Dark Matter is Randy Newman’s first album of new songs in nine years and his smart mix of cynicism and sentiment is fully intact.

Dark Matter

I can think of no songwriter as fruitfully unhappy as Randy Newman. Not angsty—there are angstier—and not depressed in the poetic, European sense, but unhappy: that cow-eyed state in which the good stuff doesn’t feel that good and the bad stuff you just learn to laugh at. For 50 years he has delivered us obliquely sentimental, trend-free music about racists, losers, lovelorn deadbeats (“Marie”) and children who tell their parents to come visit anytime—but do call first (“So Long Dad”). His jingoists dream of liberation through atomic war (“Political Science”) and his wife-beaters complain of having to sit down when they pee (“Shame”). His is a world in which it sucks to be at the bottom and sucks to be at the top but at least the people at the top are rich (“The World Isn’t Fair”). Did I mention most of these songs feature an orchestra? Randy Newman can get an orchestra to pull tears from you like a pickpocket. His sleight-of-hand is to bring out a monster and make you see the human underneath. He makes the better part of his living writing music for Pixar movies, and has been awarded several Grammys for the work.
Newman’s new album is called Dark Matter, a phrase intended both in the scientific sense and the figurative one—“it’s a dark matter.” He has lost little of his bite and none of his humor. Comfortably into his 70s, with what many would call a very successful career behind him and still time ahead, he seems less interested in polemics than before, less interested in leveraging sentiment with disgust, giving over—ever so slightly—to a softer intention.
Take “On the Beach,” a breezy piece of café jazz about a guy named Willie who just…never left the beach. Willie isn’t out to screw anyone and yet—like all Newman’s American losers—he will invariably screw himself. Decades on, he’s still talking about the advent of the Hobie Cat the way some boomers talk about the Beatles—harmless, lost, reconciled to a past that isn’t coming back to pick him up anytime soon. Elsewhere, set to a piece of high-striding brass-band music, “Sonny Boy” tells the true story of Sonny Boy Williamson, a blues singer who travels north only to find another blues singer making a living under the name Sonny Boy Williamson. Sonny Boy II ended up touring Europe and became royalty for white blues-rock bands like the Yardbirds and the Animals. Sonny Boy I was stabbed in the head with an icepick during a robbery in Chicago; his last words were reportedly “lord have mercy.” In Newman’s version, the lord does in fact have mercy, and Williamson becomes the first and ever blues singer to enter heaven, a mixed blessing that makes him feel lucky, lonely, and lame all at the same time.
Smart but never intellectual, given more to the words we use over the words we know, Newman peppers these stories with little references to the Great Migration, climate change (the swells on Willie’s beach keep getting bigger), global politics, and American myth. Another song, “Brothers,” uses an imagined conversation between a worried John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert about the Bay of Pigs invasion as a pretext for John confessing his love for the music of Cuban singer Celia Cruz. Newman, whose songs have been successfully covered by walking moose knuckles like Tom Jones and Joe Cocker, continues to sing like a great writer. Does it even need to be said that the people who love him really love him and the people who don’t just think he’s weird?
The centerpiece of the album is its opener, “The Great Debate.” An eight-minute piece of musical theater pitting ambassadors of science against those of religion, the song will at the very least serve as a stress test for anyone uncertain of whether or not they want to listen to a whole album by Randy Newman. As a sucker for irony, I admit I sometimes take too much pleasure in the simple contrast of Newman’s sweet, old-timey sound with the flat-footed cruelty of some of his lyrics. “The Great Debate” is, on that count, one of his most evolved musical jokes, one in which heathens—like Newman himself, who gets called out by name—are won over not by the wild, tambourine-beating sounds of a Pentecostal choir but the smooth, half-secularized thrust of soul. No longer the explicit, “I’ll take Jesus every time, yes I will,” the message becomes “Someone is watchin’ me”—God as a metaphor for reassurance, companionship, the friend who walks with you even when you walk alone. An atheist, history buff and avowed leftist, Newman is, as I take it, nodding to what he considers the universe’s true high power: music. Of course the church started to sing.
Newman has often joked that he would’ve been more successful if he stuck to love songs. Probably true. Personally I can’t begrudge people their escape—the world is a terrible place. But then he writes something like “Wandering Boy.” Tough, tender, mysterious and sad, the song narrates a simple neighborhood party—the kind Newman, who has spent most of his life in the same area of Los Angeles, has been going to since he was a child, through adolescence, multiple marriages and children, the kind that innocently and without fanfare becomes a fulcrum for the vicissitudes of life.
The scene is this: A father stands to thank everyone for coming, but strays quickly from his script into the memory of a son. “The Little Caboose, we called him, the light of her life. And that’s who I’m waiting for.” It’s not his only child—he mentions four others—but one is enough to lose. Death? No, he didn’t die. He’s still kicking around somewhere, maybe close, maybe far. Everyone at the party knows who the father is talking about—they remember him at five, standing on the diving board—but has been too polite, too ashamed to ask.
Newman based the song in part on the memory of a neighborhood boy his daughter swore would be president one day. He ended up lost, addicted to heroin. Discussing the song with Pitchfork, he said, “There’s no net in this country. In Sweden, you can’t get down there to the gutter. But you can here. So I tried to imagine what it would be like if one of those homeless guys that I see on the street a little ways away from here were one of my sons.”
Newman has often put himself in these situations, the voice for characters nobody should have to listen to, curator of moments nobody wants to name. It is a painful, interesting way to be. And if it isn’t love, then what does one call that feeling, and is there any more worth writing about.


Latest from the electronic producer refines the sounds of his previous records, creating what is, paradoxically, Hecker's most dramatic and most oceanic album.

Harmony in Ultraviolet

Tim Hecker's fourth full-length under his own name isn't so much a new direction as a refinement. The differences between 2002's Haunt Me Haunt Me, Do It Again, 2003's Radio Amor, and 2004's Mirages are apparent but incremental. On each of these records, Hecker plays with pink-into-white noise, tinkling synths that float between the speakers, the occasional over-the-airwaves voice, and knotty samples of guitar with the Earth-drone pedal pushed to the jet-black metal.
But while Hecker continues to revisit some of the same sonic elements, he also seems to be listening closely to what works and playing with structure. So his latest record, Harmony in Ultraviolet, has none of the docile synth instrumentals he borrowed from Brian Eno on his debut, nor the ultimately distracting disembodied radio chatter from the follow-up. Rather, he's taken what's left and focused, zoomed in, amplified, and stretched.
Harmony is, paradoxically, Hecker's most dramatic and most oceanic record. The former implies twists, arc, and carefully planned change intended to evoke specific effects; the latter suggests stasis, immersion, and a state of dreamy contemplation. Harmony manages to be both these things by surprising as it mesmerizes, with Hecker reigning in or tempering any jarring effects just enough to keep the self-obliterating sense of endless drone intact. One key is that the tension never really dissipates, varying only in degree and quality. The opening "Rainbow Blood" sets the scene with a screeching and trebly drone, like an orchestra tuning up in the darkened theater where Rebecca del Rio performed in Mulholland Drive, and for the next 48 minutes, Harmony keeps the pulse elevated.
Tuneful passages like the Tangerine Dream sonata "Chimeras" leading into the Windy & Carl-like blissout of "Dungeoneering" have a relatively lulling effect, but the mood remains dark and uneasy. The four-part "Harmony in Blue" at the album's center, which starts nice and warm, is like a gradually descending slope into a coal black pit. The first section begins with gently modulating drones and only a bare minimum of glitchy accents; the second is dubby and aquatic, with upper harmonics lopped off; the third is a slightly lighter and wispier; and the fourth gathers an increasingly thick blanket of distortion around chilly, held tones.
By the time the suite has finished, the record is zipping along on a tightly ratcheted wire, which leads to the heightened drama of the final act. When the floor gives way following "Harmony in Blue IV", during the explosive "Radio Spiricon", it can seem nearly breathtaking, especially at higher volumes. Hecker's synths here are massive, sounding like something huge that's been torn in half with great force, exposing a bouquet of prickly and splayed binding material. We're suddenly seeing the guts of the thing, the album turned inside out. That the following "Whitecaps of White Noise" gets even crazier with its surges of distortion but then bleeds into a funeral organ drone only adds to the emotional punch. This closing 22-minute suite is some of the finest abstract electronic music of the laptop era.
What Hecker delivers when he's at his loudest and most noise-drunk is the thing that will always bring to mind My Bloody Valentine: a sense of submitting to oblivion. The violence inside tracks like "Spring Heeled Jack Flies Tonight" and the rougher bits in the "Whitecaps" section is oddly comforting, like it shows a way to tune into and accept the destructive chaos of nature. That this racket which Hecker specializes in-- top-heavy with prickly static, a dark undercurrent of synths providing a wobbly foundation beneath-- can engender such a pleasant sense of surrender is the key to his appeal. Harmony in Ultraviolet is sensual body music of a very particular kind, and it's the sort of record that asks a lot. But if you trust it and go along, it knows exactly where to lay its hands.


It's easy to romanticize Beck as the scruffy wannabe who lived on friends' couches for a year, recording a ...

Sea Change

It's easy to romanticize Beck as the scruffy wannabe who lived on friends' couches for a year, recording a new song every day on a beat-up four-track; absorbing Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music and old school hip-hop with equal enthusiasm. The aptly titled "Loser", his biggest and most career-defining hit, was recorded in a friend's living room for kicks. His first live performances were on hijacked mics at other peoples' gigs: he'd just step up with a guitar or harmonica between acts and entertain while the often bemused next band set up their drums. On the homemade tapes and scrapped-together compilations that comprised his earliest recorded output, Beck cobbled together all of his influences-- noise, hardcore, country, rap, folk, grunge, R&B;, found sound and classic rock-- and melded it into his own junkyard punk.
Over subsequent releases Beck continued to refine the art of juxtaposing achingly poignant folk songs with lo-fi guitar freakouts, collages of dialogue and noise, and Radio Shack hip-hop. With Odelay he managed to pull all of these disparate elements together in an artful way, blending nimble dobro guitar figures, say, with sample-heavy backbeats, vocal samples, banjo, a loop of Van Morrison covering Bob Dylan-- bottles and cans, or just clap your hands. At live shows, or on Chris Douridas' morning program at KCRW, Beck would often play never-recorded songs he'd likely composed just a few days before playing them, exquisitely voiced and effortlessly brilliant.
What happened to that guy?
Mutations, the genteel quickie Beck recorded on the cheap in 1998, was largely a knee-jerk reaction to the daunting task of ever having to follow up Odelay at all. His label even reneged on a provision that allowed him to release records on independents, and it's little wonder: with Mutations, shit-hot producer Nigel Godrich had crafted a slick, almost clinically glossy record, with clean guitars that never buzzed or hit bum notes. And while "Cold Brains", "Nobody's Fault But My Own", and "Canceled Check" are great songs, lesser tracks like "Lazy Flies" and "We Live Again" were shamelessly gussied-up with tired space-rock bleeps and whooshes-- and I won't even get into the made-for-Starbucks faux-exotica of "Tropicalia". No offense to Pitchfork alum Neil Lieberman, who praised the album mellifluously, but in 2002 we're up to our asses in "futuristic roots albums". Let's call Mutations what it was: a soft-rock One Foot in the Grave made with Pro Tools and a heart of steel.
Perhaps it's telling that his seventh studio album is titled Sea Change-- for rather than the smooth, utterly inoffensive quirks of Mutations, Beck opts for abrupt changes in temperament and lush instrumentation. Recording again with Godrich and his regular band (Smokey Hormel, Roger Manning, Joey Waronker, and Justin Meldal-Johnsen) pounding out a track a day over an intense two-week period, Sea Change rightfully feels like a sequel to Mutations with no alarms and no surprises. In fact, opener, "The Golden Age", would feel right at home on Mutations itself, with its gentle mid-tempo strumming, lonesome wails of pedal steel and predictable space-rock flourishes.
A cloud of mind-numbing melancholy hangs over Sea Change, from the world-weary grandpa-Beck voice he employs on most of the tracks to its unfailingly morose lyrics. "These days I barely get by/ I don't even try," Beck sings in "The Golden Age", and that's just the tip of the jagged iceberg that looms ever larger in Sea Change's periscope. It's obvious just from perusing the song titles-- "Lonesome Tears," "End of the Day," "Already Dead," "Lost Cause"-- that the 2002 model Beck is one sad sack (and it's impossible not to armchair quarterback which of Beck's celebrity girlfriends inspired such gut-wrenching bile). But though the songs are jam-packed with typical Beck imagery (stray dogs, moonlight drives, diamonds as kaleidoscopes) there's very little here that measures up to the eloquence of "She is all, and everything else is small."
It's pretty obvious what Beck is shooting for with Sea Change: that timeless quality that his heroes Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Nick Drake seemed to exude with every recording. But here, as on Mutations, he confuses lyrical simplicity and standard-tuning, key-of-C songwriting with the unpretentious directness of his idols. Too often Beck saddles these songs with half-baked cliches and easy rhymes: "sky" always rhymes with "die", "care" always rhymes with "there". He doesn't even sound like himself on many of Sea Change's more paint-by-numbers cuts. On "Guess I'm Doing Fine" Beck emotes in an unnatural croak that's likely the product of a digitally decelerated vocal track, but he mostly just sounds constipated. Likewise with the karaoke-honed Gordon Lightfoot impression Beck turns in on the hoary "End of the Day": "It's nothing that I haven't seen before/ But it still kills me like it did before."
Elsewhere, Beck mines Mutations' folky space-rock vibe with more artful and ear-pleasing results. The chiming guitars and groaning strings of "Lost Cause" creak and sway like the tired masts of a pirate ship; washes of backward sound snake through the melody like restless ghosts. "The Golden Age", with its chorus of tinkling glockenspiels and cavernous echo, is a pleasant diversion in the vein of Mutations' "Cold Brains." An unnecessary remake of 1994's "It's All In Your Mind" is tarted up with the omnipresent synth blips and drums, but some tastefully distant banjo licks and Suzie Katayama's swooning cello lend the song a resigned majesty the original certainly never portended.
But it's Sea Change's most daring tracks that are ultimately its most satisfying. Beck's father, David Campbell, contributes inventive string arrangements to three cuts: "Paper Tiger" is a low-key triumph, with a minimal bed of bass and drums punched up by sudden, deep string attacks-- Beck's "Glass Onion," if you will; the deliciously overwrought "Lonesome Tears" is an uncomfortably raw display of emotion, with an unpredictable melody and unbelievably tortured chorus ("How could this love, ever-turning/ Never turn its eye on me?" Beck questions as the song builds to a cathartic tsunami of violins and ear-splitting noise); the moody, cinematic "Round the Bend" cribs the cadence and nocturnal vibe of Nick Drake's "River Man", augmented by plucky upright bass and Beck's subdued, almost intentionally slurred vocal.
But Cap'n Beck saves his strangest songs for the second half of the album, with the enigmatic "Sunday Sun" bathing odd, disjointed lyrics ("Jealous minds walk in a line, and their faces jade the strain") in a Brian Wilson-inspired glow, with mixed but cosmetically acceptable results. The unsettling sea shanty "Little One" is a return to form, with a fetching minor-chord hook and creepy lyrics ("Cold bones tied together by black ropes we pulled from a swing") intoned in a convincing Kurt Cobain growl.
He knots it all together, sorta, with the anticlimactic closer "Side of the Road", which plods along awkwardly amid busy slide-guitar work and a rambling electric piano. It's a far cry from the back-porch perfection of "Ramshackle", but given what it reveals, it'll do. "Something better than this, someplace I'd like to go," sings Beck in a tremulous voice seemingly decades beyond his 32 years. "To let all I've learned tell me what I know/ About the kind of life I never thought I'd live."
On Sea Change, Beck sounds intentionally world-weary, but it's the songs themselves that sound labored. Is it no longer enough for Beck to write profound, genre-bending tunes that stand on their own? Does he really need the crutch of suffocating overproduction and bold strokes of orchestration to shock us into caring again? Two turntables and a microphone, man!
'Cause there was a time when Beck didn't need Nigel Godrich to space out his white-collar blues. A winter spent in Calvin Johnson's basement, an afternoon spent with a beatbox and a slide guitar in a friend's living room was all he needed to pluck otherworldly songs from the fertile Beckscape of desolated views, crazy towns, lost causes and stolen boats. Given how much soul-searching obviously went into this record, it's distressing how little soul the finished product actually has. If there's anything the self-absorbed murk of Sea Change illustrates with unmistakable clarity, it's that Beck has forgotten how to connect with his inner loser-- and it's nobody's fault but his own.


On his first solo acoustic outing in a decade, the former Harry Pussy member shifts from deconstructing the guitar to reassembling it according to his own idiosyncratic design.

Bill Orcutt: Jump on It

Bill Orcutt is an unlikely elder statesman of traditional American guitar music. Though he looks the part, with his professorial eyeglasses and John Berryman beard, his confrontational work with ’90s noise rockers Harry Pussy offered little indication of where he’d eventually end up. Harry Pussy called it quits in 1997, and then, after more than a decade of silence, Orcutt returned in 2009 with a set of frenzied improvisations for his four-string acoustic Kay guitar, summoning Lightnin’ Hopkins and Lightning Bolt in equal measure. Since then, he has carved out a niche for himself with deconstructions of the Great American Songbook, solo electric compositions, and Reichian exercises in counterpoint. Like any American master, Orcutt is too eccentric and unpredictable for direct comparisons. His influences are clear—the dissonant improv of Derek Bailey, the athletic fingerpicking of John Fahey, the ethereal spaciness of Loren Connors—but these points of reference outline a completely new constellation.
Orcutt’s early solo records consisted of cubist blocks of sound cascading from his guitar with the speed of late-game Tetris bricks. When he went electric in the middle of the last decade, his notes instead drifted down like snowflakes (though he still occasionally kicked them up into flurries). Jump on It applies this later, more mannered approach to Orcutt’s first solo acoustic outing since 2013’s A History of Every One. Its mic placement gives the impression that the listener is uncomfortably close to Orcutt, ears hovering somewhere between the body of his guitar and the collar of his shirt. His breathing is frequently audible, as is the squeak of his chair. For a guitarist whose frantic outbursts of noise could keep audiences at a distance, these 10 tracks, running just half an hour, offer an intimate glimpse into the minutely considered songcraft hidden within the bang and clatter of his technique.
Jump on It’s beautifully crafted miniatures are often somber even as they shimmer and gleam with natural reverb. Some tracks, like early standouts “What Do You Do With Memory” and “The Ocean Will Find Its Shore,” delicately unfurl into long, flowering tendrils of fingerpicked melody. The album’s second half becomes more dense and winding with “New Germs,” which grows from a tentative beginning into a dizzying swirl of notes backed by soft moans. Orcutt’s penchant for repetition—a constant in his work from before his solo debut through to his most recent album—appears here as well. “In a Column of Air” ends with a tornado of cyclical figures, while the entirety of “Music That Fights Back” is built from variations on a short repeating phrase. If the compositional approaches are not new, the clarity and patience with which they are carried out certainly is. Orcutt spent years deconstructing the acoustic guitar only to carefully piece it back together according to his own idiosyncratic design.
Jump on It is the easiest introduction to Orcutt’s sizable discography. As Charalambides’ Tom Carter says in the album’s liner notes, these tracks express a “conversational beauty that would please the most dissonance-adverse listener.” To longtime fans, that may suggest that the music has lost its edge, that it is less blazingly original than his early acoustic work. But careful listening reveals that the album’s welcoming facade is an invitation into a tantalizingly complex world, like a perfectly manicured hedge maze guiding you through concentric pathways.


The Brooklyn rap group Flatbush Zombies deliver an off-kilter take on '90s touchstones like Gravediggaz and the Flatlinerz with a touch of ODB. Their debut LP is a deep dive into psychotropia—the highs and lows—with paranoia and invincibility trading places with suicidal thoughts.

3001: A Laced Odyssey

For those paying attention, 2012 represented a minor hip-hop renaissance in New York, with burgeoning rap acts blanketing all corners of the city. A$AP Rocky and his Mob had Harlem secured; French Montana turned the Bronx sound upside down. Action Bronson was out in Queens fighting Ghostface comparisons. And in Brooklyn, we had Joey Bada$$ and his Pro Era crew and, of course, the Flatbush Zombies, invoking the sound of NY eras past.
While Joey and the Pro Era kids blend Golden Era vibes with mid-90s street rap like Boot Camp Clik and early Nas, The Zombies deliver a more off-kilter adaptation — think Gravediggaz and the Flatlinerz with a touch of ODB. Defined on the 2012 debut mixtape D.R.U.G.S. and the following year's Better Off Dead, their sound was a combination of visionary and the grotesque, evidenced by the equal-parts dark and absurd video for the breakout track "Thug Waffle." However, by the time their 2014 collaboration Clockwork Indigo with fellow Brooklynites The Underachievers dropped, the Zombies had fallen into the periphery, just another talented rap act that couldn't get traction.
Now that their long-awaited debut album 3001: A Laced Odyssey has surfaced, the group—comprised of Meechy Darko, Zombie Juice, and Erick "The Architect" Elliott—seek to hurdle the high wall facing rappers with skill but no significant retail milestones. Songs that have all of the basic food groups (bars, beats, hooks) always help, and perhaps that’s what Flatbush Zombies seem to be lacking the most on 3001. Their talent is obvious—Meechy Darko fills the role of the court jester; Zombie Juice has sharper wordplay, and Erick The Architect fills in for kick offs and clean ups when he’s not producing the hell out of the tracks. But the money-making hooks are missing in action, and so are surprises. This is a group that knows exactly who they are, almost to their own detriment.
Much of the project is a deep dive into psychotropia—the highs and lows—with paranoia and invincibility trading places with suicidal thoughts. The opener "The Odyssey," is an old-fashioned lyrical exercise over beautiful symphonic production that poses the question "Why I feel like the past is catching up to my ass?" The de-facto single "Bounce," has a fitting title with a beat to match, but still falls short of any real hook value. "Fly Away" is a nightmarish dreamscape about questioning life within the context of drugs and suicide, while "Ascension" oozes hypomania with a sort of hook that sounds like a Bonecrusher throwaway. Two tracks "Good Grief" and "New Phone, Who Dis?" pull from the A$AP playbook in their twistedly dismal reflections of fame, the former utilizing singer Diamante to rehash some throwback Aaliyah riffs.
But all of that is filler for a handful of cuts that are the real stars. "R.I.P. C.D." is a flawless tribute to days past, heavy on the ‘90s hip-hop influence and channeling Boot Camp Clik right down to the bassline. The chanting hook "RIP to the CD, can’t even play my hits" is a handy metaphor for how the Zombies see themselves in rap: outdated relics of a realer, prouder era. The closer "Your Favorite Rap Song" is another winner, where the Zombies strip away the bells and whistles of their aesthetic to straight pour out lyrics. "Pave the future for boosters, I'm contributing my two cents / So I'm a nuisance, producing, and I tighten the loop, like it's a noose-sance," spits Erick the Architect.
3001: A Laced Odyssey does an adequate job of reminding us all of Flatbush Zombies’ smart, sharp lyrics. What they lack in hit-single potential, they make up for in talent, but without a calling-card song it's hard to know what their next move is.  Their weirdness is a massive selling point, though they’re almost burdened by their dedication to formal, old-school lyricism. It’s a unique quandary to have, begging the question of which asset to forego since right now they live in a rap half-life where they’re too good to be unknown but not distinctive enough to be famous. Now that the group has officially one album under their belt, they can move accordingly from here. But "where to?" is the real question.


Taso’s new EP features collaborations with DJ Spinn and the late DJ Rashad, at times evoking the latter’s legendary album Double Cup.

New Start

It is impossible to consider a given release by a footwork artist without confronting the long shadow cast by DJ Rashad’s catalog, particularly his magnum opus, Double Cup. The writing sessions for Double Cup started four years ago in San Francisco, after the producer Taso (Anastasios Ioannis Skalkos III) invited Rashad and DJ Spinn to the Bay Area. Taso appears four times on that album, and though it can be hard to discern an individual footwork producer’s idiosyncrasies, he leaves an indelible mark. He has a remarkable ability to smooth over the acidic edges that come with footwork’s inherent speed. This was especially true in the Double Cup’s introductory song “Feelin,” a revelatory musical moment that almost single handedly brought footwork to a larger audience. The three-man effort from Taso, Rashad, and Spinn was soulful and sensual, but also discombobulating in the way footwork often is. In other tracks like “Pass That Shit,” Taso helped break down the genre’s common barrier between dancefloor utility and home-listening. Overall, he was one of the architects of footwork mainstream jump, and he has returned with a solo effort, New Start, that extracts some of Double Cup’s best qualities.
New Start opens much like Double Cup, with a collaboration between Taso, Rashad, and Spinn. On the album’s first song, “New Start,” there’s an immediate sense of warm familiarity. When these three producers worked together, they generated a sound that is both pulsating and comforting; perfect for both club speakers and paltry headphone listening. There was a pleasurable universality and malleability to the music they made together. On “AM Track,” the second of the trio’s collaborations on the album, they perfect the formula for smooth and soulful footwork found on Double Cup.
Elsewhere, Taso works with other members of the Teklife crew, including DJ Earl, Gant-Man, Manny, and Taye. In all these collaborative works, he finds a way to locate and amplify the voice of another artist. For example, his track with Taye, “In the Green Room,” heightens Taye’s tendency towards a more hip-hop driven footwork by brightening it with elements of Miami bass. In “Da Capo Al Coda,” he is able to draw out the very best of Earl’s melancholic energy by slowing the beat way below 160 bpm, moving towards something closer to billowing ambient. Taso shows his individual voice just once on this album, in a track called “Murda Bass,” which surprisingly paints him a bit of a sentimentalist for vintage British dance music. He borrows freely from garage and UK bass, and it would be a stretch to call this track footwork. Here he showcases his versatility as a producer, able to accommodate and inhabit many styles at once.
Oddly, some of the very best tracks on this album are in their own way slightly retrograde and stuck. They copy and fine-tune the aesthetic of Double Cup, and do little to break the mold. If anything, some of the most forward-thinking footwork of the moment is being made outside of Teklife (take for example Foodman’s intense experimentation). Still, New Start proves that the prowess of footwork’s first family is intact, and Taso might just be the glue that holds it all together.


Michelle Zauner embraces the spotlight and goes for the brass ring on her third album, a stylish and eclectic record that feels of the moment and also steeped in classic indie sensibilities.

Jubilee

This spring, somewhere between her memoir Crying in H Mart debuting at No. 2 on The New York Times’ Best Sellers list and her turn as a vampiric sugar baby to an ex-Soprano in a self-directed video, it officially became Jbrekkie Season. Michelle Zauner, the musician, author, director, and food enthusiast behind Japanese Breakfast, had seemingly planned it that way, holding her ambitious third record—and first in four years—until the pandemic eased. As she declared in press releases and interviews, Jubilee would be a celebration of joy after years of feeling defined by her writing about grief, following the loss of her mother to cancer in 2014.
This jubilee, like many others, comes with an air of regality: triumphant horns and swooping strings fill the music like a lush 2000s chamber pop record. But no album about joy would be complete without a few killer pop songs, from the sexy-in-slow-motion “Posing in Bondage” to “Be Sweet,” which is frankly begging for an ’80s montage scene to soundtrack. Some have positioned Taylor Swift’s folklore as the great nexus of pop music and indie culture, but an album like Jubilee is a more interesting example of pop’s fluidity: a true blue rock star tempered in the waters of shoegaze, Pacific Northwest rock, and twee, making music that naturally bridges the gap between dream pop and electropop. It’s an exuberant listen that feels of the moment and also steeped in classic indie sensibilities, packed with Zauner’s sharp observations and frank desires.
You can feel that specific buzz in the opening track “Paprika,” which layers martial snares, bubbling orbs of synth, and horns that practically announce “I’m here!” The lyrics colorfully illustrate the blessing and the burden of getting to express yourself creatively for a living: “How’s it feel to be at the center of magic/To linger in tones and words?/I opened the floodgates and found no water, no current, no river, no rush.” But Zauner clearly had no trouble finding inspiration for the song itself, which comes to life with a playful sense of grandeur that’s hard not to get swept up in, waltzing yourself around the house, tingling with wonder. When she’s on, her energy is completely infectious, and the beginning of the album thrives on this current while accommodating numerous styles. Swooning small-town ode “Kokomo, IN” channels Belle and Sebastian at their most orchestral, “Slide Tackle” splits the difference between Arthur Russell’s lo-fi disco and Carly Rae Jepsen’s sax moments, and “Posing in Bondage,” with its striking vocal effects and flickering synths that bring to mind flashing tones, is like Zauner’s more guitar-driven take on Lorde’s Melodrama. They’re all quite different and yet feel perfectly at home next to one another on this mission to sustain bliss.
Happiness, unfortunately, needs to be tended to constantly. As much as Japanese Breakfast tries to throw her arms around joy, the back half of Jubilee can get pretty dark, whether it’s the more overtly fictional songs or Zauner crooning lines like, “Hell is finding someone to love and I can’t have you.” Furthering the Jbrekkie sci-fi tradition and exploring the dubious morality of the super-rich, “Savage Good Boy” is told from the perspective of a capitalist space colonizer seeking safety from the coming apocalypse (think Elon Musk but also a Daddy in bad jeans). “I want to make the money until there’s no more to be made/And we will be so wealthy I’m absolved from questioning,” she sings calmly, her words front and center. A driving guitar and piano track, it opens with the chirp of pitch-shifted harmonies and ends with a distorted guitar solo that’ll make your arm hairs stand at attention. In less than two and a half minutes, Zauner crafts this perfect snowglobe of a villain and his beloved floating away, left to wine and dine on freeze-dried food while convincing themselves that a future civilization depends on their sex life.
Michelle Zauner can write devastating prose that explores knotty subjects like loss and her Korean-American identity, as well as craft these elaborate, world-building videos. She navigates the musical hopscotch with ease on Jubilee, even helping to arrange the string and horn parts, but, occasionally, Zauner strains to reach the vocal heights needed to nail the glory notes. Rock stars who come out of punk traditions rarely have the same kind of range as pop singers, and when Zauner moves from breathy, pretty modes into a higher register or a place where soulfulness might enter the picture, her voice can sound a little thin against the glossier production.
The small flaws along the way fall by the wayside in pursuit of something greater. This is a record about happiness and wanting so badly to feel happy, two similar emotional states separated by a chasm. The slow words that fill up the first half of final song “Posing in Cars,” a slow ballad about loneliness and a love that grows deep within, are soon exploded by an epic rock coda in the style of the War on Drugs or mid-era Wilco. It’s challenging, a moonshot at an ecstatic catharsis, that nearly rises to the level of a show-stopping album closer, complete with Zauner shredding until the lights go out. Listeners love Japanese Breakfast because she gives you everything: a buffet of sub-genres, blunt confessions, larger concepts, and on-point orchestration, led by someone with undeniable charisma. Listening to Michelle Zauner go all in on Jubilee provides every bit of the joy she intended.


On their first studio album in 24 years, the long-reunited Southern indie rockers make mighty, angry songs better suited for now than then.

Reason in Decline

How should the coveted bands of indie rock best reunite? Play the hits and relearn some curios, like Pavement? Pick up where they left off and barrel ahead, like Dinosaur Jr. when they reconvened their classic trio and slashed back to basics? Or should they, like Dylan Carlson’s renovated Earth, acknowledge that both they and the times have changed, that past sounds no longer suit them even if the mood remains much the same? Another possibility: sort through the successes and strikes of their bygone days, choose what still feels right, and see if it makes sense now, scrapping anything that feels like a mere simulacrum of then. That is the smart choice that Archers of Loaf made for the mighty Reason in Decline, not only their first studio album in 24 years but also a compelling testament to the way the old you and the new you can make one helluva tandem.
In the ’90s, North Carolina’s Archers of Loaf were the quintessential Southern indie rock band: powerful to the point of seeming brutish, but with an understated streak of sophistication; unflinchingly honest and critical, but with a grace note of wit. Releasing four albums (and a full-length B-sides set) in only six years, they careened wildly among gnarled jangle pop, urgent noise-rock, and snappy hardcore like Hüsker Dü’s younger country cousins, sometimes trying out samplers or sequencers in the madcap way of their moment. The tunefully churlish baritone of Eric Bachmann—a towering, glowering singer mad at love, the music industry, the olds, and pretty much everything else—strung it together, his voice frayed like an old piece of rope forever ready to snap.
And then it did. Despite dalliances with the mainstream and Robert Christgau’s unequivocal endorsement (“other indie bands should just retire”), Archers couldn’t sustain their post-adolescent ire into the new millennium. They broke up right before it began, just as Bachmann softened his stentorian roar into a curious croon in the great chamber-folk act Crooked Fingers. The live Archers reunions began a little more than a decade later, but talk of something more always seemed like a non-starter. The angry young men were husbands, fathers, and even lawyers now, pals getting together to cosplay their past at the occasional festival without pretending they were really the same people. Whenever interviewers optimistically asked Bachmann about another Archers album, he demurred: Why pose about old problems with new songs?
Reason in Decline doesn’t pose. Instead, these 10 tightly coiled songs rightfully treat those former concerns—bitter character studies of lovers and townies, jilted analyses of the overcrowded underground—like Clinton-era trifles, conflicts of no consequence in a time of autocrats and prospective apocalypse. Bachmann, now 52, funnels his vintage bile into new ducts here. “In the Surface Noise,” for instance, is a righteous elder’s anthem for the inspirational kids demanding systemic change. “Coming up from under/Myth, deception, subterfuge,” he barks, offering both a nod of approval and a wish that his own generation had gotten more things right. He turns backward and inward for “Mama Was a War Profiteer,” a beautiful tune where romantic sounds smartly cloak disdain for those apathetic souls who vacation their way through someone else’s injustice.
It’s not all disgust for Bachmann, who has often turned to sweetness on recent solo records. “Aimee” is a gentle hymn for a friend unsure of anything, while “The Moment You End” reckons with age and the crippling notion that our best times and selves are always in the rearview. Such solidarity is a welcome addition to the Archers’ emotional reach, epitomized by Reason in Decline’s opener and masterpiece, “Human.” Though the song is a chugging jeremiad against some bitter and cruel enemy, Bachmann pulls back in the chorus to recognize his—and your and our—own failures. “It’s hard to be human,” he sings over epiphanic guitars and stomps, a hard-won soulfulness to his tone. “Only death can set you free.”
Longtime fans may balk at how clean this record sounds, how guitars that once seemed to shed sparks as they ground against one another now lock into recognizable harmonies. But see how half of the band hangs back for the first two verses and chorus of “Human,” and the power that drummer Mark Price and bassist Matt Gentling deliver upon delayed arrival. Or spot the way that Eric Johnson’s sunny little riff in “Breaking Even” turns into a feint, catching on a note here and howling there, illustrating Bachmann’s lyrical cycle of hiccupping paranoia. The textural depth of “In the Surface Noise,” the tessellated stomp of “Misinformation Age,” the crisscrossing instrumental-and-vocal urgency of “Saturation and Light”: For act two, Archers of Loaf have simply found more finessed ways to be playful and pissed at once, their defining paradox forever. Where they used to sound like smart kids made wonderfully dumb with disappointment, here they sound like adults who’ve at last seen therapists and learned to channel their gripes.
It is fitting, funny, and maybe a tad sad that Archers’ triumphant return to record comes alongside another round of reunion-and-reissue coronations for Pavement, the cross-country counterparts to which they were exhaustingly compared in the ’90s. Their distinct approaches are telling. Where Pavement seem content to relive old glories every decade or so, Archers made a record that actually fits their setting in the present—mad dads and pals getting together to gripe, playing sharper than ever. Story checks: If Pavement were the wiseasses that lobbed witticisms from the wings of the party, Archers of Loaf were the Tar Heel blue-collar dudes who’d get loaded enough by night’s end to get in your face and tell you the truth. With a little more softness and a lot less concern for the scene than the world, that’s exactly what they do again—having finally reunited in their own defiant image—on Reason in Decline.


The band’s first new album in six years is a procession of pinging, clanging, reverberating tactile pleasures, an inventive backdrop for Isaac Brock’s familiar blend of forced optimism and unforced paranoia.

The Golden Casket

Time is now part of Modest Mouse’s process. During the band’s early peak, they raced out three monumental albums in five years—long, sprawling records, seemingly confined only by the capacity of a CD—along with troves of great EPs, rarities, and odds and ends. But after “Float On” elevated them to alternative rock’s A-list, the spigot slowed. It took the band eight years to complete 2015’s Strangers to Ourselves, and although Isaac Brock promised another album “as soon as legally possible,” it took them another six years to finish The Golden Casket.
Even more than Strangers to Ourselves, The Golden Casket never tries to pretend it was recorded in a single time or place—a band that once worked in frantic bursts of inspiration now prefers lengthy, unhurried tinkering. But unlike Strangers, which was the first Modest Mouse album without new things to say or new ways of saying them, Casket has some unique sounds to show for all its slow-cooked experimentation. It’s some of the band’s most luxuriously textured work, a procession of pinging, clanging, reverberating tactile pleasures. Early on, Brock pledged not to play any guitar on the record, and while he ended up playing some, the instrument’s frequent absence clears space that’s inventively filled by percussion and troves of obscure and vintage instruments.
The album credits meticulously catalog each musician’s contributions down to their finger snaps, because this is the kind of record that differentiates between the sounds of different fingers. On one song, band member Tom Peloso is credited with playing “Fun Machine, piano, mini Korg, and Crumar”; on another, Brock plays not only banjo and melodica but also vibraslap, spacephone, and “soft drink percussion” (it involves soda cans). Even if you can’t place the vibraslap, the textural specificity helps these studio concoctions conjure any number of settings real or imagined: an Archie McPhee warehouse, a 1980s FAO Schwarz, the dumpster behind the Price Is Right soundstage, Danny Elfman’s rec room.
As usual, Brock’s songs are a strange blend of forced optimism and unforced paranoia. On the chipper side, there are a couple of easy-drinking radio singles, including the marimba- and drum machine-driven “The Sun Hasn’t Left.” “Lace Your Shoes,” an uncharacteristically earnest love letter to Brock’s children, is the most sentimental song he’s ever written. But he always sounds more believable on the gloomy stuff, and The Golden Casket gets dark. Between mostly tame swipes at selfies and online dating and pleas to put down the phone every now and then (“Just being here now is enough for me,” he repeats as a kind of transcendental mantra on “Wooden Soldiers”), he centers the album on the anti-tech manifesto “Transmitting Receiving,” the bleakest, most upsetting music he’s recorded since The Moon & Antarctica.
The song’s verses play out as long, spoken lists of devices and forces that may or may not be transmitting directly to our skulls (“Computers, clocks, drones, clones, trees and stalks/Moles and trolls, lights at four-way stops”). In interviews, Brock has self-effacingly called “Transmitting Receiving” the “tinfoil hat” section of the album, but he’s also insisted “it’s probably the most important shit that I’ve written about,” reiterating his belief in V2K, targeted individuals, and gang stalking—convictions often associated with mental illness. Like all songs that raise concerns about their creators’ well-being, it’s a difficult listen, but in a roundabout way, it bolsters The Golden Casket’s thesis. On an album about the dangers of the internet, Brock has platformed a lot of conspiracies he almost certainly picked up online.
What The Golden Casket is missing is the kind of contagious earworm that made Modest Mouse radio mainstays. There’s no “Float On” here. There’s not even a “Dashboard.” But the album rewards the time and patience it demands in a way the last couple haven’t. Even the songs that underwhelm at first—like the booming lead single “We Are Between,” the band at its most Coors-commercial pandering—have a way of opening up over repeated listens, revealing loose threads and teasing all the different ways they might have been knotted. Modest Mouse may never again bottle the explosive impulsivity of The Lonesome Crowded West, but they’re getting better at making their polished edges feel like a fair substitute for the old rough ones.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Released on a label run by Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz, this is the emocore pioneers' first new album in a decade and it catches the band fairly close to its late-period shine, though coupled with the wisdom (and differences) of age.

Lifetime

In the early 1990s I interviewed L.A. pop-punks All in their van outside a club in Trenton. It was around the time "punk broke" (again), and they spoke in semi-veiled terms about bands like Green Day who'd been inspired by their past work with the Descendents and were now enjoying ill-bought commercial success. Bummer, but it seemed sadder that they cared.
Lifetime could definitely get pissy about the success of any number radio-ready emo acts. But 17 years after they formed, and a decade after their last album, they've joined forces with their mutant offspring and signed to Decaydance, a label run by Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz. As it goes, lots of their original fans will probably shout "sell out" over Maximum Rock'n'Roll and morning coffee, but the quartet's reunion and self-titled comeback escapes the creepy, pathetic feel of, say, Pixies or Dinosaur Jr. Instead, it feels graceful and intelligent, the natural outcome of latent interests rather than an attempt to cash in on nostalgia or compete with the kids.
But nostalgia's a major Lifetime component. In that way, a comeback's an intriguing idea; every Lifetime collection already comes wrapped in memories, ably enunciated by Ari Katz in his addictive, fractured vocals. His words gather the force of things past, conjuring the bygone experiences we still wistfully replay in our minds: The lines beside that girl's eyes when she smiled, or that New Brunswick basement show when she first sat next to you and you each mocked yet another group of Samiam knockoffs. Katz wears his heart on his sleeve, but also the heart of his scene and community.
It doesn't matter that Katz is now married and has a kid. Like the best punk writers weaned on Cometbus, he finds duct-taped Jawbreaker-style poetry in everyday events, evoking youth and youth culture in transcendent ways. It's something for which the Hold Steady's Craig Finn has recently become very famous. He and Katz are after some of the same things, but Finn needs more sentences to pull it off. In fact, Katz's economy is amazing, how he paints a room an all its inhabitants with two strokes. Earning emo stripes, his underground storytelling is also more emotionally tinged (you can picture him in those places, ecstatic and amped).
Katz's writing fits perfectly with his bandmates' playing: Lifetime usually eschewed excess, and as with past efforts, the songs here still end before you expect them to: 11 anthems in under 25 minutes. It's less fragmentary and poppier than 1995's Hello Bastards, but more tightly arcing and less radio-friendly than Jersey's Best Dancers (the recording itself is super compressed, lending the album the feel of a single blast). Lyrically, Katz refuses to let things go; sonically, whenever there's 40 or so seconds remaining in a track, the band pulls out the catchiest stops, launching into a few of their best hooks ever. Goodbyes are redolent flight patterns.
After three dozen listens, there are still no duds. The first few tracks, though, are certainly trying hard to dig their talons into the listener. Packed with bouncy shifts, the opener "Northbound Breakdown" could be a continuation of "Turnpike Gates" from Jersey's Best Dancers, but is also redolent of the premature escape and return of Jawbreaker's "Chesterfield King": "I hope you're in your car right now/ Turning this shit up so loud/ I hope you're in the mood to turn it to my favorite station." But a summer cruise can't be without its problems: You run out of gas, need help getting pushed up the overpass. And after an obstacle course like that, Katz's final entreaty feels well-earned.
Lifetime isn't an album of sunny delight; nighttime is the predominant ambiance. "Airport Monday Morning" documents a girl's departure, and its harmonies and last-ditch chorus turn out like this: The protagonist watches a line-halting couple kissing at the airport. Conversely, "Just a Quiet Night" embraces domesticity, as does the one-on-one vinyl listening session "Records at Nite" (have fun guessing what they're spinning).
There is one dig at today's emo stars: During "All Night Long," wandering in the rain after a fight with his lady, Katz mentions "punk rock millionaires with coke up their nose/ ...Writing records in designer homes." He knows, though, that his damp, less plush situation is pretty perfect. And the girl? "It's really all right if we don't talk at all/ It's only one song." This is just one moment of smart, mature meta.
Katz has said that months of touring are no longer in the cards for the band; in fact, it's said to be a reason they broke up in '97. If this ends up as a one-off-- a tiny chapter-- Lifetime catches the band fairly close to its late-period luster, though coupled with the wisdom (and differences) of age. It feels like a recap: There are references to older songs and characters, luggage and leavings, doors opening and closing, the slow creep of adulthood, and tons of people feeling tired. Lifetime is less about meeting the kids at the flagpole and more about the exhaustion brought on by navigating love, boredom, shows, and sickness. The eponymous title? Feels like the signature at the end of a letter...


As an initiate of santería, the Havana-born jazz singer is in tune with her religious and musical practices, as Cubafonía illuminates, pulling from genres within and adjacent to Cuban popular music.

Cubafonía

At the top of her brow, underneath her headwrap, Daymé Arocena wears a small feather. She’d received a message once from a saint telling her that it would guide her so that she’d never lose her way. As an initiate of santería, or Regla de Ocha, the Havana-born jazz singer is well in tune with both her religious and musical practices, which are inextricably tied. In her latest project, Cubafonía, Arocena illuminates those ties, as well as those that connect different genres within and adjacent to Cuban popular music.
After her 2015 debut full-length, Nueva Era, and follow-up EP, One Takes, the now-24-year-old took some time to tour. Along the way, she came to realize just how much she missed home, which in turn inspired her sophomore album. Where on her first album, the songs are mostly jazz records with strong Afro-Cuban undercurrents, on Cubafonía, it often tilts the other way too, so that a track might be a rumba or a bolero, but with a distinctly jazz bent. She also makes it a point this time to work almost entirely with Cuban musicians. Leading them, she sounds more confident than ever. The result is a vibrant, bold record that is, at its heart, a love letter to her home country.
True to her roots, Arocena opens the album with a chant to Eleggua, the opener of roads. Otherworldly voices pierce through Ethiojazz-y horns, as she belts salutations to the orisha. Highlighting the influence of different African traditions in Cuban music, she follows up “Eleggua,” which is Yoruba (or Lucumí), with a rumba, which combines various West and Central African musical traditions. “La Rumba Me Llamo Yo” is a lively rumba guaguancó that tells the story of a woman whose mother warns her of a man she doesn't want near her. It ends in an all-out party: “What is it you want them to give you?” the chorus asks in Spanish. “Rumba, ven ven!” they answer. Daymé, for her part, scats her way through a clatter of voices and percussion, coming out the other side unscathed and triumphant.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, her orisha is Yemayá, goddess of the sea. Arocena’s voice, like her laughter, is wide and enveloping. She sings with a warm rasp reminiscent of Buika (as on “Lo Que Fue”), an emotional breadth that recalls Aretha, and an unwavering willingness to lay herself bare. In the first of a three-song run of ballads, “Cómo” is a smooth, ’80s-inspired pop song that sits somewhere between Sade and Selena. In a hazy swirl of jazz saxophone, violin tremolo, and twinkling chimes, the artist laments (in Spanish), “How do I live with my solitude? How do I begin this end?” The very next song over, “Todo Por Amor,” she is in love again—wholly, fearlessly, maybe a little foolishly. “Eres tu mi salvation, todo por tu amor,” she practically bleeds. The song is a bolero but with echoes of bachata, underscoring again the fluidity between different Afro-Caribbean music forms. Finally, on “Ángel,” a slow, minimalist tango, Arocena’s voice arcs and dips wordlessly, longing after something we cannot see.
As unafraid of pain or heartache as Daymé seems, so too is she unafraid of joy. “Negra Caridad” sounds like it could be the soundtrack to an old spaghetti western with elements of 1950s Benny Moré-era Cuban big band music and punchy vocals that recall La Lupe. Meanwhile, “Mambo Na’ Mà” elides the spirit of mambo with New Orleans swing. Horns creak and chug; Daymé cranks her voice like a jack-in-the-box before crying, “Mambo na’ má!” Besides being a good time, it’s also a reminder that Havana and New Orleans are colloquial sister cities with overlapping musical pasts and creole histories.
The album feels warm and full, thanks in part to the production. The texture changes, though, on the very last song—the stripped down “Valentine.” The track is a changüí, a folksy song from Guantánamo, influenced by nearby Haiti. Over the scrape of a güira and a smattering of acoustic instruments (marimbula, très, clarinet), the daughter of Yemayá coos, “Mon valentin, mi valentine, my valentine/In a moment, you gave freedom to my heart.” There is a sense of gratitude in her delivery—and perhaps some relief—to have wandered but finally returned to where her heart is freest, to her valentine, to Cuba.


Working with Michael League, the leader of the Brooklyn-based jazzy jam outfit Snarky Puppy, David Crosby releases his second solo record since returning from a 20-year hiatus.

Lighthouse

There’s always been a bemusing disconnect between David Crosby’s art and persona. On record, he often sounds suspended in a haze, caught between folky introspection and steely defiance, but he can come across as cantankerous crank. Recently, he’s been apt to vent his spleen on Twitter, where he maintains one of the best celebrity feeds going, and also in candid interviews where he doesn't hide that he’s feuding with former bandmate Neil Young and is so financially strapped that he’s had to sell his schooner and that he considers purchasing a Tesla an indulgence.
All this turbulence would suggest that Lighthouse, his 2016 record, might be something of a tortured affair, but that’s not the case. Working with Michael League, the leader of the Brooklyn-based jazzy jam outfit Snarky Puppy—an outfit he’s been praising in public since 2014—Crosby abandons the slick professionalism that informed Croz, the 2014 album that saw him reviving his solo career after a 20-year hiatus. This is the first time he’s ever followed an album so quickly—previously, the fastest turnaround was four years, when 1993’s Thousand Roads followed 1989’s Oh Yes I Can—which underscores that Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young now belongs to the history books and Crosby has no reason to pursue any path other than his own.
League decided to use Crosby’s 1971 solo debut If I Could Only Remember My Name as a touchstone, but Lighthouse is by no means a re-creation of past glories. First of all, League dispensed with any hints of elaborate production—there is no percussion, no electric guitars—and yet these hushed acoustic numbers can read as jazz: there’s an elastic sense of time and no adherence to strict strong structure. Lighthouse does share some qualities with If I Could Only Remember My Name, particularly in its expansive and lonely mood. But where the 1971 album seemed to ride a melancholy undercurrent, there’s a certain sense of reassurance to Lighthouse. Older, maybe wiser, Crosby is certainly gentler, letting his songs unfold according to no real sense of time. That’s the clearest sign of League’s influence: he encourages Crosby to indulge in his eccentricities.
Usually, this manifests in songs that don’t follow strict contours. Certainly, verses flow into choruses and there are distinct melodies that provide a path to follow, but the lack of percussion gives the nine songs on Lighthouse a dreamlike feel; it seems as if the songs are unfurling as they’re imagined. Pro that he is, Crosby isn’t free-associating: Each of the songs is carefully constructed, the seams between the verses and choruses apparent upon close listening, as is the understated protest of “Somebody Other Than You” and “Look in Their Eyes.” Nevertheless, the pleasure of Lighthouse is that it’s best appreciated as mood music: with its buoyant acoustic guitars and murmured harmonies, it casts a light spell.


Released in conjunction with his book How to Write One Song, the Wilco frontman’s response to the pandemic is a mellow, easygoing collection of songs stressing the importance of human connection.

Love Is the King

It’s conceivable that Jeff Tweedy was in a better position than most musicians to thrive creatively while sheltering in place. Locked down with his family, he could call upon his sons Spencer and Sammy for musical support, and they all could head over to the Loft, the private studio that Tweedy and Wilco built over 20 years ago and maintain to this day. In addition to having access to gear and supporting musicians, the singer-songwriter also benefited greatly from a regular, reliable writing method, one that he documents in How to Write One Song, a book published concurrently with the release of Love Is the King.
Separating Love Is the King from How to Write One Song may be impossible. Tweedy began composing songs for the album while at work on his songwriting handbook, using some of his freshly minted tunes to illuminate particular points of his process. Real-time insight into the writing and recording of a new rock album is rare enough to make this book unique, but How to Write One Song is decidedly not a set of liner notes to Love Is the King. It’s a manifesto advocating the power of everyday creativity, imploring the reader to look at songwriting not as divine inspiration but rather as a practical craft: Assemble the parts, learn how to use the tools at your disposal, toil away for a set amount of time on a daily basis, and it becomes feasible to finish one song; after that, perhaps one more. Love Is the King is a testament to the virtues of this creative approach. Tweedy’s method is designed to sustain a songwriter through dry spells while also doubling as a journal of the moment; such a technique is surely beneficial when grappling with the existential stresses generated by a global pandemic.
Love Is the King contains no attempts at grand pronouncements on the state of the world in lockdown. Rather, it’s a series of vignettes, secular hymns, and snapshots, all loosely arranged around the notion of human connection. Nothing moves too fast here. “Gwendolyn” ambles along to a groove that’s just a shade soulful, “Opaline” moseys ahead with a slight grin, and “Natural Disaster” is a shambling bit of country-rock that stands out not only for its rhythm but also for how its sardonic view of love cuts against the warm sentiments that flow through the record. Warmth doesn’t preclude the presence of loneliness or worry. The gravity of isolation weighs down the narrator of “Bad Day Lately” and self-doubt nags at the heart of “Troubled,” but there’s a recurring theme of the solace and sustenance to be found within lasting love. It surfaces on the hushed “Even I Can See,” whose pivotal verse hinges on finally being able to view the presence of a god through the love of his wife, and in the murmured devotions floating throughout the semi-narcotic thrum of “Half-Asleep.”
None of these songs demand much attention from the listener, but that mellowness is part of the record’s charm. It’s music sprung from the yearning desire for comfort and connection in a difficult time, music whose meaning lies in the act of the creation itself. Since it was made during a time of seclusion, not just for Tweedy but also his audience, the imagery and emotions threaded through Love Is the King can’t help but contain empathetic echoes for listeners still struggling with a year spent apart from loved ones. The reason the record provides some measure of consolation is due to its modesty. Rather than a concept album about quarantine, it’s a snapshot of a moment in time, one that captures the confusion, longing, and loneliness of a world set back on its heels.

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The BPitch Control label founder brings the intoxicating humidity of classic techno with a crackling texture reminiscent of 2 a.m. sets at Berghain that became their own balmy, utopian ecosystems.

Nost

Saying Ellen Allien only spins “real techno” is like Roman on “Party Down” saying he’s only into “hard sci-fi.” It’s no unspoken mark of superiority anymore, being a snobby scene purist, now that pop culture continues to vaporize those borders. Those who stick to the fringes are often the ones outside the party. Today’s veteran house artists, in particular, have embraced crossover projects with shiny FM radio stars, from Benny Benassi pairing with John Legend to Armand Van Helden remixing Katy Perry and Sam Smith.
Techno has always been a different wheelhouse; it’s streamlined without being elitist, its names not so interested in crossovers while still offering a welcome, blooming space. Ellen Allien is one of the brightest and boldest techno DJ/producers in her native Berlin, famous enough to have taken residencies at Tresor and the Bunker, fronted her own minimalist fashion label, and released seven LPs without ever collaborating with a pop star (unless you count one Beck remix in 2007). BPitch Control, the label she founded in 1999, is no small shakes either, having counted Paul Kalkbrenner and Modeselektor to its ranks (and Thom Yorke to its fanboys).
Given her techno mogul status, Allien could surely be complacent with her sound—but on Nost, she brings the intoxicating humidity of classic techno to a place that seems to war with its own humanity. Fittingly for an album themed in the rearview—its title taken from the Greek root for “nostalgia”—it motors on a popping, crackling texture reminiscent of 2 a.m. sets at Berghain that became their own balmy, utopian ecosystems. “Innocence” is particularly charming with this sort of fuzziness; garbled, lightly processed whispers waft amid an unhurried beat that feints and dodges into more minimalist breakdowns. It’s one of the shorter tracks here, clocking in just shy of eight minutes, but feels like the most self-contained world.
Yet, tellingly, this gorgeous sprawl isn’t Allien’s opening salvo—that would be “Mind Journey,” a track as metallic and uneasy as “Innocence” is warm and adoring. Here, a sheaf of ominous, Vocoder-like grumbles roll over high, prickling tones and a synthesized hi-hat pulse. Paired with “Innocence,” the track sets a type of tidal friction between soft and stern that carries across Nost; the scorching, Blade Runner-worthy brunt of harsh tones and crisp breaks in “Mma” push against the orchestral palette of “Physical,” and the sweetly crackling, vaguely electroclash callback of “Electric Eye” follows the acidic funfair sirens of “Call Me.”
“Call Me” is another tetchy intersection of the past and the present. Allien’s ode to Tinder and Grindr, as she’s explained it, has the unblinking, brutalist vibe of CCTV footage: As a female vocal intones “I want your sex” with a dispassion that would make George Michael weep, icy minimalism underneath yields to a softer, more tropical shrug. Hey, this is no romantic era we live in—but a boss like Allien can always find her own way forward.


Working with a homemade instrument and utilizing unconventional techniques, the Montreal musician carves vast, expansive forms out of guitar feedback.

Amplified Guitar

In the trailer for his debut solo record, Amplified Guitar, Mat Ball holds the head of his guitar up against an amplifier as he picks a melancholy tune. The sound that emerges is guttural: A mighty buzz swarms up and creates a cloud around every pluck of the strings. At another point, the Montreal-based musician places his instrument’s head perpendicular to the floor, dragging it across the ground to make the sound wobble. He uses these techniques as ways of shaping the feedback from sustained guitar tones as it grows and changes.
Featuring a series of eight spun-out vignettes, each recorded in a single take, Amplified Guitar explores the noisier side of the electric guitar. The sound isn’t entirely new for Ball, whose band BIG|BRAVE has been carving mammoth textures out of feedback since their formation in 2012. But here, he plays an instrument he built himself—he’s a woodworker as well as a musician—with the aim to maximize both lightness and density. While Ball’s work emphasizes cavernous textures, it is minimalist at heart: He crafts dense lattices from short phrases by looping simple melodies or letting held tones resonate and gradually fade out. As much as Amplified Guitar revolves around blown-out drones, its intrigue lies in miniature details—the way the guitar scrapes along an amplifier, creating a sharp pang, or the way a melody can be deconstructed and pieced back together.
The album’s overarching structure accommodates its blossoming effect. The first three tracks lay out three different sounds—the looping tune of “To Catch Light I,” the haunted fuzz of “Within the Billow I,” and the chaotic pulse of “Steel Wound Arteries I”—that Ball returns to and transforms later on. On “Within the Billow II,” for example, the original track’s eerie textures spin out into high-pitched rings and forceful strikes, a pummeling sound that gradually simmers down into barely there bass pulses. While pieces of the original song remain, Ball tweaks the elements around it, building a new house from the same parts.
Each track offers a different palette to explore, and the “To Catch Light” trilogy proves Ball’s most successful experiment, thanks to its clear narrative arc. These tracks radiate from a forlorn blues melody that Ball blurs with plumes of feedback-induced haze. Each time the song returns, it’s subtly changed: Where “To Catch Light I” feels direct and dejected, “To Catch Light II” is a little murkier until it shatters into a vigorous, colorful final blow. That point feels like a pinnacle, a moment where all of Ball’s simmering ideas have finally boiled over; by the time “To Catch Light III” picks up the pieces, that original melody emerges with a new radiance.
The nuances of Ball’s slowly unfolding songs are what make Amplified Guitar so compelling. Many musicians have explored guitar feedback and drones, but Ball emphasizes the process of building and rebuilding masses of sound from the same small phrases, stacking slight changes into towering structures. Underneath all the distortion lie intricately woven patterns, hidden worlds that reveal themselves more with each listen.


In 1991 Pharoahe Monch emerged as half of Organized Konfusion, dropping complex multisyllabic rhymes about nebulous geopolitical threats: He is who people are talking about when they talk about thoughtful MCs whose rhymes go over audiences' heads. His newest effort finds him creating some of the more emotionally incisive and grounded music of his career.

Pharoahe Monch: P.T.S.D. (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder)

Yes, there are plenty of good reasons to assume that an album called P.T.S.D., that's a metaphor about dealing with the music industry from a veteran rapper's rapper, would be an unbearable missive from the land of butthurt MCs. Pharoahe Monch is a perennial critical favorite and industry underdog who emerged, as half of the group Organized Konfusion, dropping complex multisyllabic rhymes about nebulous geopolitical threats all the way back in 1991, before that was a thing. He is literally who people are talking about when they talk about thoughtful MCs whose rhymes go over audiences' heads, which means he's also more or less the godfather of what's evolved into one of rap's most reliably insufferable styles. On top of that, he's a poster child for the way early '00s record label disorganization completely undercut the careers of a certain set of artists, since it took seven years for him to get out a follow-up to his pugnacious, widely admired 1999 solo debut Internal Affairs.
So, yes, you'll be forgiven for assuming that Pharoahe Monch's new album might just be a mouthpiece for all the concerns of cargo-shorted rap conservatives everywhere. It even opens with a loose sci-fi framing device that seems like a particularly bad omen: Pharoahe Monch has entered “Recollection”, a facility that extracts the memories of traumatic experiences from his brain, and the album will show those memories as they are extracted. But other than a few initial flashes of concern about whether we, as a population, are staying woke enough (“I ask: Are we comatose or unconscious?”), what follows is, for the most part, Pharoahe creating some of the more emotionally incisive and grounded music of his career. The promised music industry angle is thankfully more or less absent.
The theme that the album returns to most reliably is instead the psychological effects of various traumas, especially the kind that come from living in dangerous and impoverished circumstances—a topic that, despite being the subtext in a lot of rap music, doesn't tend to get addressed explicitly very much in any form of media. On “Lose My Mind”, Pharoahe refers to flashbacks prompted by police sirens and bluntly points out the challenge in the way that this environment is handled: “My family customs were not accustomed to dealing with mental health/it was more or less an issue for white families with wealth.” Elsewhere he touches on the mind-dulling effects of anti-depressants, as well as his own struggles with severe asthma and self-doubt about his career. The album's best song, the soulful, detailed “Broken Again”, is delivered from the point of view of a heroin addict losing his place in society.
The hungry energy that defined Pharoahe when he was younger isn't quite as strong, but there's still a kind of intensity and occasional recklessness that makes him far more interesting than the bulk of currently en vogue young lyrical revivalists. “REM”, a collaboration with the Roots' Black Thought, may be a total boilerplate rap banger with its hook about being “crack music,” but it's also full of a kind of bravado—including a great bit about Pharoahe growing into a giant so he can pick up the rapper Ma$e and use him as a club to attack other rappers—that's refreshingly old school. The production mostly follows the cheesy, guitar-tinged template seemingly beloved of aging lyricists, but there are a few welcome curveballs, like Quelle Chris's squelching, frenetic beat for “Scream” and Pharoahe's own fascinating contribution, “Heroin Addict”, a tangled spoken-word interlude that could pass for a Gil Scott-Heron outtake.
At the same time, Pharoahe's insatiable desire to craft clever rhymes has always fostered a weakness for corniness, and even the best songs on P.T.S.D. are weighed down with clunkers. He's frequently distracted by wordplay, and other times he comes across like a high school teacher trying to be hip. When things do get really conscious, like on “Eht Dnarg Noisulli”, the result is painfully unsubtle, yielding nonsense like “17,000 times a day the human eye blinks/ making us even more subjectible to the hijinks.” Stabs at targets like rappers "making pussy music” on “Bad M.F.” just feel out of touch.
While he might have been able to crack the Hot 100 in 1999, Pharoahe Monch is now about as far from mainstream rap's center as possible. It's hard to imagine ever being compelled to play many of the songs on P.T.S.D. for someone else. But the fundamental lack of coolness here shouldn't do anything to deter fans of Pharoahe Monch or even newcomers who aren't quite sure what they're getting into: It's a rich album that continues to play into the rapper's long-running strengths while taking a more personal, emotional look at the kinds of issues he's traditionally addressed with more inflammatory missives. What Pharoahe Monch is doing may not be as vitally important as it once was, but it still can feel surprisingly vital.


Pantha du Prince sidesteps the naturalist preoccupations of much recent German techno with this fusion of the human and the mechanic.

This Bliss

Pantha du Prince's This Bliss hit me hardest during a train ride on a foggy evening. Peering out my window, the electricity poles looming out of the mist and then vanishing again looked like starkly geometrical trees (while the starkly geometrical trees looked like electricity poles), and the fog seemed to press against the window like it wanted inside. Most instrumental electronic music benefits from such evocative surroundings, but the work of German producer Hendrik Weber seems almost to require it: His delicate, brittle melodic techno under the Pantha du Prince moniker is itself only evocative, to the point that it only makes sense when it's making sense of the world for you.
Perhaps I was vibing off how the ambiguity of the world outside mirrored the ambiguity of the music. Weber's productions, filled with fragile melodic sequences, grim basslines, dolorous chimes, reticular house percussion, and unidentifiable found sounds (TV static? Trickling water? Rocks banging together?), seems to dwell at the precise point where nature and industry become indistinguishable. It's a vantage point from which plants and machines become just more shapes to populate the surface of the earth, and from which humans are curiously absent. But Weber is not blind to the differences between the two, and This Bliss moves gracefully between visions of the natural world and its manmade counterfeits. Given the sweeping romanticism of his depiction of the former, it's not surprising that technology adopts a slightly sinister role in his work: If the music quite frequently drifts towards "proper” dance music (often resembling the cavernous grooves of LFO's Frequencies, only with none of its playfulness), this is portrayed throughout as a sign that things are very wrong.
As with Ellen Allien and Apparat's Orchestra of Bubbles album from last year, Weber is less interesting in a sonic fusion of the human and the mechanic than he is in playing the differences off one another, and This Bliss mostly sidesteps the naturalist preoccupations of much recent German techno. For all its intricacy, its lushness, this music is clearly the product of a strictly mathematical technology, its clicks and whirs and tinkling arpeggios evoking images of an abandoned factory in which the machines quietly run themselves. The mechanical abstraction of "Moonstruck" counterposes an ominous, almost gritty bassline and depressive, atomized synth patterns that occasionally resolve into the vigilant bleep of a life-support machine (Note to producers: This trick always works), while for long sections the moody "Urlichten" sounds like it's being sucked through an industrial fan.
Even when Weber is indulging in crystalline and romantic visions of nature, the music remains a stage without actors: The sighing strings, furtive rustles and mournful horns of "Saturn Strobe" could be the sound of an abandoned forest patiently crafting its own elegy, utterly detached and yet quietly sorrowful as it awaits its own demise. Only in the anthemic final act of "Walden 2" is any light let in, with a succession of spectacular synth arpeggios that sound almost hopeful; but the moment passes quickly into a sense of remorse, as if hope is only defined by its own precariousness-- hope itself becomes too much to hope for in a narrative defined by decay. This overwhelming sense of loss, of something slipping away, becomes almost claustrophobic as the album continues, and exacerbates its context-dependence: In the wrong setting its pathos can become intolerable and its fragility ignorable. Choose your moments, however, and the quiet rebuke of this music makes for a magically humbling experience.


The debut full-length from this hazy R&B-leaning lo-fi project is the terrific culmination of a year of heavy recording activity.

Love Remains

In fall 2009, a mysterious artist called How to Dress Well posted a free EP called The Eternal Love, and a half-dozen more EPs followed on the project's blog in the next six months. The music on these mp3 releases consisted of cheap-sounding home recordings that were murky and blown out, but the style drew on the ethereal end of contemporary R&B, with layered vocals, falsetto, and tons of reverb. They turned out to be the work of Tom Krell, a philosophy student who splits time between Brooklyn and Cologne, Germany. The online buzz surrounding HTDW built steadily through 2010, and now we have Love Remains, a collection of songs taken from the EPs (some of which have been re-touched in the studio) plus a handful of new tracks.
Krell has clear and specific ideas of what he wants to do with How to Dress Well, many of which use the process of memory as focal point. According to blog posts and interviews, Krell cares deeply about R&B from the late 1980s and 90s, and he's creating a ghosted version of the music, suggesting how sounds wear down and fade over time. "I Started Remembering in 1989" was the title of a blog post from just before that first EP, and it accompanied an iconic photo of Bobby Brown; as Krell noted on his Twitter, it would be a good title for some future How to Dress Well retrospective.
The conceptual foundation is interesting, but Love Remains succeeds because you don't have to think about that stuff to absorb its peculiar magic. For one thing, it has an arresting surface-level prettiness that offers an easy way in. "Ready for the World", a sort of half-cover of "Love You Down", the silky 1986 slow jam by the Michigan group Ready for the World (it was also a minor hit in the 90s for singer INOJ), sums up the How to Dress Well aesthetic. The lyrics are indecipherable, suggesting that feeling where you're trying to sing an old song you love but can't remember the details, so you mumble along with the melody; the percussion is crude and indistinct, and somehow sounds halfway between a sample and a bad recording of hand [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| claps in a bedroom; a sampled voice from elsewhere repeats through the track, sounding both machine-like and human. Interesting questions come to mind-- Is this a cover, and do I need to know the original? Why is it so distorted?-- but it's also easy to let "Ready for the World" wash over you, which turns out to be true of the album as a whole.
The basic template of "Ready for the World" is subtly modified from track to track, so while the album feels very much like a complete statement, individual songs also stand out. One major highlight is "Decisions [ft. Yüksel Arslan]", a lurching waltz with voices piled up into a mini choir that hits with an almost symphonic grandeur. The hugeness of its sound is something considering how modestly it was recorded, and "Decisions" manages to feel both tragic and uplifting at once. The opening "You Hold the Water" is HTDW at its ambient extreme. Beginning with a sample of dialog from Todd Haynes' film Safe, it pulses along with darker, almost industrial samples bumping up against Krell's voice, offering a mood that intentionally avoids coming together as a song. "Endless Rain" gets an unbelievable amount of mileage from a single loop of drum and piano: As the Soul II Soul-like rhythm bit repeats, Krell ad libs vocals that seem to bubble up from some kind of pre-verbal place. You can pick out "you" and "say" and not much else, but it doesn't matter; the track still manages to capture a feeling in its two and a half minutes.
If the contemporary R&B slow jam thrives on the tension between earthy sexuality and the spiritual concerns of gospel, How to Dress Well mostly does away with the sex part. The thin recording and distant-sounding vocals cause the physicality of the music to dissipate into a spectral fog, leaving behind music that feels intimate and devotional and ultimately lonely-- there's a song called "Can't See My Own Face" and another called "My Body", and you get the feeling that the domain of the music probably stops there. This isn't a space for probing the specifics of relationships; it's far too hermetic for that. There's a lot of rain and a lot of death-- two tracks called "Suicide Dream", another called "You Won't Need Me Where I'm Goin'". An album I keep thinking of when listening to How to Dress Well is Panda Bear's 2004 LP, Young Prayer. That was another homemade record haunted by mortality with blurred words that nonetheless managed to communicate a powerful and highly personal sense of spiritual yearning. There are also hints of Bon Iver in Krell's falsetto and in the way he transforms the signifiers of R&B into something homegrown and personal. You can sense a few different strands of music from the last few years coming together with the sounds of an earlier era to form something new.
The distortion is at places so harsh, it's hard not to wonder why Krell doesn't do away with it. But with the sex and romantic yearning removed, the tension between the ethereal and prayerful mood comes from the quality of the recording, the way the music seems to be breaking apart as you are listening to it. How to Dress Well is to my mind the biggest breakthrough in home-recorded lo-fi in years. It feels brave, like it's going places a lot of artists in this sphere are afraid to go. And since the emotions communicated are direct and palpable even if the specifics are elusive, it also has something for people who don't follow this world of music closely. I can promise you that as I type this right now, 15-year-old kids who have been freaking out over this album are in front of their computers, trying to make their own version of this music. We'll see how that goes. But the impulse makes sense. Love Remains, because of its construction, feels like music that comes from inside, as if the act of listening completes it.


Latest full-length from the Southern rock revival's flagship band attempts to demythologize some of the American South's best-known figures.

The Dirty South

There's a stretch of Highway 64 in McNairy County, Tennessee that connects county seat Selmer and nearby Adamsville, called the Buford Pusser Highway. It's four-lane now, but years ago it was only two lanes of blacktop over steep hills and wide curves. Along this road were located both of the county's high schools, about 12 miles apart. Often, before or after school, students would race from one to the other, and several graduating classes were absent at least one student killed along this road. If you were fast enough, you could make it in eight minutes, but it depended on the absence of cops, and you had to have a good car-- like a Corvette, the kind Sheriff Buford Pusser crashed on the same stretch back in 1974, a little over a year after the first biopic of his life, Walking Tall, was released. Before he died, Pusser, a former wrestler, had earned his infamy ridding the county of the State Line Gang, which ran prostitution, drugs, and gambling rings as well as countless backwoods liquor stills. Legend has it that he accomplished this moral purging wielding only an axe handle. A historical placard now marks the spot where his car left the highway.
Pusser is part of what Patterson Hood calls "the Mythological South" in the liner notes to the Drive-By Truckers' sixth album, the inevitably titled The Dirty South. The band has explored this mythological South on previous albums, most notably their double-disc Southern Rock Opera, and like Buford with his stick, they've busted up the larger-than-life myths of figures like George Wallace and Ronnie Van Zant. Similarly, this album doesn't reify or even demonize the late McNairy County sheriff, but simply demythologizes him. As Hood announces at the beginning of a three-song suite about Pusser's legacy, "This is the other side of that story."
On "The Boys from Alabama" and "The Buford Stick", Hood relates the stories of the small-time shiners who lost their stills and their livelihoods to Pusser, who they claim was "just another crooked lawman." In between, Mike Cooley sings "Cottonseed" in the voice of one of the State Line Gang who feels the burden of having dispatched so many souls to their Maker. Neither Hood nor Cooley takes a side in this rural turf war, but they try to reveal another facet of the story and empathize with the people vilified by Pusser's legend. For the Drive-By Truckers, black-and-white aggrandizement is much less interesting than gray-area truths, and in a sense, The Dirty South rescues the flawed man from the ideal perpetrated by the movies.
All of this would be dryly academic if the band's music wasn't so sturdy and solid. As on previous albums, the Drive-By Truckers back their ambitious, word-dense songs with down-and-dirty Southern rock that's direct and bare-boned, yet often explosive. The three songwriters-- Hood, Cooley and Jason Isbell-- are also three rowdy guitar players, and their triple-prong attack instills songs like "Where the Devil Don't Stay" and the live staple "Lookout Mountain" with a raw intensity. Shonna Tucker, who replaced Earl Hicks on bass, and drummer Brad Morgan form a confident rhythm section, accommodating gritty guitar solos and letting the songs sprawl and stretch in unexpected directions. Though rooted in countless major influences-- from .38 Special to Skynyrd to The Band (as explained on Isbell's "Danko/Manuel")-- the Drive-By Truckers' Southern rock always sounds homemade, and like liquor from a still, it's extremely potent.
More crucially, they marshal this dynamic not only to tackle the South's icons, but more importantly to construct a sober, solemn view of everyday Southern life, whether through family histories like Hood's "The Sands of Iwo Jima" or story-songs like Cooley's racecar drama "Daddy's Cup". "Puttin' People on the Moon" is an Alabama version of Springsteen's "Atlantic City" with higher stakes: Instead of escaping on that cross-city bus, the narrator loses his wife and friends to cancer (presumably from NASA testing) and lives out his life in inescapable drudgery, dealing drugs out his front door. Isbell's starkly devastating closer "Goddamn Lonely Love" recounts the torture of a long-distance relationship; although this is only his second album as a Trucker, already he can hold his own with his seniors.
Granted, The Dirty South doesn't play on the band's brash humor like Alabama Ass Whuppin' or Pizza Deliverance, and it isn't nearly as personal an album as last year's Decoration Day: There are only one or two songs about the band members' own exploits and tragedies, so at times it lacks its predecessors' unshakable urgency and tough-mindedness. On the other hand, aside from the Pusser suite in the middle, The Dirty South is more consistent and cohesive song-for-song, its wide scope more public than personal. Rummaging through the iconography of the South, the Drive-By Truckers distill Southern Rock Opera's myth-breaking and combine it with Decoration Day's family photo album, and the result is a uniquely regional morality. All of these people-- from legends like Sam Phillips ("the only man Jerry Lee would still call sir") to family like Hood's grandfather ("He believed in God and country, things was just that way")-- are points on a compass of good and evil, strong and weak, outraged and complacent, through which the Drive-By Truckers are seeking a true north.
Despite the recent resurgence of Southern rock, this quest for a populist sense of Southern identity-- as it applies to a community and not just to a woman or the rest of the band-- seems rare these days. It's not just self-aware regionalism or Southern-by-the-grace-of-God cockiness, but something deeper: On these 14 songs, the Drive-By Truckers find the connections between these larger-than-life figures and the life-size experiences that shaped them. For them, the South is a stretch of highway where many have died, an ordinary place made extraordinary by human tragedies. The Dirty South is their homemade roadside memorial.


The “vocal bible” of pop R&B returns with her first album in eight years, sounding poised and warm but lacking some spark.

B7

In the nearly eight years since her last studio album, Brandy has maintained a sturdy foothold in R&B and rap. She elevates Ty Dolla $ign’s weary hometown paean “LA” and serves as the spirit guide on “Ascension,” the climax of Jhené Aiko’s druggy second album. Her megahit “The Boy Is Mine” is the lodestar for two Mahalia songs, “He’s Mine” and “What You Did.” Vince Staples shouts out her song  “I Wanna Be Down” on FM!; Chance the Rapper’s “Ballin Flossin” interpolates it. Despite this active influence (as well as her regular TV roles across the 2010s), B7 bills itself as a return. “Sorry for my tardy,” Brandy sings on opener “Saving All My Love,” as if she’s running hours late to a party in her honor. The apology feels warm and sincere, but the music that follows never recaptures that initial glow.
Brandy has never been a particularly scenic writer, but she made up for it with extravagant, heartfelt performances. While her reputation as “the vocal bible” seems to overlook the Gospel According to Whitney, the way she layers coos, sighs, and hums into knots of harmony and texture evokes the interiority of love, how it exists in your mind as much as with another person. Her best music makes romance feel like a transplant, a foreign force adopted into your essence, keeping you alive—unless, of course, it kills you.
The writing and performances on B7, though, are reserved. On “Unconditional Oceans” Brandy flatly describes love as a brewing storm. “The tidal winds blowing/The storm inside is growing,” she sings, sounding less like a storm-chaser than a news anchor reading from a teleprompter. “Lucid Dreams” is just as deflated. “Guilt dealt me tragedy inside/Ate me alive,” Brandy sings, hinting at inner turmoil and strife (and possibly alluding to a fatal car accident she was involved in in 2006) but not really revealing the shape of her emotions. There’s a strong sense of distance to B7, as if Brandy is recounting stories secondhand despite them ostensibly being her own. She’s described the record, which has been released under her newly created imprint Brand Nu, as “freeing,” but she generally feels more withdrawn than liberated.
That detachment might work if there were more sensuousness and motion to the record, but there’s little momentum to these songs. Nothing really builds, progresses, or ascends. Instead of drama, there is poise. Sometimes it works, as on “Borderline,” which is a coil of threats that feel perilously close to coming true. “Don’t you ever hurt me/I’ll change on you,” Brandy warns, her voice quaking with tension. You can feel the strain of her composure. She’s just as vulnerable on “Baby Mama,” proudly reclaiming the often dismissive term, but still baring her fangs. “Ain’t depending on you, I’m a baby mama,” Brandy says, the statement a boast and sneer.
Less compelling are the moments when Brandy holds steady. “Bye Bipolar” is a by-the-numbers kissoff that makes a clumsy pun of “bipolar” as Brandy spurns a leechy ex with saintly grace. Her dressing-down is so respectful and coolheaded you wonder why she’s bothering. On “I Am More,” she tries to end a love triangle, giving the guy at the center of it an ultimatum. “I can’t be the other woman/Mistress or a side piece order/I need more/Cause I am more,” she sings. But there’s no venom to her protest, no stakes.
The production is the album’s saving grace. Brandy, who has production credits on nearly every song, favors colorful and springy arrangements. Hit-Boy’s horn loop on “Baby Mama” is so bouncy that the song sways even when the percussion drops out. The ticking hi-hats and muted chords of Darhyl Camper Jr., LaShawn Daniels, and Brandy’s joint production on “Borderline” highlight the subtle upward and downward arcs of Brandy’s multiple harmonies; her voice is constantly coalescing and dissipating. And the propulsive finger snaps and bass kicks of “No Tomorrow” contrast the song’s grim subject matter about the end of a relationship.
Though Brandy’s voice remains a beautiful, resonant instrument, her songwriting here is so often functional and humdrum, and her performances rarely sparkle with personality or feeling. It’s obvious she has many stories to tell; what’s less clear is what compels her to tell them, what makes her want to sing.

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