The new box set includes demos, a live show, and a fascinating, stripped-down remix of the band’s 1989 album Don’t Tell a Soul that reveals an alternate history of one of their most divisive records.

Dead Man’s Pop

The Replacements story is filled with what-ifs and near misses. Their legend, essentially, is that if the chips had fallen differently, they might have become a popular band and had success into the 1990s, like their friends and rivals R.E.M. What if they had played ball with their label? What if they hadn’t made so many enemies? What if they hadn’t been so fucked up?
In 1989, the question of the hour had to do with the band’s sixth album, Don’t Tell a Soul, and it goes something like this: What if they hadn’t released a record full of slick, radio-friendly pop-rock? With proper production, could this have been another classic? The question is asked because Don’t Tell a Soul was, for many years, the most maligned Replacements album, even if its reputation has improved some since then.
Dead Man’s Pop attempts to answer these questions. Featuring extensive notes from Bob Mehr, some of which are adapted from his essential Replacements biography Trouble Boys, the box set documents just about everything to do with Don’t Tell a Soul except for the finished album itself (Rhino reissued an expanded configuration in 2008). It aims to complicate the story of the record and rescue Paul Westerberg’s songs from production compromises made in service of a theoretical audience that never materialized.
Don’t Tell a Soul had an unusually complicated genesis, involving a new band member (guitarist Bob “Slim” Dunlap), two periods of recording, each with a different producer (Tony Berg oversaw early dates that were ultimately scrapped but are presented here, while Matt Wallace helmed the sessions that led to the album), a surprise drop-in from Tom Waits at the height of his fame, and a great deal of confusion about what Sire Records wanted from the band and vice versa. Amid all this turmoil, Westerberg was writing some very good songs that built on the softer, gentler material from the last couple of albums.
The heart of Dead Man’s Pop is a new mix and sequence of Don’t Tell a Soul inspired by the one Matt Wallace made just before he exited the project. Wallace wanted to mix the record himself, but could see the writing on the wall and knew the label wanted someone with a better ear for radio for the job (Chris Lord-Alge ultimately gave the record its modern-rock sheen). This was a common practice—track with a producer the band likes, get a corporation-approved pro to give it the proper polish (see: Nirvana). But in this case, the final mix became the record’s fatal flaw, and Westerberg himself even bad-mouthed it (“It sounded good until the label brought in people to mix it to make it sound like everything else on the radio,” he told Magnet in 2002). The quickie mix Wallace knocked out was thought lost until it turned up in Slim Dunlap’s basement and, once discovered, it served as the anchor for this set, which was named after the working title for the album.
Many differences are subtle—it’s not like they turn Don’t Tell a Soul into Stink—and these are still the same songs and the same performances rendered with a simpler and more intimate tone. The opening “Talent Show” is perhaps the greatest improvement—Westerberg’s vocal is naked, the drums are reserved, and it comes over more like a studio jam than something assembled from individual parts. The guitars on “I’ll Be You” are more twangy and less cheesy, to use a common pejorative from the time of the album’s release. “I Won’t,” easily the worst song on Don’t Tell a Soul, sounds better here without the deeply corny isolated bassline and a better balance among the instruments. “Asking Me Lies” is newly airy and light, with the backing vocals more prominent.
The common thread is that the guitars are cleaner, the vocals are clearer, and previously buried fills come to the surface, like the banjo in “Talent Show.” The set also re-sequences the album according to the Wallace tape. It’s more front-loaded now: No waiting until the second side to hear “I’ll Be You” and “Darlin One” (they are in slots No. 2 and 5, respectively). And ending the set with “Rock and Roll Ghost” after opening with “Talent Show” gives it a nice thematic frame, an innocent band taking a stab at one end and a fading relic thinking about the past at the other.
The second disc of the box contains work from the disastrous aborted Berg sessions, recorded in Bearsville, New York. It’s hard to get a sense of where the record might have gone from the evidence here—they are basically full-band demos of unfinished songs. While it’s enjoyable to hear “Achin’ to Be,” “I’ll Be You,” and “We’ll Inherit the Earth” in these versions, they sound more like run-throughs. Westerberg delivers the lyrics offhandedly, with plenty of vocalese placeholders.
Two outtakes, both of which landed on the expanded Don’t Tell a Soul, are the best thing about the sessions by far—the countrified “Portland,” which is fantastic, and the jittery rocker “Wake Up.” The six tracks taken from a drunken late-night session with Tom Waits—he was a fan of the band, and Westerberg of him—are of historical interest only. The two sound completely trashed and can barely play or even speak—a reminder it’s not always a tragedy when songs stay in the vault.
That doesn’t apply to the live set included on the other two discs, which document a concert from June 1989 in Milwaukee. For anyone skeptical of Don’t Tell a Soul, the most convincing argument for their vitality is the live shows from this period. They played faster and crunchier than on record but the hooks were intact and, unlike a few years earlier, Westerberg remembered most of the words. And the setlist is stunning—the number of anthems they had on tap at this moment is almost unbelievable, drawing from 1984’s Let It Be through their then-new record and throwing in a few covers, including their terrific version of the Only Ones’ “Another Girl, Another Planet.” It gets a little ragged toward the end, by which time the band was probably plastered (“Here Comes a Regular” is a mess), but the set holds up to repeated listens.
A few months after, the Mats would tour with Tom Petty and continue to unravel as Westerberg’s alcoholism consumed his life. All Shook Down followed in 1991, and then the band called it a day right as alternative music was poised to take off. And that was pretty much it for the Replacements until their reunion gigs this decade. Don’t Tell a Soul wasn’t the breakthrough anyone hoped for, but it turned out to be their best-selling album, which might explain why many bands later accused of ripping off the Replacements (the Goo Goo Dolls, Ryan Adams) sounded the most like this era, when acoustic guitars and hushed vocals were prominent in the mix.
Whether the new mix and additional context improve Don’t Tell a Soul is hard to say—especially for me, since I bought the album the day it came out and loved it for 30 years. In its original form, I related to this stoic guy from the Midwest raised to stifle his feelings choosing to explore vulnerability. To some people, that meant that the songs occasionally tipped over into self-pity or sentimentality, but these excesses seemed part of the emotionally messy package. It was music you swallowed whole, the good stuff and bad—like a handful of pills. At a certain age, you want nothing more than to feel special, and in Westerberg’s best songs on Don’t Tell a Soul, he offers hope that someone out there just might see the specialness in you.

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The character Scarlett Johansson plays in Under The Skin is a blank-eyed cipher, a predator without apparent motivation. There is no horror more visceral than the horror of the impersonal, so it makes sense that Mica Levi, who composed the film's score, would turn to György Ligeti's masterful sense of elemental horror. The score has the feel of a thought process, albeit one conducted by a being you have no genetic relation to.

Under the Skin OST

The character Scarlett Johansson plays in Under the Skin is a blank-eyed cipher, a predator without apparent motivation. There is no horror more visceral than the horror of the impersonal, so it makes sense that Mica Levi, composing the film's score, would turn to the master of elemental horror:György Ligeti, whose ability to gather masses of semitones into translucent wisps without a center made The Shining, which relied heavily on his work Lontano, the scariest movie ever made. (Watch that film with the music off, I still maintain, and it becomes a particularly caustic domestic comedy.)
The score opens with a locust plague of dry tremolos, the strings pressing down until the sound has reached a roar. It's a sound with tremendous menace and weight. From there, the roar shrinks into a whine, and enters a hazy nexus between digitally processed and live sound. It's an indeterminacy Levi worked hard to cultivate: "We were looking at the natural sound of an instrument to try and find something identifiably human in it, then slowing things down or changing the pitch of it to make it feel uncomfortable," she told The Guardian. Insectile, near-vocal sounds erupt across the tense, arid space of "Lipstick to Void," evoking either the Knife's berserker Shaking the Habitual or the processed strings from Britney Spears' "Toxic". It's an appropriate cross-section for the film, which veers between menace and sexuality and brilliantly cross-wires high-brain and low-groin impulses.
That hovering dust-cloud of strings, which Levi referred to as "like a beehive" in her and Under the Skin director Jonathan Glazer's recent Pitchfork interview, pops up repeatedly throughout the score with minor additions and tweaks representing the journey of Johansson's character: in "Meat to Maths", there are clanging bell-like sounds behind it, while in "Mirror to Vortex" it's half-submerged in the amplified sound of its own echo. In the context of the film, these additions feel like the messiness of lived experience muddying Johansson's template, the imprint of the lives she begins to grapple with as her time on Earth extends. The hollow knock of a single drum, like a single dragging foot, is another repeating theme, giving the score a reiterative, hesitant quality. Inasmuch as you can be invited into Johansson's character's head in Under the Skin, the music does the heavy lifting. The score has the feel of a thought process, albeit one conducted by a being you have no genetic relation to.
The music unfolds as deliberately and as unconsciously as the dreamlike film itself. Levi drops in an arching, three-pitch motif at various points, one that lingers on its highest pitch the longest, like a hanging doubt. In "Lonely Void", this figure is colored in briefly by a furtive patch of tonal harmony, a startling appearance of warmth that scrubs itself out as quickly but leaves a powerful impression. There are other brief hints of tenderness, particularly in the unearthly pairing of "Bedroom" and "Love", which lifts the score entirely free from anxiety and into something exalted and sorrowful. Here, Levi's work comes closer to Vangelis than to Ligeti, and completes the film's mysterious arc. Levi's commitment to the film's themes is all-consuming, and the score is so tightly woven into the film's DNA that it is difficult to detach and experience as an album. However, the gorgeousness of the quavering synths on "Love" ask nothing of you than to be enjoyed.


This lo-fi opus from the young rapper/producer mixes Three 6 Mafia chanting, woozy Wu-Tang loops, DJ Screw wheeze, and Mortal Kombat sound effects.

SpaceGhostPurrp: Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6 (1991)

Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6 (1991)

Though nobody's idea of the next big thing, Spaceghostpurrp, a 20-year-old from Miami who makes hypnagogic stripper anthems, received a strange co-sign from L.A. Weekly's blog: They called him "Odd Future's Cosmic Cousin." To be clear, Spaceghostpurrp will not make a game-changing appearance on "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon", and outside of being another young skate kid fascinated by video games and Satan, he doesn't have much in common with Tyler and company. If a comparison must be drummed-up to sell this very weird, really good, but inarguably niche stuff, let's go with "Clam Casino's evil druggie drop-out cousin from the South."
Like last year's NASA: The Mixtape, Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6 (1991) is obsessed with the earliest, ugliest Three 6 Mafia releases (particularly Underground, Vol. 1: 1991-1994) and follows that tradition of creepy club music while slyly updating it as well. "Possessed", Blvcklvnd's intro track, is lo-fi Lex Luger that tops the oppressive feeling of all those "B.M.F."-style beats, but toys with their pop appeal, thanks to a catchy, simple hook that is screamed like a black metal vocal.
Further separating his style from anything resembling conventional hip-hop, Spaceghostpurrp doesn't care for proper mixing (you might go insane listening to this on headphones) and he piles on video game sound effects and dub reggae-like noises. "Captain Planet" is a contemplative bouncing moan, like some lost Oval track; hypnotic synth blasts turn the ridiculously titled "Suck a Dick For 2011" and hazy stripper anthem "Grind on Me" into something transcendent. By the way, there is lots of stuff like "Suck a Dick For 2011" on here, which means Spaceghostpurrp is also very into 90s rap's misogyny (lots of strip club talk and "bitch" shouts), so be warned.
The last bunch of tracks climb out of the sizzurp murk and go for a 90s New York rap style. "Legend of the East Pyramyds" does moaning soul sample rap better than it has any right to, and then it piles on Halloween sound effects. ODB tribute "Osiris of the East Pyramids Blackland R.I.P. ODB" consists of synth tones floating ominously, merging the streetwise paranoia of New York and the verge-of-death doom of Houston. It's one of this year's most haunting songs even though it sounds like a mash-up of underground hip-hop from 15 years ago.
Born in 1991, Spaceghostpurrp's really just another one of those indie bedroom producers approaching the music of his earliest years, pairing it with very of-the-moment sonic decisions, and exposing the ways that once disparate arenas of sound mesh together. Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6 (1991) is a mess of Three 6 Mafia-chanting, woozy Wu-Tang loops, DJ Screw wheeze, and Mortal Kombat and Godzilla sound effects, all paired with an off-the-dome rapping style that's equal parts Lil Wayne and Lil B. It's as if James Ferraro Lawnmower Man-ed his way into a rap rarity message board and soundtracked the journey.


The UK producer’s debut album fashions a distinctive aesthetic out of asymmetrical machine beats and dabs of electronic melody, balancing academic concerns with rave-tested thrills.

ATAXIA

Rian Treanor’s musical M.O. might best be summed up by the title of his second EP, Pattern Damage. The young British producer and visual artist uses asymmetrical rhythms and pattern modulation to pry open the sounds of electro, bleep techno, and speed garage, scattering the components into new shapes that are dazzling and danceable. The results, as on the 2018 standout “Position_B1,” resemble dance music that has curled back in on itself, forming unsteady sequences that the human brain can just about process.
Treanor has said that the rhythmic structures on ATAXIA, his debut album, are stricter and more focused than his previous work, exploring apparently contradictory ideas such as “irregular symmetry.” For an artist who once smashed Whigfield’s Eurodance hit “Saturday Night” into an unlikely underground sensation, this shift seems puzzling, and ATAXIA’s weaker tracks suffer from a certain academic dryness. “ATAXIA A2” and “ATAXIA C1” combine fussily obtuse drum rhythms with sparse machine melodies that spin around in opaque, ever-changing circles, while “ATAXIA A1” wastes a wonderfully disjointed beat on a synth melody so understated that it might as well not exist.
Yet the line between success and failure here is cigarette-paper thin. Treanor’s production—a tightly coiled spring of asymmetrical machine beats and dabs of electronic melody—is so distinctive that, aesthetically, little separates the album’s weaker tracks from its out-and-out bangers. “ATAXIA B1” is a sonic sibling to “ATAXIA A2,” which precedes it. But on “B1” the rhythm is itchily intense, its polyrhythmic vigor playing off against the central synth riff like a murderous ballet that builds in an electrical frenzy.
At moments like these, ATAXIA feels wonderfully alive. For all the apparent studiousness in Treanor’s musical methods, he says his music is “intended to make people’s bodies move in unpredictable ways,” a goal reflected, perhaps a little insensitively, in the album’s title. (Common symptoms of ataxia include a lack of coordination and the deterioration of fine motor skills, according to the National Ataxia Foundation.) Certainly, you can imagine a track like “ATAXIA D1,” which pits distressed UK garage swing against a nagging riff in the vein of DJ Mujava’s “Township Funk,” working wonders among clubbers for whom irregular symmetry is less of a concern than the queue for the bar. Best of all, though, is “ATAXIA D3,” a track that dispenses with drums in favor of cut-up vocals and insouciant organ stabs that nod to New Jersey garage don (and Daft Punk collaborator) Todd Edwards. It’s here that the album finally comes up for air.
There is something rather noble about the way Treanor’s music flirts with failure. If human beings are essentially pattern-finding machines, as Michael Shermer argues in his book How We Believe, then messing with these structures has powerful effects, both positive and negative. Treanor told Resident Advisor that the human ability to recognize patterns in music “might be why we find some things funky or some things hysterical or some things boring.” ATAXIA has moments of all three, running the gamut across funk, feverish entertainment, and frustratingly dry-eyed experiments. Throughout, however, it remains startlingly original—a powerful piece of work from a sonic adventurer of rare intellectual clarity.


Vampire Weekend’s third album is a remarkable progression from a band that was already functioning at a high level. The songs are more spontaneous and dynamic and, along with the more lived-in sonics, Modern Vampires finds the group taking a leap forward into emotional directness.

Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City

Modern Vampires of the City

“It’s really hard to even talk about the internet without seeming instantly corny,” Ezra Koenig told Pitchfork recently, “even the word ‘blog’ sounds a little grandma-y.” He should know. The Vampire Weekend singer and lyricist gave up on his own Blogspot site, Internet Vibes, seven years ago, as he finished up his English studies at Columbia University (the final post’s title: “I HATE BLOGGING”). But before he graduated from the ye olde blogosphere, Koenig held forth on a vast array of topics—from geography, to Wellington boots, to music writer Robert Christgau’s allegedly unfair critique of Billy Joel’s oeuvre—looking at everything from a incisively self-aware, curious, and optimistic angle. What's most impressive is the way he’s able to connect art and ideas from different eras and continents into a kind of ecstatic worldview. One particularly inspired ramble spins an analytic web from a friend’s visit to Morocco, the history of the Strait of Gibraltar, a 1984 interview between Bob Dylan and Bono, the film The Secret of Roan Inish, and National Geographic’s famed Afghan refugee cover—and not only does it make sense, it’s written in a way that’s funny and smart and completely inclusive. Pretty good for a 22-year-old kid from middle-class New Jersey. Now 28, Koenig’s creative medium has changed, but his omnivorous cultural appetite has not.
Take “Step,” the third song on Vampire Weekend’s third album, Modern Vampires of the City—the record that is already forcing one-time haters of this band to rethink their entire lives. At its core, the song reads like an ode to obsessive music fandom in which the object of Koenig’s affection is “entombed within boombox and walkman.” Modest Mouse are name-checked. But the sense of infatuation extends beyond a list of influences and is embedded into the music itself. The chorus and parts of the melody are borrowed from wordy Oakland rap act Souls of Mischief’s “Step to My Girl”—which itself samples Grover Washington Jr.’s version of a Bread song called “Aubrey.” But “Step” avoids back-patting nostalgia and debunks bogus generational hierarchies while using the past to inspire the present. It’s also melancholy, with Vampire Weekend musical mastermind Rostam Batmanglij surrounding Koenig’s musings with lilting harpsichord ambience. Because, as we know, music is a young man’s pursuit. “Wisdom’s a gift but you’d trade it for youth,” Koenig sings.
Still, Vampire Weekend make a damn good case for wisdom all across Modern Vampires. Yes, this is a more grown-up album. It largely trades in the Africa-inspired giddiness of their first two records for a sound that’s distinctly innate and closer to the ear. There’s more air in these songs, more spontaneity, more dynamics. The overarching themes—death and a dubious sense of faith—are certainly Serious. But you never feel like you're being preached at while listening to this album. Koenig and company are probably more clever and gifted than you, sure—but they’re not rubbing your face in it or anything. Their message is one of collective understanding and betterment, and Modern Vampires is the kind of album that’ll have you googling for Buddhist temples and Old Testament allusions at 3 a.m. while listening to reggae great Ras Michael (who’s sampled on opener “Obvious Bicycle”). Now, you don’t have to get obsessed to enjoy this music, but it’s presented with such care that you can’t help but want to learn about its deeper meanings. So while Koenig gave up a potential teaching career to take his chances as a rock singer, he’s still doling out knowledge in his own way.
Though the record often traverses in darkness—the zipped-tight “Finger Back” alludes to historic atrocities and brutality while “Hudson,” easily the band’s bleakest track to date, imagines an apocalyptic Manhattan—there’s also hope here. Partly because Vampire Weekend seem to have internalized all of the positive traits of their internet-soaked generation while resisting the ugly ones: They’ll offer jokes and humanity on Twitter without navel-gazing; they’ll play a concert for a credit-card company while roping in Steve Buscemi for promo videos that are no-shit funny; they’ll use the tools of modernity to expand their universe rather than contract it. And then they’ll go ahead and crack your heart in two.
Along with the more lived-in sonics, Modern Vampires has the band taking a leap forward into emotional directness. Koenig and Batmanglij truly seem of one mind here, as the vocals and music interact with each other in an effortless flow. While skronks and snares pop on “Diane Young,” the singer matches the live-fast intensity hit-for-hit. The song is a dissection of the 27 Club rock’n’roll myth, where Koenig’s voice on the sly “baby, baby, baby” bridge is manipulated to intoxicating effect.
Then there’s “Hannah Hunt.” In some sense, it seems like Vampire Weekend’s entire career thus far has led to this one song. It begins with the hiss of wind and some vague background chatter—the sounds of the everyday—before it’s all quickly tuned out in favor of Batmanglij’s piano and bassist Chris Baio’s upright plucks. Koenig comes in soft, telling of a couple on a cross-country road trip. His details—crawling vines, mysterious men of faith, newspaper kindling—are sparse, delicate, perfect. And then, after two minutes and 40 seconds of quiet beauty, the song blooms, and Koenig lets it absolutely rip: “If I can’t trust you then damn it, Hannah/There’s no future/There’s no answer/Though we live on the U.S. dollar/You and me, we got our own sense of time.” On an album preoccupied with the ominous ticking of clocks, this is the moment that stops them cold.
Koenig has said in recent interviews that the band’s three albums make up a trilogy. “Hannah Hunt” could be a sobering continuation of Contra’s Springsteen-ian “Run,” where two people decide to up and leave their known lives in search of some sort of American transcendence. There’s also a perilous chandelier at the center of new track “Everlasting Arms,” perhaps a callback to the hanging lights that cover the band’s debut LP. And the Modern Vampires font is the same exact one used in a trailer for Koenig’s absurd-looking college-era werewolf movie, from which Vampire Weekend got its name. These little links are not only satisfying, but inevitable. After years of engaging with anything and everything in reach, Vampire Weekend are now a primary source in their own right.


New York City’s most consistent metallurgists offer a deliberate break from their past on their seventh and eighth albums. A decade into a prolific career, Krallice prove newly elusive.

Loüm / Go Be Forgotten

By now, Krallice feel like a known entity. For nearly a decade, New York City’s most consistent metallurgists have steadily defined and refined a grand approach to black metal reappraisal. Already veterans of a half-dozen ambitiously athletic instrumental acts, guitarists Mick Barr and Colin Marston use their guitars to stretch the basic shapes of primeval riffs into high-treble, high-tremolo spirals. Drummer Lev Weinstein and bassist Nicholas McMaster have long been more than a rhythm section, warping the shape and powering the stamina of Krallice’s early 18-minute monsters with a sense of time that seemed to contract and expand. For six albums (and the essential EP, Hyperion), Krallice have sharpened each of those elements, contouring them to fit one another with near-peerless precision. They seemed, by this point, a machine.
But on their seventh and eighth albums—released during the last six weeks, without fanfare and in quick succession—Krallice offers a deliberate break from what had become a predictive past. On the brief but powerful Loüm, Krallice links with its first-ever special guest, Neurosis co-founder and bassist Dave Edwardson. Though a steadfast backup vocalist with his main act, Edwardson steps up front here, his brusque and hoarse shout clearing the brambles ahead of Krallice’s coiled strikes. He adds careful layers of synthesizer, too, a harbinger for the sudden shift on Go Be Forgotten, Krallice’s most unexpected and revelatory album since very near its start. An unruly mix of vintage rippers and sidewinding explorations, Go Be Forgotten is a stream of surprises, from an opening cover of a black metal obscurity to a swoon-worthy instrumental farewell of chiming guitars and droning keys. In fact, on the masterfully adventurous title track, Marston steps away from the guitar entirely, using the synthesizer to add broad symphonic swells behind the band’s meticulous motion. Nearly a decade into a prolific career, Krallice proves newly elusive.
Separated by a generation or two of the American metal vanguard, Edwardson and Krallice certainly are odd bedfellows. Edwardson helped build the framework of modern doom, while Krallice emerged as arguably the most arduous element of the last decade’s U.S. black metal renaissance. But on Loüm, Edwardson lends a kind of blue-collar approachability to Krallice, which has historically used mystic abstraction and fantasy escapades for esoteric lyrics that fit their musical mazes. Edwardson instead arrives as a veteran punk here, lampooning the rich and powerful and grimly surveying a world that seems to be teetering on collapse. “Little man, you’re useless to me,” he stammers like Henry Rollins during “Rank Mankind,” an oligarch’s first-person screed for the commoner. “I hate you/You have no value.” During the fast and agile “Kronus Deposed,” his warnings about “the fear that permeates this world” are given weight by his booming voice, and tumble like loose rocks in a clothes dryer. The bulk of Loüm is prime Krallice, led by a reshaped edge.
The unlikely combination works best, however, on a track that sounds like little else in Krallice’s discography—“Loüm,” an entrancing vision of escaping enemy lines by climbing a seemingly insurmountable obelisk. Krallice packs a symphony’s worth of drama and suspense into these eight minutes, with distinct but connected sections that animate the narrative arc like a movie’s score. (And speaking of scores, there’s even a hint of Ennio Morricone’s Spaghetti Western twang in the bridge.) Edwardson plays perfectly the part of the calloused survivor, his voice as damaged and scarred as the body of the fleeing protagonist. On “Loüm,” experience and enthusiasm push one another ahead, with Krallice and Edwardson navigating new territory together.
Given that spirit, and the overall sense that Krallice has tired of its own black metal revisionism, the hint of nostalgia that first ripples through Go Be Forgotten may seem discordant. Both “Failed Visionary Cults” and “Chaos of the Living” are Krallice throwbacks, two- and three-minute romps that quickly show how much more expressive and intricate the band has become. Likewise, an opening interpretation of “This Forest for Which We Have Killed”—an exceptionally deep cut from early U.S. black metal band Beastlor—proves how much Krallice has developed its trademark sound. They lift the riff and the lyrics from the original but reshape the rest entirely until it plays like a vestige of their earliest, meanest work. It is a nod to history that overtakes heritage, recasting the past with the power of the present.
But the rest of Go Be Forgotten is squarely focused on imagining Krallice’s future, on recognizing that a band that’s focused on the same few elements for a decade can stand new input. There’s an engrossing synthesizer fantasy, a track that newly tests the limits of just how much Krallice can mess with time (“Ground Prayer”), and an epic that may just be the most adventurous thing the band has ever written. Like “Loüm,” “Go Be Forgotten” was written by Barr, and it’s every bit as involved. Opening with a clenched black metal tirade, it shifts gears again and again, from a high-flying guitar solo to a synth tangent and back to both again. You can feel the members recalibrating their highly nuanced instrumental interplay in real time, working their way into a new mold. “I sit and stare at the future/Stuck still,” he screams against the tumult. “Letting it all pass.” That’s an observation, mind you, not an admission: This is the sound of Krallice, suddenly and absolutely unstuck again.


On its promising debut full-length, this Portland outfit mixes catchy psych-pop with a surprising and convincing undercurrent of funk.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra: Unknown Mortal Orchestra

Unknown Mortal Orchestra

Perhaps we'd all be better off if it was always "all about the music, man." But until recently, most discussion of Unknown Mortal Orchestra understandably went from lauding the unshakeable hooks of "Ffunny Ffriends" and "How Can You Luv Me?" to wondering why, true to their name, they remained anonymous. Protracted mystery can cause as much skepticism as the most overt press blitz, and information had been scarce since they popped up last year with a Bandcamp page of intriguing and untraceable songs. Some time after, those songs started being performed live by human beings who do mundane things like wear Baja drug rugs, live in Portland, and maintain an active Twitter feed. But there's still something eerily extraterrestrial about their debut LP, as if it were something that fell from the sky completely intact. You wonder if it might be an artifact from some psych-rock acid casualty, a long-forgotten Kiwi-popper, or an Elephant 6 offshoot. You want to poke at it, prod it, and try to carbon date it.
None of the ambiguity would matter if UMO didn't spring to life from the first happily bopping seconds of "Ffunny Ffriends" and provide a half hour of rich analog sizzle that extends far beyond its meager recording budget (seriously, try and find it on vinyl, if possible). Though obviously more camera shy than Sleigh Bells or Cults, UMO represents a similar merger of simple and catchy melodies lovingly marooned in a raw, buzzcut production that puts an emphasis on the beats. The major difference for UMO is that their grit radiates from the inside out. Funk too often comes off as a jittery affectation or genre exercise even for rock bands who are pretty good at it. But for bandleader Ruban Nielson, it feels like a natural songwriting mode. The tortured but deceptively joyous hook from "How Can You Luv Me?" does plenty to draw you in, to the point where it might take the fifth listen to focus on just how limber the rhythm section is. It's hardly alone in sounding like a readymade breakbeat, so it's not surprising that the cratedigging likes of El-P, ?uestlove, and Das Racist have all taken to tweeting UMO's praises.
But the sound wouldn't matter without songwriting. When a singer gets praised for incorporating his or her voice like another instrument in the mix, it's usually a reference to texture. And while Nielson often works in an androgynous, bristling tone that's certainly ingratiating on its own merits, it's more remarkable for its sophisticated approach to melody. Whether gripping the thrilling hairpin turns of "Bicycle", arranging complex lattices of syncopation on "Thought Ballune", or simply doubling down on his own leads on "Ffunny Ffriends", he converses with the inventive guitar playing like he's making a sales pitch. The riffs tell you what you're gonna hear, the vocals respond, and they link up in a way that makes everything so welcoming and familiar by the middle of the song itself. Combined with an expert use of space rare for such a lo-fi record, UMO manages a unique immersive and psychedelic quality without relying on the usual array of bong-ripping effects.
As with Treats or Cults, it's easy to view the band's ability to do just a few things very well as a potential liability. But many of UMO's charms come while they jab at their limitations. "Little Blu House" dots its airy landscape with harmonies that seem to change color with each stacked layer, and closer "Boy Witch" indulges in some intriguing post-punk guitar damage that could indicate a future direction. That said, the track stuffed with the most experimentation ends up being the weakest. "Nerve Damage" is part envelope filter-hotdogging and part goony thrash, but pretty much all filler, ultimately. But hell, being able to recognize Unknown Mortal Orchestra's imperfection, however minor, lends their debut some humanity. As does being able to see a press photo of the shaggy but high-functioning space cadets who made it.


Mixtape mainstay issues his proper debut; it serves as a conduit between the commercially lucrative South and a lagging East Coast scene.

Jeezy: Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101

Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101

Young Jeezy's proper debut has been a long time coming, though it's been a treat hearing his weathered, weezy rasp on mixtapes (most notably DJ Drama's Trap or Die). He is a conduit between the South, where most of today's commercially lucrative hip-hop originates, and a lagging East Coast scene. Let's Get It is not the best rap album of the year and Jeezy is hardly the world's greatest lyricist. But he slings a sometimes-creepy, sometimes-clever, sometimes-chaotic charisma and he rides that magnetism to a mostly brilliant solo entrance to the bigs.
On opener "Thug Motivation 101" Jeezy pounds his chest and growls, "I used to hit the kitchen lights, cockroaches er'where/ Now I hit the kitchen lights, there's marble floors er'where" over tense, eerie keyboards. It's a joyous moment but also the scariest album opener I've heard this year. He breathes hard on the track and stares down his microphone like it hates him. He punctuates the song with his calling card. By now Da Snowman's ad-libs are things of legend. Unbridled "Daaaayuums" and everlasting "Yeeeeaaahs" or "Thaaaaat's riiiiight"s punctuate each song. For most MCs this would weigh down their words. For Jeezy, it's the essence of his persona: maniacal shouting, catchphrases, euphoria, instant gratification. There's no parsing through flow and lyrics and drum machines. He hits hard and quickly.
"My Hood", while cheap, easy, and out of character for the steadily mean-mugged Jeezy, is blissful, thanks to a chintzy Casio beat and some sort of My Hood=Our Hood claptrap. "Get Ya Mind Right" runs on horror movie organ fuel, like a Goblin-Argento soundtrack redux. "And Then What" finds Mannie Fresh in fine, fat-faced form while Jeezy heads down to his "Auntie House" before he goes boom, boom clap. "Go Crazy" is the height of the Mason-Dixon bridge. It is also the best 1998 Roc-A-Fella drug rap song in some time, featuring producer Don Cannon's spare tom rolls, classy horns and a killer chorus. A recent remix featuring New York kings Jay-Z and Fat Joe was one of the more obvious (and thrilling) things to happen to hip-hop in recent months and confims Jeezy's universality.
All the fun shit aside, at 19 tracks and no skits, Let's Get It is long and can become a chore to wade through. Barring the Bun B-assisted classic "Trap or Die" and the soul-jockeying "Talk to Em" the album's second half really lags and Jeezy's allure ultimately wears. Why more artists don't follow the Illmatic code remains a mystery. We buy mixtapes for a reason, dudes.


Minnesota-based musician Austin Lunn splits his love of black metal and Appalachian folk into two distinct halves on this double LP.

Panopticon: The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness (I and II)

When Austin Lunn seeks musical inspiration, he disappears into the wilderness: the rolling Kentucky hills where he learned the ropes of life and musicianship; the Norwegian mountain ranges where he pushed his earthly limits in adulthood; the perma-frosted Minnesota forests where he presently lives; and the music of Panopticon, his bluegrass-metal fusion band, where all the aforementioned scenes coalesce. “I live way out in the woods now and have really grown to love it and cherish the solitude,” Lunn told Invisible Oranges in 2014, distancing himself from the project’s radical roots. “I feel like in a lot of ways the music reflects that...I am ready to focus on what I think is right and beautiful in this world.”
In the Bandcamp description for Panopticon’s new double album, The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness (I and II), Lunn emphasizes his Luddite tendencies in earnest terms. He entreats us to avoid playing the album on laptops because “it will sound like shit,” warns us of its midway pivot to Appalachian folk, and suggests fans listen during a long hike or long evening by the campfire. Lest you misconstrue this as self-important nature-boy schtick (or, god forbid, “hipster metal”), know that Lunn isn’t particularly concerned with selling an image to the public. “NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON WAS ASKED TO REVIEW THIS ALBUM,” he vows on the same Bandcamp page. It’s an understandable note, considering that The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness features some of his riskiest, most intimate music to date.
Lunn has a tendency to speak black-metal’s praises sensually, and almost invariably in terms of the physical environments that spawned his forebears. He’s described Falls of Rauros as making music that “smells of ocean breeze,” and singled out Ulver’s iconic album Bergtatt for evoking the Norwegian wilderness he beheld so long ago. The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness applies a similarly synesthetic approach, molding black metal into pastorals with vivid stories to match.
Following a relaxing introduction to the wild on “Watch the Lights Fade,” a sparse instrumental comprising accordion sighs, crackling fires, and little else, Lunn unleashes hell with “Blätimen,” a stunning, nearly seven-minute ode to a Norwegian black metal musician who froze to death walking home through the woods. Lunn conjures a Scandanavian blizzard with hollow, weeping riffs bursting into the sonic space like wind gusts as the blast-beats shatter around him. “The Moss Beneath the Snow” proves more literal in its naturalism, concealing the coming maelstrom beneath a burbling brook; the placid interlude “A Ridge Where the Tall Pines Once Stood” pairs loon laughs with a soothing reading of the late environmentalist Sigurd Olson (who also died alone in the forest, in this case, while snowshoeing). The only things missing from this heavy metal camping trip are the corpse paint and the cops.
As Lunn foretold, the second half of The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness marks a sudden stylistic shift, with a majority of its eight songs swapping leaden fury for simple, understated Americana. None of them come even remotely close to capturing the drama of the first half. That’s partly because Lunn’s homespun mix buries his hoarse melodies beneath squeaky bluegrass tracking on otherwise-solid songs like “The Wandering Ghost,” and partly because the merger of fury and folk (emphasis on the fury) is what makes Panopticon so compelling in the first place. To cleave his sound in half is to weaken it, at least temporarily. Black metal and blue-collar country might come from two different lineages, but they’ve got more in common than you’d expect: the ever-present pain, the untameable spirit, the tragic beauty, the freedom to feel both everything at once and nothing at all. The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness works best when it stuns through synchronicity, rather than separation.


The Chicago singer-songwriter’s debut LP appears at first to be fairly straightforward, but it quietly eludes convention and expectation, creating its own hermetic world.

My Heart Is An Open Field

Three scrapes on a guitar string. They arrive each time Jess Shoman finishes the chorus of “Blue Spring,” a song from My Heart Is an Open Field, the Chicago songwriter’s beguiling first album as Tenci. “If spring is green, then I am blue,” she sings, elongating and repeating the last word, twisting its pitch and inflection each time, sending it sailing like a paper plane on a gracefully turbulent journey toward the ground. And then the guitar scrapes, faint but forceful: chrk chrk chrk. The arrangement is minimal, the melodies oblique, placing these seemingly incidental sounds at the forefront of your attention, turning them into the song’s most immediate hook. The scrapes, and the circuitous vocal line they punctuate, express something foggy and difficult to verbalize, beyond the simple dichotomy of the refrain. “Blue Spring” is not about spring, or sadness, so much as it is about chrk chrk chrk.
My Heart Is an Open Field, which Shoman assembled with a loose crew of musicians from Chicago’s DIY scene, including guitarist Spencer Radcliffe and bassist Tina Scarpello, appears initially to be a fairly straightforward indie songwriter album. But it quietly eludes convention and expectation, creating its own hermetic world. At times the music’s minimalism recalls the hush of the Velvet Underground’s self-titled album, and at others it gives a small-scale approximation of post-rock. Shoman signals her sensibility with the first notes of opener “Earthquake,” sending crackly transmissions from one guitar to another, a moment of pointillistic interplay untethered to any particular rhythm. When the beat does arrive, it’s the familiar 6/8 of a sock hop slow dance, set to three chords that loop uninterrupted for several minutes. “Stay,” Shoman intones like a mantra, as the three chords reduce to one and the song sighs to a close.
The compositions throughout are similarly bareboned, combining stock gestures with patient repetition and moments of bracing originality. The instrumentation is sparse but endlessly inventive, forgoing any excess that might draw your ear away from the tiny details, which are paramount. A cello introduces “Blue Spring” with one repeated note. “Serpent” briefly unravels into noisy sprawl, then recomposes itself and continues as if undisturbed. A synthesizer arrives to double the central acoustic guitar figure of “Joy 2” and the effect is like sunshine appearing suddenly through a canopy of trees. Shoman and her collaborators exhibit a zen-like respect for silence and choose the sounds they use to fill it with great care, suggesting new possibilities with each palette.
Chief among these sounds is Shoman’s uncanny voice, high and reedy, with an unsteady vibrato that suggests someone very old or very young. (She took the name Tenci as a tribute to her grandmother Hortencia, who appears on My Heart Is an Open Field via a heartbreaking voicemail at the end of “Blue Spring.” Shoman says her own voice reminds her of Hortencia singing while doing chores, which is not hard to believe.) Sometimes, she uses her unconventional instrument in conventional ways, but the music is most exciting when she abandons naturalism in favor of a stranger, more expressionistic approach. “Fly fast, kiss fast, fight fast, gone gone,” she sings on “Joy,” slurring the consonants together until the words become nearly unintelligible, and the hisses of her breath and clicks of her tongue convey their own meaning. The idiosyncrasies of her singing, set to rudimentary musical ideas expressed on a small and motley collection of instruments, all work together toward a mysterious sustained atmosphere, frequently achieving something greater than the sum of their parts; My Heart Is an Open Field shares some unlikely commonalities with the junkyard blues of Tom Waits, though it rarely sounds similar on the surface.
Shoman’s lyrics are often surreal, offering resonant phrases strung together with ambiguous logic. Images repeat across songs, adding to the sense that the album is its own tiny universe: sweat, blood, skin being picked at. “You’re a dog in the window/I’m a loose piece of twine,” Shoman sings in “Hair Sticks.” Two songs later, she inverts the roles: “I can’t pretend I’m not a dog tied to a porch.” “Joy” contains a few of the best of these one-liners, which add up to a celebration of happiness as something ineffable, whose worth is inextricable from its difficulty to sustain: “The wind’s already brushed your hair”; “Make a cake, forget to eat it”; “I’m full of desire, don’t know if its mine.”
The two-part suite that begins with “Joy” is the most ambitious, moving, and fully realized passage of My Heart Is an Open Field. Other songs, like “Earthquake” and “Hair Sticks,” are fascinating, but they can also feel unfinished. There’s a tension between wanting more—the pleasant surprise of a new harmony, the power of a narrative to lead us from one line to the next—and recognizing that such concessions might rob the music of its power. “Joy” and “Joy 2” resolve that tension, tracing an incandescent arc that is neither incomplete nor conventional. The final line of “Joy” poignantly imagines an infant being carried off to bed by her mother: “Baby’s tired/Joy give her kiss goodbye.” After Shoman sings it a few times, the music dissolves into a wash of brushed cymbals and the album’s most important recurring motif: a single note, pulsing steadily.

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Filled with muted vocals and no wave melodies, the Bay Area group’s debut album uses 1980s horror tropes and video games to reflect on contemporary alienation.

Body Jumper

By the time musician Jonathan Lopez and vocalist Christian Petty crossed paths at a screening of the 2016 black comedy horror film, The Greasy Strangler, Provoker was already Lopez’s side project—an outlet he conceived in hopes of composing film scores—and Petty had been making R&B music of his own. After bringing bassist Wil Palacios and drummer Kristian Moreno into the fold, and releasing the EP Dark Angel in 2018, Lopez and Petty built up a fanbase on Instagram from scratch. Once their online aesthetic was realized, and COVID-19 halted the band’s 2020 North American tour, the Bay Area distortion bros attempted to become modern translators of anguish and torment in the digital age. Filled with muted vocals and no wave melodies, their debut album, Body Jumper, uses 1980s horror tropes and video games to reflect on contemporary alienation.
Made up of Lopez’s cultural mementos and Petty’s sometimes overwrought collection of 1980s motifs, the record fortifies itself with the past in order to engage with the present. The cover art looks like a still pulled from Videodrome or The Fly, and each song summons an accompanying car chase across a glistening cityscape. When Petty introduces warped vocals to the sinister backing tracks (made up of an amalgam of metal, punk, and UK trip-hop), he conjures visions of Echo and the Bunnymen in a mosh pit full of E-boys.
The characters on the album are all projections of one person playing a video game, and each song is a new level with different faces but identical consequences. It’s jarring to see each transition accumulate torments that grow more sinister with each pop hook. “Blue Sheen” meditates on losing faith in one’s ability to love another person; “Bugs and Humans” oscillates between the perspective of a child and his adult self, mourning the mistakes that come with growing up. Both songs race slurring vocals across a blistering drum machine, creating the illusion that our narrator is tethered to the front seat of a sports car in Gran Turismo but can’t help looking back.
The album revolves around a set of back-to-back tracks. On “Rose in a Glass,” Petty tells the story of a detective combing a noir-soaked city for a missing person; there is no happy ending, only an unresolved swelling tension. We transition then to the slow dissociation of “Spell Strike,” where the character’s defeatism takes shape as an RPG in a final level fight with an evil fairy boss, lamenting a metaphorical unrequited love. The two protagonists are the same, in that they are fighting against emotional turmoil, each transition relaying the transgressions of Petty’s own apathy under the disguise of different skins.
By focusing on the plights of fictional characters—private investigators, Undertale lookalikes, elven warriors, NPCs—Petty interrogates the limits of technological immersion and how it affects our perception. “Still I can’t compute your love/An illogical surrender/For me I’m just a computer/I receive I’m not the sender,” he sings on “NPC,” pivoting the focus onto the private lives of non-player characters. By pinning inadequacy onto them, Petty’s lyricism evokes a devastation that is familiar to the players we control as well. He covers similar territory on “Spawn Kill,” growing despondent at the fatality of in-game, multiplayer rebirth. What’s the use of eternal return if you are only going back to die again? That torture is hidden behind the metaphors on Body Jumper, even in their redundancy. Once you’ve waded through the muck of familiar gaming buzzwords and imagery, you’ll find Petty’s songwriting cleverly taking aim at despair and self-flagellation through bodies with infinite lives.
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The new album from Yo Gotti—current ambassador of Memphis rap—digs deeper into his roles as struggler, hustler, and city spokesman, with a more pointed focus on betrayal.

I Still Am

The cover for Yo Gotti’s 2013 album, I Am, references the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike that brought Martin Luther King, Jr. to the city. King was assassinated in Memphis during the strike, and both events had an impact on the city’s soul and (later) rap scenes. Many local artists, including Gotti, have maintained that there’s a throughline bonding the incidents in 1968, the sounds of Stax Records, and the dread in Memphis rap. “Soul is like—kinda like pain. You hear that even in the voice tone or the selection of music, and it just feel dark and painful, like the struggle,” he told NPR. And local legend Playa Fly once said, “There’s always been a dark cloud over the city. They killed the symbol for peace here.”
Gotti has emerged in recent years as the Memphis mouthpiece, a blue-collar MC channeling that same darkness. “I am the struggle/I am the hustle/I am the city,” he rapped on I Am’s title track. The album’s unofficial sequel, I Still Am, Gotti’s ninth, finds him digging deeper into roles as struggler, hustler, and city spokesman. This time the self-proclaimed reality rapper takes his Memphis pride global—from hometown shoutouts inside the Ridgecrest Apartments to jet-setting across Europe and Asia. As he expands his horizons, the enduring cracks in his writing resurface.
For years in Memphis rap, the buck stopped with Three 6 Mafia and Eightball & MJG, each act a tangent of the Memphis rap club culture. Gotti, who sounds unquestionably local in his language but panders more broadly to the sounds of the moment stylistically, has become the latest (and unlikeliest) flagship star in Memphis since the late Aughts. He buoys his more trap-angling deep cuts with surprise hits like “Down in the DM,” and his willingness to play ball has earned him national exposure and gold and platinum plaques. But still, there is very little separating him from his peers. He puts his scene on by emulating outsiders: He works mostly with Atlanta beatmakers like Mike WiLL Made-It, Southside, Zaytoven, and Drumma Boy, all of whom appear on I Still Am. The album also reunites Gotti with Miami producer and “Down in the DM” architect Ben Billion$. Inside their productions, he tackles all of the trap tropes. Yo Gotti is basically a Gucci Mane understudy, and his albums play out as if he’s been forced to replace the star last minute.
Gotti is a competent rapper who allows his voice to do much of the work, pressing into beats with repetitive phrases and rhyme schemes, single syllable rapping, and tottering slow flows. His raps get right to the point—usually at the expense of scene-setting with very little exposition. He’s either talking passed unidentified subjects, or thinking out loud about dealing, flexing, or defending his territory, or in the act of doing those things. He doesn’t have a particularly compelling point of view; some songs move in circles. There is a sense of tension in his raps, but there is rarely the activity necessary to make them gripping.
“Struggle” is a word that best describes most Gotti songs (sometimes as much in execution as in subject matter), but I Still Am has a more pointed focus on betrayal. The primary perpetrator is Gotti’s ex, but at different points on the album, he feels betrayed by close confidants, colleagues, snitches, and to a certain extent, God. On occasion, a faceless “they” are out to ruin all he’s worked for: “They had their hand out but I ain’t submissive/You tryin’ to extort a nigga, I’m from Memphis.” These betrayals open the door for deeply personal “reality raps” about small-time coke trafficking, life on the other side of dealing dope, and trying to balance hometown responsibility with world-conquering aspirations. Even as a rich man, Gotti’s struggle continues.
On “One on One,” after setting the premise—“If I could talk to God like a real nigga one on one, I’d tell him”—he poses several hypothetical questions about doing the right thing, his misdeeds, and the friends he lost to prison and the cemetery. There’s apprehension in his voice as he weighs safety measures. He’s sneaking his gun into church and worrying about his security. Most of the violence on I Still Am is a reply, in defense of comrades or his position atop the Memphis rap world. “Old lady in the neighborhood said I’m the devil, she a damn liar,” he raps. “See me bustin’ that fire, tryna protect the guys from the other side.”
The more poignant moments on I Still Am, like the stamping “2908” and “Don’t Wanna Go Back,” which laments time spent as a shooter and corner boy, are sometimes offset by the more unapologetic songs like “Brown Bag” and the chest-beating “Juice.” He can’t seem to decide which stance to take: proud street pharmacist or mournful, reformed peddler of toxins. But this conflict does produce songs like the understated and hypnotizing “Yellow Tape,” which finds Gotti at full tilt, leveraging his sandy caw for emphasis: “I’m bumpin’ slaughter gang, 21, back when I was 21/Drive-bys, homicides, switching sides, you were done/How we in the shootout four deep and I’m the only one/With an empty drum, where I’m from that’ll get you hung.” No matter how famous Gotti gets, you can’t take the hood out of him. On “Around the World,” backed by singing children, he travels to Dubai, the UK, and Japan, but always ends up back in the ‘Crest. It’s too bad that I Still Am has more to say about the city he represents than who he actually is.


The drone-metal syndicate, who reformed as an elegant blues band seven years ago, follow Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1 with an expansive, understated collection recorded during the same session as that 2011 album.

Earth: Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II

Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II

Aside from founder Dylan Carlson, drummer Adrienne Davies is the only member of Earth to play on each of the four studio albums the drone-metal syndicate has made since re-forming seven years ago as an elegant blues band. On last year's Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1, she added an immediate, omnipresent grace. She swung softly during opener "Old Black", commanding the music's slow shifts with a righteous thump. And she carefully triggered album apex "Descent to the Zenith" with a light-footed march that served as the swivel for the rest of the band's melodic swoops. For all the deserved talk of Carlson's refinement and control as a guitarist, Davies was arguably his superior, guiding the quartet along with an unspoken, perfect resolve. Without her steady presence, one assumed, all of those light tones and slight menace might wash into blur, like watercolors escaping a drain.
It's surprising if not discomfiting, then, that the second volume of Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light opens mostly without Davies. For the first 12 minutes, she resigns to almost auxiliary roles. On opener "Sigil of Brass", Carlson explores elliptical snippets of a short guitar progression, a leader advancing with caution. Cellist Lori Goldston and bassist Karl Blau pick up his patterns, stretching the same sounds above and beneath his picking with long exhalations. But Davies plays only her cymbal, and barely, adding occasional clatters that seem mostly like reminders that she's still behind the kit. She's even less present on "His Teeth Did Brightly Shine", the sort of slow, shimmering strut that she's motored with Earth for the better part of a decade. Instead, Blau mostly thumbs the beat with his bass as Carlson teases out guitar-effects flotsam beneath the sidewinding lead line. Davies merely offers bits of shakers and shells, her percussion becoming an occasional footnote to its normal narrative thread.
Somehow, though, these tracks and their themes don't wash away or turn into seismic smears that would have suited Earth back when "Kurt Kobain" was offering up guest vocals. Recorded during the same sessions that yielded volume one of this series, they show the strong skeleton, sans distraction. More importantly, they confirm the suspicion that the crew Carlson gathered for the Angels of Darkness recordings is the most sympathetic, versatile, and unselfish group he's ever had. Without Davies, these first 12 minutes are some of the most muted in Earth's catalog, showcasing a band comfortable not only with its quiet but also with how a listener can hear clearly from one side of the mix to the other (compared especially to the impenetrable stuff of two decades ago). This is the epitome of cool, quiet confidence.
But it isn't lopsided growth, as Angels II isn't simply the softer side of its predecessor. "The Corascene Dog" is gentle but glinting, with Carlson and Goldston trading sinister dialogue between their strings. And despite its classically suggestive title, "Waltz (A Multiplicity of Doors)" is actually one of the most abrasive looks yet at Earth 2.0. Goldston wrenches astringent wails from her cello, while Davies trades her generally quiet thunder for a heavier foot and a relentless tide of cymbals. Blau lets every note linger with a little extra emphasis, and Carlson tucks a web of foreboding guitar effects beneath the serrated guitar line. Earth saves the most revelatory moment for last. "The Rakehell" generously infuses funk, with Davies' syncopated trot serving as the structure beneath a lysergic smear. Carlson plays bass, using the low notes mostly to state the melody so that his guitar can push beyond it. He refracts, multiplies, and manipulates the tone, using the guitar to find the midpoint between a Meters organ and a wailing, heavy-metal lead. In an unlikely move in a career full of them, Earth add much younger bands like Sun Araw and Eternal Tapestry to their list of contemporaries.
Indeed, for all the talk about this still-nascent phase of Earth versus that earlier frame-shifting phase, the twin Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light releases actually reveal a band with interests broader than such a binary might suggest. Earth aren't simply softening and separating their drone metal as if by centrifuge, or trying to be stately rather than beastly. These tracks are built on the brethren of blues, rock, and metal, but they wouldn't be compelling without pieces of bop buoyancy, minimalist restraint, classical consonance, and near-liturgical resolve. Oh, and believe it or not, funk. This version of Earth has simply given Carlson more room and more assistance to explore, well, darkness and light-- in his own time, of course.


After several releases as Final Fantasy, Owen Pallett makes his debut under his own name, and it's his grandest and most assured statement to date.

Heartland

If you're lucky, you might already know this guy as Final Fantasy. His reasons for dropping that name are probably boring and copyright-related, but still: The name change seems healthy on whole other extra-legal levels. I've never known anyone not to be wowed by Final Fantasy's live show, and Final Fantasy's live show is just Owen Pallett: the guy himself, a violin, and a loop pedal. It's about as solo as anything gets-- a performance, not a project. Stepping out under his own name feels like an acknowledgement of this, as if Pallett's ready to cast aside the modesty of having a "project"-- it's just this thing I've been working on-- and present himself, fully upright, as an artist.
And there are a lot of things about Heartland that feel like Pallett is presenting himself more and more fully as an artist; the scope of breadth and mood of it are all grander, more assured, making ever more of a case that the guy shouldn't be viewed as a side note (string arranger for the Arcade Fire, the Pet Shop Boys) or a minor interest (D&D enthusiast, guy who titled an album He Poos Clouds). After all, one of this album's closest cousins in the indie world is a notable, well-regarded one: Joanna Newsom's Ys. Both are ambitious, classicist, cleverly arranged, lyrically high-concept, dense with possible meaning-- and, yes, a little strange.
It's that density that separates them, though, and makes me regret having to review this record in any kind of timely fashion. I'm still smarting over having underrated Pallett's last full-length; I knew I loved it, but had no way of knowing it would stick with me for months, years. And this one is richer: Pallett has leaped beyond arranging for chambers and quartets, working now with electronics, with drums, with electric bass, with the Czech Philharmonic, with Nico Muhly. These are pop songs through and through-- lively, propulsive ones. But the wonder of them is in those arrangements, which are just ripe with motion and detail-- and they're not decorative (as was sometimes the case with Ys), but central. The most immediate track here, "Lewis Takes Action", has Pallett singing grand, anthemic hooks, but the parts you're most likely to wind up humming are the stately brass and woodwind figures between them-- the amount of care and pleasure in these arrangements is extremely generous.
If you're wondering who "Lewis" is and what sort of action he's taking, well, this is one of the things that's just singular and fascinating about Pallett, every bit as much as his music-school voice or the charmingly mannered way he approaches his melodies. On He Poos Clouds, Pallett seemed to be singing about real people, even ordinary ones; it was just that they tended to describe their emotional states in the grand terms of Dungeons & Dragons magic and conjuring. Since then, Pallett's jumped fully into fantasy: These twelve songs are monologues from Lewis, an "ultra-violent farmer" in a world called Spectrum, as he tries to come to grips with his own creator, Owen Pallett. Daunting as that might sound-- there may be hand-to-hand combat with a cockatrice involved-- all it really means is that these are songs about power and faith and control: songs that allow you to sing lines like, "the night is split by the whistle of my amber whip," and have it be about feeling your own power, or just repeat, "I'm never gonna give it to you," and have it be about rejecting someone else's.
You'll have to get back to me in a few months to see how it all unravels, but in the meantime these songs are steadily revealing ever more to love. Martial drums and strings rumbling tense in the foreground with clouds of strings overhead. The sly, soulful melody of "Oh Heartland, Up Yours!"-- something that feels new in Pallett's repertoire. A kind of orchestral motorik beat on "Tryst with Mephistopheles". The way something like an 808 kick drum loops its way darkly into "Red Sun No. 5". Hints of Kurt Weill. This stuff is rich with ideas, and they're offered in the kind of rich, warm sound that should be accessible to more fans than ever before. Those of you with the inclination to pick them up will find a lot to reward you.


The composer behind Dusty Springfield’s “I Only Want to Be With You” also worked with David Bowie, the Walker Brothers, and Ian Dury. A new compilation reveals how he helped shape 1960s British pop.

Various Artists: Paradise: The Sound of Ivor Raymonde

Paradise: The Sound of Ivor Raymonde

“I Only Want to Be With You” is so perfectly suited for Dusty Springfield’s voice, it seems impossible that it wasn’t written specifically for her. But, in 1963, when a journeyman composer named Ivor Raymonde devised that racing melody and the songwriter Mike Hawker wrote the lyrics, their first stop was crooner Frankie Vaughan. When he passed on the song, the duo took it to Springfield, who was trying to launch a solo career after finding success with her trio the Springfields. It sounded like a perfect fit for her first single, so they recorded two-and-a-half minutes of pure pop ecstasy and released it a week later. “I Only Want to Be With You” shot up to No. 4 on the UK pop charts, not only establishing Springfield as a viable pop star, but taking its place one of the finest singles of the era.
Springfield is likely the only name many readers will recognize in that story (although some Brits may remember Vaughan). But hopefully the release of Paradise: The Sound of Ivor Raymonde—by Bella Union, a label run by Ivor’s son Simon Raymonde, of Cocteau Twins—will change that. Simon has described the project as a labor of love: It’s taken him years of diligent research to reconstruct his father’s sprawling catalog, which starts in the late 1940s and ends in the 1980s. The task was complicated by the fact that Ivor was a hired gun, working any number of jobs: writing songs, scouting talent, producing sessions, devising and conducting string and orchestra arrangements. He even sings on one track, the dusky pop number “Mylene,” which appeared on the soundtrack to the forgotten 1959 sex romp Upstairs and Downstairs. “In those days it seemed from all the documentation he was the sort of guy who’d turn his hand to anything, he was happy to get paid, happy to be a session musician, happy to do an arrangement if asked and didn’t turn down work,” Simon recently told the Yorkshire Post.
Simon isn’t inflating his father’s importance with Paradise. Ivor Raymonde was a figure of no small significance in the 1960s UK pop scene, but because he worked mostly behind the scenes, his name is not especially well known. A product of big bands in the ’40s and jazz combos in the ’50s, Raymonde started working with eccentric producer Joe Meek in the early ’60s, signing on as an in-house producer for Decca Records later in the decade. During that time, he worked with major artists at the height of their careers (Billy Fury, the Walker Brothers), future stars (David Bowie, Tom Jones), and many musicians who never achieved celebrity. Taken together, his catalog forms an eccentric, not exactly representative but still incredibly enjoyable, history of a sophisticated era in British pop. When Ian “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll” Dury wanted to evoke that heyday on 1980’s “Superman’s Big Sister,” he hired Raymonde to write the string arrangements, creating a song that mashes pop, punk, and novelty into three strident minutes.
Paradise portrays Raymonde as a composer with remarkable range, one who treated the stars and the nobodies, the cheeky novelties and the heartfelt ballads, with equal insight and consideration. Credited to Burr Bailey (an alias for Meek’s studio assistant Dave Adams), “Chahawki” is a frantic story-song about a Native American and his beloved dog—a B Western set to music. Raymonde gives the ridiculous story an epic quality, as well as real emotional heft, by adding cinematic strings and insistent backing vocals.
On the other end of the spectrum, his arrangement lends Helen Shapiro’s “He Knows How to Love Me” a soulful gravity that makes her transformation from independent woman to infatuated lover sound all the more persuasive and profound. Like a good film composer, his contributions succeed when they disappear into the song, when the music sounds less like the product of a hit-making committee and more like an extension of the artist credited on the 45 label.
For a concrete example of what he could do with an arrangement, compare the album version of David Bowie’s “Love You Till Tuesday” and the single version included here. The original, included on Bowie’s self-titled ’67 debut, features a fairly stripped-down arrangement with marimba and acoustic guitar. Raymonde’s, which was released on a subsequent 45, opens with a strange oboe riff and a heavy orchestral backing, pushing the song along at a quicker clip. The woodwinds wrap around the singer’s heavily accented vocals like a mod suit, emphasizing the oddity of his phrasing and making his weird laughter sound unrehearsed. Raymonde’s arrangement matches Bowie’s dandy self-regard so perfectly that you wonder what lessons the struggling singer-songwriter took from their one-off collaboration.
Songs like “I Only Want to Be With You” and the Walker Brothers’ magisterial “Make It Easy on Yourself” will be familiar to many listeners—perhaps overly familiar—but that’s the attraction of a compilation like Paradise: In addition to unearthing obscurities, it allows you to hear popular tunes with new ears. You listen for the parts you might otherwise ignore or fail to notice. I always loved the sublime strings of “Make It Easy on Yourself” but hadn’t considered how they do all the weeping and sobbing for Scott Walker, or how they grant him a determined dignity despite his heartache. I never considered how Raymonde’s arrangements for Springfield clear a path for her strong melodic lines, like bodyguards parting a crowd of adoring fans. He arranged the song as though she were already a star, a courtesy he extended to every artist who crossed his path.


On his heartfelt new album, R&B upstart Brent Faiyaz finds joy in the midst of struggle. He works through his pain without kowtowing to radio trends, offering a promising debut.

Sonder Son

The dreamy possibility of making it in Los Angeles still hasn’t lost its luster—but, for some, the city’s very present and unconscionable wealth disparity takes you out of the woozy haze of fame and into reality. R&B upstart Brent Faiyaz went out west from his hometown of Baltimore to pursue a singing career and found that, while wealth manifests in mansions and expensive cars, poverty is more present in L.A. than most East coast cities. It is an odd juxtaposition that becomes even more striking as Downtown Los Angeles develops, as condos are built alongside Skid Row. This kind of truth reigns on Faiyaz’s debut full-length Sonder Son, an album that is heartfelt when the prevailing genre trends still celebrate the bacchanal and the disposability of parties, lovers, and, really, the self.
Sonder Son is forthright about the fact that we need each other to survive. Early on the album is “First World Problemz/Nobody Carez,” where Faiyaz sings, “As long as I pay rent/I don’t even whine ’bout my paycheck/I know it is short, but I’ll make ends/’tCause it could be a worse situation.” Over a boom-bap-influenced drum machine and thick, distinct bass, he sings about finding joy with friends in the midst of struggle.
But there are layers here. Camaraderie isn’t enough without deeper emotional connections, or if materialism supersedes treating each other like real people. He begins “Nobody Carez” with fiery spoken word: “Shit is deeper than Neiman Marcus or your Hollywood starlets/Underneath there’s niggas starving, impoverished/People don’t give no fucks, nigga/Trump don’t give a fuck/Your niggas don’t give a fuck/Your favorite artists don’t give a motherfucking fuck.” The song then breaks into something lighter, hinging on Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds-style acoustic guitar but with fewer of his lyrical platitudes. The interior explored on “First World Problemz” becomes an exterior on “Nobody Carez,” as he sings about the pain and uselessly cruel gossip that can come from being down and out.
This is the album’s high point and what should guide Faiyaz as he develops as a writer. Sonder Son has the same highly intimate, nothing-to-lose quality of Frank Ocean’s Nostalgia, Ultra. but could use more of its experimental spirit. What is refreshing, however, is that it does not kowtow to radio trends, the dejected filth of a Ty Dolla $ign or PARTYNEXTDOOR, whose partying is often a coverup for pain. Here, current pain is lived in and past pain is just one small recollection away.
Sonder Son opens with a spoken sketch about bad grades. A mother yells at her son—“Please explain to me how the fuck you go to school every single day and then bring home all Fs?”—before the track flows into Faiyaz singing about how writing has always been a cure all for his mental anguish. If this is autobiography, then what unfolds on the album indicates that Faiyaz may have had other things on his mind at school—that generating stock of emotional literacy and a mastery of pop and R&B history may have been more important. The album is well-studied in the tones and textures of the past (tracks like “Stay Down” recall the yearnings of artists like 112 and Chico DeBarge, whose catalogs are are often uncited, but whose influence endures) and a Tumblr-like earnestness that is so rarely come by in popular music. The songs here may not be so sticky, but the promise of his potential is undeniable.


After a foray into singer-songwriter territory, Rjd2 rediscovers mood-setting backgrounds and rattling, rigged-to-explode instrumentals.

The Colossus

Independence is thrilling, but after those first tentative or defiant steps towards freedom, the urge to look back and survey the situation you just left can be hard to resist. That seemingly contradictory perspective, looking both forward and backwards, was at play when Rjd2 wrote The Colossus. His fourth solo album arrives at a pivotal moment, and not just because it follows the lyrical trainwreck and one man-band overreach of The Third Hand. The producer is now more than a successful yet hungry talent; he's the boss, head of the new RJ's Electrical Connections imprint. Taken in tandem with the recent release of the vinyl-only career retrospective 2002-2010, it's unsurprising he's in a reflective mood.
The Colossus, as its name implies, strives for scale, but also strains a bit under a heavy burden. While Rjd2 excels at sonic collages, the mixed motives on this album-- a current spin on past techniques, a synthesis of old songs and a turn toward the future-- are difficult to balance. After years spent mastering instruments and recording techniques, he still finds a new way to overachieve, adding his own passable, if sometimes bland, live drumming to five tracks. But, as if admitting his DIY ethos and perfectionist tendencies on Third Hand went too far, he brought in a team of guest vocalists and instrumentalists to augment his own performances. Interlude "Salud", featuring a goofy British voice similar to the one on Deadringer, says as much: "I've [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| assembled a healthy bunch of folks who are much more talented than I am."
But more important to anyone put off by his unique foray into singer-songwriter territory, he rediscovers, or at least indulges in, some of the mood-setting backgrounds and rattling, rigged-to-explode instrumentals that originally made him such a vital producer. "Let There be Horns" opens the album with stretched-out, Looney Tunes strings and a vaguely Latin beat, jumping between staccato breakdowns and guitar riffs. The applause during the song's conclusion might as well be the sound of some fans breathing a collective sigh of relief on a partial return to form, since the dust-heavy samples have long been replaced with more electrified melodies.
But just as quickly as he comes out of the gate, "Games Can Win" re-enters more shaky singer-songwriter territory. While his lyrical abilities, which still haven't caught up to his compositional skills, produce some clunkers ("Play your hand close/ Like you have a glass chin"), he takes a step forward in terms of balance with appropriately toned down percussion. The rest of the album trades off between rumbling tracks like "Small Plans" and a few songwriting efforts like the "The Glow", which --with it's smug focus on having "the glow," overseas accounts and living a life of leisure-- seems like the interior monologue of a bailed-out banker. It's still pretty creaky but better than the cringe-inducing moments from The Third Hand.
Rjd2 showcases a grasp of mood and a talent for arranging on The Colossus. His backing of Phonte Coleman's soulful vocal turn on "Shining Path" and the springy, triumphant synths on posse cut "A Son's Cycle" are both understated yet fitting. But on tracks like the eerie "The Stranger", rolling with punched-up drums and clipped guitars, or "Giant Squid", which bounces on a guttural beat, the career fusion concept pays off. His instrumental skills, and the synth-funk of Since We Last Spoke (in full overdrive on the movie theater sound check that is "A Spaceship for Now") help bring more string tones and textures to the mix, but he manages to capture some of that foreboding yet funky mood from his early work. He's spent the last few albums trying to go beyond sampling songs to creating them from scratch, and he still can sound like he's cramming tributes to half of his record collection on the same track. But when his relentless drive and sense of restraint match up, they make parts of this album a forward thinking look back.


The UK electronic-pop trio’s third album draws on a renewed sense of extroversion and energy, which can’t always overcome its lyrical and production missteps.

Californian Soil

London Grammar never made a lot of noise. Even as singer Hannah Reid’s throaty alto garnered comparisons to Florence Welch, she and bandmates Dot Major and Dan Rothman rarely offered anything more surprising than the occasional end-of-song breakbeat. The huge proportions of Adele producers Greg Kurstin and Paul Epworth left 2017’s Truth Is a Beautiful Thing sounding slumberous, so London Grammar’s third full-length, Californian Soil, attempts instead to channel the energy of Reid’s past collaborations with Disclosure and Flume. Major and Rothman embrace harder-hitting instrumentals, matching Reid’s newfound lyrical ambition to explore femininity and relationship dynamics. If the new album isn’t as consistent as their 2013 debut If You Wait or as epic in scope as Truth, the trio still push themselves to keep it interesting.
Only four songs here don’t employ an orchestra, and the cinematic scale comes through just as intended. “Californian Soil” continues the band’s penchant for making songs that sound like Massive Attack’s “Teardrop,” but the strings are so lush and Reid’s vocals so forceful that it’s easy to compartmentalize the resemblance. (That won’t help with the lyrics; what is “I am young, I am old/So you do what you’re told” supposed to mean?) “Baby It’s You,” a blissful, atmospheric love song courtesy of London electronic producer George FitzGerald, particularly benefits from the extroversion and quicker tempos.
Boosting the percussion offers more depth. The beat drops on “Lord It’s a Feeling” and “I Need the Night” hit with a confidence the band’s more restrained music never mustered. But the album’s biggest attempt at pop crossover is its greatest weakness: “How Does It Feel,” produced with Steve Mac (best known for Ed Sheeran’s inescapable “Shape of You”) doesn’t smooth out London Grammar’s quirks so much as place them in an entirely inappropriate context. Reid does her best, but her vocals clash against the stiff groove, the “Can’t Feel My Face”-style bassline, the sheer Rita Ora-ness of it all.
“Call Your Friends,” oddly also produced by Mac, represents the strongest evolution of the band’s sound. Reid’s lyrics sometimes struggle, like the reference to a “drama mama” that kills the tension of “Missing,” but on “Call Your Friends” she finds a way to assert independence while also begging for love: “Every time I tried/To make myself seem small/In the arms of others/Who never loved me better.” It’s desperate and affectionate, yet not needy. But it’s not always so easy to tell what she means to say. “There is a whisper that our God is a she,” Reid sings on “I Need the Night,” but the idea sits strangely in a song that’s mostly about drinking with friends. “America” sketches a more intriguing parallel between the false promises of a nation and those of the music industry: “All of our time chasing a dream/A dream that meant nothing to me.”
Despite missteps, California Soil expands the scope of London Grammar’s electronic-pop formula and the themes of their songwriting. There’s nothing as intimate as breakthrough single “Hey Now,” but in return, the greater variety avoids the sameness of past albums. While Soil doesn’t always fulfill their ambition, it still suggests that the more sound this group makes, the more they’re worth hearing.

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On their third album of avant-garde synth pop, Alice Merida Richards and Sam Pillay eschew protest language and the depressing status quo to conjure a vision of feminist utopia.

Ecstatic Arrow

A recent tour supporting Hookworms pushed Virginia Wing over the edge. Frustrated by the progressive psychedelic band’s incongruously laddy crowds, the Manchester synth-pop duo performed the rest of their dates against a hot pink projection that read: “END RAPE CULTURE.” Unsurprisingly, Alice Merida Richards and Sam Pillay’s message made some audiences bristle even more than the initial offenders had—and that message is in keeping with their third album, to a fashion. In a few barbed moments, Ecstatic Arrow skewers the failed promise of a supposedly enlightened independent music culture: “No half-baked program just for show,” Richards coolly declares, on “Pale Burnt Lake,” of bills that pay lip service to inclusion. But the pair generally eschews protest language and the depressing status quo, choosing instead to propose a captivating vision of utopia.
Ecstatic Arrow is an album of fresh starts. Richards and Pillay recorded in the Swiss Alps, and while the connection between location and sound is often spurious, there is a heady clarity to the album that you might describe as “alpine” if that word hadn’t been ruined by men’s shower gel. Koto sparkles; swathes of synthesizer mist descend, then break, allowing incandescent pop choruses to break through; and the pair create ashram lusciousness from icy machines. Virginia Wing’s is an understated but familiar scramble of mid-’80s pop at its most avant-garde—Laurie Anderson’s sprechgesang, Peter Gabriel and Japan’s chilly hauteur; Kate Bush’s imposing dynamic and Malcolm McLaren’s impish reinvention—so if Ecstatic Arrow doesn’t feel quite like stepping into a new world, it at least returns us to an unspoiled glade.
Especially since hype tends to peak early in an artist’s career and then tail off, it’s a pleasure to hear a band bloom on their third record. Virginia Wing’s earlier releases could be ornery and open-ended, but the songs on Ecstatic Arrow are full of the playful pop resolve that Phoenix pull off so handsomely. “The Female Genius” starts with Richards questioning the disconnect she feels as synthy twinkles with more than a passing resemblance to Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love” glint off the prowling bass. When she mocks perceptions that she is a pliant entity ready to “follow instruction disguised as suggestion,” the tone becomes robotic—which might be too on the nose if it didn’t break into such a luminous chorus, one that reaches defiantly for the future. “Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day” is similarly subversive. Its bucolic-milkmaid innocence is charming, but Virginia Wing use this puritan mode to dismiss the draining rigmarole of work and preconceived ideas about the right way to live. “There’s no tomorrow,” Richards sings. “Only today.”
There are carpe-diem moments on Ecstatic Arrow, like the punky polyrhythms of “Glorious Idea,” which lurch thrillingly between harsh, sparkling textures and degrees of intensity that oppress and release. But Virginia Wing aren’t interested in scorching the earth so much as changing the future. The first line on the album is, “Tell me, where do you go from here?”
As part of her immaculate vision, Richards attempts to divest herself of her gendered inheritance of silence and self-doubt, and she sketches the imbalance between men’s and women’s influence over public spaces in surreal, pin-sharp imagery. “I can’t provide a bench or sofa to recline/Soft furnishings feel hard when the space is confined,” she sings on “Glorious Idea.” She coins funny, surreal koans about how intentions can be misinterpreted (“You reach far with your hands/But the hands that you use are just flowers in bloom wearing gloves to confuse,” she sings on “Relativity”) but then disturbs her neat themes. On “Seasons Reversed,” Richards expresses surprise that she never noticed how conditioning had turned her into “a delicate object under a frame,” and proposes an brisk escape: “I don’t demand a violent scene/But blood in your mouth might feel like relief.” A stark bass thump highlights the pulse she might strike, and imagining the stain spread on their previously clean palette is a thrill.
Ecstatic Arrow is full of declarations delivered with such lucid certainty that they make a brighter future seem persuasively simple: “Just one full day and one perfect thought to begin again like nothing came before,” Richards sings on “Pale Burnt Lake,” amid a beautiful, looping melody. Of course, it’s not that simple. Nor is making a feminist synth-pop album that feels genuinely revelatory. But Virginia Wing make utopia feel within reach.


After a life-changing illness, the UK folk singer returns with a gentle, subtly experimental album that finds hard-won solace in motherhood and recovery.

Lucy Rose: This Ain’t the Way You Go Out

This Ain’t the Way You Go Out

After giving birth to her first child, Otis, in 2021, UK songwriter Lucy Rose developed excruciating back pain. After an unpleasant encounter at the doctor’s office and months of Rose’s own research, she finally figured out that she had a rare, severe form of pregnancy-induced osteoporosis and eight fractured vertebrae. Already reeling from the depression and burnout that inspired her 2019 record, No Words Left, Rose endured months of recovery before she could again sit at the piano and write, now with Otis in her lap. Unlike the emotional intensity of No Words Left, her new music was surprisingly energetic and joyful. She would record these songs over two days with her longtime band, recruiting producer Kwes. to help her further embellish her sound. On This Ain’t the Way You Go Out, Rose expands her capabilities as a songwriter and musician while maintaining the warmth that’s made her a British folk staple for over a decade.
Listen past the smooth production of her previous work and you’ll hear sneaky time signature changes and sophisticated piano voicings. On the new album’s opener “Light as Grass” and the soaring jam session “Interlude I,” Rose displays her command of the piano, an instrument she’d increasingly adopted in her music and fully embraces here. Kwes., known for working with Solange as well as UK rapper Loyle Carner, applies his background in alternative hip-hop and R&B to pack every song with psychedelic vocal delays, disintegrating keyboards, and aggressive treatment of David Dyson’s drum kit. On “Dusty Frames,” a tribute to the late Egyptian queer activist Sarah Hegazi, Kwes. doubles Rose’s piano with a warbly synth and looming synth bass; something devastating lurks beneath, even if the words don’t fully capture Hegazi’s impact.
Rose’s voice is as pure and light as ever, but the most inspired part of This Ain’t the Way is how the album repositions that quiet register as silent rage. “Could You Help Me” describes Rose’s search for medical professionals who would listen instead of dismissing her concerns as “hysterical” (really!): “Could I ever really feel it for you?” she asks, unable to communicate her experiences to dismissive GPs. Rose glides lightly across the track, but a distorted violin solo crashes in to express the frustration her voice disguises. The deceptively chipper “Life’s Too Short” and the sparse “No More” each touch on the loneliness of illness, the friends whose patience eventually wears thin. On “Whatever You Want,” Rose’s willingness to be awkwardly direct (“a miracle, a disaster, all in one foul swoop”) powers the song’s central question: What do idealistic phrases like “You can be whatever you want” mean to someone struggling to move? Beneath the instrumental experimentation, there’s both grief and a sense of hope inspired by raising Otis and by Rose’s own recovery. As she sings on the title track: “I blame myself for being so weak/But this brave body is still carrying me.”
After “No More” comes the biggest swing on the record, and one of Rose’s wildest songs to date. “The Racket” starts out with an oscillating chord loop, but with every chorus, the band piles on until the final minute becomes genuinely anarchic. Rose stands at the eye of the storm, sharing in plainspoken language what she’s learned: “Took it for granted/Life ain’t always what you were handed,” the chorus opines. Out of context, that might come across like the kind of unhelpful platitude Rose struggles with elsewhere on the record, but it’s clear she means every word.


Made for a Belgian coming-of-age tale, Home is the latest film soundtrack by Johnny Jewel. It features new Chromatics and Symmetry music, plus eight ambient tracks, but is strangely mild-mannered.

Home OST

Since Chromatics failed to release Dear Tommy on Valentine’s Day of 2014, the long-awaited follow up from Johnny Jewel and co. has become an elusive white whale for a particular fan of tastefully sleazy electronic music. It’s a genre that finds the sun slowly setting upon itself, and with every passing day, the audience for Jewel’s ribald mutant synth-pop gets older. Each hint that has emerged in the last two years—in the form of four songs all released without warning—has been tantalizing, yet tinged with bittersweet nostalgia. Two new videos have arrived since this summer alone, but Dear Tommy remains an enigma.
The release of Jewel’s latest film score, for Belgian director Fien Troch’s nihilist coming-of-age tale, Home, now feels overshadowed by the media cycle and speculation that Dear Tommy has produced by virtue of its absence. Nonetheless, filmmakers have recently seemed to swarm Jewel. The attention has come in the wake of 2012’s Chromatics LP Kill for Love and the larger profile it has helped Jewel cultivate, as well as his mostly-scrapped 2011 soundtrack to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, which still managed to contain Jewel’s spectral presence.
On the whole, though, Jewel’s film music has been hit or miss. In 2012, Themes For an Imaginary Film (his unused Drive music) was an engrossing and steamy soundscape. His 2015 Lost River soundtrack, meanwhile, was an overly luxuriant accessory to an otherwise comically bad film. This score for Home, by comparison, is strangely mild-mannered.
Due to its minimal distribution, U.S. audiences are not likely to see Torch’s film. In a way (and not unlike Jewel’s other filmic projects) this 41-minute, 14-track score stands alone as a musical experience, a whisper of new music from Jewel’s multiple projects, though a portion of it recycles old songs. Two of the Chromatics tracks, “Paradise” and “Running from the Sun,” originally appeared on Kill for Love. The former was lightly edited into a more dance oriented version, and the latter seems completely unchanged. Of the new music you do get: there is one new Chromatics song, three Symmetry songs, and eight ambient tracks credited to Jewel. These three different sides of Jewel are only diffusely connected. It creates a disjointed listen, as if two experiences are stacked on top of each other rather than organized for flow or logic.
“Magazine,” the sole new Chromatics track, is disappointingly one of their least interesting songs in a very long time. It lacks any of the sordid thrill, the noir funk, and essential sense of foreboding of their past releases. “Magazine” is surprisingly beige as far as Italo-disco goes. Even if the song unmistakably owns Chromatics’ sonic identity—slithering drum machine, glacial synths, greasy guitars—it comes off as hollow or caricatured. This is magnified in the film, where it is used early on to set the scene for groups of disaffected teenagers hanging out near a high school, making out, staring into the abyss of their iPhone screens.
The Symmetry songs are all instrumental genre exercises, with a slightly more focused mood. “The Alligator” is Jewel’s take on trap or EDM, and sounds like what Mike WiLL Made-It might produce if all he listened to was Giorgio Moroder. “The Magician” is perfectly melodramatic rave music, and “Countdown” is classic opiated fare from Jewel. Once the door closes on the Chromatics/Symmetry side of the soundtrack, and Jewel’s solo work takes over, the album suddenly swerves into agreeable and bland territory.
Jewel’s eight ambient works are mostly forgettable. They are all tightly constructed, brooding, atmospheric—the kind of music that is popular and ubiquitous for indie dramas of all stripes and colors. In that way, these utilitarian songs perfectly accomplish what they are supposed to do in the film: compliment, render, and foreground narrative. But any expectation of the shock of the new immediately fails to be met. That is not to say there aren’t highlights from this cluster of songs. “Remorse,” the best of these, is four minutes of gothic drums and gaseous hisses that that recall Ben Frost. Other moments, like “Trust,” favorably recall Stars of the Lid. Overall, the situation that this soundtrack generates is similar to the disappointment you might feel after opening up a pack of baseball cards. As you flip through the haul, there is the potential for something rare to pop up, but more likely than not, you’ll have seen it all before.