The third album from the Brooklyn quartet is an intimate and surreal experience, a true masterpiece of folk music from a band working together at the highest level.

U.F.O.F.

Big Thief are their own small ecosystem: Guitarist Buck Meek, bassist Max Oleartchik, drummer James Krivchenia, and Adrianne Lenker, the singer and oxygen of the Brooklyn quartet, whose lyrics can, among other things, bind all that is living and has ever lived together at the cellular level. Their music is a network of wood and wire, uncanny in its ability to sound undiscovered, like you’re stumbling upon a new species of folk rock with every song. And because they work so well as an organism, the band has a way of giving value to things that hang damp and wrinkled in our world. In the hands of Big Thief, emotion, dreams, nature, memory, even acoustic guitars are artifacts of immense size and power.
This power that Big Thief give to the natural (and supernatural) defines their third and undoubtedly best album, U.F.O.F., a mesmerizing flood of life filtered down into a concentrated drip. It’s weird in the literary new weird sense: fantastical, alien; it is an unknown presence. Spend time with this album and soon there is no tempo but Big Thief’s trot, no voice but Lenker’s whisper, you are in a now-but-then, a here-but-there. Guitar lines are Mobius strips, basslines lead you off the map, and the drums feel less like Krivchenia is hitting them and more like he is lifting sounds out of them. A dazzling record, no doubt, but the boundless joy comes from its glacial restraint, from sensing all that lies beneath its surface and all that goes unsung.
The mystery of U.F.O.F. comes in part from Lenker’s lonely and elliptical verse, like Emily Dickinson if she picked up a copy of Court and Spark. The darkness that defined Big Thief’s first two albums—the abuse and stalkers on 2016’s Masterpiece, the trauma and railroad spikes to the skull on 2017’s Capacity—has either evaporated or taken refuge deep in the subtext. What were once vivid scenes between lovers, mothers, and children are now rendered more dreamlike and misty, as if observed in the distance through an attic window. On the title track, seasons bend and maps turn blue, as Lenker waves goodbye to her “UFO friend” and sings that the best kiss she ever had was the “flickering of water so clear and so bright,” an image so indelible she revisits the “kiss of water” a few songs later. There are few greater pleasures than following Lenker’s pen to her places of solitude.
In keeping with tradition, Lenker populates her songs with people, avatars, or named vessels for parts of her personality: Jodi, Betsy, Jenni, Violet, Caroline. But more verdant on U.F.O.F. are the creatures that surround them: circling doves and lonesome loons, worms and robins, fruit bats and flies, recurring motifs of the silkworm and the moth. Lenker’s writing suggests a vast consciousness, a direct line between the inner self and the outer world. On “Orange,” hound dogs crow and pigeons fall like snowflakes, but the surreal places she travels only end back at a place of raw emotional clarity—the fragile orange wind, the flesh crying rivers on her forearm—all of it comes back to the chorus: “Lies, lies, lies in her eyes.” Her lyrics, so exquisitely drawn, could make permanent the bond between heartbreak and a blade of grass.
For every color Lenker evokes on U.F.O.F.—auburn hair, black eyes, and turquoise lungs—the band provides a lush backdrop. It is clear that Big Thief perform with a governor, their Berklee training muffled beneath the creaky, simple melodies of folk music. Fleshed out by the band are two songs from Lenker’s 2018 solo album abysskiss, “From” and “Terminal Paradise.” The former is given depth by a hypnotic drum part from Krivchenia, the latter enhanced by Meek, who adds baritone harmony to Lenker’s reinvigorated vocal performance. Meek’s electric guitar work on the album is just alluring, especially the arcing feedback he adds to the show-stopping “Jenni,” which is, in fact, exactly what a big strobe-light shoegaze jam would sound like if it were made by forest elves.
Some of these nearly imperceptible moments are the album’s best, a production flourish or a small crescendo that flicker like a shoal of fish. If you’ll bear with me on the comparison, it reminds of Radiohead at their most intimate, on 2007’s In Rainbows. The interlocking compositions, the points and counterpoints made by Meek, Lenker, Oleartchik, and Krivchenia have the same elegance of design. But the contraction and expansion of a Radiohead song—the way it leads to somewhere big—is contrasted by Big Thief’s subtle turns they breathe into their arrangements. The feedback hum that leads into the final chorus of “U.F.O.F” or the cluster of harmonies that creep in at the end of “Strange” are more like occurrences or phenomenons, things you rush to capture with your phone but before you get it out of your pocket they’re gone.
It’s hard to put a finger on the exact essence of U.F.O.F. though that is part and parcel its majesty. When I think about Big Thief, I think about “deep ecology,” an environmental philosophy dating back to the 1970s that believes the value of nature is not dependent on how useful it is for human life. U.F.O.F. revels in this, an ancient system of great worth still whirring and rustling along, unbidden to the needs of our world.
There’s also the work of the naturalist writer Rachel Carson, who, in 1941, wrote what it feels like to listen to this album when she wrote about the ocean from its shore: “To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and the flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years … is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.” The name U.F.O.F. suggests a connection to the unknown both within and without, and when Lenker sings of being called through a portal on “Jenni,” she beckons you, too.


The Brooklyn musician stretches the boundaries of his psychedelic soul sound, yielding a record that alternates between hypnotic and languorous.

WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD

Nick Hakim’s compulsively listenable debut album, 2017’s Green Twins, drew from Curtis Mayfield and D’Angelo while adding twists of beat music and psychedelia. His follow-up, WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD, stirs some Parliament/Funkadelic and Sly and the Family Stone into the mix, but the result may frustrate his fans. This time around, Hakim’s tracks are shapeless, often listless, building tension only to let it ebb away. The new record doesn’t just reward close attention; it barely exists without it. Hakim has said that “If I really sink into a recording, I don’t want it to end.” It feels safe to say that he sank into most of the recordings on Will This Make Me Good, and the result can feel endless.
But there are many worthwhile moments here, even if they’re blunted by an exhausting run time. WTMMG is definitively a headphone record, and it reveals itself slowly, sometimes on an instrument-by-instrument basis. The drums on “Qadir,” Hakim’s gorgeous lament for a friend who died at the age of 25, steal up on you; they’re fairly wonderful. The guitar chords on “All These Instruments” are catchy. In the opening of “Bouncing,” a bassline and a chorus of spectral voices come together and combust in a moment of excitement. Listening to the record becomes an exercise in prying its many beautiful moments from their duller surroundings.
“Crumpy,” buried in the album’s back half, is its strongest song, and it’s not a coincidence that it sounds a lot like the tracks on Green Twins. (Hakim said in an Instagram post that it was recorded sometime between 2017 and 2018.) It is, more than anything else here, a song, and its opening lines have more character than anything on the record: “This town has really started to grow on me/My face has become one with the concrete.” In a gesture that expresses a fundamental reluctance at the core of this album, the lyrics on the title track, a meditation on morality and radicalism that should be one of the more compelling songs here, are distorted and difficult to hear.
In a tweet announcing the album, Hakim appended a note that explained a little bit more about its origin. He said that he had been experiencing writer’s block, but that the blockage had been “a build-up to the three months of expression that led to this album.” Still, he confessed, he was “still trying to figure this record out. People have told me that it’s confusing or it’s messy—that’s fine.” Credit Hakim for his self-awareness and his candor. But the people who told him that were right. WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD has plenty of gorgeous moments. Those moments will inspire the most generous listeners to wonder what this record could have been, if Hakim had given it more time to gestate, and maybe edited himself more.

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The Pro Era lieutenant offers golden-age beats and neighborhood-corner rhymes on his solo debut, with echoes of Biggie Smalls and Phife Dawg.

Consumers Park

Stick closely to Chuck Strangers and you just might spy him in a vintage Coogi sweater. That is to say, the 26-year-old rapper and producer cares not one whit for modern trends, swaddling himself instead in the spirit of New York’s golden age hip-hop gods. Emerging as part of Pro Era, a clique of boom-bap beatniks too young to have truly experienced that era, he filed in behind Joey Bada$$ on his breakthrough 2012 mixtape, 1999. Chuck’s convincing retro beats and occasional stints on the mic made him a key lieutenant back then: Take “FromdaTomb$,” where he flips a jazz sample from the video game “L.A. Noire” into a bugged-out opus for him and Joey to pass the weed, talk shit about school, give thanks to Brooklyn, and big up their beer pong skills.
As his more famous friend has matured into a political headspace, Strangers has stayed put in that old-school lane. His solo debut, Consumers Park, drops enough dusty samples, quick-hand record scratches, and neighborhood corner rhymes to appease any historically-minded b-boy. It’s even got shots at mumble rap masters and new-age Soundcloud stars, in the form of the provocatively titled “Style Wars.” Over sentimental piano keys and a reverberating guitar line, Strangers namechecks 2Pac and summons the spirit of the God MC: “Niggas claiming they the best while Rakim still breathing.” Bada$$, meanwhile, chimes in to denounce showboat rappers who care little for the craft. It would be easy to dismiss the pair as salty old-timers in young men’s bodies hating on popular sounds, but the music here feels vital enough to at least make you want to hear them out.
A lot of that has to do with the front-to-back production. “Thoro Hall,” helmed by Los Angeles beatmaker Animoss, is a lavish piece of 1970s uptown cool. The lean soul sample of “Two Pit Bulls,” one of 11 Chuck beats, echoes early Kanye West. The Alchemist-produced “Fresh,” meanwhile, finds Strangers rapping over an old orchestral pop number that could have been snatched straight from a Scorsese flick.
Over these fresh throwback instrumentals, Strangers plumps for a nostalgic vibe. “Class Pictures” could have come off as a series of trite teen clichés, but Strangers personalizes the story in winning ways: Over a minimalist beat that sounds teased from a hacked Gameboy, he recalls getting thrown out of his parents’ house, selling his Jordans so he could take a girl out on a date, and feeling his head explode when he sees his first rent bill.
In these moments, Strangers reveals himself to be a writer with a skill for colorful detail. He’ll drop fun quotables, too. Take the catchy “1010 Wins Pt. 1 & 2,” where Chuck wryly updates classic rap hustlerdom: “Hopping out the Uber, I’m a new-school pimp.” Given how long it’s taken him to fully step from behind Pro Era’s boards, it’s a glorious surprise to find an emcee capable of following the cadences of the Notorious B.I.G., with a streetwise flow that honors Phife Dawg.
While he grew up in Flatbush, Strangers moved to L.A. five years ago. On “No Dice,” his hometown’s influence is at its most clear: You can almost hear the subway cars rumble as the rapper tries to pick up a few dollars shooting craps. As a Spike Lee-esque saxophone wanders in and out of the mix, Strangers links the spirit of Eazy-E to Capital STEEZ, his sadly departed Pro Era comrade. It’s a three-dimensional glimpse at the day-to-day movements and emotions of one man living on the block. That’s the album’s greatest victory: offering a dead-on recreation of old-fashioned sounds while still encapsulating one artist’s distinct personality.


Folk-rocker Steve Gunn's latest album is a rich and amiable meditation about travel and transition, about exploring, wandering, and letting yourself get lost.

Eyes on the Lines

“It's not the destination, it’s the journey” is an old cliché, but one that sounds refreshed and alive on folk-rocker Steve Gunn's Eyes on the Lines. It’s an album about travel and transition, about exploring, wandering, and letting yourself get lost. Every song happens on the way to something else, in the patches between starting out and ending up. Often it's unclear exactly where Gunn’s characters are headed, or why, but the flux in his words and music is vivid. To get caught up in these tunes is to eschew standing still.
Despite all the forward motion,* Eyes on the Lines *is also richly contemplative. As Gunn extolls the virtues of ambling, he gives himself lots of time to observe and ruminate. That reflectiveness is matched by the music, which is rarely static—there's always a shuffling beat or winding hook to keep the motor running—yet never rushed. Gunn’s band sounds confident without being complacent, and breezy in the best sense. The effects can be subtle as a whisper, but these songs continually move the air.
Gunn continually refers to roads, paths, and changes in direction. In “The Drop,” he sings, “I think I missed my flight/Looks like I’ll spend the night,” and sounds pretty happy about it. By closer “Ark,” his blissful aimlessness takes on a Zen-like quality: “Here is where we’ll get nowhere/And everywhere is there now.” It might seem indulgent to pair such beatific sentiments with jammy guitar rock, but *Eyes on the Lines *is actually quite focused.
Though Gunn’s songs develop gradually, the tensions mount and momentum builds. Often that comes from increasing jolts of energy, as in the stair-climbing hooks of “Ancient Jules,” which celebrates losing control in a rush of layered guitars. On “Conditions Wild,” Gunn again espouses letting go—“Feel the path and move along/The traces where you’ll go”—but the tune’s ratcheting swing makes that idea exciting rather than passive.
Nine players are credited on Eyes on the Lines, and you can feel their presence throughout, as each song weaves contributions into a tapestry. It’s been thrilling to see Gunn settle so well into collaboration. From his initial forays as a solo artist, to his excellent duo albums with drummer John Truscisnki, to 2014’s lush full-band album Way Out Weather, he’s continually stepped up without slipping. *Eyes on the Lines *continues that ascent, as does Gunn’s sense of the world as a grand vista to traverse. By embracing the expanse, his music has gotten bigger, and more universal.


Inspired by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, this five-track ambient wonder finds the New York producer letting pulses and motifs overlap until the tracks resemble the inside of a lava lamp.

Roman Birds

Jorge Velez has long been prolific, but that’s been especially true in the past few years. Like many underground electronic musicians, the New York producer has taken advantage of the internet’s self-publishing opportunities—in particular, the direct-to-fans platform Bandcamp—to sidestep label gatekeepers, streaming services, and crowded retailers. (Velez’s Bandcamp page currently numbers 26 releases.) Velez first gained recognition a dozen years ago with blippy disco derivatives for labels like Italians Do It Better, but his output has gradually become more esoteric and inward-looking. He’s still capable of ebullient club tracks, as last year’s excellent Forza attests, but many of his long, undulating machine jams sound like late-night missives to himself.
Roman Birds, released with no fanfare at the end of 2018, feels a little like that: a collection of private thoughts accidentally caught on tape. Purely ambient, it’s his most abstracted music in years, even more so than his 2016 L.I.E.S. album, Animals Disk. At the same time, it’s one of the most inviting things he’s ever done—a short, beguiling record that feels enveloping because it holds its secrets so close. “The best creations for me are the ones that seem to materialize out of nowhere—a few hours lost in the sounds being made, in arranging and removing and creating spaces for every element to breathe and act,” Velez has said of Roman Birds. These five tracks move with a dreamlike logic, their ruminative loops unspooling like unmediated transmissions from Velez’s subconscious.
Every track offers a variation on a murky, overarching mood, and they share a basic structural approach, running multiple sequences in parallel, unsynchronized and out of phase. Their burbling, overlapping pulses eventually come to resemble the inside of a lava lamp. His synthesizers’ microtonal tunings lend a viscous dissonance, a kind of coppery gleam; there are no hard edges, no sharp attacks. It feels like a dream of breathing underwater.
The opening “Heart,” the most skeletal of the bunch, sounds like at least three totally unrelated tracks playing at once. A dubby echo of Pole’s early albums rubs up against a chorus of tree frogs; a graceful synth lead, silvery and understated, glides over the top. A flickering riff during “Memory Spreads West and East” might remind certain listeners of a futuristic sound effect heard whenever Lee Majors used his bionic powers in “The Six Million Dollar Man”; the song’s psychoacoustic timbres and rich stereo processing seem to swim around your head. “Roman Birds” is the most peaceful and contemplative of the lot, with rippling tones speeding and slowing over tangled loops.
During the final two tracks, “Irriss” and “A Breeze You Can Swallow,” Velez’s pulses become thick and gelatinous, while the synths in the high end burn bright and clear, a little like Blade Runner. There’s no real melody here, just the hint of one, which rises up out of the churning depths and hovers, trembling, like an afterglow. It’s remarkable how evocative something made with so few simple elements can be: The music licks like flame, dribbles like water, and settles, ultimately, like layers of very fine ash. Roman Birds was inspired, Velez says, by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that buried the city of Pompeii nearly 2,000 years ago. Eerie, unsettling, and elegiac, it is a strangely moving tribute to that distant tragedy—and among the finest music Velez has ever made.


The Vancouver's 2009 debut Post-Nothing was an emotional blast and also a sonic blur; the follow-up finds everything hitting louder and clearer than before, along with making a huge leap in songwriting technique.

Celebration Rock

Unlike many of 2009's breakout indie bands, Vancouver's Japandroids weren't hanging onto their youth out of nostalgia. For this duo, it literally sounded like a matter of life and death. While the chaotic, fist-pumping anthems of Post-Nothing were as reckless, hormonal, and pleasure-obsessed as any teenager, escapism wasn't an option. Singer/guitarist Brian King and drummer David Prowse have admitted that Japandroids were shutting down the operation after years of going nowhere, and Post-Nothing was as meant as a swan song more than a debut. And for a half hour, they played with the desperation of young men about to lose something vital forever. That urgency is rarely a renewable resource, so as more time passed between the excellent 2010 single "Younger Us" and Post-Nothing's follow-up, the more worrisome its lyrics became. Where they had once vowed to go into adulthood kicking and screaming, had they survived only to surrender? That was the question every time King began a verse with what Tony Soprano called the lowest form of conversation: "Remember when?"
"Younger Us" is now the sixth song on the awe-inspiring Celebration Rock, and nothing has changed except how its context raises the possibility that it doesn't actually have to be about them. This shift in perspective is crucial to understanding how Celebration Rock can somehow manage to completely dwarf its impressive predecessor despite being made the same exact way-- same personnel, same producer, same minimal-overdub policy, same instruments, same eight-song tracklist. Hell, even the cover's pretty much the same. But in writing about something other than the experience of being Japandroids, the duo taps into a power greater than itself to address impossibly vast and elemental topics-- friendship, lust, revenge, art, self-actualization-- with songs every bit as big. The uptick in ragged and resonant guitar-based indie rock has dredged up a lot of deserved Replacements comparisons, but I don't think anything's captured their spirit to the extent of Celebration Rock: it's the Mats who had the chops to pay homage to Big Star, the irreverence to cover "Black Diamond", and the empathy to write "Sixteen Blue".
Combined with the revved-up riff on opener "The Nights of Wine and Roses", King's first lyric ("Long lit up tonight/ And still drinking/ Don't we have anything to live for?/ Well of course we do/ But until they come true/ We're drinking") recalls a time when the Hold Steady shot for something similar. But whether it was their tendency to write from a storytelling perspective or generally avoid choruses in favor of inside jokes, the Hold Steady always created some sort of distance from the listener. I've never been fully convinced that Craig Finn and co. wrote about people who'd actually listen to their music. Not so here, where Japandroids take on something like a Woody Guthrie anthropological approach. "On a lot of this new record, we actually tried to simulate the sound of what we thought the crowd would do during the songs," King told us in an interview back in March. "Dave and I were in the studio just screaming out as if we were in the audience at our own show."
And indeed, Japandroids are dealing with the real populist stuff on Celebration Rock. Sometimes the roots are exposed; "American Girl" gets a nod during the cow-punk rodeo of "Evil's Sway" and "Adrenaline Nightshift" follows in the footsteps of the Replacements' "Alex Chilton", honoring the lineage of transformative rock music by adding to it. But mostly, it's in how Celebration Rock treats every day like the last day of school, raising a glass to the past, living in the moment and going into the future feeling fucking invincible. It offers itself up as a social lubricant, music meant for radios, keg parties, road trips; the extent to which plural pronouns exceed singular is no accident.
And this is all achievable since the first thing you take from Celebration Rock is just how much they've improved in terms of capturing pure sound, everything hitting louder and clearer than before. Post-Nothing was an emotional blast and also a sonic blur, Prowse and King recreating their cramped live show to the point where they may as well have been in mono. Likewise, some songs lived and died on a single riff or lyric. Celebration Rock remains structurally minimal but incredibly dense, fashioning a bionic kind of rock music from the best parts without a moment that lacks crowd-pleasing purpose. The verse melodies take more chances and any time a guitar chord suspends, there's almost always a windup of a drum fill anticipating the duo gleefully throwing themselves into a flashmob-like chorus. If Celebration Rock were much longer than 35 minutes, it might actually be exhausting, the emotional and melodic onslaught so overwhelming that a Gun Club cover of all things is the only time you might be able to catch your breath between the fireworks that begin and end the record*.*
But "For the Love of Ivy" cleaves Celebration Rock in a way that makes structural sense. The first half feels like the one obsessed with classic rock legacy, and initially you're left reeling from the wallop of "Fire's Highway" and "The Nights of Wine and Roses"'s haymaker hooks. There are micro-level pleasures to appreciate too-- the Tom Petty rip might get the crowd going, but that little pivot before the chorus of "Evil's Sway" where it shifts from a breakneck rant to a major-key bridge is really where I hear a band making a huge leap in songwriting technique.
That's even more evident in terms of lyrics, where Japandroids have gone from having almost none at all to packing their songs with an astonishing command of legend and literalism that all but dares you to feel something. Everything burns brighter than it does in reality here ("sexual red" is their color of choice) and most human interactions are likened to explosions. What's the "Adrenaline Nightshift"? It's a "generation's bonfire," the affection of a girl with "a blitzkrieg love and a Roman candle kiss." Still unsure? How about "there's no high like this." I can't intelligently describe "hearts from hell" or why they "collide on fire highway's tonight" but I don't have to. "We dreamed it now we know," King belts and if you don't know, just wait for the guitar solo which doesn't play notes so much as release a blue streak of endorphins. Now you know.
While Celebration Rock is undoubtedly a fun record, it earns its spot amongst their heroes by discovering its emotional ballast during the near-perfect Side B. "Adrenaline Nightshift" and "Younger Us" are psychologically complex songs about simple pleasures of music and companionship that generate the momentum required for "The House That Heaven Built", the crest of Celebration Rock's rising action and the pinnacle of their songwriting. Over its five minutes, "House" grows increasingly heavy without any adding any superficial layers, Prowse's militant drum beat multiplying into tense fills, King's single guitar chord doubling over itself and a near telepathic vocal interplay delivering maybe the most inspiring of Celebration Rock's life-affirming credos*:* "When they love you and they will/ (And they will!)/ I'll tell 'em all they'll love in my shadow." Whether it's an unappreciative boss, an unfeeling lover, or just a hometown you've outgrown, Japandroids got your back. Throughout "The House That Heaven Built", you hear a band accumulating enough confidence to deliver the valedictory message of an album where 95% of the lyrics are immediately available for a senior yearbook quote: "It's a lifeless life with no fixed address to give/ But you're not mine to die for anymore/ So I must live."
This leads into the relatively restrained "Continuous Thunder", the one song here I'm really tempted to misread so as to apply it to Japandroids themselves. There's a devastating admission in the bridge that bookends the intro from "The Nights of Wine and Roses" ("If I had all of the answers/ And you had the body you wanted/ Would we love with a legendary fire?"), and the opening line, "The heart's terrain is never a prairie/ But you weren't wary/ You took my hand," is obviously addressed to a hesitant partner. But it plays to the overarching theme of being fearless in the face of doubt. Of course Japandroids couldn't act with the same urgency they did on Post-Nothing-- they're not in the same desperate situation, and they boldly manifest the confidence of having survived near-death experiences as human beings and as a band.
It'd be nice to think that Post-Nothing was inevitably too good to be ignored, but as a very untrendy band in a city with little support for live music, the odds were stacked against them. One lame show in front of the wrong crowd, the wrong choice of a single falling on the wrong set of ears, and that could've been it, just as they planned it. And yet, they went ahead anyway and soon found themselves playing to rooms full of people who don't have the answers, don't have the body they want, and have plenty of dreams that may never come true. But so what? Whether it's a result of faith in religion, in rock'n'roll, or another human being, two completely normal people can love each other with a legendary fire and it's no more ridiculous than two dudes pushing 30 years old from Vancouver called Japandroids making a rock record for the ages. You can be ambivalent about yourself but believe in something bigger, and the message is right there in the title: On Post-Nothing, Japandroids were worried about dying. This is a celebration of being alive.


Ratking holed up in December to craft this quick-hit follow-up to their debut, and it is a lighter, breezier listen than its predecessor, thanks to the group’s eagerness to toy with its sound and writing process.

700 Fill EP

Ratking’s debut album So It Goes was a Delorean trip through seemingly incongruous corners of New York rap music. Touching on insular Def Jux pessimism and outsized Dipset flair and coated by a shroud of bristly noise, So It Goes seemed to search for an old city, one in danger of being thrust into into the East River by an influx of doe-eyed, affluent young professionals. "Welcome to New York" this was not. Their music can feel like a trek through a forbidding city winter, so it’s fitting that the group holed up in December to craft the quick-hit follow up EP 700 Fill. Though it arrives at the tail end of an uncommonly brutal cold season and literally namechecks North Face jacket models and the grade of their goose-down filling on a song ("Steep Tech"), 700 Fill is a lighter, breezier listen than its predecessor, thanks to the group’s eagerness to toy with its sound and writing process.
Much of 700 Fill was written in just a week by rappers Wiki and Hak over beats that producer Sporting Life pieced together ahead of recording. The lack of an overarching concept gives the new material a freer feel, as Wiki trades grizzled storytelling for battle raps and rhyme acrobatics. Still, there are gems here: "Arnold Palmer" kicks a metaphor comparing the titular ice tea and lemonade hybrid to Wiki’s own biracial heritage while pining for a cold Brisk and a fat J on a rooftop in summer, while "Bethel" triumphantly renounces So It Goes’ high school graduate career anxiety after a year of good press and extensive touring. 700 Fill cycles between fleshed out cuts and looser lyrical workouts like "Lenape Lane" and "Sticky Trap" but even the most perfunctory of these exercises are intriguing.
Wiki’s internal rhyme-heavy raps and Hak’s airy hooks were occasionally too divergent to gel on So It Goes, but with 700 Fill, Ratking seems to be figuring out what to do with Hak. The EP confidently cuts him loose on intros, bridges and outros as a confectionary dusting to Wiki’s gruff veneer, although he’s still working out what to do when he’s tossed an entire verse on "Lenape Lane" and "Bethel". 700 Fill’s not afraid to throw the Wiki-Hak balancing act out the window, though: The two best cuts here are "Eternal Reveal", a gossamer Hak reverie with a short Wiki verse stuck in the middle, and "Flurry", a spitfire Wiki solo cut. Sporting Life’s taking verses too, and the brusque, unpolished humor of his voice is a reminder that home base for the group is Harlem.
With Ratking’s rapping axis exploring new forms of expression, 700 Fill is really a showcase for Sporting Life. He’s eased off the needling skronk of So It Goes and the group’s debut EP Wiki93 in favor of spacier, more melodic textures. "American Gods" and "Eternal Reveal" both revisit Sport’s knack for flaying a sample beyond recognition but drop his trademark willful dissonance, the former in service of a soulful sendup of New York’s Just Blaze era and the latter, an idyllic waltz. Otherwise, Sport prefers affixing trap drums to winding, ghostly synth lines to dizzying effect. Imagine Dan the Automator popping in the Mike WiLL era.
700 Fill is the sound of Ratking pulling its sound apart between albums to feel around for what works and doesn’t. Its off-the-cuff sound and free Bittorrent release strategy suggest a group attempting to sidestep the press and PR machine to sneak around and find itself. "We’re talking about practice," Wiki sneers in "Bethel", quoting a classic press conference from NBA superstar Allen Iverson. "Not the game!" If Wiki, Hak and Sport are just in warm-ups here, the form is still on point.


L.A. producer Will Wiesenfeld incorporates the woozy pitch-shifted samples of local beatmaking peers into surprisingly affecting songs.

Cerulean

Is there too much of a good thing going on in Los Angeles right now? Considering how instrumental Flying Lotus has been in building a scene of likeminded beatmakers, it was a bit jarring when he admitted to Pitchfork that "a lot of halfway kids, come out here, kids who started making beats six months ago, thinking they can get on stage because their drums are off." It's possible that sort of people he might be talking about would share a similar profile to Will Wiesenfeld: 21 years old, hailing from a sleepy, suburban outpost like Chatsworth, and employing non-quantized drumbeats to... gah, make love songs. But Wiesenfeld's C.V. checks out: despite his age, he's a veteran, previously working in the classically-informed but unclassifiable [Post-Foetus] before being invited by Daedalus to open for a Destroy L.A. show featuring FlyLo and Nosaj Thing. It was there that Baths was born, and with Cerulean, he places himself as something of the pop voice that the L.A. beathead scene never realized it needed.
Wiesenfeld reacted negatively on his MySpace at this site's use of the word "blunted" to describe "Maximalist", and I can understand where he's coming from. After all, his live videos on Yours Truly prove that this is music that's physically demanding to compose and perform, requiring deep concentration and focus. It's not a stretch to liken Baths to any number of beat-minded chillwavers, but the crucial difference is that where Toro Y Moi or Washed Out might let their sampled textures go slack to create a beanbag-ready laidback vibe, Baths' debut, Cerulean, is more suited to the weight bench. These beats have muscle. "Maximalist", for example, hits hard, but its force is drawn from sheer density. The track begins as a woozy wave before a low tide ushers in a Books-like sample stating, "It takes a lot of courage to go out there and radiate your essence." These are big feelings Wiesenfeld is trying to capture.
Cerulean has clear influences, but it also has its own point of view. It would probably be overload if the lyrics matched the density of the music, but the themes in Cerulean are pretty simple-- the desire for human connection and occasionally ("Indoorsy") a retreat from it. Wiesenfeld is the kind of artist who would write a Latin-tinged song about forbidden love that would show up on your iPod as "♥". And as much as the front-and-center emotionalism on the album threatens to collapse, the record comes unhinged only once, on "You're My Excuse to Travel", when matter-of-fact lyrics ("I love you enough to drive like an hour from wherever I am to be with you") filtered through a fork-in-socket vocal performance that recalls an electrified Passion Pit.
The sturdiest melody belongs to "Plea", and while the plea itself is a basic desire-- "Please tell me you need me"-- there's something deeper going on. It's addressed to a male figure, and Wiesenfeld lives in the battleground of Proposition 8, so the line, "We're still not valid," lends a crushing blow and possibly gives a new layer of meaning to "♥", where the lovers are on the lam because what they're doing is "wrong." But as with Franz Ferdinand's "Michael" or Bloc Party's "I Still Remember", it shouldn't be applauded simply because it's addressing the difficulty of gay relationships in what's otherwise a sexually blank scene. It should be applauded because it's a fantastic song.
When talking to Pitchfork earlier this year, Wiesenfeld was sheepish about the genesis of his stage name-- he just likes baths. But it's a thread that runs throughout Cerulean, trying to find an escape while remaining down to earth, searching for something magical in our day-to-day lives. Some find it in a drink; some find it in nature. Others will find it in Cerulean.


After the breakup of the art-rock band This Heat, guitarist/vocalist Charles Bullen released a solo album as Lifetones in 1983. Now reissued, it remains a strange amalgam of post-punk’s desolation set to dub reggae’s sunny lilt.

For A Reason

On "A New Kind of Water," the penultimate track on This Heat’s last full-length album, Deceit, guitarist/vocalist Charles Bullen sings in a strangulated sneer: "Of course, it's innate we're selfish/ But what if there's not enough to go round?" That he was embittered and frustrated at the start of Margaret Thatcher’s reign is obvious and in a recent interview, he spoke of his disenchantment of playing in a band at that time: "I’m singing to the people who get lulled into thinking, ‘Oh, don’t worry about air pollution. They’ll invent a new way to breathe.’"
This Heat broke up soon after that. But before Bullen threw himself into pursuits outside of punk (activism and education on the politics of health and agriculture), he self-released a solo album as Lifetones. Written and recorded during the bleakest of times for an activist such as himself, after Thatcher’s landslide re-election in 1983, For a Reason remains a strange amalgam of post-punk’s desolation set to dub reggae’s sunny lilt. It’s also been impossible to hear since the reign of the "Iron Lady," left off of numerous rounds of This Heat reissues over the ensuing decades. There have even been two reissues of bandmate Gareth Williams’s equally rare Flaming Tunes record in the intervening years.
Thankfully, Lifetones’s lone album is part of Light in the Attic’s recent This Heat reissue campaign. And while it’s not nearly as vital or serrated as that band’s output, there’s something enchanting about For a Reason. While 1983 was the year that another British punk band that absorbed and wore its reggae influences on their sleeves were releasing their biggest album in Synchronicity, Bullen’s take on Jamaican dub feels gloomy, sullen, deeply personal.
While anger was often the default of punk and post-punk vocalists alike, and one can feel the feral howls of Charles Heyward on a This Heat track like "Paper Hats," Bullen’s voice is disarming and dry in comparison. It doesn’t arise too often on the album, but when it does, its artlessness gets multi-tracked into a mass chant that at times reminds me of old British folk singers, delivering their message flat and without affect. Tinny keyboards and distant dub drums open "For a Reason" and Bullen imparts a sense of purpose with the echoing incant of "Do everything for a reason." Against that skitter of snares and needling guitar, he repeats phrases like "Love the life you live/ live the life you love" and "You have to work so hard" until they act as a mantra.
Too often, the album meanders through instrumentals, not quite getting into a deep groove. Dub effects swaddle an instrumental like "Decide," its one-chord guitar riff turned into effervescence against the echoing drums while "Distance No Object" adds a trill of melodica and chintzy keys to the mix. But unlike most reggae, the beats here are lo-fi, oddly stiff and British. The album’s most interesting track is  "Travelling" which forgoes Jamaican tropes entirely and instead roves into Bedouin territory. Full of snaking violins, woodwinds in an Eastern mode, it’s only in the last minute of this mesmerizing track that Bullen sings in his stuffed nose drone: "In the past I was that way/ now I’m this way/ No one is to blame." He sounds like an old punk opening his worldview and finding another reason to continue to fight the system.


MIKE continues a long run of great records with his self-produced 10th album, a self-assured current of shifting emotional states.

Beware of the Monkey

MIKE’s music celebrates the relief of finding the right words. When his inner monologue tumbles out into the world, he basks in the weight of the disclosure. His love of the spoken word is almost devotional; in his heady songs, voicing a thought or emotion is akin to channeling the divine. On Beware of the Monkey, his self-produced 10th album, such revelations come frequently and forcefully. The record is self-assured and polyvalent, a current of shifting emotional states that MIKE’s exquisite word and production choices shape into rich affirmations.
MIKE sets the tone early. “This my only chance left, to prove to y’all, I’m the best rapper in the fuckin’ world,” he says in the opening seconds of “As 4 Me,” a combo of confidence and urgency that’s present throughout the record. His normally lethargic raps now come with vigor and resolve as he takes stock of the comforts his music career has provided him and vows to support his family and himself. If past albums were journals where he logged secret fears and private observations, this one is a treaty—a public and binding mission statement. “Live like it’s my all, gotta give a bunch,” he says on soulful opener “nuthin i can do is wrng.” His verses throughout have the conviction of oaths.
MIKE has long been a commanding performer whose wounded baritone could draw you in even as his hazy words pushed you away, but here he is inviting and forthcoming. He’s not exactly an open book, but his constant mentions of forward momentum make his oblique references to anxiety and stress more engrossing. “Navy in the sea, shit we steering till the sea waveless,” he raps on the woozy “Ezcema.” Backed by dancehall legend Sister Nancy on the upbeat “Stop Worry!,” MIKE honors his late mother and pledges to push through pain and doubt. “I peep your hustle and ya brains ma/I hold the deed, I can’t fumble on the game shot,” he raps, the last line accented by the sound of a basketball crisply spilling through a net. This sure-shot demeanor makes his words feel even more carefully chosen.

Amid the flexes, MIKE still waxes about depression and losing loved ones, but he seems more intent on weaving those emotions into a wider patchwork of experiences. On the aptly named “Tapestry,” he ties his woes to his achievements. “Dread and blasphemy/Sitting ’laxed in my apartment where these raps put me,” he says with gratitude, his dexterous slow flow expanding and compressing his words like a lung processing air. He has never branded himself a sadboi or bluesman like, say, Rod Wave or Morray, but he clearly seeks to ballast his melancholy with his passions and interests: basketball, punchlines, romance, family. A weepy voicemail from his sister that closes “Ipari Park” and opens “Swoosh 23” captures the range of the music—her tearful words are as jubilant and encouraging as they are glum.
The production embodies that scope as much as the lyrics and interludes. Like his peers and collaborators Navy Blue, Ohbliv, and KeiyaA, as his producer alias dj blackpower, MIKE leans toward slowed soul loops that wallow in the emotive contours of the human voice. The beats on Beware of the Monkey don’t outright break from that formula, but MIKE diversifies his sources, flipping bits of R&B, jazz, and neo-soul. The slow jam sampled on “What Do I Do?” sways like lovers embracing on the dancefloor, highlighting the swing in MIKE’s loping cadences. The shrill horns looped on “No Curse Lifted (rivers of love)” ring out like rooster crows, contrasting MIKE’s muffled delivery. “23 around the earth, see the world different/Went deep into the dirt, seen a pearl glisten,” he says, the verse digging through his mind like a hand through loam.

Self-affirmation has been the core of MIKE’s music since early confessionals like “years/alone” and “ROCKBOTTOM/PEACE TO COME,” which find comfort in saying the grim stuff out loud. So even when he’s boasting and rightfully declaring himself the builder of a wave of lo-fi rap on “What Do I Do?” MIKE is still boosting his self-esteem. On Beware of the Monkey though, he expands his idea of self to encompass his inner world as well as the circles, bonds, and sounds that sustain him. As MIKE expresses himself with increasing confidence, the miracle of speaking up feels less like his coping mechanism and more like a resource anyone can tap.


Filled with numbing vulgarity, warmed-over nostalgia, and actual nursery rhymes, YG’s third studio album is a mindless step backward.

Stay Dangerous

With his 2014 triumph of a debut, My Krazy Life, YG transitioned from an anonymous L.A. mixtape rapper to a dynamic artist establishing a fresh lane for West Coast rap in the wake of Kendrick Lamar’s ascendance. He took a cache of buzzy and bouncing beats from his friend DJ Mustard and offered a gripping take on growing up in Compton, an origin story filled with charming swagger and bristling confidence. His second album, Still Brazy, showed a different side entirely. YG was shot in a recording studio while making that record, and with his back against the wall, he was able to plumb the depths of 2Pac-indebted nihilism and political consciousness. Scowling, hardened, and paranoid, he let his hurt and fear unspool over eerie soundscapes largely provided by an unknown producer named Swish. Still Brazy also revealed YG to be something of a profound soul-searcher. “When the police gon’ stop pressing me?/When my bitch gon’ stop stressing me, second guessing me?/Will the truth really set you free?” he asked on “I Got a Question” with the morbidity and hopelessness of Hamlet.
But if you’ve followed YG over the past year, from Cardi B and Post Malone collaborations to a new look anchored by patent leather dress shoes and tiny glasses, you would never know that Still Brazy even existed. Stripped of the raw desperation that once made his rapping so gripping, Stay Dangerous, YG’s third studio album, spends most of its 15 tracks toasting success, repping for the gang, and picking apart women. It’s fun and flashy and club ready. But for YG, an artist we’ve come to expect the unexpected from, someone currently standing at a career-defining intersection, Stay Dangerous is an exercise in predictability.
Maybe the biggest change on Stay Dangerous is simply YG’s rapping. He’s more performative than ever here, his voice speeding and slowing with winded breaths, jumping clumsily between low-pitched mumbles and elongated whines. YG’s never been a master lyricist—his flow and excitement carry his rhymes—but even his most boneheaded proclamations usually have a role in a bigger picture; here, they more often than not land as dead weight. Throughout the album, his verses are increasingly one-note, filled with repetition, dumbed-down jokes, and eye-rolling word play. “Handgun,” an infectious A$AP Rocky collab, has YG locked in from the jump over an ominous beat, but throwing out lazy, meaningless nursery rhyme verses (at one point, he actually recites “Duck Duck Goose”). This is Drunk Uncle YG—wasting his energy leering at women and shouting at hooligans from his porch.
Stay Dangerous has YG once again teaming up with DJ Mustard, but the producer is off his game too. No longer hip-hop’s go-to hitmaker, he’s instead become a purveyor of syrupy pop and cheap imitations of his old songs. “Can’t Get in Kanada,” “Suu Whoop,” and “Too Brazy” (saved by a fiery guest spot from Mozzy) flaunt superficial layers of trademark Mustard bounce, yet they end up falling apart due to YG’s hammed-up flow. At times, it feels like the two of them are playing caricatures of their former selves.
When YG and Mustard do find their stride, Stay Dangerous becomes incredibly fun. Calling back to their early mixtape days, the two serve up “Too Cocky,” which flips Right Said Fred’s “Too Sexy” into a sweaty jerkin’ club song that Mac Dre would’ve slid all over. “Power,” a team up of YG, Mustard, and Ty Dolla $ign, is a winningly raunchy ode to sex. And “666” may be the one sonic experiment that works here, with Mustard handing the reins over to Mike WiLL Made-It, who builds a twinkling Atlanta fantasy world for YG to hiss out a sing-songy ode to hedonism: “Damn this beat got bass/Everything that’s bad for me right here in my face.” And then YoungBoy Never Broke Again shows up, and you forget YG was even there.
Stay Dangerous is void of the narrative and thematic coherence of YG’s first two projects, and as a result, momentum ebbs and flows: For every silly, successful club track, there’s a clunker. The Quavo-featuring “Slay” is the most egregious of all, with a lazy chorus—“One time, if you a bad bitch/Two times just for the savage/All you wanna do is just slay”—seemingly delivered for the sole purpose of providing future Instagram captions. On the Lil Rich-produced “Deeper Than Rap,” YG shows flashes of his talent as a storyteller, sounding genuinely concerned about something other than women, money, or fame: “I got a daughter now/I’m barely around,” he huffs. “Should I choose this life?/Shit, I don’t know.” For a moment, his angst feels real. But then he directly follows those worries with, “I’m in love with stank hoes/When I say stank hoes, I don’t mean stank/I mean the ones that fuck the first date/Dick all in they face!” What, dude? It’s disgusting, nonsensical, and particularly bizarre considering those previous lines about his daughter. What’s most disappointing, though, is that the incessant, inane bludgeoning of Stay Dangerous feels purposeful. For the first time in his career, YG sounds like he’s trying too hard.
Closer “Bomptown Finest” has YG finally removing the mask he’s been wearing throughout the album. His voice returns to the one we’ve come to recognize, harsh and spit-filled, like the sound of throwing a handful of dirt against a wall. Backed by hazy guitar strums, YG beats his chest and stakes his claim, recapping his life and celebrating his hustle. “The past year I been makin’ all profit/My whole team got it/Then somebody shot me,” he raps, “That’s just the devil my nigga/But thank god it didn’t end with a shovel my nigga.” Through this lens, it’s easier to see Stay Dangerous in a more forgiving light: YG escaped a near-death experience and earned the right to party. Yet it’s never that easy. On Still Brazy’s title track, when YG rapped, “Got some problems, a whole lot of ’em/So I stay dangerous,” that final phrase meant looking deeper and seeing clearer, taking risks because there was nothing left to lose. Those problems, whatever they were, most likely haven’t gone away. Now, though, it seems like staying dangerous only means playing it safe, hiding behind tiny glasses that fracture the world into thin, incandescent slivers.


The Long Island rapper’s latest is a restatement of his core principles, recited in the hallowed style of a religious scripture.

RR2: The Bitter Dose

Roc Marciano makes the unflinching pursuit of money sound spiritual. It’s a philosophy he’s been espousing since 2010’s Marcberg, which revitalized the Long Island rapper and producer’s career after previous stints in Busta Rhymes’ Flipmode Squad and as part of the underrated, Pete Rock-endorsed crew the U.N. Marcberg gained Roc Marci friends in high places: If you believe ?uestlove’s Twitter chat, it’s an album the Roots drummer and Jay-Z have discussed at length. More importantly, it established Marci’s talent for crafting beautifully gutter music. Sampled loops of old soul songs still flecked with static and drums laid ominously low in the mix conjure up a sort of quiet storm boom-bap. Just like the music, his grainy and blasé drawl resonates with a nonchalance that makes his grisly threats even more menacing—like when he’s recommending dumping bodies in the Hudson River, or warning he’ll physically bite someone’s face off if provoked.
The albums Roc Marci has released since Marcberg have tweaked the formula: 2012’s Reloaded brought in an expanded cast of producers to cinematic effect; 2013’s Marci Beaucoup seemed more like a mixtape with a roll call of guest MCs; last year’s Rosebudd’s Revenge amped up the pimp paraphernalia. His latest, RR2: The Bitter Dose, feels like a restatement of Roc Marci’s core principles, recited in the hallowed style of reading from a religious scripture.
The funeral march piano loop of “Respected” instantly sucks you into his shadowy domain. He shuffles onto the track—outfit embellished with “fox fur on my evening coat”—and outlines his mission: “I give these heathens hope.” What follows for most of the next 13 songs is vintage Marci, with beats hooked around melancholic loops and lyrics that bandy wanton boasts about flooding the scene with “blood stones,” calling out “cuckolds,” and forming bonds with firearms: “Knew I was gully since the young ‘un with the runny nose/Even though we drove here in luxury it was a bumpy road/I had the pump, it feels good to have company though,” he relays on the stirring “Bohemian Grove.”
Going deeper, the ’80s sci-fi analog synths of “C.V.S.” prompt a glimpse into Roc Marci’s original come up: “187s, felons and ‘caine sellers/Back when [Big Daddy] Kane was selling I had the big chain with the name embedded/Made some bread and my ladies aided and abetted/The Mercedes ain’t rented, bitch, I was saving up to get it.” It’s aspirational rapping on the order of the back cover of Eric B & Rakim’s Paid In Full. Or, as Marci puts it, “This is some bucket list shit.”
Of course, after nearly 40 years of recorded hip-hop history, there’s nothing particularly fresh or innovative about rapping about the pursuit of cash per se, whether it’s gained through illicit means or as reward for an MC’s prowess. (Even Wild Style, the 1983 film that helped spread hip-hop across the world, features a prescient scene where old school party rocker Busy Bee celebrates a rap battle victory by spreading banknotes on a hotel bed to make a giant letter B.) What elevates Roc Marci from his contemporaries is that the accumulation of cash—or even what you spend it on—isn’t the climax of his hustle. The real payoff comes with learning the rules needed to translate financial success into respect. Again, there’s a tinge of East Coast rap religion to these tenets. Tellingly, the two guest MCs on the album, Action Bronson and Knowledge the Pirate, both reference Jesus Christ during their verses.
Bringing this theme home, the album’s closing track, “Power,” begins with Roc Marci ad libbing over a gospel-influenced soul song that includes a sung interpolation of John 3:16. “We play it by the book here,” he states. “Niggas think they can come in the game, change the rules, it’s always little corny niggas with no rules, no morals and ethics.” Then after rapping about bringing his family out of poverty by virtue of  “printing money, I’m the dollar tree,” the ad libs return to coin the claim that Roc Marciano’s been inching towards all album: “I’m black Jesus out here, I’m black Jesus.”


This 3xCD/DVD set documents Davis shows from 1967 with his second great quintet. It offers a chance to hear one of the greatest bandleaders of the 20th century push his collaborators and be pushed in turn, into a creative frenzy.

Miles Davis: The Bootleg Series, Volume 1: Live in Europe 1967

The Miles Davis quintet of the mid-to-late 1960s occupies a weird place in the trumpeter's canon. Critics (this one included) will tell you that it isn't just the best band Miles ever led, but one of the choicest small groups in jazz history. If you're not a jazz nerd, though, you may not know it existed. This is because the outfit-- rounded out by tenor saxist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams-- doesn't register on Miles' pop-cultural timeline. The group issued a string of brilliant studio LPs during its 1965-68 run, yet there's no Kind of Blue or Bitches Brew among them; by this period, Miles had pushed way beyond the sumptuously chilled-out sound of the former but hadn't arrived at the murky psych-jazz of the latter.
So if the Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams band (often called Miles' second great quintet, in deference to his stellar 1950s group) was transitional, a checkpoint between consensus masterpieces, why should you care that there's a new box set featuring previously unreleased live recordings from this time? Given that nearly every microphase of Davis' career has been expanded into box form by this point-- ask an expert before gifting a random one at Christmas-- casual consumers are right to be suspicious. But Live in Europe 1967, which presents five concerts from October and November of that year on three great-sounding CDs and one DVD, is no footnote: This set, Volume 1 in a new Davis Bootleg Series built on the Bob Dylan model, offers a chance to hear one of the greatest bandleaders of the 20th century push his collaborators into a creative frenzy and be pushed back in return.
Aside from Carter, each of these players would become giants of electric jazz (Davis and Hancock transitioned into something like pop stardom), and the period documented on this set represents their farewell to their bebop roots: both an ecstatic celebration and a ballsy deconstruction of how small-group jazz had been played for the previous two decades. Live in Europe 1967 won't soundtrack any romantic dinners or inspire dorm-room acid trips, but it does show off the central thrill of jazz-- spontaneous interplay among dangerously skilled players-- as well as almost any other collection you could name.
That "among" is key. As much as this set testifies to the leader's own vision, the real takeaway is the virtuosity of other musicians, and how Miles' anti-hierarchical aesthetic spurred them toward the riskiest, most engaged performances of their careers. No player on this set reaches more than Tony Williams. A famously precocious drumming prodigy-- he first recorded with Miles in 1963 at age 17-- he was exactly the kind of daredevil Miles was looking for, a player naturally inclined toward pure outrageousness. (By 1967, he'd already explored cutting-edge improvisation on deeply unusual masterworks such as Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch.) Williams is in particularly wired form here on the version of "Footprints" from November 2 in Copenhagen (disc two). During Miles' trumpet solo, the drummer casts himself as Donkey Kong to Davis' Mario, throwing out flaming barrels for the leader to navigate; Williams keeps time on the ride cymbal, but runs a near-constant interference pattern of asymmetrical fills and swelling cymbal flurries. (You can hear the legacy of Williams' pot-stirring percussion style, rarely better documented than on Live in Europe 1967, in players like Deerhoof's Greg Saunier, who loves to slide around a song's central pulse, sending bits of rhythmic shrapnel flying at his bandmates.)
As dazzling as Williams sounds, what really catches the ear is how the entire band provides the improvisational boldness that Miles was after. On the Copenhagen "Footprints", Herbie Hancock plays like a deranged outsider artist. Instead of providing a sturdy foundation underneath Wayne Shorter's saxophone solo, he offers squiggly little phrases, like jumbled fragments from a 20th-century classical score; on the outro, he answers the horn players' theme statement with a mocking paraphrase. Ron Carter, meanwhile, constantly reconfigures the piece's waltzing bassline, jumping between half-time and double-time, and mixing in percussive slaps and low, droney digressions.
These performances represent an upending of the soloist-and-background model of small-group jazz up to this point. Miles' second great quintet wasn't the first to play this way; by 1967, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Cecil Taylor had each exploded the conventions of 1940s and 1950s jazz in their own ways. Yet none of these other artists had figured out how to combine deep, risky interactivity with such sustained coherence. Many of the pieces on Live in Europe 1967 play like cooperative action paintings, with everyone allowed but no one entitled to be the center of attention at any given time, and with the overarching logic of the compositions keeping chaos in check. It's at this stage, just before the quintet's dissolution-- over the next two years, as Miles engaged with electric jazz, Carter would exit, followed by Williams and Hancock-- that the conversation is at its most lively and lucid.
Crucially, though, freedom, as it was interpreted by this band, didn't always equal volume and density. Some of the strongest moments on Live in Europe 1967 are also the calmest. During "Masqualero" from the November 6 Paris concert (disc three), as Miles plays a poignant, slow-building solo, Hancock settles into a haunting, repetitive figure and Williams quiets to a whisper, marking faint tempo on the hi-hat. Later, when Hancock's solo begins, Williams drops out entirely, leaving the pianist and Carter to play a delicate, free-floating duo. During the same set, on "Walkin'"-- a staple of Davis' 50s repertoire-- Williams and Carter guide Shorter into an up-tempo frenzy and then gradually fade to silence. The saxophonist moves into a rare unaccompanied passage, playing an abstracted kind of bebop, full of tumbling phrases and murmuring digressions.
By late 1967, thanks in large part to John Coltrane (who had passed away in July) and mavericks such as Albert Ayler, shrieking, high-density free jazz was in full flower. As you can hear in Live in Europe 1967's many boldly stripped-down moments, Miles and his band were aiming for a different kind of freedom, one where aggression coexisted with near-stillness. Funk was in the mix too: During the October 28 "Masqualero" in Antwerp (disc one), Williams and Carter keep up an infectious Latin pulse behind the soloists, providing a danceable base for Shorter to tear off his heated phrases and also foreshadowing Davis' groove-based experiments, which would begin in earnest on 1969's In a Silent Way.
Miles clearly savored this band's broad dynamic and emotional range, and constructed its sets accordingly. Unlike the quintet's studio recordings, the concerts on Live in Europe 1967 take the form of unbroken medleys. On four out of the five sets here, the tempestuous "Footprints", a Shorter original, segues into the Thelonious Monk favorite "'Round Midnight", which begins each time as a beautifully sparse dialogue between Davis and Hancock. Other transitions keep these long sets feeling brisk. In Antwerp, a lengthy version of Miles' hard-swinging, midtempo "No Blues", gives way to a turbulent three-minute sprint through Hancock's "Riot"; in Paris, "No Blues" snaps into Shorter's moody, Spanish-inflected "Masqualero", a striking shift that immediately reengages the ear. Live in Europe 1967 marks the first time we're hearing this band engage with such a wide range of material; a previous second-great-quintet live box, The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965, featured mainly well-worn jazz standards.
As much microscopic variety as there is in these shows, it's important to note that Live in Europe 1967 documents a single tour with a more or less fixed set list. Davis did vary the repertoire occasionally-- trying out "Walkin'" and the standard "I Fall in Love Too Easily" in Paris-- but buyers interested in a more diverse overview of what this band could do might be better off picking up one of their studio releases (E.S.P., from 1965, and Nefertiti, recorded just a few months before the shows heard here, are both great starting points). Don't let the repetition scare you away, though. All five concerts here have their own rewards and idiosyncrasies; the best path through the box is to treat each segment like the concert it originally was and savor it individually.
The DVD, which documents two shows not featured on the CDs, is a sharp addition. There's a bit of arty treatment-- often two players appear superimposed in the same frame-- but on the whole, these are tasteful black-and-white concert films that put you in the midst of the onstage action. You see the youthful Williams bearing down fiercely on his ride, Shorter entering a closed-eyes trance while playing, and Hancock cocking his ear, tuning in to his bandmates' improvisations with genuine curiosity. And in the middle of it all is Miles: his usual, unflappable self. This is one of our last glimpses of the trumpeter in pre-psychedelic mode; the sequined pants and wraparound shades would arrive by 1969, as Miles flipped for Jimi and Sly and started co-billing with future rock legends at the Fillmore and the Isle of Wight, but here he sports natty suits (the sidemen wore tuxes), embodying the same model of 50s cool that won the trumpeter a mention in a 1960 Esquire list of "Some of the Best-Dressed Men in the United States."
That shift in fashion wasn't just superficial; Miles' music changed drastically in the period following Live in Europe 1967. LPs such as 1969's In a Silent Way and 1970's Bitches Brew are still some of the most compelling jazz-crossover experiments ever attempted. And Miles' sidemen would make equally important contributions to the movement that came to be known as fusion: Shorter with the vibrant Weather Report, Hancock with his funky Mwandishi and Headhunters bands, and Williams with Lifetime, one of the grittiest and heaviest of the early jazz-rock groups.
These impending transitions are part of why Live in Europe 1967 is essential: You get to hear exactly how these virtuosos were behaving just before the big change occurred. They were still operating in an old mode, small-group acoustic jazz, but they were interrogating it relentlessly, seeing how far they could stretch its conventions without ditching them altogether. Before they could break into the larger world of pop, they had to reach jazz nirvana, and that's what they attain on Live in Europe 1967. The aesthetic here is less easily definable than those heard on Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew, but it's no less significant. At its heart, jazz thrives on bold, sensitive interaction in the moment, and Live in Europe 1967 represents the pinnacle of that practice.


Neil Young’s polarizing 1982 album, influenced by new wave and heavy on the Vocoder, has long divided fans and critics. But beneath its cold exterior is a record with a lot of heart.

Trans

It’s the end of the world. The sky is an ominous shade of red, and the air is thick with poisonous fumes. Some people are silhouetted with an eerie glow while others are dying of radiation poisoning. “It shoulda been me that died,” Neil Young says, riding a bike alongside actor Russ Tamblyn. Tamblyn shrugs him off, and the two make plans for the evening. Tomorrow may never come, but tonight they’ll take their dates to the drive-in, where Tamblyn begs Neil not to play his ukulele or to sing “in that high squeaky voice.” So goes the opening scene of the 1982 film Human Highway, an apocalyptic comedy written and directed by Neil Young under his long-standing nom de plume Bernard Shakey. It’s a muddled and paranoid work, filled with forced slapstick humor and wild jams with Devo. In one scene, the members of the Ohio new wave group haul toxic waste in a flatbed truck down a lonesome highway. “I don’t know what’s going on in the world today,” Devo’s Booji Boy says to himself as images of skulls flash across his bandmates’ faces, “People don’t seem to care about their fellow man.”
This is where Neil Young’s head was at the top of the ’80s. Human Highway—Young’s third picture, following the psychedelic Journey Through the Past and his quasi-concert film Rust Never Sleeps—shares a title with a song from 1978’s Comes a Time. “Take my head, and change my mind,” he sang in its chorus, “How could people get so unkind?.” With its gentle acoustic guitars and fantasies of misty mountains, “Human Highway” plays like a eulogy to a specific type of Neil Young song. The Canadian hippie who sings in a high squeaky voice about packin’ it in and buyin’ a pick-up is only one side of Young. In fact, a decade into his solo career, Neil Young had developed a reputation more like an actor, someone remembered more for the parts he played than the unifying presence behind them all. After Comes a Time, he stepped away from his role as a ’70s folk singer, with 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps introducing a decade of restless exploration. The world was getting meaner, and Neil Young was tired of being typecast as merely an observer: He wanted to take part in the madness.
Although they both speak to the increasingly uneasy state of Young’s mind, “Human Highway,” the song, never appears in Human Highway, the film. Instead, the movie is mostly soundtracked by a record called Trans, released that same year. In the film, Young gets into character by contorting his face, wearing a pair of dorky glasses, and slapping motor oil on his cheeks. On Trans, he transforms himself by setting his songs in a distant future and filtering his voice through a variety of synthesizers, most notably (and infamously) a vocoder. The warped new wave of Trans suits the movie’s otherworldly (if endearingly chintzy) backdrops. You believe that this is the music that would play in the film’s shoddy roadside diner, where Dennis Hopper cooks sausage patties and swats at radioactive, laser-pointer flies. In fact, the movie might be the best context to hear Trans—an album that’s often treated more like a symbol (for artistic reinvention, for failed experimentation, for creative self-sabotage) than an actual entry in a body of work characterized by prolificacy and versatility.
Part of what makes Neil Young’s discography so rewarding for new listeners is that it’s filled with great entry points: the classic rock radio staples with more depth than you imagined (After the Goldrush, Harvest); the intimate passages that, even after all these years, feel like uncovered secrets (Tonight’s the Night, On the Beach); and the bizarre left-turns like Trans that inspire cult fandom just for existing. And while Trans sits comfortably along with Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait in a lineage of puzzling-if-fascinating failures, its mythology is only part of the appeal. Reed and Dylan always felt like provocateurs—for Dylan, even finding Jesus felt like a means of snapping back at critics. But Young’s transformations have always felt less divisive, more natural and earnest and instinctual. Even when he followed Trans with Everybody’s Rockin’, a slight collection of anti-capitalist rockabilly songs, he held the latter record in high esteem: “As good as Tonight's The Night, as far as I'm concerned,” he’s said.
Young has made similar claims about Trans. “This is one of my favorites,” he said grimly, holding the album art to the camera during a 2012 interview, “If you listen to this now, it makes a lot more sense than it did then.” Even if Trans is still confusing, it’s a point well taken. In the context of Young’s discography—rich with remakes and sequels, major reunions and minor pet projects—Trans has only grown more triumphant and singular as it’s aged. He would do new wave again, he’d mess with his voice some more, and he’d even return to the idea of full-on concept albums. But he would never make anything quite so conceptually confrontational—a challenge to even his most ardent followers’ understanding of what a Neil Young album sounds like. “If I build something up, I have to systematically tear it right down,” he’s said, referring to his penchant for moving quickly from one project to another, carrying with him few traces of the previous work. It’s remarkable, then, that Trans—an album ostensibly designed to “tear down” a specific image of Neil Young—ends up standing for exactly what’s great about him.
Like so many of Neil Young’s albums, Trans is filled with mysteries and unanswered questions (Why is his 1967 Buffalo Springfield song “Mr. Soul” on here? Why is a track called “If You Got Love” listed in the lyric sheet but not on the actual album?) It’s hard to think of an artist with as many classic albums who has wrestled so constantly against the medium: even his canonized work has a raw, unfinished quality to it. “If anything is wrong, then it’s down to the mixing,” he’s said about Trans, “We had a lot of technical problems on that record.” Fittingly, much of Trans concerns man’s fight against technology. A song called “Computer Cowboy (aka Syscrusher)” details a team of rogue computers robbing a bank, with Young’s voice zapped down to a digital squelch. In “We R in Control,” a choir of robots lists the aspects of daily life—traffic lights, the FBI, even the flow of air—in which humans no longer have a say. Thematically, these songs—with their dystopian images of a world run by screens and numbers, where humans have everything at their fingertips but remain unhappy—have aged pretty well.
It’s the sound of the record that makes it more of an ’80s relic. No matter what format you listen to the album on (and it’s still never been released on CD in the U.S.), you feel as though you’re hearing it from the tape deck of a passing car. Even with longtime collaborators like producer David Briggs, guitarist Ben Keith, and drummer Ralph Molina, these songs sound very little like Young’s timeless ’70s work. The goofier, beat-centric tracks from his previous release, 1981’s shaky Re-ac-tor, certainly set a precedent. But despite its reputation for being aggressive and inscrutable, Trans is, at its heart, a pop record. It’s filled with hooks and beats and synths informed equally by krautrock and MTV. In “Sample and Hold,” guitarist Nils Lofgren—whose solos added an element of bluesy desperation to Tonight’s the Night but would soon light up football stadiums on Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. tour—points to future hits like Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” and Oingo Boingo’s “Weird Science.” When the Trans Band played “Sample and Hold” during the album’s comically over-the-top tour—an endeavor that Young claims in Jimmy McDonough's authorized biography Shakey lost him $750,000 (“And we sold out every show,” he adds)—Neil and Nils stalk the stage with rock star charisma, trading solos and bleating into their talkboxes. In the sweet, melodic “Transformer Man,” Neil’s vocoder actually adds an element of purity to his voice, as layers of wordless choruses shower him. Listening to these songs, it’s not impossible to imagine that Trans could have maybe, possibly, in another world, been a pop hit.
But that world is in a galaxy far from this one. While the critical reception to Trans was not nearly as harsh as legend would have you think (Rolling Stone compared it to Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy; Robert Christgau gave it a higher mark than Harvest), it was a commercial dud—a rough start for the fledgling Geffen Records label, who also released Joni Mitchell’s adult contemporary turn Wild Things Run Fast the same year. Trans wasn’t the album that convinced David Geffen to sue Neil Young for making uncharacteristic records—that would be its follow-ups *Everybody’s Rockin’ *and Old Ways, the country record that plays like a made-for-TV adaptation of Harvest. But the idea had to be floating through David Geffen’s head when he first heard this record. At once Young’s coldest sounding album and his most vulnerable, Trans makes its flaws immediately apparent as soon as you press play—from the murky production to the mixed-bag tracklist.
When you listen to Trans, you’re really only hearing two-thirds of it. Only six of the album’s nine songs were intended for the actual project. The other three came from a different album entirely, one that concerned young love and ancient civilizations. It was to be titled Island in the Sun, and Geffen Records quickly steered him away from the concept. Album opener “Little Thing Called Love” stems from those sessions, and it’s the record’s clearest connection to Young’s more celebrated talents. Its chorus riffs on the title of one of his most beloved songs (“Only love,” he barks in a chipper tone, “Brings you the blues”) and the ensuing chord progression would eventually find a new home in the title track of 1992’s Harvest Moon. While demonstrating the fluidity of Neil’s catalog, the song also makes for a striking introduction in its own right: a singalong before the apocalypse, when human connection would become as archaic as LaserDisc copies of the Solo Trans live show are today.
The Island songs also help highlight a major theme of Trans: it’s an album about affection. At the start of the decade, Neil Young and his wife were enrolled in intensive therapy with their son Ben, who had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy. The program’s long hours slowed Young’s hectic work schedule and opened him up to writing about fatherhood. His struggles to communicate with his child and the technology that connected them inspired the lyrics of Trans and even informed the way he recorded his vocals: “You can’t understand the words, and I can’t understand my son’s words,” he explained in Shakey. In that context, Young’s naked voice in respective side-openers “Little Thing Called Love” and “Hold on to Your Love” represents the catharsis of an emotional breakthrough. You understand the words he wants you to understand—and most of them just say, “I love you.”
Even with Human Highway serving as a vehicle for the album, Trans was originally conceived with a different film project in mind. “I had a big concept,” Young said in Shakey, “All of the electronic-voice people were working in a hospital, and the one thing they were trying to do is teach this little baby to push a button.” That metaphor pops up a few times throughout the record, most squarely in “Transformer Man,” a song Young's openly dedicated to his son. “You run the show,” he sings to him, “Direct the action with the push of a button.” The Trans film might not have moved the album to the commercial heights Neil and Geffen imagined, but available evidence suggests that it would have at least made its digital world feel warmer, more grounded and productive—the qualities fans had come to expect from Young’s work. Instead, the songs would have to stand on their own, their meaning buried inside them, like a constellation of stars you have to connect based on your own perception.
Near the end of Human Highway, a concussed Young enters a long, inscrutable dream sequence in which he, among other things, gets bathed in milk, attends a desert ritual, and becomes a world-renowned rock star. When Russ Tamblyn wakes him, they celebrate the mere fact that he’s alive. For the film’s final 10 minutes, Neil lives with a newfound sense of purpose and ambition (“We could do it,” he says, “We could be rhythm and bluesers, we could go on the road!”). Even with the fiery explosion on its way to squash his dreams and reduce the world to a pile of ash, it’s a brighter ending than what Trans leaves us with. In the lost paradise of “Like an Inca,” Young envisions himself in the aftermath of a nuclear bomb, crossing the bridge to the afterlife, at once happy and sad and totally alone. It’s a fitting finale for a heavy album, one whose only brief glimmers of hope come from our connection to one another. “I need you to let me know that there’s a heartbeat/Let it pound and pound,” Young sings in “Computer Age.” His voice is masked beyond recognition, but the pulse—steady and wild—is unmistakably his own.


The sprawling and spectacular Cindy Lee album is an essential trove of music. Each song is like a foggy transmission from a rock’n’roll netherworld with its own ghostly canon of beloved hits.

Diamond Jubilee

This may be the greatest radio station you’ve ever come across. Unless it’s multiple stations talking over each other, in and out of range. Sounds arrive in strange combinations; nothing is quite exactly the way you remember. Did that classic rock band really have a synth player, and why did they pick a patch that sounds like a mosquito buzzing through a cheap distortion pedal? And those eerie harmonies swirling at the outskirts of that last-dance ballad by some 1960s girl group whose name ends in -elles or -ettes. Did they hire a few heartbroken ghosts who were hanging around the studio as backing vocalists? Or are these fragments of other songs, other signals, surfacing like distant headlights over a hill, then disappearing once more?
Or maybe this is Diamond Jubilee, the sprawling and spectacular new album by Cindy Lee: two hours, 32 songs, each one like a foggy transmission from a rock’n’roll netherworld with its own ghostly canon of beloved hits. Like much of Lee’s past work, its spiritual center is girl group music, reduced to a single girl and reflected through a hall of mirrors. From there, it extends toward the far reaches of the radio dial, and sometimes beyond: the warped classic rock of “Glitz,” the fragmented disco of “Olive Drab,” the sunburnt psychedelia of the title track, the nocturnal synth-pop of “GAYBLEVISION.” “Darling of the Diskoteque” sounds like Tom Waits and Marc Ribot masquerading as Santo and Johnny; “Le Machiniste Fantome” like a cue from some fictional Ennio Morricone score to a film about 9th-century monks. But even at its most idiosyncratic, the music conveys the archetypal yearning of pop. Nearly every song is about a lover who’s gone, and the dream that their loss—the solitary moonlit nights, the resolve to move on, the resignation to wallow forever—might be as romantic as the love itself.
Lee is the glammed-up alter ego of songwriter, guitarist, and drag performer Patrick Flegel. In a different lifetime, they were the frontperson of Women, a brilliant and volatile Canadian post-punk band of the late 2000s. They flamed out quickly after two albums, an onstage fistfight, and the unrelated sudden death of one member, but their spindly guitar lines, asymmetrical rhythms, and surprisingly sweet melodies have remained influential on wide swaths of DIY rock. Flegel’s old bandmates formed Preoccupations and soon gravitated toward the crisp sonics and propulsive grooves of new wave. If Preoccupations found a stable middle ground between their old band’s extremes, Flegel pushed further out in both directions, donning a blue bob wig and Nancy Sinatra boots and releasing a series of albums as Cindy Lee that set pure pop songwriting alongside confrontational blasts of feedback.
Flegel sometimes speaks of “going rogue” from the music industry in interviews, and has released Cindy Lee albums both via small labels and on their own. Nothing about the presentation of Diamond Jubilee, which they self-released with no promotional campaign, signals a change from that outsider ethos. Aside from its demanding length, there is the question of how to hear it: As of this writing, the only officially sanctioned methods are to download WAV files from a Geocities website in exchange for a $30 suggested donation or cue up a single 2-hour YouTube video with no track breaks. Flegel may not have intended Diamond Jubilee as a breakthrough to a wider audience, but the exuberant generosity of the music seems to prime it for one. The recording fidelity remains proudly out of step with contemporary slickness, but there are no clattering sound collages or noisy assaults on the listener this time around. The songs are immediate and inviting in ways that Cindy Lee’s previous discography has only hinted at.
Though Flegel’s songwriting tends to reference the modes of earlier decades, Diamond Jubilee’s melange of styles, united by sheer force of imagination and the haze of home recording, can’t help but recall the ’90s of the artist’s youth. Guided by Voices, with their voluminous collections of imaginary yesteryear classics, loom large. So do Yo La Tengo, in the way they can make even howling feedback come across like a whispered sweet nothing. But where those bands made a virtue of a certain amateurism—the sense that they were cobbling together anthems with the only four chords they knew how to play—Diamond Jubilee is a work of highly accomplished craft.
Flegel is the sort of songwriter who could have gotten a job at the Brill Building had they been born a few decades earlier, and the sort of guitarist whose delicate subtlety could send much showier players back to the woodshed for more practice. Their singing, often but not always delivered in a reedy and androgynous falsetto, is emotionally supple, toughening the sad songs with resolve and softening the rockers with plaintive streaks. It is rare, these days, to encounter a musician so classically skilled and so unprecious about it, with no apparent aspirations toward stuffy respectability or commercial success.

You could look at Diamond Jubilee’s ramshackle outer appearance as a sort of declaration of allegiance to the underground, or you could see it as an aesthetic choice. If Flegel’s songwriting often gives the sense that someone or something is missing, so too do their musical arrangements: additional percussion here, or a bigger bass sound there, to bring them out of the mist and closer to the material world. But if you listen in a certain way—like mentally focusing on some object in the periphery of your vision without actually moving your eyes to center it—a full orchestra might flicker to life for a second behind a keyboard’s chintzy strings preset.
Had Flegel given Diamond Jubilee a traditional album rollout, “Kingdom Come” would have made a fine choice for the lead single. (Some other contenders, for those who would prefer to peruse the highlights before submitting to its overwhelming totality: the funky and vaguely menacing “Stone Faces,” the triumphantly melancholy “If You Hear Me Crying,” the soaring “Flesh and Blood.”) Its twinkly guitar lines offer one of the album’s best instrumental hooks, and its rhythmic bounce evokes no single era or style in particular while drawing elements from several different ones, demonstrating Flegel’s ability to transmute their influences into something uncannily out of time. Its opening lyric, sung sweetly from some far corner of the left stereo channel, could serve as Diamond Jubilee’s thesis statement: “The other day/I could have sworn I heard you call my name/All through the melodies of yesterday/’Til kingdom come.”
All over the album, Flegel similarly entwines images of music and loss, favorite songs standing in for past friends or lovers, and vice versa. If you were to count the frequency of every word in the lyrics—there is, of course, no official lyric sheet—“melody” and “memory” would both surely score well, not too far below “you.” The devastating ballad “Don’t Tell Me I’m Wrong” makes them interchangeable. “Without you close to me/All I’ve got’s this song/And your memory,” goes the first chorus; by the second one, the memory has departed, and Lee has only a melody in its place.
With that in mind, the marathon duration of Diamond Jubilee seems not just like the result of an especially talented and prolific songwriter’s years-long hard drive accumulation—Flegel has been talking about the album’s scope, and mentioning it by name, at least since 2020—but also like a manifestation of the music’s themes. Even after many listens, it is difficult to hold the specifics of every single song in your mind; there are simply too many of them to allow for perfect recall. Which one is your favorite, again? “Dracula,” “Always Dreaming,” “All I Want Is You”? The one with the guitar solo, the one with the eerie harmonies. The music is always on the verge of receding to that phantasmic pop realm from which it came, where love always lives on, in memory and melody alike.


The new album from Copenhagen electronic artist MØ—aka Karen Marie Ørsted—ditches shock-rap for more mature but no less immediate electro-pop exploring the swirling confusion of young adulthood.

No Mythologies to Follow

Five years is a long time, especially in your early 20s, as you try on certain identities and cast off others in search of one you feel more or less comfortable in. Case in point: five years ago, Karen Marie Ørsted was writing Peaches-aping novelty songs titled "When I Saw His Cock", which included raps as trashy as her beats. Fast forward half of a decade, and the only thing the music of the Copenhagen native, now 25, shares with her earliest demos is an omnivorous musical appetite, one that synthesizes a number of of-the-moment sounds on her self-assured debut as MØ, No Mythologies to Follow.
The album finds MØ (pronounced somewhere between "Muh" and the sound a cow makes) ditching shock-rap for more mature but no less immediate electro-pop that explores the swirling confusion of young adulthood. Its sound is one that's equally as indebted to the forward-thinking Scandinavian pop scene she comes from as it is to the sounds of Southern rap and modern bass music. It's the kind of output you'd expect from an artist who's grown up with instant, unlimited access to music from every corner of the globe. This melting-pot approach pervades No Mythologies to Follow, which was produced almost entirely by Ronni Vindahl, a fellow Dane who makes up one-half of No Wav., the production team that includes Robin Hannibal, aka the dude responsible for the sensuous, restrained arrangements found on last year's debut from Rhye, Woman.
MØ and Vindahl are a good pairing, sharing an easy chemistry as collaborators; Vindahl's production keeps up with but never eclipses MØ, and she doesn't bat an eyelash at his production, which has some bite. Most of the album's twelve tracks are built on top of a sturdy bedrock of tick-tick-ticking 808s and swarms of pulsing synths; "Maiden" and "Red in the Grey" get the throb of post-dubstep right, and glockenspiels and horns play nice with molasses-thick claps and a gurgling bassline on "Pilgrim". There's often a lot happening on these tracks, and this is only compounded by the fact MØ loves her multi-tracked vocals and ad-libs. It has the effect of turning her into a one-woman girl group—the massive lurch of "Fire Rides", for instance, leaves plenty of space for MØ to harmonize with herself, and she stuffs the track to the brim with ecstatic shouts and fists-in-the-air woops.
At this point you're probably getting the impression that No Mythologies to Follow isn't exactly a study in minimalism; combined with her everything-is-a-hook style of songwriting, MØ ends up building a rather outsized persona for herself over the course of the album. It's never of the one-note all-caps variety, but it sometimes obscures nuanced performances and her ability to simultaneously nail a bunch of conflicting emotions, often within the span of a single line. "I never want to know the name of your new girlfriend" she wails on "Never Wanna Know", both because she's not sure she can handle the piece of information but also because she recognizes that knowing gives her another reason to obsess over her ex rather than move forward and on.
At the heart of everything is MØ's voice, a powerful and versatile tool comfortable expressing emotional turmoil as it is wearing a fuck-the-haters scowl. You can almost see her stretching on the tips of her toes as she soars into the clouds during the chorus of the aforementioned "Never Wanna Know", and she plays a convincing house diva on "Slow Love", a Balearic slinker that recalls John Talabot at his loosest. And although it makes no apologies for the bits and pieces it takes from her contemporaries, No Mythologies to Follow doesn't work because it assembles the right ingredients in the right amount—it works because a likable persona is something you just can't teach.


On a collaborative album, the Canadian indie stalwarts draw inspiration from domestic life during lockdown, penetrating the familiar haze with sharp insight.

Julie Doiron / Dany Placard: Julie & Dany

Julie & Dany

Pandemic-era art has given us a shorthand for a collective experience—sourdough starters, whipped coffee, Pelotons, loneliness, confinement, boredom. Over time, adopted by enough of the bored and lonely, repetition sands away the emotional texture until these signifiers feel flat and impersonal. Canadian indie stalwarts Julie Doiron and Dany Placard’s Julie & Dany, recorded in their New Brunswick home during the province’s mandatory isolation from neighboring Quebec, adopts the lofty goal of infusing the staid with fresh meaning. These loose, unvarnished tracks—evocative of the couple’s earlier work in groups like Eric’s Trip and Plywood—penetrate the post-traumatic haze with sharp, keening insight.
When the parameters of life shrink to the size of a home, so does the well of inspiration, but Doiron and Placard sift through the domestic like expert miners. Opener “Dégèle” plunks us into the loop of their routine after a humanizing false start in the first few seconds. As the song gets going, so do we—taking in a little fresh air, dancing lifelessly in the kitchen, planting flowers to stave off creeping fear. Specificity makes this thrumming, harmonized chant—a chorus that translate roughly to “I’m going outside for a little air,” and later, “The earth’s gotta thaw”—all the more convincing, plucky guitars charging ahead like someone determined not to think too hard or too much.
“Lying,” two songs later, is when reality catches up—grief, fear of an unknown future—and its simple, incantatory lyrics sail on Doiron’s plaintive vocals. Intimacy might be a natural consequence of these homebound songs, written by two people cohabitating through a crisis, and the use of regional phrases like “Chu” (“I am”) instead of formal French “Je suis” (also “I am”) lends further charm: We’re pulled in close, sharing internal monologues and mayonnaise from the fridge nearby. Through this diction, the duo further anchors the record not only in a particular (bad) year but also in a particular place, a particular lens through which to see the world.
Julie & Dany’s experiments with degrees of scale are another canny way to ensure the record stretches beyond its physical confines. Where “Lying” and “Vénus” are soft and inward-facing, “Jean-Talon Market” opts for bombast and electric riffs, David Bowie’s “Heroes” with the grit and insouciance of a Liz Phair song. “Tomate” slogs through sludgy guitars and barroom vocals, imbuing the planting of tomatoes with imminent danger. This nimble back and forth between defiance and defeat means nothing gets stale: Sounds and feelings go from large and sweeping to huddled in a corner, whispering into a microphone, a polarity that rings true to lived experience.
Not every track is a revelation. “What If I Said” sounds like a paler derivation of Doiron’s excellent 2004 song “Dirty Feet”; even her evocative, signature vocal style can’t find its pulse. Closer “My Brain” feels more like a sketch than a finished song, too spare and twee to stick the landing. Still, this record is an artifact that achieves what many attempts to depict isolation have not—distilled emotional truths, of varieties both universal (“I’m sick of my partner”) and specific (“I’m sick of these tomato plants”). The album shows its seams, a DIY aesthetic that’s defined both artists’ careers, and this intimacy offers welcome relief. If the approach hasn’t changed, the world has, and Julie and Dany foray into new territory with comforting familiarity.


On his second Big Black Delta LP, Jonathan Bates delivers a maximalist take on electro-pop. On these far-reaching songs, it feels like he’s coloring with every crayon in the box, just because he can.

Trágame Tierra

As a descriptor, "electronic music" is pretty expansive; at a time when nearly all music is produced with the aid of computers, it’s also fairly meaningless. Still, if you attempted to take stock of everything that could be fairly placed under that tent, you might start with experimental music, move through dance music’s various permutations and end up at the sort of post-Postal Service pop you’d expect to hear in a car commercial. Trágame Tierra, the latest full-length from Mellowdrone frontman and touring M83 member Jonathan Bates, feels like just such a survey of all things "electronic." This is a record that pivots from industrial noise to radio-friendly pop on a dime, which counts Debbie Gibson among its guests yet closes with 10 minutes of synth drone. To call Trágame Tierra ambitious would be an understatement.
Admittedly, Bates’ adventurousness and disregard for genre lines results in some novel combinations. "Well My Heart" layers a folk-country vocal over racing synth arpeggios and an '80s pop rhythm. "Overlord" starts out as a pounding house number yet lands somewhere closer to the Knife’s deviant Scandinavian electro-pop. "Kid Icarus" is powered by an appropriately chiptune-like beat but counts a Brian Wilson falsetto among its vocal quirks. And the aforementioned Gibson feature carries "RCVR" to a place where The Cars, Daft Punk, and Vangelis meet.
For the most part, though, Bates’ stock in trade here is middle-of-the-road electronic-pop, the sort of music you might find yourself fidgeting to while standing in line at the pharmacy. There’s an arena-sized ambition in these songs—widescreen production, huge choruses, layer after layer of instrumentation and vocals—but Bates’ ability as a songwriter to deliver on that intent is limited. As eager to please as these songs are, none of them can really be called catchy or memorable; big hooks abound but none of them stick.
Lyrically too, Trágame Tierra offers far too little to hold on to. On nearly every song, it feels like Bates is aiming for maximum reliability but often ends up with phrasings that feel wholly generic: "Gonna grow old in California," "You can bring me up/Just to bring me down," "Well my heart, she is a-melting." One song finds Bates reassuring the listener by repeating the phrase, "It’s OK" ad nauseam. These sorts of lyrics only reinforce the feeling that many of these tracks are more jingle than song.
To be certain, Bates does have plenty of potential as a musician. For evidence of this, just look to some of the minor details tucked away in these songs: the wobbly, mournful synths that open up "I See Fit," the delicate, chiming melodies of "H.A." and "Strange Cakes," the joyously bent notes that scurry through "RCVR"’s coda. However, there are just too many ideas crammed into these songs and far too few that connect. On Trágame Tierra, Bates is both audacious and original, two qualities that are hard to fault. But in the absence of focus, listening to Trágame Tierra can feel like looking for dinner in a candy store: there's a lot of brightly-colored packaging to take in but not much you can really sink your teeth into.