Messing with Miles Davis music is a dangerous proposition. It was necessary for Don Cheadle's  biopic Miles Ahead, and with help from Robert Glasper, it's sometimes a successful endeavor.

Robert Glasper / Miles Davis: Everything's Beautiful / Miles Ahead OST

In cinephile circles, biopics are notorious for being underwhelming. Nitpicking can come from multiple directions—with one camp deriding a central lack of tension in the telling of an icon’s familiar story, and another wailing over any dramatic liberty taken with the historical record. Director and actor Don Cheadle’s new film about Miles Davis plunges consciously and energetically into this fraught zone, not least because it dares to call itself Miles Ahead (aka the title of one of Davis’ great big band LPs). That titling move amounts to an open invitation to jazz whiners and/or experts everywhere.
As an actor, Cheadle looks and sounds the part. His styling is immaculate, and his voice channels Davis’ famous rasp. But at a level of sound, the two recordings that spring from Cheadle’s project face an even steeper challenge—simply because any re-appropriation of Davis’ music is a more precarious enterprise than acting out the life story. In this light, reporting that the original sounds created for (or inspired by) Cheadle’s film do not immediately register as embarrassments is a form of high praise.
The bulk of this film’s single-disc “original motion picture soundtrack” is built from brief dialogue snippets from the film (which are fine), select Davis cuts presented in full (“So What,” from Kind of Blue, naturally) and a few edits of classic Davis recordings (which should be avoided on general principle). Shaving down clips of Miles is a necessity of cinematic sound-design convention, and isn’t a mark against the film itself. But once you’re listening to a recording, outside the theater, I doubt even the filmmakers behind Miles Ahead would argue that it isn’t more important to seek out a complete, originally issued take. The soundtrack’s most interesting custom songs come toward the end of the album, where the film’s musical supervisor, keyboardist Robert Glasper, has the chance to offer four original pieces inspired by Davis’ protean example. And he makes each opportunity count.
“Junior’s Jam” has a spare funk indebted to Miles’ Jack Johnson sessions (and fortunately the playing of Glasper, saxophonist Marcus Strickland, and trumpeter Keyon Harrold doesn’t sound overly imitative). The chill of “Francessence” sounds equally inspired by In a Silent Way as well as latter-day film score work by the likes of Terence Blanchard. There’s a group rave-up meant to connote an active club feel (“What’s Wrong With That?”), and it includes some fiery soprano saxophone playing from onetime Davis band member Wayne Shorter. And album-closer “Gone 2015” features joyously triumphant rhyming from the too-often overlooked Pharoahe Monch.
Working on the film seems to have given Glasper more ideas than could be included on the original soundtrack. So, with the permission of the Davis estate, he’s also created another full-length release that frequently uses the trumpeter’s recorded legacy as point of departure. More than a “remix” album, Everything’s Beautiful shows off Glasper’s skills with sampling, and his talent for creating original work. The pinnacle of the set comes on “Maiysha (So Long),” when Erykah Badu delivers original lyrics over Glasper’s playing and a sample of a Davis performance found on the album Get Up With It. And the keyboardist’s cover of “Milestones” proves that he doesn’t need access to the trumpeter’s tape-vault in order to create valid interpretations.
Glasper’s supporting cast draws from the range of talents he’s also employed on his reliably enjoyable Black Radio series of jazz-meets-R&B fusion recordings. So in addition to Badu’s star turn, we get Phonte rapping over a 9th Wonder production (during “Violets”), as well as the presence of vocalists like Bilal—whose phrasing and register-leaps animate the strut of “Ghetto Walkin’” (built from a groove Davis cut in 1969). The melisma and occasional grit of Ledisi’s voice drives “I’m Leaving You,” a song which also puts the spotlight on the guitar work of latter-day Davis collaborator John Scofield.
A trio of cuts toward the middle of Everything’s Beautiful suffers from feeling less robustly reimagined than the rest of the set—placing a slight drag on momentum. But there’s an easy fix: To experience the full range of the pianist’s Davis-derived thinking, just add Glasper’s contributions from the Miles Ahead soundtrack to Everything’s Beautiful. By being respectful of the artist’s legacy while also making some smart, contemporary production choices, Glasper’s best work proves an an ideal vehicle for paying tribute to an artist who had a firm feel for tradition, but who never stayed fixed in one place for very long.


Brunhild Ferrari, the longtime partner of Luc Ferrari, is a powerful creative force in her own right. Jim O’Rourke assists on two new realizations of her work, interpreting them with rare sensitivity.

Brunhild Ferrari / Jim O’Rourke: Le Piano Englouti

Le Piano Englouti

A number of thrilling things happen throughout “Tranquilles Impatiences” (or “Quiet Impatiences”), the second piece on Le Piano Englouti (The Sunken Piano), an album of realizations of work by the composer Brunhild Ferrari. A jittery, nerve-jangling scrum of tones underpins “Tranquilles Impatiences,” a tense chorus of high-pitched sounds that acts as a constant destabilizing force. Their “imperturbable wriggling,” as Ferrari describes it, scratches an arc over more peaceable, low-end drones that fold together like a fabric at the core of the piece. The tension that builds throughout—not so much between these two core elements as because of their parallel co-existence—makes for something of a white-knuckle ride. Shorter than previous realizations, this version of “Tranquilles Impatiences” has raw impact.
Brunhild Ferrari composed “Tranquilles Impatiences” using material by her husband, the late French-Italian composer Luc Ferrari—specifically, five of the seven tapes he created for 1977’s Exercices d’improvisation. In that context, they existed as sequences of electronic music, the grounding force for improvisations by up to eight musicians. They serve a different purpose here, yet there is something in their dynamics, their strange playfulness, that reflects both Luc Ferrari’s humor and thoughtfulness and Brunhild Ferrari’s sensitivity and compositional acumen. If the spotlight has, until recently, been trained predominantly on Luc, it’s worth noting that the couple collaborated intensively over more than 40 years together, with Brunhild first helping out with paperwork and administration before Luc encouraged her to record and compose.
Between them, Luc and Brunhild Ferrari created a unique musical world, one where sounds were porous and active, and where an interest in the sonic aspects of everyday life met an engagement with the cinematic possibilities of organizing sound. Luc Ferrari’s approach to composition was multifaceted—playful and witty, sensuous and seductive, rigorous yet never alienating—and Brunhild increasingly took part as an editor and recordist, a collector of sounds, and a voice on some of Luc’s recordings. (A 2013 quadruple-CD set on Shiiin, Contes Sentimentaux, featured a series of 11 radio dramas broadcast between 1989 and 1994, consisting of dialogues between Luc and Brunhild about Luc’s work, set over corresponding Ferrari compositions.) Over the decades, Brunhild Ferrari would be a significant interlocutor in her partner’s work, and a powerful creative force in her own right.
Jim O’Rourke’s role on Le Piano Eglouti is as co-interpreter, assisting in performing the pieces on synth, tapes, and electronics at SuperDeluxe in Tokyo in October 2014, and subsequently revising and remixing them in 2019. He’s a perfect choice: A serious student of electroacoustic composition, he’s long been vocal in his support of the work of Luc Ferrari. Recalling his first meeting with Ferrari in Paris, he told The Wire’s Rob Young, “I actually bit right through my lip when he walked past me. I was so fanatically worshipful, I was terrified to meet him.” His deep understanding of both electroacoustic composition in general, and the Ferraris’ work in particular, is brought to bear on his performances here, interpreting Brunhild’s compositions with rare sensitivity. You can hear lingering traces of the experience, perhaps, on his recent four-hour album To Magnetise Money and Catch a Roving Eye, which shares a similar compositional surety.
In the same discussion with Young, O’Rourke made a perceptive observation about what set Luc Ferrari apart from other musique concrète and electroacoustic composers, including those he worked alongside at the pioneering music institute INA-GRM: “[He] was the only one that I felt paid attention to what the sounds were.” This is something that Brunhild Ferrari continues to do; you can hear it in “Le Piano Englouti,” where she is particularly aware of the interwoven possibilities of the raw material at her disposal. As she writes in her liner notes, the sounds for the piece were recorded “in 1996, at a Greek island almost swallowed by its noisy Aegean Sea, and in 2010, at a very isolated and silent Japanese island.” In her narrative of the piece, the noise of the sea and the pachinko parlor “end up swallowing a foolish piano.” Though perhaps not as immediately successful as “Tranquilles Impatiences,” it is compelling in its own way, weaving recordings of everyday phenomena within washes of electronic disturbance. The piano advances and then recedes, swamped or overturned by other sounds, a slow-building push-me-pull-you between the various elements. Episodic and deliberate, “Le Piano Englouti” is a focused drift of possibility.


Ever since detaching from Roc-A-Fella, the Philadelphia rapper has felt a bit like a town crier with no square. On his fourth album, his first for Babygrande, he positions himself as a reliable alternative to the mainstream.

Diamond In The Ruff

Leslie Pridgen, the Philadelphia rapper better known as Freeway, cannot suck. It is categorically impossible. The man with the broken-glass screech will always have a spot in our ears, if only for his inextinguishable white-hot ferocity. Life-or-death urgency is Freeway's stock in trade: he hurls every word at you like a man who's just arrived on foot from a murder scene. Anyone who treats his craft this deadly seriously cannot and will never truly suck, ever.
However, ever since detaching for good from the Roc-A-Fella roster, Freeway has been slamming up against a different wall: Steadily diminishing returns. He's been a free-spraying firehouse in search of a burning building, a town crier with no square. His talent is the kind that needs traction and guidance to reach any sort of target, and while Free has admirably maintained his intensity and productivity through shifting, uncertain years, it's hard not to feel that the context around him has slowly leaked away. Under Jay-Z's wing, as a studio instrument wielded by Just Blaze, Freeway was unstoppable, a force of nature. On Diamond in the Ruff, he sounds more than ever like he’s the ultimate good soldier, one desperately in need of a general.
Freeway sounds good here. He always sounds good. His feel for tension is unparalleled. He's internalized Pac's ability to make every verse feel like a hail of body blows, switching up his flows constantly and pouncing hard on syllables you can never anticipate. He has picked a sterling row of soul-rap instrumentals to rap over. But all of this praise doubles as diagnosis; nothing has changed in Free's attack for years, and it's starting to lose its impact. Deja-vu is setting in: "Dream Big" is a tepidly jazzy reworking of "Still Got Love", which would be bad enough, but album closer "Lil' Mama" is built on a near-identical loop. "Greatness" feels suspiciously close to "Throw Your Hands Up" from The Stimulus Package. He's repeating himself, and more blatantly than usual.
There are a few moments here that reach outside of Free's well-worn soul-rap groove. One is "Wonder Tape", which suggests an indie-rap recasting of the smeary-headlight melancholy of "I'm on One". There's "No Doubt", which strands a single hiccuping vocal sample over a cavern of empty space. And there’s "True", which feels closer to trance-rap than anything Free's done since "Lights Get Low", his duet with pre-greatness Rick Ross. They are the brightest spots on the album by virtue of suggesting there might still be unexplored stylistic avenues for Freeway.
More upsetting, there are lyrics issues as well. Free's always been a cadence-first, words-later rapper; even his most immortal lines are more memorable for their delivery than what they contain. But on Diamond, his rhyme patterns mangle his sense so often it grows distracting: "Even the Grim Reaper is only job doing," he growls on "Right Back". "Flow raw as vagina with penis entering," he says on "The Thirst". That second lyric points to a second distressing problem-- an abundance of corny, half-baked lines, like  "I'm the last Flow bender like Ang" ("All the Hoods"); "Vegetarian, I go in with the lettuce" ("Money is My Medicine"); or "She just played karaoke on my pokey" ("Early"), which just felt so embarrassing to type that I simply cannot imagine how it feels to shout it.
Ever adapable, Freeway has been positioning himself, post-major label fallout as a "real hip-hop," reliable alternative to the mainstream kind of guy. It makes sense as a career move, but Diamond sees him growing a little  too comfortable in his out-of-time role: On "Sweet Temptations" he makes fun of rappers with "tight slacks" and ponders "buy[ing] a plane ticket to Africa" and moving back. On "Right Back", he drops the Abe Simpson-worthy "Fab say he the best that ever twitted/ Well, I'm the hottest spitter that ever Googled," which is doubly unforgivable for not even knowing how to pronounce the word "tweet." None of this stuff is deal-breaking on its own. Freeway is still nowhere near close to sucking. But he's well on his way to not mattering.


As Surgeon, UK producer Anthony Child composes an aggressive, peculiar mix of techno, industrial music, and noise. His three best albums, 1997's Basictonalvocabulary, 1998's Balance, and 1999's Force + Form, are seeing re-release at a time when his influence has become apparent in a new generation of misfits.

Surgeon: Basictonalvocabulary / Balance / Force + Form

In the annals of underground musicians rubbing shoulders with the mainstream, Surgeon's opening sets for Lady Gaga late last year stand out. They do so less for what they portend—"I don’t think it’s the beginning of any connection between pop and techno," Surgeon (UK producer Anthony Child) said in an interview about the dates—than for how they highlight the enduring allure of Child's aggressive, peculiar mix of techno, industrial, and noise music. The gigs, which saw Child—bookish, dutiful—fiddling with his modular synthesizer in packed arenas, were the result of Gaga collaborator/opening act Lady Starlight praising him during a gig in Birmingham, near his hometown. His presence on two subsequent ArtRave tour stops proves there are very different methods of honoring that concatenation.
Then again, Child's profile has always seemed somewhat outsized for a noisy techno artist from a Midlands town. He's probably been labelled "techno don" or "techno kingpin" more than any other artist: There's something authoritative and presidential about his work, which seems to appease both the jocks (hedonistic party children) and the nerds (noiseniks and gadget fiddlers). His three best albums, as well as a spate of early singles, are seeing re-release at a time when his influence has once again become apparent. Over the last three or so years Child has helped usher in a new generation of clamorous British techno, serving as an inspiration to labels like Perc Trax and Avian, and to artists like Untold, Truss, and Blawan (with whom Child collaborates as Trade).
Child released his early work on the venerable Birmingham label Downwards, the archetype for all grimy, industrial-leaning British dance music. His music—and that of peers like Female and label boss Regis—steered itself far from rave's chirpy maximalism. Nor did it feature jungle's dizzying fusion: this was music from the hinterlands, far removed from London's electric unions.
Child's music took inspiration from nuanced, brave sources—noisy innovators like Throbbing Gristle, electronic body music extremists like Skinny Puppy—and channeled them into hammer-on-nail immediacy. While the music of Child and Downwards couldn't have existed without Detroit pioneers Jeff Mills and Robert Hood, it also represents a philosophical break from them. The Detroit producers, with their lofty artistic rhetoric and sci-fi imagery, sought escape; what Child et al. offered was simple, punishing release, most likely from boredom. Detroit trusted that the music would take them higher; Birmingham didn't trust shit.
But the music—pounding, abrasive, gritty—sounded great in dingy little clubs, and, when Europe turned those clubs into giant concrete halls, it sounded great there, too. Legendary Berlin label Tresor snatched up Child, and it's for them that he released his three best albums: Basictonalvocabulary, Balance, and Force + Form. Child excelled at the full-length album the way few of his peers did, using them to stretch his compositional legs while injecting weird little interludes and noise passages; it's on these records that his reverence for artists like Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle really shows.
Berlin is where the Detroit techno sound calcified, and it's only in the light of the unadorned, brutalist music the city embraced that an album like 1997's Basictonalvocabulary can sound so festooned and enthusiastic. On first listen, Basictonalvocabulary is so hurried that it's almost stressful to listen to. Songs open with quick little riffs like they've been released out of the starting gate. Several of them, such as the influence-betraying "Krautrock", sound like Robert Hood's carnivalesque "Unix" run through an un-synced delay pedal, with the sounds doubling back and crashing into one another. Only after a few listens do you get comfortable with all the interlocking pieces of a song like "9 Hours into the Future", or "Rotunda"'s breach of the four-on-the-floor cage.
Balance, from 1998 and somewhat ironically, is the album where Child can't quite resolve all his interests. It doesn't push quite as hard, or as playfully, as Basictonalvocabulary, sounding muddied as it loses itself in too-long, formless sketches like "Dialogue". On 1999's Force + Form—two concepts close to Child's heart—his craft caught up with his vision. Comprising four long, evolving tracks (the shortest is nearly nine minutes), Force + Form flutters and jabs before throwing its punches, earning its noisy, formless codas only after extended bouts of aggression. The final track, "At the Heart of It All", is probably the most euphoric piece Child has ever put to tape, and the effect is a great gasp of air after a long period below surface. It's as immersive and structurally thrilling as longform techno gets.
Child has been continuously active (a singles overview is long overdue) since Force + Form, his last album for Tresor, but he's mostly backed away from the LP format. As he primes for what seems like a period of renewed creativity it's instructive to revisit these albums, especially as a new generation of British misfits discover techno can be a fertile ground for exploring disparate styles (dubstep, drum & bass, ambient, noise). Child is an unlikely shepherd, but then the strength of his music has been thrusting him to unexpected places for more than two decades.


On his new collection, the German minimalist techno producer Thomas Brinkmann makes painstakingly sumptuous music that's minimalist, but isn't techno. Ambient’s not the right word either, because the songs are too alien-sounding to settle into the scenery.

Thomas Brinkmann: What You Hear (Is What You Hear)

What You Hear (Is What You Hear)

Spend too much time listening closely to music and you may find yourself obsessed with tones, ignoring the melody and rhythm that give songs meaning to most people. It’s a common affliction in recording studios, where one minute you can be doing something relatively mundane like figuring out the right placement for a hi-hat in the mix and the next thing you know you’re hours deep into microscopically tweaking an array of equalizers and compressors, feverishly searching for some sort of tonal nirvana.
Usually this is a sign of studio madness, but some musicians and producers have made it a viable way of working. On What You Hear (Is What You Hear), German minimalist techno producer Thomas Brinkmann has gone deliriously over that particular edge.
Minimal techno, a genre that revolves around compulsive sonic fastidiousness, is a breeding ground for tonal obsession—the picky ears of its makers and audience have played a major role in keeping pure analog synthesis alive and evolving during the periods when it wasn’t in style. Even within this context, Brinkmann stands out as an especially exacting engineer, and his recordings offer a sense of painstaking sumptuousness that stand apart from the rest of the minimal techno crowd.
What You Hear (Is What You Hear) is minimalist, but it’s not techno. Each track consists of a single tone held for anywhere between two and 11 minutes, with minimal modulation and no significant changes in dynamics or pitch. Rhythm is only occasionally a factor, and only emerges as a byproduct of the sustained sound’s internal pulses, never as a separate track. Ambient’s not the right word for it either, because the songs are too alien-sounding to settle into the scenery.
The static quality of the compositions don’t make for what’s traditionally considered an exciting listen, but anyone who enjoys dissecting what comes into their ears will find a lot of pleasure in What You Hear. It rewards listeners who take an active role in the listening, those willing to dig deeper, analyzing the elements in the sounds one at a time and teasing apart their structures.
But the record’s not just for obsessive audio freaks. If you engage with the songs on their own terms they’re fascinatingly evocative. "Ziegelrot" (which means "brick-red") is a recursive, juddering howl that sounds like the first feedback-saturated seconds of a cheaply recorded hardcore song extended to the length of an entire 7" side. "Mitisgrün" begins as something like the comforting white-noise pulse of a distant air conditioner unit and ramps up to a throbbing grind so slowly and subtly you’re likely to miss the point where it tips over from soothing to anxiety-inducing.
Brinkmann’s experiment in pure tonality is the inverse of the works where he’s effectively removed it from his compositions entirely, producing music that’s pure rhythm. In the incredible video of a performance at Tokyo’s Taico Club, he skillfully etches lines in blank vinyl on eight turntables and constructs a fully rave-able techno song out of the staticky pops the gashes produce. The only apparent direction he has left is to make a record that doesn’t have any musical elements at all. It’ll probably sound great.


The Minnesota rapper’s blurry, distorted tracks conceal downhearted emotion, half-told stories, and irreverent humor.

Dog Days

In case you haven’t heard, things have been really noisy in rap’s underground lately. The beats are full of distortion and clipping 808s, the vocals submerged in gunk—it’s music that can often sound like you have the volume cranked up in multiple tabs at the same time. This isn’t anything new for Lerado Khalil. For a few years now—especially since dropping the deep-fried EP CDQ in 2020—the St. Paul, Minnesota artist has been experimenting with a bugged-out, trancey style that feels like being sucked down a wormhole in slow motion. It isn’t just chaos for chaos’ sake: All the fuzz and blurriness collides with a monotone delivery that falls somewhere between the exploratory ambling of Black Kray and the inner monologuing of IDLSIDGO Earl to create droopy mood pieces like his latest album, Dog Days.
Dog Days sounds like one of those manga panels splattered with thwacks and cracks, though what’s actually happening inside the character’s head is a lot quieter. On the intro, Lerado and Virginia producer GAWD generate overpowering, blown-out rhythms that could shake stone, while his raps are buried underneath. Behind a bonkers 14 Golds beat on “Thats a Set,” Lerado doesn’t quite sound sad as he stitches together murky, pitched-down thoughts—just a little humdrum and gloomy. Even so, it’s not that serious. On the madhouse “Whatsapp,” he interpolates Kreayshawn’s time capsule “Gucci Gucci” and makes the anthemic “One big room full of bad bitches” sound so droll. I would listen to an entire mixtape of his dazed spins on nostalgic internet hits.
Lerado’s own lyrics are intentionally difficult to decipher, when they’re possible to decipher at all. That’s not necessarily a problem, because his music is much more about the feeling than the words, but in some cases it’s not enough. “Mission” is heavily distorted but generic, missing that fine coat of dust that makes the rest of the songs feel like they’ve been ripped from a cassette. And “White Lie” loses touch with the album’s sense of internal soul-searching because it feels more like guest Harto Falión’s song than Lerado’s.
When Dog Days works, more often than not it reminds me of listening to MIKE’s slice-of-life raps, or early, coming-of-age Lucki: rappers who make it feel like you know them better than people you speak to in real life. It’s just a lot noisier. Think of “Fine Line”: Lerado’s flow is bleary and muffled and Savedher and Jacob Rochester’s instrumental contains it like a lid over a pot of boiling water, yet the melancholy and regret feels clear. Midway through “Bandcamp,” the beat (by Osyris Israel) starts flickering like a dead lighter and it only heightens Lerado’s scatterbrained headspace. And every now and then, a bar will pierce through the mess, like the repetition of “Sent a text when I should’ve called” on “Can’t Come Back.” It’s only a few words, but set your imagination loose and it turns into an entire story.


Ruins is Grouper's "unplugged" record, essentially, as much as that might sound odd for a musician who has always put acoustic guitar and piano and voice at the core of her work. Here she foreswears the looping pedals and the innumerable layers of fuzz, and what we're left with is achingly beautiful.

Ruins

What happens in the margins of the music Liz Harris makes as Grouper is often as important as the music itself. In a performance at Krakow's Unsound Festival earlier this month, the rattle of a film projector added a layer of instant nostalgia to her murky swirls of voice and guitar. Much of the time, Grouper's music is so diffuse that there's no longer any distinction between center and margin anyway, no difference between foreground and background.
That is not the case on Ruins, the first album from the Portland, Oregon, musician since last year's The Man Who Died in His Boat. Here, the incidental noises—crickets, croaking frogs, thunder and rain, and, at one point, the unmistakable beep of a microwave oven that fired up after a blackout in the house where she was recording—serve primarily to underscore how stark the music is, unadorned and pocked with vast silences. Ruins is Grouper's "unplugged" record, essentially, as much as that might sound odd for a musician who has always put acoustic guitar and piano and voice at the core of her work. Here, however, she foreswears the looping pedals and the innumerable layers of fuzz that are just as essential to her aesthetic. What we're left with is achingly beautiful and, given the intensely private nature of most of Grouper's work—on stage, she often plays sitting down, crouched over in order to manipulate her effects pedals, her face hidden in shadow—almost unnervingly direct.
The emotional core of the album is the four melancholy songs for piano and voice, which are complemented by two instrumentals of a similar mood. Rarely have Harris' lyrics been so clearly audible, and rarely, if ever, has love been so plainly the focus of her songwriting. "I hear you calling and I wanna go/ Run straight into the valleys of your arms," she sings on "Holding", her multitracked close harmonies reminiscent of Low circa The Curtain Hits the Cast. On the devastating "Clearing", she sings, "Every time I see you/ I have to pretend I don't"; on "Call Across Rooms", she has a change of heart: "I have a present to give you/ When we finally figure it out." ("The song is on one level very plain and literal, about a letter I wrote for someone I loved and could not get along with," she told Vogue.)
Not everything is so explicit. In "Clearing", she keeps her vocal range between the notes of her piano chords, as though she were seeking refuge there, and her wispy voice frequently dissolves into indecipherability, like cold breath passing through a beam of sunlight. Her phrasing is tentative and guarded; even without recourse to her trusty loops, she finds ways to muddy the atmosphere. Multitracking offers a way of hiding behind her own shadow, and her foot rarely leaves the piano's sustain pedal, even on the instrumental numbers.
Only two songs on the album don't quite fit the mold. The opening "Made of Metal", essentially a means of clearing the air, is just a slow, ritualistic drumbeat wreathed in the sound of distant frogs. And the closing "Made of Air" returns us to the drifting ambient world of Grouper that we're most familiar with. The latter dates back to 2004, and it's of a piece with other material from that period, like her 2005 album Way Their Crept, where looping tones of uncertain provenance—Voice? Guitar? Keyboard?—swirled into a jellied haze. It doesn't necessarily fit with what's come before it, but it's a welcome addendum to the album, if only for its familiarity.
Ruins has a vivid sense of place. Harris recorded the album in 2011 during an artistic residency in Aljezur, Portugal—a tiny coastal town tucked inside a nature preserve on the southwestern corner of the country. In a press release, she describes the pleasures of recording simply, hiking to the beach, and getting lost in her head, working out "a lot of political anger and emotional garbage… The album is a document. A nod to that daily walk. Failed structures. Living in the remains of love." Even without knowing the particulars of the album's backstory, the naked recording means that you can practically picture the room in which it was made—the worn floorboards, or maybe ceramic tiles, dusted with sand; the stucco walls, slightly damp; the steam rising from a cup of tea near the upright piano. Even the microwave that made the tea, which beeps once towards the end of "Labyrinth", an accidental noise allowed to remain in the final cut. From the hushed mood and half-enunciated vocals of it all, you get the feeling she didn't speak to many people during that time of focused creativity. Lucky for us.


Ten years after its release and subsequent appearance on so many soundtracks and commercials, the influential debut album by the synth-pop project of Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello has been reissued. The deluxe set includes remixes and covers by Matthew Dear, the Shins, and others.

The Postal Service: Give Up (Deluxe 10th Anniversary Edition)

Five episodes into its first season in 2004, Veronica Mars makes sure you hear and appreciate “Such Great Heights.” Veronica and her totally-wrong-for-her boyfriend Troy are driving around looking for his stolen car when the Postal Service comes on the radio. “I dig this song,” he tells her. “Yeah, me too,” she replies. They let it play out for a few more measures of beeps and beats before launching back into their conversation. The song plays again during the closing scene, when the girl detective is listening to a weird, round, portable contraption meant to play compact music discs. The scene is quiet and poignant, not only playing the band’s wistful pop in the foreground but contrasting it with the character’s recent glimpses of the compromised adult world. “Such Great Heights” is a way for Veronica to hang on to childhood for another four minutes and twenty-seven seconds.
Just a few weeks after Veronica Mars did the unthinkable and funded a feature-length movie via Kickstarter-- raising $2 million in eleven hours-- Sub Pop is reissuing the Postal Service’s platinum-selling Give Up in a deluxe, 2xCD set. This pair of pop culture artifacts point to a growing nostalgia for the golden age of prematurely canceled TV shows (see also: the fourth season of Arrested Development) and indie pop as cult soundtrack. The Postal Service's lone album has proved surprisingly influential, casting a long shadow over the 2000s. Not only did it show up in films and on television-- Garden State, Grey’s Anatomy, *D.E.B.S.-- * but its songs were covered regularly by a wide range of artists, from Ben Folds to metal act Confide to a ska act called Tip the Van. In commercials for Kaiser Permanente, UPS, and (for legal reasons) the actual United States Postal Service, Jimmy Tamborello’s bloops and beeps conveyed the idea of ideas: synapses firing, synergy synergizing, connectivities connecting. For better or for worse, for a little while, the Postal Service made laptops the new guitar.
Not bad for a side project. Tamborello and Ben Gibbard first collaborated on “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan,” for Dntel’s 2001 album Life Is Full of Possibilities. Apparently, they worked so well together that they kept at it, even corralling Jenny Lewis, Jen Wood, and Chris Walla to play on their songs. In the days before Dropbox and YouSendIt, they had to snail-mail tracks back and forth, so they called themselves the Postal Service. Released in 2003, their debut was a slow grower, but it had a long life and was still producing singles in 2005. What began as a side project… well, stayed a side project, but Give Up looms large in both men’s careers. Tamborello failed to capture that sense of evocative purpose on either of Dntel’s subsequent albums, although he has become a key member of the L.A. blip scene that includes Baths and Flying Lotus. Gibbard has released seven full-lengths with his day-job band Death Cab for Cutie, but many of his best and most beloved tunes are all on Give Up. Which, by the way, is Sub Pop’s second highest selling album of all time, besting the Shins’ Oh Inverted World.

Even in 2013, when those perfectly aligned freckles have faded, it’s not hard to hear why Give Up would be a hit. The album’s highs represent a perfect marriage between Tamborello’s synths, which sound like the first rays of dawn hitting a Mister Bulky, and Gibbard’s gee-whiz lyrics, which possess a mussed-hair whimsy. The best songs here-- not just “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight” and “We Will Become Silhouettes” but also “Recycled Air” and “Nothing Better”-- evoke innocence and imagination in equal measure, a sense of the fantastical that persists as a defense mechanism against the terrible or the simply mundane. No wonder it appealed to Veronica Mars and seemingly every other teenager who heard it: Give Up allowed them to see their worlds differently. “Silhouettes” turned heartbreak into nuclear holocaust without sounding over the top, because who hasn’t felt like the last person on Earth? “Such Great Heights” made freckles more than something to be insecure about; instead, they became the stars that crossed lovers. Thanks to Gibbard’s twee imagery as well as his persistent use of second-person pronouns, Give Up reinforces each listener’s individuality.
By not recording a follow-up, the Postal Service never had to strike that impossible balance again-- they left it up to Owl City, Hellogoodbye, and too many other imitators to carry the synthpop banner. The Postal Service's dubious legacy often obscures the fact that Give Up is only a good album, not a great one. Those quirky lyrics curdle into something unbearable on “Sleeping In”, as Gibbard recounts a dream about JFK’s assassination and the environmental apocalypse. “Clark Gable” is a tortuously meta love song, although that might actually be the point. Sequencing is an issue as well: the album is so frontloaded that the second half drops off a cliff. How many people actually made it to “Natural Anthem”? But the highs are high enough to offset the lows, and I imagine listeners may have spent the last 10 years mentally re-editing the album so that only the good parts remain.
Despite the surprising success and durability of Give Up, Tamborello and Gibbard gave up on the collaboration. Sub Pop released an EP of covers and remixes in 2005, but it seemed more like a gesture of apology than of renewal. As a result, the band’s catalog doesn’t sprawl messily across album after album. Instead it’s neat, compact, containable-- which means this reissue doubles as a celebration of the album and as a definitive history of the band itself. The remixes-- by Matthew Dear and John Tejada, among others-- don’t add much to the originals besides length, but do underscore what precise editors Tamborello and Gibbard (and co-producer Chris Walla) were. Their mixes of the Flaming Lips, Nina Simone, and Feist, however, are missing, as is “(This Is) The Dream of Evan & Chan”, which isn’t rare but does serve as the root of all of every Postal Service song.
The duo covered frequently just as they were frequently covered, so the tracks by the Shins and Iron & Wine at least work as time capsule. The former’s deadpan take on “We Will Become Silhouettes” makes the apocalypse sound jangly and grim again, while the latter’s whispery “Such Great Heights” recalls that moment in the previous decade where folkies were slowing down fast pop songs. On the other hand, the Postal Service’s cover of Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds” is awkward in both conception and execution. And finally, there are two new tracks, the bleak “A Tattered Line of String” and the undercooked “Turn Around” (which is, sadly, not a Bonnie Tyler cover). They’re fine showcases for Tamborello’s sophisticated beats and Gibbard’s heightened melodies; the production is crisp, the hooks catchy, but these tunes lack any sense of newness or discovery or connection. More crucially, it’s off-putting to hear the Postal Service re-create that 2003 sound in 2013. That’s the burden of any album that so completely defined its time: Give Up remains anchored in its heyday, and like all those canceled TV shows, it only reminds us how far we’ve moved away from that particular moment.


The G.O.O.D. Music signee sets out to explore desire and sexuality, but her downcast songs rarely venture much past mood lighting.

Like a Woman

Before Kacy Hill signed with Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music, she was a backup dancer on West’s Yeezus Tour. The women “dancing” on that tour were primarily clad in skintight bodysuits, with stockings over their faces. This might sound a little bit dehumanizing for Hill, but her pre-tour CV touts her modeling for American Apparel, whose softcore ads are not unlike Hill’s debut album, Like a Woman, in one important respect: Its overt sexuality obscures the fact that it isn’t selling anything original. At least AA’s rainbow-hued basics and hoodies were functional; Hill’s album is more muted, full of inscrutable lyrics buried under piano-ballad drama. It’s a strangely retrograde look for an artist affiliated with such an ostensibly forward-thinking crew.
In the video for “Like a Woman,” Hill can be found masturbating on the back of a public bus and touching herself in bed, oiled up and dressed in flesh-colored vinyl lingerie. The song is about trying to deny someone affection despite the carnal feelings they inspire in her. “I’m sayin’ things I thought that I wouldn’t/And now you caught me, remind me of my beatin’ heart,” she sings in the chorus. Juxtaposing lyrics about forbidden desires with a video full of self-love would be clever if it hadn’t already been done first, and better, by so many other pop musicians (see, for instance, Hailee Steinfeld’s girl-power confection “Love Myself” and Tove Lo’s entire album Lady Wood).
Production on the minimalist piano ballad was handled by DJDS, Terrace Martin, and DJ Mustard, whose presence barely registers beyond a few finger snaps and inorganic bass notes. This is the mood of the entire album: Futuristic and exploratory sensuality is buried underneath maudlin brooding. You can hear it on the Florence Welch-pantomiming “Hard to Love,” as well as “Say You’re Wrong,” which is full of subdued, dubstep-adjacent bass. The music wants to exist in Kanye’s experimentalist playground, but it’s constrained by an adult-contemporary sheath that simply isn’t sexy, no matter how hard it tries to be.
One wonders what exactly inspired this moodiness. If Hill were a fan of someone like Tori Amos, the foggy drama of her voice and the melancholy backdrops she sings over might make sense. Instead, she’s cited ’90s rock radio titans like Third-Eye Blind, Semisonic, Tonic, and the Cranberries as her inspirations. “There’s almost this melancholy element to all of those kind of songwriters,” she told The FADER in 2015. “There’s a dark element to the pop songs, too. There are songs that you can dance to, but then it’s, like, a really depressing song! Or, just very introspective.” But you can’t dance to anything on “Like a Woman,” and if you’re looking for introspection, the lyrics don’t reveal much of that, either: “Stripped down from all that’s holy, with narcoleptic hoping/It’s okay to look straight without naive impulsions,” she sings in the chorus of the ironically titled “Clarity.” In order to stand out in the overpopulated world of brooding, downcast pop, Hill will need to be more inventive: Competing with artists like Banks, who makes genuinely interesting visual choices, and Bishop Briggs, one of the style’s most powerful new voices, she hasn’t set herself apart from the pack.
The album still manages some interesting moments. The Swedish producer and Giorgio Moroder collaborator Oskar Sikow adds perky flourishes to “Cruel” and The Life of Pablo collaborator DJDS’s woozy production on “Keep Me Sane,” “Static,” and “Interlude” facilitates some of her finest performances on the record. Her voice rarely ventures beyond a drama-club lilt, but you can hear her having a little bit more fun here. One wishes that Hill had benefitted from a slew of producers from the Kanye Brain Trust instead of just one; alternately, DJDS could have helped her navigate the whole ride—thus avoiding pitfalls like the bland synth detailing on tracks helmed by Madonna and Pet Shop Boys producer Stuart Price. Hill has said she’s using the album to explore her sexuality, but the music would benefit if she also considered sound as worthy a subject of investigation. She certainly has the mentor to help her do it.


The grunge stalwarts’ sixth album revisits their Seattle roots, with a sound harkening back to the early ’90s, when they were swept up in a wave of Pacific Northwest acts achieving international fame.

Rainier Fog

Early promotional efforts surrounding the release of Rainier Fog, the sixth studio album from Alice in Chains, centered around the group’s birthplace of Seattle. The quartet played an acoustic set atop the Space Needle, as well as a secret show at the Crocodile, the local venue co-owned by drummer Sean Kinney. To cap it off, the Seattle Mariners held an “Alice in Chains Night,” during which guitarist and vocalist Jerry Cantrell threw out the ceremonial first pitch as the band’s 1992 hit “Would?” played over Safeco Field’s PA system.
This campaign makes sense for an album named after the volcano that looms over the Seattle skyline. But it’s also a fitting reflection of a record that feels like an attempt to trace the group’s musical roots, with a sound harkening back three decades to the time when they were swept along with the wave of bands from their area code achieving international stardom.
Some of Alice in Chains’ efforts to this end are essentially sentimental. They laid down the basic tracks for Rainier Fog at Studio X, the Seattle studio formerly known as Bad Animals, where they recorded their self-titled album from 1995. There’s also a guest appearance, on the abrasive blues track “Drone,” by Chris DeGarmo, the co-founder of prog-metal titans Queensrÿche, who served as Cantrell’s touring guitarist in 1998. But the core of Rainier Fog melds the grimy, glammy elements of their 1990 debut Facelift with the thicker doom-metal approach that has dominated the group’s last few studio albums.
Unfortunately, recapturing their heyday was always going to be an impossible feat, because Alice in Chains have changed dramatically since their first LP. Gone are the key elements of their most successful era: the sinister growl of vocalist Layne Staley, who died of an overdose in 2002, and the fluid yet tensile basslines of Mike Starr, who left the band in 1993, long before his own death in 2011. As capable as their respective replacements, William DuVall and Mike Inez, are, these new members’ styles have effectively turned Alice in Chains into a different band.
DuVall, who joined the fold in 2006, had a particularly notable impact on their sound. Like Staley, he has a voice that blends well with Cantrell’s, but his singing for Alice in Chains is far less distinctive, endowed with neither his predecessor’s bluesy edge nor the soulful sting DuVall brings to his his other band, Comes With the Fall. On Rainier Fog, he only occasionally drifts to the surface, on the growling title track as well as the songs that bookend the album, “The One You Know” and the slowly decaying finale, “All I Am.”
Where Alice in Chains do succeed in bringing themselves full circle, it’s by cutting down on the acoustic elements and pop influences that surfaced on their 1992 EP Sap. Rainier Fog often acts like a cudgel, pounding DuVall and Cantrell’s sludgy guitars and the hip-swiveling grind of the rhythm section directly into the listener’s temporal lobe. This leads to some spectacular moments, like the downward-spinning chorus of “So Far Under,” the sputtering downstrokes on “The One You Know,” and the undulating waves of guitar on anti-Trump anthem “Red Giant.”
Still, for all its volume and bursts of power, Rainier Fog feels like an unnecessary regression. Alice in Chains were showing signs of growth on their previous DuVall-era albums, 2009’s Black Gives Way to Blue and 2013’s The Devil Put the Dinosaurs Here, whose jumps between heavier tunes and gentler fare were abrupt but at least attempted to strike a balance. Here, with the exception of the lighters-in-the-sky power balladry of “Fly,” the more melodious passages on tracks like “Maybe” and “All I Am” are still countered by blunt-force guitars and blaring volume.
It’s hard to fault the band for trying to recapture a bit of their past grunge-era glory. No matter how far away its members move from their old stomping grounds (Cantrell and Inez both live in California now, while DuVall resides in Atlanta), they will always be thought of as a Seattle band. And they’ve been called back to the city frequently over the past 20 years, to reckon with the deaths of their bandmates and, more recently, their friend Chris Cornell. Those experiences only serve to pull those bonds tighter. But just as the city that birthed them has changed dramatically in the years since their first album hit the Billboard charts, so have Alice in Chains. They’re no longer the same band they once were, and that evolution is something to be extended, not erased.


The Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer performed this hypnotic, four-song, two-and-a-half-hour set less than a year after being released from prison, and his pointed, usually funny monologues about that wrongful imprisonment are a large part of this 3xCD collection's charm.

Live in Detroit 1986

When he rolled into Detroit's historic Fox Theater in November, 1986, Fela Kuti had been out of prison less than a year. He never should have been in prison in the first place; he'd been jailed in 1984 by the government of coup leader Major-General Muhammadu Buhari on trumped-up currency charges. Fela was an outspoken opponent of Buhari, as he had been of Nigeria's other coup-installed dictators before, and his imprisonment was an attempt to silence him. It backfired. Amnesty International launched a worldwide campaign for Fela's release, and then Buhari himself was overthrown by another coup, this one led by Ibrahim Babangida. Babangida pardoned Fela and actually brought Kuti's older brother, Beko, into his administration as Health Minister.
Fela opens the concert captured on Live in Detroit 1986 with a short monologue that directly references his wrongful imprisonment. "In my country," he says, "Things happen just like that…You go your own way, mind your own business, next thing I know I'm in prison, man, just like that." It's part of a nicely rhythmic build-up to the song "Just Like That", a song that continues the litany of arbitrary ills that Fela laments can befall an average Nigerian (he generalizes it to all of Africa, too), wrapping them in recollections of Nigeria's devastating 1967-1970 Civil War.
This version of "Just Like That" is half an hour long, which makes it by some distance the shortest workout on this set, which was taped by Bob Teagan at the Fox and is just now seeing release. The set is only four songs long, but it sprawls for nearly two and a half hours spread over three discs. Honestly, it could have fit on two discs without changing the running order, so I'm not sure why there are three. Fela's last band, Egypt 80, was a pretty different animal from Africa 70, which is the band most people are familiar with from its funky, forceful, and relatively compact masterpieces "Zombie", "Water No Get Enemy", "Expensive Shit", and "Roforofo Fight", among others. Egypt 80 emphasized jazz over funk, for one thing, and indulged in long, spacy jams built around hypnotic grooves.
The performance flows very freely through the four songs, each of which is introduced with a pointed, and usually pretty funny, monologue from Fela, whose facility with sarcasm was just about unparalleled in his day. Kuti engages his audience, teaching them short Yoruban phrases for call-and-response passages (and admonishing them to pronounce Yoruban words like Africans-- "We Africans talk with our whole mouths"), and these sections of long tracks make for good contrasts with the rhythm section's coolly funky vamping and the lead instrumentalists' winding solos.
It is a mostly great show, though not all dynamite. "Confusion Break Bones" wanders through one section so bizarrely discordant that it almost sounds like each instrument in the rhythm section is playing a different song at the same tempo, but it's a few minutes out of 40, and works in its own kind of freaky way. One of the show's highlights comes near its end, as "Beast of No Nation" thumps out of a big, full-band crescendo and settles on this amazing, bass-led rhythm that's so compelling on its own no one bothers to play anything over it. It gets the audience, already obviously engaged and even familiar with some of the material, really pumped. Listening to it off a very well-recorded audience tape is of course different from being there, and as a listening experience, this show is perhaps best taken a disc at a time. Still, whether heard whole or in pieces, it captures one of Fela's less appreciated phases and finds him still brimming with piss and vinegar two trying decades into his crusading career.


The Brooklyn musician, a member of Palberta and the duo Lily and Horn Horse, crafts whimsical, minimalist indie pop with a slippery lyrical sensibility.

Lily Konigsberg: It’s Just Like All the Clouds EP

It’s Just Like All the Clouds EP

At the center of a Venn diagram containing haunted dolls, Arthur Russell, and Ariana Grande sits Lily Konigsberg. The idiosyncratic, shape-shifting Brooklyn musician’s boundless creativity animates a range of projects: the jagged experimental trio Palberta, the avant-pop duo Lily and Horn Horse, and a wide array of collaborations and solo releases under her own name. Konigsberg’s latest solo release, It’s Just Like All the Clouds, is a brief but charming EP of stripped-down indie rock. In four songs recorded by Paco Cathcart (The Cradle), she leans into her bubbliest impulses, enlivening well-worn sounds with earnest playfulness.
In all of Konigsberg’s releases, even her most abstract, there is an implicit pop backbone. It’s Just Like All the Clouds takes that tendency and strips it to its essence, resulting in short, infectious songs with punchy hooks. Opener “At Best” dabbles in indie pop, thanks to Konigsberg’s cheery guitar and peppy drums performed by her Palberta bandmate Nina Ryser. “When I find it hard to relax/I fix myself and then/I’m okay/And then I punch my brother/I have a better day,” she sings blithely. Konigsberg has name-dropped Liz Phair as an influence, and the jangly warmth of “I Said” feels especially indebted to the indie-rock legend. “Crushing all the bugs that I find in my hairbrush/Crusty but harmless guys clustering in a circle,” she murmurs sweetly, her honeyed voice veiling the decay beneath.
The EP’s title track, on the other hand, is a whimsical burst of Auto-Tune that’s closer to Lily and Horn Horse. It’s a small song that expands kaleidoscopically with zippy whimsy. Lyrically, Konigsberg leans toward minimalism, often relying on the repetition of simple observations. In this case, the message is vague but firm: “Now that you don’t want me I don’t need your time/I’m bound to stay away.” The freewheeling, flitting melodies underline the precision of Konigsberg’s songwriting: She knows what she wants to say and she is methodical about how much to reveal.
It’s Just Like All the Clouds closes with the wistful “Summer in the City,” where Konigsberg is joined by frequent collaborators Andre Schiavelli on keys and Charlie Dore-Young on bass and backing vocals. It is an understated vision of nostalgia: As Matt Norman’s pensive horn weaves through the background, Konigsberg captures an elusive longing, letting the melody speak for her. Though the whole EP is over in seven and a half minutes, the warmth Konigsberg generates extends long after the record ends.


Just 18 months after the effervescent electro-pop of Junior, Röyksopp return with an all-instrumental follow-up.

Senior

Röyksopp's career arc to date has seen the Norwegian duo steadily developing into exquisite pop architects. Beginning with the comparatively muted Melody A.M. in 2001 and continuing through to 2005's brighter, bolder The Understanding, Röyksopp fully blossomed into electro-pop impresarios with last year's Junior, sculpting alternately effervescent and melancholic synthesized soundscapes to accompany an expressive cadre of female singers. Looser than Air or Zero 7 yet less all-over-the-map than Basement Jaxx, Röyksopp seemed to have found their niche and hit their stride, crafting danceable, emotionally satisfying techno-pop that's neither too tasteful nor too garish.
It took Röyksopp, always busy remixing other artists, nearly four years to follow up Melody A.M. with The Understanding and another four to unveil Junior, so the release of Senior after a scant 18 months already suggests it's a different sort of beast. Following three albums of increasingly accessible pop, Senior is an entirely instrumental effort, and a moody, slowly unfurling one at that. Taken as a resolutely minor work, it yields a favorable amount of correspondingly minor charms, but there's also no mistaking that it neutralizes much of the momentum Röyksopp have gradually been building up over the past several years.
Röyksopp's previous albums have all been peppered with instrumental cuts, typically serving as palate cleansers or interstitial tissue to subtly strengthen the album's effect as a whole. Yet a whole LP of interstitials isn't the sort of thing that can stand on its own. The kind of downtempo stuff that makes up the majority of Röyksopp's vocal-less compositions just doesn't hold up to concentrated, repeated listens like many other forms of instrumental electronic music (techno, post-disco, wonky, etc.). Its ruminative nature is at odds with rhythmic propulsion and rarely delivers much of a "wow" factor. At the same time, it also lacks the precise, engrossing intricacy Four Tet or Caribou exhibit in their oft-contemplative efforts.
What we get instead is largely an album of langorous, meditative cuts, the best of which-- "The Alcoholic", "Senior Living", "Forsaken Cowboy", "Coming Home"-- succeed by sending fragile, melancholic synth and guitar melodies loping across lush, atmospheric sonic floors. Unfortunately, over a third of the record's running time is wasted on the meandering "The Drug", ponderous "The Fear" and a pointless instrumental redux of Junior's "Tricky Tricky". It can't be said that Senior fails to meet its modest wallpaper-ish aims, yet it hardly represents the best Röyksopp has to offer.


While few are responding to The Passion with the same intensity that New York Times columnist Frank Rich did a…

Seven Swans

While few are responding to The Passion with the same intensity that New York Times columnist Frank Rich did a week ago—for starters, Rich titled his harangue “Mel Gibson Forgives Us for His Sins”—it’s fair to say that, recently, the American public finds itself thinking more deeply about the tensions that can surface when religion and art intersect so explosively. Yet, from an art-historical perspective, it’s the dissociation of the two, not the intersection, that has always been most curious: Relatively speaking, only recently have religion and high art not been commonly joined at the hip. Religion has always served as an inspiration and benefactor of art, a fact which has made it all the more amusing when people criticize The Passion as an awful film purely because of its religious content—they might as well pass over, among others, the Laocoon statue, the Sistine Chapel, Bach’s St. Matthaus Passion, and practically every Dostoevesky or Joyce novel.
That said, skepticism still greets the release of Seven Swans, Sufjan Stevens’ sparse and intimate fourth album, in which the Detroit-raised Brooklynite deals with the stories of his Christian faith most directly. Which is not to say that Michigan and its tales of personal grief and acceptance of one’s suffering were any less Christian in ethos, just that Seven Swans is so topically concerned with Christianity that a few wrong steps could easily have been a disaster. Religious content, by its very faith-based nature, is passionate and fantastical, and, if not fashioned with a commensurate degree of care and artifice, the emotion exceeds the form, throwing the listener headlong into the realm of melodrama and self-parody (confer all “Christian rock” bands).
Frank Rich himself talks of The Passion’s unbridled over-the-toppity, the film “constructed like nothing so much as a porn movie.” Where The Passion fails artistically for Rich is not in its highly charged subject matter, but in its crudely considered execution. On similar grounds, Seven Swans partly succeeds for me because Sufjan rarely steps foot in the excess of pedantic preaching, despite the openly Christian nature of his lyrics here. At their melodic cores, the songs on Seven Swans are equally as potent as those on Michigan, though perhaps a little rougher around the edges and generally more sparsely arranged. The raw simplicity, coupled with the stripped-down, banjo-led instrumentation, lends Seven Swans a particularly high degree of sincerity: Even if we’re not taken by the subject matter, we’re taken by how beautifully and personally Sufjan is taken by it.
On songs like “All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands” and “To Be Alone With You,” Sufjan does well to collapse the distinction between divine- and human-directed affections—his “You” could apply to God and loved one alike. Especially in the former song, which opens Seven Swans, Sufjan showcases his curious ability to change a song’s grief-stricken tenor to a hopeful one on the flash. The opening moments prove this eloquently: As Sufjan sings, “If I am alive this time next year,” his weary banjo accompaniment slowly imbues the line with convincing optimism, a progression that continues throughout the song with similar effect as Sufjan is joined by a breathy background chorus from Elin and Megan Smith and drummer David Smith’s labored tympanics.
Because Sufjan commits himself so rigorously to this sparse, acoustic compositions, those few moments when electric instruments are used are particularly powerful. The first comes in “The Dress Looks Nice on You,” in which tandem plucks and sweeps of guitar and banjo are suddenly contraposed midway against a quirky Casio keyboard breakdown. A second comes during the vaguely alt-country lullaby “Sister,” which positions a light, nondescript jangle behind a screaming electric guitar that arises from the swell to become even more lively and expansive as the song builds on its repeated anthem.
“Abraham,” “Seven Swans,” and “The Transfiguration” confront religion most directly, and to varying success. In “Abraham,” Sufjan briefly recounts the Old Testament story in the Book of Genesis when Abraham, ordered by God as a test of faith to sacrifice his son Isaac (“Take up on the wood/Put it on your son”), leads Isaac up a mountain and prepares to kill him as commanded before God sends an angel to intervene. (See also: Leonard Cohen’s beautiful “Story of Isaac.”) Musically, the song marks the low point of Seven Swans: Sufjan’s vocal melody is well-delivered but somewhat impotent, and the backup chorus seems incongruous given the subject matter.
As the last two songs on the album, “Seven Swans” and “The Transfiguration” seem to work as a pair. Both are of relatively epic lengths and movement-like constructions, and as equal statements of faith—the fear-inspiring “My father burned into coal,” and the comforting “Have no fear! We draw near!”—they dovetail perfectly. First, “Seven Swans” is a dark, brooding anticipation of the Apocalypse in which Sufjan begins with a foreboding banjo line, only to be swept up in crashing storms of resonant piano and a terrifying octave-jumping chorus of “He is the Lord!,” easily one of Seven Swans’ most memorable moments. “The Transfiguration” follows immediately on the bittersweet note of Jesus’ requisite suffering, the song performatively ebbing back and forth from major to minor chords as new melodies and instruments are stuffed into the mix.
Given Sufjan’s ability to handle such dangerously effusive material as his own religion so well, it’s no wonder that he aligns himself with the similarly concerned writer Flannery O’Connor, whose short story A Good Man Is Hard to Find is recast here from the perspective of O’Connor’s Mephistophelic character, the Misfit. O’Connor, as the late Yale professor Robert Dubbin noted, is unusually capable of masking the Christian mechanisms at work in her stories without cheapening them—she effectively crafts Christian revelatory experiences into ones of universal enormity and applicability. The same comment could very well apply to Sufjan Stevens on Michigan and Seven Swans alike: A gifted musician to begin with, Sufjan invites not our religious conversions, but our innate human compassion.


About 10 years ago, I put a copy of Morton Subotnick's *Silver Apples of the Moon* on hold at a used record store in New Jersey. I've avoided picking it up mostly because I like the idea of it still being nestled away somewhere, forgotten by everyone. Devendra Banhart's title *Golden Apples of the Sun* neatly references the final line from W.B. Yeats' "The Song of Wandering Angus", where it's paired with those silver moon apples. ("And pluck till time and times are done/ The silver apples of the moon/ The golden apples of the sun.") It's also an album

Various Artists: Golden Apples of the Sun

Golden Apples of the Sun

About 10 years ago, I put a copy of Morton Subotnick's Silver Apples of the Moon on hold at a used record store in New Jersey. I've avoided picking it up mostly because I like the idea of it still being nestled away somewhere, forgotten by everyone. Devendra Banhart's title Golden Apples of the Sun neatly references the final line from W.B. Yeats' "The Song of Wandering Angus", where it's paired with those silver moon apples. ("And pluck till time and times are done/ The silver apples of the moon/ The golden apples of the sun.") It's also an album by Judy Collins, a collection of stories by Ray Bradbury, and a low-budget 1971 film about violence and hippies. But perhaps Banhart chose the title to contrast directly with Subotnick's famously chilly modulations, because even while this compilation functions as a kind of now-sound capsule of the contemporary neo-folk scene, its best artists share an anachronistic, misfiled air with Subotnick's dusty gem, patiently awaiting discovery.
Whatever the title's derivation, as head curator, Banhart assumes the tricky role of scene definer. I can't imagine the man behind "This Beard Is for Siobhan" subscribing to locked-door scenesterism, but Golden Apples of the Sun draws a clean line in the sand. Unlike Brian Eno, who kept his No New York sampler to just four acts, the bearded bard here musters a generous spread of 20 diverse freakfolk acts to serve as representatives of the various facets of the underground's most recent (and most promising) pigeonhole. Not intended to flood the market, Golden Apples of the Sun is limited to 1,000 copies and can only be had through Arthur magazine, which released the disc on its newly founded Bastet imprint.
For this disc, Banhart wisely pairs spankin' new tracks with a number of previously released ones. In an interesting change of pace from most compilations, however, the non-exclusive cuts are the real draw here, and they greatly benefit from both Banhart's careful sequencing and separation from their original full-lengths. Saddled between two downcast instrumentals, Little Wings' "Look at What the Light Did Now" absolutely sparkles. Kyle Field owns a preternaturally heartbreaking (and charmingly off-key) voice even at his happiest, and here, outside the context of his spotty K Records albums, his syllables are remarkably affecting. Viking Moses also kicks it Little Wings-style; his "Crosses" (from the album of the same name) displays a pawnshop sweetness: "Without love, life is gone/ Without life, love goes on and on."
Golden Apples' shifts in gradation keeps the narrative from stalling-out: Espers' "Byss & Abyss" balances boy/girl contrast with just the right amount of Philly opiate haziness; six-stringer Jack Rose ups the finger-picking ante with the careening notes of "White Mule" from his Red Horse, White Mule; Iron & Wine beautifully represent for soft strums with "Fever Dream" from their hugely popular Our Endless Numbered Days; and Banhart himself shows up dueting with folk legend Vashti Bunyan on the title track of his recent masterstroke, Rejoicing in the Hands.
Anti-folk singer/songwriter and nutritionist Diane Cluck's "Heat from Every Corner" (from Macy's Day Bird) comes complete with ambient footsteps and a click of the off switch, and sounds as though it was placed on tape by Chan Marshall 40 years ago. Current 93 collaborator and one of NYC's most compelling voices, Antony, closes out the disc in style with a musical interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Lake", featuring his signature heart-rending, androgynous operatics and mesmerizing piano. (If you're unfamiliar with his work, check out the I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy EP and be blown away by the brilliant camp heartache.)
Displacement breathes life into Currituck Co.'s "The Tropics of Cancer", a smiling but subdued acoustic instrumental from the often enjoyable Ghost Man on First, while Vetiver turn in "Angel's Share", a collaboration with Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval that marked the standout on their self-titled debut. White Magic's "Don't Need" isn't the most riveting track from the Brooklyn trio's Drag City debut, but this meandering twanger makes more sense in the compilation's context than any of Through the Sun Door's witchier tracks.
Meanwhile, inherently strong numbers continue to shine: Joanna Newsom's "Bridges and Balloons" feels just as triumphant torn from The Milk-Eyed Mender. It functions as a lead-in for Six Organs of Admittance's "Hazy SF", a wee ditty that swims in the suave-dude realm of Compathia rather than the gorgeous spaciousness of the recently reissued gem For Octavio Paz.
The real treats, however, come courtesy of two lesser-known acts. Chicago's Josephine Foster (of Born Heller and The Children's Hour) rustles backwoods memories amid banjo, flute, and the indescribable air of English romanticism on the unreleased home recording "Little Life". It's a stunning fragment: Shirley Collins collides with and bows gently within the cleansing mud of a rocky stream. Likewise, ex-Matty & Mossy vocalist Jana Hunter blows the roof off the barn with "Farm, CA", a section of hauntingly whispered lo-fi dreaminess.
Not everything here achieves the understated power of these aforementioned tracks, but Golden Apples of the Sun's sprawling landscape presents a persuasive case for the depth of a scene that seemingly sprung up (like mushrooms) overnight. It's impossible to pick apart intentions, but this music feels far more sincere than other recent buzzes, and even if these artists are pulling the wool over our eyes (which seems unlikely), it would appear that perhaps a few of these players will outlast the current critical harvesting. To see if I'm right, hide this disc in your bedroom after one listen and wait a decade before that second date.


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 explore Neneh Cherry’s explosive pop debut, Raw Like Sushi.

Raw Like Sushi

When Neneh Cherry’s brash “Buffalo Stance” crash-landed into pop in late 1988, the landscape had been primed. J.J. Fad’s fast-talking “Supersonic” and Salt-N-Pepa’s winking “Push It” had proven Top 40 radio’s remit, while still hesitant toward rap, was at least able to handle female MCs. Production outfits like the hip-hop/freestyle masterminds Full Force and M/A/R/R/S flipped rare samples into gold and platinum records. And the big-tent sound of the ’80s could properly accommodate the rappers’ bravado and the producers’ bone-shaking beats. Precarious as it was, the framework was there.
Still, “Buffalo Stance” exploded it all. The Swedish singer provided something familiar yet vital that sounded both of the moment and of the future. It’s a nearly six-minute collision of synths and skronk, scratching and squealing, presided over by Cherry, whose streetwise rebukes to a gigolo looking for a new sucker were balanced out by the sugar-spun alto she used on its dreamy, yet mean-mugging chorus. She dreamed of sweetness, comforted by the way that her crew of London bohemians, the titular “Buffalo” throwing down their stance, was standing right behind her.
What makes “Buffalo Stance” more remarkable is its origin: The sophisti-pop duo Morgan/McVey’s 1987 song “Looking Good Diving.” You can hear the nuts and bolts of the song in its background, especially the victorious synth-sweep on the chorus. When the single was to be released out, it needed a B-side, so she decided to go with a remix featuring Bristol-based proto-hip-hop crew the Wild Bunch. That remix scooped arpeggiated synths out of the song’s glossed-up chorus put Cherry—then a model, albeit one who had been a member of the agit-punk crew Rip Rig + Panic—on the mic. Her vocal is tentative at first, but after she drops the Cockney-tinged “wot is he loyyyyyke?” she becomes more emboldened, leaning into the track’s bridge and setting a bar for the streetwise ebullience of its successor.
But it was Tim Simenon—who, as Bomb the Bass, had released the manic collagist hit “Beat Dis” in 1988—that reworked “Looking Good Diving” into a single for Cherry. His cut-and-paste approach transformed the musical bed into something that resembled a city, all heat action and unexpected sounds whooshing into earshot. “Tim kept coming up with these samples and it would lead you into a different section,” co-producer Mark Saunders told Sound on Sound in 2017. “If we’d have been thinking properly about how to make a hit record, I don’t think we would’ve had anywhere near as many different parts to it.” Cherry rose to the challenge, upping the ante with a shouted-out vocal and asides like “Bomb the Bass… rock this place!” that would give the song extra yell-along juice in the clubs and on the playgrounds.
“Without rejecting anything, I’m on purpose rejecting formats,” Cherry told The Guardian in early 1989, as “Buffalo Stance” was climbing the Hot 100. Raw Like Sushi built on that promise with gusto, using influences from all over the pop landscape to craft a singular statement on womanhood in the late ’80s. Instead of placing songs in boxes, Cherry and her producers let them breathe and grow, seeing where they might go—and often they’re taken to exciting places. “Inna City Mamma” is loose-limbed, its percussive pianos give its strut swing even as it’s wistful about the ways urban life can chew up a person inside and out; the verses of “Heart” summon strength from Cherry’s manic flow and a playground-taunt verse, with skittering synths retreating from view once the New Jack Swing chorus kicks in.
It’s very much a maternal record, too; two decades before M.I.A. went onstage at the Grammys while on the verge of giving birth, Cherry triumphantly mimed “Buffalo Stance” on the UK chart show “Top of the Pops” while clad in maternity Lycra and a bronze bustier-blazer combo. At its best moments, Raw Like Sushi mixes its nurturing spirit with an audacious optimism, a hopeful foresight that mirrors Cherry’s vision of a genre-agnostic pop landscape.The coming-of-age tale “Kisses on the Wind” pairs squalling guitars and malfunctioning electronics with lyrics about how puberty makes girls feel awkward, with Cherry serving as the omnisciently tender narrator of a young woman’s journey toward her next self; “The Next Generation” is a stoop conversation about politics on a sweaty day turned into a stretched-out brass jam, its clashing of musical styles coming together create a cacophonous, hopeful centerpiece. There’s raunch to be had, too, with the album’s final track, “So Here I Come,” ending with the campy declaration “I came already!”
Another mother loomed in the background as well, as Cherry’s up-from-the-underground take on pop and style inspired more than a few critics at the time to fire off Madonna comparisons. (USA Today compared the “light, pop-friendly” side of her voice to the Material Girl’s, while The New York Times reviewed Sushi against the backdrop of Madonna’s push into pop confessionalism Like a Prayer.) While the underground clubs where both drew their inspiration were spiritually simpatico, the music they released had key differences. Madonna knew how to draw within pop’s lines the way Cherry simply couldn’t, for reasons involving radio, race, and the still-strict lines between formats: “We went over [to America] with our funny little posse from London,” Cherry told Pitchfork in 2014. “And in the black department, [”Buffalo Stance”] wasn’t black enough, and in the white department it was too black. So it was this weird middle satellite, floating around.”
“Manchild,” the second track on the album, is probably the best example of Raw Like Sushi’s widescreen view; it reunites Cherry with Wild Bunch member Robert “3D” Del Naja, who by then had formed trip-hop collective Massive Attack. Anyone expecting something like “Buffalo Stance II” to be Sushi’s second single was probably surprised. Its shape-shifting, woozy synths, which floated in and out of keys, led and were led by Cherry’s soulful yet pointed vocal. She’s acting as the prodding yet sympathetic sage to a flailing other, rapping about “R-E-S-P-E and C-T” while chords quiver and hover.
Audacity was what made Raw Like Sushi such a thrilling album three decades ago, and it’s also a big part of why today it looms large, both as an example of musical possibility and as a totem of womanhood. The front of Raw Like Sushi shows Cherry in full-on Buffalo stance, her arms crossed, her gaze set, her pout square. Its back cover, however, shows Cherry in flight and lost in the music, her curls midair, her arms splayed—realizing the joy in pure possibility, and dancing along with it as fast as she can.


Kelsey Lu recorded her debut EP live in a Brooklyn church with a loop pedal and Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly co-producing. The music lingers and haunts, rich with sadness and unease.

Church EP

Kelsey Lu remembers her first encounter with the cello. She knew she would take it home, if she stared hard enough, and if Sarah, her teacher, sensed her urgency (which she knew she would). Despite Lu’s 17-year mastery of the instrument, it’s as if that primal scene—the regal, mysterious, child-sized wooden figure lurking in the corner—continues to inform her skeletal, mournful take on folk. Her debut release, the solo-cello EP Church, has histrionic moments that betray her lofty patronage (support slots with Florence, collaborations with Dev Hynes) as well as displays of incredible composure. But there are ghosts in its shadows. The music is characterized by eerie moments like the closing passage of “Liar.” Just when the song might erupt, a balletic solo glides in, pirouettes, and collapses in the spotlight. When it leaves the stage, it’s as if a dark curtain is drawn, but for two more minutes, the cello groans and whispers. It’s magnificent enough to simply exist, knowing we’ll calmly submerge ourselves in its reverberations.
Church’s six songs comprise a minimal, intensely introspective suite, but one with an elevated sense of drama. For effect, Lu recorded the EP live—with help from a loop pedal and, on co-production, Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly—at a church in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Given her upbringing, it’s a curious choice of venue. Raised strictly Jehovah’s Witness, she’d visit church only when attending non-believers’ funerals. For a religious tearaway like Lu, who fled her devout family at 18, the church can be nostalgic, a reminder of those early communal engagements. But it’s a strange place to be alone.
Alone is how Lu performs, and how you feel listening in. The key to the recording is its vast reservoir of space. Rather than intimacy, the ambience imposes austerity on the music. A complicated silence lurks behind the tunes, like a latent threat—church echoes, feedback groans, bow scrapes, sliding fingertips. The effect is jarring: You accept it to be part of the set, without quite managing to forget it’s there. It makes listening to Church a self-conscious experience. At times it’s as if, sitting front row for a small play, you’ve been pinned back by the gaze of an actor reciting a fierce monologue.
But Church, like a furtive Kranky gem, somehow hypnotizes through the tension, and Lu sings as beautifully as she plays. In sleepier passages, like the four-minute “Dreams” intro, her strings seem to mourn the silence they replace. The reverence with which she treats each note engenders a tone of quiet rapture. On “Liar,” as a patient, three-chord twang spills light across the cavern walls, her voice becomes interchangeable with her instrument. Vowels slide over her tongue, vibrating like strings against the bow.
Across the EP, the gravity of Lu’s voice and repetitive lyrics transform stark sentiments into rootless syllables that linger and haunt. “Everybody knows/The feelings that you feel/Aren’t real” is a cutting line on “Time,” perhaps addressing her mother, who banned secular friends, or the abusive ex who showed her New York before she showed him the door. But Lu’s elegant tone smoothes even the most razor-sharp jibes. In contrast, “I feel you in my dreams” is an utterance so mawkish it ought to disintegrate in air, yet in the world she creates, it’s the only kind of mantra that makes sense—impassioned yet passive, with a gentle power. It’s as if, self-trained to master engulfing forces, she has learnt to hold communion solo. Singing about heartbreak and overcoming, Lu taps into a state often reserved for spiritual musicians: that of being utterly alone without the fear of loneliness.


The mesmerizing Brooklyn rapper's latest release finds him disappearing further into his singular style: gritty samples, low-key rhymes, no real hooks.

Full Circle

Medhane’s writing leans on the value of blood bonds and forged friendships. “With my fam,’ on the grind, going to the sky/Putting pain in, tell a story like a painting,” he raps on “Dan Freeman,” the opening track from his new project Full Circle. Street rap narratives often involve a come-up, but this NYC laureate of dread raps like a young man living moment-to-moment, day-to-day, check-to-check. With no expectation that music will deliver riches, the only sense of purpose he derives is from the people who surround him.
This darkness is palpable in Medhane’s uncompromising aesthetics. It’s fair to say the Brooklynite arrived in the shadow of Earl Sweatshirt, but the comparisons no longer serve him. At eight tracks and just 15 minutes, Full Circle feels lower-stakes than last year’s debut album Own Pace, but it finds Medhane further disappearing into his singular style: gritty samples, low-key rhymes, and no real hooks.
Medhane’s bars have always been economical, and here they feel shorter and more clipped than ever before. You can picture him paging through his rhymes with a red pen, crossing out unnecessary words. Or perhaps his scattered wordplay just reflects a stream-of-consciousness thought process. Take the 82-second “Big38” (one of six songs that come in under two minutes): With no wasted motions, Medhane declares his love for his kin, muses on astrology, and asserts he has “sent the hurt away” with the forlornness of someone just pretending to be ok. While his flow in the past felt spectral, Medhane has modified his voice into something more forceful. Rather than letting his rhymes gently float through the mix, he now regularly thumps out his syllables, sounding more confident on the mic than earlier recordings.
There are other surprises on Full Circle. The screwed sample and militant tone of “I Was Just In the Mara” resembles Kanye West’s Wyoming sessions work, and rising rapper maassai almost steals the spotlight as she viscerally describes “running from hearses” as “cardio.” “4Evafaded” closes the album with an old soul loop that would instantly turn the head of Griselda Gang, prompting Medhane to sign off with some positivity: “Why relish the hurt?” he asks, taking a nostalgic beat to remember his grandmother palming him some cash and advising that he save rather than spend it.
Mostly, though, Medhane traverses a chilly version of New York. On “No More Tequila,” he recalls a three-day bender; the pensive “Redline” details a winter’s day in the life as he moves through the city with friends, jumping subway turnstiles, buying weed, and facing wind and rain in just a grey hoodie. Medhane exists in this realm not on his own, but alongside compatriots MIKE, Adé Hakim (formerly known as Sixpress), Caleb Giles, and Slauson Malone. Together, they are creating a new ripple of the New York rap canon, offering a murky and ghostlike vision of one of rap’s most well-painted cities.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misquoted a lyric. The lyric has since been removed for clarity.


The newly independent singer’s latest project is designed to make her stand out in a crowded R&B field but falls short of any singular, defining moments.

Space & Time

Justine Skye first garnered fame on Tumblr, where she released a series of originals and covers that helped land her a deal with Atlantic Records in 2013. Three years later, she moved to Roc Nation and dropped her debut album Ultraviolet. Between label switches and multiple EPs, Skye has built a consistent R&B catalog: seven projects in eight years. Now, as an independent artist—a decision she said freed her from the confines of major-label creative control—her latest project attempts to cement her as a prominent R&B force and not just a model and influencer.
Space and Time has the futuristic sound of its executive producer Timbaland’s greatest hits, with robotic tempos and slap-bass melodies; it’s a pairing that works well in theory but relies heavily on mimicking artists of the past. Skye is aware of her middling status in the R&B world—she referred to it in a tweet as “all that talk”—and she recognizes the stain of former public relationships with fellow artists Goldlink, Travis Scott, and Sheck Wes, who Skye accused of abuse in 2019. As a result, there is a unique sense of urgency and directness on Space and Time, setting the album up as a chance for her to dig deeper into the industry baggage that made her step out on her own. But if the project is designed to make her stand out in a crowded field, it falls short of defining moments.
Among a generation of singers like Summer Walker and SZA known for airy, whispered vocals, Skye has a notably deeper tone but never pushes her range. On “It’s About Time,” Timbaland introduces her by name as if it’s the year 2000, and with tracks like “Innocent,” he plays into his predictable narrative of creating protégés like Aaliyah. The song samples “If Your Girl Only Knew,” with a Justin Timberlake feature that, rather than revitalizing the original, plays like a phoned-in collaboration. A snippet of Timberlake’s “Holy Grail” hook (co-written and produced by Timbaland) on another heartbreak tune, “We,” fits Skye’s breakup theme— “Just stop hurting me/It’s all in agony” she sings. “Pray, but my heart is weak, yeah/It’s all monotony.” But the song feels like an attempt to again relive an old Timberlake/Timbaland feature on a project that’s meant to re-center Skye.
Forced nostalgia aside, Space and Time is Skye’s chance to lay bare her journey of coping with heartache and self-doubt. Opening track “Conscious” repeats the question “Where have you been?/How did you get in?” setting the scene like the protagonist of a sci-fi film frantically searching for familiar surroundings. The video for “Twisted Fantasy,” an Afropop ditty featuring Rema, shows Skye traveling through a mirror into multiple realms before entering an alternate universe where the two have a face-to-face showdown at a dimly lit bar. The album’s standout is “In My Bag,” which is on-brand in the arsenal of TikTok-savvy hot girl summer anthems, with lyrics that champion women and getting to the money. The song ends with a call-and-response as if the DJ held the beat for all the ladies to huddle and perform their last twerk. It may very well birth a viral dance moment but not quite a star-making one.

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On this three-track album from Sam Ray’s electronic project, originally recorded in 2014, samples are absent and stillness is the move.

am i happy, singing_

Playlist culture suggests that we take our music with a side of multitasking—or perhaps, the other way around. Spotify, for instance, perpetuates this idea with its “Genres & Moods” section, featuring efficiently labeled playlists for a range of daily activities: “Workout,” “Sleep,” “Dinner.” Listening to am i happy, singing_, Sam Ray’s latest release under his electronic alias Ricky Eat Acid, it’s reassuring to discover that none of its songs come remotely close to any of those categories.
Originally written and recorded as a rough draft in 2014, am i happy was laid down in just three days. Ray has said he considered releasing the album immediately, but was advised to spend more time with it, later devoting months to retouching and re-tooling the work in a manner he likens to “reshaping a lump of clay, or chipping away at a hunk o’ marble to make a better statue.” In the four years since that initial recording, the Maryland composer/producer has developed a reputation as an eclectic, oddball bedroom-pop auteur as fans have discovered Ricky Eat Acid releases like 2014’s Three Love Songs and 2016’s Talk to You Soon, as well as full-lengths from his low-fi folk project Julia Brown and his indie rock band American Pleasure Club (FKA Teen Suicide).
am i happy marks a sharp detour from the sample-heavy approach that has united much of Ray’s previous work. Three Love Songs memorably repurposed a cover of a Drake and Rihanna duet, a fire and brimstone radio sermon, and countless collaged vocals; American Pleasure Club’s recent A Whole Fucking Lifetime of This flips Frank Ocean’s version of “At Your Best (You Are Love).” Every note of am i happy, however, is original—the only samples present are those borrowing from Ray’s own compositions. Like an audio magpie, he has been amassing these sound scraps for years, hoarding excerpts from string quartets and cataloging every plink of piano. With a slow and steady hand, Ray stitched these varied elements together. The result is a collection of arresting sonics that resist passive listening, instead commanding undivided attention.
Opening track “‘sitting in a diner’” is one of the most difficult pieces Ray has released to date, but in this case “difficult” and “beautiful” are not mutually exclusive terms. The song doesn’t so much begin as erupt, bursting like a glitter cannon loaded with shards of broken mirror. An early listen caused me to wonder if my speakers were shorting out, but the patchwork of noise is fragmented by design. It is a gorgeous assault on the eardrums, intercutting complete silence with 808 chirps that sound like Mario leaping through a row of coins.
His use of homegrown samples throughout am i happy, and the months he spent finessing the record, illustrate heightened discipline for someone who’d already churned out dozens of Bandcamp albums by the time he recorded it. That discipline pays off: am i happy is among Ray’s most cohesive recordings, playing like a linear triptych rather than a scrapbook. Thematically, too, it represents a development. Works like Three Love Songs and Talk to You Soon conveyed a narrative sense of place, memory, and motion. Cuts like “Driving alone past roadwork at night” and “Spinning About Under the Bright Light in Bliss” evoked filmic tableaus filtered through the grainy glow of nostalgia—one could easily imagine taking a midnight road trip, or making out in a drunken stupor.
am i happy, on the other hand, requires absolute stillness. It’s too jarring to score mundane activities, and too interesting to be relegated to playlists like “Hanging Out and Relaxing” or “Wine & Dine.” “two_beautiful ways of moving_your_hands” may be fabricated with gorgeous strings, but their incomplete, looped phrases arouse an intense yearning for them to fully bloom. It is a sensation I can only liken to the blushing tension between a “good night” and a first kiss. The anticipation escalates when the audio cuts out for a full four seconds, an eternity in song time. As a listener, you are hanging on every note, or lack thereof.
The album’s final, 17-minute movement, “am i happy, singing_,” is some of the lushest music Ray has ever made. Harmonica-like wails stretch across lambent synths, and static surges under minimalist piano like a hissing river. A halo of birdsong drifts around the perimeter. It is the record’s most musical and naturalistic offering, and feels particularly well-earned given the prior turbulence. By the time we reach its closing minutes, am i happy, singing_ has migrated miles from its initial commotion. Even in stillness, we are still moving.


London-based quartet's latest record is confident, menacing, and equally indebted to shoegaze and synthpop.

The Witching Hour

Even though the warm breath of October has made it easier (here in Toronto, anyway) to pretend we're still in July, the spell is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. From the browning leaves to the scarves in the windows of the downtown department stores, it's understood that we're just playing in injury time now, and that any prickly chill might signal autumn's speed trials on the way to another interminable winter.
Beyond the first snowfall, I am not a finds-comfort-in-December kind of person, which is probably why my treasured winter albums mean a lot more to me than the summer ones. There's something to be said for all records that lend themselves to certain seasons; the really good ones have this strange ability to extrapolate themselves across time. When Björk's Vespertine came out in 2001, I knew it wasn't just going to be a record I listened to a lot that winter, but in every one after it. It's instant, like a mirror-in-mirror hallway, folding out into the future for God knows how long, always as much a mystery as it is a comfort.
This year, for reasons I haven't figured out yet, I'm feeling like perhaps the good winter records are going to be even more important than usual. Maybe it's because I'm getting older, and the mirrors are getting smaller. Or maybe it's just going to be that much harder to fend off the creeping feeling of end days without the benefit of summer's attendant glories.
I won't lie: I didn't expect this to be one of those records. In fact, with the exception of a handful of singles, the best of which still felt brittle and two-dimensional, I never cared much for Ladytron. Granted, the whole electroclash thing getting levied against them seemed kind of unfair (the takeaway: keyboard basslines and polygonal haircuts are a gateway drug to dumb press), but for a type of music that was supposed to be emblematic of, if not a stand-in for, mountains of cocaine, Ladytron always seemed kind of enfeebled, their glassy tick-tock a weak substitute for anything properly muscular.
If they lacked the horsepower before, the year plus they spent touring behind 2002's Light & Magic put the meat on their bones. Despite being delayed for nearly a year thanks to the collapse of their UK label Telstar and the emergency room administration required for their still-dormant U.S. label Emperor Norton, The Witching Hour is the most urgent and immediate of their career. The earlier records were sort of toylike and plastic; this not only has a pulse, it has chilled blood in its veins.
Every quantum leap record has a quantum leap single, and in this case, it's "Destroy Everything You Touch". With a charging chorus and shivery production that sounds as equally indebted to shoegaze as it does synthpop, this is probably the most confident and menacing thing they've ever done. Almost as good is "International Dateline", which marries a pogo punk rhythm and a post-punky guitar lead with a keening vocal hook. With nothing but a transparent wash of synths and a simple minor-key vocal melody, closer "All the Way" demonstrates that Ladytron's advancement owes as much to their songwriting as it does to their increased production prowess. And, for better or worse, the barely concealed cocaine metaphor of "Sugar" ("If I get the sugar, will you get me/ Something elusive and temporary") proves they could go there if they wanted to.
But perhaps the most surprising thing about The Witching Hour is how affecting it is. Beyond the crumbling synths and the uneasy washes of white noise are lyrics that move between sounding commanding and hopelessly lost; where vocalists Mira Aroyo and Helena Marnie once sang about things like movie theatres and Commodore computers from about four steps back from mic, they're right between your ears now, their lungs fighting with the wheezing synths for airspace. That's as good an illustration as any of how far they've come in these last three years: if Ladytron of old was a truckful of ice, this one's a winter storm, bundled up people and all.