The long-married Malian duo confronts the country’s upheavals with an album of shimmering Afro-pop that urges hope and offers uplift.

La Confusion

Once student and teacher at Mali’s Institute for the Young Blind and now grandparents celebrating 37 years together, Mariam Doumbia and Amadou Bagayoko are the original Awesome Tapes From Africa. The blind Malian couple began releasing cassettes in the late 1980s and have since become iconic international African stars who count Damon Albarn, David Gilmour, and TV on the Radio as fans and collaborators. Despite charges that Western influence has infiltrated and diluted their sound, they have become an African power couple, two of the continent’s most prominent cultural exports.
But just what does Africa mean to the outside world in 2017, five years on from their last album, Folila? The American president praises “Nambia,” a nonexistent country, in a speech at the UN; some DJs pay a small country’s GDP to collect original Nigerian boogie albums; and Drake and Ed Sheeran ride the charts on lightened and brightened African beats. These are minor issues compared to the true crisis facing Amadou & Mariam: Since 2012, northern Mali has been in and out of the hands of Islamic extremists who have imposed Shariah and banished music (and musicians) from parts of their homeland. It’s hard to pick a more apt word to describe the world’s current predicament this year than La Confusion, the title of the duo’s new album, recorded in Paris. “Nothing is what seems, and you have to get a lot of patience to understand what is really going on,” Amadou said in a recent interview. But even capturing such tumult, the couple radiates beauty and confidence on the title track, with producer Adrien Durand buoying the song with a shimmer befitting an early-’80s pop hit.
Their ninth album eschews the guests that swelled the ranks of their recent recordings; this time, their principal collaborators are African musicians like kora player Djeli Moussa Diawara and ngoni player Youssouf Diabaté. Opener “Bofou Safou” boasts a rubbery, buoyant bass sound redolent of early African house, full of clanging cowbells, canned claps, even a snatch of vocoder. If it had come out in the late ’80s or early 1990s, it would doubtless be fetishized by contemporary DJs. When it reaches the chorus, the song bursts into full bloom, making good on the type of dancefloor confection that the couple’s remixes have always hinted at. (As the album’s first single, it’s been reworked by Henrik Schwarz, Africaine 808, and Fatima Yamaha.) But behind the feel-good house beat, Doumbia also sings: “It is necessary to work in life/One must not cross one’s arms in life”—hardly a message of dancefloor escapism. “Fari Mandila” boasts horns reminiscent of Bagayoko’s former employer, the Malian big band Les Ambassadeurs. The lyrics here similarly urge strength instead of hopelessness in trying times. Were it sung in English rather than their native Bambara, it might well serve as a theme song to the #Resistance.
Even with a slick bassline and bit of saxophone and flute to smooth the song out, Bagayoko’s spangled guitar, entwined with the ngoni, gives “Filaou Bessame” a nervy feel; most of the songs’ silky surfaces are belied by worrying concerns. The ambient bird calls and swelling synths of “Femmes du Monde” accompany lyrics about gender inequality, and the percolating polyrhythms of “C’est Chaud” underpin a song about the uncertainties of migrating to another continent. But despite such subject matter, the duo nevertheless remains optimistic. Midway through “Massa Allah,” a gentle, twinkling instrumental interlude of synth and hand drum, Bagayoko’s unadorned guitar drifts across the song. The title is an expression of gratitude addressed to God, even in the most trying of times. It’s a sentiment that resonates broadly: La Confusion offers uplift in a time of global insecurity.


The sequel to 2014’s beloved Black Metal is a brief but thrilling project from the mercurial artist, featuring the most approachable music of his career.

Black Metal 2

Dean Blunt has never exactly seemed approachable. His interviews are coy, almost dismissive, his projects are enigmatic, and his live sets are cryptic, fog-filled descents into the inscrutable. Then there’s the music itself, which can be sample-heavy and noisy or acoustic and melodic. On his 2014 album, Black Metal, you were as likely to hear him sing over a Pastels sample as you were to confront a 13-minute dirge with squawking horns and burnt-out piano. His music was fundamentally averse to genre, an avant-garde milestone that made implicit arguments about how we categorize music: “I get really put off by people that are too conscious of genre,” he told NPR in 2016. “I find that people who are too conscious of genre usually are way too conscious of race and way too conscious of shit that I also am irritated by.”
In typical Dean Blunt fashion, the rollout of Black Metal’s long-awaited sequel was understated and tongue-in-cheek. But once you actually listened to the music—looking past the trollish humor and unignorable allusions to Dr. Dre’s 2001—it became clear that Black Metal 2 is the most approachable album of his career without losing the vital ambiguity that has always made his records special. This is minimalist sophisti-pop, sung by a terminally downward-looking troubadour. It is the clearest Dean Blunt has ever sounded and one of his most thrilling releases to date.
In place of the flashes of intensity that popped up through Black Metal’s noisy interludes, its nominal sequel is built around stately strings, steady percussion, and jangling guitars. Black Metal’s instrumentation felt purposefully tinny; the strings were compressed, somewhat muted, as if Dean Blunt had recorded them on his cellphone and placed his vocals over them in Audacity. The production, mixed with freeform loops and martial snares, felt like a personal homage to post-punk: Colin Newman’s Commercial Suicide or This Mortal Coil’s Blood on a budget. While the music is a good deal softer this time around, the approach isn’t so much Dean Blunt goes pop as Dean Blunt goes Talk Talk. On “SKETAMINE,” rumbling bursts of guitar entwine with an ascending string section, while a harmonica wails in the distance. Blunt’s hazy imagery glints across the surface of the production, forming a loose outlaw ballad from scattered details like a “gun on the beach.”
Dean Blunt’s commanding baritone is newly and immediately at the front of the mix; he sings as if he’s given up a piece of himself that will never be restored. “Daddy’s broke/What a joke,” he murmurs on “NIL BY MOUTH,” a melancholy strummer pushed forward by Giles Kwakeulati King-Ashong’s drums and folk singer and frequent collaborator Joanne Robertson’s vocals, a constant companion through the album. Under the cool dismissal of these lyrics is an acceptance of eventual tragedy; throughout the album, Blunt states the fates of the characters in his narratives in an almost neutral tone, emphasizing the interchangeability of their dilemmas.
As the music grows more polished, Dean Blunt’s transmissions get rawer and more difficult to parse. His storytelling is often clipped, cut off when he’s just about to say something conclusive. On “VIGIL,” the stunning opener, he speaks as if bearing witness to an act of violence: “Nigga, where you are?/Can’t see in the dark/So nigga, where’s your gun?/Can you see what you done?” As the strings fade, you’re left with just the terrifying ambiguity. Taken literally, it seems possible that he is speaking to someone who doesn’t yet know he’s a killer. It’s somewhere between an observation and a testimony, which is the fertile ground where most of these songs lie. The emptiness of Dean Blunt’s songs comes from a recognition that so much of identity is made before you’re even cognizant you have one.
Dean Blunt gently mocks the absurd roleplaying that gets us through the day, while also recognizing its importance. Take the scammer’s mantra of “MUGU”: “Everybody gotta sin/So a scammer’s gotta have a win.” Because he views self-presentation as a form of self-preservation, you get the sense these words have more to do with seeing yourself as a winner than actually winning anything. And when he later sings, “Let it out, nigga, let it out/Show them crackers what you all about,” his tone is at once empathetic and sarcastic, a subtle way of arguing that performing anger is just another way of reencoding notions of Black masculinity. Though trying to pin Dean Blunt’s actual beliefs down has never been the point of his music, what seems certain now is that his words contain as much truth as they do fiction; behind every bit is a deeply held feeling.
The gripping finale, “the rot,” is the closest Dean Blunt comes to putting it all on the table. The instrumentation is magisterial yet rustic, evoking a sense of desolation. It’s the type of song you might expect a singer to growl or wail over—yet Blunt draws out the words with detachment: “I told her relax/You might as well relax/’Cause the fear is going down, down, down.” Robertson responds with a quiver, echoing his message: “And I guess it’ll rot away.” This might be the closest a Dean Blunt record has ever come to offering words of comfort. It’s a skeletal glimpse at something like hope, a fitting message to end on. Before you’ve taken it all in, it evaporates away.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On her first album in a decade, the folk great takes a hard look at the state of the world and tries to muster something like hope.

Whistle Down the Wind

In June 2015, just days after a white gunman shot and killed nine African-American worshipers in Charleston, South Carolina, President Obama delivered a eulogy for the slain Rev. Clementa Pinckney that included an a cappella performance of “Amazing Grace.” It was a remarkable moment for many reasons, not least because it acknowledged that certain horrors and hopes were beyond his powers as a public speaker. That moment demanded a song. Two years later, the folk singer Zoe Mulford wrote her own song about that day and called it “The President Sang Amazing Grace.” It’s a matter-of-fact lyric, as though reluctant to do anything but record history: “The President came to speak some words/And the cameras rolled and the nation heard.”
It is, in other words, exactly the kind of song Joan Baez might have sung 50 years ago. And so, when Baez covers “The President Sang Amazing Grace” on her first album since 2008, Whistle Down the Wind, it feels right. In its subject matter as well as in its funereal pace, it recalls Richard Fariña’s “Birmingham Sunday,” written after another act of white supremacist terror, the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. Baez included that song on her 1964 album 5, and the extent to which her voice has changed over the last half-century only underscores the extent to which the times have not. Her voice now sounds graver, more deeply grooved by age, with a slight tremble as she recounts the violence in Charleston and its aftermath. Her version is less pretty than Mulford’s, less settled, less communal. When Obama sang “Amazing Grace,” he was joined by a grieving congregation. When Baez sings about that moment, she sounds lonely, her optimism measured at best.
Having lived through decades of protest-song history, Baez knows how to gauge the state of the world and how to pitch her music to reflect it. She chooses songs that convey a sense of ambivalence about our country’s fate, as though she must now work to muster something resembling hope. That struggle is what makes this album so compelling and ultimately so rewarding. Working with producer Joe Henry, who has helmed similar late-career albums by Solomon Burke, Mose Allison, and Allen Toussaint, Baez crafts a lo-fi acoustic palette that makes room for the occasional flubbed note and sounds all the more immediate and intimate for it. She sings Anohni’s “Another World” to an insistent thump against the strings of her guitar, which could be a racing heart or a ticking clock. As with the 2008 original, it’s the details that put the song across and make it more than just a farewell: “I’m gonna miss the sea, I’m gonna miss the snow.” Rarely has Baez ventured so far beyond the folk and roots world to find material, but the song suits her remarkably well as both an ecological warning and as a personal consideration of mortality.
For the most part, though, Baez doesn’t sound like she’s saying goodbye or setting her affairs in order, even if she has suggested that this will be her final studio album. She brings a steely fury to “Silver Blade,” a murder ballad penned by Josh Ritter that plays like a righteous #metoo anthem. Similarly, Baez manages to convey a novel’s worth of information in the first four lines of “Whistle Down the Wind,” written by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan: “I’ve grown up here,” she sings, bending the words slightly upward to convey both nostalgia and bitterness. Only “The Things We Are Made Of,” by Mary Chapin Carpenter, sounds a bit too sentimental for an album that rejects easy sentiment.
Indeed, to her credit, Baez continues her lifelong reluctance to settle for easy answers on Whistle Down the Wind. She doesn’t shy away from political protest, but she’s careful to couch her dissent in the personal and the compassionate. “I’m the last leaf on the tree/The autumn took the rest but they won’t take me,” she sings on the album’s other Tom Waits cover, “Last Leaf.” Baez makes such resiliency sound like a noble, necessary virtue.


The Norwegian alt-pop singer’s second album feels both evocatively raw and painfully shallow.

I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY!

I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY! starts in a better place than girl in red’s 2021 debut, if i could make it go quiet. Gone are Marie Ulven’s intrusive thoughts about physically hurting her loved ones and herself, the spiraling anxieties that seemed to plague her every moment. In their place, she’s discovered a newfound self-confidence and some much-needed stability. Maybe, as she suggests on the opening song “I’m Back,” taking some time away from the music industry helped. But mental illness is a lifelong struggle, and while she’s eager to say, “I love being alive,” she’s careful to caveat it: “At least for now.” On her second album, Ulven approaches familiar topics—unrequited love, self-doubt, the pains of growing up—with a stronger sense of self, sounding both softer and more fierce than before. As a queer pop star with a firm grasp on her own emotional failings, girl in red addresses common issues from a unique perspective. But too often, her lyrical ambitions fall short of their lofty goals.
Ulven’s strength as a lyricist is also her weakness: The 25-year-old artist writes about romance and heartbreak as if she’s the first person ever to experience them. On “A Night to Remember,” her giddiness is infectious, the propulsive dance-pop and palpable excitement (“The whisper in my ear/Saying let’s get outta here/Yeah, I’ve never been so light on my feet”) helping to smooth over some of the song’s clunkier lines (“Cocaine and weirdos” is a club descriptor best saved for the next day’s recap text). “Too Much” vividly channels the fury of a relationship breakdown: “House always wins, so I’m taking all my love back/With you I lose either way.”
Ulven writes about her own experiences with a remarkable degree of honesty and clarity, but more profound revelations are just out of reach. At its best, her naivete is evocatively raw. “Phantom Pain” recasts a trite turn of phrase into a genuine moment of self-reflection: “I really didn’t notice the heart on my sleeve/I think I got invested in you and me.” But it’s hard not to wish for more insight—breakup sentiments like “I wish I never met you in the first place” feel inanely common. The slick production across I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY!—helmed by Ulven and fellow Norwegian Matias Tellez—would be better served with more nuance. Their warm synths and her textured growls call for deeper feelings. In contrast to its lyrical shortcomings, her second album is sonically richer, balancing the delicate piano on “I’m Back” against heavier basslines on “Ugly Side.” Ulven’s voice also extends further than before, cracking into a roar on “Phantom Pain” and retreating into mellower territory on “Pick Me.”
The promising near misses come sandwiched between some egregiously sloppy songwriting. “Doing It Again Baby” is an onslaught of half-sensical affirmations that would sound right at home as interstital music for Selling Sunset: “Got my Ray-Bans on and I’m rolling with the boys/Having all this swagger was never a choice.” After our heroine dons an outfit fit for a Bode devotee—Japanese denim, loafers—the song ups its obnoxious ante with inexplicable banjos. Elements best used sparingly, like spoken-word interludes, take center stage. Rather than allow guest Sabrina Carpenter to do what she does best (broad superiority platitudes) on “You Need Me Now?” Ulven awkwardly introduces her for 10 seconds first. And at the end of an otherwise plaintive reflection on the ways mental illness can hurt those around us on “Ugly Side,” she flattens her own feelings with an excerpt from what sounds like a therapy session.
That’s all lead-up to the album’s strangest song, closer “★★★★★,” where Ulven imagines herself at Andy Warhol’s Factory in the 1960s (“I’m reading up on history/Pretending I’m in NYC”). Instead of fraternizing with Basquiat, she retreats to simple rhymes: “The factory/The fact to me is/I do amazingly bad.” Like so many songs across the album, it’s a concept with potential that severely misses the mark.
I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY! is the sound of an artist searching for what comes after the initial rush of self-discovery. Ulven has said she wants to steer clear of the “shallow mental health songs that don’t tell the story.” To do so, girl in red must do more than scratch the surface of these thorny but oft-discussed topics. “Can I do it again?” she asks at the end of “★★★★★.” Yes, girl in red is capable of another skin-deep album about crushes and self-doubt. But it would be far more interesting to see her attempt sincere emotional depth.


Matmos audio alchemist Drew Daniel returns with his ambiguously ironic, plunderphonic project, The Soft Pink Truth. His latest excursion seemingly tackles the dancepunk phenomenon with diced-up and often homoerotic disco and microhouse covers of punk classics from the likes of Minor Threat, Crass, Die Kreuzen, The Angry Samoans, Swell Maps, Rudimentary Peni...and Carol Channing.

The Soft Pink Truth: Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth?

A word war will set off the keg
My words of war!
Should a word have two meanings?
What the fuck for?
Should words serve the truth?
--Minutemen, "Do You Want New Wave (Or Do You Want the Truth?)"
Let's dance with semantics. Perhaps The Soft Pink Truth's Drew Daniel revised the title of the Minutemen's classic ballad just because it's a clever phrase. Many audiences didn't know what the 80s punk legend was screaming about in concert. D. Boon and Mike Watt hollered blue-collar fuming about bosses in high castles. Their lyrics could be interpreted as Everyman frustration contorted into cubist shapes or mere beer napkin scribbles, but the selected passage from "Do You Want" is poignant. It argues that political language's barrier is its perpetual ambiguity, self-contradiction, and cliches. On his latest album, Daniel tackles that dilemma by slipping a neon-green cassette of house music on the P.A. when a mosh pit breaks out at a hardcore primal scream session.
Daniel's music thankfully never gives easy answers. His solo work and musique concrete tomfoolery in Matmos can sometimes confuse listeners about whether he's expressing genuine affection or ironic commentary. There's his remix of Missy Elliot's "Get Ur Freak On" where he clanged actual gold bars for "bling-bling" beats or his suave microhouse homage to the nosejob on "California Rhinoplasty", sampling godawful surgical scrapes and drills. Do You Party?, his 2003 debut album as The Soft Pink Truth, traced his roots as a go-go dancer in San Francisco's gay disco culture; cartoonishly skewering it all into autistic microhouse with stuttering R & B divas, 80s new wave melodrama, and venereal beats for "Big Booty Bitches". The "genuine affection" factor rang there-- evoking more passion than the electroclash sold at the time. With Do You Want New Wave, his cover album of punk classics, he's on the offensive. Consider his robo-funk cover of the Angry Samoans' "Homo-Sexual", as he deadpans "Screw your wife up the behind and tell your kids everything's fine." Homophobia reduced to a sing-along for any rainbow parade. The irony can kill 20 men with one drop.
Daniel deftly retains punk's spirit of negation. Instead of remixing the originals by underground punk legends like Die Kreuzen, Minor Threat, Rudimentary Peni, and Crass, he pasteurizes their dogmatism and raw vitriol as disco calls. Daniel subverts by stripping away the distortion and lousy enunciation that cloaked the lyrics of these songs on record or in concert, and reveals their kinkiness. His disco element also dents the "punk rocks, disco sucks" ethos of snapping the young n' disaffected outta disco's narcotic escapism with anti-grooves. Although the ever-solemn Crass did release the galloping death-disco number "Walls".
It's difficult to say if Do You Want is nostalgic for Daniel's punk roots (the liner notes dedicate the record to his beloved Louisville hardcore scene of the late 80's), or a mocking bastardization. Hell, the record could be just a distraction from his Ph.D. studies at UC-Berkeley. The CD's inner sleeve features "Dissertation Avoidance," a brainstorm list of the record's possible meanings like "Escapist Nostalgia," "Regressive Fantasies," and "Ruining Sacred Truths."
Daniel's music makes the original songs' social defiance sound terribly cute. Consider his fingerprints on Minor Threat's straight-edge anthem "Out of Step". The song is now a jock jam with a techno-pop rhythm slowed down to allow cheerleaders to stomp and clap along to, and chanteuse Dani Siciliano giving the Mary Poppins treatment to "Don't smoke/ Don't drink/ Don't fuck/ At least I can fucking think." Daniel even mixes in samples of a starch-collared doctor praising the listener for not smoking. "Out of Step" is now a jingle worthy of a DARE video aimed at sixth graders.
More faithful is Crass' declaration of revolt, "Do They Owe Us a Living?", where he razor-slashes with a bare, tech-house beat to let People Like Us's Vicki Bennett tell citizens in the unemployment line to overthrow their society and its ideals of a natural aristocracy. "They'd live to see me dead," she sneers. Unfortunately, Daniel mares the song with wanky lasers and DSP'd ping-pong beats. His digital swordplay fares better on Die Kreuzen's "In School", which sounds like a Do Your Party? b-side with its stitched-together fragments of a dozen singers and robots, and a hypnotic disco cover of Rudimentary Peni's "Vampire State Building", on which he disintegrates the voice of fashion designer Jeremy Scott.
The brazen homophobia of "Homo-Sexual" still nags though. The Angry Samoans always tried too hard to offend for the sake of political incorrectness but Daniel's fellow Matman, Martin Schmidt, diminishes their impact with his rendition of Nervous Gender's "Confession". Singing through a coagulated vocoder over a Valley Girl-charming handclap, he announces, "Jesus was just like me!/ A homosexual nymphomaniac/ Walking the streets of Galilee." And then there's the giddily misogynistic Teddy & The Frat Girls' "I Owe it to the Girls", where Daniel and Blevin Blectum duet to a rump-tickling, tech-house beat, singing, "I can't get no pussy...relief...ride...ice cream/ I owe it to the girls." These three songs are now dancefloor punch lines akin to DJ Assault's "Ass and Titties"-- or "Disco Duck" for that matter. Firing between the eyes is the CD's design that equates a "punk" with a double-arrow bedroom companion.
Ultimately, Daniel seems to be giggling at his punk past. He ends the album with an eerie, androgynous rendition of Styne and Robin's Broadway tune, "Looking Back", once sung by drag icon Carol Channing. The song is now a funeral wake with a dreary feedback tone that places silver dollars on the eyes of a mourning lullaby about how "It's nice looking back at the past/ Full of memories that last/ Souvenirs of a life that was fast and fun/ Now it's done." A fine ending for one of this year's most remarkable "punk" albums.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit Mariah Carey’s triumphant comeback, an album that captured the zeitgeist of 2000s R&B and resurrected a pop icon.

The Emancipation of Mimi

Mariah Carey is zipping up to Harlem in Cam’ron’s purple Lamborghini when she suggests they ditch her security. It’s long past the middle of the night, they’ve outgrown the afters at her Tribeca penthouse and want some fun in the relative anonymity before dawn. Cam steps on the gas, gaining some distance on Carey’s detail in the SUV behind them, and speeds her to a brick church on 131st Street, where her great-aunt Nana Reese used to worship, and where her mother and father were married.
In Carey’s recounting, this moment occurs after the release of 2002’s Charmbracelet, her ninth album, and as a prologue to the creation of The Emancipation of Mimi, the massive 2005 release that would reinvigorate a career that, at that time, many in the music industry and media had left for dead. She had weathered the chaotic rollout of her 2001 movie Glitter, a commercial flop reviled by critics. Its accompanying soundtrack was released on 9/11, which Carey watched live on television from the communal room of a Los Angeles rehab facility. (More than a decade later, Carey would reveal she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.)
That July, she’d planned a stunt with MTV in which she rolled an ice cream cart onto the set of TRL to promote “Loverboy” and rambled a bit, calling it “my therapy session.” For the tightly controlled TRL, it was off-the-cuff and random, but after three decades of reality television, not that wild in hindsight. Yet host Carson Daly sniffed sensationalistically that “Mariah Carey’s lost her mind,” and the tabloids sneered that she was “crazy.” Her label, Virgin, paid her $28 million to leave its stable rather than put up with the flagging sales and negative press.
Charmbracelet, the result of a bidding war won by Island Def Jam, was layered and introspective but didn’t shoot her to the peaks she’d achieved in the past. Yet by the time she was joyriding in Cam’s Lambo, she had reached peace with what she had overcome—Glitter and a sexist, racist media culture trading on schadenfreude, but also the aftermath of her controlling and coercive marriage to former label boss Tommy Mottola and her fractured relationship with opportunistic family members. Outside the crumbling Harlem church, Carey contemplated her great-aunt and grandmother’s ownership of several brownstones despite their lack of formal education, meditated on the cumulative effects of the Jim Crow South, and recalled her devout Nana Reese, an “extra-crispy Christian.”
“So much of the pressure from the recent past had been lifted,” Carey wrote in her 2020 memoir with Michaela Angela Davis, The Meaning of Mariah Carey. “I had a new record deal. I had people who were excited and enthusiastic about my comeback. I had thought that Glitter would be the death of me, but it gave me new life. I took it as an opportunity to retreat, rest, and renew my purpose.”
At 35, Carey was primed to write The Emancipation of Mimi, named for a long-fought spiritual liberation and a nickname from her childhood. Though she had always considered herself a soul singer, Carey—a multiracial woman of Black American, Afro-Venezuelan, and Irish American descent—had been dogged by label suits demanding she remain in the “crossover” white pop space even after years of hip-hop-influenced singles and collaborations with rappers.
For the bulk of Mimi, Carey reunited with Jermaine Dupri, the So So Def super-producer who had worked on Charmbracelet, 1996’s “Always Be My Baby,” and produced her best remixes (“Honey,” “All I Want for Christmas Is You”). Their approach was contemporary, free, and in the moment, embracing Atlanta’s growing dominance in hip-hop and Carey’s desire to write bright and cheeky songs about love and relationships. At the same time, she was reinvesting in her spiritual faith, as manifested in one of Mimi’s most powerful songs, “Fly Like a Bird,” a gospel soul track that features Bishop Clarence Keaton, the leader of the Brownsville, Brooklyn church she began attending regularly during the rough years at the turn of the millennium. “Don’t let the world break me tonight,” she belts, clear and emphatic. “I need the strength of You by my side.”
“Fly Like a Bird” is the only blatant godly part of Mimi. Like R&B throughout its existence but especially in the mid-2000s, the two moods are love and the club. Mimi’s songs express the fun she’d been yearning for, making tactile the sound of an evolving woman who’d shook free from her albatross and kicked off her Choos. “When I see Mariah now,” Dupri told Joan Morgan at Essence in 2005, “I see her almost as a new person who’s lived a full life.” Carey’s new attitude paid off: Mimi became a colossal success, ultimately selling seven million copies in the U.S. Seven months after the album’s initial release, an Ultra Platinum Edition added an EP worth of remixes and songs, including the soon-to-be-everywhere, lush slow jam “Don’t Forget About Us,” which became Carey’s 17th No. 1 single and tied a record set by Elvis Presley (she later surpassed him). Untethered from the judgment of others, Carey returned with a vengeance.
From Mimi’s opening track, “It’s Like That,” Carey signals her desire to put an end to the past. Over Dupri’s whistling synths and drum machine, she sets a boundary, drawing the line at “stress” and “fights”: “Mimi’s emancipation/A cause for celebration,” she chirps. “I ain’t gonna let nobody’s drama bother me.” The drum machine has a dinky clink at first, a common tic in the crunk era, but it’s a proportionate amount of dink that allows Carey to soar between the kick drums and cowbell. On the triple-time verses, she telegraphs that no matter her superstar status, her ears are angled toward the club: “All the fellas keep lookin’ at us/Me and my girls on the floor like, what?/While the DJ keeps on spinnin’ our cut,” she sings, cocksure in a fashion that would inspire two decades of dancefloors to mimic her pose, before unforgettably rhyming “Caution, it’s so explosive” with “Them chickens is ash and I’m lotion.”
Carey was lotion, and she was a hair-flip. She flaunted her impassivity to drama on “Shake It Off,” the slinking, mid-tempo radio hit built on a piano-propelled lowrider bounce. As she reads a laundry list of a paramour’s indiscretions, including “this one and that one by the pool, on the beach, in the streets,” her voice is baby-oil smooth and almost slack to signify her breezy indifference: She can’t even bother to entirely enunciate consonants. The whisper quality of her background vocals—“I gotta shake, shake, shake you off”—sounds like salt thrown over the shoulder to prevent bad luck, a gentle internal monologue that gives the song its nimble quality. On “Say Somethin’,” another chrome-smooth single—and, alongside the jaunty “To the Floor,” her first time collaborating with the Neptunes—Carey bats her eyes and flirts with a coy low register, the smoky persuasion of Snoop Dogg as her rapper foil. (The album cut, however, remains slightly inferior to the sublime So So Def remix with Dem Franchize Boyz.)
These three singles, as well as the breakup dirge and gigantic hit “We Belong Together,” are notable for what Carey is not doing in them: She is not performing vocal gymnastics, she is not hitting impossibly high notes, she is not venturing anywhere near music that could be considered overly emotional or even treacly. It is easy to get caught up in the mere fact of Mariah Carey’s voice, which is impressive and beguiling but invites the listener to get over-jazzed by her technical razzle-dazzle—her four-and-a-half-octave range, her whistle register, her melismatic backflips. This prowess can elide the emotion within each song, and on Mimi especially, she is exercising a characteristic rarely cited in exaltations of her genius: her total restraint. “I’ve just never wanted to only belt,” she told the New York Times’ Lola Ogunnaike. “And when I sing breathy it feels more intimate.”
Her vocal self-discipline fit perfectly in a year when the biggest and most culturally resonant R&B hits—Ciara’s “1, 2 Step,” Amerie’s “1 Thing,” Kelis’ “Milkshake,” even Rihanna’s “Pon de Replay”—were sharp and contained. Those records played tight, streamlined production against simple, sometimes coquettish vocals, a response to the gospel-inflected power ballads that had dominated R&B in the ’90s, and Carey sat neatly within this zeitgeist. Her ability to convey the more sordid nuances of relationships—and assert herself as a much stronger woman finally having the best night on the town—was undeniable to fans old and new. Everybody loves a redemption narrative. Mimi was the best-selling album of 2005, ubiquitous on all radio stations and video channels, and remains the marker of when pop-R&B morphed irrevocably with hip-hop’s synthy shift (not to mention the mid-’00s dominance of the Korg Triton).
In retrospect, Mimi feels like a pointed assertion of Carey’s relevance in the third decade of her career. She was catwalking out of the ’90s into a wiser, more authoritative iteration of herself—as signified by the futuristic album cover, where she stood gilded and celestially glowing, infinite golden leg aslant. Her exhortations to the physical world situated her within the moment too, as she sang about using the answering machine or changing the terrestrial radio station, technological concerns that would be dustbinned within a decade. (The last-call jam “Get Your Number” also places her firmly there, courtesy of Jermaine Dupri’s extremely 2005 delivery, though their playful good time at least gave us Michael Ealy as its video club hook-up.)
Behind the pop juggernaut, though, resides an extremely enduring soul record. Strip away the memory of hearing Hot 97 and MTV Jams play “We Belong Together” 12 times an hour, and it’s affecting how in the pocket Carey was. On “Stay the Night,” a newly famous Kanye West revs up the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly, Wow,” while Carey makes being a side chick sound like the most angelic pursuit in the world, singing in a rasp alongside the pops of the sampled record. On the chorus, when she belts “niiiiiiiight” and “liiiiiiight,” she mirrors the pure, planetary timbre of a very young Michael Jackson (a reminder that she covered “I’ll Be There” for her 1992 MTV Unplugged EP). On “Mine Again,” with its flourishes of Rhodes and flute, Carey channels Diana Ross without ever sounding like anyone but herself. “Circles” hearkens to classic Philadelphia soul with its warm bass guitar, sax, and other live instrumentation, showcasing Carey’s most kaleidoscopic talent: the way, when she harmonizes with herself, it evokes infinity mirrors in the most glamorous discotheques, so glittering as to be hallucinogenic.
Perhaps not unexpectedly, the initial reception to Mimi was lukewarm, and still marred by the negative reception of the Glitter era. (One 2005 interview with Carey in the New York Post began, “Everyone knows Mariah Carey is crazy,” as if the writer felt obligated to preemptively disclaim his praise.) Nonetheless, as Andrew Chan points out in the book Why Mariah Carey Matters, Emancipation brought in scores of new listeners who hadn’t grown up on “Vision of Love” or “Emotions,” maybe hadn’t even been born when those songs were released. To longtime fans, the initial critical reaction didn’t seem to matter, and the astronomical sales eventually nudged a reluctant critical establishment to come around. Carey’s attunement to what was popping on the streets showed, and her fealty to soul and self shone through. “There are so many intimate, special, inside, almost intangible details that are specific to me on that album,” she wrote in The Meaning of Mariah Carey. “You can actually feel my authentic emotions; there are no dramatic, overproduced ballads to appease label executives. This was pared down, simple, real shit.”
Mimi’s best song is one of its simplest. The beat for “Your Girl” is based on the Kanye-style, sped-up soul record trend that was aflame at the time, but it was made by Scram Jones and samples an acoustic guitar from “A Life With You,” a 2004 song by the New Zealand R&B duo Adeaze. The premise is classic: a shy young woman makes up her mind to seduce a man she’s had her eye on for ages, asserting herself in his presence for the first time. The chorus is an exercise in exhilaration that arrives in a high-registered delirium—“You’re gonna know! For! Sure! That! I should be your girl!” Carey’s ecstasy is premised less on the potential for love and more on the rush of finally going after what she wants. It’s a transcendent moment so bright it’s nearly blinding.
There’s a Diplomats remix, too, which circulated on the DJ mixtapes—physical CD mixtapes, the kind procured from disinterested guys running tiny stalls on Canal Street—featuring Juelz Santana and Cam’ron at the peak of their fame. “Roll that purple and pop that Crissy/We the ’05 Bobby and Whitney, yo mami you with me?” Cam raps in the intro. “Forget security, you hopped in the whippy/We left the block at 160/Cops couldn’t get me/I’m gone.” The elusive chanteuse hums feather-light vocal runs around his verse, as if lost in thought behind her knowing smile, in ascension while the wind whips through her hair.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan


The Buffalo-area MC is a savvy and earnest lyricist, pairing a violent streak with a clear-eyed gaze at the conditions behind her grisly scenarios.

Apollo Brown / Ché Noir: As God Intended

As God Intended

Halfway through As God Intended, on the ominous static-flecked storytelling track “12 Hours,” the Buffalo-area MC Che’ Noir mistakenly winds up murdering a man she suspects of cheating on her with a friend. In reality, the unlucky soul was simply consulting with said friend about buying Che’ a ring, which the Hennessy-fortified Che’ subsequently finds in his pocket after shooting him with a gun she’d taken from his safe. “Fuck, I gotta get the fuck out of here,” she whispers at the end of the track, before hightailing away from the bloody scene. The grisly vignette is an apt summation of the world Che’ depicts in her music, where violence and relationships intermingle with themes of betrayal and loss.
On the surface, there’s often a wild violent streak to Che’s rhymes on As God Intended, which she delivers in a smooth and unhurried monotone over beats by Detroit-based producer Apollo Brown that trade in alluring mid-tempo melancholy. As an MC, Che’ delights in killing her foes without remorse. On the album's opening song “Anti-Social,” which is carried by soothing piano and a classic breakbeat, she comes packing “bullets big as tennis balls” and calmly warns, “I put rappers in cemeteries/Then go to your wake and autograph your obituaries.” Later, on “Worth Gold,” she politely informs us, “I keep a blade that I use just to cut the tongue of a snitch.” But just like last year’s The Thrill Of The Hunt 2 project, which was entirely produced by Rochester’s 38 Spesh, As God Intended has a depth that reveals Che’ as a savvy and earnest lyricist, adept at linking dramatic scenes to the wider socio-political shackles that might prompt them. She's also unafraid to add vulnerable autobiographical flashbacks to her writing, as she delves into her family and upbringing.
“Daddy's Girl” emerges as a key to understanding Che’ as she gazes back on the psychological effects of a childhood without a dependable father figure. “Look, black complexion, bad and reckless in my adolescence/’Cause I was young the first time I seen my dad arrested,” Che’ recalls before reflecting, “Too young to comprehend it at that time but now I’m old enough/To understand the damage from his absent presence growing up.” On “Money Orientated,” she pries further into the effects the criminal justice system can have on the dynamics of a household, musing over a pensive piano loop, “I got family that’s behind walls and they caged down/Went in a Christian, now it’s Allah when he pray now/That’s when I realized jail or death is where this money don’t matter/Can't buy my way into heaven when He judging me after.”
A lot of rappers are skilled at describing the immediate world around them, whether that’s growing up on hardscrabble streets or flaunting the excess of the glamorous life. But on As God Intended, Che’ aims higher, subtly spotlighting how the various factors of her environment and experience—single parenthood, blighted neighborhood blocks, the prison system, religion and family values—all connect and influence each other, for better or worse. It’s an emphasis that turns the album into a persuasive reminder of the rewards that come with striving to paint the bigger picture.

Buy: Rough Trade
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A mammoth box set of Daevid Allen’s prog-rock project makes a virtue of its excesses, capturing the band’s monumental strangeness.

Gong: Love From the Planet Gong: The Virgin Years 1973-75

If Daevid Allen’s prophecy is correct, we are a mere 13 years away from Planet Gong descending from the heavens to deliver enlightenment to all earthlings. Allen first posited his theory on a series of albums by Gong in the mid-1970s: Each LP was designed, he said, to prepare “the heads of all who hear their music for the arrival in the year 2032 of many Pot Head Pixies who will be coming to help spread of joy in the new age.” Those albums, long known among the Gong cognoscenti as The Radio Gnome Trilogy, are housed alongside a bounty of unreleased live material excavated from deep in the Virgin Records vaults in the hefty Love From the Planet Gong: The Virgin Years 1973-75, a 12-CD/1-DVD box set whose very weight may intimidate anyone who is not already a member of the band’s dedicated cult.
Gong tended to attract cultists, in every sense of the word. Freaks of all stripes flocked to Allen, hearing loopy wisdom lying underneath Gong’s cacophonic prog-funk fusion, ever-expanding space-rock, and tall tales of spliff-toking sprites. The most famous of these fans was Sherman Hemsley, who gained notoriety as George Jefferson on the Norman Lear sitcom The Jeffersons. At the height of his fame in the late 1970s, Hemsley flew Allen out to his Los Angeles home, where the Gong guitarist discovered a chamber devoted to his band. Flying Teapot—the first installment of The Radio Gnome Trilogy, released in 1973—played on a loop in a darkened room filled with naked women, and that was just the tip of the actor’s devotion. Hemsley planned to wallpaper Hollywood with billboards trumpeting Flying Teapot, in hopes of spreading the Planet Gong philosophy to the masses. Gong’s music inspires this intense dedication but also its opposite reaction: To those on the outside, the fantastical music-hall jazz sounds utterly bewildering.
If Gong seem as if they flew in from another world, there is some truth in that suspicion; they were born in the serene surroundings of the French countryside. As a member of the pioneering psych-jazz outfit Soft Machine, the Australian-born Allen was part of Canterbury’s nascent prog-rock scene in the late 1960s, but once the band’s 1967 European tour wrapped up, the UK denied him reentry due to an overextended visa. Undaunted, Allen claimed Paris as his new home, witnessing the student revolution of 1968 before eventually settling on the edge of a forest with his partner Gilli Smyth. Before long, the pair formed Gong, which from their earliest days defied anything resembling a stable lineup. Musicians would come and go, usually living in the band’s communal house in Voisines. Allen wasn’t so much the leader of the bunch as he was its shepherd, encouraging his flock to follow his path but happy to take whatever detours the pack pursued.
A few Gong records came out on the French label BYG in the early 1970s, but the three years the group spent at Virgin is where they took flight. Happily, they inked a deal with the fledgling Virgin Records when Richard Branson was flush with cash and willing to let his acts do whatever they wanted. Along with Mike Oldfield, whose “Tubular Bells” became a massive hit thanks to its prominent placement in The Exorcist, Gong were Virgin’s signature act. Flying Teapot, largely recorded prior to the Virgin deal, didn’t quite take full advantage of this freedom, yet it still shows the band taking shape. It’s a technicolor blimp that lurches and glides, cruising along on dextrous funk fusion before it descends into annoying maniacal chants. Chalk the latter up to the pothead pixies, who were central to Allens’ “Gong philosophy,” which wasn’t so much a cohesive manifesto but a feverish prankster fantasy filled with cheap puns, smutty jokes, and a fervent belief in cosmic unity.
All those elements gel on Angel’s Egg, a 1973 LP that Gong recorded at their country home, miking the woods for ambiance. The crackpot idea worked. Gong sound utterly unencumbered by gravity, floating between moments of grace and madness. Again, much of that lunacy comes from Allen’s mythology, which picked up themes and the thinnest of narrative threads from Flying Teapot, then turns it into a jumble that’s indecipherable without bushels of weed.
Paradise eventually comes to an end, and so it was with Gong. A bust—equal parts customs and drugs violations—prompted France to kick the group out of the country, so they headed to England and gathered the material for 1974’s You, which was their biggest, boldest album. Nominally the conclusion of The Radio Gnome Trilogy, You found Allen’s Gong philosophy slowly subsumed by the majestic power of the band. In a sense, they achieved an equilibrium, with the band—now featuring the liquid, startling guitar of Steve Hillage—racing along at the same speed of Allen’s mind, while his lunacy prevented the knotty extended improvisations from calcifying into egghead art.
The divide between Allen and much of the rest of Gong came to a head in 1975. At a concert, Allen claimed “a force-field stopped me taking the stage on my musical cue,” so he simply left the band he created. Some members quit in his wake, while others were relieved to see him go: Drummer Pierre Moerlen and percussionist Mireille Bauer were eager to ditch the “silly lyrics” and overhauled the group into a slick, serious outfit that could hold its own with Weather Report. That incarnation of Gong can be heard on 1976’s Shamal, the last of the four studio albums included on Love From the Planet Gong. It’s an impressive work, sharing a clear lineage with the nimble jazz-funk of the preceding three albums, but neither Shamal nor the post-Allen live concert from 1975 quite feels like Gong. Without Allen’s babble, the band lacked the means of achieving transcendence.
Not that Gong often did that anyway. Most of the time, the band was working at cross purposes, a tension that is maddening and thrilling in equal measure. In the studio, these tendencies were gussied up, often in an appealing fashion, but the live recordings that provide the bulk of the unreleased material on Love From the Planet Gong show the band’s muscle and might at work. Stripped of the stage visuals—their act was replete with mime, sorcerer hats, ultraviolet lights, and paper plates doubling as flying saucers—the group is an unwieldy delight: a British Sun Ra Arkestra that manages to make it home in time for tea.
The live recordings are bracing and, oddly enough, they provide a better gateway to understanding Gong than the albums themselves, as the LPs often are dressed in fussy period charms. Returning to the studio trilogy after absorbing the live recordings, Flying Teapot, Angel’s Egg, and You seem like vivid snapshots of songs that are often too wild to sit still. Gong’s restlessness is integral to their appeal, since it’s what pushed them to explore the outer reaches of the universe from the confines of a French country home. The group managed to create an enduringly weird body of work whose strength is perhaps best appreciated in total, not in parts. Taken individually, or without the concert recordings, the LPs seem merely odd, but when they’re combined as they are in this box, the strangeness seems monumental. And that’s fitting a testament to Gong: They’re not a band designed for dabbling, only a full immersion will do.


One of the most promising dubstep producers is also one of those responsible for taking the dance genre places it usually doesn't go: R&B, post-rock, IDM.

Mount Kimbie: Maybes EP / Sketch on Glass EP

Maybes EP / Sketch on Glass EP

If you're still trying to figure out what dubstep is, keep in mind that people are already using the term "post-dubstep" (and "halfstep" and, god, "brostep"). I'd rather not get neurotic about genre-- especially in the obsessively territorial underbrush of dance music-- so I'll say that Mount Kimbie is a London duo that makes pretty, mostly mid-tempo tracks between three and four minutes long with sped-up vocal samples, little tunnels of ambience, unimposing synth patches, and syncopated percussion that sounds like someone putting away the silverware (or that water-droplet effect people make by flicking their cheek with their finger). Small music, scarf music.
Maybes and Sketch on Glass aren't always sunny, but they're playful, dreamy, and melancholic-- refreshing qualities to hear in dubstep, a genre slightly less emotionally versatile than hair metal. Even Burial-- its most expressive, articulate producer-- works in a kind of greyscale compared to Mount Kimbie (though, to be fair, Burial's music reaches a depth that Mount Kimbie's doesn't, and probably isn't aiming for).
It's true that their rhythms are still dubstep in DNA-- deftly syncopated, slightly off-center, ambiguously danceable-- but most of what they lay on top of the beat sounds like it's being dragged out from places dubstep usually doesn't go: R&B, post-rock, IDM. Of the two EPs, Sketch on Glass is markedly funkier but also feels more self-assured and detailed: The bass is deeper but the sound is lighter and more agile; the plinks and pops-- sorta cute-- really ricochet around in the mix instead of just accenting it; the vocal samples are warped and flattened in weirder ways.
Still, Maybes-- especially the title track-- is a good listen, and should be of interest to listeners who find dubstep's pervasive moodiness to be a turn-off (in his year-end column for this site, Martin Clark mentioned the group in a paragraph about records that went "beyond the dubstep sphere"). Between both EPs, there's character, humor, light chaos, nice sound design, and real melodic imperative. It's strong music, and I want to hear more. Big ups, as they say in England. Oh, and some people are just calling this stuff "step."


On her latest release, the Canadian electronic producer approaches emotional turbulence from a place of spiritual calm.

Interplay

Since launching her solo project YlangYlang in 2012, Canadian producer Catherine Debard has split her time between gigs in Montreal’s subterranean experimental scene and the more formalized world of artists residencies, workshops and academic programming. Over time, her iridescent synth drones and sparse laptop beats have gelled into an abstract ambient pop that’s as equally suited to attentive gallery space performances as the kind of venues you have to direct message for their address. With her new album Interplay, Debard layers her raw electronics with live instruments, building introspective and sophisticated songs glazed in noise.
Debard has worked alone for the majority of her YlangYlang discography, but here she invites a host of other musicians into the booth. The chopped bell samples and synth arpeggio that lay the foundation for “Dualities” open up to include squeaking cellos and stray clangs from a dulcimer-like instrument called a santur. Every timbre floats shapelessly, only fusing together when a wave of ugly static engulfs the mix. In “Our Provisional,” distant horns meander amid scrambled electronics before rising up in a moment of harmonic clarity. “Lost Realms,” one of several instrumentals, begins with a wash of textural noise that recedes into a tide pool of layered brass and woodwinds.
YlangYlang’s latent new age tendencies also take on a new depth here. In the past, these inclinations manifested as superficial signifiers like a tape of self-described “therapeutic” improv jams (titled You might want to burn some sage, no less) or the soundtrack to a hypnosis meditation. While there are still references to healing ceremonies and neural pathways, the new age undertones on Interplay surface most when Debard approaches emotional turbulence from a place of spiritual calm. She circles back repeatedly to themes of solitude and separation, ultimately giving herself over to the will of the universe.
In “Limitless” she walks alone through the city, sorting through the fallout of a recently ended relationship. The song transforms feelings of pain and rejection into near-euphoric surrender. Rather than wallowing, she processes her emotions and reconnects with herself outside the context of the expired romance: “I accept this shifting from the start/As a part of a greater process /I’m humble, I’m porous,” she sings, in the patient cadence of a mantra. Over the course of the record, Debard makes arrangements to return an ex’s house key, stifles screams of frustration in her tiny apartment, and writhes on the ground contemplating the end of civilization, grateful at every turn just to experience it all.
For all its existential thrashing, Interplay exudes warmth. Even the harshest moments are grounded, exploring chaos but never spinning out.  Seeking out the beauty in an array of precarious feelings, Debard follows her contradictory impulses into the ether. As she asks with the album’s closing lyric, “What else is there to do?”


Field recordings and ambient synthesizers combine to paint an evocative picture of the English countryside and its natural cycles of rot and rebirth.

Sleepmoss

Have you ever picked a blade of grass, stretched it taut between your two thumbs, and blown this makeshift reed to release its musical potential? You get the same sort of satisfying squeak when you walk across a wet lawn in sneakers. This almost animalistic sound is rife in the latter half of “Night Rain,” from UK producer Lara Rix-Martin’s second album as Meemo Comma, Sleepmoss. Had she not stated in the accompanying notes that the record was inspired by her daily walks on the South Downs—a stretch of hills that runs for a couple hundred miles along the southeast coast of England—it wouldn’t have been too tricky to work out: the dense and scurrying sonics of Sleepmoss quickly establish the gist.
Sometimes the musing on a personal relationship with nature is especially explicit, as on the soothing “Murmur,” with its field recordings of morning birdsong, the simulated tap-tap-tap of a woodpecker, and a low hum that evokes a thousand busy minibeasts. Likewise, the crunch and creaking tones of “Tanglewood” suggest a contemplative autumnal woodland stroll. That said, Sleepmoss really soars in those moments where Rix-Martin’s sound design is attuned to a more cinematic purpose. The use of distortion and what sounds like reversed audio on “Windross,” for example, accurately conveys the sensation of wind whipping past the ears, the fragments of signals it carries forever scrambled. “Amethyst Deceiver,” too, is irresistibly uncanny; its tense and scraggly melody conjures a hopping magpie in my mind’s eye, bending its head to one side as if to assess the onlooker’s character.
Being in nature, wherever you are in the world, amplifies your own internal nature. It’s not just the isolation that leads to reflection, but the abundance of life and death in a never-ending cycle. What makes Sleepmoss a particularly English countryside album in this regard is that it nails the predictably unpredictable weather. There are parallels to be drawn between the ecosystem of UK undergrowth—damp and rotting, yet at once sprouting and squirming—and the thought cycles of the mind. It’s the presence of rain that grounds Sleepmoss and gives it strength.
Where the album occasionally falters is in its attempts to evoke rain’s opposite. While most of the album avoids pastoral cliché to walk a more nuanced path, the bright synth and chimes of “Winter Sun” come off as twee. Similarly, on closing track “Psithur,” a soft synth that sounds like a CGI pan pipe is an odd note to end on. It falls flat because it feels like it’s trying too hard, unlike the rest of Sleepmoss.
When I smell wet soil, I know that I am from the earth and one day will return to the earth. This is the truth of the great outdoors and one that Rix-Martin excavates with care. Our planet’s land belongs to no one, and therefore no one has the right to deny others access to its metaphysical riches—because everyone, ultimately, is part of it. That Sleepmoss arrived during this time of Brexit and climate change makes it a particularly resonant document. Moss has found a way to survive anywhere and everywhere for millions of years, yet some of its most ancient forests are in danger of being wiped out. Within these contexts, it is Sleepmoss’s poignant title track that best rounds out the album for me: a mass of vibrating life-force strings that act as both meditation and invigoration.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Sharing two members with Tame Impala, this Australian psych trio blends indulgent chunks of far-outness with fundamentally solid rock'n'roll tunes.

Beard, Wives, Denim

More often than not, most side-projects and spin-off bands don't spin very far from their respective musical mothership. Take the charmingly shambling Pond, a psych-rocking Australian three-piece that shares two members with Tame Impala, the psych-rocking Australian four-piece responsible for 2010's terrific Innerspeaker. That debut put a revisionist spin on guitar-driven psychedelia so much so that, unlike other bands mining for retrograded, kaleidoscopic gold, Innerspeaker felt beholden to no specific time or place. So it's with Beard, Wives, Denim that Tame Impala alumni Nick Allbrook and Jay Watson (here with Joseph Ryan) give the same kind of sounds and textures a more worldly setting with Pond. This album may not deviate much from the Tame Impala playbook (and, as sort of a guiding principal, trades the sheer scope of that record in for something more organic), but instead welcomingly recontextualizes that sound while offering it in easily digestible bites.
Recorded in a "ramshackle old farmhouse in Western Australia" over two weeks back in 2010, Beard, Wives, Denim feels like some very capable musicians getting back to their play-it-loose-and-fast roots. The communal, freewheeling looseness is one of the album's greatest assets, as you feel as if you were a party to the making of the record in Eagle Bay, too. This is obviously not a record meant to transport you to anywhere except the small little universe in which it was created, helpfully buoyed by a genuine sense of good humor, evidenced by the press release's silly accompanying track notes ("Nick B slept for upwards of thirty hours, becoming the human-koala") and the odd stitch of audio caught while the tape was still running. "That was pretty shit, that one," a voice notes amid laughter at the end of "Dig Brother". Nothing here could be classified as being pretty shit, but at almost an hour there's certainly some trimming that could've been done. "Tangent-heavy" seems like a more appropriate criticism. But brevity clearly isn't the aim: Beard, Wives, Denim exists and works in very much the same way a high school battle of the bands would, where whichever band can wedge a freaked out, three-minute improv into a perfectly fine two minute pop song will probably lay claim to the prize.
Despite the fact that said pop songs are mostly used as vessels, there sure are some pretty sweet ones here. As opener "Fantastic Explosion of Time" suggests with its deliciously warped take on the British Invasion, there isn't much mystery to where these songs' influences sprung from. Like Tame Impala, Pond's genre sampling feels authentic under the canopy of an established sound, with odes to swaggering 1970s cock-rock ("Moth Wings"), twist-n-shout good vibes ("Leisure Pony"), and some relatively bluesy shit-kicking western wanderers ("Elegant Design"). All would make fine singles, if only it weren't for the jammed-out extentions and loose-limbed codas that each song eventually falls subject to. Most of the detours are massively fun, like the immersion-blender-to-the-dome shred fest that intersects "Sun and Sea and You", and the terrific little details tucked into just-okay tunes, like the desert mirage guitars on "Mystery". Getting a little lost along the way, it would seem, is kind of the point.
It may be unfair to compare Pond to Tame Impala too much, but when a band like the former's shadow looms so long, it's difficult not to. And in instances where Pond get a little too comfortable, focusing intently on the kind of horizon-gazing slow-bloomers that Tame Impala manage to render so elegantly, you may find your skip-button finger itching. More at fault might be Pond themselves, who are clearly very good at nailing tracks with a best-of-both-worlds approach, fusing those indulgent chunks of far-outness with fundamentally solid rock'n'roll tunes. And thanks to the communal tack, none of these ideas were given much time to stagnate. So it's hard to complain when the trips in between take a little longer than expected. But if your guy happens to have some of that high-test left, and you've got a little time tucked away, you're going to be just fine.


The Against Me! frontwoman intended to record these bracing songs with her main band before the pandemic sidelined that plan. Her austere solo version feels like a pale shadow of the real thing.

Stay Alive

Is there a producer better cut out for the pandemic than Steve Albini? The famously hands-off engineer has been keeping a safe distance from bands in his studio since well before the CDC was advising it, and the coronavirus hasn't changed his process much. As Laura Jane Grace tells it, masks aside, the recording sessions for her first solo album Stay Alive weren't all that different from the usual Albini productions: no computers, no overdubs, no wasted time or niceties. They tracked the album in just two days. “I could kind of tell that if I did more than two takes, he got annoyed,” Grace told Rolling Stone.
Stay Alive is not the album Grace hoped to record this year. She intended these songs for Against Me!'s first album since 2016's Shape Shift With Me, but the pandemic uprooted those plans, stranding her band in separate parts of the country. Rather than let her songs grow cold, she committed them to this largely acoustic set, an austere shadow of the electric Against Me! record that might have been. Save for an occasional primitive drum machine or amplifier, it's largely just Grace's graveled voice and her six-string guitar—her rawest recording since the very earliest years of Against Me!, when the band was essentially a folk-punk solo project.
Despite the spartan setup, Stay Alive doesn't shy from volume. Grace pitches her voice somewhere between a bark and a roar, intermittently channeling the uninhibited wail of The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle. At its best the session has the intimacy and power of a living room concert; at other times it's more like a subway busker performing too loud for passersby who won't make eye contact.
Although these songs were written before Covid-19, Grace uses them to process the shock of our new normal, conjuring the helplessness of those first few weeks of lockdown in particular. “This only feels like the death of everything,” she snarls on the hard-strummed opener “Swimming Pool Song.” On “The Calendar Song,” she longs for travel, fantasizing about the tropical warmth of Portugal or the vibrant green pastures of Glasgow. Cabin fever hangs over the entire album. “There's always someone dying to leave where you're dying to get to,” she sings on “Shelter in Place,” yet another song that somehow predates the pandemic, despite lyrics like “my own private paradise quarantine is very nice.”
Generally the ferocity of the performances make more of an impression than the songs themselves. Though it doesn't mince words about Donald Trump's flirtations with white supremacy, “Hanging Tree” once again lays to waste the idea that his election was somehow going to usher in a golden age of protest music. “You're tweet-tweet-tweeting from a golden tower/Ain't got no soul to sell and that's your power,” Grace sneers. She's got the conviction, but it's hard for even the boldest songwriters to lobby a critique of this guy that isn't already expressed hundreds of times an hour online.
COVID-19 has taught us to settle for poor substitutes, because they're all we have—birthday parties with three people, live streams instead of concerts, Zoom happy hours instead of real ones. So perhaps it's in the spirit of the times that, like almost everything in our lives right now, Grace's solo debut feels like an unceremonious consolation. Once the allure of hearing Grace so stripped down wears off, the record begins to sound like what it is: glorified demos for an Against Me! album we'll never get to hear. Even at its most vital, Stay Alive never escapes the sense that the pandemic has one again cheated us out of something better.

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With the help of producer I.B. Classic, the Chicago trap-soul rapper delivers the most defining and unifying record of his career.

I.B. Tree

One of Tree’s loose Soundcloud uploads from 2015, an unusually quiet year for the Chicago rapper and producer, was a song called “Pac Dilla,” inspired by “years of comparisons by writer after writer.” Tree has called Tupac a sworn influence, whereas Dilla has been his most frequent point of comparison since his breakthrough 2012 release Sunday School—sometimes, a way of implying that Tree is more distinctive as a producer than MC. His latest rapping-first project, an EP entirely produced by fellow Chicagoan I.B. Classic, proves the perceived slight may be a good punching bag for him. It makes the case for Tree-the-MC better than any of his other projects, while Classic's beats, with their soupy synths and funhouse samples, maintain the spiritual connection to Dilla.
Tree’s previous rapping-only releases (most recently, last year’s Trap Genius) can lack the duck-and-weave approach the MC favors while rapping over his own more lopsided instrumentals. But I.B. Classic aligns more with Tree’s style than past collaborators. He described the producer’s role on the EP as “chauffeuring MC Tree through the upper, lower and mid-level echelons of soul trap housery.” Classic has his own flair though, favoring dusty sonics and hollow trashcan snares over Tree’s preferred Lex Luger kits. His concoctions tease out Tree’s strengths. “I fuck with I.B. Classic, man,” he chuckles at the beginning of “Couple Nights.” “Make me feel like Pac, yo.”
As it turns out, Tree just sounds really good when he’s relaxed. On I.B. Tree, he rarely moves to belt out gospel-tinged melodic hooks; the mournful chorus of lead single “On Dem 4’s” is muted, crooned, and heard from afar. “Kinfolk”’s plea to “keep it plain, keep it simple” manifests itself across the entire EP; every song bends toward exhortations to remain humble, loyal, and grateful. The mantra is to stay in touch with one’s roots despite snowballing success.
His talking points mirror the delivery. A particularly striking and uncharacteristic example is “Heard Nothing,” where Tree gently pulls in and out of time, fakes us out, and scales a jazzy drum cadence. You begin to wonder if he has been taking cues from his past collaborator Roc Marciano, or his elusive associate Ka. “The Plug” is comparatively fiery: Tree builds the story of a routine drug rendezvous (“Come by yourself/Top floor at the Palmer House/Make a left when you exit”), into a storm of introspection (“I put two and two together/Jealousy the brother/Matter ’fact, twin/Hater be the mother”), and still it’s a quiet one.
With independent Chicago artists now a solidified presence in hip-hop media, message boards, and the nationwide concert circuit more than they were prior to the drill boom of 2012, there’s less pressure for MCs to prove themselves based on standards other than their own. Tree’s private quest to become the kind of rap statesman he wants to be—or at least, to keep trying new things—has led him, seemingly accidentally, what is perhaps his most rewarding release since his breakout year.


The Atlanta rapper’s second album asserts her confidence and versatility, rounding out the trap beats with tracks that draw on pop, gospel, and R&B sounds.

777

At 16, Latto won first place on a reality show called The Rap Game, but turned down the prize—an offer to sign with Jermaine Dupri’s So So Def—believing that she was worth more than the deal offered. After a slew of mixtapes, the Clayton County-raised rapper made her breakthrough with the lively 2019 single “Bitch From da Souf,” which became inescapable that summer and led her to sign with RCA for her studio debut, 2020’s Queen of da Souf. Nearly two years later, Latto, now 23, has continued to fine-tune her craft. Personal growth, along with public scrutiny, pushed her to change her stage name from Mulatto to Latto, meant to be short for “lottery” and representative of “a new chapter, good fortune, spiritually and financially.”
With this rebrand, it’s clear that she’s still in the process of finding herself and her sound. She uses her second album, 777, to get reacquainted with fans and position herself for mainstream success. If you weren’t familiar with Latto before, the fiery and combative two-part intro “777 Pt. 1” and “777 Pt. 2” will quickly enlighten you: “Top two, and bitch, I ain’t number two/Real rap back and Latto is the proof,” she asserts.
This newfound confidence allows her to venture away from her comfort zone and explore a more diverse selection of beats across the 13-track project, with mixed success. Lead single “Big Energy” aims to showcase her range with a fresh twist on Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love,” but misses the mark. The song sounds almost like a jingle, and Latto’s bars aren’t strong enough to revive the concept of “big dick energy,” a meme that by now feels a bit dated. “Real One” is a classic Pharrell production, with a bouncy, playful beat, but Latto’s flow makes an awkward fit, and her description of a relationship gone sour keeps the details at surface level.
She’s more triumphant at flaunting her versatility on “Sunshine,” an unexpected feel-good anthem Latto has described as “hood gospel.” She goes toe to toe with guests Lil Wayne and Childish Gambino, venting about past betrayals and feeling grateful to move beyond them. “They use my couch when they needed the therapy,” she raps, then pivots to sing the hook: “I just let the sun shine on me.” It feels like the first warm summer day in the hood, having fun on the block with your people. It’s a fresh sound for Latto and one of the album’s high points.
Opposite the more pop-influenced, upbeat tracks are R&B sounds—“Sleep Sleep,” which samples Twista’s “Get It Wet,” and “Like a Thug,” with Lil Durk—that offer a peek at a softer, more sultry side of Latto. She also taps into her more usual trap beats, saving some of her best rapping for the hard-hitting “Trust No Bitch” and “Stepper,” featuring Nardo Wick. 777 proves that Latto is a formidable force, though there’s still work to do to realize her full potential. If she hasn’t quite nailed down a winning sound, she’s willing to take some big gambles.


The second full-length from UK electronic artist Forest Swords focuses more acutely on the music’s organic elements. It retains the uncanny qualities he’s known for, but with dashes of hope.

Compassion

When Forest Swords’ breakthrough EP, Dagger Paths, was released in 2010, the Merseyside, England-based producer born Matthew Barnes was leading a wave of artists fascinated by the darkest and most insular aspects of club music. At the time, Barnes and his contemporaries found an uneasiness lurking beneath pop’s slick veneer. His music, which mixed elements of techno, hip-hop, house, and dub, was a daguerreotype of the dance floor; if there was a rave in the Upside Down dimension on “Stranger Things,” Forest Swords would have made for the perfect soundtrack. Seven years later, that description holds, but Barnes’ vision has grown with each subsequent release, becoming more ambitious and varied while retaining the uncanniness he’s known for.
Compassion, the second proper Forest Swords full-length, focuses more acutely on the music’s organic elements. Percussion clacks and clatters with the sound of actual wood meeting solid resistance; vocal samples, though chopped and deconstructed, resonate more deeply; sweeping arrangements take the listener from claustrophobic drones to world-expanding crescendos. It’s a breadth of sound that Barnes has been building to his whole career as he’s added weight to his music’s skeletal frame. It’s also a relatively predictable direction: Forest Swords’ previous album, Engravings, had already taken much of what made his early music great while dilating and deepening it. In 2017, the Forest Swords of Compassion isn’t entirely a maximalist, but he’s perhaps more similar to Ben Frost than he is to Burial.
Most of Forest Swords’ tracks are wordless, but the human voice is key across Compassion, expressing Barnes themes of state power, technological isolation, and gender dynamics. While the interplay between his inspirations is impressionistic (you have to mine interviews and press materials to explicitly uncover Barnes’ inspirations) the tension created by the music is easy to grasp. Like other electronic producers with a political edge, Forest Swords’ relationship with technology is ambivalent, if not downright hostile. Last year he soundtracked In the Robot Skies, an experimental film made with drones. And perhaps the best track on Compassion is “Panic”; the refrain is unusually clear above its Eastern melody. “I fear something’s wrong/Panic is on,” sings a voice breaking through the static.
But Compassion is often as hopeful as it is paranoid, a first for Barnes. “I’ve struggled to see any kind of light at the end of the tunnel,” Barnes has said, reflecting on the political moment. “I realized there’s some sort of power in trying to create our own instead.” The stately “Exalter” is a standout, using clipped samples, rattling percussion, and looped motifs that coalesce in a powerful denouement. By track’s end, it’s as if rays of sunlight have broken through stormy clouds. Compassion also contains hints at the freeform experimentalism of Oren Ambarchi and Ryuichi Sakamoto; “Arms Out” feels like an actual embrace, enveloping the listener in a new age blanket of crystal-clear vocals.
While Forest Swords has always hidden hooks in his music that reveal themselves upon repeat listens, Compassion is by far his most approachable album at first pass. “The Highest Flood” and “Raw Language” use opaque vocal samples that become irresistible earworms, though not the type you’d necessarily sing along to. They recall spirituals, bringing a warmth to even the chilliest synths. “Raw Language” ends with a bright melody somewhere between Pentecostal gospel and occult chant. Time and again, Forest Swords compositions begin fractured and end ecstatic.
Compassion’s cover depicts a man underneath a boulder, doing his best not to be crushed. It’s as if Sisyphus had somehow tripped and gotten himself into an even worse pickle. But in this dire situation, our hero hasn’t given up. Forest Swords music does the same; even as melodies are swallowed by the void, optimism remains. If you’re wondering which side is winning out, just look to the title.


Kanye West’s executive-produced gospel album is the most realized music to come from this era of his career. The production and the choir’s dynamic power creates an almost hallucinatory effect.

Kanye West / Sunday Service Choir: Jesus Is Born

Jesus Is Born

Last October, Kanye West got into the booth with Zane Lowe and in a prophetic voice, he spoke: “Ye cannot die. Ye cannot be buried.” Since the genesis of his career, Kanye has had an outsized obsession with everlasting life: in art, in life, in Christ. For someone who built his earliest songs out of extracting vocal loops from obscure, sometimes decades-old songs, Kanye has seen the way musicians can be resurrected and given new life. Unearthing the voices of the dead almost makes time travelers of forgotten artists. They are rediscovered, fed through the sampler, chopped and warped and given new life in a new song, then spill anew from speakers into cars and arenas.
Part of Kanye’s process is the meticulousness with which he works to flip samples by tweaking the speed, pitch, and phrasing to become something totally new. From songs like “Through the Wire,” where he flipped Chaka Khan’s “Through the Fire,” and on his breakout hit, “Jesus Walks,” where he sampled the Arc Choir and gave us the first real taste of the way he fuses two seemingly disparate venues: the club and the church.
To be clear, there is very little club to be found on Jesus Is Born—it is a pure gospel album. One of the most radical elements of the album is what’s absent: Kanye’s voice. Instead, he’s assembled a massive choir to channel his Christian message in a joyous, all-consuming wave of sound. Although there are no samples here, per se, it’s as if Kanye is using the choir as a living, breathing sampler. He’s still selecting old songs, whether they’re traditional hymns or late-’90s R&B hits, and recontextualizing them. The voices almost seem to warp in real-time as though Kanye were at the sampler tweaking speed and pitch. The effect can be hallucinatory, like on the opening track, “Count Your Blessings”—a rendition of Rev. Timothy Wright’s original—when the choir climbs scales that reach notes so high it makes you feel like you’re staring directly into the sun.
The album is at times minimal, just voice and piano, and at other times erupts into maximal textures of trombones, drums, and fluctuating voices that are all in the service of praise and joy. And even though there is something almost psychedelic about the production, Jesus Is Born has less in common with the slick, radio-friendly textures of 21st-century gospel music. It’s more of a descendent of more traditional singers like Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and the Clark Sisters. The Sunday Service Choir as a whole also seems to be taking cues from groups with no real lead singer like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the Dixie Hummingbirds, and the Blind Boys of Alabama. They are collectives working in tandem to praise God. Some of these acts have existed for almost a century; perhaps Kanye hopes his Sunday Service will outlast him, as well.
As is the case with many creative types, West has described himself as an artist with synesthesia—he sees sound as color. As such, light plays a major role in his artistic endeavors from stage to song. He chose Roden Crater—an extinct volcano in Arizona that the visual artist James Turrell has been transforming into a naked-eye observatory for the last 40 years—to create what would become the IMAX film to accompany his first overtly devotional album from 2019, Jesus Is King. The Sunday Service Choir features prominently in the film, as though they were shooting their voices through a giant telescope into the sky as light moves through them.
And there is an impermeable quality of light in the DNA of Jesus Is Born. Even when Satan is mentioned toward the end of the record, on Pastor Shirley Caesar’s “Satan, We’re Gonna Tear Your Kingdom Down.” The song exudes a clear, white, blue shimmer, just like the album cover: a bright sun suspended over blue water, framed in dark blue. The voices actually sound like they are trying to tear a hole in the sky to conquer darkness. This, of course, is the point of Jesus Is Born. Aside from spreading the gospel, it’s a way to bottle extreme light and joy.
Take the album’s final song: “Total Praise.” Like many Kanye songs, a singer begins vocalizing one line, just once, from the original source (Richard Smallwood’s 1990 song of the same name). Then, just like Kanye chopping up a sample, he extracts the most affecting bit of the original song, and has the entire choir circle around the word “amen,” as tenors, sopranos, and altos pile on in sections, until the song crescendos. It’s trance-like.
The best artists continue to redefine the work that defined them. Whether Kanye’s rebirth has been endearing or distancing, he is still manipulating the human voice in new and, at the very least, interesting ways. Gone is the isolated, severed, screaming head that served as his Twitter avatar for years, replaced with a view of the globe centered over Africa. Both of these versions of Kanye seem like different ways of striving for life eternal—or ways in which to speak to something greater than himself.


Montreal-based singer-songwriter Laurel Sprengelmeyer, recording with members of Arcade Fire and the National, steps out with an assured debut.

The Golden Record

"Oh, I don't know who I am, and I don't know what I'll be," coos Laurel Sprengelmeyer of Little Scream, above acoustic guitars that run like rivulets. Sprengelmeyer sings her self-doubt at the start of the second verse of "The Heron and the Fox", the quietly reflective, sadly nostalgic centerpiece of her stellar debut, The Golden Record. An Iowa native now living in Montreal and recording there with members of Arcade Fire, the National, and A Silver Mt. Zion, Sprengelmeyer sounds both worn from experience and inspired by something she can't yet imagine, the peripatetic sort who's old enough to be wise but young enough to be adventurous. That's the great thread that runs through this album, a perfectly mixed bag of graceful folk, coiled pop, and expansive art rock. Lyrically, Sprengelmeyer seems to yearn for the past; stylistically, though, she presses for a bold polyglot future of twisted contexts. Here, she gets both.
It'd be easy to separate The Golden Record's 10 songs into a few orders: There are the mostly still drifters, like the gently swollen "Black Cloud" and the reverb-washed break-up of "People is Place". There are songs that rock and lurch, like the violin-trilling stomp "Boatman" and the snarling-and-smiling "Cannons". There are those experiments, like "Guyegaros", that fit neither. Segregating the songs, though, means selling Sprengelmeyer short as some manic amateur unable to unify or control her ideas. But most every move she makes as Little Scream is a good one: "Cannons" is as incisive and propulsive as the best of St. Vincent, an oft-occurring but fairly inadequate comparison. She sculpts guitar noise and synthesizer squiggles into a perfectly odd pop song that's as aggressive as it is endearing. The same goes for "Red Hunting Jacket", a somehow cheerful cavalcade of handclaps and guitar abrasion punctuated by a vamp of boogie-woogie piano and spiraling flute lines. The song itself is an excavation of forgotten memories from a relationship built on the run-- "What can we communicate that won't just turn to dust?" Sprengelmeyer sings, her band twisting deliriously beneath. A kick drum thunders through a scrim of noise and samples at the start of "Your Radio". It's the resolute beginning to a charged electric track that eventually rises to arena sizes, with tiered harmonies and a band whose trust in repetition pays off in a coda that suggests the Dead C scoring a battlefield scene. She brings the same sort of control to "People Is Place", one of those gentle tracks that builds over its four minutes to a gorgeous instrumental groan, glowing long tones breaking against a piano like waves against a shoreline. Each look is as convincing as the next.
The Golden Record is a wide-open exploration of Sprengelmeyer's sensibilities, the introduction on which she's able to explore both her most spare and extravagantly orchestrated impulses. It's easy to imagine a scenario where, after a year or two of touring these songs, watching audiences respond, and feeling herself grow tired of certain tracks and maybe not others, Sprengelmeyer circumscribes herself as a writer, favoring a handful of styles versus the horde she delivers here. That's not necessarily a bad thing, either, as every approach sounds assured and evolved. There's no stylistic filler, no dilettante drivel badly in need of an editor. An album of Sprengelmeyer's quiet songs would be as welcome as a full-length of her quakes. For the time being, though, The Golden Record is the document of a real-life wanderer who sings about drift and regret, dreams and reality, in songs that know enough not to sit still. The Golden Record is an infinitely approachable and enjoyable welcome by an artist who sounds like she's here now, for the duration.


Though the upstart British songwriter is a capable storyteller when he zeroes on a single topic, his debut is only intermittently transcendent.

Hypersonic Missiles

Raised on a council estate in North Shields, England from the age of 10, Sam Fender took solace in the music of Bruce Springsteen, finding common ground between Springsteen’s Asbury Park and hardship in his own hometown. Now 25 and a songwriter himself, Fender landed a deal with Polydor and won the Critics’ Choice award at this year’s BRITs before he’d released his first album. When he takes a swing at “pop machine” artifice, or milquetoast peers like James Bay or Ed Sheeran, it’s not just outsider posturing—except that Fender now finds himself on the inside. Label executives have heralded Hypersonic Missiles, his debut album, as the second coming of Bruce. But though Fender’s commitment to addressing serious social issues sets him apart, the well-intentioned Missiles is only intermittently transcendent.
The album’s best songs come from the most honest, intimate places. Fender wrote “Dead Boys” in response to friends’ suicides, and the words are terse and direct: “We close our eyes/Learn our pain/No one ever could explain/All the dead boys in our hometown.” It has the fewest lyrics of any song on the record, a restraint that underscores the stigma surrounding male mental health. “The Borders” initially sounds like a stiffer War on Drugs, but its lyrics about the pain of dysfunctional family life are more grounded than Adam Granduciel’s soul-searching. The song ends with some legitimately chilling final lines (“You pinned me to the wall and smashed a bottle/Your eyes the door to hell and all within”), proving Fender is a capable storyteller when he zeroes on a single topic. It’s the kind of intimate, emotional writing that may resonate with other young men questioning their assumptions about masculinity and vulnerability.
Fender runs into trouble when he tries to tackle everything at once. The title track climaxes in a thrilling Boss homage (complete with Clarence Clemons-y saxophone solo), but stumbles on the way there as Fender’s protagonist groans, “The tensions of the world are rising higher/We’re probably due another war with all this ire.” The lowest moment is a folk ballad called “White Privilege.” Taking a different approach than the Macklemore songs of the same name, “Privilege” pairs dense harmonies with an onslaught of societal grievances: Brexit, social media, liberal arrogance, political correctness. The critiques are often shallow and, unlike the better songs here, devoid of empathy. Fender says the song was written as a series of characters, but the lyrics are so muddled it’s hard to tell when the perspective shifts.
“Privilege” at least represents a risk, while Hypersonic Missiles eventually retreats into previously released singles and songs Fender wrote as a teenager. In his own estimation, the album has “a couple of stinkers” on it, including Hozier pastiche “Call Me Lover.” That song’s peaks and valleys actually help to set it apart: Elsewhere, Fender treats surveillance states (solid 2017 debut single “Play God”), one-night stands (Strokesian romp “Will We Talk?”), and landlord gripes (misbegotten gospel exercise “Saturday”) with identical shouty intensity. The only real non-single highlight from the back half is closer “Use,” which enters intriguing, Nina Simone-inspired territory when Fender dips his voice.
Fender may yet live up to the praise he’s received, but the lack of focus and mostly formulaic arrangements on this record won’t get him there. Snow Patrol collaborator Rich Costey’s antiseptic, airless mixes don’t help, robbing even the flourishes (strings, backing choirs, more saxophones) of their potential. In the blandly apolitical landscape of modern rock, Fender’s blend of social commentary and huge choruses offer the suggestion of real conviction.  When he tells stories about human beings rather than philosophizing about the human condition, he sounds like he’s on his way to greatness. But Hypersonic Missiles on its own is unsatisfying, and the overconfident presentation risks stifling his voice before he’s found it.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Created during a residency at Gainesville’s Pulp Arts studio, Nandi Rose’s latest album as Half Waif is complex, daring, and emotionally unsettled.

Mythopoetics

At first, Nandi Rose intended her fifth album as Half Waif to be a return to the basics. With her longtime collaborator and producer Zubin Hensler, she embarked on a recording residency at Gainesville’s Pulp Arts studio. The idea was to let her songs ring plainly in space, rendered on piano instead of her usual synth pop settings. Mythopoetics retains traces of that original conceit, like the brief opener “Fabric,” a spacious, serene track that’s easy to imagine Rose playing on piano in an otherwise empty room. But that simple, congruous arrangement of the songwriter and her instrument soon fractures under the stress of her lyrics, scattering off into daring, swirling electronic arrangements that better suit Rose’s ruminations on love, aging, loss, and time’s impenetrable sweep.
Throughout Half Waif’s discography, Rose has excelled at staging intimate, escalating conflict laced with rich sensory detail. Burning lavender, unfolded laundry, cooling coffee, and other objects caught in states of change accentuate Rose’s own reckoning with entropy. She projects an uncertain gaze onto the relationships that sustain her—familial, romantic, platonic, creative—studying and testing the tethers in her web. Often, when the inquiry becomes overheated, her voice splits off from itself, chasing down a countermelody on a secondary track or merging into the electroacoustic instrumentation. Her subjectivity is polyphonous, unstable. She sings with conviction about the possibility that her certainty might shatter at any time.
Mythopoetics advances Half Waif’s tendency toward plurality of voice. More than ever, the distinction between Rose’s vocals and their environment seems called into question. “Horse Racing” punctuates her overlapping lines with synthesizers whose timbre approaches that of the human throat, shadowing her voice with an opaque, wordless register. On “Sodium and Cigarettes,” reverb-heavy backing vocals envelop and absorb similarly processed keyboard riffs. The voice expands to fill the surrounding vacuum, then swallows its accessories, a porous membrane rather than a steady, singular figure.
Many of Rose’s lyrics yearn for solitude while also reckoning with its impossibility. “Have I forgotten how to be alone? I blame you,” she sings against spare piano in the album’s first moments. On “Sourdough,” she flees from a “you” whose pronoun she sings with an accusatory grain, just after imagining bleeding herself dry to feed the ones she loves. She is, as everyone is, entangled with others, and, like many of us are, ambivalent about that entanglement. She pulses in and out of aloneness and communion, finding both to be constraining. On the highlight “Orange Blossoms,” Rose cries out from isolation for an ambiguous “somebody” who might help her weather the humiliations of existence: having to wake up, check email, move through time. “Somebody just give me the damn highlights/I don’t wanna be here,” she sings. “Everybody goes home/And the way there is not clear.”
Could the lostness itself be the way? When Rose is adrift, she seeks foundation; when she’s grounded, she sings herself loose. The constant, desirous shifts that mark her work suggest that the murk doesn’t obscure the map—it is the map. Dissatisfaction stirs our movement rather than stalling it. If Rose is restless, itching even amid a life that she has wrenched toward harmony, it doesn’t mark failure or a lapse from her path. It means the path keeps opening, beckoning her to fill its space.

Buy: Rough Trade
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