-consuming sadness that keeps you stuck in your room, unable to open the door. She brings the unexpected happiness of a smile that emerges through tears. She captures the kind of restless melancholy you can only dance your way through. She knows that misery and horniness aren’t mutually exclusive. For Okay Kaya, “both” is a way of life.


Remastered, rescanned, and color corrected after years languishing in Paisley Park’s vault, the 1985 concert film and its soundtrack receive the deluxe reissue treatment they’ve long deserved.

Prince / The Revolution: Prince and the Revolution: Live

Prince and the Revolution: Live

After only a few months of touring in support of his commercial breakthrough Purple Rain, Prince was eager to move on. Locked into a rigid nightly routine of rehearsing and performing, he grew restless reliving a body of work that, in his mind, he had already perfected. To stave off his growing boredom, he would tweak the show from one stop to the next, shuffling the setlist and dropping in new songs for his band, the Revolution, to learn during soundchecks. In between shows, he’d retreat to a mobile recording system set up on his tour buses, or, time permitting, have a local studio booked during extended layovers. He oversaw Romance 1600, the sophomore album by his percussionist and apprentice Sheila E., from start to finish in these moments of downtime. He also had his own follow-up, Around the World in a Day, completed and ready to go, to the surprise of his band.
With a couple of months still remaining, he sat his crew down and announced he was cutting the tour short. Everyone around him was bewildered. Purple Rain was still brand new and at the peak of its popularity; the album had the potential to be toured for another year at least, but Prince would not be swayed from his course. He was ready to close the book—but he wanted to end his time on the road with a purple flash that could be seen from every corner of the world. It was decided in March 1985, as the final dates were approaching, to record a concert for home video and beam the event live to Europe. At the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, New York, Prince and the Revolution tightened up their act and put on the performance of their lives. This wouldn’t be just any Purple Rain show—it would be the definitive document.
With this concert film finally receiving the deluxe treatment it’s desperately needed, it’s clearer than ever why Prince and the Revolution: Live was such a special moment. The source recordings, which have been sitting in Prince’s Paisley Park vault for the better part of three decades, have been given a full remaster, far exceeding the compressed sound of the original videocassette that bootleggers have been copying for years, or even the DVD included with the lavish Purple Rain — Deluxe Expanded Edition from 2017. Every detail can be appreciated with crystal clarity, from Prince’s breathy sighs when he stretches his falsetto to its limit on the bluesy ballad “How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore” to his confident chuckle between verses on “Irresistible Bitch.”
Though the audio sounds better than ever, it’s best experienced alongside the stunning concert footage, which has been meticulously rescanned from the original film and color corrected. Purple Rain’s visual hallmarks—the big hair, the ruffled coat, the purple crushed velvet—would become just as important as its signature sound. Live places the experience in the totality of its context: as a companion piece not only to the studio album, but also to Purple Rain, the film. No expense was spared for the cutting-edge lighting and effects, and everyone on stage donned the role of thespian as well as musician, playing their part in elaborate set pieces inspired by the movie.
Prince leads into “Purple Rain” B-side “God” with a dramatic confessional, simulating the Holy Spirit’s thunderous wrath by smashing against the keys of his piano while a blinding spotlight acts as a heavenly stand-in. Then-unreleased vault curiosity “Possessed” takes on a separate identity from its studio versions, becoming a full-on tribute to Prince’s idol James Brown. The band locks into a propulsive funk groove while Prince gives his best impression of the godfather of soul—imitating his iconic mic stand kick and exclaiming “good God!”—with saxophonist Eric Leeds acting as his Maceo Parker. And, of course, there are plenty of risqué moments, such as when he turns his backside, draped in a pair of see-through pants, to ask the crowd “Does your man have an ass like mine?” The Revolution are in top form, twisting and twirling in perfectly choreographed lockstep with their bandleader while nary dropping a note. (A feat which, while impressive, was rough on the band: “It ruined my back for the rest of my life,” keyboardist Lisa Coleman admitted to Rolling Stone in 2017.)
The Purple Rain Tour was a herculean triumph, made possible by a tangled web of people carefully managing every aspect of the show each night, from staging to lighting to costuming to music. This fact wasn’t lost on Prince; he used the increased visibility of the Syracuse show to give thanks to as much of his entourage as he could. “Baby I’m a Star” evolved into a long, formless jam session, and everyone on hand was brought up to the stage. (Protégé group Apollonia 6 were even flown in to appear, despite not being part of the tour.) Prince placed immense trust in his collaborators, occasionally setting his instrument aside and counting on his band to keep things going so that he could focus on getting the theatrics just right. When he finally holds his guitar for longer for a few minutes—to play an extended encore of his spiritual communion, “Purple Rain”—time bends to his will and a third of an hour goes by in a blink. He’s giving us a firm reminder of what we already knew: “My band is great, but I’m still the greatest.”
The studio album was already indebted to the arena-rock explosion of the 1980s, capturing streaks of that explosive live energy by sourcing several tracks straight from a legendary performance at the Minneapolis nightclub First Avenue. At Syracuse, Prince pushed each track as close as he could to its theoretical endpoint; the loudest songs became louder, the sensual moments bordered on voyeuristic, and the spiritual themes came down like divine revelations. Prince and the Revolution: Live is the culmination of months of tireless practice, a refined gem so filtered of imperfections you could hardly believe it came together in one take. Finally, Purple Rain can flourish in the environment it was always meant to—and the whole world is invited to bear witness.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the 1980 album from the shapeshifting UK prog band, a pivotal moment in their journey to pop-rock stardom.

Duke

At the height of his celebrity in the 1980s, Phil Collins developed a habit of writing letters to his many, many critics. You can expect this type of backlash whenever someone reaches his level of popularity, both as the drummer-turned-vocalist of Genesis and through his run of blockbuster solo albums. All of their titles sound like tell-all memoirs by disgraced comedians—Hello I Must Be Going, …But Seriously, Both Sides—and all of their covers feature close-up photographs of his face, because this was his product: eyes you can look into, a single emotion to bathe in, a world where nothing and nobody exists besides you and Phil Collins.
Because of his public persona, there is a misconception that he single-handedly transformed this artful, bookish progressive rock band into the Phil Collins Show as soon as he took over vocal duties from Peter Gabriel in 1976. And in retrospect, the band’s increasingly popular, slow-danceable ballads closing out the decade—“Ripples…” and “Your Own Special Way” from 1976, “Follow You Follow Me” in 1978—do emerge from their discography like exit signs toward the oncoming highway to fame, just up the road.
As natural as it feels to equate Genesis’ turn from progressive rock to pop with Collins’ rise as a solo star, the truth is that Genesis was always a band, and Collins was always just one voice. At some point in the ’80s, Collins and his bandmates—keyboardist Tony Banks and bassist/guitarist Mike Rutherford—established a rule that no individual member could enter the studio with pre-written musical ideas. In other words, anything and everything on a Genesis album had to be created within the presence of the entire group: This way, no single person could be credited (or blamed) for the music that emerged.
This process led to songs that could sound like three minds interlocking like a jigsaw puzzle (“Turn It on Again”), or a pinhole view into a lightning-in-a-bottle experiment (“Mama”), or, occasionally, a bad joke that should have never left the room (“Illegal Alien”). But more than anything, the rule created a guiding principle for Genesis: to honor the spirit of collaboration, to push each other beyond what they could accomplish individually, and to invite their audience along as we all discovered something, together.
Even before the ’80s, this was their appeal. The curtains always open on something new in a Genesis song. In “it,” the band sounds like a futuristic piece of machinery restarting; in “Supper’s Ready,” they had an entire mythology to unfold. Or take 1980’s “Turn It on Again,” which blends a 13/8 time signature with lyrics about a guy watching television and an honest-to-god riff into something that sounds like a radio hit: It aims to keep you on the edge of your seat; no matter how many times you replay it, you feel like you are hearing it for the first time.
And so the criticism got to him. The way Collins tells it, the review that really pissed him off was when a San Francisco journalist panned a live show, calling him the “McDonald’s of pop.” As far as I can tell, there are no records of this article on the internet. Googling the phrase only brings up Collins himself repeating it to journalists.
II
The first iteration of Genesis was formed in 1967, and neither the name nor the sound belonged to them. A moody, introspective group of friends at England’s ritzy Charterhouse boarding school passed their demo tape along to one of the school’s more notable alumni, the musician and producer Jonathan King. Knowing he was a fan of the Bee Gees, teen frontman Peter Gabriel did his best Robin Gibb impression. King took the bait and offered to produce their debut album. He dubbed the band Genesis (another idea was Gabriel’s Angels) and he titled the album From Genesis to Revelation. It was released by Decca in March 1969 and sold 650 copies, total. “Oh well,” King thought and disappeared. Gabriel and his angels returned to school.
Around the same time, an unremarkable British band called Flaming Youth gathered in the studio to get a handle on their first album, also destined to be their last. They had been approached by two songwriters, Ken Howard and Alan Blaikely, searching for a band to record their concept album about media coverage of the moon landing. The title was Ark 2, which was confusing to people who thought they had to hear the first Ark first, and the plot had something to do with the apocalypse, the perils of modern media, and the healing power of love. The members of the band seemed to change their instruments from song to song, uncertain about the material and their own identity. The centerpiece was a 12-minute suite dedicated to the planets. It’s hilariously overambitious, and it left the unseasoned performers scratching their heads. Who wants to sing this one? “I’ll do it,” said the drummer.
III
A quick note on selling out: There are easier ways to do it than how Genesis did it. Their eventual pivot came so naturally, appealed so effortlessly, created such a definitive break between the first two decades of their career, that to acknowledge the act of selling out seems mostly tangential to the music they made. Yes, they dumbed things down. Yes, they had hits. Yes, one of them sounded very similar to Toto’s “Hold the Line.” But after the ’70s, nearly every major prog band tried their hand at writing simpler tunes for a hipper crowd, and there’s a reason why the protagonist of American Psycho goes nuts for Phil Collins, and not, you know, Under Wraps by Jethro Tull.
In order to do what Genesis did, you have to be self-aware, self-critical, and willing to adapt. In his memoir, Collins writes that, when he auditioned to join Genesis in 1970, he wasn’t crazy about their music: a bit fussy, a little gentle. Even after he joined the band, he made a habit of listening back to tapes of their live shows, obsessing over mistakes. For most of the decade, he saw his role like a goalie, holding things down in the backfield. It wasn’t until Duke, his eighth album as a member and fourth as lead vocalist, that he began presenting his own ideas confidently to the group. During the sessions, he was often the first one in and last one out of the studio. “We’ve always tried to write singles,” he would say after their commercial breakthrough, sounding a little bit defensive about it. “Now we’re just doing it better, I suppose.”
IV
Reflections on Phil Collins’ auditions for Genesis:
“Anyway, Phil had arrived a bit early, so while the drummer before him was finishing, we sent him off for a swim in the pool.”
—Mike Rutherford, The Living Years: The First Genesis Memoir
“If I’ve learnt anything over the last couple of years, it’s to grab any and every opportunity. Who knows if I’ll ever again get the offer of a dip in a private heated pool in the countryside.”
—Phil Collins, Not Dead Yet: The Memoir
“By the time it came to Phil’s turn, he’d already heard and memorized the part we were using for the audition and, when he sat down at the kit, you just knew.”
—Rutherford
“He had a lightness as a personality, too. He could joke and everything. We were very intense.”
—Tony Banks, Sum of the Parts
“Just the way he sat down on a stool… I knew that he was gonna be good. Some people just have this confidence about what they do.”
—Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins: A Life Less Ordinary
V
In most accounts of the early days of Genesis, Peter Gabriel is described as a serious, shy figure. The legend goes that he started telling intricate fantasy stories on stage because it was taking his bandmates forever to tune their instruments and he had to fill the dead air. Eventually, he wore costumes because the crowds were getting bigger and he was insecure about his slender, shadowy appearance. When he came on stage wearing his wife’s red dress and a fox mask, he did it without telling his bandmates. He knew they would have vetoed the idea if they’d had the chance.
The Gabriel era proceeds this way: a whirlwind of big ideas and surprises that peaks with longform, conceptual pieces like the 23-minute song “Supper’s Ready” and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, their feature-length concept album with ambient assistance from Brian Eno. While on tour for that album in 1974—a multimedia event that featured the band playing the entire thing front to back with a then-unprecedented visual accompaniment—Gabriel decided it was time to go solo. One of his many costumes was so elaborate that he couldn’t actually sing while wearing it, which seems as good a metaphor as any for the dead-end he faced.
VI
There are great bands who evolve by expansion, or by drastic reinvention, or by keen attention to the demands of their time. But I can think of no band besides Genesis who evolved so fluidly through subtraction. Without the guiding, commercial vision of producer Jonathan King, Genesis evolved into a pastoral folk group with a focus on Anthony Phillips’ 12-string guitar. When Phillips quit, they became a heavier prog band led by Gabriel’s theatrical vision. When Gabriel quit, they developed a more atmospheric sound, showcasing the inventive style of guitarist Steve Hackett. When Hackett quit, they were now a trio with Collins on vocals, left to focus on melody and songcraft. And with nothing left to lose, they became one of the biggest bands in the world.
VII
“Within seconds the entire clean, green, smooth surface of the park was a mass of dirty brown writhing objects. Old Michael continued to rub his flesh into the ground. This time he looked even happier. And he whistled a little tune. It went like this…”
—Peter Gabriel introducing “Supper’s Ready” at a Genesis concert in 1973
“I remember being more worried about what I was going to say to the audience than anything else. Because what Peter did have was a communication. Although it was more of a mysterious traveler than a bloke next door or a mate, he did communicate with an audience. And I thought that was very important.”
—Phil Collins on his first show replacing Peter Gabriel as the frontman of Genesis, Genesis: A History
VIII
The origins of Duke can be traced to Phil Collins’ bedroom. It is here that Collins, Rutherford, and Banks gathered to demo new material after a brief hiatus. The latter two had worked on solo albums while Collins flew to Canada to address his failing marriage and make a last-ditch effort to save his family. It didn’t work, and, with his bandmates preoccupied, Collins found himself drinking and sulking, writing sad new songs with a drum machine he’d been gifted during a tour in Japan.
When they reunited, Collins shared some of the songs he had written. Banks and Rutherford liked two of them: a surefire hit called “Misunderstanding” and a tender ballad called “Please Don’t Ask.” The rest—like “In the Air Tonight,” with its basic chord progression and plodding, spacious arrangement—felt distinctly un-Genesis. Collins decided he would save them for his own solo album, the next item on the list.
A theme of failure and extinction courses through Duke: “You know you’re on the way out,” goes the paranoid chorus of Banks’ “Cul-de-sac.” “It’s just a matter of time.” Another song called “Duchess” seems to be about a musician whose immense popularity creates a rift within her own identity. And if these lyrics feel like insights into the underlying emotion of Duke, Genesis never let it show: Duke is a brazenly confident album, written in block letters with exclamation points. The message is not in the lyrics but in the music itself: Collins’ syncopated rhythm and newly expressive vocals, Rutherford and Banks’ guitar-synths and keyboard-trumpets—instruments invented to sound like the future versions of themselves. You don’t listen and think of a band fearing their waning relevance, or Collins and his failing marriage. If they treated the span of their career as a long, epic song, this was the part when the toms start rolling and the action begins again.
IX
Watching footage from Genesis’ tour for Duke is like watching the superhero first become aware of his powers, staring awestruck at the hands that have just done something incredible. With his drumming duties transferred to touring member Chester Thompson—previously of Weather Report and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention—Collins stands before the microphone, 29 and bearded, noticing the audience in the palm of his hand. Through Europe and America, he sees sold-out concert halls getting more engaged with the music. They seem more diverse, younger. He sees people who might not even remember a time when Phil Collins wasn’t the frontman of Genesis.
Introducing the part of the set that includes the new songs, Collins recites a monologue harkening back to the old days. He tells of a sad sack deadbeat called Albert who falls in love with a television set. Then, with the kind of comic timing that gets you cast as the lead in a romantic comedy and lands you a guest role on Miami Vice, he reveals that he means this quite literally: “In two days, he was in hospital having the glass removed from his private parts.” Is the audience laughing with him or at the old version of Genesis, the one who once took these preambles so seriously? Does this story actually have anything to do with Duke? In the end, these are questions for journalists. The audience roars; the band is about to play the new stuff.
X
A few moments on Duke offer a glimpse into the future of prog rock in the ’80s. You hear it at the very beginning of the record—an instrumental motif that Tony Banks composed. Played on an expensive-sounding synth, the notes are sudden and decisive as the signs on a slot machine. When the trio lineup of Genesis reunited for a comeback tour in 2007, they opened every show with just this part of the song, letting the rest play in the audience’s imagination.
As for the rest of the song: It’s called “Behind the Lines,” and it kickstarts a suite of interlinked compositions forming the core of the record. There are rumors that the band considered presenting them as an uninterrupted, side-long suite, which offered perfect fodder for betrayed fans who wanted to believe the poppier direction was a result of Genesis compromising their vision for record label suits, or a radio-crazed Phil Collins demanding they preserve the singles. But the truth is that Genesis decided among themselves to separate the music, finding the prog rock gesture to be old-fashioned, uninspiring.
One day in the studio, Collins played a tape of “Behind the Lines” at the wrong speed and realized it sounded a little like Michael Jackson. Funny! But he was taking notes. A few months later, he brought in Earth, Wind, and Fire’s horn section and recorded the sped-up version for his debut solo album, which he called Face Value, and which would go multiple-times platinum around the world.
These alternate versions of the song—one, a utopian vision of prog rock; the other, a jumpy imitation of the most famous artist in the world—mark the first time that Collins’ solo music and the band’s felt in clear competition. On the cover of Duke, a figure stands before a window to who-knows-what: Those eyes on the cover of Face Value show you what awaits him. There is a real person standing there, and his future is the only one.
XI
The critical wisdom is that prog rock was living and breathing and thriving, and then punk rock came and killed it. The story always made me envision a gang of pissed-off kids in leather jackets bum-rushing the stage, ripping capes off old British guys; the sound of Mellotrons coming unplugged as the audience gasps.
There is a kernel of truth to it. The things that punk represented—anger, politics, a new generation fed up with the old one, shorter bursts—did seem antithetical to one vision of prog rock. But prog was already in motion by the time anything resembling punk came to the forefront, and Genesis had been in a steady evolution their whole career. What would have been an actual death sentence, a real sell-out move, would have been if they carried on like nothing happened, repeating themselves, pandering to the people who were already on board—coasting.
Duke takes the opposite approach. It is a divider: If you are a fan of Genesis, their tenth album is either where you get off the ride, or when you buckle up and start paying attention. They had made better albums (nearly everything from the ’70s) and they would make more commercially successful ones (everything else in the ’80s). But they never made one so important to their survival. In his memoir, Rutherford notes that the band considered changing their name after the album’s success. Nothing ever came of the conversations—they didn’t even start brainstorming an alternative—which was fine, because the message had already been sent: If you think you know Genesis, you are wrong. They are united, inspired, and just getting started.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Atlanta rapper rewrites the rulebook on winning on his most thoughtful album.

Rap or Go to the League

2 Chainz formed his rap group Playaz Circle in 1997, the last year he played college basketball at Alabama State. He’d sold dope in the meantime, and for much of his life; he was a felon before he was legally an adult. The College Park native had turned to rap in search of a “legal hustle,” he said, to “stay out of jail and stay out of the grave.” His dream route from D-1 prospect to NBA franchise player didn’t ever pan out, but he eventually found his way to the All-Star game anyway: Last year, he allegedly spent $1 million on a blimp that flew over the Staples Center in Los Angeles. All to announce a rap album.
This construct 2 Chainz embraced in his youth and followed to stardom—that there are only two permissible prospective paths to success for black kids looking for a way out of the ghetto, one of the more well documented ideologies in rap history—is one he reevaluates on said album, Rap or Go to the League. As one of a few people at the center of the rapper-trapper-athlete Venn Diagram (joining alums like Cam’ron and the Game), someone who found recurring success doing at least one as a result, he is in a position to anatomize the process. The album is proposed as the rapper’s rejection of the very premise in the title, and in asides and outros he does occasionally question this bifurcation of black liberation, but the music mostly tracks his own path to prosperity through a minefield. In that regard, it is his most cogent and organized album by far, and his most thoughtful one. As he provides more context for his story than ever, he rewrites the rule book on winning, opening up about his life as certified dealer to rap stars, critiquing the broken collegiate athletics apparatus, and warring against Uncle Sam. Executive produced by future NBA Hall of Famer and Snapchat rap A&R LeBron James, it finds 2 Chainz exploring things he’s danced around his entire career.
The closer on 2 Chainz’s last album, Pretty Girls Like Trap Music, set the table for this one: “See my verses are better and my subject is realer/See my mom was an addict and my dad was the dealer/And their son is that nigga, I’m no Black activist/I’m a Black millionaire, give you my Black ass to kiss,” he rapped. He presented his success as its own sort of affront to a broken system: He opted for one rock over another, transitioned into rap, and became rich and famous. But his is the exception that proves the rule.
2 Chainz still isn’t an activist, but he has tweaked his messaging a bit. It isn’t enough for him to be a Black millionaire now; he must also question the conditions that make someone in his situation so rare. This leads him to break down the exploitative measures of a primarily black sport (“NCAA”), reflect on his corner-boy past (“Statute of Limitations,” “Momma I Hit a Lick”), and lament a framework that pays cops to kill the same black kids it under-educates (“Sam”). He never really makes the point he thinks he’s making—that there are other paths than these, than his—but he intentionally makes another: that he’s a modern renaissance man. Against the odds, he continues to win, and revel in the spoils. The way he sees it, he’s a triathlete turned executive.
There is still plenty of his patented humor, and he sneaks in the zingers (“Have you ever had two one-night stands?”), but there is also an unusual seriousness and thoughtfulness. It’s probably impossible for someone as exuberant as 2 Chainz to feel anything as debilitating as shame, but he does at points express regret. His outsized persona is tamped down somewhat, owing at least in part to his newfound domesticity (“Got a family now so I gotta pipe down/’Fore a young ho fuck up my timeline”) but the flows are nimbler, even by his standards, and more poised. The set-up/punchline structure that has long anchored his verses is largely set aside for spinning yarns.
While it’s bracing to hear the man formerly known as Tity Boi talk openly about married family life, or challenge the established narratives surrounding inner-city escape routes, Rap or Go to the League shouldn’t be mistaken for the  “serious” or “mature” 2 Chainz album. There is usually an element of pathos even in 2 Chainz’s funniest lines, and anyone half-listening knows he’s been operating at his peak for at least three years now. Songs like the 9th Wonder-produced “Threat 2 Society,” with its life-affirming sample (“It’s so good just to be alive!”) and “Money in the Way” aren’t really departures, they’re simply articulated differently, with the heavy-ish tone we’ve come to associate with message music. He delves deeper into his personal life more but he is just as sharp as been across his last handful of releases. It isn’t so much that these songs are better; they simply render a more complete picture of him, one he’s been working toward.
In that respect, Rap or Go to the League feels like a personal triumph. There are more eye-popping 2 Chainz raps and more epic 2 Chainz songs elsewhere, but this album offers of 2 Chainz as a man and artist. It finds him retracing his own steps, looking to the world beyond himself, and seeking a way forward for others. Throughout the album, two different stories are unfolding. Just over 1% of NCAA players make it to the NBA; the odds are likely just as bad for rap. “Balling”—in all its permutations—will probably never become the be-all end-all for rebuilding black communities. But it sure suits 2 Chainz fine.


Like Wavves, this basement lo-fi hero continues to clean up nicely, offering deceptively dense and increasingly clearer power-pop.

Cloud Nothings

Last Fall, Dylan Baldi-- the young, bespectacled face and brains behind Cleveland power-pop outfit Cloud Nothings-- was gearing up for two simultaneous releases: a delicious new 7" single and a wide-release compilation that wrangled together nearly every other hook he had burned to cassette, vinyl, or CD-R in the year before. While both shared remarkably strong songwriting, said single was recorded without much of the fuzz and distortion that enveloped his work up until that point. The difference was huge. Baldi's home-recorded hooks had never been hard to hear, but out in the open, free of that lo-fi asterisk, they thrived. Breaks were crisp, turnarounds hit like boomerangs, and every sweet, tightly coiled melody could be savored in full. In the lead-up to this, his first full-length in wide-release, Baldi hinted that he'd continue to clarify his recordings. He stuck to his guns.
The result is another fantastic step forward, though not without some growing pains. In the transition from basement to studio, one component has yet to come into full focus: Baldi's voice. The gap between those sounds coming from his hands and those from his mouth is noticeable. The opening five-song blast, as exhilarating an assemblage of tracks as he's ever strung together, provides a useful chart of his comfort level now that his voice is completely uncovered. Within the insanely hummable, sometimes gummy verses of opener "Understand At All", you can hear Baldi's voice originate just at his throat, where the screams of "Not Important" hail. And while the latter motions toward the skittering Midwestern pop-punk of the Promise Ring and recently reunited Get Up Kids as much as Buzzcocks, its final gasp echoes (as though in tribute) that of Wavves' Nathan Williams, another former lo-fi kid who's made impressive use of the studio. "Should Have" opts however for the suburbs instead of the beach and the unabashed melodicism of Gin Blossoms over Nirvana, Baldi's voice moving even lower. Once "Forget You All the Time" arrives, he sounds as strong and confident behind the mic as he does unspooling all those gorgeous strands of guitar.
That quick trip downward from mouth to core doesn't speak directly to the quality of each song, but it does their overall delivery. When "Nothing's Wrong" and its torrent of sugars and stutters begins just seconds after, the shift in pitch and pace can be jarring. That feeling isn't unusual throughout. Cloud Nothings' pop has become deceptively dense-- there is literally (and paradoxically) so much hook to be found here from corner to corner that, unlike similarly, ostensibly simple records, multiple listens are required to appreciate the taste of all its herks and jerks. In the late sear of "Been Through", Baldi hits a lasting sweet spot. It's a song that moves swiftly and forcefully, the calm vocal at its center not just its equal, but also the sort you hear when you first wake up any number of mornings thereafter.


Sarah Assbring has said her fifth El Perro del Mar album, the first since 2009's Love Is Not Pop, was inspired by the 90s house and trip hop she used to love. She goes so far as to include a very noticeable sample from Massive Attack's "Unfinished Sympathy".

Pale Fire

In September 2011, El Perro del Mar posted the song  "What Do You Expect" online. Comprising a collage of samples over a minimal beat, it was a protest track released shortly after the London riots. Considering that Sarah Assbring was better known for chronicling romantic relations over those between social classes, it was jarring to hear her deploy samples like "The police are not listening to them-- what do you expect?" Toward the end, in her characteristic sullen murmur, she delivers the lines, "Never grow tired of this pale, pale fire." It's a bit vague to be inflammatory on its own, but in context, it bore a certain poignancy.
"What Do You Expect" hasn't ended up on the LP she named Pale Fire, and Assbring has backed off from politics since then, focusing instead on the dueling forces that have preoccupied her since her debut, 2005's Look! It's El Perro Del Mar. "In this world, you think you have no reason to believe in love or in anything much," she said of the title. "Then one day, when you least expect it, a light appears on the far horizon...It's the pale fire. The promise of love and hope-- all consuming and elusive."
A slight cop-out? Sure, though no one was expecting an album of fiery protest songs from one of Sweden's most reliable portrayers of romance and whimsy. What twists the knife is that Assbring has said that Pale Fire was inspired by the 90s music she used to love-- namely house and trip hop. The idea of a dance album from El Perro Del Mar is tantalizing: tears on the floor and a thick, moody fog in the air, as apt for dancing as for watching shadows. The extended version of Pale Fire's centerpiece, "Walk On By", goes so far as to include a whopping, very noticeable sample from Massive Attack's "Unfinished Sympathy", but disappointingly, Assbring's dalliances with the politicized movement and with the bold, era-defining chime of house are reduced to wan dilutions of the original inspirational source material.
Set those intentions aside, though, and Assbring at least stays true to the hushedly sensual vibe with which she's made her name. The title track punches in with a flurry of horns which fade to a tentative murmur and a resigned dance breakdown better made for moping than any frenetic movement. A synth zips its way around "Home is to Feel Like That", and its beat is initially as giddy as its first words: "I just had to see you, I just had to see you." But those words quickly veer south and become a farewell, something that characterizes Pale Fire. Each mention of love is followed by an annulment, and the closest thing to a straightforward declaration of intent, "I Was a Boy", is a delicate husk that's about as appropriate to carry the themes of a love song as is a requiem.
But most requiems aren't this easy to move to, and Pale Fire fortunately picks up the pace from time to time. "I Carry the Fire" is house inhabited by ghosts, and "To the Beat of a Dying World" clings tight to a steady, propulsive drone. "Hold Off the Dawn" comes off like an intensely loud synthpop track heard through layers of gossamer that slowly envelop the song. Somewhere in the mix are lasers, stuttering pianos, and skips of percussion, but picking them out isn't easy. Nothing's exactly immediate -- but that's hardly a surprise either. Pale Fire doesn't command your attention so much as wait patiently until it drifts into your view and then goes away. Assbring's said as much about the concept of love over the years; on Pale Fire, it sounds just as much like her stance on music.


Bridging the sepia warmth of Laurel Canyon with Appalachian folk, the Mountain Man singer’s solo debut revels in the magic of telling your own story.

Karaoke Angel

For a singer whose voice sounds like an amber flame, Molly Sarlé hasn’t always been so sure about singing. Friendship led her to folk trio Mountain Man, where she, Amelia Meath, and Alexandra Sauser-Monnig entwined their vocals into uncannily intimate, honey-tipped harmonies. But if their lauded 2010 debut, Made the Harbor, and later tour supporting Feist seemed like a clear path forward, Sarlé had her doubts about a career in music.
A break, a Zen center, and Sarlé’s brief pursuit of acting haven’t fully abated those doubts. “I’m far from knowing/What I’m doing here,” she sings on “Passenger Side,” from her debut solo album Karaoke Angel. She craves perspective, acknowledging her penchant for “looking for a bird’s eye view in my rearview mirror,” as her voice dips in register and an electric guitar echoes cavernously around her. The vantage may never broaden, but Sarlé’s come to see the magic in telling your own story as opposed to performing other people’s.
Sarlé studied performance theory in college, and shades of that framework appear throughout Karaoke Angel, which bridges the sepia warmth of the Laurel Canyon sound with the rooted hymns of Appalachian folk. On “Almost Free,” she performs a doting daughter for her father, stretching the boundaries of her affection: “So I tell my dad what he wants to hear/I say ‘I love you,’ say ‘I need you here.’” Desire becomes a tangled performance on “This Close.” “Are we really this close, or is it just the drugs?” Sarlé asks, drawing out her phrasing and briefly luxuriating in pleasure, even if it’s tied to a destructive romance.
Finding the space to fit Sarlé’s expansive voice required three years and three recording attempts—in Los Angeles, Durham, and finally Woodstock. The album finally coalesced at Dreamland, the former church turned studio, under the guidance of producer Sam Evian. Evian has said recording Sarlé felt like making a documentary, and viewed that way, her voice threads Karaoke Angel with a narrative cohesion. Absent the surrounding vocals of Mountain Man, or much instrumental framing beyond guitar, synths, and occasional drums, Sarlé’s voice comes into full frame.
Performing for others becomes dangerous when our mask starts to reflect someone else’s needs. On the witty “Suddenly,” Sarlé stumbles into a moment of clarity. “I don’t know why/But suddenly I am exactly what I wanna be,” she sings, her voice radiating. But instead of internalizing that confidence, she uses it to please her lover. “After giving you head/I get the fuck up out of bed,” she sings, as her doubled voice nears a howl. The tempo stumbles, as if Sarlé grows weary of performing what Norman Mailer once called “a mirror of pleasure,” and she refocuses on her own cravings: “Melt some butter in a pan/Throw some cheese between two pieces of bread.” Whatever glow of self-recognition she felt before the bedroom fades. “I don’t know why/But suddenly I am no longer what I wanna be,” she sings, chafing at the frustration.
Sarlé fluctuates between knowing who she is and what she wants, and convincing herself that others hold those keys. “I wanna tell you if you lead me back to myself/I won’t go running to anyone else,” she sings on “Human,” her billowy vocals making the loaded promise seem effortless. Her journey to understanding—that long drive with only a rearview mirror—may have its limits, but storytelling offers a space for control. On Karaoke Angel, Sarlé wields her voice with power, finding actualization in the act of telling. On “Dreams,” her whisper works its own pace against winding synths. “I’ve been working on a version of the truth/I think you’re gonna like it,” she sings. “Call it a song you can sing along to.”


Elegant and perverse, Dan Bejar’s latest album slinks around in the shadows like he did on Kaputt, synthy, sleazy, and newly paranoid. He remains one of the most evocative songwriters of his generation.

ken

Dan Bejar has been recording as Destroyer for over two decades, and each of his 12 full-length records feels uniquely unmoored in time: It’s as if he’s never been of any era, but merely adjacent to several, attentively noting the mores of the day from some vaguely aristocratic, martini-sipping remove. It makes sense, then, that ken, Destroyer’s first new release since 2015’s Poison Season, contains lessons, both musical and spiritual, about how history repeats itself—all the ways in which we are destined (or doomed) to fulfill old prophecies.
Bejar named ken after the working title of Suede’s “The Wild Ones,” a tense and thrilling ballad first released in 1994 (“Oh, if you stay/We’ll be the wild ones, running with the dogs today,” Brett Anderson sings). “The Wild Ones” is a sad and wistful song about wishing someone wasn’t about to leave you; on it, Anderson sounds both imploring and lost. Bejar has called the song “one of the great English-language ballads of the last 100 years or so,” and said he was “physically struck” after discovering it was initially called “Ken”: “In an attempt to hold on to this feeling, I decided to lift the original title of that song and use it for my own purposes. It’s unclear to me what that purpose is, or what the connection is. I was not thinking about Suede when making this record. I was thinking about the last few years of the Thatcher era.”
Bejar was born in British Columbia in 1972, which means he was 18 when Margaret Thatcher, then the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was forced to resign, in 1990. Thatcher’s legacy is, at best, hugely divisive; a very large faction of the world believes her aggressive economic policies led to an era of unfettered greed and cruelty, from which we are still (barely) recovering. During her three terms in office, many artists responded musically to her policies, including the post-punk band Gang of Four, whose 1979 album Entertainment! is considered a direct and furious indictment of Thatcherism. “It was violent, paranoid music for a violent, paranoid time,” Nick Cave later said of the scene in London then.
Those words, of course, don’t feel any less applicable to late 2017. ken isn’t overloaded with explicitly political lyrics—although plenty can be read that way—but it does cultivate a paranoia that feels especially germane to our cultural moment. On “A Light Travels Down the Catwalk,” Bejar sings of alienation (“Strike an empty pose/A pose is always empty”). His voice sounds dry and desperate over acrid, wobbling synthesizers, but his breath and enunciation—especially on the line, “On bullshit for the night,” which closes the first verse—make him feel extra close, as if he’s just appeared over your shoulder to intone heavy warnings. This is the Bejar of 2011’s Kaputt: slinking around in the shadows, checking to see if you’re paying enough attention.
It’s hard not to reference the synth-pop and smooth jazz of the 1980s when contextualizing Bejar’s musical aesthetic —he uses saxophones and keyboards to express a particular kind of sleazy, noir-ish longing, a yen for anachronistic romance. The images ken conjures can feel nearly cartoonish: a midnight walk down a foggy street, smoking under the tepid yellow glow of a streetlight, wearing an elegant trench coat with the collar flipped high. Yet for Bejar, songwriting is almost exclusively about evocation. His lyrical work isn’t particularly narrative, nor is it directly engaged with the self; this can feel like a revolutionary choice in our present era, in which even more outré genres tend toward confessionalism, or intimate and specific narrations of loss and alienation. One gets the sense that Bejar finds these sorts of unmediated first-person pronouncements garish, if not corny. He isn’t interested in telling anybody exactly how he’s feeling; ergo, there are no easily discerned thematic arcs. Instead, he builds a strange, anxious atmosphere, writing couplets like, “Asleep in cars, theatre under stars/Shakespeare in the park, you’ve come undone.” All that computes, ultimately, is menace. Which means ken is a record that’s more easily felt than interpreted.
And while Bejar is often compared to David Bowie, ken Bejar’s playful and seductive approach to narrative also recalls Leonard Cohen. Take the verses that open “Sky’s Grey,” the first track:

Sky’s grey
Call for rain
Every day
You cancel the parade

Give up acting? Fuck no!
I’m just starting to get the good parts
Walk into a room and everything clicks

It feels like an egregious critical cliché to describe new music as “Lynchian,” yet there’s something about Bejar’s sensibility that plainly evokes the director’s whole gestalt—particularly the way he manipulates and weaponizes nostalgia. Both warp familiar sounds or images until they feel not just foreign, but unsettling. It’s all cocktails and smoking jackets until suddenly, blood is dripping from somewhere weird. Like one of Lynch’s filmic worlds, ken is elegant and perverse, a reflection on where we came from, and the unbelievable place we seem to have ended up.


Rock might be anathema to house-music purists, but that won’t stop Eris Drew dropping the needle on Led Zeppelin in one of the year’s most anticipated, and most fun, DJ sets.

Raving Disco Breaks Vol. II

Good news, boppers—Eris Drew finally released the second edition of Raving Disco Breaks, the pick-up-your-feet, turn-your-whole-day-around DJ mix series she debuted in 2019. The theme of the second edition is Rock the House—not exactly rock as in RAWK, but the verb sense of the word, as in “Keep it rockin’.” Once again the mix is available on SoundCloud and on cassette, though it landed on my desk more like contraband, one gigantic audio file too big for cloud storage to handle. Ah yes, I thought, now that’s the good stuff.
Naturally Drew remains enamored of throwback breakbeat house, a sound she associates with her initiation into underground rave culture as a disillusioned ’90s kid looking for deeper meaning in life. As on Vol. 1, the cuts are fast, the selections will put you neck deep in obscure 12"s on Discogs, and the mixing style is more DIY party poster than endless scroll. Drew spins through speed-dealing ’90s rave tracks, old-school hip-hop samples, and an incredible, improbably perfect Led Zeppelin guitar part that lands like a caped hero. There are strobing keyboard stabs, Pong synth bass hits, a voice that insists on “just, like, rock’n’roll.” You ever heard Janis Joplin sing a feature on a dance track? You have now. Drew guarantees every sample here to be at least 20 years old, if not older. She remains jazzed on horns. You can breakdance; you can bunny hop. It is an entirely worthy successor.
Drew makes body and emotion music, as captured in the name of the label she shares with partner Octo Octa, T4T LUV NRG. And though she’s not the kind of musician who writes lyrics, her love of wordplay is conspicuous. The Raving Disco Breaks mixes make improbably extensive use of language, chopping it up along with the samples into playful cut-and-paste winks. In Vol. 1, it might have been the announcer voice that seems to welcome you to “Clubhouse Disco” (that’s three genres, makes me laugh every time); here it’s snippets of well-worn rock’n’roll attitude slogans and fresh spins of all kinds of tracks that invoke the concept of “rock” in their titles, dialing up famous telephone headset user Terrence Parker’s “Gonna Rock You All Night” and classic b-boy soundtrack “To a Nation Rockin’.”
Drew doesn’t write lyrics but she does write an online newsletter. I’m struck by a passage in a recent edition, on the topic of dancing and drugs, where she describes the miserable local ragers she escaped for the light of the underground warehouse rave. “Most of my peers in high school would find a party at some suburban teenager’s house (unwitting parents out of town) and drink until they were blue in the face,” she wrote. “Everyone either was straight or pretended to be. Rock’n’roll and hip-hop were the only ‘real’ music at these parties. … Social norms and cliques were celebrated and reinforced rather than dismantled.” Contra the spirit of rock’n’roll, clearly, though I recognize the scene Drew describes here (perhaps a slightly younger, more sheltered teen would have turned to reading indie music blogs). The best thing about Rock the House, besides being a hell of a good time, is that those distinctions do not matter anymore, have never mattered, and in fact were fluid all along. Food for thought when you hear that little vocal clip of Joe Strummer rapping on the single most disco Clash song, “The Magnificent Seven,” as extracted and sampled by a deep-cut ’90s club track, as sampled and remixed by Eris Drew.
So I hope it’s not too mind-expanding to pitch Rock the House as a mix about aesthetic integration, in line with Drew’s personal spiritual concept of a universal Motherbeat, one I like to imagine as a kind of ever-present psychoacoustic ether but also a like a big stack of records—one really, really, really long waveform extending back through the entire corpus of musical creation from the latest live mix to the first human to beat on stone (what were they up to?). It speaks to her singular vision and personality as a DJ, too, though I don’t get the sense that she cares whether you care that this is the Eris Drew Show: You come to this rave to expand the collective consciousness. Good luck fitting that on Google Drive.


The appeal of the producer, DJ, and Kompakt co-owner's first full-length of new material in eight years largely comes from how self-contained each cut is. Whether it's a horror show theme, a nod to Jan Hammer, a bouquet of harp trills and birdsong, or a jazz workout, each song aims at a distinct idea.

Mantasy

If the recent appetite for artists like Nicolas Jaar, Actress, and Andy Stott has anything to tell us about the taste of dance music's more studious set, it's that fitful and filthy are in, and streamlined and tidy are out. This development is neither sudden nor surprising-- the swapping of sleek sounds and tidy quantization for more distressed sonic textures and complicated time signatures has been a throughline of pretty much all electronic music for the past three or four years. But it's a difficult enviornment for someone with as crisp an aesthetic as Michael Mayer.
Mayer may be among the more celebrated of the last decade's dance personalities, but he doesn't slot quite so easily into this current landscape. That's partly because the louche, tasteful, and continental sensibilities that defined his best work don't seem like dominant ideologies in dance music anymore. Perhaps correspondingly, it also feels like his ambition and energy have waned. Over the last few years, Mayer's label Kompakt has settled into a comfortable but unremarkable groove, working roughly the same corners of the same circuit for what seem like ever-diminishing returns. Meanwhile, Mayer's solo work has been so sporadic and incremental that his Discogs page might as well be covered in moss.
Mantasy is Mayer's first original full-length in eight years. Considering such a lengthy absence, you'd be forgiven for wondering if he might come back with something dramatically different, but he doesn't take any big swings here, nor does he seem to worry much about stretching beyond his own aesthetic bounds. Detractors will argue that in 2012 his kind of touch sounds more middle-aged than craftsmanlike, and, frankly, they'll be right. In that way, I suppose Mayer is kind of a litmus test for modern dance music listeners: So long as the idea of "middle-aged" isn't total anathema to you, you'll find something to like here.
Even though it operates under the familiar laws of Mayer's universe, Mantasy's appeal largely comes from how self-contained and individual each cut is; whether it's a fidgety horror show theme ("Lamusetwa"), a moody nod to Jan Hammer ("Mantasy"), a bouquet of harp trills and birdsong ("Baumhaus"), or a skronky jazz workout ("Rudi Was a Punk"), each of these 10 tracks aims at a distinct and concrete idea. Which isn't to say that all of them hit.
As with the tepid rhythm exercise "Neue Furche" and the aforementioned "Lamusetwa", Mayer's tendency to dial things like promisingly outre sounds or rhythm sections requiring muscle toward tastefulness instead of coarseness means that he has a frustrating default tendency toward the middle of the road. On other tracks, though, such as the perfectly pitched "Rudi" or the "Billie Jean"-aping highlight "Wrong Lap", which manages the neat trick of containing some pretty nuanced sounds while also sounding huge, you're reminded of how the right amount of restraint in the right places can still lead to unexpected magic.


The Nigerian singer blends the personal and political into a new benchmark of Afro-fusion music.

African Giant

The music spread across West Africa’s many cultures have been frequently miscategorized, lumped together under the racist “world music” banner, or altogether ignored. There are still mix-ups surrounding Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat and the current umbrella pop genre Afrobeats. Somewhere in between the not-so-ambiguous space of that “s” is Nigerian cross-pollinator Burna Boy. His grandfather was Kuti’s manager, his dad introduced him to the music of deejay Super Cat and dancehall great Buju Banton when he was a kid, and a girl he liked at 10 gave him his first Joe CD, initiating a love of America R&B and subsequently rap. He is a musical omnivore who left Nigeria to live and learn in London but never strayed too far from home.
Burna Boy is one of West Africa’s brightest rising stars, and he has long been poised for a crossover moment here in the States, but his position on the Coachella billing earlier this year illustrated a disparity between who he is in Africa and who he is in America. “I am an AFRICAN GIANT and will not be reduced to whatever that tiny writing means,” he wrote on Instagram. The memo was loud and clear: Africa will not be marginalized. When his mother accepted, on his behalf, the award for BET’s Best International Act (an ill-defined category that reinforces just how noncommittal we are as a society about most non-white imported music), she reminded an audience full of Black musicians that they are part of a larger whole: “The message from Burna, I believe, would be that every Black person should please remember that you were Africans before you became anything else.”
This idea of tracing all Blackness back to the wellspring is the crux of Burna Boy’s new album, African Giant; his mother’s words, sampled from the BET speech, are the last ones spoken on the album. Burna’s compositions are all based in something he’s dubbed Afro-fusion—blending pop, American hip-hop and R&B, Jamaican dancehall, and hard UK rap with Nigerian music—and he puts Africa at the root of that expanding lineage while also pushing the more traditional sounds forward. The album is a splendid hour of jams, both personal and political, that never sacrifices its bewitching groove even when it’s dressing down corrupt officials. African Giant is more cohesive, more robust in sound, and significantly broader than his previous music. He siphons external sounds to enhance the shape and texture of his homegrown slappers.
Last year’s Outside made a play for Western audiences in the wake of Burna’s cameo on Drake’s More Life. There’s still a sense of that here but the hybridist isn’t making any concessions for such audiences. The music reaches across the diaspora because his sound has a unifying power. It starts with Africa first, then extends outward. While he used English frequently before, here he sings primarily in Pidgin, Yoruba, and Igbo and pulls guests from all over into his distinctive polyrhythmic world: Nigeria’s Zlatan and Ghana’s M.anifest, Angélique Kidjo, reggae legend Damian Marley and dancehall singer Serani, Jorja Smith in the UK, across the Atlantic with Jeremih, YG, and Future. He described leading the latter two into Afro-fusion as “bringing my brothers home.”
This musical Garveyism produces two of African Giant’s most massive moments. On “Show & Tell,” Burna meets Future halfway, exchanging tough talk as the flavor of his melodies seeps into the rapper’s Auto-Tune. The buoyant sway has all but taken hold when suddenly the song bottoms out into something darker and unpredictable. The Jeremih and Serani-assisted stunner “Secret” melts swaggering Naija pop into an R&B slow burner, the washed-out guitars rolling over Burna as he drifts into a refined falsetto.
Elsewhere, Burna is at his best either holding it down at home or tracing African influence beyond its shores. He trades blows with Zlatan on “Killing Dem,” each hyping up the other. He secured a guest appearance from premier African diva Angélique Kidjo on “Different” with Damian Marley, in which they sing about the similarities and disparities of Black suffering. Burna and Marley’s verses mirror each other, structurally and melodically, rising and crashing, building to a surging Kidjo coda. In his lyrics, Burna uncovers how rampant corruption inspired personal study. “Differently intelligent…/Different studying of my roots and origin/Tell my truth in melodies.”
While Burna Boy takes his position within the expansive and nuanced musical legacy of Africa, he probes Nigeria’s turbulent history. He can’t really be an African giant without speaking truth to power, after all, and he spends much of the album breaking down the narratives that have surrounded Nigeria since it gained independence in 1960. No sequence embodies this better than the two-pronged economic evaluation of “Wetin Man Go Do” and “Dangote”; the brutal nature of a life making ends meet is put shoulder-to-shoulder with the unrepentant drive of billionaires (the song is named after the Nigerian business tycoon Aliko Dangote, the richest man in Africa). If the Nigerian elite won’t stop amassing wealth, Burna suggests, then he can’t slow down in his pursuit of money either. He comes off both impressed by their appetites and anxiously aware of an expanding fiscal imbalance. In instances like these, Burna Boy juggles roles as an everyman, local griot, global ambassador, party-starter, and occasional badmon with ease.


Tech-house hot boy's second full-length for Ghostly International's Spectral Sound imprint fails to reach the peaks of his previous 12-inches and debut full-length.

Backstroke

Every morning, Detroit tech-house artist Matthew Dear has to wake up to the painful realization that, for the rest of his career, he might never again release anything as good as "Dog Days". This is hardly a slight to Dear-- "Dog Days" just happens to be one of the most irresistible house numbers to come out in years, and the song casts a long, pitch-black shadow over the rest of his work. Even Dear's 2003 solid debut LP, Leave Luck to Heaven, which tried to keep "Dog Days" tucked away until the sixth track, ultimately suffered from this emergent disparity.
Dear definitely feels the pressure. After Leave Luck to Heaven, he tried his best to match the hook and energy of "Dog Days" with the feisty 12-inch single "Anger Management". The fractured acid-house groove had just as much energy as "Dog Days", but lacked Dear's breathy vocal hook, relying instead on the warmth of the synth sounds themselves. B-side "Future Never Again" fared similarly with gorgeous high- and low-end production, and from the release, it seemed that Dear had decided to forgo the "Dog Days" formula entirely and instead to concentrate on this very exciting warm acid-house approach. Dear's abrasive debut Kisses EP as Audion only fortified this expectation, the 12-inch bearing the faint hint of a denser, club-friendlier Pan Sonic.
Given this trajectory, Dear's new Backstroke LP comes with two surprises: For one, Dear relies much more heavily on his vocals to carry the songs than before-- more than half of these tracks prominently feature his vocals. What consciously results are Dear's first pop songs, most of which make recourse to traditional verse/chorus/verse structure. The other surprise is more frustrating: Dear's instrumental tracks are remarkably flat. They hardly match the energy of "Anger Management" or Kisses, let alone Dear's fantastic earlier EPs. What's worse, since the instrumentals come between the vocal tracks, an otherwise exciting Backstroke suffers from some serious drag.
The torrent of noise that delays opener "Another" for over a minute finally gives way to a pulse of timid synth straight out of Warp's back catalog. Dear updates the line halfway through with a bubbly glitch treatment, but given the line's fragility, he can't do much else with it, and the song stagnates. Dear himself must have realized this about "Another"; in fact, the vinyl release of Backstroke pulls it from the tracklist altogether.
Percussion sounds on "Tide" fire off and recoil while Dear snakes a simple but gargantuan bassline and some twitchy guitar action into the mix. By the time Dear enters in verse with modest reverb, the song's chorus is about to take over: The guitar drops out, and Dear's catchy nanny-nanny boo-boo potshot ("I don't care 'bout you anymore") is closely followed by a trail of deadened vocals, used to bewilderingly great effect.
Unfortunately, what life "Tide" manages to breathe into Backstroke is enervated by "Takes on You", a seven-minute instrumental that boasts the precision of Kompakt but none of its heart. Dear won't reclaim the listener's rapt attention until "Grut Wall". Here, Dear contrasts trench-deep but well-defined low-end with bright clicks, while a tired bee-like buzz flutters between the two. Shortly thereafter, the song's colorful electric piano melody-- perhaps a sinister counterpart to Jurgen Pääpe's line on "So Weit Wie Noch Wie"-- settles in for good. "Grut Wall" would have killed even as an instrumental, but Dear's exorcised vocals send it rocketing up to meet "Tide" as an album highlight.
After "Grut Wall", Backstroke becomes particularly disappointing. "I Know Howser" is Dear's lazy attempt at schaffel-pop; the possibly tongue-in-cheek "Huggy's Parade" is an undeveloped, infantile "Dog Days" rehash; and there's not much to say about "Good Girl" other than that it's just fucking terrible. Thankfully, the album's epic closer, "And in the Night", redeems some of the album's second-side sins. Though definitely out of place on Backstroke-- it sounds more like an overloaded Happy Mondays than the minimal house approach to which Dear primarily subscribes-- its storm of horns, keyboards, bell sounds, and tape hiss work quite well behind Dear's multitracked vocal melodies.
It's unclear if "And in the Night" marks a new direction for Dear or just a fluke, but it stands as one last reminder here of how much Dear is capable as an artist. In this sense, Backstroke could become even more of a burden to Dear: The album makes it strikingly clear when he's dead on, and when he's miles off.


The eccentric 29-year-old guitarist, artist, model, and former city council candidate’s new solo guitar album showcases his studious and inventive approach to the genre.

Hayden Pedigo: The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored

The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored

John Fahey occupies a paradoxical position in American life. Born and raised in suburban Washington, D.C., his music invokes a kind of a kind of localism by way of the folk, blues, jazz, and country traditions that initially inspired his intricate fingerpicking style. Yet it’s also remarkably placeless, only taking on a specific regional feel by way of its inheritors and the pastoral styles they’ve developed in their own areas. While Fahey’s music itself doesn’t feel of a specific time and place, it’s easy to imagine a map dedicated to all the local sounds it’s informed over the past 50 years, with pins to denote Jim O’Rourke’s Chicago, William Tyler’s Nashville, and Daniel Bachman’s Virginia, where undoubtedly, the city of Amarillo, Texas, would be reserved for Hayden Pedigo.
As a child of Amarillo, the 29-year-old guitarist has found lasting inspiration in his locale, developing a mode of fingerstyle performance that’s specifically indebted to the area. His 2017 album, Greetings From Amarillo, made this connection explicit in both its track titles and on its recordings, which placed his temperate fingerpicking alongside dreamy kosmische soundscapes, and included a vocal interlude from the local visual artist and outlaw country icon Terry Allen (whose music has itself been the subject of recent reissues). Pedigo’s commitment to the region has only seemed to deepen in recent years; in 2019, he starred in a series of surrealist videos announcing his plan to run for Amarillo City Council, which resulted in an outpouring of online support that inspired him to take the election seriously and follow through with an actual campaign, as documented in the 2021 film Kid Candidate. “I definitely mulled it over a lot. It wasn’t a knee-jerk thing,” he told Rolling Stone at the time.
Despite ultimately losing the election to a more monied contender, Pedigo’s campaign introduced the world to his offbeat sense of humor—part John Wilson, part Tim Heidecker—which has since emerged as a central part of his music career. While the recordings themselves have remained just as tranquil and stone-faced as before, they’ve arrived with new photos, videos, and album art that lean into the stir-crazed insanity that seems to accompany the feeling of being an outsider in a small town at every level of success. “Solo guitar music, to be frank, it’s such a stuffy genre,” he said in an interview with Aquarium Drunkard. “People pose for their press photos wearing a tweed jacket with their guitar on their lap. I’ve done that too. But I’m willing to not take myself too seriously.” In 2021, he brought his cowboy charisma to the runway, walking in Gucci’s “Love Parade” show in Hollywood and later sitting for portraits with the celebrated fashion photographer Hedi Slimane. Precisely the kind of surreal career milestones that could easily go to another’s head, these experiences haven’t seemed to phase Pedigo in the slightest, whose music remains as focused and surprising as ever.
The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored arrives a full decade removed from Pedigo’s debut cassette. Gone are the buzzing organs, clumsy multitracking, and unfocused picking that lent Seven Years Late and Greetings From Amarillo an understated charm, replaced by taut phrasing and melodies that push back against the guitarist’s early abstractions. The album adopts the phrase as its basic unit of expression, stitching neighboring tones from open tunings into melodies that fan out across the fretboard. On “Looking at the Fish” and “Elsewhere,” this approach is contained within the bouncing mid-tempo grooves that populate Pedigo’s earlier material, but other songs embrace new temporal possibilities that produce some of the strongest melodies of Pedigo’s career.
Consider “The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored”; in the first few seconds of the track, a distorted electric guitar cuts through the mix at a hurried pace that seems to knock the acoustic melody off-center before stumbling back into alignment with the electric. The short, roughly 15-second phrase is repeated with slight variations throughout the track, embellished with lead melodies that wander ever-slightly before returning back to this central theme. It’s the kind of phrase that could easily grow stale in another guitarist’s hands, but one that his deft touch and deep understanding of tradition lend a feeling of timelessness.
The album is filled with similar moments of splendor that feel like clear triumphs in the context of Pedigo’s catalog. Both “Nearer, Nearer” and “Then It’s Gone” feature equally disarming phrases with the kind of expressive, even-keeled rubato that comes with endless practice. Yet even while releasing songs that feel expertly arranged and rehearsed, Pedigo still retains his sense of humor; alongside the title track, the guitarist released an instructional video for the single that echoes the spirit of his campaign videos. Draped in vintage TV effects and peering out from behind a pair of oversized glasses, Pedigo assumes the role of a cheesy, washed-up guitar instructor, offering real guidance on how to play the piece and warm words of encouragement for students of all ages at home. Loosely framed as comedy, it’s a scene that comes from a sincere place that feels both authentic to Pedigo and genuinely new in the context of his musical career. There’s an honesty and understanding of self here that feels refreshing, especially amid so much fingerstyle traditionalism.


The latest collaboration between the heavy psych-rock mavens and the master of noise music consists of two separate CDs meant to be played simultaneously.

Gensho

Gensho, the latest sprawling collaboration from fellow Japanese experimental giants Boris and Merzbow, seems made and marketed to elicit the attention of Gizmodo or Mashable. The set splits 13 tracks unevenly between the artists; Boris takes credit for nine, while Merzbow can claim four. But compare the track lengths—add them up, even—and you'll notice that, collectively, the running time for Merzbow's contributions essentially equals that of Boris' drum-less recreations of its greatest hits. The halves are meant to be started and played simultaneously, so that the mixing between the two happens in real-time and at the high volumes facilitated by two separate sound systems. It's a more modest rendition of The Flaming Lips's Zaireeka, enhanced by the twist of partnership between these longtime collaborators.
Don't be surprised if, upon first spin, Gensho sounds like a mess, or if listening to the whole 75-minute cycle gets exhausting. Boris and Merzbow, of course, are dual institutions of loudness; the former has a classic called Amplifier Worship, the latter a masterpiece called Sonic Command. At times here, they seem to go at one another's throat, Merzbow's spirals of clipped-and-mangled signals lashing out against Boris' honeyed drone.
Each time you run this gauntlet, you will undoubtedly notice new cooperative nuances between the two acts, particularly moments when Merzbow seems to be working to fit inside Boris' world and to augment it. When the band lurches into "Sometimes," for instance, with sweeping guitar chords moving like tectonic plates beneath airy vocals, he locks into a sustained signal and guilds it with quick, near-manic cuts. It's as though he's adding a bass line and his version of a blast beat to the low, slow rumble. He's almost playful during "Akuma No Uta," countering the band's grand, ascendant riff with a crosstalk of dissonant bits and shards. Such moments, though, are either so few and far between or so constant (it's hard to determine which, really) on Gensho that the entire experience becomes more arduous than enjoyable. Both Merzbow and Boris have built enormous legacies by being monolithic in sound and singular in style, but those assets become liabilities here.
Listening to these sets separately is actually the more interesting experience. The two-part "Goloka" suite, which takes the middle 40 minutes of Merzbow's contribution, finds the master in all his versatile glory. He slides seamlessly between electroacoustic radiance and concussive punishment, between drones that are nearly pleasant and scrambles that suggest all the world's servers stalling at once. And the nine preexisting songs that Boris chose for this set—the tidal "Farewell," the snarling "Vomitself," the floating "Rainbow"—are among the landmarks in an enormous catalog. Re-created here without drums, they're newly fascinating, with forgotten elements pulled suddenly into the spotlight. Boris' side of Gensho is the band's most assured and purely pleasurable album in years. As if knowing they'll be overshadowed by Merzbow's volume, anyway, the trio seems to be enjoying itself here, delighting its way through the classics of its own canon. Perhaps it's best to think of Gensho, then, as a split box set.
Still, particularly for this era of instant, easy access to almost everything, Gensho is an intriguing, subversive concept. It makes the listener work to hear the music as it's intended, and that process allows the listener input as to how, exactly, the music should be heard. Which side should be louder? Who gets the right channel? Should the stereos used be the same? Gensho feels delightfully out of step with our present notions of convenience, our belief that music should practically come to us if it wants to be heard. It's not quite so extreme as the infamous Merzcar, in which Merzbow's Noisembryo was locked crypt-style into the CD player of a decrepit Mercedez-Benz, but it's certainly more involved than Adele circumventing Spotify.
Alas, that challenge is the most lasting aspect of the least rewarding partnership between Boris and Merzbow to date. By the fourth or fifth trip through Gensho, the idea begins to slip into pure gimmickry, as though this were a notion that sounded fun for old friends to try but isn't so fun to hear. What's more, Boris' decision to plunder its back catalog for such an album dovetails with the recent feeling that this band, no matter how hard it tries, is simply running out of ground and energy. They couldn't even be bothered to write new songs for this old, borrowed concept. At least it's good to revisit the ghosts of a force that seems to be fading.


Even on this shorter EP, saxophonist and composer Kamasi Washington displays a tireless ambition with his compositions, performance, and spiritual approach.

Kamasi Washington: Harmony of Difference EP

Harmony of Difference EP

Where the standard path through jazz usually involves an ascending series of apprenticeships and supporting gigs, saxophonist Kamasi Washington and his compatriots essentially created their own scene in relative isolation in South Central Los Angeles. Washington first gained national notice for his playing and arrangements on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (the album also included contributions from members of Washington’s loose collective, the West Coast Get Down), but by the time that album was released, he was 34 years old and had written enough music for an audacious three-hour, three-disc debut album, 2015’s The Epic.
Instead of a jazz label, that record came out on Flying Lotus’ imprint, Brainfeeder, and Washington’s band got booked to play clubs and festivals that typically host indie rock or rap groups; which is to say that so far, nothing about Washington’s rise fits an established template. His music is very much of jazz, but the context he and his collaborators have created sits slightly outside it. Continuing the trend, Washington’s new EP, Harmony of Difference, comes courtesy of Young Turks, a sublabel of XL that has released music by Jamie xx and FKA twigs, and it contains music written for an exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2017 Biennial.
Harmony of Difference was originally part of a multimedia work that illustrated how forces that seem to be working in opposition could come together as a composite of complex beauty. This was illustrated in the original exhibit by a series of projected paintings (created by artist and Washington’s sister Amani Washington) that were gradually overlaid to form an abstract image of a face. Musically, Washington explores the theme by writing a series of five short pieces that are also folded together into a lengthy, recombinant suite.
That extended piece, called “Truth,” was released earlier this year as part of a short film by director A.G. Rojas (which was also part of the Whitney exhibit). The structure lends a sense of déjà vu, as motifs and riffs and melodies are introduced and then reappear later. Where musical counterpoint was the driving idea for the compositions, Harmony also feels like a meditation on memory, association, and vantage point. Hearing it in one sitting is like looking at a sculpture from multiple angles and suddenly the three-dimensional form clicks in your mind and you apprehend the whole.
In approach and tone, Harmony feels of a piece with parts of The Epic. “Desire” anchors the suite with its elemental one–two–three bassline, which hints at the iconic motif from John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, while “Humility” is driving and jagged, focusing most on Cameron Graves’ spray of piano notes. “Perspective” is a mid-tempo groover in the soft funky vein of Grover Washington Jr. There are elements of ’60s small-group jazz and ’70s R&B; calypso rhythms percolate under tightly arranged ensemble sections and then the structure gives way to thematic improvisations. Throughout, Washington has a particular mode of arranging and layering the horn section (which, along with his tenor, includes Ryan Porter on trombone and Dontae Winslow on trumpet) that’s dreamy and lush, a slowly drifting cloud of healing sound.
Though Washington is a fine tenor soloist, the essence of his artistry is found in his explosively grand compositions and arrangements. “Truth,” like parts of The Epic, is a dense, maximalist tune with strings and choirs reaching for the heavens in the manner of an old Hollywood production number choreographed by Busby Berkeley, and for some people the sheer drama of it all may prove to be overwhelming. But Washington expertly juggles all the parts to create music that is deeply (and surprisingly) accessible. As a player/bandleader/composer/arranger, Quincy Jones and Oliver Nelson are two of Washington’s clear antecedents. Albums like Jones’ 1970 classic Gula Matari and Nelson’s 1961 outing The Blues and the Abstract Truth featured exceptional soloists on extended pieces where genre was fluid and the composition and the arrangements were the biggest selling point. Like Jones and Nelson, it’s not hard to imagine Washington having great success in film scoring—his sense of shading and the broad sonic palette available hint at a vast well of possibility.
But what ultimately binds Washington’s work together is his spiritual approach. As with The Epic, the title of this release and of the individual pieces suggests the scope of his ambition. The concept for Harmony and the video for “Truth” make clear that Washington is framing his work so that they’re in conversation with the biggest social issues facing the world. His music is both a challenge and a balm, the starting point of a conversation and a place you can go to meditate on what’s been said. Following on its massive and sometimes unwieldy predecessor, Harmony of Difference, a brief and concentrated blast of emotion, is a great place to catch up on what Washington has to say.


Mackenzie Scott’s fourth album is both her most intimate and eclectic. Its best moments are the sound of someone powering through uncertainty until they find their direction again.

Silver Tongue

In 2017, singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott released Three Futures, her most aggressive, starkly arranged, and provocative album to date. Despite its direct lyrics and instantly memorable visual aesthetic, Futures failed to meet the commercial expectations of her former label 4AD—maybe it didn’t stand out enough against records like St. Vincent’s Masseduction, or maybe it was too unflinching to be as accessible. Maybe a line like “I’m not a righteous woman, I’m more of an ass man” would have trouble reaching a mainstream audience.
Scott wrote Silver Tongue, her fourth album as Torres, after the unceremonious fallout with her label left her feeling ambivalent towards her musical career. It would be several months before she started writing again, using her “cyclical muse” relationship with her girlfriend, the artist Jenna Gribbon, for an album about love as a stabilizing force. Her first album on Merge, Silver Tongue is less confrontational than Three Futures and less theatrical than 2015’s Sprinter (and less raw than her 2013 self-titled debut), but that makes sense given the circumstances that inspired the record. Scott self-produced this album out of necessity, due to a smaller budget but a wide-ranging vision for the record, taking equal influence from Gregorian chant music, Phil Collins’ percussive Tarzan soundtrack, and the in-vogue new-age legend Enya. Even as Scott’s ambition sometimes clashes with the content of the actual songs, Tongue is both her most intimate and eclectic album thus far. As long as the unrelenting stare that is her contralto takes prominence, it’s still Torres.
Scott’s Southern roots have long informed her music ever since she recorded her debut in “swamp rock legend” Tony Joe White’s Nashville studio while she studied at Belmont University. She would occasionally reference her upbringing in songs like “Cowboy Guilt” off Sprinter (the clearest precursor to her current electronic direction) or in the video for “Three Futures.” While she wasn’t openly identifying as queer in 2013, Torres consistently used cowboy iconography as a means to a gender-defying end. Silver Tongue opener “Good Scare” distills her background into a single line about Tennessee pickup truck sex, and even if she acknowledges that “folks here in New York [will] get a kick out of” country motifs, her references are more meaningful than simple namechecking. “Dressing America” is even sweeter, a love song of extreme devotion (she sleeps in cowboy boots in case her lover needs her) featuring a mix of distant pedal steel and blown-out drum machines.
That sweetness is the biggest change from her past records. Conflating an artists’ life with their music inevitably brings to mind the word “confessional,” a term used to implicitly dismiss a songwriter’s abilities to write beyond her own experience. Yet several songs here, including the penultimate track “Gracious Day,” unambiguously explore Scott’s relationship with Gribbon. The pleas of “Gracious Day” sound vulnerable, but Scott admitting, “I don’t want you going home anymore/I want you coming home” over interlocking guitar lines and eavesdropping synth flutes is as affecting as Three Futures was intimidating. The only weak lyrical moment on the whole album comes on the broader strokes of “Good Grief,” as the punchline “there’s no such thing as good grief” engulfs nearly a quarter of the five-minute runtime.
The way the lead guitar gradually overtakes “Good Grief” is uniquely exciting on this largely muted record. The mood of Silver Tongue is caught between plaintive country, spacey alt-pop, and jagged indie rock, but in a way that leaves some of the most confident songs Scott has ever written feeling strangely inert. Lyrical highlight “Two of Everything” is a (more) sapphic “Jolene,” only from the person about to steal rather than the pleader: “To the one sharing my lover’s bed/It’s not my mission to be cruel/But she don’t light up the room/When she’s talking about you.” A would-be standout gets lost in an arrangement both undercooked and overwrought, uninspired drum patterns clashing with guitar synths, both drowning out the vocals. “Good Scare” has the opposite issue, gliding for three and a half minutes then fading out—it sounds pleasant, but the washy mix doesn’t serve the lyrics.
The best production moments, like the chaotic, paranoid “Records of Your Tenderness” and soaring closer “Silver Tongue,” are the sound of someone powering through uncertainty until they find their direction again. To rediscover her path, Scott sings more openly about love, about her love, than she ever has previously. The high-concept “gregorian country” vision aside, what Silver Tongue really depicts is the need to find comfort in a period of transition—taking stock of what’s still there and holding onto it tightly. In the case of the video for “Dressing America,” it becomes literal; Torres carries Gribbon, wrapped in a blanket, through the streets of New York. That could be as good an album cover as the one Gribbon painted; Silver Tongue makes clear that Gribbon has carried Scott too.

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Berlin’s Phillip Sollmann strikes a balance between dancefloor techno and avant-garde experiments; his tracks slip into the cracks between common melody and rhythm.

New Atlantis

There’s a quality that sets Efdemin’s music apart from most techno: a soft, pneumatic heft; an all-encompassing glow. Efdemin, aka Berlin’s Phillip Sollmann, is known as a minimalist; he was long affiliated with Hamburg minimal-house label Dial, home to Lawrence, Carsten Jost, and Pantha du Prince, and he is a resident DJ at Berlin’s Berghain, a techno nightclub with a famously austere aesthetic. New Atlantis appears on Ostgut Ton, the club’s in-house imprint. But if the elements of Efdemin’s music can be stripped down, the suppleness of the results is anything but. Ironically, the linearity of his productions contributes to their sumptuous character: His tracks glint like a ribbon of asphalt that stretches toward the horizon, shimmering in the heat.
New Atlantis is his first album as Efdemin in five years (not counting a mix CD, a showcase for his Naïf label, last year). In the meantime, Sollmann has been exploring pastures far from the dancefloor, teaming up with percussionists and electric guitarists and toying with bell tones and neo-kosmische abstraction. He has a particular interest in unconventional methods of generating sound: His Monophonie project utilizes fanciful instruments by the American composer Harry Partch, sound sculptures by the Detroit furniture designer Harry Bertoia, and a 19th-century double siren, a steampunk gizmo by the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz. What all of those have in common: an escape hatch from the strictures of just intonation and the conventional 12-tone scale.
Those tonal experiments have rubbed off on New Atlantis, the most diverse and ambitious recording to appear under the Efdemin name, incorporating not just standard electronic kit but also dulcimer, sing-drum, hurdy-gurdy, and guitars. On its face, it is a techno album. The majority of its tracks barrel forward, fueled by four-to-the-floor kick drums and strict, time-keeping hi-hats. “Good Winds” gallops along, its kick drum as dry as an anechoic chamber, the better to emphasize the softly thrumming organ chords that slowly expand over every molecule of its atmosphere; “Black Sun” pairs a punishing thud with gurgling synths reminiscent of classic minimal techno and then wraps both in more of those gorgeous, ever-expanding chords, as nuanced as the gradients of a sunset.
But the presence of a techno beat does not always translate to what many might recognize as conventional techno. “A Land Unknown” marries the rigid pulse of trance music to buzzing drones evocative of Indian raga, and the title track is even more bare-bones, underpinning its gaseous clouds of overtones with the merest boom-tick drum pattern for more than 14 hypnotic minutes, closer in spirit to La Monte Young than to Ricardo Villalobos.
Sollmann has said that lately, he has been seeing how far he can reduce the elements of his music, and occasionally, listening to the ticking-clock minimalism of a track like “New Atlantis,” you wonder if perhaps he muted one too many channels on his mixing desk—or, conversely, if he should have just gone whole-hog ambient and done away with the drums entirely. But there’s a reason they’re there; bit like in Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project, the static kick drum functions like a handrail leading you deeper and deeper into the shifting layers of overtones.
A few tracks leave the dancefloor behind entirely. “At the Stranger’s House” brings John Gürtler’s processed saxophone, a la Jon Hassell, to a microtonal field of water-drop pulse and shimmer; the all-too-brief “Temple” overlays Jeff Mills-style loop techno with whistles and flutes and deflating balloons—not so much minimal techno as techno in miniature, a kid’s birthday party set to the beat of an 808. The album’s title comes from a utopian novel by the philosopher Francis Bacon, published in 1626, in which he predicted, with startling prescience, the synthetic nature of music production 400 years hence. A portion of his text is read over the album’s closing track, “The Sound House”—“We have also sound-houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmonies, which you have not… Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown… We also have divers strange and artificial echoes…”—in which Efdemin cleverly does his best impression of a Renaissance ensemble anticipating the music of Aphex Twin.
But the album’s most affecting track takes a very different tack. The opening song, “Oh, Lovely Appearance of Death,” takes angelically beautiful chords and overlays a mournful a cappella recording of an 18th-century Methodist hymn. The subject of the song carries the beauty of the human corpse—not in some gruesome sense, but as the ultimate mark of purity. “Longing to lie in his stead,” the subject of the hymn envies the dead man’s final union with god—“No longer in Misery now/No longer a Sinner like me.” This is also a kind of vision of utopia, albeit not one you might expect to find associated with Berghain, a club with a decidedly un-saintly reputation. But it’s a testament to Sollmann’s vision that the music betrays no apparent contradiction. Techno has always been about the promise of disappearing into nothingness. And just as Francis Bacon foresaw (in a roundabout way) synthesizers and Spotify, Sollmann finds a pre-echo of rave’s dissolution of the ego in a melancholy funeral hymn from 1780.